by Alex Adams
All that listening, and it takes me several minutes to understand Lisa is missing.
My breath catches and holds. If I drown out my own sounds maybe I’ll hear hers. People make all kinds of noises: sniffing, throat clearing, belching. Even shifting inside a space can produce sound: the rub of fabric against fabric, or the squeak of sweaty skin.
Breathing. There should be breathing at least, but there’s just a house full of emptiness.
“Lisa?” The name falls into the room like an iron lump. I try to remember the topography of this space, but sleep came too quickly for my surroundings to sink in.
Once more, with as much volume as I dare: “Lisa?”
In this dark room, the nothingness stretches on forever. She is not here. Not alive, at least. The house is too small—I remember that much, and I would hear something if she were.
How far can she have gone by feel alone? I hope I can reach her with my voice.
The door is at my back. I wrench it open, throw her name into the wind. In the distance there’s a golden glow, small enough that I can cup my hands around the light and snuff it. A flame? A light? There is no steady electricity, hasn’t been for at least three months—maybe longer, maybe less here—so I know it’s not that. Greasy hair strands flog my cheeks and forehead, until I’m wincing from the blows.
And then I see it’s not raining. It’s not raining.
I trot down the steps, raise my head to the sky. The clouds are still a thick blanket obscuring the stars, but it’s not raining. For the first time since I stepped on Italian soil, it’s not raining. I want to laugh. It’s right there, bubbling in my chest, waiting for my diaphragm to push it free. Here it comes …
… and dies in my tightening throat. My fingers clutch at what’s binding me and touch the harsh fibers of rope. I’m reeled in like a gasping fish.
Someone speaks. “Why aren’t you dead?” A voice with all the softness of a sack filled with nails and broken glass. “Tell me,” he rasps. The rope tightens and burns. “Why aren’t you dead?”
FIVE
DATE: THEN
Never get attached, I remind myself. Don’t give the lab mice names. They have numbers assigned according to their birth date and sex; they don’t require more. Blowing kisses as I sweep the laboratory floor is borderline acceptable.
Pope Pharmaceuticals’ labs are a stereotype, taking white to new shades of pale. They’re filled with the usual array of machines, each costing more than a house in California, test tubes, petri dishes filled with agar. A chip packet is a bold sun against the floor. Laboratories on television are always clean. In my reality the lab workers eat lunch at their computers and desks. I don’t mind my work. It’s a means to a specific end: I want an education.
I’m mopping when Jorge comes in. He’s a grease spot on an otherwise pristine work environment.
“Don’t forget to see the doctor, eh?”
“I won’t.”
“Good, otherwise …” He mimes snapping a neck that’s clearly mine. “You want me to come with you?” He acts like he’s my supervisor. I act like he’s my barely tolerable coworker. One of us is right and I’m sure it’s me.
The cleaning cart sticks on the door tracks. I persuade it with a shove.
“I suspect I’ll manage.”
From there I go to the women’s locker room, change out of my uniform, and toss it down the hatch that I know leads to the laundry. Another fresh one will be waiting for me next shift. With my bag slung over one shoulder, I take the elevator up to the tenth floor, where the medical facilities are located.
Biannual physical. Company protocol. No checkup, no job, no paycheck, ergo: no college.
Dr. Scott is waiting. We go through the routine I’ve performed three times before today: blood pressure, EKG, weight. He takes a vial of blood and then he’s back with another needle. It’s not the first time.
“It’s that time of the year again,” he says. “Company orders.”
He rolls up my sleeve until my upper arm is bare, then swabs an area the size of a quarter. The tip goes in like I’m butter.
“Hold still,” Dr. Scott says by rote, even though I’m a statue.
The pain is a spider unfolding impossibly long legs.
“What the hell?” It takes all I’ve got not to jerk away. “What is that stuff? Liquid fire?”
“Flu shot. Keep still. Nearly done.” He eases the needle out. “All done. You know the routine.”
I do. Rest for half an hour to make sure there’s no reaction. The fire blazes long after he drops the needle in the hazardous-waste trash.
“Seriously, what was that?”
“Flu shot,” he repeats, like they’ve made him practice the words a thousand times. “Everyone has to have one. You can go now.”
DATE: NOW
My breath comes in desperate bursts. The rope grinds into one of my tracheal valleys, held snug there in the shallow V. Pounding in my chest blocks out all ambient noise.
“Where’s Lisa?” I try to say.
The rope jerks and my mouth opens in an airless gasp.
“I’m asking the questions.”
The accent isn’t American or British, but the wind could be distorting the softness of the vowels, the crispness of the consonants.
My fingers work the rope, searching for weakness, a gap I can exploit the way the rope holder exploited mine. I find it at the back and discover he’s looped it around my neck without bothering to twist, which means there’s space enough for two fingers. Cracking my head into his face isn’t an option, because his mouth is shoved up against my ear.
Rough fibers grate my fingers as I ease them along the path. They burn new grooves into my whorls and loops. No helping hand comes from the weather; the wind dumps dust in my eyes before whisking away the irrigating tears.
“Why are you alive?”
“There are still people alive.”
