by Alex Adams
On the heel of my boot, I turn and scan the pitch.
It’s just a flicker in my peripheral vision, like the fluttering of a panicking insect when it realizes it’s just flown into a spider’s web and become entangled. That’s all it is, nothing more substantial than that. Look! my senses scream. As my neck twists, I glimpse it: hair blond and neatly fitted to a smooth skull. Hair that belongs to a ghost.
The adrenaline seizes control. Propels me toward the twisted olive trees. I half run, half walk, deeper and deeper into the wild land. Esmeralda stays close without complaint, more sure-footed than me. Guilt washes over me; she trusts me to keep her safe and I hope I can honor that.
Fate steps in, reaches out and places a hole where ground should be. My ankle twists. Pain shoots through my shin and I fall. The last thing I see is a woman emerging from the black, her face scarred, her hair that of a madwoman.
The Medusa of Delphi.
NINETEEN
DATE: THEN
The city has fallen into an endless hush. Silence is a sponge soaking us up. Shoes slap silently on the sidewalks. Coughs fade before they’ve left their irritated throats. The only noise comes from vehicles moving through the streets: occasionally passenger cars, sometimes buses with a handful of riders staring hopelessly ahead.
“Where are you going?” Morris asks one day. The bus is straddling the broken yellow line. The driver stares at us expectantly and shrugs. He thrusts a thumb at his fares.
“Wherever they want to go.”
“Any place in particular real popular right now?”
He shrugs. “Airports, mostly.”
“What’s there?”
He looks at her like her brain just dribbled onto her khaki T-shirt.
“Birds. Big silver ones.”
“They’re still taking passengers?”
“Hell if I know. I just drive the bus. Nothing else to do except sit around and wait to die.”
The bus doors sigh and hiss as he eases his foot off the brakes and keeps right on following the yellow line.
“Oz,” I say.
Morris peers at me over the top of her aviators.
“The Wizard of Oz. Did you ever see that?”
“Sure I did. Those flying monkeys freaked me the hell out. What about it?”
“Have you heard any planes lately?”
Head shake. Expectant look.
“Exactly. They’re all going to meet some wizard who doesn’t exist, in search of brains, a heart, or whatever it is they need.”
“Are you going somewhere with this?”
I turn and head back toward the old school. “Nope.”
“You’re losing it. You should go talk to —” She stops dead.
“Nick. Don’t be too much of a sissy to say his name. I can. Nick, Nick, Nick.” I hold up my hands. “See? I’m okay with it.”
But I’m not okay with it. My heart’s been bruised before, battered and bandied about by others. Boys at first, then Sam’s death. And now Nick. But this is different. Bigger, like a bubble of grief that holds me within its thin walls. No matter how fast I run, the bubble moves with me. Hamster in a wheel.
I take to walking the streets on my own. I have a gun. I know how to use it; Morris taught me. There’s a knife in my pocket and I know how to use that, too. Can I, though? I don’t know. But I have it—my cold, hard, metal insurance.
Other things go into the pockets of my heavy coat: food, money, and my keys. I can’t break that habit.
And Nick’s unopened letter. All I have left of him.
DATE: NOW
Do you love me, Mommy?
I do.
Why?
Because you’re mine.
Why?
Because I’m lucky.
Then why don’t you look happy?
Oh baby, I’m happy about you, but I’m sad, too.
Why?
Because I miss your father.
Do you love him, too?
I do, baby. I do.
Then why isn’t he here?
We’re going to him, baby. Soon.
DATE: THEN
There’s treasure in this basement. Bars of gold wrapped in plastic, their crumbs packed tight around a chemical core. Their value is immeasurable. I open a box. Slip a precious bar into my pocket.
“You’re actually going to eat that?” Morris says behind me. “I quit them years ago.”
My body jerks with surprise, and the Twinkie falls to the ground with a shallow thump.
“Supplies,” I say. “I was on my way out.”
