Dead Reckoning and Other Stories

by Dino Parenti

  5

  Five days after the thawing of Lady and Gentleman, and the day following Sam and Holly’s wedding, Denny Shuster began coughing. It was minor at first. The weather had been drafty and he’d been down by the shoreline gathering tidal samples and getting all kinds of damp in the process. I remember seeing the idiot without a shirt, eager for the kind of tan only a near-arctic sun can produce, never mind that the sunburns would be just as nasty, especially under the area where the ozone layer was its thinnest. He’d even mentioned during the wedding of having beaten melanoma in the past, and somehow he’d convinced himself that the purity of the environment we were in would act as some sort of buffer. That cancer didn’t like the cold. I bit back on asking from what school his science degree was from, mostly because I understood where he was coming from on an emotional level. An unparalleled beauty surrounded us—the glaciers, the wildlife, the quality of light, razor-sharp and pristine. Even Lady and Gentleman, shriveled and locked in their death embrace, though freed from the ice by then, were something truly breathtaking to see.

  15

  When I said that I was shrewd about men, I was in all honesty just musing aloud over what Terry once said about love, how it was more complicated than all the math and sciences put together. I don’t agree. Like hate, love is simple. Scary-simple. And like hate, complicated only by our fear of not having it, or of losing it, or of getting crushed under its weight. The face he replied with after I told him this, I might as well have just shat on his waffles. Reflecting on Terry and looking at Kirk, I often wonder what it is that makes them think the things they think, feel the things they feel, do the things they do. Not the good, kind, decent stuff, but the other stuff. The stuff that can hurt and demean. The stuff monkeys do because they have no rules or filters or oversight, and because it’s invigorating and empowering and so very in-the-now. Is it spontaneity they lust after? Freedom? Do they just miss hanging from trees and laughing without shame while flinging their turds and spanking their monkeys? Anyway, we just crossed into Alabama and I have nothing else to say.

  6

  Other than some missing teeth, Lady and Gentleman displayed no obvious physical trauma. Certainly nothing to suggest that injury had been what had killed them. As it turned out, there was no trio as we’d first hoped. The sling across Lady’s chest—most certainly for an infant—was empty. We could only surmise that it was illness that ended their lives, likely some pestilence that killed off their entire village, along with their baby. Viruses are tough sons-of-bitches, and they could still be viable after long dormant periods, though the odds weren’t in that favor. Yet living bacteria has been found as old as 400,000 years. In 1997, a 140,000-year-old live plant virus was found in a Greenland core sample. Time and herd immunity usually force viruses to go dormant, at least until a new naïve population is introduced as spreaders. Denny was that naïve carrier, 14,000 years later, give or take. He’d used syringes to take pulmonary tissue samples back to his camp for analysis, figuring at worst some form of smallpox had done in Lady and Gentleman, or even cancer from radioactive trace elements the ensuing ice age had surely wiped away. Now cancer, that’s its own outlier. Not a virus or a bacteria, but mutated cells that have lost the ability to self-destruct. Denny was sure the big-C would eventually take him down someday, and not an ancient, pre-Columbian virus. He was found in the morning, stiff and dank and very much dead not twenty-hours since he started manifesting symptoms. That night, after we quarantined his body and radioed home for instruction—and craving a smoke as much as ever—I slipped into the tent-lab we’d built up around Lady and Gentleman. I laid my sleeping bag perpendicular above their heads, and wondered how Lady had won his heart, and if Gentleman was truly a gentleman to her—in the best possible sense he could’ve been considering his limitations. When I mentioned they displayed no physical trauma, that wasn’t exactly true. Up close, very close, you would note scratches on Gentleman’s face and neck in various degrees of healing. And if you took the time to examine Lady’s ragged nails, you might find that they matched the breadth of those wounds, though no equal injuries could be found on her. Lady’s were invisible, but likely just as deep. And yet they continued slogging together through a cold, white world without end, where sky and land dovetailed, and their sense of the end of things became no more sophisticated than our own today. With their heads nestled within the cradle of my fetal arrangement, I reached out to them. I don’t know what prompted that, but as I drifted to sleep I kept brushing their stringy hair in the tender way I’m sure they had done with their baby, however long they had it, murmuring their versions of sweet-nothings, words wilted in icy plumes for a blink of time.

