After the Plague: And Other Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “Get rid of who?” I said, but I already knew.

  I watched her face as she filled me in, the rolling eyes, the clamp and release of the long mortal jaws, moral outrage underscored by a heavy dose of irony, because she was an educated woman, after all, a liberal and a Democrat, but this was just—well, it was just too much.

  I didn’t need this. I didn’t want it. I wanted to be in my own house minding my own business. “All right, yeah,” I said, pushing the clipboard back at her, “but I’m real busy right now—can you come back later?”

  And then I was rolling up the driveway, the gate already rumbling shut behind me. I was agitated and annoyed—Sarah Schuster, who did she think she was?—and the first thing I did when I got in the house was pull the shades and turn on the computer. I checked Peep Hall to be sure Samantha was there—and she was, sunk into the couch in T-shirt and jeans, watching TV with Gina—and then I smoothed back my hair in the mirror and went out the front door. I looked both ways before swinging open the gate, wary of Sarah Schuster and her ilk, but aside from two kids on bikes at the far end of the block, the street was deserted.

  Still, I started off in the opposite direction from the big white house on the corner, then crossed the street and kept going—all the way up the next block over—so as to avoid any prying eyes. The sun was warm on my face, my arms were swinging, my feet knew just what to do—I was walking, actually walking through the neighborhood, and it felt good. I noticed things the view from the car window wouldn’t have revealed, little details, a tree in fruit here, a new flowerbed there, begonias blooming at the base of three pale silvery eucalypti at the side of a neighbor’s house, and all that would have been fine but for the fact that my heart seemed to be exploding in my chest. I saw myself ringing the doorbell, mounting the steps of the big white house and ringing the bell, but beyond that I couldn’t quite picture the scene. Would Samantha—or Traci or Candi or whoever—see me as just another one of the creeps she had to chat with on-line for two hours each week as part of her job description? Would she shut the door in my face? Invite me in for a beer?

  As it turned out, Cyndi answered the door. She was shorter than I’d imagined, and she was dressed in a red halter top and matching shorts, her feet bare and toenails painted blue—or aquamarine, I suppose you’d call it. I couldn’t help thinking of the way she looked without her clothes on, throwing back her head and spewing flames from her lips. “Hi,” I said, “I was looking for Samantha? You know, Jennifer,” I added, by way of assuring her I was on intimate terms here and not just some psychotic who’d managed to track them all down.

  She didn’t smile. Just gave me a look devoid of anything—love, hate, fear, interest, or even civility—turned her head away and shouted, “Sam! Sammy! It’s for you!”

  “Tell her it’s Hart,” I said, “she’ll know who—” but I broke off because I was talking to myself: the doorway was empty. I could hear the jabber and squawk of the TV and the thump of bass-heavy music from one of the upstairs bedrooms, then a whisper of voices in the hall.

  In the next moment a shadow fell across the plane of the open door, and Samantha slid into view, her face pale and tentative. “Oh,” she said, and I could hear the relief in her voice. “Oh, hi.”

  “I’ve got something to tell you,” I said, coming right out with it, “—bad news, I think. This woman just stopped me when I was pulling into the driveway—my next-door neighbor—and they’re circulating a petition.” I watched her eyebrows, her eyes, saw the glint of the rings on her right hand as she swept it through her hair. “But I didn’t sign. I blew her off.”

  She looked distracted, staring out over my shoulder as if she hadn’t heard me. “Louis warned us there might be trouble,” she said finally, “but it really isn’t fair. I mean, do I look like some kind of slut to you? Do I?”

  I wanted to make a speech, or at least a confession, and now was the time for it, now, but the best I could do was shake my head slowly and emphatically. Louis? Who was Louis?

  Her eyes were burning. I heard a blast of gunfire from the TV, and then the volume went dead. “I’m sorry, Hart,” Samantha said, lifting one bare foot from the floor to scratch the other with a long casual stroke of her instep, “but do you want to come in? You want a beer?”

