After the Plague: And Other Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Then one evening, after Sonia had soiled herself so thoroughly and repulsively I had no choice but to draw her a bath, there came a knock at the door. I had her in my arms, Sonia, my Sonia, the water in the tub as mild as a breeze and only two inches deep, but rising, rising, and she gave me a look that ate right through to my soul. It was a plea, a very particular and infinitely sad request that sprang like fire from the depths of her wide and prescient hazelnut eyes… .

  The knock came again, louder and more insistent now, and I set her down on her back in the slowly accumulating water, all the while watching her eyes as her spastic little legs kicked out and her fists clenched. Then I rose—just for a second, only a second—wiped my hands on my pants, and called, “I’m coming, I’m … coming!”

  The knock at the door roused John momentarily—Good God, it was past one in the morning, the fire was dead, and Barb, where was Barb?—but he was caught up in something here, and he tried to fight down his anxiety, compartmentalize it, tuck it away in a corner of his brain for future reference. When the knock came again, he didn’t hear it, or not consciously, and Sonia, he was thinking, what’s going to become of Sonia? till Buck was there and the door stood open like the mouth of a cave, freezing, absolutely freezing, and a figure loomed in the doorway in a great wide-brimmed felt hat above a gaunt and harried face.

  “Dad,” Buck was saying, “Dad, there’s been an accident—”

  John barely heard him. He held the book to his face like a screen, and over the tumult and the confusion and the sudden slashing movement that swept up the room in a hurricane of shouts and moans and the frantic sobbing bark of the old dog, he finally found his voice. “Fifteen pages,” he said, waving a frantic hand to fend them off, all of them, even the dog. “I’ve just got fifteen pages to go.”

  Friendly Skies

  When the engine under the right wing began to unravel a thin skein of greasy, dark smoke, Ellen peered out the abraded Plexiglas window and saw the tufted clouds rising up and away from her and knew she was going to die. There was a thump from somewhere in the depths of the fuselage, the plane lurched like a balsawood toy struck by a rock, and the man in the seat in front of her lifted his head from the tray table and cried, “Mama!” in a thin, disconsolate wail. On went the “Fasten Seat Belts” sign. The murmur of the cabin became a roar. Every muscle in her body seized.

  She thought distractedly of cradling her head—isn’t that what you were supposed to do, cradle your head?—and then there was a burst of static, and the captain’s voice was chewing calmly through the loudspeakers: “A little glitch there with engine number three, I’m afraid, folks. Nothing to worry about.” The plane was obliterating the clouds with a supersonic howl, and every inanimate fold of metal and crease of plastic had come angrily to life, sloughed shoes, pieces of fruit, pretzels, paperback books, and handbags skittering by underfoot. Ellen stole a glance out the window: the smoke was dense now, as black and rich as the roiling billows rising from a ship torpedoed at sea, and stiff raking fingers of yellow flame had begun to strangle the massive cylinder of the engine. The man in the seat next to hers—late twenties, with a brass stud centered half an inch beneath his lower lip, and hair the exact color and texture of meringue—turned a slack face to her. “What is that? Smoke?”

  She was so frightened that she could only nod, her head filled with the sucking dull hiss of the air jets and the static of the speakers. The man leaned across her and squinted through the gray aperture of the window to the wing beyond. “Fuck, that’s all we need. There’s no way I’m going to make my connection now.”

  She didn’t understand. Connection? Didn’t he realize they were all going to die?

  She braced herself and murmured a prayer. Voices rose in alarm. Her eyes felt as if they were going to implode in their sockets. But then the flames flickered and dimmed, and she felt the plane lifted up as if in the palm of some celestial hand, and for all the panic, the dimly remembered prayers, the cries and shouts, and the sudden, potent reek of urine, the crisis was over almost as soon as it had begun. “I hate to do this to you, folks,” the captain drawled, “but it looks like we’re going to have to turn around and take her back into LAX.”

