Ophelia Immune_A Novel

by Beth Mattson

  “Shh, that’s it. Slowly. Not all at once. Let the puddles even out.”

  As the water drained from the pot, her legs began to move in slow motion circles under the blankets. One hand clutching me, the other the grasping reflexively at the air. She began to perspire transparent, grey beads of sweat. Her tummy was steaming and distended with the water. I snaked the tube out of her throat.

  Her face snapped to attention in my direction. Her eyes were still black and frozen-looking. She rolled nimbly onto her hands and knees and crawled on top of me, her jaws clicking at my neck. I held her up by the shoulders, gazed at her eyes, clouded and murky. I held her up by her cheekbones and looked for her pupils. They were gone. Her eyes were solid, creamy rocks.

  I wiggled one handful of fingers in the air near her face. Nothing. I snapped the same fingers. She roared and lunged for them. She was blind. Warm, distended, and blind. Back in the world of the moving, but not seeing anything. Not seeing me, not dreaming, more like a dirty fish than ever – flopping and writhing, puffy with bulging eyes and a horrible, gasping mouth. I hugged her to me as she writhed, her wet nose rubbing against my ear while she worked at chewing through my two scarves.

  I pulled tight-wristed wool mittens onto Juliet’s hands and duct taped them to the sleeves of her sweater. I stood on her mittens while I wrestled puffy, too-big snow overalls up her legs. I zipped them as far as the waist, then forced one arm in after the other. She twisted and writhed while I fastened the hood. She hated the hood, but couldn’t manage to claw it off. Her claws were mitted and her arms could hardly bend through the immense layers of synthetic down encasing her like a sausage.

  She walked to me like a scarecrow, her arms out at her sides, her feet shuffling about in cold tennis shoes. That would never do. I had better steal her some new boots. In the meantime, I cut a pair of my wool socks to fit over her shoes. They stretched tightly and made her feet slipperier. She fell into the table that she couldn’t see and knocked over the dried flowers. She didn’t see them hit the floor. She bounced from the refrigerator to the counters and walls, listening for something that moved. She moaned in frustration.

  I banged my shins on a chair, trying to sweep up the glass from the broken vase. My shins tingled. The smoke was getting too thick. I couldn’t see now either. I felt my way quickly to the window and ripped open the curtains where I had nailed them. I clattered the window open on its worn tracks and wafted the smoke out with my hands. Juliet fell down again with a soft thump. Her arms made whooshing noises as she waved them about, making an ash angel in the soot on the floor.

  Smoke billowed out of the window into the night. The deep dirt of the city called to me. The cool dark was welcome on my face. I could use a visit to the Clinic, leave some of my blood behind. Stop watching my sister clatter around like a cockroach.

  With my new, big, brown Book that I had rescued from Swan wrapped in my arms, I leapt onto the fire-escape and then my sneakers slapped against the pavement, leaving behind a canopy of smoke streaming out of my window. Nobody would want to deal with that. A man in a tattered raincoat bolted away when he saw me coming, without even knowing that I was a zombie. I waved at his back as he went. I had seen him before, jumping in all the same dumpsters that I did. He had good taste in dumpsters, which I crawled on top of now, stomping to distract the only zombie in the alley from chasing him.

  It was a slow, molasses monster, and would have been frozen if it had been outside for long. It must have been fresh. It died a second time underneath the heavy weight of my new, leather Book. I squashed its head like a grape between the dumpster lid and the back cover, which I wiped on my jacket after I pulled the body up and into the bin, flattened hairline first.

  The moon winked at me, lighting my way to the Clinic. I couldn’t see the stars; the slinking snow clouds buried them and the flickering street lamps disguised them. I wondered why Scientists didn’t try to get us to live on the stars, they looked so much happier. But both the moon and the stars looked cold, hanging on the wires above every alleyway. Probably no zombies would get to go there, not even if they learned how to read.

