by Isaac Marion
When Julie comes back with the food, I borrow her spoon and take a small bite of rice, smiling as I chew. As usual it goes down like Styrofoam, but I do manage to swallow it. Julie and Nora look at each other, then at me.
“How’s it taste?” Julie asks tentatively.
I grimace.
“Okay, but still, you haven’t eaten any people in a long time. And you’re still walking. Do you think you could ever wean yourself off . . . live foods?”
I give her a wry smile. “I guess . . . it’s possible.”
Julie grins at this. Half at my unexpected use of sarcasm, half at the implied hope behind it. Her whole face lights up in a way I’ve never seen before, so I hope I’m right. I hope it’s true. I hope I haven’t just learned how to lie.
• • •
Around one AM, the girls start to yawn. There are canvas cots in the den, but no one feels like venturing out of Julie’s room. This gaudily painted little cube is like a warm bunker in the frozen emptiness of Antarctica. Nora takes the bed. Julie and I take the floor. Nora scribbles homework notes for about an hour, then clicks off the lamp and starts snoring like a small, delicate chain saw. Julie and I lie on our backs under a thick blanket, using piles of her clothes for a mattress on the rock-hard floor. It’s a strange feeling, being so utterly surrounded by her. Her life scent is on everything. She’s on me and under me and next to me. It’s as if the entire room is made out of her.
“R,” she whispers, looking up at the ceiling. There are words and doodles smeared up there in glow-in-the-dark paint.
“Yeah.”
“I hate this place.”
“I know.”
“Take me somewhere else.”
I pause, looking up at the ceiling. I wish I could read what she’s written there. Instead, I pretend the letters are stars. The words, constellations.
“Where do . . . want to go?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere far away. Some distant continent where none of this is happening. Where people just live in peace.”
I fall silent.
“One of Perry’s older friends used to be a pilot . . . we could take your housejet! It’d be like a flying Winnebago, we could go anywhere!” She rolls onto her side and grins at me. “What do you think, R? We could go to the other side of the world.”
The excitement in her voice makes me wince. I hope she can’t see the grim light in my eyes. I don’t know for sure, but there is something in the air lately, a deathly stillness as I walk through the city and its outskirts, that tells me the days of running away from problems are over. There will be no more vacations, no road trips, no tropical getaways. The plague has covered the world.
“You said . . . ,” I begin, psyching myself up to express a complex thought. “You said . . . the . . .”
“Come on,” she encourages. “Use your words.”
“You said . . . the plane’s not . . . its own world.”
Her grin falters. “What?”
“Can’t . . . float above . . . the mess.”
She frowns. “I said that?”
“Your dad . . . concrete box . . . walls and guns . . . Running away . . . no better . . . than hiding. Maybe worse.”
She thinks for a moment. “I know,” she says, and I feel guilty for crashing her brief flight of fancy. “I know this. It’s what I’ve been telling myself for years, that there’s still hope, that we can turn things around somehow, blah fucking blah. It’s just . . . getting a lot harder to believe lately.”
“I know,” I say, trying to hide the cracks in my sincerity. “But can’t . . . give up.”
Her voice darkens. She calls my bluff. “Why are you so hopeful all of a sudden? What are you really thinking?”
I say nothing, but she reads my face like a front-page headline, the kind that announced the atomic bomb and the Titanic and all the World Wars in progressively smaller type.
“There’s nowhere left, is there,” she says.
Almost imperceptibly, I shake my head.
“The whole world,” she says. “You think it’s all exed? All overrun?”
“Yes.”
“How could you know that?”
“I don’t. But . . . I feel.”
She lets out a long breath, staring at the model planes dangling above us. “So what are we supposed to do?”
“Have to . . . fix it.”
“Fix what?”
“Don’t know. Ev . . . rything.”
She props herself up on one elbow. “What are you talking about?” Her voice is no longer quiet. Nora stirs and stops snoring. “Fix everything?” Julie says, her eyes sparking in the dark. “How exactly are we supposed to do that? If you have some big revelation, please share, ’cause it’s not like I don’t think about this literally all the time. It’s not like this hasn’t been burning my brain every morning and night since my mom left. How do we fix everything? It’s so broken. Everyone is dying, over and over again, in deeper and darker ways. What are we supposed to do? Do you know what’s causing it? This plague?”
I hesitate. “No.”
“Then how can you do anything about it? I want to know, R. How are we supposed to ‘fix it’?”
I’m staring up at the ceiling. I’m staring at the verbal constellations, glimmering green in distant space. As I lie there, letting my mind rise into those imaginary heavens, two of the stars begin to change. They rotate, and focus, and their shapes clarify. They become . . . letters.
T
R
“Ter—” I whisper.
“What?”
“Truh—” I say, trying to pronounce it. It’s a sound. It’s a syllable. The blurry constellation is becoming a word. “What is . . . that?” I ask, pointing at the ceiling.
“What? The quotes?”
I stand up and indicate the general area of the sentence. “This one.”
“It’s a line from ‘Imagine.’ The John Lennon song.”
“Which . . . line?”
“‘It’s easy if you try.’”
