by Fiona Maazel
“The next day, the boys left and as soon as Dick went to work, I went to the public high school to ask about how to buy pot and then to the library to read up on orgasm, and then home, where I used the computer to buy things that promised to reproduce the sensation I had with Todd. By the end of the week, I had a large bag of marijuana and a collection of toys that cost four hundred dollars. I smoked and I smoked and I used the toys and all that happened was that I bruised myself and slept a lot. Eventually, once I was too sore to carry on, I gave up on that part of it and just smoked. Every night, then every day and night, then all the time. Eventually Dick found out and said he would leave me if I didn’t stop, he had a reputation to keep. So here I am.”
Susan said thanks. And that the why of Dee’s drug abuse was maybe not so hard to figure out. I stood to stretch my legs. Also, I had to go. One more miserable story and I’d strangle someone. I pleaded indigestion. Susan said I could go rest in the infirmary, which was just a room where the nurse-cook, when not nursing or cooking, did crosswords. I told Mother I’d see her later. Grunt. I headed for the infirmary, then walked right past it. It’d be a thirty-minute walk through the desert to get to our barracks, but I figured it was worth it. I didn’t quite get the purpose of having to mire myself in so much dismal story. Then again, I was feeling for these people, feeling in general, which, they say, is a door opened. Every feeling a new door.
Twenty-nine
My heels are cracked. By the time I reach our barracks, it feels like I’m soled in thorns. Noticeably, someone has been in my room. It pleases me to think of the intern rifling through my drawers and coming up empty. At least I will have succeeded at something.
While I am still lucid, I recoup my phone, which I am now hiding from Mother in the bathroom. There is voice mail from Eric and a text message from Stanley. Eric says things I cannot understand, except for USAir and come home. I listen again and again but cannot glean from the static anything that telegraphs subtext. Does he need me? Why? The message is long as song—there is loop and riff—and so adieu, wireless network provider, may the apocalypse befall you and everyone who works for you and their children, too. I listen once more but cannot gauge his tone, which failure has me feeling irate and insane.
I check Stanley’s text. It says: SP in TX, get out now, which has the dual effect of scaring me about plague but relaxing me about Eric. I want to be missed, I do, very very very very badly do I want to be missed, I want to be loved by this person so furiously that it is often the only thing that animates my day—I want this, but no. Not given what’s real in our lives. In his life, whose joys are nascent and fragile, and born of things that do not include me.
I release three pills from the tube in my thong, and from my bag retrieve a portable TV, which the underappreciated, trespassing intern should have taken but didn’t. The reception is crap, plus I worry Mother might barge in, so I keep the sound down, with one ear trained on the happenings outside, which, far as I can tell, are nothing. I manage to get a Western, a classic in which manifest destiny rationalizes the way John Wayne and pioneer consorts depredate Native American culture. Only some other station keeps cutting in and it’s like the flashes from New Year’s Eve all over again. There’s been more death, this time in New Mexico. An elementary school teacher who lived alone not one hundred miles from here and who apparently had the presence of mind to photograph herself as she got sick. What better way to protest the government’s response to plague than to put a face on it? It was like those photos of the battle of Antietam taken before the carnage was swept away. No one in the North had a clue what the Civil War was really like—all that death and gore—until these photographs went on display at a snappy gallery in New York City.
A note on-screen cautions that the following images may be disturbing. In the first, the woman wears a dashiki. She is a practitioner of Eastern religions. She is vibrant and without brassiere. I bet she grew her own marijuana. In the next photo, she is in bed. Gone is the dashiki. And the brio. And all her clothes. The network has fogged over her nipples and pubic hair, as if these are the body parts whose exposure cannot be survived. Her cheeks are tinted sea kelp owing to the depletion of oxygen in her blood. She has a bolus on her neck, which is actually a lymph node swollen with bacteria. Her fingertips are livid in gangrene. There is blood sputum dribbled down her chin.
I look at my own hands and shudder. The avarice with which disease troops through your blood just doesn’t cohere with the upshot, which is a body slick and foul, dense like mud, with limbs hard and black as a truncheon. It is so vile as to seem unreal. There is rape and arson and murder and war, but you’d never know it from the way light stalks the trees at dawn.
I turn up the volume. Apparently, two of the plague bandits—that’s what we’re calling them now—were spotted in West Texas. I do the math: incubation period is about two to four days, which means if they were able to transmit plague, they should be dead themselves. Only they are not dead. And they are close to Bluebonnet. I start to listen more intently, despite John Wayne’s redmeat inflection crosscutting with the Asian reporter for KSAT News. Molly Ning is saying we have reason to believe the bandits might well be the first asymptomatic hosts. The two anchors do not understand. She elaborates. “They are like grenades only they detonate every time they come into contact with another person, and scientists cannot say how long they will remain contagious.” The anchors are silent because the news is staggering—because anyone could have the plague and not know it. And so a new moniker is born: shadowplague. Holy Christ.
