Three Moments of an Explosion (11 page)

She walked to the front of the shop. She could be wearing any necklace or bracelet beneath her high-necked long-sleeved clothes. McCulloch looked up and watched her go in the rounded security mirror, her body distorted into something wide and shining.

“Even if it didn’t have one,” he said. Even if there was nothing there.

Sophia turned in the doorway. She said, “Just like she was holding its hand.”

THE CRAWL

A TRAILER

0:00–0:04

Blackness. Slow, labored breathing builds into a death rattle.

Voice-over, elderly female (A): “We lost the world.”

0:05–0:09

Series of fixed-camera shots of cities destroyed, deserted but for wind. The urban images become interspersed with close-ups of wounds and dead flesh.

Voice-over, A: “To the dead.”

0:10–0:13

An overgrown yard crowded with rotting corpses. They shamble.

At the furthest corner of the lot, something hidden in the weeds snatches a zombie and pulls it down and out of sight.

0:14–0:16

Young man (Y) runs through charred remains of an art gallery. A mob of bloody dead run after him.

0:17

Blackness. Sound of wet explosion.

0:18

Y has turned, is staring at a swamp of decaying blood, all that is left of his pursuers.

Voice-over, A: “We’re all prey to something.”

0:19–0:21

Interior, a broken-down shack. Unkempt men and women surround Y. He says, “They were taken!”

A young woman says, “By what?”

0:22–0:28

Montage of zombies. Some shuffle, some run. Every one of them is taken, yanked into the shadows by something unseen.

Voice-over, A: “First they walked. Then they ran. Now it’s a new phase.”

0:29–0:33

Close-up, a dead man’s face. Camera pulls back. He is one of many zombies in a city square. They crawl toward the camera.

They do not crawl on their knees but on their toes and their knuckles or fingertips or the palms of their hands. They move at odds with their own bodies, like humans raised by spiders.

0:34–0:35

Director card.

0:36

A dead hand slowly lowers a gavel.

0:37–0:39

A schoolroom. We see the elderly woman, A, for the first time. She speaks to survivors.

She says, “Life adapts.”

0:40–0:44

Voice-over, A: “So does death.”

A lone zombie on the flat roof of a tower. Looks down at humans on the street. Grabs its own solar plexus with both hands.

Cut to humans below. Drop of blood hits one man’s shoulder. He looks up.

The zombie flies overhead, descending, dripping, its arms outstretched, tugging its own rib cage apart and its bones and skin taut, making them wings.

0:45

A bat crawls across cement on the points of its folded wings and its stubby feet.

Voice-over, A: “There are new ways to be.”

0:46–0:49

A man staggers in a book-lined library. A zombie clings to him with all its limbs, biting his chest. It stares at him. It is sutured to him. The stitches go through both their flesh and clothes.

0:50–0:52

A cellar packed with fresh corpses, knee-deep in oil. A fat nozzle descends the stairs and gushes, slowly filling the room and covering the motionless dead.

0:53–0:54

The hand continues to lower the hammer.

Voice-over, unknown man (B)’s voice: “A different collective.”

0:55–1:00

A montage of crawling zombies, alone and in groups, in many different locations. Some chase living humans, some chase standing zombies. The crawlers tear their quarries apart.

Voice-over, A: “The dead who walk and us, we’re both a problem.”

1:01–1:04

A zombie crawls vertically, gripping the wall of an elevator shaft in ruined hands. The shot pans: human survivors stand, oblivious, by the open door one floor above.

Voice-over, A: “Something’s taking care of it.”

1:05–1:08

The dead hand touches the hammer to the wood at last. It makes a tiny click.

1:09–1:14

Survivors in an aircraft hangar, by a broken drone. There is growling. Dark smoke pours from the drone’s engine.

Cut to a control room. A dead drone pilot watches them on monitors, blasts the jet with one hand. Pull back: he has been stitched spread-eagled throughout the room, a flesh web.

1:15–1:18

Y hefts heavy hydraulic spreaders. There are fragments of the dead around him. He whispers, “
They
didn’t come
back
 …”

1:19–1:23

Night. A factory. Its windows are lit from within and we glimpse grotesque silhouettes.

Voice-over, B: “
We
haven’t got
there,
yet.”

1:24–1:27

Close-up of the face of the young woman who spoke at 0:20. She is newly dead.

Voice-over, A: “What wouldn’t rage? We’re eggs that don’t want to hatch.”

The corpse opens her eyes.

1:28

Blackness.

Voice-over, A: “We knew it was war …”

1:29–1:33

A bridge over a river. Two zombies kiss so hard their faces distort as they shove into each other. Behind them, a violent battle between crawling and standing dead.

1:34–1:37

A ruined office. The clicking of a keyboard.

A young female voice off-camera: “Someone’s at work.”

1:38–1:41

A dark room. A group of long-dead corpses sit, quite still, around a table.

At one seat is a living man, shivering with cold. He pushes a sheaf of papers forward, as if for consideration.

1:42–1:45

A rocky hillside. Hundreds of zombies crawl into the entrance of an old mine.

Voice-over, A: “… Not that it was
civil
war.”

1:46–1:49

Night. Zombies stand motionless by a wire fence. Beyond it are rough edgelands that are rapidly becoming invisible.

Voice-over, A: “Between the second dead …”

1:50–1:55

Close-up of swaying flesh. Pan back to show a zombie on the back of another, as if it were a horse. The shots reveal hundreds of the crawling dead. A few are mounts for other zombie riders.

The crawlers labor on hands and feet through scrub and trash, toward the town. We can see the wire, the standing zombies waiting.

1:56–1:58

Blackness. Title card.

