As fast as a large, pregnant woman walking through such dross possibly can, I decide to brave the stench and possible microscopic invaders for more than the cheap storefront chocolate. I get boxes of the good stuff. 70% cocoa, organic. No corn syrup or hydrogenation for Squirt. Hardcore chocolate. Growing accustomed to the smell, I move on, gathering bottles of juice, jars of peanut butter and canned goods. I’m just dumping everything non-perishable into my grocery carriage. I still have a lot of this at home, but the need to prepare for anything compels me, a squirrel before winter, hoarding food. Aside from the stench, the lack of people and the dark aisles, the trip is as uneventful as it might have been seven months ago. I push the over-full carriage out to the truck, unloading one bag at a time, careful to not lift too much, or push myself.
After looting groceries, I head to the pharmacy section and begin preparing for birth. August was helpful in this regard. I grab bottles of witch hazel and rubbing alcohol. Without an accurate prescription or a doctor or midwife to monitor me, the painkillers frighten me, so I decide against them. After a few minutes of fretting, I sweep the shelves’ contents into the carriage with my arms, wanting to just get the hell out of there, and to never return. I’m going to take the whole pharmacy and sort it all out later, at home, where things aren’t rotting. I may need all of it someday, and I have ceased feeling guilty about hoarding and over-preparing.
The looting takes me two hours. I’ve worked up a good sweat by the time I’m done, standing beside the now full truck. My blood is pumping. The sun shines on my face. I close my eyes and listen to the wind and the rustling leaves. Not a Blur in sight. Which, of course, doesn’t mean they aren’t present, but I decide that ignorance is bliss. That, and whether or not I’m home probably doesn’t matter. If they want to turn me into dust, they can do it here or there. And August said the Blur he’s encountered seem to prefer the cover of darkness.
Truck bed filled, I drive home, unload, feed Luke, let him out and then, feeling bolstered by my out and about achievement, I head back out, to the local farming supplies and hardware store, next to a popular yoga studio and a Goodwill. August and Mark seemed to enjoy tossing around ideas for how I could outfit the house with some early warning systems and other protection, but most of what they came up with seemed straight out of movies. Cans and bells on tripwires, boarded up windows, assorted booby traps.
The parking lot is empty. There isn’t a car in sight.
The store must have closed due to the storm, before the event.
I slide out of the seat, wary of the emptiness around me, confidence fading. But I press forward and check the door. Locked. Of course.
I look at the mostly glass storefront, aisles of what I need on the other side. I consider breaking the window and climbing through, but I get visions of my belly being sliced open by an errant shard. Not going to happen. So how do I get in? I’m not exactly a locksmith.
I don’t need to be, I think. In a world with no laws, rules or judgement, I can get as extreme as I want to and no one will ever care. I look back at the big truck and smile. “Sorry, Dad,” I say, imagining what he would say about his pristine, shiny truck. Then I’m in the cab, swinging the vehicle around so the back end is facing the store. I put the truck in reverse and shove the gas pedal down. The wheels sputter and catch. The impact is jarring, but just for a moment, as the front door and windows on either side, give way to the truck. I pull forward again, hop out and grin at the gaping hole.
I feel bolstered by my ability to destroy. I can do this, I think. I’m small, but I can fight if I have to.
Inside the store, I gather several deadbolt kits, new bulbs for the burned-out, motion-sensitive flood lights at the house, fishing line and gardening poles for the tripwires, a bag of bells, nails and a new hammer. I’m sure my father has a hammer, but I don’t want to waste time looking for it.
Before getting wood from the stacks behind the building, I have one more stop. Since this is a privately owned store, in New Hampshire, the back of the store is lined with guns. If there were anyone around to ask, I’m sure they’d say the weapons were for coons, coyotes and foxes, but people just like their guns. Not that the weapons did them any good in the end. They might not do me any good, either, but they’ll make me feel better, at least. I have the one rifle at home, but I can position these around the house and the yard, so there’s always one handy. I leave the handguns and take four rifles, mostly because I know how to shoot, reload and aim them.
I make several slow trips back and forth, carrying my goods out through the ruined storefront, loading up the truck. I’m acclimating to the endlessness of this type of life, which is interesting. Everything takes hours longer. But with nothing else to do, and no one else to deal with, I am hugely productive. I’ve even been doing some drawing, although the images that emerge are mostly terrifying, not meant for public consumption—if there were a public, which there isn’t.
Back inside, as I reach for the last box of ammunition, I realize I’m still wearing the tentacle bracelet around my left wrist, the piece of the crash I took with me. I’ve been wearing it so long, this alien thing, that it feels like a part of me. It draws my awareness inward for a moment. I am barely recognizable to myself anymore. Huge, lumbering belly. I haven’t plucked my eyebrows in months. The blue in my now wild hair is grown out and can be tucked behind my ears. It’s been a while since I showered. Or shaved anything. I check my breath and wince. I need to remember to brush my teeth more often.
I look up at the gun display. The wall behind it is mirrored. The silhouette I see of myself is frighteningly wild, like I should be lumbering around the streets, naked, shouting obscenities at passing birds. I strain in the low light, to see my face, and I don’t like what I find.
