But they were in their yards, facedown. Cara abajo.
All I had on my phone were texts from a fourth-string football player and the girl who I think I’m in love with. Yeah, it’s love. Even then I knew it was. To think, two weeks ago, I had sex for the first time, I was practicing for Macy’s, and clocking in at 1250 on my SAT practice tests. I could smell victory in my life.
Mom’s work voicemail. Her voice sounding clear and upbeat—I can see her at her desk with her clipped-on ID card, Janice March, her long brown hair greying at the temples contained by the tortoise headband she always wore at work, her large brown eyes narrowing at some item on her screen and having to lift her reading glasses to her face, wearing a shawl because the office was always so cold—a mother in the prime of her life, her offspring growing up around her, her daily work meaning enough, her mate companion enough.
If my brain wasn’t bathing in chemicals fire-hosed on so as to increase the chances of my body’s survival, I wouldn’t’ve caught the emotion in my throat at hearing her voice. Instead, I left a perfunctory message she’d never hear in a strong assertive voice. Pretending to be communicating with Mom soothed, if only for seconds. “Hi, Mom. I know you’re probably just getting in but, give me a call back when you can.”
I put my palms on the windowsill, nose pressed against the glass, steaming it in expanding and ebbing blooms as if each contained a thought which got sucked back into my mind. My face went placid staring out across the street.
Mrs. Fleming lay in her yard. Flapping skirt. Mom lay somewhere, a yard, a stairwell, a street. I whined and fought back tears. Burst out with it, once. Emergency sirens lowing in the distance where tires squealed.
I wondered if any of those squeals were made by Martin. This guy I’ve been forced into knowing. Sometimes I like him. Sometimes I don’t. I’d say it’s a mutual tolerance borne out of love for Mom. I love my brother even though he’s half Martin. Sometimes when Johnny says Dad my emotional wires cross and fuzz with smelting heat and break apart because Johnny belongs to me and Martin doesn’t. There’s that split between us, and that split always causes me pause.
Wanting to try my laptop in the other room, I started to walk down the hall. I was going to catch the coverage of the world coming apart online. Finally, I’d get at least some answers, see somebody, even if only on a screen.
And then the rumbling.
The family pictures on the hall wall clattered. In one, Johnny’s missing teeth, Martin’s less sunken in and with darker hair, that wheelin’-dealin’ smirk and bullshitty gleam in his eye. Mom’s hand is on Martin’s shoulder, her wedding band sparking in the flash. The photographer kept saying stand over by Dad, no, no by your Dad, there, over there, stand over there and I said no. Unexpectedly, Martin had smiled. Maybe he was pleased that I stood my ground on that blue drop cloth next to the light umbrella. Rarely was he pleased with anything I did. But in that mall studio, an infant wailing in the waiting room, Martin was pleased.
The rumbling. I thought of the wave down the river and sounds that preceded it. Was that all this was after all? Aftershocks of some fracking-induced earthquake?
The waving bald man, the jumpers, the bleeding trashman, cops careening past.
Mrs. Fleming’s flapping skirt.
That scaly tail’s slither into the brush.
Earthquake? Yeah, right.
The low rumble got louder and the house shook.
I heard something in the rumble. A high whine. Mechanics gone wrong.
I dashed outside against all logic to see that what made this horrible sound was a machine losing its battle with gravity. There in that blue sky came a transcontinental jetliner with its nose pointing down at an angle too severe to be anything but crashing.
It came from the north and was going to crash in our neighborhood. I understood the phrase “deer in headlights” because I just froze. This behemoth hurtled at me. I say hurtling but really it was weird how slow-moving it seemed, how destined. It boomed and shrieked as its gossamer shadow passed over. I clamped my palms over my ears and winced and turned to watch it glide over the house. It got even louder then, the failing turbines shooting sound at me. I took my hands away in time to hear the ineffable crash and explosion, one, two, hitting me in the chest. I stumbled then righted. The fireball looked fake above our treetops.
I heard crackling but nothing else. No screaming and no emergency sirens pouring this way. Stunned on my heels, I watched the sky fill with black smoke, then the wind carrying some away.
