She snatches the car keys off the dresser a little too fast and descends the stairs with the tempo of a tap dance. I shouldn’t have asked the question. I have plenty of worries inside my own head; I don’t need any more from outside.
I glance back at the house as we approach the car and feel another wave of guilty relief to be leaving it. This is my home, but it’s also my wrestling ring, the site of all my trials and humiliations as I stumble toward humanity. Whatever is happening in the city, at least it won’t be about me.
“I’ll drive,” I say, crossing in front of her.
She eyes me dubiously. “Are you sure?”
Her reaction is fair—I still have a habit of using other cars for parking brakes—but after this latest disappointment in the bedroom, I feel a need to recover some manhood.
“I’m getting better.”
She smiles. “If you say so, road warrior.” She tosses me the keys. I start the car and put it into gear, and after a few jerks and sputters and minor fender benders, I drive us out of the cul-de-sac, ignoring the soldiers’ laughter. Embarrassment is just one of the many perils I accepted when I made the choice to live. Living is awkward. Living hurts. Did I ever expect otherwise?
Once upon a time, in a short-and-sweet fairy tale, I might have. I was a child then, a newborn baby piloting a man. But I am rapidly growing up, and the Frank Sinatra fantasies are fading. I do not have the world on a string and Julie is not my funny valentine. We are an asthmatic orphan and a recovering corpse driving a rusty car into a rabid world, and Evan Kenerly was right: we don’t know anything.
WE
WE FEEL THE currents flowing in the earth. We see the movement beneath the stillness. We watch the people sitting alone in their homes, and we hear the molten rivers in their heads.
A short man sinks deep in his recliner. He has not moved in sixteen days. This would not be unusual if he were simply dead, but he is also Dead, a condition of much greater interest to us. The dead have evaporated and we have breathed them in, but the Dead remain weighty and agentive. To be dead is to be gone from this world. To be Dead is to be marked with death’s brand and conscripted into its army, but still here, still blessed and cursed with a body, and thus still awash with choice.
When asked his name, the Dead man presses his lips together and produces a percussive stutter. His neighbour, a small Living female, has dubbed him “B.” But this is the extent of his interaction with this woman and her pale friend with the baffling scent—the electric sweetness of life with a note of death’s smothering null. And under this … something else. Something very distant but very large. When B smells this third scent, he feels motion beneath his feet. He feels a vastness opening up around him. He feels awe and terror, so he stops breathing until his neighbours go away and the scent fades.
Who are these creatures? What do they want? Why aren’t they afraid? Do they know the turmoil inside of him? The thousand opposite urges throttling each other in his head? They visit him every few days, tiptoeing into his living room and attempting conversation as he sits in the dark, staring at their reflections in his television screen, trying to understand why he isn’t eating them.
He remembers a day when something changed. He felt a shift in the breeze and an interruption in gravity, a cool, clean stream flowing into his dust-crusted soul in the form of a simple question: Why are you here? That was the day he stood up from the warm corpse he was chewing and walked out of the airport. He found this house. He sat in this chair. He continues to sit in this chair, thinking but not quite doing. Wanting but not quite taking. Waiting and watching television.
He glances away from the endlessly looping feed of disjointed imagery—a tense football game cuts to a woman in a bikini emerging from a pool, then a sunset and a soothing voice reciting an inspirational quote, then a pulled-pork sandwich—and looks through his open front door as his neighbours drive past in their sputtering junk heap of a car. His eyes don’t move when the car is gone. They rest lazily on the grass of his lawn, which is wild and gone to seed, yellowing in the summer sun.
Other eyes watch the Mercedes as it works its way through the neighbourhood and out onto the open highway. B has many neighbours. New ones arrive every day, some from the airport, others from elsewhere, stumbling into town and squinting at streets and houses with traces of recognition, faint remembrances of something lost.
Death’s army is large and strong and deals harshly with deserters, but there are rumblings. Uncertain corpses sit in their houses and stand in the streets, thinking, watching, waiting. And they hear a noise in the distance. A low, pulsating drone.
In the blue-brown haze of the eastern sky, three black shapes are growing larger.
I
I AM CONCENTRATING fiercely on the art of driving—the contour and condition of the road, the speed and inertia of the car, the intricate interplay of throttle and clutch—so Julie hears them first.
“What is that?” she says, glancing around.
“What?”
“That noise.”
It takes me a few seconds to hear it. A distant hum, three slightly offset pitches forming a dissonant chord. For a moment I think I recognise this sound, and fear stiffens my spine.
Then Julie twists around in her seat and says, “Helicopters?”
I check the rearview mirror. Three black shapes approaching from the east.
“Who is it?” I wonder aloud.
“Nobody we know.”
“Goldman Dome?”
“Working aircraft are practically mythical these days. If Goldman had helicopters, they would’ve told us.”