They Shall Begin Again

by Giacomo Papi

  “No one will ever be born again!”

  Maria ran to her bed in search of her cell phone among the sheets. She found it and turned it on. She tried calling Adriano—he’d be back any minute now—but it didn’t ring. No one answered. Fucking asshole, answer, do something. She imagined him asleep in his car. Maybe he wasn’t answering because he was asleep. It was cold. She walked over to the coat rack and put on his doctor’s coat. It was huge, but it was as if it were protecting her, even if it made her look like a scarecrow. All of a sudden she heard the rush of footsteps stop outside her room. She froze and held her breath.

  She heard someone knock. She dropped her cell phone. They knocked again, this time faster and more insistent. Adriano. She took a step but she stepped on something hard and hurt herself. She knelt down to see what it was: her cell phone battery. She threw it on the bed in a burst of anger. She took another step. She was now in front of the door. She forced herself to calm down. Someone was out there. Adriano. He would say “It’s me.” She could hear him breathing. But no one said anything. Another knock. She didn’t move. She was frozen. Then, a whisper. A murmur. Incomprehensible. She couldn’t understand the words.

  “Aperi, Maria, aperi.”

  Luckily she had locked the door. The voice continued to whisper.

  “Aperi, aperi, fugenda, aperi. Aperi, aperi, Maria, subito.”

  Instinctively she turned the key in the keyhole. The door opened, there was a shadow there, it was Rufina. Maria ushered her in and shut the door in a hurry and pushed her against the wall.

  “Fugenda es, Maria … You must flee. Ausculta me … Hic infestum est. Rinati pervenient, mulieres et puerulos caedunt … Little girls and women kill. Understand you me? Iam sala partus irruerunt. Appena in sala partus fuerunt … You follow me must, Maria.”

  Rufina grabbed her hand and dragged her to the door. She poked her head out into the hallway and started to run, pulling Maria behind her. They turned to look behind them many times. Maria heard a group of people rushing up to them, she heard a door being opened and the sound of confused and excited voices.

  “She’s running away! She’s running away!”

  They ran fast, the weight of her belly dragging her forward. They saw two men ahead of them in the darkness. Rufina opened a door and they went his inside a room. Maria saw an empty bed and collapsed onto it, her legs splayed open. Her breath burned her lungs, and Rufina lay down next to her. They could hear wild voices outside. A few minutes passed. She calmed down.

  “Thank you.”

  “You must fugere, Maria. Locus tibi percolosus est. Capisci? Very very danger. Loro quaerunt mothers and children. Necandi sunt. Occidere vos.”

  “But if I flee they will find me. How the fuck am I going to hide this belly?”

  Rufina made her stand up and took off her nightgown. She pulled out a pair of stockings from a drawer and tore them at the crotch. She put the stockings over Maria’s head and poked her hands through the foot of the stockings, turning the legs into sleeves.

  “What are you doing to me, Rufina?”

  “Ventrem tuum occulto, no?”

  She pushed her on the bed and wrapped her chest entirely in layers of absorbent cotton. Then she stretched the elastic of the stockings over the cotton and down to her stomach. An incessant murmuring coming from outside. Rufina raised Maria’s arms and covered her bust with an elastic bandage. Then she led her to the mirror and helped her put her nightgown back on again. The adhesive bandage was tight, but her belly was gone. She had become a uniform block. She was now obese, but at least she no longer looked pregnant. Rufina, meanwhile, looked out the door.

  “Now go. Multitudo est. Ubique. Recordare. Neminem tangere cum utero. Ever. Neminem, capisci?”

  “No, I do not understand.”

  “Non tanghere no one cum centre, your big belly, do not touch people, no intellegant te incita esse.”

  “I understand. I will be careful not to bump into anyone. Why are you helping me?”

  “Cum decessi puerpera eram, Maria. Mother I was, too.”

  The girl caressed her cheek. Maria leaned in to kiss her closed eyelids. They were wet.

  They opened the doors onto a river of shadows. A never-ending procession of human beings was headed in one direction. She could feel Rufina’s fingers push her into the crowd. As she made her way into the current, Maria turned around and heard the girl say “luck”.

