Stories From the Plague Years

by Michael Marano

  “Is this a weapon?” the Customs Official had asked when he’d lifted the shard from my effects. Though I said it wasn’t, the shard was a weapon . . . the same way soldiers’ camouflage is. On the day I’d first pushed a shard like this along my throat and jawline, while I traveled another outland for Justine’s sake closer to our home but much crueler, I’d faced soldiers in brown and green camouflage milling in snow, ready to kill me. Theirs, though deadly, was a theatre of authority; it was made a performance by their being distracted by religious theatre they listened to on the phones they pressed under their helmets, that they commented about to each other through tactical headsets, even though they stood close enough to speak normally. They had poor costumes for their play. They lacked the winter fatigues that would have bent light around them as they hid on the embankments of the highway choked with stripped and derelict cars that Allen and I walked to get home. Such gear would short the electronics that let the soldiers be audiences of the drama that so enthralled them, that made their daywatch a mummery that would have killed Allen and me in front of an unseen audience with one lone member . . . a being I’d later learn was himself fleshless, and less visible than these soldiers would be if outfitted in stealth gear.

  The few soldiers who didn’t have phones pressed to their ears smoked contraband—slouching, undisciplined as the deserters I’d seen as a boy looting warehouses and hospitals. They milled at the roadblock with the foot-to-foot hopping that told me they’d sooner shoot Allen and me and pack our stripped bodies with thermite than scrawl form entries accounting for our deaths. No more would be left of us than fragments like the furnace-cracked teeth I picked from the tread of my boot after walking access roads near factories. Not even a smear of ink on government foolscap would be our epitaph. No Boston Police were at the roadblock. No Staties, private military or CDC personnel . . . a cold, sea-water dread pissed into my guts as I wished to God for the presence of those from whom I’d hidden as a boy, who’d often deserted to form kidnap gangs that preyed on families desperate to reclaim their few scattered members.

  The soldiers seemed to be waiting the half hour until dark before taking to the embankments—when those not enthralled by serial dramas would use nightscopes to shoot travelers with Godlike impunity, mimicking their own cruel, arbitrary God . . . whom they resented for not lifting them in the promised Rapture, leaving them in an emptied world with no warrior Christ under Whose flag they could butcher. My life and Allen’s had been spared for the moment by the oversight of a quartermaster too busy commandeering quicklime to properly camouflage these irregulars pulled from the staffs of rust-sealed prisons and the sheriff’s departments of counties that now only existed on roach-spotted maps. To this day, I can’t stand the grind of sled runners on pavement—the memory of that sound while waiting to feel bullets shatter my ribs is too strong, as is my memory of the fear that I’d not be dead when hooks would bite around my collar bones and drag me to a pit greased with the jellied gasoline that had once been a weapon of war, but that was now a tool of “civic hygiene.”

  I skimmed the shard from jaw to cheek, over the swelling in my face where blood and lymph pooled that would have, at home, settled near my ankles. My face had been wolf-gaunt when I’d had to first learn its contours under the kiss of glass on my skin, in a room thick with toxic smoke, with food long rotted to clay and the smells of wine, beer and liquor that had evaporated in their glasses, leaving concentric rings of mold.

  The steam of that moment—maybe an hour before I’d faced the soldiers—had reeked with the newly woken musk of decay and mildew . . . even though the plastic-tinged water that had made the steam then had been pure enough to drink. I myself had reeked like a thing dead on a summer road, from a week of back-crooking labour in a hinterland that consumed itself. Knowing I’d face men eager to kill me, I’d pressed broken glass to my face in a room so cold, the mist beading on the windows froze into stars like those etched in Polish crystal. My hands shook from hunger as the glass skated where blood pulses closest to the skin. Allen, casting aside the urgency of just a heartbeat before—an urgency that felt as if it stood breathing by our shoulders as a third person next to us—grinned after my first stroke didn’t add the steam of my split jugular to that which froze on the windows. I grinned back, drunk with a euphoria I never want to know again.