  And then I was in, following the sweep of Samantha’s shoulders and hair and the sweet balsam scent of her into the living room I knew so well—and that was strange, surpassing strange, to know a place in its every apparent detail and yet never to have been there in the flesh. It was like a dream made concrete, a vision come to life. I felt like a character in a play, walking onto the set for the first time—and I was, I was. Don’t look at the camera, isn’t that what they tell you on TV? I glanced up, and there it was, staring me in the face. Gina stuck her head through the swinging door to the kitchen. “Hi,” she said, for form’s sake, and then she disappeared—out onto the deck, I supposed, to tan her hot sexy young limbs. I sat in the chair facing the dead TV screen and Samantha went out of the frame and into the kitchen for the beer, and I couldn’t help wondering how many hundreds of perverts went with her.

  She came back with two beers and sat opposite me, in the armchair facing “Living Room Cam 2,” and gave me a smile as she settled into the chair.

  I took a sip of beer, smiled back, and said, “Who’s Louis?”

  Samantha was sitting with one leg tucked under her, her back arched, the beer pinioned between her legs. “He’s one of the operators—of the site? He’s got something like thirty of them around the country, and he’s like—”

  “A cyber-pimp?” It was out before I could think.

  She frowned and looked down into the neck of the bottle a minute, then brought her head back up and flicked the hair out of her face. “I was going to say he’s like used to this sort of thing, people hassling him over zoning laws and sex-oriented businesses and all that, but really, I mean, what’s the big deal?”

  “I watch,” I said suddenly, looking directly into her eyes. “I watch you.”

  Her smile blossomed into a grin. “You do?”

  I held her eyes. I nodded.

  “Really? Well, that’s—that’s great. But you’ve never seen me do anything dirty, have you? Some of the girls get off on it, but I figure I’m just going to live, you know, and get my end out of it—it’s a good deal. I need the money. I like the money. And if I’m nude in the shower or when I’m changing clothes and all these guys are jerking off or whatever, I don’t care, that’s life, you know what I mean?”

  “You know when I like to watch you best? When you’re asleep. You look so—I don’t want to say angelic, but that’s part of it—you just look so peaceful, I guess, and I feel like I’m right there with you, watching over you.”

  She got up from the chair then and crossed the room to me. “That’s a sweet thing to say,” she said, and she set her beer down on the coffee table and settled into the couch beside me. “Really sweet,” she murmured, slipping an arm round my neck and bringing her face in for a close-up. Everything seemed transformed in that moment, every object in the room coming into sudden focus, and I saw her with a deep and revelatory clarity. I kissed her. Felt the soft flutter of her lips and tongue against mine and forgot all about Stefania, my ex-wife, Sarah Schuster and Grandma Rivers. I broke away and then kissed her again, and it was a long, slow, sweet, lingering kiss and she was rubbing my back and I had my hands on her hips, just dreaming and dreaming. “Do you want to—?” I breathed. “Can you—?”

  “Not here,” she said, and she looked right into the camera. “They don’t like it. They don’t even like this.”

  “All right,” I said, “all right,” and I looked up too, right into the glassy eye of Camera 1. “What do we do now?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Just hold me.”

  Going Down

  He started the book at two-fifteen on a Saturday afternoon in early December. There were other things he’d rather be doing—watching the No
tre Dame game, for instance, or even listening to it on the radio—but that was freezing rain slashing down outside the window, predicted to turn to snow by nightfall, and the power had been out for over an hour. Barb was at the mall, indulging her shopping disorder, Buck was away at college in Plattsburgh, and the dog lay in an arthritic bundle on the carpet in the hall. He’d built a fire, checked the hurricane lamps for fuel and distributed them round the house, washed up the breakfast dishes by hand (the dishwasher was just an artifact now, like the refrigerator and the furnace), and then he’d gone into Buck’s room in search of reading material.

  His son’s room was another universe, an alien space contained within the walls of the larger, more familiar arena of the house he knew in all its smallest details, from the corroding faucet in the downstairs bathroom to the termite-riddled front porch and the balky light switch in the guest bedroom. Nobody had been in here since September, and the place smelled powerfully of mold—refrigerated mold. It was as cold as a meat locker, and why not? Why heat an unoccupied room? John felt for the light switch and actually flicked it twice, dumbfounded, before he realized it wasn’t working for the same reason the dishwasher wasn’t working. That was what he was doing in here in the first place, getting a book to read, because without power there was no TV, and without TV, there was no Notre Dame.

