Thirst

by Benjamin Warner

  “Excuse me,” he said.

  He turned and started running again, listening for them to call after him, but none of them did.

  The cars parked along the street were only half as many as there should have been, and maybe less than that. No lights were on in any houses, though some people were in their yards. They stood at the edges and talked to one another and somebody shouted at Eddie to ask him why he was running.

  Laura’s car wasn’t in the driveway. He felt himself saying “Come on come on come on come on” before he realized he was saying it aloud. He stood at the front door and prodded his empty pockets. His insides didn’t know what to tell his outsides to do. His house key was attached to the ring of his car key, and he didn’t know where his car key was. It could still be in the ignition. It could be on the side of the highway.

  He pulled on the knob and threw his shoulder into the door. He did the same at the back of the house and at the basement. At the basement door, he kicked with the heel of his shoe and felt a twinge in his knee.

  There was a pile of smooth stones the size of softballs beneath the back porch stairs, and he palmed one and hit at a glass pane in the back door, but the pane didn’t break. He hit it again and again, and on the fourth time, it shattered. He used the stone to punch out the shards, and reached through to unlock the door.

  “Laura!” he called.

  The inside of the house was already too dark to see. The switch was dead. He knocked through the kitchen drawer where they kept the flashlights.

  The beam darted over the walls, past the sink, and into the empty living room. She wasn’t in the bedroom, either.

  He called her name again and let the flashlight drop. Neither of them had made the bed that morning, and, in a panic, he dropped down into it.

  When he stood, his knee buckled. It was like one ligament had twisted around another. He limped into the kitchen and put a glass under the faucet. When he lifted the metal arm, nothing happened. He wrenched it up and down, and a clunking sound arose from the plumbing. He tried in the bathroom, too, turning the knobs.

  The house was dry.

  Once, when they’d been visiting Laura’s parents during a hurricane, Eddie had watched her father fill their tub as a precaution. When he’d finished, Eddie had stood there with him in the silence of the small guest bathroom, watching him look sternly at the water as though an important task had been completed. Eddie hadn’t known what to say to Laura’s father—he was not his son and couldn’t ask the questions a son could ask. It seemed to him he’d met Laura’s father too late in life. Eddie was a man by then and felt her father would have liked him better had he still been a boy or at least a younger version of himself—and so he’d kept a stern expression on his face and watched the tub with him for a long moment before Laura’s mother called to ask what they were doing.

  Now Eddie went to the basement door and gripped the wooden handrail, stepping lightly down the stairs. There were two plastic water bottles down there with the camping gear, and he went to the utility bathroom and dipped each of them into the toilet tank. As an experiment, he flushed, and the water went down but didn’t refill. He screwed the caps on top of the water bottles and put them in the bottom of the closet.

  He didn’t want to call the water company only to have them ask if he’d checked the water main, and it took him a moment to remember where it was. There was an old TV stand against the wall, and as he bent and moved it, a few old issues of Sports Illustrated slid off. Behind it was a wooden panel. He spun a metal latch to take it out. Inside, he tried to turn the valve, but the valve was all the way open, and so he put the panel back in place.

  Above him was a shelf where they kept his five-thousand-meters trophy from high school and Laura’s silver pom-pom. She’d been a cheerleader for a year after a guidance counselor had suggested extracurriculars. In spite of herself, she’d made friends in the pyramid, though where they were now, she didn’t know. When she got into one of her cleaning moods, Eddie would sometimes surprise her with the pom-pom to cheer her on as she scrubbed the grout above the bathtub. He brought it down to his face and inhaled it the way he might her shirt, though the plastic strands were odorless.

  Back upstairs, he thought to fill more bottles from the toilet in the bathroom, but he was being ridiculous. There was a container of apple juice in the fridge, and he lifted it and drank in big, greedy gulps. It overflowed his mouth and ran onto his chin. He stopped only when he had to gasp for breath and could feel the liquid sloshing in his stomach.

