by Ben Marcus
I would like to say that love shows itself in strange ways, but that would not be true in this case. Sometimes love refuses to show itself at all. It remains perfectly hidden. One spends a lifetime concealing it. There is an art to this. To conceal love is, in its way, the most sophisticated kind of smallwork there is.
Esther stood outside our house with her head down, shoulders small.
I rushed her again, moved my daughter yet farther into the yard, and she slumped over me, let herself be carried. At the sidewalk I dropped her and with my hands I made the most terrible gesture I could.
It was the most fluent I’d ever been without speech.
Stay, stay there. Do not come in this house again. You are forbidden from here. We do not know you.
Esther looked up at me and nodded. With her little finger she crossed her heart.
I would not be fooled by her ministrations, such conspicuous acts of tenderness designed to fool us into letting down our guard. She should have known better. Maybe now she would.
Tonight I needed to protect my home and that meant keeping people like her—blood relation or not—well clear of it. If Esther tried to return I would be ready for her. I would meet her with everything I had.
21
We drove out the next morning. Our breath was scarce and we were bruising in dark pools beneath the skin. A small wound on my leg failed to bleed. It opened like the mouth of a baby. From the gash came the faintest wheeze of sound. I flinched when I heard it, braced for it to sicken me, too.
People swarmed the street. I could not see their faces. Our evacuation was orderly and our denial so final, we were spared overt displays of grief. The day was hot, there was weeping down the hill, some other person’s weeping, and in our own yard, under the fractured shade of the oldest tree on our block, such a clutter of moths bothered the air. These were the slow, bird-size moths, so awkward they may as well have been tagged and numbered.
My face felt so heavy, I thought I could remove it, step on it until it composted. I coupled my hip bag of adrenaline with boiled-down Semantiril to queer any speech sounds I might hear. I needed speech estranged into grunts and huffs. Even these could command people into action. I required speech submerged in fluid, warbled, buried in the ground. The Semantiril got me close. It brought foam into the holes, filling in whatever silence was left inside a word. What I heard were solid blocks of tone, like the test sounds from an emergency broadcast.
Throughout the day I paused while loading the car to huff these vapors from an oily lunch bag.
The last signs of life flickered inside Claire. That much and no more. When she looked at me I felt the high disgrace of being known for what I am.
Outside the house was a whiteout of silence, the sound of a whole neighborhood holding its breath. I kept my head down, vowed not to see. If I did not regard others in their shame, their haste, perhaps they would spare me from seeing mine.
Once I had Claire in the car, I noticed she was clutching the letter she’d written to Esther. Somehow she’d found the strength to sit down and write a final message. It was sealed and I was not to read it or ask about it. Fairly simple parameters to follow. The envelope was wrinkled with sweat, with whatever leaked freely from Claire.
I wrote no such letter myself. There was something blackening to the act of writing words, like carving into flesh. My hand felt foreign. It would not cooperate. And if I did write anything, it looked like a drawing dismantled into too many pieces. I could make the parts but I could not put the parts together.
Decipherment of words on a page was too difficult. When I managed it, I was never sure what had happened, who’d been killed by whom. It was becoming clear to me that reading would be something I would avoid. The very thought of it sent a wave of fear through my chest.
When I finally sat down with a voice recorder the night before, I produced only excuses. The rhetoric of a whitewasher. Nothing passed for tender in what I said, which meant that I had already communicated all I could on the topic. Everything else, like most of my parenting to Esther, would have to go without saying, without doing. But when I listened back to the recording, to check the quality of the sound, I heard the sounds of a man with cloth stuffed in his mouth. In the end this was what I left for Esther. There was no larger wisdom I could impart.
Here, my final words to you, just nothing. It is all that I know.
In the car I pulled Claire’s nightgown from where it was bunched under her legs. I straightened her coat. Beneath the seat I clicked the lever and shifted her back. Her legs released into the freed-up space and she relaxed.
I did not want to hurt her so I did not speak. I held her face and mouthed, “How’s that?”
She stared straight through me.
I looked at this stoic, long-suffering woman, who really should have died weeks ago. What an insult this all was to her. She did not want me breathing in her space, leaning my weight against her. She did not want me getting close. In Shippington, in Lobe Arbor, in one of the fields that ran flush to West Hollows, Claire could be alone all she liked.
If there was a plan, it was that we’d head down Route 4, but take the splinter trail that cuts beneath the Monastery, following the tracks until the trail dovetails with 41. In Shippington or Lobe Arbor we’d book a motel, monitor the situation from there.
I’d called ahead this morning, gotten nothing, not even an unanswered ring.
When I thought of Esther alone in the house, without us, I pictured her being waited on by … us. Facsimiles of us. Robot usses. Father and mother us, hovering over Esther with bowls of berries, with the special dinner of steamed greens, the de-meated slab of protein and sautéed bread she liked. Her own baby bowl of salt, hooked onto her dinner plate like a sidecar. I couldn’t see her, Esther didn’t exist, without a satellite of us orbiting by, although I’m sure Esther had no problem imagining her solitude. We’d always cooked and cleaned for her, served her food, done her laundry, put away her things. Standard-issue caretaking. There was no way to distill these tasks into words and leave her with any clear sense of how to take care of things herself. But I flattered myself when I thought that what Esther needed was instructions regarding the house, a set of operational strategies to keep her afloat inside the family home. That is not what Esther needed.
