I overheard these two girls talking. They were thin and blond, and it was clear they had never worked in McDonald’s in their lives. The one was saying to the other, “I don’t know if I want to come back here anymore.”
The other one asked where she wanted to go instead, and they talked about Hawaii or Miami something.
I hated them. I don’t know why; they were probably nice enough. But I just hated them. I thought, I almost died to get here. I still felt a little sick and dizzy, and I went in one of the stalls and sat on the edge of the toilet. Usually I don’t want to touch anything in a public bathroom.
Maybe it just hit me, I don’t know.
I had heard that all the guys lived, although I suspected none of them was exactly ready to come to Cancun. I had specks dancing in front of my eyes. I put my head down on my knees and took deep breaths, and I tried not to think about my head swelling up so that I couldn’t open my eyes.
I’m okay, I thought. I’m okay.
Someone called, “Are you all right?” It was Mel, jingling with bracelets.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“Are you sick?”
I was actually feeling better. I stood up and flushed the toilet and came out. “It’s okay,” I said. “I think I’ve just been drinking too fast.”
The music was disco. The beat was thumping. I went out and I started dancing, too. My head was still kind of light and as I was dancing, I felt lighter and lighter. Not in a bad way, but in a good way. I thought about those girls in the bathroom. And what it would be like to be able to decide to go to Hawaii. About what it would be like to be them, or to have gotten the other kind of injection.
I thought about luck.
I could think about that, or I could dance. Right now I wanted to dance. It didn’t seem like a bad choice.
THE EFFECT OF CENTRIFUGAL FORCES
When I was a kid, I had a book—I still have it, although it’s in a box. It was called Mary Anne’s Dragon, and the cover showed a girl, dressed for school, and in the air, coiling above her, an immense, Oriental-looking dragon. The illustrations inside were all black and white, finely detailed drawings; full of texture and detail that filled the page. My favorite illustration showed Mary Anne’s father, the magician, in his study at his desk. He was young, maybe in his thirties. He had fine black hair and a drooping black mustache and black eyes and wore a black turtleneck, and he took Mary Anne quite seriously. You could tell by the way he was looking out of the page that he was not patronizing.
I loved his study even more than I loved the magician. Behind him were cabinets full of little drawers. They were all quite firmly and neatly shut, but the fact that there were so many of them meant that they had marvelous things in them. On top of the cabinets, near the ceiling, were a glass orb that reflected Mary Anne, some plants, a statue of a horse. The rug was an Oriental rug, and even though the illustration was black and white, you could just tell that it was full of colors, reds and yellows. On the magician’s desk were candles and an ink bottle and some books and a skull.
There was a brass orrery, a mechanical model of planets circling the sun.
It was all cozy and pure and safe. I swore I would have a room like that, but I never have.
—Alice
Irene hated Alateen. For awhile, Alateen had been okay. Now, when Alice dropped Irene off for a meeting, Irene swore to herself that she would not talk during the meeting. She would remain detached.
The meeting was at a Lutheran church. The parking lot was recently resurfaced. Alice had mentioned it. “Black ice,” she had said. “Skateboarders used to call it that. I love how black it is, how … clean.”
Classic Alice comment. It was a fucking parking lot. Talking to Alice was like talking to a four-year-old. She said stuff that didn’t quite make sense. She would appear to be listening to you, and then she’d interrupt you because she’d noticed something or remembered something she was afraid she’d forget to tell you. She was always cutting stuff out of newspapers or printing stuff off the internet to give to Irene. She’d given Irene an article about a study that showed that the children of gay parents were actually better adjusted than average. Which just proved to Irene that this was one more thing her family couldn’t get right because they were a fucking freak show.
The Alateen meeting was in a room that was used for Sunday school. There were coloring book pages of Noah’s ark in the windows. There were a couple where the kids had stayed in the lines and drawn the boat brown, the water blue, the giraffes yellow and brown. But a lot of them were just little kid scribbles. Orange orange orange in crayon tangles.
Naomi was there, squeezed into one of the little kid chairs. Naomi didn’t just have hips, she had haunches. She had long, straight black hair and glasses. She had chipped purple nail polish. She exemplified everything half-assed. She had her blue spiral-bound notebook and was writing, furious, which meant that she’d talk about her arguments with her mom again. Naomi had an unfair ratio of talking to listening. It wasn’t like she had more problems than anyone. Lots of kids had really scary stories—times in homeless shelters, in foster care, parents hauled off for involuntary detox, violence. One of the reasons that Irene had decided that she wasn’t going to talk was because really, those were the kind of problems that deserved Alateen. Irene’s mom had split up with her other mom, her momms, when things were just sort of crazy. Mom and Momms, together, and then Momms split and there was just Irene and Mom. It had been mostly like a normal divorce. Then Mom met Alice. Momms got, of all things, a boyfriend. That had been weird. The new boyfriend, Lonny, was strung out even when he wasn’t necessarily high; all Adam’s apple and skanky hipbones and funny nervous grin. But by then Irene had made it clear that she wasn’t spending any time at Lonny’s apartment, so they met at Denny’s, where Momms jittered and smoothed her hair over her ear again and again and didn’t eat and talked a mile a minute. Annoying, but not the same as your drunken dad punching you.