  There was beer left in the fridge, too, and he took one out and opened it. Then he went outside and sat on the stoop. He felt silly for breaking the window. He could have sat out here and waited for Laura to come home and let him in.

  She would ask him if he’d checked in on any of the neighbors. Her own family took care of people that way. When she’d first brought Eddie home, they’d all walked down the block to deliver a plate of dinner to a ninety-year-old woman who still lived by herself. Laura’s father had cut the chicken into bite-sized pieces and covered it all in plastic. After they’d rung the bell about a dozen times, the woman had opened up in curlers, and mumbled something of recognition and gratitude.

  Laura wanted them to be like that, taking trays of food to people. To care about the neighborhood. Who were their friends now? Sometimes it felt like it was just the two of them on their own, but Eddie didn’t mind that.

  A retired couple in their seventies lived across the street from them. Mr. Mathias was a religious man—he’d been a preacher or minister or something. His wife had been a nurse.

  Eddie walked across the street and knocked, the beer still in his hand.

  There was no answer. Both of their cars were parked on the curb, and he knocked again.

  This time, he heard shuffling inside, and Mr. Mathias opened the door. He had on a red baseball cap with the curly W of the Nationals, and a thick cloth neck brace.

  “I’m your neighbor,” Eddie said, and felt the falsity of the gesture: the truth was he didn’t want to be standing there. He wanted to be waiting for Laura—to watch her drive up the road so he could walk from his stoop to her car to greet her. “Ed Gardner. I’m right over there,” he said, pointing across the street.

  “Yes, sir.” Mr. Mathias had an accent that might have been Caribbean. His head was cocked to the side in an uncomfortable-looking way.

  “I’m just checking in. With the power out and all. You folks all right?”

  “Oh, we okay. We okay, yes,” Mr. Mathias said. “We got the candles going. Thank you.”

  “You holler if you need anything. I’m right over there.” Eddie pointed again. Mr. Mathias closed the door before Eddie turned to leave. There were old-timers all over this neighborhood. Old-timers and young couples like him and Laura. Many of them had children.

  The house next to his was the Davises’. Patty Davis had wobbled out onto her deck and Eddie could smell cigarette smoke. In the dark, he couldn’t see her face, only the shape of her body. She was overweight by a hundred pounds, at least, and had a short pageboy haircut. When she walked, she looked to be wading through deep water.

  He started to call to her, but his voice had no strength and died before it left his mouth. Laura would find all this amusing—how worried he’d become.

  When he was close enough that he didn’t have to shout, he said, “Mike Sr. home yet?”

  “Nah.” Her voice was big and round in the night air. “He’s stuck with the rest of ’em.”

  “You get any calls out?”

  “Nah.”

  “Lines must be down everywhere,” he said.

  “I got put on hold at about four o’clock, when it first went out. Then I got cut off in about two seconds.”

  “The power company?”

  “Yeah. They must know. In two thousand eight we were out six days.”

  “The water company, too, huh?”

  “Couldn’t get through.”

  “Your phone’
s working? I’m trying to call Laura.”

  “She’s stuck out there, too?”

  “I guess. But if your phone is working, I can try her again.”

  “No, I don’t have any service.”

  Eddie walked up to her side of the lawn. A chain-link fence divided the properties halfway up the driveway, and he leaned against it. When his hands touched the metal, he felt that they were shaking.

  “Six days?” he said.

  “Yup. I was cooking spaghetti and meatballs on the grill. That was in a snowstorm.”

  “The repair crews better get here soon,” he said.

  “At least they got good weather to work in.”

  Even in the dark, Eddie smiled to be neighborly. He put the beer to his mouth and drank off about half of it in a gulp. His knee ached in a serious way, but he didn’t care about it then. There was a drunkenness to the way the night had come down so thick and black. The air swirled above them loosely on a breeze. Eddie felt his mind begin to pitch. He sat down on the grass.

  “I had to run home,” he told Patty. He stretched himself out and the top of his head touched the fence. He kept his knee bent and it felt better.

  “You okay down there?” Patty asked.

  “Yeah. How about Mike Jr.? He get home from daycare?”

