Dev’s resting blank face was as good as a magnet when it came to drawing them out whenever either got him alone. Not really paying attention to the substance of what was being said—which, as nearly as Dev could tell, was almost always some neurotypical emotional mountain manufactured out of a logical molehill—he’d make a comment about something that was going on in the real world, like, “Aren’t those flowers huge?” or “Do you remember it always being this hot in the summer?” But instead of taking these as literal observations about what was literally going on in the world around them, Lucy and Marcus inevitably took them personally, reading them like some sort of Zen commentary on whatever they’d been blathering on about.
“So you’re saying I should appreciate the things I have?” (or) “Tomorrow really is another day, isn’t it?” (or) “It’s just that simple: let it go, reboot, and start again . . .”
Invariably, they’d conclude with “I’m glad we had this conversation,” as if they’d actually had one.
Lucy was the one who helped establish the pattern, though it was Marcus who was the first to talk to Dev alone—at Lucy’s prodding. She’d suggested it, mainly, to get away from her “significant other” for a while, which had been easy enough while he was bedridden, but became slightly less easy once he started using a cane. Among the latest things to drive her crazy—in addition to realizing she was carrying a would-be terrorist’s child—was his increasing tendency to talk to said child through her belly button as if she weren’t there. It was during one of these Lucy-excluding father-kid talks that she pushed Marcus away, saying, “Go play with Dev.”
“What?”
“You know what I mean,” she said. “Bond, or whatever.”
Marcus looked at her the way he had ever since she’d become undeniably pregnant: funny. “You’re sure you’ll be okay?” he said, this apparently being the day for him acting like he cared.
So Lucy nodded and began counting off. “Keep breathing,” she said, ticking off one finger. “Don’t get myself killed,” another. “And, oh yeah, don’t lift anything heavy,” a third and a pause. “That about cover it?”
“Sure,” Marcus said, leaning on his cane, “ridicule me for caring . . .”
Precisely, she thought, but said, “Just teasing, sweetie,” like he was a diabetic for whom sweetness could be deadly.
And so Marcus tried to be buddies with Dev, to the extent that either was capable of being that with or for the other. There were some stumbling blocks, of course. For Dev, there was his Aspergerian conviction that the needing of friends was a kind of weakness he’d fallen prey to in the past, to his peril. Marcus, on the other hand, was a natural friend maker—something that had also cost him much (nearly all) in the past.
But Dev was a challenge, even for the other’s natural empathy, and knowing about his location on “the spectrum” didn’t help. Marcus understood the condition, intellectually, but he couldn’t get the feeling of what it was like not to have feelings—which was not what Asperger’s was, he knew, but he couldn’t help himself from still thinking about it like that. Looking at Dev, trying to figure him out, the phrase “the feeling of no feelings” drowned out any more productive reactions to (as he spoke of it to Lucy later) “the whole Dev situation.”
To the world’s single female, “the whole Dev situation” wasn’t anything new. It was just how all boys were about feelings, scaled up.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that the male of the species are not really social animals,” she said. “You’re all sociopaths. You play at being sociable to the extent it might help get you laid, but . . .”
“That’s harsh,” Marcus said, “but . . .” And he was about to say, “I know exactly what you mean,” when, sensing this, she cut him off.
“And yet, accurate,” she concluded, with all the feminine certainty on the subject of male emotions that made guys clam up on the subject—inadvertently confirming the diagnosis.
“But if we’re such bad guys,” Marcus tried.
“So you’re talking for Dev now?”
“I mean other guys . . .”
“What other guys?” Lucy asked. Because that was the trouble with everyone else being dead: all generalizations suddenly became very personal indeed.
Lucy: that was the key. Marcus realized this right after she pushed him to “go play with Dev” for the second time. He and the Martian could bond over the real alien in their midst: Lucy.
“You know how she . . .”
“Like when she . . .”
“Women.” “People.”
