by Jeff Long
So, of course they did not jump.
Nathan Lee could not bear to watch the pirates finish. He slid back beneath the canvas, shuddering with cold, and lay heaped among the mess of gear, too weak to move, not even caring if the sailors found him.
Darkness seeped over him. Night or despair, it was all the same. Even in his worst hours in Tibet, he had never felt so alone. He did not believe in God. It was not a matter of doubt. He did not believe. And yet—strangely—he had only God as a culprit. From the plague to this slaughter of innocents, the evil went beyond human wickedness, beyond the workings of an indifferent universe. Maybe the French woman was right, God was simply hitting the delete key and starting over from scratch.
The waves hammered his little boat, beating him against the wood struts. They were dragging him back to the graveyard of Asia. He tried to summon up the face of his daughter, but she was hiding from him. He remembered the looks of horror on the children’s faces. At last, Nathan Lee remembered the knife. He crawled up through the canvas covering and cut the rope, and the sea grew still. He was alone.
* * *
HE DRIFTED ALL NIGHT, shivering, legs stuck in the emptied rubber bag, shoulders and head wrapped in sailcloth. Slowly his warmth returned, enough of it to function. In the morning, he figured out the mast. It was only two feet taller than he was. The pole fit into a socket and had a crosspiece. The sail was little more than what he’d already used it for, a bedsheet. But once he got the parts assembled, it caught the wind.
He was no sailor. He obeyed his little compass, due east. When the wind grew too boisterous, he pulled the sail down and rowed. When the air calmed, he put the sail up again. Three days passed.
The sea grew strange.
On the second night, he heard gulls and thought his boat was reaching land. He pushed his head through the rent canvas ceiling, and there was no land. Rather a gigantic ship was silently bearing down on him.
It was lit like a city, with an immense flat deck that tabled out above the waters. It was an aircraft carrier, and could only be American. “Help,” he shouted. He stood and waved his arms. With the last of his matches, he lit a few pages torn from his book and held the little torch above his head. The scraps of flame lasted mere seconds. He kept flapping his arm in the air.
The waters were still, not a whisper of wind. The carrier drew nearer. It soared in the night, a vast silent metropolis. He didn’t see a single person up there. Clouds of gulls swarmed in the lights, barking and cawing. “Hello,” he yelled. “Help!” Now he could see the American flag drifting in the ship’s self-made breeze.
It became evident the carrier would miss him by a good twenty or thirty yards. A metal staircase ran down one side, almost to water level. There was not one thing he could do to get closer. Even if his sail had been set, there was no wind. He wiggled the rudder to try and row himself.
USS Truman, the prow proclaimed. The gray steel wall towered overhead, four or five stories high. Now he could hear the rumble of the turn screws. “America,” he shouted. “Help. Down here.”
It swept past him. He stood in his little boat and watched the lights sink westward. The clamor of gulls died. Night took over. He grew cold and sheltered from the piercing stars.
After another day, he came to a flock of green and turquoise icebergs. They seemed not to move in the lapping sea, planets unto themselves. He entered their maze and floated among their towering cliffs. He patted their flanks. He chipped off flakes of primeval ice to suck on. That night he pulled the boat onto a diamond-hard strand and made camp on the ice. But he couldn’t sleep for the beauty of it all. The sea glowed with neon green plankton or some other inner light. The aurora borealis hung overhead like rainbows dreaming.
After the violence of the Ichotski, this crystal world was a silent paradise. He decided to stay another day and night, and then another. The sun emerged and, ironically, for the first time in weeks, he was warm…on the back of an iceberg. Days he spent exploring, resting, writing in his book. On one of his expeditions to the backside of the iceberg, he found an animal trapped inside the glass walls. It had a feline shape. With an axe he might have been able to chop it free and feel its tawny fur. But all he had was his little paring knife, good for slicing apples and rope and not much more.
He stayed on a fourth day, eating canned sardines and a hash of horsemeat or dog left from the Soviet days. That night he dreamed the animal trapped in the ice was him. He woke and realized it was no dream, but an omen. The ice was seducing him with its magic and peace.
