SelectionEvent (2ed)

by Wayne Wightman

  Chapter 34

  The next day, they stayed in bed till afternoon, exhausted. Before finally getting up, Martin lay watching the patterns of light change on the ceiling and thought that although this was the same world that he had awakened to the day before, it certainly didn't feel like yesterday's world. Yesterday was a trial, an ordeal. Today was a delight, a banquet of possibilitie.

  Moreen came back into the bedroom carrying a black lacquer tray she had found somewhere, and on it were two glasses and two bottles of wine from the garage. She wore nothing, and her perfectly straight hair fell evenly over her shoulders. She smiled at him, warm and open, her strange reticence left behind.

  Since the middle of the night, she had been a different person, and if anything made Martin uneasy, it was that. What had happened to the old Moreen, the one who deprived herself so she could talk to god? Was she still in there, waiting for her next anxiety attack? When, he wondered, will the ax fall, and what kind of ax will it be?

  The afternoon light dimmed and they were going to get up, but it the drizzle started again so they stayed in the warm bed a little longer to listen to the rain's dull drumming on the roof and then the drips as they fell from the eaves onto the japonica below the bedroom window.

  Later, “Why did you come to my bed last night?” he asked. They were sitting outside in the damp-aired twilight, eating again, and he was enjoying watching Isha and Mona stalk and chase each other through the wet weeds.

  “I couldn't help myself.” She sat in a nylon webbed lawn chair with her hands curled around the ends of the armrests. “I was lonely and I'm a weak person. I gave in to my animal nature.” One word slid into the next, giving her voice a liquid quality.

  “I don't know if I should feel flattered or not.”

  She shrugged. “Feel what you want.”

  He did, knowing it was dangerous.

  Twilight was nearly gone but there were no stars visible through the haze and clouds. Two mockingbirds on opposite sides of the house carried on a warbling interchange. Isha and Mona still romped through the weeds, though they were only dark shapes now. Animal nature didn't look so bad at the moment.

  ....

  Getting in bed with her every evening was the greatest pleasure of his day. Touching her skin both soothed and excited him, and their lovemaking was always as passionate as the first time. It was the dessert for the end of the day.

  In the following week, Martin was astonished at his energy. He collected gasoline for the generator, got a second one for standby, went to the library and brought home books on gardening and medicine. He found a scythe and cleared the backyard and replanted the garden with rows of tomatoes, lettuce, corn, cabbage, broccoli, and potatoes. He planted parts of rows of a dozen other vegetables.

  In scouting through the neighborhood, he located dozens of fruit and nut trees, but many of them were diseased by fungus or damaged by insects and bore no fruit. The change in climate, the rain and cooler temperatures, had been more than these specialized, highly bred trees could tolerate. There would be little fresh fruit this season.

  But he also found two asparagus gardens, and from one of them he collected more than a hundred spears. It had done well in the cool weather.

  When he showed them to Moreen, she said, “Is that where you've been all morning?” She had taken up smoking and was in the process of lighting another cigarette when he showed them to her.

  “Yes, we're beginning to find our own way, rather than live off the past.” He carefully dumped the asparagus in the sink for cleaning. “This is going to be wonderful. I'll get some meat out of one of the freezers and we can have a feast! In a few weeks we may get a few apricots from a tree down the street.” It excited him to see the prospect of fresh food becoming a reality instead of having to scrounge canned food from people's houses.

  She nodded and blew smoke into the air. “Small things make you happy, don't they?”

  He made a quick decision not to react to her tone. For some reason she was trying to pick a fight. “What have you been up to this morning?” he asked, casually as he could, as he rinsed off the asparagus.

  “Do you want me to be doing something all the time, cleaning your house, like your maid, or your wife?”

  He stopped and turned to her. “You're angry. What's wrong?”

  “Nothing's wrong,” she said, tossing her head and flipping her hair behind her shoulders. She turned her head and looked out the window and blew smoke into the air.

  “You don't have to clean the house,” he said. “No one's ever said you had to do that. You don't have to do anything at all. I was just curious.”

  “Are you afraid god is talking to me?”

  “No. Why are you trying to pick a fight?”

  She gave him a blank look that reminded him of when he had first met her in the park.

  He had decided that even having her withdrawn and cranky was preferable to not having her there at all... for now anyway. When he was out looking for food or materials, he sometimes caught himself in moments of panic, fearing that he returned, she would be gone, and he would be alone again.

  Sometime later he would give her an opening to talk to him about what was troubling her, but he wouldn't press her. He needed the sound of a voice other than his own. The residue of the year alone still hung on him, like lead in his spirit.

  ....

  “You're using me, aren't you?” she said over dinner that evening. She had put three asparagus spears on her plate, nothing else.

  “How do you mean?”

  “How do you think I mean?”

  Martin ate two more bites as he considered the question. He had been without human contact for so long, he had forgotten that people often asked questions like that, guess-what-I'm-thinking questions. It was a cheap way to start a fight. And he had completely forgotten about it.

  “I can't answer a question if I don't know what it means. How do you mean 'using you'?”

