The Time of Quarantine, page 21
Except, she isn’t to the car yet and the bird—maybe the bird won’t even be there.
The path had not seemed so steep when she wandered down it earlier, but now it stretches uphill so sharply that it’s hard to climb, and Lyda is breathing hard—panting—but from—what, exertion, or fear?
Not wanting, yet, to know, Lyda stops to catch her breath, bending herself to the fog that’s blowing in over and around her, stalling on the path and thinking how there wasn’t anything her mother could have done, for no amount of rocking could have changed the changing in her body or the used up cans and worn nylon stockings, tossed from above the way people once tossed their stuff from the bluff that rose from the beach made of beautiful garbage. But in the absence of pounding wave action on the streets where Lyda lived, what had become of their refuse heaps? Of everything her father never told her, at least her father could have told her that. It’s better, her body, now, the changing more complete or at least familiar, but like the little hummocks of hills rising in all the wrong angles around her as if they don’t entirely belong in this too fragile space, Lyda’s own body is strangely out of place here.
Not so unlike, she thinks, the small fleece family and the vista point with its possible whale, but the thought of the whale pierces her with regret. Once, Lyda knows, the whales rose up, breaching on ships to split them in two and drown the whole crews, but that was a long time ago. Now, like the bird, they are gone. But the grief Lyda felt for the whales is nothing to what she feels now for the missing, domesticated bird that is not even hers. Lyda knows nothing about this bird, which came with the car and talked like someone else, but as she starts back toward it again she’s trying not to think, at least not with words, about how it really might be gone, hoping, instead, to find it disgruntled and noisy, perched on the back seat of the red car with the windows rolled up tight and safe, all its feathers ruffled, and something like a scowl on its bright bird face.
And this is when the panic hits, making Lyda run, but with a running made wrong not just by the steepness of the trail and the wrong-colored plants, but also the darkness that creeps from beneath and swallows up the world like fog, but not fog. What she’ll do, when she gets to the car, she’ll cup her hands with water and hold them to the bird, to drink. This will be her offering. The bird will drink, but to her it will feel like little bites, little pecks at the palms of her hands until, refreshed, it will hop up like always to the back of the passenger’s seat and announce, let’s GO. This thought, the thought of the bird’s imperative, makes Lyda smile a smile that’s not going to last because at some level she also understands it’s not really a bird but just the idea of a bird, and anyway it’s gone now, for good.
Once she thinks this, she will split again in that old way from inside her box and find herself back in the present moment, stuck in its raveling cusp, one moment after the next, and wondering somewhat bitterly how she could ever have imagined things might be different, a thought that sets off a pique of frustration and leaves her, profoundly, on the verge of hot, terrible tears.
Sometime after dawn, Lyda finds herself curled in the back seat of the tiny car with a few green feathers drifting up around her, already starving for eggs. There’s not a thing about this that surprises her, but yet it’s hard to uncurl her stiffened body anyway and make it take her back across the still deserted parking lot, thick with something more like real fog, toward where the café windows are lit up like beacons.
Inside, the smell of burnt coffee and pie, stacked high in a gleaming display case, causes a sudden burst of Lyda’s salivary glands. The coffee will be bitter, but Lyda doesn’t mind. She doesn’t even mind the blue bowls of powdery non-dairy creamer. Chemicals, she thinks blandly, but without revulsion, as a neutral-faced waitress shows up wearing jeans exactly like the ones Lyda is wearing.
Got eggs, the waitress announces, boasting shyly. Then she nods to a dim back corner where another girl sits hunched over coffee. That girl brought them, fresh from the hen.
Oh, Lyda says vaguely, eggs. Oh eggs would be nice.
And pie? Olallieberry pie. We could even do hash browns, but it might take a while. The waitress warms to the idea. Hash browns and pie coming up.
