White Horse

by Alex Adams

  On the door’s other side the grayscale world is waiting. I slip a leash on my gloom and go out to greet it. When I reach the lobby, my feet stop. Someone has thrown a pair of combat boots in my path. They’re filled with Nick.

  “You’re not dead,” I say.

  “I’m not dead.”

  “Why? How?”

  He laughs. “Dying wasn’t on my list.”

  My smile sputters until it’s full and real. “What is on your list?”

  “Not dying. Coming here. This.”

  He reels me in, cups my face with both hands, and becomes my whole world. This is a kiss—maybe the last one we’ll ever know, so we stay there forever, warm and safe. When he pulls away, something is lost. I think it’s my heart.

  “What else is on your list?”

  “Zoe …”

  My lips are cooling too quickly; I know what he’s going to say. “I get it. I do. You have to go. Men need to be heroes.”

  “I don’t want to fight,” he says. “But I want to win.”

  “I know. And I’m glad you came. But if you die out there, I’ll hate you forever.”

  “No you won’t,” he says, and turns until both feet point toward war.

  The glass door drifts shut behind him. My hands dangle by my sides, those useless things.

  How do you file a restraining order against sadness?

  Week after week there’s nothing. The obituaries come thick and fast now. Not just the elderly, but young people dying of what appears to be an errant stomach flu. The media blames it on farm animals, contaminated food, illegal immigrants, but really they don’t know. And I feel better in some ways because how could this have started with me? It’s arrogant of me to think I could be that important. And yet, a voice still tells me none of their guesses have struck truth. None of them speculates that somewhere in this city there’s a box filled with shards and bones, and the whole thing feels like death.

  The newspapers don’t list war deaths. With the Internet still dead, computers are little more than boat anchors, so there’s no database running queries, spitting out names, or coming back with—one hoped—no result.

  We return to the old ways: lists slapped onto walls in government buildings, people hovering, hoping, fists pushed between their teeth, chewing their lips, twirling their hair. Nervous tics. Superstitious, too.

  Jenny and I visit the library every evening. She’s always there in her cherry-red coat, the one that should be too warm for this time of year, leaning against the center pillar. I see her sometimes as a stranger might: relaxed, the contrast of her dark hair against the red wool pleasing to the eye; a vibrant young woman. The illusion lasts until I’m close enough to read her face. We sprang from the same gene pool, and while we look like our own separate beings, her facial expressions are my own. Constant fear has knocked the girlish layer of subcutaneous fat from her face so that the line of her jaw and cheekbones jut through her skin in an off-key rendition of magazine-cover chic. Her brow line dips in the middle even when she paints on a false smile, like she’s doing now. I’ve faked that same smile before. I’m faking it now. And she knows that I know that she knows.

  Wearing that polyester smile, I jog up the stone steps to meet her. My preference would be to sit at the bottom, pull myself into a ball, and rock back and forth until the world swings back to normal. But I have to be strong for Jenny, because Mark is out there. Like so many others, he swapped a keyboard and mouse for a gun and cut-rate body armor.

  We perform the ritual: hug, squeeze, peck on the cheek.

  “How was work?” she asks.

  “Fine. How are you?”

  “Fine. Ready?”

  “Sure.”

  More lies.

  We push through the towering doors, take a sharp left, stride to the far side of the lobby, where the wall is covered in corkboard.

  The list is up. I don’t know who puts it there, only that they do. Today there are over a hundred names—and this list is just for our city, not the country. The violence is escalating. Or they’re dying from the same disease that’s killing people here. I can’t tell. The papers are silent about everything except our victories. They ply us with a steady stream of celebrity gossip, feel-good stories, and minor grievances to keep us from asking What? Where? Why? The news channels are more of the same—those that haven’t gone dark.

  Jenny squeezes my fingers until the bones are nearly crushed to crumbs. I wince but I don’t say anything, nor do I pull away. She needs to give pain and I need to accept it. Because if I see Nick’s name up there, I’m going to take shelter in that physical hurt.

