by Fiona Maazel
“Who’s the old guy with you? Is he your boyfriend? Because he looks old. What are you doing home, anyway?”
It was the first anyone had asked. “Remember Kam? I came for her wedding.”
“Oh, yeah. She was calling here a bunch a few weeks ago. Want a Klonopin? I stole them from Mom.”
My body tends to act without prelude. Every time I get with a man, I don’t see it coming. Or when I leave the house. Put on my clothes. I just do these things without thinking, which is why I’m inured to alarm. Wake up enough nights in some guy’s tub, you stop asking questions. And so do they. But Hannah, she’s only twelve. And when I yell, she’s shocked.
“Are you out of your mind?” I said. “Those pills can kill you. Where are they? Tell me right now.”
But she didn’t, and I doubted any password would get me back in her room.
Hannah likes to tell the story so that no one is ashamed: On an expedition to Guatemala, our dad spent one night with a biologist who worked on lethal paralytic shellfish poisoning. She got pregnant, but kept it to herself. Not sure what perversed her ethics—debt, probably—but a couple years later she resurfaced to extort money from Dad or blow the story. Guess she didn’t figure on the dispassion with which he regarded his family life. Come D-day, he just accepted the baby into our home with the same indolence you might see in a guy picking up his mail. As for Mother, she didn’t even meet Hannah for a day and then only because the nanny, Maurice, had given Hannah’s toddler leash enough slack to let her get from the pantry to the living room. Maurice, who’d snuck into the States from Barbados, was always trying to patent habits indigenous to her clan. She’d lash groceries to her body with a fabric sling. Sometimes she wore Hannah that way, all over town. The toddler leash was years ahead of its time, part suspender, part sarong.
Dad had been in charge of hiring our nannies. The arrangement was this: he’d offer asylum, they’d offer themselves to science. It’s true that human vaccination trials border on genocide. That as a result of the trials, hundreds of illegal immigrants died and none was missed. But Dad had an answer for everything. If pressed, he’d reason that human trials were the only way to devise vaccines, that many diseases simply do not reproduce in animal hosts. Next he’d refer me to Edward Jenner, who discovered vaccination by noting that dairymaids exposed to cowpox didn’t seem to get smallpox. To prove it, he had to zap a little boy with the cow stuff, then with pathogenic smallpox juice. The boy lived. And look at the results: the word vaccine derives from the Latin word for cow, rooting a pillar of epidemiology in that most harmless and ridiculous of creatures.
Maurice was spared, though she was frequently ill and once confined in a Level 4 biocontainment hospital suite while Hannah wailed outside the roller rink because no one was there to pick her up. She still has the toddler leash stuffed in a drawer. We miss Dad but don’t talk about it.
On TV: rats. Rats whose vectoring of bubonic plague nearly wiped out fourteenth-century Europe.
In short: Here we go again.
“What a time we live in,” Agneth said. “Horrible.”
I threw a pillow at the screen. Stanley, God bless him, said at least we’ve got the kosher chickens. Chickens at the plant are safe as can be.
My stomach hurt. Mother had boxed herself in the faux fireplace. She liked to say it was the safest spot come the big one. Also: From every corner hails word of the Apocalypse. And: If disease doesn’t get us, the Big One will. I knew I was not going to last long in this environment, so I looked to Agneth for guidance. She’d taken steps to protect herself from plague by wearing those surgical masks, even though the protection was nominal. Also, she was knitting a kimono, which meant she knew how to experience peace of mind. I thought yarn probably wasn’t the best fiber for a kimono, but she told me to take it up with Vogue.
Aggie is a marvel. There is a Potatohead affect to the way her body has arranged itself over the years that makes her enjoyable to hug. Also to watch, since when she laughs, her stomach bobs with zero regard for what the rest of her is doing. Her stomach bobs when she’s sitting down! I have often found her in the bathroom, coloring in her eyebrows with blue pencil. There is no telling her it’s blue. You can’t tell Agneth anything. She trucks with mortality better than anyone I know. She is teaching herself Japanese so that in the next life, she has a leg up. I ask what if she comes back a clam. She says it doesn’t work that way. That the mind always outlives the body and can only reincarnate in a brain sophisticated enough to host it.
