Updating this blog-book has been a nightmare as of late. For that, I can only apologise, as I have done at the start of the past three or four updates.
Here's the second half of Part 4, Chapter 3, as way of redemption.
Enjoy!
Dave.
-------------
3 (Continued)
“Get your things, Martin,” I say. “We’re leaving.”
The boy still lies on the ground. Blood covers his head, but he appears to be more worried about me than for his own health.
Saul coughs and rolls onto his side. Blood comes out of his mouth in a thick red river and drips to the ground.
“Get your things, Martin!” I shout this time, and martin struggles to his feet. Uneasy on his legs, he hobbles to the front entrance where our bags stand. He stops when he sees the blood on his palm, and his mouth opens in shock. “Don’t worry,” I say. “It looks worse than it is.” He nods through the tears.
I walk over to him, looking back at Saul on the ground as I pull my jacket on and tug a hat over my head. “I'm sorry,” I say with all sincerity to the boy and he nods again in dumb reply.
Saul is rocking on his side, coughing, as Martin and I carry our bags outside.
*
Quickly, we throw our bags into the truck. It’s cold outside and we can see our own breath. Our bodies are still running on adrenaline; my own body feels like it doesn’t even belong to me, as if I’m watching these events from afar, utterly disconnected from the situation. The sensation of autopilot is so intense.
We climb into the cab of the truck, without exchanging a word. I fumble for the keys, stick them in the ignition, and attempt to get the vehicle started. The engine keeps growling and spluttering, but nothing more. The truck faces Saul’s home, so Martin stares alternately at me and then at the home’s open door.
Back and forth, as the engine growls and growls and finally roars.
As the truck kicks into life, Saul emerges from his home, bloodied and limping. He is too far away for me to read his expression, but close enough for me to notice he is carrying his rifle again. He raises the gun to shoulder height and points at the car. My stomach drops.
Martin yelps and I yell at him, “GET DOWN!” Saul stares into my eyes and I stare back into his own, and I see nothing. An eternity passes, I turn to look behind me, and kick the vehicle into reverse. I can feel Saul’s eyes drilling into the back of my skull, and with them, the barrel of the rifle he holds. I continue to reverse the truck down Saul’s long sloping driveway, as fast as I can handle, and towards the main road. I turn my head forward again and Saul is walking down the driveway to follow us out, still holding the rifle at shoulder height, still pointed at the truck. Martin fidgets and I warn him again through tight set teeth, “Stay down!”; just to stay down a little while longer.
And then I roll onto the road, as simple as that, and swivel the car to face south. Martin pulls himself up over the dashboard, timid and curious. I don’t reprimand him. We can both see Saul watching us and as we pull away, he drops his rifle back to his side, his chin falling, sorrowful, into his chest.
“Are you ok, Martin?” I ask.
He doesn’t reply.
A long time passes.
“I’m sorry, Martin.”
“I know.”
Silence fills the air between us as we stare out of the windscreen and at the curving road ahead.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Part 4, Chapter 3 (First Half)
Again, I'm sorry about the slow updates. I'm moving apartment (again!) today, so it's been a busy week. Enough excuses though, here's the first half of Part 4, Chapter 3. There are only three chapters left after this one, and it's at this point that conflicts start to come to the fore, and we see the resolution on the horizon.
I'll post the second half on Thursday, and I'll even schedule it into the Blogger program, so I don't forget.
Enjoy your coming week.
Dave
-------
Chapter 3
The next morning I wake to the noise of somebody moving around in the living room. I drag my lethargic body out of bed and stumble through the doorway. I know I look a comfortable mess. Martin is awake, groping through his backpack. It occurs to me that throughout the night, my own bag has sat in the corner of the room with the machinegun strapped to its side. This realization gives me a brief sense of panic until I notice that the gun hasn’t moved an inch since I left it there. The relief washes over me in a cool wave.
“Hey,” martin says with a smile. “How’d you sleep?”
The reaction from the boy cheers me, as for the first time since arriving at Saul’s home, Martin has shown enough confidence to start talking again. I know this is because Saul isn’t in the room. I don’t understand the boy’s aversion to the man — Martin has never displayed any nervousness around me, so I know he doesn’t worry about strangers. Saul is old. Saul is black. Saul is a loner. Any of those things could be an explaining for the boys attitude. “Yeah, I slept fine thanks,” I say. “It was great.” I look around the living room, uneasy in another man’s strange home. “Is Saul awake yet?”
“Yeah, he uh—” Martin pauses long enough to shrug his shoulders. “Well, he went out earlier, but I don’t know why. He thought I was asleep when he left so he was quiet about it.”
This strikes me as odd. “Oh, ok then. I guess I’ll make tea.”
*
While Saul is gone, Martin and I sit around the coffee table in the living room and talk. I ask Martin about his school life, trying to unearth why he was often so insular and shy, but after much digging I get no closer to understanding his reasoning.
Martin tells me about a particular teacher at his school who, in an effort to combat Martin’s shy nature, would make him read aloud in front of the class each day. Martin despised this, but his English skills were far exceeding those of his classmates who were denied the same opportunity. Martin laughs about how relieved he is, now that he will never go through that ordeal again, and we hear Saul turn the handle on the front door. The boy’s laugh falters. It’s a terrible way to react, but I’m inexplicably worried for my own and Martin’s safety. Saul’s mysterious disappearance didn’t concern me too much, but his silent approach upon the house is uncanny and unnerving. As he fumbles the door open and walks into the room, I’m on the edge of my seat.
