They came to the end of the Upper Street, which stopped at the slight dune overlooking the stretch of flat beach.
The full moon shone across the glassy sea. The sand itself glowed an unearthly green from the diatoms that had burst from the waves.
On the sand, the shadow of slow, pained movement as a hundred or more mangled, half-eaten Sunlanders struggled to die in a corner of the earth where there was no death.
7
Billy said, “I saw one of them up close. When they got my dad. She had long hair, and her eyes were silver. She had the fur, and the claws and all, and her wings, like a pterodactyl. But there was something in her face that was almost human. Even when she tore my dad’s throat open, she looked kind of like a girl. Boy,” he shivered, “I’m sure glad I’m up here and not down there. Down there looks like hell.”
Roy said, “From down there, up here looks like hell, too. And it won’t just end by itself.”
Billy seemed to understand. “You swear you’re not lying about what everywhere else is like?”
“I swear.”
“Okay. Let’s go down there. But in the morning. After the sun’s up. I still can’t believe it,” Billy cocked his head to the side, looking from the moon to the sand to the sea to Roy. “I’m standing here with the King.”
“Is that enough for you?”
“I guess. I got laid once, and that was enough. Standing here with you, that’s enough.” Billy pointed out someone, perhaps a woman, trying to stand up by pushing herself against a mass of writhing bodies, but she fell each time she made the attempt. “When I was little, we used to come down here and throw stones at some of them. But it’s kind of sad, ain’t it? Some of the guys I used to throw stones with, they’re down there now. Someday, I’m going to be down there too, and if there are any girls left, they’ll have babies, and they’ll start throwing stones at me too. Where does it end?”
“Now,” Roy said. “In the morning. You and me and a couple of railroad ties.”
“There’s going to be lots of pain, though, huh?”
“There’s always pain. You either get it over with quick, or it takes a lifetime.”
Billy rubbed his hands over his eyes. “I’m not crying or nothing.”
“I know.”
“I just want to get my head straight for this. I mean, we’re both going to hurt, huh?”
“You don’t have to. I do. I can find someone else to help.”
“No. We’ll do it. Then I’ll be a legend too, huh? Maybe that’s enough. We just drag those ties down there and set it up. One way or another, we all end up on that beach anyway, huh?”
8
It was easier said than done, for they had to borrow Joe’s truck to get the railroad ties to the beach, which was the easy part. Lugging those enormous sticks across the burning sand, sliding them across the bodies, the faces … it made a mile on a Thursday morning at nine a.m. seem like forty or more. By the time they’d arrived at a clearing, Billy was too exhausted to speak. When he finally did, he pointed back at Sunland. “Look.”
Roy, whose body was soaked, his suit sticking to his skin, glanced up.
There, on the edge of Upper Street and Beach Boulevard was the entire town, lined up as if to watch some elegant ocean liner pass by. The chanting began later. At first the words were indistinct. Gradually, the boy and the man could hear them clearly: two murders, two atonements.
“Roy?” Billy asked.
“Yes?”
“I’m scared. I’m really scared.”
“It’s okay. I’m here. I’ll go first.”
“No. I want to go first. I want you to do me first. I might run if I go last. I can’t do it right if I go last—I mean, I’ll fuck it up somehow.”
“All right.” Roy went over and put his arm across Billy’s shoulder. “Don’t be afraid, son. When this is over, it’ll all change again. Atonement works like that.”
“I wasn’t even born when you did it. Why shouldn’t one of them do it with you? Why me?”
“Now, Billy, don’t be afraid. If they could’ve done it before, they would’ve. I think Jesus brought you and me together for this.”
“I don’t even know Jesus.”
“You will. Come on,” Roy lifted up one of the smaller spikes and placed its end against Billy’s wrist “This one’ll fit. See? It’s not so bad. It’s just a nail. And all a nail can do is set something in place. It’s so you won’t fall. You don’t want to fall, do you?”