  And now there was a collective groan. The man with the meringue hair let out a sharp, stinging curse and slammed the back of the seat in front of him with his fist. Not LAX. Not that. They’d already been delayed on the ground for two and a half hours because of mechanical problems, and then they’d sat on the runway for another forty minutes because they’d lost their slot for takeoff—or at least that’s what the pilot had claimed. Everyone had got free drinks and peanuts, but nobody wanted peanuts, and the drinks tasted like nothing, like kerosene. Ellen had asked for a Scotch-and-soda—she was trying to pace herself, after sitting interminably at the airport bar nursing a beer that had gone stale and warm—but the man beside her and the woman in the aisle seat had both ordered doubles and flung them down wordlessly. “Shit!” the man cursed now, and slammed his fist into the seat again, pounding it as if it were a punching bag, until the man in front of him lifted a great, swollen dirigible of a head over the seat back and growled, “Give it a rest, asshole. Can’t you see we got an emergency here?”

  For a moment, she thought the man beside her was going to get up out of his seat and start something—he was certainly drunk enough—but mercifully the confrontation ended there. The plane rocked with the weight of the landing gear dropping into place, the big-headed man swivelled around and settled massively in his seat, and beyond the windows Los Angeles began to scroll back into view, a dull brown grid sunk at the bottom of a muddy sea of air. “Did you hear that?” the man beside Ellen demanded of her. “Did you hear what he called me?”

  Ellen sat gazing straight ahead, rigid as a catatonic. She could feel him staring at the side of her face. She could smell him. And everyone else too. She narrowed her shoulders and emptied her lungs of air, as if she could collapse into herself, dwindle down to nothing, and disappear.

  The man shifted heavily in his seat, muttering to himself now. “Courtesy,” he spat, “common courtesy,” over and over, as if it were the only phrase he knew. Ellen leaned her head back and shut her eyes.

  There was the usual wait on the ground, the endless taxiing, the crush of the carry-on luggage, and the densely packed, boviform line creeping up the aisles and into the steel tube that fed the passenger terminal. Ellen inched along, her head down, shoulders slumped, her over-the-shoulder bag like a cannonball in a sling, and followed the crowd out into the seething arena of the terminal. She’d been up since five, climbing aboard the airport bus in the dark and sitting stiffly through the lurching hour-and-a-half trip in bumper-to-bumper traffic; she’d choked down a dry six-dollar bagel and three-fifty cup of espresso at one of the airport kiosks, and then there was the long wait for the delayed flight, the pawed-over newspapers, the mobbed rest room, and the stale beer. Now she was back where she’d started, and a flight agent was rewriting her ticket and shoving her in the direction of a distant gate, where she would hook up with the next flight out to Kennedy, where her mother would be waiting for her. Was it a direct flight? No, the agent was afraid not. She’d have a two-hour layover in Chicago, and she’d have to switch planes. On top of that, there was weather, a fierce winter storm raking the Midwest and creeping toward New York at a slow, sure pace that was almost certain to coincide with her arrival.

  She moved through the corridors like an automaton, counting off the gates as she passed them. The terminal was undergoing renovation—perpetually, it seemed—and up ahead plywood walls narrowed the corridors to cattle chutes. There was raw concrete underfoot here, and everything had a film of dust on it. She looked anxiously to the bottleneck ahead—she had only ten minutes to make the flight—and she was just shifting the bag from her left shoulder to her right when she was jostled from behind. Or not simply jostled—if it hadn’t been for the woman in front of her, she would have lost her footing on the uneven surface a
nd gone down in a heap. She glanced up to see the man who’d been sitting beside her on the aborted flight hurrying past—what should she call him? Stud Lip? Meringue Head?—even as she braced herself against the woman and murmured, “Excuse me, I’m so sorry.” The man never gave her so much as a glance, let alone a word of apology. On he went, a pair of shoulders in some sort of athletic jacket, the bulb of his head in the grip of his hair, a bag too big for the overhead compartment swinging like a weapon at his side.

