“What the hell?” muttered Elliot. In spite of himself, he felt drawn to the throng. He remembered watching Keelan on television, saying, “There is a natural urge for human beings to congregate, even when it is obviously contrary to their best interests. That’s when the state should step in.”
“Police!” shouted Elliot, and a few individuals hurried along on their way. But even a thinned group was an obstacle. Elliot was strong but already feeling hobbled from supporting Keelan’s weight for so long.
“This man has ARAMIS,” he shouted. “Let us through.”
Most scattered immediately. With the crowd gone, Elliot could see an unconscious woman lying on the ground and a teenaged girl crouched down beside her. The girl was shivering in a T-shirt, her drenched hair dripping down her back as she held a sweater to the side of the woman’s head. The woman must have slipped on the wet curb. Her eyes were closed and blood trickled from her head into a pinkish puddle that was draining into the gutter. The girl, who was not wearing a face mask, had a tense, fixed jaw and was audibly mouth-breathing. Elliot was reluctant to get too close.
“I called 911,” she said, almost defensively. “They’re on their way.” She nodded down to the sweater in her hands, presumably the one she had been wearing. “They told me to press something on the wound.”
Elliot thought it was a bad sign that they’d already hung up on her. “That’s good,” he said. “You’re doing a great job.” He could see the girl’s face relax.
Another middle-aged woman was next to her. Maybe she had been there the whole time. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll stay with them.” As Elliot nodded and moved away, he glimpsed her removing her jacket and giving it to the girl.
Once they’d crossed the street, Elliot heaved Keelan over an empty metal newspaper box, then jogged up and down the street pressing the car keys. An old Volvo responded and, flooded with a short-lived relief, he fetched Keelan and helped him into the back seat, with little assistance from the man himself.
Elliot drove to the hospital at a pace he tried to keep steady, one eye on Keelan’s prone figure in the rear-view mirror while trying to remember what Keisha had told him about the point allocation system. If there was a shortage of ventilators, the professor wouldn’t cut it. He was widowed, his only daughter was grown, and he was definitely over sixty-five, maybe even over seventy. At the moment, his eyes wavered in and out of lucidity, but by tomorrow they would be blank and unseeing, radiating a depersonalized pain.
Elliot had often imagined—unwillingly at first, at the start of his quarantine, and then in a kind of self-flagellating way when he knew he would survive—what had happened to his friends in their final days and hours. But after what he had witnessed during his posting at the hospital, he no longer needed to imagine it: patients wheeled into the isolation ward, their livid faces half obscured by medical equipment, unmoving but still wet with tears. He had heard a rumour that a handful of people had died in the waiting room, too sick or afraid to come to the hospital until it was too late.
Soon the old man would be unable to move. The progression of the virus and the onset of symptoms had a broader spectrum than most people believed, and the inflammatory pain had not been widely reported. Certain patients reported only weakness, while others described muscles that burned like they were on fire, with intense pain triggered by even the slightest movement. During his time at Methodist Morningside, from the other side of the isolation ward doors, Elliot had heard screaming from ARAMIS patients whose lungs had not yet weakened.
It was no stretch to picture Keelan succumbing in a matter of days to the virus that had already claimed so many. Maybe even in a matter of hours.
The thought that came to Elliot’s mind was: What does the virus get out of it? It thrived, he supposed. It got stronger. It survived.
* * *
—
At the intake desk, Keelan leaned on Elliot as he inquired about admittance. Elliot knew plenty of staff members in Emergency from his shifts there, but in a stroke of bad luck he didn’t recognize anyone on duty. The receptionist insisted he fill out an admittance form, then instinctively retreated back into her cubicle as she pointed towards the ARAMIS waiting area, set off to the side of the main room.
Elliot helped Keelan into a seat in the corner. Out of the rain and under the bright fluorescent lights of the hospital, the professor seemed to have regained a certain awareness. “I need to get Julia,” he said. “Take her home.” He closed his eyes and rested his head against the wall. “Letters in my coat.”
Elliot patted his arm. “Okay, sir. You’re in good hands here.”
“Don’t go,” said Keelan, bolting upright. “Take the letters.” He gripped the plastic seat with the oversize mittens as though afraid of sliding off. “I was going to come before. I should have come before. But now I have everything ready.”
Elliot unzipped his knapsack for his stash of spare evidence bags. With his gloved hands he opened Keelan’s camel coat and, in an inner breast pocket, found an unsealed envelope stuffed with pages of handwritten letter. He placed it in one of the bags.
“They need to leave,” said Keelan. “Both of them. Promise.”
“I’ll get them to come see you. I promise,” said Elliot. He waved to a nurse who had come out to scan the room.
“No.” The professor shook his head. “No, no. It’s too late. Bring them home. Make them go today.”
“Okay, I will. I’ll bring them home.”
The promise extracted, Keelan sank back into himself.
