Stories From the Plague Years

by Michael Marano

  I began the trek away from what and who I’d been at that moment of good-bye—marking distance in spirit, not miles—when Allen and I left the house in which we’d read the books that had painted our lives and times with the paschal-egg colors of Romantic fantasy.

  We waylaid farmers and bargemen uninterested in selling us goods for which they’d get much better prices in the city, and who had no work for two boys sallow with malnutrition. It was past noon before we earned salted fish that we hoped came from waters not too near treatment plants, and winter apples soft and almost brown that had the mustiness of a root cellar clinging to them. Late afternoon, we earned a single potato. By night, we squatted another house marked with door scratchings that told us there was a working fireplace within. A cache of old phone books, the only paper left in the house, and the pine shelving from the last house we’d squatted (which we’d chopped and stacked on our sled) fueled our fire that night. We wrapped the potato in already twice-used foil and placed it in the fire. When we’d eaten it, we used the ugly paste boiled out of marshmallow root to pack our guts with the illusion of a full meal. I fell away from my own unfed sides, a hollow man, of whom famine was making a wilderness in which I’d wander and die.

  Allen pulled stalks of willow wand from his pack; boiled into tea, they’d stave off fever. “Should we?” he asked. And if I weren’t so cold and tired, I would have found small joy that the boy who seemed ever-wise was now asking me what was wise.

  “Shouldn’t risk it,” I said, thinking of the rot willow wand had caused within kids who’d drunk it while malnourished . . . we’d filled our bellies with a lying food that, even as it bloated us, would let us starve if we ate it too long.

  “We’re still going to risk fever.”

  “Maybe we need to risk fever,” I said. In my mind, I tasted the death-stink of a girl named Susan in our ward whose liver had dissolved because of willow wand she drank during the mild famine of three winters before. Her body pooled ammonia. She convulsed so violently, the nurses restrained her with belts and strapped a helmet to her. I saw the fountain-marks on the walls by her bed, like those on stable walls when a steer’s throat has been slit, after she’d gouted blood from her nose and mouth during the fit that had killed her. Jeremy, her friend, had no Dusk Colors with which to mourn her the day she was buried. As if lifting the sins of his fathers, he took up the Before mourning color of black, which made him look paler than he truly was. In my memory, the kicked-dog hurt in his eyes will always be joined with the poisoned breath that infused the ward long after Susan had been lifted away and her mattress burned.

  I know Allen and I spoke of other things after he put away the willow wand. What they were is muffled by the hunger I knew as I was transfixed by my hands. I’d last truly seen them while saying goodbye to Justine. They were forms unknown to me, grafted to my arms. The veins at the backs of my hands stood out as they never had before. I’d once read in a rotting book with no cover that it’s when these veins stand out that you’ve truly become a man. Yet did they stand out because I was no longer a boy, or because famine had burned away tissue that had been between the veins and skin? What man would I be? Could I be a strong, decent man if my adulthood was midwifed by starvation? How would the man I’d be unfold himself, should I meet him on the road?

  I hope the young man whom we did meet the next day still lives . . . that in this world made so brutally small, I can find him and make amends . . . both with him, and the self I lost in meeting him. I hope my hunger during our meeting was an alien thing, a possessing spirit, like those I’ve seen blamed for the fits of epileptics in the outlands near Chicago. Allen had his own spectre to carry, woven into his flesh. By shirking that burden, he too changed. I choose not to endure the thought that maybe he changed because his burden had shirked him.

  When we met the young man, our feet were lead-heavy and numb, our hands throbbed in our wool gloves. The rot of our skin slicked oily on our clothes. It had been afternoon before we found work, heaving salvaged pipe and wire onto the cart of a scrap dealer who paid us in bills so old and greasy they smelled of the horses that pulled his cart and looked as if they’d melt if we balled them in our naked hands . . . a thing we’d not do, for our palms were crisscrossed from handling the copper razor-strands of cable that had once streamed data to houses now infested with creatures that dulled their teeth on wire insulation. Our work gloves, good for pulling bramble, were too thin to turn frayed metal threads. We thought to buy a pot recast from melted cables from the merchant but didn’t, knowing that the desire to own the pot was born of our hunger to imagine food in it.

