Mark Falkin - The Late Bloomer

Where did that sentiment come from? Often enough during those first days I remember this nihilism flashing through me like a flicking shadow, a hot wave.

I thought of stopping, running up alongside and jumping onto one of the ladders, lope along the top like a hero with perma-stubble to the front where I would slip feet-first into the engineer’s car, shove the corpse aside, slam down the accelerator, and plow onward into this odd future. I sped up to get way ahead of it so I could time it, got out of the car, jumped the guardrail and scrambled up the berm, slipping in the loose rock up to the track. I stood on the track with my feet spread shoulder-width apart on a tarry tie and watched it come. Austin’s skyline loomed half lit-up behind me. The tie shuddered beneath my feet. My molars clacked.

It rolled toward me, a hundred yards away now.

I closed my eyes and in my mind saw the nose of this massive metal engine lifting me up and then me being ground under it. When I heard my own screaming underneath the wheels, saw my body pummeled, I chased away the thought.

At least I was still chasing away the thoughts.

The white stuff hadn’t come for me, and I knew it wouldn’t. But was I getting a slow drip of the other? I felt like I was going crazy right then. My mind splitting. Look at me, I thought, standing on a train track in the dark, a dawdling train coming toward me, and I’m debating with myself whether I should stay.

Is this what all the other late bloomers were doing? Fighting it off, going mad in the process?

Was there anybody else besides us? Actuarial logic said there had to be. Beyond that though, I knew there were. I had never felt, intuited things so deeply and assuredly. I knew things now. Just knew them. I know them.

When I opened my eyes again, I knew the late bloomers left wouldn’t be for long if we didn’t get together very soon.

The train was only fifty yards from me now. I waved my hands above my head in big sweeping SOS. arcs. It came on slow and implacable and pointless.

Just as it reached me, I stepped off and moved my arm in the way of a suave matador allowing the crazed bull to bellow by, bowing to it as it passed. The train rolled by an arm’s length away. My hair moved in its wake. I looked straight at it in a blur for a minute but the squeals of metal on metal became too much.

From the car I saw the graffitied phrase scroll by over and over: A Pox on Yo Lips .

Apocalypse. The white stuff. My eyes followed the last tag for as long as I could still read it. When my eyes jumped back, directly in front me, in the flashing interstices between train cars, it stood looking at me. I knew what it was. I saw its wings folded to its ribs, its snaky tail coiled around its talons.

I did not blink. I did not breathe.

My view of it was indistinct as an image through a zoetrope. It looked at me as I looked at it.

The train rolled past. That I no longer saw it standing there wasn’t a surprise. I leaned on the hood of my car and for the first time really cried.

On the short drive back to the house I wondered if we, Kodie and I—her and I alone—could rebuild. Could we do it right? Had Bass messed up that simple equation?

I turned on the radio and listened to a couple of looping ad jingles. Yesterday I found them annoying, dismaying, then macabre. Today, like the train, I’d rather listen to them more than just about anything. I could picture all the people involved and, though I didn’t know them, I missed them terribly. I can see them in the studio standing around a boom microphone, all with headphones on, singing the inane lyrics they held in their hands but getting into it because it’s work and work is good.

Working is living.

I saw the advertising people in their urbane outfits playing it for the client in some swank glassed room and they all nodded to it until they cut it off and then, after the moment of uneasy quiet, the smiles started and handshaking and backslapping wouldn’t stop and then a few of them would go out to happy hour pleased with their work that day and a woman and a man would kiss in the car on the way home and remark to each other how they felt like teenagers and that each always had liked the other but was afraid to say anything.

Daybreak and there’s no low roar of a city waking up.

Nobody waited on the porch. The front door stood inches ajar. I pushed it open. Bass’s snores filled the back half the house. A swing in the backyard set swayed. I stood at the picture window and saw Kodie come back to it from behind the stand-alone garage. I watched her rock back and forth on the swing. She sensed I watched her and looked up. I went out to see her.

“Did you catch it?” she asked, the subtext clear: Did you find Johnny? She coughed into her fist, looked at her hand, then tucked it under her knee.

I shook my head and eased into a swing. We listened to birds call and respond in the oaks above. “I stood on the tracks. For a sec, I wanted it to hit me and would’ve let it if it’d come faster. I chickened out and stepped off just before it got to me.”

“That’s not chickening out. C’mon, we’ve got to keep trying. Once Bass gets up, we should talk, plan.” She coughed a little more, which then bloomed into a productive hacking.

“You okay?”

She coughed like a goose. She put her hand up to say wait a minute. When she was finished, she glanced at a shaded spot behind the garage where she had been when I first saw her out here. I followed her glance. In the still summer-green St. Augustine, I saw spots of red.

“Is that from you?” I asked her. “Kodie?” Dumbstruck. “Is it…?”

“I feel hot to you?” She leaned over in her swing and I felt her head.

“Yeah. Let’s go inside and take your temperature.”

“No. Let’s just sit here for a minute. Please. The birds.” She scanned the canopy and inhaled the fresh air. Grackles chivvied above us, not caring at all about our predicaments. A smile lifted her mouth’s corners. “Where do you think they are?”

“Johnny and Rebecca?” After a long exhalation and running my hands through my hair, I said, “I feel like they’re all together somewhere. Maybe in the city, but I feel like they’d be heading somewhere else, away.” In my mind’s lidless eye, from the boulder atop Mount Bonnell, I saw the river flowing to the Gulf.

“You feel that?”

“Don’t you feel something?”

“A broad question given the last twenty-four hours.” She coughed. “About them? The children?”

I nodded.

“Yeah, I feel it,” she said, “but I don’t know what it is I’m feeling.”

“They’re gathering. Waiting. They’re not part of the old world. That’s why they’ll be leaving the cities. I’d say I’m having visions about it but that’s… seeing them all together out in an open field.” Lidless eye: On the beach. Rows of fires. Piles of stones.

She stood up, excited though stifling another cough. “Not dreaming, but in, like, little flashes. When I think of the children, that’s what I see. Tens of thousands, like you’d see at a music festival or something.”

I think not of sunny Austin City Limits but of a Las Vegas night, broken windows on the thirty-second floor, automatic rifle fire.

“Yep, me too.” I start swinging, almost like I’m dismissing the coincidence. I wasn’t seeing flashes, though. I was seeing, had been since midsummer, entire scenes. Had heard their hummed polyphonic songs.

“Aren’t you at all interested in why we’re both… or how?”

“Of course, I’m interested, but what to do about it?” I swung higher and higher, looked up into the umbrellas of oaks and knew I was right. “I just don’t know what knowing it gets us.”