Park wants to answer with the word nothing. Nothing is wrong.
“I think we could still get by, even with a third,” he says. Speaking his mind feels so easy right now. Almost dreamlike, as though he can say anything without consequence. “It could be good for us.”
“A third,” Lee says. “As in a third human being?”
“Yes.”
“Park.”
“Yes?”
“Look at us,” she says, spreading her arms. “We have nothing. What can we offer someone else?” Her voice is getting louder.
“We could get by with less. Make it go further.”
Lee pauses a moment. “What you mean is that I could,” she says.
“I didn’t say that.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “We don’t have enough of anything to go around, Park. You should know that.”
He hesitates and then he nods, and no one says anything else for a time. When Park finally does speak again his voice is quiet.
“You can’t only think about the bad of it,” he says. “Think of the good.”
“I’m thinking about another open mouth,” Lee says. “Tell me the good in that, Park. What am I not seeing?”
“The good of having a child with us,” he says.
“A child.”
“Yes.”
“That’s what you want now,” she says, almost laughing. “A child?”
“I want to do something besides run.”
She doesn’t reply to that. She just shakes her head and then returns to her packing. Shoving items—a watch, a dead flashlight, a 2-liter soda bottle filled halfway with water—into her carryall.
“You like the idea of a child,” she says, still packing. “You don’t want any part of the actual work of keeping one alive. And regardless: have you even seen an unclaimed, living child out here?”
“Quiet down.”
“Name one we’ve seen. And I mean a child who has a chance,” she says. “One that isn’t half in the ground already. Name a single time, Park.”
He doesn’t respond. He turns away from her, toward the water.
The boy is standing in the surf with his back facing them. The small string of bone like oblong beads running down the midline. He holds himself tightly around the midsection and shivers unabashedly in the way that only children or the dying will allow themselves to do publicly.
After a time the boy seems to make a decision and he goes still. He straightens. He lowers his hands and begins walking the wet slope toward the sea—resolute and steady and unhurried, arms at his sides. Marching as though gripped by some kind of sirenic song, something death seeking. His posture. Everything affectless. In moments the boy is submerged to the thighs and then the chest, and then his small body is rising and falling with the motion of the water. A wave rolls into the child’s frame at the level of his throat and it takes him under.
Park remembers the disappearance of the boy’s skull. He clearly remembers it. The way that his hair spread over the water for a brief moment before it also went under. He remembers how it all looked and he remembers roughly where it all took place.
Park tears through the stand of woods between the culvert and the seafront, aiming toward the area where the boy went in. There is nothing concrete to train on, no sign of struggle. Just an unshaped locus on the sea surface identical to any other on any side of it. Wave after wave, inbound, swamping the memory of what he just witnessed, turning it illusory.
His vision is blurring and he plunges forward, frenzied. The whiplike lashing of branches and horsetail reeds and the scandent runners of trailing vines against his face, his midsection, his legs. His arms are oaring through the foliage, tearing open a path to the beachfront, and behind him he can hear his wife’s voice telling him to stop, to turn around. She is screaming at him. Cursing him. What the hell are you doing? Stupid-ass sonofabitch, have you lost your goddamned mind?
Park makes a five-foot drop from the treeline onto the loose sand, landing hard, and then he gets up and keeps running. His shoes are sinking into the soft terrain of the outer berm. He scrabbles his way past the rows of chairs, the canopies, the wicker drink tables. The dark wooden caddy with folded guest towels still stacked on its shelves. He crosses the wrackline onto the wet beachface, barrels full-board down the incline and plunges in, going completely under.
The tepid warmth, almost amniotic. For a time he forgets the purpose and he stays submersed, as motionless as the medium will allow him to be. His body is pliant and suspended, arms wide and oblique, wafting, eyes closed—it’s too dark to see anything of value so there’s no reason to expose them. He rests himself, buffered on every side. It’s not so bad, the genesis of your own drowning, that first moment when you give yourself over to the idea.
The seconds pass and a sense of purpose returns to him. His body tightens. He opens his eyes and they burn from the salinity and he is scanning the blackness, seeing absolutely nothing. He kicks and writhes. His arms are trawling through the churn around him and his hands are grasping for something that feels human enough to justify clinging onto and carrying ashore with him. He pushes up to the surface for a breath and he goes back under.
One of his hands brushes against what could be a small limb—a forearm, maybe, or the lower part of a leg near the ankle. Flesh underlaid with linear bone. He clasps it, immediately redoubles his grip, and drags the mass toward him; the weight feels about right, that of a fully-loaded suitcase. He tows the limp form to the surface and he can see now that it is the boy. The slicked, brown hair and the pallid skin, almost bluish under the asthenic dawn light, and the wide open eyes.
Park holds the small face above water. Cupping the boy’s chin, he scissor-kicks in the direction of the shore for a few seconds until he can touch bottom and then he stands, water pouring from him. He lifts the boy into his arms and carries him up the beachface to the dry sand above the wrackline and gently lays him down. He kneels and puts a palm on the boy’s chest. He lowers an ear to the boy’s mouth.
