The Living Page 4

  “I don’t drink alcohol,” Tomsen says, watching the proceedings from the elevated perch of the driver’s chair, spinning it left and right with her leg while her fingers wander through her short mat of copper curls. “Makes me jittery.”

  “Hey,” M says, lifting his head to frown at everyone, “if anyone needs a drink right now, it’s me.”

  Nora takes the bottle from Julie and pours it into M’s wound. He shrieks.

  “Oh, wrong hole? Sorry about that.” Her sadism softens as she holds the bottle to M’s lips, pouring a gentle stream into his mouth. “I bet you miss being a slab of frozen beef, when you could get shot all you wanted.”

  M swallows the liquor and lets out a sigh. “Those”—he winces as she plunges the stitching needle—“were the days.”

  “Remember when we first met? When I shot you three times and you were too busy eating my friends to notice?”

  The mirth drains from M’s face, but Nora gives him a playful slap on the cheek. “I’m just fucking with you, Marcus. Past is past.”

  She takes a long pull off the bottle and continues stitching.

  • • •

  By the time the surgery is finished, Nora is far too drunk to be performing surgery. M looks a little tipsy too, but he’s spending all his euphoria on pain management. He eases himself back to the floor and groans, “Goodnight.”

  “Are we done partying already?” Nora asks the room, crestfallen.

  “It’s been a long day,” Julie says. She’s not entirely sober either, but her buzz looks more internal, the kind that leads to thoughts and feelings more than energy and action. The only kind I know.

  “Fine,” Nora sighs, capping the vodka and handing it to Tomsen, who tucks it away with visible relief. “We should give these two the big bed,” Nora tells her, indicating Julie and I and the “bedroom” at the rear of the RV. “And I hope you have earplugs, because they’re wild ones.”

  I feel heat in my face at the irony in her voice. It’s been so long since Julie and I had a moment alone, I had almost forgotten about our difficulties. But what were those difficulties, really? What could possibly be left of them after the fires we’ve passed through?

  “Seriously, though,” Nora says, “we’re all taking our clothes off, right? We just survived a hurricane and I’m not sleeping in this soggy shit.”

  There is a tense silence.

  “I’m good,” M says, folding his hands on his chest. “But you should definitely strip.”

  Tomsen glances around uncomfortably. “Goodnight,” she says, and curls up on the couch-bed as close to the wall as she can get, her shape disappearing beneath her baggy safari gear.

  Nora shrugs and begins stripping.

  “Goodnight!” Julie chuckles and drags me into the bedroom before I see more than a bare stomach. She slides the curtain shut, and we’re alone.

  We slip under Tomsen’s ratty old blankets and I inhale a bewildering array of scents, from mildew to craft glue to various shades of body odor. Then as Julie begins to peel off her wet clothes, draping them piece by piece on a shelf, I forget about smell and focus on sight.

  “Come on, R,” she says, tugging at my soaked shirt. “You’ll wet the bed.”

  I shed my clothes while I watch her shed hers. She stops at her panties, which I take as a signal, so I leave my boxers on too. We curl up together in the back of this ancient RV, parked in some weedy field whose former crop I could never guess. I press my body against hers, both of us cold and clammy at first, then slowly warming, and despite the damp cotton between us, I feel myself responding. I want her, in every way. I always have, and I think I’ve finally thinned my hedge of fear. But a barrier remains, and it’s not mine. She eases away from me, a subtle retreat from my pressure.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask her.

  “I don’t know,” she mumbles. I wait a moment and ask again.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I just…I still don’t know who you are. Not really.”

  I give this a moment to settle. “I’ll tell you.”

  I feel her shaking her head, rocking it back and forth on the pillow. “Not now.”

  “Not now,” I agree. “But I’ll tell you.” I lean in, burying my face in her hair, but she curls up tighter.

  “There’s too much.” She is nearly in the fetal position, like her nightly program of bad dreams is already starting. “My mom…everything. There’s just too much.”