Saul looks at us, aware of the strange atmosphere. He smiles, surprised and innocent.
“What?” he says, gesturing to his hands. He holds several small logs of wood. His smile turns to an amused smirk. “I was only getting wood for the fire.”
*
Noon approaches. Through the remainder of the morning, Saul and I sit in the living room and he tells me stories from his life. I know that he enjoys the role of the older man who passes on knowledge to his younger protégés. I know he doesn’t do this often, so I rarely interrupt his narratives. He tells me about the time he enlisted with the military, stationed in Israel in the 1950s, jumping from planes, fighting with his superior officers, landing himself in military hospital and finally military prison. He tells me of when he was stationed in the Egyptian desert, watching the huge battleships move slowly along the Nile. In that endlessly flat landscape, the ships look like they sail through the sand instead of any misplaced waterway.
As Saul tells me of beer, cigarettes, and violence in an intolerable heat, Martin sits by the fireplace, poking at the burning logs with a metal rod.
Saul tells me how his love of literature came to fruition. He’d started a fight over a beer tab. Things didn’t go his way and he woke up in an Egyptian military hospital with a knife wound in his stomach. Bored shitless in the hospital, he turned to reading to pass the long hours. He borrowed books from the meager hospital library and stole others from a rich British soldier in the next bed. He repeatedly devoured J.B. Priestley’s, An Inspector Calls, and several of the patients staged a performance of the play with Saul’s direction. Then when Saul was transferred to military prison (because the other combatant was an Officer), he turned to books again to survive the harsh environment in which he found himself. Saul had heard rumors that military prison was supposed to be an easy affair, but his own experience was far from this. He found himself the only black man in the complex. This was unusual and he was soon an outcast, despite the camaraderie normally found in the armed forces. From that time onwards, books saturated Saul's life. His method escape from these hardships was through the musty pages of old hardbacks, the quiet flutter of paper, and the overwhelming swarm of words as one flicked through a tome. Saul buried himself in those pages and words and never left, retreating into bibliophilia, loving his books more than anybody or anything else in this world.
Perhaps this explains his violent overreaction to Martin’s accident.
As Saul recites his stories, Martin entertains himself with the fireplace, nudging the wood with the steel poker, causing the flames to surge and fume, taunting the fire and losing himself in fascination. I watch the fire dance as I listen to Saul’s tales of his youth. When a chunk of wood falls from the fireplace, much to Martin’s dismay, it takes me a moment to react. It takes Saul longer. He notices my reaction first, and then turns to notice the burning log. Already Martin is trying to scoop the wood back towards the fireplace with arwith a, but in one regard, it’s too late. The unfortunate casualty is a copy of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. A flame licks it’s dusty, peeling cover, and fries the top pages. Martin bats the burning wood away and it rolls to the base of the fireplace where it rests on the hard flooring. Then he hits the flickering novel and puts out the burgeoning fire, leaving a jagged hole in the books centre.
Saul stands in silent disbelief and stares at the novel. He scoops is up from the ground, still hot, and holds it before his face. “What—” he begins. An eternity passes, and he continues to stare. Martin looks to me, nervous. “Saul?” I ask.
But he just stands in the middle of the room, cradling the book. “Oh no,” he says in a flat tone. Then he repeats himself. “Oh no, oh no.” I can’t grasp the depth of his devastation. It seems so alien. How is he so upset over a single book when surrounded by so many thousands more? Like a child who damages a toy and decides that toy had meant the world to them. Saul is so self-absorbed that he fails to place such a small loss in any reasonable proportion.
I ignore Saul’s lamentations for a moment and turn my attention to the burning wood on the ground. I pick up the two open beers on the coffee table and pour them over the flames. Then I turn back to Saul and The Pilgrim’s Progress. The old man holds the book away from his body at waist height trying to ascertain the damage, which is greater than I first realized. Again, he says, “Oh no, oh no.” The smoke from the extinguished wood fills our lungs. It brings back images of burning down my family home. Now, that was loss.
Martin’s face is a mask of worry and horror. “It’s ok, right?” he says to Saul. When the boy fails to evoke a response, he turns to look at me. I stand a couple of feet away. I don’t know what to do, or even if there is anything I can do. Instead, after Martin and I make a brief eye contact, I shrug my shoulders in a gesture of reassurance and turn to wait out Saul’s bizarre reaction.
“Look what you’ve done,” Saul says. He shakes his head and repeats himself, spitting through clenched teeth, the book held in the firm grip of newly appeared anger.
“I’m sorry,” is all Martin says.
I try to defuse the situation. “Saul—”
“Look what you’ve done.”
“But, it’s alright?” Martin says, as he reaches up to touch the book. I’ve broken out in a sweat. The perspiration on my forehead is a shocking cold, like electricity through my brain. My arms have begun to heave and wobble as adrenaline surges through my body. I’m nervous of what’s going to happen next and worry that Saul’s reaction could manifest itself physically. Didn’t he only just say he was once holed in military prison? I know something terrible is about to happen — I can read such a reaction in Saul’s bloodshot, bulging eyes.
Saul steps slightly away from Martin; more like his body veers an inch or two to the side. “No, it’s not alright,” he says with his teeth set tight in anger. “It’s not alright!”
Martin utters an upset, “But,” and retracts his hand from Saul and the prize the old man grips.
And Saul snaps.
“Does this look alright, you little fuck?” he yells at Martin. This from the man who only one night previous had told me how much of a responsibility Martin must become to me. “Does this look alright?” He thrusts the book close to Martin’s face, so the boy can see what he’s done. Martin takes a step backwards in fear.
