by James Phelan
I rush after her. I am halfway down the series of steel grate stairs when I hear noises from above and feel the vibrations of twelve pairs of feet thundering after us. I slip on the slick cold steel, tumble down to a landing, crushed of breath, but I get to my feet and push on, limping. Another flight, the sounds nearing behind me as I slide down what is a slim steel ladder to the street and turn to scan for Anna. I see her back as she rounds a corner up ahead—I chase after her.
I yell: Anna!
She’s faster than I remember, faster than I’d ever given her credit for. When I get to the corner I see her across the street and she calls out to me before disappearing again and I chase after her, slipping on the icy road but somehow keeping my feet. In a few seconds I am running through the stacks of a library, headed for a light towards the back of the room and then I see them: my three friends. Anna is there, so is Dave, and Mini. I thought they’d left me days ago, I thought they were gone, that I’d never see them again. They smile. I have so much to say, so many questions and so much to share. Outside the window, the Chasers flash by, running fast down the wrong street. Then they’re gone.
That was—
I stop speaking as I look across to my friends. I take a step back, taking it in—they’ve changed. Felicity, Rachel, and Caleb are now standing next to me, right where my departed friends had been. Had I imagined them just now, some kind of mind trick, some measure of madness? It’s then I know that none of this adds up; the illusion is over, I know what this is.
I don’t know what to say to them, the three people before me now. I am lost, more than just for words. My world seems to spin and I catch myself from falling by holding on to a bookshelf. My friends before me now, each of them a survivor like me, I’d met in the last couple of days. I’d met each of them in the days since I’d been alone, since the attack, since all this . . .
Am I dreaming?
None of them answer. The looks they give me—I could read anything into that. Pity. Fright. Ineptitude. Love. Anger. Anything and everything, to the point where I cannot face them and I turn my back and look out the window to a day that is growing darker. I see Anna’s reflection in the glass, her dark hair and pretty face and bright red mouth that tasted of strawberries. This may be the last time I see her like this, and I watch her, taking in this last moment in a string of final moments and we share a last look backward before going forward to the light: that pinprick of dawn, the horizon turning on itself, inverted, so that you are looking down at the earth and you’re suspended up there, with the sun and the moon and all of us in the same big sky.
I know what this is. I know, and I’m sad about it. I know Dave couldn’t be here, not like this, standing there behind me. Certainly not Anna. I know only one place where they could all appear like this, replace my other friends like that, so I know what this is. I’ve had enough and I have to leave, it’ll drive me mad otherwise, it might even tempt me to stay with them. But something in me won’t let me hang around and I think I’m grateful for that. This will all be over soon, and then I won’t be alone anymore.
Anna asks: Jesse, what do you want?
I look at her reflection, and even though I’m asleep I cry in my dream and I can feel the tears in my eyes in my sleeping self.
I want what I’ve wanted every day since all this happened—I want to go home. But I know that’s now not that easy, nor is that place so easily defined. I accept that home may now be wherever my friends are.
28
I opened my eyes and rolled to my side. I was hot, laid up on the couch, covered with a couple of heavy quilts, and weary, but there was something niggling away at the back of my mind. I stretched out to try to wake up, and kicked the covers off. Caleb sat next to me, writing in a book. I liked being here with him, but I could not shake the feeling that I had to be someplace else, that there was something urgent that had to be done . . . I just could not summon what it was.
“Hey, welcome back, buddy,” Caleb said, looking at me.
I smiled sleepily.
“I’ve been talking to you all night while you slept,” he said. “Hear any of it?”
I didn’t answer, my world in a drowsy fog.
“Gotta say, you’re a good listener; helped me figure some stuff out with my story.”
“Story?” I asked, my voice raspy.
“Yeah, this is what I was talking about,” Caleb said, showing me his notebook. It appeared to be some kind of graphic novel, evidently an epic judging by the size of the pad. “Very much a work in progress.”
The cover seemed familiar: a cool but spooky emblem had been drawn in black ink on the gray-green card and it looked like a world that had burned, leaving a skeleton frame within, and there was a winged shield wrapped around the equator, all filled in solid with black. Was that winged shield protecting the world or attacking it?
“My villains are cannibals,” Caleb explained, flicking though some pages. “That’s just part of it, though. But they prey on people, hunt them, target them for all sorts of different reasons. Course, this is still concept artwork, but close to what I think it needs.”
“Looks good.” It really did. The illustrations were black and white but they were detailed, set out in a simple nine-grid layout against a backdrop that looked like near-future New York, emerging from the other side of all this mess. I thought about outside, about banging on Caleb’s door and feeling sick, about fainting.
“These are inspiration,” he said, showing me some open art books he had splayed before him on the floor. They featured vivid color pictures and they were spooky as hell, yet I couldn’t help thinking perhaps my new friend was really more inspired by what had happened to this city in the last fortnight than the work of past masters.
“This one here is my favorite: Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault.”
The double-page color image depicted a handmade life raft covered with the dead and dying, with some survivors sitting among and standing on top of them.
