The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories (29 page)

“Never mind,” she said. “I think maybe we found our guys.”

IV.

The general consensus, for a long time, was that Africa was too big to sink. By the time Africa sank, we had already lost Central America and some of Australia and all of Japan. I had been in the city only a few months after we lost Japan, and I had started working my first job as a reporter around that time, too. In my office, a few of the reporters and editors started a betting pool, and to make me feel more at home, I suppose, they invited me to join the pool, and before I fully understood what we were betting on, I said okay. Then they asked me what I thought would go next and how much money I wanted to bet on that. It was fairly crass. I thought so at the time, and I think so now, but at the time, thinking so, I still placed a bet. Most people figured somewhere in Europe. Spain, maybe, or Portugal, or the British Isles. Especially the British Isles, as those seemed ripe for sinking. A couple of people figured Greenland would go next, and one guy put a couple of dollars on North America, or maybe just on any part of North America, Nova Scotia, maybe, or Alaska, because he said the odds were too good to pass up, but even he didn’t put any money on Africa. In fact, when they were making the pool sheet, no one even thought to include Africa on it, not the whole continent, anyway, because everyone knew. To be safe, then, I told them to add Africa and that I’d put money on Africa. They told me I should just bet on South Africa, maybe, or Egypt, or Madagascar, which, at least, was an island. I made them give me odds on Africa, on the whole thing, and then I put down a quarter and that was the only thing I bet, and they rolled their eyes at me, the rest of the reporters and editors in on this pool, and they acted like I was the biggest jackass they had seen, and this made me defensive, and so I said to them, hardly serious at all, “If you think I’m an asshole now, you just wait until after it sinks and I win.”

Sometimes when I think about this, I can’t help but laugh. I want to laugh at the situation and at what I said, which was stupid, and the ridiculous and horrible nature of the thing we were betting on itself, and then at the fact that out of everyone, I won, but it’s not really something to laugh about, is it?

I didn’t think I’d win, of course. Nobody thought I’d win.

It’s a silly thing to think sometimes, but there are times, there are a lot of times when I think about that bet, when I think about the bet and about how Africa sank, how quickly Africa sank after I made that bet. There are times, late at night or if I wake up early in the morning, if a trash truck or my neighbors, the ones above me, who often fight and scream late into the night, if something wakes me up and I find myself lying alone in my bed in the dark, I will remember that bet I made, and I will blame myself for what happened, blame that quarter bet for the way Africa sank right into the sea, and though I know it’s a foolish way to think and to act, I will look back on that bet with great and shuddering regret.

V.

There were screams at first, but only from those few men and women closest to the action, the people, in other words, who had gathered around the now empty pool to see what Harold Cornish was doing to it. Otherwise, the rest of the party seemed oblivious to what was going on by the pool. If you knew him or if you’d heard him speak, you could maybe pick out the brittle, nasal sound of Harold Cornish among those first voices, but maybe not. Apparently, the guys—three of them, all drunk on stolen champagne and holding, as if they were firemen, an average-sized water hose—didn’t know that Cornish was inside the pool working on fixing the hydraulics, and when he lifted his head up to see what the hell was going on, he received a faceful of water. This struck the gentlemen with the hose as extremely funny. One or all of them then doubled over in laughter, sending, for a brief moment, a spray of water up and out over the crowd, so that soon those who had had no idea that anything was happening were quite focused on the pool and the men and the hose.

I turned to Karen to see what, if anything, might be playing across her face as this all transpired, but she had left my side, and after quickly scanning the courtyard, I spotted her kneeling down and leaning into a row of shrubs planted against one of the far walls. She had hiked her black, sparkling dress up over her knees, and her left hand dug into the bushes in search of the water spigot, which she found, and, after briefly turning the nozzle hard to the left and jetting more water into the crowd, she managed to shut the hose down. By the time I turned back to look at the men with the hose, security had confiscated the water hose, and the three drunks—who later turned out to be interns with the bright idea of speeding along the process of sinking the model of the African continent—were being escorted into the museum proper.

Then Karen was at my side again and she said, shaking her head, “You’re taking me out for a drink after all of this.” I looked at her, not a little surprised, and she said, “I deserve a drink after all of this, and so someone’s taking me out for one, and it might as well be you.”

Before I could say anything to this, the speakers let out a high-pitched whine that hurt our ears, and everyone in the courtyard turned to the stage, where Owen Mitchell was now standing, his finger tapping against the microphone. At the time, I thought that someone had made a mistake and told him it was now time for him to speak, that he had quietly protested, the commotion only just ending, that an overeager employee of Karen Long’s or someone from the board, nervous about the way this party had begun spiraling out of control, had practically shoved him onto that stage to give his speech, whether we were ready to hear it or not. Later, I found out this was not the case. Mitchell stepped up to the microphone of his own accord, he told me. “Things had gotten out of hand,” he said, smiling. “No one seemed to remember why we were there.”

