Part 3, Chapter 2 (First Half)

Here's the first half of Chapter 2. I'll post the rest on Sunday. Enjoy the rest of your week,

Dave

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2

The dawn sun shines through the window of this strange living room and eases me from my sleep. First thing: my stomach aches from hunger, so I search the kitchen for food. A Tupperware box sits on the counter. I lift the lid, hopeful, but find moulding mung beans that smell like rotten milk. I open the kitchen window and throw the box, with its disgusting contents, into the garden, for the rats to eat.

In the cupboards, I find canned ravioli and a packet of dried macaroni and cheese. I eat the cold ravioli and watch the light snow fall against the large glass doors by the rear of the building. Pine tree’s stand at the back of the garden, snow covered, with spots of brown poking through. Bird footprints trail through the expansive white.

I palm some more water from the toilet’s cistern tank.

With my morning routine complete, I decide to get moving again. There’s no reason to waste the daylight. I shove the macaroni into my backpack and tie my blanket up.

The whole time I’ve been here, I’ve avoided looking in mirrors. I haven’t seen my face in three days, since Hank and I were in the Southside, and I’m half-scared of what I might find there. I rinse it with water, and tell myself I’ll look later.

As I prepare to leave the home, about to hoist the bag onto my back, I see an acoustic guitar propped by the side of a computer desk. I drop my bag again and sit on the couch with the guitar on my knee. I can only play one part of one song. I think it’s called Cavatina, and it’s the closing music to the movie, The Deer Hunter, which was made a little south of the city. I know the song because my father was a guitarist and used the song as a warm-up exercise. He began learning the instument in his late thirties and he played it every day since with a devotion my mother had never seen him muster before. I remember, while I was in high school, each year through most of the fall and winter I would stay late at school to attend theatre rehearsals. I was Stanley from A Streetcar Named Desire one year and then Iago from Othello the next. When I returned home in the evenings, my father would be back from work and upstairs in his and my mother’s room, carrying out his daily, hour-long practice. I can remember dropping my bag by the stairs and standing in the hall for a minute or so each day to listen. Most of the time, he was playing Cavatina. Slow-fast high notes, the pauses, the refrain, ultimately mournful, but also a celebration of whatever was lost.

Here, in this strange house, I try a few bars of the song, like my father taught me. I last a moment but then I fret the wrong note, and then again a second time, so I give up. I put the guitar, with a certain respect, against the desk where I found it. Cavatina reminds me of returning home, and that’s what I’m supposed to do today.

*

The snowmobile takes a while to start, and the I have to slowly maneuver out of the barricaded street, but after that I’m cruising at a pleasant pace through the city’s outskirts, a clear sky overhead, and a good mood prevailing.

A few miles further out of the city, I pull over at a gas station to salvage a small gas-tank, which I half-fill with fuel siphoned from an old, rusting Chevrolet.

While I’m at the gas station, I decide to look inside the shop. The shelves are bare and the cash register is broken open and emptied of its contents. Through an open door, I see into the storeroom, which looters have ransacked, like everything else. As I move around the shelves, I kick some trash at my feet, and a squirrel appears by the coffee dispenser. It scrambles out through the front of the building, its claws clattering against the tile floor and its tail bouncing through the air.

Whenever I go into these derelict places, be they homes, grocery stores, or gas stations, I feel almost like a detective trying to piece together the last moments of the building’s life, and the lives of its inhabitants. I look for clues, like footprints, broken objects, and points of entry. I look for clues because these buildings feel so unnatural that there must be a mystery somewhere.

Kicking through junk, I walk behind the counter, through the storeroom, and into the manager’s office. I kick a coffee cup aside and it leaks a mould-topped black sludge across scattered printed papers detailing accounts, orders, stock, and so on.

I wish there was somebody I could talk to around here.

Instead, there’s a man’s body sat in an office chair, slouched backwards, head tilted towards me, and eyes open. Maybe a week ago this would have scared me, but I’ve seen enough bodies now. An ashtray with a half-smoked cigarette is on the desk in front of the corpse, next to an empty bottle of expensive looking wine.

Whoever this man is, whoever he was, he didn’t die from the plague. The G9 plague is relatively slow and wilting, and gives an individual the time to get to a bed. Maybe this was a heart attack, a huge seizure, or something else of that severity. Whatever, the final stroke must have been sudden and unexpected. When this happened, there would have been no ambulances to come to this man’s aid. It was quick. He was one of the lucky ones.

A distinct smell of piss hangs in the air, and it’s this, more than anything else, which offends me. Couldn’t this man have been awarded just a little bit of dignity?

Maybe I should bury him. Maybe such an act of respect would save an ounce of my own wicked soul.

But I don’t have a shovel, and I don’t know where to get one out here, so I just leave.

I walk out of the store and strap the old, half-full gasoline tank to the back of the snowmobile. Then I set off again for another few hours of driving on the cold, monotonous, and often crowded, static Highway-74, heading north out of Pittsburgh for what seems like an eternity.

*

But an hour later, I’m forced to stop again as I approach an old military roadblock…

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