Part 4, Chapter 1 (Second Half)

Here's the second part of Part 4, Chapter 1. I'll post Chapter 2 on Thursday. Enjoy it!

Dave

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Chapter 1 (Continued)

After stalling the old engine several times, we eventually arrive at the shallow hill leading out from Bramble and begin to head back towards my parents’ old home, or at least what remains of it. From there we’ll get back on the highway and head into Pittsburgh. It feels like half a plan because there’s no motive behind the journey, other than that it simply feels like the right thing to do.

Later, with evening creeping over the horizon, Martin asks about the half developed motives behind my plan. He still has that social immaturity which allows him to ask such blunt questions without consequence. Prior to this question, Martin and I had filled our journey with conversations about movies and comic books. It found genuine glee to discover that Martin was reading the same comics that I’d read as a young teenager, and occasionally into my current twenties: Batman, Swamp Thing, and Spiderman, to name a few. He told me how his best friend had given him copies of The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, some of the best superhero comics ever written, and I filled him in on my own theories surrounding these texts, concocted during my adolescence, and refined using my literature study’s terminology and theories. This was pure self-indulgence; I’d never had a captive audience like this when it came to my ideas about comic books.

But eventually he does ask the difficult question burning in the back of my mind. “What does Pittsburgh have that we don’t already have in Bramble?”

I have to think for a moment, so I squint my eyes, pretending that I’m paying attention to my driving and a tricky bend that may or may not be in the distance. As much as I want to treat Martin as an adult, I know that this is too much to ask of him. This is how I know I’ll never let him use the gun I found, despite my earlier deliberations, and this is why I sometimes have to adopt this patronizing tone. I loathe my patronizing tone.

“Well, because there are people there, I guess. And there’s plenty of food. Shelter. Maybe even electricity soon. Who knows? Any progress will be made in the city rather than out here.”

“But we have food and shelter already. There are no people, which is good because then that means we don’t have to share the food, and it means we’re safe too, right?” This last comment makes me wonder what the boy had seen in the past few weeks that made him so afraid of other people. But then, he wasn’t afraid when he first saw me. In the end, I guess making amateur psychological guesses about those who have gone through such trauma is pointless. “I like it with just the two of us,” he adds.

This kind of attitude gives me a headache. When I’m trying to sort something out and I don’t have a clue what I'm doing, but I’m doing my best, I don’t want anybody calling me out on my naivety. “How do you know what you like yet?” I ask with a sideways glace.

“Of course I know what I like.”

Like I’ve said, although I want to treat Martin like an adult, I don’t like him questioning the things I’ve failed to question enough by myself. I’m the one forced to make the big decisions here because of my age. It’s a situation I don’t want to be in and that’s why I resent these questions. These questions are like admitting failure before I’ve begun.

“We—” I need to think over my reasoning some more, so I pat my jeans as if I’m trying to wipe dirt off them, crinkling my face in confused disgust. “What do you expect will happen when we run out of canned food? We’ll both be full of gout or scurvy or something when that happens, sick of soup and chili. You think that between the two of us we can do something like farm enough to eat, or even find enough in this town to survive on?”

“Why not?” he asks.

This question really pisses me off.

“Look,” I snap, “you’re just a kid, ok?”

“I can be grown up.”

“You mean mature? Not grown up. And is that what reading comic books and playing Gameboy for two weeks in a diner is all about?”

The kid starts to cry, not because of what I said, I think, but because everything he has been through rushes back to him when it dawns on him that maybe I’m not his savior, and that maybe he still does have to look after himself. He’s been though more than any kid his age needs or deserves. He sobs a few times, lowers his chin to his chest, and wipes his face. Then he notices my sidelong glances and tries to act tough and composed. He’s unsuccessful. My comment, it’s now apparent to me, was childish in itself, and I’m clearly ashamed to make a child cry.

“The only way we’ll survive,” I say in a calm tone, “is in a city. Somewhere we can establish the essentials, and get a system figured out. Despite what happened at Mecca, this is still true.”

“What’s Mecca?”