I take the batteries out of the TV and throw them in the toilet. I cannot sustain fear. Fear makes me crazy. The only reason I even wanted to come here was to plane fear. To level the terrain of emotion so that nothing trips me up on the path to sobriety. I head for the back window on the balls of my feet and look out to make sure the coast is clear. This is why I do not notice our holes have been violated until I’m already out the window and sitting in the brush. Our holes! Violated! Then I look down the length of the building and notice several such excavations. I can’t believe the underappreciated, frangible intern found my drugs. Mother’s drugs! I wonder if he works on commission. I wonder if he skims off the top. The intern! How dare he!
I haul ass through the window and race for the drawer, where I left one of my thongs. I can feel the panic creeping up my neck. The odds that plague finds its way here, to this idiot rehab, are very slim. We will be fine. We’ll be fine!
I open the drawer, grab thong—no pills. Holy Christ.
I call Eric back, only this time I do not sound so charming. I say I know the bandits are in Texas. That I hate this place. I want to go home. I’m scared.
Then I consider calling Hannah. I get as far as punching our number before giving up. If I call, I might start to cry about the intern who stole my drugs. At the very least, I need to hide how little progress I am making. Besides, plague is not in New York, I have no duties there.
The air mattress sneezes under my weight. It’s almost a whoop. I hug the burlap throw to my chest and say, “Fuck, fuck.”
And then it gets worse. Outside there are coyotes and snakes, cottontail rabbits and armadillos—a whole mess of wildlife I never want to encounter, but which certainly does not include the species responsible for the susurrus I hear, coming close. I’ve hardly taken any pills, so it can’t be I am imagining things. If there are Martians outside my window, well, okay, I am always wanting to make new friends.
Since I am the dumb broad who always gets knocked off first in every horror movie, I step outside with little but a branch to protect me. The sun sets early in winter and the darkness is like pawing through squid ink. My heels burn and I’m not especially graceful, so I stumble and make a ruckus. The whispering stops. I look left, I look right, nothing.
With my luck, the bandits are hiding in some bush, waiting to exhale.
The druggie buggy wends up the road. Its headlights mean I won’t get slaughtered by whatever’
s out there. The relief is nice, but quickly displaced by fear of Mother when she finds her hole’s been spoiled.
She flounces into my room and collapses in an armchair. “I’m exhausted,” she says. “But here, I brought you some dinner rolls.”
She might as well have a marsupial pouch for how many rolls turn up in her lap.
“Uh, thanks. I take it I didn’t miss much in group?”
“No. Just the woman with the tracheotomy tube. She’s a heroin addict. She started after throat cancer. Oh, and Susan made off with the radio. The news is too disheartening. So now we are totally cut off. Excuse me.”
She retreats to the other room. Politesse always strikes her at the weirdest moments. I’m sitting tense because any second she’s gonna look out the window. And the shriek will be awful. I plug my ears, get braced. This lasts for a minute or so. I start to get alarmed. If she’s not shrieking, she must be dead. I knock on the connecting door, then let myself in. Well, would you look at that. Mother is doing lines off the dresser.
“Where’d you get that?”
“How stupid do you think I am? A place like this, they always find your hole. Mine was just a decoy.”
“Gimme some.”
“I think not.”
“Give it!”
She relents. I do a line and spread out on her bed. Ten, nine, eight, and things start looking good. I get to believing I can clean up over the next few weeks. That I can lick this thing. Shadow-plague, how absurd, I will go home and start over.
Mother gets in bed next to me. “See that?” she says, and points to the ceiling, whose impasto, like what’s in my room, renders the ocean during a storm—capping waves and all that.
“It’s ugly, yeah. I could do better.”
“No, but you see it?”
“What?”
I stand so that my face is only a few inches from the ceiling. And there it is, written in pencil: This is not the appex of our lives.
“You write this?”
“Apex with two p’s?”
I start jumping on the bed, shouting, This is not the apex of our lives!
Mother gets to her feet. “Let’s take a walk. I want to walk.”
Outside, the moon’s on the wane, which leaves the sky flecked with stars. We can see the milk of the Milky Way. I pull off my shoes. And my clothes. The air rips through my hair because I am running.
Being nude in the desert black is not like skinny-dipping, with its uterine appeal. It’s more like, Look at me and my kingdom; my chest is percussive, the animals heed me.
I circle Mother at top speed. I have an unflagging spirit and stores of energy that nothing can deplete. When’s the last I felt so happy? My options are unlimited. I will get clean. I will feel joy.
I attempt a cartwheel and come down hard on a rock whose edge jabs at the rim of my kneecap. When I stand, the cap feels wobbly, like it’s come loose. And I start to laugh, thinking, I have entropic kneecap disease!
“Did you hear that?” Mother says, and grabs my arm.
“How’s my knee? It’s okay. Thanks for asking.”
“Shhh, listen.”
