could have been morning, noon, or almost night. The clouds could have been ready to spit out rain or snow or just break apart and let the sun shine in.
It was waiting-room weather. Purgatory weather.
I left Danny behind with Floyd and my computer. Charlie had shown him how to transfer outgoing information onto his thumb drive, and he agreed to upload my latest post. He wasn’t too happy about it, though. He had a couple of hours away from the courthouse and didn’t want to spend them baby-sitting Floyd and mucking around with my computer. He wanted to go with me to find Taylor. He wanted to make sure she was okay.
But I didn’t want that. I didn’t want him coming along.
And I couldn’t even give him a valid reason why. I just told him no. Sorry—really, I’m sorry—but no.
Danny’s map took me east on Mission, then south toward I-90. I stayed off the main road as I rounded the university, instead crossing to the residential street one block to the east. I probably didn’t need to bother. There wasn’t a soul around. The only sound in the still air was the rasp of my breath and the sharp echoes of my footsteps.
I took pictures of the abandoned houses as I walked. Most still looked pretty good—it hadn’t been that long, after all—but they all showed signs of neglect and abuse. In the first month after the evacuation, the yards had sprouted out of control, crowding sidewalks and invading lawns, and then they’d died. The streets and sidewalks were plastered with wet leaves, and there were broken windows up and down the street. A couple of the front doors hung wide open.
I approached one of the houses and took a picture of its shattered door; there was a splintered dent to the left of the knob where a boot had staved it in. Looters, scavenging for food or money, or maybe just looking for a warm place to stay. Since that act of violence—maybe a month ago, maybe more—the world had slowly started to make its way into the house. I crouched just outside the door and took pictures of the entryway. Dead leaves and dirt littered a nice Persian rug. Lumps of wet, shapeless paper—once-glossy magazines, a stamped handwritten letter—adhered to the tiled floor. There was a whiff of mold in the air and hard-water stains on the dingy beige walls.
I took a half dozen photos before I noticed the line of muddy paw prints stretching from the front door to the rear of the house. The prints were large, and as soon as I noticed them, I thought I caught a hint of animal musk in the air. It was the barest tickle at the back of my nose—probably just my imagination, really, nothing more—but it was enough to transport me back to the tunnel in the park. And once again I was there, following Mac down into the dark, searching for him as he faded away, as he found entry into Amanda’s world. A world of dogs and wolves. A world of savage eyes and teeth and blood and flesh.
I recoiled from the entryway and retreated back to the middle of the road.
After that, I didn’t linger. I stopped taking pictures and instead just concentrated on covering ground.
There was graffiti on a building near the 290 bridge, clearly visible from the middle of its span: overlapping green and black lines scrawled across white stucco.
It was the Poet’s work. I recognized the writing.
Just one sentence, but it left me feeling perplexed and just a little dizzy:
I THOUGHT WE WERE FALLING, NOT FLYING.
I took a couple of pictures and moved on.
Danny’s map was surprisingly precise. It ended in a neat series of squares sketched out along Second Avenue, filling the space between Pittsburg and Magnolia Streets. There was a circle around the middle square and an arrow pointing to a phrase at the edge of the piece of paper: “blue tarp on roof.”
I rounded the corner and immediately spotted the house with the tarp. It wasn’t a very nice neighborhood, sitting right there at the edge of I-90, but the blue-topped house looked well cared for. It was boxy and small: two stories tall, but the second floor couldn’t have been much more than a single slant-ceilinged room. None of the windows were broken, and the hedges at the yard’s perimeter looked as if they’d been trimmed recently. The tarp on the roof looked fairly new as well, bright blue and still perfectly placed, despite the weeks of wind and rain and snow. There was absolutely no way it predated the evacuation.
I paused and turned a full circle before approaching the house. The street was still and silent. There were no people, no animals. The nearby stretch of I-90 was deserted as well, the western roadblock miles away, the military occupied elsewhere.
I was alone here, near the center of the city, and it was all very … calming.
This was a feeling I’d been having for a while now, something I’d been circling around, narrowing in on, as I walked the empty streets and thought about the empty city. Away from the eyes of people, I could do anything and it really wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t change the world. It wouldn’t change a single mind.
And that was very liberating. For so long, I’d been trying to impress others. I’d been trying to impress my father, my peers, the girls in my life, the professors at school. And then there was the whole photography thing, nothing but a desperate attempt to impress the whole world.
But here I’d found something different, something new. I’d found comfort in not making an impression, jumping into the ocean and not making a splash, not leaving a single ripple.
I can’t imagine that this was a very healthy thought—it was the height of solipsism, after all—but it
I stayed to the side of the house as I approached, rounding a chest-high hedge and ducking beneath the nearest window. I raised my head and looked in through the slats of a venetian blind. The front living room was empty. There was a sofa and an armchair arrayed around an unlit fireplace, and an end table supported a stack of magazines at its side. I continued toward the back of the house, stopping in front of a kitchen window. Someone left the room just as I raised my head to look in. I only caught a brief moment of dark-clad back as he or she turned the corner into a hallway on its far side. The person was nothing more than a blur of motion in the doorway; I couldn’t tell if it was Taylor or one of her parents.
I continued on. There was a screen door at the rear of the house, hidden inside a tiny garden. The garden was well maintained but not very lush. Slumbering for the winter. I carefully picked my way through the garden and glanced in through the back door window.
There was a narrow hallway on the other side of the door, leading all the way to the front of the house. Taylor was standing in its center, facing away from me. There was a blanket strung across the corridor at about breast height—a makeshift clothesline barrier, partitioning the hallway into a number of smaller spaces—and she was peering over its edge, down toward the floor on the far side. She was talking to somebody, somebody hidden out of sight, and gesturing with both hands. I couldn’t make out most of what she was saying. Only a couple of her words, raised loud, made it through the doorway: “not staying,” “not safe,” and a single, pleading
There was an answering voice from the person on the other side of the blanket, but it was low and calm, and I couldn’t make out a single word.
It was strange, this scene, and I couldn’t tell what was going on. Who was she talking to? One of her parents? And why here, in the middle of the hallway? And what was up with the partition?
I held my breath and tried to concentrate on the muffled sound of Taylor’s voice, trying to pick meaning out of that muted cadence. But there was nothing there, just the dull rumble of argumentative voices, or, rather, the rumble of one argumentative voice set against the reassuring calm of a patient and soothing one. This didn’t go on for too long. After a couple of minutes, the conversation ceased, and Taylor was left standing there, vibrating with mute energy. Then, in a gesture of complete frustration, she pulled the blanket aside and stormed toward the front of the house.
As she made her way to the front door, pushing aside a second barrier, the blanket closest to me slipped from its clothesline and fell to the floor, spilling with a quick, fluid motion. And what it revealed … well, I actually jumped at the sight, and my hands, pressed flat against the screen door, bounced wildly off the metal barrier.
It was a man, merged with the hardwood floor. The top half of his body looked perfectly normal: a Middle Eastern man dressed in a white button-down shirt. But the shirt stopped midbelly, at the floor, and the bottom half of his body was gone. His hands moved against the floor and walls, slow, languid, and completely insensate. His head lolled, and a line of spittle spilled from his lower lip. I couldn’t see his eyes—his head was moving, and he was