  The procession moved forward slowly, she felt like a leaf on water. Everyone took baby steps, dragging their feet. Maria stared at the back of the person in front of her, careful not to bump or touch him with her belly. The windows in the hallway were wide open. Humanity swarmed below.

  She only had one way of escape. She had to distance herself from the crowd. Someone close to her said something about the third wave and that now they were reaching the billions, and that they needed to prevent all future births by killing all pregnant women. The power was still out. Voices resounded in the thick darkness, both tired and indifferent. All those dead people had gathered in the hospital, answering the call of their kind, governed by the rules of their species. Dead people reappeared in the same beds where they had died.

  Time lost all dimension. It felt like she had been walking for hours, but it was still night. The air seeped in, fresh and black, scraping things and people. The procession halted suddenly and gathered around the windows. Maria perceived blurred bodies in the crowd, heads approaching, coming out of the current and slicing through the throng of people. They barked at the rest of them to make way and people obeyed. It was best not to look anyone in the eye but she did and found herself staring at Medioli, who had recognized her and was approaching her. In his expression she read his urgency to speak to her, which would expose her to the crowd. She waited for his mouth to open and the words to spill out. But instead he turned and shouted an order: the mass of people made way for them to pass through to the other side. Together they reached a ramp and walked down, one step at a time. Now they were on the ground floor. The exit couldn’t be very far off.

  She stayed pressed up against the wall, taking deep breaths of fresh air from the open windows. She looked at the sky. It was that livid hour in which night is about to come to an end and looks as though finally something new might happen, or else that everything worth happening has already happened. It was the hour when night melts to day, when blue becomes purple and birds chirp high in the trees. But now she heard nothing, only the voices of men. They stopped again. Were they waiting for dawn? The window framed the façade of the building across the street. She saw a glimpse of sunrise. Light filled everything, defined contours, and uncovered the fatigue that weighed down on the world. They were in a hallway. Across the way she identified a gray door with a red emergency handle. The mumbling was interrupted by a louder sound. The shouting of women. The shuffling of running feet. A door opened violently. People entered, bewildered, and stood in a circle. In the middle of the circle, a girl. She was holding on tightly to a bundle in her arms and looked terrified.

  “This is a miracle, it’s a miracle, a miracle …” she mumbled.

  She wore a white nightgown and was barefoot. Her face was washed out, small and pale. She gesticulated, looking for the crowd’s comprehension and she kept speaking, clutching the newborn to her breast. It was wrapped in a light undershirt, its fragile head resting on its mother’s breast, its minuscule waxy hand in mid air, several centimeters from her mouth.

  “This is Cecilia. I’ve found her again. We are reborn. This is a miracle. I died in childbirth many years ago. Tell them, I beg you, tell them that we are reborn too. Don’t let them kill us, please. My baby is only two days old. Only two days. I beg of you.”

  She fell to her knees in slow motion. She brought her empty hand to her face, while the other hand sustained her baby’s head, and started crying soundlessly. Everyone around her was quiet. Two men and a woman burst in. The mother gripped Cecilia tightly. They had found her. She looked at them from h
ead to foot, without fleeing. They helped her up and grabbed her by the arms.

  “Come with us now, Signora. Calm down.”

  “Follow us.”

  The mother of Cecilia didn’t put up a fight. She surrendered. Someone shouted.

  “Leave her alone!”

  “Where are you taking them?”

  “You need to sterilize them, not kill them.”

  “This is a massacre! Butchers!”

  But the three torturers were walking away and no one dared stop them.

  “Let us through. Let us through. Keep calm.”

  Before the door closed with a shudder, the mother managed to turn to look at the people who had defended her.

  People started to walk again. The empty space was filled.

  It was dawn when they made their way outside. The last star was dying.