  He crossed the faintly glutinous carpet and cranked open the blinds; a bleak pale rinsed-out light seeped into the room. When he turned back round he was greeted by the nakedly ambitious faces of rap and rock stars leering from the walls and the collages of animals, cars and various body parts with which Buck had decorated the ceiling. One panel, just to the left of the now-useless overhead light, showed nothing but feet and toes (male, female, androgyne), and another, the paws of assorted familiar and exotic animals, including what seemed to be the hooked forefeet of a tree sloth. Buck’s absence was readily apparent—the heaps of soiled clothes were gone, presumably soiled now in Plattsburgh. In fact, the sole sartorial reminder of his son was a pair of mud-encrusted hiking boots set against the wall in the corner. Opposite them, in the far corner, a broken fly rod stood propped against the bed above a scattering of yellowed newspapers and the forlorn-looking cage where a hamster had lived out its days. The bed itself was like a slab in the morgue. And that was it: Buck was gone now, grown and gone, and it was a fact he’d just have to get used to.

  For a long moment John stood there at the window, taking it all in, and then he shivered, thinking of the fire in the living room, the inoperative furnace and the storm. And then, almost as an afterthought, he bent to the brick-and-board bookcase that climbed shakily up the near wall.

  Poking through his son’s leftover books took him a while, longer than he would have thought possible, and it gave him time to reflect on his own adolescent tastes in literature, which ran basically in a direct line from Heinlein to Vonnegut and detoured from there into the European exotica, like I Jan Cremer and Death on the Installment Plan, which he’d never finished. But books were a big factor in his life then, the latest news, as vital to day-to-day existence as records and movies. He never listened to music anymore, though—it seemed he’d heard it all before, each band a regurgitation of the last, and he and Barb rarely had the time or energy to venture out to the wasteland of the cineplex. And books—well, he wasn’t much of a reader anymore, and he’d be the first to admit it. Oh, he’d find himself stuck in an airport someplace, and like anybody else he’d duck apologetically into the bookshop for something fat and insipid to kill the stupefying hours on the ground and in the air, but whatever he seemed to choose, no matter how inviting the description on the cover, it was invariably too fat and too insipid to hold his attention. Even when he was strapped in with two hundred strangers in a howling steel envelope thirty-five thousand feet above the ground and there was no space to move or think or even shift his weight from one buttock to the other.

  Finally, after he’d considered and rejected half a dozen titles, a uniform set of metallic spines caught his eye—gold, silver, bronze, a smooth gleaming polished chromium—and he slid a shining paperback from the shelf. The title, emblazoned in a hemoglobic shade of red that dripped off the jacket as if gravity were still at work on it, was The Ravishers of Pentagord. He’d never heard of the author, a man by the name of Filéncio Salmón, described on the inside flap as “The preeminent Puerto Rican practitioner of speculative fiction,” which, as even John knew, was the preferred term for what he and his dormmates used to call sci-fi. He looked over each of the glittering metallic books that constituted the Salmón oeuvre and settled finally on one called Fifty Going Down (Cincuenta y retrocetiendo). And why that one? Well, because he’d just turned fifty himself, an age fraught with anxiety and premonitory stirrings, and the number in the title spoke to him. He’d always been attracted to titles that featured numbers—One Hundred Years of Solitude; Two Years Before the Mast; 2001: A Space Odyssey—and maybe that was because of his math background. Sure it was. He felt safe with numbers, with the order they represented in a disordered world—that was all.

  When he reemerged from the narcotic gloom of Buck’s sanctuary, he had the book clutched in his hand, and there was a nostalgic feel to it—to the book and the whole business of it, opening the cover and seeing the title there in bold black letters, and the epigraph (“Death is something I only want to do once”—Oliver Niles)—and he opened a can of chicken corn chowder, thought briefly of heating it in the fireplace, then dismissed the idea and settled into the couch to spoon it up cold and attack the book. It was quiet, preternaturally quiet, no hum of the household machinery or drone of the TV to distract him, and he began, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, to read.

