Followers

by Megan Angelo

  On the boat, Marlow stood at a deck railing, holding one of the cocktails they were all pretending to drink. As the light came up, she pulled off the wig and dropped it into the waves. She checked to see if anyone recognized her. But each passenger was staring resolutely at the sky as they gripped their giant glasses, pretending to be lost in the sunrise. For them, it was part of the ruse.

  But Marlow really was mesmerized. She watched the colors of the sunrise bleed upward from the water. She pictured her father in his room. She pictured her mother ugly-crying over Marlow with her good side turned to the camera, and even though she meant the thought to be nasty, she found herself, suddenly, missing Floss so much that she almost sank to her knees. She wondered if Ellis had broken down and called Honey, if he’d felt doubt molding in his airtight analysis of Marlow and decided to take the deal after all. She pictured Honey in her pajamas, flapping around her gorgeous lobby—what did the driver mean, Marlow hadn’t shown up? Her mother and husband and famous acquaintance—they would all be thinking the same thing. Where could Marlow possibly be, besides where she’d been told to go?

  Here. Here, cutting through choppy, silt-filled water, away from all of them and closer to the truth. Marlow had been taught that being watched put food on the table, that there wasn’t a better way to live. But she had seen, on the sidewalks of New York, all the happy nobodies—people whose days weren’t built around lengthening the trail of attention spans floating behind them. They were paunchy and muttering and somehow more alive, and they made Marlow feel sorry for Floss and Ellis, with their endless performing, and Honey, with her army of dark-hearted disciples. They might have had all the followers, but they were never finished chasing.

  Marlow was done being looked at. Now she was doing the looking, and finally seeing things differently. She found, in the sunrise, all the colors the pills had kept from her for years: a shade of orange she loved. A yellow that reminded her of when it was her favorite. A pink that might have been fine after all. She was hearing something, too, in the space her device used to fill: a brand-new voice inside her head, telling her to keep going.

  She leaned over the boat’s railing, into the spray, and listened to the voice. She was almost positive it sounded like herself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Orla

  New York, New York

  2016

  Orla followed her super, Manny, off the elevator, toward his place, 1A. “Most of the building is gone for Christmas,” he said. “So we’ve got enough space for anyone who doesn’t have a watch. I think it’s better we stick together, as a precaution. Seems like it might be the whole block.”

  “And none of the clocks are working?” Orla said. “Yours say the same thing, too?”

  Manny nodded. “If it plugs in, it’s fucked.”

  She remembered her phone then, patting for it, and slid it out of her belly pocket. “But we can use—” she said, trailing off when she saw the screen. Her background—a photo of her and Floss from the year before—had been replaced by a strange, fuzzy graphic. The screen was filled with white, rounded-corner squares—a white padded wall, Orla realized, like the ones lining cells in mental institutions. There was no time, no date, no prompts. Just the white squares, keeping them locked out instead of in. “Look at this,” she said, and showed Manny.

  He grimaced. “Yeah. They all look like that.” He opened the door. When they went in, Orla noticed he locked it behind them.

  Manny’s kitchen gave her déjà vu. It was the same as hers had been her first two years in the building, before men came through and updated it: yellow light even worse than the hard white that came after, cabinets with faux-pine picture frame edges.

  Orla took a few steps in. There were about a dozen of her neighbors in the apartment, huddled around the kitchen table, shifting to make room for each other on the burgundy sofa. Sunk into the center of the couch was the angry old woman who spent her days on the lobby’s leather bench, jabbering at the doormen. “Punks, or some sort of glitch,” she muttered now, to no one in particular. “Talk about an overreaction.”

  Leaning against the green speckled counter was the fiftysomething man from the second floor, the one whose Boston terrier carried rolled newspapers in his mouth. “Exactly,” the man said. “I lived downtown breathing dead people for a year. So you’ll excuse me for thinking not knowing the time is not the end of the world.”

  In the living room were the children from the fourth floor, a boy and a girl whose ages were indiscernible to Orla and whose bright toys were always splitting into pieces in the elevator. They were staring at the television—which, Orla saw, her pulse picking up, had the same white squares as her phone. The children’s mother twisted around to look at her. She was wearing the same candy-cane pajamas as her kids. “It’s been like this for a while,” she said. “But we’re keeping it on just in case.”

  The Latin, muscled guy who used to leave for work the same time as Orla was helping Manny’s son, Linus, move the Christmas tree farther into the corner, so that it took up less of the room. Orla nodded at Linus, but he wouldn’t meet her eye. She thought it might have had to do with him being spooked by her giant breasts, until he raised his face and she saw that his eyes were red from crying. He was scared.

  Manny came over then. He put his hands on his boy’s shoulders. “So we don’t know much,” he called out to the room. “The electric’s still working, but someone’s messing with the time somehow. Everything’s got this six-six-six. The internet’s gone, the TV’s gone. All sorts of shit is just...frozen. No one’s had any luck with their phone, right?”

  They all tried, screen-punching hungrily, and shook their heads. No.