In the temporary glitch that follows, Lyda struggles to fix things from—before. There is something familiar about the waitress—a bit like the fleece mother, or even Lyda’s own, her gaze clear and open and—blank. Lyda closes her eyes and imagines a great dimmer switch that could cause this world to flicker—flicker and disappear—but when she opens them again, it is all still there, and biscuits would be nice, she tells the waitress even as the waitress offers her final enticement: biscuits, she says brightly. I’m starving for biscuits, aren’t you?
On the yellowed counter, Lyda spreads out beach shards—S-O-E-L-G-T—beautiful blue letters from another time. Playing idly, she arranges and rearranges them like the tiles of an ancient game until they spell things—spell glotes, spell toesgl, spell: LET’S GO. And such a loneliness washes over her that she turns to consider the girl in the booth, only to find her gravely looking back. Small and startled looking, she’s wearing a stocking cap pulled low over her forehead and is dressed, Lyda notes, entirely in gray—an oversized sweatshirt and jeans, both faded to gray, like the gray in her flat gray eyes. And there’s something not entirely healthy about her, but frail, instead, in the manner of women who carry their frailty with them, from colicky infancies, with slow growth and limited weight gain, through childhoods plagued by infectious diseases, to wan young adulthoods blunted by emotional trauma.
She does not look, Lyda thinks on closer inspection, entirely there.
To test this thought, Lyda stands and calls, hi there, her voice as bright and determined as her step, I’m Lyda. Mind if I join you?
And in the silence after she has spoken, she becomes aware of a faint humming, almost a fluttering sound or soft and rapid tapping, like a rustling of leaves. There’s a lag before the girl responds, then what might be an affirmative nod toward the dull formica of the table. The room is growing dense with the overheated smell of biscuits baking, the windows fogging from the heat, as Lyda takes a seat across from the girl, but the uneasy silence that roots between them makes her instantly regret it. Even though the coffee is scorched and the whitener lumpy, she’s so anxious to put something other than words in her mouth that she burns her tongue.
A sudden image of eggs in a nest of soiled twigs rises up in Lyda’s mind.
I had a rabbit once, the girl says just as the food arrives, great mounds of it steaming on their plates. Then she smiles, a bit sadly, revealing pale gray teeth. Now I have a tattoo. Moments later, she says, did you hear me?
You mean about the tattoo or the rabbit, or both?
Eat, the girl says. You’ll feel better.
But Lyda is already shoveling food into her mouth. The eggs—the yellowest, creamiest eggs Lyda’s ever seen—taste astonishingly rich, the biscuits are buttery and flaky, the hash browns, delicately browned and crunchy. But eating like this, Lyda will soon finish it all, and the wan girl across from her still has not lifted her hands from her lap, taken even one bite, or sipped one sip of coffee.
Excuse me, Lyda flushes with embarrassment. I must really be hungry.
The sound of her voice has the somewhat surprising effect of dispelling the awkwardness between them, freeing up a moment of inattention during which the girl picks her fork up, then self-consciously puts it back down almost at once, laying her hand beside it where Lyda can see. And although looking feels as impolite as staring at a defect or anomaly—something deeply private and normally hidden—Lyda does look. She looks and looks, as though famished for the sight, for they are such beautiful hands, the most beautiful hands, it seems, in the world, but like the mismatched features of the girl’s face, seem not to belong entirely to her, or here—to belong elsewhere.
But not the girl, who sits with her hands turned open like a woman awaiting a transfusion, the tiny scars on the back of her wrists—the indentations—pulsing and blue until, seemingly satisfied, she lifts them again—the hands—and they burst into the somewhat ordinary mechanics of eating. One by one, the fingers unfurl, reach for a fork, picking it up and working it through the mound of yellow eggs, the eggs that steam, speared by the fork in the beautiful hand which, as it moves toward the girl’s pursed mouth, resolves at last into the next part of the memory that slams Lyda without warning.
In it, they’re standing, the two of them—Lyda and this girl—beneath the throbbing sky of a barren planet where any minute now, the sun will come blasting over the ridge of the wash they are in and the rest of their lives. The white sky presses down in what Lyda recognizes as a threat. Lyda does not know how she knows that if they don’t act now to save themselves, they will be lost here forever, but she knows she must struggle against the lure of it, for in the absence of water—and she knows this too—their blood will slowly thicken in their veins until, like frozen sap in trees, it bursts open inside them.