  We join the cluster of some hundred heads and wait our turn.

  This is the worst part: the waiting. It’s relative: if we see a name we recognize, that becomes the worst part. We’ve seen some. Mostly people we knew in school or worked with in some distant time. Those days we walk away with our heads hung low, not speaking until we reach the bottom of the steps. We go, we sip coffee on a street corner, silent until one of us says, “I hope it didn’t hurt.” War being war, I figure there’s a fifty percent chance of that being true. You can either go quick in a single blast or make a grab for life’s tail and hold on while it tries to shake you off like a pissed-off tiger.

  “He won’t be there,” I say.

  “He won’t be there,” she parrots.

  People peel away from the front. We inch closer. They wear temporary smiles. Tomorrow they’ll be back, tense with fear. I envy them; they already know they’ll return.

  An anguished cry cuts through the crowd. I flinch, because even though it’s expected, I still hope that we’ll all walk away wearing that transient smile. I am a fool.

  “No, no. It’s a lie,” the woman shrieks. Hysteria has her in its grasp. “They’re wrong.” She makes to tear the list from the wall but is stopped by the people behind her. They shove her aside and insert themselves in her place. “Fuck you!” she screams. “Fuck you with a chain saw! I hope your sons, fathers, and husbands are dead. Why should I be the only one? Fuck you.”

  I move to break from the pack, comfort her, but Jenny holds me fast. “Stay with me,” she whispers.

  The woman picks up a stack of free newspapers, a local publication filled with upcoming events around town. They’re two months old now, remnants of a time when a concert or festival sounded like it mattered.

  “Fuck you.” She flings a paper at the nearest person. “And fuck you.” Another paper aimed at someone else. “Fuck you and her.” More papers. Finally she tosses the remainder across the crowd. “Fuck you all!” She drags the last word out until there’s no more breath to carry it.

  Some watch her shuffle away, too broken to be humiliated by her actions. The rest don’t dare glance at her because they know how easily they could break. Words on a page could make them her.

  When it’s our turn at the head of the line, Jenny grips my hand tighter. The pink of my fingers fades to white.

  “I can’t look.” She always says this and yet she always stares at the list unblinking until she doesn’t find Mark’s name.

  It’s my finger that glides down the page, sticking on any name with a similar formation to Mark’s. We’re looking for Nugent. Mark D. Nugent. I enter the Ns and shoot right out the other side without glimpsing his name.

  Jenny clutches my arm. “He’s not there. He’s not there. Check again.”

  But I’m already on the move, falling down the list, falling, falling until I hit R. Ramirez, Rittiman, Roberts. No Rose.

  “He’s not there, Jen.”

  “Check again.”

  Feet shuffle behind us. I glance quickly at the Ns again. “Mark’s fine.”

  Jenny’s smile shaves five years from her face. “He’s fine.”

  Neither of us says today.

  Afterward, we perform our new ritual. We buy coffee at a nearby café and hang out on the street corner that will carry us in different directions.

  “Who are you looking for? On th
e list,” Jenny asks.

  My hands tense and I realize I’ve been hugging the cup too tight between my fingers. The cup is hot, the coffee even hotter, and the warmth seeps into my skin. I’m shivering. I look up at the darkening sky. It shouldn’t be this cold in October.

  I look back at Jenny. She’s giving me that look like I’m holding out on her—and I am.

  “No one.”

  “If you say so.”

  “It’s nothing. Just a friend.” But he’s not even that, although I felt it was true. There’s a gap in my heart, or maybe just my soul, large enough to park a city bus.

  “I know that look.”

  I say nothing.

  “It’s the one I get every day when I know Mark is safe for another day. That’s when I can let my guard down and feel hope again. That’s why I like drinking coffee afterward, because that’s the real beginning of my day. Tomorrow morning the deathwatch starts all over again.” I go to speak but she stops me. “It’s a deathwatch, Zoe. We both know it.”

