The Messenger (36 page)

And she will use it.

Exhausted, she hallucinates driving through different borders. Or is she sleeping as she drives? No matter which direction she picks, it all looks the same. America is huge. Getting lost is very easy to do; traffic is light until it isn’t. The semis travel in caravans. Plenty of official vehicles buzz by her. Ambulances and military vehicles. Refugees. People retreating home along the back roads of Oklahoma, then Texas, then Oklahoma again, and finally New Mexico.

As the news of the genetically engineered strain of smallpox is transmitted around the country, she notices that more people than
she would have imagined are behaving in a contrarian way. She has to slow as she drives through the town of Clayton. There is a big dance—the men in white straw hats, the early October weather still warm enough to linger at the picnic tables spread out around the park. Breaking every quarantine rule in the book. Not a mask in sight.

What is that? Defiance? Stupidity? Denial? Faith?

Running the gauntlet is not hard. Masked and driving a very nice set of wheels, she is waved right through. Americans are not going to give up their freedom to drive, no matter what.

She pulls into a truck stop. Her side is throbbing and she hasn’t eaten. Not very sane, really.

Inside, you’d never know that the world was ending. There is country music in the background. People talk, pull their masks down to eat, sip their coffee, then put them back up. Sometimes they stay down until a waitress comes along with a wink, or a cop gestures from across the room. Partly it’s the natural tendency of people to demonstrate their courage. It’s normal, she thinks. It’s even charming.

There is a television, but she cannot bring herself to watch and is shown to a booth, buys a hamburger and fries with a big iced tea, and sits there staring at the placemats, which are decorated with a tourist map of New Mexico surrounded by cartoon characters, vistas of cliff dwellings, rattlesnakes with silly forked tongues. The kind of thing that you’d give to children with crayons.

When the waitress comes over, Daria sees that she is wearing latex gloves.

Over the waitress’s shoulder the television shows her—Daria’s—face. It is a new picture, one she has never seen before. Then she recognizes it as a happy moment from their little NASDAQ party in New York City. There’s Burke.

And there she is. Smiling, a little drunk, lifting a glass to the lens. A girl gone wild.

“You see that?” she says to the waitress. The woman looks around. “That’s me.”

“Maybe …” the waitress says, looking back at her to compare.

“It is me. It could be me. I look like her, don’t I?” With one finger she pulls down her mask.

The waitress frowns and squints back at the television. “Maybe …”

“It is me. I was her. I was that girl.”

“You better cover up now, honey …” the woman says and moves on.

The burger, when it comes, is exquisite. The fries are a rich concoction of salt, fat, and starch. The iced tea is like drinking nectar. Halfway through the meal, she begins to shake and her nose starts running inside her mask. She can’t finish the meal, and crawls out of the booth, takes a twenty up to the register, and leaves it beneath the cleansing light.

She is bloated and her stomach is cramping by the time she reaches the Mercedes. When she tries to get in, she is racked by a sudden wave of nausea and vomits across the asphalt. Retches another two or three times and then stands there coughing until the spell passes. The strain of her heaving has adjusted her rib yet again into some new position. It doesn’t hurt any more or less, it’s just different.

She falls into the car and drives. South, she thinks.

The road is crowned, cracked and bumpy with sudden potholes. Relentlessly straight across the desert. Dull and stupid, she steers with one hand on the wheel, staring out at the great expanse, careening over the bumps. It turns into an even crappier road, and she goes slower and slower until she realizes she is stopped dead. It takes someone blowing by in a pickup truck and honking the horn to wake her up.

She goes. West, maybe.

The next time she wakes, she does not know who she is.

Her memory is shuffled or missing. She is dazed. Going mad, but very slowly. She looks around at the interior of the car … How
do they make these things? All the edges so carefully fitted together. Luxurious curves. Strong. Safe. Fast. Expensive.

Once again the steering wheel is before her. There is a pad at its center where the air bag nests. The covering is leather. Soft and resilient. The kind of thing you wouldn’t mind having explode in your face.

She is chilled and groggy. She has no idea where she is. Apparently she’s parked on some farm road. Everything is flat as a pancake, a horizon of brown fields. It reminds her of that old movie where the innocent man has to run away from the airplane.

Miraculously, nobody has bothered her, no cop has come along to render aid and assistance and seen the gun she left in plain sight on the seat.

On the windshield a solitary bee wanders among the remains of the dead insects smeared across the glass. There are no flowers there, no nectar for you, she wants to tell the bee. It buzzes and then stops, crawls a few more steps, and then starts the whole dance over again. It’s sick, she decides. It’s dying, too.

She pushes the door open with her foot, and tries to slide out under the steering wheel. It’s the only way to move, because it hurts so much to twist. She can’t get her breath, and waits for the broken rib to puncture her lung so she will die, drowning in her own blood.

Well. It would solve one problem.

She clings to the sculpted fender of the Mercedes and squats beside the rear tire and pees into the parched soil. Getting back up makes her groan and gasp. She takes off her T-shirt and inspects the wound by looking at the reflections in the windows and in the side mirror. It is all soft and yellow, spreading across the skin above and below the band of dirty white tape. Her skin is clouded with a red rash. Maybe she is getting the killer pox, after all. Maybe whatever antidote they gave her in Berlin is no good. If so, nothing can stop it.

No, she will never be a grandmother.

She pulls up her tights and walks a few paces, her legs and knees stiff. While sleeping she has kicked off her shoes and left them on the floor of the car. There are ancient cigarette butts and broken
glass in the dirt of the road. But she picks her way, birdlike, everything rough beneath her bare feet.

