by Mark Tufo
Cliff was Theo’s identical twin brother. Though his letter was short, it sat atop a sheaf of papers that supported his claims. Jaimie could read the printed type but many of the words were unfamiliar. He went to his room and reappeared in a moment with one of his dictionaries to work through his uncle’s warning.
Jaimie loved the dictionary even more than television because it is the one book that contains all others. Jaimie looked up “variant” and “adaptation” and “evolution” and “contagion”.
At times, even with one finger under the questioned word and his other hand planted on the dictionary’s explanation, Jaimie was lost. What exactly did Uncle Cliff mean when he said a virus could “jump”? The definition of one word led to other words. Jaimie disappeared into his dictionaries for hours, each time finding new paths to follow to new treasures he hadn’t known existed.
Cliff and Theo had not gotten along in childhood and the letter seemed to acknowledge the distance between them. Uncle Cliff seemed to expect his twin to object to whatever he might say, so he sent copies of World Health Organization reports. The whispers shot back and forth between Theo and Jack for an hour as they read and reread the letter.
Jaimie caught a few of their words. His mother used the words “journey to Golgotha”, which seemed to displease his father. Jaimie remembered that Golgotha, in Greek, meant place of the skull. Jaimie liked descriptive language.
Theo repeated the word “conflagration.” Jaimie went back to his dictionary, turning pages fast to keep up.
Anna waited until the lull between dinner and dessert to steal the letter from its place by Jack’s plate. When she came back to the table, Jaimie could tell she was excited: Back straight, eyes wide. “What are we going to do?”
Theo and Jack looked to each other, their faces blank.
Jack’s eyes went tight, squeezing out tears.
Jaimie looked up from his dictionary and watched his father reach out and rub his mother’s back in slow, warm circles. Tentatively, Jaimie reached for his mother’s cheek. His hand came away wet. Thinking of amphibians on stove tops, Jaimie said one word: “Frog.”
Without understanding the dark context of Jaimie’s thoughts, they all laughed.
Tonight we dream of claws and teeth
Jaimie enjoyed school. He listened in class but his teachers asked little more of him than his attention. Anna said she didn’t like school, but she cried when the government shuttered all the schools and decreed that everyone had to stay home.
Jack listened to the radio and shook her head when a parent called in to say that school closures interfered with his job. Daycare centers were also closed. The words “social distancing” were spoken so much that some people started saying “SD” instead.
Anna talked to a friend on the phone and complained how bored she was. Then she called another friend from school and made the same complaints. When she talked to her boyfriend Trent, she closed the door on her little brother, saying only, “Ears!”
Away from their teachers, Jaimie’s classmates called him Ears, as well. Jaimie had large ears, but he thought the right one special. It pointed forward so his mother called it Jaimie’s listening ear. His teachers said they wished all their students listened as well as he did. Jaimie liked that, so he didn’t mind the nickname.
He didn’t mind being called “retard” very much, either, because that didn’t say anything about what he could do. Jaimie could listen better than anyone, and remember everything. It took Jaimie some time to realize he saw the world more deeply than everyone he knew.
When he discovered they didn’t see the colors he could detect, he felt sorry for them. They spoke easily but were mostly blind. For instance, the boy saw the colors of numbers. Each flower had its own sound, gently humming to itself.
Words were Jaimie’s favorite thing, though. Words had meanings everyone could understand, but Jaimie could detect the music and feel the shape of each word. As a very young child, he’d been lost in an overwhelming sea of color, taste and sensation, near to drowning. Currents and tides closed in over his head until he had to close his eyes to the beautiful onslaught. The texture of the sounds on the radio distracted him. Soft music tasted sweet. Angry voices felt jagged. Sharp words prickled his skin. Everything in the world had such dimension that Jaimie remembered everything he saw. Jaimie was the perfect witness to the end of the world.