From Elliot’s time posted in Emergency, he knew the waiting room was not where things were supposed to happen. It was a place of suspension, a hiatus between problem and solution. It was the vestibule of life’s interminable emptiness, where the lesson to be learned was serenity, lest you throw yourself on the mercy of outdated issues of Time or In Touch Weekly. Eventually, the nurse read off an inaudible name and a man and woman got to their feet, and the room—packed to capacity with every possible census demographic—returned to its previous state of expectant disquiet. The world was there in the ER, the city in all its infinite colours and accents and emotional frequencies, and this time Elliot was no longer set apart by his uniform. He was one of them, vying for a limited set of resources. He could almost hear his father’s Hobbesian voice in his head, warning him of “a war of all against all.” But the inwardness and pitifulness of most of those present made the very idea seem absurd. If his mother were there, she would probably have deplored the marketization of the medical industry and bemoaned the devaluation of the caring professions. He wondered what Keelan would have made of the situation if he weren’t deteriorating so rapidly.
From his years on the force, Elliot knew everyone reacted differently to tragedy, but what he’d seen in the past few weeks made him uneasy about how unpredictably people might behave. The fear that had slunk in during his solo patrols was now lodged in his throat like a lump he could neither swallow nor ignore.
Keelan batted Elliot’s side with a giant mitt, in a gesture of entreaty that caused him obvious pain. He was a fish drowning onshore, waiting for someone to show him mercy. The professor’s gasping wheeze was only slightly less horrific than his visible anxiety. His eyes rolled around with a wild helplessness.
The nurse returned and, meeting Elliot’s gaze, gave a minute shake of the head that was both acknowledgement and dismissal, a signal of not yet. Elliot tried to make his own breathing shallow, to avoid inhaling whatever ARAMIS was coming off the older man. He began to sense the urgency of contacting somebody. He had no number for Julia, no number for Dory. Shifting slightly, he managed to slide his phone out of his back pocket and dialled his mother, who answered after the second ring and responded with her typical efficiency.
“I’ll see what I can do. Somebody must have Julia’s number.” Gretchen’s voice thickened as though she was getting choked up. �
��It’s a good thing you’re doing, honey.”
“Thanks, Mom.” Elliot hung up, feeling a momentary reprieve from disaster. Then the professor lunged forward in a coughing fit and, when it passed, remained half-supported against Elliot’s chest. Elliot had no idea how long they spent like that. His legs began to fall asleep. The ceiling-mounted televisions conferred a dissonant sense of normality carrying on, urgency dribbling away.
On the news was a story about the Taser-related deaths of three civilians following the Police Commissioner’s authorization of the use of force against people violating quarantine. The familiar photo of ARAMIS Girl flashed on the screen just as Keelan moaned, his whole body quivering. Elliot struggled to his feet but only made it up into a semi-crouch that radiated pain through his leg muscles.
“We need help here!” he shouted. But the rest of the room was unresponsive, already a casualty of the fear that ARAMIS was spreading like a secondary infection. The other people who had been glancing over, their attention drawn by the professor’s rattling breaths, were now averting their eyes. But in any case, they were too far away to see his face, the heavy brow cresting with spasms. Elliot found he could not look away, though the sight was distressing. Keelan’s eyes had returned to their former glassiness.
Elliot sat down heavily and Keelan lolled across his lap, as though no longer moving under his own power. His head rested on Elliot’s thighs, his long beard fanning out like a skirt around the borders of his mask.
“Hang on, Professor,” said Elliot, tears smarting his eyes. The virus that held the professor in its grip was implacable, nature at its most terrible. Elliot had never felt less prepared to deal with an emergency that was right in front of him. He thought of Julia, far away and unaware of what was unfolding. All the sad, failing efforts of human beings who would never, ever get it right, whether they were trying or not. Everyone, no matter who they were or what they intended, left pain in their wake. There was enough hurt in the world to burn it down ten times over. It was delusional to think any individual could make a difference.
Keelan opened his mouth, but only a strained, scraping hiss emerged. And then he was gone and Elliot was shouting again, asking for help though he knew it was already too late.
October 17, 2020
Emma, my dear granddaughter,
As an Aslet, I’m sure you know that what some people believe to be inevitable is just that—a belief. Reality is very different. With sufficient funds, anything can be accomplished.
On that note, I have good news: you and Stuart have been pre-approved for Haven Archipelago! Haven is one of the oldest and most exclusive survival projects, and those of us who have been long-term investors enjoy certain privileges—such as extending invitations to family if space remains available. Though the current catastrophe has taken the world by surprise, many of us have been preparing for this sort of calamity for a long time.
I wrote to your parents, but they intend to “weather this storm” without me. Securing an invitation for your sister’s family could be trickier. I hear she married an Arab, though a wealthy one. Please encourage her to be in touch with me to discuss further.
Also, given your profile, I realize you and Stuart might be fielding invitations from other communities. Would you mind sharing the details? Haven is fantastic, but one always wonders if one is actually getting the best as promised—and paid for.
It’s a shame this can’t reach you any faster from our secure location, but we’ve had it on good authority that the old-fashioned kind of mail is ultimately harder to trace.
We haven’t had much of a relationship, I know, but let’s make up for lost time. I’d like to meet my newest great-grandchild.
Walt
P.S. Just to clarify, you and Stuart will still be responsible for all fees, etc. Hope to hear from you. W.