  When you have a sister, you hold a mirror in your hands.

  ELEVEN

  DATE: NOW

  To watch Lisa is to stare into Alice’s looking glass. Nothing about her is quite as it should be. Each day her fingerhold on reality slips a little more, dipping another inch of her essence into dark waters. She faces the sea, always wearing a secretive smile that fades if anyone approaches.

  She holds vigil at the stern, feet in ballet’s first position, hands resting lightly on the rail. Her hair is a greasy mass pinned to her scalp, the result of not enough shampoo and too many weeks of rainwater. Her spine is distinct and prominent, its own creature, one I half expect to see flick its tail independent of her movements. A steady diet of thin air and canned foods has carved the meat from our bones, leaving us just enough to live on. Each time I glimpse myself in the ferry’s sliding glass doors, I can’t believe I’m seeing me. The ragamuffin person with stick legs is not who I am. In my mind, I am robust and healthy, with flesh that threatens to sprawl if I take that third cookie.

  I need to eat more. We all do. War and disease have cured obesity too well.

  “Hey,” I say, to warn her of my approach. “Do you want to hear something neat?”

  She shakes her head. Keeps staring at what we left behind.

  “There’s land. It’s a long thin strip of not much at the moment, but the captain says it’s spectacular to watch it come into focus.”

  She dips down in a rigid plié. “And then what?”

  “When we get there?”

  “What happens when we get there?”

  “I have to go north.”

  “And me?”

  “I told you. You can come, too.”

  “What if I don’t want to?”

  I swallow slow, consider the words on my internal Scrabble board. If I push them into the wrong formation, something will be lost.

  “You’re your own woman. You have to do what’s right for you.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  She starts as a distant speck, the isle of Greece, and as I watch she steadily inflates, bobbing above the waves like a massive buoy. Technically she is not an isle; that’s just a pretty word thrown in there to fill out the lyrics of a pop song.

  “The bottom half, the Peloponnese, she is an island made by men,” the captain tells me. “One hundred years ago, maybe more, they cut into the land so the boats can pass through. Just like the …” His mustache jerks about as he chews on the right words.

  “Panama Canal?”

  His fingers snap. “The Panama Canal, yes.” He holds up a dehydrated hand. “This is one level. No boomp-boomp-boomp.” As he says this he bunny-hops his hand to simulate the lock system for which the canal at Panama is famous.

  “How long until we get there?”

  “Eh.” He coughs. “Just a few hours.”

  A few hours. My heart knocks faster.

  DATE: THEN

  The new receptionist from the lobby disappears two weeks after she arrived. Her facsimile is already in place. “Good morning, howkinIhelpyew?” she snaps into the headset. Her hand is heavy with a rock. Somewhere out there she’s got a fiancé—probably in the war.

  Upstairs in the bathroom, the women have gathered, but not to talk babies.

  “Did you hear? Cynthia is dead,” one says when I walk in.

  Two weeks ago she was jubilant, and now she’s gone. I barely knew her, and yet it takes everything I have to hold myself in a single column.

  That afternoon a man approaches me on the train. The usual crowd has dwindled to just a smattering of backsides in seats, so he stands out like a bloodstain on white pants. He’s burrowed down in his green sweater, fingertips peeking out the ends of the sleeves. He has a lollipop head covered in thick sandy hair that hasn’t seen a barber’s scissors in some time. So slight is he that the messenger bag slung crosswise his body seems to be the only thing holding him down.

  “Can I … May I talk to you? It’s polite to ask, so that’s why I’m asking instead of just talking.”

  I turn in the seat, look up at him, try not to be annoyed at having my worrying interrupted. He goes on without my consent, which should be my first clue to shut him down, but he’s caught me in an unguarded moment.