At the meeting, first they read the steps and the Serenity prayer. Then they all had to write an experience where they had gotten angry. Sandra, the meeting facilitator, gave them all little sheets of paper and pens. Naomi was the first to drop something in the bag. Something, Irene was sure, about another argument with her mother.
Irene thought about the things that had gotten her angry during the week, and then thought about which ones she would be willing to actually talk about. Nothing about Alice’s piles of stuff in the living and dining room of the condo. Nothing about her mother’s increasing lack of coordination. Nothing about her mother and APD. Momms was a safe thing to be angry at. Momms was the drug addict, and therefore her behavior was the thing that Irene was here to talk about. Irene couldn’t think of any specific thing that she’d done that had made Irene crazy, but she wrote “Momms at Denny’s” on her piece of paper and folded it up and dropped it in the paper lunch bag. She used to love these exercises. But now they were just such a pain in the ass.
Irene was the last one to drop her piece of paper in the bag.
When Sandra reached into the bag, she tensed. She had promised herself she’d be silent, but already she couldn’t help planning what she would say.
“Naomi,” the facilitator said. “Do you want to read what you wrote?”
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.
Avian Prion Disease, or APD. APD is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (or TSE) similar in effect to Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease (CJD), Kuru, and Fatal Familial Insomnia. Like Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (Mad Cow Disease), an animal-based illness that crossed from cows to humans, APD is a disease that appears to have arisen spontaneously in a chicken that was breeding stock for a large chicken producer. The resulting infection leaped the species boundary from avian to human.
The disease was spread through the food supply in processed chicken products like “nuggets.” Commercial chickens are usually slaughtered within forty-two days of hatching, before they show symptoms of APD. Thus, though the
disease was apparently never widespread, it was also unchecked.
In humans, APD has a latency period of about five years. No one knows how many people were exposed to the disease. The current rate of infection is about one per two hundred thousand people, but the number of cases is expected to rise over the next five or more years as APD expresses itself in people in whom it is still latent.
Initial symptoms include headaches, ataxia (loss of muscle coordination), trembling, and slurred speech. As the disease progresses, the victim becomes unable to walk without support, and the tremors become worse. The victim has wild emotional swings from despair to euphoria. In the final stages of the disease, the victim becomes incontinent and incapacitated. The victim cannot speak or swallow. The body wastes. Death occurs in six months to two years, often as a result of pneumonia or infection from pressure sores.
There is no test for the disease.
After the Alateen meeting, Irene was first into the parking lot. She really didn’t feel like conversation—either the “wasn’t that a great meeting” type or the “didn’t that meeting suck,” type. Both could come from the same person. She had engaged in both, about the same meeting, even. It pretty much summed up Alateen, except that the needle was swinging more and more into the “sucks” category and less and less into the “great.”
There was no sign of Alice.
Not long after Irene had started Alateen, they’d talked about cell phones in one of the meetings. It had been back when Alateen meetings were more likely to be “great.” It had been a pretty good meeting, as she remembered. Some girl who was no longer coming had said that she figured this was one hour out of her life she could really dedicate to getting herself straight, and she always turned her cell phone off. Irene had thought that was cool and had made it kind of a rule. She still did it, even though the hour didn’t feel nearly as dedicated. Alateen seemed like one of those things, like diets, where everything great happened at the beginning.
She dug out her phone. She had three texts from Alice.
Call me.
Your mom fell, at ER.
Your mom is ok just hurt her wrist will pick u up asap
Had her mom tripped over something in the house? One of Alice’s goddamn piles of crap? Fuck a bucket but life sucked.
Because of the broken wrist they gave Natalie a prescription for hydrocodone.
Alice maneuvered her through the crowded living room, holding her elbow. Past the pile of clothes waiting to be folded on the couch, and the stacks of magazines, and the pile of empty plastic storage containers, and the box of teal dishes. The painting that Alice had brought home because the frame was good. Alice maneuvered her into the bedroom and sat her on the bed. Alice undressed her, so tenderly, so sweetly, saying over and over, “All right?”
She hurt, and the shock of the fall had further loosened her mind. Her brain was being turned to holes by prions, which she thought of as tiny wires bent like paperclips. They bumped along her neurons and made more and more paperclips, turning the cells to lace.
She could not seem to stop moaning, and sighing.
Alice put a nightgown on her. Natalie didn’t ever wear a nightgown, not since she was girl. Alice had bought her nightgowns of white cotton. Little House on the Prairie nightgowns that hung loose around her. Alice had hung them outside to dry, because the dryer was broken. They smelled of sunlight.
Wasn’t Alice here? Alice wasn’t here.
She sat on the edge of the bed smelling the sunstroked cotton and wondering if she should lie down.
Alice was here. Alice had a glass of water and a pill.