Dev looked at the one who said women while Marcus looked at the one who said people. And that’s when Marcus got the tiniest inkling of what life was like for the only other male left standing. Dev was like the only guy living in a world full of women (emotionally speaking). Everybody of either sex was inscrutable to and prejudging of . . . him.
Marcus tried putting his new understanding into words. “So,” he said, “being around people for you is like holding a fart on a date that never ends.”
Dev thought about that. He wasn’t sure Marcus was right, but he wasn’t sure he was wrong either. What he suddenly saw with blinding clarity, however, was what he needed to do to make Marcus think he understood, thus forging a bond that would make living with his new guests easier in the long run. And what he needed to do was so simple, so primordial, he was surprised he hadn’t thought of it sooner.
He farted.
And Marcus nearly tipped over with laughter, finally sitting down before he didn’t have a choice. And from that position, with his butt cheeks splayed on a surface that promised amazing acoustics, he let one rip. “Am I right?” he asked, looking at Dev for a reaction.
Dev pinched his face—and less visible parts—eventually producing a sustained flatulent response he capped thusly:
“You took the words right out of my mouth.”
After that, whenever they saw each other without Lucy around, they exchanged farts just like saying hello. They’d laugh just like that first time, boys being boys, regardless of their more nuanced neurological wiring. And after that, they’d get down to whatever business needed getting down to, which was usually just walking, exercising Marcus’s leg, complaining about Lucy, checking the perimeter to make sure all the things they hoped to keep at bay were.
“You did this all by yourself, eh?” Marcus commented, surveying the wall of death once again, this time with less trepidation, seeing as the worst had already happened.
“Well,” his host said, in an uncharacteristic moment of modesty, “the inherently flammable quality of gasoline helped.”
Marcus hesitated before fobbing Lucy off on Dev, even though he really needed a little Marcus time. The trouble—of course—was that Lucy was a girl and Dev was a boy. And Marcus was the boy who’d had sex with Lucy more recently—that more recently being a thought that needled him constantly, now that the girl presumably had options.
He needn’t have worried. Even before, when there were so many more possible partners—including ones as weird as he—Dev couldn’t imagine having sex. His fantasies were decidedly PG, mainly consisting of scenarios in which he and some mystery woman were in the same room together—at a restaurant table, say, or, even sexier, a kitchen table set for breakfast. They wouldn’t be having sex in these fantasies—just talking, Dev doing most of it and (the fantasy part) actually being listened to with something like interest. Now he found it even harder to imagine experiencing romantic love, given the radically reduced options when it came to finding a willing partner. Lucy wasn’t an option because, well, she was Marcus’s. And even though Marcus complained about her often, Dev didn’t read that as his chance to insinuate himself into the situation. If there ever came a time when the two fought over Lucy, the only thing he could imagine it being over was her bread baking. He’d really gotten used to having toast with his eggs again; he’d hate giving that up.
Bread.
What farts appeared to be for M
arcus and Dev, bread was for Lucy and Dev. “You need to knead it,” she explained, suggesting that his own failed attempts were due to the lack of this important step—in addition to his having left out key ingredients, like baking powder or yeast. “You try it,” she said, removing her doughy hands from the lump she’d been working over like a fat man’s back on a massage table.
And so Dev did, touching the dough tentatively at first, with his index finger, like he was poking a potentially dangerous animal. He couldn’t help but view the lump as somehow alive, thanks to her explanation about the importance of fermentation, meaning bacteria were involved.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Dig in.”
So Dev did, first with one hand, then, once it appeared he deemed the overall texture tolerable, both.
“I’ll tell you something else that needs needing,” she said, not spelling out her poignant pun, letting the tear that rolled down her cheek do that.
“What’s wrong with your eye?” he asked, pointing at the one that was leaking with a dough-covered finger.
Lucy wiped it away. Sniffed. “I think Marcus hates me,” she said.
“Why?” Dev asked, his hands back in the dough, working away. He seemed like he was actually starting to enjoy the feel of it, squishing it between his fingers, rolling it out like a snake.
