“Uh-huh.” Dee perched on the edge of the bench as if ready to flee at any moment. “I don’t know why they bother,” she whispered. “He didn’t want to have anything to do with them before, and I’m sure he doesn’t want to have anything to do with them now.”
“Why are you whispering? It’s not like he can hear us or even understand us if he does. What's his problem again?"
“Repetition compulsion,” Dee said, plucking on her cigarette. "He relives the same traumatic event over and over. When he first came here—when he wasn't catatonic—he'd be running all over, screaming. He thought he was a spy or something, called himself 'Chuck Rose.' Thought that he killed his family and they were after him. Like zombies or ghosts or something. Brrr. It was spooky."
“But I thought he left them?"
"He did. Again and again."
Lisa ground her cigarette out beneath her heel and scuffed it under some vegetation.
"Was he a spy?"
"No. He used to say he was an undercover whatever but he was just an accountant. He was a miserable human being when he got here. I can't imagine being his family.”
Lisa said pensively, "I wonder what he thinks about now."
Dee looked over at Charlie Rosenstein as she pitched her cigarette into the bird feeder. She shrugged with indifference.
Lisa got up and stretched, putting her book in her pocket. "If you’re taking him back I’ll come with. I’m almost off.”
Dee leaned in front of Charlie and said, over-enunciating and loudly, “Charlie, your family is here. Your wife Teresa's here with your kids. Isn’t that nice? Let’s go see them, shall we?”
Lisa smirked. “You’re going to give yourself a hernia yelling that loud. I told you he couldn’t hear you.”
Dee smiled, turning Charlie’s wheelchair around. “I have to try. What are you doing this weekend?”
“Double-date.”
As the nurses walked off with Mr. Charles Rosenstein, the birds chirped steadily to insects humming in the flowering stalks. The earth was fecund and moist and alive. Chuck—Charles Rosenstein—lived differently, however. Every day, every hour, and every minute.
Revelation
Matthew Buscemi
Editor: Who have we influenced? Who have we loved? What have we wrought? Whether death comes in a great apocalypse or from long illness, the Ferryman makes each of us take stock in the value of our lives.
apocalypse
from Greek apokalupsis, meaning “uncover”
So, this is what it feels like to know you’re going to die. Now that I think about it, I always knew that I was going to die. It’s just that…the exactly when of it felt deferrable. Part of some far-off future not worth bothering over. Ten percent of my salary is about all the care I ever gave that future, and it seems inadequate now.
I wonder if I should have known. If I could have avoided this by simply paying more attention. But if I walk my life back far enough to have not ended up at this place in this time, then I can’t imagine the decisions I would have to have made to be rationalizable.
And yet here I am, standing atop this roof, looking down over…I close my eyes. I don’t want to look anymore.
People who know they are about to die are supposed to relive their lives in the moments before their death. I’ve got about ten minutes, give or take. Could I have done any better? Reduced any suffering, affected one more rescue? All the same, I feel guilty. And ashamed.
I remember a small tremor during the meeting with the executive committee. I have no idea if the shaking was related or not. For all I know, it could have been just a tiny earthquake, but it was the first moment that I became aware of something worming its way into my mind, whispering that things were not as they should have been.
At the time, Angela’s presentation held all of my attention. She talked about how my team was to prioritize work for Jeff’s team—that’s the Tooling and Product Support team, TPS—over the work we might do for Rachel’s team—that’s Data Analytics; no one calls them DA (don’t ask me why).
TPS had been late on their last three projects, and each time Angela had confronted Jeff with this uncomfortable fact, he’d attempted to drag my team—that’s Central Technology, usually Central Tech, but never CT—down with him. We’d bounced back of course. During such incidents, I would just calmly explain my position, meet all the demands made upon my team and more, and then I’d go back to the meetings, just like this one, and show everyone the numbers. No hysterics, no finger pointing. Just numbers. It’s worked well for my team, I think.