When Esther was finally old enough to walk to school by herself, she still wanted approval for things that were too basic to be considered talents. Eating an apple. Standing on one leg. Soon she’d want to be congratulated for waking up, leaving a room. Once she sat on our windowsill—she must have been eight or nine already. She was very pleased with herself, swinging her legs back and forth.
Do you know, Dad, that I can do a trick?
Oh yeah?
Yeah!
I can make my legs go this way and that, that way and this!
I see that.
Do you see?
I do.
You’re not looking. Why aren’t you looking?
I’m looking. I see it.
You’re not, though. You’re not.
I should have congratulated her. Who was I to say this wasn’t extraordinary? What did I really know about extraordinary things?
At the car I crouched down next to Claire to administer her travel dose. When we got to the motel I would bathe her, let her sleep, and go out and get us some food, if I could find any. Perhaps she would sleep for days. I would let no children into the room. Would I hurt the children if they approached? I had not decided. I would refrain from speaking. The television and radio and phone would be unplugged. Claire would enjoy total silence. She could rest and eat and rest and bathe and eat and sleep until this was over and she recovered.
I had recuperative medicines in mind for this next phase. Claire needed a few weeks of quiet.
Perhaps we’d find the moans that were safe to exchange, and into them we’d spread enough meaning to get by.
I pushed Claire’s gown up her legs and grabbed a handful of skin.
/> She didn’t flinch when I jammed in the needle.
A clear bead of serum gathered on her thigh, clung to a fine hair.
Despite the precaution against speech, I spoke to Claire, and I wish I could remember what I said, if only to seal off this memory and never consider it again. I have not found my doubt to be useful. It is a distraction to live so long with uncertainty.
What I said to Claire may have been an estimate of our departure. Probably that sort of chatter, whatever was coming next. We were minutes away—Let me check the trunk. Are you thirsty?—or it may have been an endearment I offered. Did I say that I loved her? Nothing but wishful thinking would suggest that I did. Such a phrase would have sounded awful on that day. Certainly ill-timed, certainly self-serving. A phrase designed purely to trigger an equivalent response. But wishful thinking has had its way with me. It has hounded me. In all of this silence it is my primary voice.
Did I say that I loved her?
The question is immaterial. It’s the last piece of speech I gave my wife, and it matters to no one but me.
The car was packed, but before we could leave I had my own injection to administer. I’d doctored my blend with a trace of Aphaseril, which curled into the serum in a dark ribbon that settled at the bottom of the vial. For privacy I crouched down against the rear wheel of the car.
“Here’s how,” I said to no one, and fed the needle into my loneliest vein. A coldness overtook me as the needle found purchase, chilling my groin, rising up my stomach. I clung to the car as my heart surged. Such a sweet ache rushed in to cover the nausea. It was what I needed to make the final push out of here.
2
22
When the departure horn tore open the New York air, and the cars started their slow crawl from town, Claire opened the passenger door and stumbled into the grass. At first I thought she forgot something in the house, so I let her stagger away.
My wife in her nightgown on a strangely warm December day, running not so well from the car.
Go ahead, I thought. If we couldn’t have Esther, we could have more of her stuff. Grab the baby teeth stashed in the foot of an old onesie, the self-portrait Esther took with her long face overlit in the lens, the blanket stitched from Esther’s stuffed animals that might make this easier. We have no more time, Sweetheart, we really don’t, but go ahead. They’re motioning us to leave now, so please hurry.
It was true. The officials of the quarantine had initiated a semaphore that left no room for doubt. People so disfigured in padding they looked like technicians from a bomb squad, waving bright yellow traffic rods, firing a jolt at those few of us who were seeking to stay put. Men and women doubling over in the road from lightning shot into their torsos. It was time to go.
But Claire didn’t go to the house. She crossed into the field, entered the high growth, and before she even reached the meadow she faltered.
I raced after her but by the time I reached her she was fallen, her eyes already cold. She couldn’t even make it to the tree line. By the time I reached Claire the men of the quarantine dropped down on me, dragging me back to the car.
I left Claire on her back in the grass, staring through me, at something no one else could see. She looked finally gone.
From the woods trotted a pack of dogs, like old men in animal suits, barking with human voices. Behind them trudged a human chain of jumpsuited rescuers, arms linked so they’d miss no one. They were flushing stragglers from the woods, kicking the bushes for shapes.
And there were some stragglers. They thought they could wait out the evacuation, then return to their homes until this blew over. But nothing was blowing over. We kept believing it couldn’t get any worse, as if our imaginations held sway in the natural world. We should have known that whatever we couldn’t imagine was exactly what was coming next.
The technicians of the quarantine carried me over their heads in grips so fierce I couldn’t move.
