City of orange, p.9
City of Orange, page 9
He peers out from behind the blanket. Gong, gong, gong. It is coming from the terminus. The sound grows steadier and louder: footsteps. No doubt about it. Someone inside the massive drain pipe, approaching.
He hastens down the slope. Halfway down he remembers his weapons. He crouches to a skidding halt and sprints back up to the shelter to retrieve his long spear, then his short prybar. He holds the spear tip steady before him as he dashes to the first bridge and conceals himself in the shade of a support column there. He slips the heavy prybar into the wire loop on his belt and hopes it’ll hold.
The gonging grows louder and louder. He peers at the terminus: nothing. He ducks back behind the column.
His heart thrashes about in his chest, and he realizes he is suddenly damp with sweat. There is a moment approaching, he knows. A moment that may be his last conscious experience. On the column are words debossed into the concrete: mcpherson const. co. 1995. A faint waterline marks the surface just below eye level. Water flowed here once. Down at his feet sits a looped hook of junk plastic. It is, he realizes, one of those tiny hangers used to display socks at department stores.
Brand-new baby socks with crisp tissue paper crinkling inside.
He had held socks like this once, in the palm of his hand, before she had been born. The sound of the crisp tissue paper was the first event that eventually led him here. But how?
This hopeless question could be the last ever produced by his panicking brain.
He adjusts his grip on the spear and watches the three pipes of the terminus in the near distance. Which one? The gonging comes to a stuttering crescendo, and stops.
A shuffling sound now. The sound of someone dragging themselves across a tin roof. A figure emerges from the pipe on the right, pipe number 3. A White man with crazed white hair wearing long black garments. Attached to each of the man’s limbs are a dozen white shopping bags, each filled to bursting. The weight of the bags forces him to move with a swinging effort, like a deep-sea diver crashing his way out of the ocean. One of the bags bears the words thank you thank you thank you thank you.
The man scoots along in a seated position until he reaches the lip of the pipe. With the great care of a drunkard, he turns his body onto all fours in preparation to back himself out of the pipe. He seems to be considering how best to dangle onto the ground six feet below.
The man’s foot slips. He falls onto his chest and slides, fingertips thudding against the corrugated steel, before dropping like a rag doll onto the concrete floor of the river channel. The man’s head bounces once, and hard. He lies there with the breeze pushing at that mad hair of his. He lies motionless.
Twenty-One
He watches the old man for what feels like an hour.
The guy doesn’t move. Is he dead? He adjusts his grip on his spear again and again. There’s no way the man could be dead from a fall so short. Unless he hit the ground at a freakish angle. Maybe his neck snapped. Maybe he is lying paralyzed and unable to call for help.
He watches for a few more long minutes. Still nothing. The adrenaline seems to be ebbing from his body, and in its place comes the gradual realization that he could be staring at a man helpless and suffering. He may have nothing to fear after all.
He can walk right up and finish him off with a single spear thrust to the eye.
He can pierce the white bags and sift through their contents at his leisure while the man stares in horror.
He can simply stand there and gawk. He’d never seen a dead body before the world ended. Now he’s seen two in a single week that he’s been allowed to remember. Two is probably on the low end of the scale for most these days.
The old man could also be a trap. Maybe the old man is not stupid. He had spotted him well in advance, this younger, clearly panicked, clearly inexperienced man in his obvious stakeout spot holding his pathetic weapon.
Maybe the old man has just taken a well-practiced pratfall. He has a full belly and a sharp mind and now lies awake and alive, listening for his mark’s footsteps to come close enough for a solid surprise attack.
This pretend death, he remembers, is called playing possum.
Not today, old man. He settles deeper into his position and holds his spear tip forward. The spear is no toy, no sir. I can wait as long as it takes.
* * *
—
Another hour passes. The last traces of adrenaline have vanished from his body, and his clothes cling with sweat. The prybar is pulling his flimsy wire loop loose; he tightens it again and resumes his watch.
The old man has not moved.
He can’t tell much from the shape of the plastic bags. They are round and fluffy and soft. Clothes, maybe? Food? Maybe the old man is far gone by this point, and carries a collection of found women’s underwear? Marshmallows? Severed ears?
What about weapons? A small pistol, and a supply of ammunition that grows increasingly precious with each shot fired? Or maybe something more ordinary? Ordinary things now count as weapons in this new world. His clear string, for example, could cut into a throat. The foil cutter on his wine tool. And of course the prybar. He mentally practices drawing it out quickly for attack. It’s good to have a backup weapon.
Then there is the question of where the old man has come from. The three storm-drain pipes stand unguarded and open, an enigma waiting for anyone willing to climb in and venture into darkness.
Three perfect cylinders set in a massive rhombus of concrete, punctuated by a body on the floor.
He can imagine whole groups of survivors heading underground, maybe to the safety of abandoned maintenance tunnels below. That kind of thing had been done before. There was an old photo of Brits huddled in subway tunnels, all still in their smart street clothes. Every time there was a bombing, or the threat of one, they scrambled below while sirens droned on, carrying whatever they happened to be carrying, no clue if they would ever live normal lives again. No clue if the world above ground would still be there when they came back up.