  “You really haven't noticed, have you.” Her voice was strained and tense. Another ink-blot question.

  “I'm blind as a bat.” He put down his fork. “How have I been using you? You get to do whatever you want. We don't have to sleep together. Did I drag you screaming to my bed?”

  “You made it so easy,” she said venomously. “You made it so easy for me to submit, against my better judgment, against everything I believed — and you knew that. That makes it rape.”

  Martin looked at his plate of now unappetizing food and had a great sinking in his stomach. “I don't know what to tell you. You're free to do whatever you want. I wanted you to stay with me because sometimes I like to talk to you. Sometimes you've made me happy.”

  She gripped the edge of the table, her fingers white with the pressure. “See? It's so obvious. You use me for your own benefit.” She stood up suddenly and lunged away from him, out of the room. He heard a door slam down the hallway and then the turning of a lock.

  Martin sat looking at the cold asparagus on his plate.

  So now what was he supposed to feel? It wasn't making a lot of sense. It was getting more and more like the old world, now that he thought about it. Was he going to have to start over again?

  ....

  The days of the following weeks were without confrontation, and they spent little time together, once again sleeping in separate bedrooms. During the day he never saw her eat.

  He tended his garden and went for walks with Isha and Mona. Mona grew rapidly, becoming more attentive to the humans around her. In the evenings she often sat in a lump on the mantle — a five-foot jump from the floor which didn't give her any hesitation — and silently observed the humans sitting silently.

  On his walks, Martin became less and less aware of the swarms of birds that had taken over the city and the occasional zoo animals that roamed the overgrown yards. Instead, on his walks, he was preoccupied with what he might have done to offend her and what she was feeling. Now, when he ate alone, he often simply opened a can of corn or be
ans, dumped it in a bowl and spooned it cold into his mouth.

  In the evenings, he tried to talk to her, but she responded as briefly as possible. The only conversation she had initiated was when she asked if he could hook up a television so she could watch movies in her bedroom. Yes, he said. No problem.

  She found a bicycle the next day and had gone into town and had come back with a backpack filled with movies, all of them low-budget movies of surprising graphic violence. Some were documentaries showing executions, maimings, animal attacks, or people being swept away or crushed in natural disasters.

  Since then, over the last five evenings, she had watched movies until late at night. While she slept in one morning, he had looked through the backpack and along with the movies found three documentaries called The Faces of Death. They apparently showed executions, disasters where people had died, and animals being slaughtered.

  It was troubling to hear muted screams and sounds of violence from her room.

  Martin decided he would talk to her about this, whether either of them liked it or not. He dreaded the possibility of being alone again, but her neurosis was growing blacker than he had wanted to admit. He decided to no longer leave the animals alone with her.

  One morning, he got up intending to go to the library. He got Mona and Isha into the car and was thinking that the air was drier today and the sky seemed less milky. In fact, it seemed like it could be a warm day — a day which for Santa Miranda should have come months before. He was thinking, I should be happy. It's a pretty day and I should be happy.

  He was about to turn the key in the ignition when he heard something.... A machine? A car?

  Martin realized he was grinning broadly at the prospect, and that kind of happiness he hadn't felt since the first morning he had awakened with Moreen beside him.

  “Let it be Diaz,” he murmured. “Let it be Diaz.”

  The car rounded the corner — a big car, an old Ford trailing billows of white exhaust. The windshield was opaque with dirt except for the semicircles where the wipers had smeared it away. Its horn honked three quick bursts as it drove up and pulled to a stop beside him.

  “Let it be Diaz,” he said one last time.

  But the face inside was gray-bearded, lined with sun and age, a shock of graying hair springing wildly from his head. The stranger rolled down the window and grinned at Martin, who was holding his breath.

  “Howdy!” the man said, extending his right hand out the window. “Diaz sent me.”

  Martin breathed and grinned again and took the two steps to the car and shook the man's hand. It wasn't Diaz, but it was the next best thing.

  Chapter 35

  The man said his name was Winchell, Winch for short, and he had run into Diaz in Reno. He had been a handyman in one of the casinos, a painter, electrician, carpet-layer, plumber, and most often, he said, “A remover of embarrassing stains.”

  They sat in the living room, Mona perched on the mantle, and Martin leaned forward, elbows on his knees, drinking in every word the man said. Again, he realized how thirsty he was for for the sound of someone's voice.

  “It was strange, I tell you,” Winch said. “I never watched television much, except if I went in one of the rooms and somebody had one on, and for some reason I let my newspaper subscription expire two, three years ago, and I never missed it. Didn't have a computer. So newswise, I was out of it.” Martin thought that Winch had a voice like a sailor had a walk: it was rounded and full and he spoke in a rolling baritone. “I did my work and went back to my room, and those people there, they weren't much for inspiring conversation, if you know what I mean. They talked about who was screwing whom and where, what kind of equipment they found in the rooms and so on, so I never talked to anybody much. I read a lot.”

  “Sounds like me,” Martin said.