I caught one last sight of Claire. She seemed confused. No one told her she’d come up short in the field and collapsed. No one told her she had not escaped.
They stuffed me in my car, shut the door, then banged a hand on the roof to tell me it was okay to go now. Join the procession out of here. Get going. Without her.
But it was very much not okay. I scrambled across the seats out the other side of the car, made a break for the field to get my wife—even dead, she should be coming with me, even if I had to drive up to Fort Wine to bury her—but they grabbed me again, pushed me back in, this time guarding the doors with their cushioned bodies.
When I kicked on the doors they were blocked from the outside. It was like my car was underwater and I could not get out. Underwater, with padded men hovering over me like … like nothing else I’ve ever seen.
From inside the car I watched them take Claire to their truck and then the truck’s cargo door slid down and the truck’s lights flashed once, before the truck pulled out and took, not the street, because the street was clogged with cars, but the field that stretched out beyond our houses. And if the truck stopped as it cruised through the grass, it was only to collect another straggler, some local citizen who had lost the strength to leave and would now join my wife and the stunned others inside that dark vehicle, headed slowly out of sight like the rest of us.
23
I drove from home through a gridwork of shadow, the car cold and dark. When I cleared the town line I hugged the access road along the wooden boulevard until it converted into open asphalt at Meriwether. A shudder of speed bumps shook the car, launching me onto the highway.
A siren from town erupted in deep, low tones. It blew nearly too low to hear, but I felt the rumble of it deep in my hips, and it took miles of driving before the vibration released.
The quarantine with its poisonous children was behind me.
In my rearview mirror no cars followed, nobody traveling north. Everyone else fleeing town had peeled off west, south, and I had the road to myself. The view was mostly washed out by the winter air, but outside of Van Buren a trail of smoke ripped through the sky. Somebody’s flare from some road somewhere, maybe.
I drove until I slumped exhausted against the steering wheel and the car crunched to a stop in a gravel swell. I awoke with salty, warm blood in my mouth and drove on, sometimes following roads that were so broad, so ill defined, it seemed I was traveling through a vast parking lot.
This was far from home already, along the northern vein toward Albany. In my life I had not driven this far north. This must be what birds feel when they look down on the world and find the entire landscape new. Suddenly they’ve flown into a strange place where even the wind is foreign on their bodies, a wind so thick it’s like a person. He’s mauling you and you can’t move. Everything is different. The buildings, the earth below, the wires bisecting streets into broken pieces of stone.
My maps were old, drawn for a louder world, and it sickened me to even consider them.
The road grew over the curb, threatened the grass. As I gained distance north, the road leaked into the woods, spreading over hills, a blanketing of asphalt. I could not leave the highway. The rumors about this region were true. Even the hills were made of road. I pulled over, but found only more road to clear, and no matter how far I pulled over I only entered new parts of highway, which spilled in every direction. It was not safe to slow down. More cars joined me now, humming past in reckless vectors, a traffic without lanes, drivers staring at the hardened space ahead.
I held fast to what seemed a straight line and did my best to focus.
By noon the road eased into a slushy grass, and I drove faster, the wet soil like a wake of water beneath me. I crossed Allamuchy, where trees enclosed the roadway in a dark tunnel, violated by shards of light so blinding they seemed to throw white rocks in my path on the highway.
A fine green grass covered the countryside here, blown flush to the soil by the volley of speeding cars. Whole meadows leaned over at once as if some great airplane roared overhead.
Outside of Corning a thin geyser of mud shot from the earth, whining into the air before stalling at its peak of flight, then falling in streaks to the ground. I do not know for how long I pushed forward. With my windows sealed the world passed by in silence, and such conditions made it almost impossible to mark the passing of time.
At intersections the stop signs had been effaced, caked in metallic red paint. Road signs and city distances had likewise been distorted. Most public writing, issuing basic commands to drivers, had been camouflaged. The bright, hammered slabs of road signs still hung from their posts, but they were wordless blocks of color that commanded no action.
Wherever the epidemic stood north of town, no one was taking any chances. If there had been any language in the countryside, it had now been systematically erased.
I saw no real writing for hours. Such conditions suited me fine.
At a county border marked by a heap of rope, a man on a ladder disguised a road sign, adding marks to the letters until they flowered out of meaning. The word looked to have once been Rochester.
That such a word once meant something seemed now only to be an accident.
I drove on. Before checkpoints I slowed. With one of Claire’s hospital masks I wiped the warm leakage from my eyes. No one questioned me.
Somebody wept inside a clouded booth, where a line had formed. I saw the colorful body bags of Albany. A woman outside a medical tent sprayed a mist on what looked to be an antenna, the dark rod quivering in her hands. Possibly it was only a braided metal cable, feeding into a mound of dust at her feet, but I did not stop. Her ears were packed with mud.
I could stick a wire into any piece of soil and listen to Burke, LeBov had said.
At most during these checkpoint stops a man peered into the car, smelled the air. My trunk was opened and probed. For children, no doubt, they searched. For something I did not have.
