Slices

by Michael Montoure

  I remember the headline and I want to see if the news is on, see if I can find out what they were talking about, but I’m not awake enough to find the remote. I just close my eyes and go back to sleep again, wondering what I’m letting the TV whisper into my dreams.

  Third night I break down and call you. I don’t want to bother you, I know you’ve got school to worry about, that’s why you’re not out here — not that you want to be, any more than I do. But I don’t know who else to call — feel like I lost track of all my friends when I was still trying to get rich playing the dot-com field, and you see how well that worked out, so, yeah. I don’t know who else I’ve got left. You sound kind of annoyed to be hearing from your big brother, and I think I hear some boy’s voice in the background, but I’ve got to ask you if you’ve been watching the news. If you’ve seen or heard anything.

  Because something’s wrong here.

  When I got to the hospital this afternoon, the same guy was still slumped over on the bus-shelter bench. Was still there when I left tonight, same position, and I kept my eyes straight ahead of me and kept walking and convinced myself that wasn’t blood down the front of his shirt, that he was still breathing.

  More people on the bus tonight sick, coughing, looking miserable. Pale skin and dark-circled eyes. A couple people were wearing surgical masks, or whatever you call them, looking around, flinching each time someone coughed.

  Restaurant at the hotel was mostly empty but still slow, one waitress trying to do the work of four, and she kept apologizing — everyone else had called in sick. Guy at the table next to me was reading a newspaper, and I could just see the headline on the local section — “Mystery Virus at Three Hospitals.” I got up to ask him if I could borrow the paper when he was done with it, but he started coughing himself, eyes watering from the strain of it, and I just kept walking past him and into the bathroom. I turned on the water in the sink as hot as I could stand it and washed my hands over and over again. Like Mom would make us do — best way to keep from getting sick, she’d say, scrubbing and scrubbing at my hands until they were red and raw from it. I stared at myself in the mirror, trying to see if I looked pale.

  I get back to my table and my food’s there now, but my appetite isn’t, and I drop a twenty on the table and walk out, head back to my room, pick up the phone.

  You haven’t been watching the news, you tell me, but you promise you will, you promise you will if that’ll get me to stop babbling, and have I been drinking?

  No, I tell you, I haven’t. But it’s not a bad idea.

  Four days later and I haven’t heard back from you, and everything here has gone off the rails.

  I’ve seen people collapse on the sidewalk. I’ve seen dozens of people wearing surgical masks now and I want one myself but the stores are out of them.

  I hear the siren sound of ambulances tearing down the street almost all the time now. The hospital’s getting harder and harder to take. I’ve seen patients choking and gagging, strapped to gurneys and wheeled away out of sight. Mom still keeps insisting there’s something wrong with her, that she’s burning to the touch and white as a ghost and can’t breathe, but she’s fine, anyone can see just looking at her that she’s fine.

  But she’s about the only one. They came in while I was there and carried her roommate out on a stretcher and the old woman looked dead to me and I asked the nurses and they wouldn’t tell me, they wouldn’t say a goddamn thing, and some of the doors in this wing are covered in plastic sheets now and the staff are just telling everyone to be calm, just stay calm, everything is being handled, and they look dead on their feet and ready to break.

  Mom’s got all kinds of theories and I hear all about them while she holds my hand death-grip tight, while she drifts in and out of coherence. It’s the terrorists, she tells me. Or it’s the Jews, or the blacks. Whoever she’s scared of right this minute, that’s who’s doing this, and she’s scared of so much right now.

  I’m not just catching snippets of news reports and half-glimpsed headlines any more. Every paper I see is screaming about this on the front page. Every TV I see in the hospital lounges has scientists and experts calmly trying to figure out what to do.

  Last fucking straw tonight, I was on the bus again headed home and the passengers around me looked like they were being taken away to a concentration camp, helpless and pale and thin, and this one guy —

  I don’t even know how to tell you this part.

  This one guy, he started coughing and retching, and stood up, flailing for the cord to pull to get the driver to stop, clutching his throat with his other hand, flecks of spit flying from his mouth, people bolting out of their seats to get out of his way, and bulging from his open mouth, his tongue was — his tongue looked the size of a fist, the color of a plum, and he kept choking —

  Then his tongue just. It just burst. Blood flew everywhere. People were screaming. I think I was. I don’t know. The woman right in front of him was wiping the blood from her face with both hands screaming get it off get it off oh Jesus get it off me.

  The bus hit something. Another car or a bus shelter or a mailbox, I don’t remember. The doors opened and the driver was freaking out but trying to stay calm and telling us okay don’t panic everybody off single file someone call an ambulance and everybody went for the doors at once. I was right in the middle of it and there was something blocking the door at my feet, I was stumbling and I looked down, there was a kid, I don’t even know if it was a boy or a girl fallen down and the crowd just going right over and I wanted to stop and help them up but there were people behind shoving me and hitting and screaming so I just — kept going, stepping right on the kid like everyone else and you would have done the same damn thing if you were there. You would have.

  Somebody should call an ambulance, somebody should do something, but everyone just scatters. I drop to all fours, skinning my hands on the sidewalk, and lose everything I’ve got in my stomach.

