Pariah

by Bob Fingerman

  “What? I insulted him?” Abe scoffed.

  “You insulted both of us.”

  “Shaming isn’t the same thing. A little shame is a good thing.”

  “If you say so.”

  From their respective windows the residents of 1620 watched Paolo make it halfway across the avenue before being overwhelmed and consumed in his insufficient version of Abe’s improvised survival gear.

  Abe retired his heroic saga.

  A week later, Emily died.

  Mike manned up enough to dispose of the petite corpse, sparing Ellen the details. He hoped the wrappings were sufficient to keep the creatures from eating her. But then again, they only seemed to go for live flesh.

  Did that count as a blessing?

  10

  July, Now

  Karl stood by his open window, looking out across York Avenue. Between the zombies and the abandoned cars, including today’s fresh one, the street was so packed you couldn’t see the pavement, but Karl knew it was sticky as a movie theater floor in the glory days of Times Square. The street below, however, was shellacked with immeasurable quantities of blood. With the fire having burned itself out, the only noise was the hum of flies and the occasional grunt or moan.

  Karl often wished he’d been old enough to enjoy the myriad adult entertainment palaces that had operated freely in the days before “America’s Mayor,” Rudy Giuliani, had cleaned up the city. It was getting harder and harder to remember “important” figures from the days before the pandemic. Giuliani had been on a mission: to make the city safer and more antiseptic for its citizenry, but mainly for the tourists. New York had endured decades’ worth of bad image, fostered by both fact and distortions in the media. America overall had a skewed conception of the Big Apple: graffiti-streaked, litter-strewn, oozing with degenerates of every ilk who were ready to ply their vile talents on wholesome, unsuspecting visitors.

  Karl had relocated to New York from Ohio for the express purpose of being plied vilely, but it never happened. Like a nomad in the desert he’d followed a dreamy ignis fatuus of chimerical pendulous bosoms swaying to throbbing disco beats. By the time Karl got to Fun City, however, Times Square no longer resembled the one captured by filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Paul Morrissey, or even Frank Henenlotter. This Ohio boy had wanted Taxi Driver, Forty Deuce, and Basket Case.

  Instead he got The Lion King.

  Karl got a job, an apartment, and an education in reality versus illusion. And shortly thereafter it all went south. People started dying and coming back and eating each other and the rest was history. Who was to blame? No one knew, or at least no one was saying.

  “Thanks, Mean Joe,” Karl spat, a vicious parrot tormenting himself. “Thanks, Mean Joe. Thanks, Mean Joe. Oh yeah, Dabney’s really going to welcome me up there again. Beyond thinking that I’m the biggest douche in the world, now he probably thinks I’m a racist. Thanks, Mean Joe. What else is he going to think? Stupid dumb stupid-head! Of course some hick from the hinterlands is going to be a cracker redneck racist. I’m just fulfilling my genetic-slash-socioeconomic obligation.”

  Karl continued to glare at the graceless meat puppets stumbling around beneath his window, more vegetable than animal. Meat. Vegetables. Karl’s stomach growled. He wished he had more of Dabney’s vermin jerky. Rat. Pigeon. Squirrel. Whatever it was, it was good. The way they meandered down there, individual forms swallowed by the massiveness of the crowd, Karl could cross his eyes slightly and blur the overlapping double image. Meat. Vegetables. The surface pulsated like stew burbling in a boundless Crock-Pot. Meat. Vegetables. His life had been reduced to a sad homage to those cartoons where starving castaways on a desert island pictured each other as anthropomorphized hot dogs and steaks and hamburgers. Karl’s stomach lurched and he cursed himself for having purged Dabney’s vittles.

  The shadows were beginning to deepen as the sun started setting. Soon the oppressive darkness would spread, drowning everything in pitch black, and another seemingly endless night would begin. Another reason Karl had been seduced by the city was that like heights, the dark was not one of his favorite things. When Karl had first moved here, he loved the fact that the streetlights kept the city bright all night long. Now it was country dark.