Aggie has ideas, among them that Mother is hosting Knut the Soft, a ninth-century Viking who had to be carried on a shield, but who still sacked Angers, maybe Nantes, and was pretty good-looking, too. As the story goes, either he ate too much or he was born with Klinefelter syndrome, which meant he had man boobs and soft skin, high cheekbones, and the most fuckable ass in Jutland.
Hard to tell if Aggie’s diagnosis was a compliment or not.
As for me, she would not say whose spirit was manifest in this body of mine. And I was okay with that. Because if I was a faggot Viking, I don’t think that’d sit well. Even so, I’d ask if she had thoughts about what I should do to rampart the family against, I don’t know, the swell of doom tiding high now that plague seemed imminent.
“Just stay here,” she’d say. “Your mother could use you.”
“Have things been bad?”
“Yes.”
“More than usual? You know how Isifrid gets.”
At this point, Agneth would sigh because she does not like me calling Mother by name, which I’ve been doing for years. Isifrid Clark. My dad used to call her Dizzy Izzy, which was cute until it was true.
“Things have been bad, yes, especially for Hannah. You think it’s good for her living here? I’m an old woman. What can I do?”
At this point, I would sigh because there was just so much wrong with Hannah’s life. For one, Mother had put her in a day camp called Good-Time Living. As I understood it, the campers were indoctrinated with hate, hate, hate. Racism, jingoism, intolerance. Those and Bible study, which should have nothing in common.
At night, the Hazmat stickers on Hannah’s door glowed neon. She seemed to have only one friend, a black girl named Indra, who couldn’t possibly attend Good-Time Living.
“Now go talk to her,” Agneth would say. “And put some drops in your eyes. At the very least you could act the role model.”
Right. Pass the mantle to me. Boy do I look good in this mantle.
I checked my phone. There was a message from Dirty Ben and one from Wanda to say that my abducting Stanley had affronted Dad’s legacy. How true. The sentinel surveillance program gave everyone a sense of mission. It was proactive. And for a while, it seemed to give Dad relief from the anxiety of everything else he faced. The labs at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease are notoriously chaotic. Their inventory is a mess. I could probably walk out of there with enough Ebola to wipe out Chicago. Stuff goes missing all the time, and no one gives a shit unless the press makes a stink. In our case, the press made a stink. Dad was indicted, slandered, ruined. The charge? He stole the vials himself. Psychologists said he was a highly patriotic American with plans to arrest the country’s march toward hedonism. Nothing like widespread death to reassert the importance in culture of family, tradition, and salt-of-the-earth labor. Other people said he was a eugenicist who’d targeted the poor and colored. The CDC fired him. Hate mail accrued on his desk at home. A local restaurant refused to seat him. A couple months of this, and no one was surprised by his death.
We’ve all been interviewed. The house has been searched. Mother had to relocate her stash and paraphernalia to a safe-deposit box downtown. Then the contents of the box were subpoenaed. The Feds, in their mercy, overlooked the stuff. They were looking for plague, not a Tiffany sack of crack.
In the last eight months, I have intended to prepare for the worst. To get the family safe. Each time there’s a letter, I swear to get on it. So far, I have researched two
gas-impermeable bubble tents.
It was Narga and Glanders and African Horse Sickness before Hannah relented and opened her door. I was disappointed. I’d been trying to accord the number of guesses with how many Klonopins she’d give me.
She was still on the bed, computer open. Her laptop has a seventeen-inch screen because she does not like to squint. She appeared to be toggling between a chat room and a catalog. I watched her type in the numbers from Mother’s credit card. When I asked what she was buying, she said Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus. Freeze-dried and everything.
If she ends up being the next Unabomber, I will not be surprised.
“Klonopin?” I said, because really, what else was there.
“I was kidding,” she said. “God, you’re a mess.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Fine. Now can you go?”
And just like that, I gave up. 1 slunk out the door. Six others lined the hallway, and behind each could have been Agneth. “Agneth!” I yelled. “What should I do?”