  “So one day, I was down on the floor, in the casino where the action is, you know, and I noticed there wasn't much going on, just a few plinkers, no bells, not even much trash on the floor. So I says to the bartender, 'Action's kind of slow today,' or something like that, and he looks at me like I'm some kind of alien or something and says, 'Where you been, Winch?' So—” He laughed at himself. “So I says to him, 'I been digging keno tickets out of a toilet up on twenty-six, why?' and he poured himself about five fingers of scotch, never took his eyes off me, and drank it down like it was water. Right then, I knew something was up. Pretty bright, eh? Next thing I knew, couple days later, I go to get my day's work order, and it ain't there. Boss ain't there. His secretary ain't there. In fact, when I look around, everybody ain't there, except some dogs in the kitchen digging through the food. Damn strange, I thought.”

  Winch held a beer and turned it in his rough hands as he thought a few moments.

  “I went outside, all the casino lights were on down the street. It was lit up like a party, but nobody was there but the coyotes. Couple of 'em come trotting down the middle of the street under the 'Biggest Little City' arch. Interesting scene. Coyotes trotting along through the neon, scouting it out before they take it back. I thought I'd seen some hinky deals in my time, you know, but that took it. Everybody dead. Jeez.” He shook his head. “You here by yourself?”

  “There's a woman here too. Moreen. She's probably still asleep. Down the hall. I believe she's crazy.”

  “Lotta that going around.”

  Winch nodded thoughtfully and ran his fingers through his gray beard. “I wouldn't mind sticking around here with you for a while, Martin, rest up, plan my next move, but if you want me to butt out, I wouldn't be offended. Not a bit. I'll scrounge me some gas and hit the road.”

  “I want you to stay,” Martin said. “Please stay. I need somebody to talk to.”

  “Well, I wouldn't mind,” Winch said. “Diaz gave you a good recommendation. It took me three cars to get down here and I had to walk part of the way. Hearing another living voice with a living face attached... well, it's real nice.” He leaned back and spread his arms across the back of the sofa. His face saddened. The lines around the eyes seemed to grow deeper. “Everybody's dead, man. My last day there, I went down on the floor, it was a Friday evening, it creeped me out of my skin. There was a granny pulling on a slot machine. That was it in the whole place. The granny, I watched her, she walked over behind the bar, poured herself a drink, emptied the register, and went back over to her slot. She saw me but didn't say a word. Just kept at the machine. I was on my way out when Diaz blew into town. We had a few drinks, he told me you were here....” He shrugged and finished off his beer. “I keep saying to myself, 'the end of the world, the end of the world' but I don't believe it. What were you, back in the old days?”

  “I never was quite anything. I was troubled, that's what I was,” Martin said with a laugh. “I was superfluous. All my friends had a program, they wanted to be teachers, engineers, speech therapists, whatever. I couldn't ever be sure. I thought I'd be a psychologist for a while. Or an architect. There was always something else to be interested in. My program was always getting muddled.”

  “I wanted to be jazz musician,” Winch said. “Saxophone. I got one in the car. The price tag on it was $5200. I'm going to give it a try.”

  “What's the end of the world for,” Martin said, “if you can't play saxophone once in a while?”

  “What I said to myself,” Winch said. “Martin, introduce me to the young lady.”

  It was Moreen, coming out of the hallway, wearing a long-tailed white shirt. She usually didn't get up till noon, and it was only 10:00 AM. She didn't look sleepy-eyed; she looked like she had been awake for hours.

  Winch stood up and wiped his hands on his pants. “My name's Winch Hobson, ma'am. Martin already told me your name was Moreen. A pretty name.”

  “Hi,” she said, staying where she was, half a room away from him. “I wanted to watch some of my movies now,” she said, gesturing vaguely toward a living room shelf where she kept some of them.

  Winch glanced at Martin.

  “I'll show
you around,” Martin said to Winch, “how I've got things working around here. Maybe you could suggest some improvements.”

  “Be glad to look,” Winch said, picking up his cap and heading for the front door.

  Moreen was on her knees, going through the movie cases.

  Isha was already at his feet, ready to go, but Mona stayed on the mantle. Martin glanced at Mona then back at Moreen. “Will she bother you?” he asked.

  She either didn't hear or ignored him.

  He hesitated a moment and then said to Winch, “Let me show you the pump,” and led him out the door.

  Chapter 36

  They were standing in the appliance store where Martin had hooked up the generators and the freezers. Winch had looked it over and had given it an approving nod, but their talk had been of other things.

  “Well,” Winch said after Martin had told him how Moreen had changed, “you might think that the disease has passed over us by now, but it hasn't. The virus is finished doing its work, but it screwed up a lot of people, those who had to see it happen, who lost everybody, and those who might have been normal till everything got taken away — no frame of reference.”

  Martin nodded in agreement. He remembered Curtiz and Stewart and the woman he and Ryan had brought from San Francisco.

  “Maybe Moreen will normalize a bit if she has enough time.”

  Martin told him about the movies she had begun watching.

  Winch shook his head.

  “I don't know what to do,” Martin said. “Every time I think I've left the old world behind, more of it crops up. I think I've made about three new starts so far.”

  “You could talk to her.”

  “I don't know. She only wants to argue.”