“Again? What do you do out there?”
“Walk. Window-shop. Go out for morning tea with the girls.”
She steps into the pantry. It’s a room the size of my apartment filled with food. Little Debbie’s entire line of food is here; good eats at the end of the world. Morris plucks a golden cake from the box, unwraps the confection, crams it into her mouth. And a second. When she’s done eating, she grins at me with cake-crumbed teeth.
“Damn, I forgot how good these are. Did you open Nick’s letter yet?”
“No-o-o-pe.”
“That’s mature of you.”
“Says the woman who just crammed a whole Twinkie into her mouth.”
“Two.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, Tara Morris, Twinkie-eating champion of what’s left of the world.”
We giggle like silly girls, carefree and alive, until reality begins to lap around the edges like a thirsty cat.
Morris turns grim. “Open the letter. Please.”
“I can’t.”
She shakes her head at me, her eyes forgiving though her mouth is not. “You’re scared, and for what? That fear buys you nothing except a whole lot of walking the streets with a pocket full of Twinkies, worrying yourself sick over him.”
“It’s just one Twinkie.”
It’s just one Twinkie at first. Then two. Four weeks after Nick left, I take my walk accompanied by three chemical cakes. I pretend he never existed. I believe he’s dead. I pray he’s alive and safe and with his family.
I’m in the library when it happens, the same one where my sister’s dreams died before Pope slaughtered her on an empty street. There are no new lists. The old ones flap with excitement when I push the door open. Look! A person! Then they fall still. The librarian is gone, her haughtiness relegated to the history books as a once-cliché. She’s no longer here to care whether or not I eat near the precious tomes.
I peel away the plastic wrapper.
Crumbs fall onto the pages of the atlas I’ve spread open. I press my finger to the page, then lick the yellow dots. The dry finger of my left hand traces an invisible line across the thick, rich paper, across the pale blue ocean—first the Atlantic, then the Mediterranean—from New York to Athens. From there I creep north, inch by colorful inch, across the splintered states that form the country of Greece.
The name, the name, what was the name? Nick told me the name of the village where his parents were raised, but standing here looking at this swath of unfamiliar places, I’m overwhelmed by their otherness. The names swim on the page until they’re meaningless.
My stomach lurches. The atlas swirls. The bright mosaic tiles rush up to greet me.
Thank God, I miss the books. The librarian would never forgive me.
DATE: NOW
I am dead and this is hell. Fire licks my face, dances with the shadows, forces its partners into the darkness before taking others. Light plays across the faces of sightless marble men, twisting them into fiends. Soldiers whip their horses, Faster! Faster! as they gallop across plaster walls.
“Not hell.” The words are not mine. They come from outside me; I’m awake enough to know that.
“Where?”
“Delphi.” The voice quavers at the edges as though the vocal cords have been slackened by time. She pronounces the word Thell-fee, not Dell-fie like the corporation.
Moving my body hurts, but I manage to feign sitting. An outsider might
see me as a sack of potatoes, and that’s how I feel, my weight constantly shifting, my insides compressed yet lacking the structure a skeleton provides. My perspective shifts. The fire retreats to its pit, leaving the room awash in a preternatural mix of shadows and light. The woman lingers in the half-light.
Two stone men tower over me.
“Who are they?”
“Kleobis and Biton. Heroes rewarded by Hera with the gift of endless sleep.” The words are hesitant.
“Not something you can regift.”
“What is … regift?”
This is Greece, the woman is Greek, and though her words are English, I realize their slowness is a result of translating the words in her head before presenting them to me. I wish I could offer her the same courtesy.
With simple words I explain and she nods.
“Gods give freely … or not at all. Their mother sought a boon and was punished for her pride in her sons.”
Their mother. My hands go to my stomach. “My baby—”
“Still lives inside you. He is strong.”
“He?”
“Or she.”
