After the Plague (28 page)

“Already?” The book was in his lap, his left index finger marking the place. “That was fast.”

“It was a long trip.”

“Yes,” he said, and he didn't know why he was saying it, “yes.” The wind came up suddenly and twisted round the corner of the house, spraying the windowpanes with compact pellets of snow.

She was in the room now, hovering over the couch. “I was just—I mean, I'm not sleepy at all, and I thought it would be nice, you know, just to sit by the fire … for a while, I mean.”

“Sure,” he said, and she squatted by the fire and threw her head back to curb her hair, and a long moment went by—five minutes, ten, he couldn't tell—before she spoke again. He'd just folded back the page of the book when she turned round and said, in a low murmur, “Buck's been very depressed. I mean, like clinically.”

Her face was broad and beautiful, with a high forehead and the nose of a legislator or poet. That face stunned him, so beautiful and new and floating there like an apparition in his living room, and he couldn't think of how to respond. The snow ticked at the windows. The old dog let out an audible fart. “He can't—” John began, and then he faltered. “What do you mean, depressed? How? Why?”

She'd been watching him, focusing a clear, steady gaze on him
that seemed to say all sorts of things—erotic things, crazy things—but now she dropped her eyes. “He thinks he's going to die.”

Something clutched suddenly at him, something deep, but he ignored it. He was going to say, “Don't be ridiculous,” but aimed for something lighter instead. “Well, he is,” he said. “I mean, it's a rational fear. We're all going to die.” He stared into her eyes, a pillar of strength and wisdom. “Eventually,” he added, and tried for a smile. “Look at me—I'm fifty already. But Buck—you kids, the two of you—what have you got to worry about? It's a long way off. Forget about it, enjoy yourselves, dance to the music of life.”
Dance to the music of life?
The phrase had just jumped into his head, and now he felt a little silly, a little quaint, but seductive too and wise and so full of, of love and maybe fear that he was ready to get up from the couch and embrace her.

The only problem was, she was no longer there. She'd heard something—and he'd heard it too, Buck calling out, the wind dragging its nails across the windowpane—and had risen like a ghost and silently vanished into the black hole of the hallway. John looked round him a moment, listening for the smallest sounds. The snow ticked away at the roof, the gutters, the window frame. The dog groaned in her sleep. He glanced down absently and saw the book there in his lap, turned back the page with a single autonomous sweep of his hand, and began, again, to read.

I'd never wanted to be a father—it was enough to have been father to my own diminishing parents, and I vowed I would never repeat the experience. Sonia felt as I did, and we took precautions to avoid any chance of conception, especially as she began younging and found herself menstruating again. I'd seen my own beloved mother dwindle to the size of a doll, a glove, an acorn, to nothing recognizable except to a scientist with a high-powered microscope, and the idea of it—of parenthood, little people, babies—terrified me.

But what could I do? I loved Sonia with all my being and I'd sworn before the Creator and Father Benitez to minister to her in sickness and health, if not in age and youth. It was my duty and my obligation to care
for her when she could no longer care for herself—some would say it was my
privilege,
and perhaps it was, but it made me no less miserable for all that. For, you see, the inevitable had come to pass and she was an infant now, my Sonia, a baby, a squally, colicky, wide-eyed, little
niñita
sucking greedily on a bottle of formula and howling through the sleepless nights with miniature tears of rage and impotence rolling down her ugly red cheeks.

“Sonia!” I would cry. “Sonia, snap out of it! I know you're in there, I know you understand me—now just stop that bawling, stop it right now!”

But, of course, she didn't. How could she? She was only a baby, eight months old, six months, two. I held her in my arms, my lover, my Sonia, and watched her shrink away from me day by day. I picked her up by her naked ankles as if she were nothing more than a skinned rabbit ready for the pan, and I laid her out on a clean diaper after swabbing her privates and the little cleft that had once been my joy and my life.

Don't think I didn't resent it. Oh, I knew the rules, we all did, but this was cruel, too cruel, and I wept to see her reduced to this sucking, grasping, greedy little thing. “Sonia!” I cried. “Oh, Sonia!” And for all that she just stared at me out of her eyes the color of hazelnuts, eyes as brimming and lucid as her adult eyes, eyes that must have seen and known and felt. I lost weight. I couldn't sleep. My boss at the Banco Nacional, an eminently reasonable man, took me aside and informed me in so many words that I was in danger of losing the position I'd held for nearly sixty years.