At first light, he launched his boat and escaped the gentle icebergs. There was no way to tell how far he had drifted, nor in what direction. All he could do was set the little sail and continue east. When his cans of food were gone, he subsisted on chips of ice from a chunk of the iceberg. The big glassy lump lay like a carcass on the floor of the boat.
He tried fishing. That didn’t work. On an empty half acre of island a few inches above sea level, he harvested bits of seaweed.
Looking into the sea, he saw masses of phosphorescent plankton drifting like mountains. The full moon moaned with the weight of its extraordinary light. Periodically he comprehended that the moans were his.
The science of navigation was utterly beyond him. Nautical maps and instruments would have been useless. He had quit trusting his ability to reason. For all he knew, the currents dragged him backwards each night. After that, he kept the sail up under the stars and let the wind carry him where it would.
One morning he heard gravel crunching beneath the bow. The boat stopped, or seemed to. He raised his head and fog was covering the water like smoke. He heard the slap of surf washing against a long, wide shore. Either he had reached the Americas, or beached upon their phantom. Was there a difference? He crawled from the boat and staggered on the gravel. When he looked again, the boat was drifting off into nothingness.
14
Mr. Swift Goes to Washington
THREE MONTHS LATER
He woke to zebras.
It was the inner edge of dawn. The forest hung with cold green mist. And there were zebras. He looked out from the cave, and for a minute it seemed entirely possible the plague had caught him. They said it caused intense memories, then intense forgetfulness. And here was Africa…on the crest of the Blue Ridge in the Shenandoahs.
It had taken him over two months to descend from Alaska. He had crossed many borders, but couldn’t remember crossing this one, the slip into his own past.
They dipped their muzzles, browsing the spring tenders. Their black and white stripes were stark as moons. The animals didn’t seem imaginary. He could smell their ripe dung. Twigs snapped when their hooves shifted. His mother had taught him the four species of zebra. These had big, rounded ears.
Thunder rolled along the Appalachian furrows. It would rain again today. A man appeared from the forest on horseback. He wore hunter’s camouflage and carried an M16 rifle across his saddle. His horse towered above its striped cousins. They didn’t bolt away, giggling, the way wild zebras should have. They merely shifted at his approach and went on foraging. When a foal strayed, the horseman gently turned it back into the group.
Nathan Lee didn’t volunteer his presence. He lay still, trying to wring some explanation from the scene. If it was not real, he didn’t wish to be talking to himself.
The cave walls were stained from old campfires and scratched with grafitti. Over the centuries, it had sheltered many travelers, apparently including Indians and Revolutionary War soldiers and Confederates and lovers. One night Nathan Lee had brought Lydia to a cave like this, but she only complained about the mosquito bites.
A second horseman appeared. A sniper’s net with foliage was draped across his shoulders. He looked like a barbarian in skins, or a scarecrow with vast shoulders. It was he who spied Nathan Lee’s footprints in the mud leading to the cave. He said something to his partner, who gently herded the zebras into the deeper mist. They nickered and vanished.
The scarecrow man waited until the zebras were gone. Then he dismounted and, before Nathan Lee’s eyes, he disappeared, too. He sank down into the mountain laurels and mist and melted from view. Nathan Lee heard a rifle bolt ratchet. “Come out,” the man called.
Nathan Lee stayed quiet. His hallucination had diminished to a voice in the forest.
“I know you’re in there.”
Maybe the apparition would go away. Then Nathan Lee saw the orange twinkle of muzzle flash, and a bullet was suddenly cutting against his cave walls. It sizzled and rang. The chipped stone had a raw, singed odor. Nathan Lee curled into a ball. “Who are you?” he yelled.
“Come out.”
“I don’t want any trouble. I don’t have anything.”
“You want another?”
“Don’t shoot me.”
“Stay in there, I will.”
“I’m unarmed.” Nathan Lee crawled out of the cave. His joints ached from the damp. He knew to keep his arms up, hands open. He walked downhill.