I close my eyes. The ache is too much—relief that Nick’s child still lives, despair that he isn’t here with me. “At least I have that.”
From the shadows she comes, her face a tangled web of burns. “Snakes,” she says as my gaze slips away from her right side. “A gift from the sickness.”
I look at her and her face, and I know at once what she did. “You burned them off.”
One nod. “Yes. I burn them off with the fire. It was”—she raises a hand to her face, then pulls away as if she dare not touch—“very painful.”
“Like Medusa.”
Another nod. “Of all the figures from mythology, this is the one my body chose. Me who is nobody, just a servant of the gods.”
“The gods? Not the one God?”
“I find more comfort with ones who walked the same path as I. Their feet … mine …” Two fingers step through the air. Then she changes tack. “You know someone follows you.”
For a moment, I’m confused. “Did the gods tell you that?”
“No. I hear. Now is time for rest.”
I close my eyes but do not sleep.
Abomination. That single word is a malignancy that takes hold in my mind. Tendrils snake out and coil around the rational thoughts, squeezing them like they’re there to be juiced dry of reason.
Abomination.
My child is fine. My child is—
An abomination.
—healthy.
My savior finds me on the low wall outside the museum. Her gaze fixates on the ground as she walks so that her hair falls forward, concealing the scars with a black waterfall threaded with silver. She’s older than I first thought, skimming the edges of fifty. Only when she’s seated beside me does she lift her head.
“Are you … sick?”
The snake woman’s words tug at the elastic band binding those thoughts, but it does not snap; the bundle of doubt remains.
I shake my head. “Last night, you said someone was following me. Did you see them?”
“No. I just hear.”
“You heard what, exactly?”
It takes her a moment to translate, formulate her reply, then translate again. “Shoes. Who?”
“I don’t know. A ghost, maybe.”
She turns to face me, a question in her eyes. Daylight is cruel and unforgiving: out here the scars are knotted and gnarled and red as though irritated.
“A dead man.” I draw a line across my throat, wiggle my fingers in the air. “Ghost.”
This time she nods. “The dead, they stay with us. But I do not hear your ghost. Maybe mine, eh?”
People used to flock here for this sunshine, this view, this experience. A cobblestone path stretches from the museum’s steps all the way to the famed ruins, interrupted in places to accommodate sapling laurels. The museum is a geometric hillock rising from the path in a seamless transition of color and stone. Someone planned carefully, matching the colors of the new to the centuries old. I can’t see what remains of ancient Delphi from this angle, but there’s a quiet energy that hums through the trees. There are ghosts here, spirits of the dead who walk these paths like death was an inconvenient stepping-stone on their way back to right here, right now.
I’m not convinced and I’m sure she’s not, either, by the uncomfortable way she raises her hand to her face and gingerly scrapes a nail across the mangled flesh.
“Does it hurt?”
She smiles with one side and shrugs with the same. “Eh, a little.”
My hatred for Pope flares anew before fading to a dull contempt: what havoc he wreaked on the world because of his selfish desires.
“Do you have a family?”
“My family is here.” She waves a hand toward the disappearing path.
“Children?”
“I am the child.”
Grief shivs my heart, but it’s dry of tears. “You’re lucky.”
“Perhaps.”
The cryptic word accompanies an equally impossible-to-decipher half smile. Who is this woman? I ask her and so we swap names the way people in polite society do, then we go back to staring, both of us fixated on the same stretch of cobblestone, both of us seeing something completely different, neither of us having shared a thing about ourselves beyond an arbitrary title.
Abomination.
Aren’t we all now?
DATE: THEN
Morris leaps from her seat. “Jesus Christ, what’s wrong?”
My cold, clammy hand slips and slides against the door’s slick painted jamb. “Don’t come near me. I’m sick.”
Fear blossoms in her dark eyes, shrinks as her face softens into concern, twists as anger rages in. She snatches up the clipboard on her desk, hurls it at the wall. Two broken pieces clatter on the floor.
