The Merchants of Zion (22 page)

I watched a tall, white man with a shaved head plod along his row, raising the tube and blasting each infected ear of corn with a cloud of mist. After several moments he looked up and caught me staring. He dropped the sprayer and began shambling towards the train. It left a shallow furrow in the dirt as he dragged it along. As he edged closer my heart seized in fear, and I felt the instinctive panic of a cornered animal. I knew it was absurd—between us was a fence lined with razor wire, an irrigation ditch, and the train itself, but the mindless savagery raging in his eyes disregarded distance and had no concept of physical impossibility.

He stopped at the fence, his arms hanging limp at his sides and his head tilted up in a way that suggested it took great physical effort on his part to maintain the pose. My terror turned to curiosity, and I pushed my forehead against the glass. Had he been lobotomized? I thought I saw a small scar above his right eyebrow, but he was far away and my imagination was in hyperdrive. Besides, a lobotomy was supposed to render you docile, not rabid.

I never decided on a satisfactory explanation. The train lurched and groaned, and the zombie farmer swiveled his head to track my window as we rumbled away. Elly stirred and asked for another cereal bar. We each ate one, then watched 
Eponymals.
 The cornfield receded behind us.

* * *

We were scheduled to hit Chicago around midnight, but dawn found us stuck in a crumbling Indiana ghost town. When we finally arrived, a trip scheduled to take six hours had ballooned to twenty-four. The conductor wished us a pleasant stay in Chicago as we stepped off, and Elly showed her the picture she'd drawn on her tablet of a ruined factory. We'd stopped beside it for several hours.

Helen's mother was waiting for us on a bench near the tracks. Elly cried “Grams!” when she saw her, and dropped her backpack as she ran. Her grandmother stood up and waddled forward, and Elly wrapped her arms around her Grams's waste. I smiled at the cutesiness—an irrepressible, cheek to cheek grin—and picked up her discarded backpack.

“Hello Mrs. Berger. I'm Cliff,” I said, shaking a hand extended over Elly's buried head.

“Hello, Cliff.” She paused. “Have we met before?”

“Yeah, once briefly. I was a friend of Ryan's.”

“Right.” I stared at Elly, awkward and unsure how to continue.

“Where's Gramps? Why isn't he here?” Elly demanded, taking his absence as a personal slight.

“He's in the restroom, honey. He'll be so disappointed he missed your train.”

“He should be!”

“We can yell at him when he gets here.” She sat back down. Elly, who was too big for her grandmother's frail body, clambered into her lap, but if Mrs. Berger minded she hid it beneath a kind, stoic face, listening patiently as Elly told her about every detail of the train ride and the landscapes she'd seen and how they'd served her breakfast and how she had a new computer to watch TV shows on and about the bathroom and how nice the conductor was and on and on... Throughout it all her grandmother cradled her in her arms, laughing and gasping, her attention wholly on her granddaughter's inanities.

It had been five years since I'd last been to Chicago, when I'd attended my mother's funeral. I didn't bear the city any ill will, but I was over it forever. Like when you finish high school and can't imagine walking through those particular glass doors ever again. I'd spent my childhood in and around the city, and it had etched its influence on myself. Then I'd grown up and left, looking forward to a successful life out East. Although if success lay ahead for me, it was beyond the horizon or in possession of effective camouflage.

When her grandfather returned Elly hopped off her Gram's lap and hugged him. He was stocky and bald and leaned heavily on a wooden cane.

“Gramps!”

“Elly-baby!”

He threw his cane to the ground and scooped her in his arms more easily than I could have. It was evidence in favor of James's theory about old-man strength: as men aged they replaced their former flexibility with a rigidity that created the illusion of immense physical prowess. To use his analogy, which I thought was moronic, consider a table made of glass compared to one of rope: the glass table can bear a heavier load, even though it is more brittle and cannot bend. I told him his analogy was false—a rope table would hold more weight than one made of glass—and we never came to an agreement on the basic facts of the matter.

“Hello Mr. Berger. I'm Cliff.” He didn't offer his hand, but nodded his head.

“Pleased to meet you. My thanks for keeping our granddaughter safe.”

