by Alex Adams
But am I happy because I’m carrying a child? My hand rests on my abdomen. It’s a shadow of its preapocalyptic self, but there’s a fullness there now, like I’ve indulged in a too-big meal.
Am I happy? Even the sound of the word rolling around in my head sounds foreign. More than anything, I’m scared. Terrified we won’t make it. Horrified at the possibility that I won’t be able to protect my child from the monsters that cling to the shadows. Happy is for when I reach my destination. Then and only then.
“You can’t tell him, you know,” I say gently. “Who the father is.”
She stares straight ahead. Her cheek twitches.
“Don’t let him take advantage of you. He’s not—”
“He’s not like them.”
“You don’t—”
“He’s not like them.”
“You’re right. He’s something else. There’s something inside his head that’s not right. I don’t know if it’s from before or after all this, but it’s there. He’s dangerous, Lisa. Be careful.”
“That’s not what I meant,” she says.
“Then what?”
She’s done talking, at least about this.
“I’d be happy,” I say, “if I could stop being terrified.”
An invisible force jerks Lisa’s head up. The Swiss walks this way.
DATE: THEN
“I’m sorry,” the woman says. “I don’t know who you are.” She’s a pencil wrapped in a black nylon tracksuit. She has Raoul’s look, only on her his strong jaw looks heavy.
Over her shoulder, I see Raoul’s apartment is inexpensive chic. He likes beige, although that’s probably too generic a term. He’d probably call it toasted almond, ecru, potsherd powder. Something more interesting than beige, which implies a lack of imagination.
When I tell the woman who I am, her kohl-rimmed eyes sink further into her skull and harden.
“My brother was not homosexual. He was a good man.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I say. “I liked your brother.”
“Nobody knew him better than me. Nobody. He never told me about this person.”
“James. My friend’s name was James.”
“James.” She says it like his name is a disease. “Did your friend leave something here? What do you want?”
So I explain.
“I gave it away. Filthy animals spreading disease.”
“To who?”
“The animal shelter. It’s their problem now. I have to deal with burying my brother.”
“James died, too,” I say quietly.
The animal shelter has never heard of Raoul’s sister, nor have they seen the cat.
“Probably she let him go. People do that all the time. Sometimes they move and accidentally on purpose forget to tell the cat or dog, if you know what I mean,” they tell me.
I do. I wish I didn’t.
There are many noises that cause a human heart to want to gallop up and out of the throat: a child’s scream, the one that play cannot evoke—only pain; unexplained mechanical noises on a plane thirty-five thousand feet aboveground; the screech of wheels seconds before a concrete median leaps up to kiss you; the wail of an ambulance too close to your home.
Ambulances are nothing new around here. Typical for a healthy-sized city. But my building is filled with people too proud to announce sickness. They drag themselves to the next block instead and suffer quietly outside the apartments there, where they are surrounded by fast-walking strangers instead of familiar faces. They wait for the paramedics where they are not known. Such is life—and death—in the apartment Sam and his mother left to me.
It’s after ten. Just me and the jar watching each other. Ben is dead. Raoul is dead. James is dead. That can’t be a coincidence. I can’t be that unlucky. What are the odds?
Three people dead. All three the only ones who came into contact with the jar. All three with cats. A building with forty-one cats, none of them seen for days. The natives have been whispering in the corridors. It’s that Chinese restaurant down the block, they say. No, it’s that Indian place, says another. Hell, maybe it’s that barbecue place with the ribs everyone goes crazy for. No one can agree on anything except that their cats have disappeared into the ether and no amount of rattling a spoon inside a tin can rally their interest.
Then there’s me. I’m fine. Physically fine. Not even a blip of nausea. Shouldn’t I be dead, too?
My hands shake as I flip through a magazine. Buy me and your life will be prettier, the ads whisper like would-be seducers.
In some dark distance, an ambulance announces its search. I picture it hurtling through the city street until it nears its destination, slow crawling as it ticks off the addresses: Not you, not you, nope, not you, either. Ahhh, there you are. Found you. Until the relentless wah-wah, wah-wah cuts mid-wail. The dead siren leaves an empty space my heart hurries to fill because it’s stopped on my street, on my block, on my front doorstep. I imagine Mo, the night doorman, setting aside his Reader’s Digest, the one he keeps open on his lap while he watches Nick at Nite, shambling to the front door, where he’ll open it just a crack and say, “What can I do ya for?”
Blood rushes through my ears. They’re hot to the touch, which strikes me as odd, because I’m shivering.
Curiosity slithers through my fear. Who’s dead? I need to know. I snatch up my keys and phone and bolt down the stairs. The only thing faster than my heart is my feet. When I throw open the lobby door, I know how I must look: the wild-eyed woman obviously too crazy to bother with polite accoutrements like shoes or a coat thrown over my pajamas.
Mo is already back behind his desk, book in lap, eyes fixed on the small screen. The ambulance loiters at the curb, blocking the entire front view.
“Miss Marshall,” he says. “What can I do—”
I slap my hands on the counter. “Who are they here for?”
“Who?”
I want to reach over the counter and shake him until the answers spill out his mouth.
