The video went viral. Most everyone thought it was a hoax but it was hard to dismiss. Her white haunches and her black pubic hair . . . and the way the first nurse fell so hard on the floor that we could see her arm breaking and her pager go flying . . . None of it seemed staged. We supposed it could be CGI’ed but every time Cal and I watched it together the hair had risen on my arms. The video had been soundless but I imagined the sound of that body bag shuffing on the linoleum as she took each step, like a needle off the track of a turntable. Ssh. Ssh. Ssh. The same sound I would later make to Lindy when she had nightmares about the “sick people” outside our boarded up windows. Ssh, ssh, ssh. Go to sleep.
More incidents like the one in the New Delhi hospital followed: Mumbai, Singapore, Tokyo, Bangkok. Doctors backpedalled, saying it was physically impossible for the dead to rise and what we were seeing were patients who had been prematurely declared dead. Calming sound clips included “Determining death can be difficult . . . ” “The puffer fish, for example, emits a powerful neurotoxin which can induce a death-like paralysis . . . ”
But one beleaguered doctor was adamant. “The patient’s heart had stopped. There was no brain activity. Forty-eight hours later there was still no brain activity, and her tissues had actually started to decay and putrefy.” (I remember his Indian accent and emphasis on putrify.) “And then the patient rose.” This was the sound bite played round the world.
“What did the optometrist say?” Cal asks when I get home.
I present my new black-rimmed glasses with lenses as thick as Coke bottles, and wrinkle my nose. “I need a new prescription, but these are the only ones he had close to it.”
He laughs. “Sexy librarian look. How is Houston?”
“Good. Less traffic, that’s for sure. Someone in the waiting room said that the museums might reopen for one day a week.” I don’t tell him about the cases of hysterical blindness, or the new “old” songs playing on the radio.
“I’d love to see the Menil collection again,” he smiles hopefully. “How much were the glasses?”
“Eighteen ration points. I’ll put in more overtime.”
“No worries. I’ll do more.” Our candles are lit because the power is off again and we share a can of chili that only expired two months ago, along with some sliced cucumbers from our victory garden. I can smell the shadows of the house, dusty and waiting. Their silences press on me as firm as a hand. In the back of the house is Lindy’s room, and I suppose her stuffed animals are covered in dust and her plastic fairies all have cobwebbed wings.
The first time I saw a Turner, in real life, was on campus. Cal was teaching his college algebra class in the A-wing and I was downstairs teaching English lit. The black, beetle-like phone mounted on the classroom wall began to ring and I stopped my lecture to stare at it stupidly. I had never heard the classroom phones ring before. Before I could reach for the receiver all the students’ cell phones started buzzing and vibrating, and an alarm in the hallway went off and a speaker crackled: “Emergency alert. Please lock all classroom doors and wait for instructions. Do not use emergency exits. Repeat . . . ”
I rushed to the back of the room and locked the door. The college had installed the phones, alert systems, and the new door locks soon after the Virginia Tech shootings. I told the students to move away from the windows. I thought we had a shooter, or that maybe there had been an accidental release at the nearby petrochemical plants. But a shadow passed by the window.
A girl shrieked and we saw a man’s gaunt face and hollowed eyes. He was shuffling past our classroom to the pavilion outside. There were crusts of blood around his mouth and fingers. A campus security guard cornered him but the man, moving surprisingly fast, rushed towards the guard and bit into his jugular. Both tumbled to the ground and then the man . . . god it’s hard to write this . . . the man bit straight down into the guard’s belly and shook his head, like a dog does, as he ripped out portions of entrails. The guard’s white shirt became blood soaked but it wasn’t like the horror movies, not all red and monochromatic; it was red and maroon and dark brown and then bile green when the bowels were pierced. My students were screaming, hysterical.
I was frozen.
Three police officers ran into the pavilion and shot. One of the bullets pinged against a bronze sculpture of cranes, and I remember how dispassionate the regal birds looked. One bird had been sculpted with its foot tucked up against its body, and now it looked as if it was trying to gracefully avoid the bloodshed at its feet. More shots: once, twice . . . at the third we saw shards of pink pieces of bone explode from the man’s kneecap but he crawled onward, always reaching for the police. He looked ravenous. He never said anything, just groaned, and his eyes were milky and dead-looking, like a shark’s. It wasn’t until they shot him right in the head that he stopped for good. I smelled the vomit from one of my students as it seeped into the classroom carpet.
The blood from the two dead men outside was pooling, running through the cobblestones, being funneled straight toward our classroom’s baseboard. I stood up shakily and pulled the blinds down. We huddled under the tables in the classroom and listened to the squawk of the police radios outside until the alert system blatted, “Please proceed to emergency exits.”
That was our last day at work. Cal and I raced to each other’s offices and grabbed tests and papers to grade—isn’t that funny? I suppose we were thinking that a few days at home and there would soon be a cure. A final alert was being sent out: “To minimize the threat of contagion, all local school districts will be closing. In the aftermath of today’s tragedy . . . ”
“Why is it always ‘aftermath’?” Cal said as we raced to the car. “They never call it ‘after English or after Science.’ ” It was his math teacher joke, and a really old one. But he was trying to comfort me. We were running so fast that we couldn’t hold hands.
“We’ve got to get Lindy,” I said. All I could think about was our daughter.
We saw real horrors on the road getting to her sitter’s. I won’t write about them . . . I can’t; I’ll make myself ill. When we got to the sitter’s she didn’t say anything except “Christ Lord almighty,” and deposited our sleepy four-year-old in my arms. Then she slammed her door shut and locked it.
When we made it home, we ran inside and bolted our own door. And that was the last time Lindy and I were ever outside together.
This morning I watch Cal work his Sudoku puzzles and I wonder if it always took him this long to complete them. He doesn’t seem as quick-witted. He used to be able to make me laugh with just one dry retort, or one silly pun. I haven’t laughed in a long time. Does he have post-traumatic stress? Do I? Does he have permanent cerebral damage from the infection? I listen to him chew his cereal and I feel so grateful he’s alive. And furious too.