as if to go to sleep.
Carson set up a vaporizer, hoping that would make her breathing easier, then quietly shut her door before leaving.
Crowbar in hand, he crossed the dirt expanse that was his front yard, stepped over the dry-leafed hedge between his yard and the neighbors. The deadbolt splintered out of the frame when he leaned on the crowbar, and one kick opened the door. The curtains were closed, darkening the living room. Carson wrinkled his nose at the house’s mustiness. Under that smell lingered something rotten, like mildew and bad vegetables gone slimy and black.
He flicked on his flashlight. The living room was neat, magazines fanned across a coffee table for easy selection, glass coasters piled on a small stand by a lounge chair and family photos arranged on the wall. Three bedroom doors opened into the main hallway. In one, a crib stood empty beneath a Mickey Mouse mobile. In the second, his light played across an office desk, a fax machine and a laptop computer, its top popped open and keyboard waiting.
The third door led to the master bedroom. In the bathroom medicine cabinet he found antacids, vitamins and birth control pills, but no antibiotics. When he left the house, he closed the front door as best he could.
An hour later he’d circled the block, breaking into every house along the way. Two of the houses had already been looted. The door on the first hung from only one hinge. In the second, the furniture was overturned, and a complicated series of cracks emanated from a single bullet hole in the living room window. In some of the houses the bed sheets covered long lumps. He stayed out of the bedrooms. No antibiotics.
His chest heavy, barely able to lift his feet, he trudged across the last lawn to his house where one window was lit. Whatever the illness was, it felt serious. Not a cold or flu, but down deep malignant, sincere, like nothing he’d ever had before. This was how he felt, and he’d started in good shape, but Tillie hardly ever ate well. She never exercised. Her system would be especially vulnerable. He pictured his house empty. No Tillie gazing over her cards before drawing. No Tillie wandering in the yard, looking for a single geranium to give her hope. “How do you bear it?” she’d asked.
Tillie was sleeping, her fever down again, but her breathing was just as hoarse. In his own lungs, each inhalation fluttered and buzzed. He imagined a thousand tiny pinwheels whirling away inside him.
Carson started the New York City Marathon video, then returned to the chair next to Tillie’s bed. He wet a washcloth then pressed it against her forehead. She didn’t move. “What a celebration of life,” said the announcer. “In the shadow of disaster, athletes have gathered to say we can’t be beat in the long run.” A map of the course winding through the five boroughs appeared on the screen. Then a camera angle from a helicopter skimming over the streets showing the human river. At one point a dozen birds flew between the camera and the ground. “Doves,” thought Carson, feeling flush. Even his eyes felt warm, and when he finally rested his head on Tillie’s arm, he couldn’t feel a difference in their temperatures.
He dreamed about bird books spread across a desk in front of him, but he wasn’t in his office. Other desks filled the room, and at each one a person sat, studying books. In the desk beside his, a man with tremendous sideburns that drooped to the sides of his neck picked up a dead bird, spread its wing feathers apart, scrutinizing each connection. He placed the bird back on his desk, then added a few lines to a drawing of it on an easel.
“Purple finch,” said the man, and Carson knew with dreamlike certainty that it was John Audubon. “A painting is forever, even if the bird is not.” Audubon poked at the feathered pile. “It’s a pity I have to kill them to preserve them.”
“I’m searching for a bird’s name,” said Carson. Some of the people at the other desks looked up in interest. He described the bird. “I’ve only seen three of them flying with European starlings.”
“Only three?” Audubon looked puzzled. “They flew in flocks that filled the sky for days. Outside of Louisville, the people were all in arms. The banks of the Ohio were crowded with men and boys, incessantly shooting at the birds. Multitudes were destroyed, and for a week or more the population fed on no other flesh, and you saw only three?” Carson nodded.
“With European starlings?”
Carson was at a loss. How could he explain to Audubon about birds introduced to America after his death? He said instead, “But what is the bird’s name?”
“Purple finch, I told you.”
“No, I mean the bird I described.”
Audubon picked up his pencil and added another line to the drawing. He mumbled an answer.
“Excuse me?” said Carson.
More mumbling. Audubon continued drawing. The bird didn’t look like a finch, purple or otherwise. His lines grew wilder as the bird became more and more fantastic. He sketched flames below it with quick, sure strokes, all the while mumbling, louder and louder.
Carson strained to understand him. What was the bird? What was it? And he became aware that the mumbling was hot and moist in his ear. With a jerk, he sat up. Tillie’s lips were moving, but her eyes were shut. What time was it? Where was he? For a moment he felt completely dissociated from the world.
Two aspirins in hand, he tried waking her up, but she refused to open her eyes. Her cheeks were red, and in between incoherent bursts of speech, her breathing was labored, as if she were a deep-sea diver, bubbling from the depths. Her forehead felt hot again. A sudden shivering attack took him, and for a minute it was all he could do to grit his teeth against the shaking. When it passed, he swallowed the aspirins he’d brought for her. Maybe there might be antibiotics in one of the houses a block over.
He put on a coat against his chills, grabbed the crowbar and flashlight, then crossed the street. In the night air, his head seemed light and large, but walking was a strain. The crowbar weighed a thousand pounds.
In the second house he found a plastic bottle marked Penicillin in a medicine cabinet. He laughed in relief, then coughed until he sat on the bathroom floor, the flashlight beside him casting long, weird shadows. Only two tablets, 250 mg each. They hardly weighed anything in his hand. What was an adult dosage? Was penicillin the right treatment for pneumonia? What if she didn’t have pneumonia or she did but it was viral instead of bacterial?
Carson staggered back home. After fifteen minutes, he was able to rouse Tillie enough to take the pills and the aspirin. Exhausted, he collapsed on the chair by her bed. He put his head back and stared at the ceiling. Swirls and broad lines marked the plaster. For a moment he thought they were clouds, and in the clouds he saw a bird, the narrow winged one that he’d seen by the river, the one Audubon said he knew, and suddenly, Carson knew too. He’d always known, and he laughed. No wonder it looked familiar. Of course he couldn’t find it in his bird books.
Smiling, holding Tillie’s hand, he fell asleep.
A pounding roused him.
Thump, thump, thump. Like a heartbeat. His eyelids came apart reluctantly and gradually he focused on the length of bedspread that started at his cheek and reached to the bed’s end. Without moving, without even really knowing where he was, he knew he was sick. Sickness can’t be forgotten. Even in his sleep, he must have been aware of the micro-war within. It surged through him, alienating his organs, his skin. The machine is breaking down, he thought.
“Someone’s at the door,” said Tillie. She stirred beside him. “It might be the pool man.”
Carson pushed himself from the bed, his back cracking in protest. His legs felt wooden. How long had he been next to her?
She was sitting up, blankets over her legs, an open book facedown under her hands. “You’ve been sleeping, Bob Robert,” she said brightly.
He put a hand against her forehead, then against his own. “I’m not Bob Robert.” She was cooler, and the wheezing in her chest didn’t sound quite as bad. The empty penicillin bottle sat on the night stand beneath her reading light. Could antibiotics work that fast? Even if they did, one dose wouldn’t cure whatever they had. She’d relapse. He’d get sicker. He needed to find more.
A pounding from the front of the house again.
He stood shakily, his chest aching on each breath.
“I’ll be back,” he said.
