Laura Kasischke: In a Perfect World

Even to her, it sounded weak, the question childlike, as if she really were expecting an answer to that question from the ten-year-old under the bed.

Sam went completely silent again. Not even a sniffle. Jiselle knelt down beside the bed and tried to look under it, but all she could see was darkness and the white rubber sole of one shoe.

“Okay, Sam,” she said. “Tell me what’s wrong. Can you please tell me?” She waited.

This time she counted to fifty.

Finally, she reached under the bed, fishing around until she’d gotten a grip on what she was fairly sure was a tennis shoe, and then a second one, and pulled Sam out by his feet as gently as she could.

He didn’t struggle. He emerged with a long strand of dust attached to his head, and his face a mess of tears and snot, wrinkled and blotched from crying.

“What’s wrong?” Jiselle asked, leading him to the edge of the bed by his wrist and sitting him down beside her.

“I miss my dad,” Sam sobbed.

“Oh, Sam,” she said, and she couldn’t help it then. A few tears ran from the corners of her eyes into the little valley between her lips and her nose. She wiped them away and said, “I’m so sorry. I miss him, too.”

So, they decided together that they needed to keep themselves busier. They wouldn’t miss Mark so much if they had 37 more to do. Especially in the evenings, after dinner, and just before bed. Jiselle would, they decided, read aloud to Sam in the evenings. He agreed that the Hans Christian Andersen looked good. She’d taken the book down from the shelf and held it out for him to see. “My father,” she told him, “read this whole book to me one summer.”

She placed it on his lap.

The heft of it was satisfying. The gilt-edged pages glowed. Opened, it smelled of pine trees and the past.

It was a hundred and two degrees that evening in the center of the city. For heat that summer, every record that could be broken had been. From the sewer grates rose a smell so sweet and terrible that people held tissues and pieces of clothing to their mouths and noses. A few wore surgical masks. The latest thing was surgical masks with noses and mouths printed on them.

Bozo noses.

Smiles with front teeth missing.

An elderly woman had tied a little scrap of pink chiffon scarf loosely around the muzzle of her poodle, which trotted beside her, looking about shyly, as if it were embarrassed about the scarf.

Some said it was the heat that was causing the Phoenix flu—which health experts were no longer referring to as the Phoenix flu but as hemorrhagic zoonosis, because it was not an influenza, they said, but an antibiotic/vaccine-resistant strain of Yersinia pestis.

Phoenix flu, they believed, was not only an inaccurate term; it was an incendiary one. People diagnosed with it were shunned, isolated in corners of emergency rooms, refused small-town hospital beds, driven out of apartment complexes, expelled from institutions of all kinds. It was hoped that calling it something scientific might lessen the public’s fear of it.

The public continued to call it the Phoenix flu.

It was not caused or spread by the heat, experts said, despite the ill effects the heat had on those who were already sick.

And birds, too, had been ruled out as infection-carriers.

If anything, it was said, humans were infecting birds.

Still, biohazard teams were sent out in yellow suits whenever a dead bird was found on the sidewalk or in a backyard—to take it away, dispose of it. The days of birdbaths and birdhouses and birdfeeders seemed over.

Then, after an outbreak at a daycare center, outraged citizens demanded a ban on imported toys—although no connection to the toys and the disease was ever confirmed. The Chinese government retaliated by banning flights from the United States to China if they held even the cremated remains of American dead, devastating Chinese Americans whose loved ones had requested to be returned to their homeland after their deaths.

But the Chinese government compared the scattering of American ashes in China to the medieval practice of catapulting plague-dead corpses over fortress walls to infect enemies.

There was nothing the U.S. government could do about the ban, except make threats.

Quarantining oneself, experts agreed, was futile. The virus could be in the water, in the dirt, in the air. Who knew? It could take years to discover the source of the infection, and more years to find a cure. Most people quit trying to guess where it might be, and how to avoid it, and simply went on with their daily lives. A poll asking, “How concerned are you about the Phoenix flu?” reported that 61 percent of Americans were Not very concerned. Another 10 percent were Not concerned at all.

As well as being the day of Britney Spears’s death, it was Jiselle’s birthday, and they were meeting her mother for dinner at Duke’s Palace Inn. It wasn’t the first time they’d eaten together since Jiselle’s wedding. There had already been a disastrous dinner at the house that had ended with Sara leaving the table without touching the food on her plate, and Sam running to the bathroom to throw up the liter of root beer he hadn’t mentioned having guzzled before sitting down to chicken and dumplings. (“For God’s sake, Jiselle, why do you let that boy drink soda?”) Fearing something even worse this time, and in public, Jiselle had almost canceled the birthday dinner, but she knew what her mother would think about that—about her new marriage, about her stepchildren, about her whole life, and all of her decisions—if she did. She would say, “How sad for you, alone on your birthday. Mark simply couldn’t take one day off to spend with you?”

They were still a block away from the restaurant when a bus rolled by, and the exhalation of diesel fumes came as a nearly pleasant relief in the stifling heat. A woman ran past with a baby tucked into her blouse. From under the damp white silk dangled little porcelain feet.

When they reached Duke’s Palace Inn, the front window was dark, but Jiselle could see the ghostly flickering of candles on the other side.

The year before, to celebrate her birthday, Mark and Jiselle had met in Copenhagen at the Tivoli Gardens, where they strolled among the flowers. The Danes said there had never been a summer like it—so much color, and the swarms of strange, stingerless bees hovering over everything in a shining, golden hum.

Together, Mark and Jiselle watched the changing of the guard outside the palace, and then took a boat ride along the canals, got a glimpse in the distance of the Little Mermaid shining against a gleaming sea—a provocative naked fish-girl, head bowed, as if she were self-conscious or a little sad, or both.

It was like seeing a character from a dream, in life. On the fireplace mantel in the house in which Jiselle grew up, her mother kept a figurine of the Little Mermaid—green, like the statue itself, but ceramic, and about the size of a lap dog.

Once, and only once, despite her mother’s many warnings not to, Jiselle had taken it down. She was twelve or thirteen, and holding it in her hands that day for the first time, she realized that it was hollow—and also heavy, especially for something hollow. When her mother walked in and saw her holding the Little Mermaid, she shouted, “Put that back. Your grandfather gave that to me.”

Jiselle had turned hurriedly to put the figurine back on the mantel, stammering something about just blowing off the dust, but her mother rushed at her, grabbed it out of her hands. “I’ll take care of that. You keep your hands off of it,” she said as she straightened the mermaid on the mantel, and then turned back to Jiselle with a look that was both threatening and beseeching. “Please.”