by Alex Adams
“I’m sorry.”
“It is life. Many of my people die young.”
Corrugated iron walls and roofs form makeshift mansions. Maybe fifty in all. Nothing that couldn’t be broken down easily enough and hitched to the back of a donkey. The Roma have livestock. They congregate untethered at the edge of this shanty town, smart enough to stay close to food they don’t have to gather themselves.
Yanni’s boot-clad feet halt outside a shack slapped with white paint. “Your husband is in here.” He tugs my sleeve as I stumble toward the door. “He is not good.”
I’m a shit lying to this boy. But I make it right inside my head, tell myself they chose to believe this. They assumed the Swiss and I were together. A lie of omission. They were there, they saw him bleed. They could have gone the other way, seen the truth, that I cut him to save myself. To bring him to break bread with the Reaper.
The boy hangs back, lets me enter the building alone. It’s a cracker box room with a thin curtain bisecting the space. The room stinks of blood and shit and piss and death.
Foot by laborious foot toward the curtain. He’s back there, that Swiss bastard. His boots jut past the flimsy fabric. They do not move.
I hope he is dead, or at least close enough to tumble over that edge into the long sleep.
My fingers jerk back the curtain and there he is. I half expect him to leap up from that military cot and strangle me, but he doesn’t. His eyeballs perform a vigorous ballet under the thin membranes. His chest rises and falls rapidly; his breathing is shallow. Parchment skin stretches across the planes of his face. He’s a parody of himself carved in damp wax. Not so male now. Not so intimidating. All the bite leached from his bark. Across his throat a poultice sips the infection from his body, but the area is raw and red. The infection has taken hold. Death creeps.
Too slow.
I’ve tried so hard to be good, to stay human enough to recognize myself in those quiet moments when it’s just me and the voices inside my head. But the gods of this land are either testing me or telling me something, because they’ve placed a thin pillow covered in striped fabric just inches from my hand.
Do it, they’re saying. Snuff him. Take him outta the human race before he gets another shot at you. My fingers twitch with want.
Ladies and gentlemen, the parade marches through my head. Theme: Thirty Years of Yearning. On the first float a pony stands, its saddle so polished that all my other desires reflect back at me: Cowgirl Barbie with Dallas the horse; just one more chocolate-frosted cupcake; red shoes, like Dorothy; impossibly high heels; a Trans Am; a Ferrari; Sam; a good education; and then Nick— only Nick. On the last float, the Swiss takes his final breath and exits the world stage left.
The pillow is in my hands, then it’s not, then it is again. My hands keep changing the game. So easy to wipe him out. One firm, enduring press and there would be one less thing to worry about. A rectangle of salvation. All I have to do is act.
But … but …
Lay the pillow across his face and lean as I would on a ledge. Easy. Pretend the tin wall is a shop window filled with unbroken things. Mentally, I could tally the coins in my pocket and choose one thing as a treat for coming this far, while the Swiss finally climbs off the fence and chooses death.
Inside me, tectonic plates clash and collide, scraping at each other, wrestling for dominance. To kill or not to kill? That is my question, my imaginary friends. I push the pillow away from me, release it from my tight embrace, lower it onto the Swiss’s sweat-slicked face. The stopwatch starts in my head. I need three minutes, maybe four.
Thirty seconds. His hands twitch at his sides as he tries to suck air and gets nothing but cotton for his effort.
One minute. A struggle. Jerking shoulders. Snapping knees.
Two minutes. The Reaper chews a breath mint, shoots his cuffs, primes himself for seduction.
Then my baby kicks, swift and hard, right where it counts.
The anger dies. A disappointed Reaper slinks away, toting his blue balls. I’m tired, I want to rest, I want to go home and find my family still alive and raise my child with Nick. I don’t want to have to kill to survive.
The Swiss isn’t coming back. There was no real fight in his movements, just the herky-jerky reactions of a brain stem with enough power left to simultaneously breathe and piss his pants. He’s already dead, it’s just that nobody’s bothered to deliver the bad news.
“I don’t know how the fuck you’re still alive, you bastard. But if you don’t die, I promise I will kill you.”
Yanni is still waiting outside, cigarette dangling from his lip. A little kid playing at being a man. I want to snatch the cigarette from his mouth, tell him to be a child awhile longer, because being an adult isn’t always fun. Hard choices have to be made. Battles need to be fought. Struggle is inevitable. Then I look around and see this is no place to be a kid. It’s a hard world encapsulated in a brutal new world. Being an adult before his time might just save his life.
The boy rushes to steady me.
“He is not your husband. No?”
“No.”
“I did not think this is true.”
“Does anyone else know?”
“No. I hear everything and no one says nothing. They say he is a dead man.”
“Good.”
“Is he a bad man?”
“Worse.”
He leads me back to my own bed. I don’t look back. If I do, I might race to the building and finish what I started. I want to. I don’t want to.
If he leaves that bed, I will kill him. Can I look myself in the eye if I do that?
I think I can.
