Pariah

by Bob Fingerman

  “No. Don’t put words in my mouth. I’m saying is there anything I can do to alleviate your funk?” Ellen rose from the table and began to undo her blouse, but Alan turned away.

  “Not everything can be solved with sex,” he muttered.

  “It used to be.”

  “There are a lot of used-to-be’s. Used to be Manhattan wasn’t a massive graveyard full of corpses too stupid to stay still. Used to be we could go outside and walk around and not worry about being eaten. Used to be . . .”

  “Okay, fine. I get the picture,” Ellen snapped, refastening her buttons. “Look, I really don’t want to get into a thing, okay? Why don’t you go to your apartment and do some drawing or something? Maybe take a walk.” Alan raised an eyebrow, but before he could say something snide Ellen added, “On the roof. Or the hall. Just go out for a while.”

  “I thought this was my apartment now.”

  “It doesn’t have to be,” Ellen said, and instantly Alan regretted his snippiness.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, but Ellen fanned him off, gesturing toward the front door. “Really, I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.”

  On the landing Alan stared at the outside of the closed door. A domestic squabble, he thought. How banal. But not in the least bit comforting. Could Jack maintain his pretense as a preening homosexual, keeping Mr. Roper ever at bay? Could Chrissy wear a top that was even lower cut, but not so low cut the network censors wouldn’t let it air? Could Janet utter some pithy platitude that neatly wrapped up their dilemma with a trite little bow? Could he and Ellen pretend to be a happy couple while all else was unimaginably bleak?

  Stay tuned.

  Karl sat on his bed in his bare-walled apartment.

  Along with all the pinups, gone were the posters of heavy metal demigods. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Since the arrival of Mona he’d reevaluated his secular values and desires and felt nothing but shame. That he’d intended to attempt to bed her was something he’d have to live with in private. Thank God he hadn’t articulated his impure desires to anyone, least of all her. In the passing weeks he’d born witness to her selflessness. And the way she moved unscathed by the ravenous masses outside.

  Karl didn’t believe in the Rapture, but he didn’t not believe in it, either. The husks shuffling around outside weren’t “left behind.” At least that wasn’t how it was supposed to go. But maybe they were. The Bible and Bible prophecy were so open to interpretation. He thought if you didn’t get sucked up to Heaven you were to remain on the hellscape that was Earth and live out the remainder of your days, biding time until you went to hell. Where did those things outside fit into God’s plan? Karl remembered some lines from Corinthians. “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” And “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” Death’s sting and victory were pretty evident to Karl’s eyes.

  If Karl remembered right, at the Battle of Armageddon everyone who wasn’t a believer would be slaughtered. Were those the zombies? That’s a whole lot of unbelievers. Maybe those things outside were the husks of the righteous who’d ascended to Heaven, sort of the ultimate in recycling. Their earthly bodies no longer needed, they now were used to punish the remaining infidels—like him and his neighbors. Supposedly, after the Battle of Armageddon, Satan would be defeated and Jesus would set up the Millennial Kingdom in Jerusalem. Karl’s posture slumped. It sounded so gaga, but then again, look out the window. People eating people—or at least things that used to be people eating people.

  People. People who eat people,

  Are the yuckiest people in the world. . . .

  People used to whine about their bad luck or what a cruddy day they’d had. Sometimes people would try to equate a lousy day at work with the calamities of Job. A mean boss was hardly comparable. Your job sucked, but being Job sucked worse, yet he still loved God. So maybe this was the Tribulation. In which case, Karl hadn’t seen the light until it was too late. He wondered if it was too late. It definitely was for those brainless pods outside, but Karl could still fill his heart with love for God. God was supposed to be merciful, though the physical evidence seemed contradictory to that thesis.

  Karl’s feelings about Big Manfred had altered, too.

  Honor thy father and thy mother. Though Manfred Stempler had been a stern and brutish presence, perhaps Karl hadn’t understood that he’d been so to fashion his sons into better adults. Karl wished he had a Bible, but he didn’t and was too embarrassed to ask around. Besides, the others were likely heathens. Alan kept only escapist fiction and was an avowed atheist. Ellen, who could tell? Probably agnostic at best. The Fogelhuts, Jews, which was perfectly all right. Jews, Big Manfred had said, were merely unperfected Christians. Eddie and Dave? Sodomites. Maybe Dabney was different, but surely not the others. Perhaps he could ask Mona to obtain a Bible for him on one of her sojourns among the unclean. If it wouldn’t be too much of an imposition.