“Tell me again how you’ll do it?”
“Oh, well, I set this rope up around my hand so I can keep it up like this… and then I press the pointed part of the nail against my hand and pull on the rope. My hand goes back in place, see? Like this, only I have to push a little, too.”
“You won’t leave me, will you?”
“No, I won’t. I’m the King and you’re the Prince, remember? I won’t abandon you. Now, why don’t you just lie down on it like that and your hand, see? It’s going to pinch a little, but just pretend it’s one of those things with the claws. Just pretend you won’t scream, because you know they like it when someone screams. Okay? Billy, don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid…” Roy spoke soothingly as he drove the spikes through Billy’s wrists.
9
By two, they’d both gotten used to the pain of the crosses. Roy tried to turn his head toward Billy to see how he was holding up, but his neck was too stiff and he could not.
“When’s it going to happen?” Billy’s voice seemed weak.
“Soon, I guarantee it. I had a dream from God, Billy. Something inside of me knew what to do.”
Billy began weeping. “Just because of a couple of queers. What kind of God is that?”
“It’s the only God.”
“I don’t believe it,” Billy whimpered. “I don’t believe that God would punish everyone just because of what you did. I don’t believe that God would punish the unborn just because of what you did. It’s all a lie, ain’t it? We just did something stupid, building crosses and crucifying ourselves. Look at that, look up.”
Roy tried to look up, but he couldn’t. What he could see was the endless sea, and the shimmering sky as the sun crisped the edges of the afternoon. The smell was growing stronger from the bodies.
“I don’t believe in God!” Billy cried. “Somebody! Get me down! Get me down! He’s crazy! Somebody help me! Somebody get me down! Jesus!”
Roy tried to calm him with words, but Billy didn’t stop screaming until an angel dropped from the sky and tore into him.
Roy remained, untouched on the cross, amid the writhing bodies on the shore of the damned. He waited for some sign of his atonement, but only night came, and then day, and then the long afternoon set in.
Chosen
1
When it was over, he remembered the picture.
Because of living in the big city all his life, his first-hand knowledge of nature had come mostly from television documentaries and whatever he could recall from high school biology class.
But he’d forgotten about the picture all those years.
The caterpillar, its skin green and translucent and wet.
The wasp.
The bumps beneath the caterpillar’s skin.
The caption: “As paralysis sets in, the wasp has proven her superior power.”
He remembered what he thought, too, of the picture: that in some awful way it radiated a beauty beyond conscience.
This was what he kept coming back to, later, when it was over, in his mind. Not his emotional life or his education or even his work, but that picture from a book he’d seen at the public library when he was only nine or ten. How, even in his forties, it could come back to him with so strong a memory.
2
Rob Arlington awoke one morning and thought he felt something on his hand. He brushed at it but saw nothing there. A sensation left over from a dream, perhaps. He took a quick shower, crawled into his suit (he was so tired from being up late the night before
), and grabbed his briefcase on his way out the door. It wasn’t that he was late for work, it was just that for the fifteen years of his life that he had lived alone, he hated it. Not life, not work, not his loves and losses, but just the fact of knowing he was alone in the morning, that, at his age (forty), there was no one human being who shared his home with him.
The hallway, when he stepped into it, was hospital green, and smelled of paint. He locked his door, then thought he heard a noise from inside it. As if something were moving around in the kitchen. He looked at his door: to open or not? Could be just an echo from another apartment. Glancing down the hall, he saw, just this side of the fire doors, the super, papers in one hand, a dripping paintbrush in the other.
“Exterminator comes on Thursday,” the super said. He was taping notes to doors; he came up to Rob and slapped a note to his door. The super, with his fat glasses and balding pate with its twin sprays of hair, looked like a large worker ant going about its business. Rob shot him a friendly grin—never hurts to be on good terms with management—and lifted the note off his door. It read: “Exterminator, Thursday, 10 a.m.”
