Last Last Chance

by Fiona Maazel

  The truck was acting funny, which I did not like. But then it’d acted funny before. Anything happened, I’d just take a horse into town and get whatever part I needed. That night, when Bill took sick, I didn’t think much of it. But then his fever got high. He had the shakes. I’d read my bit on superplague and knew if he had it, he’d die within twenty-four hours if I couldn’t get him something, and even if I could, he’d probably die just the same. I figured if he’d already passed it on, well, we’d both of us die anyway, so it’d be best to get help. He seemed pretty sure on death, though, and before I left, he asked me to take his wedding ring. It fit just perfect. For a second I was put off by wearing another man’s wedding ring, but then it made me feel like we were all bound up in the same love, what difference who you pledge it to.

  I went out back. Course the damn truck chose that night to go bust with the timing belt. And wouldn’t you know I’d find the stable door unhinged and the stalls empty. Bill was going down fast, so I grabbed a canteen and decided to hoof it. No doubt I’d hitch a lift on the way. Only there was no one on the road. It was the deadest I had ever seen. Best choice was to make for the rehab and hope I didn’t pass out from dehydration along the way.

  When I got there, I was so happy. Strange about the electrified fence, but I didn’t make too much of it. Felt like my mouth and throat were thick with baby powder. I just wanted some water and a phone. In the courtyard, I saw a kid and made right for him. I think I even waved, in a friendly-like way. The place was for women, I guessed him a counselor. So I’m waving and maybe dragging ass a little, but the kid, he panics. Turns his back on me and runs. But by now, I’ve got all my hope and desire bound up with this asshole, I can’t give him up. Next I know, I’m running after him. I try to explain. But I might as well have been speaking in Arab because the kid was all terror, and I had never seen anything like it. But now here’s the thing that strikes me in retrospect, I had seen it before, and I knew that look on his face. I knew his problem, and in that instant I knew everyone else in the rehab had it, too. Escape panic. I should have just shot myself right then and saved him the trouble. Instead he gets a jolt of survival energy and, whack, my brains are splattered all over the wall, which is jagged and none too pleasant to have all mixed up in your stuff.

  Time’s different out here. I’ve already had a chance to read up on herd mentality and a fact sheet about infectious disease published by a company that specializes in herd mentality. Obviously, the two bed down together. The madding crowd—they’re hungry, they’re sick, they’re furious. Want to be scared shitless? Here’s what just got leafleted all over New York City:

  BE PREPARED: A PLAGUE PRIMER

  If a 30% attack rate, understand what this means:

  30% of your family. 30% of doctors. 30% of emergency staff. 30% of bank tellers. 30% of drivers. 30% of police officers.

  Add to that the number of people withdrawing from society to protect themselves and their loved ones.

  In sum: Rely on no one to help; take precautions now! Do not be complacent about your own resilience! Be self-sufficient!

  MODEL I: Plague is transmitted via contact with infected person and/or his belongings.

  PROPHYLACTIC: Wash frequently.

  ASSUMPTIONS: Water is available, soap is available, towels are available, towels are clean, detergent to launder towels is available, water for laundry is available, paper towels are an alternative, paper towels are available, paper towels are sterile, paper towels can be disposed of safely, etc., etc. Plan ahead.

  MODEL 2: Plague is transmitted via breath.

  PROPHYLACTIC: Use gas mask.

  ASSUMPTIONS: Gas masks are available. Gas masks are effective. Use handkerchiefs. Handkerchiefs are available. Handkerchiefs are effective. Use tissues. Tissues are available. Tissues are effective. Etc., etc. Plan ahead.

  Etc., etc. We have a people’s-watch nonprofit to thank for this. Flyers have clogged up every drain in the city, the debris is worse than your average ticker-tape parade, and this nonprofit, with best intentions, has the nerve to add, oh and by the way:

  In regard to all of the foregoing, panic-buying is not recommended.

  Ho Ho very funny, ha ha it is to laugh.

