After the Plague: And Other Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  There was no answer, so she moved to the window beside the door and parted the curtains. A man stood on the concrete doorstep, staring at the flat plane of the door as if he could see through it. He was small and thin, no more than five-five or -six, tanned to the color of the copper teakettle on the stove and dressed in the oily jeans and all-purpose long-sleeved shirt of the bums who lined Cabrillo Boulevard with their styrofoam cups and pint bottles—or should she call them panhandlers or the homeless or the apartmentally challenged? Sean called them bums, and she guessed she’d fallen into the habit herself. They said crude things to you when you walked down the street, gesturing with fingers that were as black as the stubs of cigars. They were bums, that was all, and who needed them?

  But then the man turned to her, saw her there at the window and turned to her, and she had a shock: he was Hispanic, a Latino just like the man on TV, the killer, with the same dead cinders for eyes. He put three fingers together and pushed them at his open mouth, and she saw then that he had no mustache—no, no mustache, but what did that mean? Anybody could shave, even a bum. “What do you want?” she called, feeling trapped in her own apartment, caught behind the wall of glass like a fish in an aquarium.

  He looked surprised by the question. What did he want? He wanted food, money, sex, booze, drugs, her car, her baby, her life, her apartment. “Hungry,” he said. And then, when she didn’t respond: “You got work?”

  She just shook her head—No, she didn’t have any work—and all the time she had to give this man, this stranger, this bum, had already been used up, because there was smoke in the kitchen and the seeds were burning in the pan.

  It was past eight when she drove home from work, feeling exhausted, as if she were in her eighth month instead of the second. The day was softening into night, birds dive-bombing the palms along the boulevard, joggers and in-line skaters reduced to shadows on the periphery of her vision. All through the afternoon the mist had been rolled up like a carpet on the horizon, but it was moving closer now and she could smell it on the air—it was going to be another dense, compacted night. She parked and came up the walk and saw that the upstairs neighbor—Jessica, Jessica-something, who’d been there only a month and was so pathologically shy she cupped both hands to her face when she talked to you as if a real live moving mouth were somehow offensive—had been doing something in the flower garden. The earth was raw in several spots, as if it had been turned over, and there was a spade leaning against the side of the house. Not that it mattered to Melanie—she’d never had a green thumb and plants were just plants to her. If Jessica wanted to plant flowers, that was fine; if she wanted to dig them up, that was fine too.

  Sean was in the kitchen, banging things around and singing—bellowing—along with one of Wagner’s operas, the only music he ever listened to. And which one was it?—she’d heard them all a thousand times. There it was, yes, Siegfried going down for the count: Götterdämmerung. Sean was making his famous shrimp and avocado salad, and he was in the throes of something—Wagner, Theory, some sort of testosterone rush—and he barely glanced up at her as she trudged into the bedroom. Her mistake was in taking off her shoes, the flats she wore for the sake of her feet while propping up an automatic smile behind the reference desk, because once her shoes were off she felt out of balance and had to rest her head on the pillow, just for a minute.

  The gods of Valhalla had been laid to rest and the house was silent when she awoke to the soft click of the bedroom door. Sean was standing there framed in the doorway, the tacky yellow globe of the hallway light hanging over his shoulder like a captive moon. It was dark beyond the windows. “What,” he said, “are you sick or something?”

  Was she? Now was her chance, now was the time to tell him, to share the news, the joyous news, pop the cork on the bottle of champagne and let’s go out to a nice place, a really nice place, and save the famous shrimp and avocado salad for tomorrow. “No,” she said. “No. Just tired, that’s all.”

  At dinner—Sean and Lacan and a scatter of papers, the shrimp salad, lemonade from the can and an incongruous side dish of Ranch Style barbecue beans, also from the can—she did tell him about the man at the door that morning. “He said he wanted work,” she said, waving a forkful of shrimp and beans in an attempt to delineate the scene for the third time, “and I told him I didn’t have any work for him. That was it. The whole thing.”

