by Steven Price
She opened her eyes.
She was very cold. She felt something flutter across her face and it felt like a moth and the darkness before her was utter and absolute. Then she sat up, and the white sheet fell away.
She had been laid out in a field of the dead. She pulled the sheet away and got to her feet and her left arm was hanging at a strange angle from the elbow. All around her lay the bodies of the dead and some were covered as she had been and others had been rolled onto their backs and their sightless faces shone in the night. She was naked to the waist but she did not cover herself and in the darkness she could not see the bad shape her arm was in.
She staggered over the rolled corpses and down a grassy incline towards the street.
Her throat was dry and her lips cracked and her tongue felt huge and furred in her mouth. There was something not right with her and she cast her face slowly from left to right and then she knew it was her son and she lurched back up towards the bodies and picked her way among them. Gasping, her bad arm dangling. She could not think clearly and she stooped, peered, straightened, stooped. But she did not see her son.
She felt nothing. She did not think she could walk but even so her legs carried her down to the street and towards a yellow lantern where a man sat staring into the night. There were lights moving out in that darkness and she could not understand what they were.
He stood very quickly when he saw her.
Oh my god, he said. Oh god. Are you okay? Pike! Sit here. Pike!
She was trying to ask about her son and her ruined mouth worked silently and no words came. Then in that soft light she saw her crushed hand. The skin was mottled and black as if the rot had already set in and her fingers were half again as long as they should have been. Two fingers stood out at a weird angle. The arm was covered in slicks of blood and some yellowish grease that smelled of fat and she looked at it as if it did not belong to her.
Where’d you come from? the man was asking. And then: Pike!
Where is my arm? she said thickly. She raised her head and looked at the man. Where is my son? she tried again.
A second man came out of the darkness. He looked at her and kneeled down beside her speaking to her all the while and then he stood and disappeared again into the night. He came back carrying a case and set it down and unlatched and lifted its lid and he pulled from the box several coils of bandages and wrappings. He looked very tired. He pressed a pill between her lips and then lifted a bottle of water to her and she choked as it went down.
Give it a minute, the man said. He was a squat thick man with a black beard and his eyes were liquid and wet. He smelled of sweat and urine. His mouth was hard.
I know this woman, he said to his companion. I was there when they brought her out. We thought she was dead.
Christ. I thought she was a ghost.
The second man was wiping very gently at her face and the gauze was coming away black with dried blood.
My son, she said thickly. My son. My son is.
Try not to say anything just yet.
My son. He was with me.
The man sat back on his heels and looked at her. He did not smile. He said in a soft clear voice: Your son is alive. Look at me. No look at me. He’s fine. We pulled him out hours ago.
Mason?
Yes.
She started to cry then and she bent over and cried for what seemed a very long time. She cried and then someone was draping a blanket across her naked shoulders and the bearded man was still talking.
What? she said through her tears. What are you saying?
Your son’s fine, the man went on. He’ll be glad to see you.
Where is he? she said. I want to see him.
What’s wrong with her head? the first man said.
Nothing. It’s just a small cut. But look at this. The second man lifted her arm with great gentleness. Each shift in position left her shuddering with pain, light-headed and dazed with it.
It’s crushed, he said finally. And I don’t know what else.
I want to see my son.
You will. Try to be patient. I haven’t seen him since last night. He must have been taken to the relief station on the last truck. Which is where you’ve got to go yourself.
There’ll be doctors there, the second man said.
You’re a, she said and frowned. You’re a doctor?
No. He did not look up from her arm as he spoke. I worked construction for a few summers. There were a lot of accidents. I don’t know what else could be wrong with her, he said over his shoulder. She might be hurt internally.
She grimaced, her teeth clenched. Already the pain was subsiding and then it flared up again and then it seemed as if it were sifting through some sort of a mesh screen and when it reached her it was in very tiny points of pain and then even that was dissolving.
It’s kicking in now. Look at her.
You feel that? the bearded man said.
No, she said dully. Yes.
Do you remember your name?
She stared at him and blinked and then she nodded.
What’s your name?
Anna Mercia.
Do you know what year it is, Anna Mercia?
I need to find my son.
He began to wrap her blotched hand very carefully in a thick winding bandage and when he had pinned this he set her forearm as best he could and held it bent at her ribs and wrapped it firmly against her body and then binding it tight he pinned it off.
Who’s her son? the second man murmured.
Little black kid. What was his name? Mason?
Mason.
As she said it she felt her thoughts clearing, hardening to a very cold sharp edge.
When is the next truck? she asked. I need to use a phone. I need to phone my daughter.
You won’t get through to anyone. The lines are down.
She means a cell. Do you mean a cell? Some of the cells are getting through.
When is the next truck?
But they did not know. It could be an hour, it could be later, the second man told her. The two men slid a thick grey sweater over her head and very carefully worked it down over her dressings and she roped her good arm through a sleeve. Then the engineer with the black beard pointed to a light high up in the rubble and told her that she would find a young woman there with a badly stitched cut along her nose and that this woman had a working cell. He walked her to the base of the ruins and gave her a flashlight and held her shoulder briefly in his strong grip and then he was gone.
