Act of God

by Jill Ciment

  Headlights swept through the blackness, vectoring on the open-air theater. Trucks rumbled up to the gates, next to the ticket windows. Strobes suddenly blinded the players and crew. A dozen or so men, all hooded and hermetically sealed, began ducking under the bleachers, entering the dressing rooms.

  The stage manager approached the hood giving orders, and then pointed at Vida. The hood turned to look. Vida recognized the HAZMAT chief’s face in the clear plastic window. There was no sign of the grin.

  “We’re going to need you to step into the fumigation tent,” said one of his suited squad, a woman.

  Outside the theater, between the four-thousand-watt searchlights and the cordoned-off curious crowd, Vida felt as if she were at a premiere, in her bra and panties. Some of the onlookers recognized her, and not as Queen Goneril. People began aiming their smartphones at her, taking pictures and shooting videos.

  The fumigation tent, lined with showerheads, resembled a car wash.

  Without removing her hood, the woman asked Vida to undress, then sealed Vida’s bra and panties in a biohazard bag. Vida then stepped into the shower area; ten jets sprayed her from all directions. The woman asked her to hold up her arms and then scrubbed Vida raw with what felt like an industrial-sized push broom. Before Vida was allowed to towel off, the woman coated Vida with chemical-smelling talc from what looked like a fire extinguisher. Still naked, Vida was led to a water fountain that squirted her in the eye. Afterward, the woman had Vida look up and administered drops.

  “You’re fumigating my eyes?”

  “It’s perfectly safe.”

  Vida’s fingernails and toenails, underneath and around the cuticles, were swabbed with a Q-tip that smelled of bleach.

  “Should I see my doctor?” Vida asked, as the woman used another Q-tip to disinfect the whorls of Vida’s ears.

  “Do you have symptoms?”

  “What should I be looking for?”

  “Headaches, nosebleeds, fatigue, trouble breathing, coughing up blood, hair loss, rashes, swollen glands, memory loss, vomiting.”

  Vida involuntarily touched her neck glands. Were they swollen? She couldn’t remember what size her neck glands normally were. Her arms smoldered and itched, but she saw no rash. Nausea fisted in her stomach. Was she about to vomit? If she didn’t have a headache before, she had one now.

  The woman issued Vida an orange jumpsuit, the kind worn by prisoners, and a pair of plastic clogs. When she emerged from the tent, all the other cast and crew sported orange jumpsuits too.

  “The theater’s being closed,” announced the stage manager.

  “How are we supposed to get home?” asked Regan. “All our money and credit cards are sealed in biohazard bags.”

  “Everyone will be issued Red Cross debit cards,” explained the stage manager.

  “What about our house keys?”

  “Can’t the doorman let you in?”

  “I don’t have a doorman,” said Gloucester.

  “You can’t call a neighbor?”

  “All our neighbors’ numbers are in our confiscated phones.”

  “You’ll have to call a locksmith,” answered the exasperated manager.

  “With what?”

  Outside the park, traffic moved a block an hour. No cabs were available in any case. The subways were paralyzed. At the station entrances, bodies poured out of the stifling black underworld. Vida joined a sweaty herd pressing downtown. Here and there, a cold fluorescent street lamp blinked eerily above. Someone lit a cigarette.

  “Put that out!” a flurry of voices shouted.

  “You going to arrest me?” the smoker taunted. “It’s a blackout. I’m going to smoke a goddamn cigarette in my own city if I damn well please. Fuck the mayor!”

  Match flares, distant campfires in the dark night, sparked up here and there as smokers lit up.

  By the time Vida reached Brooklyn, her new plastic clogs had given her what felt like trench foot. Was that one of the symptoms?

  A red dot, the glass tower’s emergency light, guided her toward the entrance. She blindly climbed the stairwell to the second floor, found the right door by counting knobs. Despite fatigue, she didn’t go straight to bed. By touch, she opened every closet in Sam’s apartment, anyplace she might have kept those infested pants, hunting for the phosphorescent spores. The unbroken blackness became the most beautiful color she could imagine.

