In fact, I felt calmer and more detached than I could remember ever feeling. There I was, trapped under a heap of stone, my wife's dead body no doubt only a few feet away. I was sharing what would most likely be my grave with a mysterious and malodorous companion, silent except for his snoring. And I didn't seem to have a care in the world. When I thought about it, the only thing I felt was an unusual sense of strength. I felt so strong, I was sure I could now push my way out of the rubble.
Lying on my back, I had almost no freedom of movement. I could raise my left knee a few inches, but not my right. I could manage some lateral movement with both arms, but I couldn’t raise my torso enough to get any leverage. I was exploring these possibilities when my companion spoke.
"Not yet,” he said, calmly. “The sun is still up."
Under different circumstances, that might have scared me to death.
"Confusing, isn't it?" the voice added, with dreamy tranquility.
I was reluctant to say anything. It was as if by speaking I would enter into some form of complicity, and I wasn't sure I wanted to do that.
“Anyway, it's too risky to move the stones by yourself," the voice continued, with calm authority. "We'll do it together, later, when it's dark outside. In the meantime, you should rest."
His name, I would soon learn, was Calvin. At the time, some part of me already suspected he had something to do with my wife’s death. That part of me wanted to be enraged by the injustice. I couldn’t understand why another part of me was pushing that rage into the background, forcing my feelings to recede. It was as if years had passed since her death, instead of only hours. I thought it might be due to the ambiguity of the situation; the mixing up of the injustice of her murder with the moral neutrality of a natural catastrophe. But this thought, too, was rejected by some unfamiliar part of me. It was as if this unfamiliar part knew very clearly what had happened, and it wasn’t letting me indulge in my familiar moods.
It was, indeed, confusing. It was as if the very core of my personal identity was being erased by something cold and inhuman. And most confusing of all was that I didn’t seem to be particularly bothered by it. At any rate, not bothered enough to stop myself from drifting back into sleep. Some hours must have passed before his voice woke me again.
“What do you say? Shall we stretch our legs?”
The question made me laugh. It was as if extricating ourselves from the rubble wouldn’t be any more difficult than stepping out to the porch for a smoke. And as it turned out, it wasn’t. Once free, I immediately became preoccupied with the range and intensity of my senses. At first, I thought this might be the experience of heightened awareness one hears people speak of after a brush with death; the feeling of an intensification of life that, I assumed, would soon pass. There were a couple of problems with that explanation, though. I was as emotionally detached as I had ever been in my life. And things were not returning to normal.
The moon was just a thin crescent, yet by its light I could see clearly, several paces away, a tiny beetle crawling along the shadowed edge of a rock. Fifty paces away, amid the city’s fresh ruins, I could see the glittering eyes of rats. I could hear their claws scratching on stone. All around me, I could smell the violent death hidden under the collapsed buildings. And somewhere in the distance I could hear the faint muffled crying of a child.
Calvin sat on a large slab of fallen wall, swinging his dangling feet like a dreamy young girl gazing at the moon. It struck me suddenly that, of all the horror surrounding me, he was the only thing that unnerved me. He was obviously indifferent to the panorama of destruction. And I knew he had been injured. My hair, neck and shoulders were still caked with his dried blood. But in less than a single day, he had miraculously recovered and seemed to be in perfect health.
I had a lot of questions and Calvin seemed to offer the best chance of getting answers, but I hadn’t even opened my mouth when he jumped down from his perch and dusted himself off.
“Well then,” he said, as if something had been resolved, “I’ll be on my way.”
“On your way?” I asked, dumbfounded.
Calvin stopped and looked at me with the expression of a man momentarily vexed by the discovery of some trivial annoyance, like a stubborn piece of lint stuck to his jacket. “Is there something on your mind?” he asked, not the slightest suggestion in his voice that he was interested in an answer.
I wanted to get angry, but I was too confused by my own inability to call up the familiar emotions. “Yes,” I said, more calmly than I’d anticipated, “there is something on my mind. To begin with, what the hell happened?”
Calvin briefly considered my question. “It wasn’t my intention to turn you. But it’s done now and undoing it would be unpleasant for you and more effort than it’s worth for me. I realize it’s disorienting, but you’ll get over it. The thirst will educate you. And frankly, nothing else matters.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. “The thirst?” I asked.
Calvin paused, deliberating over a response, then apparently changed his mind. “I’m sorry,” he said, turning to go, “but I don’t have
