by Eric Shapiro
19
I shouldn’t have spent the past six weeks watching television; my body is in no mood for exercise. We walk over two miles to the nearest exit, the one leading to the town beside mine. Maybe I’ll see somebody I know. My school used to play sports against theirs.
Paula walks two steps ahead of me and Gina. The three of us bake in the sun. I imagine that the dry blood on Paula’s face and scalp is very uncomfortable, not to mention the wound itself.
“Paula,” I say.
“Yeah, kid?”
“I’m sorry for what I said before, about them using their pricks as weapons.”
Even though I can’t see Paula’s face, I sense it changing. The outline of her head widens. She’s smiling.
I go on, “It was the drugs.”
“You should really lay off that shit.”
I touch the metal bowl in my hip pocket. A zip-lock bag crinkles beneath it. It wasn’t too long ago that I told Selma weed was jamming up our communication frequencies. It’s tempting to empty my pocket out onto the street, but my nerves won’t allow that. You never know when panic’s coming.
Paula has yet to explain her game plan. I pray that she truly has one. The odds that she does are high; she hasn’t lied to me yet. I play guessing games with myself until we arrive at a corner convenience store: cracked windows, no lights, open door.
“Hopefully there’s water in here,” Paula says, disappearing into the darkness.
Gina and I look at each other. I’ve never seen someone as grave looking as Gina. She’s set some kind of record, even by today’s standards. Her mouth brings to mind the lines on a heart monitor: mostly straight, yet twitchy and wrinkly at times. I gather that she speaks either Spanish or Italian. Too bad I slept through the former during high school.
We follow Paula into the shop. Like most stores nowadays, it’s been trashed and ransacked. Most people are doing one of two things: eating like pigs or stocking up in case they survive. The reports in favor of survival predict that 60,000 of us will walk away from this thing without a scratch. I personally don’t buy it, but you never know. It’s interesting to think about which 60,000 might win the lottery. Hopefully there will be more women than there are men; that way they’ll be able to get the whole civilization ball rolling again. (And women like Paula notwithstanding, they’ll probably be more peaceful in the meantime.)
I wonder if there will be any geniuses in the new population. Mad scientists capable of drafting a new constitution or setting up a new economy. Well, even if there aren’t bona fide geniuses, there will be relative geniuses. Somebody—or some group—will be recognized as intellectually superior. With any luck, that person or group will have the moral strength to get it right next time.
Paula is pouring spring water over her head. Just as I pictured it before. Her wound comes into full view; it’s not as bad as I’d expected. That explains why her mind is so sharp. Don’t get me wrong, though: It’s still a pretty frightening gash. It looks like an eye socket after the eyeball has been torn out. My scalp tightens just from looking at it.
“Did you hit the ground with your head?” I ask her.
“I broke the fall with my hands, then my head got hit when I rolled.” She stares me down. Sarcastically, she says, “But you’re right: They didn’t deserve to die.”
My lungs release a hard chip of breath. “I never said they didn’t deserve to be punished.”
“Yeah? And how were we gonna do that?”
I smile. “You could have shot them between the legs.”
“They would have bled to death anyway.”
She’s got a point there.
“Anyway,” she says, “you should have thought of that then.”
“Sorry, the whole heart-beating-in-my-brain thing threw me off a bit.”
Paula laughs. A genuine laugh. She walks over and puts me in a loose headlock. Then she checks out my face. “You could use some water yourself.”
She’s referring to Lisa’s scratch marks. The residue of my weed/opium high made me forget all about them. When Paula throws some water in my face, I remember them in all their stinging glory. The water is warm and silky. A little goes into my mouth and relaxes my tongue.
On our way out, we find Gina near the cash register, filling a paper bag with soda cans and packs of little fish crackers. She smiles at Paula and me, seemingly proud of her contribution. A miracle: The lady smiles. Then she gives us a little nod that I take to mean, “You guys look much better.”
Paula interprets Gina’s nod differently. She says to Gina, “Good question. Where to next?”
“I was wondering about that myself,” I say.
We stand on the sidewalk and study the neighborhood. Standard suburbia: post office, cinema, gas station, ice cream shop. Not a soul in sight. Most of the population has been done in by fear or suicide—or both.
Paula says, “I say we knock on someone’s door and ask for their car.”
Every muscle in my body melts into a cozy liquid. I’m thrilled that Paula’s on my side. I touch her shoulder and call her a master.
“What else did you think I had in mind?” she asks me.
“I was picturing a piggyback ride,” I grin.
She pretends to punch me in the gut. I say to her, “What about your phone call?”
Paula lets out a dramatic shiver. “Not yet. That particular phone call can wait.”
“Understood. What about Gina?”
“We’ll make sure she gets to a phone also. Ready?”
Gina and I both nod. I admire Gina’s intuition. Either she’s a good performer or there’s genuine perceptiveness in her eyes. I prefer to believe the latter. As we start moving to the nearest cross street, I say to Paula, “I should warn you, though: This morning I saw a man freak out over giving away a drinking glass.”
Paula winks at me and says, “We’re not asking for a drinking glass.”