  My Scientist, Jim, was just pulling the last of the boxes inside when I rounded the corner. He pushed two of them back outside for us to sit on. He rested easily on top of one and patted the other for me. The squiggles on the side of the box told me that I was using Petri Dishes as my chair.

  “Hello,” I rattled.

  “Hi, Ophelia. Welcome back,” Jim pointed to my new, papery friend, “What do you have there? It looks big enough to kill with.”

  “I did.”

  He only paused long enough to swallow once, and then looked the covers up and down for black smears. I cleaned off the last of them.

  “May I see it?” he leaned in.

  I hesitated but I let him pick it up. He opened up the thick front face. His eyes moved across the pages, and flipped through more than I had yet dared.

  “Is it good? What kind of Book is it?” I asked, “Not very many pictures.”

  “It’s a very good Book,” he said, “What you have there are the complete works of Kathryn James and I dare say that one of your parents thought that it was good Book, too.”

  “Why?”

  “Your name is in one of her plays.”

  “Plays?”

  “You've never heard of plays? There are actors on a stage. In a theater. With chandeliers and candles. And spy glasses so that you can see better.”

  He held his fingers in loops up to his eyes. He stood up on a box and raised a finger into the air, pointing to the heavens. In a booming voice, not caring who overheard, he shouted.

  “To breath, or not to breath …”

  He looked at me for recognition.

  I stared up at him, impressed by his tone, convict steam swirling through my teeth.

  “How about the Sonnets?” he asked, climbing back down to sit, “Surely you've heard of Kathryn James' Sonnets.”

  “Sonnets?” I repeated the new word, wondering how many times my parents had said the same word. And which one of them? Dad who tucked flowers into his lapels or Mom who loved Civilization? For whom had they named me? Why didn’t they give me any Books that weren’t maps? Why couldn’t I have written these squiggles with my crayons? They were too busy keeping me alive. And they had failed at that too. They failed to make me dead.

  I counted the pages as Jim flipped them, stopping after twenty-three, to a section labeled with the number of a famous Highway – the number 1. He gingerly stroked the page, cleared his throat and glanced up at me as he began. He read to me of coldness and lightness and death and love without edges, through lyrics that rhymed and rolled over my damaged brain on wheels made of feathers. I hummed.

  “Look,” he said, “Thanks for coming back. The Doctors inside of the Clinic really need your blood, and if you keep coming back, I will keep reading to you.”

  He handed me a large empty vial. His fingers brushed mine. They were clean and hot, with nothing growing under the nails and no mud ring where his sleeves ended. He jumped back and I dropped the vial on the ground. It hit with a dull, plastic clank and rolled in circles. I backed away from his super-heated, breakable fingers. I didn't want to kill my Doctor. He blushed and tossed the vial back to me.

  “Is my blood worth the risk?” I asked, turning my back to him so that he wouldn’t have to see my gore while I added a fresh cut to my reattached arm, but he came around and stood in front of me. He talked while he pulled on a pair of thin plastic gloves.

  “Absolutely, we’re using it to formulate a viable Cure.”

  “A Cure? Really? From using my blood? A Cure?”

  “We’re still working on it, but your blood really helps us determine the difference between regular blood and Infected blood, better than the fish blood does, or even the monkeys.”

  “What? You have fish in there? Disgusting! Dangerous!”

  “Look, Ophelia, if you keep coming back here to hang out with me and give
us more blood, I’ll teach you how to read.”

  “You can't do that for free,” I said, “I should give you something, more than my blood.”

  “You can protect me while we read.”

  An ex-librarian that had been flopping out of the broken fourth floor Squatter's window above us, finally fell and splattered on the pavement, freed from the sill where she had been tangled. Would Jim have just run away if I hadn't been there?

  “I won't always be here to protect you. I should train you.”

  “Train me?”

  As I watched the zombie with a fraying bun and cat's-eye glasses get to its knees, I thought about who had trained me to kill the undead. Dad was a great teacher, with all of his exercises and drills, but, in the end, even he hadn’t been able to keep his ex-kids from wandering alone forever. Could I do better? Could I teach somebody to have good aim and finish the job?

