After the Plague: And Other Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  And there she was, just like that: Sally.

  Sally in her virginal parka and fluffy boots, locked in her mother’s grip and fighting her way up the walk against a tide of chanting zombies—and I recognized them too, every one of them, the very ones who’d been dragged away from my brother’s door in the dark of the morning. Sally wasn’t coming in for an exam—there weren’t going to be any more exams. No, Sally meant business. You could see that in the set of her jaw and in the way she lowered her head and jabbed out her eyes like swords, and you could see it in every screaming line of her mother’s screaming face.

  The light was fading. The sky hung low, like smoke. And then, in that instant, as if some god had snapped his fingers, the streetlights went on, a sudden artificial burst of illumination exploding in the sky above them. All at once I felt myself moving, the switch turned on in me too, all the lights flaring in my head, burning bright, and I was out the door, up the corridor, and pushing through the double glass doors at the front entrance.

  Something was blocking the doors—bodies, deadweight, the zombies piled up on the steps like corpses—and I had to force my way out. There were bodies everywhere, a minefield of flesh, people stretched out across the steps, obliterating the sidewalk and the curb in front of the clinic, immobilizing the cars in the street. I saw the punk from this morning, the teenage tough guy in his leather jacket, his back right up against the door, and beside him one of the dumpy women I’d flung him into. They didn’t learn, these people, they didn’t know. It was a game. A big joke. Call people baby-killers, sing about Jesus, pocketful of posies, and then the nice policeman carries you off to jail and Mommy and Daddy bail you out. I tried to kick them aside, lashing out with the steel toes of my boots till my breath was coming in gasps. “Sally!” I cried. “Sally, I’m coming!”

  She was stalled at the corner of the building, standing rigid with her mother before the sea of bodies. “Jesus loves you!” somebody cried out and they all took it up till my voice was lost in the clamor, erased in the everlasting hiss of Jesus. “We’re going to come looking for you, brother,” the tough guy said then, looking up at me out of a pair of seething blue eyes. “You better watch your back.”

  Sally was there. Jesus was there. Hands grabbed at me, snaked round my legs till I couldn’t move, till I was mired in flesh. The big man came out of nowhere, lithe on his feet, vaulting through the inert bodies like the shadow of something moving swiftly overhead, and he didn’t so much as graze me as he went by. I was on the third step down, held fast, the voices chanting, the signs waving, and I turned to watch him handcuff himself to the door and flash me a tight little smile of triumph.

  “Sally!” I shouted. “Sally!” But she was already turning around, already turning her back to me, already lost in the crowd.

  I looked down at my feet. A woman was clutching my right leg to her as if she’d given birth to it, her eyes as loopy as any crack-head’s. My left leg was in the grip of a balding guy who might have been a clerk in a hardware store and he was looking up at me like a toad I’d just squashed. “Jesus,” they hissed. “Jesus!”

  The light was burning in my head, and it was all I needed. I reached into my pants and pulled out the gun. I could have anointed any one of them, but the woman was first. I bent to her where she lay on the unyielding concrete of the steps and touched that snub-nose to her ear as tenderly as any man of healing. The noise of it shut down Jesus, shut him down cold. Into the silence, and it was the hardware man next. Then I swung round on Mr. Beard.

  It was easy. It was nothing. Just like killing babies.

  Captured by the Indians

  At the lecture that night they learned that human life was expendable. Melanie had sat there in shocked silence—the silence of guilt, mortification and paranoia (what if someone should see her there in the crowd?)—while Dr. Toni Brinsley-Schneider, the Stanford bioethicist, had informed them that humans, like pigs, chickens and guppies, were replaceable. In the doctor’s view, the infirm, the mentally impaired, criminals, premature infants and the like were non-persons, whose burden society could no longer be expected to support, especially in light of our breeding success. “We’re hardly an endangered species,” she said with a grim laugh. “Did you know, all of you good and earnest people sitting here tonight, that we’ve just reached the population threshold of six billion?” She was cocked back from the lectern in a combative pose, her penurious little silver-rimmed reading glasses flinging fragments of light out into the audience. “Do any of you really want more condominiums, more shantytowns and favelas, more cars on the freeway, more group homes for the physically handicapped right around the corner from you? On your street? Next door?” She leveled her flashing gaze on them. “Well, do you?”