  Karl was mighty confused. Mona could walk among the undead. Wasn’t that a Bible-style miracle? Was she an emissary of God? Her perpetual serenity seemed to denote some sublime characteristic. Was she imbued with the Holy Spirit? Karl heard her tunes, though. She listened to Evanescence; he heard it with his own ears. They were a Christian band, right? Or were they kind of wishy-washy about it? Maybe they were just spiritual. At any rate, he’d heard her listening to Black Sabbath, too, so what did that mean? What did any of it mean?

  “Are you there, God? It’s me, Karl.” He made a face. Was it blasphemous to paraphrase Judy Blume in a time of spiritual crisis? “Anyway, forgive me for this inferior supplication, but I’m a little out of practice. Scratch that. I’m a lot out of practice. I’m so confused and everything. I’ve never stopped believing in You, but there’s so much I don’t understand, nor do I think I’ll ever understand it. Forsooth. I’m sorry. I’m trying to be fancy. That’s false. But my entreaty is for real. Sorry, I won’t try to talk all grandiose and whatnot. Ugh, this isn’t coming out right at all. Listen, I know I’ve thought many impure thoughts, but I cleansed my chambers, okay?” His mind flashed to Lourdes Ann Kananimanu Estores—Miss June 1982—secreted in his dresser drawer. His emergency stash. “I don’t want to cast out Lourdes Ann. Please. There has to be some beauty in my existence. I haven’t masturbated in weeks. Doesn’t chastity count for something? I don’t mean to wheedle. You wouldn’t have created perfection such as Lourdes Ann if it wasn’t to be admired, right?”

  Karl stared up at his ceiling, noting a long crack that ran diagonally from one corner to the other, bisecting the expanse of whitewashed plaster. Just the mention of Miss June 1982 flooded impure thoughts into his head. No, no. Fight them. Fight the urge. But why bother? I’m doomed anyway, aren’t I?

  Karl thought about those Left Behind books and the righ teous so-and-sos who’d created them, particularly the really creepy older one, Tim LaHaye, which sounded like LaVey, as in Anton LaVey—two sides of the same coin. When Karl had first come to New York he thought Anton LaVey seemed cool. He had the perfect look, that cue ball head and pointy beard. High Priest of the Church of Satan and the author of the Satanic Bible. Cool. But maybe not. But still, cooler than Tim LaHaye. That guy had helped Reagan into his governorship, then the presidency. He even looked like Reagan. Was that some kind of extroverted narcissism? Wasn’t that a sin? One reason Karl had turned his back on the church was that its loudest and most passionate proponents all seemed so corrupt, bullying, and insane. The clergy, the evangelists, the propagandists; none seemed all that holy.

  Karl fingered his one tangible souvenir from Big Manfred, the one his old man had insisted he take before heading off to New Sodom: a Smith & Wesson Model 910S 9mm pistol. Karl had left it tucked away in its case since he’d arrived in New York, but now he held it in his hands. It felt alien, but it was the one thing he owned that his father had touched. Not a cross, a gun. Ellen was right. It would be pointless against those things outside. Karl ran his finger around the muzzle, sighed, then replaced the gun i
n its foam-lined case. Guns were not his bag.

  If Eddie ever found out I had this . . . Karl let that thought die.

  He got off the bed and returned the carry case to his underwear drawer, then stepped into the hall just as Mona was walking down the stairs from the roof, head bobbing as ever. Sunlight poured down the stairs through the open door and skylight, enshrouding her in a blinding white glow. He flushed and cast his head down.

  “Need anything?” she asked, popping out an earbud.

  “Uh, well jeez, I’m kinda embarrassed to say.”

  “ ’Rhoid cream?”

  “Huh?”

  “Roof dude wants ’rhoid cream.”

  Karl forced a laugh. “No, no. I want a Bible. Either the King James or the New Revised Standard Bible. Or anything, really, as long as it’s officially a Bible. I don’t want to put you out.” Mona jotted it down in her notepad but showed no reaction. “I want to brush up a little and see if I can make any sense of what’s going on out there.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I mean, maybe these are the End Times?” Karl inflected the statement as a question, hoping to engage Mona. “You know, like in the Bible? Like in the Book of Revelation?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Okay then,” Karl said, shrugging and smiling. “I guess that’s all for now.”