It came to the boy that he was unique in his perceptions when he happened across his word in the dictionary. It had started with a random find of the word “poeticule.” Wandering through the Ps, he found “perspicacity” and “perception.” In the details about perception, Jaimie found a reference to “synesthesia”. He followed that path to the Ss. That’s where he found himself. “Synesthete.”
Jaimie saw the worry lines in Jack’s forehead as she listened to the radio. Her body’s envelope of energy contracted and took on a washed-out yellow tone. When she turned off the radio, she unplugged it, as well. The first day the schools were closed there were only 406 cases of Sutr Flu in all of Canada. There were 1,200 in the United States, only 98 in the Britain (they shut their borders early), “over 3,000” in India. (No precise numbers were provided once they got past 2,500). China stopped reporting any cases once the number rose past 4,000. Some journalists suggested that meant the true number was higher than one million in China.
* * *
Later the same week, schools everywhere shut down and it was said there wasn’t a working subway train in the world. Sometimes when Jack was outside working in the garden, Theo would plug the radio back in and listen with the sound low. The voices didn’t feel sharp on Jaimie’s skin anymore. He felt something in the radio voices he hadn’t encountered before. Fear that arrives electronically is a cool, yellow that tastes sour, like a rotten lemon.
Jaimie sometimes thought his father could see the colors because he watched the radio as he listened to it, as if he saw something more than the others. When Theo looked up, he was startled to see his son standing close. Theo unplugged the radio, yanking the plug from its socket by the wire. Theo gave a small, lopsided smile and took Jaimie’s hand to pull him outside.
“You should see this,” he said. “It’s something I haven’t seen in years.”
Jack was on her knees digging in a corner of the garden. Jaimie looked around but didn’t see anything different. Theo pointed up. The sky was azure, without a cloud. It was hard to imagine that anything could change under that sky or that anyone had anything to fear.
“I haven’t seen this since 9/11,” Theo said. “No planes, no jet exhaust. There aren’t any planes up anywhere, not even the military jets or drones,” he said.
“Why wouldn’t they fly the drones?” Jack asked. “Robots can get viruses, I suppose, but not the Sutr Virus.”
Jaimie watched his father’s face and recognized the indigo and violets of a new thought’s inception. “They’re drones. The pilots…they’re um…social distancing the pilots, too.”
“Or all the pilots are sick,” Jack said. “It’ll ease up the global warming, I guess.” Jack clawed harder at the earth with her trowel.
“It’s pretty early to start thinking about the garden, isn’t it? There’s still frost to come.”
“It’s something to do,” Jack said. “The way things are going, we should be planting vegetables.”
“No azaleas? No petunias? You love petunias.”
“We’ll plant what we can eat. Cliff said to get some seeds if we’re going to hunker down. I got them. Cabbages are hardy, and I got lots of root vegetables. We’re going to get sick of carrots, I got too many of those…but who’s to say what’s too much now?”
“Think we can eat it all? The kids don’t even like that stuff.”
Jack looked at him sharply, a rub of dirt stuck under her left eye. Jaimie hadn’t seen her look at Theo that way before. “They’ll eat it and like it if there’s nothing else to eat. We’ll be eating a lot of soup, like my parents did in the Great
Depression.”
“We don’t know that’ll be necessary yet.”
“Don’t we?”
“We need more data before we panic. I checked the radio. There isn’t an open border anywhere now.”
“Viruses don’t know anything about borders. They’re citizens of the world.”
“The problem could be solved or contained yet.”
“It could, but the people in charge don’t have a great track record for solving problems. Most people are B and C students. There are a few brainiacs working with microscopes, but they’re generally not the ones in charge. Think high school. The jocks ran the show. Same thing now. Get a bunch of people together to solve a problem and it’s not the smartest guy who does the talking. It’s the loudest.”
“We’re brainiacs,” Theo said. “We’ll be okay. We’ll get through this.”
Jack watched the ground and Jaimie wondered if she saw something there that he couldn’t see. Did the earth harbor answers, or just the cold future?
