In Concert

by Melanie Tem

  “Empty,” she said.

  But it was not yet empty. The sky was pale blue. The sun would very soon rise above gray and brown roofs. Light would stream between buildings and into the room. Then, the morning would be empty.

  He was aware of what was happening before she was, although they had both expected it. He saw the first ray of sunshine fall across her tangled hair and set it on fire. He saw her fingertips begin to disintegrate, and then she felt the first pain. “My dear,” he said sadly, but he did nothing to try to stop it, knowing he could not. He did not flinch or look away. For that, as long as she was aware of anything, she was grateful.

  PIT’S EDGE

  On his last night in the beloved city where he’d lived his entire adult life, Alan rode the bus from downtown to the edge of the eastern suburb where his home had always been. He used to do this all the time, while he was finishing grad school and then when he’d worked on Seventeenth Street. Some colleagues and neighbors had warned he was taking a risk. That was true, even then, but Alan had gone out of his way to scoff. Over the years it had grown increasingly difficult to pinpoint exactly where danger would be coming from.

  He didn’t know why he was riding the bus now. There was no good reason to have been downtown. It was a foolish risk. By his very presence he was daring them to get him. They would, of course. Maybe they already had. He wasn’t sure he’d know.

  For now he was permitted—or sentenced—to wander more or less at will, and to immerse himself in what had happened to his city. Terrible as it was, maybe it was better than staying at home. Yet he yearned to be at home, and was afraid of that yearning, and was also afraid to be out here.

  This is a fucked-up way to be, he thought, and considered saying it out loud. But he didn’t. He’d heard stories about how they sometimes reacted to profanity.

  The No. 10 bus still stopped across the street from his office, although the office itself, like almost every other establishment in the center of the city, was closed. His house was at the end of the line, if the route hadn’t changed. He waited, shivering, on the always-windy corner of Seventeenth and Bank Streets, nostalgic for the people who’d waited at the same bus stop, relieved that no one else was here.

  The bus was only a few minutes late. The driver nodded and offered him a pleasant enough, “Hi there. Nice evening, isn’t it?” and he looked all right, but Alan knew better than to trust his own perceptions. Early on, people were known to look and act normal, even though they’d already become monsters. That was, in fact, one of the worst aspects of this—what? Plague? Moral decay? Invasion? Alan found any metaphor unspeakably coy, but there seemed no words capable of directly naming or describing the change that had swept through the world.

  Except that it wasn’t really change at all. Things were as they had always been. Only more so.

  He hadn’t noticed anything peculiar about Nan, other than a certain edginess not unlike moods she’d put him through practically ever since they’d been married, until that night in bed when she’d nearly torn off his penis in the throes of what he’d expected to be familiar connubial passion. He shuddered at the memory, but it also aroused him. He couldn’t bring himself to think much about that, although he knew he should. Maybe he just hadn’t known her very well in the first place, his wife of nineteen years.

  Eventually he’d had to strap her down, and he still worried over whether that had been the right thing to do. She’d never tried to attack him again, but she did awful things to herself. Once she’d eaten her own right thumb. If she wasn’t monitored, she would chew great hunks out of her lips. He was far more bothered by this self-cannibalism than she seemed to be, and even Kelly seemed to regard it with a certain equanimity. Maybe he shouldn’t try to stop her. He didn’t know what to do. Certainly there was no one to consult. It didn’t seem proper for a father to ask advice in such matters from his adolescent daughter.

  The bus driver was holding out a gloved hand for the fare. That was suspicious; the procedure was simply to drop it into the fare box, unless you had or required a transfer, which Alan did not. He hesitated. In the bleeding incandescent gloom of streetlights and neon lights filtering through the big encrusted windows, he tried to be inconspicuous as he looked for a way to deposit his two quarters without coming into personal contact with the driver and also without making a scene. The driver’s brown-uniformed forearm rested across the fare box, completely obscuring the slot. He was trapped, unable to move, staring at the driver’s arm.

