In the Mean Time

by Tremblay, Paul

  She sheds the detritus, stands, and moves forward, lamplight striking her brown mask, skimming across her new eyes, black along her forehead like a jewelled ornament. They blink, disregarding him as unimportant, roving up and around the room. Only her original eyes meet his, and they are gentle. Her limbs are elongated, arms and legs and neck, flesh strained across them so thinly he sees her veins and the ichor within them, which is black.

  He says, “I only ever wanted to help you.” How easily they fall into recriminations and regret.

  She shifts her weight, and the tightening and relaxing of tendons is audible. “Do you still paint and sketch?”

  “You,” he says. “On the Grand Hundred stairs every morning. I watch from my window. I’ve almost completed a series of studies. I only need the fifth figure.”

  She runs her hand across the tabletop, plucks a soft apple from a pile and holds it in her palm. “The day before I left, I stood in front of that window. I asked you to do something. Do you remember?”

  Anderbine remembers their last day together.

  Despite the cold temperature they were on the terrace, seated at an outdoor table for two. A sore spotted the corner of her mouth. The indoor dining area was closed. The wait staff and bus boys wore gloves and masks. Their food was served but they weren’t eating. Anderbine had seen and known and, regrettably, already done too much.

  She said, “We could leave and make a life in the territories, Anderbine. We could go anywhere and be away from the Ministry.”

  He said, “No,” and he’d keep saying that word no matter how much he knew it tore them apart. She wouldn’t look at him. He wished she would. He wished she’d share his eyes and listen to his stories from the Ministry, the stories of his lifetime of work. He’d tell her everything, and then maybe she’d understand how unreasonable and irrational her request was. He wouldn’t leave the comfort the Ministry afforded him (them!) for a life unknown. He wanted to believe that she didn’t understand because of her youth, but he knew better. He reached out and touched her elbow, but she flinched away. Below the terrace were quarantined sections of the city, the plague zone in infancy.

  She said, “Are you that afraid? So afraid that you won’t dare try to live on your own?”

  Anderbine’s hands went from the table, toward her, then into his lap and back to the table. They didn’t know what to do without a pencil. He said, “My answer is no, Midria.”

  She said, “Then, I am sorry.” She stood up and left the table, then broke into a jog. Anderbine watched her disappear, left a handful of money, and walked home. He went directly to his study and his canvases. But she was there, standing in front of his window, already a shadow, already a regret.

  4

  Midria says, “Do you remember what I asked you to do?”

  “I was confused. I needed more time. If you would have waited a bit longer . . .” He lets the words die at the end of his tongue.

  She ignores his lies. “Anderbine, do you remember?”

  He says, “I didn’t hear you that night. I swear.”

  She folds and opens her arms and legs as if staying in any one position were unbearable, seeking some perfect pose for the sham artist and lover before her. Her precise, stilted movements mock his powerlessness. She still chooses to move, to act. He is nothing but her archivist.

  Midria says, “What did you say to me?”

  “I asked you to move aside,” he says. “I told you there was something on the Grand Hundred that I needed to sketch. A procession to the well. I swear I did not hear you.”

  She says, “You chose not to hear me.”

  Anderbine resumes his lies; he doesn’t know what else to offer her. “There was the fading light of dusk on the backs of the penitents, and light at their feet, and they were bowed so perfectly for a sketch, a study of the play of light across their backs . . .”

  “I said, see me.” Then, in his silence, she opens her mouth, lays her tongue flat, and a gray proboscis emerges from the back of her throat, contained in some physiological modification he has not seen in any of his cadavers. She inserts the needle-tip of the proboscis, glistening with saliva, into the mealy cheek of the apple, and then withdraws it.

  “I make the plague victims as easily,” she says. “The entire city sees us, Anderbine. In your Ministry, in your vestibule, in what you think are safe places. You see us. We die, and clog up the drains. We live, and clog up the Grand Hundred. Did they tell you how this came of a Ministry-released plague victim?”

  He nods.

  She says, “Rumours and lies, of course, although we both know the Ministry is far from blameless.”

  “There have been mistakes. . . .”

  She interrupts, her voice bubbling into a higher register and volume. “I kept getting those sores. I thought they disgusted you. I thought they were something rotten in me. You knew what they were.”

  Anderbine whispers, “I’m sorry. I was going to help you if you had just let me.”

  She says, “I went looking for you in other men. There were many men, Anderbine. Men who had wives, men who visited whores.” The lantern gutters, and a slow rill of black smoke rises from the wick before it rallies back brightly. “I think you should take a new rumour back to the Ministry. One that has more flair and romance, and one closer to the truth,” she says. “We made this, Anderbine. You and I.”

  His face in his hands, Anderbine says, “I did not make this,” although he no longer believes his lies.

  “One of us could not see, and one of us could not wait. Vision and patience are the strategies of the wise. Aren’t we terrible, terrible fools?” She drops the apple to the floor, adding to her sea of refuse, then folds herself in complicated, vertiginous ways, and scuttles back underneath everything, squelching through the wet and mulch of her nest, out of sight. Anderbine stays, waiting for what, he doesn’t know. He follows her movement around the room by the rise and fall of garbage until it lies still for a long time, then returns to the rickshaw.

