After the Plague

by T. C. Boyle

  Sarai and I drove down the mountain road, through the deserted small town of Springville and the deserted larger town of Porterville, and then we turned south for Bakersfield, the Grapevine and Southern California. She wanted to go back to her apartment, to Los Angeles, and see if her parents and her sisters were alive still—she became increasingly vociferous on that score as the reality of what had happened began to seep through to her—but I was driving and I wanted to avoid Los Angeles at all costs. To my mind, the place had been a pit before the scourge hit, and now it was a pit heaped with seven million moldering corpses. She carped and moaned and whined and threatened, but she was in shock too and couldn’t quite work herself up to her usual pitch, and so we turned west and north on Route 126 and headed toward Montecito, where for the past ten years I’d lived in a cottage on one of the big estates there—the DuPompier place, Mírame.

  By the way, when I mentioned earlier that the freeways were clear, I was speaking metaphorically—they were free of traffic, but cluttered with abandoned vehicles of all sorts, take your pick, from gleaming choppers with thousand-dollar gold-fleck paint jobs to sensible family cars, Corvettes, Winnebagos, eighteen-wheelers and even fire engines and police cruisers. Twice, when Sarai became especially insistent, I pulled alongside one or another of these abandoned cars, swung open her door and said, “Go ahead. Take this Cadillac”—or BMW or whatever—“and drive yourself any damn place you please. Go on. What are you waiting for?” But her face shrank till it was as small as a doll’s and her eyes went stony with fear: those cars were catacombs, each and every one of them, and the horror of that was more than anybody could bear.

  So we drove on, through a preternatural silence and a world that already seemed primeval, up the Coast Highway and along the frothing bright boatless sea and into Montecito. It was evening when we arrived, and there wasn’t a soul in sight. If it weren’t for that—and a certain creeping untended look to the lawns, shrubs and trees—you wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary. My cottage, built in the twenties of local sandstone and draped in wisteria till it was all but invisible, was exactly as I’d left it. We pulled into the silent drive with the great house looming in the near distance, a field of dark reflective glass that held the blood of the declining sun in it, and Sarai barely glanced up. Her thin shoulders were hunched and she was staring at a worn place on the mat between her feet.

  “We’re here,” I announced, and I got out of the car.

  She turned her eyes to me, stricken, suffering, a waif. “Where?”

  “Home.”

  It took her a moment, but when she responded she spoke slowly and carefully, as if she were just learning the language. “I have no home,” she said. “Not anymore.”

  So. What to tell you? We didn’t last long, Sarai and I, though we were pioneers, though we were the last hope of the race, drawn together by the tenacious glue of fear and loneliness. I knew there wouldn’t be much opportunity for dating in the near future, but we just weren’t suited to each other. In fact, we were as unsuited as any two people could ever be, and our sex was tedious and obligatory, a ballet of mutual need and loathing, but to my mind at least, there was a bright side—here was the chance to go forth and be fruitful and do what we could to repopulate the vast and aching sphere of the planet. Within the month, however, Sarai had disabused me of that notion.

  It was a silky, fog-hung morning, the day deepening around us, and we’d just gone through the mechanics of sex and were lying exhausted and unsatisfied in the rumple of my gritty sheets (water was a problem and we did what laundry we could with what we were able to haul down from the estate’s swimming pool). Sarai was breathing through her mouth, an irritating snort and burble that got on my nerves, but before I could say anything, she spoke in a hard shriveled little nugget of a voice. “You’re no Howard,” she said.

  “Howard’s dead,” I said. “He deserted you.”

  She was staring at the ceiling. “Howard was gold,” she mused in a languid, reflective voice, “and you’re shit.”

  It was childish, I know, but the dig at my sexual performance really stung—not to mention the ingratitude of the woman—and I came back at her. “You came to me,” I said. “I didn’t ask for it—I was doing fine out there on the mountain without you. And where do you think you’d be now if it wasn’t for me? Huh?”