  She saw him again at the gate—at the front of the line, a head taller than anyone else—and what was he doing? There were at least twenty people ahead of her, and the flight was scheduled to depart in three minutes. He was just standing there, immovable, waving his ticket in the attendant’s face and gesticulating angrily at his bag. Ellen wasn’t a violent person—she was thirty-two years old, immured in the oubliette of a perpetual diet, with limp blond hair, a plain face, and two milky blue eyes that oozed sympathy and regret—but if she could have thrown a switch that would put an instant, sizzling end to Meringue Head’s existence, she wouldn’t have hesitated. “What do you mean, I have to check it?” he demanded, in a voice that was like the thumping of a mallet.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Lercher,” the man behind the desk was saying, “But federal regulations require—”

  “Ler share, you idiot, Ler share—didn’t you ever take French? And fuck the regulations. I’ve already been held up for two and a half hours and damn near killed when the goddamn engine caught fire, and you’re trying to tell me I can’t take my bag on the airplane, for Christ’s sake?”

  The other passengers hung their heads, consulted their watches, worked their jaws frantically over thin bands of flavorless gum, the people-movers moved people, the loudspeakers crackled, and the same inane voices repeated endlessly the same inane announcements in English and in Spanish. Ellen felt faint. Or no, she felt nauseated. It was as if there were something crawling up her throat and trying to get out, and all she could think of was the tarantula creeping through the clear plastic tubes of the terrarium in the classroom she’d left behind for good.

  Waldo, the kids had called it, after the Where’s Waldo? puzzles that had swept the fifth graders into a kind of frenzy for a month or two until something else—some computer game she couldn’t remember the name of—had superseded them. She’d never liked the big, lazy spider, the slow, stalwart creep of its legs and abdomen as it patrolled its realm, seeking out the crickets it fed on, the alien look of it, like a severed hand moving all on its own. It’s harmless, the assistant principal had assured her, but when Tommy Ayala sneaked a big dun trap-door spider into school and dropped it into the terrarium, Waldo had reacted with a swift and deadly ferocity. A lesson had come of that—about animal behavior and territoriality, and nearly every child had a story of cannibalistic guppies or killer hamsters to share—but it wasn’t a happy lesson. Lucy Fadel brought up road rage, and Jasmyn Dickers knew a teenager who was stabbed in the neck because he had to live in a converted garage with twelve other people, and somebody else had been bitten by a pit bull, and on and on and on. Fifth graders. Ten years of fifth graders.

  “Chicago passengers only,” a flight attendant was saying, and the line melted away as Ellen found herself in yet another steel tube, her heart racing still over the image of that flaming engine and the fatal certainty that had gripped her like the death of everything. Was it an omen? Was she crazy to get on this flight? And what of the prayer she’d murmured—where had that come from? Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Prayers were for children, and for the old and hopeless, and she’d grown up to discover that they were addressed not to some wise and recumbent God on high but to the cold gaps between the stars. Pray for us, now and at the hour of our—

  Up ahead, she saw the open door of the plane, rivets, the thin steel sheet of its skin, flight attendants in their blue uniforms and arrested smiles, and then she was shuffling down the awkward aisle like a mismatched bride—“The overhead bins are for secondary storage only… . A very full flight … Your cooperation, please”—and she was murmuring another sort of prayer now, a more common and profane one: Christ, don’t let me sit next to that idiot again.

  She glanced down at her boarding pass—18B—and counted off the rows, so tired, suddenly, that she felt as if she had been drained of blood. (“Anemic,” the doctor had said, clucking her tongue, that was the problem, that and depression.) The line had come to a halt, Ellen’s fellow passengers slumped under the weight of their bags like penitents, and all she could see down the length of the aisle was their shoulders, their collars, and the hair that sprouted from their heads in all its multiethnic variety. The lucky ones—the ones already settled in their seats—gazed up at her with irritation, as if she were responsible for the delays, as if she had personally spun out the weather system over the Midwest, put the lies in the pilots’ mouths, and flouted the regulations for carry-ons. “All right, all right, give me a minute, will you?” a voice raged out, and through a gap in the line she saw him, six or seven rows down, blocking the aisle as he fought to stuff his bag into the overhead compartment. Force, that was all he could think to use, because he was spoiled, bullying, petulant, like an overgrown fifth grader. She hated him. Everyone on the plane hated him.

  And then the flight attendant was there, assuring him that she would find a place for his bag up front, even as an amplified voice hectored them to take their seats and the engines rumbled to life. Ellen caught a glimpse of his face, blunt and oblivious, as he swung ponderously into his seat, and then the line shuffled forward and she saw that her prayer had been answered—she was three rows ahead of him. She’d been assigned a middle seat, of course, as had most of the passengers bumped from the previous flight, but at least it wasn’t a middle seat beside him. She waited as the woman in the aisle seat (mid-fifties, with a saddlebag face and a processed pouf of copper hair) unfastened her seat belt and laboriously rose to make way for her. There was no one in the window seat—not yet, at least—and even as she settled in, elbow to elbow with the saddlebag woman, Ellen was already coveting it.

  Could she be so lucky? No, no, she couldn’t, and here was another layer of superstition rising up out of the murk of her subconscious, as if luck had anything to do with her or what she’d been through already today or in the past week or month or year—or, for that matter, through the whole course of her vacant and constricted life. A name came to her lips then, a name she’d been trying, with the help of the prescription the doctor had given her, to suppress. She held it there for a moment, enlarged by her grief until she felt like the heroine of some weepy movie, a raped nun, an airman’s widow, sloe-eyed and wilting under the steady gaze of the camera. She shouldn’t have had the beer, she told herself. Or the Scotch, either. Not with the pills.

  The plane quieted. The aisles cleared. She fought down her exhaustion and kept her eyes fixed on the far end of the aisle, where the last passenger—a boy in a reversed baseball cap—was fumbling into his seat. Surreptitiously, with her feet only, she shifted her bag from the space under her seat to the space beneath the window seat, and then, after a moment, she unfastened her seat belt and slipped into the unoccupied seat. She stretched her legs, adjusted her pillow and blanket, watched the flight attendants work their way up the aisle, easing shut the overhead bins. She was thinking that she should have called her mother with the new flight information—she’d call her from Chicago, that’s what she’d do—when there was movement at the front of the plane and one final passenger came through the door, even as the attendants stood by to screw it shut. Stooping to avoid the TV monitors, he came slowly down the aisle, sweeping his eyes right and left to check the row numbers, an overcoat over one arm, a soft computer bag slung over the opposite shoulder. He was dressed in a sport coat and a T-shirt, his hair cut close, after the fashion of the day, and his face seemed composed despite what must have been a mad dash through the airport. But what mattered most about him was that he seemed to be
coming straight to her, to 18A, the seat she’d appropriated. And what went through her mind? A curse, that was all. Just a curse.

  Sure enough, he paused at Row 18, glanced at the saddlebag woman, and then at Ellen, and said, “Excuse me, I believe I’m in here?”

  Ellen reddened. “I thought …”

  “No, no,” he said, holding Ellen’s eyes even as the saddlebag woman rolled up and out of her seat like a rock dislodged from a crevice, “stay there. It’s okay. Really.”

  The pilot said something then, a garble of the usual words, the fuselage shuddered, and the plane backed away from the gate with a sudden jolt. Ellen put her head back and closed her eyes.

  She woke when the drinks cart came around. There was a sour taste in her mouth, her head was throbbing, and the armrest gouged at her ribs as if it had come alive. She’d been dreaming about Roy, the man who had dismembered her life like a boy pulling the legs off an insect, Roy and that elaborate, humiliating scene in the teachers’ lounge, her mother there somehow to witness it, and then she and Roy were in bed, the stiff insistence of his erection (which turned out to be the armrest), and his hand creeping across her rib cage until it was Waldo, Waldo the tarantula, closing in on her breast. “Something to drink?” the broad-faced flight attendant was asking, and both Ellen’s seatmates seemed to be hanging on her answer. “Scotch-and-soda,” she said, without giving it a second thought.

  The man beside her, the new man, the one who had offered up his seat to her, was working on his laptop, the gentle blue glow of the screen softly illuminating his lips and eyes. He looked up at the flight attendant, his fingers still poised over the keys, and murmured, “May I have a chardonnay, please?” Then it was the saddlebag woman’s turn. “Sprite,” she said, the dull thump of her voice swallowed up in the drone of the engines.