Jimmy picked up the shovel and held it out to him. “It’s getting late.”
“It’s the boy’s birthday today,” said Patrick, quietly.
“Dead people don’t have birthdays. Only alive people.”
Patrick looked up. “You’re a fucking monster, you know that?” But he said it without conviction, or heat, and a moment later took the shovel.
They steered the wagon between the rows of frozen traffic, to the opposite verge. The trees in the cluster Jimmy had chosen were denuded and emaciated, and managed to throw only a patchwork skein of shade on the earth beneath them. Three plywood headstones poked out of the ground, like numbered chits from an ancient cash register. They said: Audrey, Frances, Kevin.
“Someone’s already here,” said Patrick.
“There’s room,” said Jimmy, and plunged his shovel into the earth, stepped on the blade to drive it down.
“Aren’t you curious? About who these people are?”
“No.” He levered out a clod of dirt. “I know who they are.”
Patrick waited, but Jimmy had nothing more to say on the subject, so he bent to the work.
* * *
Two hours later, they had a broad, short, deep grave. Patrick threw down his shovel and wiped the sweat out of his eyes and went to the wagon and drew off the tarp. The little girl stared blindly up at him with red, swollen eyes. He lifted her, then dropped to his knees and lowered her gently into the hole. Laid her legs straight, crossed her arms over her chest, smoothed the hair away from her face. Then he did the same for the boy. As if he were putting them to bed.
“Do you want to say something?” said Jimmy, after a short silence.
“Like what?”
“Like a prayer, maybe.”
“I don’t pray anymore,” said Patrick, and he began to cry, quietly.
“I prayed,” said Jimmy. “When I buried Frances, I said, ‘Please God give her the pony she always wanted.’ And when I buried Kevin, I said, ‘Please God let him play with boys his own age,’ because he didn’t get to do that much when he was alive. And when I buried my wife, I said, ‘I’ll miss you forever.’ Which wasn’t a prayer, I guess.” He paused, considering. “Well, maybe it was a prayer to her.”
They stood for a while. Patrick said: “Go away, Jimmy.”
“Okay. Just call me when you’re ready.” Jimmy put down the shovel and stepped out of the circle of trees and wandered for a while between the cars until he found a cache of magazines in the back of an old Nissan. He climbed onto the roof of a nearby van and lay down on his back and opened a Reader’s Digest.
He was just finishing an article about the many benefits of fiber when he heard the sounds of labor from the copse: the hiss of a shovel, the dry skitter of falling dirt. He put down the Reader’s Digest and looked up at the sun, just cresting the apex of its arc, then down at the river of cars that stretched southbound down 95, into the day’s bright and empty horizon.
* * *
Margaret batted at the air. Her left eye had darkened into an angry shade of purple, nearly black. Her skin was white and marbled with capillaries that stood out against the pallor like a skeletal roadmap. Her hair was falling out in clumps, exposing patches of white scalp.
Jimmy caught up her hands and held them. He said: “Nothing you’re seeing is real.”
“They’re eating me.” She spoke in a cracked, guttural whisper. “They won’t stop eating me.”
“No they’re not. Come on, I have something to show you.” He knelt and put one arm under her back, the other in the joint of her knees, and lifted her. She was fragile as a bird, and weighed nothing at all. A papier-mâché doll of a woman.
The air outside had turned chilly. The sun hung just over the tops of the trees, red and purplish, tinting the sky in fading orange strata. Jimmy climbed onto the highway and made for the van he’d sunned himself on earlier, moving quickly. Patrick was waiting on the roof. He handed her up, then scrambled after.
“You should leave her alone,” said Patrick, his lips pursed in a prim expression of disapproval that seemed wildly out of place on his broad, rough-hewn features. But he helped ease her into the low beach chair they’d brought up earlier.
Jimmy knelt down and shook her, gently. “Time to wake up, Margaret.”
Margaret let her head loll to the side. Her good eye, pink now, rolled toward him. “You’re on fire,” she said.
“I’m not on fire. Wake up now. There isn’t much time.”
