After the Apocalypse (19 page)

On Saturday I was so tired of the whole thing, I didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

I wished I could find out what happened to the construction guy, the guy in the flannel shirt. Four of the guys were out of ICU in a couple of days, and I hoped he was one of them. I hoped he wasn’t the guy whose girlfriend had said his head swelled up.

Then the news stopped talking about it.

It was almost like it had never happened. I got a check from the company that did the drug trial, and I put it in my bank account. It was weird because in some ways it was a bigger deal when Chris and I got our marriage annulled. People talked about that for a long time, and not just in Lancaster. But even Mel didn’t talk to me about the drug trial thing unless I brought it up.

It didn’t bother me, not really. I think about it sometimes. I’m not doing any more medical trials. I figure I gave my all for science already. But other than that, it’s just something that happened.

We went to Cancun, my Not-A-Honeymoon-Trip to Cancun. We stayed in a resort hotel with a pool that went halfway around the hotel and had two swim-up bars. Being in Mexico, I thought everything would be more foreign, but in Cancun things felt a lot the same. There was McDonald’s and KFC, Pizza Hut, even Wal-Mart. Mel said it looked just like Florida, only more people speak Spanish in Florida.

Still, it was incredibly fun. You walk out of the hotel and down to the road, and this bus comes along. There’s no schedule, because they just take you from the
zona hotelera
to the downtown. It costs fifty cents. We partied a lot because even if we got trashed it didn’t matter.

There was this one club that sold drinks that were two feet tall. We’d been to Coco Bongo the night before, which was great but too crowded to dance, so we just picked this place at random because it had a dance floor. They had these long skinny glasses, red and blue plastic. I was sick of margaritas, but all you could get were margaritas and daiquiris, so I was on my third daiquiri. Usually I could drink pretty much. I started to feel kind of sick—Cancun catching up to me, I figured. I found the bathroom. I rinsed my face off, careful to keep my mouth tightly closed. I didn’t want to get Montezuma’s revenge.

I overheard these two girls talking. They were thin and blond, and it was clear they had never worked in McDonald’s in their lives. The one was saying to the other, “I don’t know if I want to come back here anymore.”

The other one asked where she wanted to go instead, and they talked about Hawaii or Miami something.

I hated them. I don’t know why; they were probably nice enough. But I just hated them. I thought, I almost died to get here. I still felt a little sick and dizzy, and I went in one of the stalls and sat on the edge of the toilet. Usually I don’t want to touch anything in a public bathroom.

Maybe it just hit me, I don’t know.

I had heard that all the guys lived, although I suspected none of them was exactly ready to come to Cancun. I had specks dancing in front of my eyes. I put my head down on my knees and took deep breaths, and I tried not to think about my head swelling up so that I couldn’t open my eyes.

I’m okay, I thought. I’m okay.

Someone called, “Are you all right?” It was Mel, jingling with bracelets.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“Are you sick?”

I was actually feeling better. I stood up and flushed the toilet and came out. “It’s okay,” I said. “I think I’ve just been drinking too fast.”

The music was disco. The beat was thumping. I went out and I started dancing, too. My head was still kind of light and as I was dancing, I felt lighter and lighter. Not in a bad way, but in a good way. I thought about those girls in the bathroom. And what it would be like to be able to decide to go to Hawaii. About what it would be like to be them, or to have gotten the other kind of injection.

I thought about luck.

I could think about that, or I could dance. Right now I wanted to dance. It didn’t seem like a bad choice.

There was a brass orrery, a mechanical model of planets circling the sun.

It was all cozy and pure and safe. I swore I would have a room like that, but I never have. —Alice

Irene hated Alateen. For awhile, Alateen had been okay. Now, when Alice dropped Irene off for a meeting, Irene swore to herself that she would not talk during the meeting. She would remain detached.

The meeting was at a Lutheran church. The parking lot was recently resurfaced. Alice had mentioned it. “Black ice,” she had said. “Skateboarders used to call it that. I love how black it is, how … clean.”

Classic Alice comment. It was a fucking parking lot. Talking to Alice was like talking to a four-year-old. She said stuff that didn’t quite make sense. She would appear to be listening to you, and then she’d interrupt you because she’d noticed something or remembered something she was afraid she’d forget to tell you. She was always cutting stuff out of newspapers or printing stuff off the internet to give to Irene. She’d given Irene an article about a study that showed that the children of gay parents were actually better adjusted than average. Which just proved to Irene that this was one more thing
her
family couldn’t get right because they were a fucking freak show.

The Alateen meeting was in a room that was used for Sunday school. There were coloring book pages of Noah’s ark in the windows. There were a couple where the kids had stayed in the lines and drawn the boat brown, the water blue, the giraffes yellow and brown. But a lot of them were just little kid scribbles. Orange orange orange in crayon tangles.

