by Brian Hodge
The double doors parted; it was already there.
He leaned his head back into the padded interior. He shut his eyes.
He squinted down through slitted lids at his legs. The right leg still felt cold. The foot, through some oddity of perspective, appeared very far away. He tried to thrum his toes but felt nothing, though the round, scuffed rubber end of the sneaker flexed like a mound of earth beneath which some unseen creature moved.
In fact the sensation, or lack of it, had now crept up to his knee; he rocked forward, took a step, but felt nothing.
No blood coursing, no pins-and-needles. Only a coldness.
The floor locked into place, and the doors slid back.
Well, he could still walk.
He hobbled into the hall.
2642…2644…twenty-sixth floor.
The elevator thumped closed behind him.
He had come up here for something. What? So I'm just as morbid as the rest of them, he thought. Maybe worse. No, he decided, not worse; they'd all be up here now, too, if they could, just to see where it happened, to savor the thought of it, turning it over and over before their minds' eyes like the secret behind the door at the end of the hall in the middle of the night in a house they thought they'd forgotten.
But he was already as high as the machinery would take him. He'd have to take the stairs the rest of the way, to the roof.
All but dragging one leg, Morgan tried to make it to the end of the long hall.
He passed door after door, yet he had the impression that they were moving past him while he remained in place, as if struggling on a treadmill. Each door was closed tight, sealed. Only if the doors were suddenly to swing wide could the lives they hid impinge upon him, or he upon them. And what then? Would their eyes recoil at the unexpected contact, would they slam soundproofed doors at his passing? Or would they stand frozen, fascinated?
Probably neither, he decided. They would most likely pretend that he was not there, that he did not exist.
He wondered in passing how many of the guests, insulated within these structures in which their lives played out—how many of them knew what was down there in the street right now? Would they want to know? What about the one who had chosen to leave his hermetic safety, to climb out under an alien sky, to scream down, straining to burn like a shooting star in the steely dusk?
He stopped, breathing heavily.
He leaned against a wall, and felt something cold touch his skin.
He turned: a fire extinguisher.
In the glass, behind the words BREAK IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, the reflection of his face.
The dim image reminded him: twenty-five, thirty extra pounds, so that the lines of his features were now soft, the face puffed, the skull beneath almost hidden by granola, wheat germ, yogurt, honey, unpasteurized milk, acidophilus culture, desiccated liver, torula yeast, turbinado sugar, dried fruits and cashew butter and whole wheat spaghetti and Brockmeyer's ice cream and date nut bread and carrot cake, and brown rice…it was good food. But now he looked at himself, unable for the moment to walk, and the fear returned, the fear that sapped and took the place of his will, and he forced himself to see and be reassured. But he could not look back, not for long. That's right, nodding sadly, turning away, you can serve it up, can't you? But when it's on the plate, you can't see it. Can you?
"Shit," he said aloud. The first thing he had thought when he saw him in the street was, I'm glad it wasn't me!
The left side of his body was cold, and growing colder.
But still he wanted to be there, to be up there, to be where he had been, to know what it was like.
He had to swing one leg around, using the other as the axis, and reach down with his good right hand and hold the knee from folding. In that way he managed to go on. To the fire door.
The stairs were a problem.
From here Morgan could see the Pacific Ocean beyond the shadow palm trees at the end of Wilshire Boulevard. The shoreline was broken by the ragged teeth of silhouetted buildings and, above it all, the clouds seemed to be bleeding dull colors that were illuminated from behind, masked by drifts of suspended particles.
He approached the edge of the roof.
He felt currents of air rising to meet him. He stopped between the two blocklike structures, which he now recognized as ventilation outlets. Droplets of moisture fell on his face and neck. They were like warm pinpricks.
The left side of his body, from toes to fingertips, was icy cold, numb.
He moved closer to the edge.
When he looked down, there was no sense of dizziness. At this distance the body on the street would be just another dark spot on the sidewalk.
