Carson turned on her reading light, painting her face in highlights and sharp shadows. He knelt beside her. Her lips were parted slightly, and she licked them before taking her next rattling breath. He wanted to jostle her awake. She slept so poorly most nights that he resisted. The fever startled him. As long as it was just a cough, he hadn’t worried much. A cough, that could be a cold or an allergy. But a fever, that was a red flag. He remembered all the home defense brochures with their sobering titles: Family Triage and Know Your Symptoms. “Tillie, I need to check your chest.”
His fingers shook as he pulled the blanket away from her chin. Her neck was clammy, and underneath the covers she was sweating. She smelled warm and damp. Clumsily he unbuttoned her nightgown’s top buttons, then he moved the light so he could see better. No rash. She wasn’t wearing a bra, so he could see that the tops of her breasts looked smooth. “Tillie?” he whispered, really not wanting to wake her. Her eyes moved under her eyelids. Maybe she dreamed of other places, the places she would never talk to him about. Gently he rubbed his fingertips over the skin below her collarbones. No boils. No “bumpy swellings” the brochures described.
Tillie mumbled again. “Bob Robert,” she said.
“I’ll get some aspirin and water.” He pulled the blanket back up. She didn’t move.
“You’re nice,” she said, but her head was turned away, and he wasn’t sure if she was talking to him or continuing a conversation in her dream.
As he poured water from a bottle in the refrigerator, he realized that it would be difficult to tell if Tillie became delirious. If she started talking sense, then he’d have to worry about her.
The distribution manager had said to come back the next day, so there was nothing to do other than to give her aspirin and keep her comfortable. She woke up enough to take the medicine, but closed her eyes immediately. Carson patted her on the top of her hands, made sure the water pitcher was full, then went to his office where he printed the pictures from his camera. The last one was quite good. Full view of the bird’s beak, head, neck, breast, wing shape and tail feathers. Identification should have been easy, but nothing matched in his books. He needed better resources.
Driving to Littleton library meant passing the landfill. Most days Carson tried to ignore it-it reminded him of Arlington Cemetery without the tombstones-but today he stopped at the side of the road. He needed a place to think, and the broad, featureless land lent itself to meditations. Last year swarms of gulls circled, waiting for places to set down. The ones on the ground picked at the remnants of flags that covered the low hills. The year before, wreaths and flags and sticks festooned with ribbons dotted the mounds while earth movers ripped long ditches and chugged diesel exhaust. Today, though, no birds. He supposed there was nothing left for them to eat. No smells to attract them. The earth movers were parked off to the side in a neat row. Dust swirled across the dirt in tiny eddies that danced for a moment, then dissipated into nothing. The ground looked as plain as his backyard. Not a tree anywhere or grass. He thought about Tillie searching for a geranium.
He looked up. The sky was completely empty. No hawks. Could it be that not even a mouse lived in the landfill?
What would he do if she left? He leaned against the car, his hands deep in his pockets, chin on his chest. What if she were gone? So many had departed: the girl at the magazine stand, the counter people at the bagel shop, his coworkers. What was it he used to do? He could barely remember, just like he couldn’t picture his wife’s face clearly anymore. All of them, slipping away.
He slid his fingers inside his shirt. No bumps there either. Why not, and were they inevitable?
A wind kicked across the plain, scurrying scraps of paper and more dust toward him in a wave. He could taste rain in the air. Weather’s changing, he thought, and climbed back into the car before the wind reached him.
Skylights illuminated the library’s main room. Except for the stale smell and the thin coating of neglect on the countertops and the leather chairs arranged in cozy reading circles, it could be open for business. Carson saw no evidence that anyone had been here since his last visit a month ago. He checked his flashlight. Sunlight didn’t penetrate to the back stacks where the bird books were, and he wanted to make sure he didn’t miss any.
On the bulletin board inside the front doors hung civil defense and the Center for Disease Control posters filled with the familiar advice: avoid crowds, get good sleep, report symptoms immediately. The civil defense poster reminded him that Patriots Protect Their Immune Systems and the depressing, Remember, It Got Them First.