  “Wore himself out riding his bike,” she said.

  “No training wheels?”

  “Not since he took them off last weekend.”

  “That’s good.” Eddie looked at the sky. “He’s a little athlete.” He got the sense the stars were swirling toward a single point, as if going down a drain—that even the air resting on his face was pulling in that direction. “A good athlete can make friends for life,” he said.

  Patty was silent, as if contemplating the idea of her son in the future.

  “Hey,” she said after a moment, “make sure not to flush.”

  Eddie’s imagination had leaked into the starlight. It was only he who’d been contemplating Mike Jr. all grown up; Patty was thinking about the water in his toilets.

  “Was the water out in oh-eight, too?” he asked.

  “The water, nah. Must be something else. They’ll send people for it.”

  “The water company knows when they have problems with the pipes,” Eddie said. “They have sensors that can tell when one’s about to break.”

  “Yeah, I heard of that.”

  “It has to be something with one of those big water mains. I saw on the news that they’re over seventy years old. There’s only so much patching up the county can do.”

  He stopped to listen to the air. There was no sound of the peepers in the trees. Just a thrum in his ears.

  “You have enough to drink in there?” he said.

  “Sure. I have a gallon of milk I just bought … I’ve got prune juice, not that anyone but me would drink it. I’ve got a little wine spritzer in case me and Mike Sr. feel like celebrating.”

  Eddie stared up at the sky.

  “Poor Mike Sr.,” she said. “He’s got bladder problems. Probably ready to piss himself by now. Oh, well. He’ll have to use a Big Gulp cup.”

  Eddie didn’t want to think of Laura peeing into a Big Gulp cup. Wherever she was stuck, it was closer to the city—farther south than he had been, running through that suburban no-man’s-land—and she could at least leave her car and get to a restaurant or grocery store or one of the gas stations.

  He tried to think of other things instead.

  In college, he’d taken an English seminar. Dammit, if he could only remember one thing, he’d remember that line from Dickens. It was about Wenman or something. Wemmick.

  That was the character’s name.

  The professor had been reading passages. He could still see him standing on the stage of the lecture hall. Eddie had been up high in the seats, alone.

  “Wemmick,” the professor had read, “had such a slit for a mouth that he didn’t so much eat his food as post it.” He’d paused after that and let the hall fill with shuffling. Fat and gray-bearded, the professor had been, with a pleased expression on his face. “The magic of literary description,” he’d said. “Close your eyes.” And Eddie had closed them. “Now. Picture Wemmick. Do you see him?” Eyes closed, Eddie had nodded. He had seen the man.

  “What color shirt is he wearing?” the professor trumpeted. “Does he have on pants? How thick is his hair?”

  Eddie hadn’t been able to answer. Each attribute he’d given—a red sweater, for instance, or a shining, bald head—was false; it was not Wemmick. In his mind, Wemmick’s shirt was both there and not there. Wemmick’s entire body—even his mouth, which could not have possibly looked like a post office slot—existed without dimension.

  When he pictured Laura stuck out there in traffic, the lanes had no depth, no beginning or end. The cars around her were both there and not there—a catastrophe and nothing.

  He went inside and lay down on the bed. His clock radio had a battery backup and was illuminated to 9:33. The numbers cast the room in dull blue. When he closed his eyes, he could see the boy in the woods so distinctly that he snapped them back open. It took Eddie a moment to recognize the room. The clock read 1:07.

  “Laura?” he called.

  He ran a palm over the sheet next to him and felt her absence there.

  In the kitchen, he saw through the window that there were no cars in his driveway and only Patty’s car next door. He tried the sink again, and again there was nothing. He sipped from the apple juice in the fridge and allowed his mind to continue buzzing.

  His neck was stiff, and he rubbed his thumb into it. Then he went outside into the warm night. She’d have come around from the east on the Beltway, up six miles on 295 from her office in the city. She’d have been on her way out around the same time he’d left his car.