“It's my job, sir.”

He grunted. “All right Elly-Baby. You ready to go?”

We walked to the parking garage. The station had fallen on hard times; most of the storefronts were empty, and even those still in business had their share of broken windows. I could see straight through into an empty sandwich shop staffed by a lone, plucky black teenager and into a gift shop with bare shelves. New York looked utopian compared to the busiest train station in Chicago, and I wondered if Leopold Heights was the new urban norm rather than a neglected neighborhood on the outskirts of civilization.

The parking garage was better maintained—barely. The graffiti had been painted over half-way, as if whoever was in charge decided to move on from one tag to the next after rendering the message unreadable. All of the lights worked, however, and I suppose there was something to be said for that.

The Bergers had parked on the fourth level, and the elevator was broken. Mr. Berger told his wife and Elly to wait while he and I brought the car down. I said I could take care of it alone, but he waved away the idea with a shake of his hand.

“Come on... Cliff was it?”

He pulled himself up the stairs by the railing and a heavy thud accompanied every other step as he put the entire weight of his body on his good leg. He didn't say anything and I had no idea what I should talk about with him. I got on well with older women—mothers, grandmothers and such—because I could adopt a flirtatious attitude minus the sexual subtext. Being clever, friendly, and talkative worked well enough with them, but when it came to older men like Elly's grandfather—or Mr. Felkins—I was at a loss. They saw their world as a conquered space, a niche they'd carved out and could call their own, and had little interest in the lives and aspirations of those outside their bubble. Women enjoyed hearing my stories and were interested in me as a person. Or at least they were better able to pretend.

We took a break at the top of the first flight of stairs. I kept my eyes on the ground to avoid being pressured into conversation, and turned over my possible futures in my mind like a charred rotisserie chicken. I couldn't tutor Elly forever, and either my cousin would take his house back someday or Liberty Bell or the government would come and seize it. My best bet was to get hitched to someone successful enough to support me and become a stay-at-home dad. Maybe Ruth? Or—

“What are you looking at?” Mr. Berger asked.

“Eh?”

“You were gawking at my limp.”

“Um... No sir, I wasn't.”

“Yeah okay. Let's get going.”

His comment about my ableist gaze was no more than a pretext to bring up the subject. At the top of the third flight he said, “Do you know how I got it?”

“No, sir. Why would I?”

“I thought Helen might have told you. I was caught in the airborne toxic event.”

I hazarded a guess. “Partial paralysis?”

“No. When it got into our office building I jumped down an empty elevator shaft. Three stories. I was able to crawl to a utility closet and stuff the cracks with rags.”I was in there for five days. I was afraid to leave. I didn't want to come out and find the world had come to an end.”

“My mom was caught in rush hour traffic when it happened,” I said.

“A lot of people were. After the hazmat team found me they carried me through the building's lobby. The bodies hadn't been cleared yet.”

“That's awful.”

“Ryan was captured not long after that. He'd just gotten promoted, you know, and he was supposed to visit us for Christmas.” He stood at the top of the stairs, staring outside like he was looking at an alternate history, one where his grandson and two million faceless Chicagoans were still alive.

“They're probably waiting for us downstairs,” I said. I hadn't asked to be privy to this man's extinguished hopes for his dead grandchild. Why even offer that information to me in the first place? I could see the deaths he'd witnessed playing out in his head—experiences incommunicable to anyone who hadn't been there. Those and other half-remembered memories were best left boxed up to collect dust in a confused and aging mind.

My first summer after college I'd been digging through our attic for God-knows-what-reason and had stumbled upon a plastic bin full of old action figures. Each one had a missing limb, a ripped cape, a cracked torso, some evidence of decay, but as I sifted through them my mind drifted back to my childhood. The first thoughts had been happy, of weekends spent organizing battle lines on my bedroom carpet. Then I remembered how lonely I'd been as the dorky new kid at school. Having no friends, I created imaginary narratives where no one else was needed.

People are tough and most get through the worst times without damaging their psyche to the point of ruin. Pets die, grandparents die, parents die, children die, and people continue with their lives, harsh as that sounds. Life sucks, shit happens, get over it.