Anna Mercia went up uneasily. She found a heavy-set woman in the darkness sitting on an overturned crate and she said, Are you Aretha? I need to use your phone.
But the heavy woman shook her head and waved her on up towards a circle of light farther on. There were men sitting in the light speaking in low voices and a red-haired girl off to one side with a badly stitched nose and this girl’s hands looked huge in the shadows.
Aretha? Anna Mercia asked.
The red-haired girl looked up.
I was told you had a phone.
The batteries are low.
I need to call my daughter.
The red-haired girl studied her a long moment. Two minutes, she said. That’s it.
She nodded and took the phone and pinned it between her knees and started to dial her home telephone and then she stopped. Then she dialed her home anyway and listened for a moment to the dead tone. The girl watched with a furrowed brow. She quit the call and dialed her daughter’s cell and let it ring.
On the fourth ring a man answered.
Who is this? she said abruptly. Where’s Kat?
Who? the man said. His voice was echoing as if he stood in an empty room.
Katherine. My daughter. Let me talk to her.
Who is this? the man demanded.
Then the line went dead.
Hello? she shouted. Hello? Are you there?
The girl watched and bit her lip and Anna Mercia punched the numbers again, avoiding the girl�
�s eyes. It rang and rang and this time no one picked up.
She stared foolishly at the phone for a long moment. She felt angry and then embarrassed and then very frightened.
It was the right number, she said.
What happened?
I don’t know. A man answered.
She had not dialed the wrong number. She knew this.
Kat lost her phone, she told herself. She just dropped her phone and somebody else found it. It doesn’t mean anything. Anyone can find a phone. It doesn’t mean anything.
The phones are all a mess right now, the red-haired girl said. You could’ve been connected with anyone.
Anna Mercia looked away. The men were muttering among themselves and she sat then with her elbow on her knee and she closed her eyes, lowered her head. She did not want to think about what to do.
—at 8.6, one of the men was saying. And not just Seattle. Bill would know. Bill?
Anna Mercia opened her eyes, studied the men in the harsh light.
A short thick young man was leaning forward. His hands were badly cut up and he counted off on his fingers as he spoke. She watched the glint of his wristwatch in the lamplight. Electricity, water, hospitals, airports, most of the roads, they’re all gone, he said. Airport’s closed except to emergency traffic. Roads are a mess. If help comes it’ll have to come by sea. But we’ll be on our own for at least 72 hours.
She closed her eyes again. Her head felt thick and her arm had begun to ache. The voices rolled in and past her in waves and she could not quite grasp them.
I heard that too.
What does that even mean? Seventy-two hours from now? Or from yesterday?
We’re just supposed to wait it out—
Until the weekend at least. Fuck this.
Take it easy.
Isn’t anyone coming? Don’t they have anyone to help?
Come on. Take it easy, Bill.
Shut off the gas. Conserve what water you’ve got.
You know what this means?
They got the army coming in. No fucking doctors. But the army? Sure.
Oh they got doctors. Just not for us.
Vancouver’ll get the attention. You wait and see.
We’re the fucking capital.
You think that matters? Wait and see.
What you need is a radio. You don’t got a radio, you’re fucked.
I said take it easy.
You tell me to take it easy one more time.
She sat for a long time in that darkness listening to them. The hour was very late when at last she stood. She crossed that small circle of light and paused and held her shattered arm and stared out at the darkness. There were no lights in the city. She shivered.
Men were bearing loaded buckets streetwards and their forearms passed back and forth in the darkness and their skins were slick despite the cold air. A wire handle snapped and a bucket fell skittering off the broken slabs with its rubble bursting in small clouds and she saw it tumble out of the harsh lamplight and heard it bang to a stop below and then a lady set up cursing. The bucket-bearer stood with the handle still in his fist and he met the woman’s gaze and shrugged wearily and threw the wire aside and made his slow way down. Iron punch of shovels, the loose shale underfoot. She could just make out the shrunken heads of dolls, solitary brogans, sheets of music, a mattress split savagely with its steel coils bared like fish hooks and all of it bending spookily in the smokey white light. A choke of dust in the air and the sour smell of gas and rotting meat and she stood to one side eyeing the deepness beyond and there were fires burning up the street and figures huddled near them. She rubbed her eyes.
She rubbed her eyes and then she went down into it.
It seems a long time ago now.
We never did get to Karachi. It was the eighties, nothing seemed to go right. Our train cut abruptly at the edge of a south Indian city, I don’t know what the problem was. I felt old. You’re never as old as you are at twenty. I’d been with David only eight months and we barely knew each other. I can say that now. We lugged our packs through humid streets, thinking of home. The offices there were built of glass and steel and too modern to evoke old Asia. Which of course was the Asia we’d come to see. The Asia everyone that age comes to see.