  My mother was my child. I mean this in no metaphoric sense, but literally, because my universe is not strictly like yours, the universe of decay and decrepitude, in which one sinks each day closer and closer to the yawning mouth of the grave. I loved my mother—she raised me and then I raised her—and my memories of her are inextricably bound up with the cradle, the nursery, toys and playthings and the high ecstatic thrill of juvenile laughter. And sadness. Infinite sadness. But it is not my mother I wish to tell you about, but my wife and lover, Sonia, the mature woman of fifty with the voice of smoke and the eyes of experience, the silky girl of twenty who would bound ahead of me along the banks of the Río Luminoso as if she had been granted a second childhood. Which she had.

  Let me explain. You see, in our scheme of things the Creator has been much more generous than in yours. In His wisdom, He has chosen the age of fifty as the apex of existence, and not a debilitated and toothless ninety or an even more humbling ninety-five or a hundred. (And what is more obscene than the wasted old man with his mouth full of mush and crumbs on his lapels, or the gaping hag staring round her in the street as if she’s misplaced some vital part of herself?) We do not progress inexorably in age as you do, but when we reach the magical plateau, that golden age of fifty, we begin, as we say, to go down. That is, one is forty-nine the year before one turns fifty, and one is forty-nine the year after.

  When Sonia was forty-nine for the second time, I was thirty-one for the first. She had been a dancer, a model, a photographer and a sculptress, and she was looking forward to going down, and, as I presumed, doing it all over again. She’d known some of the great younging minds of her day—they were history now, all of them—and I admired her for that and for her accomplishments too, but I wanted a wife who would stand by me, fix me paella and roast veal in the languorous evenings and hand me a crisply ironed shirt each morning. I broached the subject one afternoon just after our engagement. We were sitting at an outdoor café, sipping aperitifs and nibbling at a plate of fried squid. “Sonia,” I murmured, reaching across the table to entwine my fingers in hers, “I want a wife, not a career woman. Can you be that for me?”

  Her eyes seemed to grow until they ate up her face. Her cheekbones were monuments, her lips like two sweet desert fruits. “Oh, Faustito,”
she murmured, “poor little boy. Of course I’ll be a wife to you. I have no interest in society anymore, really I don’t—I’m retired from all that now.” She sighed. Patted her lips with a snowy napkin and leaned forward to kiss me. “I just want to be young again, that’s all—young and carefree.”

  The room had grown cold and the darkness was coming down when John next looked up. It was the darkness, more than anything, that did it: he couldn’t see to read. He woke as if from a dream and saw that the windows had gone pale with the storm—it was snow now, and no doubt about it. The can of soup, the spoon still transfixed in a bit of congealed goop at the bottom, stood frigidly on the end table beside him. When he let out a breath, he could see it condense in a cloud at the tip of his nose. Stirring himself—this was a crisis, the pipes would freeze, and just look at that fire, nothing but embers and ash—he stoked the fire impatiently, laid on an armful of kindling and two massive slabs of split oak. It was four forty-five, he was a hundred pages into the book and the snow was raging down over the slick heart of the ice that lay beneath it. And where was Barb? Stuck in a drift somewhere? Abandoned in a darkened mall? Dead? Mutilated? Laid out on a slab at the county hospital?

  The anxiety came up in him like a sort of fuel, pure-burning and high of octane, and he’d actually lifted the phone to his ear before he realized it was dead. There was no dial tone, no sound of any kind, just the utter nullity of the void. He went to the window again. The sky was dark now, moiling with the flecks and bits of itself it was shedding over the earth. He could barely see to the end of the drive, and the lightless houses across the street were invisible. He thought of the car then—his car, the compulsively restored MGA roadster with the fifteen-hundred-dollar paint job in British racing green—but he couldn’t risk that on streets as slick as these were bound to be. He hardly drove it in winter at all—just enough to keep it in trim—and it certainly wouldn’t get him far on a night like this, even in an emergency. And he couldn’t call Barb’s absence an emergency, not yet. They were having a storm. The lines were down. There was no way she could get to him or he to her. He couldn’t call the police, couldn’t call her sister or that restaurant in the mall or that store, Things & Oddments, that featured so prominently in his monthly credit card bill. He was powerless. And like the pioneers before him, he would just have to batten down the hatches—the doors and windows, that is—and wait out the storm.