He wadded the noted up.
“I don’t want the exterminator,” Rob said, still vaguely listening for the thing that might be moving around in his kitchen. Was it a rat?
“You don’t got roaches?” The super, his glasses magnifying his small button eyes to enormous disks of glare, thrust out his lower lip in a middle-aged pout that meant disagreement. “Everybody in New York’s got roaches.”
“None that I’ve noticed,” Rob lied. Of course he had roaches, but he also didn’t like the idea of the super and his wife going into his apartment, looking through his things. He already had evidence of their last visit when he’d been on a business trip to California, how they’d gotten in and used his tea kettle. He’d known it was the super, or perhaps Fanny, his wife, because they’d left behind a set of skeleton keys, which Rob returned to them hoping that embarrassment would be enough incentive to keep them from going through their tenants’ homes again. “Look,” Rob told him, “I’ve been fogging.”
“You been what?”
“Fogging the apartment. I buy these foggers—you know—and it kills them. I don’t have roaches. Or spiders, for that matter.”
Then 6C opened her door. She was clunky and large, like an old piano, with hair in her eyes from just washing, and an enormous towel wrapped around her middle, barely keeping her breasts bound up. “I don’t want one either,” she said. “A bug killer. Don’t let him into my place. Let me chance being beloved of the flies, but I don’t want no bug killer coming through my place. I like my privacy.”
The super looked at her, then back at Rob. “Pretty soon, everybody’s gonna tell me they got no roaches. Why in hell’d I call up the exterminator if suddenly nobody’s got no roaches?”
The woman in the doorway glanced at Rob. Her eyes were wide and glassy, like she’d just had great sex and was now a zombie. She was not pretty, but still looked freshly plucked, which, to a man of Rob’s years was just this side of alluring. She was less overweight than stocky, and her skin was pale from staying inside too much. When the super had gone on down the hall, through the fire doors, she said, “Do you really fog?”
She’d been eavesdropping at her door, he figured. “No,” he said, “I just don’t like the nosy couple going into my apartment without me around.”
She let slip a smile and blushed, as if she’d just dropped an edge of her towel. “They do anyway. I’m here all day, and I see them. They go through all our apartments. All except mine. ‘Cause I’m here all the time.”
Then she drew herself back through the doorway, hands clutching the door and frame, as if her legs weren’t quite strong enough. She seemed to drag them with her, one after the other.
On the weekend, Maggie came up. When she and Rob lay after the Great Event, him feeling sticky, and her feeling exhausted, he mentioned meeting the neighbor for the first time. Maggie said, “I’ve talked to her on the elevator. She seems nice. It’s too bad about the accident, but I guess we all get smashed about once or twice before life is up.”
He moved his arm around, because the back of her head seemed to cut into it at an uncomfortable angle. “She get hit by a car or something?” Remembering his neighbor’s legs, how she barely moved them.
“She told me she’s agoraphobic. Stays in all the time. Lives on disability. Sad little thing.”
“Sad hefty thing. How the hell does she afford that apartment on disability?”
“That’s not nice, the hefty part. It’s her grandfather’s old apartment—he had it since the building was built in 1906. He knew the Lonsdale family, in fact, when they were designing the place. And she’s sweet, even if she is strange. She’s only thirty-four—can you believe it? It’s life that’s aged her—in that apartment, all her grandparents’ things around, antiques, and dark windows, and old shiny floors, she just sits there and collects her checks and… well, ages.
“Like a cheese left too long under glass,” he joked. “She claims she’s beloved of flies.”
Maggie was beginning to look stern; she didn’t tolerate disparaging remarks about women. “Oh, stop it. She’s had a terrible life. She worked at a grocer’s, but her back bent or something. And then she finally works up the courage to get out, into the marketplace, as it were. She went out one day, she told me, to see her mother, who’s in Brooklyn, and when she was coming up from the subway, two men took her purse and pushed her down the steps. Twenty steps, she said. She woke up in the hospital, and couldn’t move for three months. She’s only been back in her place maybe two weeks. She said she had terrible nightmares in the hospital. She’s scared of people, I think.”
