Apocalypse- Year Zero

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  “That’s…. funny,” I said.

  She sighed. Her whole body lifted up and down. “I’ll bet he told you lots of things. I moved to Newark after the divorce, and he visited every weekend, but as soon as he was started at Choate it was, sayonara, Mamma. He wouldn’t even answer my phone calls. Ungrateful pig, he turned out just like his pappa. Ridiculous. Only thing I’m surprised by is you’re not a fourteen year-old girl. But maybe that was what he kept on the side. You know, he marked all my Christmas cards ‘Return to Sender?’”

  “He probably just didn’t like you. Because you’re such a bitch,” I told her. It slipped out, and I was glad.

  “Yeah, that, too,” she said. “Nobody’s perfect.” Her voice got softer. She squeezed my shoulder and I cringed. More wounds opened with oozing fluid. The sheets around me dampened.

  “Did they tell you?” she asked.

  I didn’t answer.

  She breathed out. Her breath was feint peanut butter. Definitely not the kind of lady who lunched at the Twenty-One Club. “No, they probably thought they were doing you a favor and kept it from you. But you should know. You inherited the whole deal,” she said.

  I closed my eyes. She was awful.

  “I bet you think I’m after it. Well, I’m not. I didn’t take a penny from his father, and I’m not going to pick today to start robbing the dead bodies of my children.”

  The bed creaked as she repositioned herself closer to me, and the peanut and bleach smell grew.

  “You hear me?” she asked. I blinked, which she interpreted as assent. “I came here for my conscience. This man. Short, balding. Looks like one of those sleazy dial-a-sheister lawyers you see on billboards. You’d never guess he was a gangster… But maybe that fits. You’d have to be kinda team B to get into that line of work.”

  It occurred to me that she might be an imposter. The real Natalie was still eating crepes in Paris, eating crepes, and this woman was just another 9-11 loon. Had anyone checked her paperwork?

  “I’m a drug rehab counselor, in case Cole never told you. Had a problem with Gin, which he also probably didn’t tell you. Anyway, baldy tracked me down and broke into my office t’other night. Didn’t say his name. Thought I knew something, and he can’t get in to see you, so he came to me. Cole was into some dirty business. Weapons—”

  My breath hitched and she stopped talking. Her cheekbones were high, just like Cole’s, and they both had sharp chins. The resemblance was uncanny.

  “You all right?” she asked.

  “You ought to go before I call for security,” I said. I noticed then, that no one had cut the ring from my finger. I could see the lump it made under the bandages.

  She shook her head slowly, left to right. I imagined her body on fire. Watched her burn like I had burned.

  Sweating, she continued. “Weapons-grade uranium. You know what they use that for, right? Bombs. The kind that start wars. Cole was supposed to have it delivered to a buyer in China, but he died. So he’s got the money and the uranium, and no one knows where. Anyway, they let me alone when I proved I hadn’t seen him in twenty years. His dad wasn’t so lucky. Serves him right. He let me sink my whole retirement fund into Enron. Maybe you read about him in the paper. They cut him into pieces and threw him into the East River. One of those Mexican immigrants fishing off the 125th Street pier caught his arm on a fishing line.”

  “But God, it’s hot in here all a sudden. How can you stand it so hot? If I were you I’d give them everything. Hire somebody to get in touch with them, so you never meet them, and they don’t feel like they have to kill you.”

  Her hand hovered over my arm, close enough that I could feel the displaced air, anticipate the sting.

  “You’ve got the wrong guy. Or they do,” I said, and even as I said it, I wondered. No trust fund, no inheritance, and yet, the man had owned a two-thousand square foot apartment on the Upper West Side.

  “No, honey. I don’t,” she said. By now her short hair was damp, and beads of sweat ran into her eyes. She mopped them with a white handkerchief. “Good luck,” she said. The bed squeaked as she stood. I wished, suddenly, that I could set her on fire, and turn her to ashes.

  “You don’t know anything,” I said. “He came back for me that day. He got past security and found me. He made me leave with him before the collapse. He saved my life.”