Angela stopped speaking only momentarily when the building juddered. Jeff gripped the table and his knuckles turned white. Rachel looked around the room anxiously, as though the walls might collapse inward at any moment. Martin was there too, my team’s technical lead. He furrowed his brow momentarily.
I just watched them.
The moment passed. It couldn’t have been more than a second or two. Angela just proceeded onward as though nothing had happened. Had it, though? I know it’s odd to fixate on such things, especially now, but I find myself wondering if that’s a moment we should have been aware of something, some veil being lifted—and I use words like that because as I gaze across the Seattle skyline now, that’s what I see. I see a vast revealing, the world’s farcical mask being stripped away and its true nature, which was always there, merely coming to the foreground.
I wonder how much pain I’ll be in.
But I’m jumping ahead.
I’m the production lead for Central Tech, and if you don’t work IT, which you probably won’t because from the sound of it there won’t be any IT left by the end of the day, then those terms need a bit of unpacking. Unlike Jeff’s and Rachel’s teams, who work on one thing—a piece of software, or some service—my team works on all the things for the whole company, just not all at the same time. We’ve got our own engineers, who jump from project to project as need be, making sure that individual teams don’t end up reinventing the wheel or going down some technological garden path that someone else has already discovered won’t work.
The engineers on my team decide how to build things. Always has been that way, always will be (at least for about ten minutes more). If I took that away from them, I’d be a bad leader. As the production lead, I decide what they work on, while leaving them complete autonomy over the how. And if you think that sounds important, remember that most of my time is spent in awkward meetings about how to resolve the fact that Jeff and Rachel both want us to work on their respective projects during the same two-month period.
I listen, and I observe. That’s most of what my job entails. So I wonder how I missed something as big as this.
After Angela, Jeff, and Rachel had left the exec meeting, it was just me and Martin, my team’s “how” authority, sitting there. He asked me if I had a moment, and after Jeff had shut the door, he stared silently at the tabletop.
I wasn’t looking out the large wall of windows along the conference room exterior wall—I should have glanced at least, but didn’t—I was looking at him, his gaze reticent, his eyes telling me he was thinking something that he wasn’t sure he should voice.
“What’s on your mind?” I tried.
He finally looked up. “How are you?”
I shrugged. “Fine.”
He seemed to allow himself a small smile. “I appreciate you looking out for our team at every turn.”
He didn’t know the half of it. Central Tech is an easy target. I fended this kind of stuff off two or three times a week, just usually not on the level that would warrant getting exec, and therefore Martin, involved. Production types attached to typical product teams can’t help but set their sights on us when they blunder into something unexpected and need a scapegoat. “We’re a good team. It’s easy to sing our praises.” It’s true. I’ve never had to creatively recast our numbers into something that looks better than it is. I can just tell the truth.
“Are you okay?” I asked, wonderin
g if this had been some attempt to deflect some insecurity on his part.
“Yeah,” Martin replied easily. “I like the work, and the team is great.”
“But?”
He pursed his lips. “It’s so great to find enclaves like this one in a company. I’ve been lucky to find them in the past, and especially lucky here. Everywhere I’ve worked, the petty politics always seems so much larger and so much more…omnipotent than the healthy enclaves. It’s like human systems just aggregate that way. And the only way to keep the healthy enclaves healthy is to fight tooth and nail all the time.”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Yeah?” Martin raised an eyebrow.
“I just want to help good people do good work. It feels empowering to empower others.”
Martin blinked at me a few times, then smiled a bit. I remember thinking that I’d outed myself as some kind of unicorn of management—someone who’s more interested in doing good work than manipulating the system? Blasphemy!
I changed the subject to our schedule for Rachel’s team, then we talked code for a bit. Those details are fuzzy in my memory. Nothing really gets clear again until the roof—but I’m jumping ahead again.