Maybe a new generation of underground refugee is within those pipes, huddled in the darkness. Their temporary shelter now permanent. Faces illuminated by leisure camping gear now rendered dire and crucial while fires razed the neighborhoods above into the blackened fields they now are.
Maybe, maybe, nothing but maybes.
Supplies dwindled. The underground survivors sent scouts out for supplies, and they never came back. So they turned on one another. Cannibalism. This old man has escaped one hell after another, only to fall six feet to an unceremonious death.
Maybe, maybe.
Hot now, even in the shade. He lowers his spear for a moment to wipe his brow and lies on the slope of the river channel to rest. He can still keep his eyes on the old man even lying down. See?
* * *
—
They used to have that shitty fan. A tall, creaky floor device with clear blue blades spinning within the torus of its wire cage, gently swinging its head back and forth in the heat. Oscillating. No one could have possibly known that word before these fans.
It was hot as hell, summer, lying in a bed in the afternoon. No AC in their cheap apartment. She lay next to him, and they were both naked, and they were both so young they had nothing else to do with the day except lie there and see where their minds wandered. This was way before any pregnancy or birth. The brown skin of her abdomen bore no scar. They’d just made love.
There was a place your body settled into while at absolute rest, in a pose of such stillness and contentment and inevitability that to move even the slightest bit would disturb its perfection. To rise, sip from the glass of ice water laden with beadlets of condensation by the window aglow with the sheer primrose drapes she obsessed over, and then attempt to regain that position of ideal repose, would be impossible. The cavity in the bed would have ballooned slightly. The bedsheets would have cooled just enough to mark your absence.
Thirsty as he was, he did not move. He lay there with her. A perfect black curlicue of her hair lay stuck to the sweat on his forehead and he wondered how long it would take to dry and blow free.
Their heads were touching. He remembered how they loved this: a small point of contact the size of a dollar coin, but potent nevertheless. They liked to imagine their brains’ electrical signals rerouting and merging at this new nexus, little nodes of light slowing their pace to sync up these two systems now each mated with one another. They liked to imagine they were exchanging data.
On this warm, lazy day, she sent him a single bright rainbow-colored bit. He paused, smiled, sent a matching bit zipping back.
As the oscillating fan blew about the room, they knew they would have a baby.
Twenty-Two
He opens his eyes.
No.
He’d fallen asleep. His hands sit in his lap, still cradling the spear.
He hears a shuffle and glances up.
The face of the old man floats before him, a mask of crushed paper. Holding something in his hands, about as long as a human femur, hooked on one end.
The prybar.
He springs back, clutching the spear anew. The old man is on all fours and shrinks back in response.
Berries? asks the old man, and shakes the prybar in the air before him. Berries?
The old man’s eyes grow wider as he holds his ground.
He renews his grip on the spear and aims the tip right at the old man’s face. If the spear fails—fails to pierce the soft target of his eye and travel back into his hot brain, oh God—he always has the wine tool as a last resort. Although he’ll need to get a few feet away to retrieve it and flick it open and ready. He tries moving back, but finds his legs are unable to.
Both his legs have fallen asleep.
He hears the old man murmur again, Berries, this time with wonder, and watches as he shifts his withered gaze down the channel. The old man is staring at the blanket in the distance, covering his shelter. He seems to comprehend the importance of that place.
Oh no no no. He shifts to a low squat, almost tipping on his own unresponsive legs. You are not going to jack my shit.
He suddenly remembers a time when his arm had gone so numb in his sleep that he thought a stranger had tucked their hand under his face. Or a severed limb.
That’s how numb his legs are now.
He watches helplessly as the old man looks back at him, then the shelter, then him, then back again. He jerks his spear in warning: don’t you dare. The old man jerks the prybar—his prybar, dammit—right back at him.
The two of them hold this standoff for a long moment. It’s almost polite, the way they wait for each other to make the first move.
The numbness in his legs begins to dissolve, flooding his nerves with thousands of white-hot pinpricks.
The old man turns—ehh—and begins hobbling toward the shelter.
Stop, he hisses at him, and each step in pursuit sends brilliant pulses of pain up his body, so impressive and sharp he wants to laugh. No one in the history of humanity has ever died from a case of pins and needles, but dang.
The two men shamble together for a few long seconds in silence. From a distance it probably looks like the old man is pulling him along with a stick. Some kind of tedious two-man Beckett play for no one in particular.
The old man is just one step out of reach of his spear. Just inches away.
Nuh, he blurts, not quite a battle cry, and lunges forward with a wild slash across the old man’s legs.
He makes contact with the rod of the spear, not the tip. But it works: one leg crashes against the other, and the old man falls in a splash of noisy plastic.
Berries, he cries.