20
We stand on the front porch of an upper-middleclass home. Paula rings the doorbell. Gina munches on fish. I tap my foot on the concrete: We’ve got just over five hours, and I need at least two and a half for driving.
“Nobody’s home,” Paula says.
“Let’s try another one,” I suggest, skipping off the porch without waiting for a consensus.
I hear Paula and Gina land on the grass behind me. We march toward the neighbor’s house. As we pass the upper-middle home’s bay window, Gina lets out a scream to end all screams. Her native tongue is definitely Spanish. She’s saying something about God and pointing through the dark window.
Paula makes a visor with her hand and squints through the glass. It occurs to me that Paula has bad eyesight. Maybe the bus drivers broke her glasses. Because if she could see clearly, she would have already seen the three bodies hanging from the kitchen ceiling: mother, father, and child. They used electrical cords, probably from the TV or stereo. The child looks no older than six. Chairs and stools lie sideways on the kitchen floor. The family holds hands; the child is conveniently located between the parents, unifying their souls. I’m too exhausted to be terrified. Part of me actually envies this little unit.
Paula cups her hand on the back of Gina’s neck. “Don’t look, come on.”
Gina understands. Her eyes are red and teary as they walk on to the next house, leaving me gazing through the window. “Time is of the essence, Sean,” Paula calls back to me.
I look at the slightly swaying bodies and think, Only for some of us.
Another porch, equally swank. Everyone around here could be dead; I’m sure the suicide rate is rising by the second. My nervous system starts accepting the idea that my day/life may end with two phone calls: one to Selma and one to home. Or at least one to Selma; I think my parents and I nailed our goodbye, so I’m hesitant to try another take. We’ll see. In the meantime, nobody is answering the door.
“Is everybody gone?” Paula asks no one in particular. “Gone” sure is a pleasant way of saying “fucking dead.” I don�
��t think Paula believes these people are at the movies.
“Maybe we should shoot open a garage,” I say, pleased with my ability to amend Paula’s good idea with one of my own.
“Sshhh,” Paula goes. “I hear something.”
The three of us stand at attention. (Gina of course registers the universal “Sshhh.”) I run my palm over my face to feel if my cuts are bleeding. They’re good.
Then comes the magical sound: locks clicking on the other side of the door. Unless we’re about to meet a denial case, we should be on the road in no time. Come on, come on, come on.
Before my eyes compute the presence of the man in front of us, my ears hear a woman screaming somewhere inside the house. Her screams hit something deep within me; my nerves become a ball of twine. Paula hears the screaming, too (her thumb hooks into the pocket where she’s holding the gun), but she puts on a natural face. The man at the door is furry and bear-like. Even though he has no facial hair, he has enough on his hands, arms, neck, and head to bring forest life to mind. Gray forest life. His face is open and innocent looking. All the more reason to believe that he has a prisoner in the back room.
“Excuse me,” Paula says. “Sorry to bother you, but our car just broke down and we need to get upstate by sundown.”
“Oh,” the man says, his voice echoing and warm, his eyes dropping with concern, “I can’t give you a ride. Sorry.”
He’s not closing the door, which is a good sign.
More shrieks tear their way from inside the house. Gina and I shudder. Paula remains nonchalant.
“Actually …” Paula says.
Let it go, I think. There are other houses.
“… we were wondering if we could …”
I butt in, “Thanks anyway.” I take Paula’s free hand. Paula shakes me off and gives me a dirty look.
She continues, “We need to borrow your car.”
The man’s lower lip climbs inside his mouth. When he releases it, he says with an ironic smile, “You mean take my car.”
Paula and I pretend to laugh. More high holy yells from inside the house. Paula probably thinks the screamer is merely frightened of the end. She and I rarely draw the same conclusions.
“It would mean a lot to us. And if you’re not using it …”
The man frowns with confusion. He probably thinks we’re a hallucination. He’s got one hand on the inner doorknob. Then he says, “Sure, I don’t see why not.”
Inside my head, a gear spins and puts a smile on my face.
“But, if it doesn’t bother you,” the man says, “I’d like to ask for something in return.”
The gear in my head spins back to its original position. This is it: the part where he asks for our kidneys in return for the car. I nearly grab the gun from Paula’s overalls.
The man says, “My wife is about to give birth to our first child. She’s due any second now. Would you all mind giving me some help?”
My eyes pan from the gun to the man. Pointing to herself and Gina, Paula says, “Oh of course. We can stay, but he’s gotta run.”
Paula’s long pink thumbnail is cocked my way. The man stares me up and down. He’s studying my face, which means he sees the cuts, which means—given Paula’s fib about our car breaking down—he probably thinks we were in an accident. “That’s no problem,” he says.
I feel something rise inside of me, and I say to the man, “Whatever. I’ll help out, too.”
The man nods slightly, turns around, and goes back into his house.
21
Maybe Paula thinks I’m a hypocrite for opting to stay. Maybe she thinks I was lying about being in a rush. But I can’t worry about that right now: I have to see this baby come into the world.
