by Tim Curran
Her hands clenched and unclenched.
Her eyes rolled back white in their sockets.
Her face was contorted in an agonized, silent scream, teeth gnashing, head whipping from side to side on her pillow.
Her entire body arching, muscles standing taut, ligaments strained tight as bowstrings, she rocked and jerked stiffly, rippling waves passing just beneath her skin. Her face became a mask of agony, her teeth and gums jutting from her mouth as pink meat juice trickled from the corners of her lips.
From the closet opposite the bed, there was the sound of breathing, rasping and anxious.
31
The first escalation of hostilities on Birch began with garbage, of all things. On Birch Street, garbage bags were not left on the curb or set out at the perimeter of the alley. No, that would have been too untidy and tasteless. The city had provided plastic 95-gallon bins that were picked up on Tuesday mornings by an automated side-loader truck. Things looked much neater that way.
Some two hours after the fall of meat, Mr. Bagmore stepped out onto his porch to find someone going through his bin. It was, of course, an inexcusable offense on Birch. Mr. Bagmore should have been offended by what he saw, but he wasn’t. Ever since eating the meat, he looked at the world in a whole new way.
I expected this, he thought. God yes, I expected this.
The offender in question was no doubt Jeff Baker from across the street. He was blatantly digging through the garbage, tossing things about that didn’t interest him—dirty paper plates and bags of fast food scraps, rotten lettuce and slices of moldy bread—in his search for something else, something very important.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Mr. Bagmore asked him. He’d picked up a pair of hedge clippers on his way and now he brandished them at his visitor.
Jeff looked up, a steely gleam in his eyes. They reminded Mr. Bagmore of dirty—very dirty—nickels.
“I’m looking for something,” Jeff told him, as if going through a neighbor’s garbage was the most ordinary thing in world. “It was everywhere. I saw it. Now it’s gone. Everyone took it. Jenna took it, too, and hid it. Now she won’t give me any.”
“Any of what?”
“You know.”
“Tell me.”
Jeff stood up. In his chino shorts and button-down chambray shirt, he did not look like the sort of guy to be found digging in garbage cans. His cropped hair was as metrosexual fashionable as his beard stubble. His teeth were white, his skin lightly tanned. He looked like he stepped off the cover of GQ…or would have, if it hadn’t been for the stains on his shirt, the egg yolk and shell fragments on his shorts, the filth smeared up his arms.
On any given day, Mr. Bagmore would have called him a preppie. But not today. Today, Jeff Baker looked like an animal. In fact, with his crazy eyes and sneering lips, he looked like an animal that had been cornered, hackles raised in preparation to fight.
“You need to share it,” Jeff said.
Mr. Bagmore, of course, knew exactly what he was talking about, just as he knew he would never share what fell from the sky with another human being. The idea was ludicrous. In fact, it was unthinkable—like ripping out one of your kidneys in a bloody, flaccid mass because someone mentioned that they needed one. You didn’t do that anymore than you shared your coveted meat.
“Where is it?” Jeff demanded, his shoulders bunched, his hands balled into fists.
Still, Mr. Bagmore wouldn’t play the game. The desperation in Jeff’s eyes amused him as did his threat posturing.
He tasted it and now he wants more. In fact, he needs more…but he won’t get it.
“You shouldn’t be digging in other people’s trash, Jeff,” Mr. Bagmore chided. “It’s not right. And it’s unsanitary.”
“You’re not using it.”
“Even my garbage is still mine.”
Jeff wiped a hand over his sweaty face, leaving a smear of bacon grease (three days old) across his cheek and forehead. “You have some meat. I want it.”
“No.”
“I have to have it.”
“Get your own.”
“You don’t understand,” Jeff said, a string of drool hanging from his lower lip. “I’m hungry…I’m so hungry I can’t think of anything else.”
“Get out of here.”
“Not without the meat.”
Mr. Bagmore raised the clippers. “I mean it.”
32
Since first tasting the meat, Jeff had become ravenous for it. In fact, he could really think of nothing else. It owned him. Possessed him. Compelled him. To be without it was not only to know the horrendous physical pangs of a hunger that could never be satisfied, but to suffer horrible paranoia and rampant hallucinations that distorted one’s perception of reality. There was also emotional distress—like a love that could never be quenched.
And only the meat could cure this.
So as Jeff looked upon Mr. Bagmore’s overconfident face, he saw a tormentor that denied him everything he needed to survive: food, psychological stability, and emotional comfort. Worse, there were large scarlet-red millipedes crawling out of his mouth and ears.
Mr. Bagmore was a monster.
An infested monster.
And what made this nightmare scenario even worse was that the millipedes were no disorganized creepy-crawlers, no random assemblage of fluttering segments and wiggling legs, but an industrious unit that linked themselves together into wriggling daisy chains that enshrouded him in squirming belts until he was no longer visible.
Jeff squeezed his eyes shut until tears ran because he did not want to see this. He pressed his hands over his ears because the millipedes had tiny, hellish little human faces that screamed at him, louder and louder, dozens of screeching voices making the blood boil and roar inside his head.