Naomi was there, squeezed into one of the little kid chairs. Naomi didn’t just have hips, she had haunches. She had long, straight black hair and glasses. She had chipped purple nail polish. She exemplified everything half-assed. She had her blue spiral-bound notebook and was writing, furious, which meant that she’d talk about her arguments with her mom again. Naomi had an unfair ratio of talking to listening. It wasn’t like she had more problems than anyone. Lots of kids had really scary stories—times in homeless shelters, in foster care, parents hauled off for involuntary detox, violence. One of the reasons that Irene had decided that she wasn’t going to talk was because really, those were the kind of problems that deserved Alateen. Irene’s mom had split up with her other mom, her
momms
, when things were just sort of crazy. Mom and Momms, together, and then Momms split and there was just Irene and Mom. It had been mostly like a normal divorce. Then Mom met Alice. Momms got, of all things, a boyfriend.
That
had been weird. The new boyfriend, Lonny, was strung out even when he wasn’t necessarily high; all Adam’s apple and skanky hipbones and funny nervous grin. But by then Irene had made it clear that she wasn’t spending any time at Lonny’s apartment, so they met at Denny’s, where Momms jittered and smoothed her hair over her ear again and again and didn’t eat and talked a mile a minute. Annoying, but not the same as your drunken dad punching you.

At the meeting, first they read the steps and the Serenity prayer. Then they all had to write an experience where they had gotten angry. Sandra, the meeting facilitator, gave them all little sheets of paper and pens. Naomi was the first to drop something in the bag. Something, Irene was sure, about another argument with her mother.

Irene thought about the things that had gotten her angry during the week, and then thought about which ones she would be willing to actually talk about. Nothing about Alice’s piles of stuff in the living and dining room of the condo. Nothing about her mother’s increasing lack of coordination. Nothing about her mother and APD. Momms was a safe thing to be angry at. Momms was the drug addict, and therefore her behavior was the thing that Irene was here to talk about. Irene couldn’t think of any specific thing that she’d done that had made Irene crazy, but she wrote “Momms at Denny’s” on her piece of paper and folded it up and dropped it in the paper lunch bag. She used to love these exercises. But now they were just such a pain in the ass.

Irene was the last one to drop her piece of paper in the bag.

When Sandra reached into the bag, she tensed. She had promised herself she’d be silent, but already she couldn’t help planning what she would say.

“Naomi,” the facilitator said. “Do you want to read what you wrote?”

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

Avian Prion Disease, or APD. APD is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (or TSE) similar in effect to Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease (CJD), Kuru, and Fatal Familial Insomnia. Like Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (Mad Cow Disease), an animal-based illness that crossed from cows to humans, APD is a disease that appears to have arisen spontaneously in a chicken that was breeding stock for a large chicken producer. The resulting infection leaped the species boundary from avian to human.

The disease was spread through the food supply in processed chicken products like “nuggets.” Commercial chickens are usually slaughtered within forty-two days of hatching, before they show symptoms of APD. Thus, though the disease was apparently never widespread, it was also unchecked.

In humans, APD has a latency period of about five years. No one knows how many people were exposed to the disease. The current rate of infection is about one per two hundred thousand people, but the number of cases is expected to rise over the next five or more years as APD expresses itself in people in whom it is still latent.

Initial symptoms include headaches, ataxia (loss of muscle coordination), trembling, and slurred speech. As the disease progresses, the victim becomes unable to walk without support, and the tremors become worse. The victim has wild emotional swings from despair to euphoria. In the final stages of the disease, the victim becomes incontinent and incapacitated. The victim cannot speak or swallow. The body wastes. Death occurs in six months to two years, often as a result of pneumonia or infection from pressure sores.

There is no test for the disease.

After the Alateen meeting, Irene was first into the parking lot. She really didn’t feel like conversation—either the “wasn’t that a great meeting” type or the “didn’t that meeting suck,” type. Both could come from the same person. She had engaged in both, about the same meeting, even. It pretty much summed up Alateen, except that the needle was swinging more and more into the “sucks” category and less and less into the “great.”

There was no sign of Alice.

Not long after Irene had started Alateen, they’d talked about cell phones in one of the meetings. It had been back when Alateen meetings were more likely to be “great.” It had been a pretty good meeting, as she remembered. Some girl who was no longer coming had said that she figured this was one hour out of her life she could really dedicate to getting herself straight, and she always turned her cell phone off. Irene had thought that was cool and had made it kind of a rule. She still did it, even though the hour didn’t feel nearly as dedicated. Alateen seemed like one of those things, like diets, where everything great happened at the beginning.

She dug out her phone. She had three texts from Alice.

Call me.

Your mom fell, at ER.

Your mom is ok just hurt her wrist will pick u up asap

Had her mom tripped over something in the house? One of Alice’s goddamn piles of crap? Fuck a bucket but life sucked.

Because of the broken wrist they gave Natalie a prescription for hydrocodone.

Alice maneuvered her through the crowded living room, holding her elbow. Past the pile of clothes waiting to be folded on the couch, and the stacks of magazines, and the pile of empty plastic storage containers, and the box of teal dishes. The painting that Alice had brought home because the frame was good. Alice maneuvered her into the bedroom and sat her on the bed. Alice undressed her, so tenderly, so sweetly, saying over and over, “All right?”

She hurt, and the shock of the fall had further loosened her mind. Her brain was being turned to holes by prions, which she thought of as tiny wires bent like paperclips. They bumped along her neurons and made more and more paperclips, turning the cells to lace.