The Late Bloomer

by Falkin, Mark;

  I pulled out my phone and called him, but nothing happened. I tried Martin’s cell phone. Same thing. Texting. Anybody. Nothing goes through. The last ones I had were those two from Bastian and Kodie. When I couldn’t reach anybody, couldn’t get online, when no apps worked, nothing, I said, “Shit,” and looked straight up at the sky.

  I tried to get reception through the antenna on the old set in my parents’ room. All snow except for one Spanish language news channel. It didn’t come in clearly but I could hear voices and see some shadowy picture with heavy zigzags through it.

  Some newsroom somewhere actually had a camera pointing at a newsperson. This man spoke Spanish which I took at school but he spoke so fast and the reception kept fuzzing so I couldn’t begin to understand. He kept looking off camera and the camera kept moving. Once, the man got up from his chair and ran around behind the camera and you could hear him talking, consoling the cameraman who obviously faltered. The newsman gasped and called out, “Antonio, Oh Antonio.” The camera steadied.

  “Cerca cerca cerca,” he muttered.

  Back at the desk, he tried to compose himself. The reception cleared and steadied. He wiped sopping sweat from his brow with his hand. He said, “Dios mio, es el final de nosotros.” He crossed himself twice and kissed his knuckle and repeated “El final el final,” shaking his head. The guy sat alone in the studio. He lifted his head to a loud noise. “Jesus Christo…El final”—he coughed and grabbed his throat and got that look on his face. Pain and panic. “Señoras y señores…me despido de ustedes.” He got up and shambled off camera.

  I left the TV on in case while I packed a backpack.

  I got Martin’s pistol and bullets from the closet. Though he did have a safe he kept it in sometimes, he didn’t always. Martin had it stuffed in the back of his bottom drawer with his rattier T-shirts. While not exactly your rootin’ tootin’ NRA type, he did take his gun ownership seriously. He’d taken me and Johnny to the shooting range once and gave us the talk about how dangerous they are and how to use it and basically here it is, pop off a few rounds but then stay the hell away from it. Checking a box Mom had drawn for him. Same with the safe.

  I dunno. Maybe I’m too hard on Martin.

  I tell you, I’d give anything to see him now.

  I held it heavy in my hand and stared at it.

  I found Martin’s nylon holster, strapped it on my shoulder and around my waist. It felt weird tucking the gun into its place. But I have to say, in sliding the loaded gun snug into its place not far from my beating heart, with all the horror happening and what I knew I’d come across out there, I felt so free right at that moment. Everything erased. Instead of total fear, right then I felt incredible hope. The guilt that came sidling along with that feeling I quashed by putting my hand on the gun butt just below my left armpit and looking out of Mom’s bedroom window. Freedom. Newness. Not now, but soon. A fresh start.

  Though I had survival to worry about, I had no other worries. Those everyday burdens lifted away from my head, my shoulders, and most of all my heart, the constant compression there unwrapped. The elation I felt forced a laugh from me. One big burst—ha!

  My laughter came from the open-ended feeling before me, not from anything being funny. Shock and disbelief reigned. My parents were surely dead. The world, the human one at least, had broken apart. All in one morning, planes fell from the sky, billions of people leaped from high places, died of some fungal crystal coming in a slow upchuck.

  I’d not been able to slow down enough to really think, to miss anyone. It’s just been reaction, stimulus-response, fight and flight. Mostly flight. Running for your own life has left little room for mourning.

  The Dollar Tree is in a tiny strip mall on Burnet less than a mile away. The two stoplights on the way blink red. At first glance, nothing looks wrong except there’s no traffic, kind of like how there’s none on a 105 degree day on an August Sunday afternoon, nothing but spectral heat vapors rising from asphalt.

  Way up on Burnet, a car rolls toward me. I sat at the blinking stop sign and watch the big older boxy Buick or Caddy. It looked like a drifting boat as it angled across the road going the wrong way against traffic, if there had been any. It runs up over the curb, hits the Hat Creek sign, and stops.

  Nobody gets out. I remember thinking it’s a rather benign apocalypse, all things considered. It’s not just in T. S. Eliot’s poem. This, in fact, is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but a whimper.

