by Jill Ciment
“Gladys, they’ve finally opened an emergency shelter. That’s where I’m headed now. Come with me. We’ll have showers and a hot meal and clean sheets. Maybe we’ll finally find out what the city has planned for us. There must be hundreds of us mold refugees by now. The mayor must have a strategy. You can’t stay here.”
“I already asked. It’s a no-pet shelter. I can’t just leave my cats. They’ll be scared at night without me.”
“Why don’t I keep you company until the cats fall asleep and maybe you’ll change your mind,” Kat said, climbing into the passenger seat.
“My babies are good company but it’s nice to talk to a person for a change. Can I get you something to drink? I have Diet Coke,” Gladys said, opening an ice chest behind her in the van’s rear.
Kat thirstily drank the saccharine brown effervescence while Gladys fixed her a lunch meat sandwich, with a swipe of mustard. While Kat ate, Gladys picked up the binder and leafed through the pages.
“Are these the letters Edith always talked about? She told me they were off to the Smithsonian. Edith was so smart and accomplished, just like your mother. You could always count on her for good advice.” She looked beseechingly at Kat as if Kat might miraculously transfigure into her sister. “Things are getting very tense back there. George can’t bear the sight of Mona anymore. They don’t stop fighting. I don’t know what to do?”
It took Kat a second to realize that Gladys was asking about her cats.
“Maybe you could blindfold them?”
“I could try. I could use those cones cats wear after surgery. At least they wouldn’t have to look at each other all the time.”
Kat tilted her head back against the pillowed headrest and struggled to stay awake to listen to the rest of Gladys’s feline soap opera. She must have momentarily dozed off, because when she next opened her eyes, infinitesimal diamonds of light, Las Vegas as seen through an airplane window on a cloudless night, scintillated on the console where Gladys had put the letters before falling asleep herself. The binder was sparkling, as if a schoolgirl had adorned it with glitter. She opened the cover. The paper was alive with spores. She almost flung open the door to hurl the book into the night, but all that would have accomplished would be to spread more spores and set loose the cats. Gladys would wake up alone. She knew what had to be done.
Taking Gladys’s lighter and the manuscript, she quietly slipped outside and walked until she found an ash-blackened oil drum under the expressway.
After three or four tries with the lighter, the archival plastic sleeves began to melt while the acrid smoke crept and curled underneath the bubbling transparencies, blackening the half-century-old lunch counter placemat and the Plaza stationery, the brown bag and the length of toilet paper. Sparks popped and sizzled until the binder finally exploded into a bluish flame. The flame answered all the questions. Will I find love again? Why did she lie to me? How could my husband sleep with my sister? Am I lovable?
She could stand to think that life’s experiences, good and bad, died with the body, but she couldn’t bear to believe that dreams vanished too, those exquisite flights of reverie that never actually happened. All those experiences you can have for free. How could they burn and turn to ash? She would disappear one day, too, both her flesh and the woman she dreamed herself to be.
Without Edith, she had to accept the strangeness and solitude of existence.
Kat returned to the van to make sure that Gladys didn’t wake up alone and disoriented. She gently stirred the befuddled woman awake. “It’s time to go to the Red Cross shelter, Gladys.”
“What about my cats?”
“They’ll be thrilled to have the van all to themselves for a change. You need some human company.”
“You think?”
“I know.”
It’s not every day that you’re needed.
She and Gladys had to pass by their old block, bad enough with the blighted row houses, but now the trees were winter-bare, the sidewalk ankle deep in leaves though fall was still two weeks away. Looking up at the normally verdant elm that had shaded her stoop for a century, Gladys said, “I guess a tree can no longer grow in Brooklyn.”
A guard let them into the school while a volunteer, wielding a flashlight, guided them through a basketball court lined with cots. Her beam landed on two empty ones. Gladys, who hadn’t slept in a bed for days, immediately sank into snoring, but not Kat. She looked around the encampment. Blanketed bodies tossed and twisted in the reddish glow of exit lights. She recognized many of her neighbors sleeping in donated pajamas—the Syzmanskis, Marty the plumber from next door, but not Frank. What could they be dreaming about? Over the snores, she heard someone, Marty she thought, keening in his sleep. His mother had died shortly after Edith.
