III
Your skin, by the third year, for which the traditional gift is leather, is covered with words no one uses any longer. He’s careful. You’re careful. The blood isn’t much.
Sometimes he quotes you. “Brother, I don’t even know you exist.” Then sometimes he laughs. Sometimes he doesn’t.
Sometimes you tell him everything you know about him, which is everything except one thing.
Other things have gone wrong outside. You’re living in a drifting cloud of ash from some far-off worm-battling explosion, and the lights are out, and the sun’s dimmed. You eat from cans opened with stabbing, and you aren’t sure what you’re eating, but no one says anything nasty. You’re still together, in a new little room, this one with only three walls. Your old apartment sank into a hole in the Earth and was gone for good. He traces words on your skin, and then erases them, and then traces new ones over the scars. You comfort each other with childhood.
“Blackboard,” he says, grinning in the dim. “Do you remember?”
“Eraser monitor,” you reply. “More times than I should have been.”
“Chalk dust,” he says. “Inhaled.”
“Snow,” you say. “Back when there was snow.”
“There’s still snow somewhere,” he says.
“I don’t think so,” you say. “No ice. Remember ice?”
“Of course I remember ice,” he says, annoyed, because he’s started to forget it. “Your drink had ice the night we met.”
“There isn’t any ice left,” you say, your voice taut against his cheek, and what you mean is, I’m a new world, fall into me. You’re scared of being by yourself at the end of the world, even though you pretend you’re chill. Chill, you repeat to yourself, chill chill chill. It starts to sound like a word you don’t know.
“How would you know?” he asks.
In the dark, you hand him the scar from your inner thigh. In the space where it was, there’s now another scar. You’ve stitched the leather into a purse, on which you’ve scarred an unsayable word.
“Tetragrammaton,” he says, and you feel him tasting the sound of it, not unimpressed with your syllables.
The end of the world has not made you a believer. The end of the word has.
IV
By the fourth anniversary, you’ve forgotten the traditional gifts. Sex has begun to involve your skeletons. Your boy gives you his scalp. There’s a girl one apartment over who was a surgeon, and she comes in with a flat cloth-wrapped packet of knives and little saws like chefs used to carry. She cuts a circle out of his scalp, then out of his skull. You touch his brain, just once, with your fingertip, watching his eyes roll beneath closed lids. Then the doctor replaces the circles and closes his head back up with black stitches so no worms get in.
You give him your heart. Once your chest cavity is open, he looks at it beating for thirteen seconds, and then the doctor closes you back up again. It takes months to heal from that anniversary, but when you finally do, though you no longer have a bed, you lie on the floor and hold hands, and he tells you what your heart looks like at close range. You tell him about the gray whorls of his brain.
“I pretty much love you,” you say at last.
“I pretty much loved you the whole time,” he says. “Since I saw you standing on top of the bar as the roof fell in. Since I saw you kill that worm with a bottle of bourbon.”
This is a new kind of love for both of you, but not a new kind of love for the world. In the pre-catastrophe world, things that loved one another sometimes ate their mates. You both consider this. The thought of lapping at blood and chewing flesh becomes tempting. You’re both getting mad scared of the dark.
V
For your fifth anniversary, after the sun is apparently gone for good, you’re fully baroque. You cut off your hair and sell it to buy a ring for him. There’s still a trade in hair. It’s used to weave blankets. It’s also used in spells. Magic has started to exist again, in the desperate early mornings.
He’s had the bones of his fingers made into a comb for your hair, which is, of course, gone. There’s a man who does that, filing the bones down into something spined and wired. The story that inspired these gifts is a cheesy classic, one you both partially remember from childhood, and it’s become hot, too, though in its original version it was only about love and pocket watches. Sex at the end of the world is a pornographic, ecstatic recitation of everything that has ever and has never existed, a naming of genus and species, taxonomies of winged creatures and those that slither.
“Lunchmeat,” he says.