I stand there for a minute, gazing up like an intrepid explorer of the cosmos. Then I lie down and fold my arms behind my head, eyes wide open. I don’t have the answers she’s asking for, but I can feel their existence. Faint points of light in the distant dark.
SLOW STEPS. Mud under boots. Look nowhere else. Strange mantras loop through my head. Old bearded mutterings from dark alleys. Where are you going, Perry? Foolish child. Brainless boy. Where? Every day the universe grows larger, darker, colder. I stop in front of a black door. A girl lives here in this metal house. Do I love her? Hard to say anymore. But she is all that’s left. The final red sun in an ever-expanding emptiness.
I walk into the house and find her sitting on the staircase, arms crossed over her knees. She puts a finger to her lips. “Dad,” she whispers to me.
I glance up the staircase toward the general’s bedroom. I hear his voice slurring in the dimness.
“This picture, Julie. The water park, remember the water park? Had to haul ten buckets up for just one slide. Twenty minutes of work for ten seconds of fun. Seemed worth it back then, didn’t it? I liked watching your face when you flew out of the tube. You looked just like her, even back then.”
Julie stands up quietly, moves toward the front door.
“You’re all her, Julie. You aren’t me, you’re her. How could she do it?”
I open the door and back out. Julie follows me, soft steps, no sound.
“How could she be so weak?” the man says in a voice like steel melting. “How could she leave us here?”
We walk in silence. The drizzling rain beads in our hair and we shake it out like dogs. We come to Colonel Rosso’s house. Rosso’s wife opens the door, looks at Julie’s face, and hugs her. We walk inside into the warmth.
I find Rosso in the living room, sipping coffee, peering through his glasses at a water-stained old book. While Julie and Mrs. Rosso murmur in the kitchen, I sit down across from the colonel.
“P
erry,” he says.
“Colonel.”
“How are you holding up?”
“I’m alive.”
“A good start. How are you settling into the home?”
“I despise it.”
Rosso is quiet for a moment. “What’s on your mind?”
I search for words. I seem to have forgotten most of them. Finally, quietly, I say, “He lied to me.”
“How so?”
“He said we were fixing things, and if we didn’t give up everything might turn out okay.”
“He believed that. I think I do, too.”
“But then he died.” My voice trembles and I fight to squeeze it tight. “And it was senseless. No battle, no noble sacrifice, just a stupid work accident that could have happened to anyone anywhere, any time in history.”
“Perry . . .”
“I don’t understand it, sir. What’s the point of trying to fix a world we’re in so briefly? Where’s the meaning in all that work if it’s just going to disappear? Without any warning? A fucking brick on the head?”
Rosso says nothing. The low voices in the kitchen become audible in our silence, so they drop to whispers, trying to hide from the colonel what I’m sure he already knows. Our little world is far too tired to care about the crimes of its leaders.
“I want to join Security,” I announce. My voice is solid now. My face is hard.
Rosso lets out a slow breath and sets his book down. “Why, Perry?”
“Because it’s the only thing left worth doing.”
“I thought you wanted to write.”
“That’s pointless.”
“Why?”
“We have bigger concerns now. General Grigio says these are the last days. I don’t want to waste my last days scratching letters on paper.”
“Writing isn’t letters on paper. It’s communication. It’s memory.”
“None of that matters anymore. It’s too late.”
He studies me. He picks up the book again and holds the cover out. “Do you know this story?”
“It’s Gilgamesh.”
“Yes. The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest known works of literature. Humanity’s debut novel, you could say.” Rosso flips through the brittle yellow pages. “Love, sex, blood, and tears. A journey to find eternal life. To escape death.” He reaches across the table and hands the book to me. “It was written over four thousand years ago on clay tablets by people who tilled the mud and rarely lived past forty. It’s survived countless wars, disasters, and plagues, and continues to fascinate to this day, because here I am, in the midst of modern ruin, reading it.”
I look at Rosso. I don’t look at the book. My fingers dig into the leather cover.
“The world that birthed that story is long gone, all its people are dead, but it continues to touch the present and future because someone cared enough about that world to keep it. To put it in words. To remember it.”
I split the book open to the middle. The pages are riddled with ellipses, marking words and lines missing from the tablets, rotted out and lost to history. I stare at these marks and let their black dots fill my vision. “I don’t want to remember,” I say, and I shut the book. “I want to join Security. I want to do dangerous stuff. I want to forget.”
“What are you saying, Perry?”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“It sounds like you are.”
“No.” The shadows in the room pool in the lines of our faces, draining our eyes of hue. “There’s nothing left worth saying.”
• • •
I am numb. Adrift in the blackness of Perry’s thoughts, I reverberate with his grief like a low church bell.
“Are you working, Perry?” I whisper into the emptiness. “Are you reverse-engineering your life?”
Shhhhhh, Perry says. Don’t break the mood. I need this to cut through.
I float there in his unshed tears, waiting in the salty dark.