  Back in Rushsylvania, Ohio—a tiny blip in the already bliplike Logan County—it got so dark at night you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face after a certain hour. There had been streetlamps outside, but they didn’t saturate everything with that pervasive sodium-vapor lambency that city lights did. For most of his childhood Karl slept with a night-light, much to his father’s chagrin. A night-light was a crutch, and Manfred Stempler wasn’t raising any cripples, emotional or otherwise. Manfred got the bright idea to go camping in Hocking Hills State Park. Nine-year-old Karl had been dead set against it, preferring to stay home and watch late movies under his blanket on his eleven-inch black-and-white TV.

  “Manfred Stempler is not raising a sissy,” had been his dear papa’s response.

  So off they went. Could his father spring for one of the cottages in the park? No way. That wouldn’t be “roughing it.” A tent was pitched, a campfire was made, and with as much detachment as a spooked nine-year-old could muster, Karl observed his older brother, Gunter, and their father enjoy themselves in the great outdoors. “Is this so bad?” his father kept asking, and though Karl’s shaking head said, “No, no, no,” his eyes held a different answer. When the last traces of daylight ebbed away, swallowed by the earth and foliage, the campfire’s light seemed pitiful and inadequate. The woods made noises. Karl wasn’t a superstitious kid, so he didn’t believe in monsters—which in light of the current state of affairs was kind of funny—but there were things creeping about, rustling the leaves, crunching the soil, which unsettled Karl.

  Small oases of light had dotted the periphery from nearby RVs, accompanied by the purr of generators and the occasional drunken whoop, but it felt like the surface of Mars to Karl. Just because someone is born in the country doesn’t mean he’s not a city boy by nature. At home he’d secreted away a prized single from destructive Gunter and evangelical “all contemporary music is the devil” Manfred: David Lee Roth’s “Yankee Rose.” Roth was Manfred’s worst nightmare: a sex-charged metropolitan hedonistic Jew in showbiz, put on this Earth to lead impressionable youths—like his sonny boy—down the primrose path to Hell. Karl would listen in secret to Diamond Dave rhapsodize, “Show me your bright lights, and your city lights, all right!”

  That had been 1986.

  And Karl started planning his run from Logan from then on.

  New York City was to be his Yankee Rose, resplendent in bright lights, city lights.

  Even with its Lugosily ghoulish name, Rushsylvania—population just shy of six hundred—boasted a nearly 100 percent white populace, all good Christian folk. Everyone was pink and fair-haired. His father—Big Manfred—was very active at Rushsylvania Church of Christ on East Mill, epicenter of nowhere. Every Sunday Manfred escorted Karl, Gunter, and their mom, Josephine, into the bland house of worship. White faces upraised praising their lily-white version of Jesus, all soft, mousy brown hair and blue eyes, very European, very not Middle Eastern—very, extremely, super not Semitic.

  If Christ had been portrayed in art as he actually looked in life, Christianity never would have caught on. All those generations of European artists westernized the Christ to conform to standards suited to their parishioners’ predilections—early market research. A Yasir Arafat-looking spokesmodel wouldn’t have put asses on the pews. Pushing the Christ was all about marketing and demographics. But tell that to Big Manny.

  And then count on the beating of your life.

  For all the times his father whipped out the Bible—and occasionally whipped him with it—Karl couldn’t remember a single time Big Manfred cracked it open. He wasn’t even sure his father could read. But it had made a compelling prop, thick of girth and bound in chipped oxblood leather.

  Karl remembered the Lord’
s Supper service on Sunday mornings—an odd time for supper, but why quibble over details when illogic reigns supreme? The bread, representing Christ’s body, cups of juice, representing Christ’s blood, passed out to all. Those who believed in Christ as their personal savior were invited to eat the bread and drink the juice that was dispensed. What a ghoulish practice. Though Karl didn’t miss that old-time religion, he could go for some of that body and blood right about now. A big heaping helping of Nabisco Body of Christ. Yum. Blessedly bland bites in every box. He looked at the zombies on York. Mindless, conformist, primed to eat bodies and drink blood.

  The sun was almost gone for the day. Five stories below, the seething stew turned a deep burnt umber. Accompanied by a chorus of growls from his abdomen, Karl stalked over to his bed and willed himself to sleep, intoning a sacred hymn.

  “She’s a vision from coast to coast, sea to shining sea . . .”