Martin and I left the conference room at some point and went to the elevators. We pressed the buttons, but they didn’t light up. In fact, the elevator lobby felt awkwardly, wrongly silent. At any time during the business day, one should be able to hear the little squeaks, rattles, and grinds of the passenger cars ascending and descending, but at that moment—pure silence and dark buttons. Maybe one of the banks could have been out of commission, but all six of them?
I suggested taking the stairs up to the eighth floor, and Martin followed.
What was I thinking as I climbed those stairs? Certainly not yet thoughts of total catastrophe, but something more amiss than normal. A fire drill that had uncovered a broken fire alarm system, perhaps. Or perhaps an elevator system of the same make and model had encountered a design flaw that had resulted in the deaths of a car full of people, and our building’s administration had deactivated our elevators in response. I admit that I let a stray thought to the effect of, “thank goodness it wasn’t me” pass through my mind before chastising myself for it. The irony of my present situation is not lost on me.
When I got back to my desk, Jones stood over his desk (which is next to mine) looking out the large exterior window wall. He’s not a part of my team, but his desk is in our area for some reason known only to facilities. His first name is Kelly, but he hates it. He makes everyone call him Jones. I once asked him what his middle name was, and he replied that he hated it even more than his first. That was the last time I talked names with him. I just called him Jones like everyone else.
He stood there just gazing out the window. I was nearly ready to ask him about what he was looking at—I came so close to finding out right then and there—but Mary, one of our software engineers, who’d seen me return to my desk, jumped out of her chair and began asking me—
You know, I really don’t remember. Something to do with priority of some task over such and such another. Something TPS wanted done. It’s so odd. That thing we call the backlog, that prioritized list of tasks, that abstract entity so crucial to keeping my team healthy and safe, is now the furthest thing from my mind. Maybe that’s because half my team has gone, and I think the other half is on the other side of the rooftop. None of it matters anymore, because the ones I kept safe are safe, and the ones I couldn’t aren’t, and the backlog had nothing to do with any of it.
But you’d think I’d still be able to recall details regardless.
Anyhow, I helped Mary determine what to work on next, and then Carmine, who’s the Quality Assurance lead on TPS, came up and had a question about yet another task I can’t remember anything about. When she finally left I slumped down in my seat, took a deep breath, thought about maybe getting coffee. Why can I remember wanting coffee but not the items on my backlog?
Now all I could see was Jones. He was still standing there, looking out the window, catatonic, same as he’d been when I’d first come back to my desk…five minutes before?
“Jones?” I asked.
No reply.
“Jones!”
Still nothing.
“Jones, what’s—”
That was it. That was the moment I knew that something was really, truly, very, deeply wrong. More wrong than a small earthquake or an elevator malfunction. I turned my gaze over the desks of Central Tech, half of which lay against the wall-windows that cover our building’s exterior.
Sarah stood gaping over her own desk. Nate stood next to her, his hand over his mouth. Their eyes radiated terror.
I scrambled to a window, perhaps even shoving Jones aside in order to do so. Down below, no traffic moved. There were cars in the road, sure, but all crusted over brown and green, as though they’d all molded over. Corpses lay slack behind wheels, human-shaped tufts of fibrous pus. Everything had been engulfed, the roads, the lampposts, the trees, the buildings, all of it turned brown and green, with tiny cilia swaying and glistening with each passing breeze. It spread as far as I could see, down Sixth Avenue, in every direction. A few bodies lay huddled on the sidewalks, consumed, just like the sidewalks and everything else. And most horrifyingly of all, one could see, against the building adjacent to our own, the green-brown mold spreading itself out, unfolding again and again, like a perpetual, biological Jacob’s ladder, across the exterior of the building’s third floor. It took less than a second for me to conclude that my own building was under just such an attack, and was now only five flights away from my present location.