“No wonder I never see her. You heard all this in the elevator?”
“You’d be amazed how much information she can fit in between the fifth and second floors.” Maggie paused and looked at the wall beside the bed. “You don’t think she can hear us, do you?”
“Not unless she has a glass to the wall. Hey,” Rob said, rapping his knuckles along the wall, “no spying.”
Somewhere beyond the wall, the sound of shattering glass.
Then, after Maggie left at eleven, he took the elevator to the basement, the weekend’s laundry in the machine, and counted quarters out. He thought he heard a noise. Figuring it was a mouse, he ignored it. There were cracks in the lower parts of the walls, right where wall met floor, all along the basement. He had seen fat roaches run into these hidey-holes when he’d flicked the laundry room lights on. Always gave him the creeps; but they’re only bugs, he told himself.
He put his quarters in the machine and switched it on. He leaned against it, listening to the gentle humming as water sprayed down on his clothes. Rob always took a book with him when he did his laundry—and he never left the room while his wash was going, because the one time he did, his clothes had been taken out in mid-cycle and left on the dusty cement floor. At some point in his reading, above the sound of the machine, he heard a series of ticks, like a loud clock ticking. Assuming the laundry had set the machine off balance, he opened it; rearranged the soaked clothing; closed the lid. But the ticking continued. He lifted the machine lid again, and while it turned off, the ticking kept going. He identified the area of ticking as one of the cracks along the wall. Then he thought it might be coming from over by the trash bin, down the hallway—sometimes the noises in the shafts echoed through the basement. He walked down the narrow, dimly lit hall, its greenish light humming as if about to extinguish from unpaid utilities, and looked around the trash.
Something was tapping from inside one of the disposal shafts. Rob hesitated at first wondering if a very large and angry rat might be inside it but the tapping continued, and seemed too steady to be a rat. He went and lifted the hatch up—
Something living, wriggling, wrapped in gauze and surgical tape, dropped. He instinctively caught it because he saw a bit of pink, like a human hand, from an undone se
ction of the gauze and he knew as he caught it that it was a baby.
3
He had the sense to call the police before he unwrapped the gauze, and was spared the sight of the dead infant.
“I think it was alive when I found it,” he said. “I felt movement. Not for very long, though.”
The officer, named Gage, shook his head. “Nope, she wasn’t alive when you found her, Mr. Arlington. She’d been dead at least a half hour.”
“I heard tapping. I think the baby was moving.”
“It wasn’t the baby,” the officer told him.
The next morning, he read about it in the Daily News.
“Must be a slow week,” he told one of his coworkers. In the paper they detailed the story: newborn baby, wrapped in gauze, skin chewed up by roaches, apartments under investigation, related to similar cases of babies left in Dumpsters and thrown down sewer drains, left in parks wrapped in old newspapers, covered with ants or flies or roaches or whatever scavenger insect had lucked into finding the fresh meat. There was his name: Rob Arlington. Advertising man. There was the building: The Lonsdale, Central Park West, where they refused to let the most famous rock stars live, even the ones who could pay the rent. It had another picture, older, of a man in his fifties, in the style of the turn of the century, a stern-looking man with a Rasputin beard and glaring eyes. The caption read: “The Original Lonsdale Scandal of 1917. Horace Grubb and his Theory of Nature.” But nothing in the brief article elaborated on this photograph.
Maggie came by that night with wine and fresh salmon. “I thought you could use some cheering up,” she said, whisking past him in the doorway with her packages. She smelled like gardenia, which he loved, and wore a bustier under a short jacket, a translucent skirt, and boots. He knew she would seduce him so that he would feel better, and he loved her for the thought.
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