He could not see it.
There were only a few raptorial stragglers left around the entrance, a single police car, the sedan with the dent and the TV station wagon. The man under the tarp had been cleared away. It had all started when he touched the hand, the empty hand curled heavenward; the cold hand. He wondered about the body. He pictured a collapsed sac, crushed bones, the pools of blood inside.
He heard a door slam. The door to the roof. But he had closed it. The wind? He stretched his neck but could not see around the air outlets.
Then he heard voices.
Police, probably. Or in-house security, checking, rehandling the details like beads until they satisfied themselves that it was a simple suicide.
And what would they think, finding him here?
But they could not see him. They would not, as long as they stayed away from the edge.
He turned back, swaying slightly.
Now several new dots angled on the sidewalk, and others moved jerkily across the street to gather at the front of the building. With a peculiar calmness, he realized that they were clustering together to watch him.
How long had he been standing here? Long enough for the police to notice, to send someone up? Did they think—
He waited, taking more and more of his weight onto his right side as the left side of his body grew heavy, a dead weight, unresponsive; and still he waited. He no longer had voluntary control over the stiffening joints, the leaden shoe. He watched with detachment as it began to move in the rising wind. The foot lost contact with the graveled roof, rose an inch, two inches into the air and swung, slowly at first, then in an increasing arc, nearer and nearer the edge. Now in space, now over the roof, now in space, now over the roof.
He waited, watching with growing concentration and concern, and presently he began to wonder which way it would fall.
Heads cocked and eyes fixed, his own and many others.
THE SMELL OF DEATH
The little girl bundled in the back seat of the Falcon wagon was covered with pink blotches, and as the man from the diner leaned over her she released fast, shallow breaths almost directly in his face, breaths that smelled of bread hot from the oven. He drew back and stood shakily, a shudder passing down between his shoulder blades.
"I can't say what we'll do," whined the woman, "if we can't find that doctor. He's the only one for miles and miles. He's supposed to be fishin' all weekend, that's what that lazy nurse of his told us, but…" Her voice ebbed and she sank again into the shadow of the headrest.
"I tol' you," whispered her husband hoarsely, a big, uneducated man with cracked hands, "t' stop it. Now we just got t' bear it. It's no one's trouble but our own."
The man from the diner turned away, dredging up a sigh from so low it shook his dry, thin chest, and kept his face from them. He walked back inside, made three ham sandwiches and two coffees in Styrofoam cups and snapped on the lids and brought it all out to them in a tight brown paper bag.
"Scarlet fever, is that so bad?" asked the wife hopefully, peering around her husband's shoulders from inside the car.
"That's not what it is," he told them. He handed the bag in and took the three wrinkled dollar bills, one for the gas, two for the food. He unfolded them, pocketed two, handed one back impulsively. "Two'll do it."
"It ain
't the fever, then?" said the husband, still suspicious, grasping for an alternative as he took back the bill unquestioningly. In the light through the windshield his face took on a sallow look.
"Scarlatina," he said shortly. Before they could react to that, he waved a dark hand and directed them. "Go straight down the highway to the first turnoff, veer right, and in about thirty miles you'll hit Alamagosa. There's a kind of clinic there. It's run for the Indians, but they'll see you. Ask at the Phillips station."
"Well, come on, then," said the husband, slamming the worn transmission into reverse and hunching his head around over his big shoulder.
"No need to hurry," the man from the diner said. The car hesitated, the back end dipping on worn-out shocks as the transmission strained mightily to hold to the underside of the car.
He decided not to say anything more.
He walked around to the back and looked inside as the woman said, "I just can't thank you enough." She seemed ready to release a stream of words that had been locked up tightly for years, like a five-year diary waiting to spill open at the first touch. "You seem to know so much," she added, leaving the sentence up in the air in a kind of polite awe.