  Thirty-three

  When Alfred’s article about the women of plague hit stands, it sold out immediately. Eric faxed me the piece, though I already had a copy pilfered from the dollar store by Margaret, who still snuck into town and back on occasion. It was six pages long, spliced with photos whose accruals of light and shadow seemed to bully out of frame evidence that we looked awful. Mother’s prying bones turned avant-garde. The rotunda of Aggie’s body, once silly, now majestic. Even I looked okay, like the autumnal coloring of my face and hair had been commissioned by L.L.Bean to invoke home, hearth, and cocoa on a chilly day. This was Eric’s doing, of course. He could wrest beauty from anything. For Hannah, though, I’m not certain what he was after. The gap in her front teeth, symbolic of the adolescent ordeal the world over, it was almost cherubic. Likewise her C-curve bangs and freckle spread. But the eyes—globes of pea green in which pupils sapped tight—they seemed to allege hatred as the sustaining emotion of her life.

  The article mentioned me and Mother and Agneth, several times of course, but it was really about Hannah. How one nation’s duress could be sourced to a little girl keen on pneumatic plague. There was Hannah saying, “Dad didn’t even want to study plague.” There was Hannah saying, “It was my idea.” And she was right. Dad might well have studied malaria otherwise. But her persistence, it probably delighted him in some regard. His nine-year-old in pigtails fixed on the most tenacious slate-wiper in history.

  I read the piece and decided I had to go home immediately. Only it was too late. I’d heard something about leaflets dropped from a helicopter that had seized New York with a pell-mell disregard for the law, for instance, people were breaking into the lowbudge clothing depot Old Navy. Stanley said it was too dangerous, I had to stay put. We spoke every few days. I’d use an office landline to call him and Eric, but since there were always people waiting for the phone, I’d save Hannah for next time. Or the time after that. Whenever I’d ask about her, the news was so upsetting, I didn’t want to know more. Stanley would say they didn’t talk much and she wasn’t home much. That he assumed she was still back in school, but could not say for sure.

  I asked about surrogacy. He said people were not in the mood to have babies, theirs or anyone else’s. Plus can you imagine having to get plague in your ninth month? Horrible.

  He asked about me. I said I was alive. And Mother? Less so. She’d been off drugs for several weeks, but her health showed no correlate improvement. Hers was the most unwilling detoxification ever.

  Eric corroborated Stanley’s account of life in New York. Said he and Kam were trying to rent a car to get the hell out of there, but that there were no rentals left. Also, her parents had forbidden them to use the house upstate, they were saving it for themselves. He was thinking of stealing a car. How did you steal a car? I said there were cars left to steal? He said not really. I told him I’d been weaning for a whole month. He said, “That’s fantastic.” I asked if he could help with Hannah. He said he wouldn’t know where to begin.

  We savaged Alfred’s article. How dare he allow a young girl to take the blame. How dare he make of her flagellating a spectacle. We also noted how little he’d written about my dad. As if in the way conflicts outgrow their putative cause—like anyone gave a shit about Archduke Ferdinand once the war started—the superplague had left him behind. If Dad had gleaned a vaccine or remedy from his work, and if an inimical government or highly patriotic American had devised and unleashed a strain of his own, the country would have been inured and my dad a hero. Instead, he’d become paterfamilias to the hybrid identity of America in a time of plague, part vigilante, part soccer mom. We were assimilating new concerns into old routines. And for every problem, teamwork.

  Apparently, our rehab qua embattlement had att
racted notice. Eric heard mention of it on a Sunday morning talk show about the country under siege. If these were really our last months on earth, how were people dealing? What was the country doing? I could just hear McLaughlin now—Predictions: Koresh or kibbutz, Pat Buchanan?

  We were thirty drug addicts and seven refugees (eight if you included Sam’s baby, which seemed okay since she was getting huge), Susan and five other staff members who lived on the premises. This made forty-four. Forty-four people in a self-managed domicile whose remove gave us a chance.