There was the risk that the painkillers would launch her deeper into dementia. Already, nouns fled her. She could not seem to hold them and found herself saying to Alice, “It’s started, there is water, from the sky.” Alice said “rain,” and the word was there. Why lose “rain” but not “sky”? Why nouns? Of course, she wasn’t thinking “nouns.” Just a wordless why. She had known about dementia once, had understood it from outside. Her grandmother had dementia, not Alzheimer’s but something they couldn’t give a name to, something that progressed differently, something that wasn’t Parkinson’s, or nutrition, or drug interaction, or even (they tested for it) syphilis. Something that took away her grandmother’s mind in dribs and drabs over many years but that was, in a strange way, kindly. It didn’t seem so to everyone else, of course. It was terrifying. And exhausting. The way the conversation looped around the same things. The way her grandmother explained over and over that something had happened to her sister, that her sister had fallen right down (gesturing with her hand) like that, and nobody would tell her what had happened. Nobody knew. The sister had been dead for almost forty years. Still, her grandmother didn’t get angry or agitated or wander. At the beginning she had been upset. She had hid the gaps in her memory. Her driving had gotten bad, and she clung to the shoulder of the road and had once taken out a mailbox. Then her grandmother went to an assisted living place and, in some strange way, relaxed. Except for the business about the long-dead sister.
Not so for Natalie. ADP was not kind that way. It jerked her muscles and made her twitch. Walking, her leg would suddenly rise high as if she were marching, knee coming up, foot kicking out. When she tried to sleep, the twitching woke her up, again and again. Sometimes it was that sensation of falling that comes on the edge of sleep. Feelings rose in her, like flights of birds, fluttering and flinging themselves against the bones of her ribcage. Anxiety made manifest. She said she wanted to be here as long as she could for Irene and Alice, but honestly, she got so tired of the knowledge that she was going to die, of never being able to put that burden down, that she craved oblivion. She took the hydrocodone for her wrist pain. There was a reason she knew that she shouldn’t take the hydrocodone, and she could see that Alice knew it, too.
Alice was giving her the pill. Was Alice trying to poison her? She could not hold on to what she saw in Alice’s face. This woman she knew who suddenly seemed strange. She knew her, and she did not. She was afraid, and she tried hanging that fear on Alice’s face and then on the bulky cast on her wrist, so very, very white, but the fear attached to everything and nothing.
She was lying down, and Alice was covering her with a flowered sheet. “Are you cold?” Alice asked.
She was thirsty. Her arm jerked, and her wrist throbbed. She heard herself moaning, but it didn’t seem like her. She certainly had no control over it. Irene stood in the doorway, watching. She looked at Irene.
It went on and on, and Irene wasn’t in the doorway anymore.
The pill tugged at her, finally, pulled her down. She closed her eyes.
It would be nice to say that she dreamed of Irene. Or that she remembered things. She had delirium dreams: the world was out there, and she could access it on a screen against her eyelids, like her smartphone, but every time she moved her eyes, she moved to a different screen. She had made something happen in the world every time she did that, like hitting enter on a computer, and she didn’t know what she was doing. She was causing trouble for everyone, but her eyes kept flicking.
This was not her. This was a remnant. A fossil.
A few weeks before, Natalie had gone out. She drove, not knowing it was the last time she would drive, but knowing that maybe she shouldn’t. She was hungry and nearby in a strip mall was a place that sold hamburgers. It wasn’t a chain, and she had thought it might be better because it wasn’t a place that had been made to be like other places. It was a placed that dreamed of becoming a chain. Its signature, for God’s sake, was a pastrami cheeseburger. It had six tables and white walls and somehow just failed being either retro or current, but at 11:30 it was half full of people. She lived a relentlessly white, liberal life just five or six blocks away, but here on Venice Boulevard, the kids eating their grilled cheese and chicken sandwiches and bacon cheeseburgers were all brown and black. (None of them had ordered the pastrami cheeseburger, and neither did she.) There were lots of places on Ve
nice where liberal white people went. Thai restaurants, and Indian, and even Himalayan (they had yak chili on the menu), but this was not that kind of place. It turned out to be a place where the fries were made from frozen and the bun had sat in a dry steam tray long enough to get a little tough around the bottom. The kids were chattering and goofing for each other, and a sharp-faced girl was being cynical and unimpressed. They paid no attention to a lady with a cane. The guy who fried up her cheeseburger brought it out to her table instead of calling her to the counter. (He wore one of those paper hats that look like boats—retro short order.) He and Natalie were the only white people in the place and she doubted he was the kind of person who ate yak chili. Irene and her friends might “discover” this place, but they would be slumming, and that would be part of the charm. The kids here today were not slumming. They owned this place, it was in their territory, and she had passed through the semipermeable membrane of class. The burger was fresh and the fries, honestly, were better than those things they served at In-N-Out. She read her book and ate her burger carefully.
When she was finished with her burger, she sat a few minutes to finish her book. She was ignoring the beating anxiety in her chest. She was carefully not thinking about this being the last time, or about the kids with their lives in front of them, although she wanted to ask the kid who had ordered the chicken sandwich if he was crazy. But they said on the news that there was no danger from ADP in the current food supply, and anyway, all of these kids had eaten chicken nuggets in the last five years and for all any of them knew, paperclips were bumping along their neurons.
After the Apocalypse Page 15
