by Greg Hrbek
As he drives, he tries the call again. Gets another dead beeping signal. On the radio, they are saying bioterror, but unknown whether food, water, or air. He finds the park deserted (though votive candles are lit and flickering all along the wall of the war memorial), then takes the route home his son would most likely take if riding home, which Mitch is confident Dorian is too smart to be doing, but then he remembers yesterday, the panic his son was in after riding through the rain, and he isn’t so sure if intelligence or even preparedness has much bearing on human behavior once the energy of an emergency has been released; and who is he, in any event, to be judging the decisions of a boy not even twelve years old when his own decisions yesterday and today have been so unintelligent, ill-considered, and driven by emotions he has no excuse, under the circumstances, for not being able to control … What emotions, what are you talking about? Don’t act dumb. Tell me you didn’t leave the house today because of her, to get away from her—after she had gone back into the bedroom and you went in there later and found her in the bed which you had deliberately not slept in the night before because of what she had said to Dorian at dinner (“don’t guilt trip me right now”), when all the kid had been trying to do was give her food. You looked at her in the bed: “What are you doing in here, Kate?” She, after a long delay: “I can’t keep my eyes open.” And you pushed the door closed and asked: “Is this really who you want to be to them?” Them meaning: Your children. This meaning: An image of weakness, of addiction to your belief in your own weakness, so invested in a sense of weakness that you can’t stand with the people who love you, much less stand up to the ones who hate you … Words not so much recalled as rephrased in thought as he drives the route his son would most likely be taking. Not seeing him. Which is a good thing (probably sheltering in, maybe in the old casino building in the center of the park), yet wishing, too, to converge with him on the road so he can get him into the car and bring him home and keep him close until this thing ends, however it ends. Never should have let him leave the house today, as Mitch himself never should have left it. What is wrong with him? With all of them? A family whose members have not only not been together on this defining and exacting day, but have, in fact, one by one, gone missing. She first, to some inner world of despondency. Then he to his office at the college—because when she is like this, she falls into herself like an imploding star that will pull anything in its vicinity over an event horizon of gloom. So he escaped to a place always quiet in these summer months but today nearly soulless, and he sat at the desk in his office and opened the file (listeningvessels.docx) and tried to work on what he’s been writing, if one can correctly call it writing, this phenomenon that, all along, has been more like a streaming of content than a composition of words. But how is he supposed to write when the nation is on high alert and he is so angry, not just about this latest episode of depression but also about an ancient history of which the document on his computer is nothing if not some kind of revision—
Well, that’s what fiction writers do. What, hold grudges forever? Fuck off. No, seriously, tell me. They write about their lives but they change things. So that’s what this is: a fiction? (Thinking, steering, looking for his son): I don’t know what it is. Except you do. It’s what would have happened if you’d known, when you were twenty-four, that the woman you were in love with was pregnant, and the baby was yours (and not that of the other, whose name we will try not to speak) and had been born instead of not, so you would have had a daughter, and she would have grown up but only to a point, only to die at the age of eighteen trying to save a boy who wouldn’t have lived no matter what she did, and in the end her death would’ve been your fault, because she came to you that year, in the spring, and told you what she wanted to do: live in the city for the summer, in a sublet, and intern at a publishing house and wait tables and babysit, and, of course, write. Well, you said, your mother won’t like it. I know. That’s where you come in. Who said I’m coming in anywhere. Dad, seriously, c’mon. A little intercession. With the end result that, six months later, she was present in San Francisco (instead of a hundred miles farther north in Sonoma); in someone else’s home (instead of her own, the one shared all her life with you); and instead of watching the disaster unfold on a television screen, she was in it, a moving suffering part of it—and your wife (her mother) able to say to you: She shouldn’t be there. She should be here. She would be here if you hadn’t let her …
Lost all the same, just in a different and immeasurably more painful way—and the guilt, rightful or not, the father’s to bear, but also, at least, the father’s to own.