  We had devised a system. And because we were in rehab, there were certain principles on hand, most notably: in every problem are the conditions of its undoing. This is why addicts are often thanking God for their addiction: in the disease are tools not only for handling it, but for learning from it, too. It is the same argument that favors growing biological weapons for study and the same that holds smallpox samples in reserve. It takes a pox to fight a pox. It takes a deadly strain of plague to articulate a cure. And in some cases, not just a cure but a cure-all.

  Dees one and two had solved the food situation. If we absorbed IGA branch manager Tom Watson’s gambling debts, he’d arrange for a weekly drop of groceries to an abandoned warehouse. In this way, no human contact and enough time for plague droplets, if extant, to self-destruct before pickup. Next came the task of precincts inviolate. The electric fence was fine, but we needed people on the line equipped to deter trespass. People who could aggress the deadly interloper with more than just rage. Cecilia and Gale were on it.

  When you log as much mileage on the road as Gale, you acquire friends divers and seditious. Among her favorites were two Cubans she had smuggled into Florida a couple years back for Elián González activity. Now she was calling in the favor and next you knew, the Cubans had procured for Bluebonnet a crate of Taser M-18s. Cecilia’s job was to sell us on the Tasers. Who’d say no to an old lady? Who would doubt an old lady? She said they were like BB guns. Christopher, who was at that meeting, launched out of his chair. Said, “Are you cracked? The M-18 could bring down Godzilla.” You couldn’t know if Cecilia was genuinely surprised because you couldn’t tell which Cecilia was there. But Gale was miffed. She had assumed the perimeter jobs would lose cachet if they meant having to strut an arm of the militia. She was mistaken. There was a rush on the crate. And after, a lecture about use and care, which only the people in front could understand and then only just, since in addition to the trach tube, Penelope had a cold. Something something electromuscular disruption. Darts, wire, fifty thousand volts. Central nervous system disabled. Muscles contracting unbidden, intruders rendered fetal and paralyzed on the ground for ten seconds. When asked, Penelope said, “Of course I have a problem with this. Should be twenty seconds.” When asked, Gale said, “It’s not like you’re killing the guy, just telling him to back off. The Taser is really a self-defense weapon. Like a stun gun. But more fun. Hey, I like that: More fun than a stun gun.”

  At first, the perimeter jobs seemed to act on the volunteers the way junior ROTC works on the high school kids. They had responsibilities to discharge. Guns to discharge. Our safety was in their hands. This one woman, Monica, I’d seen her come in a month ago. Maybe a few days after me and Mother. What a mess. A nurse had brought her, and they’d just gotten off a plane from Chicago. Monica was dope sick and lolling on the floor. Occasionally, she shrieked. “I can’t be dope sick! I can’t be sick! I can’t stand it!” The admitting intern stood over her with a clipboard and tried to get answers. Age, weight, allergies, and was she experiencing any withdrawal symptoms? The courtyard smelled like vomit for days.

  Weeks later and Monica was the first to get hands on a Taser. A month before she could not look you in the eye and now there she was, standing tall and issuing orders to her unit. It’s true, we had units. And Monica was team leader. She prosecuted her duties with gusto. She reminded me of the Navy Seal woman at Hannah’s day camp, which got me thinking about the ass-whupping female in general and the last horror film I’d seen, one of these werewolf v. vampire things in which the battle for global supremacy is entirely physical. The thinkers die first, and the spoils—such as they are—always go to the species that can effect the most lurid method of snuffing the enemy. The added appeal of this movie, however, was the presence of an ass-whupping female, whose prototype has been in vogue for years. She is hot, she is prehensile, a smattering of blood always complements her skin tone. The AWF might well be analogue to the bra burners of the sixties, but you have to wonder if she’s advancing or retarding their work. Come Halloween, I’m not looking to ape Eleanor Roosevelt, I’ve got the delectable Catwoman in mind. In fact, I have Catwoman in mind even when it’s not Halloween, which is to confess ambitions that demean my gender for the simple reason that a girl in latex will always beat a girl in chambers. In short, Monica was looking good.