  “Well,” I considered, “Winter is for the Beginner, as they say.”

  “They say that? Where? In The Boonies?”

  “When it is cold, zombies are nice and slow. On their way to freezing. Easy to hit. The first lesson is to be ready, Jim,” I handed him my hammer and took my ax to the ex-librarian, its name tag dangling from its sweater and its claws still gripping a date stamp. “You stand behind me, knowing that if I fail, you will have something to do, alright?”

  I jabbed it in the chest to knock it upright and then swung my ax horizontally from right to left, splicing the neck clean through. I always kept my blades nice and sharp. The body crumpled to the asphalt. The head hit with a soft plunk and began to open and close its jaws slowly.

  Jim squinted at the head under my boot. I rolled the head onto its face, so that he couldn’t see its eyes.

  “What do I do?” he asked, tucking an orange curl out of his eyes.

  “You take my ax,” I said, and pointed in a line across the head from ear to ear, “And then you make a medium-hard splice right there.”

  He raised my ax only about half as high as he should have, and then he made up for it by slamming it down on the back of the head as hard as he could. My ax cut through the tissue like it was butter, and the bone like it was a cracker, and it hit the pavement like it was a railroad stake. I winced and took my weapon away from him; I was going to have to sharpen it this morning.

  “Hey, that was kind of cool,” he made a fist and pointed his thumb upwards.

  “Yes, well, ok. Good job. In the Winter you can wait for the corpses to freeze before you move them. I have another one near my house just like this – the one I killed with my Book. You can go on inside and get Warm. Come back in an hour or so and this one will be ready for dismantling and disposing.”

  He beamed and flushed from his cheeks to his ears, bunching his pristine, white pocket fabric between his fingers. The Clinic swallowed him up again, with his boxes and clipboards. I pointed to the moon and told it that I understood; the Scientists were working for both of us, my sister and me. I walked home slowly, kicking at cans and clingy paper flyers that were too wet with snow to burn.

  I took my time cleaning up my Book kill, careful not to further nick my sharp blades while I dawdled with the pieces that didn’t quite fit into the heaping trash mound. I whistled to think of the Cure for Juliet and me. Maybe they could fix her eyes, too. Make her whole, let me carry her home with no Infection following us, no fishy presence among healthy Humans, no screams flowing out of the alleyway in front of our ramshackle Squatters’ home.

  I paused. The screaming that I could hear right then sounded a lot like Swan. I ran around the corner, and there she was, challenging a slight, scrappy, windblown man with ropey muscles under his tattered tunic. He twitched back and forth, trying to decide whether to run away with the scared, young girl who stood by his arm or to strike Swan. She was hovering near them, holding her marble rolling pin up above her head. She inched closer to the man, threatening him with stuttered taunts and ill-swung jabs on behalf of the girl cowering at his side. When she missed, he reached out and struck her. I was too far away to stop him.

  It didn’t look like he hit her very hard, with his elbow to her chin, but she fell down to the concrete, her rolling pin clattering next to her scrawny, jacketless frame. The girl who was being grabbed by the man screamed and cowered away from Swan’s fall as much as she did from the man. She hunched her shoulders, looking away from both of them and wailed at the icy ground. The man paused, again deciding between kicking Swan or turning tail and running somewhere with the screaming girl.

  I sprinted directly between Swan and the grimy man. I peered at him, blowing the stench of my rot in his face and patting my ax against my palm with taut, violent slaps. He took a step backwards, puffed out his bony chest, and pulled the girl by a fistful of her rags. I shook my head to warn him. She wasn’t his yet. If she could stop her screaming, she could decide where to go all by herself. The second girl I had saved.

  His chest deflated. He slunk further and further away from me, towards the bigger streets around the corner, still holding the girl by her holey sweater, his knuckles wound round the meager strands. I set my booted feet a few rapid paces closer to them. He scurried. I stomped again. He turned and ran, leaving the girl behind.