  “Lucky for you all,” he said cheerily, “this old bastard’s still got a landline. I’ll get the cops over here to check it out.” He took the phone off the wall and listened, then frowned and put it back quietly.

  “Miss,” a man said softly, behind Orla. “Would you like to sit?”

  Orla turned around. In a wingback chair with a doily draped over it sat a broad-shouldered white man. He wore silver-rimmed glasses over his calm, wide-set eyes. Beneath his rumpled white shirt, Orla could see the collar of a yellowing undershirt and pale brown chest hair curling over it. It took her a moment to place him: he was the Ukrainian man from the penthouse, the one whose deck they had borrowed long ago, Floss emboldened by her perfect ass, and Orla emboldened by Floss. She thanked him and took his seat.

  There was a weak knock. Everyone turned. Manny looked through the peephole. He was already shaking his head as he opened the door. “I’m sorry,” Orla heard him say. “I gotta think of people in the building.”

  “I understand,” a woman’s voice replied. “But just for a while, to get warm. I live on Staten Island. I can’t get home. Everything’s shut down. The buses, the trains. The tunnels, the bridges. No one’s allowed on the roads.”

  “Is that true?” someone whispered behind Orla. “Jesus.”

  “I can’t do it,” Manny said.

  “Please.”

  The woman sounded familiar. Orla stood and shuffled right, trying to see who she was. She saw a puff of dyed hair above a fleece headband. She went to the door and touched Manny’s shoulder.

  Mrs. Salgado watched her, blank-faced. Expecting nothing.

  “She’s with me,” Orla said.

  Manny curled his lip at her. “We can’t get started with that,” he said. But then he sighed and ignored the hot gaze of his wife. He let Anna’s mother in.

  * * *

  Together, they stayed up all night, waiting for something to change.

  Manny went out when the sun came up. He came back with sliced bread, peanut butter, and bits of disorienting news, gathered from cops and jumpy cashiers making change by hand. The police all used the same term: multipronged hack. GPS signals, they said, had been snuffed out. All the major cable and phone and i
nternet companies were ravaged, backups upon backups defeated. One cop told Manny that in a sleepy town upstate where some people still used a local web provider, there were still a few people online, trying all the websites they could think of and finding them broken and gone.

  The power grid—that was the part that scared everyone, because it meant they were dealing with artists. The hackers had found a way to tweak the electrical current. That was why even old and dusty plugged-in things were no longer counting moments right. Manny heard that the NYPD, the FBI, the mayor, and the governor—they had all set up shop at Grand Central, beneath the old clock with its four opal faces. And Mrs. Salgado was right: no one was going anywhere. Stoplights’ timers were fried. Trains were dark and useless. Planes were either grounded or circling, waiting for air traffic control to triple-check their paper maps.

  The streets were mostly empty, Manny said. People were hunkering down the way they might have anyway, considering it was still snowing. But he admitted, with lots of shrugging to keep from alarming them, that he had skipped the closest grocery store because of “just a little looting.”

  Then the lights went out. The room became the same blue-gray of the outside’s overcast morning.

  They went a long time without talking, like the lights might come back if they didn’t mention the darkness. But finally, it seemed official, and the Ukrainian man gave a sigh. “Well,” he said, scratching his ear. “It’s Christmas.”

  * * *

  Everyone could sense Manny’s wife needed space. She had been picking up people’s water glasses and putting them in the sink. So they mumbled about going back to their own places for a while. They would bathe and rest, while it was light. They could reconvene at sunset.

  The feel of Mrs. Salgado following her was so routine, it took Orla a minute to realize that the woman meant to come with her into her apartment. But where else would she have gone? Orla let her shower first. She handed her yoga pants and a Lehigh sweatshirt to change into.

  Mrs. Salgado took the clothes and looked at Orla’s swollen ankles. “You’d better lie down and put your feet up,” she said. “When are you due?”

  “Today,” Orla said. “But it won’t be today. I don’t feel any different.” She said it firmly; she wanted the baby to hear. She was still determined to keep Marlow in there until this was all over. Until the photographers returned and the internet came back and people were not too preoccupied to hear what she had to say: Floss tried to steal her baby.

  Mrs. Salgado looked at her. Her lips twitched. “Is that what you think it’ll be like?” she said. “You’ll wake up one day and feel like a mother?”

  “I just mean,” Orla said, “I don’t have contractions.”

  “You never will, just so you know,” Mrs. Salgado said. “The baby will come, and you’ll wait to feel different. You’ll wait for years and years. You’ll always think you’ll change one day. That you’ll wake up and feel—” She flicked the bathroom’s light switch up and down, to no effect. “Capable,” she said. “Capable of protecting this precious little thing. But it never happens. So you keep being scared that you’ll fail. And then, one day, you do.”

  Orla looked at Mrs. Salgado’s face. It was dry and crepey and grooved, and so dark around the eyes. She wondered how much of that face had come from Anna living, and how much had come from her dying. She wondered what marks she had helped to put there herself.