  A relentless bell woke her the next morning. The intercom was trilling. All the clocks in Sam’s apartment blinked noon. The electricity was back on. Naked and half asleep, she answered the intercom.

  “This is Jerzy from the front desk. Management is asking everyone to evacuate. The fire department is on its way.”

  Where’s the fire? she was about to ask when the truth slapped her.

  “Some kind of toxic mold has been found in the trash bins,” said the doorman.

  She put on last night’s orange jumpsuit and plastic clogs, proof she’d already been decontaminated, hoping against hope she’d be spared the showers. Anything but. She was scrubbed, fumigated, and issued a new orange jumpsuit and another hundred-dollar Red Cross debit card. After she dressed, she was led into a second tent for a chest X-ray and then asked to wait on a folding chair.

  A HAZMAT official dressed in a soupy shirt and loose tie opened a city map and had Vida show him the exact route she had taken on the previous night.

  “Did you stop anywhere along the way? You came straight here?”

  “Yes.”

  Holding his phone so that she could see the screen, he showed her a picture of a gray bundle (by color or dirt, she couldn’t tell) and asked if the pantsuit was hers.

  “No.”

  “This pantsuit has never been to the Delacorte Theater?”

  “Not on me. Maybe it belonged to someone in the audience.”

  “You own 66 Berry Street in Brooklyn? Your tenants are Edith and Katherine Glasser?”

  “One of the sisters is dead.”

  “Do you have a current address for Katherine Glasser?”

  He hadn’t bothered to ask her which sister had died: he already knew.

  “Did you move your belongings directly from 66 Berry Street here? Where are those belongings now?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “Nowhere else?”

  “There’s nothing left.”

  Finally released, Vida walked past police sawhorses, corralling scared, angry neighbors whose houses stood in the infested tower’s shadow.

  “What are you doing to protect our homes?” a man’s baritone boomed over the grumbling.

  “I warned you people last year about the infested Chinese drywall,” someone else shouted.

  “It’s because of the old oil spill,” a third joined in. “The mutant seeds grew in the petroleum.”

  “Yeah,” the baritone boomed again. “The flooding from Sandy just brought them to life.”

  With her newly issued Red Cross card, Vida went to buy a prepaid cell phone with a thousand minutes. At the electronics store, she borrowed scissors from the cashier to cut the phone free from its packaging, but when she turned it on, nothing happened.

  “You need to go home and charge the battery,” explained the saleswoman.

  The last time Vida had seen her home the tent was still up. Nothing bandaged it today. Her beautiful turn-of-the-century row house was now ash black and glassless, a coal miner’s face without eyes. In the empty sockets, sunlight crisscrossed the interior, soot swirling skyward, like cigarette smoke in a nightclub’s spotlight. She walked up the stoop, her plastic clogs leaving footprints in the ash. All that remained of the hundred-year-old front door with its original glass oval was a charred doorknob at her feet. She couldn’t step inside. The foyer floor was gone. She looked up to where her roof once was. All that was left were joists, the ceiling bars of a cage.

  Yet she felt oddly free, as if she’d escaped. Had the house been that much of a responsibility? Why didn’t she feel worse? She took her emotional
temperature. It was a little above normal, but that was always true the morning after a great performance, and last night’s was definitely one of her best. The intensity of losing her home had heightened her creativity. Up until the moment the electricity went out, she had only been pretending to be a queen who had lost everything. But in that first panic after the darkness, she understood. Loss was far more complicated than the embittered defeat her performance was exhibiting. For the remainder of the play, her ruthless queen also had the insight of compassion.

  The stage manager had promised to try to get the production moved to Prospect Park. If she still had her work, if she still had the possibility of matching—maybe even surpassing—last night’s performance, she could get through anything, even this.

  In a nearby coffee shop, she plugged in and dialed Virginia to see if the stage manager had called.

  “I guess you already know,” Virginia said when she heard Vida’s voice.

  “Know what?”