  I let my electricity dissipate. I relax my body, still touching but not pressing. “We’re going to find her, Julie.”

  She doesn’t reply.

  “Your mom. The kids. We’re going to find all of them.”

  “Do you ‘know’ that?” she asks with her face still in the pillow. “Is that one of those things you ‘know’?”

  I sense her alertness as she asks this. A step into dangerous territory. A question for the man she’s not ready to meet.

  “I don’t know it. But I feel it.”

  She breathes quietly. I can hear her heartbeat. “I know we won’t have long,” she whispers. “I just need to be with her at the end.” Her whisper trembles. “I need to hear what she has to say to me…before I say goodbye.”

  I place a firm hand on her hip. “You will.” It comes out with surprising conviction, and although I don’t know the future, it doesn’t feel like empty comfort. “Before we deal with Axiom, before BABL and the rest of this ‘war’…we’re going to find our family.”

  She’s silent for a long time. I kiss the back of her head and close my eyes. “Goodnight, Julie.”

  She reaches behind her and places her hand on the back of mine, her fingertips nestled between my knuckles. Then she slides my hand off her hip and up her stomach and presses it around her breast. I surrender to sleep with the soft weight of her resting in my palm, breathing the sweet, spicy scent of her hair, and I allow myself an indulgent thought: maybe we’ll get through this. Maybe the home we left behind won’t have to become a memory. Maybe somewhere in the space between bullets, we can still find room for a life.

  WE

  Abram Kelvin is fifteen years old, and he is picking up his brother from school. A normal thing, a normal day. The wrongness is all in the details: the crumbling brick of the school, the sage brush that chokes the playground, the distant specks of patrols making their rounds on the barren hilltops.

  “You don’t ‘love’ her,” Abram tells his brother. “That’s stupid.”

  “I do too,” Perry says, smiling across the playground at a little blond girl whose name Abram has already forgotten. “I love her and I’m gonna marry her.”

  “You’re only five,” Abram says.

  “So?”

  “So five-year-olds can’t fall in love.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because love is complicated and only grownups can do it.”

  Perry shakes his head, still smiling. “I can do it.”

  “You’re a weird kid, you know? At your age you’re supposed to think girls are gross.”

  “Girls are cool. I like girls.”

  Abram sighs. “Come on, weirdo. We’ve gotta pack.”

  He grabs his brother’s soft hand and drags him away, wondering if Perry realizes he will never see that girl again, just like Abram will never see the girl in his combat class, the one who gave him that wicked smile when she flipped him on his back, a private invitation that he’ll never get to accept. This place. All these people. Gone and soon forgotten.

  “Do you love anybody?” Perry asks him as they walk back to the house.

  “Nah,” Abram grunts, then turns his head and spits for no reason, the way older men do. His father doesn’t do this but all his father’s friends do, spattering the garage floor with their milky phlegm. His father doesn’t always act like a man, even though he builds houses and works
on motorcycles, and this troubles Abram. What if his father is weak? What if he can’t protect them from the world? If he can’t, it will be up to Abram to do it. Abram spits again.

  “Why not?” Perry says. “Why don’t you love anybody?”

  “I love our family.”

  “Nobody else?”

  “Nobody else sticks around. They’re not real.”

  Perry squints at him. “Not real?”

  “Think about it. Last year you said that Jeff kid was your best friend. Where’d he go? Do you even remember him?”

  Perry frowns at the ground.

  “Now you say Mike’s your best friend, but when we leave, he’ll disappear and you’ll forget him too. So was he really even there? What was the point?”

  “Well…” Perry says, considering the question, “having fun. Playing and stuff.”

  Abram shakes his head, suddenly embarrassed at his outburst of openness. “Forget it. Just remember to stick close to the family. Things might get bad out there.”

  “Where are we going, though?” Perry asks.

  “Don’t know yet. Somewhere safe.”

  “But I like it here. I want to stay here.”