  The later opening of our jackets was motivated by the same stupid and hunger-driven desire. In twilight the color of boiling sap, Allen and I, our hands too raw and swollen for us to work the next day, fumbled with hook-eyes and let the sick breeze out of the west make wings of our coats, and so made the wind our accomplice. We had to give our hands a day to scab. This was our unspoken motive for what we committed. The young man pulled a child’s wagon, the carboy of telltale orange in the wagon visible from tens of yards away. In light narrow as an old woman’s breath, the silver wedding ring he wore, un-scuffed and still bright, sponged up the yellow dusk. That he was desperate enough to take to the road alone, was stupid enough to travel with such a precious thing on his finger, and didn’t put a tarp over the carboy told Allen and me more about him than we should have known. I often think of his wedding ring, and the young woman who wore . . . or still wears . . . the ring’s mate. I’ve prayed that he—just a few summers older than I—returned to her a victim of no greater crime than what Allen and I inflicted on him. I’ve prayed that the wedding ring didn’t find its way, black with grease, tossed among the buckets of wedding rings saved so that their inscriptions could identify the cremated dead who’d owned them. I have prayed he went home after meeting us, and that brigands didn’t cut his ring from the cooling body that would feed the whelps of foxes in their winter lairs.

  We stopped him, letting him see our guns, letting him see that we could take what we wanted, even though he had the hands of a farrier and was broad-shouldered as a miner. The fear on him was like a thing seen in deep winter morning—a rock or tree that is as much shadow as substance. We “bought” the carboy of treated nitric acid from him for far less than it was worth, as the one thing on his wagon full of cheaply made tools that could find him any work. Whether Allen and I would have taken the carboy if he had not “sold” it to us is a thing I’ll never consider. Had we not been starved and filthy, had we not been cold and afraid of being unfit to work because of our savaged hands, had we been the decent boys we’d been before that moment . . . we would have shared our heavy-duty wood borer in exchange for use of the acid and sought work with him, this fool who had no borer, only a chrome-forged pick that would bend against frozen soil.

  I’ve stood on the porches of houses in fields when summer storms have arced like waves over the horizon. I’ve felt the air drawn out of those houses as thunder crashed nearby; it has touched my shoulders like a cloak before moving past me and away. Something that had been part of me flowed over my shoulders and away from me in the same way . . . my decency? Or my perception of a decency I never truly had? The shame, I knew, came from within and without, as if draped on me by one who was saddened by my apostasy, but who didn’t understand it well enough to judge.

  In another house, heated by the fire of newspapers bundled for recycling the year I was born, Allen and I peeled off the linings of our soft woollen gloves, gaping apart cuts that had scabbed to the fabric. Our lacerated canvas work gloves stood blood-hardened near the fire . . . like mandrake roots made into Hands of Glory in the witches’ shops that linger in the rotted neighbourhoods of university towns. Allen’s whimper as skin came off with his glove lining was like the cry I’ve heard a mute girl make while she dreamed.

  “Guess this was a cool thing we did, huh?” I said.

  Together, we let out sounds a
t once like grunts and laughs, as we waited for the sweet cicely root and aspen bark we’d use as poultices to boil in our rusty electric pot. In silence, we avoided adding to our guilt by making excuses for our crime.

  Shame of what we’d done roared like the noise of water in my thoughts the next day, as we came upon one long-term squatter after another clearing what had been suburban yards for planting. The long-termers were easy to mark along the roadway, given away by the unseasoned cordwood of newly felled trees piled so the long-termers could cart it away to sell.

