the mortis (13 page)

He backs away, and he can hear the laughter of the man on the other side of the treeline. 

“Still hungry,
blåman
,” Nil asks, chuckling.  “You want to eat from the civilized table?”

Park pushes his way out of the copse and back into daylight and leans over, hands to knees, breathing hard.  He spits twice and wipes his mouth each time.  His eyes are starting to water.  He turns his face upward and stares at the sky. 

When he can stand up straight again, he turns to the man.

“
Yes,” Park says.  “I want to.”

Together they return to the Makoa building, and on the way Park is allowed to pause at the rain barrel and use a collapsible plastic cup that the man lends him.  He removes the filter screen and reaches down.  The light
’s reflection playing off the interior walls of the blue drum.  Park ladles the water and brings it back, dripping, to his mouth and drinks deeply, and the water is piss-warm and there is an algal bloom on the surface, but there has never been a sweeter thing to cross his tongue in this godforsaken life.  He goes in again and again, and the man looks on.

Back inside, they go to the Jumellea room.  Park sits, and Nil orders one of the women in masks to go to the kitchen.  Make a plate, Nil tells her.  When she answers that the fire has been doused, Nil tells her to make the fire hot again.  Start over, he says.  Go on.

Park spends days there, working inside and on the grounds of the Makoa building.  He sleeps securely in a guest room, the same one he started in.  Twice a day he consumes the food that is prepared by the women in masks, plated with their calloused hands, and then placed silently on the table of the Jumellea room.

They despise him, these mas
ked women—they make it obvious.  Not one of them has spoken more than a word to him since the day he was delivered, broken and bleeding, into the confines of their community.  They drop his plate in front of him with force, and the portions he receives are the smallest of the group.  They take great pains never to look in his direction, and when they do, their eyes are piercingly cold and observing, disdainful as the eyes of cats. 

Park is confined to the first floor and to the grounds outside the building, that
’s all.  He isn’t permitted to venture to the upper levels, and he’s never told the reason, but he never questions the edict either—not this one and not any of the rest of them.  He does as he’s told.  He obeys and calls it survival, doing what he has to do.

In between his assignments, Park thinks about the real task once in a while, the medicine that may or may not wait on the fifth floor above him, but he doesn
’t think of it as often as he ought to.  Instead he finds himself lapsing into the comforting routine of this new life.  The regular feedings and the proper mattress and the hand-laundered sheets.  His own card key to the room, still functional because of the battery backup—two simple, familiar AA batteries—in the reader mechanism.  The tilling of the rich garden soil and the uprooting of the non-native plants and the daily morning harvests made more meaningful by the aching paucity of them—the pure and naked need of those on the receiving end.  It’s startlingly easy to forget the path he was previously on, or even better, to imagine that he’s traveling on it still, that he never really left it, and that the time spent in the Makoa is just a waystation, and a necessary one.  I am gathering my strength for you.  I am biding time, and I am on my way still.  I am coming.

On the fourth or fifth morning Park is called to the Jumellea room by one of the masked women.  She doesn
’t actually call to him—that would be a waste of perfectly good words—she simply raps one knuckle on his stateroom door, and when he answers she points in the direction of the hall.  She leads the way, and when they arrive she leaves him in front of the closed door.

Park
opens it and Nil is there, standing as he always seems to, with a near-empty plate.  Nil sets the plate down on the table.  He chews a few more times, mouth open, and then he visibly swallows; the nodule on his throat dips down and comes back to position.

“
Sit,” Nil says. 

Park steps forward to find the closest chair, and Nil sits also, opposite him.

As usual, the man is appraising him.  “You look good,” Nil says.  “Better already than the scraggy little monkey you were.”

Park doesn
’t say anything. 

Nil smiles at him. 
“It’s time to tell the reason for keeping you,” he says.

There is another silence, but Park doesn
’t try to fill it.  After a time he nods.