The cart he found had a wheel that shook and didn’t track with the others. It pulled to the left and squeaked loudly as he pushed it between the rows. In the big building, the noise felt out of place. Absurdly, Carson almost said, “Shhh!” A library was supposed to be quiet, even if he was the only one in it.
Back at the bird books, he ran his flashlight across the titles, all his favorite tomes: the Audubon books and the National Geographic ones. The two huge volumes of Bailey and Niedriach’s Birds of Colorado with their beautiful photographs and drawings. He placed them in the cart lovingly. By the time he finished, he’d arranged thirty-five books on the cart, every bird reference they had. He shivered as he straightened the collection. The back of the library had never felt cold before.
At the checkout desk, he agonized over what to do. When he was a child, the librarian filled out a card that was tucked in the book’s front cover. Everything was computerized now. How was he going to check the books out? Not that it was likely anyone would want them, but it didn’t feel right, just taking them. Finally he wrote a note with all the titles listed. He stuck it to the librarian’s computer, thought about it for a second, then wrote a second one to put into the gap he’d left in the shelves. He added his address and a P.S., “If you really need these books, please contact me.”
Before going, he wandered into the medical section. Infectious diseases were in the 600 area. There wasn’t a title left. He took a deep breath that tickled his throat. It felt odd, so he did it again, provoking a string of deep coughs. It’s just the dust in here, he thought, but his lungs felt heavy, and he realized he’d been holding off the cough all day.
Carson stopped at the distribution center on the way home. The parking lot was empty. He wandered through the warehouse, between the high stacks, down the long rows. No manager. No assistant. Last year Carson had hauled a diesel generator into a theater near his house. He’d rigged it to power a projector so he could watch a movie on the big screen, but the empty room with all the empty seats gave him the creeps. He’d fled the theater without even turning off the generator. The warehouse felt like that. As he walked toward the exit, his strides became faster and faster until he was running.
As the sun set into the heavy clouds on the horizon, he accepted the obvious. Whatever Tillie had, he had too. She breathed shallowly between coughing fits, and, although the fever responded to aspirin, it rebounded quickly. The aspirin helped with his own fever, but he felt headachy and tired.
Sitting beside her bed, he put his hand on her arm. “I’m going to go back to the distribution center tomorrow, Tillie. He said he might find some medicine.”
Tillie turned toward him, her eyes gummy and bloodshot. “Don’t go,” she said. Her voice quivered, but she looked directly at him. No drifting. Speaking deliberately, she said, “Everybody I know has gone away.”
Carson looked out the window. It would be dark soon.
Tillie’s arm burned beneath his fingertips. He could almost feel the heated blood rushing through her. “I’ve got to do something. You might have pneumonia.”
She inhaled several times. Carson imagined the pain; an echo of it pulsed in his own chest.
“Could you stay in the neighborhood?” she asked.
He nodded.
Tillie closed her eyes. “When it started, I watched TV all the time. That’s all I did, was watch TV. My friends watched TV. They played it at work. ‘A Nation Under Quarantine’ the newscasters called it. And then I couldn’t watch any more.”
Carson blinked his eyes shut against the burning. That’s where he didn’t want to go, into those memories. It’s what he didn’t think about when he sat in his camp chair counting birds. It’s what he didn’t picture when he bolted solar cells onto the roof, when he gathered wood for the new wood stove he’d installed in the living room, when he pumped gasoline out of underground tanks at silent gas stations. Sometimes he had a hard time imagining anything was wrong at all. When he drove, the car still responded to his touch. The wind whistled tunelessly past his window. How could the world still be so familiar and normal and yet so badly skewed?
“Well, we keep doing what has to be done, despite it all,” he said.
“I was innocent.” Her gaze slid away from his, and she smiled. Carson saw her connection to him sever. The shift was nearly audible. “I don’t want to see the news tonight. Maybe there will be a nice rerun later. Friends or Cheers would be good. I’ll go to the mall in the morning. The fall fashions should be in.” She settled into her pillow
