But now? There was none of that—just a father-to-be who’d come willingly on or not. Marcus might have objections—exhibit A, the condoms—but he couldn’t deny the world needed more people. So she’d just have to talk him into it—or maybe burst his bubble about the effectiveness of his chosen form of birth control. A pinprick should do it, she figured. And after that, she’d be on her way to having her own little backup person in case . . .
In case . . . what?
In case Lucy’s luck turned sucky again. Sure, Marcus acted like he loved her, but she’d known herself longer than he had. It would only be a matter of time before the jig was up. Or maybe Marcus would turn out to be the jerk. In her experience, statistically speaking, guys and girls were pretty much fifty-fifty when it came to being jerks. If the line between Jesus and jerk were a teeter-totter, the Messiah’d be catapulted halfway to heaven, the scales were that unevenly balanced when it came to good people versus the rest. So, a baby would either cement the relationship or expose one of them as the jerk they really were, before driving the other away. But that was the beauty of it: either way she’d have a backup person, growing inside her, waiting to keep her company. A backup person who’d force her to keep on keeping on.
She introduced her topic using the Socratic method by way of Jeopardy!, tiptoeing up to it with questions, beginning with, “What are we doing?”
“Doing?” Marcus asked back. “Doing when? Like, for dinner?”
“Right now.”
“Um, driving?”
“But why?”
“You know why,” her cosurvivor said. “We’re looking for others.”
“Correct,” Lucy said. Paused. “But what if there aren’t any?”
“That’d suck.”
“And . . . ?”
“And what? It’d suck.” Marcus paused, worried he’d walked into a trap—which he had, just not the one he was thinking of. Hoping to avoid a fight, he looked for the words that’d show he didn’t mean being alone with her would suck. What he meant was . . . blank. He had nothing. But then Lucy surprised him by going in a totally different direction.
“I meant, And . . . what are we going to do about it?”
Marcus shrugged, stumped.
“If the mountain won’t come to Mohammad,” she said, quoting the old saw, “Mohammad must go to the mountain.”
Marcus jerked the wheel, catching the shoulder and spraying gravel as he fishtailed to a stop. “What’s that sup . . . ,” he began, preparing excuses, though what these would be, he had no idea.
“What I’m trying to say . . . ,” Lucy said, clearly flustered.
“So say it,” Marcus said, cutting in.
“. . . is,” she continued, ignoring him, holding on to the syllable for a beat or two.
“Yes?”
“Maybe we need to make the others ourselves.” Boom, Lucy thought. How’d you like them apples?
Meanwhile: This again, Marcus thought, rubbing his brow, but then nodding, not wanting to argue. “Okay,” he continued, still nodding as he pulled off the shoulder and back onto the road. “Okay,” he said again, not necessarily agreeing with her, but stalling so he could weigh how being a father would cramp his style, in the event they found any others that were still breathing—women, especially. Because even though the fun had been fun, even fun gets old—a rationalization of male fickleness she’d not be getting from him, even under torture.
“Okay,” he said after several miles of not talking about it. “Let’s talk about it.” By which he meant: “Let’s see if I can talk you out of this baby nonsense.”
“Okay,” Lucy agreed. “Let’s.”
“One,” Marcus said. “More mouths to feed.”
“In a world full of canned goods as far as the eye can see,” Lucy countered.
“Two,” Marcus said. “I’m no doctor.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Lucy said, with more sarcasm than Marcus felt was strictly necessary. “Mom’s going to be soooo disappointed.”
“No talking about,” he warned, not saying “others,” “mothers,” or “the departed”—and not needing to.
“Sorry,” she said, pursing her lips, turning an invisible key. She waited for the weasel to pop once more before continuing. “Where were we?” she asked.
“Me, not being a doctor.”
“Oh yeah,” Lucy said before wondering aloud about how the species had managed to reproduce for millions of years without the medical-industrial complex, to which Marcus added: “And women died. In childbirth. A lot.”