  Sean had begun to develop a groove just over the bridge of his nose, a V-shaped gouge that might have been a scar or the mark of a hot branding iron. It vanished when he was asleep or sunk into the couch with a beer and the New York Times, but it was there now, deeper than ever. “You mean he was Mexican?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “he was a Latino. I was scared. He really scared me.”

  There was a long silence, the clock her mother had given her ticking dramatically from atop the brick-and-board bookcase in the hall, someone’s sprinklers going on outside, the muted rumble of Jessica-something’s TV seeping down through the ceiling—Melanie half-expected to hear the blast of the train’s whistle, but it was too early yet. “It could be,” Sean said finally, “—I mean, why not? You’re right. The guy takes a train, he could be anywhere. And then there’s the aleatory factor—”

  She just stared at him.

  “Chance. Luck. Fate. You can’t buck fate.” And then a look came over his face: two parts high seriousness, one part vigilante. “But you can be ready for it when it comes—you can be prepared.” Suddenly he was on his feet. “You just wait here, just sit tight”—and his voice had an edge to it, as if she’d been arguing with him, as if she had to be restrained from running off into the night like one of the screaming teenagers in a cheap horror film—“I’ll be right back.”

  She wanted a glass of wine, but she knew she couldn’t drink anymore, not if she was going to keep the baby, and if she hadn’t known, the doctor had taken her down a smiling anfractuous road full of caveats and prohibitions, the sort of thing she—the doctor—must go through ten times a day, albeit tailoring her tone to the educational level of the patient. Outside, the sprinklers switched off with an expiring wheeze. She could hear Sean in the bedroom, rummaging around for something. Tonight, she would tell him tonight.

  Because the knowledge was too big for her to contain, and she wanted to call her mother and have a long, confidential chat, and call her sisters too—but before that, before there could be any possibility of that, she had to tell Sean, and Sean had to say the things she needed to hear. During her five o’clock break, she’d confided in one of the girls she worked with, Gretchen Mohr, but it did nothing to reassure her. Gretchen was only twenty-three, in no way serious about the guy she was dating, and Melanie could tell from the way she squeezed her eyes shut over the news that the idea of a baby was about as welcome to her as paraplegia or epilepsy. Oh, she tried to cover herself with a flurry of congratulations and a nonstop barrage of platitudes and one-liners, but the final thing she said, her last and deepest thought, gave her away. “I don’t know,” she sighed, staring down into the keyhole of her Diet Coke can as if she were reading tea leaves, “but I just don’t think I’d be comfortable bringing a baby into a world like this.”

  When Melanie looked up, Sean was standing over her. He was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Freud on it, over a legend that read “Dr. Who?” His hair was slicked down, and the left side of his face, up to and encircling the ear, was inflamed with the skin condition he was forever fighting. But that was ordinary, that was the way he always looked. What was different were his eyes—proud, incandescent, lit up like fireworks—and his hands, or what was in his hands. Swaddled in coarse white cloth that was stained with what might have been olive oil lay an object she recognized from the movies, from TV and pawnshop display cases: a gun.

  “What is that?” she said, edging away from him. “What are you showing me?”

  “Come on, Mel, give me a break.”

  “It’s a gun, isn’t it?”

 
“We’re on the ground floor here, and we’re going to lock the windows tonight, even if it’s hot, which I doubt because already the fog’s coming in, and we’re going to keep this by the bed, on the night table, that’s all.”

  She’d drawn up her legs and hugged them to her, as far away from him on the couch as she could manage to be. “I don’t believe you,” she said, and she could hear the thin whine of complaint in her own voice. “You know what my father would say if he saw you now? Where did you get it? Why didn’t you tell me?” she demanded, and she couldn’t help herself—her voice broke on the final syllable.

  He drew the thing back, took it from its cradle and raised it up in one hand till it grazed the ceiling. The muscles of his forearm flexed, the soiled rag dropped to the carpet. “Son of a bitch,” he said, “son of a fucking bitch. Tell me this,” he said, “would you rather be the killer or the killee?”