  Then I think of the lipsticked smile, the little girl’s vacant eyes. I think of the sound the nurse made when she hit.

  Ends not with a bang nor a whimper, but a whuh!

  I turned my head and saw a man dressed in dark clothing lying in the parking lot of the CVS. I stepped on the gas and turned sharply into the strip mall anchored by the Dollar Tree. I had expected to see bodies everywhere. I guess the dying went to someplace private to do it—that is, if they’re not leaping from high places (with smiles on their faces)—like a sick dog will go off by itself to a secreted place to die. An atavism, something to be done alone.

  You don’t come into the world with anyone. I mean, sure, you’re with your mother, but you didn’t leap into life holding someone’s hand, and you won’t jump out of it holding anyone’s, either.

  I wish the experiences of birth and death were reversed. I wish we were more cognizant of being born. We get the full knowledge of our dying, unless it’s so sudden that we can’t, if we’re struck by lightning or something. Another one of God’s lovely mysteries at which we’re to shrug our shoulders and utter well, it’s his will, not for me to wonder why.

  What. A bunch. Of crap.

  Mr. Fleming had locked his door on me. Although I didn’t hear the shotgun go off—for all I know it did while I watched the Univision guy say his last words before going off air—I know he went back in there to die alone. Muttering to the nobodies there in the living room.

  Did Mom wander off to do the same? Felt the choking coming on and something within her told her to walk out of the house. Or…did she . . .? Oh, I don’t want to think about that.

  That first body, the body of a stranger in a parking lot, ratified and compounded the fear. Afraid of the unfolding circumstances, afraid that I wouldn’t be mature enough, that I’d just crater with fear and ineptitude.

  Kodie.

  She texted me to meet her here. I work with her at the Dollar Tree. Doesn’t matter what she’s wearing, whether it’s her standard black skinny jeans or her baggy Army-Navy store fatigues and Black Jack boots fully laced up to go with, or those same boots with a skirt, any skirt, well, let’s just say I don’t always ask debit or credit or say have a nice day because I am staring. The girl adheres in every way to the Euclidian Golden Ratio. And I don’t just mean physically. She’s in community college (studying to be a teacher or social worker) and likes Emily Brönte. A lot.

  I’m not much on classics. She says I’m missing something and I say I doubt it. Customers watch warily as if a fight brews between us. When I tell her she’s a pseudo-intellectual poser while we’re restocking, she says the term pseudo-intellectual is used by pseudo-intellectuals.

  “Why here?” I wonder out loud as I pull in to the lot in front of the DT’s banks of glass. Here comes Kodie striding to the front door which is flanked by huge draping plastic jack-o’-lanterns with leering faces she and I hung up in the windows the last day of September. Her hair’s dyed black but you can see the brown tint in sunlight. Half her head’s shaved almost to the skin, the half that faces me when we work registers. Her sharp jawline and full lips really jump out in relief against the wall of hair hanging down the other side. A small nose ring graces a nostril.

  Through the glass I see her cruising through the registers. She’s carrying a baseball bat at its fat middle with one hand. She’s stuffing something else in a deep pocket of her military cutoffs. She unlocks the door with her
master key and smashes down on the door’s crash bar. The sun reflects sharp on the glass. By the time I’ve closed the car door, she’s on me. She hugs me so tight it hurts a little.

  “You’re okay?” She looks me up and down.

  “Yeah. I’m okay, I think. Seeing you helps.”

  I squeeze back and lift her off her feet. When I do, first she kisses the side of my face then puts her mouth to my ear and with slow hot cinnamon breath whispers, “How’s Johnny?”

  I put her down and really notice her red eyes and a face that has been wiped several times over. “Gone. Not at home.”

  “Oh, God, Kevin.” She stands with wide eyes, holding her elbows with her hands, smacking her cinnamon gum. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “I don’t either. Couldn’t stay at the house.” I couldn’t tell her the reason was because I feared my neighbor across the street just might come calling with his shotgun.

  Something was wary in the way she asked about Johnny. It let me know I wasn’t crazy. Besides Kodie, a dying Mr. Fleming, the floundering trashman, the jumpers, the SUVs and flying cop cars, I haven’t seen an adult. Not alive, anyway.

  Was Kodie an adult? Nineteen. Old enough for war and voting. Probably not old enough to rent a car, but a motel room, sure. Those were legalities, business policies. The answer is: being an adult depends on the person. There’s no bright line one crosses.

  “Me neither.” She spread her arms out, exasperated. “What the fuck!” She dervished round and round like the hills were alive, which was creepy because all you could hear were her boots scuffing the pavement.

  Here we were on Burnet Road in the middle of greater Austin and I heard nothing but her boots echoing off the building. Glancing at the leering jack-o’-lanterns, I sensed my neck hair standing up and felt a chill.

  I tried to shake it off. “I know, I know. Crazy. I don’t . . .” I just wasn’t able to articulate anything for the shock.

  Kodie stopped twirling. In the silence of the strip mall parking lot, the fear came and I knew I had to keep it at bay or else I’d just drive home a capering mess and curl up on the floor. I couldn’t do that, especially for Johnny. I had to find him.

  Kodie tried to lighten things. “You know what I keep thinking of?” she asked with a nauseated chuckle. “How last week nobody had been in for an hour or so and you said it felt like the end of the world?”

  I did remember. And we both had laughed and said that’d be cool. We can live free, no mindless job, no parents, no societal structure, total autonomy. We could feed ourselves from Whole Foods until the power goes, then we could shuttle food and refrigerate it at Barton Springs pool—assuming no roving gangs of the apocalypse, no sprinting zombies. Garden of Eden—Here. Here’s a cool apple for you, Kodie. I’d pull one from out of the clever containing device I’d constructed in the spring-fed pool. And there would be no huge snake looming in the hoary live oak up the slope from the springs, its dark and bent malignancy reflected in the pool’s calm—hissing, waiting, assessing the sin—and there would be no judgment. And Kodie would take a bite and juice would run down her chin and she’d smile. Her teeth glistening with juice, we’d both smile.

  “Yeah, I remember. Freedom and all that.”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “This ain’t it.”

  “No.”

  “Do you know anything?” I asked her. “Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head, and then…. ” I snapped my finger.

  “I was lying awake in bed, the sun up, when I heard alarms, sirens.”

  “Yeah, me too.” I wasn’t yet ready to tell her what I’d heard at dawn. I wondered if she’d heard the dawnsounds too and felt the same way. Because they are the sounds of insanity that if you admitted to hearing in the old world, you’d be told to get help, and if you refused, you’d be involuntarily committed.

  But isn’t that what those sounds asked of me? Committal? Involuntary…mandatory?

  Kodie examined my face as if she knew the thing I hid. I broke up the momentary impasse with, “Your folks?”

  “They weren’t home. Car gone. I dunno. I tried calling and texting them. They have one car and ride-share to work usually. Early for them to be gone. Maybe….” She got lost in thought for a moment but shook it off. “Yours?”

  “Same…but my mom’s car is still there, her keys and phone by the door. Her hairdryer was on the floor but plugged in.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Should we go try to find them?” We looked at each other. “Don’t we know what we’ll find?”

  Kodie nodded, looked down, sniffed. Her chin muscle quivered. She looked up at me with moist eyes and nodded and said, “Yeah, we do,” with mucosal thickness. “I’ve got to try to find them, though. I can’t just…”

  “I don’t want that to be my last memory of them.”

  Silence.

  Reality drilling down, striking rabbit terror which now bubbled up.

  I prattled on like a soap opera matriarch glossing over profound familial injury. “Yeah. And that plane? You hear that? Crashed right behind our house. I watched it float right over.”

  “Man…”

  “You see any media at all? I missed everything. Everything went down before…well, I did see this one guy on Univision. But that ended quickly.”

  “So…you don’t know.” Kodie said, not asked. She looked away in thought.

  “Know? I know nothing. What is this?”

  “Well, I don’t know that, but for a little while on cable news they were showing camera phone footage. All over the world, Europe and Africa. Eastern seaboard, then Texas. Kevin, people were—”

  “Yeah. My neighbor told me.” I paused, inhaled. “I’ve seen that myself.” Exhaled.

  “You mean you saw people…?” Kodie lowered her voice and finished her question. “You mean you saw people…killing themselves?”

  I nodded in eyes-closed solemnity.

  “Where?” she whispered, loud and breathy.

  I tossed my head in the direction. “Hancock Bridge over MoPac. You know, with the pedestrian sidewalk, that fence?” I put my palms together and made a discrete diving motion.

  Kodie put her hand to her mouth and her eyes welled. “Into traff—” she stopped herself. Down to a clipped whisper now. “Traffic?”

  This had to be a dream. Sure it was. I’d awaken and this would all seem a bizarro dream. I’m dreaming the world is ending because I’ve been kicked off the band squad and I’m stressing about the SAT and I’m stirring all that together with an increase in pot smoking and insomnia. Of course. I’d laugh and I’d tell Bass, “Dude, there were these fubar whalesounds at dawn, people foaming at the mouth and dying in their yards, people killing themselves with grins on their faces…”

  Kodie paced back and forth in a five-step rhythm. When she pivoted away on the second pass, I noticed it. There, behind her on the parking lot cement, set so haphazardly that it said to me that this was no longer a parking lot but simply a surface on the earth.

  They had been building out the strip mall to include a five-story apartment-condo. Lots of stone and brick and wood stacked around at the staging area there at the back of the lot. What I saw was made of some of the broken bricks and rocks, this little rounded pile, about two, three feet high, seven feet long. I hadn’t seen it when I first pulled up I was so focused on Kodie.

  My stomach went out on me, and my bowel did this shimmy-shift. Seeing it, I immediately looked over my shoulder at the CVS across the intersection, at the parking lot, where that dead guy was.

  A neat pile of stones there now.

  Wouldn’t we have heard the stones clacking in all this quiet? That pile made me think about all the bodies.

  All the bodies.

  Kodie yanked me from my reverie. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m fine.” Kodie saw
my face and mouthed, What?

  She already knows. Or intuits.

  I asked her, “You? How do you feel?”

  “I’m okay I think. It’s all happened so fast. Seems like it would’ve hit me by now, you know? If it’s infectious, or a gas, it’s everywhere. I’m not feeling any different, physically that is.”

  Over her shoulder I saw Mi Victoria, the Mexican bakery where Johnny and I always got breakfast tacos. Mi Victoria likely had a cook in the kitchen dead on the floor from either choking on whatever-it-is or sticking his head in the deep fat fryer like he’s bobbing for apples, that smile seared into his face. Mi Victoria wasn’t cranking out egg and chorizos for the construction crews gentrifying the Burnet Corridor.

  My head hurt right then. As it hurt in the summerdreams.

  My face must have gone ashen because Kodie asked me in a panic if I was okay again, stepping to me and grabbing my wrist.

  What disease chokes you on glistening webby crystals? Quickly chokes you, like volcanic lava overflowing, too late to stop it once the seal brakes, and, oh, God, what disease makes you gladly commit violent sudden suicide? “I’m fine, I’m fine,” I said, straining to keep the reticent shake out of my voice. Reticent shake being another way of saying terror.

  “You see that?” I lifted my arm and extended it slowly, my index finger rising to meet its target. Kodie turned around.

  She froze, put a flat hand across her brow, a salute to block the sun.

  “What is that?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Was it there before?” Kodie asked.

  “Don’t think so.”

  What had she seen before she got here? Why was the door to the store locked when I pulled up? And why was she holding a baseball bat? Dollar Tree only sold Whiffle sets.

  We heard a low boom far away which took our glances from each other and up to the middle sky. The sound seemed to have come from as far away as Camp Mabry off of MoPac a couple of miles west.

  It sounded like a shotgun blast, or even something bigger. After September 11, 2001, Camp Mabry wasn’t as open to the public anymore. I have no clue what weapons they have there. A mortar round? We didn’t even ask each other if we heard it. It made our time in the parking lot feel like it needed to end, that lingering anywhere wouldn’t do.