“Last night I did a lot of googling. I already knew that every empire falls. Entropy rules,” Jack said. “I’m not saying this is the end of the world but — ”
“You have to be careful what you read, hon. Lots of people are screaming now.”
“I’m not an alarmist,” she said. “I’m saying this could be the end of the world as we know it. Things are going to change. Everything changes and I’m scared of everything changing.”
“This isn’t going to be that bad. People recover.” Theo said. “Lots of people. Most people. We’ve seen this before. Spanish Flu killed 25 million, but somehow the world kept turning.”
Jaimie’s mother rose, bristling. The boy felt thick needles dance across his forehead and into his ears. It felt like tiny, sharp-toed ants scurrying. The light around her head went from a rich blue to a navy blue. “This isn’t panic. This is what planning looks like. It is precisely because we don’t have enough ‘data’ that we need to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. By the time we have enough information, it could be too late.”
Theo crossed his arms and looked away. “I’m not disagreeing with you. I’m just saying we already used the vacation budget for this.”
“If Cliff’s wrong and it all blows away, we’ll go camping this summer. It’ll be good for ’em. In the meantime, I need you to help me with the yard. I’ll get Anna out here, too, if I can drag her away from the phone.”
He hesitated. “How much do you want to dig up?”
“A rectangle, from the swing set to the edge of what used to be my flower bed.” The swing set sat in the middle of the large yard.
Theo whistled and put his hands on his hips the way he did when he was upset. “That’s a lot of square footage, Jack.”
“We get awfully hungry. I’ve got a lot of unanswered questions and your brother’s got a lot of scary answers. He should know what he’s talking about.”
Jaimie watched his father’s healthy green colors slowly turn to that now familiar sour yellow, mixed with red.
“Are you with me?” Jack asked.
“Of course,” he said.
North Americans expected their doctors to have all the answers they needed when they needed them. They expected limitless supplies of all the basics and luxuries without end, too. They’d depended on technology and wealth for so long, North Americans had difficulty telling the difference between wants and needs. They had more illusions to lose, so they held on to them harder.
That afternoon, Jaimie dug in the ground for the first time. He pulled worms out of the dark, brown soil and arranged them in a line for sorting by size. He counted them and wondered what worms think about. Anna complained a lot at first and then retreated into a stony silence that felt warm and pleasant, at least to Jaimie. It was those times that he felt closest to his sister. The depth of her silence met his own, though her colors flared red around her head and in the center of her chest.
The family dug through the afternoon, overturning turf and softening the ground. Jack worked with a clawed hoe, Theo and Anna with spades and the boy with the small trowel. They broke the clumps of grass, taking turns with a new pick axe. After half an hour, they were all shiny and wet with effort. The backyard was the family’s first farm and the first time they had all worked together.
Jack’s anger was a red that dulled to a blue-black bruise the harder she swung the pick. Anna stayed angry red. Theo was yellow but getting greener, like a lime.
The color around Jaimie’s hands went from purple to a deep violet. Jaimie decided later that those were the hues of his purest happiness.
Tomorrow’s for the promises we’ll fail to keep
Jaimie got out of bed and listened at the crack at the bottom of the door. His parents whispered back and forth, but he could hear his sister clearly. “How bad?…How long?” More urgent whispers. Anna stomped up the stairs, passed Jaimie’s bedroom and slammed her door.
When Jaimie got up early the next morning, his parents were dressed in the same clothes from the night before. Both their laptops stood open on the dining room table and Jack had a pad of paper. Jaimie couldn’t read her scrawl, but Jaimie recognized the look of a list, each word or groups of words in a stack.
“I’m taking the day off work,” Theo told Jaimie. “You come with me and you can push the cart and help carry things.”
His mother looked to her husband, her face a question.
“He’s sixteen and strong,” Theo said. “We’ll take the van. Give me what you’ve got so far and we’ll go work on that. When Anna gets up, take the other car and fit what you can in it.”
