Karen asks, “What’s your name?”
“It’s Max. My lips . . . my lips are stinging.”
“Oh Jesus. Max, honey, hang in there, okay?”
Karen is having a flashback to five years ago, when Casey had antibiotic-resistant E. coli poisoning. The craziness, the hospital, the sadness, and, oh, the helplessness.
Rachel heads behind the bar and turns on the tap, but no water emerges. In her toneless voice she says, “The water isn’t working. Max, I want you to remove your clothes. Right now. Drop them on the ground — don’t throw them, don’t kick up any dust. Then we’re going to take you out to the back area and rinse your body with whatever we can find. Nobody touch Max’s clothes. We’ll bag them later. Karen and Rick, you rinse your hands now with whatever you can find.”
While Rick hoses down Karen’s forearms, Bertis calls from the floor, “Excuse me, I never got the royal treatment like this guy,” to which Karen says, “No. You didn’t.”
Rachel looks in her purse and removes a prescription container, from which she takes some pills and puts them in Max’s hand. “Take these.”
“What are they?”
“Propanolol. It’s a beta blocker that curtails adrenaline production, which in turn reduces memory production, which in turn reduces post-traumatic stress.”
Rick says, “What?” looking at Rachel as if she were a grizzly bear riding a unicycle.
Rachel continues, “The hippocampus loses its ability to make memories adhere to the brain. Guys fighting in Iraq take it all the time. I keep them in case I have a too-big freakout in public.”
Rick says, “Are they safe?”
“They are.”
Max pops the pills in his mouth and swallows them, and Rick hoses out Max’s mouth with what remains from the soda pump. Max continues disrobing as best he can, though his movements are awkward thanks to adrenaline and fear. Karen sees deep, anthraxy lesions on his arms and legs. When his cargo shorts hit the ground, she hears a thud. She’s guessing that in a pocket of those shorts is the iPhone holding pictures of her taken on the plane what feels like a lifetime ago but was really just earlier that day. For Karen, that thud marks the official start of the rest of her life, and of a whole new way of life — a new world that exists within a state of permanent power failure. A perpetual Lagos, a never-ending Darfur. A world where people eat fortune cookies without bothering to read the fortunes. A world where individuality means little: People are simply Scrabble tiles with no letters, Styrofoam packing peanuts, napkins at McDonald’s.
Karen decides that at the first opportunity, she’s going to ask Rachel for a few of those pills. Just last month, in the break room with Dr. Yamato, Karen joked that the smartest thing science could do would be to make a pill called September 10; if you took it, it would be as if 9/11 had never happened. Now Karen wants a pill that will make the whole twenty-first century disappear — that will make this unavoidable future vanish. Dr. Yamato said that earth was not built for six billion people, all running around and being passionate about being alive. Earth was built for about two million people foraging for roots and grubs.
“Aren’t you being a charmer,” Karen said, packing up her cubicle for the day.
Dr. Yamato, crabby after a three-day bipolar symposium, went on, saying, “Karen, history may well prove worthless in the end. Individualism may prove to be only a cruel and unnecessary hoax played on billions of people for no known reason — a bad idea dreamed up by God on the Eighth Day.”
Karen had laughed — laughed!
Rick takes over guard duty, and Luke and Karen escort a limping Max to the storage room, over by the recycling bins.
Karen asks, “Where were you when the explosions happened? How did you get here? Were you with your family? Where are they if you’re here?”
Max stands in his boxer shorts and says, “We were in a rental car headed downtown.”
Luke says, “There’s no bottled water or club soda here. The best I can do is melted ice from the machine.”
“Do it.”
Karen reboots the conversation. “Your family was in the rental car.”
“Headed downtown. Me. My dad. My sister.”
“Where’s your mother?”
“She moved in with her trainer last year. I don’t know.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s no big deal. So, we were the last car out of the lot before they stopped renting. The guys at the counter were making weird faces. I looked at their monitors, and there was an override message saying STOP ALL REFUELING IMMEDIATELY and then STOP ALL NEW RENTALS IMMEDIATELY. Ouch!” The melted ice water smells like Teflon and nickels and dimes as it flows over Max’s scalp, then dribbles down his torso. “It feels like my entire body’s been stung by hornets.” A tear forms in his right eye, clearly visible against his angry crimson skin.
Luke grabs a bottle of vodka, pours some into a plastic cup, and adds some Coke to it, then places the cup in Max’s hands. “Drink that.”
“What then?” asks Karen.
