They thought Copernicus and Galileo were heretical crazies.
If someone just told you about the Holocaust, wouldn’t you think that crazy? Yet, it happened. If someone just told you about 9/11? Crazy. Yet . . .
Before he turned and walked back toward the lab I’d glanced down at Warren’s credit card receipt. He’d written below his signature It needs you to need it. As he was walking away I held the receipt up and yelled at him, “Hey, what’s this about?” He turned, put his hands up in surrender and yelled back, still walking backward, smiling in apology— “You’ve got the conch, Ken.”
He turned on his heel, shoved his hands into his pockets, and walked into the dark.
It felt like I had the conch now, and it was heavy, and I didn’t know what to do with it.
It needs you to need it.
Why had Fleming repeated that, whispered that to me from behind his locked door?
Professor, why did you tear that part out and throw it away?
I think maybe I knew why, but there was nothing I could do about it now. Too late. Like Rebecca said.
Bass honked, and I’m glad he did. I stuffed the papers in my pocket and ran out of the house.
As I approached the Bronco, Bass rolled forward, playing with me, making me run and catch up. Kodie laughed, slapped him on the shoulder and told him to stop. As I reached for the door, he lurched, the muffler popping. I said, “Dammit, please stop,” laughing a little, savoring the camaraderie. I thought I could be happy if he just kept doing this, teasing me, and me and Kodie laughing and Bass smiling, the reek of death drifting out of my clothes, my hair, me chasing them forever and laughing.
“What was in there?” Kodie asked. We were taking turns without stopping at intersections, our bodies leaning and recoiling back, tires screeching.
“My neighbor,” I mumbled. “Bass. It’s not a race,” I said, a little annoyed with his speed. He slowed a little but didn’t look both ways when we approached the usually busy street, the border to my tucked-away neighborhood. Yesterday we felt uncomfortable, obeyed traffic laws, but just a day later and we’re covering these streets like it’s our own personal racetrack. The rule of law was falling away.
Kodie’s neighborhood was just two miles away. Negotiating a couple of roundabouts, we came to the house, a small wooden gray ranch style with white trim which filled the tiny lot. Tall Chinese elms flanked each side and overhung the house. Though she had said her parents weren’t there this morning, that their car was gone, she wanted to start here anyway. Then I knew why.
“Oh shit oh shit oh shit.” She leaned her forehead against the back of the front seat.
“What?”
“The car is there.”
“I thought you said—”
“I did,” she sighed. “But sometimes they get up early and go to Hyde Park Gym.”
“On Guadalupe with the veiny curling arm sticking out of the wall?” asked Bass.
Kodie nodded. “After trying here, going there was going to be my next guess.”
“But they came back,” I said.
“They go real early.” She sniffed and wiped her nose. “They’re so cute how they work out together. Mom’s the one who hauls Dad out of bed at five.” She laughed once and knuckled away a tear. We sat in silence. The old truck’s metal ticked as it cooled. Kodie stared at the back of the seat trying to find something there that would give her permission to get out of the car. Suddenly, she grabbed her bat, flung the door open, and marched toward her house.
“You want me to come with you?” I asked. She spun around while walking, grim-faced, shook her head, spun back. When Kodie got to the small front porch, she stopped on the first of three cement stairs. She lifted her forearm over her face.
The smell.
Her parents.
She bent over in despair. I wasn’t sure she was going to be able to do it. She stood up and waved me over.
“You okay?” I asked at her side. She gripped my hand and we opened the unlocked door. They wore workout clothes. The part of her dad’s T-shirt I could see read Gazelle Foundation Run for. They were both on the floor right in the living room as we walked in, her mom on top of her dad like the final scene of Romeo and Juliet. The smell was overpowering. I coughed and turned away. There were flies. Kodie knelt down to shoo them away and touched them each on the cheek, bawling in hysterical grief. Their mouths were full of white. I sat down beside her and rubbed her back as she wept. There were no words. She uttered oh amid her cries and touched them. The flies were insistent. I’m not sure how long we sat there like that.
Bass’s Bronco chugged. Kodie sat vacant in the back.