  Alan very nearly backed down. He began shaking his head, considered muttering “wrong bus,” and retreating down the steps. That would have taken him back into the city evening, which was full—though not nearly as full as it should have been, considering what was going on there—of screams human and inhuman and the howling of sirens whose effect was not to rescue or to relieve but to add to the general hysteria.

  He steeled himself and managed to drop the coins into the shiny cupped palm with only minimal contact. Wiping his hand on his pants, he hurried along the aisle into the tubular metal vehicle. He tried to take the measure of his fellow passengers without seeming to, because sometimes nothing more provocative than a passing glance triggered an attack.

  When this thing had been going on for a while, unfazed by legislation and neighborhood patrol groups and social reform plans however radical, the police chief had held a news conference instructing the populace on how to avoid conflict. Don’t argue over a parking space. Don’t answer back to an insult or a smart remark. If they want your money, give them your money. Whatever you do, don’t make physical contact. Don’t let them smell you. Unstated: because then they’re going to want to taste you. “Your pride isn’t worth your life,” the chief summed it up, in what Alan had at the time considered a rather catchy slogan and had repeated to his children. Now it seemed ridiculous and smug.

  Of course there was no sense in trying to outguess them. Their violence was random, impersonal, and without motive. Still, the instinct for self-preservation, surely vestigial or downright dysfunctional by now, kept working to come up with some way to keep the organism safe and its environment predictable.

  Alan took note of a stout middle-aged man sitting with big knees wide apart and taking up most of the sideways seat behind the driver which ordinarily could accommodate three people. Midway back on the other side was a woman with a preschool child; Alan particularly hated it that current circumstances made him wary even of the children. In opposite corners of the shadowy back seat, two thin young men wore earphones out of which a beat, stripped of melody, seeped loudly enough to be felt throughout the bus.

  He took the seat directly across from the back door. The sense of available escape this position afforded him was, he knew, utterly illusory, since the door would open only to the driver’s command and not to his own. He sat next to the aisle so as not to appear inviting to a potential seatmate, and found himself thinking about Kelly, who had ridden the bus to school and to work since she’d been a young teenager and had always elaborately scoffed at his paternal urgings of caution. In an ironic way, she’d turned out to be right; he never would have thought to warn her about the form the real dangers would take. Fathers needed to warn, caution, elucidate, but by now it was obvious to everyone that fathers didn’t have a clue.

  The two kids with the boom box got off at Magnolia. They didn’t stare at him or flash any arcane signs or bump into him as they swaggered past, and Alan was so grateful he trembled. Such gratitude was infuriating.

  The back door eased shut almost noiselessly, but the bus gave a great wheeze and belch as the driver shifted gears and pulled back into traffic. Both the smooth, silent motion and the loud, jarring one were unsettling.

  Thinking about Kelly produced so much anxiety that Alan could hardly bear it. That made him angry, too. He crossed his legs, crossed his arms over his chest. He should not have left her alone with her mother. Kelly was nineteen, hardly an age that should require a babysitter, and she’d always b
een more independent than he was ready for. Under ordinary circumstances, he’d have tried to dismiss his uneasiness as Nan once would have, affectionately or impatiently: He was too protective and doting for either his or Kelly’s own good. He did her no favors by teaching her to live her life in fear.

  Even tonight, under what they both knew were circumstances so far from ordinary as to be virtually incredible, Kelly had laughed at his hesitation and pushed him gently out the door. “I’ll be fine, Daddy. We’ll be fine. I know how to take care of her, and I’ve got some packing to do, and I have to wash my hair. Go.” Feeling foolish and old, Alan had turned in the doorway and kissed her, so glad there was someone left whom he could touch without fear. His daughter had patted his cheek and said lightly, “Take care, and don’t be too late or I’ll be worrying about you.”

  Alan had been touched by that, but the bittersweet pleasure of it hadn’t lasted long. He’d seen things about Kelly that he didn’t want to understand. He’d seen the way her top sometimes fell down, exposing her breasts, and how she didn’t always pull it up right away. He didn’t want to see his daughter’s breasts. He didn’t. But he didn’t dare say anything to her about it, and he was afraid to reach over himself and cover her.

