Three A.M. (11 page)

Then I bolted for the door, grabbing the whiskey bottle—it being the only blunt object that came to hand—and leapt down the stairs, taking them four and five at a time. I burst out onto the street and stopped just off the sidewalk, my feet wide, arms up, looking from side to side. Silence. A faint breeze stirred the evening, swirling about me. I was still for a long time. Scarcely breathing. Nothing.

Then, from very far off, came the faint sound of receding footfalls. Not those of anyone trying to flee or be stealthy—just a man walking away. I craned my neck from side to side, trying to determine from which direction they came. I was sure it was right and then left. I stood upright, looked down at the whiskey bottle in my hand. The amber liquid was dark in the pale light of the shop’s sign. I backed up against the bricks and felt them on my skin, cool and crumbling. I took a sip of scotch. It wasn’t so foggy tonight. I could see three orbs in either direction. They shone like angry eyes, frowning at me half-naked and frightened and alone in the night.

I went back inside. I poured a tall glass of liquor and a small glass of water and placed three pills on the table. I gathered up the papers strewn about the place and stacked them in an uneven pile in a corner. As I rose, looking down at my notes and observations and scribbled theories, I thought that maybe I’d never touch them again. “Can’t help you now, Eddie,” I said in a slow whisper. Can’t do anything but try to help myself.

I gulped scotch and took little sips of water and tried not to think about anything. Every time I made a connection, it only confused me further. The man in the blue suit with the piercing eyes … he had looked at me like one stares across the ring at his opponent, not like one examines something new. Watley hadn’t seemed the least bit surprised by me showing up at his door. He seemed more like he had been waiting for it. Becca was lying about her lover. I was just trying to survive each day. Just trying to have a few dollars and a bed.

Before I joined the army, I had tried my hand at a few other things and failed like a champion. I worked in an office for a few months once. Or maybe it was weeks. Strapped to a desk and making phone calls and filling out forms, trying to get a few orders filled each day. Paper. The company sold raw paper to manufacturers. We’d sell the pulp that they would turn into cardboard boxes or posters or toilet tissue or whatever else. The management used to extol the virtues of our lowly enterprise, pouring aphorisms about greater good and necessary service and other such bullshit down on our heads. “Remember, everything you buy comes packaged in paper. Every idea is written down before it’s carried out.” I was twenty-one years old when I took that job and twenty-one when I quit.

I was a cog. I couldn’t take it. If everyone in the company were essential to every part of the company as they would preach, fine, but anyone could be one of those everyone, and I could not. I stole pens and a coffee mug and left. Everyone wants to think of themselves as honest and good, but Number One comes first. Always. The person who tells you they are truly honest, truly pure—that person has just lied and torn their own ethos apart. Sure, I don’t want to hurt anyone who doesn’t hurt anyone else, but I’ll take your bread if you won’t realize it’s gone. I too must eat bread.

For months I did nothing. My parents would call me and ask how life was and I would be as pleasant as I could force and then get off the phone. I lived not fifteen miles away from home yet hardly ever saw them. It was not for lack of love for them that I became a recluse; it was because of the confusion and disgust I felt with myself.

On my darkest days in those early years, nothing filled me with more revulsion and ennui than the knowledge that my self-loathing and listlessness were entirely not unique. My father had given me his old car. It was a reliable but wretched gray sedan with scratches all along the left side and a muffler that coughed and wheezed until I got into fourth or fifth gear. But it was my home on wheels. My room with a view. I would stuff a few beers and a pack of cigarettes into the glove box and drive out of the city into the fields and just roll along for hours. Sometimes I’d go fifty, sixty, a hundred miles in one direction before I realized I had to turn back.

I never really knew why I turned back. Turning back and driving home meant my same pungent mattress, my same mildew-covered walls, and my same smoky mirror, where I would stare into my same hollow, twenty-one-year-old eyes.

