She used to define herself, like zillions of other people, by what she did for a living. Her career. Now her career was living to see the next day, for no discernable reason other than just to do it. Now she was defined by her sex. She and ancient Ruth were the only two females in the building—maybe the world. Gerri, the floating wild card, didn’t count. She came and went by and large unnoticed.
“Gettin’ a moon tan?” came a deep voice from the dark. Dabney.
Whether modesty was démodé or not Ellen felt the flush of embarrassment. It wasn’t like Dabney could see much, but her nudity made her feel vulnerable. Ellen shook her head. Like she was anything to look at—a flimsy rack of bones held together by a pallid veneer of skin, her slack abdominal skin lightly puckered by a petite frowning cesarean scar. What a fox. She didn’t see much of John, not being a habitué of the roof, but he still seemed formidable. At least that was her mental picture.
“S’okay,” Dabney said, his voice a baritone purr. “Moon rays don’t do any harm. Sun’ll just give you cancer, not that it much matters. What’s cancer gonna do? Shave a few precious days, maybe hours, off your life?”
“I think I should be going,” Ellen said.
“Not on my account, I hope. Only visitors I get up here are the fellas. Nice to hear a sweet voice. One lacking testosterone.”
“Oh.” Ellen didn’t know what else to say.
“How’s your lesser half?” Dabney asked.
“Huh?”
“Your lesser half. I’m just joshing. Mike. How’s Mike? He hasn’t paid me a visit in a while.”
“Mike’s dead.”
A faint breeze filled the awkward silence. Dry leaves rustled in the corners of the roof.
“When did this happen?”
“This morning.”
“I didn’t know. I’m sorry. With everything on the avenue, nobody said anything. How did it . . . I’m sorry. I don’t mean to pry.”
“It’s okay. Mike fell out the window. I think he broke his neck. He just lay there as they ate him. He was still alive. But not anymore. Just like my baby.”
Dabney leaned against the stairwell housing, where he’d been all along, wondering if it was possible to suck all the air out of a room outdoors.
Answer: YES.
12
“You’re wasting candles,” Ruth scolded.
“I want to read.”
“In this light? You’ll ruin your eyes. Besides, since when are you a reader all of a sudden?”
“Since there’s nothing on television last I checked. Since I can’t sleep and I’m tired of inspecting the insides of my eyelids. It’s never too late to better yourself, right? So consider me bettering by the second.”
“Ucch. All right, but do you really need four candles burning?”
“You want I should get eyestrain? You’ve got me talking like a peasant.”
“That’s my fault?”
“You used to say I didn’t read enough, that reading would better me. So here I am, reading, and now it’s ‘don’t read, you’ll ruin your eyes.’ You’re talking out both sides of your mouth, and with your teeth out it’s particularly repulsive.”
“Why are you so cruel?”
“It’s all I have left. Feh. You need your beauty sleep, fine. I’ll adjourn to the sitting room, your majesty.”
A clap of rainless thunder taunted them as Abe grabbed the platter on which the candles were arranged and left the room. Tsuris he did not need. He’d borrowed a couple of books from the kid in 3A, some cockamamie science-fiction chozzerai, but it was diverting enough. The writer, a fellow named Philip K. Dick, seemed bent on doling out as much torture as possible to his characters. Abe enjoyed others suffering even worse than he. At least Abe knew where the hell he was—he was situated in his misery. The poor schmuck in Dick’s book didn’t know whether he was coming or going; his reality kept shifting on him. What a lousy predicament. It was a riot.
Another sequence of rolling thunder followed him down the hall. “So rain already,” he griped. “Enough with the foreplay.”
Mixed in with the thunder were other sounds. A crash followed by the peppering of ruptured safety glass on pavement. That accompanied by the plaint of countless zombies.
“The natives are restless,” Abe said with a smirk. “It’s a regular hootenanny out there.”
