Simon Clark - Stranger

“You’re going to get your hair cut whether you like it or not, young man.” That’s what my mother said for the tenth time. Normally, she was relaxed and fairly cheerful. Now her lips had pressed together into a hard line. She tugged the steering wheel hard. I was being a brat. Believe me, that irritated the hell out of her.

Then I had one of those lessons in life that surprise you as a child. Adults don’t always get their own way. For no real reason the back wheel of the car fell off.

Now that’s my first memory. Sitting behind my mother as she drove the car. We’re both watching this wheel go rolling down the road. And it’s going faster than us and keeps on rolling into the distance. My mother looked shocked at first, but then, as she stopped the car (which must have been throwing up sparks and smoke from the rear axle as it plowed the blacktop), she started to laugh. She laughed like a loon. I laughed, too, as that wheel carried serenely on. Rolling clean across the state as far as I knew.

There! That was my first memory. Now it’s easier to write what comes next. And how everything fell apart. And how I come to be sitting here with the blood of strangers still dried to the laces of my shoes. You couldn’t tell knots from blood clots.

There was a Valdiva in the theater the night Abraham Lincoln got shot. My grandparents tell the story that Morton Valdiva helped carry the blood-soaked president out of the theater box. It seems Morton Valdiva had served as a ship’s surgeon. So he tears off a great chunk of his own shirt as a dressing and tries to stop the president bleeding out there and then onto the theater rug. But Lincoln’s people didn’t know old Mort Valdiva and dragged him away, thinking this stranger might cause Lincoln more harm. My grandparents insist that my ancestor could have saved Lincoln’s life if only they’d let him do his job.

OK, so it’s a family legend. But once, a long time ago, I was shown a cotton shirt that had been framed like a picture under glass. If it had once been white it had now turned deep gray. Sure enough, there’s a strip torn out that Morton Valdiva had planned to use to plug the bullet wound and maybe save the great man’s life. What’s more, there’s a stain down the shirtfront that Grandpa said (in the awed tones of a believer showing me a piece of the True Cross) was the blood of Lincoln.

Every family has its own legends. You’ll have your own. That your ancestors were on the Mayflower, that they’re blood descendants of Pocahontas or that they shook Neil Armstrong by the hand the day before he blasted off into space, or that they were dancing in the streets of Berlin the night the Wall came down.

To bring the Valdiva story more up-to-date, my mother and father met at college. He neglected his studies in favor of DJ-ing on student radio. He got good at it, too. A local station hired him for the late-night slot, playing soft rock ballads. But he made that show his own. Like a prospector he panned the import bins at local record stores, or made on-air pleas for kids to send in tapes of their own music. Soon he was what they called a cult figure. Soft rock oldies went out the window. Within weeks he had the raunchiest, most cutting edge music show in the state. Teenagers stayed home just to hear him play this great new music. A bigger station poached him. He married my mom. A year later MTV called. Great things awaited my dad. But then he died. I’d have been eighteen months old.

You know, nature can play tricks. For no real reason people are born with harelips, or a finger short of the regulation ten pack, or with birthmarks like a strawberry on their chin. Nature monkeyed around with the electrical signals that regulated the rhythm of my father’s heart. One evening my father went to bed, a healthy twenty-four-year-old man. Sometime in the night a blob of neurons sent a message to the nerves that control the heartbeat. OK, guys, time to pull the plug on this one.

As simple as that. His heart stopped. He never woke up in the morning. This may sound cold on my part, but I can’t get sentimental about my dad. He sounded like a great guy and all. Only I never knew him. Later, when I was around eight or so, I started thinking about him a lot. I couldn’t remember a face or the sound of his voice. I was a baby when he died, for Chrissakes. If I did try hard to remember him I heard music in my head; a powerful music that went soaring upward; in my imagination I’d see a shadow that sort of filled the room. For a while I’d imagine this was my father returning as my guardian angel.

Well, things moved on. My mother went on to enjoy other relationships with men, but nothing lasting. One of these resulted in the birth of my sister. I never associated her as the daughter of another man. He’d moved on, never to be seen again. Nor did I kid myself that this was a virgin birth.

Chelle was noisy as hell. I have to say that. For a long time I wasn’t bowled over with sharing a house with a sister. But within a few years we learnt to get on well together. And so we grew up-Mom, Chelle and me in a small house in a small New Jersey town. Mom worked long, loooong hours for a marketing company. Cash tended to be on the scant side. The cars we owned always had a nice rust bloom running ’round the wheel arches. Life ran to normal enough schedules-school, vacations, Christmas, birthdays. Nothing earthquaking. Apart from the Chunk episode that I mentioned a while back.

In fact the whole world ran to its normal schedule. Of course it wasn’t a fairy tale of peace and prosperity. Worldwide there were the usual wars, famines, floods, hurricanes, droughts, stock market implosions, political assassinations, revolutions, treaty signings-you name it. You’ve seen all that stuff on TV. It wasn’t pretty, but for Planet Earth and humankind it was business as usual.

As all that stuff happened I quit school, flipped a finger at college and found work at the local airport (yes, brothers and sisters, I was the guy who tossed your suitcases onto the conveyor belt that fed the carousels). As movie stars partied on Oscar night, as farmers worked their land, as politicians cut their deals and as people like me and you ordered pizza in time for our favorite medical drama, or shopped, or ground away at homework or at our day jobs, or slept in our beds, something unusual was happening. Something so unusual, something so out of the ordinary, nobody noticed at the time. Or at least if they did they shut it out of their minds.

My job here in Sullivan is to make sure everyone’s got enough firewood for the cooking stoves they’ve now got sitting out in their backyards. Part of that job is to collect all the old newspapers I can find, so they can light their fires in the first place. During the winter nights I found myself reading them. At first it was just something to do; then for no real reason I started hunting down news stories that described the early stages of… hell! Let’s make no bones about it, the disaster. And I should spell the word in great, menacing black letters: DISASTER

So I clipped reports from newspapers as blizzards turned the world white outside.

I’ve only started putting them into some kind of order. At the time they didn’t point to any kind of global disaster or apocalypse (yeah, apocalypse is a good word). They were the kind of thing you glanced at, thought, “Well that’s pretty strange,” then turned to the TV pages and forgot all about them. But it’s there, all right. Like the little drops of blood in your handkerchief. That’s nothing, you tell yourself. A few drops of blood. I only blew my goddam nose too hard, didn’t I? But if only it was true. Those few specks of red in your tissue are the start of something BIG. A something that could be a freshly budding tumor in your lungs that will eat you alive.