“Because he said so,” Lucy said. Paused, then qualified her statement. “Not in so many words, but . . .”
“How do you say something without using words?” Dev asked.
“You know,” she said, “the way you can mean something by what you don’t say,” thinking, Like, “I love you.”
“Isn’t that like the movie Minority Report?” Dev asked.
“You mean, arresting people for things they haven’t done yet?” Lucy asked, wondering if that’s really what she was doing with Marcus—considering him guilty until proven innocent.
Dev shook his head. “Mind reading,” he said.
“Oh,” Lucy said, interpreting Dev’s response as telling her that she shouldn’t be angry at Marcus because he couldn’t read her mind. “I don’t think I’ve even seen him read a book all this time,” she said, continuing the thought she’d begun, aloud.
“Who?”
“Marcus.”
“Tell him to try Minority Report,” Dev advised. “It was a book before it was a movie. Philip K. Dick.” He paused. “Excuse me,” he said.
“For what?”
“I used the d-word.”
Wow, Lucy thought. Wow, wow, wow. “You really are different, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Yes,” Dev said, and left it at that.
46
Marcus thought he was getting better until it occurred to him suddenly that he wasn’t. And then he really wasn’t. He asked Lucy to feel his head.
“You’re burning up,” she said.
“Don’t exaggerate,” he said back.
And so Lucy got the thermometer they’d used to clear her of Zika. She inserted it between his reluctant lips like she was checking his oil with a dipstick—a comparison she now knew to make, at the cost of one fried Sonata, and everything else that followed.
“You’re burning up,” she said, presenting him with the thermometer as proof. One hundred four degrees Fahrenheit. He’d been scratching his leg—the shot one—for days, had complained of feeling light-headed and had thrown up a few times, but hadn’t mentioned, or maybe even noticed, the darkening veins underneath his already dark skin, crawling slowly but inexorably toward his organs.
When he was still bedridden and didn’t have much say in the matter, they’d changed his dressing regularly. But ever since he’d been caning it, Marcus had been more cavalier in the area of basic prophylaxis. Still able to stand (with help) after a through-and-through gunshot wound, he had figured his time would be better spent getting his muscle strength back to where it was supposed to be. No pain, no gain, and all that crap.
The problem with equating pain with progress is that it might not necessarily be the kind of progress one is hoping for. In this case, for instance, the pain in Marcus’s leg was a sign of sepsis progressing—a diagnosis they all suspected the second they removed the soiled dressing and recoiled from the stench that arose from the wound, a smell they all recognized from having smelled it all around them, afterward.
“He who smelt it dealt it,” Dev said. The others remained stony, which he took as his cue to fetch the Physicians’ Desk Reference he’d used to get a heads-up on what to expect from Lyme disease, so they could confirm this less ambiguous diagnosis of sepsis. Proper diagnosis was important because Marcus’s only hope was if it was something other than blood poisoning. That’s because the treatment for sepsis, a.k.a. blood poisoning, was—and here Lucy’s ironic universe was having its way once again—massive doses of broad-spectrum antibiotics, the use of which would also kill Marcus.
“How bad is it?” he asked, his eyes closed.
“Bad,” Lucy said.
“But how bad?” he asked again.
“As bad as it gets,” she told him.
By the time the end came, the only nonstupid thing about the whole stupid affair was the lesson it taught the remaining two: the only thing they had to fear was being stupid. That and the fact that stupid was all around them, just waiting to take its advantage. For Dev, this was not news, and his behavior didn’t change much from the way it had always been. Lucy, on the other hand, took the news kind of hard, seeing the world now much more cautiously, through eyes grown justifiably paranoid about—well, just about everything.
“After, you know,” she confided, meaning after the whatever, not Marcus’s dying, “I felt lucky, I guess. Special, like I’d been chosen. It was like the world said, ‘Her. Let’s spare her.’” She paused, sniffing back some snot. “But it didn’t last, that feeling. Now it feels more and more like I was saved, but just for later. You know, like for dessert?”
