The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005

by Laura Furman

  Luka saw the same faces behind the coffee-shop window every day. “HUNDREDS EXPOSED TO VIRUS IN TOKYO. NEW EPICENTERS DISCOVERED IN JOHANNESBURG, COPENHAGEN, PERTH.” Ellison Brown, who prepared the baked desserts in the kitchen, always waited for Luka to leave before he glanced at the headlines. His wife had been a poet of the type who liked to loom nearby with a fretful look on her face while he read whatever she had written that day, and there was nothing that bothered him more than feeling that he was being watched. “INCUBATION PERIOD LESS THAN FIVE HOURS. EXPOSURE AT NOON, MORTALITY AT MIDNIGHT.” Charlotte Sylvain would sip at her coffee as she scanned the paper for any mention of Paris. She still considered the city her hometown, though she had not been there in fifty years. Once, she saw the word “Seine” printed in the first paragraph of an article and her fingers tightened involuntarily around the page, but it was only a misprint of the word “sienna,” and she would never see her home again. “VIRUS BECOMES AIRBORNE, WATERBORNE. TWO BILLION DEAD IN ASIA AND EASTERN EUROPE.” Mie Matsuda Ryu was an enthusiast of word games. She liked to read the Sims Sheet twice every morning, once for content and once for any hidden patterns she could find—palindromes, anagrams, the letters of her own name scrambled inside other words. She never failed to spot them. “‘TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR BUG’ CROSSES ATLANTIC. FATALITY RATE NEARING ONE HUNDRED PERCENT.”

  The people who went knocking on the doors of the city began to notice something unusual. The evangelists and traveling salesmen, the petitioners and census takers, they all said the same thing: the numbers of the dead were shrinking. There were empty rooms in empty buildings that had been churning with bodies just a few weeks before. The streets were not so crowded anymore. It was not that people were no longer dying. In fact, there were more people dying than ever. They arrived by the thousands and the hundreds of thousands, every minute of every hour, whole houses and schools and neighborhoods of them. But, for every person who made it through the crossing, two or three seemed to disappear. Russell Henley, who sold brooms that he lashed together from cedar branches and hanks of plastic fiber, said that the city was like a pan with a hole in it. “No matter how much water you let in, it keeps pouring right through.” He ran a stall in the monument district, where he assembled his brooms, marketing them to the passing crowds, which barely numbered in the low hundreds these days. If the only life they had was bestowed upon them by the memories of the living, as Russell was inclined to believe, what would happen when the rest of the living were gathered into the city? What would happen, he wondered, when that other room, the larger world, had been emptied out?

  Unquestionably, the city was changing. People who had perished in the epidemic came and went very quickly, sometimes in a matter of hours, like a midspring snow that blankets the ground at night and melts away as soon as the sun comes up. A man arrived in the pine district one morning, found an empty storefront, painted a sign in the window with colored soap (“SHERMAN'S CLOCK REPAIR. FAST AND EASY. OPENING SOON”),then locked the door and shuffled away and never returned. Another man told the woman he had stayed the night with that he was going to the kitchen for a glass of water, and when she called to him a few minutes later he did not answer. She searched the apartment for him—the window beside her dressing table was open, as though he had climbed out onto the balcony— but he was nowhere to be found. The entire population of a small Pacific island appeared in the city on a bright windy afternoon, congregated on the top level of a parking garage, and was gone by the end of the day.

  But it was the people who had been in the city the longest who most felt the changes. While none of them knew—or had ever known—how much time they had in the city, or when that time would come to an end, there had usually been a rhythm to their tenure, certain things a person could expect: after finishing the crossing, you found a home and a job and a company of friends, ran out six or seven decades, and while you could not raise a family, for no one aged, you could always assemble one around you.

  Mariama Ekwensi, for one, had made her home on the ground floor of a small house in the white clay district for almost thirty years. She was a tall, rangy woman who had never lost the bearing of the adolescent girl she had once been, so dazed and bewildered by her own growth. The batik cotton dresses she wore were the color of the sun in a child's drawing, and her neighbors could always spot her coming from several blocks away. Mariama was a caretaker at one of the city's many orphanages. She thought of herself as a good teacher but a poor disciplinarian, and it was true that she often had to leave her children under the watch of another adult in order to chase after one who had taken off running. She read to the smaller children, books about long voyages, or about animals who changed shape, and she took the older ones to parks and museums and helped them with their homework. Many of them were badly behaved, with vocabularies that truly made her blush, but she found such problems beyond her talents. Even when she pretended to be angry with the children, they were clever enough to see that she still liked them. This was her predicament. There was one boy in particular, Philip Walker, who would light out toward the shopping district every chance he got. He seemed to think it was funny to hear her running along behind him, huffing and pounding away, and she never caught up with him until he had collapsed onto a stoop or a bench somewhere, gasping with laughter. One day, she followed him around a corner and chased him into an alley and did not come out the other end. Philip returned to the orphanage half an hour later. He could not say where she had gone.