And then they were twenty-two-year-old eyes. I tried to find work as a driver—any sort of driver. I figured it would suit me well: time alone, time driving like I always did but being paid, no chicken shit. But the only offer I got was trucking sodas around town, and it was more time spent at delivery stops than on the road and would involve talking to scores of people all the time. I never had anything against people as a whole; I just didn’t want to be around them that much.

Eventually my money ran thin and I was faced with the prospect of begging from my middle-class family. Then they died, and I immediately joined the army. I was older than most of the others. They were children who could scarcely grow beards. I was a child who could grow a beard. We ran and did push-ups and shot rifles and made our beds. They yelled at us and we yelled back. Then training was over and I was qualified to shoot a rifle and I knew how to iron my uniform and I could run wires to lumps of explosive clay and explode things and I marched around when I was told to and I was always surrounded by boys with the same haircut but I didn’t have to think very much and it suited me fine, really.

The sickness came so fast, it was almost easy to deal with. Everything was normal one day, and then the next it was not. Its swiftness made it more tolerable than the fog, despite its horrors. The fog could be ignored at first—the disease could not. Whole towns’ worth of people just started rotting. Some places were almost untouched; some were almost erased. Everyone I knew outside of the young recruits I slept beside and did not know died very quickly. They died in their homes or in hospitals or wherever the buses we were ordered to force them onto took them. They told us the buses went to quarantine and treatment centers, but I was sure they just took them off to die out of sight—I never once saw evidence of the “clinics” the officers and civilian advisors claimed had been established.

Those who wandered back into sight we shot, and it was just that simple.

And then shortly after that, we were corralled into the city and then it slowly grew misty.

I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t ask for any of it. If I could go back to the night of my conception, frankly, I think I would have told my father to roll over and go to sleep. It’s amazingly awful not to desire to be alive, yet not to hate life quite enough to end it.

I always wondered what kept a guy like Heller going. Why Salk bothered waking up each morning to lament fate in his flowery prose and sell canned goods and illicit meds. I guess it must have been worse than this at times before. Plagues and pestilence and wars and floods and fires have laid waste to mankind for longer than we’ve bothered to record. I wondered if the whole world was like this. Pockets of humanity riding out the storm of disease and death in a thousand gray nests that were randomly spared. I wondered if there was any change to hope for. Hope is a dangerous commodity if it is in vain. Despair, at least, can lead to definitive action.

I was drunk. I had finished my glass, finished the bottle, and delved into the fifth of vodka. Rebecca’s vodka, I ruefully muttered as I took another sip. I washed all three pills back with a pull of ice-cold liquor and gagged, choking the capsules down and coughing, hands on my knees.

I lay down on the carpet next to the door and pulled my pants off. Then my socks. I paused, feet on the floor and legs bent, looking up at my cracked and molding ceiling. There had to be more than this.

Even in times of hardship, the measure of success is always calculated against the level of others’ misery. In a blue-sky world, would Watley have strolled among manicured hedges and well-groomed rosebushes while I drank cheap wine on a tenement roof? And would he have been as happy for that as he was for his high ceilings and polished wooden tables? I supposed a medieval peasant might have seen my little chambers and refrigerator with its meager but preserved rations and thought me something of a nobleman.

Noble. I laughed aloud as I stripped off my underwear. For all I knew, I would be killed in an alley, just like some scientist I’d never met, for asking questions. The only reason I had a few thousand dollars crammed into a hole in my bathroom wall was that most people were too scared to ask questions anymore. It was so easy to disappear in the fog. Fewer people would miss me than I could count on one finger. Maybe Adam the bartender would wonder for five minutes why his bottle of Cutty Sark was lasting so long. Maybe Rebecca was clean after all and would be upset, for a little while, that I’d never panned out. Maybe Heller would miss my occasional loans. And he’d want his Chopin back.

More likely, Watley would shoot me in the back and eventually, when my rent went unpaid for long enough, someone new would sleep in my wretched little home.