“Hey, Saul!” I yell. He was right last night. He said the boy was my responsibility and so I won’t let the old man bully him. “What the fuck are you doing?”
But Saul doesn’t hear what I say. He’s too absorbed in his own anger. He’s not angry at the book’s value diminished, or even angry that Martin committed such an accident, instead he is angry that something has been taken from him. He’s angry that he has had to deal with another loss. Perhaps this is why he has imposed such an isolated lifestyle upon himself. Perhaps Saul has been through more loss than any reasonable mind should have to cope with. But that excuses nothing.
All that loss is a mute point as I watch this old ex-military man advance on a twelve-year-old boy, tears on both of their faces and my own body pumping with new fury.
“Saul!” I yell.
“Please!” Martin begs.
“You little fuck,” the old man screams, clutching his book. “You little fuck!”
And the boy is tumbling backwards, tripping on the raised tiles of the fireplace’s terracotta base. The tiles are cracked and lined with soot and Martin falls towards them with a yelp, cut short by a thud, his head cut short by the hard wall. He’s on the ground, crying, a long drone at first, and then a hoarse intake of breath, before a wail cutting through my ears.
Saul’s expression has changed. He heaves air into his lungs, panicked at what he may have done, horrified at what he has already done. Then my own emotions of anger manifest themselves in physical outrage at Saul. I see blood around Martin’s head.
“You old fuck,” I scream. “You dirty — you bastard fuck!”
And then I’m running at him, my peripheries burring, the boy’s screams filling my skull and Saul turning to face me, in slow motion, in horror. My fists are pounding the old man and make contact with his bald head. He drops backwards to the ground and I follow him down, screaming. “You fucking bastard. A boy! You fucking bastard. I could kill you!” Somewhere behind me, I know Martin’s bleeding. And really, really, I do, for a moment, try to kill Saul, wishing him dead as I continue to pound my fists through my ragged breath and a lip bursts or a nose bursts and my knuckles are numb and Martin’s crying has stopped because he sees what’s happening and, somehow, I’m dragged back into the world with an unconscious, maybe dead, old man beneath me, with red running down the black valleys of his creased face and blood on my own knuckles. I roll back and lie on the ground. All three of us on the ground, and all three of us wondering, what the fuck has happened? What the fuck has happened? How the fuck did this happen?
*
“Get your things, Martin,” I say. “We’re leaving.”
I'll post the second half on Thursday, and I'll even schedule it into the Blogger program, so I don't forget.
Enjoy your coming week.
Dave
-------
Chapter 3
The next morning I wake to the noise of somebody moving around in the living room. I drag my lethargic body out of bed and stumble through the doorway. I know I look a comfortable mess. Martin is awake, groping through his backpack. It occurs to me that throughout the night, my own bag has sat in the corner of the room with the machinegun strapped to its side. This realization gives me a brief sense of panic until I notice that the gun hasn’t moved an inch since I left it there. The relief washes over me in a cool wave.
“Hey,” martin says with a smile. “How’d you sleep?”
The reaction from the boy cheers me, as for the first time since arriving at Saul’s home, Martin has shown enough confidence to start talking again. I know this is because Saul isn’t in the room. I don’t understand the boy’s aversion to the man — Martin has never displayed any nervousness around me, so I know he doesn’t worry about strangers. Saul is old. Saul is black. Saul is a loner. Any of those things could be an explaining for the boys attitude. “Yeah, I slept fine thanks,” I say. “It was great.” I look around the living room, uneasy in another man’s strange home. “Is Saul awake yet?”
“Yeah, he uh—” Martin pauses long enough to shrug his shoulders. “Well, he went out earlier, but I don’t know why. He thought I was asleep when he left so he was quiet about it.”
This strikes me as odd. “Oh, ok then. I guess I’ll make tea.”
*
While Saul is gone, Martin and I sit around the coffee table in the living room and talk. I ask Martin about his school life, trying to unearth why he was often so insular and shy, but after much digging I get no closer to understanding his reasoning.
Martin tells me about a particular teacher at his school who, in an effort to combat Martin’s shy nature, would make him read aloud in front of the class each day. Martin despised this, but his English skills were far exceeding those of his classmates who were denied the same opportunity. Martin laughs about how relieved he is, now that he will never go through that ordeal again, and we hear Saul turn the handle on the front door. The boy’s laugh falters. It’s a terrible way to react, but I’m inexplicably worried for my own and Martin’s safety. Saul’s mysterious disappearance didn’t concern me too much, but his silent approach upon the house is uncanny and unnerving. As he fumbles the door open and walks into the room, I’m on the edge of my seat.
Saul looks at us, aware of the strange atmosphere. He smiles, surprised and innocent.
“What?” he says, gesturing to his hands. He holds several small logs of wood. His smile turns to an amused smirk. “I was only getting wood for the fire.”
*
Noon approaches. Through the remainder of the morning, Saul and I sit in the living room and he tells me stories from his life. I know that he enjoys the role of the older man who passes on knowledge to his younger protégés. I know he doesn’t do this often, so I rarely interrupt his narratives. He tells me about the time he enlisted with the military, stationed in Israel in the 1950s, jumping from planes, fighting with his superior officers, landing himself in military hospital and finally military prison. He tells me of when he was stationed in the Egyptian desert, watching the huge battleships move slowly along the Nile. In that endlessly flat landscape, the ships look like they sail through the sand instead of any misplaced waterway.
