by Jack Douglas
“You’re eating?”
She took a deep breath, coughed again. “My stomach felt sick,” she said softly. “I just needed to put something in it so I wouldn’t feel so nauseous.”
“Your stomach,” he said, his face now bright red. “Well, so long as your stomach’s feeling better. So long as you got your candy. No wonder you didn’t pick up any breakfast.” He threw his hands in the air. “I can’t believe this. Here I am sitting in the living room with an empty stomach and a pounding headache and you’re in here munching on marshmallows and gumdrops. Having yourself a little feast. Saying to yourself, ‘To hell with ol’ Craig. Let ‘im starve. I’ve got motherfucking candy corn. Yay for me!’”
She got to her feet and put her hands to her ears. “I can’t take this anymore.”
He put his hands out. “Can’t take what? Candy corns? You ate so many your stomach hurts while I’m in here starving?”
“Can’t take you, Craig. I can’t take us.” She walked purposefully around the bed and over to the dresser. She quickly folded her bedclothes and stuffed them into her suitcase.
“What does that mean? What are you doing?”
She closed her suitcase and pulled the zipper around. Then she looked at him, her eyes watering. “I’m sorry, Craig. I can’t stay here with you anymore.”
He looked like the wind had just been knocked out of him. His mouth fell open again and now even his ears went red. He appeared uneasy on his feet and put his right hand out, steadied himself on the dresser. “Amy, don’t do this to me.”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I have no choice.”
He reached for her but she pushed past him, grabbing the suitcase, letting it fall off the dresser and hit the floor. She dragged it behind her into the living room.
“Please, Amy,” he begged. “Please reconsider. Think about what you’re doing to me again.”
“I never should’ve come here,” she said, standing before the door. “I’m so sorry. I made a huge mistake.”
She was crying now, worse maybe than she’d ever cried before.
Because this was it, really it. This was The End of Amy and Craig.
He was crying, too. Standing there, running his hands through his shaggy brown hair. “You can’t,” he choked. “You can’t go.”
Her chin fell to her chest and she couldn’t find the words. Didn’t know quite how to say goodbye. Not in person. It wasn’t like in Hawaii when all she had to do was sneak out and leave a note. This was hard. This hurt.
I love you, she thought. But no, that wasn’t right. Saying that wouldn’t help matters. It would only make things worse.
Just go, she told herself. That was really the only way to handle this. Just turn the knob and leave. Head to the lift and don’t look back and if he grabs you or threatens you, open your mouth and scream bloody murder.
She reached out to unlock the lock but it wouldn’t turn. She applied more pressure but it wouldn’t budge. She tried the doorknob but it wouldn’t move. She twisted it, pushed it, pulled it, but the door stood still, heavy and implacable before her.
She turned to him. “Open it!”
He stared at the door.
“Open it,” she said again.
She stepped aside and he moved toward it, tried the lock, then the knob, then the lock again. But the door didn’t open; still it wouldn’t budge.
“What did you do?” She pushed him out of the way, grabbing at the doorknob again. Twisted it in her hands until they stung.
“I didn’t do anything,” he said.
“I heard you. I heard you before from the bedroom. I heard you playing with the goddamn door. What did you do to it?”
He raised his voice. “What the fuck do you think I did, Amy? I oiled it. I oiled it to keep it from making noise.”
She shook the knob as hard as she could then began slapping her palms against the door, yelling, “Let me out! Let me out of here! Let me out!” Then she switched to the heel of her fists and continued pounding away. She didn’t quit until they were raw.
Craig watched, hands on his hips, a look of sheer puzzlement on his face. He didn’t help, didn’t try to stop her. Just stood there and watched and waited for her to tire herself out.
Finally she threw her hands in the air and her back against the door. She sunk down low to the floor. She pulled her knees to her chest and fell quiet. The tears were streaming and her cheeks were burning and her head hurt and her stomach was more nauseous than before. She breathed heavily.
What did you do?