  16

  We stopped for a quick gas-and-bathroom break before our final push to the Florida panhandle. Kirk ran into the mini-mart to stock up on water, snacks and beer while I stayed in the car to mind Ollie and Clay’s restless slumber. The radio continued to sell an ever-increasing horror-show. Three more cities had reported in with cases of infection, and of hospitals bursting at the seams with clambering coughers and lung-bleeders. And yes, some more corpses as well. Almost a thousand in less than eight hours. For the first time I heard the words “national guard” and “pandemic” thrown about. This was the Flu’s M.O. alright, manifesting and spreading under the somewhat benign, silent guise of a garden-variety bug. Unlike smallpox however, this particular virus actually carries with it a built-in hindrance for the immune system to fight it. As the virus metastasizes, the body attacks it with increasing quantities of highly toxic substances in order to compensate. This results in rapid, lethal damage to the lungs, leading to pneumonia, culminating in a twisted, sodden, writhing finale. A vicious bastard to be sure. The harder your body fights, the quicker the virus works to destroy it. Ten minutes later, Kirk marched back to the car, mouth puckered in a perpetual death-kiss, eyes swinging madly in vain efforts to seize some elusive semblance of resignation, though for what, I couldn’t say. I’m sure I reflected the same, his hopes, like mine, spiraling steadily towards a foggy morass of bar smoke. Our faces shuddering us to the core, blowing back the exasperation of our efforts like so many splattered bugs on the windshield. Bugs swarming to an empty hive, much the way the world was about to pantomime. Kirk had just started up the car before I remembered something I’d meant to buy, and I was out of the car in a shot before he could bitch about it. Truth-be-told, I hadn’t forgotten anything. I just didn’t want Kirk suspecting a damn thing.

  7

  It spread fast in the camp after Denny died. Five were already sick while he was still holed up in his tent coughing up mists of blood and suffering severe muscle cramps from the permanent fetal position he’d assumed until his end. Twenty-four hours after Denny, three others were dead and fourteen were moderately-to-severely sick. Uncontrolled, lunatic strains of hacking and labored air bellowed throughout. The sounds of ravenous wolves tearing into live cows. Many of us took solace early on in the fact that Terry’s intern, Sam, along with his new wife and eight others had left just as Denny’s symptoms had begun. A few of our numbers might survive, we all thought foolishly, but those ten ended up becoming unwitting human cluster bombs, ferrying out their infectious payloads away from the relatively contained isolation of the Perito Moreno Glacier. Sam and Holly headed to Comic-Con in San Diego. Their perfect geek honeymoon, as well as the perfect shit-storm confluence: over 150,000 people from all over the world in a single contained space. When they found Sam in his hotel, the tabloid internet article described it as if all his fluids had been wrung from his body like a workout towel. For once, those rags didn’t exaggerate details. Holly would die in a hospital less than nine hours later in the same gruesome fashion. As for the others who’d left, they all went to separate academic conventions and seminars at major convergence hubs like Chicago and New York, infecting thousands more before buying it themselves.

  17

  I’ve never been shy about reiterating that Ollie and Clay are sweet, beautiful boys
who deserve better than Kirk for a father. And while Terry agreed with me in the general principle, he always took issue with the word “deserve.” He felt it muled within it too many undermining provisos, namely a providence willing to ante in, and if he’d learned anything else while on this plane, it was that providence was a most fickle and miserly fucker. Sometimes I’d play devil’s advocate and rile him up with argument and hypotheticals, never mind that privately I generally agreed with his sentiment. It allowed me to find some peace in not being able to conceive, never mind that I was never gung-ho about it in the first place. Now though? None of that seems to matter anymore. I do all I can to ignore the crushing dread—the likelihood of having to watch these boys die very soon and not being able to do a damn thing about it. Philosophy isn’t going to help with that. That’s the luxury of the hale and static, which pretty much sums up my marriage to Terry.