Such an abrupt morphing, both degrading and blossoming at once. I’m like a snake about to shed her skin, preparing for newness, or a hibernating bear, unsocial, fat and hunkering. In some ways I feel like a felled tree, only useful for the advancing of growth. Moss and insect homes. Felled trees and hibernating bears are unaware of their appearance, and just do their job. That’s how they survive. So that’s what I will do. Who cares what I look like? Right now, nobody.
I make my way out of the hardware store and drive the truck through the chain link fence at the back. I consider the sheets of plywood first, but they’re too big, so I settle for the easier to carry, easier to cut, pine planks. I take as many as I can, wipe the sweat from my brow and am assaulted by weariness. I did too much, but I decide to not be hard on myself. This stuff needed doing, and I’ve waited far too long to do it. Should have been done months ago. I’m not sure why I waited. I think preparing for a fight, somehow makes it feel more possible. Like setting a time and place for a schoolyard brawl. But now that I’m huge and swollen—in places beyond my belly—I feel less mobile and even more protective of the life inside me; the life that, if born today, would survive and grow outside of me. I’m going to turn the house into a fortress, a second womb for Squirt’s safety.
Feeling lightheaded, I drive home, careful not to turn fast and lose the contents of my overfull truck bed. I sit in the driveway, watching Luke watch me through the window, his whole body moving back and forth from the vigorous wag of his tail. Then I lean my head back, watching him bounce side to side. The movement entrances me. My eyes slip shut.
I dream of August, whose face I can’t see, although I know he is happy and smiling. In the dream, under a sunny sky, he hands me my bones, one by one. They are white, shiny and covered in scrawling, undecipherable, black script. Uninjured, I spread them out on the grass in an elegant, complicated pattern, and then take his warm, large hand in my small one. His fingers envelop mine, and I feel ready and satisfied.
When I wake to Luke’s insistent barking, the pleasantness of the dream stays with me, although I swallow a throat lump over missing August, the man I’ve never met. Feeling slightly refreshed, I slide out of the truck cab and begin preparing our home for war.
44
POE
Ironically, boarding up my home, setting a tripwire perimeter with bells and stashing rifles in hides around the property are all activities that I manage well, but slowly. From beginning to end, my fortress-womb building takes two weeks. Sure, I need to take more than the usual amount of bathroom breaks, and once I’m down on my knees, standing is a slow, grunting affair. My skinny, muscular arms and equally slender legs are spindly sprigs framing a basketball, my belly button protruding like the air valve. I’m having mixed feelings about the stretch marks. If I lie on my back for too long, I can’t breathe. In short, I’m huge. There is no denying I will be delivering a baby in a month. I just can’t believe I’ll get bigger.
Holding wood up while nailing it is a lot easier if you can hip check it into position. My sweaty, heavy body lacks grace and it frustrates me. The light in the house is diffused now, windows boarded up. The rooms around me are hot, airless and dusty. I sing quietly all day and talk to Luke and Squirt. And, if I’m honest, to myself. When I recognize the warm rumble approaching, those psyche scissor lines like earthquakes, mirror-shattering depression, I enact embarrassing physical rituals. Activity I will have to cease doing if people ever find me.
It started the other day, after I thought I lost Luke. He went outside and took a good, long while to come back in. I called for him, quietly at first, wary of the unseen, and then loudly. I went outside and looked around for him, calling. After a few minutes, he came bounding back out of the woods, all muddy, but I was beside myself. I even yelled at him.
Trying to calm myself, I drew, and I got lost in it. Like driving a familiar road and suddenly being at your destination, the entire trip unnoticed, I saw the finished drawing on the floor in front of me. On several large sheets of paper, overlapping at the edges, I’d drawn an outline of my entire body. I was naked and holding a sharpie marker in my right hand. Upon inspecting my body, I saw black lines along one hip, one calf and both elbows, where I allowed the marker to glance off my sides as I traced.
Every day since then, Luke goes out into the woods for a while. I forgive him the freedom that I lack. Is he visiting the Blur? And also every day since then, dread burbles through my veins until I complete another body tracing. All of them I remember, now, though. I’m getting low on paper. The pages had gone askew when I stood up, fracturing my body, splitting the head in two, and I thought that it was a more accurate depiction of my breaking apart.
I fled from that state of mind by focusing on the house, and I’m done. I’m bored...and feeling like my mind is getting lost again. I talk to August twice a day, occasionally joking around with Mark, who may or may not have the depth required to keep up with my introspection. Perhaps before the event, he could have been one of my usual guy pals, someone to play video games with and we could eat macaroni and cheese. But now, as a mother and survivor, it’s August who fuels my peace and my hope for the future. But that probably doesn’t make me any different from the rest of them, all of whom had parents like mine: UFO abductees who built pods and shoved their children inside. They follow August, ‘like I’m some kind of cult leader,’ he said. It makes him uncomfortable, the responsibility, but can you blame them? Twenty eight people all with the same parting message from doomed parents—Find August—against incredible odds, manage to find him.