  She didn’t answer right away, but I could feel her consolidating in the bed beside me, magma becoming rock. “I’m not going to have sex with you again,” she said, and still she was staring at the ceiling. “Ever. I’d rather use my finger.”

  “You’re no Danielle,” I said.

  She sat up then, furious, all her ribs showing and her shrunken breasts clinging to the remains of them like an afterthought. “Fuck Danielle,” she spat. “And fuck you.”

  I watched her dress in silence, but as she was lacing up her hiking boots I couldn’t resist saying, “It’s no joy for me either, Sarai, but there’s a higher principle involved here than our likes and dislikes or any kind of animal gratification, and I think you know what I’m talking about—”

  She was perched on the edge of a leather armchair I’d picked up at a yard sale years ago, when money and things had their own reality. She’d laced up the right boot and was working on the left, laces the color of rust, blunt white fingers with the nails bitten to the quick. Her mouth hung open slightly and I could see the pink tip of her tongue caught between her teeth as she worked mindlessly at her task, reverting like a child to her earliest training and her earliest habits. She gave me a blank look.

  “Procreation, I mean. If you look at it in a certain way, it’s—well, it’s our duty.”

  Her laugh stung me. It was sharp and quick, like the thrust of a knife. “You idiot,” she said, and she laughed again, showing the gold in her back teeth. “I hate children, always have—they’re little monsters that grow up to be uptight fussy pricks like you.” She paused, smiled, and released an audible breath. “I had my tubes tied fifteen years ago.”

  That night she moved into the big house, a replica of a Moorish castle in Seville, replete with turrets and battlements. The paintings and furnishings were exquisite, and there were some twelve thousand square feet of living space, graced with carved wooden ceilings, colored tiles, rectangular arches, a loggia and formal gardens. Nor had the DuPompiers spoiled the place by being so thoughtless as to succumb inside—they’d died, Julius, Eleanor and their daughter, Kelly, under the arbor in back, the white bones of their hands eternally clasped. I wished Sarai good use of the place. I did. Because by that point I didn’t care if she moved into the White House, so long as I didn’t have to deal with her anymore.

  Weeks slipped by. Months. Occasionally I would see the light of Sarai’s Coleman lantern lingering in one of the high windows of Mírame as night fell over the coast, but essentially I was as solitary—and as lonely—as I’d been in the cabin in the mountains. The rains came and went. It was spring. Everywhere the untended gardens ran wild, the lawns became fields, the orchards forests, and I took to walking round the neighborhood with a baseball bat to ward off the packs of feral dogs for which Alpo would never again materialize in a neat bowl in the corner of a dry and warm kitchen. And then one afternoon, while I was at Von’s, browsing the aisles for pasta, bottled marinara and Green Giant asparagus spears amid a scattering of rats and the lingering stench of the perished perishables, I detected movement at the far end of the next aisle over. My first thought was that it must be a dog or a coyote that had somehow managed to get in to feed on the rats or the big twenty-five-pound bags of Purina Dog Chow, but then, with a shock, I realized I wasn’t alone in the store.

  In all the time I’d been coming here for groceries, I’d never seen a soul, not even Sarai or one of the six or seven other survivors who were out there occupying the mansions in the hills. Every once in a while I’d see lights shining in the wall of the night—someone had even managed to fire up a generator at Las Tejas, a big Italianate v
illa half a mile away—and every so often a car would go helling up the distant freeway, but basically we survivors were shy of one another and kept to ourselves. It was fear, of course, the little spark of panic that told you the contagion was abroad again and that the best way to avoid it was to avoid all human contact. So we did. Strenuously.