  As Mona retreated down the steps Karl tried to make out Mona’s thumping music of the moment.

  “Uh, Mona?” he shouted, to be heard over her tunes. She stopped at the foot of the stairs and looked up, removing the earpiece again. “Uh, Mona, I was just wondering what you’re listening to?”

  “Ministry.”

  “Oh. Uh, what song?”

  “ ‘Jesus Built My Hotrod.’ ”

  “Oh. Okay, thanks.”

  She nodded and headed downstairs.

  Karl was so confused.

  “Are you still moping?” Ruth asked, incredulity marring any attempt on her part at a sympathetic tone. “My God, Abe, get over it.”

  “ ‘Get over it,’ she says. Unbelievable. She accuses me of being derelict in my duty. She accuses me of being obsolete. Get over it. Maybe a younger man should take the crow’s nest. Maybe I’m not the one to watch for the lights in the tower window.”

  “What tower window?”

  “ ‘One, if by land, and two, if by sea; And I on the opposite shore will be . . . ,’ ” Abe muttered.

  “He’s rambling. I don’t know why I bother.”

  Ruth shuffled out of the room, back to the bedroom. Good, Abe thought. Like I need a stoop-shouldered harridan eroding the last vestiges of my manhood. He sat by his post, a cup of coffee—neither hot nor iced, but room temperature—in his hand, staring out the window, awaiting Mona’s return, walkie-talkie tucked in his breast pocket. He’d be damned if he’d allow Ruth the satisfaction of catching him slacking off twice.

  “ ‘Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,” Abe recited, in schoolboy cadence, “In their night-encampment on the hill, Wrapped in silence so deep and still, That he could hear, like a sentinel’s tread, The watchful night-wind, as it went, Creeping along from tent to tent, And seeming to whisper, ‘All is well!’ Yeah, right. All is well, my ass. Gottenyu, what the hell kind of poetry would Longfellow have wrought from this paskudne situation?” Abe settled back and wondered if anyone anywhere was writing poetry about the current condition. If they were it was probably awful, like everything else in the last quarter century.

  Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead.

  Abe leaned forward and looked at the dead, or rather the undead. How long could they keep going? They ate when they could, but that was infrequent at best—happily. Were their reserves of energy infinite? That seemed so unlikely. Those things kept going and going, like that stupid battery bunny, none keeling over from depletion. You’d think, Abe thought, that eventually they’d just all collapse and the worst would be over. Sure there’d be a lot to clean up, but what a small price to pay. Then again, as Abe often mused, you’d think a lot of things in this life. You’d think death was the worst that could happen. You’d think the dead would stay dead. You’d think getting terribly ill or the cessation of your Social Security checks would be the worst that could happen in your dotage. You’d be wrong. But being wrong was the biggest part of life. Wrong choices and regrets; Abe was up to his tits in both.

  “You cabbage heads have got it good, you know that?” Abe hollered out the window at the crowd below. “Not a care in the world, eh? You think anything any more? Probably not! How lucky is that, you lucky sons of bitches? You don’t even need TV any more! Look at this. It just hit me! This is the end of the evolutionary ladder, the perfect twenty-first century man! Not a thought in its head! Not a care in the world! Idle yet active, going no place, doing nothing, taking his sweet time, and vicious as hell if given the opportunity! Hey, Darwin, you cocksucker, congratulations!” Abe laughed, pounding his fist against the splintering slate windowsill, doing his old bones no favors at all.

  At the other end of the apartment Ruth eased the bedroom door shut, muffling the splenetic ravings of her husband.

  26

  “You’re crazy,” Alan said, his voice rising in disbelief. “SNL was crap compared to SCTV.”

  “It’s a matter of taste, not sanity, for God’s sake,” Ellen countered. This was stupid. How could Alan get so worked up over a TV show? A long-gone obscure sketch comedy show, at that.

  “Or the lack thereof. Just because something’s more popular doesn’t mean it’s better. Often it’s just the opposite. Everyone says they like SNL better, but trust me, it wasn’t.”

  “It was funnier to me, okay? Me. In my opinion. Opinion, Alan. O-P-I-N-I-O-N.”