“Fuck.”
“It’s okay,” I reassure her, like she’s the one who’s sick. But it’s always like this, isn’t it? The terminally ill assuring their loved ones that everything will be just fine if everyone thinks positive and wears a smile. Nothing holds death at bay like a rainbow over the river Styx.
“It’s not okay. It’s so not okay. It’s not even on the same planet as okay.”
“I have to leave. I can’t let it spread.”
“No,” she says. “You have to stay. Besides, if we haven’t caught it by now, we’re immune.”
“We don’t know that. We’re just guessing. If we follow that logic, I shouldn’t be sick.”
“You’re right. Shit. I can’t think. Jesus, Zoe. You can’t be sick. I—”
“Won’t allow it?”
“Yeah.” She picks up the clipboard pieces, tries to fit them back together, but they’re not cooperating. “I can’t lose any more people, Zoe. You, the others, you’re my family now. I thought we were all safe from that fucking disease. I was relying on it.”
“I’m sorry.”
She stomps over to her second-floor window, shoves the glass pane high in the sash.
“Fuck you, George Pope!” she screams into the empty streets. “I’m glad you’re fucking dead, you asshole. Burn in hell.” In stoic silence, the other buildings stand, reserving their judgment yet unwilling to yield to her hard words.
“Tara,” I say gently. “It really is okay. We all have to die somehow, right?”
“Wrong. We should be immortal.”
“That’s mature.”
“So is you stomping out of here because you think you’re sick.”
“Look at me. I’m sick. I just puked all over the library floor. Soon God knows what’s going to happen to me. This thing will flip my genes on and off and I’ll turn into something that isn’t me anymore. There’s no telling what that will be. Maybe I’ll survive as some kind of evolutionary freak, maybe I’ll die. I’m going to pack.”
“Don’t,” she says. “Please.”
“I have to.”
Morris sig
hs, hard and loud. She bends over, presses her elbows into her desk, bangs her head against the surface. After a few good thunks, she looks up at me.
“You’re not going to change your mind, are you?”
“Not a chance.”
“Fine. Do me a favor. Don’t go too far. Set up in one of the buildings across the street where I can keep an eye on you.”
I nod, turn away from my friend. What I don’t tell her is that death isn’t totally unwelcome. For the first time in my life, I’m flirting with The End and I don’t care. Let it slide its tongue into my mouth, taste the metal and take control.
Anything to stop my heart from hemorrhaging.
TWENTY
Eeny, meeny, miney, mo. The street is filled with choices, each as unappealing as the next. Oh, they’re all fine to look at: office buildings and businesses and apartments hewn in bricks and rough stones. The thing is, I’d feel like an intruder living in someone else’s home, even though they’re long gone.
Dead. You helped burn them, remember? They didn’t go on vacation.
Morris is a whippet bouncing at her office window. She’s pointing directly across the street at what used to be a Kinko’s. Technically it still is—they’re just no longer printing copies. Directly above that is a small office space once filled by a small accounting firm. No beds, but they have a decent sofa in the waiting room, Morris told me. That’s where she wants me.
My wave is limp and lacking, and hers is just as weak. I don’t want to do this. I have to do this. No choice. I turn to take another long hard look at my new home. It’s just me, the backpack digging into my shoulders, and this box in my arms. For a moment I balance the box on my knee and readjust the weight, and then let myself into the building. The previous tenants made it easy, or maybe Morris and her crew did; either way, the door opens freely. The door is made of both bars and glass. Anything coming through is going to make enough noise to wake the dying.
That would be me. I can’t help but laugh a little. Who knew death could be amusing?
It’s true, there’s a sofa in the bland waiting room, along with two generic armchairs and a cheap desk. In places, the laminate is warped and stained with rings from hot, wet cups. My knees bend; I touch my backside to the very edge of the chair that doesn’t have its back to the window and place the box between my feet.