The rectangle comprised of Tenth and Eleventh streets and Fifth and Sixth avenues remained as it had been on Bainbridge, a grassy patch of suburban houses and part of an elementary school. It appeared as though a gigantic buzz saw had cut around this swath of the island. The cross section of a two-story house immediately bordered Sixth Avenue, its rooms like chambers of a heart revealed in ultrasound. Behind that house, part of a crumbled two- lane road abutted what was now Eleventh. It wouldn’t be long before the contents of this block were scraped like icing off a cupcake and dumped onto one of the outgoing barges, the leftover space erupting in mirrored office buildings. A garbage truck loaded with meticulously replicated pieces of the dead city’s trash—Styrofoam packing material, fast-food cups, kitty litter—lumbered by. Abby paused in a doorway to catch her breath. This place, this dream, what was it? A video game mating with physical reality? A movie set? The overcrowded basement of some demented dreamer’s vision of Heaven?
The next day after a fitful sleep she found the nearest subway station and rode uptown to the Upper West Side amid others who, like her, warily occupied apartments of the dead. In exchanged glances they communicated how long they’d been here, conveying the jitters of a newbie or the resigned calm of those who’d grown comfortable in their new personas. Abby climbed the stairs at an uptown stop, emerging from the piss-scented station into deep forest, where gilded light streamed through boughs of red cedar and hemlock. A bunny appeared, regarded her, and sniffed the air as if it were animatronic. Abby steadied herself with a stick and tried to avoid sinking into the forest floor in Sylvie’s Jimmy Choos. She came to a clearing of sorts, where stood the overgrown ruins of a house, a tool shed, and what appeared to be a heap of lumber. The hardened ground, covered in crosshatches of fossilized tire treads, trembled as a subway passed underfoot. A newman, pale, weak, ribs showing from decades of hibernation, emerged from the shed, supporting himself on the door frame. His hair was black, a thinning bob, his nails yellow and long. Black dirt ringed his mouth. He chewed purposefully, occasionally reaching to the ground to gather another handful of soil. He made it only a few steps toward Abby before he had to sit down in grass that buzzed with fat, dumb bumblebees. As Abby stepped closer the thing looked scared, flinching as if expecting to be struck.
Abby assured the newman their races were no longer enemies. She told him her name.
The newman said, “I’m Eo. Is he close?”
“Who?”
“The king. I woke hearing his call. He must be close.”
“Wait,” Abby said, squinting at the overgrown shack, “is this Star and Nick’s house?”
“You know about Star and Nick?”
“I listened to a story about them…”
Inside the shack, a voice. Abby asked the newman who was inside.
“Star is inside.”
Abby crouched into a tunnel through the brambles and emerged in the shack’s sparse kitchen. A black girl about eight years old, her hair in pigtails, wearing a bright yellow dress, sat on an easy chair in the middle of the living room, staring straight ahead. Abby slowly approached and said, “Star?”
The voice that came out of the girl belonged to the long-dead woman. She said, “We were mostly happy otherwise, the three of us. Little Nick, Marc, and me. During the day my husband was friendly and intelligent and witty. He worked hard for us, drafting. He loved Nick. But at night he spoke in a demon’s voice, in a language of hisses and barks. Nick, he slept through everything. At first I’d wake Marc and he’d get angry and confused and deny he’d been talking in his sleep. He spent the long summer nights and weekends working on the new house. And it seemed the more he worked on it the more he talked in his sleep in that strange language. The tone of his voice changed in his sleep, became more menacing, more vehement. Marc would lie in bed shaking while he spoke, spitting out words, cold sweat dripping off his body. I didn’t know what to do. I tried to convince him to see a doctor but he refused.
“One day I checked a tape recorder out from the library, brought it home, and put it under the bed. That night when his crazy talking started I recorded twenty minutes of it. But I didn’t tell him about it right away. I waited a couple days then got up the courage to take the tape to the University of Washington, where I met with a linguist. She had done some research into the phenomenon of speaking in tongues and I thought she might be able to shed some light on what Marc was doing. I played the tape for her and she just looked puzzled, then asked if she could borrow the tape and play it for some of the other professors in her department. I figured she’d never get back to me. For weeks after that I continued to go to bed every night terrified. I read about night terrors and anything I could get my hands on at the library that had to do with sleep.
“Finally I’d had enough and recorded Marc again, this time for about half an hour. The next night after we’d put Nick down for bed I played the tape for him. First he looked confused, then shocked, then afraid. I didn’t tell him I’d already shared the tape with someone at UW. Then I got a letter from the woman—we had no phone—asking that I come to the university as soon as I could. She wanted to introduce me to somebody.
“On the drizzly day I showed up on the campus, the linguist introduced me to someone named Dr. Pliss. A Native American man, he specialized in recording and preserving languages that were on their way to extinction. We met in his office over coffee and he seemed excited. He said that he was pretty sure Marc was speaking in a language that hadn’t been spoken in over a hundred years, one that belonged to a tribe whose last known members were slaughtered in eastern Washington in the late 1800s near Lake Chelan. Dr. Pliss was a broad, heavy man but his voice wavered as he spoke about how rare and miraculous this was. He only knew about the language because a missionary had written a document in 1890 in which he instructed other missionaries how to communicate with the tribe.
“This was all fascinating but I wanted to know what Marc was
“The linguist led me out of the building, supporting me as I stumbled down the hall and out onto Red Square. I was terrified to go home but my terror for my own safety was nothing compared to my fear that my husband was going to hurt my boy.
“When I got home, Marc was sitting in the living room holding the letter from the linguist. He asked what it was. In ten minutes our world unraveled. I told him about the tape I had sent to UW, and of the conversation I’d just had with Dr. Pliss. I told him about what the transcript said. Marc was furious. I watched his face waver between fear and rage. The shack became too small to contain his emotions, so he went outside. I sat on the couch and cried. A while later I heard the echoes of hammering and I looked out the window to see him pounding nails into plywood, working on the interior walls of the new house. He worked well into the night. I went to bed and lay awake waiting for him. When he finally came to bed, smelling of sawdust and sweat, I tried to touch him but he shrugged me off. I listened to him fall asleep and that night he didn’t talk in his sleep for the first time in a long time.
“The next morning Marc got up early and went out to work on the house again before he went to his job. I walked Nick to the bus stop, returned home, and made some tea. As I pulled the teabag from the cup I heard Marc cry out. I raced outside, knowing he’d been hurt. When I found him he was lying unconscious on the concrete foundation. He’d fallen from the second story. Blood was coming out of the back of his head, pooling on the foundation.
“In the hour I watched my husband die I lost my mind. I could have gotten in the truck and driven to the nearest house with a phone. I could have run down the driveway and flagged the first passing car. But I chose to stand and do nothing and let him die. I felt for his breath with the back of my hand. I felt it coming from his nostrils at first, in little bursts. The halo of blood grew wider. Then his breath stopped and his skin grew cold.
“I chose my son over my husband. As I watched Nick grow I remembered Marc’s dark prophecy in the language of a long- extinct people. I locked his shedful of silly plans. My world grew dark and small. Nick was all I had, my only reason to live. Until one day his friend, who’d suffered the loss of his whole family, became my lover. For a brief moment our darknesses canceled each other out. Then Luke had to leave.
