Eleven Twenty-Three, page 14
I sigh and stare idiotically at the floor, trying to put the events from earlier into a coherent narrative. In the last hour and a half, hundreds of people have died, and the ones left to account for the departed have been transformed into rambling infantile dumb-asses. I have to begin three more times before finding my voice.
“We were at Dad’s funeral, just like we had planned to be. Pastor Robbins was delivering the eulogy. Then—I don’t know what happened. He just lost it. He attacked Uncle Stan just before killing himself. Right then like half of the family went crazy. They, um—they started trying to hurt one another and then themselves. I don’t know why. Their eyes were rolled back in their head. They were foaming at the mouth. They weren’t themselves at all anymore. It was like they had schizophrenia and rabies at the same time or something. And then, just like that, everyone who had been crazy the minute before went unconscious, and that was it. Things have been quiet since, I’m pretty sure.”
My mother attempts to process this as I lie her down on the sofa. She touches her face gingerly and pulls her hand away, inspecting the streak of reddish dirt on her fingers. I quickly go into the kitchen and wet down a rag and fill a glass with water. When I return and sit on my haunches to try and wipe at her face, she pushes my hand away and stares intently at me.
“It didn’t just happen in the cemetery, though. Am I right?”
“You’re right. It happened across the End, it looks like.”
“And everywhere else?” she asks, clenching her eyes shut.
“I don’t know for sure. I don’t think so, though. I think it might just be here in town. Let me clean your face up.”
Before I can take three swipes at the area around her mouth with the damp rag, she suddenly clenches my wrist and keeps my hand suspended in mid-air.
“Layne, tell me the truth. I was one of the people that went crazy, wasn’t I?”
Her eyes stab at me, and her grip tightens until my hand goes numb. I focus on the dress shoes I am wearing, which are covered in dead filth.
“It’s okay,” she says. “You can tell me. Was I one of them, Layne?”
“Yes.”
“Oh my—oh my God. Did I—?”
“No,” I say emphatically. “No you didn’t.”
Only because you stopped her, a tiny evil voice reminds me. But what happens the moment you walk out that front door?
“You’re sure?” she chokes.
“I’m positive, Mom.”
“What is this blood on me then if I didn’t kill anyone? Don’t lie to me, Layne.”
“You attacked people, just like the others. But you didn’t kill anyone.”
“Who did I attack?” she asks through her tears.
The image of my mother, her teeth ripping into the child’s leg and filling her mouth with dirt and rocks and trying desperately to choke herself, sears my memory. I swallow the acid in my throat.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I can’t remember who it was. It doesn’t matter, though. It’s not your fault. None of this is anybody’s fault. It just—it just happened, Mom. But look: Tara and Hajime are down there, and they have no idea if their own families are okay. I promised to take Tara and check on her parents and her sister, and Hajime has to go back to his car so he can see about his mom and dad in St. Augustine, so I’ve got to go, Mom. But I promise—I promise—that I will be back in a few hours to check on you. I’ve just got to go and see if I can help them right now. Okay?”
She smiles weakly and lets go of my hand. I finish wiping what I can from her face and then hastily stuff the soiled rag into my pocket. I try to offer her a reassuring grin, but can only succeed in a ghastly flash of my teeth. While she rests and tries to undo in her head what’s been done to the End, I head into the kitchen and surreptitiously remove all of the kitchen knives from the sink and slip all but one of them into the trash before stuffing the last one into my back pants pocket.
“Should I go with you?” she asks, keeping her eyelids shut and pretending not to notice me scanning the room for anything potentially harmful.
“No. You’re weak and it might be dangerous again. It’s best if you just stay here and find out as much information as you can from the news so you can update me later when I come back.”
What occurs to me as I open the cabinet under the sink and begin pouring out the contents of her household cleaners is that, if things were to devolve again, it truly is best if she’s alone here in this apartment, so that she can’t hurt anyone but possibly herself.