“We didn’t get very far. The police began to barricade all the highway routes to the airport. People everywhere were freaking out, and, like, ten thousand people were trying to get back to the airport to fly home. But, I mean, all the flights were stopped — what were they thinking? There’s no gas anymore. And then suddenly this guy came and pointed a gun at us, and his buddy started siphoning the gas out of our car. There were a couple of cops nearby and they didn’t do anything. This guy just stood there holding a gun, and the other guy drained the tank, and then he made my dad drop the car keys into the gas tank so we couldn’t get away driving on what gas remained.”
Luke gently lifts Max’s left arm and rinses it with the melted ice water.
Karen asks, “What did you do then?”
“That’s when the explosions happened.”
“What were they?”
“I don’t know. Nobody does. We saw that the fallout was headed our way, so we tried to run away from it, but it kept changing course and was on top of us by the time we got to this hotel.”
“Was there no other place to go to for safety?”
“What — like under an overpass? No way. That stuff is pure chemical. I tried going into the hotel, but it’s locked. Why would they do that?”
Luke and Karen swap glances.
“Where are your father and sister?” Luke says.
“I don’t know. We got separated. We couldn’t see — from the fogginess of the chemicals and then because our eyes stopped working. And the air was so thick. There was no echo, like in a storm. I — I have no idea where they are.” Max begins to cry, and he says to Karen, “I know you. You’re that pretty lady from the plane. I recognized you when I first came in, even with only a little bit of eyesight.”
Rachel comes in with a bottle and a fresh candle. “I found some more water. I’ll keep looking.” Rachel leaves and Luke says, “Max, I’m going to rinse as much as I can off you.”
“Okay.”
Karen looks around as Luke drizzles water over Max. She notices that Rick keeps extra bartender outfits hanging back here. “Try on this shirt,” she says, wrapping Max’s hand around it. “You’re shivering.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I�
�m cold.”
Max manages to put on the shirt, but the pants sting his raw skin and he cries out. Karen sits on a crate and says, “Max, come and sit beside me. Luke, go fetch the iPhone from Max’s cargo pants.” Max puts his arms around Karen’s neck.
___
Karen remembered holding Casey in the hospital five years ago, the first time she’d held her since she was maybe five or six. Holding her child felt nice. Children have weight. They’re warm. You can feel their heart and lungs pumping from within.
Now Max asked, “Am I going to be blind forever?”
Karen said, “No, sweetie, your eyes will be fine. And soon all of this will be over and you’ll be home.”
Max sat beside Karen, his head slumped and resting on her chest. He was a big kid, not fully grown but almost there.
“I didn’t mean what I said earlier.”
“What do you mean?”
“That bit about not caring about my mother. Because I do.”
“I know you do, Max.”
“She just left us. How can someone do that — just leave you, like you’re nothing to them?”
“People do it all the time. It’s the dark side of people.”
“I miss her all the time, and she won’t even answer my emails. She pretends she doesn’t know how to work a Gmail account. And then she accidentally cc’ed me about a barbecue she was having the afternoon she was supposed to be at my sister’s violin recital.”
“Violin recital? My daughter plays the violin.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. She’s fifteen and going through a goth phase right now. I was worried she’d stop going to lessons because it wasn’t cool or something.”
“I don’t get the goth thing.”
“I don’t, either. When I was her age, you had only two choices: popular or unpopular. There are so many things you can be these days.”
“What’s your name?”
“I’m Karen.”
“My skin hurts, Karen.”
Karen almost burst into tears but stopped herself and said, “So, Max, yesterday I went into Subway and bought a sandwich that was totally different from the one I’d normally get. Different toppings, bread, condiments. I got chili peppers and cucumber slices.”
“Yeah, and?”
“And then when I went to eat it . . .”
“What?”
“It tasted like somebody else’s sandwich.”
Max smiled. “That’s funny.”
“So tell me, Max, why is it that chickens don’t taste like eggs? And why is it that traffic lights are red and green but don’t seem the least bit Christmassy?”
Max chuckled.
“I’m a bit drunk. Is this gin I’m drinking?”
“It’s vodka.”
“I’ve been drunk before.”
“Have you, now?”
“I got bed spins. I hated it. Crème de menthe and rye in my friend Jordan’s basement. But now is different. You know what I wanted?”
“What do you mean, ‘What I wanted’?”
“To do before I die.”
“Max, you don’t need to think that way.”
“I wanted to get shot.”
“You what?”
“I wanted to get shot. And survive. And what I wanted to do after getting shot was to get my driver’s licence and then buy a car, a real wreck from the 1990s, and shoot some holes in its side, because that would be the coolest thing you could ever have on a car. You’d be instantly cooler than if you had a Mustang or Lamborghini.” Max’s face was lit up as though he were six and Karen had allowed him to lick chocolate cake batter from a pair of electric beaters.
