White Horse (28 page)

Afterward, the vocal cords change patterns and tongues tell stories not set to music. There’s a rhythm to tales oft-told. A smoothness to the words. Polished stones that have witnessed a million high tides.

“I have to go soon,” I tell Yanni.

“The women say you will have your baby here.”

“I’ve been here too long already.”

I shake my head, feel the whips of my hair.

“I have to keep going north.” His head tilts. That is his tell, the one that signals that he hasn’t understood. “North is up.”

“On the road?”

“Yes.”

“The way up is not safe.”

“Nowhere is safe.”

“No. Listen,” he says, “to the story.” He nods at the man who, by his sheer physical presence, manages to occupy the head seat at a round campfire. Not a large man, but he expands to fit the tiny crevices in the air around him and defends his space with broad hand gestures that supply punctuation and italics.

Yanni translates in hobbled English.

“He talks of Delphi. Do you know it?”

All I really know is Delphi’s famous oracle, but my head nods regardless.

The boy listens for a moment before continuing. The Gypsy man has drawn his arms close to his body, hunched his shoulders, scrunched his neck. Taut vocal cords push out a voice drum-tight.

He talks of Medusa, the woman with snakes for hair and a gaze that turned all who looked upon her to stone. By Perseus’s hand she was decapitated, and from her neck sprang Pegasus, the white winged horse, and his brother Chrysaor. Greek mythology involves many creatures born from un-holey body parts.

The mood shifts to something darker. There are rumors, he says, that Medusa is reborn, that she dwells in the woods near Delphi, petrifying anyone who dares meet her gaze. The woods are filled with statues that were once people with hopes and dreams and families. Anything she doesn’t turn to stone she devours. The main road north along the coast was destroyed in a quake. Now the only way up is a perilous pass through Delphi, through the territory of this modern-day Medusa.

“You see? Is very dangerous.”

A flesh-eating woman who turns people into columns of stone. A year ago I would have scoffed, but no more.

“Has anyone seen her?”

Yanni thinks. “Many people. My uncle. He sees her carrying the wood and he runs away fast. Do not go north. Is not good. Stay here.”

I’ve lingered too long. I have to go soon. I have to find Nick before our child comes.

SEVENTEEN

DATE: THEN

N
ick makes a list. He always does.

“You’re assuming blame that doesn’t belong to you,” he says. “You’re not responsible.”

“I opened the jar.”

“People were dying before that.”

“I know.”

“So taking the blame isn’t logical. Pope was going to do this—with or without you.”

“I know.”

He makes his list. Of what, I don’t know.

“Are you sleeping?”

“Yes.”

He checks my face for lies. There are none to find.

“What do you write now?”

“Now?”

“It can’t be a shopping list. There’s no shopping to do.”

“It’s a list,” he says, “of all the good things I’ve still got.”

“Like what?”

“Like you.”

“Why me?”

“I’ll write you a list.”

DATE: NOW

My body mends. My belly
swells. My child treads viscous fluid, ignorant of the sins of men. She’ll never know a whole world, just the fragments of what civilization used to be. To the absent God I say nothing. Instead, I direct my prayers to the ones who once ruled this land. I ask for a safe place to raise my child, a place with enough food to nourish a growing body, and healthy people to serve as teachers. I want my child to know what we once were, and how we fought to maintain our humanity.

I am a being with three pulses now: my own, my child’s, and her father’s. All three dance to a steady beat in my soul. If he were dead, I’d feel the Nick-sized hole in my heart.

I have to go.

DATE: THEN

The war doesn’t so much
end as it simply stops happening.

Our men and women come home to silence. At the docks and airports there’s no one to greet them except a few reporters who ask questions in which they’re not invested; they’d rather be at home, dying with what remains of their own families.

A bold one shoves his microphone in the face of a coughing corporal who doesn’t look old enough to have hair around his cock.

“Are you glad to be back?”

