After the Plague

by T. C. Boyle

  “The young-looking one in the white parka and furry boots? The last one. The last one in. I was just wondering if, uh, I mean, what her problem was—if she was, you know, coming in for a procedure or whatever.... ”

  “Listen, Rick,” he said then, and his voice was back in the deep freeze, “I’m willing to give you a chance here, not only for Dad’s sake but for your own sake too. But there’s one thing I ask—stay away from the patients. And I’m not really asking.”

  It was raining the next morning, a cold rain that congealed on the hood of the car and made a cold pudding of the sidewalk out front of the house. I wondered if the weather would discourage the Jesus-thumpers, but they were there, all right, in yellow rain slickers and green gum boots, sunk into their suffering with gratitude. Nobody rushed the car when we turned into the lot. They just stood there, eight of them, five men and three women, and looked hate at us. As we got out of the car, the frozen rain pelting us, I locked eyes across the lot with the bearded jerk who’d gone after the girl in the white parka. I waited till I was good and certain I had his attention, waited till he was about to shout out some hoarse Jesus-thumping accusation, and then I gave him the finger.

  We were the first ones at the clinic, what with the icy roads, and as soon as my brother disappeared into the sanctum of his office I went straight to the receptionist’s desk and flipped back the page of the appointment book. The last entry, under four-thirty the previous day, was staring me in the face, neat block letters in blue metalpoint: “Sally Strunt,” it read, and there was a phone number jotted beneath the name. It took me exactly ten seconds, and then I was in the back room, innocently slipping into my lab coat. Sally Strunt, I whispered to myself, Sally Strunt, over and over. I’d never known anyone named Sally—it was an old-fashioned name, a hokey name, Dick and Jane and Sally, and because it was old-fashioned and because it was hokey it seemed perfect for a teenager in trouble in the grim sleety washed-out navel of the Midwest. This was no downtown Amber, no Crystal or Shanna—this was Detroit Sally, and that really appealed to me. I’d seen the face attached to the name, and the mother of that face. Sally, Sally, Sally. Her name sang through my head as I schmoozed with Fred and the nurses and went through the motions of the job that already felt as circumscribed and deadening as a prison sentence.

  That night, after dinner, I excused myself and strolled six cold wintry blocks to the convenience store. I bought M&M’s for the boys, some white chocolate for Denise, and a liter of Black Cat malt liquor for myself. Then I dialled Sally’s number from the phone booth out front of the store.

  A man answered, impatient, harassed. “Yeah?”

  “Sally there?” I said.

  “Who’s this?”

  I took a stab at it: “Chris Ryan. From school?”

  Static. Televised dialogue. The roar of Sally’s name and the sound of approaching feet and Sally’s approaching voice: “Who is it?” And then, into the receiver: “Hello?”

  “Sally?” I said.

  “Yes?” There was hope in that voice, eagerness. She wanted to hear from me—or from whoever. This wasn’t the voice of a girl concealing things. It was open, frank, friendly. I felt expansive suddenly, connected, felt as if everything was going to be all right, not only for me but for Sally too.

  “You don’t know me,” I said quickly, “but I really admire you. I mean, your courage. I admire what you’re doing.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Chris,” I said. “Chris Ryan. I saw you yesterday, at the clinic, and I really admire you, but I just wanted to know if, uh, if you need anything.”

  Her voice narrowed, thin as wire. “What are you talking about?”

  “Sally,” I said, and I didn’t know what I was doing or what I was feeling, but I couldn’t help myself, “Sally, can I ask you something? Are you pregnant, or are you—?”

  Click. She hung up on me. Just like that.

  I was frozen through by the time I got back with the kids’ M&M’s and Denise’s white chocolate, and I’d finished off the beer on the way and flung the empty bottle up under a squat artificial-looking spruce on the neighbor’s lawn. I’d tried Sally twice more, after an interval of fifteen or twenty minutes, but her father answered the first time and when I dialled again the phone just rang and kept on ringing.