• • •
Morning sun streams through the balcony window of Julie’s bedroom. The green constellations have faded back into the blue-sky ceiling. The girls are still asleep, but I’ve been lying here awake for all but a few uneasy hours. Unable to stay motionless any longer, I slip out of the blankets and stretch my creaky joints, letting the sun baste one side of my face, then the other. Nora sleep-mumbles a bit of nursing jargon, “mitosis” or “meiosis,” possibly “necrosis,” and I notice the dog-eared textbook resting open on her stomach. Curious, I hover over her for a moment, then carefully lift up the book.
I can’t read the title. But I immediately recognize the cover. A serenely sleeping face offering its throat of exposed veins to the viewer. The medical reference book Gray’s Anatomy.
Looking nervously over my shoulder, I whisk the heavy tome out into the hallway and start flipping through its pages. Intricate drawings of human architecture, organs and bones all too familiar to me, although here the filleted bodies are shown clean and perfect, their details unblurred by filth or fluids. I pore over the illustrations as the minutes tick by, wracked by guilt and fascination like a pubescent Catholic with a Playboy. I can’t read the captions, of course, but a few Latin words pop into my head as I study the images, perhaps distant recalls from my old life, a college lecture or TV documentary I absorbed somewhere. The knowledge feels grotesque in my mind but I grasp it and hold it tight, etching it deep into my memory. Why am I doing this? Why do I want to know the names and functions of all the beautiful structures I’ve spent my years violating? Because I don’t deserve to keep them anonymous. I want the pain of knowing them, and by extension myself: who and what I really am. Maybe with that scalpel, red-hot and sterilized in tears, I can begin to carve out the rot inside me.
Hours pass. When I’ve seen every page and wrung every syllable from my memory, I gently replace the book on Nora’s belly and tiptoe out onto the balcony, hoping the warm sun will grant some relief from the moral nausea churning inside me.
I lean against the railing and take in the cramped vistas of Julie’s city. As dark and lifeless as it was last night, now it bustles and roars like Times Square. What is everyone doing? The undead airport has its crowds but no real activity. We don’t do things; we wait for things to happen. The collective volition bubbling up from the Living is intoxicating, and I have a sudden urge to be down in those masses, rubbing shoulders and elbowing for space in all that sweat and breath. If my questions have answers, they must certainly be down there, under the pounding soles of those filthy feet.
I hear the girls chatting quietly in the bedroom, finally waking up. I go back inside and crawl under the blankets next to Julie.
“Good morning, R,” Nora says, not quite sincerely. I think addressing me like a human is still a novelty for her; she looks like she wants to titter every time she acknowledges my presence. It’s aggravating, but I understand. I’m an absurdity that takes some getting used to.
“Morning,” Julie croaks, watching me from across the pillow. She looks about as unpretty as I’ve ever seen her, eyes puffy and hair insane. I wonder how well she sleeps at night and what kind of dreams she has. I wish I could step into them like she steps into mine.
She rolls onto her side and props her head on her elbow. She clears her throat. “So,” she says. “Here you are. What now?”
“Want to . . . see your city.”
Her eyes search my face. “Why?”
“Want to . . . see how you live. Living people.”
Her lips tighten. “Too risky. Someone would notice you.”
“Come on, Julie,” Nora says. “He walked all the way here, let’s give him a tour! We can fix him up, disguise him. He already got past Ted, I’m sure he’ll be okay strolling around a little if we’re careful. You’ll be careful, right, R?”
I nod, still looking at Julie. She allows a long silence. Then she rolls onto her back and closes her eyes, releasing a slow breath that sounds like consent.
“Yay!” Nora says.
; “We can try it. But R, if you don’t look convincing after we fix you up, no tour. And if I see anyone staring at you too hard, tour’s over. Deal?”
I nod.
“No nodding. Say it.”
“Deal.”
She crawls out of the blankets and climbs onto the side of the bed. She looks me up and down. “Okay,” she says, her hair sticking out in every direction. “Let’s get you presentable.”
• • •
I would like my life to be a movie so I could cut to a montage. A quick sequence of shots set to some trite pop song would be much easier to endure than the two grueling hours the girls spend trying to convert me, to change me back into what’s widely considered human. They wash my hair. They wear out a fresh toothbrush on my teeth, although for my smile anything above a coffee-addicted Brit is not in the cards. They attempt to dress me in some of Julie’s more boyish clothes, but Julie is a pixie and I rip through T-shirts and snap buttons like a bodybuilder. Finally they give up, and I wait naked in the bathroom while they run my old business wear through the wash.
While I wait, I decide to take a shower. This is an experience I had long forgotten, and I savor it like a first sip of wine, a first kiss. The steaming water cascades over my battered body, washing away months or years of dirt and blood, some of it mine, much of it others’. All this filth spirals down the drain and into the underworld where it belongs. My true skin emerges, pale gray, marked by cuts and scrapes and grazing bulletwounds, but clean.
This is the first time I have seen my body.
When my clothes are dry and Julie has sewn up the most noticeable holes, I dress myself, relishing the unfamiliar feeling of cleanness. My shirt no longer sticks to me. My slacks no longer chafe.
“You should at least lose the tie,” Nora says. “You’re about ten wars behind the fashion curve in that fancy getup.”
“No, leave it,” Julie pleads, regarding the little strip of cloth with a whimsical smile. “I like that tie. It’s the only thing keeping you from being completely gray.”