Bass asked, “Kev? You want to go try to find your par—”
“No.” I looked at Kodie’s garage door like it held a secret. I remembered what I had stuffed in my pocket. Just as I had it unfolded, Kodie snatched it from me and began scanning. “Hey, Bass, let’s go to the Draught House.”
“The movie theater? Which one?”
“No, not the Draft House theater. The Draught House pub on Medical.”
Kodie was reading and reading and nodding faster and faster. “Yeah, let’s start there. We can find the lab from there.”
“Lab. It’d be great if you’d fill me in as I Uber you two to your destination.”
On the way I told Bass what Professor Fleming had said to me on his doorstep and read the letter’s postscript, looking up, eyeing for Johnny every other sentence.
Bass flicked his eyes to us in the rearview. “A scientist thinks he found something important. It’s not like we can continue his research or use his work. Basically, Kevin, so what?”
“Let’s just go see, okay?”
“Yeah, let’s go see,” said Kodie. Her tone: something there worth knowing.
Kodie had read the entire letter. The first part about Fleming’s feeling about me. She put the pages on my lap and patted them, turned her head to me and shot an eyebrow, nodding to the pages. She didn’t want to discuss it in full here.
We pulled into the Draught House parking lot. There was a cairn in the beer garden. “Okay, which way?” asked Bass.
“Fleming said the lab was nearby, a nondescript building,” I said, swiveling my head up and down the street.
“And walked into the dark,” Kodie recited from the letter. She pointed. “There’s a streetlamp. So, he walked the other way.”
Bass drove out of the lot in that direction and within seconds lifted the index finger of his driving hand. “I’d say this right here is a pretty damned nondescript building.” He turned in without our assent.
The building was beige, squat, without signage, without windows, and set farther back off the street than the rest at an angle.
“Gotta be,” I said. Kodie held up her hand in high five. I matched my palm to hers, marveling at her positivity after what she’d just witnessed.
We were parked at the side of the building in front of a metal door. It was locked, so we went around the front and tried its glass doors.
Open. Slight sweet-sour death reek.
Beyond the tiled foyer, lights in the hallway to the left flicked and buzzed. As we went deeper into the building, the smell gathered, thickened. We made a turn and saw that at the end of the thinly carpeted hall was an open door to a dark room.
We lifted our shirts to cover our noses and mouths. Peering in, coughing and waving and blinking our way through the smell, we see that it’s a hybrid office and meeting room with a big stainless conference table stacked with neat piles of papers weighted down by brown riven stones, manila folders, and books. I flip another switch on the wall by the door and another set of lights pop on and it is then that we see the man at the desk with his back to us at the back of the long room. We take in this tableau.
Even as death worked its putrefaction upon his body now losing its rig
or, Doctor Warren Jespers’s jowly cheeks were still soap-burnished and ruddy. He looked almost comfortable in his desk chair. His eyes, however, were wide and livid with shock as they fixed upon the massive whiteboard on the wall in front of his desk where it was written in large letters at the top it needs you to need it. Below that, linking it with a squiggled arrow, this man of hard science had written Matthew 16:23.
The walls are bare save for a gilt-framed sepia photo of a young woman holding a baby which hung anachronistically small next to the huge whiteboard. Over the woman’s shoulder in the distance is the UT clock tower. I thought of the seven plunging suicides from that tower, that one’s name was Moment and she had taken off her shoes before she jumped.
His computer’s flat screen is frozen. The connection has long since been lost but the last image Jespers was looking at is of a similar scene: a man at a desk, dead. This man is slumped onto the desk. His face cannot be seen. At the corner of the screen is an instant message window. Faucheux, Guillaume. Doctorat, UPMC. En Génétique. Away 17 mins. 2 Participants. In the dialogue box, the French doctor had written simply: Mort. Près près près. In Jespers’s box below it at 7:31 a.m. CST: What’s happening??? Are you ok??
Kodie and Bass fan out. On Jespers’s desk is a thick printout. Inspecting it, I realize it’s the peer-reviewed paper Fleming had referenced replete with his acid marginalia in red pen. Wadded balls of it riddle the floor.