That night, for the first time since Edith died, she was waiting for Kat in sleep’s foyer.
“I have so much to tell you,” Kat said.
After not having so much as a kopeck in her pocket ever since she came to this country, the hundred-dollar card and the bulging pillowcase seemed like a fortune to Anushka Sokolov, but Ashley knew better. Without the names and addresses from hen’s Rolodex—long gone—she had no idea where to go. Even in her panic, she was tempted to buy something pretty in one of the shop windows, or if she couldn’t afford pretty, sugary. In cafés, rich young Americans dressed up in pretend rags and slurped frothy iced coffees. She noticed bowls of ice water set out for the dogs. She was thirsty. Was she supposed to get down on her hands and knees and lick from a bowl? She passed a window display of petrified noodles and fish, a shop that only sold lamps made from pop bottles and hangers, a juice bar that served liquid wheat, a store that sold hundred-year-old peasant furniture for thousands of dollars, an organic ice cream truck serving scoops the size of winter cabbages. A bicyclist, juggling a cell phone and a triple scoop, nearly pedaled into Ashley. His three chocolate balls splattered on the sidewalk. Good! Why does he get ice cream and not her?
She passed the long night riding subways, the gift card deep in her pocket, the pillowcase locked between her knees. By midnight, the commuters had thinned out. On her third round-trip to Brighton Beach, she had a car all to herself except for a middle-aged couple and a widow-peaked young wolverine in white slacks so tight and revealing, he looked like he wore sausage skins. Closing her eyes, she pretended she was in a first-class train compartment on her way to Hollywood or Las Vegas, rather than in a dirty boxcar burrowing under Brooklyn.
“Knock, knock, can I enter your daydream?” he asked. His English was thick and syrupy. He had a Muscovite accent.
“Het,” answered Anushka.
“Where did an American girl like you learn Russian?”
Each syllable chimed in her ears with startling clarity. She hadn’t heard a word of Russian, let alone a whole sentence, since arriving in this country noisy with growls, hoots, yowling, caws, hisses, and brays. At last, a human voice!
“I’m from Omsk,” she said.
“Omsk?! My mama’s from Omsk! I knew you were too pretty to be from Brooklyn … a little Siberian raven. What street did you live on? Where did you go to school?”
Anushka told him.
“That’s the same neighborhood my mama grew up in! She’ll want to meet you. I bet she knows your mama. What brings you to America?”
After two months of jury-rigged, lonesome English, the exquisite unthinking headiness of speaking Russian was like a shot of truth serum. Anushka couldn’t stop talking, even when Ashley told her to shut up. Anushka told the wolverine how she’d come to New York to be an au pair for a theater agent’s little boy, but was treated like a slave. Her employer hid spy cameras in the baby’s toys and then threw Anushka out on the street with no money. She temporarily became an actress’s roommate, but the actress kept her apartment so dirty that mushrooms grew in the closets.
“You’re safe now,” said the wolverine. “My mama will take care of you. She makes the best pierogies in Brighton Beach.”
> He reached into his sausage-tight pants pocket, removed a business card from his thick wallet, and wrote down his mother’s address. The card was in Russian and English, embossed gold letters on slick white stock. He was in the import-export trade. Though the hour was four a.m., he told her he had to hop off at the next station to meet a business acquaintance—his deals ran on Moscow time—but afterward, he would meet Anushka at his mother’s.
After he left, Anushka slipped his mother’s address into her pocket to keep safe beside the gift card, but the gift card was gone.
Ashley was certain the wolverine had filched it, but Anushka still held out hope that someone’s mama would take her in. She decided to get off at the Brighton Beach station and see if the address was real. Maybe a light would be on?
The train had risen above ground, two stories high. When she stepped onto the platform, she saw right into people’s windows—a man’s hairy arm in lamplight, a cat’s arched shadow on a broken blind.
The address turned out to be a fish store.