As Saul tells me of beer, cigarettes, and violence in an intolerable heat, Martin sits by the fireplace, poking at the burning logs with a metal rod.
Saul tells me how his love of literature came to fruition. He’d started a fight over a beer tab. Things didn’t go his way and he woke up in an Egyptian military hospital with a knife wound in his stomach. Bored shitless in the hospital, he turned to reading to pass the long hours. He borrowed books from the meager hospital library and stole others from a rich British soldier in the next bed. He repeatedly devoured J.B. Priestley’s, An Inspector Calls, and several of the patients staged a performance of the play with Saul’s direction. Then when Saul was transferred to military prison (because the other combatant was an Officer), he turned to books again to survive the harsh environment in which he found himself. Saul had heard rumors that military prison was supposed to be an easy affair, but his own experience was far from this. He found himself the only black man in the complex. This was unusual and he was soon an outcast, despite the camaraderie normally found in the armed forces. From that time onwards, books saturated Saul's life. His method escape from these hardships was through the musty pages of old hardbacks, the quiet flutter of paper, and the overwhelming swarm of words as one flicked through a tome. Saul buried himself in those pages and words and never left, retreating into bibliophilia, loving his books more than anybody or anything else in this world.
Perhaps this explains his violent overreaction to Martin’s accident.
As Saul recites his stories, Martin entertains himself with the fireplace, nudging the wood with the steel poker, causing the flames to surge and fume, taunting the fire and losing himself in fascination. I watch the fire dance as I listen to Saul’s tales of his youth. When a chunk of wood falls from the fireplace, much to Martin’s dismay, it takes me a moment to react. It takes Saul longer. He notices my reaction first, and then turns to notice the burning log. Already Martin is trying to scoop the wood back towards the fireplace with arwith a, but in one regard, it’s too late. The unfortunate casualty is a copy of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. A flame licks it’s dusty, peeling cover, and fries the top pages. Martin bats the burning wood away and it rolls to the base of the fireplace where it rests on the hard flooring. Then he hits the flickering novel and puts out the burgeoning fire, leaving a jagged hole in the books centre.
Saul stands in silent disbelief and stares at the novel. He scoops is up from the ground, still hot, and holds it before his face. “What—” he begins. An eternity passes, and he continues to stare. Martin looks to me, nervous. “Saul?” I ask.
But he just stands in the middle of the room, cradling the book. “Oh no,” he says in a flat tone. Then he repeats himself. “Oh no, oh no.” I can’t grasp the depth of his devastation. It seems so alien. How is he so upset over a single book when surrounded by so many thousands more? Like a child who damages a toy and decides that toy had meant the world to them. Saul is so self-absorbed that he fails to place such a small loss in any reasonable proportion.
I ignore Saul’s lamentations for a moment and turn my attention to the burning wood on the ground. I pick up the two open beers on the coffee table and pour them over the flames. Then I turn back to Saul and The Pilgrim’s Progress. The old man holds the book away from his body at waist height trying to ascertain the damage, which is greater than I first realized. Again, he says, “Oh no, oh no.” The smoke from the extinguished wood fills our lungs. It brings back images of burning down my family home. Now, that was loss.
Martin’s face is a mask of worry and horror. “It’s ok, right?” he says to Saul. When the boy fails to evoke a response, he turns to look at me. I stand a couple of feet away. I don’t know what to do, or even if there is anything I can do. Instead, after Martin and I make a brief eye contact, I shrug my shoulders in a gesture of reassurance and turn to wait out Saul’s bizarre reaction.
“Look what you’ve done,” Saul says. He shakes his head and repeats himself, spitting through clenched teeth, the book held in the firm grip of newly appeared anger.
“I’m sorry,” is all Martin says.
I try to defuse the situation. “Saul—”
“Look what you’ve done.”
“But, it’s alright?” Martin says, as he reaches up to touch the book. I’ve broken out in a sweat. The perspiration on my forehead is a shocking cold, like electricity through my brain. My arms have begun to heave and wobble as adrenaline surges through my body. I’m nervous of what’s going to happen next and worry that Saul’s reaction could manifest itself physically. Didn’t he only just say he was once holed in military prison? I know something terrible is about to happen — I can read such a reaction in Saul’s bloodshot, bulging eyes.
Saul steps slightly away from Martin; more like his body veers an inch or two to the side. “No, it’s not alright,” he says with his teeth set tight in anger. “It’s not alright!”
Martin utters an upset, “But,” and retracts his hand from Saul and the prize the old man grips.
And Saul snaps.
“Does this look alright, you little fuck?” he yells at Martin. This from the man who only one night previous had told me how much of a responsibility Martin must become to me. “Does this look alright?” He thrusts the book close to Martin’s face, so the boy can see what he’s done. Martin takes a step backwards in fear.
“Hey, Saul!” I yell. He was right last night. He said the boy was my responsibility and so I won’t let the old man bully him. “What the fuck are you doing?”
But Saul doesn’t hear what I say. He’s too absorbed in his own anger. He’s not angry at the book’s value diminished, or even angry that Martin committed such an accident, instead he is angry that something has been taken from him. He’s angry that he has had to deal with another loss. Perhaps this is why he has imposed such an isolated lifestyle upon himself. Perhaps Saul has been through more loss than any reasonable mind should have to cope with. But that excuses nothing.
All that loss is a mute point as I watch this old ex-military man advance on a twelve-year-old boy, tears on both of their faces and my own body pumping with new fury.
“Saul!” I yell.
“Please!” Martin begs.