In the bedroom, Ruth stared into the void. Abe wasn’t always easy to deal with, but at least he wasn’t always such a bastard, either. She’d been spoiled, she realized, by all his years away at work. She’d kept a few jobs here and there in her younger days, but they were usually part-time and often for relatives. Sure it was nepotism, but for such lousy pay, who’d make a fuss? She worked a little at a travel agency (Uncle Judah); a printing plant (cousin Sol); a catering hall (cousin Moshe); a small-time talent agency (cousin Tobias). When Abe came along she became a full-time housewife, then an overtime mother. Three children she’d raised, almost single-handedly.
That wasn’t a job?
Abe made her feel like she was living the pampered life of a queen because she didn’t have to schlep to an official place of work. Sure, Abe brought home the bacon—all right, not bacon; they kept kosher, give or take—but Ruth slaved, too. And for the meager allowance Abe doled out? It was indentured servitude. Even when they got along she’d prayed for liberation. Where was her own personal Moses to lead her to the Promised Land? Three children, and God only knows where they were or what their fates were. Was it too much to ask of God to at least know? Were Miriam, Hannah, and David even among the living? In her head she thought it possible, but in her heart, and more persuasively in her gut, she doubted it. So that meant the grandchildren were gone, too.
When God doled out the punishment he really laid it on thick, but she believed.
Ruth believed because of the absoluteness of the fate of mankind. The scientists had their theories, back in the first few weeks, before the television and the radio were kaput, but the theories didn’t hold much water. Biotoxins. Germ warfare. Terrorism. Advanced mutated Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Anthropoid spongiform encephalopathy.
No.
This was the work of a vengeful god. This was the work of a god who’d had enough, and who could blame Him? People had been doing terrible things ever since they arrived on the scene, but in just the span of her lifetime it went from not so good to bad to worse to unimaginable. Politicians got slimier and greedier and less trustworthy. Wars weren’t waged for noble causes, they were pecuniary agendas. The younger generations kept getting stupider and more selfish and less humane. Popular culture was all in the toilet. Bad language was rampant. Overt pornographic imagery had infiltrated regular television—Ruth didn’t know from cable firsthand, but from what she’d heard it had been the telecast version of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Craziness.
Gone were any kind of values one could hold dear. The people of her generation were shunned by society. The only ones who cared at all about them were the politicians, and that was only because the older generation still got out and voted. So, politicians and the pharmaceutical companies. Everyone else just was biding their time waiting for all the seniors to drop dead and vacate apartments like this one. Geriatrics and gentrification didn’t often cozy up. But that was just a personal beef. Donald Trump and his ilk didn’t erect the real estate that mattered. The Tower of Babel had been built again, at least metaphorically, and this time God was playing for keeps.
God had had enough of his naughty children.
Death was near, Ruth felt. Abe would be in for a rude surprise when he found out his soul would continue to exist even after his mortal form didn’t. In the next world—Olam HaEmet: “the World of Truth”—he’d have to answer for all his bile when they played back his life for him. Abe wasn’t a bad person—mean, maybe, but not evil—but his lack of faith would surely not be looked on with favor. Gehenom awaited Abe. It wasn’t hell, and he could move on, but he’d have to do some serious soul-searching—literally
—to purify his untidy soul.
The depiction of the afterlife wasn’t explicit in the Torah. That’s where the goyim had it made. It was so black and white. They got scary fire and brimstone if they were bad or the Pearly Gates and Paradise if they were good. The Torah was more enigmatic. As a good Jew you were supposed to focus on your role in this, the material world. An eternal reward was a vague but effective motivator to stay on the correct path. All Ruth knew was that the soul went on for eternity and that was good enough for her. She just hoped that Abe would get his act together and make peace with God so they could link up in this nebulous afterlife.
And the children and grandkids.
And maybe Cary Grant.
Sure he was treyf, but oof.
Abe held the book close to the candle, straining to read the small print. Though he enjoyed Dick kicking the crap out of his poor deluded bozos in their subterranean Martian hovels, drugged to the gills with their little Perky Pat doll setups, the pain in his eyeballs negated the pleasure. Besides, he was actually envious of these fictional characters. Sure they’d been forcibly evicted to live on Mars—which was a complete crudhole—but at least they could get bombed out of their gourds and have these collective fantasy trips courtesy of some kooky hallucinogenic drug called Can-D. Or was it Chew-Z? It was both. Whatever. It was a crazy book, but Abe found himself embroiled in its labyrinthine plot. Dick was a nut, but an imaginative nut.
