After the Plague: And Other Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Over the course of the next several days, the radio would sporadically come to life (I left it switched on at all times, day and night, as if I were going down in a sinking ship and could shout “Mayday!” into the receiver at the first stirring of a human voice). I’d be pacing the floor or spooning sugar into my tea or staring at a freshly inserted and eternally blank page in my ancient manual typewriter when the static would momentarily clear and a harried newscaster spoke out of the void to provide me with the odd and horrific detail: an oceanliner had run aground off Cape Hatteras and nothing left aboard except three sleek and frisky cats and various puddles of flesh swathed in plaid shorts, polo shirts and sunglasses; no sound or signal had come out of South Florida in over thirty-six hours; a group of survivalists had seized Bill Gates’ private jet in an attempt to escape to Antarctica, where it was thought the infection hadn’t yet reached, but everyone aboard vomited black bile and died before the plane could leave the ground. Another announcer broke down in the middle of an unconfirmed report that every man, woman and child in Minneapolis was dead, and yet another came over the air early one morning shouting, “It kills! It kills! It kills in three days!” At that point, I jerked the plug out of the wall.

  My first impulse, of course, was to help. To save Danielle, the frail and the weak, the young and the old, the chairman of the social studies department at the school where I teach (or taught), a student teacher with cropped red hair about whom I’d had several minutely detailed sexual fantasies. I even went so far as to hike out to the road and take the car into Fish Fry Flats, but the bar/restaurant/gift shop/one-stop grocery/gas station was closed and locked and the parking lot deserted. I drove round the lot three times, debating whether I should continue on down the road or not, but then a lean furtive figure darted out of a shed at the corner of the lot and threw itself—himself—into the shadows beneath the deck of the main building. I recognized the figure immediately as the splay-footed and pony-tailed proprietor of the place, a man who would pump your gas with an inviting smile and then lure you into the gift shop to pay in the hope that the hand-carved Tule Indian figurines and Pen-Lite batteries would prove irresistible. I saw his feet protruding from beneath the deck, and they seemed to be jittering or trembling as if he were doing some sort of energetic new contra-dance that began in the prone position. For a long moment I sat there and watched those dancing feet, then I hit the lock button, rolled up the windows and drove back to the cabin.

  What did I do? Ultimately? Nothing. Call it enlightened self-interest. Call it solipsism, self-preservation, cowardice, I don’t care. I was terrified—who wouldn’t be?—and I decided to stay put. I had plenty of food and firewood, fuel for the generator and propane for the stove, three reams of twenty-five percent cotton fiber bond, correction fluid, books, board games—Parcheesi and Monopoly—and a complete set of National Geographic, 1947–1962. (By way of explanation, I should mention that I am—or was—a social studies teacher at the Montecito School, a preparatory academy in a pricey suburb of Santa Barbara, and that the serendipity that spared me the fate of nearly all my fellow men and women was as simple and fortuitous a thing as a sabbatical leave. After fourteen years of unstinting service, I applied for and was granted a one-semester leave at half-salary for the purpose of writing a memoir of my deprived and miserable Irish-Catholic upbringing. The previous year a high school teacher from New York—the name escapes me now—had enjoyed a spectacular succès d’estime, not to mention d’argent, with a memoir about his own miserable and deprived Irish-Catholic boyhood, and I felt I could profitably mine the same territory. And I got a good start on it too, until the plague hit. Now I ask myself what’s the use—the publishers are all dead. Ditto the editors, agents, reviewers, booksellers and the great congenial book-buying public itself. What’s the sense of writing? What’s the sense of anything?)

  At any rate, I stuck close to the cabin, writing at the kitchen table through the mornings, staring out the window into the ankles of the pines and redwoods as I summoned degrading memories of my alcoholic mother, father, aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents, and in the afternoons I hiked up to the highest peak and looked down on the deceptive tranquillity of the San Joaquin Valley spread out like a continent below me. There were no planes in the sky overhead, no sign of traffic or movement anywhere, no sounds but the calling of the birds and the soughing of the trees as the breeze sifted through them. I stayed up there past dark one night and felt as serene and terrible as a god when I looked down at the velvet expanse of the world and saw no ray or glimmer of light. I plugged the radio back in that night, just to hear the fading comfort of man-made noise, of the static that emanates from nowhere and nothing. Because there was nothing out there, not anymore.

  It was four weeks later—just about the time I was to have ended my hermitage and enjoyed the promised visit from Danielle—that I had my first human contact of the new age. I was at the kitchen window, beating powdered eggs into a froth for dinner, one ear half-attuned to the perfect and unbroken static hum of the radio, when there was a heavy thump on the deteriorating planks of the front deck. My first thought was that a branch had dropped out of the Jeffrey pine—or worse, that a bear had got wind of the corned beef hash I’d opened to complement the powdered eggs—but I was mistaken on both counts. The thump was still reverberating through the floorboards when I was surprised to hear a moan and then a curse—a distinctly human curse. “Oh, shit-fuck!” a woman’s voice cried. “Open the goddamned door! Help, for shit’s sake, help!”

  I’ve always been a cautious animal. This may be one of my great failings, as my mother and later my fraternity brothers were always quick to point out, but on the other hand, it may be my greatest virtue. It’s kept me alive when the rest of humanity has gone on to a quick and brutal extinction, and it didn’t fail me in that moment. The door was locked. Once I’d got wind of what was going on in the world, though I was devastated and the thought of the radical transformation of everything I’d ever known gnawed at me day and night, I took to locking it against just such an eventuality as this. “Shit!” the voice raged. “I can hear you in there, you son of a bitch—I can smell you!”

  I stood perfectly still and held my breath. The static breathed dismally through the speakers and I wished I’d had the sense to disconnect the radio long ago. I stared down at the half-beaten eggs.

  “I’m dying out here!” the voice cried. “I’m starving to death—hey, are you deaf in there or what? I said, I’m starving!”

  And now of course I was faced with a moral dilemma. Here was a fellow human being in need of help, a member of a species whose value had just vaulted into the rarefied atmosphere occupied by the gnatcatcher, the condor and the beluga whale by virtue of its rarity. Help her? Of course I would help her. But at the same time, I knew if I opened that door I would invite the pestilence in and that three days hence both she and I would be reduced to our mortal remains.

  “Open up!” she demanded, and the tattoo of her fists was the thunder of doom on the thin planks of the door.

  It occurred to me suddenly that she couldn’t be infected—she’d have been dead and wasted by now if she were. Maybe she was like me, maybe she’d been out brooding in her own cabin or hiking the mountain trails, utterly oblivious and immune to the general calamity. Maybe she was beautiful, nubile, a new Eve for a new age, maybe she would fill my nights with passion and my days with joy. As if in a trance, I crossed the room and stood at the door, my fingers on the long brass stem of the bolt. “Are you alone?” I said, and the rasp of my own voice, so long in disuse, sounded strange in my ears.

  I heard her draw in a breath of astonishment and outrage from the far side of the thin panel that separated us. “What the hell do you think, you son of a bitch? I’ve been lost out here in these stinking woods for I don’t know how long and I haven’t had a scrap for days, not a goddamn scrap, not even bark or grass or a handful of soggy trail mix. Now will you fucking open this door?!”

  Sti
ll, I hesitated.

  A rending sound came to me then, a sound that tore me open as surely as a surgical knife, from my groin to my throat: she was sobbing. Gagging for breath, and sobbing. “A frog,” she sobbed, “I ate a goddamn slimy little putrid frog!”

  God help me. God save and preserve me. I opened the door.

  Sarai was thirty-eight years old—that is, three years older than I—and she was no beauty. Not on the surface, anyway. Even if you discounted the twenty-odd pounds she’d lost and her hair that was like some crushed rodent’s pelt and the cuts and bites and suppurating sores that made her skin look like a leper’s, and tried, by a powerful leap of the imagination, to see her as she once might have been, safely ensconced in her condo in Tarzana and surrounded by all the accoutrements of feminine hygiene and beauty, she still wasn’t much.

  This was her story: she and her live-in boyfriend, Howard, were nature enthusiasts—at least Howard was, anyway—and just before the plague hit they’d set out to hike an interlocking series of trails in the Golden Trout Wilderness. They were well provisioned, with the best of everything—Howard managed a sporting goods store—and for the first three weeks everything went according to plan. They ate delicious freeze-dried fettuccine Alfredo and shrimp couscous, drank cognac from a bota bag and made love wrapped in propylene, Gore-Tex and nylon. Mosquitoes and horseflies sampled her legs, but she felt good, born again, liberated from the traffic and the smog and her miserable desk in a miserable corner of the electronics company her father had founded. Then one morning, when they were camped by a stream, Howard went off with his day pack and a fly rod and never came back. She waited. She searched. She screamed herself hoarse. A week went by. Every day she searched in a new direction, following the stream both ways and combing every tiny rill and tributary, until finally she got herself lost. All streams were one stream, all hills and ridges alike. She had three Kudos bars with her and a six-ounce bag of peanuts, but no shelter and no freeze-dried entrées—all that was back at the camp she and Howard had made in happier times. A cold rain fell. There were no stars that night, and when something moved in the brush beside her she panicked and ran blindly through the dark, hammering her shins and destroying her face, her hair and her clothes. She’d been wandering ever since.

  I made her a package of Top Ramen, gave her a towel and a bar of soap and showed her the primitive shower I’d rigged up above the ancient slab of the tub. I was afraid to touch her or even come too close to her. Sure I was skittish. Who wouldn’t be when ninety-nine percent of the human race had just died off on the tailwind of a simple sneeze? Besides, I’d begun to adopt all the habits of the hermit—talking to myself, performing elaborate rituals over my felicitous stock of foodstuffs, dredging bursts of elementary school songs and beer jingles out of the depths of my impacted brain—and I resented having my space invaded. Still. Still, though, I felt that Sarai had been delivered to me by some higher power and that she’d been blessed in the way that I was—we’d escaped the infection. We’d survived. And we weren’t just errant members of a selfish, suspicious and fragmented society, but the very foundation of a new one. She was a woman. I was a man.

  At first, she wouldn’t believe me when I waved a dismissive hand at the ridge behind the cabin and all that lay beyond it and informed her that the world was depeopled, that the Apocalypse had come and that she and I were among the solitary survivors—and who could blame her? As she sipped my soup and ate my flapjacks and treated her cuts and abrasions with my Neosporin and her hair with my shampoo, she must have thought she’d found a lunatic as her savior. “If you don’t believe me,” I said, and I was gloating, I was, sick as it may seem, “try the radio.”

  She looked up at me out of the leery brooding eyes of the one sane woman in a madhouse of impostors, plugged the cord in the socket and calibrated the dial as meticulously as a safecracker. She was rewarded by static—no dynamics even, just a single dull continuum—but she glared up at me as if I’d rigged the thing to disappoint her. “So,” she spat, skinny as a refugee, her hair kinked and puffed up with my shampoo till it devoured her parsimonious and disbelieving little sliver of a face, “that doesn’t prove a thing. It’s broken, that’s all.”

  When she got her strength back, we hiked out to the car and drove into Fish Fry Flats so she could see for herself. I was half-crazy with the terrible weight of the knowledge I’d been forced to hold inside me, and I can’t describe the irritation I felt at her utter lack of interest—she treated me like a street gibberer, a psychotic, Cassandra in long pants. She condescended to me. She was humoring me, for God’s sake, and the whole world lay in ruins around us. But she would have a rude awakening, she would, and the thought of it was what kept me from saying something I’d regret—I didn’t want to lose my temper and scare her off, but I hate stupidity and willfulness. It’s the one thing I won’t tolerate in my students. Or wouldn’t. Or didn’t.

  Fish Fry Flats, which in the best of times could hardly be mistaken for a metropolis, looked now as if it had been deserted for a decade. Weeds had begun to sprout up through invisible cracks in the pavement, dust had settled over the idle gas pumps and the windows of the main building were etched with grime. And the animals—the animals were everywhere, marmots waddling across the lot as if they owned it, a pair of coyotes asleep in the shade of an abandoned pickup, ravens cawing and squirrels chittering. I cut the engine just as a bear the color of cinnamon toast tumbled stupendously through an already shattered window and lay on his back, waving his bloodied paws in the air as if he were drunk, which he was. As we discovered a few minutes later—once he’d lurched to his feet and staggered off into the bushes—a whole host of creatures had raided the grocery, stripping the candy display right down to the twisted wire rack, scattering Triscuits and Doritos, shattering jars of jam and jugs of port wine and grinding the hand-carved Tule Indian figurines underfoot. There was no sign of the formerly sunny proprietor or of his dancing feet—I could only imagine that the ravens, coyotes and ants had done their work.

  But Sarai—she was still an unbeliever, even after she dropped a quarter into the public telephone and put the dead black plastic receiver to her ear. For all the good it did her, she might as well have tried coaxing a dial tone out of a stone or a block of wood, and I told her so. She gave me a sour look, the sticks of her bones briefly animated beneath a sweater and jacket I’d loaned her—it was the end of October and getting cold at seventy-two hundred feet—and then she tried another quarter, and then another, before she slammed the receiver down in a rage and turned her seething face on me. “The lines are down, that’s all,” she sneered. And then her mantra: “It doesn’t prove a thing.”

  While she’d been frustrating herself, I’d been loading the car with canned goods, after entering the main building through the broken window and unlatching the door from the inside. “And what about all this?” I said, irritated, hot with it, sick to death of her and her thick-headedness. I gestured at the bloated and lazy coyotes, the hump in the bushes that was the drunken bear, the waddling marmots and the proprietary ravens.

  “I don’t know,” she said, clenching her jaws. “And I don’t care.” Her eyes had a dull sheen to them. They were insipid and bovine, exactly the color of the dirt at her feet. And her lips—thin and stingy, collapsed in a riot of vertical lines like a dried-up mud puddle. I hated her in that moment, godsend or no. Oh, how I hated her.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded as I loaded the last of the groceries into the car, settled into the driver’s seat and turned the engine over. She was ten feet from me, caught midway between the moribund phone booth and the living car. One of the coyotes lifted its head at the vehemence of her tone and gave her a sleepy, yellow-eyed look.

  “Going back to the cabin,” I said.

  “You’re what?” Her face was pained. She’d been through agonies. I was a devil and a madman.

  “Listen, Sarai, it’s all over. I’ve told you time and again. You don’t have a job anymo
re. You don’t have to pay rent, utility bills, don’t have to make car payments or remember your mother’s birthday. It’s over. Don’t you get it?”

  “You’re insane! You’re a shithead! I hate you!”

  The engine was purring beneath my feet, fuel awasting, but there was infinite fuel now, and though I realized the gas pumps would no longer work, there were millions upon millions of cars and trucks out there in the world with full tanks to siphon, and no one around to protest. I could drive a Ferrari if I wanted, a Rolls, a Jag, anything. I could sleep on a bed of jewels, stuff the mattress with hundred-dollar bills, prance through the streets in a new pair of Italian loafers and throw them into the gutter each night and get a new pair in the morning. But I was afraid. Afraid of the infection, the silence, the bones rattling in the wind. “I know it,” I said. “I’m insane. I’m a shithead. I admit it. But I’m going back to the cabin and you can do anything you want—it’s a free country. Or at least it used to be.”

  I wanted to add that it was a free world now, a free universe, and that God was in the details, the biblical God, the God of famine, flood and pestilence, but I never got the chance. Before I could open my mouth she bent for a stone and heaved it into the windshield, splintering me with flecks and shards of safety glass. “Die!” she shrieked. “You die, you shit!”

  That night we slept together for the first time. In the morning, we packed up a few things and drove down the snaking mountain road to the charnel house of the world.

  I have to confess that I’ve never been much of a fan of the apocalyptic potboiler, the doomsday film shot through with special effects and asinine dialogue or the cyberpunk version of a grim and relentless future. What these entertainments had led us to expect—the roving gangs, the inhumanity, the ascendancy of machines and the redoubled pollution and ravaging of the earth—wasn’t at all what it was like. There were no roving gangs—they were all dead, to a man, woman and tattooed punk—and the only machines still functioning were the automobiles and weed whippers and such that we the survivors chose to put into prosaic action. And a further irony was that the survivors were the least likely and least qualified to organize anything, either for better or worse. We were the fugitive, the misfit, the recluse, and we were so widely scattered we’d never come into contact with one another, anyway—and that was just the way we liked it. There wasn’t even any looting of the supermarkets—there was no need. There was more than enough for everybody who ever was or would be.