“It’s . . . amazing,” I said.
“Yeah,” Caleb replied. “The picture, it was a French shipwreck in 1816, and the artist would visit the survivors in hospital to sketch and paint accurately—I mean, he even built a scale model of the raft. And he—and I’m serious—he kept a severed head on his studio’s roof to sketch a corpse head! It’s . . . sorry, I could talk about that painting for hours. I mean, even the way it’s composed . . .”
I nodded, feeling a bit put off by his story and the scenes it conjured before me. They were creepily similar to what had been going on around us but in a sense there was something even more real about it than reality. Maybe it was the knock to the head. Maybe it was the pills Caleb had given me.
Maybe my lingering doubts about what was real and what was in my imagination hadn’t gone away completely. Memories were all I had of some things—the memory of a happy family before mum left home was one I clung to. I wanted to get rid of some of them, of course—the bad memories—and I thought I could do that if I left 30 Rock. But that would mean surrendering all the good ones, too. Then again, I’d realized that even the most embarrassing ones or shameful ones—which I would have given anything to take back—were to be cherished. But perhaps the lesson learned—as if it were the title of one of Dave’s books—was that none of them could be trusted. Or none of them was mine to control.
I stared at one of the other paintings, but found it hard to focus. There were some images from the Sistine Chapel that I’d seen with my grandmother when I was ten. They had been moving to me then, but they were haunting now; a reminder not only of perpetual gloom, but the reality of it.
“Why the hell cannibals?” I asked, feeling sick by the thought of it—too close to what was all around us now. “Couldn’t you have some mutant space monster?”
“And what, copout with some giant squid coming in at the third act, destroying the city?”
“It’d do. It’d be better. It could still work as an allegory.”
“Yeah
, well I’m not running from this idea because of what’s going down all around us,” he said. “Since I was a kid, I’ve thought about this. And believe me, beyond all this Chaser crap, cannibalism has been around us—remember the news reports of that creep in Europe who advertised in a newspaper for someone to eat?”
I remembered that. It had really happened.
“Someone actually replied to the ad, right?” Caleb tapped the table. “There’s good reason why they say that truth is stranger than fiction. My grandpa used to scare us with stories about a guy he worked with—another reporter at the New York Times—who had tried cannibalism out. I guess it stuck with me ever since, and when I started thinking about this book . . . it was something I wanted to write about, explore why it had stayed in my mind. Besides, what more evil a thing could I make up than something that was true?”
“People might not want to read this kind of thing anymore.”
“I’m exploring this in my own way, looking for some answers, and to me that’s art,” he said. “Besides, my good guys will show you how the others can be beaten.”
“And your heroes do what, exactly?” I asked, feeling slightly beaten myself. “Turn the bad guys into level five vegans?”
“Ha! No, but I might steal that line,” he said. “They fight this underworld group—but it’s hard, because these cannibals walk among us.”
“Feeding on the weaker masses . . .”
“Yeah.”
“And what, that’s their secret? That they get power from whoever they eat?”
“There’s more to it than that, but yeah. They have a litany of secrets that they live by, cannibalism being just one of them.” He packed away his ink pens.
I looked up at the ceiling, my head floating on the pillow.
“But your good guys don’t just go in and karate them about I hope?”
“Hell, no!” Caleb replied. “The better the evil, antagonistic force, the better the good guys—they’ve all in some way seen and felt the exhilaration of violence, and were distraught by the human consequences. That’s why they were selected to defend humanity.”
“Well . . . it sounds pretty cool, pretty solid,” I said. Cool and solid. Was it? What was I doing here, anyway? My memory came, short and sharp; a knife, in and out: I had not slept last night, but why? I looked at my watch: it was now the afternoon.
Was I just tired? There was more to this memory. Voices had woken me in the night—no, noises. I’d woken and gone out someplace cold, someplace old . . . the zoo! And slowly, my foggy mind began to clear, bit by bit. The girls were safe, they were together, but why had I left them?
29
I had a million questions but no time. Caleb was, as always, restless, ready to move on.
“Now you’re awake,” he said, “let’s go outside for a while.” He led the way up to the fourth-floor terrace, the roof of the store. I thought back to how those Chasers had come here and Caleb had pulled out his beanbag shotgun and gone: blam blam blam. That was cool. He was cool.
“Check this out.” He passed me the binoculars. “That corner there, about five blocks down?”
I looked through the binoculars to where he pointed to the south. I was expecting another look-alike but there was not a soul to be seen. Everything looked pretty much the same: abandoned, crashed, smashed, lonely.
“After dropping you back at the zoo the other day, I was checking out a building on that corner,” he said. “And do you know what? It had a missile in the front room.”
“A missile?”
“Big one.”
“Just laying there?”
“Like it had come in the window, smashed against the far wall, and didn’t explode.”
“Did it have any markings?”
“Like a ‘Made in China’ sticker or a DHARMA logo? No. Nothing at all.”