He cleared his throat. The whining stopped. He tapped the microphone again and cleared his throat again. The crowd, those of us still left in the courtyard, fell silent. I turned to look at Karen again, and she was looking up at the stage. Mitchell looked out at us and he shaded his eyes, and then he looked down at the notes in his hand, and he folded them and stuffed them inside his jacket pocket, and we waited for him to begin his speech.

It was a short speech, shorter, maybe, than even he had planned. It was not the speech we knew. Mitchell had managed somehow to boil it down to its essence, or maybe he made it into something entirely new. I can’t remember it now, not its specifics, not past those first few words, and Mitchell hadn’t written it down, had abandoned, at the last moment, his own notes, and cannot remember it himself. It spoke of tragedy, I think. I think, too, that it spoke to the enormous loss of life, to the sense that this world had been pushed to the brink, but in truth, the speech might not have been about any of that. It was not the speech we knew, yet by the end of the speech, I felt as if I weren’t listening to Mitchell as he spoke in front of us, as if the words weren’t coming from him, but had been borne inside my own head, had always been part of my own thoughts, that Mitchell was simply reminding me of something I already knew and had somehow forgotten. Judging by the soft sighs escaping Karen’s lips as she stood to my right, the way her lips moved as if she were reciting the speech along with Mitchell, I was not alone in this.

“They told us the center will not hold,” he began, and there seemed to be no other sound but the sound of his voice. “If we lose this, they said, the center will not hold and we will not survive, yet here we are.” He smiled. “Here we are.”

Juan Manuel Gonzales: A Meritorious Life

G
ONZALES, JUAN MANUEL (1804–1848). Innkeeper, forger. Place of birth: Delicias, Mexico. Don Rafael, who owned land in what is now the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, had a son, Hernando. As the story goes, Hernando was in love, but his love, for Gabriela, the daughter of his wet nurse, was forbidden by his father. When Don Rafael discovered that Hernando and Gabriela were still meeting, in secret, and that their affections had only grown stronger despite his wishes, he sent Gabriela to Mexico City, where he enrolled her in a school for nurses, and in exchange for her agreement to end her foolish affair with his son, Don Rafael agreed to pay for her schooling as well as a room he acquired for her at an all-girls’ boardinghouse. In addition to this, Don Rafael provided Gabriela with a stipend equal to fifty dollars a week.

Hernando, struck dumb by how quickly Gabriela acquiesced, refused to leave his father’s house for two weeks after Gabriela went away. He canceled all appointments with his friends and instructed the house staff not to allow anyone, but for the unlikely Gabriela, entrance onto the large estate.

Then, one hot summer afternoon, Hernando, who had that day moved no farther a distance than that between his bed and the chaise lounge set beneath his bedroom window, was surprised to see in that bedroom window the face of a faithful servant and friend. At first startled and then quickly angered (for had he not given specific instructions?), Hernando at once decided to shove the intruder, push him out of the window and off the wall, so that he would fall and perhaps break his legs. As he grabbed the man’s shirt, ready to give him a strong shove, the servant pulled from his person a carefully folded letter and shook it in Hernando’s face, saying, “Please, Don Hernando, please, I have instructions from Gabriela.” Quickly, then, Hernando pulled the young man inside, grabbed the letter, and read it and read it again and read it for a third time before once looking up at the servant who had delivered it, at which point he said, “You may leave.”

As per the letter’s instructions, Hernando approached the innkeeper, Señor Juan Gonzales, hired by Don Rafael to run the inn in order to pay off a debt, and informed him that letters would soon arrive, sometimes many in just one day. Gonzales was to keep these letters, and every Sunday after the eight o’clock Mass, he, Don Hernando, would come to the inn for breakfast and Señor Gonzales would slip the letters to him, hidden wrapped with the tortillas. Señor Gonzales was not, under any circumstances, to hand the letters to anyone else.

