by Claire North
They let him enter the USA.
“Have a nice trip,” said the man who stamped his passport. “There’s a shuttle to Disneyland from right outside the terminal.”
Chapter 79
In a land of freedom …
… in the land of the mountain and open plain …
Lying on his belly on a bed in Miami.
The bed was hotel normal.
The hotel was international chameleon.
The city was a sprawling void.
The plane, as it descended over Florida, had flown over swamp. Sometimes straight roads cut through the swamp, running from nowhere to nowhere. Sometimes a swimming pool, cartoon blue, appeared for no discernible reason out of the muddy waters. Sometimes, not nearly as often as Charlie had expected, there was a town, low, metallic, small, clinging to curves of reclaimed land like a scorpion to the back of a crocodile.
Palm trees. Wet, car-fume-enhanced heat. The constant whoosh of air conditioning. Mickey Mouse ears—on heads, on posters, on the tops of cars, and on the electricity pylons as they wobbled their uneven way through the twisted trees.
The woman who cleaned his hotel room spoke Spanish.
The receptionist spoke Spanish.
The man who called a cab for him.
The cab driver.
The woman behind the counter of the shop that served him a giant pastrami sub, the taste of onion and pepper overwhelming everything else, jaw labouring mightily against the weight of bread.
On the side of the highway, billboards.
Illegal immigration—it’s everyone’s problem.
XXX Supermarket, next left turn!
Discount gun and ammo fair, this weekend only.
Been in an accident? Scott and McKaw will fight for what’s justly yours.
Aged 5–18 and want to be a model for Jesus? Apply now.
Talk Radio, for all your news and gossip.
Bill’s Motor Repair, trusted for 35 years.
“Illegal immigrants are criminals, they come here, they’re criminals …”
“They’re criminals because they come here?”
“Yes, they cross the border illegally! If I’m hit by an illegal driving a car, I can’t sue them, not like I could a U.S. citizen!”
Once, the first time Charlie came to the USA, he thought he’d travel by public transport. But the trains were creaking and crowded, crawling slowly down narrow routes, not so much a spider’s web across the continent as a spider’s thread. Then he thought he’d take the Greyhound bus, listen to Bob Dylan songs and have interesting encounters with old-timey wise folk who lived on the side of the road; but the bus only ran twice a day, and his flight got in at the wrong time, and he had places to go, people to see.
So he hired a car.
“Miami is full of New Yorkers now, they all retire down here, come south, it’s been ruined, the whole place, ruined.”
Charlie had ice cream by the beach, with extra sprinkles on top. The sand was soft yellow, mown flat every night once the swimmers were gone and the beach was closed. The women in bikinis and boys in Hawaii shorts danced and raved until the sun came up, and then slept until the sun set again, ready for another hard night by the sea. The old folk tutted and turned their heads away and said it wasn’t right, not right at all, and moved to Tampa, where they could do their crosswords in peace.
“Hi there! Come stay at the Pleasance Motel!”
A video, men and women staring at a cheap camera. “Hi there! Welcome! Hi there!” They waved awkwardly, and then the next video played, advertising Sally’s Crab Shack and the best place to hire jet skis.
Charlie drove.
At night, he checked his itinerary, and every evening something new would have appeared, a growing list of names and days, appointments and gifts required.
To an old woman on an island over the long bridges beyond Tampa: a gift of a photographic film showing DNA markers. She smiled, an oxygen line taped to the side of her face, and said, “I still recognise it, you know? I still remember the day we isolated the gene.”
“What was it?”
“It caused the body’s immune system to attack the kidneys. You could still sustain life with dialysis, but that’s not living, not really, not when …”
A hacking cough. Charlie sits and listens and waits. She is near the end, Death comes, Death comes, but first the Harbinger comes before.
“The whole team got prizes. Except me. I was a junior research fellow, and the only woman, and at the time I didn’t think, but now …” She smiled, laid the image carefully on her bedside table, and pressed Charlie’s hand between her own. “We changed the world; I don’t need a medal. I’m ready for Death now,” she mused. “We talked a few times, when I was doing the overseas work. She would come and sit with me when the medicines ran out, when Pestilence was doing her thing. We’d look at the
empty cabinets together and wonder how many people would die
tonight from easy things, easy, easy things—dysentery, diarrhoea, cholera—all because the money had stopped. She was always polite, was Death, always had time to talk to the medics in the front line. I’m glad she remembers me, now the time has come.”
Charlie smiled back, and squeezed her hand tight, and was happy—so happy—to be here, for this moment. “Sometimes I am a courtesy,” he replied. “I am honoured to have met you.”
They talked a little while longer, as the sun went down.
On the drive back towards his Tampa hotel, Charlie stopped at a red light, and five men and women with no clothes on except flip-flops on their feet crossed the road in front of him, bags of shopping in their hands.
This highway, said the sign a little further down, is sponsored by nudists.
At the convenience store where he bought a bottle of water, a woman in pearls and nothing else waited patiently by the door, while the smiling clerk brought her a dressing gown to wrap herself in, lest she upset the other customers.