He shakes his head against me. “Not without a good reason. What are you? Somebody important? You’re just a woman.”
“I’m nobody.”
“Liar.”
He might have a weapon. If he has rope, then chances are better than good that he does. But I do, too. There’s the paring knife in my pocket, nestled between the seams. One of us has to be faster, and from where I’m standing—with a rope around my neck—that had better be me.
I close my eyes, try to blink away the grit. Maybe it’s my imagination but the wind seems less determined now, like it’s running out of breath, too tired to go on.
“Speak up,” he says.
“Screw. You. Asshole.”
I jerk my left arm up, ram my elbow into his gut. He jumps back in time to avoid most of the damage, but gives me an advantage in doing so: his fingers have released enough of the rope for me to twist around, snatch up the slack, and yank it from his hands.
It’s too dark to see the rope burn through his skin, but his muffled yelps deliver the message.
“Lunatic,” he says when he recovers. He drags me by the arm back up the stairs into the house I just left. “Talk. But not too loud.”
“Where’s Lisa?”
“Dead.”
My heart is an elevator with broken cables crashing through the floors all the way to my feet. I snap. I can’t help it. My fist crashes through something in the dark. It feels like it might be his face. A palm collides with my cheek. Teeth rattle in my head. A sob claws its way through the miserable lump in my throat.
“You bastard. She was just a damn kid.”
“A stupid girl, outside in the dark alone. You should have raised her better than that.”
“She’s not mine. Just my responsibility.”
“Well, then she’s a fucking stupid child. A stupid dead child now.”
“What did you do?”
He shoves me to the window, points. “Do you see that light?”
The light is still there. Steady. Constant. “I see it.”
“Your idiot friend is there. W
hat is left of her.”
“I want to see her.”
“Not yet. First you must answer my questions.”
“I want answers, too.”
“No. You have no choices now.”
The accent, I still can’t pinpoint it. Somewhere European. German, Austrian, Swiss maybe. I can’t tell the difference, which makes my stomach squeeze with shame. How little of the world I knew before it was almost all gone.
Lisa is dead. It’s just me now. Me and this guy.
“I’m nobody. A cleaner at a drug company.”
His laugh is tight and bitter. “A cleaner. You are telling me a janitor made it this far?”
“Why not?”
“You’re as stupid as your friend. Come with me.”
Like I have a choice. He loops the rope around my hands so I’m forced to follow him back down the steps. The wind has flatlined. There’s no sign of rain. It’s cloudy with a good chance of death.
I see his shape in the dark. There’s not much to him, although what there is of his physique is hard. He’s made of wire, not bulk. My height, in heels. I can take him. If I wait, I can take him. I hope. For Lisa’s sake. For mine. Because nothing will stop me from meeting that boat.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, and hope that Lisa can forgive me.
“I am going to show you something. But if you make a noise, I will snap your stupid neck. Nod if you understand.”
I nod, show I understand, although in truth I’m more ignorant than I ever was.
The stone behemoth squats in a field past the village’s rim, malevolent in the dark with its single glowing eye. It’s a half-blinded beast from a world that came to a different end to ours.
My captor creeps now, each step deliberately pressed into the damp grass. He pulls me with him and I see no good reason not to obey. He has all the information and all I have is a sense of foreboding that fills me with frosty dread.
When we reach the window, he shoves me into the shadows, holds a finger to his lips, lifts his face to the glass.
I want to see, too. I need to. Even if all the horrors in all the world are collected in this barn, I need to look inside.
He senses my urgency, the fair-haired man with cheekbones high enough and sharp enough to slice cold cuts, and indulges my desire.
From beams thicker than my thigh, hooks dangle, Spanish question marks that ask a question for which I wish I had no answer. But I do; I know what happens in this place and I wish so hard I didn’t. I’m a city girl, born and raised. My meat used to come with price tags and a dose of carbon monoxide to keep it red. But here, meat moved in herds.
The village has survivors and they’ve gathered, the half dozen of them wrapped in clothes that will never know good days. My gaze zooms in. Pans and scans. Breaks everything into can-deal chunks. Takes in the nest these once-people have created. Bones and rust-colored straw litter the barn. Decaying gore. Old bones, judging from the meatless sheen, from chickens and other livestock. They’ve been picked clean, snapped in two, the marrow slurped from their centers. Heaps of cans rust in the corners. Empty food wrappers form a carpet that will never rot. Tools hang on the walls, abandoned. No more harvests under a bulging autumn moon.
One of the villagers breaks away, crawls across the floor to a wooden bucket jerked from a well, but his pose is anything but penitent. A row of jagged bones forms painful-looking spikes along his spine. They shudder as he swallows. When he’s done, he sits on his haunches, rivulets racing down his face, dripping onto his food-stained chest. Animal blood has dried on his tattered shirt many times over, then soaked anew. The others crouch in a crude circle, staring up, up, at some object of fascination. So I follow the path of their obsession. My gaze slides along the networked beams until it catches on something blond and blue. My heart lurches.
Lisa.
Desperation and terror must have pushed her up so high. I can’t see the how, but it doesn’t matter: she made it to relative safety.