“The paramedics. They stopped here. Who for?”
He grunts as he sits upright, reaches for the leather-bound ledger that holds the names of guests. He makes a Busby Berkeley production of running his thick ink-blackened finger down and across the page until it sticks on the final entry. Clears his throat.
“Mrs. Sark in seventy-ten.”
The woman with four cats masquerading as one. My fingernails are cut back to the quick, so there’s just a soft pat-pat-pat as my fingers drum the polished countertop. It’s do this or scream, and I don’t want to scream.
“Do you know why?”
He shrugs. “Who knows? A lotta people here been sick lately. Porkchop was telling me how the Jones boy painted the door with his lunch last week. Waste of a good Reuben.”
Porkchop is the day doorman, real name Jimmy Bacon.
Three hard knocks on glass end our conversation.
“What can I do ya for?” Mo says when he gets around to opening the door. Whatever he’s hearing, it must be okay, because he opens the door and the two cops who aren’t cops step inside. Ben’s still dead, I want to tell them as their gazes latch onto me.
They take the elevator up, and when they come back down, they’re accompanied by two paramedics and Mrs. Sark. At least, I think it’s her, but it’s hard to tell through the thick yellow body bag.
“I guess seventy-ten will be available now.” Mo sighs like his world is ending. “More work for me, with all the prospective tenants traipsing through.”
NINE
DATE: NOW
Post-man, pre-man, the countryside knows not the difference. Its beauty flourishes for as long as it can hold progress at bay, which may be forever. We gorge ourselves on grapes meant for high-priced wines and carry as many as we can with us.
We rest, but not for long. Time is running short. Sometimes I wonder why the Swiss is so eager to accompany us. I should ask, but I don’t. His insanity is a cold and quiet one, and I know he’d kill, n
ot to save us, but to eliminate any threat that would cross our path. It’s best he stay with us, not exactly on our side but at least not fighting us. Where I can watch him.
He uses Lisa as he pleases now, often stopping to take her between the fruit trees in some verdant orchard. The smell of spoiled fruit is the scent of his lust, and to smell that oversweet perfume turns my stomach. Lisa is complicit, or maybe just compliant. She goes to him, her expression half-triumphant, half-bewildered. That he wants her thrills her, but she doesn’t understand why he does. She walks quietly afterward, and I know she’s asking herself: Is this love? When we rest, she hangs her head low.
I don’t judge her. She’s just a kid.
“Do you want to watch?” he asks.
“Screw you.”
I don’t need to taste rotting meat to know it’s no good.
“Do you think it’s true?” Lisa asks.
“Is what true?”
“Is there a monster inside me? Inside you?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“But you don’t know.”
“No.”
“I don’t want to give birth to a monster.” Lisa faces straight ahead with her one blind eye. “I don’t want to give birth at all.”
DATE: THEN
The shadows don’t make sense in my dimly lit apartment. They seem to have chosen to lurk where they please rather than follow physics’ dictates. I could turn on more lights, shoo them away, but I don’t because there’s a part of me that believes they’d cling to the walls, refuse to let go. And there’s another piece of my mind that doesn’t want to know what they’re concealing.
I don’t hide in the shadows. I pick the center of the kitchen to make my phone call. From here I can see the front door and the jar. From here I can tilt my head an inch or two to the left and make them disappear.
The line rings. My hope diminishes as each note fades. Then voice mail answers and I hear an imprint of Dr. Rose’s voice speaking to me from the past.
I’m glad he didn’t answer. It’s easier like this, talking to a computer that’s converting my words into a sound file stored on a server somewhere, probably in the Midwest or maybe in India. This way I can talk to him and still be heard without being listened to.
“Hi, it’s Zoe Marshall.” The words snag on my tongue as though they’re aware of their triteness. “I don’t really know who else to call. My family would think I’ve lost it and my two best friends are dead. Which means they’re great listeners now, but lousy as far as support goes. Since support and listening is your thing, I thought of you.”
I pull my knees up tight against my chest, rest my chin on the cartilaginous curves.
“I think … I think the jar’s bad luck, or maybe it’s killing people. I know you think I should open it but I can’t. It’s like that whole Pandora’s box story. What if I open it and the world goes to hell? What if all the ills of the world really do pour out? People around me are dying. That’s not normal. I don’t want to be Pandora or Typhoid Mary. I just want to be me. I’m sure you’ll think I’m nuts when you hear this, but … forget it.”
I kill the call.
Just me and the jar chilling in my apartment. The green glowing numbers on the oven flick away the minutes. When my life is seventeen minutes shorter, my phone rings.
“I want to see you,” Nick says. Nick. Not Dr. Rose now. Nick. Thinking his name makes my cheeks warm as though that particular arrangement of letters weaves some kind of aphrodisiac voodoo spell on me.
“Do you still have Friday afternoon open?”
“I don’t mean professionally.”
“Oh.” Then: “When?”
“Soon. But give me a few days.”
There’s a note in his voice, a kind of tension that tells me there’s an obstacle not easily moved standing between us.
“What’s wrong, Nick?”
I know it. I know it even before he says it.