The soldier stops. He’s too thin, too tired, too war-weary for civility. “Glad?”

“To be back home.”

“My whole fucking family is dead. How d’you think that feels?”

“How—”

“I just want a fucking cheeseburger.”

“Do you think we won?”

The corporal lunges, his hands choking the reporter as they fall to
the ground. “I … just … want … a … fucking … cheeseburger.” He punctuates every word by bashing the man’s skull on the concrete. Flecks of bone rain down in the creeping blood pool.

No one stops him. No one says anything. Someone mutters, “Did someone say
cheeseburger
? I’d kill for a cheeseburger.” Another voice laughs nervously. “I think he just did.”

We watch this on the news as Luke Skywalker’s about to discover Darth Vader is his father. When regular television comes back, the movie is over and we’re left blinking at the screen without so much as a crinkle of a protein bar wrapper. Twenty-something bodies, a whole bunch of muscles, and not one of us twitches.

The weather war is over, and we’re down about three hundred million citizens. Maybe more. Maybe all, before White Horse is done. Despair folds us in her arms and squeezes us in her loveless arms.

Hope
is a four-letter word rotting in antique dictionaries between
hop
and
hopeless
.

High upon the rooftops, Nick
and I watch night arriving, a sky full of stars hitching a ride on its coattails. From up here the world looks almost normal. Only the curious absence of cars skidding through the icy streets makes the eye catch and the mind whisper:
The world is not okay
.

“You’re really not afraid of heights, are you?” he asks.

“No. Heights don’t bother me. I haven’t fallen yet, so there’s no precedent for fear.”

He nods. “Good attitude. Heights scared a lot of my patients. Wide spaces, too. I see—saw—people all the time scared of life. Every day I wanted to shake them, tell them that this day is the only guarantee they’ve got.”

“But?”

He gives me a tight, wry smile. “It’s not in the psychologists’ handbook. We’re not supposed to freak the fuck out and shake the shit out of clients.”

“Even if it’s for the best?”

“My clients don’t always want what’s best. They’re human. They like what’s comfortable. Coming to therapy every week is comfortable, familiar. Even at a hundred-plus bucks a pop.”

“Was I comfortable?”

He turns to face me, but I don’t look at him. I keep staring at the city. That’s what’s comfortable, familiar, safe. Nick isn’t safe.

“You could have just told me the truth. I was on your side.”

“It sounded crazy.”

“Hey, crazy is what I do every day. I see women who save their shit in plastic Baggies and weigh it so they can make sure what goes in comes back out. I see guys who spend their nights beating off to Internet porn when they’ve got beautiful wives in the next room. Real women don’t turn them on anymore, they’re so into the fantasy. I see kids who cut themselves to mask pain, kids who cut themselves because their friends do it and they want to fit in. You want crazy? I can tell you a million stories. But some jar showing up in your apartment? That’s criminal, not crazy. Crazy was lying about it to someone who was on your side—a person you were paying. You wasted your own money. That’s crazy.”

“I get it, I’m crazy. You’re the expert, you should know. Do you want me to climb up on the cross or would you like to nail me up there yourself?”

“C’mon, Zoe. …” He’s big and broad this close, densely muscled enough to crush me if he chose. And maybe I’d like that.

“Kiss my ass.”

I stalk toward the door, grab the handle, meet resistance. The building has two rooftop entrances— or exits, depending on how you look at things. One gets locked at night so we only have to guard the other. Morris doesn’t like to keep both locked, in case of emergencies.

“Shit.”

He groans. “It’s the end of the world. Let’s not fight.”

His words deflate my anger. “You’re right.”

“Say it again.”

“You’re right.”

“I’m always right.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“You will when you see I’m always right.”

This is almost flirting, except neither of us are smiling. A million million miles away, a star hurls itself across the sky.

“I don’t want to be Chicken Little,” I say. “I don’t always want the sky to be falling.”

“It’s going to be okay.”

“Is it?”

“Truth?”