  “I wouldn’t have guessed that,” she said. “Maybe he wasn’t such a shit after all. At least not to you, which I guess is some kind of consolation.”

  “You didn’t know him,” I said.

  She was at the door now, calling back over her shoulder. I could feel it in the shape of the wind that came at me. “Well, nobody really knows anybody, do they?”

  She opened the door. The wind breezed through, and then went stagnant as the heat swallowed it.

  Chapter 9

  I don’t want another drink; I just want my last one again.

  By November I’d so mystified Dr. Rossoff and his colleagues that they’d decided to be honest with me. Too much of my skin had been burned for grafts to take. The heat my body had endured and survived without organ damage defied any documented precedent. The melting point of platinum is 1774 degrees. During my flight with Cole’s body, by engagement ring melted to my hand, and could not be removed without severing my fourth finger.

  Rossoff explained all this to me, his intern in tow. By now I could sit up in bed, and a hard layer of scar tissue had formed around my neck, so that I could swivel it without tearing anything open.

  “How am I still alive?” I asked.

  Rossoff shook his head. “I have no idea. But it gets more interesting. Your skin is growing back: you’re regenerating.”

  I lifted my hand, which was no longer bandaged, and saw that in places, small islands of scar tissue had grown. It was monstrous.

  “I hope you believe now, that it hurts,” I said.

  “That’s another thing,” the doctor said. “Most people would have died from the smoke first, the heat second, the exposure third, and finally the morphine. We considered you terminal, so we were kept upping the dosage. Right now, you’re taking enough to kill a linebacker. But here you are.”

  “Here I am,” I said. A thought occurred to me, and I wondered that I had not thought of it before. “I’d like a mirror.”

  Rossoff looked at his clipboard as if I had not spoken. The intern, a young Asian man with black hair, cleared his throat.

  “I want to see how bad it is,” I said.

  “We should wait. You might continue to improve,” Rossoff answered.

  “Give me a mirror!” I said, only my voice was dry like a desert, and I began to cry, not at all certain, with those bandages, whether my eyes produced tears.

  Rossoff leaned over, and shot my IV bag full of morphine.

  * * *

  “I want to see myself,” I said the next day, when I woke again.

  My parents were visiting. My mother reached into her sensible black nylon purse and took out the Cover Girl pressed powder compact.

  “Don’t,” my father moaned.

  “Yes,” she said, still with that unsinkable smile, and handed it to me.

  I unwrapped the bandages. With each layer I unwound, my cheeks felt more of the soft breeze coming air filters. When I held up the mirror. I was unprepared for what I’d find. My teeth were where my lips should have been. Instead of skin, there were pulsing veins. My nose was gone, too. Only bony cartilage.

  I looked dead. Perhaps I was dead, only walking.

  I flicked the compact away from me. While I cried, it caught the light from the window, and reflected it against the wall, burning a tiny hole. I didn’t stop crying until my mother got up from her chair and climbed onto the side of the bed, but knew better than to touch me, and open my fragile wounds.

  Chapter 10

  Presumed Dead

  By late June, a thin layer of hairless scar tissue had grown over the entirety of my body. The bandages were gone. The hospi
tal was kind enough to honor my request, and stopped serving my food with silverware, so that I did not spy my grotesquerie in the reflection of a spoon. I ate with my hands.

  My parents stopped by every day on their way from work. They brought sandwiches in brown bags that my father had packed, and ate with me, then left together. One night, after reassuring me that I was still beautiful on the inside, my mother took her leave from me with my father. Once she was out of my room, she broke down and wept. I got up from my bed on scarred and broken feet and watched her through the windowed door. My father held her. They buried their faces in the crooks of one another’s necks, and it occurred to me that they had a good marriage.

  My new skin was tender, and continued to burn, as if I’d carried the fire with me. It hurt to walk; it hurt to cough, it hurt when my mother kissed my cheek; it hurt just to breathe.