  “You haven’t seen it? The YouTube starring you? Some iPhone auteur filmed you in your bra and underwear being led into a decontamination tent by a guy dressed as if he’s about to clean up Fukushima’s Reactor 3. That’s only the half of it. The footage is intercut with clips from your commercial. I got a call from Ziberax’s attorney this morning. Pfizer is considering pulling the ad if the video goes viral. I’m sorry, Vida, I’ll do what I can.”

  She sat down at a dirty table—milky dregs in a coffee cup and an untouched scone. She ate the scone. She hadn’t eaten since yesterday.

  At the next table, a slow game of solitaire played on an iPad. She asked the tablet’s owner, an unshaven young man masticating a blueberry muffin, if she could borrow it, just for a moment. He stared at her orange prison jumpsuit and then suspiciously handed it over.

  The YouTube clip opened with scenes from her commercial—the lovely beach house, her character’s brittle responses to her playful husband, the doctor visit, the post-coitus close-up, intercut with handheld footage of her, practically naked. A rubber-suited, respirator-clad escort led her into a decontamination tent marked with biohazard, radioactive, and infectious disease symbols. Vida had never before seen herself on film when she hadn’t been acting—even in home movies, she acted. The real Vida looked very much like her childhood self—wide-eyed, gap-mouthed.

  A male voiceover began: “Ziberax side effects may include radioactive urine, transmittable pustules on or near the labia, swelling and peeling of the tongue, bloody saliva, blistered nipples, toxic breath, glowing discharge, and vaginal fungus.”

  There were now over a million hits.

  Just like last time, Kat grabbed the irreplaceable letters and clutched them to her chest after the respirator-clad HAZMAT man gave her and Ashley five minutes to evacuate the penthouse. She would love to have saved Edith’s pantsuit as well, but Ashley had thrown it down the garbage chute last night. She could hear drawers and cupboards banging in the other rooms as Ashley stuffed her pillowcase with everything she could cram inside—the model apartment’s dinner plates, napkins, napkin rings, the tablecloth, the candleholder, a vase, and the faux laptop.

  Yesterday evening, when Kat had finally emerged from the life-restoring hot bath, she’d found Ashley in the dark living room, transfixed by the window, unaware of her presence. The puzzling girl stood haloed in the city’s afterglow, tiny and vulnerable against the pulsing skyline. Kat had sensed that Ashley had taken her in as much for the company as the money. She had to be a lonely but very brave girl, thought Kat. She’d come all by herself to America to be enchanted by those lights. Kat couldn’t help but remember her own younger self, a girl hankering after glory. Then the city went abruptly black.

  This morning, clutching the letters, she tried to get Ashley to evacuate, but the stubborn girl wouldn’t leave until her pillowcase was as lumpy and heavy as a sack of potatoes.

  Just when she thought she might have to drag her out, Ashley jammed one last towel into her distended sack and followed Kat down the thirty flights of service stairs with the other fleeing residents. The elevator had been shut off. On the ground floor, Kat turned to join the lines of stunned evacuees waiting to be decontaminated, while Ashley continued down to the basement exit. Kat followed her for a few steps, pleading with her to reconsider. “Ashley, if Edith had been properly decontaminated, she might be alive today.”

  “I be alive, but in Omsk.”

  “I’ll tell them you’re my niece.”

  “Who believe homeless woman. I keep stuff.”

  “No possession is worth dying over.”

  “You think Chernobyl cleanup guys let you keep old letters? No way. They burn Mama’s book, then push you in chemical shower. Even false teeth brushed with bleach.”

  Kat handed Ashley the letters. “Don’t let anything happen to them, please,” she said, wondering if she’d ever see them again. “Where will we meet?”

  “I find you.”

  Outside the lobby, a pop-up containment zone with two orange double-garage-sized decontamination tents blocked the street, one for men and one for women. The number of HAZMAT trucks and teams had quadrupled since Mr. Syzmanski’s building was evacuated only three days ago. Kat got into the women’s line.

  She was stripped and scrubbed down by a tired nurse. The nurse must have washed at least the four dozen women before her.

  “I think you missed a spot on my back,” Kat said, reaching behind to direct her. “This is my second evacuation in two weeks. Last time, no one bothered to decontaminate me or my sister, and now she’s dead.”