  But I couldn’t ignore the squeak and rattle of a shopping cart wheeling up the bottled water aisle, and when I turned the corner, there she was, Felicia, with her flowing hair and her scared and sorry eyes. I didn’t know her name then, not at first, but I recognized her—she was one of the tellers at the Bank of America branch where I cashed my checks. Formerly cashed them, that is. My first impulse was to back wordlessly away, but I mastered it—how could I be afraid of what was human, so palpably human, and appealing? “Hello,” I said, to break the tension, and then I was going to say something stupid like “I see you made it too” or “Tough times, huh?” but instead I settled for “Remember me?”

  She looked stricken. Looked as if she were about to bolt—or die on the spot. But her lips were brave and they came together and uttered my name. “Mr. Halloran?” she said, and it was so ordinary, so plebeian, so real.

  I smiled and nodded. My name is—was—Francis Xavier Halloran III, a name I’ve hated since Tyrone Johnson (now presumably dead) tormented me with it in kindergarten, chanting “Francis, Francis, Francis” till I wanted to sink through the floor. But it was a new world now, a world burgeoning and bursting at the seams to discover the lineaments of its new forms and rituals. “Call me Jed,” I said.

  Nothing happens overnight, especially not in plague times. We were wary of each other, and every banal phrase and stultifying cliché of the small talk we made as I helped her load her groceries into the back of her Range Rover reverberated hugely with the absence of all the multitudes who’d used those phrases before us. Still, I got her address that afternoon—she’d moved into Villa Ruscello, a mammoth place set against the mountains, with a creek, pond and Jacuzzi for fresh water—and I picked her up two nights later in a Rolls Silver Cloud and took her to my favorite French restaurant. The place was untouched and pristine, with a sweeping view of the sea, and I lit some candles and poured us each a glass of twenty-year-old Bordeaux, after which we feasted on canned crab, truffles, cashews and marinated artichoke hearts.

  I’d like to tell you that she was beautiful, because that’s the way it should be, the way of the fable and the fairy tale, but she wasn’t—or not conventionally, anyway. She was a little heavier than she might have been ideally, but that was a relief after stringy Sarai, and her eyes were ever so slightly crossed. Yet she was decent and kind, sweet even, and more important, she was available.

  We took walks together, raided overgrown gardens for lettuce, tomatoes and zucchini, planted strawberries and snow peas in the middle of the waist-high lawn at Villa Ruscello. One day we drove to the mountains and brought back the generator so we could have lights and refrigeration in the cottage—ice cubes, now there was a luxury—and begin to work our way through the eight thousand titles at the local video store. It was nearly a month before anything happened between us—anything sexual, that is. And when it did, she first felt obligated, out of a sense of survivor’s guilt, I suppose, to explain to me how she came to be alive and breathing still when everyone she’d ever known had vanished off the face of the earth. We were in the beamed living room of my cottage, sharing a bottle of Dom Pérignon 1970, with the three-hundred-ten-dollar price tag still on it, and I’d started a fire against the gathering night and the wet raw smell of rain on the air. “You’re going to think I’m an idiot,” she said.

  I made a noise of demurral and put my arm round her.

  “Did you ever hear of a sensory deprivation tank?” She was peering up at me through the scrim of her hair, gold and red highlights, health in a bottle.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. “But you don’t mean—?”

  “It was an older one, a model that’s not on the market anymore—one of the originals. My roommate’s sister—Julie Angier?—she had it out in her garage on Padaro, and she was really into it. You could get in touch with your inner self, relax, maybe even have an out-of-body experience, that’s what she said, and I figured why not?” She gave me a look, shy and passionate at once, to let me know that she was the kind of girl who took experience seriously. “They put salt water in it, three hundred gallons, heated to your body temperature, and then they shut the lid on you and there’s nothing, absolutely nothing there—it’s like going to outer space. Or inner space. Inside yourself.”

  “And you were in there when—?”

  She nodded. There was something in her eyes I couldn’t read—pride, triumph, embarrassment, a spark of sheer lunacy. I gave her an encouraging smile.