  The television had stopped covering my story; even Fox News had moved on, favoring instead the woman soldier who’d been captured in Afghanistan, and the brave men who’d stormed the desert to rescue her. Other networks returned to their coverage of the celebrity gossip, from Britney’s pregnancy to Whitney Houston’s crack addiction. On the national news, there were pollution-sick fire fighters and office workers, rising oil prices, one war finished, another about to begin. I was forgotten; presumed dead.

  Turned out, Cole really had willed everything to me. His apartment, along with a few hundred thousand dollars. It was true that his father had been murdered during the week after September 11. But from what I’d read, the incident had been a bungled robbery. He was survived by his young third wife and four kids. I hadn’t known any of them well. I wrote a note of condolence. The woman who’d claimed to be Cole’s mother never returned.

  The inheritance came in handy, because my workers’ compensation didn’t cover my Oxycontin, and the 9-11 fund was still pending. My parents had taken out a second mortgage on their house to cover the costs.

  It was sunny the day my parents retrieved me from Memorial Sloane Kettering. A clear blue sky. They walked on either side of me as I double caned my way down the sterile white hall. A lone reporter wearing blue jeans and a long, blonde pony-tail, waited just outside the building. She would have been very pretty, but her wide, jointed nose rendered her plain.

  As I eased into the back seat of the car, she pointed her camera at me. The lens caught the light, and reflected it back. I turned, squinting, then dropped my hands, and let her see my face. Shamed, she did not snap the picture, but instead lowered the camera and looked away.

  My mother slammed shut the red Camry door, and off we went. Along the way my father picked his scab, which nine months later had still not healed. My mother offered me a bag of airplane peanuts. A joke? Cluelessness? I couldn’t decide. We crossed the 59th Street Bridge into Queens. The trees got thicker with each passing mile until we entered the suburbs, and then the hedged driveway that was the place I’d mocked for so long: home.

  With their help I walked the steps, and entered my, old pink room. As a surprise my mother had emptied my studio apartment, and filled this place with my double bed, antique couch, and vanity. All along the dresser were fresh cut lilacs from their garden.

  “It’ll be like your own little apartment,” my father announced, then mopped his open wound.

  “Thank you,” I told them as they left me to sleep. When they were gone, I took out the bandages I’d gotten at the hospital, sat in front of the vanity mirror, and wound them around my face layer upon layer, like the Invisible Man.

  Chapter 11

  The Redhead

  I ate my meals in bed, watched television in bed, and once my mother got the prescribed bedpan, shit in bed, too. Even on sunny days, the blinds were drawn. My father’s expression showed bewilderment, and occasional disgust, though my mother carried the heroically flat affect of a stoic, or schizophrenic. Neither contradicted my wishes to be left sedentary and in the dark with my morphine, which had now taken the guise of Oxycontin, which I chewed for the high; they pitied me too much.

  My attendant morphine dreams defied wrangling. The riders returned. The one who rode in front clarified each time she visited, while the rest stayed veiled in shadow. Her red hair was set in wide swaths, like flames. Always, that song played:

  Four is a magic number

  But then again so is five

  There's a sinking sinner in your gutter

  He's the happiest man alive

  From a distance, the riders watched the old me on a sunny day at Jones Beach. I was wearing my red bikini, showing off my old body, my old face. Cole lay on a blanket next to me, only the sand was desert dry. Then the sky got overcast, and I could hear the beating of hooves. The waves stacked and rose. Everything turned dark. Cole and I stood, holding hands.

  To my left, somebody’s bored kid sister tugged a loose thread on my suit. It zig-zagged in an endless loop of material. The girl had a deep, winding scar on her face, like the side of a hot Slinky had burned her. “You’ll need a translator. In Padmos, they speak the Patois,” she told me in a thick, Southern twang as she unwound and unwound.

  The waves got higher. Cole and I tried to run to them, but the little girl’s arms were piled with loose fabric, and I was naked. The big one froze just above us all before it slammed the shore. 1000 feet high, at least.