  Ville Tolvanen shot pool every night at the bar on the corner of Eighth and Vine. The friends he had at the bar were the same friends he had known when he was alive. There was something they used to say to each other when they went out drinking in Oulu, a sort of song they used to sing: “I’ll meet you when I die/At that bar on the corner of Eighth and Vine.” One by one, then, as they passed away, they found their way to the corner of Eighth and Vine, walked gingerly, skeptically, through the doors of the bar, and caught sight of one another by the pool tables, until gradually they were all reassembled. Ville was the last of the group to die, and finding his friends there at the bar felt almost as sweet to him as it had when he was young. He clutched their arms and they clapped him on the back. He insisted on buying them drinks. “Never again,” he told them. And though he could not finish the sentence, they all knew what he meant. He was grinning to keep his eyes from watering over, and someone tossed a peanut shell at him, and he tossed one back, and soon the floor was so covered with the things that it crunched no matter where they put their feet. For months after he died, Ville never missed a single night at the tables—and so when he failed to appear one night his friends went out looking for him. They headed straight for the room he had taken over the hardware store down the street, where they used their fists to bang on the door and then dislodged the lock with the sharp edge of a few playing cards. Ville's shoes were inside, and his wristwatch, and his jacket, but he was not.

  Ethan Hass, the virologist, drank not in the bars but from a small metal flask that he carried on his belt like a Boy Scout canteen. He had been watching the developments in his field for thirty years before he died, reading the journals and listening to the gossip at the conventions, and it sometimes seemed to him that every government, every interest group, every faction in the world was casting around for the same thing, a perfect virus, one that followed every imaginable vector, that would spread through the population like the expanding ring of a raindrop in a puddle. It was clear to him now that somebody had finally succeeded in manufacturing it. But how on earth had it been introduced? He couldn’t figure it out. The reports from the recently dead were too few, and they were never precise enough. One day, he locked himself in the bathroom of the High Street

  Art Museum and began to cry, insistently, sobbing out something about the air and the water and the food supply. A security guard was summoned. “Calm down, guy. There's plenty of air and water for you out here. How about you just open the door for us?” The guard used his slowest
, most soothing voice, but Ethan only shouted, “Everybody! Everything!” and turned on the faucets of the sinks, one by one. He would not say anything else, and when the guard forced the door open a few minutes later he was gone.

  It was as though a gate had been opened, or a wall thrown down, and the city was finally releasing its dead. They set out from its borders in their multitudes, and soon the parks, the bars, the shopping centers were all but empty.

  One day, not long after the last of the restaurants had closed its doors, the blind man was standing on the steps of the church, waiting for someone who would listen to his story. No one had passed him all day long, and he was beginning to wonder if the end had come once and for all. Perhaps it had happened while he was sleeping, or during the half minute early that morning when he had thought he smelled burning honey. He heard a few car horns honking from different quarters of the city, and then, some twenty minutes later, the squealing of a subway train as its brakes gripped the tracks, and then nothing but the wind aspirating between the buildings, lingering, and finally falling still. He listened hard for a voice or a footstep, but he could not make out a single human sound.

  He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Hello?” he shouted. “Hello?” But no one answered.

  He experienced an unusual misgiving. He brought his hand to his chest. He was afraid that the heartbeat he heard was his own.

  Michael Parker

  The Golden Era of Heartbreak

  from The Oxford American

  AFTER SHE left, the town where we lived grew flat as an envelope. Sound carried: the song of a truck driver showering five miles east. Nothing could block his dirge. Long-distance misery leaking across the fields while he scrubbed away the road grime. He, too, had come home to a top drawer cleared of underwear.

  I could hear him night and day, asking her forgiveness, beg your pardon, baby, for the times that she’d arrived home to find him gone. I knew from the rising strings that she’d never come back, that he would never get clean. Those strings: sweet Nelson Riddle arrangements, country meringue from the ’50s. Pinnacle of lovelorn lament. Fine time for misery.

  My house filled to the eaves with this song. Moths waved in the soaring orchestration. They dusted the lampshades with it, painted the medicine-cabinet mirror. Up half the night trying not to listen, I reverted to an opinion I had given up forty years earlier, along about kindergarten: globes were wobbly lies. The earth was flat as the muted-by-miles-of-not-much-of-nothing notes of the trucker's song. Nowhere to hide and no escape, just sleep for the lucky and, for me, punishing runs.

  After she left, I ran hundreds of miles along those low-shouldered roads. It got to where Mexican migrants would stop work to bring me a cucumber when I slashed past in the lethal early afternoon heat. Then the hospital, where they gave me medicine that turned me into a loaf of bread. The cheerful foreign doc asked me what year it was and I told him pointedly— I mean to say that I got up in his face so close that his pocked scars from a wicked case of acne were craters on a magnified moon—that the major daily of our Nations capital was contaminated because she had scoured its ads in want, want, want—I always got stuck on that word. I said to the doc, Her want spreads spores like anthrax. Say anthrax in one of those places. Is it an irony that registers on anyone but the inmate that you’re in there for behavior interpreted as less than rational, but when you say something crazy—which in that situation seems to me the norm—they shoot you full of more breadloaf ? Though I confess I ate the ruffled paper cup that held my pills. I confess I’d have done anything to keep from returning to an earth leveled by her leaving.