  People shifted in their seats, a muted moist surge of sound that was like the timid lapping of waves on a distant shore. No one responded—this was a polite crowd, a liberal crowd dedicated to free expression, a university crowd, and besides, the question had been posed for effect only. They’d have their chance to draw blood during the Q&A.

  Sean sat at attention beside Melanie, his face shining and smug. He was midway through the Ph.D. program in literary theory, and the theoreticians had hardened his heart: Dr. Brinsley-Schneider was merely confirming what he already knew. Melanie took his hand, but it wasn’t a warm hand, a hand expressive of comfort and love—it was more like something dug frozen from the earth. She hadn’t yet told him what she’d learned at two thirty-three that afternoon, special knowledge, a secret as magical and expansive as a loaf of bread rising in a pan. Another sort of doctor had brought her the news, a doctor very different from the pinched and angry-looking middle-aged woman at the podium, a young dark-haired sylph of a woman, almost a girl, with a wide beatific face and congratulatory eyes, dressed all in white like a figure out of a dream.

  They walked to the car in silence, the mist off the ocean redrawing the silhouettes of the trees, the streetlights softly glowing. Sean wanted a burger—and maybe a beer—so they stopped off at a local bar and grill the students hadn’t discovered yet and she watched him eat and drink while the television over the bar replayed images of atrocities in the Balkans, the routine bombing of Iraq and the itinerary of the railroad killer. In between commercials for trucks that were apparently capable of scaling cliffs and fording rivers, they showed the killer’s face, a mug shot of a slightly built Latino with an interrupted mustache and two dead eyes buried like artifacts in his head. “You see that?” Sean said, nodding at the screen, the half-eaten burger clenched in one hand, the beer in the other. “That’s what Brinsley-Schneider and these people are talking about. You think this guy worries much about the sanctity of human life?”

  Can we afford compassion? Melanie could hear the lecturer’s droning thin voice in the back of her head, and she saw the dour pale muffin of a face frozen in the spotlight when somebody in back shouted Nazi! “I don’t know why we have to go to these lectures, anyway,” she said. “Last year’s series was so much more—do I want to say ‘uplifting’ here? Remember the woman who’d written that book about beekeeping? And the old professor—what was his name?—who talked about Yeats and Maud Gonne?”

  “Stevenson Elliot Turner. He’s emeritus in the English Department.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “that’s right, and why can’t we have more of that sort of thing? Tonight—I don’t know, she was so depressing. And so wrong.”

  “Are you kidding me? Turner’s like the mummy’s ghost—that talk was stupefying. He was probably giving the same lecture in English 101 thirty years ago. At least Brinsley-Schneider’s controversial. At least she keeps you awake.”

  Melanie wasn’t listening, and she didn’t want to argue—or debate, or discuss. She wanted to tell Sean—who wasn’t her husband, not yet, because they had to wait till he got his degree—that she was pregnant. But she couldn’t. She already knew what he would say, and it was right on the same page with Dr. Toni Brinsley-Schneider.

  She
watched his eyes settle on the screen a moment, then drift down to the burger in his hand. He drew back his lips and took a bite, nostrils open wide, the iron muscles working in his jaw. “We live by the railroad tracks,” Melanie said, by way of shifting the subject. “You think we have anything to worry about?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The train killer.”

  Sean gave her a look. He was in his debating mode, his put-down mode, and she could see it in his eyes. “He doesn’t kill trains, Mel,” he said, “—he kills people. And yes, everybody has something to worry about, everybody on this planet. And if you were listening to half of what Brinsley-Schneider was saying tonight, I wouldn’t be surprised if every third person out there on the street was a serial killer. There’s too many of us, Mel, let’s face it. You think things are going to get better? You think things are better now than when we were kids? When our parents were kids? It’s over. Face it.”