“Calm down,” he finally said to her. But it sounded more like a command than a plea.
She stared up at him, her sore, red hands still clenched into fists. “Calm down?” she said. “Calm down? How the hell am I supposed to calm down? How? You have me fucking trapped.”
The first tremor arrives less than two hours after Xavier sits down to draw. It shakes the floor, rattles the window and walls. Xavier flings his papers aside and jumps to his feet, only to find that the tremor is strong enough to knock him back to the floor. He lands on his left side, breaking his arm.
Meanwhile, picture frames drop from their spots on the mantel and crack as they strike the furniture below. Xavier curls up in a fetal position, protecting his head with his good arm. Tiny pieces of ceiling drop on him like a light rain.
In the hall, he hears doors opening and slamming closed. He hears shouts and wails, some men barking orders. Children are crying— maybe some women and men, too.
Xavier doesn’t know what to do.
But after a minute or so the tremor quits. The room steadies and the ceiling stops falling to the floor. Xavier feels a wave of relief, the same feeling he always has when his mother walks through the door. But, as when his mother walks through the door, Xavier also experiences a certain dread.
Like something really bad is about to happen. And a few minutes later, it does.
The second tremor is far stronger than the first. And the second tremor lasts nearly twice as long. Larger pieces of the ceiling fall like a heavy hail. Furniture jolts as though it were alive and dancing. Doors shake in their frames but do not fall.
Neither does the flat’s lone window break, though Xavier was hoping it would. He wants to scream out for help but, as in a dream, he can find no voice. And as buildings collapse to rubble all around the Alfama, he is sure he can no longer be heard.
It is All Saints’ Day and many people are at church. Xavier pictures the stained glass windows cracking, crucifixes flying from the walls.
He envisions the tall church ceilings collapsing inward, dropping on parishioners in the middle of their prayers.
What Xavier fails to imagine are the candles falling, igniting curtains and carpets throughout the Alfama quarter. But this is happening nevertheless.
By the time the violent second tremor finally stops, Xavier is in tears.
His left arm hurts badly and at some point he bangs his head on a falling chair. Still, he’s not worried about himself. He is concerned only for his mother.
Where is she right now? Is she hurt?
During the brief calm, Xavier gets to his feet and heads for the door. He will head down to the pier and look for her. He will find her, even if it takes all day.
But it seems the quake has caused the door to become misshapen. Xavier struggles with the handle, twists and turns the knob with all his might, but it’s no use. The door is stuck in its frame and cannot move.
Xavier is trapped.
He runs to the window, just as the third tremor starts, just in time to see the roof of the neighboring building collapse. Xavier is finally aware that this may be the day that he dies. This may be the day that all of Lisbon is destroyed.
Chapter Fifteen
Morning arrived. Craig stood by the window, watching the dog. He had stayed up again all night, hadn’t slept except for a two-hour nap from about ten until midnight. He’d gotten a lot written, another six thousand words. The new novel was coming al
ong just fine.
But he and Amy were captives in their own flat. They had made no progress with the door. And the apartment’s lone window wouldn’t open, wouldn’t break. The window was made of something other than glass, something impregnable, some kind of Plexiglass or something, Craig guessed. The phone didn’t work. The lines were crossed and all they heard was a crackling noise, or now and then a faint voice murmuring something unintelligible in Portuguese. They had lost their wireless signal and could no longer access the Internet, couldn’t email or Instant Message or status update someone for help. They had banged on the walls and yelled out toward the hall, all to no avail.
Eight o’clock had come and gone and Amaro’s associate had never shown. Craig and Amy waited, both of them by the door, listening— for footsteps in the hall, a knock, a voice, something, anything. But all that arrived was more silence. By ten o’clock they’d left the door and resigned themselves to the fact that Amaro’s associate wasn’t coming.