This is what he saw.
This is what made his sanity shear open with an audible moist tearing in the back of his mind. This is what made him scream and shake and finally lunge at Mr. Bagmore.
33
Mr. Bagmore, despite his years, met him.
He brought the hedge clippers down, wanting nothing better than to bury them in Jeff’s chest. He missed because of poor aim and Jeff himself ducking away. Regardless, the blades (which were kept quite sharp) glanced off Jeff’s head, peeling a three-inch strip of hair and skin from his scalp.
The pain was real.
It disrupted everything, even the squealing millipedes.
Jeff fell back, screaming as a freshet of hot blood spilled down his face. He looked at Mr. Bagmore and growled.
“Get the hell off my property,” warned Mr. Bagmore, “or I’ll stick them in your neck.”
Jeff screamed at him again, this time not so much out of pain as rage. If Mr. Bagmore did not have the shears, he would have beat him down. He would have torn out his throat. After all, Mr. Bagmore was a monster.
As the two men faced off, the ruckus brought Donny Falconi from next door. It was obvious from the look in his eyes that diversification and muni bonds were the farthest things from his mind. Like so many on Birch Street, his priorities had changed.
“What’s this all about?” he asked, completely unconcerned about Jeff’s bloody face and scalp.
“He came to steal my meat,” Mr. Bagmore explained.
Jeff shook his head. “I wouldn’t! I would never—”
“Did you?” Donny asked.
Jeff looked from him to Mr. Bagmore. He bared his teeth like an animal in a cage. Then he darted away, nearly getting run down by a car that passed by.
Mr. Bagmore said, “Didn’t recognize that car. It’s not local.”
“Could be someone out looking for meat,” Donny suggested. “We better keep our eyes open.”
Looking at the bloody blade of his shears, Mr. Bagmore nodded. Nobody was going to touch what belonged to him. That was for sure.
34
What was taking hold of the n
eighborhood was awful to the extreme and completely beyond reason. Yet, for many it was also liberating. For Tony Geroy, the neighborhood’s favorite New Age, tie-dyed investment broker, the meat had done something that all the herbal medicine, reincarnation therapy, and healing crystals could never accomplish: it woke him up. Really woke him up. Literally and figuratively, he had achieved something quite near total consciousness. Or, at least, this was what he told himself. He felt like a hungry bear that had finally come out of hibernation.
For so long now, he had existed in something of a synthetic state brought about by alcohol and dope, fast food and preservatives, black coffee and the internet, political games and greasy corporate maneuvering. In essence, modern life and its fuck-you games. It had made him feel beat down and used up, drained and dirty, a fortysomething man dragged through the gravel face-first.
But no more.
He had finally shed the dirty wrapper of bullshit and his vision was 20/20.
It had all been going on for so long; that was the very worst part. He had been numb for years and if it hadn’t been for the meat, he would have never realized it. He would have kept stumbling numbly and dumbly through life. God, how he hated it all. Nothing had any flavor or texture before the meat. Every book he read was derivative. Every TV show was insipid. Every movie a blatant remake of a remake of a remake. And every song was a rip-off of songs he’d known years before as if after the year 2000, nobody could even write music anymore.
But it went beyond that.
He was sick of people and their opinions, prejudices, and re-channeled fears. He was tired of their politics and their religion and their small minds. The human race was devolving into the primal soup that had spawned it, and everyone was content with this. Humankind was broken. It was a Christmas tree that would no longer light and an engine that could no longer turn over. There was no spark. No creativity. No spontaneity. Nobody seemed to have an opinion that wasn’t fed to them by corrupt politicians, multi-nationals, and pale news organizations whose reporters had been sucking corporate pole for so long that they couldn’t even define journalism, let alone practice it.
But this was all done now.
Tony was no longer a part of it. He wondered if this was how a snake felt when it shed its skin and discovered something bright and shiny beneath. For years, he had felt as if he was wearing the stiffening hide of a corpse, but no more.
His brain was no longer a dying light. It had now been given a fresh bulb and God, how it shined.
As he realized this, he thought about Lara Stromm across the street. He’d had a thing for her for years, but would never admit it. He no longer hid from his passions. He wanted to know her. He wanted to crawl beneath her skin and breathe with her.
But first, there was hunger.
Like everyone else on the block, after tasting the meat, he ran around the yard stuffing it into a Hefty bag so no one else could get it. It was too fine and too rare to go to waste.
He had it hidden in the closet.
This was where he went now. He squatted in the darkness like an ape, gnawing on succulent cutlets that made his brain feel as if it was turning around and around in his skull like a dog seeking a comfortable spot.
He couldn’t wait until Pammy got home. He had a surprise for her. If she was good, he just might share the meat with her. Then again, maybe not.
35
When Bria finally woke, she realized she had been out for nearly two hours. Amazing. Her naps were usually twenty-minute affairs. This was a big one. She wondered if she’d sleep tonight.
For some time, she sat on the edge of the bed, just breathing, sending out feelers into the house. At first, it was to find Alice, to know where she was, to see if maybe she was hovering outside the door. Then it became something else. The house did not feel right. She dismissed this as a new bed in a new place (even though it was an old familiar bed in an old familiar place), but that wasn’t it.