  5

  Midria rises with the sun: both are seemingly eternal. She stands on the eighty-seventh step of the Grand Hundred and throws back her hood. Anderbine has set up a canvas next to his window, ready with his charcoal. She has split open along the seam on her new, exterior skull. A clear mucus spills down her face, her proboscis flickers in and out. She sheds her cloak and is nude. Anderbine sketches. She sheds her skin as easily as the cloak. Anderbine works in a frenzy, capturing her emergence in expert lines: the red mandibles and serrated palps, the female form re-imagined in lengths and proportions dizzying, artful, delicate and savage, membrane falling away in gristly lumps, calcareous plates emerging along her legs. She flexes, and they bend backward at the knee.

  The sun climbs higher, creeping up the heights of the Ministry spires. Other plague victims on the Grand Hundred remove their cloaks. They climb out of their skins and emerge as gargoyles of flesh and boney plates, their appendages as mottled clubs or scythes or greedy talons, their backs and chests covered in armour plating. There are some who sprout misshapen wings of stretched skin and tendon, wired with a network of bones reassigned and thinned. The transformed tear apart the guards and clamber over the plague barriers. Sirens and bells sound throughout the city. Ministry soldiers answer the cries quickly, but the transformed rout them, rending and shedding them as they did their old skin. Other transformed take to the sky clumsily but undeterred, their wings uneven but able to carry their weight, and they descend upon the Ministry, tearing stone, shingle, and glass from the spires.

  Midria climbs past the plague barrier with the others, but does not follow their flood of violence to the Ministry. Anderbine has finished the sketch of her face, and his Figure 5 is complete for when she arrives, though he knows the sketch is frivolous, as they all were. He moves away from the window, holding his sketch as if it is a mirror. He will not
impede her ingress into the room. She will stand in front of the window again. She will say, “See me now.” This time, he will see her.

  Growing Things

  1

  Their father stayed in his bedroom, door locked, for almost two full days. Now he paces in the mud room, and he pauses only to pick at the splintering door jamb with a black fingernail. Muttering to himself, he shares his secrets with the weather-beaten door.

  Their father has always been distant and serious to the point of being sullen, but they do love him for reasons more than his being their sole lifeline. Recently, he stopped eating and gave his share of the rations to his daughters Angie and Florida. However, the lack of food has made him squirrelly, a word their mother—who ran away more than four years ago—used liberally when describing their father. Spooked by his current erratic behaviour, and feeling guilty, as if they were the cause of his suffering, the daughters agreed to stay quiet and keep away, huddled in a living room corner, sitting in a nest of blankets and pillows, playing cards between the couch and the silent TV with its dust-covered screen. Yesterday, Florida drew a happy face in the dust, but Angie quickly erased it, turning her palm black. There is no running water with which to wash her hands.

  Angie is twelve years old but only a shade taller than her seven-year-old sister. She says, “Story time.” Angie has repeatedly told Florida that their mother used to tell stories, and that some of her stories were funny while others were sad or scary. Those stories, the ones Florida doesn’t remember hearing, were about everyone and everything.

  Florida says, “I don’t want to listen to a story right now.” She wants to watch her father. Florida imagines him with a bushy tail and a twitchy face full of acorns. Seeing him act squirrelly reinforces one of the few memories she has of her mother.

  “It’s a short one, I promise.” Angie is dressed in the same cut off shorts and football shirt she’s been wearing for a week. Her brown hair is black with grease, and her fair skin is a map of freckles and acne. Angie has the book in her lap. Oh, the Places You’ll Go.

  “All right,” Florida says but she won’t really listen. She’ll continue to watch her father, who digs through the winter closet, throwing out jackets and itchy sweaters, snow pants. As far as she knows, it is still July.

  The gregarious colours of Angie’s book cover are muted in the darkened living room. Candles on the fireplace mantle flicker and dutifully melt away. Still, it is enough light for the sisters. They are used to it. Angie closes her eyes and opens the book randomly. She flips to a page with a cartoon New York City. The buildings are brick red and sea blue, and they crowd the page, elbowing and wrestling each other for the precious space. Florida has coloured the streets green with a crayon.

  They are so used to trying not to disturb their father, Angie whispers her story. “New York City is the biggest city in the world, right? When it started growing there, it meant it could grow anywhere. It took over Central Park. The stuff just came shooting up, crowding out the grass and trees, the flowerbeds. The stuff grew a foot an hour, just like everywhere else.”

  Yesterday’s story was about all the farms in the Midwest, and how the corn, wheat, soy, and every other crop were overrun. They couldn’t stop the growing things and that was why there wasn’t any more food. Florida had heard her tell that one before. Upset by both the story and that they’d been alone in the house long enough for Angie to have repeated herself, Florida cried so long and loud that their father pounded on his locked bedroom door until she stopped. Angie scolded her, saying she had to toughen up. Florida folded her thin arms and legs and crawled under her own private nook of their blanket nest, mad at her sister for making her listen again, and then, when Angie wasn’t looking, Florida grabbed the storybook and drew the growing things on the New York City page with her green crayon. She coloured in the streets until the crayon was a nub smaller than the tip of her thumb.