  “Did you know that we’re cool?” he asked, making a gallows joke of a phrase we’d used to make light of toil and filth. With that joke, he rewrote the moment when he’d first asked the question into a halcyon time of a few days before, when we’d had the luxuries of a fireplace and a roof over our heads, and had felt able to handle any danger with two guns and three rounds between us.

  When he’d first asked, “Did you know that we’re cool?” it was with staccato anger accenting each syllable. It was the same anger that had scarred his voice when we were ten, and he’d asked an older boy who’d invaded the isolation ward we shared with Justine and Jim why he’d punched him . . . as if the boy had hit someone else that Allen wanted to defend.

  “What do you mean, ‘cool’?” I’d asked, turning in my sleeping bag that smelled achingly of Justine’s hair and feeling the wadded bills in my pocket we’d banished ourselves from the city to earn.

  Allen lifted the book he’d been reading by the light of the portable lamp fueled by what we stole off the nearby traffic grid and by the firelight fueled by wood-scraps and books we’d found in the house we squatted. Hunger punched our insides as we lingered in the ugly twilight between having too much empty pain in our guts to sleep and the moment we’d be too spent not to sleep. At dawn we might buy food from half-empty farm trucks heading to the freight wagons that were light enough to be pulled over the ice by horse teams. Or we could earn mouthfuls in lieu of pay by unloading the trucks. If we didn’t eat tomorrow, we’d become too hungry to feel hungry, and then we’d be too weak to work. Our boots dried on the hearth, sweating the manger-stink of the greasy, near-useless waterproofing we’d slathered on them. Our wool socks hissed on the grate, wafting the sourness of lanolin and the compost-musk of our feet.

  By the amber light of the fire and the lamp, I saw that the book-cover depicted young people—boy-men such as us, standing in god-like defiance atop a mound of rubble and curled metal in the square of a ruined city. The mound was both like and unlike the mound near the Center where Justine and I had met Allen when, before he lived there with us, he’d thieved into our ward for the fun of it—like and unlike . . . the way a storybook castle is like and unlike a real castle. The boy-men on the cover gripped ornately useless firearms and had musical instruments strapped to their backs like broadswords . . . lords of a fanciful desolation. Looking at them, I tasted the same contempt I do when I face the soft-bellied smugness of a man who lives off of women.

  “People wanted this,” he said, deadening the anger in his voice with that profoundly adult authority he could conjure, and of which I’d always been jealous. Allen was himself like a boy whisked from a storybook: bright and wise enough to not talk like a boy. He spoke as if he’d already been a parent—as if telling young people how things were had been something he’d done since he first learned to speak. Despite the acting and the elocution I’d studied, I couldn’t project the sureness he could . . . even when I played a young, wise boy such as Allen was, who told a sad tale of sprites and goblins to enthrall his mother, too terrible even for the crickets to hear. Around Allen, I had the same uncertainty I did when I forgot lines in rehearsal. I never felt alone with him, never felt without at least another pair of eyes on us. With a finger the nail of which was flecked with plum-coloured blisters, Allen pointed to the pile of rubble on the cover, the thing of a bygone era’s playground-dreams that we’d known as a place to avoid the bite of sick rats.

  I groped in my kit, felt for the stick of licorice root wrapped in plastic that smelled like the dried spit that clings to the toys of small children. I thought a moment before using the splintered licorice ro
ot to dig the day’s rot from my teeth. My mouth was slick and foul, but the resin of the licorice would make my guts bend even more for real food. Out of boredom, not hygiene, I chewed the end of the root I’d frayed with my teeth to pick away the smears of the ptomaine-foul meal of canned pork and crackers we’d choked down eight hours before, having passed on a flank too grey and stinking to have not come from a sick mule. I wondered how badly my gums would bleed should they again feel the bristles of a toothbrush.

  “Who wanted what?” I asked, with a small fear that I wouldn’t fully grasp what he’d say with his grave boy-from-a-storybook authority.

  “People who lived in this house,” he said. “People from Before. They wanted what we deal with. I think they thought it’d be fun. Like school letting out for the whole world.”

