White Horse

DATE: THEN

I get his name from a friend of a friend’s sister.

“Oh my God, you have to call him. He’s the best,” my friend says with the exaggerated enthusiasm of one passing on thirdhand news.

Nick Rose. He sounds like a carpenter, not someone who listens to problems for a crippling fee. A woodworker. Someone average. I can do that. I can talk to someone regular. Because normally when I think about a therapist I imagine an austere Sigmund Freud looking for links between my quirks and my feelings about my mother. My relationship with my mother is just fine, although I haven’t yet returned her call or contacted my sister like she asked.

What would Freud make of that? What would Dr. Nick Rose?

I make the call out on the street from my cell phone. The city is in full tilt. Horns are the spice sprinkled over relentless traffic. Bodies form an organic conveyor belt constantly grinding along the sidewalks. Out here my words will be lost, but that’s what I want. I’m a rational woman but the jar’s arrival has me questioning my grip on reality. And deep down inside me, in the vault where I keep my fears carefully separated and wrapped in positive thoughts, I get the crazy notion that the jar will know.

So I stand outside on a corner, cup my hand over the phone’s mouthpiece, and dial.

A man answers. I expected a female assistant and I tell him so and immediately feel a jab of guilt for stereotyping my own sex. Some feminist I am.

He laughs. “It’s just me. I like to talk to potential clients. It gives both of us a feel for each other.”

Clients. Not patients. My shoulders slump and I realize how taut my body has been holding itself. Dr. Nick Rose’s voice is warm and bold like good coffee. He laughs like someone who is well practiced in the art.

I want to hear it again, so I say, “Just so we’re clear, I don’t secretly want to have sex with either of my parents.”

Another laugh is my reward. Despite my reservations, I smile into the phone.

“Me either,” Dr. Rose tells me. “I worked through that in college just to make sure. It was touch and go for a while, especially when my father kept asking me if he looked pretty.”

We laugh some more. My tension is rendered butter melting away from my psyche. And at the end he tells me that Friday afternoons are all mine if I’ll have him.

When we hang up, I am light-footed. The mere act of procuring a therapist has done wonders for me already. Friday. It’s Tuesday now. That gives me three days to fabricate a story about the jar. A dream, maybe. Psychologists love dreams. Because I can’t tell him the truth and I can’t explain why because I don’t know. The answer isn’t there yet. I don’t want him to think I’m crazy, because I’m not. Desperate is what I am. Quietly desperate and insatiably curious.

I follow the routine: unlock, unlock, open, close, lock, lock, chain, security code. The blinking light on the panel glows green, just like it’s supposed to.

The jar is waiting.

DATE: NOW

Lisa’s whimpers come from her bedroom. I say her bedroom; but who knows who it really belongs to. Whoever was here before shook all their personal belongings into suitcases, or maybe boxes, and fled. So I call it Lisa’s room, although it won’t be for much longer. Not if I can help it.

Left at the top of the stairs. Second right. Through the open door.

What’s left of her family is in there with her.

Her father is a leaner man than his brother, younger by a handful of years, although from this angle I can’t see his face. His ass is a glowing white moon with a pale slash of hair dividing the hemispheres.

Beneath him, Lisa is pressed into the bed facedown. She’s past struggling, resigned to her place in the family hierarchy. A crude puppet impaled by her puppet master, hunching the bed herky-jerky with his every thrust.

Disgust is lava and pyroclastic ash erupting from my pores. A small cry is all the warning he gets as I race forward and grab his testicles mid-slap. Before our world ended, I was never one for manicures and pedicures. A stranger flicking a file across my feet would only make me squeal as the nerve endings danced. Hangnails frame my fingertips still. White dots are albino freckles on my nails. The edges are ragged where I’ve lain awake and nibbled while I rifled through my thoughts. All of this adds up to the one time a man doesn’t want a woman’s hand on his balls. My nails are pincers sinking into the delicate skin..

I expect him to shriek, but he doesn’t. There’s one last ripple of his ass and he stops cold as though he’s awaiting my instructions.

“Get off her.”

His voice is husky from the grunting. “I’m sorry.”

“Not me. Pull out and tell her that.”

He eases out. His erection withers until it’s a limp shoestring dangling in the air.

“I’m sorry,” he repeats.

“Lisa,” I snap. “Get up and get your things.” I wish my words could be gentle, but that won’t get her up and moving and out of here.

There’s a moment’s hesitation, then she pushes her body off the bed. She tugs up her jeans and fastens them without lifting her chin. This is not your shame, I want to tell her. It’s him. All him. But now is not the time.

“Lisa’s part of my family now,” I tell the man who created half of what she is. “We’re leaving.”

He’s a chipped and damaged record. “I’m sorry.”

When I release him, he remains frozen. His shoulders shake and it occurs to me he’s crying. I kneel beside him as his daughter gathers her things and crams them into a backpack the same size as mine. My hand comes to roost on his shoulder and I am shocked at myself because I know I’m about to comfort a rapist.

“We don’t have to be monsters. We still get to choose.”

“I have urges.”

“She’s your daughter.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We’re leaving now. Lisa?”

She shakes her head; she has no last words to give him.

We pack food: bread, preserves, canned goods. Anything with a high-calorie punch. These we wrap in plastic trash bags and tuck into my bicycle’s basket. There’s milk in the kitchen drained by one of the men from the cows that wander the yard. They’re living off grass now, scavenging the land. And they’re lucky, because all the rain means thicker, lusher pasture for the eating. At the back of my mind is an image of me slaughtering a cow to survive, my arms stained with what looks like ketchup but is really blood. I shove it away and try not to think about that yet.

“We should drink it all,” I tell her, dividing the tepid liquid into two glasses. My gag reflex tries to reject the fluid, but I force it down, knowing that my body needs this. Food is becoming more scarce. An estimated ninety percent of the population is dead, but perishables are long gone and fast food is anything but. What remains is processed foods. Hamburger Helper that for the first time actually does help. Eventually we’ll all be down to foraging, or subsistence farming—if any of us make it that far.

Lisa sips at the milk: a church mouse with a precious piece of cheese.

“Where’s my uncle?”

The question hangs in the air between us.

“On the floor. I had to stop him.”

She swallows. “Is he dead?”

I don’t want to touch him. I don’t. But she’s looking to me like I know what to do. She doesn’t know that I’m making it up as I go along. Pulling it out of my ass like my butt is a magician’s hat.

Kneel. Two fingers against her uncle’s neck. They’re swallowed by his flesh knuckle-deep, like he’s made of quicksand.

Please let him stay down, I chant. The fingers not lost in flab curl around a paring knife. A postapocalyptic insurance policy. For a few seconds his pulse eludes me and I think he’s dead. But no… there it is. Pa- rump, pa-rump, pa-rump. He’s the Little Drummer Boy on speed.