“Seems about right,” he said, as bad as ever when it came to telling the comforting lie.
But then, on second thought: “At least you got to say goodbye,” Dev said, probably quoting some plum of wisdom he’d heard on TV. Instead of finding it comforting, however, Lucy just remembered all the others she’d lost without having a chance to say goodbye, magnifying her grief proportionally. And so she cried—for Marcus, for Max, for her parents and brother, for her baby’s unborn brother or sister, even for Sir Sheds, goddamn it . . .
And Dev just stood there, watching, waiting it out. It couldn’t last forever, this eye-leaking and noise. That’s what she found herself thinking, on Dev’s behalf. Finally: “You can’t stop being you, can you?” Lucy asked, trying to recalibrate her expectations re her latest last man on earth.
“Not so far,” Dev admitted, avoiding her eyes as automatically as a bad smell. “Nope.”
“Cremation,” Dev suggested, being an old hand at that form of body disposal.
Lucy shook her head. If it was up to her, burial was what she’d have chosen; even though the Catholic Church had lifted the outright ban on cremation, it still insisted the ashes be buried afterward. The reason had something to do with the dead rising on Judgment Day, as if our earthly bodies were just seeds for the next life. Lucy had liked thinking about it that way, before: burial as a kind of planting, hopefulness implied. She’d soured on the idea since then, mainly because there still hadn’t been a mass resurrection, despite the apocalyptic body count. This lack had led her to conclude that whatever happened, it wasn’t the apocalypse: a hopeful thought, in Lucy’s world of diminished expectations.
“We should do it the way Marcus would have wanted,” she said.
“Explosives?” Dev asked, making her flinch. He really did have a knack for saying the precisely wrong thing.
Shaking her head, “No, he wanted his body to be”—she hesitated, resorted to euphemism—“returned to nature.”
What he actually told her was that he wanted to be fed to animals. And maybe that summed him up: he was the k
ind of guy who, while cuddling in the afterglow of making love, talked about what he wanted done with his body when he died. Lucy, who’d been staring at the ceiling of the ice cream truck, imagining the stars on the other side of it, rolled over to face him. “Is that some kind of Islamic thing?” she asked.
“It’s a me thing,” Marcus said. “I want to go out being ripped apart by something wild. I want to give myself back to nature . . .”
“You can give yourself back to nature by being buried,” Lucy insisted. “Plants are part of nature. Wouldn’t you like a nice tree growing out of you?”
Marcus looked down as his nakedness stirred, taking himself in hand, literally. “Oh, I’ve got a tree for you, all right,” he said.
Lucy slapped him, in the angry-fond way that lovers sometimes do. “I’m serious,” she insisted.
“So am I,” Marcus insisted right back.
“About?”
He glanced down. “But the other thing too,” he said. “About the wild animals. Being torn apart. It’s not like my body will be doing me any good by then.”
Lucy wondered if he’d changed his mind since being shot. If he had, he hadn’t mentioned it. Then again, he’d been busy building muscle tone, trying to wring whatever good was left him in that body.
“We need to leave him outside,” she announced, deciding it. “On the other side of the burned-up trucks,” she added. “Somewhere away from here, where the animals can . . .” She trailed off.
“. . . eat him,” Dev said, completing the thought.
Lucy nodded.
“Yeah, he told me,” Dev admitted.
Lucy looked back over Marcus’s dead body, wondering what else he might have spilled the beans about. Just thinking about it made her blush. And so she went on the defensive. “So why’d you suggest burning him if you already knew what he wanted?”
“I don’t think we need to advertise that people are still on the menu.”
It was a fair point. But as Dev would say, Lucy was a neurotypical with a baby on board, meaning she had at least one and a half votes and no pressing reason to be strictly rational. She was also the closest thing Marcus had to family; if she wanted to use his body for bear bait, so be it.
Happy Doomsday: A Novel Page 33