  Fuck this. No way. I have to get out of here. I don’t think about Mom, I don’t think about any of my stuff back at the hotel, I just get on the next bus to the airport. Ambulances will come. The police will come and take care of all this but I have to leave.

  But I can’t. All the flights are canceled. There are men in black BDUs with guns and gas-masks and riot shields blocking the gates. I don’t know whether they’re military or the police and they’re not answering any questions.

  My cell phone gets no signal here. I find a pay phone. It takes me hours of “all circuits are busy” messages but I finally get hold of you and you think I’ve gone crazy. You’ve been watching the news, you’ve been looking online, and there is not a single damn thing about an epidemic here.

  I get off the phone and just sink to the floor. That’s it, I think, we’ve been abandoned. The world’s written us off. They’re burying the story. They’ll be burying us next.

  I’m getting out of the city even if I have to walk. So I get on a bus that takes me as far from downtown as I can get and then I start walking.

  This is stupid. I know it is. If we’re really trapped here, if we’re quarantined, there’ll be more men and more guns to keep me inside. But I’m not sick. I’ve been keeping my hands washed and drinking lots of liquids and following every stupid little ritual mom ever taught me and I am not sick and they can’t keep me here.

  A few miles outside the city limits and I notice something’s wrong.

  No, what I mean is — I notice nothing’s wrong.

  I’m not hearing sirens any more. There’s not many people on the streets, but the people I do see look bored, polite, incurious, not anything like the look of fear and distrust I’ve been seeing everywhere.

  I see a newspaper box, and the front page is talking about the economy, talking about terrorism, talking about the fucking weather. I scramble through my pockets and all my change is gone, I spent the last of it on the bus, and I see a crumbling low cinder-block wall at the edge of a parking lot and there’s nobody ar
ound and I pull one of the blocks out like a rotting tooth and swing around and toss it into the glass front. I pull a paper out of the wreckage and try not to cut myself and I keep moving in case someone heard the noise.

  I’m dropping a trail of discarded pages behind me as I tear through the paper in disbelief. Nothing. Nothing about this. But this is the local paper, the same paper I’ve been reading. Two different editions? One for inside the city, one for everywhere else? That’s crazy.

  Then I think of something even crazier.

  Maybe the city isn’t really sick. Maybe it only thinks it is.

  I have a hell of a time making myself go back into the hospital. I spend at least an hour outside, pacing, wishing I still smoked so I’d have at least an excuse to be out here. I don’t want to go in, but I know, I just know it, that if there are any answers to all this, this is where I’m going to find them.

  Mom’s asleep. I’m just about to leave when the nurse comes in, and I try talking to her about what’s going on, but she just shakes her head fiercely and says, “Not here.”

  She backs out into the hall, looks around, gestures to me to follow and she’s gone. I hurry to catch up. She hasn’t turned to look at me — she’s unlocking a door and it’s a small supply room, not much bigger than a closet, and she looks around again and pushes me inside.

  I stand there blinking as she steps in after me and shuts the door. The air in the room is antiseptic and sharp, and she’s standing uncomfortably close.

  “Your mother isn’t sick,” she says.

  “I know that — ”

  “She hasn’t been sick this entire time. Just the people around her.” Her voice is flat and clipped, and there’s some accent there I can’t place. The buzzing of the filament from the room’s single light bulb makes her voice sound like a recording. “Your mother came in here weeks ago, she says she’s very sick, she lists off all the things wrong with her, and she’s not sick. It doesn’t make sense, the things she’s saying. There is no sickness with all the symptoms she talks about.”

  “Yeah. She’s a hypochondriac. I know that. But — ”

  “She is here two weeks when other people, they start getting sick. They have what she claims to have. Nothing like it in the world until she makes it up and now I have a hospital full of cases, streets full of cases. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  “No. No, I don’t.” The sound of blood rushing in my ears was like the ocean. I wanted to sit down. “Do you think — she’s causing this to happen? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “What do you think?”

  I didn’t say anything. When I finally spoke, it was like someone else talking in another room. “I think you’re right,” I said, the words sounding small and muffled in this tight space. “I think — I already knew that.”

  “Where I come from, we know what she is. We would know what to do.”

  “What she is — ?”

  She nods. “Witch. We know.”

  “What — ” The word came out like a dull laugh, and then nothing followed it. “What would you do?” I finally asked.

  “I would do nothing,” she said, arms folded over her chest. “You are her son.”

  “So I have to stop her. Yeah. I — I think I knew that, too.” The walls felt closer, now. “How do I stop her?”

  “I think you know.”

  “What, are you saying — I should just put a pillow over her face, is that it?” I laughed the same non-laugh again.

  She didn’t say anything.

  I just stared at her helplessly. “She’s my mother,” was all I could say.

  She still didn’t say anything. She just kept looking at me for a minute longer, and then turned and left the room. When I came out into the hallway, she was gone.

  It’s been five days since that moment and I haven’t slept. Every time I keep thinking it can’t get worse than this, it does.