He put the book down and closed his eyes and rubbed them—hard. With spots and tiny patterns of organic hieroglyphs swimming on his orbits, Abe sat back in the chair by the window and enjoyed the fireworks. Abe rubbed some more, even though it was supposedly bad for you. When he pulled his hands away and opened his eyes again, flashes of light joined the spots and indecipherable microscopic pictographs. A distant clap of thunder echoed throughout the dead city, followed by a chorus of idiot groans from the undead. Abe blinked and pretended he was crocked on Dick’s wonderdrugs.
“I’m on Mars,” he whispered. “I’m in my hovel. Where’s my dolly?”
As the spots and runes melted away Abe realized the light wasn’t self-induced. Lightning? No, this flash of light cut right across his ceiling. From below. What the hell? Abe manually uncrossed his sleeping legs, flung himself out of his chair and hobbled on limbs of pins and needles toward the window. Just as he hung his head out a swath of light was cutting across the tops of all the cabbage-heads, forging south—a flashlight beam!
“Jesus H. Christ! Jesus H. Christ!” Abe gasped. He ducked his head back in and shouted, “Ruth! Hey! Ruth!” Another small thunderclap swallowed his thin voice. “God damn it! Ruuuuuth!”
“What? What is it already?” Ruth screeched from the bedroom. “You’ll wake everyone!”
“Good! Come in here! Quick!”
“What is it?”
“Come in here!”
Abe was trembling all over. He leaned back out the window and shouted at the departing beam of light. As it receded down York the horde seemed to spread out before it, creating a path.
“Hey, wait!” he shouted, his frail voice swallowed by another burst of thunder. In his ferment he launched into a convulsive coughing fit, his watery eyes following the light until it disappeared from sight. Now his coughing tears mixed with tears of despair.
“What’s the commotion?” Ruth whined. Though she was shrouded in darkness Abe could picture her bitter, disbelieving face. “What’re you dragging me out of bed for?” Her mental image of Cary Grant faded into nothingness.
“There was a light out there!” Abe said, gesturing at the street below, wiping his eyes.
“A light.”
“A light, for Christ’s sake. A light! A light!”
“Abe, it’s thundering out there. Ever hear of a little thing called lightning?”
“It wasn’t lightning. It came from down there! Down there! Not up there! Down!”
Ruth sighed the sigh of a long-suffering martyr and waddled back to the bedroom, leaving Abe wondering if he’d dreamt the whole episode, his mind suggestible to the transcendental literary powers of Can-D.
Or Chew-Z.
13
“They’re beautiful in a hideous kind of way,” Ellen said, admiring Alan’s studies of the undead. A week had passed since their coupling and Alan had invited her to his studio to see his work. No one else in the building had been permitted into his sanctum sanctorum. “My God, there are so many of them.”
“And no two alike,” Alan said. “Just like snowflakes.”
“Not quite,” Ellen frowned.
“Fingerprints?”
“That’s a bit closer. It’s like you’re cataloguing them.”
“I guess I am. Passes the time. Cave paintings of the future.”
Ellen’s eyes roved over the dizzying cavalcade of renderings. Beyond their technical excellence, Alan had captured something she hadn’t stopped to consider about the things outside: their innate humanness. Those things weren’t always things. They had been Homo sapiens. Alan’s meticulous artwork, while unsentimental, betrayed an element of latent humanity in the subject matter. The tilt of a head, the softness of a brow, the turn of a mouth, all reminded her that these empty vessels once had inner lives. They’d been friends and neighbors.
“I’m amazed at how unbiased these are,” Ellen marveled.
“They don’t hate us. They didn’t ask to be what they are.”
Ellen fingered the edge of a pastel of an armless male zombie with half its face missing. It had no pants and its penis was gone, but not its scrotum and testicles. She scanned the other images. Males, females, all dismembered in various ways. Not a single one was intact. How had she never noticed that before? She hastened to the window. Resting on the sill was a pair of binoculars, which she snatched up. Though they were packed together down there, she confirmed what Alan’s drawings portrayed; not a single one of them was complete. On some the damage was more evident than others—whole missing limbs were easy to spot—but all were mutilated beyond the general rot. It made sense. Most had been savaged when they were still people. They’d died and been resurrected.