  Something corny and ancient was on the jukebox—Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, somebody like that—because the place smacked of the kind of authenticity people were looking for, the kind of authenticity that cried out from the fallen arches, ravaged faces and sclerotic livers of the regulars, to whom she and Sean—at twenty-nine and thirty respectively—were as inauthentic as newborns.

  At home, she changed into a cotton nightgown and got into bed with a book. She wasn’t feeling anything, not elation or pain or disappointment, only the symptoms of a headache coming on. The book was something she’d discovered at a yardsale two days earlier—Captured by the Indians: 15 Firsthand Accounts, 1750–1870— and the minute she opened it she was swept up into a voyeuristic world of pain and savagery that trumped any horror she could conceive of. It wasn’t a good thing to be captured by the Indians, as Sean had snidely observed on seeing her poised behind the cover the night before last, not good at all. There were no notions here of the politically correct, of revisionist history or the ethics of one people forcibly displacing another: no, it was the hot flash of murder and reprisal, the thump of the musket ball hitting home, the operation of knife and tomahawk on unresisting flesh. To die, to be murdered, to be robbed of your life and consciousness and being, that was the stuff of morbid fascination, and she couldn’t get enough of it.

  Sean was in his underwear, the briefs he preferred over boxers, the sort of thing she’d always associated with boys—little boys, children, that is—and as she watched him pad across the carpet on his way to the bathroom and his nightly ritual of cleansing, clipping, flossing, brushing, tweezering and shaving, it struck her that she’d never in her life been in an intimate situation with a man—or boy—in boxers. “The last they heard,” Sean was saying, and he paused now to gaze at her over the mound of the bedspread and her tented knees, “he was in the Midwest someplace—after leaving Texas, I mean. That’s a long ways from California, Mel, and besides, his whole thing is so random—”

  “He rides freight trains—or hops them, isn’t that the terminology?” she said, peering over the cover of the book. “He hops freight trains, Sean, and that means he could be anywhere in twenty-four hours—or forty-eight. How long does it take to drive from Kansas to Isla Vista? Two days? Three?” She wanted to tell him about the doctor, and what the doctor had said, and what it was going to mean for them, but she didn’t want to see the look on his face, didn’t want to have to fight him, not now, not yet. He’d go pale and tug involuntarily at the grown-over hole in his left earlobe where the big gold hoop used to reside before he got serious about his life, and then he’d tell her she couldn’t have her baby for the same reason she couldn’t have a dog or even a cat—at least until he’d done his dissertation, at least until then.

  “I don’t know, Mel,” he said, all the tiredness and resignation in the world crept into his voice, as if a simple discussion could martyr him, “what do you want me to say? He’s coming through the window tonight? Of the two hundred seventy million potential victims in the country, he’s singled us out, zeroed right in on us like a homing pigeon—?”

  “Statistics,” she said, and she was surprised at her own vehemence. “That’s like saying you have about the same chance of getting attacked by a shark as you do of getting hit by lightning, and yeah, sure, but anybody anywhere can get hit by lightning, but how many people live by the ocean, how many actually go in it, and of them, how many are crazy enough—or foolhardy, that’s the word I want here—how many are foolhardy enough to go out where the sharks are? Probably a hundred percent of them get eaten, and we live right by the tracks, don’t we?”

  As if in answer, there was the sudden sharp blast of the north-bound’s whistle as it neared the intersection two blocks away, and then the building thunder of the train itself, the fierce clatter of the churning wheels and everything in the room trembling with the rush of it. Sean rolled his eyes and disappeared into the bathroom. When the thunder subsided and he could be heard again, he poked his head round the doorframe. “It’s the Indians,” he said.

  “It has nothing to do with the Indians.” She wouldn’t give him this, though he was right, of course—or partially, anyway. “It’s Brinsley-Schneider, who you seem to think is so great. Brinsley-Schneider and eugenics and euthanasia and all the rest of the deadly u’s.”

  He was smiling the smile of the literary theorist in a room full of them, the smile that made him look like a toad with an oversized insect clamped in its jaws. “The deadly u’s?” he repeated. And then, softening, he said, “All right, if it’ll make you feel any better I’ll check the doors and windows, okay?”

