Stories From the Plague Years (32 page)

What happened among them was kept secret, in the way witch hunts and midnight lynchings are. The house where the torn flesh of their prey lay piled thick on the floor was burned several nights later, as was part of the fields around it.

The fire’s glow brought a false dawn to the moonless sky; the clouds of smoke carried with them the ghostly scent of sulphur and rot, of burned hair and sickness.

A spiritual plague hung like choking fog over the countryside. A plague that would have warped and killed the soul of all whom it touched.

Had it not been for the visitation in dreams of a magnificent snow-white beast that came to each of them, that touched their hearts and souls with the healing light of its horn at the moment when the burning clouds of sunset had hung upon them a great serpent the rich color of cinnabar.

The beast came to them atop a hill crowned with a grove of oaks that was held by the eternal rebirth of spring. The coming of the creature was heralded by music. Sweet music, reminiscent of the sound of snow falling on quiet winter fields, of the breath of the sky, and the voice of each crystalline feather as it alights upon the earth.

A mirror of steel is oddly silent.

There’s a depth to your reflection missing in polished metal . . . the impossibility of an echo. You can speak your thoughts in silvered glass and know that you’re heard.

The last dressing room I shared with Justine had steel mirrors, made of bulkheads from a dead country’s navy. It was part of the glut of such steel that flooded markets while warships loaded with corpses were scuttled as tomb-reefs that pressed pearls of eyes, coral of bones. Steel desks, benches and chairs crowded out wood furnishings . . . the grain of which was scarred by winters made harsh by ash-clouds of the dead and by the rings of trees that marked not just years, but tons of human soot held in the sky. Justine and I had sat beside each other, applying our make-up in the steel’s gaze, dumb as we harlequinned ourselves with the simple lines we’d devised for our
Cymbeline
. We were startled by our not speaking to each other’s reflection as we usually did, when streaming chatter replaced the dream cycles lost over days of rough travel. Our gazes twined in the mirror, and as one, laughing, we touched the un-whispering steel as if to shake it from its deafness.

Alone, farther from Justine than I’ve ever been and standing more than a year from when our gazes could next touch, I now looked at myself in a steel mirror and heard its silence in a new way. The flooring hummed against my naked feet as I shifted and bobbed, trying without knowing why to mime the tilt and roll that the train I rode would have if it moved on metal rails on solid ground. If I pushed the mirror from its silence, I’d feel the roar of the train’s engine, conducted by porcelain walls at a frequency that, if I could hear it in the anaemic air, might sicken me with vertigo. The steel was treated to not fog, and the steam I breathed in that coffin-space that doubled as basin and shower held an emptiness compounded by the steam’s inability to clear the allergy-like congestion behind my eyes, or ease the swelling in my face that made me look like a mountaineer healing after a brutal climb. The steam looked like what folktales say a sleeping dragon’s breath is like in a vale, hanging as threads far thicker than it could at sea-level, in droplets too large for the pull of an earthly ground to allow.

Steam can be silent, just as it can speak. In a free zone of Palestine, my oldest friend Jim and I had breathed the steam of a bathhouse that had been in operation eight hundred years. The bathhouse stood, and might stand eight centuries more, near a graveyard of the land that had drunk nations of blood since Caleb had first stepped there. The proprietor had let his hens peck among the sun-cracked stones, so that even the boiled eggs he offered as a parting courtesy were flecked with death. The herb-scented steam of that place, which once held the breath of Crusaders, had felt heavy and
present
in our lungs. Ripe with the taste of the past . . . in a way that the quarantine baths Jim and I had shared during the Dying couldn’t have been. Those baths burned with tinctures that left us unable to stand the touch of the softest towels and with fumes that scalded our lungs. Jim lived the past, breathed the past. And now, as he chipped the bones of giants from the Gobi and tasted the dust of dead strata, he was less remote from home than I was . . . because he was camped near trade routes and would be able to post letters. When I return home, I’ll taste the same dust, drifting from creases in the letters he’ll have sent while I was gone.