My shoulders twitch with need-to-go, need-to-get-to-her. The stranger holds me back, steers me until Lisa disappears from view. He turns us around, walks us back to the village proper.
I clutch at the damp lapels of his jacket. It’s too dark to see here, but I remember it being the drab green of all things military. “You said she was dead.”
“She is dead. Or she will be when I blow that place off the planet.”
Now I see the burden he carries: a backpack filled with secrets.
“It was you at the church, wasn’t it?”
He doesn’t confirm, only grunts.
“You can’t do it. Not with her in there. I won’t let you.”
“You have no choice.”
DATE: THEN
The jar is heavier than it looks, as though its core is filled with sand. Or maybe good intentions. Silence is the only protest as I walk it backwards and lean its top half onto the soft ottoman.
Something shifts inside. There’s a whisper like old, discarded snake skins rubbing together. A chill tiptoes down my spine’s spurred steps.
My knees dig into the beige carpet’s level loop pile as I kneel to follow Dr. Rose’s recommendation. Maybe there’s a clue here about what lies beneath. I look. Nothing. A whole lot of nothing but more of the same. Smooth, with a hint of chalkiness. It’s left a faint dusting of itself on the carpet, and I can’t help but run my fingertip across the cheap fibers. The residue is soft and silky like cornstarch.
A frustrated sigh rides my breath. I wanted there to be something. Even if it was a Made in China sticker.
This time Dr. Rose doesn’t wait for me to speak. We settle into our respective chairs and roles, or so I think until he sets his notepad aside. Instinctively, my legs cross and I lace my fingers together, clasping them over my top knee. A model of cautious propriety.
He drinks in my defensive pose with his dark gaze, then knocks it aside with his question.
“Do you want me, too?”
“Yes. And no.”
He leans back, flashes a smile that makes me wish we hadn’t met here, in this place where my mental health is a question mark.
“I’ll take that. For now.”
Inside I shiver because for now means there will be a later, and he thinks I’m worth the wait. The pursuit. But part of me flares because I turned him down, and here he is steamrolling over me like my “No, thank you” was a meaningless thing.
For a moment he watches me and I feel naked. Usually it’s just my mind feeling exposed here, but now it’s my body as well. My nipples tighten. I swallow hard.
“Did you have the dream?” he asks.
“What?”
He never goes first. Never prompts me. But here he is changing all the rules. The notebook is back on his lap and he’s sitting there, pen idle in his right hand. That much, at least, is normal.
“The jar.”
“Oh. That.” The jar, the jar, the stinking jar. The tumor in my life. The jar is like having cancer and trying to figure out where you went wrong so its growth was nurtured. Was it the butter? The margarine? Too much beef? Too much watching and waiting on the microwave to ding? What had I done that someone felt compelled to enter my home and give me an antediluvian mystery? I pick through the bones of my life looking for clues and find nothing.
“Yes,” I say.
He waits.
“It’s the color of scorched cream.” My hands reach into thin air and grasp invisible handles. And stop. They sink to my knees, massage the patella. “We do this every week and nothing changes.”
“Did you look at the bottom?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“Wherever it’s from, it’s not made in China. That I know of.”
We share a tense smile.
“What do you think is inside?” he asks.
“I couldn’t guess. Most likely nothing.”
“Have you wondered?”
“No,” I lie.
“But something has changed: this week you
looked at the bottom. Next time I want you to see if you can look inside. How do you feel about that?”
My hands ball into fists. “Fine.”
DATE: NOW
Dawn comes in the same gray cloak she always wears these days. Shades of blue would be more becoming, or maybe pearls and pinks and peaches, because somewhere out there it’s spring—or should be. My eyelids fly open to the welcome feeling of no nausea and the less welcome feeling of a two-by-four beating against the inside of my skull in some kind of erratic Morse code. Pressing my hands against my stomach, I perform a half crunch and my muscles tense in protest. Concave, although slightly closer to flat than before.
“Amino acids.”
“What?”
My captor is crouched on the floor, fastening wires to a cigarette-pack-sized block of sweating plasticine.
“You still want to save your friend?”
“Yes,” I rasp.
“Be my guest.” He doesn’t look up.
“What about amino acids?”
“They are the building blocks of life. Combined in the right order, they make proteins. DNA is made of amino acids. Probably they will kill her and eat her. Human flesh has the amino acids they need.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Are you menstruating?”
“What?”
“You’re angry. Women are often angry when they menstruate. It is the hormones.”
I rub my head until the tapping subsides to a tick.
“Where do you come from?”
“Switzerland.”
“Do they teach manners there?”
He keeps working with his blocks. “They don’t teach anything there now. My country is gone. And my people.” Hard planes maketh this man. He is the Alps of his homeland in miniature: hard, unyielding, cruel.
I pick up my body, then I pick up my backpack. And I leave.
I am going to rescue Lisa. If I don’t, there’s no hope for the child growing inside me. I need to be able to save someone.
DATE: THEN
Purple paper does not flatter Stiffy, but that’s what Ben wants.
“The bright color will make people look,” he says.