I shot to my computer, jittery, fingers shaking. I had to try two, maybe three times in order to type my password correctly. Having logged in, I found that nothing would load in my browser. Ethernet and wifi were both out. I slammed the laptop shut and grabbed up my cell phone. I have no family in Seattle, nor a spouse. The woman I’d had two recent dates with didn’t register as a concern—my team did. These are people I’d fought for, bled favors for, and will die for.
I opened my mouth to speak, but found no sound ushered forth. My eyes remained fixed on the tiny, green-brown hairs spreading across the building across the street, the buildings beside it, and all the buildings beside them, on and on up Sixth Avenue.
I shut my eyes, blinked and shook my head. “Guys.”
No one spoke.
“We have to get to the roof. Let’s go.”
Jones swung around, his gaze piercing but his voice quavering. His face was flushed red. “How will that help?”
As if to answer his question, helicopter blades sounded overhead, and, just as quickly, retreated into the distance.
“It’s preferable to waiting here,” I shot back.
Maybe I’m making myself sound braver and nobler than I actually behaved. I remember feeling that he was raving, and I got snarky back at him. Such details of who was more in the right and who was more in the wrong feel so trivial now, even though with Jones—
No. I’m not going to spend my last minutes on piety or self-righteousness. Absolutely not. I’m just as much to blame as anyone else.
I herded my team into the stairwells and we all headed upward.
At some point I called Jonathan. It must have been before the stairwell, because I don’t get cell reception in the stairwell, and I don’t think the conversation took place on the roof. Jonathan is a member of our team, but he works from his home in Renton, a Seattle suburb, often videoconferencing in for meetings.
“Jonathan?”
“Hey, man.” That was Jonathan. If someone put a gun to his head, he’d find a way to still sound chill. “How you guys doing?”
“Not good, Jonathan. How are you?”
“All right for now. Apparently the crazy shit is just downtown for now, but they say it’s spreading fast.”
“They’re not lying. You got Internet?”
“Yup. You should see social media.”
> “What happened, Jonathan?”
“Don’t know. Some people are saying terrorists, but that ain’t it, not with this stuff all over the world like it is.”
I remember a jolt of shock on par with my seeing the mold for the first time. “It’s not just Seattle?”
“No man, it’s in all our major cities, all cities in Canada, all cities in Mexico, it’s in Rio, and New Delhi, and Beijing, Cairo, Cape Town, Melbourne, Riyadh, Dubai, everywhere. That’s not terrorists, man, that’s something else. Something way more destructive than terrorists.”
“And no one knows where it came from?”
“They’re saying all kinds of shit—the cranks are on their usual alien and secret government soapboxes. I even read some guy who thinks that antibiotic resistant microflora finally evolved into something really nasty at random. Who knows? All I know is it sounds like we gotta evacuate every major urban area now.”
My mind reeled. All urban centers on Earth. The first thought, I admit, was selfish, not really for me, but for my profession—computers were done. The Internet and cell phones and software engineering: gone.
At some point I regained my focus. “Jonathan, we need a helicopter. Eight of us. Make that two helicopters. 1014 Sixth Avenue. We’re going up to the roof.”
An awkward silence. “My wife wants me and our daughter out of the house and on the road to her mom’s place in Maple Valley ASAP. But I’ll do what I can until she tears me away from the computer.”
“Thanks, man.”
“Oh, hey,” Jonathan added. “That monetization platform implementation I was working on? It’s coming in pretty late. Definitely not before the end of the sprint. Just sayin’.”
I actually chortled at that. “Duly noted.” Was that my last smile? I don’t think I’ve smiled since that; there’s been nothing to smile about. “I’ll adjust the backlog.”
“Take care of yourself, man.”
“You too, Jonathan.”
At the twelfth floor, some guy from another company and I kicked down the roof access door. Other details from along the way: Jessica kept twitching her head and jamming her body into the corners of the stairwell. I had to fall back and pry her out. Nate kept shouting at everyone, and we all shouted back to hurry on upward. A fire alarm erupted mid-ascent and continued blaring; no one paid it any mind.
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