  After a while, though, when no one came around to disturb the peace, patrol started to get demoralized. There was nothing to do out there on the perimeter at night. And under the welkin of desert America, whose brights number in the millions, if you’re just out there doing fuckall, you’re bound to end up wanting drugs. What purpose the stunning landscape if not to incite drug lust? Monica began skimping on her shift and eventually stopped going altogether. The others followed suit. I worried they’d start zapping each other for sport. I worried that principles of recovery were not going to take.

  The dead man’s name was Travis. He had a wallet, IDs, a library card, even a ticket stub for a Who concert just last year in Dallas. He was in the system. Probably he had friends. So why hadn’t anyone come looking for him? I found this three times more disturbing than his death or even the circumstances of his burial, assuming burial is what had happened that night, though you couldn’t rule out desert pyre or, I suppose, carrion under the Joshua tree.

  Everyone tried to make like it never happened, and to blend in, the logic being that if you just went about your business, the plague would not notice you. J.C. and Sam folded themselves into Bluebonnet without incident. They worked the kitchen. Turns out J.C. made a good bulk chef. Could not cook for five, but give him fifty and he was tops. Larry and brood picked up chores here and there, laundry, cleaning, handymanery. Actually, just the brood; Larry was too busy holding court or playing Ping-Pong. You had to see this guy play Ping-Pong. Couldn’t hold a cup steady—Parkinson’s or arthritis, who’s to say—but get a paddle in his hand and out came this shark with relevant accoutrements in tow, stuff like charm, zeal, and smooth talk. He’d don his Panama hat and stump for the hard bat. The new rackets and thick foam, they corrupted the integrity of the game. Nope, it was the hard bat or nothing. He beat Dee’s ass. Dee one, whose much touted facility with topspin was belied 21-2. He beat Susan, J.C., and even aspiring batsman, flesh of his flesh, young Christopher. Gale, whose finger stump aggrandized the talents of her good hand, still floundered at about 7-19. Only Monica gave him trouble, Monica whose aspirations were irreclaimable—smash the ball, kill the ball—so that even as she’d miss nine slams out of ten, the ones she hit could pop your eye out. After battle with her, Larry would call it quits, hang his hat, and start in on an encomium for days past. Anyone caught listening could be stuck there for hours.

  What I’m saying is: Life went on. I tried not to worry about Hannah. I tried to focus on recovery and to prepare for what would happen once I left.

  We went to group every day. Margaret and Sandra, who’d obviously quit their resocializing jobs at the dollar store, joined us. My benzo wean was almost over. I didn’t feel much different, but people said I looked better. And had stopped slurring. I do not recall ever having slurred, but then I don’t recall my twenties, either. I began to entertain the possibility that being clean was a good idea, but more in the way you might consider existentialism a good idea. Still, I was entertaining. Toying with. Flirting, even. And I guess this was progress.

  One morning, there was a new person speaking at group. Not new to Bluebonnet, just
new to me. A former patient turned staff. Clean for seven years. I started listening to her share about halfway in. She said, “You can have drugs or you can have everything.” Nods all around. “See, it’s like this. My life has never been better. We’re all but jailed in this place and it pretty much seems like the world’s coming to an end, but you know what? My life has never been better. And I have you people to thank for that. I have my higher power to thank for that. When I first started coming to the rooms, I was a wreck. No hope whatsoever. The pain of just being alive was unbearable. But you told me to keep coming and you loved me. No matter how many times I relapsed, and there were plenty, I was always welcome. No one had ever hugged me before the program. Not a single person. But even if you people weren’t actually hugging me, it felt like you were. Does that make sense? Being here with you is like being cradled all the time. The other thing you said, you said I should pray. That when you pray, it doesn’t change God, it changes you. I didn’t understand that. But I was so desperate to change my life, I would try anything I was told. You said show up, I showed up. You said make coffee, I made coffee. And somewhere along the way, the program got me. Sometimes it gets you way before you get it. Today I work on my attitude all the time. I still have trouble giving myself a break. I still have trouble letting go. It’s an ongoing process. But it’s worth it. It is so worth it. So thanks, that’s all I have today.”