We went back down the stairwell and onto the street, where I watched as he opened up the back of a van. He kicked out a ramp, rolled down on a motorbike, loud as hell. “How about it?” he said. “BMW 650 GS. Look at the tires. Chunky as hell, it’ll get around these streets no problemo.” He revved the engine. “Where’s your spirit of adventure?”
“Skipped town,” I replied. “Had to pack it away to make room for my spirit of survival.”
“Just a quick ride?”
“They’ll hear us.”
“We can outrun them,” he said. “Look, on my own, yeah, this is a bit dangerous, in case I have to stop, some Chaser creeps out of a nearby building from behind me . . .”
“See, my thoughts exactly.”
“But you can keep an eye out.”
“Or . . .” I steadied myself against the outside wall of the bookstore. My mind was still a mess, but I remembered Caleb and how he acted and how he was so full of denial. “How about you go check in on your old roommates?”
“Maybe,” he said, then killed the engine. “Hey, where were you headed that day, on the subway?”
“The 9/11 Memorial,” I said. “Have you been?”
“I didn’t want to see it.”
“You need to feel it,” I told him. “Some things you need to feel.” It seemed like the right time to say it.
“Why?”
“Because you’ve been marooned in that bookstore like I was up in 30 Rock.”
He looked at me and even though I still felt spaced out, I could hold his gaze and I saw him soften. Finally, he said, “I can take you there.”
“Can we go past your old place?”
“Okay . . . We can go via Little Italy. See if—if my friends are there.”
I smiled at his change. I saw the truth, not a baby step but a leap. This wasn’t about adventure, a reckless good time. He was starting to let the reality of this world in. He needed to see proof.
“How long will it take?” I asked, suddenly aware that time was important to me but I couldn’t place why. I felt I had to see this moment through with Caleb, for his sake—maybe for both our sakes.
“Couple of hours,” he replied, “tops.”
I looked up the street towards the north. I still had a niggling thought that I couldn’t place. He kicked out the bike’s stand and got off. He saw my hesitation, and walked over to me.
“We can check it out another time,” he said.
He put out a hand for me to shake and say good-bye. I looked at it, puzzled, wondering where else I’d go if not with him.
“Let’s go,” I said.
He broke into a huge grin.
The first few blocks were quiet. We took everything in, moving at a pace neither of us had experienced since the attack. The bike was sure-footed, the tires biting into the snow and ash, and we easily mounted curbs, rounded obstructions, zoomed down gaps between piled-up and abandoned cars. And we moved fast.
“I went for a ride just before, while you were still sleeping,” he said over his shoulder. “Down along the Hudson. I met some other survivors. A group of them, down by Chelsea Piers . . .”
A pause, waiting for my reaction. I tried to focus, but it was as if there were a light hitting the inside of my skull and bouncing around. I knew the name of the place from the maps but I couldn’t place it in my mind’s eye.
“Survivors?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But listen, this group—there are like forty of them there, in the big sports center. A few of them left when I got there, they were starting trouble, wanted a different existence to everyone else. They said it didn’t matter what we did anymore.”
I suddenly felt wide awake. “How so?” I asked.
“That—That choices aren’t important because what’s the point of life now? They were acting like this is now a world without morality, without consequences, so what’s it matter what we do?” He glanced back at me quickly. “You know? Got me thinking: what if it matters even more now, what we do. More than we’ll ever know.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I get that.” But all I could think about was why he’d waited this long to tell me about these survi
vors. “Did any of this group know what’s happened? Why the attack happened?”
“They all had an opinion,” Caleb replied, “but apparently, on like the second day, a cop came.”
“And he explained everything?” I asked.
“Well, he’d heard on his radio at the time of the attack that missiles were seen coming in, from the east.”
“The east?”
“That’s all this cop had told them, that there were sightings of missiles and it lasted a couple of minutes.
Everyone had their own opinions on where they came from—Long Island, a boat, a submarine, Iraq, you name it.”
“What about the cop?”
“He didn’t say, apparently. He was there for a couple of hours and then left.”
“Left?”
“They said he had family in the Bronx or something. Never saw or heard from him again.”
“So what is this group of survivors going to do?” I asked.
“I heard a few talking about leaving, heading to someplace out of the city. But I guess most of them will stay. They say that more come every day, sometimes a few leave, but they’re always getting bigger in number.”
“Why didn’t you stay with them?”
“I had to get back to you,” he said. And then for no reason, he started laughing, kind of like my friend Mini used to laugh. Her quiet, deep laugh always seemed odd coming from such a small person. But it was always contagious. Mini and Caleb were nothing alike and for a moment I was confused. I didn’t know what to make of it, but started laughing too. Lately, I’d laughed mostly from relief that something worse hadn’t happened. So it was nice to get caught up in the pleasure of it. We didn’t stop until he started coughing.
“Besides,” he continued once he’d recovered, “being around them reminded me how this is a weird city sometimes.”
From Fifth Avenue onto West 14th and then down Bowery, which was clear, we moved like lightning. Caleb stopped the bike in the middle of the empty street and turned the engine off.