  Her eyes were on the book. Way off in the night she could hear the dying rattle of the last car at the end of the train. Her life was changing, and why couldn’t she feel good about it—why shouldn’t she?

  He was in the doorway still, his face settling into the lines and grooves he’d dug for it over the past two and a half years of high seriousness. He looked exactly like himself. “Okay?” he said.

  She didn’t have to be in at work till twelve the next day—she was an assistant to the reference librarian at the university library, and her schedule was so flexible it was all but bent over double—and after Sean left for class she sat in front of the TV with the sound off and read the account of Lavina Eastlick, who was twenty-nine and the mother of five when the Sioux went on a rampage near Acton, Minnesota, in the long-forgotten year of 1862. There was a moment’s warning, no more than that. A frightened neighbor shouting in the yard, first light, and suddenly Lavina Eastlick—a housewife, a hopeful young woman her own age rudely jolted from sleep—was running barefooted through the wet grass, in her nightgown, herding her children before her. The Indians soon overtook them and cut down her husband, her children, her neighbors and her neighbors’ children, taking the women captive. She’d been shot twice and could barely stand, let alone walk. When she stumbled and fell, a Sioux brave beat her about the head and shoulders with the stock of his rifle and left her for dead. Later, when they’d gone, she was able to crawl off and hide herself in the brush through the long afternoon and interminable night that followed. The wounded children—hers and her neighbors’—lay sprawled in the grass behind her, crying out for water, but she couldn’t move to help them. On the second afternoon the Indians returned to dig at the children’s wounds with sharpened sticks till the terrible gargling cries choked off and the locusts in the trees filled the void with their mindless chant.

  And what would Dr. Toni Brinsley-Schneider have thought of that? She’d probably applaud the Indians for eliminating the useless and weak, who would only have grown up crippled around their shattered limbs in any case. That was what Melanie was thinking as she closed the book and glanced up at the casual violence scrolling across the TV screen, but once she was on her feet she realized she was hungry and headed off in the direction of the kitchen, thinking tuna fish on rye with roasted sunflower seeds and red bell pepper. She supposed she’d be putting on weight now, eating for two, and wouldn’t that be the way to announce the
baby to Sean six months down the road, like the prom mom who hid it till the last fatal minute: And you thought I was just going to fat, didn’t you, honey?

  Outside, beyond the windows, the sun washed over the flowers in the garden, all trace of the night’s mist burned off. There were juncos and finches at the feeder she shared with the upstairs neighbor, a dog asleep at the curb across the street, pure white fortresses of cloud building over the mountains. It was still, peaceful, an ordinary day, no Indians in sight, no bioethicists, no railroad killers hopping off freight trains and selecting victims at random, and she chopped onions and diced celery with a steady hand while something inexpressibly sad came over the radio, a cello playing in minor key, all alone, until it was joined by a single violin that sounded as if a dead man were playing it, playing his own dirge—and maybe he was dead, maybe the recording was fifty years old, she was thinking, and she had a sudden image of a man with a long nose and a Gypsy face, serenading the prisoners at Auschwitz.

  Stop it, she told herself, just stop it. She should be filled with light, shouldn’t she? She should be knitting, baking, watching the children at the playground with the greedy intensity of a connoisseur.

  The sunflower seeds were in the pan, the one with the loose handle and the black non-stick surface, heat turned up high, when the doorbell rang. The violin died at that moment—literally—and the unctuous, breathless voice of the announcer she hated (the one who always sounded as if he were straining over a bowel movement) filled the apartment as she crossed the front room and stepped into the hall. She was about to pull open the door—it would be the mailman at this hour, offering up a clutch of bills and junk mail and one of Sean’s articles on literary theory (or Theory, as he called it, “Just Theory, with a capital T, like Philosophy or Physics”), returned from an obscure journal with postage due—but something stopped her. “Who is it?” she called from behind the door, and she could smell the sunflower seeds roasting in the pan.