  Two clever boys we seemed, to be able to drill deep into new stumps that would take horses and tractors hours to clear, and to pour nitric acid infused with accelerants into the borings, so the partly dissolved wood itself became the explosive that would blast the stumps out of the ground. We’d detonate the stumps with wires strung to an old tractor battery, or we’d make a punk out of rags sopped with clay dug from under bramble that had been hedges. What punishment we saved our hands fell on our backs, as splinters hit us like small hatchets; our coats were no protection, for we had to take them off to run from the stumps while the punks burned more quickly than we’d have liked.

  We worked, it seemed, as quickly as the punks burned, lest the blasts lure other traveling workers, who’d try to rob us of the carboy that we had ourselves robbed.

  We stayed that night in a house the yard of which we’d cleared. By the warmth of the electric heater we ran off the grid, we salved our hands with cheap amber disinfectant we’d gotten from a long-termer and dared count our bills for the first time. Some bills were near worthless as bavin-coins, and would have to be exchanged at the bank or through black marketeers for fresh currency. Others were printed in the blue ink that marked them as worth exactly their dollar amount in gold on any given day in any district on the continent. Yet others were so mulchy and porous, they sponged the orange tinctures from our fingertips. We’d each earned enough to pay rent on a large house for three months. We divided the bills, and, knowing what anguish cheap gun oil full of impurities would leak into our hands, we cleaned our weapons anyway, to make sure our three rounds would truly matter, should they need to.

  The next day, we found a truck on the road, the rusted contents of which, if we had found them in the ground, would have prompted us to dig deeper for the bones of dragons. No scrap hunters had gutted the swords, fit to kill ogres in fables, and the suits of mail, fit for exiled princes, that rotted in the truck. Maybe scavengers—finding a cache like those mentioned by the old professors and teachers who wandered to people’s homes in these parts and told a night’s worth of stories in exchange for a meal and a bath—felt they shouldn’t loot a tomb that might have a curse protecting it.

  The swords were of good steel, not like the lightweight swords I’d helped prop-masters make. The chain mail, grimed with blood-smelling corrosion, was as heavy as five of the coats of costume mail I’d worn that were made of thick yarn hardened with grey paint. Lances and what had been saddles of fine leather were now mold-eaten as the boots we still found on unburied corpses.

  “It’s for a play,” Allen said. And as I felt more than knew that he was wrong, I was sickened by something. In my hollow guts, the sickness had a weight. The time I knew as “Before” had a Before. I could see that while a wise boy like Allen couldn’t. I remembered when I was small, banners advertising fairs that recreated the past without the un-pleasantries of war, famine, plague . . . the hardships that made the art of the past passionate and enduring. Though it seemed that plague had risen up to brigand this fair, so that the owners of this truck would abandon it and hide until a burnthrough could occur. That they never reclaimed the truck told me the past had claimed its due from them.

  I lifted a sword the way Arthur would lift it from the Stone and Before burned my palm, as the damp leather braided at the pommel seeped rot into my wounded hand. I—newly born a thief whom those of Before might see as a highwayman of the romantic past, and who walked the tomorrow they thought would be a holiday—couldn’t stand holding the weapon they’d have me bear. I dropped the sword. “No. It’s just another thing that was supposed to be cool,” I said, pleased to say something dramatic and final, to eclipse the wise boy Allen could be while he faced the past. Allen was quiet. I felt as if what I’d said had been heard by someone who wished to speak, but couldn’t. We left the past’s dream of the further past to corrode in the snow.

  That night, in the final house we’d squat, I saw my face for the first time in days. There was no connection to the grid to link our heater. We didn’t light a fire, so the smoke wouldn’t attract the desperate fools who took to the road to find work and food only now, weeks into the famine. We’d be prime victims to rob and kill, with the small fortune we carried. Our foot-and-sled tracks in the snow leading to the front door were betrayal enough, without smoke to promise our killers a warm night’s sleep by our looted bodies. I shuffled to the first floor bathroom of the house, to piss in the sink rather than face the cold outside. The bathroom had the unique stink of raccoon shit, but no shaggy forms ducked from the beam of my flashlight. Even in a room rank with the dung of scavengers, the stink of my own crotch was offensive to me . . . as was the spoiled beef smell of my steaming piss, rich with the proteins my body had taken from itself and now sluiced as waste. With my flashlight set in a mounted toothbrush holder, I saw myself lit from below in what my old acting mentor Frank had called “Shylock lighting” . . . transformed into a caricature of the Dirty Jew. I looked like a villain in the illustrations of the misspelled tracts that hayseeds leave stacked in train stations to extend their ministries while they traveled.