  “Where did you live before?”

  “Sixty-Six Berry Street.”

  “Your name?”

  “Katherine Glasser.”

  After she was sprayed, swabbed, and X-rayed, the nurse issued her an orange jumpsuit and told her to dress and wait there. Ten minutes passed before a man in a crumpled, sweat-soaked shirt and unknotted tie holding a crisp manila folder appeared, more than enough time to read a chest X-ray.

  “Did you see anything on the X-ray?” Kat asked, assuming the film was in hand.

  “Sorry, I’m a doctor of public health, not a radiologist,” he said.

  “Am I going to die? This is my second exposure to the mold. Did my sister die of mushroom poisoning, and is it just taking longer to kill me?”

  “Your sister was Edith Glasser? You lived at 66 Berry Street?”

  “I already told the nurse where we lived. When do I get my questions answered?”

  “Your sister died of an ischemic stroke from a pulmonary embolism most likely caused by fungal pneumonia.”

  “But she didn’t have any symptoms.”

  “Sometimes people don’t.”

  Kat involuntarily clutched her chest in anguish over Edith’s suffering, and in terror that her brain might flood any minute, too. The man assured Kat that if the radiologist had seen any sign of fungal pneumonia, let alone an embolism, she’d already be in an ambulance on her way to the hospital.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He angled his smartphone so that Kat could see the picture on his screen, a gray heap of mildew, a fistful of mushrooms punching a hole out.

  “Is the pantsuit yours?”

  “Yes. No. It might be my sister’s.”

  “Where are the rest of her belongings now?”

  “The Metropolitan Hotel is holding her suitcase for me.”

  “I’m sorry to tell you this, but the Metropolitan and everything in it is scheduled to be burned tomorrow. Do you know how your sister’s pantsuit wound up in this building’s basement?”

  “My niece threw it down the trash chute.”

  “Are your belongings still in your niece’s apartment?”

  “What belongings? I’ve lost everything.”

  Kat sat on a bench by the river. She no longer owned a watch, but she knew she’d been waiting more than two hours for Ashley to find her. The sun was now a pillar of flame between two distant skyscrapers. Just as she started
to panic that Ashley had disappeared with the letters, she heard a thick Russian accent say, “Orange for sure not your color.”

  Clad in a new stolen dress, Ashley stood by the railing, the letters safe in her hands. “Surprised see me?”

  “Just happy you found me. Oh, Ashley, you were so right. The letters would have been confiscated and destroyed.” With gratitude, she opened her hands for Ashley to give her the binder, but Ashley threatened to drop the letters into the racing current.

  “I swap for Red Cross gift card.”

  “You think I wasn’t going to share the money with you?”

  “Yeah, for sure.”

  “Yes, I would have,” Kat said, and she meant it.

  “You think two live on hundred dollars? How long?”

  “We could help each other.”

  “BlackBerry, too.”

  “Why are you doing this? I thought we were friends.”

  Ashley jiggled the letters over the railing until Kat gave her the card. To prove to Ashley that she no longer had Edith’s phone, she turned her jumpsuit pockets inside out.

  “I have nothing left of Edith’s but that book.” She held out her empty hands again. She couldn’t accept that Ashley didn’t possess a penny’s worth of compassion. “Please.”

  The heaviness of those letters as Ashley dropped them into her grasp, a weight the editor had found too much, was the most comforting burden Kat had ever held.

  After Ashley left without so much as a good-bye, Kat watched the last spokes of daylight roll behind the skyline. She had only wanted to take the lost girl with her to the emergency shelter. One had been opened in a nearby school gymnasium for the growing number of evacuees. But now that she had the letters, she worried they’d be taken from her. No one was allowed to bring any personal items to the shelter—not clothes, not photographs, not even a toothbrush.

  She knocked on Gladys’s van window, hoping to leave the letters with her. The noise startled the poor woman and she abruptly sat up, once again trying to comprehend where in the world she was. Kat glanced over at the vinyl console. A lipstick tube and a can of aerosol deodorant shared the cup holder. The floor was thick with cats.