Maureen McHugh - After the Apocalypse

Mel got there just about the time that it came on the news, so I almost missed the first part. Not that it was very exciting. This news woman with really stiff, unmoving newscaster hair said that six people went to the hospital in a drug trial that had gone horribly wrong. The six men were hospitalized in critical condition with multiple organ failures. Then they showed the outside of a hospital—not Cleveland Clinic, maybe University Hospital?

“Fuck,” Mel said, “that’s so stupid.”

I didn’t know what she meant.

“Showing the outside of the hospital. It’s just a building.”

I said, “It’s where they are.”

“So?” she said. “What does showing you the hospital tell you? It’s like when they are talking about a car accident and they show you this perfectly normal stretch of road with cars whizzing by.”

Mel was really mad. It seemed a weird thing to be mad about.

“It’s wrong,” she said. When she lifted her hands, her bangles jingled. “It makes everything seem normal.”

“They have to show something,” I said, although that sounded lame.

“No they don’t,” she said. “We could go back to Miss My-Hair-Wouldn’t-Move-in-a-Hurricane.” She shook her head. “I don’t know. Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Nothing happened to me.”

“I don’t know why it pisses me off so much,” she said. “It’s just the news.”

The next day they had an interview with the girlfriend of one of the guys who got sick. She said that her boyfriend was in a coma and his head had swelled up to three times its normal size and he looked like the Elephant Man. I didn’t think she should have said that. She should have given him his dignity. All day at work I told people what had happened. People wanted to know if I was going to sue. For what? They had told us that there was a risk. They’ve got to test drugs, or people would still be dying of plague and polio. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was just something that happened. I explained it over and over again. But people kept saying to me, “Are you going to sue?”

On Saturday I was so tired of the whole thing, I didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

I wished I could find out what happened to the construction guy, the guy in the flannel shirt. Four of the guys were out of ICU in a couple of days, and I hoped he was one of them. I hoped he wasn’t the guy whose girlfriend had said his head swelled up.

Then the news stopped talking about it.

It was almost like it had never happened. I got a check from the company that did the drug trial, and I put it in my bank account. It was weird because in some ways it was a bigger deal when Chris and I got our marriage annulled. People talked about that for a long time, and not just in Lancaster. But even Mel didn’t talk to me about the drug trial thing unless I brought it up.

It didn’t bother me, not really. I think about it sometimes. I’m not doing any more medical trials. I figure I gave my all for science already. But other than that, it’s just something that happened.

We went to Cancun, my Not-A-Honeymoon-Trip to Cancun. We stayed in a resort hotel with a pool that went halfway around the hotel and had two swim-up bars. Being in Mexico, I thought everything would be more foreign, but in Cancun things felt a lot the same. There was McDonald’s and KFC, Pizza Hut, even Wal-Mart. Mel said it looked just like Florida, only more people speak Spanish in Florida.

Still, it was incredibly fun. You walk out of the hotel and down to the road, and this bus comes along. There’s no schedule, because they just take you from the zona hotelera to the downtown. It costs fifty cents. We partied a lot because even if we got trashed it didn’t matter.

There was this one club that sold drinks that were two feet tall. We’d been to Coco Bongo the night before, which was great but too crowded to dance, so we just picked this place at random because it had a dance floor. They had these long skinny glasses, red and blue plastic. I was sick of margaritas, but all you could get were margaritas and daiquiris, so I was on my third daiquiri. Usually I could drink pretty much. I started to feel kind of sick—Cancun catching up to me, I figured. I found the bathroom. I rinsed my face off, careful to keep my mouth tightly closed. I didn’t want to get Montezuma’s revenge.

I overheard these two girls talking. They were thin and blond, and it was clear they had never worked in McDonald’s in their lives. The one was saying to the other, “I don’t know if I want to come back here anymore.”

The other one asked where she wanted to go instead, and they talked about Hawaii or Miami something.

I hated them. I don’t know why; they were probably nice enough. But I just hated them. I thought, I almost died to get here. I still felt a little sick and dizzy, and I went in one of the stalls and sat on the edge of the toilet. Usually I don’t want to touch anything in a public bathroom.

Maybe it just hit me, I don’t know.

I had heard that all the guys lived, although I suspected none of them was exactly ready to come to Cancun. I had specks dancing in front of my eyes. I put my head down on my knees and took deep breaths, and I tried not to think about my head swelling up so that I couldn’t open my eyes.

I’m okay, I thought. I’m okay.

Someone called, “Are you all right?” It was Mel, jingling with bracelets.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“Are you sick?”

I was actually feeling better. I stood up and flushed the toilet and came out. “It’s okay,” I said. “I think I’ve just been drinking too fast.”

The music was disco. The beat was thumping. I went out and I started dancing, too. My head was still kind of light and as I was dancing, I felt lighter and lighter. Not in a bad way, but in a good way. I thought about those girls in the bathroom. And what it would be like to be able to decide to go to Hawaii. About what it would be like to be them, or to have gotten the other kind of injection.

I thought about luck.

I could think about that, or I could dance. Right now I wanted to dance. It didn’t seem like a bad choice.

When I was a kid, I had a book—I still have it, although it’s in a box. It was called Mary Anne’s Dragon, and the cover showed a girl, dressed for school, and in the air, coiling above her, an immense, Oriental-looking dragon. The illustrations inside were all black and white, finely detailed drawings; full of texture and detail that filled the page. My favorite illustration showed Mary Anne’s father, the magician, in his study at his desk. He was young, maybe in his thirties. He had fine black hair and a drooping black mustache and black eyes and wore a black turtleneck, and he took Mary Anne quite seriously. You could tell by the way he was looking out of the page that he was not patronizing.

I loved his study even more than I loved the magician. Behind him were cabinets full of little drawers. They were all quite firmly and neatly shut, but the fact that there were so many of them meant that they had marvelous things in them. On top of the cabinets, near the ceiling, were a glass orb that reflected Mary Anne, some plants, a statue of a horse. The rug was an Oriental rug, and even though the illustration was black and white, you could just tell that it was full of colors, reds and yellows. On the magician’s desk were candles and an ink bottle and some books and a skull.

There was a brass orrery, a mechanical model of planets circling the sun.

It was all cozy and pure and safe. I swore I would have a room like that, but I never have.

Irene hated Alateen. For awhile, Alateen had been okay. Now, when Alice dropped Irene off for a meeting, Irene swore to herself that she would not talk during the meeting. She would remain detached.