She could smell and hear the ocean nearby. She’d never smelled or heard the ocean before. Under a moonless sky, the boardwalk was lit with old-fashioned globe lamps, but the world ended where the ocean began. Ashley crossed the sand and dipped her toe into the liquid black. Infinity splashed over her feet and lapped around her ankles. Infinity was surprisingly warm, not as warm as human blood, but warm enough to run through some beast’s veins. She walked back to the brightly lit boardwalk and crawled underneath. The sand was cool and soft. She sensed she wasn’t alone. Two black and orange tigers slept less than forty feet away. As silently as possible, Ashley burrowed her way into the sand until she was nearly invisible, and then kept vigilant watch over her pillowcase. In the first spark of dawn, the tigers turned into a sleeping old couple wearing identical orange jumpsuits. The stripes were the boardwalk’s shadows.
Ashley shook off her sand blanket and crawled out to watch the sun rise over the ocean. Dawn was her favorite time of day. Sunrise made no promises. A bright young beginning didn’t necessarily foretell a glorious evening, nor did a dark and livid start mean a stormy afternoon.
She was surprised by the polished surface of the flat calm sea—she could almost ice-skate across its featureless emptiness, but where would she skate to? Omsk? Loneliness seared her throat, as if she’d knocked back a shot of acid, but Ashley wasn’t afraid of loneliness, or of hunger or thirst. She was frightened of insignificance.
“The Times says all the outbreaks are genetically identical.”
“Mushrooms have genes?”
“Don’t call them outbreaks. They’re the fruit of a single gigantic mushroom growing under Brooklyn.”
“Why don’t they kill it! If it was growing under Manhattan, you better believe the authorities would find a way to kill it.”
“What authorities? No one’s in charge.”
“It can’t be killed. The taproot must be a thousand feet deep.”
“Do mushrooms have taproots?”
“What’s a taproot?”
“Only a cold snap can kill it. It’s a tropical fungus. It needs heat and humidity.”
“One grew under Rio that was five square miles; thousands died but they were squatters so we didn’t hear about it.”
“What about the one growing under Hong Kong?”
“I told you it came from China. Made in China might as well be a skull and bones.”
“I thought ours was a whole new strain.”
“It’s a mutant.”
“How did it cross the East River?”
“The Manhattan outbreaks are from a single carrier of spores, that actress from the Ziberax commercial, Mushroom Mary. Every place she visits is followed by an outbreak.”
“What about that building on Fifth and Forty-Second Street, the ghostscraper?”
Kat recognized Sutton House’s address. Thank god she’d burned those letters. She sat cross-legged on her cot, finishing her breakfast of cold cereal and coffee, listening to the low dribble of rumors bouncing around the basketball court.
“Let’s all get down on our knees and pray for the first frost.”
“You think a cold snap will kill it? Ha! When hell freezes over.”
That afternoon, bringing up the rear in a fresh line of new evacuees, Frank arrived.
“Frank! Oh, Frank!” Kat shouted.
His orange jumpsuit was a size too small. He must have endured the chemical showers. His face was brick red and sun-fried from the heat. His thirst must have been screaming, yet he ignored the volunteer passing out water bottles. He walked straight over to Kat and gave her a hug.
They sat side by side on her cot. He drank the sixteen-ounce water bottle that she brought him without taking a breath. His Adam’s apple bobbed like a cork. His leg twitched from dehydration. Kat gently rested her hand on his knee. She felt the muscles still. Frank looked at her with gratitude, but he didn’t stop drinking. In his too-tight jumpsuit, the solidness of his body made Kat feel rooted after so many itinerant days.