“You little fuck,” the old man screams, clutching his book. “You little fuck!”
And the boy is tumbling backwards, tripping on the raised tiles of the fireplace’s terracotta base. The tiles are cracked and lined with soot and Martin falls towards them with a yelp, cut short by a thud, his head cut short by the hard wall. He’s on the ground, crying, a long drone at first, and then a hoarse intake of breath, before a wail cutting through my ears.
Saul’s expression has changed. He heaves air into his lungs, panicked at what he may have done, horrified at what he has already done. Then my own emotions of anger manifest themselves in physical outrage at Saul. I see blood around Martin’s head.
“You old fuck,” I scream. “You dirty — you bastard fuck!”
And then I’m running at him, my peripheries burring, the boy’s screams filling my skull and Saul turning to face me, in slow motion, in horror. My fists are pounding the old man and make contact with his bald head. He drops backwards to the ground and I follow him down, screaming. “You fucking bastard. A boy! You fucking bastard. I could kill you!” Somewhere behind me, I know Martin’s bleeding. And really, really, I do, for a moment, try to kill Saul, wishing him dead as I continue to pound my fists through my ragged breath and a lip bursts or a nose bursts and my knuckles are numb and Martin’s crying has stopped because he sees what’s happening and, somehow, I’m dragged back into the world with an unconscious, maybe dead, old man beneath me, with red running down the black valleys of his creased face and blood on my own knuckles. I roll back and lie on the ground. All three of us on the ground, and all three of us wondering, what the fuck has happened? What the fuck has happened? How the fuck did this happen?
*
“Get your things, Martin,” I say. “We’re leaving.”
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Part 4, Chapter 2
I know this is pretty late, but here's Part 4, Chapter 2. If you enjoy it, please consider buying a copy of the ebook using the links on the right, and supporting a first time writer.
All the best,
Dave
--------
2
I maneuver the truck up Saul’s driveway later that day. Upon hearing the truck’s engine, the old man appears at his door, again holding his rifle at shoulder height. I know he won’t shoot, he did this the last time I arrived too, but the experience is still harrowing. Martin, in the seat next to me, draws a breath and mutters in fear, but Saul soon recognizes me and lowers the weapon. His softening expression appears behind it.
“It’s ok, Martin,” I say. “This man’s a friend of mine.”
“Some friend!” he responds in disbelief.
I stop the vehicle several yards from the home, climb out, and walk to greet Saul. Martin trails behind me. Saul remains stock-still, resting on his gun as if it’s a walking cane and beams a smile towards us.
“And now there’s two of you!” the old man exclaims. For a self-professed hermit, he seems happy to have company.
“This is Martin,” I respond, gesturing behind me. “He’s the only person left in Bramble.”
Despite this news, Saul smiles further and reaches to shake Martin’s hand. The boy reluctantly accepts the gesture. “It’s good to meet you, Martin,” Saul says in the warm manner that befits old men so well.
Martin, unnerved, blubbers, “You too, sir.”
“Yes, well.” Saul replies. He looks at the boy in a long uncomfortable silence and then turns to me in a gesture of hospitality. “You should both come in, of course. I’ll make coffee.” He turns to Martin, “Maybe I have some lemonade for you; I’ll have to take a look around the kitchen.”
*
Saul is excitable and eager to tell me what’s happened while I’ve been gone.
“There’s been a fire in the city! You could see the smoke billowing up from the Northside or maybe Downtown, and there was a hell of lot of it. It’s windier now – you can’t see it so well – but yesterday afternoon, once you left, I could go up the hill behind us and see the thick clouds rising from the south.”
Such an event seems fitting.
“I guess I'm surprised it didn’t happen before,” I respond.
“The world works in strange ways; only when everyone has gone does the big fire hit. You must admit though, it’s exciting stuff.”
“Oh yeah, definitely.” This is only half-true. My agenda was to go back to the city, and now that plan’s gone up in smoke too.
Saul smiles with a black humor and moves into the kitchen to arrange drinks. Of course he knows he shouldn’t be excited by the fire, but maybe, outside of books, this is the first interesting thing to happen to him in years – aside from the whole apocalypse thing. The guilty excitement reminds me of when, as a young teenager, I visited a family friend in small-town Massachusetts. While I was there, a storm broke out. A dispute within the local authority meant that nobody had cleared the drains for some weeks that autumn, and the town was flooded with several feet of water by the end of the day. Despite our best efforts, the water ruined much of the ground floor of my friend’s home, so we sat in his bedroom, upstairs, with the rest of the family across the hall, and we watched the road outside turn into a river. I had no idea when things would be clear enough for me to go home, and the material losses were nearly incalculable, but I’ll never forget how exciting it was to watch all the junk float down the street.
Saul returns from the kitchen, carrying a kettle, and puts it over the fire to boil. “So how were things in Bramble?” he asks.
“It was deserted. Really strange – but I don’t know what else I was expecting.” Martin nods his head in agreement from the other side of the coffee table. Saul waits for me to elaborate. “You know, I went there because, well, I guess leaving Pittsburgh was about leaving my responsibilities, maybe just symbolically, and going to Bramble was about finding my family, who were responsible for me instead.” Saul nods. “I wanted to find someone else who could do the hard work, I guess. Maybe my family, sure. Yeah, and seeing my family was important, but—”
I pause and Saul raises his eyebrows, waiting for me to finish.
“Well, like I said, there’s nobody left.”