They’d seen proof of it together, in a Civil War–era cemetery they’d made love in because they were still alive, and there was no one to stop them. It was also (ironically) one of the few places outdoors that didn’t stink of death—or at least not human death. When a breeze happened over where they lay in the grass, it smelled of dead flowers, the essence of their perfume condensed and distilled as the petals darkened and curled. Afterward, walking among the tombstones, enjoying the floral breeze, they noticed the family plots. There seemed to be a disturbingly high number with one old man’s stone flanked by a bunch of graves for women sharing his last name, all dying in their twenties, judging from the dates that hadn’t dissolved from acid rain.
“What do you think?” he asked, double-checking the gravestone math Lucy had pointed out. “Some kind of epidemic?”
She shook her head. “They were martyrs,” she said, eliciting the slightest flinch from her companion, who masked it with a question. “How so?”
“They died in the cause of reproduction,” she said. “They died so others might live.”
Marcus was quiet for a moment, considering what to say next, the only sound in the cemetery the rustle of leaves. “Guys get off kind of easy,” he said.
“In more ways than one,” she said.
He figured the memory of that conversation would be enough. He should have known better. Because once a person willingly accepts that something can cost their life, trying to talk them out of it is pretty much a waste of breath. The cost—perversely—was part of the attraction.
Plus, he got it, he really did. He knew why having a kid was important to her, the emotional and literal backup it would provide. He even knew she was worried about things souring between them, might even be being especially bristly lately to test how much he’d take. Thing was, Marcus was done with being tested—on faith, on loyalty, on his level of commitment to a cause. Take me or leave me, he thought, or watch me do the leaving . . .
But the even bigger truth was simpler: he didn’t want to be a parent because thinking about it made him miss his own parents all over again. The thought of being a father without having a father to call for advice seemed unimaginable. And that went double when it came to not being able to share all the baby’s firsts—tooth, word, non-gas-inspired smile . . .
How was he supposed to tell Lucy the bundle of joy she wanted to inflict on him promised to be a nonstop refresher course in grief? He couldn’t, obviously. And so he resorted to that time-honored male birth control method: acting like a jerk.
He started by opining aloud about the so-called equality of the sexes. He wasn’t seeing it and said so. Now that it was down to one of each, the sexes couldn’t be graded on a curve anymore—he said—suggesting they had been before. The sexes needed to be judged by nothing more than their individual physical abilities and circumstances—their indisputable, biological differences.
“All I’m saying is,” he said, leaping seamlessly from the dangers of giving birth to the dangers of equal rights, “you can pass all the amendments you want, I still can’t get pregnant, and you’re not writing your name in the snow anytime soon.”
“Wow,” Lucy said, with an edge that seemed to ask how such a handsome face could hide such an ugly mind. “Way to cut your side some slack.” She turned toward her window and seemed to be letting it go, but then: “Seriously?” she said, turning back. “Getting pregnant versus peeing standing up? That’s what
you’re going with?”
Marcus nodded, feeling like a creep—as planned.
“I guess you’re right,” she said, actually throwing up her hands in mock surrender. “Men and women are different—starting with their ability to at least act like mature adults.”
So Marcus dropped the b-bomb, placing the word right there in the ice cream truck between them—a trial balloon, perhaps, of just how much crap she’d be willing to take from him. A trial balloon she couldn’t hit him for, unless she wanted them to crash, seeing as he was driving and had steadily increased their velocity as the argument escalated. And so:
“Fine,” she said, her lips fusing shut like a vacuum sealer when they were done with the word, sucking out all the air after it. Let the silent treatment commence . . .