It’s the same sound I heard before only this time I think maybe it’s angels come down to love me because I am impassible. My knee is healed. My heart is healed. God asks me to tend the rain.
“I’m getting the fuck out of here,” Mother says, and hightails it to her room.
I start skipping to my Lou when the shriek I forgot about snakes through each ear and collides in my head. I race back, if only to shut her up. The sound is so painful, I am ready to smother her face with a pillow.
I vault the window with insufficient regard for my naked body. Tomorrow, I will be one giant lesion with entropic kneecap disease. The shriek continues to ring in my ears, so it takes a few seconds to notice it’s stopped. Stopped a while ago. I open the door to her room. She waves and says, “Hey, Luce.” And the people next to her—a young couple, strangers—look away like I’m the odd duck here.
I reach for a bathrobe hanging from Mother’s door. The pattern is green and reticulate—I am foliage from the knee up.
“Yeah, hi,” I say. “So who are you people?”
Mother frowns. “Don’t be rude, Lucy. This is J.C. and Samantha.”
“And Luke,” Samantha says, patting her stomach, which is distended. “You can call me Sam.” She looks about eighteen. They are both seated on Mother’s bed, leaning against the wall. Around her shoulders is a varsity jacket. He’s got pomade in his hair. I am waiting for Eisenhower to peek through our keyhole.
“Uh-huh. Well, welcome. What brings you to a rehab in the middle of nowhere? This can’t be part of your high school curriculum.”
Mother smacks my leg. “God, you are so rude.” And then, to the prom teens, “Don’t mind her at all.”
Sam’s a brunette stippled blond. She’s wearing a paisley headband that recedes her hair enough to expose a dime of skin above her cheekbone, color plum.
J.C. takes her hand and says, “We were looking for a place to wait things out. Someplace safe for the baby.” He nods in the direction of two backpacks stashed under the desk.
“To wait what out?”
They exchange a look like: Indulge the junkie, be patient.
Mother says, “The plague, sweetheart. The escapees—”
“Bandits.”
“The bandits are in Texas.”
“Somewhere in the desert,” Sam adds. “I got scared. We don’t have any family.”
J.C. brings her hand to his lips. “I kept telling her not to watch TV, but she insisted. Has to know everything.” He says this with a smile, with pride, despite the unfortunate consequence of her fear turned flight.
“So you came here to hide?”
Sam nods and rubs at the mark on her face with the heel of her palm. “Did you see the woman who just died?”
J.C., who bites his nails, obviously wants to liberate Sam from neuroses of her own. He says, “Don’t do that, honey,” and returns her hand to his. And then, to me, “Sam got upset about the photos. I can’t believe they showed that on TV.”
I pinch my eyes shut, trying not to recall the woman, which is like trying to forget your own name.
Mother says, wistfully, “Thank God I missed it.”
I tell them about my TV and the lustral experience of having drowned the batteries.
Mother says, “Are you nuts?” and dashes for the toilet, calling me names along the way.
Sam suggests it might be better for us to stay abreast.
J.C. says, “In any case, we figured Bluebonnet was pretty remote and not likely to take in people who don’t have, um, a reservation. Plus you got a cook and a nurse and stuff.”
Mother is asking if she’s going to get electrocuted from wet batteries in a portable TV. Sam says she’s got a blow-dryer, if that would help.
“Do you realize this is a rehab?” I say. “I wouldn’t bring my unborn baby to a rehab for anything.”
“Good thing you’re not pregnant,” Sam says, and turns away. J.C. strokes her hair. Mother shakes her head like I am the most heartless creature on earth.
Yeah, good thing I’m not pregnant. I sit down and think how much easier everything seems when you have a partner.
“Are people really panicking out there?” I ask.
J.C. says yes. And that it’s getting a little hairy because everyone is trying to find a place to hunker down where the plague bandits won’t go, which means the ranchers have turned border patrol because they don’t want anyone seeking refuge with them.
At this point, Sam attempts to withdraw J.C.’s thumbnail from the vise of his front teeth. The gesture is met with rebellion, and he slaps her hand away. She looks stricken. By way of apology, he locks his fingers in his lap.
Mother says, “But they are only two people. We’re in a state of lockdown because of two people? You can’t even hide in the desert. Just look at it out there. I can probably see all the way to Mexico.”
<
br /> I shake my head and roll out mitosis theory to explain how one person infects three who infect six and nine and nine million and how of them maybe none dies or everyone dies or just some die, so as far as we know, half of Texas is carrying already.
Sam says nothing. J.C.’s retracting the cuticle on his index and stripping the catch. Mother retires to the bathroom to cut lines.
“They shooting people?”
I say this sarcastically, but the response is dead serious.
“Not yet.”
“Oh, Jesus. This is insanity.”
Mother reappears, leaning against the doorframe with one arm skyward. I think she might be posing.
Sam asks me if she’s okay.
“Not really, no.”
“What’s wrong?”