  11

  The deeper Ellen slept the harder she pressed herself into Alan’s hollows, her spine folded against his sunken abdomen, the top of her head resting on the manubrium of his sternum. They were “His” and “Hers” anatomical dolls, spooned for easy storage. Or burial. Both were so skeletal they could easily fit together in a standard coffin, with room to spare. And yet her presence was comforting. Alan hadn’t expected that. Now back in her apartment, he found the sound of her breathing, though a touch raspy, soothing. At night, beyond the depth of the darkness, the city was chillingly quiet. Even the buzz of the flies abated at nightfall. It was the kind of thought Alan only entertained at night, but he wondered if flies slept.

  Somewhere out there, almost imperceptibly, a wind chime occasionally tinkled, a New Age death knell. It meant that somewhere there was a breeze, but that somewhere wasn’t here. After a few moments the tinkling abated. To suffer insomnia, as Alan often did, was like a wakeful coma, sensory deprivation with no restorative benefits. At least summer nights were relatively short. If anyone were still alive once winter arrived—a very unlikely prospect—the nights would be unendurable.

  Slick with her perspiration, Alan’s fingertips traced Ellen’s chest, down along her lower abdomen, into her thicket of pubes. He let his hand rest there, cupping her bony mons veneris. Where there should be a rise of fatty flesh there was just taut skin on bone. Alan had liked his women waxed or clean shaven, but now pubic hair was a desirable trait. With no padding, anything to reduce potentially hazardous friction was a good thing. Knocking boots was now knocking bones. He remembered those psychedelic posters of skeletons in various sexual positions, cheesy stoner Kama Sutra astrological home décor.

  Back in Forest Hills, where Alan had grown up, he had a downstairs neighbor who was the quintessential Deadhead. This guy, Lazlo, traveled all over to hear the Dead warble the same tunes over and over. He had what seemed like thousands of bootleg concert cassettes salted away in chronological order in file cabinets. He grew his own weed. He had a big Jew-fro and wispy teenage mustache. He made his own batik T-shirts. Alan wondered if Lazlo was still alive, and if so, what were his feelings on current affairs? Were the dead outside grateful?

  That seemed like such a stoner musing.

  Lazlo had the zodiacal humping skeletons poster. And R. Crumb’s “Stoned Agin!” The rest were Dead posters by various artists of varying quality.

  It was strange not sleeping in his own bed. He was used to lying awake all night downstairs in his place. If he got out of bed he could navigate in the dark. Though the layout of Ellen’s apartment was identical to his, the furniture placement was different. He couldn’t get up and just instinctively move from point A to point B without lighting a candle, not that there was anyplace to go.

  But what if he needed to relieve himself?

  That did it. Just the thought made his urethra tingle. Pissing seemed like such a waste of fluid, but was still necessary. The more he thought about it, the hotter Ellen’s bony backside burned against his groin, trapping heat, preventing fleeting succor. The less he drank the more it stung to urinate, but it had to be done, even if it felt like passing acid. His insides rumbled with discomfort, the sensation of pins and needles inside his penis magnifying with each passing moment. He had to uncouple from Ellen and take a leak. It was that or piss on her ass, which was not an option—he didn’t know her that well.

  Easing away, Alan’s crotch slowly broke free of Ellen’s rear end with a moist shluck. She made some sleepy mouth noises, smacking her lips, then rolled onto her stomach. Free of contact, Alan maneuvered off the bed, stumbling slightly, as this mattress was farther from the ground than his, then patted the air in front of him, blindly making for the nearest window, not lifting his feet off the ground, shuffle-walking.

  Several muted toe stubs later he reached the wall and felt along it. The moon was out and the faintest amount of bluish light outlined the window frame. As he edged to the right he remembered that this was the window Mike had fallen from. Why tempt fate? he thought, edging along to the window with the fire escape. As in most New York apartments, a sturdy window gate barricaded this portal, but beyond the gate the window was open and Alan positioned his penis between bars and let fly. The spattering ricocheted off the cast iron stairs, amplified by the all-consuming silence.

  Ellen awoke, excited. “Is it raining? Mike? I mean, Alan?”

  “No, no. Sorry I woke you. It’s only . . . I was taking a leak. Sorry.”