“Where do you think I’ve been all this time?”

I fill him in on the details and he doesn’t bat an eyelid at the unveiling of Sylvia. It would seem that he doesn’t know about the misogynic qualities of this plague and I decline to mention these in my recount of the story. I know that I need to tell him about this, but I can’t bring myself to do so. I’ll let it wait for a while. Maybe in a couple of weeks when things have settled down, I’ll be more comfortable about doing it.

The truck winds through the country while we sit in silence. Evening takes hold of the day and overhead the last of the sun’s rays breaks through bare tree branches.

“Do you have any children?” Martin asks with no preceding relevance.

“I’m only twenty-two, Martin.”

“So how old are people when they do have kids then?”

“I don’t know. Thirty? It depends on who you are — if you find yourself in a good relationship — those kinds of things.”

“My cousin, Amy, had a baby when she was seventeen.”

“Wow,” I say with a genuine interest.

“I think it was seventeen. One night I was sitting with her boyfriend, who’s now her husband, and his best friend on my parent’s back porch. He told us, real quiet, that this had to be a secret, and he made real sure we understood that. He said that Amy, my cousin, had gone with her friend to try to get the baby removed from her.”

“An abortion?”

“Yeah, right. There were people there though, he said, they were with signs, and yelled, because they didn’t want abortion to be allowed. So Amy’s boyfriend, Tom, he told us that she started walking over to the place and one of the people shouted right in her face that she was a murderer. And so she cried and ran back to the car.”

“So she had the baby?”

“Yeah, but Tom said he didn’t like the idea.”

“And, hang on, you’re sister—”

“My cousin.”

“Your cousin was sixteen?”

“Yeah.”

“What does she do now?”

“You mean before she died?”

I wince with guilt. “Yeah, of course.”

“She worked at the drugstore, and she’s at University too. She wants to be a nurse.”

“Emily wanted to be a nurse. I mean, she was doing her medical training.”

“Who’s Emily?”

“She’s— she was my girlfriend.”

We’re silent for a moment.

“Do you miss her?” Martin asks.

*

Emily woke up the next morning with a cough. By noon, it had worsened to invoke her entire body in guttural and wrenching heaves. The prolonged periods of dry retching drained her of energy and left her lying, fatigued, on the bathroom floor, before I carried her back to the bed. The news media informed me that by the next morning her immune system would no longer react to the virus in her lungs, so the coughing would ease. However, it would mean that she was then helpless to the encroaching illness. Soon enough, it was her stomach protesting the virus’ onset and she could no longer swallow any of the food or drink I gave her. Her face had paled and her temperature was running high.

I stayed in the apartment with her for the rest of the day. She was worried for her life, as was I, but I no longer feared catching the infection myself. I knew that if I was vulnerable it was already too late; I’d seen the ease in which Emily had caught the virus. I assumed that I too had contracted the infection during the night, only the virus was following a longer incubation period in my body and so the symptoms might remain incognito for some time. This was my layman’s understanding of virology. But I was wrong, of course.

“I want to go home,” Emily told me that afternoon. She meant that she wanted to return to her parent’s place, a short distance away in Squirrel Hill. Her parent’s were hippies, living in an old house full of eccentricities. They had garbage cans painted with leopard-print and a three-foot statue of Buddha sat in the fireplace of the living room, whose head and belly I was always encouraged to stroke and to which I always obliged. I understood Emily’s desire to return there. It was always so warm and welcoming. I promised we would go there the next morning. Secretly, I think I knew this would never happen.

We spent the rest of the afternoon talking about love and life, while I helped her sip water – food was still out of the question – and cleaned up her thin vomit. It was strange to do this for her; strange that it had become my responsibility to care for her. Normally, Emily was strongly independent. In the past, she shied from showing her real emotions, for fear of exposing a weakness. Financially, she provided for herself absolutely, often taking two jobs on top of her university courses rather than ask her parents for money. Now she was helpless and needed me to clean up her bodily fluids. I can’t imagine a situation she would have found more embarrassing.

