17
The Rio Grande
In the waiting room of Dr. Mendez are crammed a thousand people. This place has a capacity of maybe seventy, so over nine hundred of these people are dead, crushed beyond recognition. Their internal organs have been pushed out and across a firm terrain of shoulders. For a full hour a popcorn flurry of brains, squeezed through the open lids atop hundreds of heads, have jiggled and danced against each other in the free air above the dead. Blood has found a way to the floor and it moves around ankles. The bodies are under a pressure that binds most in the upper torso, gently curving them in an arched structure across the room. It is under the centre, where legs have been lifted, that the survivors huddle. Their chins push above the blood’s surface and the tops of their heads drive up into the soles of stiff feet, trying to bend them at the ankle. They gasp desperately in these tiny pockets of red air.
Dr. Mendez is seated at his desk, across which is stretched a body. He has decided to perform an unscheduled autopsy. So many strange deaths. Nothing to lose. Maybe a quick answer will show itself.
All of the body cavities have been opened and then hastily folded shut. Mendez lifts a corner of cheek back into position with his pen. The structure of the room behind him groans, the studs are returning to ninety-degree relationships. The waiting room is emptying.
All over the floor I imagine.
Dr. Mendez is right. As the crammed bodies redistribute their contents, under pressure, to fill the upper and lower parts of the space, the waiting room is returning to its shape. The living few are drowning and will not survive.
An epidemic of broken necks.
As he says this to himself Mendez knows that in two million years another species will unearth the skeletons of human beings. And then they will begin a great pastime. What broke all their necks? Did they build their ceilings too low? Did kick-boxing aliens once visit this planet? Did a meteor fall from the sky and whip around the globe at shoulder height? Mendez stands and approaches his file cabinet. He thinks: Well this is when the good physician should off himself, overwhelmed and thrust suddenly into such a medieval role. But no, instead he counts the bodies on his floor — six. The best is probably yet to come.
Down the road from the doctor’s office Ellen and Steve sit silently in the car. Steve is shaking his head. He wonders what all these cars are doing here. Ellen knows. She can hear the movement of zombies in the woods. The hunting stealth of exact steps carrying rabid people in the dark, just inside the bushes. Coiling their necks like cobras. Painful, empty minds. Their hundreds of round, open mouths hanging like bats from slick, wet branches.
Ellen knocks her door open and runs up the centre of the road, back beyond the cars, and turns quickly to leap blind into a wall of soft cedar. Steve remains in the car. He is so afraid that he can’t even move. The zombies are indiscriminate, and even though Steve has been sweet beyond compare, they will snatch him from behind the wheel and fight among themselves for the chance to snap his neck.
At that moment the angel who has been patiently rocking the ghost of the shallow and inconsolable Detective Peterson will look up with interest.
Ellen hides just inside the trees. Huddled, she stays still and silent. Just a few feet from where she sits a continuous line of zombies make their way down a path that runs parallel to, but hidden from, the road. She closes her eyes and feels herself drop inside and then plunge like a loose elevator. She has no time to imagine where she’s going. The core of her experience is free falling and the only visible sign of this is in the tightening of her lips. When she comes to rest she looks up the hundreds of feet above her head where she is crouched beside a tree. The atmosphere around her is black and cavernous. Ellen thinks: So long as this is somewhere that I am, someone can find me. She blinks her eyes, attempting to adjust to the darkness, and discovers fine streamers of red waving vertically, caught in an updraft just beyond her reach. She steps toward them, thinking, again: If I can move in this place, someone can find me here. I am in a place that can support life. She presses her hands against the invisible wall and feels a cork-board of resistance; it finally feathers against her fingers and disappears. If you come here to find me, I hope you discover this: the walls aren’t really walls here. Keep going, keep going. You’ll find me.
In this place, a bony little peninsula slicing into shallow silver water, Ellen is stepping forward, her bare toes gripping rock and displacing little black egg cups of water. When she reaches the crooked tip she returns to her crouch. She looks offinto the air above the water, into the streaks of a soft illumination around her, a hanging moss, impenetrable and glowing. This is an isolated place. Her heart sinks. People don’t come here. She drops her chin onto her knee and glides the backs of her knuckles, as if stroking a cat, in a little velvet inlet by her foot.
18
Your Name Is Wild
How often is a baby supposed to cry? There are probably answers. You can picture them. A doctor is saying every crying baby is in distress. Another says every crying baby is an exploring person. Ten times a day. The baby cried constantly. The baby cried in the morning but only for an hour. An hour? Doctor? An hour? The baby never cries. Never? No, never. OK, we’ll have to run some tests. Never?
Always. Les pulls over in Green River. The baby has been bent in a rigid bow on the seat beside him, crying a continuous wail for a full half-hour. Les slides his hand under the space beneath the baby’s arched back. Too intense. He tilts the stiff body back to rest across his palm. The wailing rises sharply. He’s in pain.
Les carefully slips his hand away. He makes a reassuring face to the infant. He touches its toes and its face inflames. Why, little boy? A man nearby pulls himself out from under an open hood. He looks over at Les. Les panics for a second. He cups both his hands, scaring himself. They are made for stifling babies. He feels a rush of compassion for the baby, but his compassionate hands can only press into the seat surrounding it, and failing thus he lifts them to his chest and grabs handfuls of himself, compassionately. I don’t know your name.
Its fingers are as blue as a baby sparrow’s head, and its entire body is locked in scream. Les looks out the window to make sure nobody else is nearby. The man repairing his car has gone. Repaired. The screams have caused the forest to close itself off and tuck its edges into a finer line under the sky. The painful tone sustains a frequency of such duration that it becomes soundless, and Les feels the blood leave his face. The silence packs his ears. He is afraid because he knows that the soundless car, leaning like a spike among the tick of gas pumps, is prompting him to know something — to know exactly, now, why his son is in such pain.