The ten-by-twelve whiteboard is full of equations and notes and flowcharts. Kodie air-traces them with her finger, whispering to herself as she reads. At the bottom corner she stops. She reads out loud, “Kevin March? Cody? (ask Becky).”
“Ho-ly fuck,” Bass whisper-mused as he jogged around the desk to join Kodie and tap the board at my name.
“Indeed,” I said.
“Huh. Cody. Me?”
Bass and I shrug-nod.
“I don’t know this man,” I said. “This was Fleming’s friend.”
“Maybe he told him about you,” Kodie said.
I had the letter with me and shuffled through it. “Maybe, but there’s no mention of you in Fleming’s let…no, wait, he says here you and the young woman. Could be you. But how does he,” I gestured to Jespers, “know of you? Your name?”
Bass cleared his throat. “Clearly, Fleming and Jespers have been discussing you two. Why, though?”
I handed him Fleming’s letter. “Read the first part.”
Bass reads quickly and drops his hands with the papers to his thighs in exasperation. “Dreaming about you? You’ve got to clue me in.”
“But he knows my name. Fleming just says the young woman,” said Kodie.
“I think it has to do with this business here.” Bass read: “‘The unknown here is: What triggered this latent, doomsday gene to go into effect around the planet simultaneously this morning? And did it hear me and Warren talking over our pints? Did it become concerned that we humans had stumbled onto something we shouldn’t have?’” Bass looked at us, gobsmacked. “You guys. Fleming’s dreaming about you two. They knew you were important in regards to this, to this it he talks about here. Fleming lives across the street. You and Kodie are a thing. I’m here. Connected. But wh—”
“Why?” Kodie asked.
I walked over the conference table and picked up a copy of Lord of the Flies. “We’ve got the conch,” I mumbled.
Kodie and Bass came to the table. There was a tall stack of subscribed-to Scientific Americans. And there were other books, heavier research and science texts with dense and arcane titles, but also, mixed in with them, a Bible, various translations of Lord of the Flies. Kodie held El Señor de las Moscas. Bass thumbed Sa Majesté des Mouches. The Heart of Darkness, Wisconsin Death Trip, Camus’s The Plague, O’Nan’s novel about a diphtheria epidemic, A Prayer for the Dying, wherein Jespers had dog-eared a page and underlined she jerks as if pitching a fit, thrashes her head side to side…‘Jesus Jesus Jesus,’ she moans. ‘Jesus Jesus Jesus.’
After a quiet time of perusing, Kodie shows me an underlined passage in her Spanish copy of Lord of the Flies, a passage: cerca cerca cerca, ending with no vayas? Without talking, I simply showed her the page I had my finger on, one Jespers had also underlined. It was the same passage in English. Now Bass holds up his French copy. Same highlighted passage.
“Yeah. That paper he tried to publish,” I pointed to the floor, the desk. “A no go.”
Kodie added, “He was still working on proof. And then, before he was able to…everybody died.”
“I had written this weird story this summer. I just wrote an extra credit essay on this.” I held up Golding’s novel.
A beat of stillness and thought.
“I don’t get it, but it’s more than coincidence. I’m fucking spooked,” Bass said as he begins to quickly unhook Jespers’s desktop computer to take with us. I’m retrieving Jespers’s paper from his desk, collecting and unwadding the pages from the floor.
Kodie says in dazed wonderment, “These men meant to lead us here so we’d know. They presaged this. Fleming wasn’t ready to tell anyone yet because it sounds crazy. They want us to carry on with it somehow.”
Just as I’d said, “Yeah, but what I can’t figure out is why Fleming tore off and threw away this PS part, because it’s got all the—” there was a loud boom at the metal door. Another. We went to it and as we unlocked it we heard shattering glass at the front. Kodie checked the metal side door while Bass and I ran to the front, me carrying Jespers’s paper, Bass Jespers’s computer.
Glass once in the doors was strewn all over the foyer. A couple of stones lay among the shards. Bass and I ran out the doors. “Johnny?!” I screamed at the empty street.