  A week went by. I scrubbed out test tubes and jars that smelled powerfully of the urine of strange women and learned that Fred didn’t much care for Afro-Americans, Mexicans, Haitians, Cubans, Poles, or Hmong tribesmen. I tried Sally’s number three more times and each time I was rebuffed—threatened, actually—and I began to realize I was maybe just a bit out of line. Sally didn’t need me—she had her father and mother and maybe a gangling big-footed slam-dunking brother into the bargain—and every time I glanced through the blinds in the back room I saw another girl just like her. Still, I was feeling itchy and out of sorts despite all Denise and Philip and my nephews were doing for me, and I needed some sort of focus, a plan, something to make me feel good about myself. They’d warned us about this in rehab, and I knew this was the trickiest stage, the time when the backsliders start looking up their old friends and hanging out on the street corner. But I didn’t have any old friends, not in Detroit, anyway, and the street corner was about as inviting as the polar ice cap. On Saturday night I went out to a bar that looked as if it had been preserved under Plexiglas in a museum somewhere, and I came on to a couple of girls and drank too much and woke up the next morning with a headache.

  Then it was Monday and I was sitting at the breakfast table with my brother and my two nephews and it was raining again. Sleeting, actually. I wanted to go back to bed. I toyed with the idea of telling Philip I was sick, but he’d probably insist on inserting the rectal thermometer himself. He sat across from me, expressionless, crunching away at his bran flakes and sunflower seeds, the newspaper spread out before him. Denise bustled around the kitchen, brewing coffee and shoving things into the microwave while the boys and I smeared Eggo waffles with butter and syrup. “So,” I said, addressing my nephews over the pitcher of pure Grade A maple syrup, “you know why the California kids have it all over the Midwestern kids when it comes to baseball?”

  Josh looked up from his waffles; Jeff was still on dreamtime.

  “Because of this,” I said, gesturing toward the dark windows and the drooling panes. “In L.A. now it’s probably seventy degrees, and when the kids wake up they can go straight out and play ball.”

  “After school,” Josh corrected.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Whatever. But that’s the reason your California and Arizona players dominate the big leagues.”

  “The Tigers suck,” Josh said, and his brother glanced up to add his two cents. “They really suck,” he said.

  It was then that I became aware of the background noise, a thin droning mewl from beyond the windows as if someone were drowning kittens in the street. Philip heard it then too, and the boys and Denise, and in the next moment we were all at the window. “Oh, shit,” Philip hissed. “Not again. Not today, of all days.”

  “What?” I said. “What is it?” And then I saw, while my nephews melted away and Denise gritted her teeth and my brother swore: the zombies were out there at the edge of the lawn, a hundred of them at least. They were singing, locked arm in arm and swaying to the beat, stretched across the mouth of the driveway in a human chain.

  Philip’s face was drawn tight. He told Denise to call the police, and then he turned to me. “Now you’re going to see something, little brother,” he said. “Now you’re going to see why I keep asking myself if I shouldn’t just close down the clinic and let the lunatics take over the asylum.”

  The kitchen was gray, a weak, played-out light pasted on every surface. Sleet rattled the windows and the conjoined voices mewled away in praise of mercy and forgiveness. I was about to ask him why he didn’t do just that—close up and move someplace friendlier, someplace like California, for instance—but I already knew the answer. They could haras
s all the chalk-faced Sallys and thump all the Bibles they wanted, but my brother wasn’t going to bow down to them—and neither was I. I knew whose team I was on, and I knew what I had to do.

  It took the police half an hour to show up. There were three squad cars and a bus with wire mesh over the windows, and the cops knew the routine. They’d been here before—how many times you could guess from the deadness in their eyes—and they’d arrested these very people, knew them by name. Philip and I waited in the house, watching the Today show at an uncomfortable volume, and the boys stayed in their room, already late for school. Finally, at quarter past eight, Philip and I shuffled out to the garage and climbed into the car. Philip’s face was like an old paper sack with eyes poked in it. I watched him hit the remote for the garage door and watched the door lift slowly on the scene.

  There they were, right there on the street, the whole bug-eyed crew from the clinic, and ninety more. I saw squat, brooding mothers with babies, kids who should have been in school, old people who should have known better. They jerked their signs up and down and let out with a howl when the door cranked open, and though the cops had cleared them from the mouth of the drive they surged in now to fill the gap, the big Jesus-thumper with the beard right in front. The cops couldn’t hold them back, and before we’d got halfway down the drive they were all over us, pounding on the windows and throwing themselves down in the path of the car. My brother, like a jerk, like the holy fool who automatically turns the other cheek, stepped on the brake.