“
The other day, remember?  I witnessed you, taking the leash off the girl,” Nil says.  “One of my girls.  And when I saw that happen, right away I thought to make you into meat for what you did.  You were this close to the fire.”  Nil puts his fingers close together.  “But then I changed a little bit.  I came to have a respect for the simpleminded nature of the act you did.” 

Nil pauses, staring at him as though expecting gratitude, and so Park obliges. 
“Thank you,” Park says.  He is starting to feel lightheaded, dizzy, in the heat of the room.

Nil nods. 
“I changed a little bit.  And you’ve changed too, haven’t you,
blåman
.”  The man starts chuckling like he’s recalling something mildly funny.  “You learned what happens when you think of showing kindness to a wild animal, didn’t you.  You sure learned.  Yes, you did.”  The man’s voice is getting quieter the longer he goes on, as though he’s lapsing into a soothing form of self-talk.  “The
blåman
learned something that day, yes he did.”

Park has no response to any of this.  He just quietly watches Nil as he nods and stares downward, addressing himself. 

Eventually Nil refocuses and looks at Park. 

“
I pulled you out from the closed jaws,” Nil says.  “From between the very teeth.  You know it?  Without my intervention to bring you here, you would still be lost in your darkness, or you would only be bare bones degrading on top of the soil.”

Nil stops speaking and just stares at him.

“Yes,” Park says.

“
So after the service I’ve done,
blåman
, I should be able to trust you inside of my house,” Nil says.  “Around my things.”

Park is nodding now, but the motion feels exaggerated so he lessens the range, the frequency.  He
’s having trouble focusing; his head is swimming.  “You can,” he says.

Nil stops staring at him and looks down at his own soiled hands.  He spreads the long fingers widely, and he is smiling a little. 

“I believe you,” Nil says. 

There is a protracted silence between them.  Park is staring at a wall, and at first he
’s doing it just to pass the time, letting his mind drift from this place, but then he starts to consider the man’s words and actions—really turn them over and over in his head—and like whetstones they rasp against his dull thoughts, sharpening them.  It’s becoming clear, this vital piece of information that Park should have already understood: he can’t stay here.  This seems so painfully obvious to him now.  

“
I should move on,” Park says.  The tone he chooses to use is benign, but it’s also ironclad.  There’s no wavering in it.

Nil
looks up from his hands.  His mind has managed to unearth itself.  “What does that mean to you, move on,” the man asks.

“
Just that I’m going.  It doesn’t have anything to do with gratitude.  You have that.”

Nil shakes his head. 
“The
blåman
tastes what I have and thinks he’s ready.  You think you can step on the neck of the world now?”

“
I just need to go.”

“
Why?  Say your cause.”

Park can
’t figure a reason that will satisfy the man.  “Someone is waiting for me,” he says.  “She needs my help.”

The man laughs openly when he hears this, and it sounds forced. 
“A woman,” he says after a time.  “That’s his reason.”  The man knuckles his eyes, one after the other, and his hand comes back wet.  “All right,
blåman
.  Go then.  Go on to your woman.”  Nil leans back in the chair. 

“
I need something else first,” Park says.

The man shrugs. 
“Need and beg is what your kind do.”

“
I need to ask you to let me look for something.  Here in the building.”

“
My building,” Nil says.

“
Your building.”

The man isn
’t laughing anymore.  “What is it.”

“
Medicine.”

“
No,” the man says immediately, shaking his head.  “Medicine is for my use.  I dispense it.”

“
This medicine isn’t yours.  It was left behind in my room.”

“
You have no room.”

“
The room that I used to have, then,” Park says.  “Look.  I’m assuming you’ve been through this place already, up and down, and stripped out everything.  So just let me go through the medicine and find her prescriptions.  Most of the things she takes wouldn’t be of any use to anyone else.”

“
What room were you,” Nil asks.

“
Fifth floor.  504.”

The man is quiet.  He seems to be considering the things he
’s heard, really thinking hard about them, and after a time he nods. 

“
I never touched the fifth,” says the man.  “You can go.  Go up and find your need.”

“
Thank you.”