1:59–2:04

Close-up, wooden floor. A decaying hand slaps down in the center of shot. It lifts away and a foot replaces it, on collapsing toes, then hauls out of shot.

They leave a wet stain and crumbs of flesh behind.

Voice-over, new voice, guttural whisper: “… And the Crawl.”

WATCHING GOD

Nailed to the top of the tower over our town hall entrance is an iron sign that reads
EVERY MAN’S WISH
. Below it the high stone step looks down a long cut of rock over the edge of the cliff into the bay and the sea beyond it, and consequently at the ships when they come.

Our town hall has two floors and the tower extends to the height of a third; it is by some way our biggest and tallest building. Every three days in the main hall we hold the market where we exchange clothes we have made or into which we no longer fit, vegetables we have grown and animals we have caught, any small fish we might have netted and the shellfish we have prized off rocks in the rock pools at low tide. In its other rooms the hall is also our hospital and our library. It is our school and our gallery.

Though most of the frames on the walls of the gallery room contain images, a few have quotations within them—some attributed, some not. They are handwritten in fading ink, or typewritten with a blocky typeface that does not match that of any of the machines on the isthmus, or torn, it looks like, from books, with half-finished phrases at either end where the page continued. Many of the older books in the library room have torn pages within them of course, no matter how vigilant Howie the librarian is, but these have not been taken from any of them.

Like most of us, I had a period in my youth when I became deeply interested in the quotations, you might say obsessed. I read them all many times and considered which were my favorites. I liked “I must deliver a small car to a rich Baghdadi.” I liked “choosing the fauna of his next life.” One day I found, as do we all, a small gilt frame below a window onto the woodpile in which in small smudged print I read, “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board,” and below it in smaller slanted letters,
“Their Eyes Were Watching God
.
”

Adults do not mention this artifact to children but let them find it according to their own investigations. As is presumably intended by that restraint, I recognized within it the words of my town’s battered metal flag with the tremendous excitement of discovery. For a short breathless time, I believed I was the only person who had made this connection.

I came to understand that it is from the assertion in that frame that stems our traditional attitude to the vessels that visit our waters. Certainly it is a metaphor, but we have tended nonetheless to regard the ships as arriving at just the right moment to load up on those hopes and aspirations we have been accreting and nurturing over the days of their absence, with which we have just (we allow ourselves to think) reached a surfeit when the ships reappear, though many of which we’d find it hard to state. When the ships come into sight beyond the bay we feel our inner loads lighten and become aware how freighted we had become with jostling thoughts.

The vessels usually sit motionless in the waters beyond the edge of the bay for two or three days, lit up from within, their portholes glowing. When—it has seemed to us—their holds are full, they move again, up anchors and sail with our wishes out over the horizon.

To the disappointment of my mother and my friend Gam, both intellectuals, I am not much of a reader. But though the library room was never one of my secret monarchdoms (what I liked most was to climb the bleached trees at the edge of the forest and take birds’ eggs and empty them carefully and paint the shells, or to build hides with fallen branches and old nails), when I found that framed clause I did spend hours over many days hunting the spines in the library room. In vain: there is nothing by anyone called
Their Eyes Were Watching God,
not among the ur-texts in their hard covers, nor in the books of new literature written by townspeople in living memory and bound in thin wood and rabbit- or rat-skin.

The ships that visit us are of many designs. Some are powered by sails (the wind on the seawall and the cliffs has been known to pick people up and throw them all the way down into the water or onto the rocks, you must be careful). Most move by engines, venting exhaust as they approach the unfinished sentence. There are trunked, single-piped, raked, complex-stacked, split-trunked, and combined outlines and vents. A few of these have chimneys higher than the masts of the tall ships, so they look like they will topple. Some are small and squat with flared smokestacks like those that front steam trains, of which we know from books.

Some of my friends like to watch the ships when they first appear, the only presences in otherwise empty water. I like to watch them as they get closer to the sentence.

Most of the oil paintings in the gallery room are of flowers and hills but there are some of ships, very bright things with skirts of foam, yawing jauntily. Those, it is easy to see, carry wishes. We have no cameras (Gam tried to make one from a diagram in a book but only made a box) but we do have some photographs also on display, most black and white and a few in a speckled and unsaturated color. There are pictures of animals that we don’t have on the spit but that we know from books, of huge cities taken from up high that look like ink-smeared blocks put together badly, and of ships.

You have to look closely at those photographed ships to make much of their shapes. Some are just dashes at the edge of water only a bit less gray than they are, some are black tangles, some look almost like cracks or mistakes on the lens. Some are like shadows come up out of the water. The greater the distance at which they sit, the harder it is to imagine them carrying any wishes with them.

I think
Their Eyes Were Watching God
was looking at a painting, not a photograph, to write those words. I don’t know why every woman’s wish is not listed as on board the ships too.

There is sea to the north, the south, and the west. A few miles to the east you get to the forest and the ravine and no one can get past that. The ships always come into view from the same quadrant, following the coastline a mile or more out. When we were children we would wave at them but no one ever waved back that we saw. We have no telescopes, though we know what they are.

Tyruss and Gam worked for a long time and made something that looked like a telescope, even with an almost-round bit of glass at each end, but when you looked through it it didn’t make things any bigger. Some people like to try to make things from the books. Gam gave the telescope to me.

Mostly no one pays much attention to the ships. If you are walking past a neighbor on the cliff-walk when a new vessel has just arrived you might, when you say good morning, that it’s a fine day, also mutter that this one has a particularly tall mast, or that it’s a long one, or that it’s flat in the water, but you would be as likely to say something about a nice tree or a flower bush, or as likely to say nothing.