Once everything goes, it doesn’t take long for any and all of us to assimilate to the new math of heartless solutions to the coldest of equations.
“I hope Tara and Hajime’s families are okay,” she says vacantly from the living room.
“Me too, Mom.”
I open the cabinet and remove the sleeping pills and the aspirin. They end up buried underneath layers and layers of trash. After getting rid of the pills, I scan the rest of the room, but already know how futile my efforts are. If what happened earlier were to occur again, she could cave her own skull in against the wall in less time than it takes to figure out how to open a prescription bottle. There is nothing I can do to stop this. I sigh and return to the living room.
“All right, I’m going.”
“Be careful, baby boy,” she murmurs, looking away. “You’re all I have.”
“I will. Lock your door after I leave, okay? And be on the lookout for any news about help coming or what’s going on outside of town. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Wait for me. Don’t leave the apartment. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Promise me you won’t leave unless you absolutely have to.”
“But what if—?” she begins.
“Promise me, Mom. Don’t be that lady right now. Please?”
“Okay. I don’t want to be that lady, whoever she is.”
“So?”
“So I promise—I’ll stay here.”
“Good,” I say. “Thank you. I’ll be back and everything will be all right again, I swear.”
“Don’t swear to things that are clearly beyond your control, Layne,” she warns. “That was always your father’s problem.”
“Well…I’ll swear anyway, Mom.”
I lean over and gently kiss her forehead before leaving. Once outside on the breezeway, I listen for the sound of the deadbolt clicking behind me. After the lock snaps into place I sprint for the car, wiping my mouth off with the back of my hand, disgusted.
01:15:41 PM
Hajime told me not long before I left the States that FEMA has been stockpiling hundreds of thousands of black plastic coffins at a facility in rural Georgia for some time. He showed me images on Google Maps and Youtube to prove it. Then he chuckled grimly and told me that the same government agency that couldn’t provide food, clean water, and necessary provisions for the people of Louisiana in 2005 was apparently quite capable of hording vast numbers of industrial containers to toss everyone’s corpses into once the next unnamed, yet wholly unpreventable disaster of Biblical proportions struck the South sometime in the near future.
He also told me just last night that the most powerful men in the world—from politicians to oil tycoons, media personalities to billionaire industrialists—met at a retreat called Bohemian Grove every summer in a forest outside of San Francisco. Once there, they would denigrate prostitutes, drink themselves into a Republican stupor, stalk around the compound nude, and burn wooden effigies in the shape of children before a mammoth Celtic idol of an owl. Then they would light cigars and discuss their plans for the world’s collective future.
These men effortlessly re-write our past with invisible ink while prancing along in the shadows of an illusory present moment. They are unseen and never once considered by the common people of the world as we carry out our mundane daily lives, and yet everything we the hoi polloi will ever do was already written, already glanced over and stamped a forged approval in a room with no doors.
But you couldn’t despair at these revelations, Hajime said. In fact, the only way you could know these things and not immediately kill yourself was to take what you’ve learned and use it to strengthen your resolve. You could never give up, no matter how grim the situation became, no matter how long the recession lasted, no matter how many soldiers and innocent people died in Iraq, and no matter how close we were to December 2012, the moment when all the ancient calendars of the world ended.
“I’m never going to wind up in some god-damned plastic coffin,” he said, and made another brush stroke on the canvas. “That’s all there is to it.”
But the paleness of his complexion right now, the way his hands are shaking as he grabs his bag and climbs out of my car, the way he bundles up in his jacket and looks at the world without a single glimmer of optimism, let alone a plan, in his eyes—I know the truth.
The truth is that he was lying to me all these years, and has already resigned himself to the bottom of that plastic coffin, just another forgotten casualty obfuscated in the cigar smoke.
“Unless an unforeseen circumstance screws things up,” he says, “I’m going to go and get Mitsuko and Mark, drive up to St. Augustine to check on the rents, and I’ll meet you two at Tara’s place at seven tonight. Is that right?”