He emptied his lungs and bent a last time over the girl child, whose cheeks were the color of the inner surface of shells found on a beach at sunset, and took a heavy, very heavy breath. What he had been hoping not to find was there. It was there and so there was nothing else left for him to do. He stretched inside to his waist and put his sunburned hands on the girl's face as if feeling for a fever.
The child was already delirious. He lowered his ear to her lips. She was muttering like lightning, most of it incoherent, but he caught a few words:
"…green stars going up to the sky…ride my bike…"
He cupped his hands around the sides of her neck, meeting his fingers at the back in the sweat-steamed twists of blanket. He gazed down, hoping to see her eyes, but they were lidded over by almost translucent membranes streaked with veins swollen full of blood. He saw the jerky movements of her eyes fighting from side to side in their sockets. He held his breath, forcing the infection from his nostrils, and made an adjustment in her neck. He felt a nerve slip out of place. The girl's brow knitted quizzically for a passing moment, and then she died.
He stood up.
"You're a kind man," said the woman, extending her hand from the front window. He went around but did not let her touch him. "I want to thank you. When Rose Ann's well," she rushed on, trying to get it all out before the car bounded away, "we're going to stop back by here and—and buy the biggest dinner you ever served up!" She beamed. "That'll be all right, won't it, Mister…?"
"Raven," he said, his mouth dry as dust, and turned on his worn heel and walked quickly back to his diner, head down, eyes hidden, not looking back and trying not to think of them again as the station wagon pummeled the rocky dirt and ground away down the highway, heading east.
He hoped it would be a long time before they checked the back seat.
The screen door slammed like an old overshoe against the door jamb. He shut his eyes as the air inside hit him. Doughnuts. Bologna and sharp brown mustard. Horseradish. Coffee, fresh and old grounds. Open packages of bread. Cheese, American and Swiss. And the acrid bus tray blue with silver cleaner where the dirty forks and spoons were soaking. And apples and oranges and bananas, and the warm stickiness of runny chocolate.
And the sawdust.
Nostrils flaring, he stormed behind the counter and began rewrapping everything, twisting the end of the bread, hurling the cheese into the groaning refrigerator, screwing the cap back on the mustard, burying the can of chocolate syrup deep in the cupboard.
He turned to face the empty diner. The chairs dry sticks of kindling. The flowing window glass frozen in still heat mirages, the sills below burial pyres for the mummified flies.
He swayed over the sawdust.
It was a knife at his nostrils. And even as he shook his head the fume of the oranges crept again from behind the door to the back room, the chocolate beginning to pour down invisibly from the crack in the cupboard, the old smells of slowly decomposing food filling the empty desert air like a crowd closing in on him from all sides.
He cursed, the pungent air barely moving in front of his shiny, creased lips.
He brought his hand down suddenly on the counter top with a force that stung his fingers and rattled the napkin holders. He brought his hand down again and again, slamming wrist and forearm as well, firing needles of pain that blocked out everything else again and again and again.
In his rage he did not see the figure approaching until the screen door screaked, bouncing lightly.
"Hey, you're open, aren't you? You gotta be."
It was a man, late twenties, coat slung over his shoulder, wide tie loosened at the bulging, moist collar.
"Menu's on the table," mumbled Raven. He turned to the water glasses.
"Uh, you run the station, too?" The young man hooked a thumb toward the pump outside and the garage.
Raven glanced back at him. He hadn't heard him drive up. He squinted, trying to see through the gaping rents in the weathered screen door.
The young man dragged his dusty feet to the counter and closed a shaky hand around the plastic tumbler. He drained it noisily in one pull. Raven flinched at the grease and gasoline permeating the man's skin, the almost rancid rilling in the hair curling behind the ears and something else, an expensively androgynous floral cologne mingling with the perspiration, the mixture of smells strongest in the darkened armpits of the wilted sport coat over his shoulder.
"I said, would you mind?" the young man was saying.
Raven refilled the water glass.
Halfway through it the young man slowed down.