Time passed. Slowly. Like a kidney stone. Or like someone using the bathroom when you need to, making you imagine the kidney stones you’re growing out there in the hallway, knees squeezed together, each tick of the clock an accident waiting to happen. Something’s got to give—meaning someone—and it (they) does (do). Because—postapocalyptically—the shelf life on the silent treatment was not what it used to be, thanks to there being literally no one left to exercise her talking parts with, except herself, which, given the tightness of their quarters, Marcus would most certainly hear, real life not being a Shakespearean soliloquy, and so . . .
“I need words,” Lucy announced one morning over microwave coffee.
Marcus let out a slow sigh like a pricked balloon.
She’d been thinking about their situation all the while she wasn’t talking about their situation. And what she kept coming back to was Marcus’s confession about how easily he’d been played by some cyber slut he’d never met, back when there were plenty to choose from. Feeling thus emboldened, she figured maybe she should exercise some of her power as the last woman on earth.
“What were we using before?” Marcus asked.
“Not talking words,” Lucy quibbled. “Reading ones. I need to rub my eyes over some words on a page.”
“If you’re bored, we’ve got DV—”
“Words. On. A. Page,” she clarified, a stubbed finger punctuating each word as the TV tray that was their breakfast nook shook, making both their coffee cups ring like bells as their spoons jiggled against ceramic.
“Okay,” Marcus said, hands up. “Message received. We’ll look for a bookstore or something.”
“I think there’s one next to the record store,” Lucy said, hiding her smirk behind a sip.
“Right,” Marcus said. “Library. Got it.”
A single dead librarian lay behind the checkout desk. It may have been Lucy’s imagination, but the book sorter’s corpse seemed to be decomposing more neatly than others she’d seen, more like a Smithsonian mummy than the fly-clouded gut bags she was used to. She tapped Marcus’s shoulder and pointed wordlessly.
They’d passed from the unrelenting heat and humidity of a southern summer into slightly drier and more reasonably heated territory, but this hadn’t stopped them from wearing gas masks. As such, their conversation that followed felt a little like another argument.
“Weird,” Marcus shouted. “It’s like somebody just let the air out. The skin’s all sucked in around the bones, like one of those suitcase space savers.”
“What do you think caused it?” Lucy said back, pitched at a volume normally reserved for swearing.
Marcus of the Desert contemplated the corpse before shouting back: “Humidity, maybe?”
“What about it?”
“There doesn’t seem to be much,” he said. He rolled up his sleeve and fingered his arm. “No sweat,” he said. “Literally,” he added.
“Why do you . . .”
But before she could finish, he answered: “Books,” he said. “Paper. I think all this paper must have acted like sponges, dehumidifying the place.”
Lucy shook her goggled head like a giant bug, still trying to figure out a world that just kept getting stranger as she headed for the shelves.
Unfortunately, all that paper couldn’t wick away the moisture inside her gas mask. Trying to read the spines, her eye windows kept fogging up, making her look like some steampunk Orphan Annie. She tried holding her breath and waited for the fog to clear. And waited. Beads of fog collected into bigger beads, became drops, sliding down the glass, but still blurred the world beyond it. Finally, impatient—and needing the breath she was holding—Lucy yanked back the mask, gulped at the air, and was about to wipe the lenses clean when she noticed she wasn’t gagging. She sniffed. Musty, not lilacs, but not all that bad either. The olfactory influence of the mummified librarian was limited at best.
“Hey, Marcus,” she called, her tone normal, her voice unmuffled.
He turned to face her standing there, smiling, unmasked.
“What are you . . . ?”
“It’s okay,” she said. “The air’s not bad.”
Marcus looked at her, and Lucy knew he was wondering if he was being punked. She had cried “clean air” before at times when it was especially rank. It had amused her, their differing capacity for bad smells. The last time he fell for it, he’d inhaled a little bit of his own vomit and spent the rest of the day hacking up phlegm. He folded his arms. “I can wait you out,” he said.
“You could,” she admitted. “But there’s no need to. It’s really not bad.”