But she shook her head, and kept shaking it, a gesture that shaded from refusal to anger to despair. Jimmy put his hands on either side of her head, steadying it, and brought his face close to hers and waited until her darting eyes slowed and found his.
“Good,” said Jimmy. He swung around to sit beside her, draped an arm over her shoulder, and pointed at the cars below, a frozen river of metal and glass flowing endlessly southward. “Now watch.”
Patrick frowned and shook his head, said something, but Jimmy wasn’t listening. He was staring westward, at the setting sun. As he watched, its lip touched the top of the treeline and spread instantly across, limning the rich dusky greens in red and gold. He turned back to the road, and said: “Okay, here it comes.”
A wash of brilliance exploded up out of the highway, the slant of the sunlight reflecting up from thousands of sloped windshields, and suddenly the road below them was a sparkling, blinding sheen of narrow white light, hemmed in by the trees on either side. A brilliant path laid suddenly down on the surface of the world, plunging southward into the heart of the far horizon.
Margaret caught her breath, and whispered: “Where are we?”
“We’re in California,” said Jimmy.
Her hand found his, grasped it tightly. Her breathing eased, and her tensed, knotted body began to relax.
“Oh, Nabil,” she said at last. “It’s beautiful.”
“Of course it is,” said Jimmy.
They sat watching until the sun dropped below the trees, and when Margaret closed her eyes Jimmy tucked the blanket about her shoulders and kissed her gently on her forehead. “Goodbye, Margaret,” he said.
* * *
They buried her the next day, in the graveyard copse, beside the drawing of her husband. Jimmy said a few words when they were done, and then, after a moment’s silence, they crossed the highway and settled into their lawn chairs.
“I’m thinking tomorrow we should go into town and pick up some Cheerios,” said Jimmy. “Cheerios don’t go bad, ever. You can’t kill Cheerios. They’re the cockroach of breakfast cereals.”
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” said Patrick.
Jimmy looked over. “Really? Where are you going?”
“Down to Florida. I’ve got family down there.” He shrugged. “I’m immune to this fucking thing, and I’m not the only one with my genes.”
Jimmy nodded. “It would be nice if you stayed, though.”
“You should come with me, man. There’s nothing here for you.”
“There’s my café. And there was Margaret, and there was you.”
“That’s over now.”
“That is, sure.”
They lapsed into silence, and watched the birds wheel and dance over the dead rows of cars.
* * *
The next day, Jimmy found a big hiker’s backpack and stuffed it with donuts and beef jerky and a two-liter Coke bottle filled with fresh creek water. “Be careful,” he said, handing the pack over. “Stay near the highway. Sleep inside cars at night. Wild things are starting to come out, now that we’re gone.”
Patrick nodded. “Thanks.”
“Come back and visit if you can. We’re always open.”
Patrick grinned. “It’s been a pleasure, Jimmy,” he said. They shook hands and he turned away, moving down the shoulder, southward.
Jimmy watched him disappear into the early morning haze, then went back into the café and tidied up a bit. He took Margaret’s sheets off the cot and burned them in a little py
re. He rubbed the window clean, swept the floor, polished the table. Then went outside and settled into his lawn chair, and waited.
* * *
Four days later, a stuttering, puttering sound came down off the highway. He jumped to his feet and ran up, peering north. A scooter was winding its way through the cars, dragging a small makeshift wagon behind it. An Indian woman sat hunched over the handlebars, navigating carefully. The man in the seat behind her lolled against her back. His skin was pocked and white, his eyes vermillion.
They were very close before the woman saw him. She started and braked hard, and the sharp squeal of her tires pierced the morning’s stillness like a needle. A small boy with tousled hair and large round eyes popped his head up from the wagon, and said: “Are we there yet, Mommy?”
The woman clambered carefully out of her seat, then turned to catch the man behind her, who was listing hard to the side. Jimmy rushed over and took his other arm, and together they eased him onto the street.
“Thank you,” said the woman, warily. The boy clambered out of his wagon and hid behind her, peeking shyly up past her skirts.