“The glow was so bright, it woke me. I thought my cousin left the bathroom light on,” he told her after finally quenching his voracious thirst. She didn’t retrieve her hand, though his leg was now as still as a tree trunk. “So I get up to see. My cousin’s got one of those old claw-foot baths. It almost looked beautiful, like the tub was sculpted out of glowing ice. Then Annie, that’s my cousin’s wife, sees the slime and mushrooms and lets out a shriek. I’m deaf in one ear from my boxing days, but that shriek cured it. My cousin says we better keep this a secret or we’ll be out on the street. I tell him I know people who died. He says him and me will remove the infested tub tonight, then rent a truck, and dump it somewhere. His wife goes nuts. Call the fire department, call the police! It’s a plague from God! She takes her kids and goes to her sister’s. Me and my cousin stay. We get the tub into the backyard and hide it under a tarp. Then he starts removing the bathroom floor, then the subfloor. It’s like a glowing icicle had been bored deep into the basement. It’s the root, I tell him. But he doesn’t listen. He tries to dig it out. Maybe hell is made of ice, Kat, not fire. Turns out one of his neighbors reports a suspicious glow under a tarp in the backyard, and here I am.”
“I’m so glad you’re here,” Kat said after he had slaked his thirst for talking. She told him how she had to destroy the letters she’d hoped to publish as a tribute to Edith and her mother. “It felt like I was burning history, but what choice did I have? The pages were alive, Frank. They didn’t smell like paper burning, they smelled like scorched flesh.”
The whole time she spoke, Frank comforted her and stroked her hand, the one still on his knee, with his big-knuckled, clay-warm fingers. The weight of his touch felt unexpectedly fragile to Kat, as if the hand had long ago been shattered, and then reassembled with a piece or two absent, like an ancient vase glued together with bits missing.
Just before dinner, a Red Cross volunteer handed Kate one of the shelter’s public cell phones.
“Katherine, it’s Stanley Flom. I’ve been trying to reach you for days. I left messages on Edith’s voicemail.”
“That number is no longer in service,” Kat said.
“I wanted to let you know that Edith’s body is finally being released. I’m afraid the Jewish funeral home we chose can no longer accept her. Her remains have been classified as biohazardous. Her body is required by law to be cremated at a facility with provisions for hazardous waste. There’s a facility in the Bronx, I’m told.”
“A funeral home or just an incinerator?”
“Janice—you remember my secretary—looked up the mortuary online and said it was quite dignified. There was a picture of a lovely chapel.”
“Will she have a casket?”
“I believe so. Do you want to pick one out?”
“I don’t care as long as it’s not a biohazard bag.”
Gladys found Kat a black dress and navy shoes in one of the donated boxes of clothes. Frank claimed a dar
k jacket and tie from the men’s selection. Mr. and Mrs. Syzmanski drove everyone to the service. The Syzmanskis still had their car. The crematorium was a windowless freestanding building in an industrial Bronx neighborhood. If not for the smokestack out back, Kat would have guessed they were lost.
The funeral director escorted them into the chapel. Thirty-odd folding chairs had been set up. The pine casket, on wheels, faced a heavy theatrical black drape. Feetfirst or headfirst? Edith was afraid of diving. She always plunged feetfirst into the water, as if a rug had been pulled out from under her. To think her sister was in that box.
An expensive black rose wreath had been laid over the casket’s lid. Stanley and Janice occupied the second row, dressed for work, not sorrow, as if they were only taking a half day off, though Janice was openly weeping. Edith’s wishes stipulated no clergy, so the funeral director held a moment of silence before trundling the casket through the drapes. Kat caught a glimpse of what awaited her on the other side—not a brick incinerator as she’d imagined, but a stainless steel oven. She hoped Edith was feetfirst. She closed her eyes, but she only saw more clearly—a conflagration vibrant and alive, performing a sinuous dance over her sister’s flesh.
At the small reception afterward, while Frank brought her a cup of coffee, Kat looked around for Vida. Price, Bloodworth had taken out a death announcement in the Times. Kat thought maybe Vida would pay her respects after what happened.
“She’s not coming,” said Frank, eating a Danish. “She wouldn’t dare show her face after what she did to Edith. You see her YouTube video yet?”
Frank unholstered his phone and called up Vida’s video. He kept the volume low out of respect for Edith. How could Kat not be curious? When the side effects were read at the end, the grief fermenting within her for the past two weeks escaped as burps of laughter. Stanley and Janice looked at her as if the wrong twin had died.