  It was almost easier to think about Scott, he told himself. But it wasn’t. Scott could be out here anywhere, still his son but only because Alan insisted on it, no longer his son in any recognizable form. Scott never had had much common sense. He had always wanted to go out at night, wander around, just to see what he could see. He said it was “like, inneresting.” No matter what Alan told him about the dangers, he’d felt compelled to be out there. With them. Alan couldn’t help wondering if Scott had eventually joined them of his own free will.

  He had not seen his son since the night Scott had come home. With his new friends. By the time Alan had been willing to listen to his own misgivings, it had been very hard, cost him a great deal, to keep them out of the house and away from Nan and Kelly. Kelly had been a little insulted that he’d protected her.

  “He’s my own brother,” she’d objected. “He wouldn’t hurt me. Anyway, I can take care of myself.”

  The child in the middle seat stood up and tugged at the bell cord. Delighted by the sound he’d made, he tugged it again, and the driver frowned irritably into his mirror. Hastily the mother pulled her child into her lap. The child protested loudly. The mother hushed him, surreptitiously watching the driver. The two of them were down the steps and out the door before the bus had completely stopped. Alan saw her look over her shoulder at him, as if he might be some danger to her and her child, and that embarrassed him, hurt, angered him.

  The end of the line was at the bottom of the steep hill on the outskirts of the city. Alan was the last passenger on the bus. The driver waved but didn’t speak or smile, and Alan couldn’t see, for all his furtive glances, into the eyes that must surely be under the low-pulled cap.

  Trudging up the hill, Alan pulled the flashlight out of his briefcase, and then the gun. You couldn’t be too careful. He’d come to live by that credo. He’d always told his family that, even though he knew they never listened. “Be careful,” he’d whispered gently each night, just the same.

  Kelly would be all packed by now. She was a good girl, a good daughter. He counted on that. She always did what she said she was going to do. He neared the top of the hill. He could see the edge of the silver halo cast by the huge lights mounted evenly around the pit in order to illuminate the rim. The Manager of Public Works had insisted on that, when there had been a Manager of Public Works. Alan had never quite understood the purpose of the lights: To scare them away? To keep away the rest of the public, that other “them”? To stop the adventuresome and the careless from falling into the pit—as if falling into the pit could ever be accidental? In any case, the bright lights only made the pit itself and the darkness around it seem darker.

  Alan reached the summit and stared down the rim line of the pit to where his dilapidated little house perched on the pit’s edge like some elderly, would-be suicide. All the lights blazed inside. Kelly always liked plenty of light, especially when she was home alone with her mom. She would be done packing by now. Maybe she would be feeding Nan. He didn’t like to think about that.

  Tomorrow they would leave for his home town, a hundred miles from here. The numerous reasons he’d left still grated, and he’d had no contact with anyone there in all the years since he’d moved away, but he was hoping things might not be so bad there yet. With the bogus certainty a father can muster when speaking to his child, he’d said as much to Kelly, only he’d put it without hesitation: “We’ll be safe back home.”

  Alan meant to hurry around the rim of the pit without looking in, to reach the crumbling shack he and his family were trying to live in—but only for one more night, only for a few more hours—without having to acknowledge what lay outside it, at its very door, under the lip of its foundation. But the pit had widened and deepened again just since he’d been gone on his self-indulgent bus ride, and in order to keep from sliding in he had no choice but to look.

  It was usually the crane cranking up each morning that awakened him, diesel engines roaring to life as if the pit were spreading its jaws in a hedonistic yawn. Hardly awake, he’d stumble outside to watch. Sometimes when he stood outside his house on the edge of the pit, the crane operator waved to him: slowly, mechanically. And some mornings he almost waved back, and then he was awake enough to remember that the crane operator was one of them.

  Some of them had talents. Or a sense of routine that substituted for talent. They could be quite dependable, that way. They could be tolerated, from a distance.