“Stop there,” the voice said. Not ten feet further, a man’s head rested on the ground like a pumpkin. He rose up and the ground seemed to rise on his back. His face looked freshly unburied, smeared with soil and wood smoke and leaves in his beard. Much like Nathan Lee’s own face. He kept the black dot of his muzzle trained on Nathan Lee’s eye.
The first horseman in hunter’s clothing returned. His horse’s nostrils smoked in the cold.
“I was passing through,” said Nathan Lee.
“You should have kept passing,” the scarecrow said.
“It started to rain.”
“What a coincidence. Right among the meat.”
Meat? They thought he was a poacher. Of zebras? Had people gotten so hungry? “I’m a physician,” he said. “I’m on my way to Washington.”
“No one’s going to Washington these days,” said the horseback man.
“I am.”
“Let’s see your blood book.”
Nathan Lee lowered one arm, carefully fetched the i.d. booklet, and tossed it to the scarecrow. In lieu of latex gloves, the man used a folded leaf to pick it up.
“Charles Andrew Bowen,” he read aloud. “M.D. Bay City, Texas.” He compared the photo to Nathan Lee’s face. Nathan Lee had paid the forger with Tibetan gold. He looked old in the picture. It was a fair snapshot of his soul. With a twig, the scarecrow opened the pages to mid-booklet, and visibly relaxed. “He tested negative at the Hancock station. That was two days ago.” He lowered his rifle.
The horseback man did not. “Now he knows where the herd is.”
Who were these guys?
“What’s your business?” the scarecrow said.
“I’m looking for someone.” That annoyed them. Everyone was looking for someone. The phone network had crashed long ago. The information age had gone the way of the albatross. “It’s the truth,” he said. He stopped. Everybody had a story, losses to tell, an angle, a hunger.
“I wouldn’t go down there,” said the scarecrow. “The coasts are getting hot. You know about Florida.”
The plague had showed up in Key West and spread to Miami. Taking no chances, the authorities had lopped the entire peninsula from the map. No one entered. No one left. It was not a police action. There were no polite checkpoints. The curfew was absolute. From Jacksonville to Pensacola, the Army patrols shot to kill. The empire’s furthest outposts were being overrun, one by one. First Hawaii, then the Gulf. Alaska had started to turn mean, too. He had used every resource in catching one of the evacuation flights down into the lower forty-eight.
“It’s not too late,” said Nathan Lee.
The two men exchanged a look. The horseback man kept his finger on the trigger. He continued scowling. “He knows about the herd.” Only then did Nathan Lee see the string of ears hanging from his pommel. They were coyote and dog ears, but one was human. The horseback man grinned.
“What are those zebras doing here?” asked Nathan Lee.
“You ever hear of the National Zoo?”
It fell into place, or part of it anyway. “You’re rangers?”
“I was in my third year at veterinary school,” said the scarecrow. “Then the food riots hit. After that, we trucked all the big mammals into the mountains. They’re safer here, even with the predators about. If they find a cure, the animals can go back to the zoo.”
“And if they don’t?” said Nathan Lee.
“Nature won.”
While he fetched his pack from the cave, the two men rode off into the mist. Nevertheless, Nathan Lee felt watched all the way out of the forest.
THE RANGERS were right. No one was going into Washington, only trying to leave. On the east side of the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge, he came to a great logjam of people waiting to be processed so they could cross the Potomac and strike off for the interior. He could smell and hear the blood stations at work on them. The stench of Clorox disinfectant was powerful in the noon heat. Worse were the shrieking children, whose little veins were hidden away.
“Where do I go for my blood test?” he asked a soldier.
“You’re inbound? No test.”
That was ominous. They were giving up on D.C.
The Metro was closed until further notice. Thousands of homeless inhabited it, a dark, tubular municipality all its own. Not wanting to chance the darker parts, he set off along Lafayette Boulevard on foot.
Back the Attack, said a poster pasted on a wall. The Health Services had tried a number of such slogans, some borrowed from WWII, some lifted from now outdated battles against diabetes, breast cancer, or AIDS: We Can Beat It, Speed the Cure, All Together, Our Blood Is One.