EMMA
NOVEMBER 2020
Emma can’t be sure if the barista loves or hates her. She thinks she would be fine with either—it’s just that she can’t tell, so it remains a ragged edge on the fabric of her day. A morning irritant, a blind spot. Another small failure.
“It’s my first time out with the baby,” she says. Her voice is rough and croaky.
The barista has a narrow face, with shockingly crooked teeth, and he gives her a tentative smile—or is it a smirk? Either his features are too odd and inscrutable or she is still too unsuited for the weirdness of fame. He isn’t wearing a face mask and Emma wonders if he has removed it for her sake, in some misguided attempt at connection. She is among the fraction of the population who ignore the official municipal infection precautions: face masks, curfew, no large gatherings. Most people don’t go outside when they don’t need to, let alone with a baby. But Emma isn’t afraid. She has already been through it all.
He produces her latte with its perfect crema pattern that is nowadays so common that no one even comments on it anymore. Emma remembers when she used to compliment the baristas on their patterns (their latte art? wasn’t it called that?) at this very coffee shop. How quickly everything changes. How fast luxuries become commonplace. Her own life has taken wing into proportions her old self would scarcely recognize. This is partially why she comes to this same coffee shop with its adoring or hateful baristas, its sameness, its physical solidity—to remind her of who she was/is and will be/will be/will be.
She keeps her eyes on her coffee as she carries it to the closest table and sits down, one hand on the back of the baby carrier strapped to her chest. The baby is asleep, so she feels alone. Emma is not afraid, as some new mothers are, of a baby who never sleeps. She thinks, on the contrary, it would be companionable. She has already been awake for hours and hours—for days and days, really—thinking about this coffee or something like it. Something to get her through to the next day, and the next.
There is almost no one here. ARAMIS has been ravaging Austin, although it is possible the worst is over. But the authorities won’t roll back the restrictions until the morgues are emptied, the dead buried. The mayor made that mistake before, lifting the state of emergency prematurely, which led to a new spike in infections. A grieving mothers’ group burnt his figure in effigy, and he gave a tearful apology on television. He tried to resign, but the city council wouldn’t let him. MAYOR MUST STAY AND FACE THE MUSIC, MOTHERS SAY. Across the café, a young man in a face mask and a Dove Suite T-shirt gives her a small wave, and by long instinct her mouth twists up into a momentary smile until, just then, the baby stirs. She looks down at her, relieved for an excuse to turn away. The baby is still sleeping, only restless. Emma tugs at the muslin blanket covering her daughter’s face. It is too porous to function as a mask, but it should keep people from pointing fingers. You almost never see children outside anymore, let alone babies.
The baby makes a small cry then. Pressing a hand to the table, Emma gets to her feet but feels the ground tilting, the floor turning to quicksand. A head rush. She closes her eyes, but when she opens them again the room is still swaying, as though the whole café has pushed off to sea on the swollen waters of the Colorado River. She drops back into her chair, back into her childhood mal de débarquement, when the earth itself became hostile, churning, anything other than a safe place to land.
It’s only fatigue. It will pass—it is already passing. But Emma is afraid of becoming someone she doesn’t recognize. So maybe it is better to remain so unsure, so unsettled, so full of the feeling of never arriving, never being comfortable, never having a home except with Stu. Stu is home.
If she is always a little bit adrift, then at least she will still be herself.
* * *
—
At home, the apartment is ablaze with morning light. They have three sides of the building, a full half-floor of the tallest property in Austin. The east wall of windows has been fitted with automatic curtains for which the button still needs to be repaired. Emma remembers Stu jabbin
g at it one morning, pre-coffee, hair askew, the hoarseness of sleep still in his voice.
“Add it to the list,” he said.
The list was real and ongoing, and it worked. A spiral notebook comprising pages and pages of tasks and goals, great and small.
Choose a lead single.
Have a baby.
Find a nanny.
Change the light bulb in the guest linen closet.
The list is now sitting on the corner of the dining room table, a rustic affair in hickory with chairs for fourteen. Emma has not touched it in weeks.
Like the dazzlingly bright apartment, the baby is ablaze, too; it hurts to look at her. They’d decided on her name together before she was born: Blaze Aslet-Jenkins.
Stu balked when she first suggested it—he said Blaze was a name for a stripper, or a horse. But that objection became technical, as they both liked it, loved it even, in spite of their better judgment. It had come to Emma in her third trimester, in a dream from which she had woken up happy. It was precisely because she was not the kind of person to traffic in dream revelations that the name had come to seem important.
Blaze is a gorgeous, gleaming baby with large, watchful eyes, and everyone who has ever seen her says she looks like Stu. But then, of course they would say that.
Their apartment is a haven that she and Stu have taken pains to make their own. The old posters from their first apartment have been framed and restored to hide the tack holes and crumpled corners. A beautiful commissioned collage of gig flyers from their first college shows is hanging in the front hallway. Besides the studio with its own mixing booth, there is a home theatre with surround sound and reclining leather couches, and a gleaming deluxe chef’s kitchen because it is basically impossible to buy a new condo without one.
Songs for the End of the World Page 32