  He walked back onto the street, the way he’d come through the neighborhood earlier. Someone had started a fire in a little pit and sparks popped in the air. As he got closer, he heard the murmur of voices. One of them laughed, and others joined in. They had a grill going. He could smell the meat. They were making burgers past one in the morning.

  He did not want to be called over. He did not want to be stopped and asked to have a beer with these people. He jogged up the street, passing by their yard on the opposite sidewalk, and didn’t turn his head to look at them.

  At the dead stoplight, he went right, back onto Route 29. It was called Colesville Road here, and Eddie crossed over to walk on the grassy median, which had been mown close to the ground. The road was empty, but up ahead was the intersection with University Avenue, and he could see where cars had come in on the eastbound lanes and were stopped.

  There were restaurants ahead: a burrito place and a Peruvian chicken shack. A gourmet pastry shop. He’d bought Laura’s birthday cake there last winter. People stood in front of the chicken shack speaking Spanish. Peruvian chicken, but all the Spanish speakers here were from El Salvador. The Post had done a piece on how terrible the gang violence was down there. If you had a certain kind of tattoo, you could never go back.

  He jogged left at the intersection for University. Cars were parked three lanes across going toward the ramp for the Beltway and as far back as he could see down the eastbound lanes. In the other direction—the direction Laura would be coming home—the lanes were empty. The other accidents, wherever they were, must have cut off the exits leaving the Beltway.

  The median ended and there was no sidewalk. He could have moved much more easily up the deserted westbound lanes, but their emptiness was like a prohibition keeping him away.

  He jogged between the cars. Though he knew that none of them could have been Laura’s, and that it would only make him crazy to look inside their windows, he looked inside them anyway. Seats had been reclined all the way back, and people were sleeping or at least closing their eyes. Others came out from the woods and opened their doors, illuminating interiors. Farther up, people were sitting on their hoods and whispering like stargazers.<
br />
  There was a woman standing up ahead, leaning against her side mirror. She wore a white dress. Maybe that’s why he ran to her—glowing in the dark the way she was.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Stretching my legs.”

  Eddie was shocked by her voice—that she’d responded to him at all, that she wasn’t an illusion.

  “What can we do?” she said as Eddie stared at her. “Unless you got news, you can go back to your friends.” She jutted her chin to a car somewhere behind him.

  “I’m not here with my friends,” Eddie said. “I’m new.”

  “New? I swear to God, this is the worst emergency I’ve ever been in.”

  “I mean, I just got here.”

  “Yeah? Well, I’ve been here all night.” When she looked at him, her face softened, as if she felt she’d been unfair. “A lady up there has sodas in her trunk,” she said, “but they’re probably gone by now.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Beltway’s jammed. This is all jammed. I haven’t seen one cop the whole time. I heard sirens about three hours ago, but that’s all.”

  “People are just sleeping in their cars?”

  “What are they gonna do? Walk home? We got trees right here. You don’t have toilet paper, do you? If you got toilet paper, you’ll be a hero.”

  “No,” Eddie said.

  “A few of these idiots were playing their radios before. Probably drained the batteries.”

  “How will you get home?”

  “Same way as you. Wait it out. You think they’re gonna fire everyone who doesn’t make it to work in the morning? I’d like to see them try.”

  Eddie walked ahead. A few boys were kicking a soccer ball in the pull-off. They were good players, juggling it on their feet before passing. Someone’s headlights were lighting them up and dust swirled in a dramatic way.

  The on-ramp was only one exit away, and when he came to it, cars had filled it up two across. A truck had run into the wall at an angle, and in the space between the wall and the truck’s tailgate, the nose of an Audi had shoved in between. Eddie turned sideways and had to brush against the grit on the door to get past. No one was inside any of the cars on the ramp. It rose and turned sharply, and beneath him, Eddie could see a long stretch of the Beltway. Traffic stood still in both directions, and dome lights blinked on and off as doors opened and closed. Laura drove a blue Civic, but it was impossible to tell what color was which from where he stood. He knew its shape—compact, wedgelike, too sporty for her. They’d bought it used from a lot.