One hand over the other, centered on the boy’s sternum. No perceptible movement. He bears down. He delivers a few quick compressions, but the boy’s chest yields too readily, almost caving, and so he lightens the pressure. Another twenty compressions. Do them fast, don’t wait long in between. He stops and pinches the boy’s nose closed and leans down, covers the boy’s mouth with his own and blows two breaths, watching for the chest to rise, but there is no change. Only a rattling wheeze. He inhales deeply and blows another breath and there is the same wheezing sound, but now he can feel the air escaping from somewhere around the boy’s ribcage.
All at once, his wife’s hands hook under his arms and pull his body backward. She’s so strong still—in spite of everything, she hasn’t been stripped of her base physicality, not yet. She drags him away from the supine child and dumps him on the loose sand, and then she leans over him, screaming. She asks him what the hell he’s thinking. But he knows he isn’t supposed to answer, just to let her go on, so he stays quiet. She asks him if he’s trying to check himself out. Is that it? If it is, that’s fine. Just let me know so I don’t have to come out here chasing you down.
Park sits upright, slowly, and it feels as though he’s returning gradually to consciousness after having fainted. He wipes something gelatinous from his lips with the back of a hand and then he spits out a rancid taste. There is the sound of the waves wending up the shore toward them.
“I was helping the boy. So we could have him.”
“What?”
“I wanted to help the boy,” he says. Louder this time.
She just stares at him, saying nothing. Her dark eyes are wide.
“Can you try?” he asks.
She shakes her head, no. For some reason, she looks particularly terrified right now.
“Can you try helping him?” he asks again. His words are slurring. “You’re better at it.”
She doesn’t answer—instead, she looks away from him, toward the sky.
This means that his wife is processing. She is already considering where to run, what tasks still need doing before she goes, whether her husband will be with her or not, and whether it matters either way. He can tell by her face.
Park decides that it’s best to let her be, and he returns his attention to the child lying in the sand a few feet from him. He begins crawling back to the boy’s side. Hands and knees. Seawater trailing behind, as though his body is broken somewhere and leaking fluid. Lee doesn’t do anything either to help or to stop him.
As Park nears the child, his attention is pulled away by a flare of light in his peripheral vision, almost as though a match has been struck. There is a faint, bathing warmth. Eastward, the sun’s leading edge is spilling richly over the volcanic slopes that encircle the guulfo. The air around the thin arc is quavering.
Park lets himself smile. Turns out that his wife was wrong about the sunrise—the wait time was significantly longer than she predicted. He needs to let her know that. Once the child is safe and dry, he will tell her.
Park crawls the rest of the way to the figure on the sand. He looks down at it, up close, and the face looks different to him now—older, with more hollows—but young people change so fast that he thinks maybe this is a normal thing. They grow up before your eyes—don’t people say that?
Park leans in and looks below the neck, and then he notices that there are no legs on this body, that they were taken off at the pelvis, and he feels confident that the boy—his boy—had been equipped with two legs to run on. He is almost certain of that. He looks again to verify, studying, and after a time he comes to accept the fact that the boy isn’t lying here any longer. The boy is gone. Someone else took him already, someone claimed him, which means that he waited too damn long.
Now there is just this corpse—bloated and rotted through—where the boy used to be. The remains of a grown woman by the looks of them. At least a week spent in open water, maybe longer, submerged and churning and picked over. He can see the exposed bones of her ribs, white and sharp-tipped, embedded in the meat of the chest cavity. The lips are gone from her face, leaving both rows of grey teeth fully bared.
Park gets up. He turns and trudges upshore to where his wife is standing, arms crossed.
“Did you take him?” he asks loudly.
Lee looks at Park. He can tell she’s been crying.
“What?”
“Did you take him?”
“Take who?”
“The boy,” Park says. “Just tell me.”
“What are you talking about? What boy?”
His teeth are gritted. He is shivering all over. “You know what boy,” he says.
Lee pauses and puts a hand on his face. She is shaking her head, no, over and over.
“Park, look at me,” she says. “There is no boy.”
Park is scouring the sand for traces of the boy that he can show her. She values evidence. A single, crisp depression made by the boy’s bare foot in the wet silt pack would be enough proof to bring to her.
Park goes to his knees. His face is lowered, a few inches from the sand, as though he’s supplicating. He crawls back and forth. Lee is standing a few yards up the beach from him, and she doesn’t say anything but he knows she is impatient with him. Without taking his eyes off the sand, he tells her that it will only take a moment. I just want to show you. I know it’s here.
She lets him search for at least fifteen minutes before calling his name. The tone is hissing, insistent. He tries ignoring her but she won’t give him a moment’s worth of peace to finish the task. She says his name again, the same tone. He doesn’t look up. He tells her to wait just a second, it will only take another second or two. Hold on, dammit, I’m almost done. Just hold on.
Park finds what could be a child’s heel print. A small, smooth cup hollowed-out of the wet sand. Clean in all its lines, perfectly formed and composed, elliptic. Almost fossil-like. He studies the curvature of the mold. He is excited but he tries his hardest to focus on authentication. For a moment he considers shaping the indentation with one of his fingers so that it looks more convincing, but she is too smart for that. She would know, in the same way she always knows any time he tries to shape reality for the purpose of pleasing her. He has to concentrate harder, but it’s so difficult because she is still calling for him; he can hear her. He murmurs for her to wait a second for Christ’s sake. Let me verify this. I think I have something here. Just hold on.