“
Hanna will lead,” the man says.  “She is going to the third and fourth for chores.  When she’s done, she’ll let you use the master key.”

“
Okay.”

Park starts to leave the room but then he pauses. 
“Which one is Hanna?” he asks.

The man is smiling again. 
“They all are.  They are all the same,” the man says.

Park returns to the guest room.  He spends the wait time swapping out the serum-crusted wound dressings.  He packs what he can into a loose bindle made from a white bath towel; once he has the meds, he needs to be ready to walk out the door.  He secures the steak knife in his waistband at the small of his back, then a thin-bladed hand trowel at the front hip.  He straps the dust mask around his neck and lies down on the mattress, chewing his thumb tip, his mind clouding over, and within the hour, one of the women in masks, one of the anonymous Hannas, comes for him. 

Together they climb upward in one of the dark stairwells, the north one.  Resolute strings of blue emergency LEDs shine on the wall under the handrail.  Park is walking behind the woman.  Her faded grey sundress and the ratty blonde lengths of hair.  This is the same Hanna that manages the kitchen, the Hanna that he met on his first entry into the Jumellea.  Maybe twenty-five years, at most, this child. 

She makes it clear that she doesn
’t care for him still, but he can tell she has warmed to him by a degree or two.  Maybe it’s that she knows he’s leaving soon, it’s hard to say, but today she is granting him eye contact once in a while, and she has spoken a handful of words since they left the stateroom, more words than she’s graced him with over the last five days put together.

The woman is carrying a white five-gallon paint bucket in each hand.  The lids are still on, and the buckets hang on the ends of wire handles with loose-fitting plastic helve
s.  The buckets look weighted—her arms are straight down and lank. 

Park doesn
’t ask what the buckets contain and she doesn’t tell him.  They simply walk together.  He keeps his right hand behind him, poised at the small of his back, near the knife handle. 

She leads him to the fourth floor, and they exit the stairwell through a heavy grey fire door wi
th a wire-meshed glass window—Park stays well behind her.  The hall glows a spectral blue from the outage lights, the same as every common area in the building, and he can hear the sound of the woman’s breath through the mask weave, the sound of a wire handle chafing a bucket’s plastic body.  They pass open door after open door—all of the rooms are stripped down to the bare drywall, by the looks of them.  Everything of value is gone.

Halfway down the hallway, the woman stops walking and sets
both buckets on the carpet.  She turns to a closed door, labeled 453.  She reaches down and hikes up the hem of the sundress to her waist and there is a black-strap belt there and nothing else.  She unhooks a set of keys on a ring and the dress falls.

Park looks at the door.  Its structure—the frame, the paneling—all of it has been heavily secured.  Near the top there is a swing-hasp closed over a metal eyelet with the U-shackle of a padlock threaded through.  A standard brass privacy chain has been installed underneath, and midway down the jamb, there is a bike lock cable strung from the frame of the door panel.  One end is bolted down to the door itself and the other end is looped around a five-inch nail pounded into the wall of the hallway.  The cable has some slack to it, a degree of give.

The woman uses her foot to pop the bolt on a floor lock that Park hadn’t seen.  She takes the keyring and skims through the keys until she finds the right one, and then she unlocks the laminated padlock and hangs it on the hasp staple by its open U-shackle.  She unslots the privacy chain, letting it hang, but leaves the bike cable secured.  There is a white plastic keycard hanging on the ring of keys, a crude hole punched through one end, and she raises it to the reader housing.  She pauses and turns to Park.

“
He wanted you to see this,” she says. 

The woman dips the card into the reader and quickly pulls it, and then a green indicator light blinks and there is the sound of the latch whirring.  She pushes the door open to its limit, the point at which the bike cable catches—maybe a foot
’s worth of space—and immediately there are pale and emaciated limbs erupting from the gap.  Reaching out, scrabbling blindly at the frame, the molding.  Faces start to press into the space.  Lidless eyes and long, gaping mouths trailing saliva.  There is no sound coming from the room save the scratching of ragged nails.  The stench wafting through is almost physically staggering.