And while Mitchell Wakefield makes one more loop back to the park and along a different series of streets (the keens of ambulances mixing now with the sirens of the municipal warning system), and Kathryn Wakefield, through the ebbing light of a forest subconscious, is trying to find a place to vomit and void herself of the parasites that are moving faster now, burning up her insides, keyed as they seem to be to the wailing of banshees coming from deep in the wooded distance, the Tesla Electric being driven by Shadea Kinglsey is negotiating with a falsetto squeal the turn onto Poospatuck and Dorian is saying: “A little further. That one, on the left. Right here, this brown one.” The car abruptly brakes at the foot of the driveway, bodies jouncing forward and back again, and he about to open his door when the mother says, “Hold on,” reversing in order to pull up the driveway while the girl whom he was kissing behind a hedge fifteen minutes ago, first girl ever kissed, is taking his left hand in her right, though not imperatively, not an action suggesting the panic of a separation impending and irreversible; rather, a soft and steady touch that makes him think of the candle they lit together at the park and placed at the base of the memorial. The mother asking: “Do you have an opener?” And he bringing up the app on his phone, garage door lifting, and struck suddenly with a sense of proper comportment in the present situation (driven home, life possibly saved by the parents of a girl suddenly something more than a friend), he says: “Mr. and Mrs. Kingsley, it was really nice to meet you.” Both of them looking back at him: the father with an expression like what-planet-are-you-currently-on; but the mother with a well-wishing smile—and then he’s getting out, watching the car go away, raising a hand in response to her upraised hand … In the garage, only the one car. Opening his contacts and touching the image of his father. Dead beeping signal. Now at the door, keying in the code with the same fingers he had put on Khaleela’s neck and in her hair. Bringing the hand to his face now, he can still detect a trace odor of the soap or shampoo he had smelled when, after the very first kiss, he pressed his face against her cheek, as if you can hide behind a cheek, as if there was anything to hide from there, alone with her. “I hope that’s not all,” she had said; and he breathing then, trying to slow his breathing, breathing in a scent he knew (sweet, verdant) though would not have been able to name; and then putting his hand on her neck and into her hair, eyes closed, not daring to open his eyes but thinking he had to because how else would he relocate her mouth which he never should have strayed from in the first place, but then suddenly there her mouth was, right where he guessed it would be. Calling out now, running into the house and up the stairs, calling to his mother and receiving no answer while thinking Am I in love, can you be in love from just that much and Why isn’t she answering, fearing, becoming suddenly and fully afraid, that upstairs he will find her in the same attitude as when he left her, hours ago. But she can’t still be in bed, not now, not anymore, when some kind of biological agent (they don’t know what yet, or they just aren’t saying) could be floating in the air and coming closer or may already be all around us—taking all at once the easy step over the fine line between fear and anger and imagining that he will find her in the bed, same as he left her, doing nothing and hiding from everything, so he will have to turn on the light and tell her, in a voice steeled by the fortitude it shouldn’t be his duty to display, Get up, goddammit, Mom, get the fuck up, because it’s her
, she and all the rest who grew up in the time before, in a peacetime that was nothing but a willful turning away from a war that had already begun: their duty, not his; yet he the one to have to come home and tell his mother that this is serious, that’s why sirens are going off and the phone is making that sound, you pick it up, see, and touch the screen, and then you start trying to stay alive. But opening the bedroom door will scatter all this acrimony to a kind of wind. Yes, the smartphone, lying on the bedside table, is lit up and the tone is sounding through the speaker. But Dorian can tell, even in the dusk-light, that, although the bed is unmade, his mother is not in it. Not there. He takes a breath. She’s probably in the safe room with the radio on. She just couldn’t hear him. And he is about to turn away (sorry for the angry thoughts, cognizant that her struggle will someday be his, for depression is in him and waiting for him, an inheritance no parent wants to leave, and none of it her fault, none of it anyone’s fault) when a sound comes from the bathroom. A sob, a gasp for breath. Dorian already moving forward and seeing, through the open door, his mother on her knees. That much he can see in the gathering dark. But not until he waves a hand at the motion sensor does the color come clear: the red in the bowl of the toilet and splashed darker on the seat which she neglected to raise; and as the room lights up, she holds up a hand, also blood-stained. Not reaching out to him. Warning him to stay away.