  “For days, I guess,” she said. “I just sort of lost track of everything, who I was, where I was—you know? And I didn’t wake up till the water started getting cold”—she looked at her feet—“which I guess is when the electricity went out because there was nobody left to run the power plants. And then I pushed open the lid and the sunlight through the window was like an atom bomb, and then, then I called out Julie’s name, and she … well, she never answered.”

  Her voice died in her throat and she turned those sorrowful eyes on me. I put my other arm around her and held her. “Hush,” I whispered, “it’s all right now, everything’s all right.” It was a conventional thing to say, and it was a lie, but I said it, and I held her and felt her relax in my arms.

  It was then, almost to the precise moment, that Sarai’s naked sliver of a face appeared at the window, framed by her two uplifted hands and a rock the size of my Webster’s unabridged. “What about me, you son of a bitch!” she shouted, and there it was again, everlasting stone and frangible glass, and not a glazier left alive on the planet.

  I wanted to kill her. It was amazing—three people I knew of had survived the end of everything, and it was one too many. I felt vengeful. Biblical. I felt like storming Sarai’s ostentatious castle and wringing her chicken neck for her, and I think I might have if it weren’t for Felicia. “Don’t let her spoil it for us,” she murmured, the gentle pressure of her fingers on the back of my neck suddenly holding my full attention, and we went into the bedroom and closed the door on all that mess of emotion and glass.

  In the morning, I stepped into the living room and was outraged all over again. I cursed and stomped and made a fool of myself over heaving the rock back through the window and attacking the shattered glass as if it were alive—I admit I was upset out of all proportion to the crime. This was a new world, a new beginning, and Sarai’s nastiness and negativity had no place in it. Christ, there were only three of us—couldn’t we get along?

  Felicia had repaired dozens of windows in her time. Her little brothers (dead now) and her fiancé (dead too) were forever throwing balls around the house, and she assured me that a shattered window was nothing to get upset over (though she bit her lip and let her eyes fill at the mention of her fiancé, and who could blame her?). So we consulted the Yellow Pages, drove to the nearest window glass shop and broke in as gently as possible. Within the hour, the new pane had been installed and the putty was drying in the sun, and watching Felicia at work had so elevated my spirits I suggested a little shopping spree to celebrate.

  “Celebrate what?” She was wearing a No Fear T-shirt and an Anaheim Angels cap and there was a smudge of off-white putty on her chin.

  “You,” I said. “The simple miracle of you.”

  And that was fine. We parked on the deserted streets of downtown Santa Barbara and had the stores to ourselves—clothes, the latest (and last) bestsellers, CDs, a new disc player to go with our newly electrified house. Others had visited some of the stores before us, of course, but they’d been polite and neat about it, almost as if they were afraid to betray their presence, and they always closed the door behind them. We saw deer feeding in the courtyards and one magnificent tawny mountain lion stalking th
e wrong way up a one-way street. By the time we got home, I was elated. Everything was going to work out, I was sure of it.

  The mood didn’t last long. As I swung into the drive, the first thing I saw was the yawning gap where the new window had been, and beyond it, the undifferentiated heap of rubble that used to be my living room. Sarai had been back. And this time she’d done a thorough job, smashing lamps and pottery, poking holes in our cans of beef stew and chili con carne, scattering coffee, flour and sugar all over everything and dumping sand in the generator’s fuel tank. Worst of all, she’d taken half a dozen pairs of Felicia’s panties and nailed them to the living room wall, a crude X slashed across the crotch of each pair. It was hateful and savage—human, that’s what it was, human—and it killed all the joy we’d taken in the afternoon and the animals and the infinite and various riches of the mall. Sarai had turned it all to shit.

  “We’ll move to my place,” Felicia said. “Or any place you want. How about an oceanfront house—didn’t you say you’d always wanted to live right on the ocean?”

  I had. But I didn’t want to admit it. I stood in the middle of the desecrated kitchen and clenched my fists. “I don’t want any other place. This is my home. I’ve lived here for ten years and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let her drive me out.”