  “Why have you been following me?” Orla said.

  Mrs. Salgado tilted her head to one side and tugged the band from her matted hair. She made a face like she was looking at the sun. “I wanted to try to make you less of a monster,” she said. “I’ve only seen you on TV. I thought if I watched you walking or riding the subway or buying your groceries, I don’t know—maybe stepping in a puddle or something, it might make you seem more real. I was trying to think of you as someone else’s daughter.”

  Orla’s heart clutched in on itself. She thought of her parents. They were nearly finished with a six-week European tour that Orla had surprised them with, despite the fact that it nearly doubled the mean red number on her credit card statement. She had booked the trip months ago, wanting them far away for her third trimester, never the wiser as she went from pregnant to not so, one way or another. Gayle had been highly suspicious—“thirty-seven isn’t a big anniversary, honey”—but she had gone along with the gift.

  “Did it work?” Orla said to Mrs. Salgado.

  The woman put her hand on Orla’s arm. She patted it, rubbed it. She said, “Not at all.”

  * * *

  After her shower, Orla slept, the sort of light and troubled sleep in which she heard her own moans. When it was dark again, Mrs. Salgado woke her. They went back downstairs. Orla noticed on their way out that one of Floss’s heiress books, which she had left behind when she moved, was sitting on the counter. Mrs. Salgado had tucked a take-out menu into it where she left off, like she planned to come back.

  The crowd of neighbors was thinner on Christmas night: just Orla, Mrs. Salgado, the old woman, the Ukrainian man, and Manny’s family sat around the table, eating the pernil Manny’s wife had cooked on the gas stove. She kept mumbling that it wasn’t enough for all of them, how could she have known, and they kept mumbling back that sure it was, and of course she couldn’t have, and anyway, it was delicious. The Ukrainian man brought a bottle of vodka and poured drinks for everyone but Orla, even Linus. Linus looked at his mother. She surprised them all by saying, “If you can get it down, go for it.” She was wearing jewelry she hadn’t had on that morning—a platter of a necklace, dripping earrings, thick bracelet—and it seemed to improve her mood slightly. Orla was grateful that Manny had shopped well, and early.

  They cleaned up together. Orla dried dishes until Mrs. Salgado took the towel from her hands and told her, firmly, to sit. The Ukrainian man carried the old woman, who was drowsy and flushed from the liquor, to the couch.

  They were all just settling in, thinking the same thing, Orla could tell—what do we do now?—when they heard a roar coming from outside. It came in waves, rising and dying, and there was an intimidating force to the sound. But they were more stir-crazy than they were frightened, so they held the super’s Bic lighter to the wicks of his wife’s tapers. They went outside.

  It turned out to be singing.

  Eighth Avenue was crammed with people facing east, looking up at a man leaning precariously out his window on the third floor of a low-rise. He wore flashing Christmas-tree novelty glasses. He was leading the crowd in song with wild, wide-armed gestures. In one hand, he held an oversize martini glass, its liquid sloshing onto the street. In the other, he held an oversize dildo, purple and illuminated. He slashed it back and forth as he led the crowd in “O Holy Night.”

  “That’s nice,” Manny said, grinning. His wife countered, with a sharp look at the dildo, “No, it’s not.”

  Orla looked down the block. Someone had ransacked the Starbucks. The mermaid that usually dangled from a post above the door was facedown on the sidewalk, wires sticking out her back. Farther north, the screens on Madison Square Garden were black and quiet. The Empire State Building was snuffed out, its dark spire slicing the moon. The sounds Orla was used to had evaporated—no horns, no sirens, no engines. It was almost comforting to see the wild-eyed man from the corner of Twenty-Sixth Street shouldering through the crowd, still yelling about Jesus. “It’s too late!” he was saying to the singers. “Too late!”

  When he got to Orla, he stopped and stared at her. Instinctively, she took a step back. “You’re wet,” the man said, in a completely normal voice.

  “What?” She wrapped her arms across her midsection.

  “I said you’re wet,” he repeated. “Your pants are wet.”

  She thought he meant at the bottom, from the way her cuffs dragged in the slush, but then Mrs. Salgado lowered her candle. Orla saw that her sweatpants were soaked in the cro
tch, darkening down her leg.

  “Your water broke, Orla,” Mrs. Salgado said. “We need to get you to a hospital.”

  “No,” Orla said. Tonight was not the night, so this had to be something else. Then there was a hot push going through her back, filling her vision with sparkling pain. “I want to wait,” she said.

  But no one heard her. Mrs. Salgado was calling to Manny, who was calling, over the music, to a cop. Orla heard his voice woven into the chorus, the masses and her super competing. Yo, night divine, need some help over here, oh night divine, gotta lady in labor. Oh night divine.

  * * *

  The generators at Mount Sinai West were already sagging. The lobby went black, then blinding, then black, like the kind of nightclubs Floss had always loved and Orla had always hated. Mrs. Salgado was beside her as she made her way to the desk.