  Trenta

  All those people looked tiny from above. Serafino Currò eyed the street from his kitchen balcony. An intricate mix of pink-hued bodies fluttered and twisted every which way. It reminded him of the cans of worms that he would take with him on fishing expeditions as a boy, and one thought led to another. There was a dead cat lying on the side of the street. An older boy turned its body over with a stick. Its stomach was ripped open but it was still moving as if it were breathing. Someone said that it was still alive, but the boy with the stick said, “No, idiots, look,” and they got a closer and saw a mass of white larvae in its stomach. Serafino smiled. It was a little past seven in the morning, but it was already unbearably hot. He needed to close the shutters. He would spend yet another day in complete darkness.

  Maria felt like her stomach was full of rocks and the elastic bandage was tearing the skin under her arms. People crowded the streets, going in all different directions, walking down sidewalks and taking up lanes in the street and slowing down cars. She focused her energy on trying to put one foot in front of the other, taking on one meter at a time, one second at a time, baby steps. She kept on reminding herself not to walk like a pregnant woman. She needed to look dead. She had to imitate the others. To be present, only present. Something that moves, eats, and breathes. She couldn’t let herself to be afraid.

  At the wheel, Adriano sifted through his thoughts. He could feel the humidity on his skin from the day before and the cold dampness from the night. He was shirtless. Dirty. Sticky. It had taken them a little over five hours to get there and the way back was going to be more complicated. After a series of turns and backed-up overpasses, he finally made it to the tollbooth of the highway. It was abandoned. Men, women, old people and kids stood in the emergency lanes. These were the dead that were left outside the city, or the living that were trying to go home. Many, in the hopes of hitching a ride, kept walking down the road, at the risk of getting run over. No one stopped. He drove on, but felt like he wasn’t moving, like the planet was spinning under the car wheels.

  With his free hand he tried calling Maria. He had left his cell phone on the passenger seat along with his wallet, the only objects he managed to keep. There was no service. Nothing. He fiddled with the car radio but only picked up static. There was no way of knowing anything. No more news. Cars were the last resort when it came to power. He lowered his head onto the steering wheel and looked through the windshield. It was a sunny morning and there were white clouds in the sky. Everything looked bigger. The sky was a giant sheet of light blue, covered by a stretch of unraveling clouds, but he saw no airplanes, not even a trail of one in the sky. He turned on the GPS. He was surprised to find that it was still functioning. Satellites would keep on traveling their orbits, undisturbed, even after man disappeared from the face of the earth, and would slowly be consumed by the friction of the atmosphere.

  He hadn’t eaten or drunk anything since the day before. He needed to fill up the tank. His wallet was next to him. Was money still worth something? He kept his eye on the road. There couldn’t be this many people out roaming. The third wave. The last wave. If everyone was really reborn, there wouldn’t be enough room anywhere, not even where Maria was … Almost one hundred billion humans, that’s what Chengrong had said … Adriano would take Maria and the baby to the mountains, to the desert … they would start over. They would eat mollusks, like Wa Zí. They were going to become primitive again. Was his daughter born yet? Where was Maria?

  Heat rose from the surface of the earth. The sun burned low in the sky, she was breathing heavily. Maria was sweating. She needed to drink. Adriano’s coat, the cotton, the stockings, the adhesive bandage that was sawing at her armpits, the plants of her bare feet on the asphalt. She didn’t know where she was headed and she didn’t ask herself. She lost all perception of time. She needed to drink and eat. Life became foggy and surrounded her like vapor. She walked among the people as if in a fairy tale: a little girl lost in a forest full of brambles, her feet hurt, she wants to go to sleep, but she keeps walking because she knows that maybe, after all the walking, at the end of the darkness, she might find a flickering light and a tiny, tiny home. She wandered through the scattered bodies. A big, black vehicle drove down the middle of the street. Its engine stopped and started up again.

  She didn’t move to let it through. The fender touched her legs. The man at the wheel stuck his head out of the window.

  “Get the fuck out of the way, fatso.”

  Maria turned around. Three more heads turned around.

  “Will you get out of the way or not? Move your ass. You’re not pregnant, are you, fatso?”