  “I just can’t see how an intelligent woman such as yourself could choose Saturday Night Live. Okay, it had some funny stuff, granted. I’m not saying it didn’t. But it was nowhere near the quality of SCTV. That show was inspired and brilliant. It never pandered. Because they were outside the mainstream they got to be so much more inventive and as a result of being unfettered by having to please sponsors and, worse yet, the lowest common denominator, they created some of the best sketch comedy ever to originate in North America.”

  “Can’t we agree to disagree?”

  Alan was about to opine his distaste for that expression but let it pass. Let Ellen keep her clichés, both conversational and comedic. He slipped the silvery disk back onto its spindle and put his prized SCTV box set back on the shelf. He was tearing through pack after pack of batteries, watching them over and over again, but the laughter justified the waste. Too bad Ellen couldn’t enjoy them. Sure, she thought they were sort of amusing, but that kind of faint praise just irritated him. He’d never met a woman who recognized that SCTV was infinitely superior to SNL. He’d never even met one that liked it all that much. Was this a gender thing, like The Three Stooges? Alan thought that kind of stereotypical men-versus-women stuff was bunk. He didn’t like The Three Stooges, either. Ellen wasn’t stupid, but she was a tad conventional. Maybe more than conventional. Pedestrian. More people liked SNL, it was as simple as that. It didn’t matter. He could enjoy the Second City episodes with headphones on.

  “I said can’t we agree to disagree?” Ellen repeated, impatience straining her lovely features.

  “Of course.” They hugged and retreated to their corners, he to watch another episode, she to do another crossword puzzle. As he plucked another disk from the case Ellen cleared her throat theatrically and gave him a hard stare. “What?” he asked, hoping to avoid further turpitude.

  “You haven’t painted lately. Or done any drawing.”

  “I’m taking a breather, okay? Maybe I haven’t been touched by the muse. Maybe I just want to chill and catch up with a little video. Am I allowed?”

  “Of course you’re allowed,” Ellen said, attempting to keep her voice neutral. “It’s just you were such a dynamo before you got that DVD thingy. I’m not saying you’re not entitled to a little downti
me, but . . .” Alan raised an eyebrow. “Never mind. Watch your shows. Enjoy.”

  “Thank you.”

  Ellen watched Alan slip on the headphones, the gesture eerily evocative of Mona and her ever-present earbuds. As he lapsed into a state of televisual bliss, Ellen felt a virulent wave of disconsolation. Alan’s posture seemed to mimic Mike’s, the way he slouched on the sofa, legs up on the ottoman, ankles crossed. The way his toes flexed when he laughed. Alan’s face relaxed as the vintage comedy soothed him, but Ellen’s expression began to collapse. This couldn’t be over an argument about their preferences in comedy. The wave of disconsolation turned into a wave of nausea. She got up from the dining table and bolted into the bedroom, reaching the window just as the rise in her gorge crested. A torrent of partially digested food spewed out, dousing the zombies below, none of whom seemed to mind.

  How long had it been since she’d vomited? It almost seemed decadent. But maybe some of the food was tainted—lack of refrigeration and all. Ellen gagged up a few more blasts, then slumped down and let her head drop between her knees. For a few long unhappy months in high school Ellen had had a flirtation with bulimia. Alan reliving happier times in the living room; Ellen reliving unhappier times in the bedroom. Her puke splattered all over where Mike had been slaughtered, consumed, possibly digested by those filthy, hateful, unnatural things.

  Mike.

  Her husband.

  Former.

  Father of her child.

  Former.

  Former husband. Former child.

  Former everything.

  Her sobs drowned out by Alan’s headphones, Ellen’s body drew in on itself, convulsed in sorrow.

  Eddie wiped spooge off his hand with a paper napkin, his right bicep burning from exertion. Ever since he’d liberated his cache of DVDs from his old boudoir he’d been Stroker Ace squared. Dave sat on the couch and thumbed through an old issue of Time, the cover story of which was rampant obesity in America. Ah, for the good old days. Dave wasn’t really reading, though. He feigned indifference to Eddie’s incessant onanism but inside he was seething. And hurting. How Eddie could prefer servicing himself over having actual sex with an actual human being was beyond Dave. It was like what they’d developed together was an accident, a phase. Dave kept offering to facilitate Eddie’s pleasure, even if it meant Eddie’s eyes being glued to the seven-inch monitor. But Eddie wasn’t having it. Now that he’d scored his porn, Dave was out of the loop.