But Agneth and Isifrid could not be bothered. They were playing gin in the blue room.
Three
Mother used to have a dog. A Neapolitan mastiff. Her given name was Celina but we called her No Face. She was all slobber and flap. Mother thought she’d been trained as a guard dog, which we hardly needed eight floors up in a doorman building, and which didn’t even seem true since No Face was more hog than bouncer. But I guess she looked scary enough. The dead stare. Sorrow of the world. And if she sat on you, forget it. No Face could clear the coffee table and move furniture. Her cheek meat, like drapery, would continue to ripple long after she’d come to a stop. Her paws were big as muffins. No Face and I had a storied past. When I started in on heroin, I got intense about there being people in the house. Had to be empty for me to shoot. Empty and dark. So I’d lock myself in the closet and listen real hard, certain that if there’d been no one home five seconds ago, there was someone home now. Only No Face confused things. I could shoot so long as I knew it was her making noise, but you could never be sure it was her. So I’d lock us both in the closet and listen real hard. Only she had a chain around her neck that drowned out whatever else I was listening for. I’d sit on her like a bench and tell her to can it, but every time she moved, I’d have to start listening all over again. This could go on for hours. It never occurred to me to take off her collar.
Later I’d be on the floor, staring at our ceiling fresco. The will to live might have left my heart, but the fresco still had me. I’d start counting angels and having the talk, like: Look, people, can’t you come down and get me or something? Maybe I’d start to cry. Or feel like crying. Either way, No Face would plant her wattle on my chest so the whole thing spread out like batter. I loved that dog more than I loved my parents. Sometimes I figured that between me and death was No Face. Everyone else could live without me, but who’d take care of her the way I did?
When she was six, No Face ate the rubber finger brush I used to scrub her teeth. It lodged in her throat, and she died. Now I wear her collar, even to bed. Stanley has been quick to understand. He still wears his wedding ring. And his wife’s earrings, which are diamond studs. He says she was wearing the studs when she died.
Mother says the collar makes me look like a retard. It’s been five years, get over it. When we have this talk, it’s all I can do not to ram my fist down her throat. I have rage. In a former life, I was probably a jihadi teen.
Stanley disagrees. He thinks I was a turtle. I tried to explain Aggie’s theory of the reincarnated mind, but got stuck on his choice. A turtle? Soft on the inside, he said, then nibbled my hip.
The content of our rapport was growing. Our first few days in the apartment, he was tiptoeing around Isifrid and telling me about it. After that, he lost interest. And after a week, he was onto me. He wanted to know me, he said. He wanted to talk. Apparently, we were on a mission to repair things with Kam. I said he was on a mission, since I couldn’t stand the thought of ever seeing her again.
Whenever we have sex, I swear he talks to his wife. No matter. I am not much into it, either. The social worker at the Listerhab, which is what I call it, said my life’s motifs were apathy and armament. I guess this means I cannot enjoy intercourse. Probably I should have asked her to clarify. I remember she said this in a conversation just days before I got released. We’d been having one-onone sessions that lasted an hour. At five to, a buzzer would go off followed by the exquisitely debasing We have to stop now, and the social worker arranging on her face a look both aloof and sympathetic. Professional rue. These people have rue down to a science. Sometimes I got so enamored of that look I wouldn’t say anything meaty until seconds before the buzzer. The social worker would get peeved. Like I was yanking her chain. But I wasn’t yanking, I was enamored. And that was a big deal. Interest in anything but drugs and sleep was a big deal.
The longer me and Stanley camped at Mother’s, the more I wondered what he was doing there. Sometimes I’d ask, noting that we had not called Wanda and that we had no money. But he’d just grin and hit a bottle of rye and next I knew he’d be ejaculating into a cup because he wanted to test his sperm. Bought a kit online. His sperm used to be fine, but he wanted to know for sure that age and alcoholism had not ruined them. His wife could not carry a child, so she had frozen her eggs intending to find a carrier once Stanley dried out, the logic being that dads who are sober fare better than dads who are not. Problem was, Stanley could not dry out. Problem was, Sylvie waited and then she died. I did not like the idea of Stanley gauging his sperm around me because it meant that at any second, he could ask. Like I was in any shape to host a baby. But this is how he got me to talk. If I was talking, he wasn’t.