The kettle on the fireplace whistles as the water boils, so Saul climbs out of his chair and makes tea. I turn to look at Martin who still looks uncomfortable. He stares about himself as he digests the strange environment that the bibliophile, Saul, calls home. He turns his gaze to me and I give him a reassuring gesture. This appears to cheer him up.
Meanwhile, Saul has returned to kitchen, from where he yells through to us. “While you were gone, I finished a book I was reading. I meant to have read it years ago after a friend in New York told me how much they enjoyed it, but I’d put it off because this friend was a bit of a tool – he was the curator of some shitty art gallery in Manhattan. Sorry.” He means he’s sorry for cursing in earshot of Martin. “The gallery was some junk about painting mattresses. But anyway, the book was Crime and Punishment. Have you read it?”
“No. Is it good?”
“Long. I’ve heard people say it’s poorly written; I think Hemmingway said so in a book of his, maybe in A Moveable Feast…” his voice fades out in thought and possibly because he’s trying to find clean mugs. “But I enjoyed it regardless.” He drops something on the ground with a clatter. “So near the end of the book, after six hundred pages or so, the protagonist, Raskolnikov, has these delirious dreams while he’s locked up in prison.” He returns to the living room, without the tea, and picks up a copy of the book. “Listen to this,” he says as he flips through the pages and digs out a bookmark. “‘He,’ Raskolnikov, ‘dreamt that the whole world was condemned to a terrible new strange plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia. All were to be destroyed except a very few chosen.’ And the plague, you see, is this plague of ignorance, kind of. I mean, it makes everyone think that they have found the one and only absolute truth and this means that everybody has these unchangeable notions of right and wrong different from everybody else. So communication falls apart in the face of anxiety as everyone thinks all those around them can’t grasp their same truth. And so, for instance, armies will be fighting and it will all fall apart as the soldier’s start fighting within their own ranks. The soldiers all think, as individuals, that they’re right about what they’re doing and that everybody else is wrong and they’re unswerving in this opinion. That’s the idea behind Dostoyevsky’s virus. So, he goes on, here and there, ‘men met in groups, agreed on something, swore to keep together, but at once began on something quite different from what they had proposed. They accused one another, fought and killed each other. There were conflagrations and famine. All men and all things were involved in destruction. The plague spread and moved further and further.’ And this is the bit that really stuck in my mind, listen, ‘only a few men could be saved in the whole world. They were a pure chosen people, destined to found a new race and a new life, to renew and purify the earth,’” he pauses for dramatic effect, “‘but no one had seen these men, no one had heard their words and their voices.’”
Saul puts the book down, with pride. “Isn’t that a great image? A great portrait of humankind’s mentality? I love it. This plague brings the worst in us to the surface. And that’s why we see horrible things like looting. We always wanted to do it and a situation like this provides the rationale. And then at the end of it all, the inability to help yourself out of your desperate situation transpires into you waiting for some great third party, some man in the sky to lift you out, like Dostoevsky’s ‘pure chosen people’…”
It seems that sometimes when Saul talks to you, it seems he is only talking to himself and you happen to be there, willing to listen. Not that your willingness to listen has anything to do with it. He’d tell you anyway.
*
An hour later, we sit drinking tea and telling stories about our lives before the plague. We sound like those old men who sit in the park and drink one-dollar McDonalds’ coffee. The conversation wanes. After a brief silence, Saul tilts his head to the window and announces, “I think spring is on its way.”
As normal, Martin and I wait for him to continue.
“It will soon be that time of year. I can already feel the weather easing up, slowly but surely. Soon enough the snow will begin to thaw and the green will reappear. It can’t be long now, boys. The birds will fly back north and carry on their lives as if nothing ever happened. The earth will renew itself and repair the damage we’ve all done to it. Give it a few hundred years and Pittsburgh, and New York, London, Paris, and all those, will be like the Incan cities we keep finding buried in the rainforests.”
This topic has been on my mind for days. “Yeah,” I contribute, “I can almost see the archaeologists digging all of this up again, in years and years, and finding a, uh, a…”
“A spoon.”
“Ha, yeah, a spoon, or a cell phone, or something, and looking at it like it holds a key to the mystery to our civilization, and sticking it in a museum.”
Saul laughs with words, “Ha ha ha. Imagine them trying to figure us out, when not even I understand all that bullshit.”
We both laugh again, but Martin is uncomfortable. He turns to me and bluntly asks, “So are we going to stay here now?”
I don’t know how to respond. I begin with a denial, because this feels like an accusation, stop myself after a syllable, then I try to utter an affirmation, but stop again. I compromise. “Maybe for a short time.” I turn to Saul. “Is that ok?”
Saul nods and hums a high note of welcome.
Martin’s annoyed by the state of affairs. He stands up and states, without emotion, that he is going to the bathroom.
He leaves the room and Saul looks at me with solemn eyes. “You have a big responsibility with this boy,” he says. “Don’t fuck it up. He may well come to hate you, but don’t fuck it up.”
*
I spend my second night at Saul’s home, but this time, out of respect for Martin, I only get slightly drunk. It’s an enjoyable evening. Saul cooks more root vegetables, which are much better than they sound, and Martin has his first beer.
Later that night, in a room half library and half office, I lie on a couch, tucked under in a thick, warm sheet. The beer making my mind swim, and I stare at the ceiling, illuminated by candle light. The roof is unevenly plastered and the bumps and grooves on the gray surface make me think of how the moon must look once you get close enough. It looks like the moon from a mile out. I daydream like this for a while, studying the valleys and craters in the ceiling and listening to Martin snore in the bed I slept in two nights ago. Saul is in his own room and sleeps silently under the light scream of the wind outside. The room is warm and comforting. I know the wind outside would freeze my bones and I’m eternally grateful for Saul’s hospitality. I find myself regretting my earlier, bizarre evaluations of Saul. I judged him as awkward and emotionless. I’d taken a flight of imagination, coming to a judgment based on his social anxiety, communication problems, and erratic hand gestures. It was unfair.