  “It’s not safe here anymore. Even Dad says so. You want to be safe, don’t you?”

  Perry looks over his shoulder at the town’s red roofs and cherry trees, the distant burble of the playground. “Nah.”

  Abram snorts. “Then you’re weird and stupid. Wait till some-thing really bad happens to you, then you’ll understand.”

  • • •

  In the last image Abram has, Perry is still a boy. Soft cheeks and little white teeth, smiling just before the attack. Abram wonders what that boy became before he died. Did he ever grow out of that rose-twirling romanticism? Did seeing his family peeled away piece by piece finally make a man out of him?

  Abram tells himself it doesn’t matter. What matters is the present, where he has a job to do.

  In this all-important present, Abram is a thirty-one-year-old man gunning a rusty motorcycle down a forgotten stretch of highway. He is no longer anyone’s brother or son or husband. He is no longer an employee or a soldier, a colleague or a friend or anything to anyone—with one exception.

  He is a father.

  Despite all the death and pain that fill the pages of his book, he is still a father, and his daughter has never needed him more. His last image of her fits neatly over his last image of Perry: soft cheeks and little white teeth, smiling at him through the window of Axiom’s transport bus, happy to see her father even as he fails to fight off the guard, fails to stop the bus, fails over and over until she’s gone.

  Abram holds the image close like a beloved photo. He runs it through his mind, caressing its sharp edges and savoring the sting of the cuts. He deserves the pain. He needs it. It will keep him moving.

  The sound of an approaching vehicle scatters his musings. He swerves off the highway and hides the motorcycle in the underbrush, and as the noise resolves into the rumble of a big diesel engine, he entertains wild thoughts. It’s the bus. It’s her. In a few seconds I’ll see her face in the window and this time I’ll do what it takes.

  He sees a flash of yellow as it passes. A glimpse of chrome and stripes.

  It’s not the bus.

  He steps out onto the road to watch it go. A garish 1970s motorhome, bristling with antennas and solar panels and fuel barrels marked “Do Not Steal.”

  It’s them. It has to be.

  How did he become the chaperone to that gang of overgrown children? How did they drag him into their suicide cult and why did it take him so long to get out? The bullet wounds in his arm and shoulder still throb, and he doesn’t doubt the girl would have kept shooting if he pushed her to it, but that’s no excuse. He had plenty of chances to snatch the gun, crack her skull, and go his way. But he stayed.

  Did their fantasy infect him? Did he enjoy the sugary taste of their dream? For one indulgent moment, maybe he did. But as he watches the RV trundle away, big and bright and begging for abuse, he tightens his jaw.

  No more dreaming. Abram will stay awake.

  He heads back to the motorcycle, an old scout bike he salvaged from the wreckage of Fort Hamilton. Most would have considered it scrap metal. Abram got it running in two hours. He unearthed the tools and fuel from a bomb-blasted mechanic shop, crawling like a rat through the briar of twisted sheet metal. He is hard, he is resourceful, and he needs no help to do his job. He will do it alone like he always has. He will find the bus. He will take back his daughter.

  And after that?

  It’s a question he hadn’t expected to hear in his head, but the answer is clear enough: after that doesn’t matter. He is a man with both boots on the ground, and what matters is the next step. Watching the steps ahead is a good way to fall on your face.

  And not watching them is a good way to get lost.

  He stops. The thought is so loud it almost sounds external, like someone is whispering to him from the shadows. But he can’t place a position or even a number—is it one voice or many? His hands squeeze around imaginary weapons as he growls reassurances under his breath.

  “I do what it takes to survive. I fight to protect my family. And that’s all there is to this.”

  There’s more.

  He whirls around, teeth gritted, fists clenched. But the road is empty. The city is silent.

  He is alone.

  I

  My sleep is a womb. I float in warm darkness and it nourishes me, feeding amniotic nectar into my fetal form. Unmade by the day before, broken into simple cells, I am growing a new body in this silent oblivion.

