Mark Falkin - The Late Bloomer

Maybe I’m being strong for something bigger. I get that feeling now. After all, why am I paddling coastward, answering a summons I cannot begin to describe?

My aloneness is total. It’s me and you, dear reader. And those who watch. I feel their eyes on me. It’s my journey to make. What? a pilgrimage, a vision quest, a… hell, I don’t know. Maybe I’ve tumbled full on into crazy. Me and Mags here. Ol’ Mags the Killer. Aintcha, girl, huh? A goddam killa.

None of us asked why those kids were tied up on that hill, or what we thought happened to them. I waited for someone else to ask. Obviously, everyone else waited too. Didn’t happen. Verboten topic among the late bloomers.

The silence peppered with muffler blats was short-lived. Bass muttered to fill the void, answered unasked questions. “They don’t mill about. Total stillness, total discipline.” I liked Bass for his talkativeness, his old-world want to fill the void.

“They didn’t come anywhere near those train tracks. I don’t think they trust technology, you know? The old ways of doing things? You’d think they’d be going bonkers, playing with everything, burning stuff, just going wild. Or at least wandering around lost and crying, looking for Mommy and Daddy, any adult. Pounding on the doors of the Palmer, something. But it’s the opposite. They’re so… contained.”

Bass stepped on the gas and took a turn to the east. I assumed he was going to get on I-35 again. “Goddammit,” he said to no prompt. Just pissed.

“Waiting us out,” said Kodie.

I said, “If we insist, you know, assert ourselves as the elders and try to take charge, we’d be quickly dispatched out of pure fear. Like white blood cells taking out a pathogen.”

“Fighting off infection,” Kodie said. “We’re the germs. Old-world cooties.”

“I don’t know, man. Fear? Those little bastards seem just plain mean to me,” Bass said, stopping at the front of the Driskill Hotel on Sixth, throwing it into park but leaving the engine on. “Be right back.” In our talking we hadn’t noticed that Bass had backtracked to downtown.

“Wait, what? Where are you going, Bass?” Kodie asked out the window at him, worry in her voice.

He smirked. “I gotta go up and see about a ghost.”

“Oh, stop it,” I said. “We’ve got other things to do.”

“You wouldn’t understand,” he said. “Be back in a sec.”

Bass stopped on the steps fronting the hotel, an 1880s structure. I dunno architecture but it’s terra-cotta-colored and textured, one of the nicest hotels in Austin and certainly the most famous. You could say it was stately.

Martin took us to the Driskill Grille once, for a steak dinner. He actually said that. Let’s all go out for a fancy steak dinner tonight . He’d closed some deal and was feeling all magnanimous. A pretty great night, actually, near Christmas last, everything festooned and lit. Martin and Mom’s faces flush with wine, the rims of the wineglasses sparkling, the civility of the table talk, the family’s future seeming bright. Not that I had bad times—just first-world uptown teenage whiny sucky times, right?—but this was one of the good times. He insisted we all get steak and we did. He even let us have wine, and Mom said nothing about it. I’ll hold on to that memory of Martin: his face flush and candlelit at his whoop-de-doo steak dinner at the Driskill Grille.

Austin lore, Driskill lore, says a ghost lives on the top floor. I knew that’s what Bass was doing. Stoned in the dark spaces of Memorial Park, he’d get all mystic and delved into gothic what-ifs. He was superstitious too, or liked to pretend he was. We’d be standing too close to a grave and I’d be coughing up a lung due to some harsh smoke and he’d say, “Let’s walk on. We need to let this guy sleep.”

“Right now?” I whined.

“What, Kevin? What’s the hurry?” Bass said, annoyed. “Seriously, take a breath.”

I blinked hard at his logic, laying the smartassery on thick.

He exhaled loud. “Just… gimme this. A coupla minutes.”

“She’s just up there waiting on you. Today’s the day.”

“I’ve got a feeling. Given what’s happened, I’d like to think there’s lots of ghosts walking around. Whole damn planet’s haunted now.”

I hated to tell him that it already was haunted. Always was.

“We’ll run into some on the way home. C’mon. Power grid’s going to go anytime. We gotta—”

“We don’t gotta do anything. Not anymore. We’re the survivors,” he pontificated, “and we don’t got to do a damned thing.” He stood astride the steps looking like a VIP telling off a hounding reporter. “Hell, I may sleep here tonight. Armed to the teeth, of course, and drunk on the Driskill’s top-shelf hooch. Come up with me.”

“No, man. I’m not into it. I want to get a plan going, get organized, then we can screw around.”

“Jeez. I mean, Kevin, the world’s already… It can’t get worse.”

“The hell it can’t.”

“We’re still here. Let’s live, dammit. You and your Warsteiner last night and now you’re all taskmastering?”

I shook my head, a look of bewilderment, I’m sure, on my face.

He waved me off and went in. The smoked-glass doors to the Driskill swung open. I figured he’d come running right back out, his face white after seeing the concierge rotting on the lobby’s marble floor before the doors even settled back into place. But he didn’t.

When did bodies begin to smell? Mr. Fleming had within twenty-four hours. This became the topic while we waited on Bass. Kodie didn’t answer. She went mute and I felt horrible for asking now.

“In a week and it’ll be unmistakable,” she said. “Do we pile and burn them? Bacteria and viruses will have nowhere else to go once they’ve burned through all the flesh. Rotting bodies don’t cause disease in a population unless it gets into the water. We stay away from them, we should be okay.” We knew we could never build enough pits to bury the world’s bodies. The earth will just have to eat them all up and the dried bones will just have to sit there for time immemorial, or at least until the kids grew up some and decide they want to clean up the place.

But I was glad at least we were now firing off questions, brainstorming the new world. The stun was wearing off and now we needed to get with it. Bass didn’t seem to think there was a clock ticking, but I knew there was.

I gritted my teeth with impatience now, my body’s glands flaring and shoving its chemicals through my veins.

That was the old-world survivor in me competing with the part of me saying screw it, why bother? Roll with it, like the kids do. I think of my jazzier trombone pieces which makes me think of that saying heard around Mardi Gras— laissez les bontemps roulez . Let the good times roll.

There would be no more Mardi Gras. All the world’s traditions, holidays moot. The Great Zamboni had come and all that scratched ice and those little piles of shavings and blood droplets gone, glazed over into a surface so mirror-like that yesterday’s games are forgotten.

Martin had taken me to a bunch of Texas Stars hockey games. I feigned not wanting to go but I always relented. Looking back, I know that I desperately wanted Martin to take me. To cheer stupidly at the swirling red lights when a goal was scored and to pretend like we were father and son. Sometimes, in din of cheering and noise from the arena’s speakers, I’d tear up wishing it was my real dad who took me to hockey games and high-fived me, our hands smacking in the cool air.

The how and the why don’t matter. Only survival matters. The kids, when they grow up, will have the burden of trying to figure it out. Then again, when I see them move and act as they do, I’m not sure they have any designs to do any such thing like figuring it out, trying to divine goddamned meaning all the time. Honestly, when I saw that wave moving up Lake Austin coming fast on the heel of those sounds, I wasn’t surprised. It knew what it was. I couldn’t put it into words, but I knew. I’d dreamed it. I’d written it in a story already. A version of it. The way it felt. Not the wave or the whalesounds, just the doom. Seeing it, my mind screamed, there it is!