He’s all over the old man now. Shut it, he breathes. He glances at the houses above. No movement. Shut your face hole or we both die. He snatches up his prybar, struggles to holster it back in his useless wire loop, tucks it under an arm. He stands over him with his spear ready.
Berries, whimpers the old man.
The old man’s face sags with defeat. There is a son somewhere in that face, a father or husband maybe, its features scrubbed so thin by time and wind that he could be anyone. Like a corpse left in the sun. He could be any race, any age between forty and a thousand. His hair gathers in dirty ivory hanks around eyes like dented glass marbles, flat with tears now.
The old man slowly reaches for his shirt pocket. His breath stinks like something died in his throat.
He shakes the old man. Who are you? he says.
The old man pulls a piece of paper out of the pocket. Berries.
What is it he keeps saying: Buries, or bears? Or is it simply babble, meaning nothing?
Of course it’s nothing. Everything is nothing here.
The old man unfolds the paper: a cracked department-store portrait of a man with a woman and daughter, around age nine. A snapshot from the world back when it was alive and clean and perfect. It looks cut out of a catalog. Maybe it is.
Or maybe it’s real, and the man is this old man, and this had been his family. Until the plague spread, until the firebombs came to contain the infected.
Berries, the old man insists, touching the photo.
He risks a closer look, and sees the eyes are the same.
Twenty-Three
He lowers his spear a centimeter and tilts his head to reexamine the old man.
The old man returns his gaze with the resignation of countless prayers to God gone unanswered. Come what may, say his eyes, as he returns the photo to its special place. It’s all pointless anyway.
What were their names, he asks him.
Burrberries, murmurs the old man.
They your family?
The old man nods.
Are you looking for them?
No response.
Are they out there? He gestures about. Alive?
The old man nods faster. Then he winces and grips his shoulder as if in pain.
He feels his heart flash with concern for the old man, but zaps that bug dead. Do not even try that with me, he says. He takes a step back. The old man continues making a big show of looking wounded, and reaches for a bag tied around his thigh.
Do not even, he says.
Berries, whines the old man, tapping the bag, then tapping his shoulder.
I’m gonna punch that bag open, he says. Do not move. Understand?
The old man just closes his eyes and massages his shoulder.
What is this? This is crazy.
What are the chances of meeting someone here in the middle of nowhere?
He wants to slap the old codger and tell him he’s onto him—onto the whole damn thing—forcing him to break character and yell Cut! so that bored camera crew workers can emerge from their hiding places stretching and bitching about shoot schedules and overtime.
This is no puzzle. It isn’t even real. It’s a show.
Get up! he yells. Cut! Cut!
But the old man doesn’t get up. A tear descends his temple and disappears into the white of his hair.
He looks around with his spear, no idea what to do next. The channel is blank like always. No camera crew, no showrunner, no nobody. He shifts his weight. He feels the key hiding in his shoe.
Then he turns and presses the spear into the plastic bag. There are multiple layers to get through, and he works the spear in and around with small movements, as if probing a body. The old man watches with grim resentment.
Inside the torn bag he can see four unopened toothbrushes, a dried sponge, trial-sized packets of hand sanitizer. The brand names and packaging spark a flashbulb memory of a drugstore lit by a hundred fluorescent tubes hanging above. He swats them aside.
There are socks, underwear, a bag of throat lozenges. Finally he hears a rattle and spots an amber bottle of painkillers. He coaxes it out, sweeps it toward him, and holds it up.
Is this what you’re looking for? He can’t stand the sight of the label and its familiar extreme strength logo. He tears it off and lets the label swirl away in the wind.
Got windy all of a sudden, didn’t it?
The old man points at a bag on his other leg.
So he pierces that one as well. Little bottles of water come tumbling out. They lie in the sun, clear as glass, and cast tiny supernovae of refracted light in their shadows.
Where’d you get these, he demands.
The old man labors to a sitting position. He points at the pipes of the terminus. Then he helps himself to some water and beckons for the bottle of painkillers.
He tucks the spear under an arm and opens the bottle of pills, pointing it away from his face as if it contains bees. But of course there are no bees, they are just pills, pink as chalk. He shakes out a couple and sets them on the ground.
Take ’em, he says.
The old man swallows the pills. He seems to relax. Berries, he says.
Then the old man places his sun-blackened hand on the tip of the spear, guides it to his ear, and waits.
What is this, he says.
Berries, says the old man.
I’m supposed to kill you now? That can’t be what I’m supposed to do next.
The old man looks up with mild disappointment.
He moves his spear away. Get up, he says.
The old man gives the ground a single weak push, buckles, and sighs with defeat.
Goddammit, he thinks, and offers a hand. The old man grasps it—skin dry and cool as stone—and teeters to his feet.
If you were the one who gave me those pills earlier, he tells him, then thanks.
The old man frowns: Not me.
What the hell does this old man signify? He’s no Man Friday. He is neither a vandal nor a walking corpse. He hopes the old man isn’t a test. He always hated tests.
He chooses an answer and hopes it’s the correct one.