We were in bed. I could hear Hannah on the phone with someone at Scholastic News. She was asking about plague, playing dumb and waiting for the guy to let something slip. She thinks the government made up the Minnesota letter to corral support now that a recent poll owed the president’s meager approval ratings to disinterest in politics and, coevally, a lust for embattled politicians as seen on TV.
Stanley took my hand and pressed it to his forehead.
“Am I warm?”
I sat up. “Why are you asking?”
“I don’t know. I feel warm. What’s wrong? Oh c’mon. It’s not superplague.”
“Can you not call it that?”
“Fine, but am I warm?”
“No.”
I moved my hand down his chest. He was wearing briefs that for all their sag looked more like shorts, and a V-neck undershirt. His stomach bore the swell of drink fairly well, retaining a tautness that surprised you on contact. His limbs, by contrast, were as toothpicks in the sausage. I found the architecture of his body a source of delight; it was so odd, it moved me.
“Stanley, what if it gets out? It won’t, but I’m just saying, what if it does? What would you do?”
“I don’t know. I’ve always wanted to take flying lessons.”
He pressed his gut to the small of my back. We spooned.
“Funny,” I said. “You’re a laugh riot. I’m talking plague and you want to hit the skies. Which, now that I think about it, makes some kind of sense.”
“Well, I just don’t see the point in speculating. Nothing’s happened since the letter. I’ve got other things on my mind. I’ve been thinking more about Sylvie and what to do.”
I stopped him short. “Yeah? I’ve been thinking about some things, too. You want me to talk? I’ll talk. My heart’s broken.”
“I figured.”
“Really?”
“Of course. Takes one to see one. Now go on.”
So I did. I said he was a photographer disguised as a real-estate broker. Eric Ludlow. That he had a tattoo of a bull’s-eye at the base of his neck. Ate Captain Crunch for dinner. That when we talked, it was like this:
Eric: Well, my collection of photos is out. Let’s hear it for selfcelebration amid the suffering—
Lucy: I know! And it’s terrific. Puts me in the mood for pudding. Eric: Let me ask you: What aspect of your life’s pleasures is not somehow captured by the phenomenon of pudding?
Lucy: I thought you’d never ask. None. None whatsoever.
But mostly, it was like this:
I love you.
Me, too.
Stanley sat up. “What’s all that supposed to mean?”
“We understood each other.”
“And?”
“And nothing. He got married.”
“Married? How awful.”
“Yep. Possibly the worst day of my life, except for I didn’t know it. Shhh, listen.”
Hannah was shouting into the phone. Saying the Scholastic guy was holding out on her.
“That girl needs guidance,” Stanley said.
“And you need to mind your own business.”
He began to knead my shoulders. “You still hurting about him? This Eric guy?”
I reached over to the bedside table and took eight Vicodin. Then I held up the bottle. “See these? Nothing hurts so long as I got these.”
I slept for sixteen hours. When I awoke, it was a little after three in the morning. Isifrid was up, watching TV in the yellow room. If it’s not a quilt show, she’s usually watching a program that smuggles in the grotesque under pretense of education. Face-eating Tumor. The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off. Tonight it’s a show about the Vikings. Isifrid’s got a thing for those guys, courtesy Agneth. In the show, they are reenacting the sack of the Lindisfarne monastery. They have cast men with long hair and pockmarks. When I come in, they are at an excavation site, panning across a skeleton whose ribs are flayed like an artichoke.
“Nice, Isifrid. Oh, jeez, why are you crying?”
But really, I should have known. Her face was all dribble. Not a tissue in sight.
“Here, let me.” I wiped her chin with the hem of my shirt and sat next to her on the couch. She balled up and put her head in my lap. Her hair was textured like mesh. It was tinted wet sand; last week was dry sand. So long as the color hewed to a shade of beach, she was happy. Or as happy as Isifrid got, which just meant being divested of the usuals: despair, mania, grief.