Worst of all, they had no food. Not a loaf of bread or a brick of cheese, not a celery stick or even a bag of airplane peanuts. And as of four this morning they had no running water. Craig had gone to the sink to pee and when he’d turned on the faucet to wash the urine down the drain, all he heard was a hiss and a muffled shriek as though a band of serpents trapped in the pipes were trying to scream. Craig held his breath and ducked into the bathroom, tried the sink and shower faucets, even the bidet, but no luck. The flat was dry, completely dry.
Amy stepped out of the bedroom in her lavender nightshirt and panties, arms folded across her chest. “Is the Internet back up?”
Craig shook his head. “I’ve been watching out the window, waiting for someone to pass by. No luck yet.”
She stepped into the living room, dropped onto the couch. She was shaking and her arms and legs were covered in gooseflesh. “What’s going on, Craig? What is this? What’s doing this to us?”
He smirked. How easily people fell back on what when they came across something that couldn’t be immediately explained. “It’s not what, Amy, it’s who. And I’ll tell you who. It’s gotta be that fuck next door, whoever the hell that is.”
She looked at him as though reason were a crime. Of course, in many parts of the world it was. But not here, not in Western Europe.
“What?” He shrugged his shoulders. “You think this is some kind of a coincidence? One night this guy bangs on our walls like a maniac, the next day we become trapped in our own apartment. Of course it’s him.”
“How?” Her eyes opened wide with disbelief. “When?”
He had already given thought to that, had formed a timeline in his mind and traced his and Amy’s movements from the moment they arrived at the flat. “It had to be when we were in the bedroom arguing about the candy.”
“Are you serious? We were in there for what, two minutes?” “How long do you think it would take?”
“And we would’ve heard him,” she scoffed.
“No we wouldn’t have,” he said softly. “Not since I oiled the door.”
(Is that what you did, oiled it?)
Amy pulled her knees to her chest and rocked herself on the couch, staring down at the floor. She sniffled. “And the phone?” she said. “The Internet?”
Craig slapped his left palm against the wall and let out a frustrated sigh. “You think he couldn’t have messed with the phone lines? And for all we know, we were using his wireless Internet service. All he would’ve had to do is shut it down.”
“Fine. Let’s say he sealed up the door. Let’s say he crossed the phone lines and deactivated his wireless broadband service. Let’s assume all that is true. What about the window? Why won’t it open? Why won’t it break?”
He turned and looked down into the alley again. The dog was gone. Craig took a deep breath and explained. He said he had read in his travel guide that Lisbon suffered a devastating earthquake back in 1755. Fifteen thousand people died in this city alone. The effects were felt as far as Italy. Many people fled Portugal after that. Many people left the Alfama. It, therefore, shouldn’t surprise them that those who stayed were still quite afraid of earthquakes and aftershocks. They took steps to protect what they had rebuilt.
Amy was shaking her head before Craig finished his last sentence. “I can’t believe this,” she said. Her voice was cracking again, breaking. She was breaking. “Could you please get me a cup of water?”
Craig swallowed. He hadn’t told her yet. He steeled himself, inhaled deeply and said, “I think he messed with the pipes, too.”
Her face went blank. She stopped rocking, stopped shaking even. Her mouth fell open but it was a few moments before she spoke again. “We have no water?”
“Not at the moment, no.”
Her mouth opened again and her tongue traced over her lower lip. She seemed to be shivering, though the flat was anything but cold. “This is serious.”
He nodded without looking at her. “I know it’s serious. We have no water, we have no food, no way to communicate.”
“The food’s not important,” she said, shaking her head. “We can go four to six weeks without food. We can only go four to six days without water. Maybe not even that.”
He said, “I don’t plan on us being confined here that long.”
“You don’t plan on a lot of things, Craig. Did you plan on us being imprisoned here at all?”
“No,” he said, almost under his breath. “Of course not.” I guess I didn’t plan on you leaving me in Hawaii, either, he reflected.