  She was asleep and dreaming the image of a baby floating in amniotic fluid, the cord attached, eyes shut tight—a big baby, an enormous glowing baby floating free like the interstellar embryo of 2001—when a sudden sharp explosion of noise jolted her awake. It took her a moment, heart pounding, breath coming quick, to understand what it was—it was a scream, a woman’s scream, improvised and fierce. The room was dark. Sean was asleep beside her. The scream—a single rising note tailing off into what might have been a sob or gasp—seemed to have come from above, where Jessica-something lived alone with her potted plants and two bloated pampered push-faced cats that were never allowed out of the apartment for fear of the world and its multiplied dangers. Melanie sat up and caught her breath.

  Nothing. The alarm clock on the night table flashed 1:59 and then 2:00.

  Earlier, after a dessert of tapioca pudding with mandarin orange slices fresh from the can, she and Sean had watched a costume drama on the public station that gave her a new appreciation for the term mediocre (mediocre, as she observed to Sean, didn’t come easy—you had to work at it), and then she’d slipped into bed with her book while the station went into pledge-break mode and Sean sat there paralyzed on the couch. She hadn’t read two paragraphs before he tiptoed into the room, naked and in full amatory display. She left the light on, the better to admire him, but the book dropped to the floor, and then it didn’t matter. She felt new, re-created. His body was so familiar, but everything was different now—she’d never been so aroused, rising up again and again to hold him deep inside her in the place where the baby was. Afterward, immediately afterward, almost as if he’d been drugged, he fell asleep with his head on her breast, and it was left to her to reach up awkwardly and kill the lamp. They hadn’t discussed a thing.

  But now—now there was chaos, and it erupted all at once. There was a thump overhead, the caustic burn of a man’s voice, and then another scream, and another, and Melanie was out of bed, the walls pale and vague, the dark shadow that was Sean lurching up mechanically, and “What?” he was saying. “What is it?”

  Footsteps on the stairs. More screams. Melanie flicked on the light, and there was Sean, dressed only in his briefs, the long muscles of his legs, all that skin, and the gun in his hand, the pistol, the nasty gleaming black little thing he’d bought at a gun show six months ago and never bothered to tell her about. “Sean,” she said, “Sean, don’t!” but he was already out the door, racing down the hall in the sick yellow wash of the overhead light, already at the front door, the screams from above rising, rising. She was in her nightgown, barefooted, but she had no thought for anything but to get out that door and put an end to whatever this was.

  There was a streetlight out front, but the fog had cupped a hand over it and blotted the light from the windows and the stairway too. Melanie shot a glance up the stairs to where Jessica stood bracing herself against the railing, in nothing but panties and a brassiere torn off one shoulder, and then she saw the glint of Sean’s back across the lawn where the cars threw up a bank of shadow against the curb. He was shouting something, ragged, angry syllables that could have made no sense to anyone, even a Theorist, and she saw then that there was somebody else there with him, a dark, shifting figure rallying round a shuffle of feet on the pavement. She was closer now, running, Sean’s feet glowing in the night, the long white stalks of his legs and expanse of his back—he seemed to be wrestling with a shadow, but no, it was an animate thing, a man, a dark little man in bum’s clothes with a shovel clenched in both hands and Sean fighting him for it. Where was the gun? There was no gun. Both Sean’s hands were on the shovel and both the little man’s, and now Jessica was screaming again. “The gun,” Sean said. “In the grass. Get the gun.”

  In that moment the little man managed to wrench the shovel free, and in the next—it happened so quickly she wasn’t sure she actually saw it—he caught Sean under the chin with the haft, and then the blade, and Sean was on the ground. She never hesitated. Before the man could bring the blade down—and that was what he meant to do, no mistake about it, his arms already raised high for a savage stabbing thrust—she took hold of the haft with all the strength in her and pulled it tight to her chest.