Missing ears, noses, jaws, chunks of shoulder, gaping gashes, hollowed out cavities where their bellies should be. She noticed that many were nude, their clothes having either fallen off or been forcibly torn away. Some trailed lengths of dehydrated intestine, which others stepped on. Several had cutaways through which their withered internal organs could be seen, just like those “Visible Man” model kits her kid brother made, only less pristine. The legless pulled themselves along with their arms, almost lost in the crowd, trod on by the others, but they kept on. Ellen looked back at the wall of Alan’s portraits, trying to match ones there with the crowd below.
“It’s like a Bosch painting out there,” she said, sounding dazed.
“Bosch was an amateur. The Black Death was a stroll in the park. Those pussies had it cushy.” Alan smiled at Ellen.
“Don’t talk like that.”
“Too dark?”
“No, too vulgar. You sound like a more cultured version of Eddie.”
“Gotcha. Ecch. Okay, I’ll refrain from the cussing. But seriously, the ninnies—is that okay?” Ellen nodded. “The ninnies of the fourteenth century had it good compared to us. But what we’ve got going on is a logical extension. Rats and fleas spread the bubonic plague. See, rats infected with the disease were brought to Europe through trade with the east. At least that’s the theory I remember. Fleas on the rats transmitted the disease to people. I mean those weren’t exactly hygienic times. Open sewers, people shitting out their windows—excuse me, relieving themselves. Just like us, right? The plague spread like wildfire. The symptoms were obvious to anyone with eyes. You’d get these buboes, which were swollen lymph nodes. Along with your high fever you got delirium. The lungs became infected and an airborne version spread from person to person through coughing, sneezing, or just talking. Maybe this whole mess started with fleas or rats. Who knows? I’m sorry, thi
s isn’t history class.”
“No, it’s interesting.”
It wasn’t really, but it passed the time. Ellen had never been much of a history buff, but Alan was smart and men liked to hear themselves talk, so why not indulge him? Alan plucked a thick volume off his bookshelf and gestured with it, the book a prop to lend credence to his thesis. Subconsciously, he’d pat the book after each sentence, punctuating his thoughts, drumming them in. He might have made a fine teacher, Ellen thought, but school had never been her favorite place.
“Is the test gonna be essay or multiple choice?” she said, smiling.
“I’m sorry, should I stop?”
“No, I’m just kidding.” Not.
“Nature’s been trying to wipe humans off the face of the Earth for centuries,” Alan continued. “The influenza pandemic at the end of World War I? Once it got going it knocked off about twenty-five to thirty million around the world. Maybe more. And quick, too. It came and went in a single year. Remember that SARS nonsense? All those little gauze masks people were running around with? Everyone looked like Michael Jackson for a couple of months? Same thing during the influenza epidemic. You could get fined for ignoring flu ordinances. So many folks were croaking there was a shortage of coffins, morticians, and gravediggers. Over time I think AIDS would have surpassed influenza, but it was all a rehearsal for this. This is the one that humanity doesn’t make a comeback from.”
Ellen just stared out the window. “No, I don’t suppose so. But maybe.”
Alan smiled and shook his head. That there was even the slightest room for optimism boggled his mind. He felt a small pang of envy. And then a larger pang of hunger. He stepped out of the room and into the kitchen, his departure unnoticed by Ellen, who seemed in a sort of trance. Maybe his little death diatribe was ill advised. Ellen didn’t come down for a dissertation. Whatever. What was done was done. Alan couldn’t unsay it. He opened a cabinet and took down a can of pork and beans and fished the can opener out of his cutlery drawer. After licking every atom of sustenance off the lid he scooped out two equal portions onto plates, then used the can opener again to remove the can’s bottom, which he also licked clean. He then got out his metal clippers and cut the can from top to bottom and carefully unfurled the cylinder, making sure not to cut himself. He tongued the exposed insides of the can, leaving them gleaming.
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