DATE: THEN
Nick watches me for cracks. I watch him for pleasure when he’s not looking. Life has changed him, scraped away any softness he once had, so that he’s all hard edges. If we two were strangers passing in the street, I’d hold my purse a little tighter while checking him out.
“I’m not crazy.”
“I know,” he says.
“I’m not.”
“I know.”
“Is that your professional opinion?”
“Are you sleeping?”
His fingers are long and thick, even curled around a pen. Capable hands. Safe hands. I wonder how they’d feel cupping my ass, tearing off my clothes, holding my legs up over his broad shoulders. How would he look holding our children? Dangerous thoughts anytime, but now more than ever.
“Zoe?”
“Some.”
“Do you dream?”
“No.”
He knows. It’s in the set of his jaw, the steel in his eyes. He knows when I lie.
“I dream about Pope. Fifty times a night I lift that ax and let it fall. His head bounces. Not like a ball. Have you ever dropped a melon?”
“Sure. Once or twice.”
“It’s like that.”
“How do you feel when you wake up?”
My face burns. “Like shit. How do you think I feel?”
“It’s okay,” he says. “Feelings are healthy.”
“I’m not crazy. But if I’m not crazy, why do I feel like I am?”
Sometime later, Morris says, “He wants you.”
Steam rises from the two coffee cups between us.
“I’m not going to risk loving him.”
“Who said anything about love?”
“What else is there?”
She laughs. “You want him, too.”
I slurp my coffee, fill my mouth with piping hot liquid so I can’t say, “I do.”
Moving into the old boarding school is merely a formality. Nick and Morris help me carry the few things I can’t live without. Clothing, important papers, the plain gold band Sam slid onto my finger on our wedding day. I almost never think of him now and it shames me. I could tell Nick, but I don’t want him to see me naked. My soul is not a newspaper to be read.
I claim a room on the second floor as mine. A space that has never known the jar.
D
ATE: NOW
In a world full of death, things are still born: legends, myths, horror stories. The imaginations of men don’t need to toil hard to create terror in these times.
The moon is a narrow slit once more. She waxes and wanes, oblivious to the planet beneath her. She is an absent guardian and a fickle friend, one who tugs the tides and denies she’s made of green cheese.
At night, the Roma congregate around the campfires. Meat and vegetables bubble over the naked flames. A lone accordion holds the night’s feral sounds at bay. After the meal, the music becomes infectious—
White Horse, coming right for us.
—flitting from body to body until most join in the song. When the song changes, voices drop out and others rise up to take their places. These are people who’ve never heard of karaoke or American Idol; they sing for love, for expression, to nourish their souls.
Afterward, the vocal cords change patterns and tongues tell stories not set to music. There’s a rhythm to tales oft-told. A smoothness to the words. Polished stones that have witnessed a million high tides.
“I have to go soon,” I tell Yanni.
“The women say you will have your baby here.”
“I’ve been here too long already.”
I shake my head, feel the whips of my hair.
“I have to keep going north.” His head tilts. That is his tell, the one that signals that he hasn’t understood. “North is up.”
“On the road?”
“Yes.”
“The way up is not safe.”
“Nowhere is safe.”
“No. Listen,” he says, “to the story.” He nods at the man who, by his sheer physical presence, manages to occupy the head seat at a round campfire. Not a large man, but he expands to fit the tiny crevices in the air around him and defends his space with broad hand gestures that supply punctuation and italics.
Yanni translates in hobbled English.
“He talks of Delphi. Do you know it?”
All I really know is Delphi’s famous oracle, but my head nods regardless.
The boy listens for a moment before continuing. The Gypsy man has drawn his arms close to his body, hunched his shoulders, scrunched his neck. Taut vocal cords push out a voice drum-tight.
He talks of Medusa, the woman with snakes for hair and a gaze that turned all who looked upon her to stone. By Perseus’s hand she was decapitated, and from her neck sprang Pegasus, the white winged horse, and his brother Chrysaor. Greek mythology involves many creatures born from un-holey body parts.
The mood shifts to something darker. There are rumors, he says, that Medusa is reborn, that she dwells in the woods near Delphi, petrifying anyone who dares meet her gaze. The woods are filled with statues that were once people with hopes and dreams and families. Anything she doesn’t turn to stone she devours. The main road north along the coast was destroyed in a quake. Now the only way up is a perilous pass through Delphi, through the territory of this modern-day Medusa.
“You see? Is very dangerous.”
A flesh-eating woman who turns people into columns of stone. A year ago I would have scoffed, but no more.
“Has anyone seen her?”
Yanni thinks. “Many people. My uncle. He sees her carrying the wood and he runs away fast. Do not go north. Is not good. Stay here.”
I’ve lingered too long. I have to go soon. I have to find Nick before our child comes.
SEVENTEEN
DATE: THEN
Nick makes a list. He always does.
“You’re assuming blame that doesn’t belong to you,” he says. “You’re not responsible.”
“I opened the jar.”
“People were dying before that.”
“I know.”
“So taking the blame isn’t logical. Pope was going to do this—with or without you.”
“I know.”
He makes his list. Of what, I don’t know.
“Are you sleeping?”
“Yes.”
He checks my face for lies. There are none to find.