  My eyes in the mirror were un-living as a doll’s and underneath had the blotches that, as make-up, I’d applied to play characters who were aged, dying or dead. My beard, such as a boy could raise, looked like mange on cheeks so hollow they made my jaw seem long as a wolf’s. My hair hung lank as the bloody locks I wore while playing Banquo’s ghost in the days when a foodstuff like corn syrup could be wasted as stage blood. I raised disinfectant-stained fingers to my face, touched whiskers that had the same frayed tips that a sickly girl’s hair takes when it grows too long. I twisted a few. They snapped like the strands of spun sugar that clung to Aunt Louise’s wooden spoon when she made sea foam candy.

  I looked at the monster I was. Then lifted the flashlight and lit myself from above and the side, changing my image to one like the portrait of a sixteenth-century saint, giving humanity to myself through the airy nothing that made me seem a lunatic, a lover and poet as I moved the light like a will-o’-wisp around my face. I left the dung-thick room and soaked rags with bleach I found in the kitchen, then stepped on the rags, cleaning my boots of any trace of the pathogen in raccoon shit that rots the brain of a healthy man to dementia in a matter of days.

  I wished to go home, but I knew I never could again. Not truly. Not as the thief I’d become. Home would never accept me, because I, reborn a thug, could never again fully accept it. Yet Justine needed me to return, whatever was left of me that was worth her love. The bills I carried were her sliver of hope, and I’d never cheat her of hope, or make her hope in vain.

  “We need to go back,” I told Allen as we “ate” cold, snot-like marshmallow root we’d boiled that afternoon.

  In a dream-state of hunger that I could feel in the stoop of his shoulders, Allen lurched around the living room where we camped, scraping his spoon against the tin plate as he paced, as if trying to summon true and plentiful food through the sound of it being casually eaten. He stopped in the lantern light dim enough not to be noticeable from the road, looking at once-white carpets, at the tracks left by the distinct boot-prints of the containment suits that CDC teams used to wear as Before fevered into the Dying. The leaking bodies dragged out by those crews had left smears on the carpets like the brush strokes of an abstract artist.

  “We need to go back,” I said again.

  “We strong enough?”

  “T
here’s going to be even less food on the road. The farmers’ll hoard what they got. More people are looking for work. I think we’re too weak to do more work. What we got left, we need to get back.”

  “See how we feel in the morning.”

  “Could you work a whole fucking day tomorrow?”

  “We got to eat before we go back.”

  “Nothing’s out here.”

  “We might be too weak to make it home.”

  I was stiff with the poisons leaked by my body’s feeding on itself; when I blinked, it felt like my eyelids scraped sand. Tomorrow, we’d have the final burst of energy that famine brings, or we’d begin the half-senile walk toward organ failure. Either way, I didn’t have the strength to talk further with Allen. I fell asleep to the scrape of his spoon across an empty plate, the noise of a conjurer without even a lump of lead to transform.

  I dreamt of the smoke that bore my mother to the sky, of the colors I saw paint the sunset of the day she bride-stepped to the clouds. So near to death, I dreamt that my mind rose as did smoke, straining the silver thread that joins it to my body. In the dream, I heard my father’s tread behind me, and waited for him to say, as he had said in fact, how the colors of that twilight suited my mother. His silence startled me. I turned and saw my mother, wearing the colors of her own mourning, gold and vermilion, looking at the sunset that would be her only grave.