I have to see this baby come into the world because I want to get a look at its face. (The parents don’t know if it’s a he or a she.) I am compelled by my very soul to look into the face of this new arrival. This odd traveler, the spirit of whom chose to arrive on Earth just as the human experiment was concluding.
They say that babies are born every minute. But, as Selma once informed me, it’s actually unfair to say that they’re born. It’s more just and scientifically sound to say that they arrive. Because born is passive; it implies that the mother is squeezing out the child and that’s that. The truth is that the baby climbs out. The thing doesn’t snap to life when its body encounters the freezing air—no. It works hard. For hours and days. The process of labor has every bit as much to do with the mother’s efforts as it does with those of the infant.
Paula of course knows this, as does every mother in the world. But it came as news to me less than six months ago. And, more than any other fact of nature, it gives me hope that there’s another world.
Because if the path of an infant is active and not passive, then the same must be said for the path of the fetus, and the path of the sperm. Willpower is present at every step along the way. All forms of life are possessed of a sparkling drive.
So who is this pilgrim that’s about to greet us? What business could he/she possibly have in this forsaken place? Is he/she some kind of anomaly, a cosmic accident? Fallout from an inept calculation by the gods? Or does something inside of him/her desire to be here?
While my eyes are fixed on the impossible sight of the baby’s skull jutting from the aging woman’s body, I think about tunnels. The artist in me goes crazy with the possibilities: I picture red tunnels, yellow ones, green, blue, purple. Triangular, circular, diamond-shaped, square. So many tunnels in life, and in the universe at large. Like the freeway less than a mile from here. That’s my tunnel for today. If viewed from a distance, I’ll bet that my whole life has the shape of a tunnel. And I’ll bet that this tunnel extends to another realm. The journey cannot end here.
These thoughts aren’t new to me. I’ve tinkered around with them before, but something about this living room and these screams and this couple and their baby makes me stop thinking these thoughts and start feeling them.
I need this feeling to hang on tight. We encounter so many crappy, loosely woven emotions throughout our lives. Fleeting bullshit that seems so strong and smells so fresh, only to collapse into nothingness a moment later. Very rarely do we get branded. I want the feeling of these tunnels to burn into my brain. I don’t care if the burn is agonizing. It doesn’t matter if it leaves me blind. Because right now, possibly for the first time, I see the light that humans have spoken of since history began.
History is ending. So please let me go out with faith. I’ve been robbed of the chance to become a whole person, so just give me this one little thing. Send me on my way with faith in my mind and in my heart. My faith doesn’t have to be formal or decorative or rooted in verse: Just keep this pathway open and let the light flow in.
Paula sees the change in my expression. She takes her eye away from the video camera’s viewfinder. The man asked her to tape the event. When she asked him why—considering there wasn’t much time to watch it, blah blah blah—he said that maybe people (or other beings) will visit his home someday and take a look at the recording. Maybe they’ll be able to learn a little something about the history of our barren world. I personally suspect that the tape will turn into dust before anybody ever watches it, but then again: Anything’s possible. If the sight of a little bald head emerging from a woman’s vagina teaches us anything, it’s that anything—is—possible.
Something resembling cynicism tickles my thoughts. It tells me that I’m being a freak, that I should stop with all the bullshit already because nobody really knows anything, now do they? True enough, the light whispers back. But you don’t have to know to believe.
A sixth person has entered the room. While Paula runs the camera, Gina dips a wet cloth into a mixing bowl, and Mrs. Perkins wheezes, Mr. Perkins holds up their new daughter. He lifts her as high as she’ll go. I take a close look at that face. She’s incredibly stunning for someone who’s so sticky and discolored. After some maneuvers involving gauze and barber’s sheers, M
r. Perkins snips his daughter’s umbilical cord. There’s no turning back now, kid. You’ve abandoned your safety rope.
Gina’s eyes are ready to depart from her skull. They’re so wide that I could iron my shirt on them. Paula’s face, which was blood red when I met her, has now gone pink. Her eyes wring out some serious moisture. Tears dangle from her chin before free-falling to the carpet. Mr. Perkins hands Mrs. Perkins their child. The infant Perkins produces screams that outdo anything I’ve heard all day.
I just stand there and smile. It’s not a tight smile that hurts my face, just a subtle flex of joy. A spacious moment passes before common sense breaks up my reverie.
Time to hit the road.
22
Paula and Gina opt to stay put. (The latter doesn’t really opt, but the conventional wisdom is that she should do whatever Paula does. Neither of them have any more business to conduct with me.) Paula’s plan is to retreat into the bedroom and call her husband and kids. She hopes to be on with them up until the end. Mr. Perkins says he has a basement line that Gina can use. The word teléfono works wonders at getting the message across.
I stand in the hallway outside the Perkins’ living room and look into Paula’s eyes. We’re close enough to kiss, but I doubt that will happen. This unusual woman, who I’ve known for half an afternoon but feel very close to, graces me with a classic smile. It sends musical notes up and down my body. “There’s something freeing about all this, isn’t there?” she says.
“Yeah, kind of. But I think the older you are, the more free you feel. I wouldn’t have minded getting a little older.”