“I’m drunk,” Max said.
“You are.”
“My body is on fire.”
“I’m sorry, sweetie. It’ll get better.”
“I don’t know where my father and sister are.”
“I don’t know where my daughter is, but I know she’ll be okay. You can’t worry that way.”
Luke came back in. “Here’s the iPhone.”
“Hand it to me, Luke.” Karen looked at the iPhone. “My boss has this same model. Why don’t I look at some of your pictures, Max?”
“I can’t see them.”
“That’s okay. I’ll look at the pictures and ask questions, and you can fill me in.”
“Okay.”
Karen fiddled with the screen until she managed to bring up a photo of Max’s father and sister at an airport gate. “You’re at the airport. Where are you from, Max?”
“Calgary.”
Karen scrolled ahead. “What’s your sister’s name?”
“Heather. A real eighties name. My mother likes it.”
A few shots later Karen came to the photos of herself — two taken without her knowledge, the third of her flipping young Max the bird. “And then we come to . . .”
“You found the photos of you, huh?”
“Yes, I did.” That last photo was just as funny as Karen had imagined it would be. She smiled. She could sense Luke standing behind her. He had said almost nothing the entire time they’d been in the storage room, but his presence had been strong. She hadn’t felt so reassured by another person since her wedding.
Max said, “Hold your breath.”
“Huh? Hold my breath?” Karen asked. “Why?”
“Just do it. Please?”
Karen held her breath, and so did Max.
Max said, “You know, I bet if we froze right here and didn’t move and didn’t breathe, we could stop time from moving forward forever.”
“Is that what you think?”
“I do.”
Karen looked at Luke, who gestured, Why not? He sat down beside her and took her hand, and the three of them sat there, not breathing, frozen in mid-motion, trying to stop time. And for an infinitely thin moment, time did stop. Heck, thought Karen, time could be starting and stopping all the time, and we’d never be the wiser because we are so utterly time’s prisoners. In the time it took to think these words, time might have stopped for a billion years. How will we ever know it didn’t?
Karen looked at Luke. Their eyes locked, and Karen knew then that the two of them were connected forever. And then the candle went out, and the room became as dark as the air between two bedsheets.
Rick
Rachel — beautiful, glowing Rachel — returns from delivering water and a candle to Karen, Luke, and Max. She scouts the bar for more water. Rick stands guard over Bertis, duct-taped to his chair and lying on the floor, staring up at a ceiling flecked with scotch-taped holiday tinsel remnants. He croaks to Rick, “So, you scored yourself a bit of afternoon delight, huh?”
“You be quiet. Soon enough you’ll be rotting in prison, and after you die you’ll reincarnate as a prisoner.”
“The world is prison enough already. And reinca
rnation is a sham. Could I perhaps have a glass of water?”
“There’s no water.”
“Whatever you have, then. And how come you aren’t out back, helping to rinse off Richie Cunningham?”
“I’m watching out for you. Guaranteed, with someone like you, I stop paying attention for even ten seconds and you escape like Hannibal Lecter and do God knows what.”
“You spoke of God . . .”
From the bar, Rachel says, “I’ll get you something to drink. I’m happy to.”
This offer surprises Rick, but then Rachel is one big unpredictable quirk. Lovestruck Rick plays in his head a mental preview of his life with Rachel: vacations in Kentucky, purchasing white mouse studs; evenings beside a crackling fireplace, listening to Rachel recite pi out loud; perhaps one of those hug machines for whenever human contact is too much for her brain to handle. Rick foresees an odd, unexpected new life, and he decides that Rachel fetching a beverage for a maimed sniper is simply part of that unexpectedness. So he doesn’t protest.
Rachel busies herself behind the bar, setting three glasses on the counter, filling them with flat Coke, mostly syrup. Seeing Bertis’s rifle still lying on the bar in a pile of bar-mix crumbs, she picks it up and says, “My father once had a rifle similar to this.”
“Don’t mess with my rifle!” shouts Bertis.
Rachel walks around the bar to the table that holds the duffle bag and zips the rifle inside.
From the floor, Bertis makes his summons: “Rachel, my beverage, please.”
Rachel fetches two glasses of Coke and a spoon, hands one to Rick, then bends down over Bertis to meticulously dole out measured sips of Coke with the teaspoon, as though she were doing a chemistry experiment. Bertis is thirsty and stays silent until his glass is empty, when he says, “Never in my life have I felt more like a white mouse in a lab.”
At the mention of white mice, Rachel perks up. “Really? What does it feel like?”
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