Breathing out steam born of water so young it had been drunk or passed by none of God’s creatures but Man, I stood before my mute double and worked foam from fine glycerine soap that had been liquefied and re-poured around a magnetized disc in case the train’s turbines stopped spinning and made the soap drift as lazily as the bubbles it made. I lathered my swollen face, and knew the steam I breathed wasn’t silent because it misted from distilled water. Such steam could yield hymns from all it touched—as the perfume my mother pressed from sheets in the violet of winter afternoons, and as the mist that combed a fresh-turned-soil scent from the dust of centuries-old dressing rooms . . . a scent joined in my mind with the flurry of costumes being pressed, the flinging open of make-up kits and the whir of hand-held sewing machines. The steam I now breathed smelled only of the tungsten coils that heated it and the plastic pipes that carried it. My lungs full of the steam’s absence, I placed the soap unmoving on the steel mirror, raised the glass shard I’d brought from my compartment and ran it up against my throat.

“
Is this a weapon?
” the Customs Official had asked when he’d lifted the shard from my effects. Though I said it wasn’t, the shard
was
a weapon . . . the same way soldiers’ camouflage is. On the day I’d first pushed a shard like this along my throat and jawline, while I traveled another outland for Justine’s sake closer to our home but much crueler, I’d faced soldiers in brown and green camouflage milling in snow, ready to kill me. Theirs, though deadly, was a
theatre
of authority; it was made a performance by their being distracted by religious theatre they listened to on the phones they pressed under their helmets, that they commented about to each other through tactical headsets, even though they stood close enough to speak normally. They had poor costumes for their play. They lacked the winter fatigues that would have bent light around them as they hid on the embankments of the highway choked with stripped and derelict cars that Allen and I walked to get home. Such gear would short the electronics that let the soldiers be audiences of the drama that so enthralled them, that made their daywatch a mummery that would have killed Allen and me in front of an unseen audience with one lone member . . . a being I’d later learn was himself fleshless, and less visible than these soldiers would be if outfitted in stealth gear.

The few soldiers who didn’t have phones pressed to their ears smoked contraband—slouching, undisciplined as the deserters I’d seen as a boy looting warehouses and hospitals. They milled at the roadblock with the foot-to-foot hopping that told me they’d sooner shoot Allen and me and pack our stripped bodies with thermite than scrawl form entries accounting for our deaths. No more would be left of us than fragments like the furnace-cracked teeth I picked from the tread of my boot after walking access roads near factories. Not even a smear of ink on government foolscap would be our epitaph. No Boston Police were at the roadblock. No Staties, private military or CDC personnel . . . a cold, sea-water dread pissed into my guts as I wished to God for the presence of those from whom I’d hidden as a boy, who’d often deserted to form kidnap gangs that preyed on families desperate to reclaim their few scattered members.

The soldiers seemed to be waiting the half hour until dark before taking to the embankments—when those not enthralled by serial dramas would use nightscopes to shoot travelers with Godlike impunity, mimicking their own cruel, arbitrary God . . . whom they resented for not lifting them in the promised Rapture, leaving them in an emptied world with no warrior Christ under Whose flag they could butcher. My life and Allen’s had been spared for the moment by the oversight of a quartermaster too busy commandeering quicklime to properly camouflage these irregulars pulled from the staffs of rust-sealed prisons and the sheriff’s departments of counties that now only existed on roach-spotted maps. To this day, I can’t stand the grind of sled runners on pavement—the memory of that sound while waiting to feel bullets shatter my ribs is too strong, as is my memory of the fear that I’d not be dead when hooks would bite around my collar bones and drag me to a pit greased with the jellied gasoline that had once been a weapon of war, but that was now a tool of “civic hygiene.”

I skimmed the shard from jaw to cheek, over the swelling in my face where blood and lymph pooled that would have, at home, settled near my ankles. My face had been wolf-gaunt when I’d had to first learn its contours under the kiss of glass on my skin, in a room thick with toxic smoke, with food long rotted to clay and the smells of wine, beer and liquor that had evaporated in their glasses, leaving concentric rings of mold.