  “Oh. Oh. It’s okay. I just thought . . . Rain would be wonderful, though, wouldn’t it? It’s been so long. What, like a month, maybe?”

  “Almost. It’s been dry, that’s for sure.” Mundane chat about the weather. The more things change . . .

  “Yeah. Remember how they used to have water shortages,” Ellen continued, “and they’d tell you not to shower for more than five minutes or to not water your lawn in the suburbs. ‘Don’t wash your cars,’ they’d say. Or, ‘kids, don’t run the fire hydrants! Not during a water shortage!’ Those assholes didn’t know what a water shortage is.” Though the words were sharp there was no bitterness in Ellen’s tone. She sounded wistful. “You coming back to bed?”

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “Come back to bed and I’ll suck your cock.”

  How could those words, cribbed from every hackneyed porno movie ever made, sound so melancholic and uninviting? Alan’s penis, still scorched on the insides from the caustic urine, twitched in expectation. Even now it wanted to do the thinking. No amount of this is wrong from the brain could dissuade the little head from wishing to be ministered to. The corpora cavernosa began to fill with blood. Maybe it will help you sleep, his penis signaled. Come on, we’re all on the same team. You can’t fool me with this self-righteous “gotta do the right thing” hooey. Get me into that mouth and we’ll finally get some much-needed rest. Do it.

  “Come back to bed, Alan.” And he did.

  Ellen lay next to Alan, the sour taste of his ejaculate lingering in her dry mouth. It had been a while since she’d fellated Mike, so she couldn’t compare offhand, but it had never been about taste or texture or any criteria she’d applied to other comestibles. But maybe that would change with Alan. Even rawboned, Alan’s cock was thicker and firmer than Mike’s. And wasn’t spooge a source of protein? Protein was hard to come by.

  These are the thoughts of a lunatic, Ellen chided internally. My husband is dead. The father of my dead child, Mike, with his bad posture and small, thin penis is dead. Chunks of him are resting in the alimentary canals of walking corpses that still linger beneath my window. His bones are still in full view from the window. I did nothing. I could have gone up to the roof and gotten bricks from John to drop on the heads of the guilty. I did nothing. My baby died. I did nothing. I’m not a wife. I’m not a mother. I have no career by which to define myself.

  “I am nothing,” she said aloud.

  Alan slept soundly. Good. She’d done some small amount of good. Now it was Ellen’s turn to leave the bed, only she knew the lay of the land and made a beeline for
the front door, unlocking it. She stepped onto the landing. She could hear Eddie berating Dave behind their front door, but only his tone registered, the dull roar of an underdeveloped mind purging. In the unbroken darkness she plotted the course upward toward the roof without incident. It was only as she stepped onto the tar paper and felt a soft, wonderful breeze across her clammy skin that she remembered she was completely naked. Whatever. She closed her eyes and basked in the gentle caress of the faint airflow.

  Though the sky was cloudy there was sufficient moonlight to see their roof, the tarnished reflective silver paint creating an eerie network of geometric outlines to follow. The other roofs, topped in traditional black tar paper, were invisible. It was like she was marooned on a trapezoidal island floating six stories above the ground.

  Ellen padded across the rooftop and stood at the lip of the slight incline that led to the roof’s west-facing edge. The pitch of the acclivity was maybe thirty degrees or less, wheelchair accessible should someone confined to such a chair wish to roll themselves off the roof to their doom. She was sure that was not the intent of the slope. And besides, the only way up to the roof was the stairs. There was no wall on the York-side end of the roof, just a faint rise of decorative cornice, then a straight drop. A fall from here might do the trick.

  No, she didn’t want to join Mike.

  Ellen lay on her back, staring up at the moon’s pitted face, almost full, but not quite. The air movement felt both invigorating and soothing. It was the middle of July and she wondered if any of them would live to see the fall. And those things on the street, how long would they continue to shamble around? How many survivors were there in Manhattan, or the outer boroughs? Were there other naked women lying on rooftops in the vicinity, staring up at the moon? Or clothed ones? Or men? Or children? If so, was that a comforting thought? What was comforting? That Alan was sleeping in her bed? She wanted Alan there so she wouldn’t have to be alone, yet here she was on the roof. Dabney didn’t count.