Then one evening, after Sonia had soiled herself so thoroughly and repulsively I had no choice but to draw her a bath, there came a knock at the door. I had her in my arms, Sonia, my Sonia, the water in the tub as mild as a breeze and only two inches deep, but rising, rising, and she gave me a look that ate right through to my soul. It was a plea, a very particular and infinitely sad request that sprang like fire from the depths of her wide and prescient hazelnut eyes… .

The knock came again, louder and more insistent now, and I set her down on her back in the slowly accumulating water, all the while watching her eyes as her spastic little legs kicked out and her fists clenched. Then I rose—just for a second, only a second—wiped my hands on my pants, and called, “I'm coming, I'm … coming!”

The knock at the door roused John momentarily—Good God, it was past one in the morning, the fire was dead, and Barb, where was Barb?—but he was caught up in something here, and he tried to fight down his anxiety, compartmentalize it, tuck it away in a corner of his brain for future reference. When the knock came again, he didn't hear it, or not consciously, and
Sonia,
he was thinking,
what's going to become of Sonia?
till Buck was there and the door stood open like the mouth of a cave, freezing, absolutely freezing, and a figure loomed in the doorway in a great wide-brimmed felt hat above a gaunt and harried face.

“Dad,” Buck was saying, “Dad, there's been an accident—”

John barely heard him. He held the book to his face like a screen, and over the tumult and the confusion and the sudden slashing movement that swept up the room in a hurricane of shouts and moans and the frantic sobbing bark of the old dog, he finally found his voice. “Fifteen pages,” he said, waving a frantic hand to fend them off, all of them, even the dog. “I've just got fifteen pages to go.”

When the engine under the right wing began to unravel a thin skein of greasy, dark smoke, Ellen peered out the abraded Plexiglas window and saw the tufted clouds rising up and away from her and knew she was going to die. There was a thump from somewhere in the depths of the fuselage, the plane lurched like a balsawood toy struck by a rock, and the man in the seat in front of her lifted his head from the tray table and cried, “Mama!” in a thin, disconsolate wail. On went the “Fasten Seat Belts” sign. The murmur of the cabin became a roar. Every muscle in her body seized.

She thought distractedly of cradling her head—isn't that what you were supposed to do, cradle your head?—and then there was a burst of static, and the captain's voice was chewing calmly through the loudspeakers: “A little glitch there with engine number three, I'm afraid, folks. Nothing to worry about.” The plane was obliterating the clouds with a supersonic howl, and every inanimate fold of metal and crease of plastic had come angrily to life, sloughed shoes, pieces of fruit, pretzels, paperback books, and handbags skittering by underfoot. Ellen stole a glance out the window: the smoke was dense now, as black and rich as the roiling billows rising from a ship torpedoed at sea, and stiff raking fingers of yellow flame had begun to strangle the massive cylinder of the engine. The man in the seat next to hers—late twenties, with a brass stud centered half an inch beneath his lower lip, and hair the exact
color and texture of meringue—turned a slack face to her. “What is that? Smoke?”

She was so frightened that she could only nod, her head filled with the sucking dull hiss of the air jets and the static of the speakers. The man leaned across her and squinted through the gray aperture of the window to the wing beyond. “Fuck, that's all we need. There's no way I'm going to make my connection now.”

She didn't understand. Connection? Didn't he realize they were all going to die?

She braced herself and murmured a prayer. Voices rose in alarm. Her eyes felt as if they were going to implode in their sockets. But then the flames flickered and dimmed, and she felt the plane lifted up as if in the palm of some celestial hand, and for all the panic, the dimly remembered prayers, the cries and shouts, and the sudden, potent reek of urine, the crisis was over almost as soon as it had begun. “I hate to do this to you, folks,” the captain drawled, “but it looks like we're going to have to turn around and take her back into LAX.”