“Nothing serious. Just a stomach flu.”
DATE: NOW
Welcome to Brindisi. Have a nice day. Enjoy the sights. Eat good food, drink our wine. Relax.
That’s what I like to imagine the sign reads. But friendly greetings aren’t usually accompanied by a skull and crossbones. Weathered words on old wood stabbed into the ground serve as a warning that this place is unholy. They needn’t have bothered: carcasses and rusting vehicles litter the streets, making it difficult to find a pure path.
The sea is near, which is why the metal falls so easily to rust. Salt air whisks away some of the decomposition smell and leaves behind a familiar briny tang. I am ten again, on the boardwalk with my ice cream cone. Fifteen, swimming with my friends. Twenty-three, falling into the sand with Sam, where we make something that isn’t yet love.
We cut through the dead city in a malformed triangle formation: Lisa and I out front, while the Swiss hangs back with the weapon he stole from a dead man. I imagine him fantasizing about where he’d put the bullets. Through my kidney or shoulder, maybe. He’d know where to cause the greatest, slowest hurt.
Brindisi is a city of peaks and lows. Whitewashed houses stare down from their perches, clean and bright from the relentless rain. As we walk on, the city thickens with towers filled with abandoned office furniture. Like all cities, it needs people to thrive. Without citizens scurrying about their business, dodging cars and chattering into their phones, the air is flat and lifeless and Brinidisi becomes a city without a soul. Every so often a face peers at us from behind a filthy window, only to dissolve back into the shadows. There is life here, but for now it wants to go unacknowledged.
The arrow on my compass shivers and settles back on North. We are going east. The sun passes overhead, glares through the clouds, continues her journey west. Our constant companion is the rain.
We walk until the buildings part and then we see her: the Mediterranean. This is not the sparkling blue sea in travelogues but a dull gray cummerbund concealing the seam between a dismal sky and a cement floor. She’s no longer herself—but then, neither am I.
I would to run to her but I can’t, because I’m too busy leaning against a parking meter weeping.
“Women,” the Swiss says. “You are weak.”
I turn around and look at him, one hand still on the meter.
“Just die, would you? Just die in a fucking fire.”
He strikes me.
Something about a wet hand facilitates a slap: it provides the blows with extra sting. I don’t care that’s he’s hit me, even though my cheek burns, because I’ve put the words out there, given my wish power.
I don’t care, because I’m here.
The port of Brindisi is a graveyard. Great steel whales hunker low in the tide, abandoned by their crews. Some languish on their sides, doomed to sink into the sea as their insides fill with water. Other, smaller boats are corks bobbing as they please. The tide washes them in then pulls them out like a child doing a gravity pull with a yo-yo. Accompanying the motion is the gentle slap of water against the docks. Salt is thick in my nose and coats my tongue with its alkaline taste.
“Where now?” the Swiss barks.
I cup a hand over my eyes to shield them from the rain. Being in a city is a visual overload after weeks of avoiding them; I can’t yet see the details within the big picture. The city cups the harbor in a concrete palm. I pace along the water’s edge and try to break the panorama into palatable pieces.
I know nothing about the boat I’m supposed to meet besides her name. Frustrated, I trek back and forth, try to pick out words. Too many are in Cyrillic lettering or Greek. Not enough English.
He’s pacing, too, peering inside the empty terminal behind us.
“Where?”
Lisa splits the difference between us, stands in the rain instead of taking advantage of shelter.
“I don’t know.”
“You brought me here knowing nothing.”
“I didn’t ask you to come.”
“You would be dead without m
e. Stupid, both of you. Stupid, stupid women.”
I walk away. I have to. Otherwise I’ll do something I won’t be able to live with. And that’s important to me, being able to live with my actions. My thoughts are a different story. They’re my own and they don’t hurt anyone but me. In the real world I smash open a vending machine in the terminal using a chair and empty it of all its worldly goods. Three small piles. One for Lisa, one for the Swiss, and one for me. I take mine and sit on the dock cross-legged, not caring about the rain. All I care about is that boat and will she be here like she promised?
They wait, too, but not with my dedication. The Swiss drags Lisa into the terminal and she does not complain. Late in the evening, we sit together and eat chips and drink warm soda.
“Just say the word and I’ll make him stop.”
“I have to do it.”
“There’s no have to. Not even now.”
“What if I never get to fool around with anyone else?”
“You might get a chance to with someone you love.”
“You don’t know that.” She empties the can. “Do you?”
“No, I don’t. But I hope.”
She points to her missing eye. “Who could love me like this?”
“England,” he calls out, and just like that she turns to him. I pick up her trash and mine and drop the refuse in the half-full trash can inside the terminal. Two steps; that’s how far I go before I’m drawn back to the container by some ancient hoarding instinct passed down by ancestors who knew a thing or two about survival. Using both hands, I dig through the trash looking for anything useful, some tool or trinket that might make a difference. But there’s nothing. Just empty packets and old papers with words I can’t read anyway.
DATE: THEN
A few days come and go and then they multiply into a full week. That week doubles and still I don’t hear from Nick. But I pick up the phone every night and dial half his number before dumping the phone into the cradle.