“Tempeh,” you say.
“Hummingbirds,” he says.
“Doves,” you say.
“Suspender buttons.”
“Oak galls.”
“Condoms.”
“Leotards.”
“Illuminations.”
“Daguerreotypes.”
“Sugarcane.”
“Bees.”
“The story where the baby gets cut in half.”
“It doesn’t. It’s a threat.”
“The story where there are a thousand babies who keep having more babies.”
“That story isn’t a real story.”
You pause in your movements, considering extinctions.
“Carol,” you say. “The secretary from the English lit department.”
“My grandfather,” he replies.
“Blake.”
“Rima.”
“Geraldine.”
“Henry.”
“I didn’t know Henry died,” you say.
“Of course he did,” he tells you, but you still don’t remember.
“The woman who used to stand at the end of the street, selling meat on skewers.”
“That wasn’t meat.”
“It was, sort of.”
“It was shoe soles.”
“It was the color of meat.”
You lie together in the dark, listening to the world ending. Five years is more than you would ever have expected, given the beginning of this. In the dark, something shines briefly.
“Glowworms.”
“Lite-Brite.”
“Dungeons and Dragons.”
“Breast implants.”
“Flaming arrows.”
“Greek fire.”
“Radioactive waste.”
“Fish at the bottom of the world.”
He puts his remaining hand up to touch your shaven head.
“There was a gorilla,” he says. “Do you remember it?”
“There was a gorilla who climbed the Empire State Building,” you finish. You aren’t who you were. You’ve given him all the things you were saving for yourself.
In the world outside your room, the question now is whether to go out and fight the newest version of the worm. This one rears up and bares its teeth. It’s got seven rows of sharp: old school multiplex shit. Now it emerges, in the shadowy days at the end of everything. No one has yet seen its tail. It seems to go on forever.
Outside your windows, buildings begin to crumble, and the sidewalks ripple. You are still that loser thinking about love.
“I have to go out,” you say.
“I have to go out, too,” he replies, and you touch him with your tongue. He tastes like you. Both of you are hungry. You feel like you might explode from out of his chest, or him from yours, writhing and opening jaws, eyeless.
Outside, the worm is rising where the sunrise was. Its flesh is smooth and gray. Your building shakes as the worm moves around it, wrapping it in coils.
“Nylon support stockings,” he says.
“Slinkies,” you counter.
“William Blake.”
“Loch Ness.”
A window breaks. He stands up. You stand up, too, and walk out without looking at him again. There’s nowhere to look, in any case. It’s dark. You start climbing.
The worm makes its way through the streets, turning left and turning right, making a low sound, a slurring rasp. It’s
a successful worm. The more people a worm gets, the bigger it grows. You walk out under the sky, hunting the worm as the worm hunts you. You’re just a normal person who lived through things she shouldn’t have. Your fires have gone out. You’re not especially special.
Heaven is a cloud of ash, a starless place full of low nests.
You hold your present in your hand, the pronged, sharpened fingers of your man, and below you, you see the worm, shining in the no light.
Fall into me, you think, using your old self, willing the worm to woo. It shouldn’t come to you, but it does. Hunger and love work the same way. The spells you knew as a little girl are still part of you. Once you start spelling you’re never stopping. It’s like you have an audience and a word with a million letters, and you’re going to spell it to death. It’s like you’re a champion.
The worm stretches itself and you stand on top of a building, watching it approach. It’s curious. No one comes out in the street anymore. It smells you, or tastes you in the air.
Then, movement. Now you know why the worm is coming. Your man is in the street, the purse made of your skin held out before him, and on your skin, the unsayable word.
The worm writhes toward him, following your scent, and you’re shaking, feeling a this-is-it-shithead situation, but you’re here anyway and so is he. You can see your ring, flashing on your man’s finger, his remaining hand outstretched. He throws the purse into the worm’s mouth, and it laps at it, tasting it, rasping. Its teeth are shining and white, whiter than anything you’ve seen before. They close on the purse like it’s a washrag being wrung. Now the worm’s eaten the name of god. In some places, that would be poison.