  Angie says, “The stuff poked through the cement paths, soaked up Central Park’s ponds and fountains, and started filling the streets next.” Angie talks like the preacher used to, back when they went, back when Mom would force them all to make the trip down the mountain, into town and to the church. Florida is a confusing combination of sad and mad that she remembers details of that old, wrinkly preacher, particularly his odd smell of baby powder mixed with something earthy, yet she has almost no memory of her mother.

  Angie says, “They couldn’t stop it in the city. When they cut it down, it grew back faster. People didn’t know how or why it grew. There’s no soil under the streets, you know, in the sewers, but it still grew. The shoots and tubers broke through windows and buildings, and some people climbed the growing things to steal food, money, and televisions, but it quickly got too crowded for people, for everything, and the giant buildings crumbled and fell. It grew fast there, faster than anywhere else, and there was nothing anyone could do.”

  Florida, half-listening, takes the green crayon nub out of her pyjama pocket. She changes her pyjamas every morning, unlike her sister, who doesn’t change her clothes at all. She draws green lines on the hardwood floor, wanting their father to come over and catch her, and yell at her. Maybe it’ll stop him from putting on all the winter clothes, stop him from being squirrelly.

  Their father waddles into the living room, breathing heavy, used air falling out of his mouth, his face suddenly hard, old, and grey, and covered in sweat. He says, “We’re running low. I have to go out to look for food and water.” He doesn’t hug or kiss his daughters, but pats their heads. Florida drops the crayon nub at his feet, and it rolls away. He turns and they know he means to leave without any promise of returning. He stops at the door, cups his mittened and gloved hands around his mouth, and shouts toward his direct left, into the kitchen, as if he hadn’t left his two daughters on their pile of blankets in the living room.

  “Don’t answer the door for anyone! Don’t answer it! Knocking means the world is over!” He opens the door, but only enough for his body to squeeze out. The daughters see nothing of the world outside but a flash of bright sunlight. A breeze bullies into their home, along with a buzz saw sound of wavering leaves.

  2

  Florida sits, legs crossed, a foot away from the front door. Angie is back in the nest, sleeping. Florida draws green lines on the front door. The lines are long and thick, and she draws small leaves on the ends. She’s never seen the growing things, but it’s what she imagines.

  The shades are pulled low, drooping over the sills like limp sails, and the curtains are drawn tight. They stopped looking outside after their father begged them not to, and they won’t look out the windows now that he’s not here; it seems a fitting way to honour him. When it first started happening, when their father came home with the pickup truck full of food and other supplies, he stammered through complex and contradictory answers to his daughters’ many questions. His knotty hands moved more than his lips, removing and replacing his soot-stained baseball cap. Florida mainly remembers that he said something about the growing things being like a combination of bamboo and kudzu. Florida tugged on his flannel shirtsleeve and asked what bamboo and kudzu were. Their father smiled but also looked away quickly, like he’d said something he shouldn’t have. He didn’t answer her as they had run out of words to share, and the daughters helped their father carry the big water jugs into their basement.

  Outside the wind gusts and whistles around the creaky old cabin. The mud room and living room windows are dark rectangles outlined in a yellow light, and their glass rattles in the frames. Florida stares at the wooden door listening for a sound she’s never heard before: a knock on her front door. She sits and listens until she can’t stand it any longer. She runs upstairs to her bedroom, picks out a pair of new pyjamas, changes again in the dark, and carefully folds the dirty set and places it back in her bureau. Florida then returns to the nest and wakes her older sister.

  “Is he coming back? Is h
e running away too?”

  Angie comes to and rises slowly. She lifts the book from her lap and hugs it to her chest. Her fingers crinkle edges of the pages and worry the cardboard corners of the cover. Despite the acne, she looks younger than her twelve.

  Angie shakes her head, answering a different question, one that wasn’t spoken, and says, “Story time.”

  Florida used to enjoy the stories before they were always about the growing things. Now she wishes that Angie would stop with the stories, wishes that Angie could just be her big sister and quit trying to be like their mother.

  “No more stories. Please. Just answer my questions.”

  Angie says, “Story first.”

  Florida balls her hands into fists and fights back tears. She’s as angry now as she was when Angie told all the kids at the playground in town that Florida liked to catch spiders and rip off each leg with tweezers, and that she kept a jar of the their fat legless bodies in her bureau.

  “I don’t want to hear a story!”

  “I don’t care. Story first.”

  Angie always gets her way, even now, even as she continues to withdraw and fade, which started before their father walked out the door. She only leaves the nest to go to the bathroom and she walks like an old woman, the joints and muscles in her legs already stiff with disuse.

  Florida says, “You promise to answer my questions if I listen to a story?”