Her breath comes in a fog, she runs her tongue around her lips and gums, spits into the dust. Her eyes are crusty and she stretches her face and tries to blink her way into wakefulness.

Nothing. Not a pickup truck, or a tow truck, or a paramedic, or a highway trooper. Were it not for the road, the plowed-to-death fields, and an infinite strand of electric wires, she could be in a primal state.

She stretches experimentally, trying to assess the hole in her side. It’s acting up again. Something about the way the seats are not quite flat when they recline, but whatever position she slept in, the ribs popped apart.

Her mind floats back to 3050 and what everyone is doing. They will have found out by now. They will be cursing her. They will be in tears, crushed, terrified. They will have to give up or die, and if they decide to go to the hospital, they will be streamed wherever the authorities decree. Right from the beginning they will be manipulated into betraying each other. Paulina having to go through all that with poor beautiful Daniel. It’s too much.

Maybe she can keep going. She has to keep going. They’ll try to run too, and maybe she can keep going until they’re safely gone from Monica’s. It will only be a matter of days. She can give them a head start. They won’t rush to the hospital—after all, they’ve all had the shots—but they will abandon the infected house as fast as they can.

She was careful there. She was clean. Maybe the smallpox, or the anthrax, or whatever it was had worn off her hands by then.

Yes, they will get away. They will find freedom and new identities in Seattle and no one will ever get sick again.

And that is her evening prayer.

Driving, she passes by a ruined building that someone has festooned with partially burned effigies of Arabs. Hanging from tree branches are the remains of bedsheet puppets meant to represent generic Bedouins—straw beards, an old fez, and something that is supposed to be a turban. Graffiti painted on the tawny brick walls:

There are lights on in distant houses, dimmed by shades, and lit only in the back rooms. On the radio—the constantly breaking news, and afterwards some mournful jazz, or classic rock to help the listener forget.

T
he Mercedes has come to a stop on a gravel road beneath the only tree for miles. On a rise behind her is a low rock wall that runs along the side of the road for a few dozen yards, and behind that is a cemetery. There are a few tombstones, but mostly the graves are marked with wooden crosses. Several are decorated with feathers, miniature U.S. flags, cacti, and plastic flowers anchored in the stony ground.

She climbs out, gets to her feet and tries to stand straight. Takes the roll of toilet paper and goes behind the tree to urinate.

When she wipes herself there is blood, and she realizes that she has lived long enough to be cursed one last time. She wads up more toilet paper inside her panties and stands there for a while looking at the morning, and the graves, and the dried-out plants. It is remarkably like the hills around her village.

She had almost forgotten. The way the light fell in the dusty evening, the children shouting, radio broadcasts leaking out of windows, the smells of cooking, of trash burning. The face of her mother, never changing regardless of what fresh tragedy engulfed her. Her village. She misses it terribly.

She walks up the rise and into the cemetery. It is surprisingly
large, and as she goes, she tries to pick up clues to who is buried there.

She knows nothing of these people, only what she’s seen in movies. Is she on a reservation? Are these dead Apaches? Are they Comanches or Mescaleros? Navajos? Hopi? Zuni? There is not much of a clue. Many are proud veterans, judging from the flags and military mementos that have been left behind to ornament the homegrown monuments. The mixture of last names tells her nothing. They are the original Americans writing with someone else’s alphabet, and now she is walking on their graves.

In the distance she hears a truck and for a moment she tenses, thinking she might have to run away, but it is only a man driving down the gravel road, and when he sees her he raises his hand in salute.

And then he’s obscured by his own dust cloud and there is silence once more. The smell of sagebrush, and something on fire, far away on the wind.

Getting through the triage station at the next town is simple enough. She just pulls her mask up and drives through the traffic cones, routed through a pool that has been improvised from hay bales and tarpaulins and filled to hubcap depth with a blue fluid that smells like bleach. Cops and barriers keep her detoured around the town, past a large football field, behind a storage facility, and back to the main road.

There are too many cops eyeing her too-expensive car. She is nervous and turns off on a yet smaller road. She is in a desert landscape now. The fields are long behind her. Rocks and what looks like broken lava. The kind of terrain that only a reptile or an insect could love.

She’s still looking to see if there are any pursuers in the rearview mirror when the pavement tees onto a wide gravel road. She brakes too late, swerving in the middle of the turn, the Mercedes skidding into a ditch and scraping on the rocks, but she keeps her foot on the gas and powers out of it, gets back up on the road pointed the right
way. Now there is no one, it’s just her and the cactus and the cows, and she’s back on cruise control.

She turns the radio on and gets about fifteen minutes of tempestuous classical music—cathartic kettle drums like great waves crashing on the shore again and again until the composer is spent. It sounds insignificant against everything around her.

The producers of the movie would save the shot for magic hour.

Natalie Portman would coast to a stop. Ahead of her, on the outskirts of a town called Coyote, there is a troika of concrete dividers skidded across the blacktop to form a barricade. Extending from the road on either side are palisades of junked cars and trucks. Someone has cut down the brush along part of the wall, and then stopped.

Silence.

They have left a way through wide enough for the trucks, and
behind that a cutoff that leads into the gas station. This safe passage has been marked with reflective neon-orange plastic barrels. Down the centerline is a chicane made up of oil drums and dirt-filled garbage bags. From her angle she sees what she will have to do—drive up and slowly navigate through the walls, all the time under the guns of … the coyotes, presumably.