The sky was a soft shade of blue, the sunlight bright and crisp. A breeze blew through the cars, carrying with it the stench of decay, the bouquet of morning. Jimmy smiled. “Welcome to Jimmy’s Roadside Café,” he said. “I’m Jimmy.”
THE ELEPHANTS OF POZNAN
ORSON SCOTT CARD
In the heart of old Poznan, the capital of Great Poland since ancient times, there is a public square called Rynek Glowny. The houses around it aren’t as lovely as those of Krakow, but they have been charmingly painted and there is a faded graciousness that wins the heart. The plaza came through World War II more or less intact, but the Communist government apparently could not bear the thought of so much wasted space. What use did it have? Public squares were for public demonstrations, and once the Communists had seized control on behalf of the people, public demonstrations would never be needed again. So out in the middle of the square they built a squat, ugly building in a brutally modern style. It sucked the life out of the place. You had to stand with your back to it in order to truly enjoy the square.
But we’d all seen the ugly building for so many years that we hardly noticed it anymore, except to apologize to visitors, ruefully remember the bad old days of Communism, and appreciate the irony that the occupants of such a tasteless building should include a restaurant, a bookshop, and an art gallery. And when the plague came and the city was so cruelly and suddenly emptied, those of us who could not let go of Poznan, who could not bear to eke out the last of our lives in the countryside, drifted to the old heart of the city and took up residence in the houses surrounding the square. As time passed, even the ugly building became part of the beauty of the place, for it had been part of the old crowded city now lost forever. Just as the toilets with little altars for the perusal of one’s excrement reminded us of the many decades of German overlordship, so this building was also a part of our past, and now, by its sheer persistence among us, a part of ourselves. If we could venerate the bones and other bodily parts of dead saints, couldn’t we also find holiness of a kind even in this vile thing? It was a relic of a time when we thought we were suffering, but to which we now would gladly return, just to hear schoolchildren again in the streets, just to see the flower shop once more selling the bright excesses of overcopious nature, spots of vivid color to show us that Poland was not, by nature, grey.
Into this square came the elephants, a group of males, making their way in what seemed a relentless silence, except that a trembling of the windows told us that they were speaking to each other in infrasound, low notes that the human ear could not hear, but the human hand could feel on glass. Of course we had all seen elephants for years on our forays out into the gardens of suburban Poznan—clans of females and their children following a matriarch, gangs of mature males hanging out to kill time until one of them went into musth and set off in search of the nearest estrous female. We speculated at first about where they came from, whether their forebears had escaped from a zoo or a circus during the plague. But soon we realized that their numbers were far too great to be accounted for that way. Too many different clans had been seen. On Radio Day we learned, from those few stations that still bothered, that the elephants had come down the Nile, swum the Suez, swarmed through Palestine and Syria and Armenia, crossed the Caucasus, and now fed in the lush wheat pastures of Ukraine, bathed in the streams of Belarus, and stood trumpeting on the shores of Estonia and Pomerania, calling out to some god of the sea, demanding passage to lands as yet unpossessed by the great stumpy feet, the probing noses, the piercing ivory, and the deep thrumming music of the new rulers of the world.
Why should they not rule it? We were only relics ourselves, we who had had the misfortune of surviving the plague. Out of every hundred thousand, only fifty or a hundred had survived. And as we scavenged in the ruins, as we bulldozed earth over the corpses we dragged from the areas where we meant to live, as we struggled to learn how to keep a generator or two running, a truck here and there, the radios we used only once a week, then once a month, then once a year, we gradually came to realize that there would be no more children. No one conceived. No one bore. The disease had sterilized us, almost all. There would be no recovery from this plague. Our extinction had not required a celestial missile to shatter the earth and darken the sky for a year; no other species shared our doom with us. We had been taken out surgically, precisely, thoroughly, a tumor removed with a delicate viral hand.