The steam of
that
moment—maybe an hour before I’d faced the soldiers—had reeked with the newly woken musk of decay and mildew . . . even though the plastic-tinged water that had made the steam then had been pure enough to drink. I myself had reeked like a thing dead on a summer road, from a week of back-crooking labour in a hinterland that consumed itself. Knowing I’d face men eager to kill me, I’d pressed broken glass to my face in a room so cold, the mist beading on the windows froze into stars like those etched in Polish crystal. My hands shook from hunger as the glass skated where blood pulses closest to the skin. Allen, casting aside the urgency of just a heartbeat before—an urgency that felt as if it stood breathing by our shoulders as a third person next to us—grinned after my first stroke didn’t add the steam of my split jugular to that which froze on the windows. I grinned back, drunk with a euphoria I never want to know again.

“
Did you know that we’re cool?
” he asked, making a gallows joke of a phrase we’d used to make light of toil and filth. With that joke, he rewrote the moment when he’d first asked the question into a halcyon time of a few days before, when we’d had the luxuries of a fireplace and a roof over our heads, and had felt able to handle any danger with two guns and three rounds between us.

When he’d first asked, “
Did you know that we’re cool?
” it was with staccato anger accenting each syllable. It was the same anger that had scarred his voice when we were ten, and he’d asked an older boy who’d invaded the isolation ward we shared with Justine and Jim why he’d punched him . . . as if the boy had hit someone else that Allen wanted to defend.

“What do you mean, ‘cool’?” I’d asked, turning in my sleeping bag that smelled achingly of Justine’s hair and feeling the wadded bills in my pocket we’d banished ourselves from the city to earn.

Allen lifted the book he’d been reading by the light of the portable lamp fueled by what we stole off the nearby traffic grid and by the firelight fueled by wood-scraps and books we’d found in the house we squatted. Hunger punched our insides as we lingered in the ugly twilight between having too much empty pain in our guts to sleep and the moment we’d be too spent not to sleep. At dawn we might buy food from half-empty farm trucks heading to the freight wagons that were light enough to be pulled over the ice by horse teams. Or we could earn mouthfuls in lieu of pay by unloading the trucks. If we didn’t eat tomorrow, we’d become too hungry to feel hungry, and then we’d be too weak to work. Our boots dried on the hearth, sweating the manger-stink of the greasy, near-useless waterproofing we’d slathered on them. Our wool socks hissed on the grate, wafting the sourness of lanolin and the compost-musk of our feet.

By the amber light of the fire and the lamp, I saw that the book-cover depicted young people—boy-men such as us, standing in god-like defiance atop a mound of rubble and curled metal in the square of a ruined city. The mound was both
like
and
unlike
the mound near the Center where Justine and I had met Allen when, before he lived there with us, he’d thieved into our ward for the fun of it—like and unlike . . . the way a storybook castle is like and unlike a real castle. The boy-men on the cover gripped ornately useless firearms and had musical instruments strapped to their backs like broadswords . . . lords of a fanciful desolation. Looking at them, I tasted the same contempt I do when I face the soft-bellied smugness of a man who lives off of women.

“People wanted this,” he said, deadening the anger in his voice with that profoundly adult authority he could conjure, and of which I’d always been jealous. Allen was himself like a boy whisked from a storybook: bright and wise enough to not talk like a boy. He spoke as if he’d already been a parent—as if telling young people how things were had been something he’d done since he first learned to speak. Despite the acting and the elocution I’d studied, I couldn’t project the sureness he could . . . even when I played a young, wise boy such as Allen was, who told a sad tale of sprites and goblins to enthrall his mother, too terrible even for the crickets to hear. Around Allen, I had the same uncertainty I did when I forgot lines in rehearsal. I never felt alone with him, never felt without at least another pair of eyes on us. With a finger the nail of which was flecked with plum-coloured blisters, Allen pointed to the pile of rubble on the cover, the thing of a bygone era’s playground-dreams that we’d known as a place to avoid the bite of sick rats.

I groped in my kit, felt for the stick of licorice root wrapped in plastic that smelled like the dried spit that clings to the toys of small children. I thought a moment before using the splintered licorice root to dig the day’s rot from my teeth. My mouth was slick and foul, but the resin of the licorice would make my guts bend even more for real food. Out of boredom, not hygiene, I chewed the end of the root I’d frayed with my teeth to pick away the smears of the ptomaine-foul meal of canned pork and crackers we’d choked down eight hours before, having passed on a flank too grey and stinking to have not come from a sick mule. I wondered how badly my gums would bleed should they again feel the bristles of a toothbrush.