Once he is confident in the heel print, he draws a careful circle in the sand around it. He looks up, smiling, but her back is facing him now; she doesn’t see him pointing proudly at his discovery, down on his knees.
Lee is standing next to a collection of abandoned plastic beach toys, and she is scanning the treeline upshore from them, staring at the area around where the boy emerged. She isn’t moving. Her posture is immaculate, straight up and down—his wife has always known how to carry herself, no matter the setting. As Park watches her, he notices that she has gone to the trouble of unlooping the meat cleaver from her belt and then rebuckling it. The blade is in her hand, at her side. He yells for her to come over. I have something here. You didn’t believe me before, but now you will. Come see this.
She isn’t listening to him. He yells for her again, louder. Come on, Lee. Look at what I have here. But she doesn’t even turn to acknowledge him; she stays focused on the woods. Park follows the line of her gaze, and after a time he sees what she sees. There is a man, unclothed and skeletal, standing motionless on the edge of the berm at the treeline, watching her.
The man is grievously pale. All of them look like this. His skin is constricted, latex-like, stretched tautly over the latticework of his ribcage. The hairless skull, peeling and filthy, the anorectic limbs. The man has been ravaged by his own bite marks, and the ruptured flesh of his left bicep has turned septic, leaking out a yellow serum all down his wrist, off his fingers. The man begins to scratch his chest slowly and fixedly like an addict. The too-wide eyes, almost lidless, bulging out, bloodshot. Once the disease sets in fully, they aren’t able to sleep like they used to. All the while, the man is still closely watching Lee.
Park tries to stand up. His head is clearer now than it was previously—the sight of the man has lent him a degree of focus, something he now realizes he was lacking earlier without ever really being aware of its absence. Eventually he struggles to his feet, swaying lightly, before steadying himself. He begins to stagger upshore toward his wife, and immediately the pale man stops watching her and begins staring at him instead—just standing and staring, soundless. After a time the man’s eyes roll back and his mouth slowly opens halfway and hangs there.
The sick man pauses briefly as though petitioning heaven. Dead motionless. Holding the same hang-jawed, blank-eyed stance. His white skin stark against the earthen cast of the treeline. For a moment it seems as though the man might stay where he is, as though he has found relief there, or maybe he has died on his feet and assumed a final rigid position, but after a short time the man moves his legs and begins to descend. Pacing quickly. A graceless, cantering gait down the beach slope. Arms at his sides, eyes still rolled heavenward, mouth still gaping. The man is barreling directly toward him.
None of these things could be called new—it could be Park’s fiftieth, even his hundredth time in this selfsame position, facing down a charge of naked white delirium—and by now he should have developed a well-honed reaction to it, something fast-twitch. A reflex founded on proprioception and muscle memory and procedural learning. The reaction should be automatically triggered in him, like a spring trap, but right now he finds himself incapable of formulating a motor response of any kind. Instead he just dumbly watches, paralyzed.
It’s the same reaction he had during his first encounter alone with one of the diseased coming at him headlong, over-bold. He remembers it was a woman, that first time. Pink-pale, somewhere in her fifties or sixties. She burst from a hotel stairwell with her teeth bared, and he remembers that he
allowed her to reach him, to take hold, and then he stumbled backward, keeling. The weight of her years spent on this earth, her execrable breath, the inertia she so easily bore along, her dominion, he remembers all of it. The way she straddled his chest and then immediately bit down hard on her own forearm and how the blood fell onto him. He remembers her expression. She looked as if she felt almost apologetic about her actions but didn’t know how to do anything else, as though this was simply her reflex, fast-twitch, the result of her own procedural learning.
The man is hurtling down the beachfront—this stripped-down scarecrow papered over with a pallid dermis—advancing toward him. The yawning orifice and the voided eyes. Twenty-five yards, fifteen maybe.
As Park stands, waiting motionless, he sees his wife stepping into his field of view. After all this time, she is still able to surprise him like this. She is still able to eclipse his perspective like this, to take over. Her movements are sure, like always. She positions herself so that the entirety of her body is between him and the pale man and she plants her feet. The white sand caves under her shoes, conceding, and her form is delineated sharply against the bleached ground. She is holding the cleaver low. He recognizes the inflection of her shoulder blades through the thin flannel fabric.
She has committed herself now. But Park knows her well enough to know that she is nowhere near as confident as she puts on. Inside, she isn’t sure that she can carry this thing off—dueling, bringing a blade to bear against a rampaging animal. Even after all she’s seen and done out here, she still isn’t sure she can accept the sooth of the wild mantra: it is always permissible to cut your predator down. Always. The idea is still distasteful to her somehow; she believes that the notion of an automatic survival instinct has been largely overblown. According to her, it isn’t all just natural instinct. There also has to be at least some small part of you that is convinced of the value of maintaining your own life. You have to be certain of its worth, and in the end it is so difficult to be truly certain of anything.
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