  8

  Terry woke me up in the middle of the night and scurried us out of the camp while most of our party was trying to stave off certain death with nothing but Tylenol and Earl Grey tea. Somehow he’d arranged a guide with a battered jeep to drive us in the middle of the night to the nearest town with a bus station. He was surprisingly aggressive and decisive about it all, and for once I found no purchase in which to crowbar argument against the selfishness of our act of abandonment. Once in town, we still had to kill 5 hours before the first bus of the morning arrived to drive us to the El Calafate airport 70 miles away. The station was a loud, smelly bustle, so we took a motel room a five-minute walk away. It was a whimsical place, organically shaped and adorned with shards of seashells and colored glass. Our room was painted a light maroon. Not a sharp corner or edge could be found. Even all the windows were round. Ditto the furniture, raw and asymmetrical, with kidney-shaped tables and chairs. On the round bed, dressed by a quilt of kitschy Andean themes, we made love. I think we just wanted a final token of the normalcy we fell into once upon a time. A memento, like a dog-eared postcard, or fridge magnet with our smiling faces filling each of Mickey Mouse’s ears. We both cried when it was over. There was a fierceness to his aspect of the act, a violence that I think only the impending death surrounding us could’ve dislodged, and for the first time after sex, I didn’t crave a cigarette to fill in the gaps.

  18

  A mob in L.A. set Cedar-Sinai Medical Center on fire. The radio reporter, who’d spoken with a witness, who’d overheard an LAPD spokesman, who’d interviewed the arresting officer of one of the alleged fire-starters said that the man had just lost his five-year-old daughter to the flu, and that they’d sent an orderly conscripted to full trauma nurse to inform him of this instead of the attending doctor. He said that he and a few other fathers who’d been similarly “disrespected” marched to the gas station across the street, filled a dozen gallon containers with regular unleaded, then returned to the waiting room, and upon clearing it of other frantic families, doused the entire place and lit it. He said that he was as qualified as any orderly to deal with the flu, and if that’s all a world-class hospital could offer, it was useless and should burn to the ground. Kirk kept nodding throughout the entire report, even when it was announced that 23 people who were huddled in the hospital chapel had died of smoke inhalation. When he reached out for a drag of my cig, I denied him. He just shrugged and kept on nodding.

  9

  Terry’s coughing startled me awake at 4:17 in the morning by the clock on the nightstand with the two-inch high numbers. When we finally fell asleep after love, we did so in an unconscious pantomime of the way Lady and Gentleman had been found, and I remembered that only because Terry had turned his back to me during the night and had scooted to the very edge of his side of the bed. I could feel the mugginess of the fever radiating from the valley between his shoulder blades, the very spot I loved to pepper with kisses whenever we’d spoon. He must’ve anticipated it coming. That or a latent hormone in us that signals inevitable death had spurred him to isolate, much the way animals do. I’m surprised it took that long, to be honest, eight days since it started with Denny, and the entire camp going to hell-in-a-hand-basket shortly thereafter. Aside from the emotional turmoil that colonized my every nerve ending, I felt physically fine. It was the first hint of my immunity to it. The first sign of my curse.

  19

  Though I was fairly open regarding the dig and the pathogen release, there are two specific matters that I’m keeping from Kirk. As intellectually-defied as he is at times, I fully trust his survival instincts and don’t wish to clutter his synapses with more stimulation than necessary. The first matter, I can hide indefinitely. I did consider telling him of my illness when we crossed the northern Florida panhandle, bronze morning sunlight etching us on the left. The light was exquisite, and I soaked it up and bottled it in my mind for a later date when things will surely be a lot darker. That I was in full remission from cervical cancer wouldn’t have eased his concern and manly overcompensations one bit. He would’ve berated my smoking to no end while daddy-fussing my every move at the same time. The irony that I was likely immune from the flu would’ve flown right through his ears without so much as an echo. As for the second matter, that I won’t be able to hide for much longer.