  I considered what he said, digging plaque from the back of my mouth and fearing that the soreness behind my molars heralded wisdom teeth I couldn’t afford to have cut from my jaw, and that I might instead have to hire a blacksmith or iceman to pull my back teeth to prevent infection. I realized I envied another skill of Allen’s—the ability to think of Before as a time like any other, and not an ideal that we only knew through dim childhood memory and the burning of its remnants to keep warm.

  “Let me see it,” I said. He tossed me the book. The pages smelled of the naked pine shelving that had kept it from turning to mulch . . . the shelving that we saved for the hearth should the boxes of old files, bank statements, letters and utility bills run out.

  The book cover was in the garish melding of the photographic and the painted favoured by publishers when my father had been young. I knew the style from the crates of books from his boyhood we’d packed for library donation before we made our exodus from the dying fringes to the center of town. The youths on the cover had the vapid idealized beauty from a time when surgery and hospital space could be spendthrift’ed on the sculpting of faces and the reshaping of flesh. (True, those who lived on the outlying estates made quilts of their flesh, yet for this they used private surgeons, whom they treated a bit better than cooks and stable boys: court jesters with scalpels and needles full of lotus to soothe their masters’ anguish of being cosseted.) The beauty of the youths was the inverse of the beauty of the faces on old coins and medallions. The youths were posed in a stance of triumph that echoed the propaganda of dead tyrannies; the only triumph I’d known amid such rubble had been when all of us from the wards had marched with borrowed shovels to stove the rats that fled the piles we’d drenched with fuel and set alight.

  “I’d like to give it to them. Right in their faces,” Allen said, as if he held his staccato anger in check for the sake of one of those teacup-fragile kids born after the Dying.

  “What?”

  “The shit we eat that they thought’d be so cool.”

  Looking back, I know why Allen and Jim never got along; Allen punched through the past that Jim so treasured.

  I wish I’d torn off and saved the book cover and shown it to others from the neighbourhood and the ward, even though it affected me in a way that made me feel as if I’d already shared it with one or two others. Instead, I threw the book on the fire, along with scores of books like it that had belonged to the last owners of this house now deeded to the squirrels that scurried in the upper floors. If we were better trappers, at least one squirrel would now be turning on a makeshift spit, dripping fat. We didn’t dare talk about this; if we did, our hunger would make us stupid enough to try to flush and catch a squirrel in the dark, rotting upper storeys. Instead, Allen and I read aloud a few pages from each of the books before conscripting them to the drying of our socks; in draping whimsy over the days Allen and I endured, all the books voiced an ulcerating need to forsake, in the name of edgy “authenticity,” comforts for which Allen and I would have given much . . . had we anything to give. I put away the blood-spotted licorice root, and was about to say something—probably about girls we knew—when Allen’s stomach growled, loud as the grunt of a small dog, through his wool sweaters and the thickness of his duct-tape-patched sleeping bag.

  “I guess this means we’re cool,” he said. And in our giddy hunger, the crack seemed worthy of the laughter we gave it.

  Our breakfast was coffee stirred from crystals and melted snow in our electric pot. Rust from the pot made my tongue rough and dry for hours. We trudged along the highway that took us away from Boston, the choking city where there was no work, and few goods anyone could afford in the markets. No checks had come from my father, nor had any mail from past the Rockies reached anyone I knew for a month, fueling rumours of closed airports and cut lines of communication, though wire reports still came from past Denver. Even if checks from my father had gotten through, it was doubtful that banks would convert them to cash we could use. Friends who’d returned from trading had told us that Manhattan was worse off, and Providence had closed all points of entry. Boston starved—as it had previous winters, yet those lean and brutal times had ended after a few weeks . . . broken by the coming of vegetables and citrus from ports as far away as South Africa, and by the sing-songs of butchers walking the streets with their obsidian knives, offering to slaughter and dress backyard livestock in exchange for a few dollars or a shank. Fresh pork, stringy old geese, oranges, rosen kale, and greens tough as parchment even after being boiled in vinegar had ended those famines before winter stores became too meagre and bodies became too ruined to fight infection. This year Boston had felt dangerous as a mastiff gone feral. Each piss-reeking corner was heavy with violence—the maybe-innocent shuffle of footsteps behind you became threatening as the sound of a mercyheart drawn from its sheath. Hunger, and the rat-gnawing worry that the rough times might not end, made walking from one house to another feel the same as did drifting into a provincial bar and knowing that you are the only unarmed man there.