Still, he felt responsible. Just as he had felt responsible for their situation in Honolulu, for her falling deeply into debt. He had never meant for that to happen either, but it had. And every morning when she got up for work just to buy their food and pay their bills he was racked with an overwhelming guilt that nearly paralyzed him. That was why he had worked so hard writing those novels. Why he had been so devastated when none of the three had sold. He wanted so badly to help, to contribute. To make something of himself, to make her proud. That was why, when he’d failed, he had resolved to kill himself, to put a gun to his throat and to blow his head clear off.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “If our next door neighbor is responsible for all this, then why the hell didn’t Amaro’s associate show up with our money last night?”
Craig gestured toward the bedroom with his chin. “Maybe he tried calling and couldn’t get through. We have no phone. Or maybe Amaro emailed me back saying his associate couldn’t make it last night. We don’t know because we have no Internet.” He sighed and added, “Maybe he’ll be coming by today.”
“We haven’t seen or heard anyone in or even around this building,” she said, “except for whoever or whatever lives next door.”
Craig thought about the movers, the indignant locals who had refused to come upstairs. “We’ve only been here about thirty-six hours.” Thirty-six hours. That was how long it had been since he’d last eaten, since that gruesome meatloaf meal on the plane. He had drunk plenty of water yesterday. They had let the kitchen faucet run and the water had turned from beige to crystal clear in less than a minute. He had gulped some down. Amy, too. And with their nerves running so hot neither one of them had been very hungry the rest of the day. But now, nerves or no nerves, he was starving.
“You didn’t pack any food in the boxes, did you?” She shook her head.
Whatever was in the kitchen he had thrown out just before he oiled the door. The boxes of cereals and baking mixes, the cans of vegetables and soups. Tossed it all into a big black garbage bag and fired the bag down the chute in the hallway.
He drew a breath. Glanced out the window. He had to do a double- take. But, sure enough, there she was. Someone other than the dog was in the alley. An old woman on the cobblestones, hobbling by.
Chapter Sixteen
Amy shot up off the couch. Moved into the gray light. Stood behind Craig, pushed up on her tip-toes, peered over his shoulder and she saw her, too. An elde
rly woman in glasses and a kerchief, tottering through the alley, pulling a rusty old cart behind her.
Craig rapped on the unbreakable glass. Yelled “Senhora!” at the top of his lungs.
But the old woman didn’t stop. Didn’t look up. Didn’t so much as slow down.
Amy joined in, slapping her palms against the window, shouting as loud as she could.
It was no use. They couldn’t be heard. At least not by the old woman. Maybe she was hard of hearing, maybe even deaf. What fucking luck!
But at least Amy knew now that people passed through the alley. Someone else would walk by and she and Craig would figure on a way to get their attention.
“Goddamn it,” Craig said as he kicked at the wall. “We’re going to starve to death in here.”
Amy shook her head. “No, we won’t. I told you, eating’s not all that important right now. We’ll die of thirst weeks before we die of hunger.”
He glared at her, a surge of anger rising like the tide, as though he were thinking, who the hell was she to correct him on anything? “That’s comforting. But right now I’m a lot hungrier than I am thirsty.”
She backed away from him. “Sometimes thirst can be mistaken for hunger. If you had something to drink you would probably feel a lot better.”
“But not the port.” His mouth contorted in a look of disgust. “No, not the port.”
The wine was a liquid, though, and it would help. But not now. Not until they absolutely needed the fluid, and even then they would have to ration it. For now, it was better for him to think that the wine was completely useless.
“The icebox,” he said.
She followed his eyes toward the filthy kitchen. “You told me there was nothing in it.”
“There’s not. But there is some frost stuck to the sides. We can melt it. Have it for lunch.”
She swallowed and tailed him into the kitchen. He opened the icebox door and stood aside. There was some frost in there. Quite a bit, in fact. Still, it wouldn’t amount to very much water. And there was another problem. The frost was brownish, kind of looked like dirty snow. Like end-of-the-winter slush piled next to the curb on a dirty city street.