  There’s a TV left on in one of the lounges. It stays tuned to the same channel — there’s a picture of a news anchor desk with no one sitting behind it. No one left at the station. No one in the lounge gets up to change the channel, and there’s the smell of rotting meat and the buzzing of flies.

  I haven’t seen a single doctor or a nurse since then. I wander the halls and wonder if I should be checking on the patients, if I should be making my own rounds. I keep mental notes of what rooms are filled with the sound of coughing and what rooms have fallen silent.

  I don’t leave the hospital now. I can see bodies in the street from the windows. There are no more sirens. There’s a garbage truck at the end of the street, turned over on its side and burning.

  I check on Mom. Again and again. She’s asleep most of the time. I’ve wanted to call you, ask what you think I should do, ask you what the news is like in your world. Is the TV there still talking about the stock market? Are you still watching reality TV shows and reading gossip magazines — can you tell me what celebrities are getting divorced, who’s cheating and who’s pregnant? Can you name them all for me, first name basis, like you know them, like it matters?

  But I can’t call you. There isn’t even a dial tone when I pick up any of the phones.

  I’ve been thinking about what the final nurse said. I’ve been thinking about it long and hard. If I really wanted to kill her, there’s more than enough here to do it with. I’ve looked at pills and hypodermics and I don’t know how to use them and that would probably make it easier and I just can’t see myself doing it. There have been times when I’ve been scared of her and times I was ashamed of her and times I hated her, but it’s still Mom. I don’t know if I love her. I just know I can’t lay a hand on her. All I can do is talk to her.

  I stop and think about it. That’s just it. I can talk to her. I don’t have to do anything else.

  “Mom — Mom, don’t try to get up. Mom, I’m sorry, listen — the doctor said you don’t have much time left.”

  Her eyes slowly opened, then grew wide. “He did? He said that?”

  I squeezed her hand tight. “You were right. You were right all along, you are sick, you’re really sick, no one’s ever been this sick. I’m sorry I doubted you, Mom.”

  She nodded, coughing. “I knew it. I knew it. I told you. I told you, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, Mom, you did. You told everyone, you told those stupid doctors and they didn’t know anything and you were right. You’re always right.”

  She kept nodding, and was coughing harder. It didn’t sound like she was faking now. The sound was wet and deep.

  “I’ve seen your charts. It’s just like you said. It’s serious, Mom, and you’re not going to make it. It’s everything you said it is. You’re feverish, and you can’t breathe, and your — ” I shut my eyes and tried not to think about the bus. “Your tongue is swollen, and you’re pale and your eyes are dark and it’s just like you said.”

  “— stupid — ” she managed to say between deep racking coughs. She’d sat up now and was doubled over.

  “That’s right. The doctors are stupid. Everyone’s stupid. Everyone should listen to you.”

  She didn’t say anything after that. She couldn’t.

  I didn’t want to sit here. I didn’t want to watch this, to be here for it. But she had my hand held tight and wouldn’t let go and all I could do, the least I could do, was just sit here and hold on as long as she needed me to.

  I wasn’t watching the clock. If I had to guess, I’d say it took her an hour to die.

  Even when her breathing had stopped, I had trouble unlacing my fingers from hers. Her eyes were still open and I knew I was supposed to close them and I couldn’t make myself touch her again once I’d managed to get free. She looked — not peaceful, not happy, but — grimly satisfied, somehow. Like she’d proven something.

  The light that’s coming into the room around the edges of the blinds is starting to fade. I can hear a sound in the distance that might be helicopters. Further in the distance, a siren, I think. It might be.


  I don’t want to open the blinds. Not yet. I don’t know what world will be out there when I do. Your world, or Mom’s. I don’t know if the nurse was right. I don’t know if I’ve stopped her — if this was a fairytale spell, I don’t know if I broke it, or if I just gave her vision of how the world works permission to exist.

  I’m sitting in the chair by the bed, not looking outside, not looking at her. I can hear footsteps out in the hall. They might be nurses, doctors, going about their work, the world spinning back into place. They might be soldiers, might be the police, I might step out and find faces with blank glass eyes and gas-canister mouths ready to stop the spread of infection, whatever the cost.

  I’m not paying attention to any of that. I’ve got the phone in my hand, and if I pick up the receiver, if there’s a dial tone this time, I know I’ll be able to hear your voice, that life will be all right whether I make it out of here or not. That one of us made it.

  That’s all I need to hear. Please, just a dial tone.

  Someone’s knocking at the door.

  I’m going to pick up the receiver now.

  ONE LAST SUNSET

  I first saw the vampire across the room at a crowded party.

  Someone had just put in a Decadence X CD, and I was startled, always startled each time I hear your voice, soft and desperate on some recording, my guitar riffs straining behind you, reaching out to catch you as you fell.

  Eyes turn toward me and people whisper, and I know what they’re saying — they’re saying, that’s her, that’s Nikki Velvet, she was the guitarist — and I want to run screaming, but I don’t dare. It took months to get invited to this party, and if I let anything freak me, I’m not going to get invited back. Even if I freak over something as simple and stupid as missing you.