  She could smell him. She could feel him. He hung on, the little man, the bum, the one who’d been on the doorstep that afternoon with his reeking breath and greasy clothes, and then he jerked so violently at the shovel she almost pitched headlong into him, into the spill of his flesh and the dankness of the grass. But she didn’t. She jerked back, and Jessica screamed, and Sean, reeling like a drunk, began to pick himself up off the lawn, and for the instant before the man let go of the shovel and flung himself into the shadows across the street she was staring him full in the face—yes, but she wasn’t seeing the man on the TV or the man on the porch or any one of the army of bums lined up along the street in their all-purpose shirts and sweat-stained caps, she was seeing Dr. Toni Brinsley-Schneider, Dr. Brinsley-Schneider the bioethicist, just her.

  There were two policemen. From where she was sitting at the end of the couch, Melanie could see their cruiser reined in at the curb, the interior a black pit, the slowly revolving light on top chopping up the night over and over again. They were built like runners or squash players, both of them—crisp, efficient men in their thirties who looked away from her bare legs and feet and into her eyes. “So you heard screams, and this was about what time?”

  They’d already taken Jessica-something’s statement—Jessica Fortgang, and she had a name now: Ms. Fortgang, as the policemen referred to her—and Sean, hunched in the armchair with an angry red weal under his chin, had given his version of events too. The man in the night, the bum, the one who’d been the cause of all this, had escaped, at least for the time being, and they were denied the satisfaction of seeing him handcuffed in the back of the cruiser, bowed and contrite. Sean had been in a state when the police arrived, clenching his jaws as if he were biting down hard on something, gesturing with a closed fist and wide sweeps of his arm. “The railway killer, it was him, the railway killer,” he kept repeating, till the policeman with the mustache, the taller one, told him the railway killer had turned himself in at the Mexican border some fifteen hours earlier. “That was the Texas border,” he added, and then his partner, in a flat professional voice, said that they were treating this as an assault in any case, possibly an attempted rape. “Your neighbor, Ms. Fortgang? She apparently hired this individual to do some yard work this afternoon and then invited him in for iced tea and a sandwich when he was done. Then he comes back at night—and this is a cultural thing, you understand, a woman looks at one of these guys twice and he expects a whole lot more. He’s a transient, that’s all, nobody from around here. But we’ll get him.”

  Melanie answered their questions patiently, though her heart was still jumping in her chest, and she kept glancing at Sean, as if for guidance. But Sean was sullen, distant, withdrawn into some corner of himself—the gun was an embarrassment, the man had knocked him down, he’d been involved in an ordinary altercation with an ordinary bum, and the railway killer had already given himself
up. She saw the lines in his face, saw the way his lower lip pushed his chin down into the soft flesh beneath it. Theory couldn’t help here. Theory deconstructs, theory has no purpose, no point, no overview or consolation—it was a kind of intellectual masturbation. If she hadn’t known it before, she knew it now.

  The police thanked them, tried on the briefest of smiles, and then Sean showed them to the door and Melanie got up from the couch with the vague idea of making herself a cup of herbal tea to help her unwind. Just as the door closed, she called Sean’s name aloud, and she almost said it, almost said, “Sean, there’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you,” but there was no use in that now.

  Sean turned away from the door, shoulders slumped, the corners of his mouth drawn down. After the skirmish on the lawn, he’d shrugged into a pair of jeans and the first shirt he could find—a Hawaiian print, festive with palm fronds and miniature pineapples—and she saw that he’d misbuttoned it. He looked hopeless. He looked lost in his own living room.

  She held that picture of him, and then she was thinking, unaccountably, of another captive of the Sioux, a young woman taken from her husband to be bride to a chief, the business settled in the smoke and confusion of a desperate fight, her daughter crying out over the cacophony of shouts and curses and the rolling thunder of a hundred rifles firing at once. Months later, fleeing with her captors after a loss in battle, she watched a brave from another party come up to them on his pony, in full regalia, trailing the shawl she’d knitted for her daughter and a tiny shrunken scalp with the hair—the blond shining hair—still attached.