"See, ah, my car quit on me back there" (no direction that Raven could judge, just back, way back) "oh, five miles, maybe." The young man snickered at himself. "I haven't had this much exercise since I quit the rowing team!"
He meant it.
Raven nodded. He reached behind for the strings to his apron. "Get in the pickup," he said. Cost you five dollars, he started to add. But the thought of leaving the diner, all of it for a while, however briefly, seemed to lift something from his shoulders.
The keys almost burned his hand. He led the way outside, and the young man hauled himself up and in as if mounting a horse for the first time. They bounced onto the road and drove west, canvas water bags thumping against the bumper.
Raven breathed deeply, grateful for the clean chickweed and mesquite and the old blacktop baking in the sun. "Where you headed?" he heard himself ask.
The young man seemed relieved to talk. "Driving straight through to L.A.," he said, pulling his hair off the side of his face. "I thought I might find what I'm looking for out here, but there doesn't seem to be much but sand and lizards. Talking to the natives hasn't gotten me much but thirsty."
"You're looking for something?" asked the driver, keeping his eyes on the road, unnecessarily since the first curve was not for two miles.
"Well, I guess I should explain. I'm a reporter, sort of. With Sandler's Monthly. Was. Supposed to be on assignment, but I'm afraid my leave is about up. I wasn't able to get the story, so I guess they'll write the whole thing off somehow. They'd better."
The reporter blotted his forehead with his sleeve and put on his dark glasses, continuing to watch the flatlands for something, anything.
"It's crazy. A guy nobody's seen for fifteen years. Named McCabe, used to work for NASA. No family, his friends swear they haven't seen him since, not even the Internal Revenue's heard a word. And I'm supposed to find him. Ha! 'How I Spent My Summer Vacation.' Don't ask."
"This way's shorter," said the driver, downshifting and spinning out as the truck left the road. A tumbleweed lodged in the passenger's side of the truck, which had no doors; the reporter kicked it away and picked nettles from his dusty cuffless trouser leg.
"Some country," he said. "A guy gets lost out
here, he may as well find a rock and start scratching out a headstone."
"Takes some getting used to," admitted the driver.
"Yeah, you could really lose yourself. I guess I'm a born city boy, though. I'm not ready for a place to escape to, at least not yet. Though I may need one, when I get back to New York empty-handed."
"It's not so much an escape," said the driver, his eyes on the distant hills, "as a haven." He added, "The air is relatively clean out here."
They drove on, passing the bleached skull of an animal of some kind half-buried next to a cactus. The sandy ground, nearly white as salt, was fairly firm and smooth-packed, so that the driver had no trouble controlling the truck.
"Tell me about your friend, the one you're looking for."
"Aw, it all happened a long time ago. It's a pretty depressing story, I'm afraid."
"I wouldn't ask if I weren't interested. Besides," the driver added flatly, "a man can get too used to being alone. Builds up a need for talk."
"Well then there now."
Breathing heavily, sweating like a pig, the reporter went ahead.
"See, this McCabe was part of a four-man team they were training in Houston for the first manned satellite program. You remember how long ago that was. They put them through this hundred-and-eighty-eight-day milk run in a lab mock-up. Self-contained air purification, moisture retrieval, you know, the whole bit.
"Anyway, if you really want to hear it…" The driver said nothing so he kept talking. "What happened was this: at one point in the test they were supposed to be cut off completely from 'ground control'; it was planned that way, to simulate a power failure in the model space station's communications systems. For thirty-six hours. During that time audio-visual contact was suspended completely. And that's when it happened.
"In spite of the really unbelievably thorough immunization against any kind of infection or disease—permanent, lifetime inoculations, by the way, some in the experimental stage then and hush-hush now, reserved for Presidents and like that—despite every precaution, something went wrong. The X-factor, Jesus factor, whatever you want to call it. Something happened, and the guys at NASA still aren't exactly sure what.