So we did not begrudge the elephants their possession of the fields and the forests. The males could knock down trees to show their strength; there was no owner to demand that animal control officers come and dispose of the rampaging beasts. The females could gather their children into barns and stables against the winter blast, and no owner would evict them; only the crumbling bones and strands of hairy flesh showed where horses and cattle had starved to death when their masters died too quickly to think of setting them free from their stalls and pens.
Why, though, had these males come into the city? There was nothing for them to eat. There was nothing for us to eat; when our bicycles gave out and we could cobble together no more makeshift carts, we would have to leave the city ourselves and live closer to the food that we gathered from untended fields. Why would the elephants bother with such a ruin? Curiosity, perhaps. Soon they would see that there was nothing here for them, and move on.
We found ourselves growing impatient as the hours passed, and the days, and still we kept encountering them on the city streets. Didn’t they understand that we lived in the heart of Poznan specifically because we wanted a human place? Didn’t they feel our resentment of their trespass? All the rest of Earth is yours; can you not leave undesecrated these crypts we built for ourselves in the days of our glory?
Gradually it dawned on us—dawned on me, actually, but the others realized I was right—that the elephants had come, not to explore Poznan, but to observe us. I would pedal my bicycle and glance down a cross street to see an elephant lumbering along on a parallel path; I would turn, and see him behind me, and feel that shuddering in my breastbone, in my forehead, that told me they were speaking to each other, and soon another elephant would be shadowing me, seeing where I went, watching what I did, following me home.
Why were they interested in us? Humans were no longer killing them for their ivory. The world was theirs. We were going to die—I, who was only seven years old when the plague came, am now past thirty, and many of the older survivors are already, if not at death’s door, then studying the travel brochures and making reservations, their Bibles open and their rosaries in hand. Were these males here as scientists, to watch the last of the humans, to study our death ways, to record the moment of our extinction so that the elephants would remember how we died with only a whimper, or less than that, a whisper, a sigh, a sidelong glance at God?
I had to know. For myself, for my own satisfaction. If I found the tr
uth, whom else would I tell it to, and for what purpose? They would only die as I would die, taking memory with them into the fire, into the ash, into the dust. I couldn’t get any of the others to care about the questions that preyed upon me. What do the elephants want from us? Why do they follow us?
Leave it alone, Lukasz, they said to me. Isn’t it enough that they don’t bother us?
And I answered with the most perplexing question of all, to me at least. Why elephants? The other wild animals that roamed the open country were the ones one might expect to see: The packs of dogs gone wild, interbreeding back to mongrel wolfhood; the herds of cattle, breeding back to hardiness, and of horses, quick and free and uninterested in being tamed. The companions of man, the servants and slaves of man, now masterless, now free. Unshorn sheep. Unmilked goats. Sudden-leaping housecats. Scrawny wild chickens hiding from ever-vigilant hawks. Ill-tempered pigs rooting in the woods, the boars making short work of dogs that grew too bold. That was the wildlife of Europe. No other animals from Africa had made the journey north. Only the elephants, and not just from Africa—the elephants of India were roaming the Orient, and on the most recent Radio Day we learned, through messages relayed many times, that they had somehow crossed the Bering Strait and were now, in ever greater numbers, grazing the prairies of America, small-eared cousins to the great-canopied beasts that now shadowed us on the streets of Poznan. I pictured them swimming, or piling onto boats that some last human pilot guided for them onto the Stygian shore.
They had inherited the Earth, and were bent on surveying their new domain.
So I took to spending my days in the library, reading all I could about elephants, and then about all the processes of life, all the passages of history, trying to understand not only them but ourselves, and what had happened to us, and what our cities might mean to them, our houses, our streets, our rusting cars, our collapsing bridges, our sorry cemetery mounds where winter brought fresh crops of human bone to the surface, white stubble on a fallow field. I write this now because I think I know the answers, or at least have found guesses that ring true to me, though I also know they might be nothing more than a man hungry for meanings inventing them where they don’t exist. Arguably, all meanings are invented anyway; and since I have no one to please but myself, and no one to read this who will care, except perhaps one, then I may write as I please, and think as I please, and reread this whenever I can bear it.
Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse Page 23