“That’s right,” I nod. He and I shake hands, and I look him in the eye. “Be careful, man.”
“You too,” he says. “Both of you.”
Tara smiles weakly next to me, and Hajime heads to his car. His hands are still shaking uncontrollably when he fumbles with his door handle.
On the drive back into town toward Tara’s parents’ house, neither of us says much. We don’t cry. We try to look straight ahead, away from the sobs of the township. Smoke dilutes our vision and hangs thick in the air like late-afternoon smog on a windless day in Shanghai.
Glancing momentarily at another dead child, I clench my teeth and wish I were back in China right now. I wish that my father was still alive and that there was no funeral this morning and that my mother wasn’t dangerous. I wish Tara and I were both in the middle of a two a.m. dream in Mandarin subtitles. I wish we had only the most optimistic, utopian visions of isolated Lilly’s End—our grinning beach-town nestled snugly between luscious mangrove swamps and sleepy fishermen’s wharfs—hanging suspended in the black pools of our subconscious. I wish everyone else was alive and well here and that none of this had ever happened, but I wish we were alive and well somewhere far, far away. It’s not enough to still be breathing under this town’s hellish vapors; I want to be on the other side of the world right now. I wish we could wake up in the morning and eat freshly steamed zongzi in the cab ride to school and lick our sticky fingers afterward, teach our pensive Japanese-hating students with gusto and American fervor, and then argue over when our home countries “changed” with the other Westerners over sticks of fatty yao tse and Cokes without ice. I want to be in a KTV drinking lukewarm beer while considering which waitresses are for sale.
But I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be strong. This is not the reluctant hero role I always prayed would someday fall in my lap. I wasn’t aching for an apocalypse like seemingly every other Generation Why American out there. I never asked for tragedy on this kind of crippling, nihilism-inducing scale.
Twenty-four hours ago, home was nothing more than some lackluster Christmas presents and a whitewashed eulogy.
“I just really wish none of this would ever have happened, Layne,” Tara says out of nowhere, lighting another cigarette. When she runs out, I’m not sure how she will acquire more in a town of sudden shut-ins.
“Me too, Sunshine,” I say, in actuality wishing I was in a Chinese Pizza Hut, laughing when the staff fumbled with our orders.
Tara is the daughter of two once-prosperous real estate agents. They live in a Spanish-style two-story house in Orange Blossom Trace. Tara’s parents once made ridiculous sums of money during the long-standing property boom across Florida. Their income afforded Tara and her older sister Chloe a lot of nice things while growing up: trips to Aspen, college dorms and new textbooks, money for weekend jaunts to Orlando and Daytona, the occasional bag of coke, candelabras for Tara and unexpected gifts for Tara’s boyfriend Layne, and shopping sprees at Bed Bath and Beyond for Chloe.
Since the disintegration of the housing market in the last couple of years, however, things have been rough for Bill and Nancy Tennille. Before Tara and I left, I was no longer seeing the expensive model train sets erected in Mr. Tennille’s shop out back. There weren’t any more lavish real estate parties with rambunctious Botoxed women and droopy businessmen on Vicodin hosted by Mrs. Tennille. The getaways to Nassau ceased. The timeshare in Hawaii was no longer mentioned. I saw clipped grocery coupons on the kitchen counter.
Things have been rocky within the family unit as well. Tara told me that, after twenty-nine years of marriage, her parents were a few sheets of paperwork and two signatures away from a divorce. In addition to the vacations and soirees, their former income yielded a lot of turned cheeks. Chloe had an eleven thousand dollar credit card bill that her parents could no longer afford to pay off every few months. Tara caused a huge controversy herself when she announced she would be moving with me to Asia, and that she would need her parents’ monetary assistance in purchasing her plane ticket. Her sister called her pathetic for following a fired teacher across the world. Her mother thought the trip was a fantastic opportunity for adventure and networking—that is, until she found out we would both be teaching. Mr. Tennille snorted and commented that the entire trip was nothing more than “creating a stop-gap in achieving your success in life.” Then he wrote her a check.