Chapter 80
In a vast and beautiful land …
… in a land where the law sets you free …
In Washington, DC, the Harbinger of Famine slammed her fist into the horn of her car and, in an unexpected moment of honesty for a woman so generally professional and austere, roared, “Fucking Beltway why the fuck can’t you just fucking take me where I need to …”
In a forest in the drooping southern Carolinas, the Harbinger of War held her mobile phone up and said, “I thought the coverage would be better out here.”
“Ma’am, we don’t need good coverage for what we do.”
“But your business …”
“Conducted from an office. This place here is for training.”
“I see. Well that does explain …”
“Our clients expect the highest standard of private security.”
“Of course, of course. Tell me—do they provide the bazookas, or do you?”
“The outbreak isn’t …”
“… we can’t take responsibility for …”
“… the virulence is off the scale for …”
“The WHO just need to get off their asses!”
“The question is of course one of risk to the population and I really think …”
Atlanta, Georgia. The Harbinger of Pestilence has spent so much time in this city that he’s thinking about buying a flat. He folds the top sheet of the report into a perfect origami swan, and leaves it on the table as the argument rages on.
A tower block in mid-town Tampa, one of the largest, crawling up from between the pink and beige houses towards the sky, a logo on the top, reflective glass windows. A woman who her whole life has sold health insurance, and now sits and cries in the arms of the Harbinger of Death and weeps, “Shit shit shit fuck shit! Shit fucking shit I thought they’d pay I thought they would but they refuse say he’s not covered not covered after all I did how can he not be covered we’ve already sold everything we’ve already sold …”
The appointment in Charlie’s boo
k was for a ten-year-old boy, and Charlie did go to the hospital, and did give him a stuffed dinosaur, because he loved that sort of thing, but the mother’s name appeared too, and Death gave her a dinosaur as well, so they could share in stories of Jurassic adventures, while there was still time.
By the Gulf of Mexico, an ancient man on a yacht, waiting for the storm.
“There may not be an El Dorado,” he laughed, “but there’s still the ocean! There’s still the seas and the skies and the storm!”
Charlie drank bourbon, and marvelled at how great and black were the veins that protruded from the man’s hands, such fragile things, a pinprick might burst them. Sometimes he coughed, emphysema, maybe something more, but with his shorts flapping around his high, craggy knees, and thin remnants of his comb-over lashing in the wind, he wasn’t going to let such things get in the way.
“I seen Death many times,” he chuckled, at Charlie’s polite expression of interest. “I met him once in the eye of the hurricane, paddling a raft made of whale bones, all lashed together, like there weren’t nothing in the world could trouble him. His skin was the colour of the drowned men, his eyes were fish grey, but we talked, as the world turned all around us, and he said he’d come find me again, another day. They say there’s gonna be a big blow up from the south in a few days’ time, and I was never one for dying in my bed!”
At this, he laughed again, and rubbed his skinny, rope-worn hands together in glee, and looked up towards the sky, willing the clouds to thicken.
An appointment, strange this one, not what Charlie had expected at all.
He drove to what he imagined was the edge of Orlando, though in truth, the edge of the city was hard to find; it stretched and sprawled and sprawled again into another roadside community, another bend off the highway, rolling past trimmed lawns of hard-biting crab grass and crooked pools of stagnant water where by day the crocodiles rested, sheltering from the heat, and where at dusk a drifting log perhaps blinked at the dog walkers passing by. In a community with its own basketball court, matching porches and identical two-car drives, all the houses the same, the American flag flying outside every other door, the red flag down on the post boxes, Charlie got briefly lost as he tried to find number 22319 in the midst of identical, nameless roads. When he did, he was not the first person there.
Boxes sat on the concrete drive. A sofa waited on the white kerbside. A dining room table was being loaded into the back of a lorry already bursting with goods. A man sat on a rocking chair, while all around, neighbours peaked through their blinds and tutted and said wasn’t it a shame, and some came outside with iced lemonade and asked if there was anything they could do, and stood by awkwardly when it turned out there was nothing.
A lady decked out in beige offered the man in the rocking chair a slice of key lime pie—extraordinary, delicious, the limes grown in her own front yard—and when he was finished eating like one in a dream, not even the sour zing enough to stir him from his contemplation, she said sweetly, “It’ll be all right, hon, I truly believe that,” and prised the plate away from beneath his fingers, and shuffled back indoors before her skin could burn.
Charlie parked in the street, a few metres down from the largest of the loading trucks, aware that no one else was parked here, no one else was in the middle of the road, every car neatly stashed in its neat drive by the door to its neat single-storey white house. He climbed out into sticky, storm-promising Florida heat, just as the final box was loaded into the lorry, the door slammed shut, the last worker in his blue shorts and stained brown vest climbing up into the passenger seat, leaving behind the man, the rocking chair, a single brown suitcase, and nothing else.