And now there was a collective groan. The man with the meringue hair let out a sharp, stinging curse and slammed the back of the seat in front of him with his fist. Not LAX. Not that. They'd already been delayed on the ground for two and a half hours because of mechanical problems, and then they'd sat on the runway for another forty minutes because they'd lost their slot for takeoff—or at least that's what the pilot had claimed. Everyone had got free drinks and peanuts, but nobody wanted peanuts, and the drinks tasted like nothing, like kerosene. Ellen had asked for a Scotch-and-soda—she was trying to pace herself, after sitting interminably at the airport bar nursing a beer that had gone stale and warm—but the man beside her and the woman in the aisle seat had both ordered doubles and flung them down wordlessly. “Shit!” the man cursed now, and slammed his fist into the seat again, pounding it as if it were a punching bag, until the man in front of him lifted a great, swollen dirigible of a head over the seat back and growled, “Give it a rest, asshole. Can't you see we got an emergency here?”

For a moment, she thought the man beside her was going to get up out of his seat and start something—he was certainly drunk enough—but mercifully the confrontation ended there. The plane rocked with the weight of the landing gear dropping into place, the big-headed man swivelled around and settled massively in his seat, and beyond the windows Los Angeles began to scroll back into view, a dull brown grid sunk at the bottom of a muddy sea of air. “Did you hear that?” the man beside Ellen demanded of her. “Did you hear what he called me?”

Ellen sat gazing straight ahead, rigid as a catatonic. She could feel him staring at the side of her face. She could smell him. And everyone else too. She narrowed her shoulders and emptied her lungs of air, as if she could collapse into herself, dwindle down to nothing, and disappear.

The man shifted heavily in his seat, muttering to himself now. “Courtesy,” he spat, “common courtesy,” over and over, as if it were the only phrase he knew. Ellen leaned her head back and shut her eyes.

There was the usual wait on the ground, the endless taxiing, the crush of the carry-on luggage, and the densely packed, boviform line creeping up the aisles and into the steel tube that fed the passenger terminal. Ellen inched along, her head down, shoulders slumped, her over-the-shoulder bag like a cannonball in a sling, and followed the crowd out into the seething arena of the terminal. She'd been up since five, climbing aboard the airport bus in the dark and sitting stiffly through the lurching hour-and-a-half trip in bumper-to-bumper traffic; she'd choked down a dry six-dollar bagel and three-fifty cup of espresso at one of the airport kiosks, and then there was the long wait for the delayed flight, the pawed-over newspapers, the mobbed rest room, and the stale beer. Now she was back where she'd started, and a flight agent was rewriting her ticket and shoving her in the direction of a distant gate, where she would hook up with the next flight out to Kennedy, where her mother would be waiting for her. Was it a direct flight? No, the agent was afraid not. She'd have a two-hour
layover in Chicago, and she'd have to switch planes. On top of that, there was weather, a fierce winter storm raking the Midwest and creeping toward New York at a slow, sure pace that was almost certain to coincide with her arrival.

She moved through the corridors like an automaton, counting off the gates as she passed them. The terminal was undergoing renovation—perpetually, it seemed—and up ahead plywood walls narrowed the corridors to cattle chutes. There was raw concrete underfoot here, and everything had a film of dust on it. She looked anxiously to the bottleneck ahead—she had only ten minutes to make the flight—and she was just shifting the bag from her left shoulder to her right when she was jostled from behind. Or not simply jostled—if it hadn't been for the woman in front of her, she would have lost her footing on the uneven surface and gone down in a heap. She glanced up to see the man who'd been sitting beside her on the aborted flight hurrying past—what should she call him? Stud Lip? Meringue Head?—even as she braced herself against the woman and murmured, “Excuse me, I'm so sorry.” The man never gave her so much as a glance, let alone a word of apology. On he went, a pair of shoulders in some sort of athletic jacket, the bulb of his head in the grip of his hair, a bag too big for the overhead compartment swinging like a weapon at his side.

She saw him again at the gate—at the front of the line, a head taller than anyone else—and what was he doing? There were at least twenty people ahead of her, and the flight was scheduled to depart in three minutes. He was just standing there, immovable, waving his ticket in the attendant's face and gesticulating angrily at his bag. Ellen wasn't a violent person—she was thirty-two years old, immured in the oubliette of a perpetual diet, with limp blond hair, a plain face, and two milky blue eyes that oozed sympathy and regret—but if she could have thrown a switch that would put an instant, sizzling end to Meringue Head's existence, she wouldn't have hesitated. “What do you mean, I have to check it?” he demanded, in a voice that was like the thumping of a mallet.