By which time (7:33 p.m. EST), William Banfelder, having driven downtown wearing a half-face particulate mask, had talked his way past the officer on guard at the entrance to the police station, and was sitting in a work cube with a detective who, after listening to everything Will had to say (a computer listening, too, and transforming the spoken words via dictation software into written text), said:
“I’ll get him in the national file.”
“What file.”
“Missing persons. It’s premature under the circumstances, but I’ll do it.”
“Okay.”
“Check in tomorrow, if there is a tomorrow.”
“But what about this guy,” Will said. “I’m telling you, there’s something—” But the police detective, heavyset with a long scar on his neck, just shook his head, refusing still to have any truck with the idea that the man who had abducted his son (“you mean,” the detective had already said, “the man your son drove away with of his own volition and, I might add, with your permission”) was a member of a terror cell with not only no intention of returning Karim, but with the aim of using him, along with the other boy, in some kind of operation, maybe as soon as tonight … Stupid son of a bitch. Oh, like the feeling isn’t mutual. Like he’s got time for some stupid old guy who lets an eleven-year-old kid of whom he’s been the legal guardian for exactly four weeks and three days get into a car with some haji he hardly knows on the second day of an elevated threat alert and then shows up at the police department five minutes after the shit hits the fan expecting immediate action to be taken in response to groundless theories and accusations— Not groundless. Yes, pal. Groundless. I’m not saying wrongful, just groundless, because I couldn’t agree more that there is something really wrong with this picture, but face it, you don’t have a single solitary fact to back up your gut, which makes you, in the eyes of law enforcement (to take just one example of an objective observer), no different from your run-of-the-mill paranoid islamophobe who sees a conspiracy behind every tree … And now almost nine o’clock, and Will Banfelder sitting in his kitchen with a can of beer on the table that he can’t bring himself to drink, the handgun on the table just to the side of the beer can, and the television on (more and more people at this hour arriving at hospitals with symptoms, though still no confirmation of what they are sick with, could be Pneumonic Plague, could be Viral Hemorrhagic Fever, “both of which start the same way,” an expert now explaining, “headache, high temperature, chills, then nausea, then worse, both agents Category A, both contagious”—while on the alert ticker at the bottom of the screen: BIOTERROR ATTACKS IN MADISON, PHOENIX, ALBANY), and he trying the call again, knowing there won’t be an answer, only that tone of failed connection like a heart arrhythmia—and knowing that, even if the networks weren’t in a state of total disorder, Karim would not answer because the phone had surely been taken from him hours ago and turned off or discarded or more probably smashed to pieces to preclude any possibility of a GPS track.
Lost.
You lost him, Banfelder. Saved him only to lose him. So, total your losses. Because all is lost now—and there is nothing that ever could have not been lost, because the sins were too many, too grievous, the things you (we) did over there, all the evil done and the good deeds left undone of which the not-doing is itself a kind of evil. Listen and you will hear still, even after all this time, the voice of that psychopath from whom you actually took orders, no different from taking orders from a demon, saying: Chill out, Willem. Ain’t no such thing as consequences here. That any of you could have believed such bullshit. Self-righteously deluded as only those can be whose time of dominance has nearly reached an end, refusing to admit the impermanence of your power though there was no more of it left than the oil in the fields you were so desperate to control (already then: a state of terminal decline), and you really thinking that, just because there was no accountability within any system of human justice, there would be no accounting … To the contrary: Your punishment shall be a constant across all pathways—even those in which you never did violence to a single living thing, of which there are many, but nowhere near enough to balance out the genocide committed across the full breadth of the grid, the killings untold of people on infinite parallel planes, men and women insurgent and civilian, whose names and sects you never knew and whose faces are long forgotten, though symbolized in the face of a boy (now lost) through whom you imagined you could redeem yourself—as if his tragedy, created by you, could become, through your mitigation of it, a valid means to personal salvation. For every path you live shall be as a path laid down between two mirrors and leading to the same end, the same loneliness, and the gun the only shade of companionship—and the temptation you feel now (to take one last life and be done with it) as ceaseless and all-important as the taking of breath.