  This is rest. This is what rest feels like.

  I get perhaps four hours to savor it, and then a hand is shaking me and I’m gasping musty air and looking up at a bearded giant who appears to be throttling me.

  “Hey,” M whispers, giving my shoulder one last shake. “Get up.”

  I blink reality back into my head, a rush of information reminding me where and who I am.

  “Need to talk,” M says. “Please.”

  I’ve never heard earnestness like this from him. As I push the blankets off of me, I realize I’ve presented a clear view of Julie’s half-naked backside, but M doesn’t even look. And now I’m very concerned.

  I throw on my clothes and tip-toe past the other two women. Nora’s clothes—all of them—hang from ceiling hooks above Tomsen, who seems to have uncoiled a little, accepting Nora’s persistent spooning in exchange for the body heat. It’s unseasonably cold. Outside, a layer of frost covers the fields, turning the old furrows into snowcapped peaks that glisten in the morning light. I glimpse a few strawberries among the weeds and think of a Beatles reference that Julie would have enjoyed once, back when all I had to do to impress her was to know literally anything.

  “Okay,” I say, throwing up my palms. “What?”

  M glances over his shoulder, a gesture that looks ridiculous in this empty field. He lowers his voice until it’s barely audible. “Do you remember a boy?”

  I wait for him to elaborate.

  “Before the airport. That long walk. Little black kid?”

  The airport itself is a fog, and before that is nothing. A gray void of abstract symbols and formless sensations, like the dreams of animals. I give him an emphatic shrug that says of course not.

  He digs his fingers into his forehead. “Keep having…thoughts. Dreams. I think maybe…” He squeezes his eyes shut. “Maybe I did something bad.”

  “You did,” I say with a bewildered frown. “Lots of things. We all did.”

  “No. Something worse.” He looks at the ground. “Something to Nora.”

  “Like…what?” I ask cautiously.

  He scrunches up his face, rubbing his shiny scalp. “Don’t know. A boy…a house… It’s just pieces.”


  So M’s voyage through the past isn’t such a pleasure cruise after all. There was a time when I might have taken some ugly satisfaction from this, and I’m ashamed to remember it. There is nothing satisfying about the anguish on my friend’s face.

  “Does she know?”

  He shrugs. “Must not. But if she finds out…remembers…”

  I clap a hand on his shoulder. I feel like I should offer him a word of wisdom, some gem that I’ve mined from my own past, but I have yet to pull the tarp off the results of that dig. It may be nothing but dirt and bones.

  “She knows who you are now,” I hear myself telling him. “Whatever it is…she’ll forgive.”

  I have no idea if this is true. I may be talking to myself more than to him. But it seems to take the edge off his fear, and he nods.

  We both turn at the muffled sound of Nora’s voice in the RV. Then Julie’s, sharp with annoyance. I step back inside and M follows with a reluctance that almost looks like shyness. I hope no one notices the change.

  “Fuck off,” Julie groans into her pillow. Nora is pulling on her ankle, trying to drag her out of bed. Only their years of friendship give Nora immunity to Julie’s morning wrath. Anyone else would die for this.

  Tomsen is awake too and already sitting in the driver’s seat, her vivid green eyes lost in a sleepy haze while she waits for the vegetable oil to warm up.

  “Get up,” Nora says. “Important shit to do, remember?”

  “Not yet,” Julie pleads, pulling the pillow onto her face as if to smother herself.

  “I thought you wanted to save the world, you fucking walrus. Get up!” Nora yanks the blanket off her, and this time it’s not her back that’s exposed. This time M does look, but I can hardly blame him.

  “Oh my!” Nora laughs as Julie scrambles to grab her shirt. “Looks like you had a good night after all!”

  Tomsen watches in the rear view mirror with a look of creeping apprehension: what have I gotten into?

  “I hate you,” Julie grumbles, staggering out of the bedroom while buttoning up her jeans. “Like, so much.”

  Nora makes a kissing noise.