I look at my fake moon surface, the shadows of the peaks and valleys ebbing and flowing in the ever-changing light. I imagine swooping through the crevices on a most literal flight of fancy. A while passes in daydream before I lean over, blow out the candle, and lie there with my eyes closed. My thoughts take on the rhythm of Martin’s snoring; slow, heaving, lumbering thoughts, on moonlight, on what I’ve lost and on what I’ve found.
Sleep swims up to greet me, but of course, that’s an event I can rarely recall.
All the best,
Dave
--------
2
I maneuver the truck up Saul’s driveway later that day. Upon hearing the truck’s engine, the old man appears at his door, again holding his rifle at shoulder height. I know he won’t shoot, he did this the last time I arrived too, but the experience is still harrowing. Martin, in the seat next to me, draws a breath and mutters in fear, but Saul soon recognizes me and lowers the weapon. His softening expression appears behind it.
“It’s ok, Martin,” I say. “This man’s a friend of mine.”
“Some friend!” he responds in disbelief.
I stop the vehicle several yards from the home, climb out, and walk to greet Saul. Martin trails behind me. Saul remains stock-still, resting on his gun as if it’s a walking cane and beams a smile towards us.
“And now there’s two of you!” the old man exclaims. For a self-professed hermit, he seems happy to have company.
“This is Martin,” I respond, gesturing behind me. “He’s the only person left in Bramble.”
Despite this news, Saul smiles further and reaches to shake Martin’s hand. The boy reluctantly accepts the gesture. “It’s good to meet you, Martin,” Saul says in the warm manner that befits old men so well.
Martin, unnerved, blubbers, “You too, sir.”
“Yes, well.” Saul replies. He looks at the boy in a long uncomfortable silence and then turns to me in a gesture of hospitality. “You should both come in, of course. I’ll make coffee.” He turns to Martin, “Maybe I have some lemonade for you; I’ll have to take a look around the kitchen.”
*
Saul is excitable and eager to tell me what’s happened while I’ve been gone.
“There’s been a fire in the city! You could see the smoke billowing up from the Northside or maybe Downtown, and there was a hell of lot of it. It’s windier now – you can’t see it so well – but yesterday afternoon, once you left, I could go up the hill behind us and see the thick clouds rising from the south.”
Such an event seems fitting.
“I guess I'm surprised it didn’t happen before,” I respond.
“The world works in strange ways; only when everyone has gone does the big fire hit. You must admit though, it’s exciting stuff.”
“Oh yeah, definitely.” This is only half-true. My agenda was to go back to the city, and now that plan’s gone up in smoke too.
Saul smiles with a black humor and moves into the kitchen to arrange drinks. Of course he knows he shouldn’t be excited by the fire, but maybe, outside of books, this is the first interesting thing to happen to him in years – aside from the whole apocalypse thing. The guilty excitement reminds me of when, as a young teenager, I visited a family friend in small-town Massachusetts. While I was there, a storm broke out. A dispute within the local authority meant that nobody had cleared the drains for some weeks that autumn, and the town was flooded with several feet of water by the end of the day. Despite our best efforts, the water ruined much of the ground floor of my friend’s home, so we sat in his bedroom, upstairs, with the rest of the family across the hall, and we watched the road outside turn into a river. I had no idea when things would be clear enough for me to go home, and the material losses were nearly incalculable, but I’ll never forget how exciting it was to watch all the junk float down the street.
Saul returns from the kitchen, carrying a kettle, and puts it over the fire to boil. “So how were things in Bramble?” he asks.
“It was deserted. Really strange – but I don’t know what else I was expecting.” Martin nods his head in agreement from the other side of the coffee table. Saul waits for me to elaborate. “You know, I went there because, well, I guess leaving Pittsburgh was about leaving my responsibilities, maybe just symbolically, and going to Bramble was about finding my family, who were responsible for me instead.” Saul nods. “I wanted to find someone else who could do the hard work, I guess. Maybe my family, sure. Yeah, and seeing my family was important, but—”
I pause and Saul raises his eyebrows, waiting for me to finish.
“Well, like I said, there’s nobody left.”
The kettle on the fireplace whistles as the water boils, so Saul climbs out of his chair and makes tea. I turn to look at Martin who still looks uncomfortable. He stares about himself as he digests the strange environment that the bibliophile, Saul, calls home. He turns his gaze to me and I give him a reassuring gesture. This appears to cheer him up.
Meanwhile, Saul has returned to kitchen, from where he yells through to us. “While you were gone, I finished a book I was reading. I meant to have read it years ago after a friend in New York told me how much they enjoyed it, but I’d put it off because this friend was a bit of a tool – he was the curator of some shitty art gallery in Manhattan. Sorry.” He means he’s sorry for cursing in earshot of Martin. “The gallery was some junk about painting mattresses. But anyway, the book was Crime and Punishment. Have you read it?”
“No. Is it good?”