  10

  We skipped that first bus in the morning. Likewise the following one four hours later. Terry got progressively worse. His half of the Andean quilt was saturated in mucus and sweat. I did all I could to comfort him, fanning his fever, wiping down his body with cool, damp towels. I whispered into his ear all my favorite moments and songs with him, and sometimes lucidity would gurgle up from the depths of his torment and buoy a smile. Mostly though, he trembled and coughed blood into the burgundy pillow. I was on the second verse of Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s, “Teach Your Children,” when I realized he was gone. For the twenty minutes prior, I was able to calm him enough that he acquired a near-regular breathing pattern. He even appeared serene, his eyes slotted in a tired reverie and trained at the window where the lace curtains swelled with the breeze like baby’s lungs. I was too drained by then to weep, and all I had in me was enough to whisper Jeffers into his ear before passing out for the rest of the day and taking the last evening bus to El Calafate: “Tonight, dear, let’s forget our plagues, and enisle ourselves a little beyond time.”

  20

  Kirk is prepping the boat now, a reclaimed forty-foot cabin cruiser named Antigone’s Tack, which I doubt he could even pronounce, much less comprehend the meaning. Windsocks along the harbor flutter in a dyslexic square dance, the result of us sitting smack dab between staggered tropical storms. The trailing one isn’t supposed to pass our way, but its heading and power might stay the outbreak from the equatorial regions, at least for a while. It’s only a matter of time though. It’s gone global. Beijing just reported in its first cases, along with Mumbai and London. Gazing at the marina’s mouth and the choppy gulf beyond, I try to scoop the last of my tobacco onto paper. Will this be my last cigarette ever? These my last words? For the answer to these and other nagging queries, we may all be in for quite the wait. The wind starts to kick up again, a flurry that scatters my good tobacco which I try fruitlessly to scoop back into a pile with my credit card before saying to hell with it. At least you’ll know I’ve quit smoking, brave reader. My hand rubs across my tiny belly. It’s too soon to know for sure, but I feel it starting. When I ran back into that mini-mart in Mississippi, I made sure to buy extra snacks and batteries. Enough to camouflage the pregnancy tests from Kirk. I resent this hiding, just like I resent my running, and my immunity, and this truant providence that decided to chip in last-minute for the fuck-all of it. The baby’s first breath of a non-liquid atmosphere will mean either certain death, or life in a graveyard. And while Terry wanted a son, I foresee a daughter. And damn, how I want her now! Need her. To be her security and strength. To be her tiny window to the world as it once was. To do it with love and words. My heart aches for the paltry sum that I’ve spun for her thus far, and for Terry as well, whom I wish
I could share the news with, my hand atop his, the three of us looking out at the water together, towards the place we hope to wait out the scourge in peace.

  UMBILICUS

  MAY WE REMINISCE about life up to the present moment, dear sister? Sprinkle mementos of youth and folly and all the disquiets without name or shape? Since you left the world, I convinced myself that you took with you the organ I lack, the one that demystifies the great paradoxes. Perhaps I may call upon you now to solve one such enigma? Faint forms rise before me, just out of view as I lay here in deep shade crafting snow-angels. Are they stalks or pilings? Blurry evocations of hash marks on a prison wall? Broken, offset birthday candles? A cowering GI’s view of iron hedgehogs littering the beach on The Longest Day? One of the countless Saturday matinees we watched with dad in more living rooms than I can recall. Trees are all my mind allows for at the moment. The tang of aspen and cedar. I smell it now. Beautiful, enchanting, alien Crater Lake. As close to home as anyplace ever was. Remember the cabin, and how we crafted entire domains mere inches off the ground? Patches of moss became meadows. Twigs, fallen sequoias. My Thomas the Train keychain, a full-sized locomotive. All things magnified and embellished, because it’s all a trick of the mind, really. And conjuring these tricks is our grandest faculty. And on those endless afternoons on the patch behind the kitchen, beneath the hose-bib with the forever leak, we were the true lords of reality, and not the phantoms they scared us with every Sunday in our regimented rows and starchiest clothes. Focus then was never the elusive balance of running on ice; every second feeling the certain stumble that so many prophesized always loomed, and uh-oh, I believe I’m slipping again . . .