  Behind him, his family would begin to stir. His wife’s jaws would crack like a snapping turtle’s, and her lips would smack. Embarrassed, he would hear Kelly coming out of sleep, lips making a wet noise like sex.

  He would force himself back into the shack as the operator started adding more bodies to the countless piled below. More body parts. Some of them still moving. Hands rising out of the piles of meat to applaud the operator’s performance, then dropping back into sleep, folded across the chest of another body, the mouth of a third. Legs idly kicking at nearby heads. Disconnected hips gyrating obscenely in time with the thrum of the engine.

  As the plague had worn on, the dead had become more difficult to kill. Not that Alan believed in death anymore, for anyone.

  “Morning, sweetheart.” He would gaze at Nan strapped to the chair. She would gaze back, opening and closing her mouth over and over. He worried that maybe it was wrong to confine her like that; she hadn’t been a danger to anyone but herself. Maybe he was imposing his own values on her. But until he could think of what else to do, he kept her like that and endured her faintly longing looks. He’d always loved her. He loved her now.

  When Alan heard the crane roar into life in the darkness, he jumped, frightened by how far into reverie he’d been. For a long moment he was disoriented, sure he was falling. It was nighttime. He hadn’t known the cranes worked at night. Things must be getting worse. Of course things were getting worse.

  The steel jaws rose into the glare of the lights, and he saw the operator: eyes shiny, mouth opening and shutting as if in mockery of the crane’s. Kelly naked astride the operator, pumping her body up and down in time with the thrum of the engine, turning to look at her father with eyes lifeless but not dead.

  The jaws of the crane rose out of darkness into obscuring brilliance once again. Alan saw the body of his wife trapped between its teeth—still thrashing, her face nearly skinless from beating against its jaws, her mouth a blur trying to eat the metal.

  Alan worked his way to the pit’s edge. He was terrified, but stronger than his terror was his determination to save one, at least one, of his family. The crane swung down. Desperately he reached up, and was just able to catch Kelly by the waist. He forced himself not to recoil from the touch of her flesh and pulled her backwards off her lover, who would destroy
her, into his own embrace. “Kelly, Kelly, don’t. What are you doing? What have you done?”

  She said, “Daddy,” and it was an endearment he could accept. She twisted in his arms to nibble obscenely and painfully at his earlobe.

  They spent the night there, at pit’s edge. Sometime during the badly illuminated hours, Alan reached the conclusion that they’d never lived anywhere else and never would. There was no point in going inside. There was no reason to travel anywhere tomorrow. The pit was growing bigger and bigger, and was constantly filling. By dawn, his daughter’s teeth on him hardly hurt anymore, and his on her were proof of his paternal love.

  IN CONCERT

  Lost…I am lost was suddenly in her mind, the words and a terrible sensation of freefall. But it was not her thought. She’d never have thought the word “freefall.” It didn’t come from inside her head. It came from very far away. Lost… That could have been her own thought—she certainly felt lost a lot of the time—but it wasn’t.

  She sat still and waited. Most of what she did at this stage of her life, because she couldn’t do anything else, was sitting still and waiting. Usually not waiting for anything in particular, just because there was nothing else to do. A thick, dull sort of waiting that stretched out and deepened time until it was just about unrecognizable. Now, space seemed to be deepened and stretched out, too, and she had the sensation of being weightless, almost formless, moving without any direction or reason, and very afraid.

  A bird was singing in the apple tree, a pattern of three notes and then four and then three again. From what had become her accustomed place on the couch, Inez Baird whistled along, whistled in call and response, as if the bird might be sending her a message or receiving a message from her. “Whistling girls and crowing hens are sure to come to some bad end,” Mama used to admonish, which had only made Inez whistle more.

  The apple tree was leafing out. It almost filled the window. The apples never had been any good—small, sour, wormy—and it was fine with her that the birds and squirrels got most of them. She’d have liked to think this bird was thanking her, but it wasn’t. It was just singing. And the I am…lost call was gone without a trace.