For three months, Gabriela mailed all letters for Hernando to the innkeeper. Don Rafael, at first glad to see his son had finally given up his foolishness, quickly grew suspicious of Hernando’s Sunday visits to his innkeeper, Señor Gonzales. When confronted, Señor Gonzales, easily intimidated, told Don Rafael that, yes, Hernando received letters, though Señor Gonzales claimed not to know from whom. Don Rafael instructed Señor Gonzales to set aside one of the letters to be handed over after Hernando had retrieved the others. Unable to disobey Don Rafael, yet unwilling to betray the young Hernando, Señor Gonzales took the first letter to arrive on Monday, hesitated only a moment before opening it, and set himself the task of copying it over and over again, doing so for the full week, meticulously tracing each letter until he had finally mastered Gabriela’s hand. And then, Saturday night, Gonzales forged a letter from Gabriela, claiming that she no longer loved Hernando, that she had met another man, a doctor, and that she wished to never see him again. He sealed this fake letter into an envelope and marked the envelope with a small
X
in the top right hand corner.

Anxious about the deception, however, Señor Gonzales, by mistake, gave the forged letter to Hernando, and accidentally passed one of the real letters, one that had arrived just the day before, to Don Rafael, only realizing his mistake as Don Rafael, after opening the letter, handed the unmarked envelope back to Señor Gonzales.

“Aha!” exclaimed Don Rafael. “It is just as I suspected. It is a letter from Gabriela. And also as I suspected, she has finally broken his heart, has left him for another man, a doctor.”

Escape from the Mall

I
have only known Roger for a couple of hours now, but when he comes over to me, he’s got a look on his face that tells me he’s got something on his mind.

He’s wrapping a strip of tattered cloth around the palm of his hand. It’s a serious venture, this wrapping of the cloth around the palm of his hand. As he walks over to me, he seems to be considering this process more than he’s considering me, more than he’s considering the act of walking, which is why, even though we are all huddled here—the seven of us—here in this janitor’s supply closet, which cannot be much larger than a decently sized public toilet, why it takes a good minute or two for him to reach me. Why it takes him long enough that for a moment I consider meeting him halfway, if only to quickly get over with whatever it is he is going to propose to me.

Instead, I try to think back over the past couple of hours to see if I can remember what he might have done to the palm of his hand, but I can’t remember anything in particular. Granted, there is a lot to remember. Granted, there is a lot I’d rather not remember.

The way Jennifer slipped on the wet tile in the middle of the food court just as the hordes rushed over her, for example. The way she screamed for our help. The way they slurped as they slurped her up. I could stand to forget that.

Not to mention the way that black guy, that black guy with the kid, the kid who’s now sulking, red-eyed and snotty and blotchy-faced in the corner, the way that guy turned around at the last minute, at the very last minute, right before Roger jimmied the closet door open, turned around and charged into the throng of them, wielding Roger’s Louisville Slugger and yelling over his shoulder, “I’ll always love you, Tyrone,” the way they kind of just parted for him, like the Red Sea for Moses, stepped aside and let him charge right into the heart of them before the mass of them swallowed him whole.

That.

I’m pretty certain I’m not the only one who’d rather forget that.

But as for Roger and his palm and what might have happened to his palm that might now require such deliberate attention, I can’t say as I remember.

He hasn’t stopped moving toward me even as he’s come close enough to me that he could probably whisper whatever it is he’s going to say and I’d still be able to hear it, and for a moment I think to myself,
Maybe he’s going to kiss me.
And then I think,
That’d be unexpected.

But he doesn’t kiss me, which is fine, as I think it might hurt Mary’s feelings, Mary who’s been looking at him doe-eyed since he decapitated the one that was about to rip her skull off and eat her brains out.

He doesn’t kiss me, but he leans in close enough that I could bite his nose if I wanted to. I guess he could bite my nose if he wanted to, too.

Neither of us bites the other one’s nose.

“How you holding up?” he says, whispering hoarsely.

“Great,” I say. “What happened to your hand?” I ask.

He lifts it up and points it palm forward at my face and says, “This? Nothing. This ain’t nothing. I’m good, man. I’m good.”

I don’t get much of a look at it before he drops it quickly back down to his side, but the smell of it that lingers in the air where his hand was just a second ago smells rotten and earthy. But before I can force the issue, he tells me he has a plan.

“A plan?” I ask. “A plan to do what?”

“We’ve been sitting here almost an hour now,” he says. “We’re starting to get restless. We’re starting to panic.”

I shift my eyes to get a look around the room, and no one looks restless or panicked. Everyone looks tired and sad and sweaty. No one looks restless or panicked at all, except for Roger, I realize, once I shift my eyes back to him.

“Sure,” I say. “What’s your plan?”