16
Not reaching out. Warning him off. Get away. Don’t come near me. For a moment, Dorian can’t understand. Then all at once he does. Five minutes later (having called for an ambulance; having gotten a mask from the safe room and returned to the hallway outside her room, where he stands shaking), he hears his brother downstairs, shouting, “Dad, Mom, Dorian,” and can’t answer: his voice gone; dumb as a dreamer in the climactic moments of a nightmare … And Cliff thinking, as he takes the stairs two at a time, that mother and younger brother must be in the safe room; as for father— Then he sees Dorian, wearing mask, holding phone, standing outside the parental bedroom (door shut) and for a second doesn’t understand. Stopping short, looking at the door and then back at the brother; then the house seeming to shift suddenly on its foundation (like that time in California, fourth grade year, a magnitude six centered practically in the front yard, if you could call it a yard, that field of flaxen yellow grass unmowed and the stand of eucalyptus trees and the smell of those trees, smell of childhood), and he putting a hand out now to the wall of a different home and saying: “Oh, man. You called nine-one-one? Okay. I’m going to get a mask. Where the fuck is Dad?”
Pulling into the subdivision. Onto Mohegan heading for Cherokee when an ambulance audible for a half minute already and having gotten louder by the moment, shows up in his rear and side view mirrors, and, as he pulls to the shoulder, screams past him, dousing the cabin of the car with tinted light, drowning out the voice on the radio, and then the voice again—“if you become ill with fever or develop other symptoms”—and up to speed again, seeing that ahead, the ambulance is making the right he is going to make and proceeding along Cherokee though not turning off on either Cayuga or Oneida, but continuing on, which means it is going to Poospatuck, giving Mitchell W
akefield the sense that he is following the vehicle according to some predetermined arrangement. Accelerate. Keep the lights in sight. If you don’t, you’ll never find your way. No, that’s not it. Get there first. If you’re there, even if only at the last moment, the dark angel will be required to pass over your house having been programmed to havoc only the households of fathers past due. But he can’t catch up. By the time he reaches the driveway, the thing is off-road and driving up his lawn—and before he is even in park, they (a pair of them, wearing yellow biosafe suits) are getting out of it, one opening the back of the ambulance, the other stepping onto his porch and hammering a fist against the door. Bolting across the lawn now, into the rotations of light:
“Wait, I live here.”
Through the respirator of his full-body garment, the one tech says: “When did the vomiting start?”
“What?”
“You said there’s blood in the vomit.”
“Jesus.”
The front door opening and Cliff with a mask on, saying: “She’s upstairs. Dad, where the fuck have you been?”
“Looking for Dorian.”
“He’s here.”
(As the other moves past them with a folded stretcher): “We’ll mask her, but stay six feet back minimum.”
“What is it?”
“Don’t know yet.” (Going in.) “But it’s contagious for sure.”
Then Dorian. Mitch rushes up to him. Literally picks him up in his arms and carries him several yards over the lawn before putting him down and kneeling in front of him, the lights draining the blood from his face and turning his flesh pale white and cold blue in alternation. Saying, “I got home and went into your room,” and Mitch looking into his eyes and telling him it’s all right, and she will be all right, “I’ve been listening on the radio, and it’s probably bacterial not viral, so there are antibiotics,” half-believing that this is what he heard, saying it as much to calm himself as to calm his son, when what he actually heard on the radio is that they don’t know yet, that it could be bacterial or viral, and if it is bacterial, it could be a drug-resistant strain of plague, and if it’s drug-resistant pneumonic, the mortality rate will be one-hundred percent, and if it’s viral there’s no cure, and if it’s viral hemorrhagic, there will be not only the vomiting of blood, but blood spilled internally, coming in time through every bodily outlet. So what he says he heard is what they must believe, because in any other scenario they are going to lose her and we can’t lose her, we can’t: every cardiac cycle of the father-and-husband now an emotional text-in-code: contraction, dilation, contraction: and we can’t lose her, we can’t …