Its head turns toward you.
You teeter, teeter, and leap, an old movie move showing up in your game plan unexpectedly. You dive for its face, its open mouth, its seven rows of teeth, and they cut you as you go in. No mouth, only throat. The thing is all throat. You hold out the comb and claw your way down.
You’re going into the center of the Earth. You fall, and you fall, and all around you the stars are falling, too. The inside of the worm is the inside of the world. You claw words into its throat, and you’re covered in blood and wet, in cold dark. You’re being digested and pulsed, inside a long channel of charnel. You think about all the people this worm has eaten from the inside, and now you’re inside it, too. You’ll do the same. You’re Woolworthing the monster, cataloging it into a bin of like unnecessaries.
You’re fucking terrified. You think about your mother, whom you haven’t seen in years. You think about your umbilical cord and the way it wormtangled around your throat. You think about how you lived through that. You hold your man’s hand, the sharpened points of the fingers, and around you, the worm convulses and quivers. You stab yourself in, using the bonecomb, finger by finger, and you tear at the worm’s simplicity, bisecting it like a bad deed on a summer afternoon.
Eventually there is a larger shudder, a scream, a rasp, and you feel the worm give way.
VI
For your sixth anniversary, you are the woman who emerged unscathed from the worm that ate the city. He’s the man who did it with you. You hold his hand in yours, and his other hand, the one made of bone, holds your hair, grown back now, into a twist on top of your head. The sky changes. The ash drifts down. You’ve given way, just as the worm did, and now, your skin, covered in words, and his body, covered in scars, are what the remaining people know to be the way that leaders look.
Beneath the streets, the worms are asunder, rotting corpses, bewildered by bones.
You met him drinking. He met you drinking your drink. Now you’re both in charge of things.
You give him a look for your sixth anniversary. He gives you the same look back.
MONSTRO
JUNOT DÍAZ
At first, Negroes thought it funny. A disease that could make a Haitian blacker? It was the joke of the year. Everybody in our sector accusing everybody else of having it. You couldn’t display a blemish or catch some sun on the street without the jokes starting. Someone would point to a spot on your arm and say, Diablo, haitiano, que te pasó?
La Negrura they called it.
The Darkness.
* * *
These days everybody wants to know what you were doing when the world came to an end. Fools make up all sorts of vainglorious self-serving plep—but me, I tell the truth.
I was chasing a girl.
I was one of the idiots who didn’t heed any of the initial reports, who got caught way out there. What can I tell you? My head just wasn’t into any mysterious disease—not with my mom sick and all. Not with Mysty.
Motherfuckers used to say culo would be the end of us. Well, for me it really was.
* * *
In the beginning the doctor types couldn’t wrap their brains around it, either.
The infection showed up on a small boy in the relocation camps outside Port-au-Prince, in the hottest March in recorded history. The index case was only four years old, and by the time his uncle brought him in his arm looked like an enormous black pustule, so huge it had turned the boy into an appendage of the arm. In the glypts he looked terrified.
Within a month, a couple of thousand more infections were reported. Didn’t rip through the pobla like the dengues or the poxes. More of a slow leprous spread. A black mold-fungus-blast that came on like a splotch and then gradually started taking you over, tunneling right through you—though as it turned out it wasn’t a mold-fungus-blast at all. It was something else. Something new.
Everybody blamed the heat. Blamed the Calientazo. Shit, a hundred straight days over 105 degrees F. in our region alone, the planet cooking like a chimi and down to its last five trees—something berserk was bound to happen. All sorts of bizarre outbreaks already in play: diseases no one had names for, zoonotics by the pound. This one didn’t cause too much panic because it seemed to hit only the sickest of the sick, viktims who had nine kinds of ill already in them. You literally had to be falling to pieces for it to grab you.