My mind trilled, go see! But I knew seeing it wasn’t going to change anything, that it was only more evidence of the old world falling away. The sky itself might as well have fallen with that plane.
The plane crashed because something has happened. I’d seen it in the faces of the smiling jumpers, heard it in the trashman’s broken voice. I’d heard it in the sounds and saw it in the wave.
I didn’t jog toward the site. I crossed the street.
I had to see her face. Her mouth.
I stopped in the middle of the Flemings’ yard. Closer now, I could see Mrs. Fleming had fallen awkwardly, which meant suddenly, as the inside of one arm faced the sky as it should not. I couldn’t yet see her face, only the tangle of her graying henna hair.
She and Mom did neighborly duties for each other like collecting mail and newspapers during vacations. They swapped baked goods around Christmas and she always seemed to know what was going on with me and Johnny, waving as she made her way to her car, yelling across the street in a real voice, not a fake singsong, asking how we were, how’s such and such going. Yesterday she was carrying groceries in—the hatchback of her aging wagon open, an old Subaru replete with political stickers (strident, baffling, some in Spanish )—and she yelled across the street at me that she was going to be watching the Macy’s parade, we all will. Todos nosotros. I had to get close, to turn her over.
So, I blocked it all out, her voice, her friendly waving, who I thought she was, and summoned strength and focus like I did in band. I marched over to her and, steeling myself, moved the hair back and turned her over in one fluid motion.
Her jaw hinged open.
I was here rather than watching the plane burn to confirm it: her mouth brimmed thick with white webbing-like material I’d seen on the trashman. The texture mucoid yet dry, like no substance I’d seen. It had a translucence, a sheen to it. Her eyes open, her mouth stuffed with this cottony webby yet shiny . . .
I stand bolt upright, aghast, my hand to my mouth like I didn’t want it to leap into me though I knew it didn’t leap, move from person to person like a virus, bacteria, a gas. It came from inside. Something already planted.
An interloper, a freeloader. It’s there from the inception, at the conception. Always been there.
It’s there as mitosis splits us, as cells amass in the womb, latent for eons, but now it’s come out at the beckoning of the dawnsounds. Starshine-white. Crystalline shards, like some malignantly alive cotton candy issuing from the throat. I can say that with some assurance now, but even then at that moment I sensed—it came from, if not far far away…a long time ago.
Though at the time I didn’t stand there to ponder it—doing that at night when I can’t sleep, listening for them.
“Don’t do that! Don’t you touch her!” a voice bellowed from the cracked door. Half of Mr. Fleming’s face, a frantic eye. He jerked his hand at me once like shooing a fly. “You get away!” His voice feral.
“Mr. Fleming! Do you know what’s going on?” My voice ricocheted and didn’t sound like mine with that hysterical break in it. I took a step toward him.
He closed the door more, leaving only inches through which to yell. “You stay back! I’ve got my gun here.” He tipped the barrel he gripped with his fist into view. “Loaded.”
“I’m not . . .” I remember I didn’t know what to say. I felt accused a
nd didn’t understand. I backed up a step and put my hands up in a defensive posture.
“You’re not what, son? Responsible? Jesus Holy Christ.” I’ll never forget that because it confused me then as it confuses me now. Though now, I must admit, I do see maybe what he meant.
“Honestly, I just got home to pick up Johnny. I don’t know what’s happening.”
His eyes scanned down to his wife. He stopped blinking and stared as renewed shock poured over him. His face was ashen and slicked with sweat. I waited for him to cry out. He looked back up at me. “I took today off. Woke up later than usual. Becky’d gone off to work. Then the exploding texts…then the TV…then I got my gun. Then I looked out the window.” He nodded down like at a struck animal on the highway. “Saw her.”
“I haven’t seen TV yet. The radio’s not been specific.”
Mr. Fleming looked above my head at the smoke from the plane, rubbed his nose with his hand. He still wouldn’t open the door. “Yeah. I’d say that’s the gist of it. Nonspecific. Lacking in specificity.” He chuckled.
