“You’re your own woman. You have to do what’s right for you.”
“Yes, I am.”
She starts as a distant speck, the isle of Greece, and as I watch she steadily inflates, bobbing above the waves like a massive buoy. Technically she is not an isle; that’s just a pretty word thrown in there to fill out the lyrics of a pop song.
“The bottom half, the Peloponnese, she is an island made by men,” the captain tells me. “One hundred years ago, maybe more, they cut into the land so the boats can pass through. Just like the…” His mustache jerks about as he chews on the right words.
“Panama Canal?”
His fingers snap. “The Panama Canal, yes.” He holds up a dehydrated hand. “This is one level. No boomp- boomp-boomp.” As he says this he bunny-hops his hand to simulate the lock system for which the canal at Panama is famous.
“How long until we get there?”
“Eh.” He coughs. “Just a few hours.”
A few hours. My heart knocks faster.
The new receptionist from the lobby disappears two weeks after she arrived. Her facsimile is already in place. “Good morning, howkinIhelpyew?” she snaps into the headset. Her hand is heavy with a rock. Somewhere out there she’s got a fiance—probably in the war.
Upstairs in the bathroom, the women have gathered, but not to talk babies.
“Did you hear? Cynthia is dead,” one says when I walk in.
Two weeks ago she was jubilant, and now she’s gone. I barely knew her, and yet it takes everything I have to hold myself in a single column.
That afternoon a man approaches me on the train. The usual crowd has dwindled to just a smattering of backsides in seats, so he stands out like a bloodstain on white pants. He’s burrowed down in his green sweater, fingertips peeking out the ends of the sleeves. He has a lollipop head covered in thick sandy hair that hasn’t seen a barber’s scissors in some time. So slight is he that the messenger bag slung crosswise his body seems to be the only thing holding him down.
“Can I… May I talk to you? It’s polite to ask, so that’s why I’m asking instead of just talking.”
I turn in the seat, look up at him, try not to be annoyed at having my worrying interrupted. He goes on without my consent, which should be my first clue to shut him down, but he’s caught me in an unguarded moment.
“You work at Pope Pharmaceuticals, right? Of course you do. I mean, I know you do. I followed you from there. I didn’t want to pick one of those science people, because they won’t say squat, at least not in terms most people can understand. So I had to pick someone else. Someone not so important who’d talk to me. People in menial jobs like to talk. I’ve seen them on the television. Everyone wants their fifteen minutes. So I picked someone like you.”
I try to ignore the insult, because something about this kid is different. “You’re a journalist?”
His gaze settles on my left ear. Flicks to my right. Down to my hands. To some spot atop my head. “Jesse Clark,
I try to shake the surrealism away.
“No, I’ve never heard of it, or you, or the
“It’s new.” The kid is a whole litter of still-blind-puppies full of enthusiasm. “So many people have gone to fight that there aren’t enough qualified journalists and newspaper people left. They want one big newspaper that tells the same news to everyone who’s still here. It’s easier that way, they say. I think it’s a conspiracy and the government wants to control the news. But since they’re paying for my stories, I just got my first apartment all on my own, so the money is nice. I’m learning to cook, too. I made oatmeal this morning, in the microwave. Last night I made an omelet. With those green peppers and bacon. The recipe said ham, but I like bacon better.”
Again he waits as though this is chess and it’s my move.
“I prefer bacon, too.”
He beams, focuses on the armrest. “Can I sit down? I know I should wait until you ask, because that’s the polite thing; but I don’t know how long it’s going to be before you ask, and standing on a train facing in the wrong direction doesn’t make me feel so great.”
Normally I’d ignore him, hope he goes away before he proves to be a problem, but these are not normal times. I wave at the aisle seat and hope he takes that, not the middle.
He chooses wisely. “I don’t want to take the middle one. That would make it look unbalanced. So if you sit there and I sit here, it’s almost symmetrical.” Prim and proper. Hands flat on his chino-clad thighs. Bag across his body. “Thank you. I have to say thank you because that’s polite.”
“You’re welcome.”
“That’s polite, too.” He stares straight ahead. “I want to ask you some questions, if that’s okay. I’m working on a story no one knows about yet. You might think I’m crazy, and it’s okay if you do, because lots of people think I am. Even my best friend Regina thinks I’m crazy, but that’s okay because she’s my friend and she’s kind of weird, anyways. My parents think I’m crazy, too. They don’t say it, but I can see it. My dad’s always getting angry at me because I’m no good at driving or playing football like my brothers, and my mom’s always saying, ‘Don’t say that. He’s a smart boy. He’s just different.’ I love my mom. I love my dad, too, because that’s what you’re supposed to do: love your parents. But I don’t like him all that much. Do you like your parents?”
“They’re good people.”
Jesse nods. “About a month ago I was looking through the newspapers and I noticed something strange. I used to get all the major papers on account of having my blog and wanting to have all the latest news. Checking out the competition, my dad calls it. Only, now I don’t have a blog because no one has the Internet anyway. When the newspapers come I like to cut out the pieces and lie them on the floor in the basement. It’s flat and no one else goes down there much, so I can spread them out and move them around however I want. I like to look for patterns. And in the past month, I’ve been seeing all kinds of patterns in the obituaries. Lots of people are dying who wouldn’t normally be dying, and they’re all dying of the same thing. Only, I don’t think anyone else has noticed or it would be in the newspapers already, right?”
I don’t tell him that I’ve noticed, too, or that I don’t know whether to feel relieved or terrified that someone has made the connection.
“So I said to myself, ‘Jesse, this could be the story that makes you someone.’ My dad will be pleased that I’m someone important and maybe people won’t think I’m so stupid. What I did next was talk to some families of the people who died. Mostly they said things like ‘Go away, mind your own business, we’re trying to grieve here,’ but some of them used ugly words, too. Like
“I don’t think they did.”
“But you know what? Some of those people talked to me. And they all told me the same stories and described the same symptoms, so I said to myself,
My heart plays skipping stones in my chest before stopping for several beats.
“How do you know?”
“I told you, I saw the patterns in the paper. Then I got on a bus—lots of buses—and visited a whole bunch of people. My dad said I was crazy and that I should get a job at McDonald’s or someplace, but the grease smells funny, so I got on the bus instead. I talked to this real nice lady in Little Rock and she said both her cat and her husband died and he wanted the cat buried with him but the funeral home wouldn’t do it. Dead is dead, so I think they should have done it, because that’s what he wanted. This lady, she told me that first her husband got real sick and vomited blood all the time. She apologized, because we were in her kitchen eating red velvet cake and she was worried I had a weak stomach. Then she said her husband got all these weird pains in random places in his body, like he was getting jabbed like a voodoo doll. After a couple of weeks he died. She said after the funeral the mortician came over to her and asked if he’d always had a tail. She said yes because she didn’t know what else to