I don’t know what we were looking for. I was a girl, a child, not much older than Kat is now. I think of her and I can’t imagine it. All the old relics, the temples, the languages, they were going to change something in us. Malaysia’s pure beaches, Cambodia’s temples, Thailand’s cliffs—all of that was going to force us into some hard understanding. So we were romantic and foolish. So what. I hope Kat and Mason both are like that. Epiphanies should come at you night and day when you’re young.
Something did change in us in that city, when we got stranded. We’d found a small hostel and I remember how unexpected and perfectly ordinary it was when it came. David was staring at me from the bed. We’d been fighting. It was dusk and his eyes were black, his pale face angular among the mosquito netting. He looked suddenly Thai, he looked Vietnamese, Malaysian, Chinese, every country we’d passed through, every man I’d seen trailing me with his eyes that summer. It wasn’t shame I felt, it wasn’t desire. I watched him watching me and it was like some part of my heart had been left behind. Like that train had arrived at a possible future. I feel foolish talking about it. David said he didn’t know where we were. He had a map in his hands but he wasn’t looking at it. I wanted him to find me inside myself, to guide me through. I didn’t say it. My eyes didn’t say it. Three nights we spent like that. We were poor, we survived off rust and water, and all that time a child was being made.
We didn’t know it then of course. It happens so fast. You’re a daughter at nineteen, at twenty you’re a mother. I look back on my life before Kat and Mason and it seems almost like it was lived by someone else. A shadow self.
What was the name of that city? Jesus.
It’s the little things. The sun at the curtains, the fear of being together, the fear of being alone. Maybe that’s all being young really is, in the end. I felt David’s bones through the sheets and how frightening it still was to be so close to a man. I felt outside of my own life, beyond absent fathers and sullen mothers. It wasn’t the first time I had felt that but it was the strongest. I told him about my father, who had left us when I was still a little girl. How he had returned to his native Trinidad for some government post. I was six. I remember going down to the kitchen and finding my mother in her white nightgown sitting in the dark and when I asked her where he was she looked up at me with a very surprised expression in her eyes and said, Who?
I told David about my mother. I don’t know what I was trying to warn him against. He just held me. He held me like some lost and awkward bundle he’d found at a train station, something not his own. All the while it felt almost like a third presence was listening, like that tiny person on the verge of becoming already had her ear pressed to our hearts. It stuns me even now when I think about it. She wasn’t any kind of reason yet.
You know what it is being a mother? Nothing’s in your hands. Everything’s accidental and unexpected. Sometimes I get so frightened for my kids I don’t know what to do. Because you can’t make the world safe to walk through. You can’t stop what’s coming.
Where she walked the sun did not rise. It did not rise and the steel-grey light gradually dissolved and paled and a sickly white sky burned off to the east and then the day was thickening and she walked on into it hard and afraid and utterly alone in her fear.
She walked in the road avoiding the dark buildings on either side and all morning it seemed to her that a figure trudged behind her. Her mind kept straying to scraps of memory but would not stay fixed on any one for long. When she sat to rest or find her bearings the shadow sat also and when she stood it stood also and together they went on.
She would walk for blocks through deserted streets, past lowlying buildings, crumbled shopfronts, crushed cars, seeing no sign of life. Then sh
e would come upon a crowd shouting and pushing in the rubble and these groups she would slip uneasily past. And then for another long while she would see very few people. But always she felt eyes on her, figures watching from cavernous darknesses in the buildings as she passed.
The sky was still very white when she rested beside a small schoolyard. She stood at the fence watching the people at work, amazed. The gymnasium roof had fallen and the long corridor of the school had collapsed and firemen were picking through the wreckage there. It seemed so strange to her to see rescuers in uniform. Just two blocks back she had seen shop glass shattered, storefronts looted. As she stood a body was brought up on a stretcher out of the rubble and it looked very small to her eye.
A circle of people had gathered to watch. A helicopter chopped low overhead and turned and circled back and Anna Mercia raised a hand to her face. When she looked away her eyes were wet and she understood she did not believe her daughter would be at the house. Not truly. But she did not know what else to do. She lowered her face, cowled in her thick grey sweater. Kat was stubborn and clever and wilful and she thought this might keep her safe. But, too, when Mason fell into the lake, how Kat had plunged in to save him from drowning though she could not swim herself. How she nearly lost them both that day. Her daughter’s catlike body on the dock, shuddering and wracking up great sobs of water, her hair in dark tangles at her face.
She studied the others gathered there in their loose shirts, their dirty shoes. Their faces in the haunted backlit day. Her chest ached fiercely. She knew she would trade any one of them for her daughter’s life. The air smelled of charcoal in the brutal sunlight. She was remembering the sleekness in her daughter’s stooped figure as she rinsed their sedan in the driveway in the late dusk months ago and how the girl had straightened and turned the hose upon the lawn and looked up at Anna Mercia in the window and she felt then a grief she had forgotten was within her.
There was a fury in the world despite everything and hope was never really possible. She watched the sun glinting on the playground bars, staining red the cedar chips strewn there and shivering against the grooved walls of the garbage bins. The firefighters’ hoses deflated and dry in the courtyard. A swing twisted, untwisted on its chains.