When we left, Tara’s parents escorted us to the airport. As we were about to go through security, Tara’s father gave me an earnest handshake and genuinely wished me well, but the hug exchanged between Tara and her parents was short and not really worthy of an airport goodbye.
But right now, I’ve never seen Tara so concerned.
When we pull into the driveway I see Chloe’s 350z pulled up behind the two BMWs in the garage. The whole family is here. Before I can completely stop, Tara springs from my car and runs toward the front door. She disappears inside. I put my Accord in Park and take a deep breath, fingering the knife stuffed down my pants. I wait a few seconds for a scream before sighing with relief and heading for the house.
I don’t see Mrs. Tennille with them, but the others are standing cluttered around the flat-screen television in the living room, watching the news. Chloe looks like a slightly thicker, blonder, hardheaded version of her younger sister. They have the same hourglass shape and soft facial features, along with similar imperfections. Tara has a small scar on her forehead, the after-effect of a terrified wild rabbit she tried to pick up as a seven-year-old. Chloe was left with a permanent cleft in her chin following a car accident on I-75 several years ago. Their father has the same fair hair as the girls, but is shorter than all three women of the house and marked with old freckles and a pointed nose. The two girls’ appearance comes mostly from their mother.
When I enter the room, I notice that Mr. Tennille and Chloe have both been crying, and Tara has just started. There is a thin trail of blood on Bill’s white golf shirt. I take a place next to him and take in the images on screen: our governor Charlie Crist signing a new bill, the flashes of cameras documenting the occasion; a newscaster reporting on Florida Indian casinos lobbying for the right to sponsor Vegas-style gambling; the weather forecast for tonight; a Christmas miracle in Michigan; reporters ordering us not to move during the following advertisements; and then a stream of commercials for new prescription pills we should ask our doctor about.
“They haven’t said anything about what’s happening here?” I ask vacantly, suddenly pretty sure I need a prescription for Lunesta.
“Not a god-damned word about it,” Mr. Tennille says. “How are you managing, Layne? It’s good to see you here.”
“I’m getting by, sir. But my mom, she—it happened to her along with the others. She’s alive, but—I may not look at her the same way ever again.”
“Same thing with Nancy. She tried to stab me.”
Tara glances at her father nervously.
“She’s not—I mean—is she okay?” I ask.
“I had to give her a nasty bruise on the head, but she’ll live. Chloe and I put her down in the bedroom not long after it happened. I think she’ll be all right, but who knows. How is your mom? Wasn’t the funeral this morning?”
“My mom will be okay, I hope. It happened at the funeral, as a matter of fact.”
“Jesus Christ Almighty,” he says. “What the hell is happening to this town, Layne?”
“I’m not sure, sir, but Tara and I were just on Massachusetts close to the police station and it was a mess down there, too. It looks like it happened all across town.”
The nation and world portion of the weekend news ends and a well-groomed man begins telling us how cold it will be tonight. He points at Orlando, where it will be in the thirties, and then points out that in Jacksonville last night it got down to the mid-twenties and there were several reports of frost. Farmers are warned to take measures to protect their crops.
“Thank you for being there with my daughter this morning, Layne. Thank god none of this happened to either of you. After Nancy went nuts and couldn’t get to me, she started taking swipes at herself with the kitchen knife. It was the scariest damn thing I’ve ever seen. After that she—”
The television instantaneously goes black. A message flashes across the screen in the blink of an eye and is gone. The news re-appears. No one says anything and Mr. Tennille goes on with his story. But I know what I just saw written in the blackness:
There is no escape.
“Whoa, wait up a minute,” I interrupt, straining my eyes. “I’m sorry, Mr. Tennille, but—but did you guys just see what flashed across the TV screen just now?”