  She’d been gone for a year and a half and I had not heard word one. I knew where she had alighted and with whom, but had no street address, no lover's last name. Just major metropolitan area with this Rick she met at a conference. Work-related: how I hate having first scoured the want ads that brought us here to this town.

  “You could just as easily hate the conference where she met him,” said my sister when I complained about having helped Fran find the job. That was when I was still fool enough to commiserate with family members and worlds-at-large. Back before, one by one, they all turned on me. Went from suggesting acupuncture to signing me up for some extended-stay hospital. People have no sympathy for the brokenhearted because it's what they fear the most. They pretend it's as minor and obligatory as having your wisdom teeth pulled, getting your heart ripped from your chest, having feral mutts tug-a-war the bloody organ in your kitchen while you lean white-veined against the rusty refrigerator, drowning in schmaltzy string arrangements.

  So I had no one—only the Mexican migrants who offered cucumbers and water from the bossman's cooler and must have recognized in my desperate stride a fellow alien. The only person I got around to trading words with was the laconic, chain-smoking Deb—or so her name tag read—who worked at the market where I purchased my few provisions. It was a sticky-floored, dirty-ceilinged store which Fran had favored over the chain grocery because after the dogwoods bloomed Deb and her coworkers would take out the magazines in aisle seven and stock it with chilis and tortillas and even Spanish videos for the migrants.

  One night I drove over to pick up my stock groceries: Band-Aids, ginger ale, Saltines, bulk raisins, chicken broth, and white rice. I could live off this list for weeks at a time. And had been doing so, and the pounds sweated away in the eighteen-mile runs, and there weren’t that many to leave puddling the road in the first place and so many times in the days after she left I would not have been able to tell you the correct use for, never even mind the name of, a fork.

  “Give me one of those Pick Ten tickets,” I said when I had my groceries all lined up on the belt. Deb wasn’t there that night. In her place was a high-school boy. His head was chubby and dripping with red-blond lanks. Used to be, in a town like this you got beat up for wearing your hair long. Now the ones doing the beating are the only ones with their ears covered.

  “You don’t want one of them,” said the boy.

  So maybe he said want when he meant need—a mistake so many make. I had never been expert at figuring out what I needed until Fran left. Then I knew: I needed her. I needed her groaning first thing in the morning when I set the alarm to the local gospel station and our day began with a mass choir filling even the shoe-strewn closet bottoms with sonic interpretations of the word Jesus. Her tireless interest in the narrative of how we happened to find each other—that miracle recounted, with much attention paid to the extraordinary odds of it happening in this maddeningly flat world—how could I not need that? Each time she asked for it I felt as if I were narrating Genesis. How humans came sweet and innocent up from the earth. I believed I breathed and ate and performed reasonably well at one activity or the other before we met, but in telling that story over and again, in having it received with such lusty anticipation, I came to believe that my life started the moment I met her, the moment we laid waste to those insurmountable odds.

  Odds are terrifying if you let yourself obsess over them. In the case of the Pick Ten lottery, I was not interested in the odds. It was a spontaneous thing, asking the cashier for a ticket. I had never once wasted money on such. But I did not care for being refused. I especially disliked being rejected by this boy whose sullen mannerisms implied that the wonder I had known with Fran was nothing more than some sappy song he’d scowl at while scanning radio stations. I believe I did nothing more than push his doughy chest with my fingers. I remember still the squishiness I encountered where I was expecting breastbone. Surely I was as shocked as he was.

  “Hole up,” he said. Then: “Dude, what the hell?”

  I held out a bill—a twenty, for which he made loud change. He was talking all the while, nervous jumble of words, “What the hell man I was just trying to help….”

  Out in the parking lot I was afflicted by my own nervous jumble of words. “Oh, help, right, you were trying to help.” Now I am squatting beside my car in a dark, rain-steamy parking lot, tapping my f
orehead against the front quarter panel of the old rusty Nissan we bought together, repeating with the zeal of the clock-radio choir these words: I cannot do this can’t do it don’t want to do this without you.

  I don’t know for how long: until my nose smashed against the metal and my face went funny-bone numb and I was dropped in a dusty dodge-ball field back of my grade school, lying in the infield inhaling the rubber of the ball that hit me and repeating that strange-to-me-then word I remembered seeing printed across the ball. Voit. Voit.

  “What’d he say?” The voice was nasally but curious. Another voice answered, lower but seemingly female and black.

  “Boat? Damn if I know.”

  “He can’t do it without his boat,” said the nasal-voiced man. “Now what do you think he can’t accomplish without his boat?”

  “Voit,” I said—indignantly—and was answered this time with a rib kick. I hit the pavement then. To feign what? Fear? Death? There was nothing left for me to fake. I knew then that since she left I’d faked everything. Or maybe the opposite was true; maybe I did not know emotion until it up and crawled in bed with me right along the same time she up and crawled in bed with her Rick.