These memories, so-called nostalgia—far too innocent of a word for such an awful feeling—are self-inflicted wounds. No one forced me to root through the attic, just like no one forced Mr. Berger to tell me about his brush with death and his Christmas with Ryan that was never to be. We open these boxes, for whatever reason, and are trapped into confronting our own mortality and the immutability of the past, which is no more than a chain of experiences lost to us forever as we hurtle towards oblivion. The act of remembering is nothing but a reminder of all the loss and hardship we've accumulated before we collapse from a heart attack or die in a plane crash or are shot or bombed or beheaded by a member of our own species. And when we choose to travel down that road, hoping perhaps to find one solace in pleasant memories, we find old boogie-men instead.

James had a motto: “People are morons, and deserve the same respect you show a cow as you load it into your mouth.”

“You're right,” Mr. Berger said.

“Huh? About what?”

“Enough standing around. Let's get to that car.”

We found the Bergers' car, a luxury sedan. He drove us to the bottom of the garage and Elly and her grandmother piled in.

“You two took forever,” Mrs. Berger said.

The old couple bantered good-naturedly and I settled into the worn leather seat. The interior smelled like cinnamon. Mrs. Berger asked us if we'd buckled our seat-belts, speaking to Elly and me in the same tone. I rolled my eyes at Elly and she giggled silently.

Chicago had recovered somewhat since my last visit, but the aura of emptiness still lingered. Sidewalks that six years ago would have been packed from the beginning of the block to the end now contained no more than a few dozen pedestrians. Likewise, the gridlock of my youth had been replaced by a level of traffic reminiscent of a sleepy farm town, in marked contrast to a landscape of grasping steel, concrete, and glass.

My phone buzzed. A text from Ruth: “You make it to Chicago ok?” I responded: “Ya. Just got off the train. Her granddad told me how he survived the ATE.”

As we drove through the city, I hoped I wasn't getting a glimpse New York's future. In many ways Chicago was its opposite, with its wider streets and sidewalks supporting a more diffuse population. It still didn't have New York's pervasive grime, but there were too many darkened windows and the hot sun beat down on untended patches of green threatening to consume the half-abandoned city. The day-to-day frivolity of walking and shopping had been put on hold, replaced by the gangrenous calm of a mortal wound.

Mrs. Berger pulled out a blue lunchbox and offered us a variety of sandwiches: peanut butter and jelly, turkey, and pastrami. Elly wanted the pb&j and I asked for the pastrami, please.

“This sandwich is really good. The pastrami's delicious,” I said.

“I just bought it this morning. There's a kosher butcher just a little ways from where we live. Walter and I get all of our meat from there.”

“Do you keep kosher?”

She laughed. “No. We don't eat pork, but only because Walter hates it.”

Mr. Berger drove and Elly slept, and Mrs. Berger told me about her time in New York at the turn of the millennium. She'd been a lawyer at a midtown law firm that specialized in corporate bankruptcy. Walter had been an analyst at an investment bank. Their paths had first crossed during the first dotcom bubble, then again in the aftermath of September 11
^th
. Walter had had the astounding confluence of good and bad luck to be caught in the midst of and survive the two major terrorist attacks of the century. Together they'd watched wars, financial panics, and natural disasters come and go. After the summer of Southern Revenge—when three hurricanes named Davis, Jackson, and Lee sank the bottom tip of Manhattan until the pumps were built—they'd decided it was time to return to their roots and so they moved to Chicago. It amazed me how much each of them had seen in their lifetimes, and I wondered what would happen before I died. And despite the steady beat of destruction, she seemed quite chipper. I was sure the money helped.

They lived in a bank of condos northwest of downtown, squeezed between the city and its suburbs. Walter opened a gate for their building and drove into a parking lot with ten foot fences lined with barbed wire.

I woke Elly and carried our bags inside. In the elevator, she jumped at the exact second it started and stopped, trying to suspend gravity for a second or two. I explained to her that the trick only worked when the elevator was going down. She nodded as the information soaked in.

Their condo was modest and well-kept.