“Long. I’ve heard people say it’s poorly written; I think Hemmingway said so in a book of his, maybe in A Moveable Feast…” his voice fades out in thought and possibly because he’s trying to find clean mugs. “But I enjoyed it regardless.” He drops something on the ground with a clatter. “So near the end of the book, after six hundred pages or so, the protagonist, Raskolnikov, has these delirious dreams while he’s locked up in prison.” He returns to the living room, without the tea, and picks up a copy of the book. “Listen to this,” he says as he flips through the pages and digs out a bookmark. “‘He,’ Raskolnikov, ‘dreamt that the whole world was condemned to a terrible new strange plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia. All were to be destroyed except a very few chosen.’ And the plague, you see, is this plague of ignorance, kind of. I mean, it makes everyone think that they have found the one and only absolute truth and this means that everybody has these unchangeable notions of right and wrong different from everybody else. So communication falls apart in the face of anxiety as everyone thinks all those around them can’t grasp their same truth. And so, for instance, armies will be fighting and it will all fall apart as the soldier’s start fighting within their own ranks. The soldiers all think, as individuals, that they’re right about what they’re doing and that everybody else is wrong and they’re unswerving in this opinion. That’s the idea behind Dostoyevsky’s virus. So, he goes on, here and there, ‘men met in groups, agreed on something, swore to keep together, but at once began on something quite different from what they had proposed. They accused one another, fought and killed each other. There were conflagrations and famine. All men and all things were involved in destruction. The plague spread and moved further and further.’ And this is the bit that really stuck in my mind, listen, ‘only a few men could be saved in the whole world. They were a pure chosen people, destined to found a new race and a new life, to renew and purify the earth,’” he pauses for dramatic effect, “‘but no one had seen these men, no one had heard their words and their voices.’”
Saul puts the book down, with pride. “Isn’t that a great image? A great portrait of humankind’s mentality? I love it. This plague brings the worst in us to the surface. And that’s why we see horrible things like looting. We always wanted to do it and a situation like this provides the rationale. And then at the end of it all, the inability to help yourself out of your desperate situation transpires into you waiting for some great third party, some man in the sky to lift you out, like Dostoevsky’s ‘pure chosen people’…”
It seems that sometimes when Saul talks to you, it seems he is only talking to himself and you happen to be there, willing to listen. Not that your willingness to listen has anything to do with it. He’d tell you anyway.
*
An hour later, we sit drinking tea and telling stories about our lives before the plague. We sound like those old men who sit in the park and drink one-dollar McDonalds’ coffee. The conversation wanes. After a brief silence, Saul tilts his head to the window and announces, “I think spring is on its way.”
As normal, Martin and I wait for him to continue.
“It will soon be that time of year. I can already feel the weather easing up, slowly but surely. Soon enough the snow will begin to thaw and the green will reappear. It can’t be long now, boys. The birds will fly back north and carry on their lives as if nothing ever happened. The earth will renew itself and repair the damage we’ve all done to it. Give it a few hundred years and Pittsburgh, and New York, London, Paris, and all those, will be like the Incan cities we keep finding buried in the rainforests.”
This topic has been on my mind for days. “Yeah,” I contribute, “I can almost see the archaeologists digging all of this up again, in years and years, and finding a, uh, a…”
“A spoon.”
“Ha, yeah, a spoon, or a cell phone, or something, and looking at it like it holds a key to the mystery to our civilization, and sticking it in a museum.”
Saul laughs with words, “Ha ha ha. Imagine them trying to figure us out, when not even I understand all that bullshit.”
We both laugh again, but Martin is uncomfortable. He turns to me and bluntly asks, “So are we going to stay here now?”
I don’t know how to respond. I begin with a denial, because this feels like an accusation, stop myself after a syllable, then I try to utter an affirmation, but stop again. I compromise. “Maybe for a short time.” I turn to Saul. “Is that ok?”
Saul nods and hums a high note of welcome.
Martin’s annoyed by the state of affairs. He stands up and states, without emotion, that he is going to the bathroom.
He leaves the room and Saul looks at me with solemn eyes. “You have a big responsibility with this boy,” he says. “Don’t fuck it up. He may well come to hate you, but don’t fuck it up.”
*
I spend my second night at Saul’s home, but this time, out of respect for Martin, I only get slightly drunk. It’s an enjoyable evening. Saul cooks more root vegetables, which are much better than they sound, and Martin has his first beer.
Later that night, in a room half library and half office, I lie on a couch, tucked under in a thick, warm sheet. The beer making my mind swim, and I stare at the ceiling, illuminated by candle light. The roof is unevenly plastered and the bumps and grooves on the gray surface make me think of how the moon must look once you get close enough. It looks like the moon from a mile out. I daydream like this for a while, studying the valleys and craters in the ceiling and listening to Martin snore in the bed I slept in two nights ago. Saul is in his own room and sleeps silently under the light scream of the wind outside. The room is warm and comforting. I know the wind outside would freeze my bones and I’m eternally grateful for Saul’s hospitality. I find myself regretting my earlier, bizarre evaluations of Saul. I judged him as awkward and emotionless. I’d taken a flight of imagination, coming to a judgment based on his social anxiety, communication problems, and erratic hand gestures. It was unfair.
I look at my fake moon surface, the shadows of the peaks and valleys ebbing and flowing in the ever-changing light. I imagine swooping through the crevices on a most literal flight of fancy. A while passes in daydream before I lean over, blow out the candle, and lie there with my eyes closed. My thoughts take on the rhythm of Martin’s snoring; slow, heaving, lumbering thoughts, on moonlight, on what I’ve lost and on what I’ve found.
Sleep swims up to greet me, but of course, that’s an event I can rarely recall.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
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
------
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.
Dave
------
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.
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