Kodie came around from the side of the building. “Nobody there.”
“We gotta find these little shits,” said Bass.
RadioShack up on Burnet would have a ham radio. None of us knew how to operate one but Bastian is one of those people who asks how hard can it be? when confronted with a novel task requiring an unlearned skill.
Kodie and Bass looked to me to do the breaking and entering. I wrapped my outer shirt around my right hand and punched in the door’s glass. An alarm sounded and my pulse quickened. Bass noticed my hesitance. “Nobody’s coming,” he said. I kicked in the whole panel of glass and was able to crawl inside and open the door for them.
The RadioShack’s hours, as stenciled on the glass next to the front door, were 10am-7pm. Nobody had opened the store yet when this all happened and, unlike McBride’s Guns, nobody had come to stock up as things fell apart.
“Can we kill that alarm?” Kodie shouted, fingers pressed to one ear.
“I got it,” Bass yelled over his shoulder.
“I’m going to get solar panels,” Kodie said directly into my ear, and then we heard a slam and a bang and the alarm stopped. Talking normally, she said, “For when the grid goes down.”
Bass came striding out from the back room comically wiping his hands together in a job-well-done manner. “There,” he said, cruising past us.
Bass was already deep inside scoping the shelves, whittling down the location and the choices until we all gathered in front of the ones he stood looking at. Bass picked the most expensive radio off the shelf. Kodie and I simultaneously asked him if he knew anything about them.
“How hard can it be?” he asked. “Solar panels. Good thinking. Also going to need to get power generators and gas. Lowe’s. But first, kids.”
“But the Wal-Mart’s got them low low prices,” I said with a bubba drawl which in old-world mixed company might have offended.
They snickered and my mind flashed on the dark smiling teeth. My stomach roiled.
On our way out, I spied this13 here Olympus digital voice recorder with intelligent functions, snatched it from the shelf like a kid shoplifting condoms. I also grabbed a pair of $1,000 binoculars.
/> We bobbed and wove around the few vehicles.
We drove fast with the windows down. We didn’t talk, just looked with amazement out at our stilled city.
“There’s just…nothing,” Kodie finally said, more to herself than us. I figured that a day later we’d see some signs of infrastructure collapse, some evidence of things falling apart. But, still nothing. No smoke, no burned-out cars, no mounds of corpses in the streets. Not even flashing signal lights. They turned from green to yellow to red like the world went on, ghost cars cruising through. There weren’t even all that many mounds of stones. A few in parking lots here and there near all-night places, that’s it.
I told Bass to go over to I-35. This stretch of one of the longest interstates in the country was the busiest so I thought (no, hoped) we’d see wreckage, jackknifed eighteen-wheelers, a city bus on its side, cars gutted, blackened and smoldering, hazard lights flashing. I still can’t articulate why I was so panicked about not seeing any signs of panic. With panic comes haste and with haste comes waste and I saw none. Standing in the DT parking lot, we’d heard distant booms. Could’ve been faraway explosions, like what happened in West, Texas a few years ago. But other than that…the inexorable winding down of it is what scared me, the way everyone seemed to have simply succumbed to it. That whimpering way the world ended.
It had happened so quickly. Obvious now. It came over you and killed you quickly. The chokers and suicides out in the open were quickly covered with stones. Mr. Fleming, Rebecca’s dad; these folks held out longer than most. It seems everyone died within minutes to an hour of dawn.
Did the rest of the as-of-yet-unaffected world know what was happening on the other side of the planet and just think, Oh, shit? What did they do as dawn rolled its way to them? Did they all hear those sounds? Did it go down that way? I. Don’t. Know.
You reading this, you probably do.
Just knowing that in house after house after house, apartment, condo, and dorm, places of business open early, there’s a succumbed corpse once belonging to a terrified human being not knowing what was happening. Just…oh. In each and every there was a Mr. Fleming with a suit on; a woman in her favorite chair with a knife in her gut; parents, like Bastian’s, like Kodie’s, lying at the front curb and on the backyard deck, on top of each other.
The Late Bloomer Page 15