Hurry, Lyda thinks, but without conviction, her pores already opening like valves in anticipation of the sweating, her own skin—the largest organ of her body—preparing to betray her, splitting open, too, beneath the ruined sun.
Lyda can’t tell if it’s a real desert, but it feels real. Hurry, she hears the girl say, reaching out one of the hands that might save them. At her feet, there’s a bird in a cage and the door she’s just opened, and above, a hole in the earth.
Then Lyda does run—she runs and runs.
And the bird flies out of its cage and flaps into green flight behind her.
And then the sun does blast over the mountains and the sweat does pour out of her, while just ahead, the gray-toothed girl hovers just a hair above the ground as they ascend toward the hole in the earth that’s been waiting forever for them.
But the girl’s not so much a girl, in the memory, as a small bald woman, hovering and expectant and holding out a damp towel as white as the shell of the most perfect egg in the world. Much smaller than Lyda, the woman has to stand on her tiptoes to wipe Lyda’s face, and this close up, even in the darkness of this place that’s not a place, there’s a strange translucence to the woman’s skin, especially her scalp and the backs of her hands, stretched so thin Lyda can almost see through its outer layers all the way through to the pulse of her blood. Her touch, though, is gentle and soothing, and Lyda hardly notices—then she does—that just across from them another bald person—a man—is doing the same thing to another man, wiping his face, then his neck—stroking, cleaning—the shoulders, the chest, the back—even as a feeling overtakes her, a paradoxical feeling of both coherence and dispersal, a feeling like sleep.
So that’s that then, Lyda thinks, the bile of eggs rising up in her throat. On the other side of the table, the girl leans toward her, chin cupped in her beautiful hands, words forming slowly between wet, gray teeth.
Maybe, Lyda thinks, momentarily hopeful again, this is just another glitch, but already the girl is raising her beautiful hands up to remove her stocking cap, peeling it seamlessly back to reveal, beneath her perfect baldness, the unreadable map of her skull. At the sight of it Lyda reaches up to touch her own head, the place in the back where crude homemade sutures had once healed into tough little scars, but there is something wrong there too—as wrong and as absent as the bird.
Now that they understand each other, the bald woman smiles a slow, shy smile and, lowering her voice to the point Lyda can’t be sure she is speaking aloud, says, I can help you find what you are missing, if you let me help you, and if you help me too.
THIS NEW SPECTACLE OF HUMAN SUFFERING
BY THE TIME Will walked out into the rain, the last thing he could remember was the last thing Peter said: I think you are going to like it. Will was so sleepy—so dusty—and Peter, when he said it, had been bending so closely over Will, wiping his forehead with something white, and then Will’s whole head had gone fat and fluffy and falling away, with only the words to buffer it.
Now the rain made things acute again, if curiously damaged and lifeless. The keen analytical part of Will’s mind was damaged too, or missing, as though cleanly excised from his brain, its absence a little stab of loneliness to him, who, because he no longer knew what or how to think, turned his face to the sky and let a low shudder pass through him.
Then he shook his long limbs out, clenched and unclenched his hands at his sides, reached decisively for the handle of the black car door, and folded into its buttery smell.
The black car was the car that was left.
Will swallowed what felt vaguely like a memory of stone or a low malarial fever come on in a time of sadness. With his delicate features and long-fingered hands, he even looked like someone else’s idea of him—head bent, limbs reined close to a body that, once unfolded, would be sure to reveal a tall gaunt man with a fierce awkwardness, like one of those long-legged birds you might see at the zoo. Or a wetland. If there were wetlands anymore, or zoos. Or birds.
In general, Will unfolded with reluctance, but there was something, too, about this moment—him ducking and slipping sideways into the car—that turned his many angles into a kind of grace, a beautiful thing.