  “You work at Pope Pharmaceuticals, right? Of course you do. I mean, I know you do. I followed you from there. I didn’t want to pick one of those science people, because they won’t say squat, at least not in terms most people can understand. So I had to pick someone else. Someone not so important who’d talk to me. People in menial jobs like to talk. I’ve seen them on the television. Everyone wants their fifteen minutes. So I picked someone like you.”

  I try to ignore the insult, because something about this kid is different. “You’re a journalist?”

  His gaze settles on my left ear. Flicks to my right. Down to my hands. To some spot atop my head. “Jesse Clark, United States Times. I used to have an Internet blog. Maybe you’ve heard of me.” He waits in an unnatural pause.

  I try to shake the surrealism away.

  “No, I’ve never heard of it, or you, or the United States Times. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s new.” The kid is a whole litter of still-blind-puppies full of enthusiasm. “So many people have gone to fight that there aren’t enough qualified journalists and newspaper people left. They want one big newspaper that tells the same news to everyone who’s still here. It’s easier that way, they say. I think it’s a conspiracy and the government wants to control the news. But since they’re paying for my stories, I just got my first apartment all on my own, so the money is nice. I’m learning to cook, too. I made oatmeal this morning, in the microwave. Last night I made an omelet. With those green peppers and bacon. The recipe said ham, but I like bacon better.”

  Again he waits as though this is chess and it’s my move.

  “I prefer bacon, too.”

  He beams, focuses on the armrest. “Can I sit down? I know I should wait until you ask, because that’s the polite thing; but I don’t know how long it’s going to be before you ask, and standing on a train facing in the wrong direction doesn’t make me feel so great.”

  Normally I’d ignore him, hope he goes away before he proves to be a problem, but these are not normal times. I wave at the aisle seat and hope he takes that, not the middle.

  He chooses wisely. “I don’t want to take the middle one. That would make it look unbalanced. So if you sit there and I sit here, it’s almost symmetrical.” Prim and proper. Hands flat on his chino-clad thighs. Bag across his body. “Thank you. I have to say thank you because that’s polite.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “That’s polite, too.” He stares straight ahead. “I want to ask you some questions, if that’s okay. I’m working on a story no one knows about yet. You might think I’m crazy, and it’s okay if you do, because lots of people think I am. Even my best friend Regina thinks I’m crazy, but that’s okay because she’s my friend and she’s
kind of weird, anyways. My parents think I’m crazy, too. They don’t say it, but I can see it. My dad’s always getting angry at me because I’m no good at driving or playing football like my brothers, and my mom’s always saying, ‘Don’t say that. He’s a smart boy. He’s just different.’ I love my mom. I love my dad, too, because that’s what you’re supposed to do: love your parents. But I don’t like him all that much. Do you like your parents?”

  “They’re good people.”

  Jesse nods. “About a month ago I was looking through the newspapers and I noticed something strange. I used to get all the major papers on account of having my blog and wanting to have all the latest news. Checking out the competition, my dad calls it. Only, now I don’t have a blog because no one has the Internet anyway. When the newspapers come I like to cut out the pieces and lie them on the floor in the basement. It’s flat and no one else goes down there much, so I can spread them out and move them around however I want. I like to look for patterns. And in the past month, I’ve been seeing all kinds of patterns in the obituaries. Lots of people are dying who wouldn’t normally be dying, and they’re all dying of the same thing. Only, I don’t think anyone else has noticed or it would be in the newspapers already, right?”

  I don’t tell him that I’ve noticed, too, or that I don’t know whether to feel relieved or terrified that someone has made the connection.

  “So I said to myself, ‘Jesse, this could be the story that makes you someone.’ My dad will be pleased that I’m someone important and maybe people won’t think I’m so stupid. What I did next was talk to some families of the people who died. Mostly they said things like ‘Go away, mind your own business, we’re trying to grieve here,’ but some of them used ugly words, too. Like f-u-c-k.” He glances around, his face pinched. “I hope nobody heard.”