  Unmask! They all shouted: the riders, Cole, the little girl.

  The wave crashed down. It had turned from water to blood.

  * * *

  Always, the dream was the same. Always, the first rider’s hair burned like stars, while her thirsty horse foamed. And when I woke, my room was so hot that the water by my bed steamed.

  Chapter 12

  Camera Obscura

  In early August, a funny thing happened. The sun’s rays passed through a small opening in the bottom of the West-facing window and shone against my pink, childhood pink wall. They made a multi-colored camera obscura, so that everything that was happening out there on the street, I could see in miniature.

  Kids in flip-flops walked to the town pool. Maple tree branches shivered in the breeze like underdressed young women. Joggers, skinny and fat, tromped along blacktop. Cars cruised at twenty miles per hour, because this was a quiet town full of children. The ordinariness of it haunted me.

  Rossoff chided me for wearing bandages, and not giving my face the chance to breathe, so I stopped seeing him, except to get my Oxycontin. A social worker came to the house to help me navigate all the paperwork I needed to fill out. I told her to stop coming when she announced that she planned to write a book about the stigma of severe disfigurement, and wondered if she could use my real name instead of a pseudonym.

  At the end of the summer, my old high school friends visited, en masse. I hadn’t seen most of them since their weddings. They giggled with each other in the vestibule of my parents’ house, happy for the excuse to reunite. I heard the sound of mewing babies, too. Once one started crying, the rest followed, all high pitched, like hunger. Perhaps I imagined it, but I thought I could smell them, too. Talcum powder, sweat, and cheap Chanel Number 5.

  My mother bounced up the stairs, thrilled to herald their arrival. I imagined them pulling fold-out chairs before me, feeding their kids with bloated tits while they talked. It wouldn’t just be pity in their eyes, but schadenfreude. What a star I’d pretended to be.

  “No, mom,” I’d told her, and watched her smile fall. Maybe she’d had high hopes that they’d redeem the drug addicted slug in bed that I’d become. “Make them go.”

  “She’s not herself today,” I heard her say with a lowered voice in the vestibule. Then clucks, disappointment, and a new decision, to eat lunch at the Carle Place Diner on Old Country Road. The sound of stroller wheels and buckles, Velcro diaper satchels opening and closing. I watched through the camera obscura as they packed their babies into car-seats, and drove in a caravan, away.

  “Your old clubs,” my father said, carrying a set of Callaways into my room, then arranging the
m by length in their bag, then rearranging them again by frequency of use. “It’s a nice day. I took it off early from work. Thought we could play nine holes and get a burger. You doctor said you should start exercising.”

  The scab on his face now had a black stitch in it.

  “Won’t you be ashamed of me?” I asked.

  He lifted his hand to pick at his scab, then stopped when he got to the black plastic stitch. “Why didn’t you see your girlfriends today?”

  I looked at the far wall, where a kid in glowing pink rode her Hot Wheels down the driveway across the street. Beneath her black, Coke bottle glasses, she had a scar from the tip of her forehead that curved down toward her eye, and then back again, to her ear, like somebody’d cut her with a knife. “I didn’t turn out like you thought I would, did I?”

  He sighed. Against the wall, the kid on the Hot Wheels skidded and fell. The prescription forms and referral papers tacked to my bulletin board rippled, as a gust of hot air filled the room.

  “This attitude, don’t you think we get tired of it? Have you noticed you’re your mother has gone completely gray?”

  I looked away from him, because no, I had not noticed until he’d just now mentioned it. “You raised me to think I was special, but it bit you in the ass. I hate you because you hate you.”

  My father let go of the clubs. They dropped and rattled. He didn’t move to pick them up. “I don’t like this side of you,” he said.

  “This is what I deserve. Both of us, Cole and me. I’m being punished. But it’s your fault, too. You made me like this with your stupid country club. Of course I wanted to be better than that.”

  He touched his cheek, felt the stitch, this time pulled at it. A tiny drop of blood crawled down his chin. “Get dressed and let’s go,” he said.