Like Lyda before him, Will headed south, easing his car through mobs that surged as though there were something to surge for—supplies to horde or slogans to endorse—but unlike Lyda, Will drove with manly purpose, blindsided by an alien desire to gun the engine and head straight for the open road. Will forced himself to breathe slow, deep—it had to be somewhere around here, the road—and almost as soon as he had this thought, he came to a gap in the buildings through which he could see, down the hill and to the east, an ancient freeway.
But when he breathed his next deep breath of relief, the smell of saltiness and decay dissipated into a thin smell of absence.
The leather in the black car was soft and had a private human smell, deeply intimate, but the animal skin of it, mediated by only the unfamiliar clothes he was wearing—jeans and a soft flannel shirt—gave Will an uneasy feeling, and because he did not want to think about whose smell it might be, he turned his attention to the improbable mobs, each block a different mob, each mob like the one before—the same teeming faces, the same stink, the same disorganized seething—until a strange calm settled over him.
On the inside of his car, Will felt separate from the outside—apart and powerful. How fast could this car go? But everywhere he turned another mob surged, and the streets were blocked with rubble—smashed cars, crumpled girders, fallen street lights and power poles—and, here and there, the odd yellow quarantine barricade or gigantic concrete planters filled with replicas of what had once been native trees—redwoods or stately Ponderosas—green and optimistic in the gloom. I am not myself, he told himself firmly, as he gunned the sleek car down one alley, then another, in the hope of a freeway access or at least a thoroughfare, when he took a fast corner and suddenly screeched to a halt, rain splatting hard and beading on the car’s polished surface, all his interior calm shattered.
In the street before him, a thin man pounding on the black car hood had miraculously escaped being crushed, the nose of the car having stopped only inches from the man’s wasted body. Inside the car, stunned and shaking, Will watched the man, on the outside, pounding and pounding, but he couldn’t hear him—heard nothing—no thump of hand, no splatting of rain, no cry of the man or what looked to be the infant or small child the man clenched under one arm, folded around it like the wing of an ungainly bird. The man was crying out to Peter—Peter could see that—and he was pounding hard, splashing off the water that was marbled on the waxed car surface, but inside the bell of Will’s silence, all was quiet, and a good thing too because if all that sound got in, surely it would be deafening.
At first Will tried to back the car up, easing it away from this new spectacle of human suffering. He felt the knob of the gear stick round and cool in his hand, the pedals supple at his feet as he switched the car into reverse. But he wasn’t moving fast enough because the man, with the child clutched under his arm, threw himself onto the hood of the car, his mouth wide open with its howl and something coming from it Will still couldn’t hear. But he could see it—the gape of the mouth, the dark rows of glistening teeth. The man, thin and long, lay prone on the hood of the car, and if Will didn’t do something soon, another mob would form and watching would not be all they were doing.
Will’s chest heaved—in and out, in and out.
The man’s legs folded up beneath him, curling his lanky body around the infant or small child to protect it, and although it seemed to Will that there had been a time when watching like this was all he had done, he felt a man of action now who told himself one sharp turn would do it. The other man, the man on the hood, had crawled all the way up to the windshield and was pressing his face against it, along with the face of the infant or child, its tiny round cheek flattened just at the level of Will’s eyes. Beneath the neck of the man’s torn pin-stripe shirt, Will could see the round neck of an old t-shirt in colors that might signify something—a political party or academic affiliation—but now Will saw the smooth cheek of the infant or child was not the right color, that there was also something slack about the whole small body.
One sharp turn, Will thought again, but without conviction.
The man pressed his free hand on the front of the windshield, splaying his fingers to reveal something written there—numbers or letters, a sign—but the ink had run together and Will couldn’t tell. No, they were definitely letters, Will saw, even as he cranked the steering wheel of the car tight to the right—and three of them, the three in the middle, Will could read—L-P-U—although there were other letters on either side that he couldn’t. But the wheel of the car was all the way cranked now and so Will did gun the engine, flooring the gas pedal to veer the car sharply in one direction, and then, just as sharply, another.
