“Maybe in America, but not here. Italy is made of mountains.” He waves a hand at the landscape. “In Italy, spaces do not go on forever.”
I stop, sit on the blacktop with the rain forming shallow puddles around me.
“Go, then,” I tell him. “But if you’re not back in an hour I’m leaving.”
“What is it?” Lisa asks.
“It looks like a military facility,” I say.
She aims her question at the Swiss. “Is that true?”
No answer. He stands there, legs spread, arms folded, maybe daring the fence to come closer, or—more likely—trying to choose the perfect insult for this occasion.
“Stay or go, it makes no difference,” he says.
Her body coiled in tense knots, Lisa trembles as she struggles to choose a side of the fence. Stay or go. With me or with him. She’s going to be a mother, forced to choose between far more dismal options than this. I cannot help her with one so simple. Questions form on her face, fall away, form anew. She’s a desperate kaleidoscope searching for a pattern that both asks her questions and answers them with words that will yield comfort.
Stay. Lisa decides to stay. So we stand together as I watch the Swiss trash-compacted by distance.
“I’m not pregnant. I’m not.”
“If you are, at least you know that’s why you’ve been sick.”
“I’ve got White Horse. I’m gonna die.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I do. I am.”
“Were you on birth control?”
“I’m going to die. You’re wrong.”
“He says you are. You believe him, don’t you?” It’s cruel but necessary. Denial won’t do anything but damage.
She stares sightlessly.
“I didn’t want to believe it, either, when I found out about my baby. There was a war limping along and half the world was already dead. Old life was disappearing and there I was with the nerve to create new. Like getting a new puppy too soon after your old dog dies.”
“Are you happy?”
Happy. What does that even mean? I can’t recall, but I think it has something to do with ice cream cones hastily licked at the beach before the butter pecan melted all over my fingers. Once your fingers get ice-creamed, they’re done for. All the rinsing in the world doesn’t wash away those last vestiges of stickiness. But you smile because the ice cream taste still lingers, reminding you that happiness comes in double dips pressed into a sugar cone with a wet metal scoop.
But am I happy because I’m carrying a child? My hand rests on my abdomen. It’s a shadow of its preapocalyptic self, but there’s a fullness there now, like I’ve indulged in a too-big meal.
Am I happy? Even the sound of the word rolling around in my head sounds foreign. More than anything, I’m scared. Terrified we won’t make it. Horrified at the possibility that I won’t be able to protect my child from the monsters that cling to the shadows. Happy is for when I reach my destination. Then and only then.
“You can’t tell him, you know,” I say gently. “Who the father is.”
She stares straight ahead. Her cheek twitches.
“Don’t let him take advantage of you. He’s not—”
“He’s not like them.”
“You don’t—”
“He’s not like them.”
“You’re right. He’s something else. There’s something inside his head that’s not right. I don’t know if it’s from before or after all this, but it’s there. He’s dangerous, Lisa. Be careful.”
“That’s not what I meant,” she says.
“Then what?”
She’s done talking, at least about this.
“I’d be happy,” I say, “if I could stop being terrified.”
An invisible force jerks Lisa’s head up. The Swiss walks this way.
“I’m sorry,” the woman says. “I don’t know who you are.” She’s a pencil wrapped in a black nylon tracksuit. She has Raoul’s look, only on her his strong jaw looks heavy.
Over her shoulder, I see Raoul’s apartment is inexpensive chic. He likes beige, although that’s probably too generic a term. He’d probably call it toasted almond, ecru, potsherd powder. Something more interesting than beige, which implies a lack of imagination.
When I tell the woman who I am, her kohl-rimmed eyes sink further into her skull and harden.
“My brother was not homosexual. He was a good man.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I say. “I liked your brother.”
“Nobody knew him better than me. Nobody. He never told me about this person.”
“James. My friend’s name was James.”
“James.” She says it like his name is a disease. “Did your friend leave something here? What do you want?”
So I explain.
“I gave it away. Filthy animals spreading disease.”
“To who?”
“The animal shelter. It’s their problem now. I have to deal with burying my brother.”
“James died, too,” I say quietly.
The animal shelter has never heard of Raoul’s sister, nor have they seen the cat.
“Probably she let him go. People do that all the time. Sometimes they move and accidentally on purpose forget to tell the cat or dog, if you know what I mean,” they tell me.
I do. I wish I didn’t.
There are many noises that cause a human heart to want to gallop up and out of the throat: a child’s scream, the one that play cannot evoke—only pain; unexplained mechanical noises on a plane thirty-five thousand feet aboveground; the screech of wheels seconds before a concrete median leaps up to kiss you; the wail of an ambulance too close to your home.
Ambulances are nothing new around here. Typical for a healthy-sized city. But my building is filled with people too proud to announce sickness. They drag themselves to the next block instead and suffer quietly outside the apartments there, where they are surrounded by fast-walking strangers instead of familiar faces. They wait for the paramedics where they are not known. Such is life—and death—in the apartment Sam and his mother left to me.
It’s after ten. Just me and the jar watching each other. Ben is dead. Raoul is dead. James is dead. That can’t be a coincidence. I can’t be that unlucky. What are the odds?
Three people dead. All three the only ones who came into contact with the jar. All three with cats. A building with forty-one cats, none of them seen for days. The natives have been whispering in the corridors.
Then there’s me. I’m fine. Physically fine. Not even a blip of nausea. Shouldn’t I be dead, too?
My hands shake as I flip through a magazine.
In some dark distance, an ambulance announces its search. I picture it hurtling through the city street until it nears its destination, slow crawling as it ticks off the addresses:
