The Late Bloomer

by Falkin, Mark;

  Understanding came when I heard the distant light rumble. The Gulf rain clouds had met with a trough of cooler air from the north and the collision made thunder.

  I lay back down slowly so as not to bother Kodie.

  I don’t remember when I grew tired of the music and dancing. I don’t remember coming to bed at all, but here she was and all felt okay, cozy even, with the sound being diagnosed as thunder. The day after the day of was still hours away.

  I turned onto my side to watch Kodie sleep for a minute, her silhouette silvery against the moon-cast window, and then put my arm over her and closed my eyes.

  It’s only me, brother. No other.

  Johnny’s voice.

  The thunder still sounded and soothed me and sleep snatched me down. Just before I succumbed, my drifting brain mined the subconscious and put together facts reminding me that thunder comes, crescendos, and then trails off.

  This rumbling wasn’t trailing off. A low note came along on top of it. It built, its source coming closer.

  My eyes flew open. I knew this sound but my mind couldn’t yet identify it because it was a sound so part of the fabric of my everyday life. Now that the new world had torn through that fabric, this noise stood out.

  Kodie propped herself up on her elbows. “What are you doing?”

  I stood in the middle of my room with my arms out and palms flared, listening. “Sshhh. You hear that rumbling?”

  Kodie looked at the ceiling. “Thunder?”

  “That’s what I thought. MoPac.”

  “There’re no cars, Kevin.” She started to lie back down, but then she shot up. “Ohhh, the train. Now I hear it.”

  “Right. But…who’s driving it?”

  “Maybe it’s been running all day. Maybe the engineer wasn’t able to stop it before he—”

  “Sounds like it’s rolling really slow. You think it’s pulling anything hazardous? I’ve been hearing that thing all my life. Never paid it any attention.” My mind reeled at the insanity of a runaway ghost train coming our way.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. At some point it’ll come to a stop.”

  “I think I should go see what’s what. Just in case there’s an adult running it.”

  “You don’t think kids can run a train, do you?”

  I stood there swaying in that space between drunk and hungover. How often we’d have to question things. Nothing would be assumed for a long time. Just how much we had ahead of us made the SATs and college and career and that life track in the urban information age seem petty and small. The learning curve ramping onto this new life felt too steep.

  “I’m going to drive over to the tracks and see. I’m sure Johnny would want to see this.” Was this what being a dad felt like? That’s a parent’s inclination, to consider including the child in an activity for the sake of pedagogy.

  How quick nature is. The roles it assigns when change comes, how nature doesn’t consider it to be change. Change is just…something else. I thought how nature isn’t conscious. It just is. Understanding? That’s man’s angst. Well, it was. Was it mine? Did I burn to understand what had happened?

  Then, I did. But now, no. I just want to live. And the only way to do that is to connect with them.

  Johnny’s room stood empty and cool for the hole in the glass. The plastic trash bag Bass and I had taped over it billowed inside and sucked back out, a palpitating sac belonging to a breathing thing.

  Mom and Martin’s pitch-dark room smelled of stale, sweet breath. I turned on the bathroom light so as to awaken Bastian. Then I remembered Johnny had passed out in the reading nook.

  No Rebecca in the bedrooms. I walked with alacrity to the main part of the house and started flipping on lights. The living room was empty, as was the nook.

  No Rebecca, no Johnny.

  I hadn’t put on the alarm. I dashed to the front door. The bolt was in place.

  The back door off the dining room was bolted as well. I jogged to the laundry room, stepped down into the mud room. That door was cracked an inch.

  The kids were outside.

  Johnny was more than just outside. He was gone.

  Kodie begged me not to go, said that it served no purpose chasing it.

  When I told her Johnny and Rebecca weren’t here, she put her fingers to her lips. I told her Johnny once mentioned he thought hopping a train would be cool. Apparently, Martin did it once when he was young. Great parenting, planting that idea into your son’s head.

  One sleepwalking night, Johnny’s in my room, standing in the dark, the train trundling. “Hear that, Kev? That’s the future. Close, close, close.”

  Johnny was among the networks of the new world’s children who didn’t want us here, who have come to believe so by intuition afforded them when those sounds boomed over the world that dawn. It’s their world now. We’re the remnants, the revenants of the old world.

  The Train Chasers. The Late Bloomers.

  They wait.

  They’ve got time.

  Is sublime patience the reason why they don’t just amass around us and kill us? Why don’t a few of the older ones come find us with the guns of their fathers in their hands and just take us out?

  Are we misunderstanding them? I asked myself.

  Why didn’t they? Because they didn’t need to. Because, as the phrase goes, they have all the time in the world. They own time. They can remake it and reshape it and mark it however they want.

  They’re afraid and confused. I think they are between worlds, being tugged between antipodes.

  It became clear to me then: They don’t just attack us wholesale, assuming they want us gone, because that would be the way of the old world, to confront and eliminate your enemies with weapons, with machines. They probably don’t see us as enemies in the literal sense.

  Things are the way they are.

  I thought about what that Simon kid had said, and then shuddered as if a blast of cold air had riffled up my shirt and grabbed my heart—Keep Johnny with you.

  I know the trilling screams I heard as Bass and I drove off were his. That terrified little boy was willing tell me that. That and something else he couldn’t let loose from his mouth. I saw his flushed face again, the freckles popping from his high cheeks, peering through the green, and I saw the bag with the rock as I lifted it up.

  I ran out the side door, flung open the trash can in which I’d tossed it.

  The rock was gone.

  A knight errant, I sped off after a runaway train hoping my brother rode it. It had stopped raining and the air and the road smelled anew. Not a full day later and the air…my God. Soon that freshness would turn into a worldwide deathreek.

  The train headed south. Johnny riding it… I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess that’s why I’m telling you, dear reader. Trying to figure out what I was thinking, hindsight offering a bit of perspective if not clarity.

  Three tire-screaming turns later, without hardly touching the brakes, and I sped along the MoPac expressway through the pools of the arc lights at four in the morning, the new dawn not yet fathomed. Hundreds of cars sat on the shoulders. Some had veered and come to a stop at the median along which the train tracks ran. All of the doors to those cars had been flung open, their occupants gone.

  Where were they? No stone cairns, no bodies. Just empty cars up and down MoPac, doors open, blinkers punctuating the dark.

  The long freight train flagged aimless. It might quit right here. My speedometer clocked me at seven once I cruised alongside. At this crawl and by the lights I was able to make out some of the graffiti, glorious confections of color, shape, and menace.

  It’s not like I really chased Johnny. But I did give desperate panting chase like a dog without a clue what to do now that I’d caught it. I just needed to come see it, I think, a relic of the old world, like me, something, anything,
still rolling along out of the past. I felt a stupid kinship to this train.

  Following the train as it eased toward the downtown skyline, all my windows down, leaning out and listening to the mechanical clack and moan. I found myself waving at the engine though I saw nobody in the window. These things ran on autopilot, I guess. Inertia on display, a body in motion. Would it exhaust its fuel before plowing through the terminus end-rails? Nobody’d be hurt. No property would be damaged, no insurance claims filed. It would be of no more consequence than a wave crashing upon a beach. Just another old-world mover ceasing to.

  How many still moved across the globe without engineers, without captains, full of dead passengers, running off rails and piling on top of themselves, cartwheeling over and over, massive cargo ships running the China to Los Angeles route tipping over in rough seas, all that cargo slipping off into the ocean, others plowing into ports, icebergs, undrawn bridges?

  The dark teeth part of me smiled, the one that’s close, close, close—Bring it all down. Be finished with it.

  Where did that sentiment come from? Often enough during those first days I remember this nihilism flashing through me like a flicking shadow, a hot wave.

  I thought of stopping, running up alongside and jumping onto one of the ladders, lope along the top like a hero with perma-stubble to the front where I would slip feet-first into the engineer’s car, shove the corpse aside, slam down the accelerator, and plow onward into this odd future. I sped up to get way ahead of it so I could time it, got out of the car, jumped the guardrail and scrambled up the berm, slipping in the loose rock up to the track. I stood on the track with my feet spread shoulder-width apart on a tarry tie and watched it come. Austin’s skyline loomed half lit-up behind me. The tie shuddered beneath my feet. My molars clacked.

  It rolled toward me, a hundred yards away now.

  I closed my eyes and in my mind saw the nose of this massive metal engine lifting me up and then me being ground under it. When I heard my own screaming underneath the wheels, saw my body pummeled, I chased away the thought.

  At least I was still chasing away the thoughts.

  The white stuff hadn’t come for me, and I knew it wouldn’t. But was I getting a slow drip of the other? I felt like I was going crazy right then. My mind splitting. Look at me, I thought, standing on a train track in the dark, a dawdling train coming toward me, and I’m debating with myself whether I should stay.

  Is this what all the other late bloomers were doing? Fighting it off, going mad in the process?

  Was there anybody else besides us? Actuarial logic said there had to be. Beyond that though, I knew there were. I had never felt, intuited things so deeply and assuredly. I knew things now. Just knew them. I know them.

  When I opened my eyes again, I knew the late bloomers left wouldn’t be for long if we didn’t get together very soon.

  The train was only fifty yards from me now. I waved my hands above my head in big sweeping SOS. arcs. It came on slow and implacable and pointless.

  Just as it reached me, I stepped off and moved my arm in the way of a suave matador allowing the crazed bull to bellow by, bowing to it as it passed. The train rolled by an arm’s length away. My hair moved in its wake. I looked straight at it in a blur for a minute but the squeals of metal on metal became too much.

  From the car I saw the graffitied phrase scroll by over and over: A Pox on Yo Lips.

  Apocalypse. The white stuff. My eyes followed the last tag for as long as I could still read it. When my eyes jumped back, directly in front me, in the flashing interstices between train cars, it stood looking at me. I knew what it was. I saw its wings folded to its ribs, its snaky tail coiled around its talons.

  I did not blink. I did not breathe.

  My view of it was indistinct as an image through a zoetrope. It looked at me as I looked at it.

  The train rolled past. That I no longer saw it standing there wasn’t a surprise. I leaned on the hood of my car and for the first time really cried.

  On the short drive back to the house I wondered if we, Kodie and I—her and I alone—could rebuild. Could we do it right? Had Bass messed up that simple equation?

  I turned on the radio and listened to a couple of looping ad jingles. Yesterday I found them annoying, dismaying, then macabre. Today, like the train, I’d rather listen to them more than just about anything. I could picture all the people involved and, though I didn’t know them, I missed them terribly. I can see them in the studio standing around a boom microphone, all with headphones on, singing the inane lyrics they held in their hands but getting into it because it’s work and work is good.

  Working is living.

  I saw the advertising people in their urbane outfits playing it for the client in some swank glassed room and they all nodded to it until they cut it off and then, after the moment of uneasy quiet, the smiles started and handshaking and backslapping wouldn’t stop and then a few of them would go out to happy hour pleased with their work that day and a woman and a man would kiss in the car on the way home and remark to each other how they felt like teenagers and that each always had liked the other but was afraid to say anything.

  Daybreak and there’s no low roar of a city waking up.

  Nobody waited on the porch. The front door stood inches ajar. I pushed it open. Bass’s snores filled the back half the house. A swing in the backyard set swayed. I stood at the picture window and saw Kodie come back to it from behind the stand-alone garage. I watched her rock back and forth on the swing. She sensed I watched her and looked up. I went out to see her.

  “Did you catch it?” she asked, the subtext clear: Did you find Johnny? She coughed into her fist, looked at her hand, then tucked it under her knee.

  I shook my head and eased into a swing. We listened to birds call and respond in the oaks above. “I stood on the tracks. For a sec, I wanted it to hit me and would’ve let it if it’d come faster. I chickened out and stepped off just before it got to me.”

  “That’s not chickening out. C’mon, we’ve got to keep trying. Once Bass gets up, we should talk, plan.” She coughed a little more, which then bloomed into a productive hacking.

  “You okay?”

  She coughed like a goose. She put her hand up to say wait a minute. When she was finished, she glanced at a shaded spot behind the garage where she had been when I first saw her out here. I followed her glance. In the still summer-green St. Augustine, I saw spots of red.

  “Is that from you?” I asked her. “Kodie?” Dumbstruck. “Is it…?”

  “I feel hot to you?” She leaned over in her swing and I felt her head.

  “Yeah. Let’s go inside and take your temperature.”

  “No. Let’s just sit here for a minute. Please. The birds.” She scanned the canopy and inhaled the fresh air. Grackles chivvied above us, not caring at all about our predicaments. A smile lifted her mouth’s corners. “Where do you think they are?”

  “Johnny and Rebecca?” After a long exhalation and running my hands through my hair, I said, “I feel like they’re all together somewhere. Maybe in the city, but I feel like they’d be heading somewhere else, away.” In my mind’s lidless eye, from the boulder atop Mount Bonnell, I saw the river flowing to the Gulf.

  “You feel that?”

  “Don’t you feel something?”

  “A broad question given the last twenty-four hours.” She coughed. “About them? The children?”

  I nodded.

  “Yeah, I feel it,” she said, “but I don’t know what it is I’m feeling.”

  “They’re gathering. Waiting. They’re not part of the old world. That’s why they’ll be leaving the cities. I’d say I’m having visions about it but that’s…seeing them all together out in an open field.” Lidless eye: On the beach. Rows of fires. Piles of stones.

  She stood up, excited though stifling another cough. “Not dreaming,
but in, like, little flashes. When I think of the children, that’s what I see. Tens of thousands, like you’d see at a music festival or something.”

  I think not of sunny Austin City Limits but of a Las Vegas night, broken windows on the thirty-second floor, automatic rifle fire.

  “Yep, me too.” I start swinging, almost like I’m dismissing the coincidence. I wasn’t seeing flashes, though. I was seeing, had been since midsummer, entire scenes. Had heard their hummed polyphonic songs.

  “Aren’t you at all interested in why we’re both…or how?”

  “Of course, I’m interested, but what to do about it?” I swung higher and higher, looked up into the umbrellas of oaks and knew I was right. “I just don’t know what knowing it gets us.”

  “It’s going to be important to you. And our common vision lends to that knowledge.”

  I swung and didn’t say anything. She looked at the speckles of blood on her hand. She smeared it into her other hand. At the apex of my swings behind her, I could see that her shoulders were lifting and shaking as she began to cry.

  I drag-stopped. “Come on. Let’s go in and take your temp.”

  Kodie’s temperature measured 102. She lay prone on the couch in the living room, her forearm resting on her forehead, her eyes closed.

  “Shit,” she said.

  No, that’s good, I thought. Fever means the body fights something from without, that invaded and spreads.

  Bass made coffee, moving about shirtless in the kitchen. He sniffed a lot, rubbed his palms under his armpits and massaged his pecs in a vain way he would do even if alone. “Warsteiner,” he said with morning-after vocal fry.

  I sat at the long white subway-tiled kitchen bar, waiting on the coffee.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Bass asked me, keeping his voice low.

  “Why don’t you ask her?” I gave him a look which said, I saw you eyeing her last night.

  He coughed into a fist. “Because she looks like she doesn’t feel like talking.”

  “Got a fever. Been coughing up blood.”

  “Blood?”