Amidst the chaos of downed-plane-nearby and dead-woman-on-the-walkway, that Mr. Fleming said this calmed me a smidge because that’s something he would say.
Martin didn’t much like Mr. Fleming—so I did, by default. I’m sure Mr. Fleming never knew nor cared. Martin didn’t think twice about announcing this dislike to us. Often he stood at the window, curtain parted with one hand, coffee in the other, watching his neighbor doing something as benign as mowing the grass, saying what’s that asshole up to now? Martin didn’t like him for the same stupid reasons people forever haven’t liked each other. He assumed the other guy thought he was special and resented him for it. What made Martin think Mr. Fleming think he was so special, what made him think he was so goddammed smart, was that Professor Fleming taught at UT. Sociology, long-tenured, PhD. He tended his raised vegetable gardens with a big floppy hat Martin thought was just precious. A real homophobe, straight out of central casting. I mean, Mr. Fleming had been married for decades, had kids on both coasts. Sometimes the news interviewed Mr. Fleming as an expert on all things anomie—social media, texting while driving, little girls dressed like hookers, the starvation death cult they discovered out near Marfa last year calling themselves Breatharians.
So, when Mr. Fleming said “lacking in specificity,” for a moment, we were talking like neighbors again. He the professor, me the befuddled kid.
“What?! What is this?” I demanded.
“TV’s not happening anymore. It’s happening that fast.”
“What is?”
“I’d tell you if I knew. But don’t touch her. Leave her alone, okay? I think the best thing you can do right now is go home and shut yourself in.”
“How long has she been like that? Did you call nine one one? What were they saying on TV?” I was whining now, desperate to know anything.
He looked down at his wife and frowned, a commonplace frown you’d issue if your raked pile of leaves had been scattered by wind. I didn’t understand it then. Now I do: he frowned at his wife’s corpse because the sadness had become so absolute that his spirit was unable to do anything else. “Just all camera phone stuff. I didn’t see any on-camera live footage. That’s how fast.”
“Footage of what?”
He paused. The constant faraway car and home alarms. “Listen, Kevin, I’m sorry but I need to close the door.” He coughed. The look on the sliver of his face said pain and panic. He swallowed hard and looked back down at Mrs. Fleming. His chin quivered. His hand shook as with elderly palsy as he raised it to clutch his throat.
“Please. If whatever this is happens as fast as you say—” and I’m nearly crying now. I wanted to blurt out my guesses in staccato to him. Oh, I wanted, still want, to name this, put it in an airtight bottle, label it, put it on a shelf of logic.
“It is happening fast.” The sound of a skidding car, a dull crunch-thud streets away. “Something black and awful. Nothing we’ve ever been prepared for or would have ever been able to prepare for. We couldn’t have known this was a possibility.” He coughed into his fist. “Something’s happened, something’s taken ahold now. It’s just…death. I think it’s extinction time, Kevin. I really do. But hell if I know what’s causing it.” He looked guiltily away. Something clouded his mind. “It’s over. It’s just…over.”
This coming from a professor of sociology, it sounds official, confirmed. And in my heart I know he’s right. But what about me? Am I going to die today?
I try but fail to not glance down at Mrs. Fleming’s stuffed maw, her purpling skin. Swallowing hard, I say, “So it’s happening that fast. I may not ever see anything about it because TV’s out.” I looked at him, beseeching. “I need to know. What did you see?”
He opened the door an inch more. “Only an hour or so. Total chaos on screen, at the newsrooms. Because they’re not just reporting it. They’re affected, too.” I remember the wind dying down and hearing the roar and crackle of the plane wreck. “The first images were of whales on beaches. Lined up like rows of batteries, bleeding from the ears. Beaches in Mexico, Nicaragua, England, South Africa, India, Australia, Japan. Massachusetts. Down here at Matagorda Bay. CNN’s running raw footage. Hardly any commentary. One woman, not even in makeup, a runner, an intern, was trying to report but she didn’t stay on camera long. Shaking shots of people running nowhere. Staggering and grabbing their throats. And then scenes and scenes of people jumping from buildings and bridges. You don’t even know what cities. There’s no scrolling chyrons. They’re not jumping from flames like on Nine Eleven. They’re just jumping. People blowing their heads off with guns.”