It almost always started epidermically and then worked its way up and in. Most of the infected were immobile within a few months, the worst comatose by six. Strangest thing, though: once infected, few viktims died outright; they just seemed to linger on and on. Coral reefs might have been adios on the ocean floor, but they were alive and well on the arms and backs and heads of the infected. Black rotting rugose masses fruiting out of bodies. The medicos formed a ninety-nation consortium, flooded one another with papers and hypotheses, ran every test they could afford, but not even the military enhancers could crack it.
In the early months, there was a big make-do, because it was so strange and because no one could identify the route of transmission—that got the bigheads more worked up than the disease itself. There seemed to be no logic to it—spouses in constant contact didn’t catch the Negrura, but some unconnected fool on the other side of the camp did. A huge rah-rah, but when the experts determined that it wasn’t communicable in the standard ways, and that normal immune systems appeared to be at no kind of risk, the renminbi and the attention and the savvy went elsewhere. And since it was just poor Haitian types getting fucked up—no real margin in that. Once the initial bulla died down, only a couple of underfunded teams stayed on. As for the infected, all the medicos could do was try to keep them nourished and hydrated—and, more important, prevent them from growing together.
That was a serious issue. The blast seemed to have a boner for fusion, respected no kind of boundaries. I remember the first time I saw it on the Whorl. Alex was, like, Mira esta vaina. Almost delighted. A shaky glypt of a pair of naked trembling Haitian brothers sharing a single stained cot, knotted together by horrible mold, their heads slurred into one. About the nastiest thing you ever saw. Mysty saw it and looked away and eventually I did, too.
My tíos were, like, Someone needs to drop a bomb on those people, and even though I was one of the pro-Haitian domos, at the time I was thinking it might have been a m
ercy.
* * *
I was actually on the Island when it happened. Front-row fucking seat. How lucky was that?
They call those of us who made it through “time witnesses.” I can think of a couple of better terms.
I’d come down to the D.R. because my mother had got super sick. The year before, she’d been bitten by a rupture virus that tore through half her organs before the doctors got savvy to it. No chance she was going to be taken care of back North. Not with what the cheapest nurses charged. So she rented out the Brooklyn house to a bunch of Mexos, took that loot, and came home.
Better that way. Say what you want, but family on the Island was still more reliable for heavy shit, like, say, dying, than family in the North. Medicine was cheaper, too, with the flying territory in Haina, its Chinese factories pumping out pharma like it was romo, growing organ sheets by the mile, and, for somebody as sick as my mother, with only rental income to live off, being there was what made sense.
I was supposed to be helping out, but really I didn’t do na for her. My tía Livia had it all under control and if you want the truth I didn’t feel comfortable hanging around the house with Mom all sick. The vieja could barely get up to piss, looked like a stick version of herself. Hard to see that. If I stayed an hour with her it was a lot.
What an asshole, right? What a shallow motherfucker.
But I was nineteen—and what is nineteen, if not for shallow? In any case my mother didn’t want me around, either. It made her sad to see me so uncomfortable. And what could I do for her besides wring my hands? She had Livia, she had her nurse, she had the muchacha who cooked and cleaned. I was only in the way.
Maybe I’m just saying this to cover my failings as a son.
Maybe I’m saying this because of what happened.
Maybe.
Go, have fun with your friends, she said behind her breathing mask.
Didn’t have to tell me twice.
Fact is, I wouldn’t have come to the Island that summer if I’d been able to nab a job or an internship, but the droughts that year and the General Economic Collapse meant that nobody was nabbing shit. Even the Sovereign kids were ending up home with their parents. So with the house being rented out from under me and nowhere else to go, not even a girlfriend to mooch off, I figured, fuck it: might as well spend the hots on the Island. Take in some of that ole-time climate change. Get to know the patria again.
Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse Page 51