  “Run them over,” I said, and all my breath was gone. “Run the fuckers over.”

  Philip just sat there, hanging his head in frustration. The cops peeled them away, one by one, zipped on the plastic cuffs and hauled them off, but for every one they lifted out of the way another dove in to take his place. We couldn’t go forward, we couldn’t back up. “Your neighbor kills babies!” they were shouting. “Dr. Beaudry is a murderer!” “Kill the butchers, not the babies!” I tried to stay calm, tried to think about rehab and jail and the larger problems of my life, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t take this. I couldn’t.

  Before I knew what I was doing I was out of the car. The first face I saw belonged to a kid of eighteen maybe, a tough guy with veins standing out in his neck and his leather jacket open to the sleet to show off a white T-shirt and a gold cross on a gold chain. He was right there, right in my face, shouting, “Jesus! Jesus!” and he looked genuinely surprised when I pitched into him with everything I had and shoved him back into a pair of dumpy women in matching scarves and earmuffs. I went right for the next guy—a little toadstool who looked as if he’d been locked in a closet for the last forty years—and flung him away from the car. I heard shouts, saw the cops wading through the crowd, and then I was staring into the face of the big guy, the king yahoo himself—Mr. Beard—and he was so close I knew what he’d had for breakfast. In all that chaos he just stood there rigid at the bumper of the car, giving me a big rich phony Jesus-loving smile that was as full of hate as anything I’d ever seen, and then he ducked down on one knee and handcuffed himself to the bumper.

  That put me over the line. I wanted to make a martyr out of him, wanted to kick him to death right there, right in the driveway and with the whole world looking on, and who knows what would have happened if Philip hadn’t grabbed me from behind. “Rick!” he kept shouting. “Rick! Rick!” And then he wrestled me up the walk and into the house, Denise’s scared white face in the door, the mob howling for blood and then lurching right into another weepy, churchy song as if they were in a cathedral somewhere.

  In the safety of the hallway, the door closed and locked behind us, my brother turned on me. “Are you crazy?” he shouted, and you would have thought I was the enemy. “You want to go back to jail? You want lawsuits? What were you thinking, anyway—are you stoned on something, is that it?”

  I looked away from him, but I wanted to kill him too. It was beating in my veins, along with the Desoxyn I’d stolen from the clinic. I saw my nephews peeking out of their room down the hall. “You can’t let these people push you around,” I said.

  “Look at me, Rick,” he said. “Look at me.”

  I was dodging around on my feet, tight with it, and I lifted my eyes grudgingly. I felt like a kid all over again, Rick the shoplifter, the pothead, the fuckup.

  “You’re just playing into their hands, don’t you see that? They want to provoke you, they want you to go after them. Then they put you back in jail and they get the headlines.” His voice broke. Denise tried to say something, but he shut her up with a wave of his hand. “You’re back on the drugs, aren’t you? What is it—cocaine? Pot? Something you lifted from the clinic?”

  Outside I could hear them, “We Shall Overcome,” and it was a cruel parody—this wasn’t liberation, it was fascism. I said nothing.

  “Listen, Rick, you’re an ex-con and you’ve got to remember that, every step you take. I mean, what did you think, you were protecting me out there?”

  “Ex-con?” I said, amazed. “Is that what you think of me? I can’t believe you. I’m no ex-con. You’re thinking of somebody in the movies, some documentary you saw on PBS. I’m a guy who made a mistake, a little mistake, and I never hurt anybody. I’m your brother, remember?”

  That was when Denise chimed in. “Philip,” she said, “come on, Philip. You’re just upset. We’re all upset.”

  “You keep out of this,” he said, and he didn’t even turn to look at her. He just kept his Aqua Velva eyes on me. “Yeah,” he said finally, “you’re my brother, but you’re going to have to prove it to me.”