And it was true, this was what they’d given up hoping for: four walls and a roof with space to stretch, protection from the elements, and air that wasn’t toxic. Slowly, he raised his mask like he was raising a cup of something hot to his lips. “Hey,” he said, removing his mask the rest of the way. “It’s not that bad.”
Lucy thought about telling him she’d told him so, but decided to save it for something bigger.
They stayed the night and did what couples often do at night, though, being young, they did it during the day as well. Needless to say, one of the unspoken rules of the silent treatment was: no sex. And so they made up for lost time, working through Marcus’s stash of prophylactics, with no mention of having babies and no mention of not having babies. They seemed to have acknowledged that one another’s bodies were one another’s business; one couldn’t force the other into doing anything they didn’t want to.
Up to a point, of course.
30
Dev contemplated the Brinkmans’ liquor cabinet, the one his stepfather went to when he’d had a “hard” day. It was also, interestingly, the one he went to when he’d had a “good” day, leaving the boy to wonder what sorts of days weren’t in need of liquid mitigation. Weekends, perhaps? Nope.
“Hey, it’s the weekend,” he’d say back when his wife complained about how early the cabinet’s door was creaking open, followed by the clink, clink of ice hitting glass like chilly punctuation marks.
Dev didn’t think his stepfather was what you’d call an alcoholic; he just drank every night. And he always drank the same amount, measured not in shots but with a graduated cylinder. Though the colors that climbed that Pyrex column changed from day to day—sometimes amber, sometimes clear, sometimes exotic hues of blue, green, red—the level to which they were poured always remained the same.
“I know my limit,” he told his stepson, “to within one cc.” And after that, an equally anal evening of paced sipping followed.
Perhaps it was this methodical nature that kept his stepfather from becoming one of the angry drunks on TV, bashing wives and children and cars until they found God or AA or died. Dev’s stepdad sipped, loosened up, became more talkative and reflective, more complimentary of Dev and his mom. Less, well, frankly, Aspergerian. The alcohol was not merely medicinal, but surgical. At least that’s what Dev gleaned, after hearing his mother tell a friend over the phone that her husband’s drinking was one of the few things to remove the stick from his butt.
Come morning, Mr. Brinkman was never the worse for wear. Unplagued by hangovers, he never had to ask what he’d done the night bef
ore. Instead, he kissed his wife while pulling his arm through the sleeve of his pharmacist’s jacket, snatching a triangle of toast on the way out the door for another day of filling amber bottles with the same attention to detail he used to mix his evening cocktails.
Dev had researched the symptoms for Lyme disease in a neighbor’s encyclopedia and crosschecked those with a copy of the Physicians’ Desk Reference. He wanted to know what he should be looking out for. Because not finding a bull’s-eye rash didn’t mean he didn’t have it. He also learned that Lyme disease was a hypochondriac’s dream. It mimicked all sorts of diseases it wasn’t, earning the nickname the great imitator. One of the few things most sufferers shared was originally being diagnosed with something else. Confusion, fatigue, muscle soreness—those could all be symptoms of Lyme disease, or the flu, or the fact that he’d been in a car crash. Misdiagnosis was itself part of the pathology; while the patient was being treated for something he didn’t have, the infection spread to more systems, leading to more symptoms to further confound proper diagnosis. Eventually, the disease took over really important stuff, like the brain and heart, leading to heart attack, dementia, Parkinson’s . . .
Dev was underage for drinking, but just reading through the progression of the diseases he might or might not have made him feel like an old man. Correction: an old man who needed a drink.
And so he opened the cabinet, removed a bottle of vodka, a mixer, and his stepfather’s graduated cylinder. Maybe he could make his liver an inhospitable place for parasites to settle. He couldn’t see how it could possibly make things any worse. Plus, he was curious about what it felt like. Would it feel like how it felt when he was in the throes of a topique? Would the top of his head lift so lightly into the air, knowledge like a breeze would come whispering across the crests and valleys of his exposed cerebellum?
Happy Doomsday: A Novel Page 21