  She stared. She wasn’t frightened. She was angry, but she didn’t know why. She instinctively gave them the finger. Then she took off running. She could hear the sound of car doors slamming. They were following her. She cut through the crowd, wedging and ducking, darting from side to side, inside a living and impenetrable forest that engulfed her, thick and protective. She pressed herself up against a wall. If they caught her they would lynch her. She saw her life collapsing into silence like a snowfall, but her fears mixed with the desire to live. She looked back. She spotted the faces of two of her persecutors less than twenty meters away.

  She ran to the right, down the ramp of a parking garage, her feet on the rough cement, the weight of her belly pulling her forward. She made it to a red and white barrier and crouched underneath. There was a flight of stairs to her right, she climbed up the first two steps, but someone could be upstairs waiting. She stopped at the first floor, panting. She looked up and tried to listen but she could only hear her own gasping. She went on, crouching low, three steps from the top. The coast looked clear. She saw overturned shopping carts and a row of closed shutters. It looked like a courtyard. Out on the street people paraded past her, oblivious. She could throw herself back into the flow of people and hope for the best, but instead she decided to slip inside, shielded by a low cement wall.

  She found herself in front of two elevators and pressed her back up against the wall. One of the men chasing her was standing in front of the entrance. She could hear footsteps down below. They were climbing the staircase. She was trapped. She threw herself into a tight alley between the building and the gate of the adjacent building. The echo of voices came closer.

  “The bitch didn’t come through here!”

  “We’ll check upstairs, you go back down.”

  There was no way out of the alley. But at the end there was a door, maybe a service entrance. She ran faster. She grabbed the door handle and flung it open.

  The car went into reserve. The emergency light flashed. He still had twenty kilometers to go. Interminelli hadn’t filled the tank. Adriano had no choice but to stop. Were the gas stations working without electricity? He saw a sign for an upcoming service area. It was four kilometers away. If he was lucky, he’d find water too. He put the blinker on, slowed down and got off the highway. There were several parked cars. He stopped at the gas pumps. The nozzles lay on the ground like dead snakes of black rubber. He grabbed his wallet and cellphone and got out of the car. Maybe there was some gasoline left in th
e pumps. He put the nozzle into the gas tank but nothing came out, not even a drop. Everything was dry. Like his mouth. He was dying of thirst.

  He locked the car door and walked towards the food court. He saw other abandoned cars with their doors open. One of them had an open hood. Someone had dissembled the radiator in order to drink. He walked around in search of a bathroom. A door. It said “private.” Handles and locks were broken. He might find water. There was a black truck parked in the middle of the lot, not more than ten meters from where he was.

  He walked in the office and shut the door behind him. Light penetrated in from a rectangular slit high up on the aluminum door. He placed his mouth on the faucet, but nothing came out. The tap ran empty. He stood on the edge of the toilet to look at the tank. He reached out his arm and put his hand inside. Water. Holding onto the pipe, with one foot on the sink, he lifted himself to look inside. He calculated that there were at least four liters in there. He arched his neck—his hands gripped onto the border of the container, his body suspended horizontally—and rested his lips on the water’s surface.

  He slurped it up, using his tongue, quenching his thirst. The liquid had a slightly moldy odor. He needed to find a container, a canister, a plastic bottle, a bucket which he could fill with the remaining water. He looked down but his gaze stopped at the tiny window. It framed the rear end of the truck. Three men were talking to each other. They had rifles in their hands.

  Maria closed her eyes and turned the knob. It opened. She slipped inside. She leaned against the door and felt something hard press against her kidney. The latch. She turned it. She needed to calm down. She couldn’t breath. The light of day filtered in through a row of windows. Her pupils dilated to see. Around her were steel desks. There were dark tiles on the floor. Big sinks. Several hooks hung from the ceiling. A plastic hose was rolled up on the floor. Where was she? She moved around through the tables. On top of these she saw awls and cleavers. She grabbed a butcher knife with a triangular blade. She moved slowly. Maybe someone was out there. She noticed an opening, a doorway, but no door. She looked inside and made out rows of shelves. She was in the butcher section of a supermarket. She wandered through the aisles.