He looks down at his shotgun, back at me. “Anchorpersons only said ‘we’re bringing you this raw footage’ and ‘we’re waiting for a message from the president.’ Things like that. A static shot of the White House press room waiting for him. Minutes later the signal just dropped out. And then—”
“Professor Fleming, what’ll we do—?”
“Go back to your house.”
“Where’s the military? The safe places? The contingency plans?” Panicked breathing.
“The military is made up of people. It’s flesh. All that might means nothing in the face of this.”
“This?”
“Go back to your house.”
“But after that. What am I supposed to do?”
He closed his eyes and said calmly, “Go back to your house.”
“You’re a professor of…you know people. What is this? I have to know. A virus? A military thing gone wrong?”
“The world choking…and worldwide mass suicide at dawn, Kevin? I cannot conceive of a virus, bacterium, a gas…” He cackled with fright and wild hilarity. “It can’t even be star monsters, or creatures wandering in from those other dimensions! Those maybe we could fight.”
I didn’t want to say it but I did. “End times? Biblical, Mayans, whatever?” A pause. “This white stuff?” As I waited for his answer, I viewed in my mind’s eye the wave rolling up the river, heard the massive dawnsounds before that, the smiling faces under wind-whipped hair. The dark smiling teeth of my summerdreams.
He put a fist to his mouth and stifled another cough, his cheeks billowing out. “Heh. Pick a book. Pick a chart. Pick a pundit, a preacher, a Petri dish.”
“But—”
“Does it really matter? It’s over.”
I stood there looking at him, felt his resignation. He sighed and didn’t look at me anymore. He shook his head as if it was all just a damn shame. Glanced at his dead wife, then looked into the loom of his house like someone else was there. I could just hear him mumble into the room, “I dunno. I dunno. All ruined now. All done.” He fell to a knee with a heavy thud, coughed haggardly, and closed the door.
I heard the dead bolt snap into place.
I expected to hear the shotgun.
But he was still there, behind the door, and I heard him whisper, “It needs you to need it.”
I didn’t bother to go in and help Mr. Fleming any more than I did scoop up that little girl on the Hancock Bridge. Sure, he’d locked me out, told me to go home, but I could’ve found my way in. But why? I knew: futility. I had to find my little brother, my friends.
Walking back over, I tried calling my dad in Charlotte. He’d moved there just before I entered third grade. I saw him twice a year, talked to him maybe once a month. I don’t even really want to talk about him much. He gave up on me, so I’ll not give him much time here. He’s got wavy brown hair, brown eyes, olive skin, thin, could eat anything he wanted and did without fattening up. Mom says I’m his twin, that I could pass for his very young brother. Apparently my dad, Nicholas March, was a looker, so I got from my mom, but that confuses me because I don’t consider myself one. A looker. I think he just got bored with Mom. She aged, got matronly and provincial, he didn’t. Simple as that. Though we kids never really know, do we? Gotta wait until we’re adults, parents ourselves before we start seeing the world through their eyes. Guess I’ll never know what happened. Like it matters.
Anyway, he strayed all the way to North Carolina. Now he lives with a twenty-nine-year-old woman (Mom calls her a girl) named Beth. She’s nice. I’d even say “go Nick” if he wasn’t my dad. I’m not into that being-friends-with-your-parents thing. Some of my friends’ parents try to act all cool with us, like hang out with us and relate, and it’s just an insult. One good thing about Dad: even though we didn’t see each other much, when I went out to see him or he came to see me, he didn’t try to be my buddy. He refused to be Good Time Dad. He tried to be a father. Stern and instructive, but not mean. That’s what it felt like, anyway. I guess it doesn’t make sense for me to say he gave up on me and then saying he tried to be a father. Like trying to make sense makes sense.
The Late Bloomer Page 4