In the ancient tradition, the elite had fled before the plague and left the city to the masses. Far from being lifeless, the streets were fiery with culture. It was cherry blossom season. Pink petals surged on the breeze. Flowers burst from the earth. All the parks had been uprooted to make vegetable gardens. Their long rows were tended by women and children, guarded by men with pawnshop guns or black market automatics. Some gardens belonged to church groups, others were owned by gangs. The most beautiful gardens he saw were cared for by the Nation of Islam, whose women dressed in white like black angels.
It was a time of plenty. Markets abounded with canned goods stolen from grocery chains and with USAID supplies. You could find live chickens to eat or to lay eggs. Ducks and other water fowl hung plucked from the rafters. Tables were heavy with crab, mackarel, salmon, and squid. Rich, spicy barbeque smoke hung in the air.
After the cold, hunched malice of Alaska, now just an armed beachhead staving off foreign carriers, Washington was bewitching. Block after block, drummers hammered at their bongos. Dancers twirled, tangoed, and writhed. A cappella reigned: choirs, quartets, brave soloists. There were fire eaters, clowns, tightrope walkers, an ax juggler. Every street corner held orators and soothsayers, philosophers, unemployed teachers giving lessons for food, and doomsayers ranting.
At first glance, there was nothing but abundance. Food convoys trundled through like chains of elephants, disbursing hundred-pound sacks of rice and beans, cases of protein bars, baby food formula, and more. Water trucks circulated. It was almost as if the government were fattening them. Or keeping them pinned in place.
Nathan Lee trekked deeper toward the center. He wished for one of the bicycles hissing past, but resisted the urge to steal one. He reached DuPont Circle next morning, after a night spent in a dry fountain with other tramps. He told himself not to be excited. But the great spoke of streets led directly to the row of Victorian townhouses where Ochs once lived.
The professor was long gone. Squatters had taken over the entire neighborhood. Nathan Lee walked back and forth a few times, getting a feel for the place. Laundry hung like festive banners from the lines rigged between windows and trees. A mountain of garbage clogged the alley. Women chattered and breastfed their babies. Children swung in a tire hanging from a tree limb. Girls skipped rope.
A young woman sat on th
e front steps bouncing her baby on her knees. Her eyes were filled with love. He crossed the street and went to her. “I’m looking for my little girl,” he said. He opened his storybook to the picture of Grace. By now, the photo was nearly featureless. What the mountain and jails had not ruined, the sea had. “She and her mother used to live here.”
“Not no more.”
He held out the book with the ruined photo. “Her uncle’s name was Ochs. Maybe they left some clue where they went.”
The girl’s eyes flickered at his book. “Never seen her. Can’t see that anyway.”
“It spoiled,” he said.
“Well, she ain’t here.”
“I’ve come a long way,” he said. “Before it’s too late.”
She tucked her baby close at his “too late.” Nathan Lee regretted his words. He closed the book. “I need to go in that townhouse there,” he said.
“I’d leave,” she said. “The men will whip you, you still loitering tonight.”
“Well, I can’t leave.”
“My, that’s brave.”
“No,” he said. “I have nowhere else to begin.”
“Let him up,” a woman said from the upper window. She had tight cropped hair and a straight neck.
“But Mama, Gerald says these people….”
“The man wants to find his baby,” said the woman.
Nathan Lee went up the stairs. The door opened. The woman was regal and lean, young to be a grandmother.
“Thank you,” he said to the woman. He held out his hand, but she didn’t take it. It wasn’t rude. It was the times.
Ochs would have been pleased. The wood floors were scratched a bit, otherwise the place was as spotless as he’d kept it. It was changed, naturally. The $20,000 killims were gone. Green plants stood where his porcelain vases and pre-Columbian statues once resided. One wall held a small, very old photo of a black family. Nathan Lee was drawn to it.
“My people. They were slaves.” The woman said it primly. Nathan Lee understood. She had no apologies for being here. “The house was empty when we arrived. I placed any keepsakes in a box, out of respect.” She led the way to a closet.