This was something else.
This was bigger.
She felt a sense of disconnection, of unreality. It occurred to her that she had felt this way before, then remembered it was when she was a kid and there was a total solar eclipse that made everything look weird and yellow.
But there was no eclipse now.
So what was it?
She climbed out of bed and jumped through the shower, then slipped into shorts and a Hot Topic tee. She checked her phone, but there was nothing interesting. A few texts from people at school. Mostly who was seeing who and who got dumped by who. Same old, same old. None of it could hold her attention because that odd sense of disorientation remained. Then, riding the rising spike of a potential panic attack, she remembered.
Your meds, she thought. Don’t forget your meds.
Yes, shit, she was late on the Zyprexa. She swallowed her daily dose with a pull of water and felt better almost immediately. Which was ridiculous, of course; Zyprexa could not be absorbed that fast. It was just the knowledge that she had taken it.
Steeling herself, she made the inevitable descent downstairs.
“Mother?” she said. “You here?”
Her voice echoed and died. There was no other sound but the hum of the central air unit outside. The air was cool, almost sterile, but not exactly fresh. It smelled sort of stagnant, briny like a beach at low tide.
“Mother? Alice?”
Still no reply. She must have popped out for something.
Bria walked through the kitchen and into the living room, nearly coming out of her skin. Mother Alice was sitting there in her rocking chair, gliding back and forth, her eyes oddly glazed and staring into space, her face sort of bloodless and hooked into a narrow grimace. It occurred to Bria that she didn’t even look real…more like a mannequin or a human doll, a simulacrum of a living thing. She rocked back and forth, back and forth, and as she did so, she licked her fingers slowly and carefully.
“Mother?” Bria said in the thinnest of voices.
Mother Alice ignored her. She stared unblinking. She rocked. She licked her fingers which were curiously pink-stained as if she’d been canning strawberries…or had just slaughtered an animal.
“Mother?” Bria said again, her voice barely a whisper now.
Then the rocking chair stopped. The licking stopped. Still not blinking her eyes, Alice’s head rotated on her neck almost mechanically. She looked at her daughter, and her eyes were like hot glass.
“What is it?”
Bria swallowed. Her throat was terribly dry. “What…what are you doing?”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“But…”
Alice looked back into empty space. “Maybe you should go for a walk. The whole world’s waiting for you out there.”
There were many things Bria could have said, but the words would not come. They tumbled over one another and got lodged in her throat. She found herself backing from the room until she reached the door. She pawed frantically at the knob until it opened and she was released into the world of Birch Street.
36
The first thing that struck her was the silence.
It was unnatural. Silence was not part and parcel of the nabe with its pretentious starter castles and Garage Mahal monstrosities. The neighborhood was a place of activity—children shouting and playing, lawns being mowed and weeds trimmed, radios playing and electric hedge clippers whirring away. But there was none of that. Only the silence which was like that of a mortuary.
The evening was warm, but she felt cold chills break out on her bare arms.
What is it? What is it I’m feeling?
It was incomprehensible. The sense of unease Mother Alice inspired in her had grown bigger now, becoming a terrible foreboding as if the world around her was about to split its seams. Insane. That’s the word she kept thinking. As if some noticeable division between reality and unreality had either widened or no longer existed at all. The neighborhood seemed off. It was as if she’d
just eaten some magic mushrooms and was starting to take off. She knew she had better relax because she was beginning to enter the territory of utter panic.
And that’s a bad, bad place.
She wondered if she was having some adverse reaction to the Zyprexa, but that was unlikely.
She went yogic again, breathing in and breathing out.
Okay.
Fine.
Better.
And that’s when she realized someone was standing right behind her.
She whirled around, her heart pumping frantically in her chest. It was Sady. There was a slight grin on her face, her eyes huge and filled with secrets. That was the thing about her, the most disconcerting thing—she always had that sardonic look, as if she knew things you would never know.
“Mind if I walk with you?” she asked.
“Of course not,” Bria said.
But it was a lie. The last thing she needed right now was Sady. She was already uneasy; she didn’t need her sister multiplying her confusion and disquiet.
Sady seemed to realize that. “Something’s bothering you, isn’t it?”
And Bria wanted to lie, but it seemed beyond her. “Yes. Maybe. I’m not sure.” She sighed and shrugged. “Everything seems off somehow. I’m not sure what it is.”
“Sooner or later, you’ll figure it out,” Sady said.
Sooner or later.
They started walking and Bria smelled something buttery and delicious. Popcorn. Sady was eating popcorn, digging handfuls of it from a red-striped box, the sort you get from street vendors or at high school football games.
“Want some?”
Bria shook her head. “Gets caught in my teeth.”
Sady went right on eating as they moved side by side up the block. All Bria could hear was their footfalls. The silence was huge, almost omnipotent. She figured if she would have dragged a stick along Mr. Bagmore’s fence, the rattling would have sounded like machinegun fire in the stillness.