Jack nodded and ripped several pages off her pad. She held them out to him, but looked in his eyes and didn’t let go of the pages. “Who should I call?”
“Call everyone in the family.”
“Really?”
“Everyone should know. Cliff might not have been able to warn everyone. He and I have had our trouble, but he risked a lot to get the word out to us about what’s really going on. He’d be in big trouble sharing some of those memos, I’m sure.”
“Just family? I have to call Brandy. She’s my best friend.”
“I count Brandy as family. Of course, tell her. It’s not that we keep it a secret from anyone. It’s just prioritizing who gets alerted first.” He looked like he was doing a difficult calculation in his head. “We’ll talk about coworkers later. I’ve called in sick, so we definitely can’t warn any of them yet. ’k?” They kissed quickly and Theo fed Jaimie breakfast at a drive-through. The tofu sausage patty was greasy and smeared the boy’s lips.
His father laughed as he wiped the boy’s face with a napkin, “You’re a shiny little ape.”
Jaimie watched his father’s aura. Theo was shiny, too. A halo of green and violet fire flared around his head as he gently wiped his son’s chin.
He caught new interest in the boy’s look. When he finished, Theo asked his son if he had anything to say.
The boy shook his head slightly.
“It’s okay, son. When you’re ready.”
Most people wore surgical masks or even carpenter masks and goggles. Some had cloth tied over their faces and the people who wore eyeglasses all seemed to be steamed up so much they maneuvered through the aisles of Target in a fog. A couple people wore winter scarves tied over their faces.
Theo held Jaimie’s hand. The boy stuck close to his side. No one wanted to bump into another person, but it was so busy, the crowd’s press was inevitable. Theo said Jaimie “heeled like a terrier.” Target was too full and only one line was open to a cashier, so they left for the mall’s grocery store.
The shelves weren’t as full as usual and the aisles were packed. Theo stuffed the shopping list into his shirt pocket and didn’t look at it again. Instead, he grabbed a cart for Jaimie to push while he pulled another. With one hand on his son’s shoulder, he guided Jaimie through the crowd and down the aisles. Instead of looking at what he was buying, Theo swept cans into the cart wi
th one arm.
The freezers were almost empty. When Theo looked at the vegetable section he said in a low hiss, “Locusts.”
All the milk — regular and powdered — was gone. Down one aisle, Theo jumped up and spotted something. He climbed the shelf to reach a big bottle of hand sanitizer covered in dust at the back, almost out of sight.
At the end of the cracker and snack aisle, a thin old woman in a black dress blocked the way. “You’re taking too much,” she said. Her lined face made Jaimie think of the pictures of witches he’d seen in fairy tale books.
“Excuse me?” Theo said.
“You’re taking too much,” she repeated, and coughed without covering her mouth. She sweated heavily and looked flushed.
“Please,” Theo said softly, but his hand clamped down harder on the boy’s shoulder and Jaimie pushed the cart forward. She gave them a hard look. As they brushed past her, there was an acidic smell that came off her mottled skin. It reminded Jaimie of a dead squirrel that had been run over in front of his house last summer. The old woman glowed with fever.
The boy couldn’t take his eyes off her as they pushed on. He thought of witches who kidnapped children, who pushed them into ovens and tricked them into eating poisoned apples. He watched the black dots, bigger and greasier, swallow up the woman’s reds and yellows. Jaimie could barely see her face, as if the black dress was getting bigger, enveloping her in a thick gauze. When she curled her thin lips back in a sneer, she revealed long, yellow teeth and bloody gums. She coughed again and Theo twisted away, turning his head, but his hand didn’t leave his son’s shoulder. Instead he squeezed tighter until Jaimie’s shoulder hurt, urging him to walk faster.
“You’re taking too much!” she yelled again.
“You don’t get to say how much is too much, ma’am,” Theo said. “You don’t know how much I need.”