Charlie approached as the trucks turned their engines on, the men inside glancing down, curious at him from their high perches. He stood in front of the rocking chair as the trucks drove away, and said, “Um …”
The man didn’t look at him. His age was hard to guess at. A gentle tan through layers of sunblock had left his skin robustly pink, telling perhaps of a genetic lineage from a land where rain was more common than sun. Lines beneath his eyes and around the corners of his mouth hinted at the passage of time. His hands were huge, swallowing the arms of the rocking chair into their grip. The hint of grey at his temples was perhaps premature, and had been dyed back to the same sun-brown as the rest of him. His eyebrows were great sweeping brushes above huge blue eyes. He sat and moved the lower part of his jaw from side to side, back and forwards, and was otherwise perfectly motionless, staring at nothing at all.
Charlie coughed, tried again. “Mr. Robinson?”
The man didn’t move. He wore a white shirt, sweating profusely down the spine and under the arms. He wore pale linen trousers, and a pair of bright green running shoes, muddy and worn around the sole. A silver ring was on the little finger of his right hand, and there was a bend in his nose where once it had been broken in a football match and reset oddly, and a notch in his chin like the Grand Canyon, shaded beneath his lower lip.
“Mr. Robinson?”
He looked up slowly, and saw the figure of Charlie without taking anything in, as if the Harbinger of Death was merely a shadow blocking the view, not a person at all. “Mr. Robinson, my name is Charlie, I’m the … the …”
The words, easy and familiar, faltered.
The man waited, squinting against the brightness of the day, motionless on the rocking chair.
“I’m the Harbinger of Death.”
A long silence.
Robinson drew his lips in slowly, as if he was going to chew them, while his jaw worked side to side, back to front, before finally letting them flop forward, and, turning half away, said, “Is it time, then?”
“It’s … No, Mr. Robinson, I’m … I’ve been sent by my employer, as a courtesy, sometimes as a warning, I’ve been sent to … Is this your house?”
Staring at nothing, the man shook his head. “No, sir.”
“It’s …”
“Taken away. Debts. All gone. Wife gone too. She left before, few years back, but the money was what did it for her too.”
The flatness of this, the blank statement of truth, left Charlie silent, uncertain. “I’m … very sorry to hear that.”
The man shrugged. “Been a long time coming. Comes a moment you can see it, when all the lies drop away, but by then there’s no stopping the thing.”
“Are you … Do you have a place to go?”
Now Robinson raised his head again, seemed to see Charlie clearly, took in his clothes, his face, his posture, and said at last, “You’re the Harbinger of Death?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re late. You shoulda come before the bailiff.”
“The bailiff isn’t … that isn’t …” Banal comforts tickled the end of Charlie’s tongue. He felt the gaze of the neighbours on his back, watching, wondering what they should do, could do, would be safe to offer to do, all things considered, and swallowed the words. “I was told to give you a lift.”
“A lift?”
“Yes. My employer … likes to give things to people. It is … it’s part of … I’ll admit I’ve never been asked before, but I was told … Look, I’m going to New York, eventually. I have to make a few stops on the way, but …”
“Are you mocking me?” Soft, quiet, huge hands around the ends of the chair. A gentleness that reminded Charlie of the slow way a wolf moves across snow, eyeing prey.
“No. I’m … I’m very sorry for your predicament.”
Silence. Usually Charlie was comfortable with silence; a great many people he visited, on discovering the purpose of his mission, had either everything to say or nothing at all, and he didn’t mind either response. But this silence, midday hot, eyeball-burning, the smell of the swamp on the edge of his nose, the Spanish moss dripping in the trees, a line of sweat suddenly released and rolling down the inside of his arm. He looked at Robinson and wondered why the man didn’t move, didn’t speak, didn’t cry, didn’t punch him. He waited,
curious to see where he would go, surprised to find he didn’t mind either way.
At last: “New York?”
“Yes.”
“You been told to give me a lift to New York?”
“I’ve been told to give you a lift.”
“My brother’s in New York.”
“Oh?”
“We never got on much.”
“I see.”
“And you wanna give me a lift?”
“It’s … That appears to be my job.”
Robinson nodded at nothing much, then stood up. He was almost a foot taller than Charlie, his shoulders hunched in the way of many tall people, his chin pushing forward, challenging some unseen future. He jerked his head to the side, indicating Charlie’s car. “That yours?”
“Yes.”
“You hire it?”
“Yes.”
“It’s small.”
“When I hired it, your name hadn’t yet come through on my itinerary. I didn’t realise it’d be …”
“You know what Death is?”
“I … I know there are many ways to die.”
He nodded, slow and sure. “True that.” Stared again at the car, as if trying to puzzle out so strange a thing in a land of monster trucks. “Think we can fit the rocking chair in the back?”
Charlie hesitated, looking back at the white-painted seat that the man had just risen from. He wondered what exactly he was meant to say, how far this particular part of his job should go. “I suppose we could try.”
Chapter 81
“I think he’s right, I think that if even one terrorist comes out of a mosque then they should all be monitored …”
“Build a wall!”
“… you want to protect the students then you gotta arm the teachers …”
“It wasn’t like this just ten years ago; this isn’t the world I knew.”
“These guys. They behead. They rape. They torture. They don’t see their victims as human.”