five. 'I'm not so sure about six and seven, though,' he said. He tried to work up a little chuckle, a half-laugh for his half-joke, but he was too tired and it came out as a yawn.
The blind man had already fallen asleep in his chair. Luka swallowed a second yawn, and Minny took his arm.
'Look, I only have the one bed, but you're welcome to one side of it.'
'Are you sure?'
'Mm-hmm. I'll sleep better that way.'
'All right. Good,' Luka said. He ended up brushing his teeth with his index finger, then washing his face with a shell-shaped piece of soap he found sitting on the rim of the bathroom sink. By the time he was finished, Minny had already turned off the bedroom light, but he could still see well enough to find his way to the other side of the bed. He stood above her for a moment. He was trying to adjust himself to the idea of sleeping next to another body. The world had swung around like a carousel, it seemed, and given him another chance.
'I think I need to finish my story,' Minny said.
'The Bulgakov? I thought you did finish it.'
'No, the other story. My story.'
He pulled the blanket down and slid beneath the covers. 'Shoot.'
'Well, I was away from home when the virus hit. That's the important thing.' She spoke slowly and deliberately, as though the story were a complicated maze of rooms she was trying to pick her way through for the first time. 'I was at a sales convention in Tucson, Arizona. Office supplies. I used to sell office supplies to hospitals and state agencies. There were probably five hundred of us in the hotel, from all over the country. When the news came through, we all rushed for our rental cars. I just kept thinking that I wanted to see my dad again. Isn't that strange? It didn't make any sense. I hadn't spoken to my dad since I was a kid, and he was dead anyway, but he was all I could think about. Not my mom, not my boyfriend. My dad. But the hotel had set up a quarantine around the edge of the parking lot, and they wouldn't let any of us leave. I guess they thought somebody might have carried the virus in from out of state. I don't know. I managed to get one of the last few Cokes out of the vending machine in the lobby, then I went back up to my room. Most of the TV networks were already down, but a couple were showing footage of the virus from Great Britain. It was horrible. Bodies lying dead on the grass or propped up against trees. You're lucky you didn't have to see it.' She shuddered. 'Honestly. There was this one shot, from London, of these hundreds of shoes lying scattered around on a flat stretch of highway. Nothing but shoes. People must have thrown them off when they were running from something, I guess. Who knows what? I couldn't help turning the TV back on every so often to see if there was anything new, but there never was. By the end of the day the networks were nothing but static, except for one of the gossip channels that was airing some show about Hollywood weddings. A repeat, of course. No more Hollywood weddings. I think it was the next morning that I started to feel sick. I remember going into the bathroom for a glass of water, but not much else after that.'
Here she stopped for a moment, and the remembering tone fell out of her voice. 'I guess that's the whole story. I'm sorry. I just had to tell somebody.'
'Can I ask you one question?' Luka said.
'Ask.'
'How long was it before you died?'
'I don't really know,' Minny answered. 'My guess would be that I didn't make it through to the night.'
She was resting on her side, hunched and facing away from him. All this time her feet had been swaying in slow half circles beneath the blankets, one grazing on top of the other, like waves covering each other over on the beach. He felt as though he could listen to the rustling sound they made forever. Just before he fell asleep, he heard her mutter, 'The dishes,' and the next thing he knew it was morning.
Once more, the blind man was already awake. He was helping Minny in the kitchen, filling the coffeemaker as she plugged the toaster oven into the wall. The three of them ate a light breakfast of English muffins with strawberry jelly, and then they started off into the city.
The streets seemed even emptier than before. Most of the trash – hamburger wrappers, ticket stubs, styrofoam cups – had been blown down to the river or collared inside the necks of various alleyways. The few pieces that remained were either too heavy or not aerodynamic enough to be lifted by the wind. A windup alarm clock. A rubber doorstop. A compact disc. They looked like part of some vast, citywide art installation: Things We Left Along the Way.
A banner was flapping between two flagpoles on the side of a building, tightening and relaxing like a sail luffing in a gentle breeze, but on the pavement everything was perfectly still. Luka kept his eyes open for any sign of human activity. He matched his step to Minny's. The blind man stayed a few paces ahead of them, running his hand along the walls and the windows, never stumbling as he stepped over the curb into the intersections of the empty streets.
Luka planned to lead them back to his office before the day was out. He was afraid he had neglected to close his window. Whether or not they found anybody, he didn't want to leave his equipment exposed to the rain. The mimeograph machine, in particular, barely worked on even the best of days: the crank often got stuck, or the drum fell loose, or the paper came through clotted with ink. He hated to imagine how it would operate with a few gallons of rainwater irrigating the machinery.
They stopped for a few minutes at a small, enclosed park on the corner of Seventeenth and Margaret Streets, where they lined up on one of the wrought-iron benches to rest their legs. Minny took her shoes off and began rubbing the soles of her feet, massaging them with her thumbs and then with her knuckles. 'This is what a lifetime of driving from the door to the mailbox will get you,' she complained. 'Little-girl feet.'
A pair of basketballs had drifted to a stop against the chain-link fence. Every so often a gust of wind would pass between them, and they would roll apart and come back together again with an oddly resonant thumping noise. Minny slipped her shoes back on, Luka tapped the blind man's shoulder, and the three of them headed back out toward the conservatory.
It was still early in the day when the blind man brought them up short, extending his left arm. 'Did you hear that?' he asked.
Luka hadn't noticed anything. Neither had Minny.
'It sounded like a gunshot,' the blind man said. 'A few miles away.'
He cocked his head and pointed. 'There! There it was again!'
All at once, and without another word, he struck off at a fast walk. Luka and Minny had no choice but to follow after him. He appeared to know exactly where he was going. He made a right onto Third Avenue, sheering around a car that was tilted up onto the sidewalk, then took a left by the Ginza Street Shopping Mall. He never turned down a blind alley or into a courtyard, never even paused. Luka couldn't figure out how he did it. Maybe it had something to do with the shape of the wind, the way various sounds came together or frayed apart in his ears. Or maybe it was his sense of equilibrium, which must have been as finely calibrated as a compass. Luka made a note to ask him whenever they got where they were going.
The blind man took them past a library and a gymnasium – four blocks, eight blocks, ten – leading them swiftly toward the river and the monument district. By the time the next gunshot was fired, the sound was much clearer. 'Damned if I can't hear it,' Luka said.
'It's a signal.' The blind man scraped past a wooden barrel and let out a huff. 'Someone's trying to get our attention.'
'Why didn't we think of that?' Luka asked.
'We did,' the blind man said. 'But I didn't imagine either of you were likely to have a gun.'
It was two more blocks before they broke out from behind the mass of buildings. They rounded the concrete wall of a parking garage, took a few steps up a wheelchair ramp, and saw stretched out before them the broad, grassy clearing at the center of the monument district. A spokelike pattern of walkways radiated from the monument, which was a polished marble obelisk supported on a narrow pedestal. A man with a pistol was standing beside it firing into the air.
And milling all around him, their voices raised in conversation, must have been two hundred people. A half dozen others were trickling in from the other side of the field, converging at the sound of the gunshot.
Minny gasped and took a step back, knocking heavily into Luka. 'I'm sorry,' she began. 'It's just… it's just that,' and she swallowed and slowly shook her head. 'It's just that I never thought I would see so many people again.'