The pills were taking hold, and I rose and stood naked in the middle of the room. The blood drained from my head as I got up, and for a moment my vision swam. My temples pulsed and a dull ache constricted my brain. I stumbled into the kitchen and sucked sulfurous water from the sink. Only a few minutes left now before I was asleep or at least blacked out. I always feared the time right after those few minutes. What if my mind released before my body? What if I stumbled down into the night while out of my head? Coming to, somewhere out there in a misty alley, naked and confused and shivering. There would be no one to help me home.

I lurched toward my bedroom. Bounced off the doorframe and stumbled. Lay down. Couldn’t find a pillow. The sheets were a messy pile, so I threw them onto the ground. Just the mattress on my skin. Rough and soiled. I was fading. Never told Watley my first name, never learned Rebecca’s last. Never asked for any of it. Never tried to make a difference or get in the way. Just wanted to keep surviving until I was ready to give up.

I rolled over onto my back. Coughing. Then I was up on my knees on the bed. I clawed at my cheeks, my chest. Sweating and gasping. It was all so pathetic—so miserable. What the fuck were we doing running around in our little world until our hearts stopped pumping or our lungs filled with fluid or our brain cells were replaced with cancer? For what? Before, at the very least, you could change your scenery. Move someplace hot and dry to spend your dying years. Spend your life savings on things. The only point of living was to avoid death. Did everyone in this godforsaken city feel like this? What did the bureaucrat do to get his jollies? Did he have a lady to go home to and get inside? Maybe. Maybe that was enough. Maybe he read books or listened to music and escaped into a polychromatic land in his head.

The eight-hundred-pound gorilla lurking in the corner of my mind was knowing that had the fog never drifted in, had the sickness never spread across the land—the earth, for all any of us knew—I would most likely still be alone and drunk and sweating on a bare mattress. I would still have never once had sex with and loved the same person. Never shed a tear another could see. Never once experienced happiness that lasted longer than one drink or one orgasm or, long ago when I was younger and would drive around in my father’s old car, one song. And that one moment of song, rolling along open roads with the windows down and the volume up on a crisp day … that one moment would never be replaced.

In the morning, the backs of my fingers were raw and sore. There were a few spots of dried blood on the concrete wall above my headboard. I didn’t remember any of it.

6

“Hi, Rebecca.” She was so focused on a piece of paper held close to her nose that she hadn’t even glanced up as she passed within inches of me. I was leaning against the speckled granite wall by my office building’s entrance. She gasped upon hearing her name.

“What are you reading?” I asked with an edge to my voice. She had crammed the paper into her pocket and closed her eyes, then took in a deep breath to regain her composure.

“Tom. Hi. Hello, I … you startled me.”

“I was just standing here. Just leaning on the wall, perfectly still. Perfectly calm. What were you reading?”

“Nothing. Nothing important. To you, I mean. Just other things in my life.

I blew a short burst of air through my nose and looked away. “Well, that’s kind of an answer. I’d like to talk to you about other things in your life, though, so I’m glad you brought it up.”

I took her roughly by the arm and started walking down the street. Her biceps was tense beneath the soft wool of her gray jacket.

“Aren’t we—what … aren’t we going to your office?” she asked, her voice growing higher as she spoke.

“No.” I tightened my grip as she tried to pull her arm free.

“Tom, what are—?”

“Don’t talk, okay.” I spat laconically. I led her down the block. She kept looking over at me, but I kept my eyes forward, my face a blank mask. When we had walked maybe fifty yards, I abruptly turned around and pulled her along as I went back the way we had come. After covering half the distance back to the office, I stopped.

“Shhh,” I ordered. She jerked her arm free and stood breathing quickly and staring at me. I looked into her frightened gray eyes for a moment and then stood still, staring off into the mist and listening for any sound. None came. A minute passed and then another and then, finally, I turned again and said, “Let’s go.”

She followed a few steps behind me as I walked quickly down the street. I knew this part of town well, so while it seemed no one was following, it would be easy for me to be sure. We passed an alley obscured by the haze, and I quickly turned left and entered it, looking over my shoulder to be sure she followed. Down another small street and then through a square we walked. I gradually led us in a circle, taking an illogical and winding path. We crossed the same square, and I was confident she didn’t realize it.