I keep busy with Luke and his daily routines, which are basically a cycle of sleeping, eating and pooping. The good life, though mine isn’t too different now. I nap, make food and draw. I’m out of shape, which worries me, but walking around the neighborhood makes me feel too vulnerable and watched, with reason. There’ll be no running away for me. I’m nesting, which seems very funny to me. A little blue-haired mama bird, my dead mama’s sewing kit beside me on the living room couch, botching up infant-sized T-shirts made from my father’s flannels. If only I had paid more attention to my mother’s (and my father’s, for that matter) domestic capabilities. This child would have been styling.
Theories tumble around in my head—the most potent one, currently, is that the Benevolent Blur, the naturey-smelling ones, are peaceable, at least now. It hasn’t escaped my notice that they turned Leila to powder in the same way that my parents, and everyone else, died. The guys haven’t dealt with that yet—not since the human race-ending attack anyway—and it’s a good thing, because they’d be dead already, if they had.
Maybe the Blur have different jobs, wherever they’re from? At times I want to extrapolate theories about who or what they are, but the anxiety of that intellectual effort leaves me breathless, hyperventilating, a reminder of my utter and alien aloneness, August still just not here, his three day car ride transformed into a six month migration. At least Squirt grows, steadily, on her own. I never thought that being pregnant would make me realize a human’s true capacity for independence. She is truly her own little person, and I, am truly mine.
When the phone rings, I shout in surprise, which is common enough these days that Luke just raises an eyebrow at me. I look around and find myself sitting on the couch. When did I sit down? I can’t remember. Nor do I remember picking up my sketch pad and charcoal. The image on the page draws a second shout from my mouth: it’s a Blur, vague except for its wooden face. I’ve drawn it so well, that for a moment, I feel its presence, and I think I can smell roses. Inside the dead eyes, the oil swirls are in the shape of a baby, umbilical curling around the small body.
They’re watching her, I think, and I shout a third time when the phone rings again. I take a deep breath and answer the phone. “Hi.”
“You sound upset,” he says.
“I drew another picture.” I’ve told him about this, that I draw without remembering, without planning. He knows about the fissure. I thought that by bringing it into the light, I might help combat it, but I think I’m just making August worry.
“Anything you want to talk about?”
I look down at the craggy face, its child eyes, and then I smear my hand across the page, smudging it into oblivion. “No. I’m fine.”
“How fine?”
“Perfectly,” I say, sticking out my jaw with no one to see. The bravado and defiance is an act, but no one likes an emotional martyr.
“Then I think it’s time.”
“For what.”
“To tell you about the Blur. To tell you what they really are.”
I know all about his last encounter with the Blur. He called me that same night, and then again the following morning to tell me about the autopsy. He made it to the eye-stabbing when I stopped him. I nearly threw up. The detail was so disturbing, too perfectly conjured in my mind, that I couldn’t handle it. But now...fortress made, weapons ready, perhaps he’s right. I should know my enemy.
“Just...go slow.” The last thing I need is to crack up and greet them in the nude upon their final, triumphant arrival, covered in paint or something. The thought makes me snort with laughter.
“What’s...so funny?” he asks.
I don’t answer him. “Luke, no. No, boy, here!” He trots over to me, sock in mouth. I pry it from his jaws, roll it up and throw it for him.
“Sorry,” I say, “throwing the balled up sock for Luke.”
“Poe,” he says, sounding a little sad. “You need to know what you’re up against. How to hurt them. We’ve been lucky so f—”
“Or they left,” I say.
“We can’t even entertain that idea. Not until we’re together and you’re both safe.”
Both. “I’m listening.”
So, he explains, unveiling all the gory details; that they are actually endlessly long worms crammed inside two suits, the first like an invisibility cloak, the other to hold all their loose forms together and protect them.
“I see,” I say, switching the satellite phone to my other hand.
He’s quiet, too, for a minute. “You still there?” he asks.
I am, but I don’t say so. Instead, I feel an uncultivated, feral shiver slowly push normal reaso
ning aside, like sliding a full bureau across a bedroom floor to a corner. The halting and skidding. A bit of shoving with one hip, and then a final positioning. Out of the way, in the room, but no longer the focus. I realize he’s been talking to me.
“…laws of physics, but can definitely be injured and killed. How many guns do you have?” I wonder what else he’s said that I’ve missed. I watch the new brain fuzziness with interest. It’s quieter here, like being under a heavy blanket. With enormous effort, I mentally pull myself back to the conversation and mumble something to him.
“A few.” The shiver hovers, wanting me back. This new development, combined with the ever-present fractures in need of constant monitoring, is rendering my psyche near unrecognizable. I imagine a brick building, only a few seconds into an earthquake, chunks of concrete foundation crumbling. The perfect image, combining both the fissures and this new shuddering. A beautiful metaphor. My father would have loved it.
“Poe, are you all right?” August doesn’t wait for me to answer, unusual for him. “Listen. This is important. You can kill them with fire. Do you have some glass bottles around, like liquor bottles, maybe in the basement?”
A few more chunks fall from the foundation, tumble into the earthquake-created crack below. In my mind’s eye, I watch the fragments tumble, down, down, into darkness, a deep too far to measure. “Why would I need glass bottles?”
The Distance Page 28