  I can see now the Desoxyn was a mistake. It was exactly the sort of thing they’d warned us about. But it wasn’t coke and I just needed a lift, a buzz to work behind, and if he didn’t want me to be tempted, then why had he left the key to the drug cabinet right there in the conch-shell ashtray on the corner of his desk? Ex-con. I was hurt and I was angry and I stayed in my room till Philip knocked at the door an hour later to tell me the police had cleared the mob away. We drove to work in silence, Philip’s opera chewing away at my nerves like a hundred little sets of teeth.

  Philip didn’t notice it, but there was something different about me when I climbed back into that car, something nobody could notice unless they had X-ray vision. I was armed. Tucked inside the waistband of my gray Levi’s, underneath the flap of my shirt where you couldn’t see it, was the hard black stump of a gun I’d bought from a girl named Corinne at a time when I was feeling especially paranoiac. I had money lying around the apartment then and people coming and going—nobody desperate, nobody I didn’t know or at least know through a friend—but it made me a little crazy. Corinne used to drop by once in a while with my roommate’s girlfriend, and she sold me the thing—a .38 Special—for three hundred bucks. She didn’t need it anymore, she said, and I didn’t want to know what that meant, so I bought it and kept it under my pillow. I’d only fired it once, up a canyon in Tujunga, but it made me feel better just to have it around. I’d forgotten all about it, actually, but when I got my things out of storage and shipped them to Philip’s house, there it was, hidden away in a box of CDs like some poisonous thing crouching under a rock.

  What I was feeling is hard to explain. It had to do with Philip, sure—ex-con, that really hurt—and with Sally and the clinic and the whole Jesus-thumping circus. I didn’t know what I was going to do—nothing, I hoped—but I knew I wasn’t going to take any shit from anybody, and I knew Philip didn’t have it in him to protect himself, let alone Denise and the kids and all the knocked-up grieving teenage Sallys of the world. That was all. That was it. The extent of my thinking. I walked into the clinic that morning just as I had for the past week and a half, and nobody knew the difference.

  I cleaned the toilets, washed the windows, took out the trash. Some blood work came back from an outside lab—we only did urine—and Fred showed me how to read the results. I discussed the baseball strike with Nurse Tsing and the prospects of an early spring with N
urse Hempfield. At noon I went out to a deli and had a meatball wedge, two beers, and a breath mint. I debated dialling Sally just once more—maybe she was home from school, headachy, nauseous, morning sickness, whatever, and I could get past the brick wall she’d put up between us and talk to her, really talk to her for the first time—but when I got inside the phone booth, I just didn’t feel like it. As I walked back to the clinic I was wondering if she had a boyfriend or if it was just one of those casual encounters, blind date, back seat of the car—or rape, even. Or incest. Her father’s voice could have been the voice of a child abuser, easily—or who even knew if he was her father? Maybe he was the stepfather. Maybe he was a Humbert Humbert type. Maybe anything.

  There were no protesters out front when I got back—they were all in jail—and that lightened my mood a bit. I even joked with Fred and caught myself whistling over my work. I forgot the morning, forgot the gun, forgot Pasadena and the life that was. Coffee kept me awake, coffee and Diet Coke, and I stayed away from the other stuff just to prove something to myself—and to Philip too. For a while there I even began to suffer from the delusion that everything was going to work out.

  Then it was late, getting dark, and the day was almost done. I pictured the evening ahead—Denise’s cooking, Winnie-the-Pooh, my brother’s scotch, six windblown blocks to the store for a liter of Black Cat—and suddenly I felt like pulling out the gun and shooting myself right then and there. Uncle Rick, little brother, ex-con: who was I kidding? I would have been better off in jail.

  I needed a cigarette. Badly. The need took me past the waiting room—four scared-looking women, one angry-looking man—through the lab, and into the back corner. The fluorescent lights hissed softly overhead. Fred was already gone. I stood at the window, staring into the nullity of the drawn blinds till the cigarette was a nub. My hands were trembling as I lit another from the butt end of the first, and I didn’t think about the raw-looking leftovers in the stainless-steel trays that were like nothing so much as skinned frogs, and I didn’t think about Sally or the fat-faced bearded son of a bitch shackling himself to the bumper, either. I tried hard to think nothing, to make it all a blank, and I was succeeding, I was, when for some reason—idle curiosity, boredom, fate—I separated two of the slats and peered out into the lot.