“What do you write now?”
“Now?”
“It can’t be a shopping list. There’s no shopping to do.”
“It’s a list,” he says, “of all the good things I’ve still got.”
“Like what?”
“Like you.”
“Why me?”
“I’ll write you a list.”
DATE: NOW
My body mends. My belly swells. My child treads viscous fluid, ignorant of the sins of men. She’ll never know a whole world, just the fragments of what civilization used to be. To the absent God I say nothing. Instead, I direct my prayers to the ones who once ruled this land. I ask for a safe place to raise my child, a place with enough food to nourish a growing body, and healthy people to serve as teachers. I want my child to know what we once were, and how we fought to maintain our humanity.
I am a being with three pulses now: my own, my child’s, and her father’s. All three dance to a steady beat in my soul. If he were dead, I’d feel the Nick-sized hole in my heart.
I have to go.
DATE: THEN
The war doesn’t so much end as it simply stops happening.
Our men and women come home to silence. At the docks and airports there’s no one to greet them except a few reporters who ask questions in which they’re not invested; they’d rather be at home, dying with what remains of their own families.
A bold one shoves his microphone in the face of a coughing corporal who doesn’t look old enough to have hair around his cock.
“Are you glad to be back?”
The soldier stops. He’s too thin, too tired, too war-weary for civility. “Glad?”
“To be back home.”
“My whole fucking family is dead. How d’you think that feels?”
“How—”
“I just want a fucking cheeseburger.”
“Do you think we won?”
The corporal lunges, his hands choking the reporter as they fall to the ground. “I … just … want … a … fucking … cheeseburger.” He punctuates every word by bashing the man’s skull on the concrete. Flecks of bone rain down in the creeping blood pool.
No one stops him. No one says anything. Someone mutters, “Did someone say cheeseburger? I’d kill for a cheeseburger.” Another voice laughs nervously. “I think he just did.”
We watch this on the news as Luke Skywalker’s about to discover Darth Vader is his father. When regular television comes back, the movie is over and we’re left blinking at the screen without so much as a crinkle of a protein bar wrapper. Twenty-something bodies, a whole bunch of muscles, and not one of us twitches.
The weather war is over, and we’re down about three hundred million citizens. Maybe more. Maybe all, before White Horse is done. Despair folds us in her arms and squeezes us in her loveless arms.
Hope is a four-letter word rotting in antique dictionaries between hop and hopeless.
High upon the rooftops, Nick and I watch night arriving, a sky full of stars hitching a ride on its coattails. From up here the world looks almost normal. Only the curious absence of cars skidding through the icy streets makes the eye catch and the mind whisper: The world is not okay.
“You’re really not afraid of heights, are you?” he asks.
“No. Heights don’t bother me. I haven’t fallen yet, so there’s no precedent for fear.”
He nods. “Good attitude. Heights scared a lot of my patients. Wide spaces, too. I see—saw—people all the time scared of life. Every day I wanted to shake them, tell them that this day is the only guarantee they’ve got.”
“But?”
He gives me a tight, wry smile. “It’s not in the psychologists’ handbook. We’re not supposed to freak the fuck out and shake the shit out of clients.”
“Even if it’s for the best?”
“My clients don’t always want what’s best. They’re human. They like what’s comfortable. Coming to thera
py every week is comfortable, familiar. Even at a hundred-plus bucks a pop.”
“Was I comfortable?”
He turns to face me, but I don’t look at him. I keep staring at the city. That’s what’s comfortable, familiar, safe. Nick isn’t safe.
“You could have just told me the truth. I was on your side.”
“It sounded crazy.”
“Hey, crazy is what I do every day. I see women who save their shit in plastic Baggies and weigh it so they can make sure what goes in comes back out. I see guys who spend their nights beating off to Internet porn when they’ve got beautiful wives in the next room. Real women don’t turn them on anymore, they’re so into the fantasy. I see kids who cut themselves to mask pain, kids who cut themselves because their friends do it and they want to fit in. You want crazy? I can tell you a million stories. But some jar showing up in your apartment? That’s criminal, not crazy. Crazy was lying about it to someone who was on your side—a person you were paying. You wasted your own money. That’s crazy.”
“I get it, I’m crazy. You’re the expert, you should know. Do you want me to climb up on the cross or would you like to nail me up there yourself?”
“C’mon, Zoe. …” He’s big and broad this close, densely muscled enough to crush me if he chose. And maybe I’d like that.
“Kiss my ass.”
I stalk toward the door, grab the handle, meet resistance. The building has two rooftop entrances— or exits, depending on how you look at things. One gets locked at night so we only have to guard the other. Morris doesn’t like to keep both locked, in case of emergencies.
“Shit.”
He groans. “It’s the end of the world. Let’s not fight.”
His words deflate my anger. “You’re right.”
“Say it again.”
“You’re right.”
“I’m always right.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
“You will when you see I’m always right.”
This is almost flirting, except neither of us are smiling. A million million miles away, a star hurls itself across the sky.
“I don’t want to be Chicken Little,” I say. “I don’t always want the sky to be falling.”