Through the window of my apartment, that afternoon, I watched the slow deterioration of the city. As it grew darker outside, the windows in turn reflected the deterioration occurring in my own private world. After a two-year relationship with Emily, she came to define my life. Now she was coughing blood and the edges of normality had long since crumbled.

“I don’t like you seeing me like this,” she repeatedly said as the night passed.

I tried to understand and I tried to reassure, but most of all I tried to stop myself running away from all of this. I still loved Emily but those hours, which soon became days, weighed heavy on me. Running away appeared so easy that it gathered a romantic aspect of its own. Of course, it would have been a terrible thing to do. I know that and that’s why I didn’t do it, but given all that time to do nothing but fantasize while she slept, I could see myself packing my bag that night and… and the next thing I would be on the road. Not happy, but a romantic loner, with the road my only friend, and the great frontier ahead. No worries. No responsibilities. None of this.

But I didn’t go anywhere.

That day and the next passed with little event. As Emily became less and less lucid, she became the shadow of the woman I once knew, trapped only in the physical concerns of her failing health. Meanwhile, I observed the world around me likewise fall into decay. The Oakland riots had occurred two days prior, and now Craig Street was a mess of continual looting. There were few things left to steal from the already ravaged area, but people still streamed through, yelling, smashing, and fighting. For what appeared to be nothing more than carnal joy, looters trashed what remained of the Carnegie Museum across the street. I took a sadistic pleasure in observing the surreal image of two men carrying a giant Monet down Forbes Avenue, towards the Cathedral. Perhaps it now hangs in a tenement block in The Hill District.

And everywhere else in the city, chaos ruled the day. Many people tried to set fire to the University of Pittsburgh’s iconic central building, The Cathedral of Learning. The heavy stone in the building’s construction meant that many of these fires were stillborn. At most, when you passed through Oakland, you could see flames flickering from office windows in the building, spreading at a pathetic and stunted pace, just as the fire wardens assured us would never happen.

Conversely, fire gutted what was once the Hillman Library. The wooden interior and mountains of books had burned for days, like the wick to a huge candle. Mountains upon mountains of information reduced to a useless ash. I wish I’d visited the library after the flames had died down, to see the extent of damage to the cavernous study halls. I’d already witnessed a bonfire of desks in the Cathedral’s main hallway, piled high and hollowed out as blackened and charred skeletons of their former selves – it was an amazing sight. These were scenes I didn’t want to miss.

And these were scenes of such a surreal quality, they kept my mind distant from reality.

But Emily still died the following morning, quiet, though labored. She didn’t say a word; she didn’t have the energy to speak. She looked at me with wide eyes and then, full of aspirin and ibuprofen, stopped. I said her name, searching her face for any response.

“Emily?”

And silence filled the room, returning abruptly after I had deemed to interfere with it.

I wasn’t filled with sorrow, or pity, or regret. Instead, I was angry with myself for being so emotionless. I pulled the bed sheets over her body and left the apartment for a few hours to escape the horrible reality. I found myself sat on a bench in the emptiness of the university lawns, considering life and death. Later, as the sun arrived at its apex, I reluctantly shuffled through the snow back to the quiet apartment.

That evening, when Emily’s father pulled up outside the building in an old sedan, I was crying by the doorway. He walked over me greet and we stepped into the building’s foyer with his lower lip endlessly quivering.

“I’ve come to pick up Emily. She’s here, isn’t she?” I didn’t reply and he continued to speak, guessing the worst, his voice cracking. “Her mother’s ill.” He paused. “So I am I, but not so bad yet.”

“I’m sorry, but you should have come days ago.”

“I tried to call but the phones are out. Besides, I knew she was safe.”

I cut him off. “She wasn’t safe. You’re too late,” I said, motioning with my eyes the floor above us. Emily’s father glanced with me, distressed, and ran to the stairwell. I heard him cry out as he reached the floor above. I turned on my heel and waited things out back by the doorway.

Hours later, I stood aside and watched as he carried his daughter’s body to the car, tears running down his bearded face. I watched the car drive away down the cluttered street and I didn’t say another word for days.