I nod.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Or if it is it won’t be okay in the same way. We’ve lost too much.”

There’s a wall between us. I long for a sledgehammer.

“I’m sorry about your brother. I saw his name on the list.”

He slouches to my side. I want to slip into his arms. He has the perfect place for me right below his chin, but I don’t dare. Not without an invitation. Maybe not even then.

“I have to get to my parents if they’re still alive.”

“Are they in the city?”

“Greece. Every summer they head back to the motherland and talk about how great America is.” He smiles. “When they’re here, all they do is talk about how perfect Greece is.”

“How the hell are you going to get to Greece?”

“There are still planes—if you can pay the price.”

“Which is what?”

“Blood. Medicine. Food. Whatever they don’t have enough of.”

The city goes out. The night stays on.

Nick and I stare at each other through the darkness, three hundred million corpses stacked between us. In another life I could love him. In this life I could only lose him.

The lights flick back on
in the morning. This brings us no comfort, because we know it can’t last. The electricity will leave us forever; it’s just a question of when. We hold our breath and wait.

DATE: NOW

The animals have a secret
.

Birds are the first to leave, in one giant airlift, a dense cloud thousands
thick, from the surrounding trees. The Roma begin to whisper amongst themselves. Something is happening, but I don’t know what. Mass migration is never a good thing unless it’s fall.

The lurchers are next. Those lanky Gypsy dogs pace ditches into the earth, their ears low, their tongues thick, red rubber lolling from their mouths.

Secret keepers, all of them.

DATE: THEN

One morning a thousand feet
come, shambling along the weather-worn blacktop. They’re a stew of ages and sexes, all of them exhausted, filthy, dull-eyed. They brought their bodies on their journey but forgot to pack their souls.

“Canadians,” Nick says. “They’re migrating south.”

“Like the birds,” Morris says.

The others trickle in behind her. Through the second-floor windows we watch the indigent parade trickle past.

“We should feed them.” This from a big guy named Troy. He’s barely out of high school. Now there’s no college for kids like him. Everything he learns has to come from the streets.

“What, all of them?” Casey snaps. Former National Guard. A twig who used to hawk cosmetics.

Troy crosses his arms, increases his bulk. “They’re starving.”

Morris serves as peacekeeper. “We can’t feed all those people from our supplies. They’re gonna have to find their own food. There’s still food out there—shelter, too. If they want it bad enough, they’ll find a way. We can’t do everyone’s surviving for them. All we can do is watch and make sure there’s no trouble.”

The bickering fades to a cease-fire. Everyone knows why there’s shelter. So many died that there’s a surplus of everything except people and fresh food and optimism.

“We’re being naturally selected,” someone mumbles.

“No we’re not,” I say. “There’s nothing natural about this.”

Morris claps her hands, wrestles for control before we turn friends to enemies.

“Positions, people. Let’s make sure there’s no problems. I don’t think there will be; they’re too beaten down, but they’re desperate, too. Desperate people don’t always think right.”

Everyone leaps into action. It’s been days since we’ve had new scenery. The power comes and goes as it pleases, and the television and news along with it. New is new. New is different. New is shiny. New means there’s still life.

A family comes, also from
the north road, its members clinging to each other as though the least thing might sever their delicate ties. Their feet are soundless, but they do me a kindness and cough politely to warn me of their approach. I unfold myself from a crouch and shake the numbness from my legs. My hand rubs away the cola foam from my mouth’s chapped edges.

Each man is a bookend keeping his three children upright. They stop on the sidewalk, their mouths full of questions.

“We’ve never been here,” one says. “We always meant to but never did.”

“And now here we are,” says the other. “What’s there to do here?”

Besides wait to die or fight to live? I don’t say that, though, because I don’t want to frighten the children. But the men know it; that hard truth is ground into their posture.

“Not much,” I say. “We have a good library and a great museum.”

I am a tour guide selling my dead city.

“Is there food here? Some place decent to stay?”