  The girl looked at me. She looked at the disappearing man. She heaved, wretched, clawed at her own face. She screamed at the top of her lungs, tripped, recovered and ran away, barefoot, as quickly as she could. She didn’t want to follow me like Swan had.

  “What on earth are you doing out here without a jacket?” I asked my ginger tag-along.

  I tucked my ax into my belt and held out my hand to hold her rolling pin while she peeled herself off of the ground with a fat lip and bloody nose. She tucked her rolling pin haughtily under her own arm.

  “I was saving that girl,” she glared up at me, “You didn’t answer your door. Somebody had to do something.”

  “No, somebody did not. You could have been killed. Look, you are broken.”

  “I’m not that fragile and helpless.”

  “Yes you are. You are bleeding. If he punched you too hard, you would die. You don’t know how to fight.”

  “So teach me. I am NOT so fragile. And somebody DID have to do something.”

  She clutched at my arms with her bare hands. I noticed a spot where my arm was leaking black blood through my crusty sleeves, where I had cut myself to donate blood. I pushed her off of me.

  “Don’t touch me!”

  “Fine.”

  She spat at my feet and stalked into our building. I followed her up the stairs. She slammed her door in my face. All three of her new combination locks clicked closed.

  “Also,” I muttered through her door, “We need to learn how to read.”

  “Go away!” she yelled.

  I sulked to my own door, but then I remembered that I had left the furniture piled against the door from the inside. Juliet scratched at me from the other side. I trudged heavily back down the stairs. I went back outside into the chill. I propped a trashcan back up under the fire escape, which was no longer leaking smoke. I kicked it back against the wall and pulled myself back up onto the landing.

  The curtains flapped in the wind, welcoming me home to our stale, cozy place. Juliet urgently smeared her nose at me on the other side of the pane, reaching for my skin, her sightless eyes rolling.

  “Hello there,” I patted her hands.

  She popped her head horizontally along the open slit of the window, tongue rubbing against her teeth. Her teeth glittered in the low light. Something was missing. Something was wrong.

  Juliet had a new, wide, raw, black oval around her mouth. A gaping hole to let her teeth out. She had rubbed her lips off. She had rubbed them off onto the nails that I hadn’t had bothered to re-smooth after ripping the curtains open. She now had fish gills to match her grotesque pupils.

  I groaned. I stooped and leaned my head against my hands, my full weight against my elbows on the rickety escape railing. I groaned more loudl
y. I leaned further, daring the thin metal to let me fall and crush my skull. A figure below ran away from my moans at his fastest limp. I panted. I yelled. I screamed until my throat ripped itself raw and gurgled as it slid behind my teeth. There wasn’t going to be anything left of Juliet to Cure. Not if I wasn't more careful.

  I clenched my teeth and looked up at her again. She snapped at me through her new, ragged mouth that might never, ever heal. What had I let happen to her? To everyone. What was going to happen to Swan and Jim if I didn’t look out for them? How could I train them so that this wouldn’t happen? How could I do any better? My own training hadn’t even worked for me. I was trapped here, half-dead with my decomposing little sister throwing herself out of a window at me. I kicked the railing bars until they bent. I threw an already broken and worm-filled flower pot down to the ground below, shattering it into a thousand pieces.

  I didn’t want this to be Juliet. I didn’t want this to be Swan. I didn’t want this to be Jim. I didn’t want us to all fall apart before there was a Cure.

  I pulled Juliet’s hat and hood tighter around her face and pushed her back inside the window by the top of her head. I tethered her safely to the refrigerator and sanded down the sharp nails while I waited for my coffee to boil. I bore down on them until the shards of metal in the sills were just sparkles tucked into the curtains and flush with the wall. Until they were again buffed to an un-hazardous sheen.

  I stirred my pot of coffee with my longest finger, urging the scorched grounds off of the bottom. I licked the drops from my knuckles and poured the steeped, brown comfort into a big, green mug with pine-tree and tent silhouettes. My wrist shook as I carried it, wobbly from the strain of rubbing nails.