  Before I’d taken to the road with Allen—with our sled weighted with the gear we’d need to husk work outside the city, helping farmers and scavengers clear what had been suburban lawns for spring ploughing—Justine’s Aunt Louise (whom I’ve called my aunt, but only, it seemed, as a gift granted by Justine) had taken my face in her cool, dry hands. “Child” was the one word she said, as if to acknowledge I was a child no longer. “Child”. . . a word? Or a name she gave me, to carry as a shield, or an inner-lamp to fill the dark places I’d travel? In Florence, I met a man who’d been named “Fool” by his grandmother, so that he, the youngest of his family, would find fortune when at fourteen he’d struck out on his own. Is “Child” a name, a title, I still bear in the folds of all that I am?

  Justine had leaned on the railing of our porch as Allen, pulling the sled a half-block down the street, offered us the gift of a good-bye alone. We stood among blood-rubies flecked on snow—with the disappearance of scraps and cat food, Crispin had foraged for mice and had scattered the innards he couldn’t eat in front of the window we left cracked open for him. With so little fuel that winter, no soot dusted the snow. Tiny red spleens gleamed against untainted whiteness. “Come back to me,” she whispered, close to the nape of my neck, as she had the times before when I’d left to search for food and money during times less dire.

  “I promise.”

  “Don’t promise, do it.” She gripped my coat by the lapels, and, unmoving, we stepped into one of the timeless moments we shared, when the span of a heartbeat seemed the whole of an evening. The feel, not the sound, of aged seams tearing brought us out of that moment, as her grasp inflicted the first of what would be many small rips in the coat we’d pulled from the charity bin two winters before.

  “I’ll come back to you,” I vowed to her and to the God who in His mercy had brought us together. I held her and breathed the new scents her skin bloomed now that she was becoming a woman, scents I could only taste for what they were now that I was becoming a man. I lifted her palm and kissed it. We looked at our hands as lovers would at a rose the perfume of which they’ve just shared. My hands were corpse-whit
e, flecked with dried skin, cracked from the winds that had scoured them as I did what work I could find that winter. Justine’s hands weren’t as dry as mine . . . she hoarded near-empty bottles of lotions she scavenged for the small vanity she had for her skin. Our hands seemed two types of earth intertwined, like those near riverbeds when rich silt is left behind by spring floods. Her sister Janice’s tread on the snowy porch behind us didn’t pull us from the moment. Janice forsook her good-bye to me so Justine and I could whisper our farewell. Janice’s silence was a presence— it touched her sister as only a bond of blood can allow. Through Justine, it touched me as well . . . the way that beauty can touch the face of a blind man.

  I’ll always ache that I didn’t say a true good-bye to Janice as I felt her watching us, the same way you can feel when someone you love watches you sleep. The neglect I showed her when she’d given Justine and me a quiet time of farewell is one of the small crimes that doesn’t mark my soul, but stains its core. Sins of inaction leave the deepest scars, because the keen of nothingness never dulls. With the warmth of Justine’s cheek on my neck, I was aware of my memory cupping the tableau in which we stood, aware of those whom we loved looking away. And I was aware of the unseeing gaze of her father’s telescope above us, a dented thing pulled from a university dump, in the far window to my right. On our narrow street, the telescope had only a sliver of sky to search. Knowing now that its gaze has since been further clouded by the sky-borne ash of the daughter of the man who owned it is a thorn in my heart. Not saying good-bye to Janice that day—as opposed to the day that I last saw her, when the smoke of her rushed cremation and of all the others who died that day painted the dusk with the colors we would wear to mourn her— is a very small sin. Yet it is a sin that has been rewritten within me, the way a simple cell can be rewritten as cancer. That moment of good-bye with Justine was the last moment that I had, without reservation, liked myself. To have shared that moment with Janice as well would maybe atone for what I’d become before I returned, when I’d begin a walk toward a loss that through frostbite might leave my body as lame as my soul.