Untouchable (2 page)

Darby didn’t look. He nodded like he’d looked, nodded and grunted loudly as a false confirmation that he’d looked, because sometimes that was enough, sometimes that satisfied Roistler and he’d get back to work without any further conversation.

“Darby, look. You’re not looking.”

Darby didn’t look. He nodded and grunted and scooped the last of the fluid from the carpeting. It wasn’t going to be enough. The carpeting would have to be disposed of. He picked a scoring razor out of his bucket and started cutting the carpet into record album-sized squares, pulling the squares loose, stuffing them into a red biohazard bag.

It was already hot in the room. Darby sweated in his suit, used his forearm to lift his goggles a half inch from his face, clear the condensation.

There was a large, shrieking splash of fluid on the wall behind the recliner. Above the fluid was a fist-sized hole that had contained the discharge of the weapon used. The discharge would have been taken by the cops, but there would still be other things in that hole, things that clung to the discharge as it made its way from the recliner to the wall.

Darby pulled a plastic dustpan from his bucket, sprayed the stain on the wall with disinfectant and held the pan underneath to catch the fluid as it ran. The disappearing stain revealed more matter stuck to the white paint, little wads of what could easily be mistaken for colorless chewing gum. Darby kept the dustpan pressed to the wall with one hand, tore paper towels with the other, picked the matter from the wall. Sprayed the entire area again, wiping it clean.

He carried a short stepladder in from the hall, climbed up to the hole, sprayed disinfectant and shone a flashlight around inside. Tough to see what the situation was. He grabbed a wad of paper towels and pushed his hand into the hole. Came away with enough on his towel to repeat the process a few more times.

Roistler stopped talking. Bob was back in the doorway. Darby tilted his head toward the recliner and Bob nodded. They tore long sheets of black plastic from a four-foot roll and wrapped the recliner, Bob rocking the chair one way and then the other while Darby pulled the plastic tight. They each took an end and carried it out of the room, down the hallway to the staircase, the gaps under the doorways shadowed as they passed, eyeholes darkening, a few doors cracking open along the way, braver souls, long faces peeking out, older men and women, mostly alone, one per room, nightshirts and pajamas, woken by the sirens and the sounds of people and equipment trampling through the building, fearstruck now by the two moonmen. They pinched their noses when they saw the recliner. The recliner didn’t carry much of an odor, but they saw the hoods and the masks and a chair bound in plastic and thought that it must smell, assumed that it must stink like cellophane-wrapped meat gone bad.

Down the stairs, third floor, second floor, the recliner heavy from the liquid weight it carried. They stopped at each landing for Bob to regain his breath. Finally they were out the front door of the building into the early light, the sun-gathering haze. Bob wedged a wooden block into the doorway to keep it from shutting, locking them out. Darby covered the floor of the first van with a large sheet of plastic and they lifted the recliner up and in.

They peeled off their gloves, pulled back their hoods, took off their goggles and masks. Breathed deeply. Traffic was starting to thicken on the freeway overpass a block away, headlights and taillights in the gloom. Bob readjusted his ponytail up under his hair net, pulled the tape from his wrists, rolled his sleeves to get some air on his skin. His moonman suits were special-ordered for his size. One of Roistler’s favorite jokes was to open a new shipment of suits at the garage, rummage through the box and announce that the supplier had refused to make Bob-sized suits any more, that the techs would have to sew two large suits together to make new Bob-sized suits.

Bob looked at his watch. “What do you think? Three hours? Four? We’re back at the garage by ten?”

Darby nodded. He looked up at the apartment building, a gray stucco slab, counted up, counted back, looking for the light, the closed windows of the room.

“Which is it?” Bob said. “Three or four?”

“Three.”

“Fifteen bucks on three?”

“Sure.”

“Dinner on three?”

“Sure.”

Bob tapped his watch, marking the time. He pulled two new pairs of gloves from a toolbox, handed one pair to Darby. He closed up the van and Darby kicked the wooden block loose from the front door of the building as they went back inside.

Darby stood in the center of the room, pulled off his goggles and mask, pulled back his hood. The cleanup was complete. Roistler was hauling out the last of the redbags and equipment; Bob was settling the paperwork with the apartment manager downstairs.

Midmorning light through the windows, soft orange and yellow. Citrus light. The beginning of another hot day in a string of them. Too warm for this late into October. He tore the duct tape from his wrists, retrieved the camera from where Bob had left it on the table by the TV.

The room had no smell, thanks to the fogger. There was a blank spot where any smell should be.

Darby lifted the camera to his eye, stepped back toward the door, getting as much of the room in frame as he could. There was a small, hard knot behind the bridge of his nose, the kernel of a headache that spread quickly out toward his temples, the back of his skull. A rushing in his ears, a loud white noise that threatened to fill the room. This had been happening for a while now, this feeling that came upon him when he was making his final check of a site. A nagging disquiet. The feeling that the room was unfinished.

He looked for something they had missed, some detail that would be discovered in days or weeks, after the carpeting had been replaced, after the wall had been patched and repainted, a telltale sign that would betray the secret of what had happened here. There was nothing. The room was clean, the job was done.

He tried to shake the headache. He held his breath to steady his hands and snapped the picture. The room flashed white.

The Kid woke in the gray pre-dawn, a sinking in the pit of his stomach, that familiar leaden feeling. He rolled over and looked at his alarm clock. He had beaten it again, had snapped awake first. The clock was a ballgame giveaway, Dodger blue, with glow-in-the-dark hands, and in a few minutes it would sound out the national anthem in bleeps and buzzes to start the day. The Kid tried to remember the dream he’d just woken from, tried to catch the last quickly-shrinking remnants, a dream where he and his dad were on the road, moving across the map, chasing someone, but the dream was fading fast, pulling off and away. He sat up in bed, shaking off sleep. He remembered where he was, how things really were. No dream, just morning. That familiar leaden feeling.

It was the autumn before the end of the world. There was a special segment on the news every night devoted to this. The woman who hosted the segment said that now was the time to stockpile bottled water and canned food, first-aid supplies, a battery-operated flashlight and radio, batteries, clean underwear, any necessary prescription medication. Two or three months worth of all of these things, the woman said, though The Kid wondered what would happen after that, after two or three months had come and gone and it was still the end of the world.

In the bathroom he peed, flushed, continued peeing, watching it swirl in the bowl. Downstairs, he sat at the kitchen table in his underpants, feet dangling, crunching cereal. The light grew slowly through the back window. He heard the alarm clock bleep to life, the first notes of the anthem. He let it play while he ate his breakfast, reading the side of the cereal box, the nutrition information, the long list of unpronounceable ingredients.

Almost every night, The Kid watched the end-of-the-world segment on the news, took notes, made lists. His dad usually watched the segment with him, but they hadn’t bought any canned goods yet, any extra batteries. It was already the middle of October, sixth grade was already a month and a half old, and The Kid didn’t think they were even close to being ready for what could happen on New Year’s Eve.

He finished his cereal, rinsed his bowl in the sink. Took the vitamin that his dad had set out for him on the countertop, swallowed it dry.

At school, The Kid had overheard other kids talking worst-case scenarios. What about weapons? Wouldn’t they need weapons for when the American system broke down and everybody started killing everybody else? This was a big deal to some of the boys in The Kid’s grade. At recess, the boys played like the end of the world was already happening, like it had arrived early. They broke into separate classroom tribes and raided each other’s side of the playground to loot supplies and capture prisoners for slaves. The Kid stayed away from this type of game. He was a magnet for trouble regardless of what was being played, but this type of game was an especially bad idea. This type of game was asking for it. At recess, he sat with his friend Matthew Crump at a picnic table near the playground aides, heavyset mothers from the neighborhood who didn’t move too quickly when there was a problem, which is why it was important to sit close by. They might not bother to cross the entire playground to pull a pile of kids off him, but at least they’d shout a couple of warnings to keep them back if he was sitting a few yards away.

The end of the world had a sinister-sounding robot name that gave The Kid a bad little thrill when he thought about it.
Y2K
. He liked the name, despite what it meant, that all the machines and computers would go haywire, planes falling out of the sky, missiles launching from secret hatches in cornfields, streaking out over the plains, across the ocean, going that way, coming this way, landing on whoever was unlucky enough to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. He liked the feeling of the name when it sat in his head, though he worried that just thinking it long enough might actually trigger it, might become its actual cause.

He got dressed and brushed his teeth, scrubbing as hard as he could. He pulled his face into a smile, looked in the mirror. Bright red strands of blood across his gums. He gargled with the astringent green mouthwash, the big plastic bottle so heavy he could barely lift it to his mouth. He counted thirty seconds like it said on the label, swishing all the time, then spat into the sink. Filled his mouth a second time, swished, spat. Gasped from the spearmint burn. Opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue, looked in the mirror for anything strange, anything suspicious. He didn’t want to carry any offensive odors, bad-breath germs, didn’t want to give the kids at school any more reasons for name-calling, nose-holding.

The leaden feeling grew, roiled in his belly.

The Kid stood in the bathroom, stood in his bedroom, stood back in his parents’ old bedroom, looked out the windows at the front yard, the back yard, the broad side of the brick apartment building next door. A few weeks before, his dad had installed metal security bars on all the windows in the house, even the windows upstairs. He’d climbed to the top of a ladder and bolted the bars into the wooden window casings. The Kid stood down at the bottom of the ladder, watching, using his hand to shield his eyes from the sun. The bars were to keep people out of the house when his dad had to work at night, the people who ran through the narrow alleyway alongside the house, the people who yelled at each other out on the street, the people who spray-painted glossy hieroglyphics across garages, sidewalks, the side of the apartment building next door, tagging anything that couldn’t move out of the way. The Kid didn’t like the bars. They kept people out, but what if somebody got in? Then it would be harder to escape, harder to run. What if he came home from school and his dad had already gone to work and someone had found a way into the house, was hiding in a closet, waiting for The Kid? Then he’d be trapped. The Kid didn’t like the bars.

He sat on the couch in the living room, pointed the remote control at the TV, rewound the tape in the VCR. His dad taped the late-night talk shows for him every night. Every morning The Kid watched the tape, studying the delivery of the hosts during their opening monologues, analyzing their gestures, their facial expressions, the nuances of their interviewing techniques. The way they led their celebrity guests away from boring stories, back toward the jokes, the perfectly-timed punchlines. He watched certain parts over and over, rewinding and replaying the tape, pantomiming the hosts’ rhythms, mimicking their timing, taking notes in his notebook. This was something he had always done with his mom in the time before school. His mom had gone to school at the same time as The Kid in the mornings, catching the bus at the corner that took her to the high school on the other side of the city. She’d taught history to eleventh and twelfth graders, big kids. The Kid and his mom used to sit on the couch, watching the tape until it was time to leave. Sometimes they talked so much about what they saw that they had to stop the tape and watch the rest of the shows when they both got home in the afternoon. Now it didn’t take very long at all to watch. Now The Kid was usually done watching the tape with time to spare.

He lay down on the floor of his room and reached under his bed, pulled out the calendar he kept there. This was the last thing he did every morning before leaving the house, marking the calendar with the secret symbol, an arrow pointing to the right, one in each square for each day his mom had been gone. The arrows didn’t mean anything on their own. He just used arrows instead of X’s so his dad wouldn’t know what he was doing, so his dad wouldn’t feel bad for what The Kid was keeping track of.

He drew an arrow in the previous day’s square, then looked back through the pages of the calendar, arrows in each square back to the beginning of the year. There was another calendar under his bed from the year before, and it had arrows in each square back to nearly this same time, both calendars making almost a full year’s worth of arrows.

His dad had left The Kid’s brown bag lunch on the kitchen counter, peanut butter on white bread. The Kid slid his lunch into his backpack, slid his notebook and pencil inside, hoisted the backpack over his shoulders. He unlocked the locks on the front door, top to bottom: chain, deadbolt, knob-lock, deadbolt. Stood behind the steel screen security door his dad had installed at the same time as the bars on the windows. Almost fully light outside. He pressed his nose to the cool mesh, looked out at the short, scrubby front yard, the sidewalk and the street beyond. Kids from his school were already passing by the front fence, shoving and joking, readjusting their backpacks, laughing, snapping gum.