This story has nothing to do with me. I know this, even as I am in the middle of it. This story has everything to do with Roger and Mary and Tyrone and the security guard. I don’t know the security guard’s name, but he’s got a look about him, a look that makes me think that this story is his story, too, more his story, anyway, than my own. He’s got that reformed-addict-turned-security-guard-waiting-to-make-the-ultimate-sacrifice-for-people-he-doesn’t-even-know-in-an-attempt-to-atone-for-the-misery-he-caused-in-his-youth kind of look. That, or maybe it’s just that he looks bigger than the rest of us. Bigger and unhurried, too, as if he has seen all this before, or as if just this sort of situation—a zombie attack, an alien invasion, a giant, ferocious lizard, mutated by the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima, rampaging through Houston—was what he had been planning for, what he had expected when he signed up for the job as a security guard for this mall in the suburbs. But when I mention this to Mary, who, every time I speak to her, looks surprised to see me there with the rest of them, she tells me he’s stoned.

I’ve got a story for Mary, too.

Recently divorced, mother of two.

Not the prom queen from high school, maybe a late bloomer, but when she bloomed, pretty enough that she married that prom-king type.

Maybe an actual prom king from the rival high school, or not a prom king at all, but a quarterback, or point guard.

All in all, a miserable affair: You’re married to an unappreciative man mired in the glory of his past, supportive of him but lonely, too, until one day, you come home to hear him tell you that he doesn’t love you anymore, that instead he loves Missy, a saleswoman at the Toyota dealership where he works, not as a salesman himself, or even as a mechanic, but as the guy who cheats car buyers into buying extra care insurance packages for things that will never break. Now she’s juggling kids, two part-time jobs, attorney fees to wrest alimony and child support from her ex-husband, inappropriate advances from her much older bosses at both of her jobs, and today. Her day off of all days, the day she has set aside for herself, not even the whole day, but the few measly hours her mother agreed to watch the kids, a couple of hell-raisers made only worse by the divorce, the one day she picked to come to the mall, not even to buy anything, not that she even had the money to buy anything, but just to look around, just to have a few moments to herself, just to revisit the world she thought was going to be her world, today is the day the mall is overrun by the evil undead.

Of course it is.

She is surprised not in the least by this.

And maybe she didn’t trip in the sporting goods store by the exercise equipment. Maybe she didn’t trip at all, but gave herself up, handed herself over, because could it be worse, really, than how she felt now?

All of this, though, all of this speculation I keep to myself. And I’ve decided to speak to Mary as little as possible in case she makes any more stray comments that might unhinge the fragile framework of my coping mechanism, as she’s already done with the security guard.

Roger’s plan might just be the dumbest plan I have ever heard ever, but I go along with it anyway. Why not, right? What have I got to lose, right?

Or, rather, other than my life, what have I got to lose?

I go along with it because I know the others will go along with it, too. They’ve followed Roger’s lead since the moment the screaming began, way on the other side of the mall, somewhere near the food court, the screaming loud enough that we could hear it from so far away. They followed his lead into that fray even when, in the opposite direction and only a hundred yards away, there were doors leading outside, leading to our escape. Even then, they followed him.

By
they
, of course, I mean,
we
.

We followed him into the fray.

We watched him save first Tyrone and then his father, and then, at the end, right before we shuffled into this janitor’s closet, Mary in the sporting goods store.

And then into this broom closet: We followed him here, too.

Now he wants us to go up into the ceiling.

“The ceiling,” he tells me, whispering still. “That’s our ticket out of here.”

I look up. He slaps me quickly and lightly on the face. “Don’t look up,” he says. “You’ll give it away.”

I shift my eyes around the room a) to see if anyone just saw Roger slap me and b) to see whom I might give this precious and vital information away to.

“To whom?” I ask.

Roger leans in closer and I wish he wouldn’t. There’s a smell to him that’s ripe and uncomfortable. Maybe it’s the adrenaline in his blood, or maybe he lets off a funky kind of sweat when fighting the evil undead. Whatever it is, I’m doing my best to breathe it in through my mouth.

“Don’t say anything,” he says. “Don’t react to what I’m about to say.”

“Okay.”

“We don’t want to freak anyone out.”

“Sure. No. No problem.”

Now his voice drops to an actual whisper, and I can’t hear him, and for a moment, I wonder if he’s saying something and I just can’t hear him or if he’s decided now is the time to pull that trick where you move your mouth like you’re talking when really you’re not saying anything at all.

“I can’t, I can’t hear you,” I tell him.

He doesn’t like to repeat things, I can tell by the look on his face, but before I can apologize for something that wasn’t my fault, he says, again, “One among us has been infected.”

This news takes me by surprise, but only slightly, and only in that it was Roger who figured this out and not me.

I figured that if anyone were to discover that one of us was infected, it would be me or one of the other unnamed peripheral characters, and only moments too late.