T. Boyle - After the Plague

She was asleep and dreaming the image of a baby floating in amniotic fluid, the cord attached, eyes shut tight — a big baby, an enormous glowing baby floating free like the interstellar embryo of 2001 —when a sudden sharp explosion of noise jolted her awake. It took her a moment, heart pounding, breath coming quick, to understand what it was — it was a scream, a woman’s scream, improvised and fierce. The room was dark. Sean was asleep beside her. The scream — a single rising note tailing off into what might have been a sob or gasp — seemed to have come from above, where Jessica-something lived alone with her potted plants and two bloated pampered push-faced cats that were never allowed out of the apartment for fear of the world and its multiplied dangers. Melanie sat up and caught her breath.

Nothing. The alarm clock on the night table flashed 1:59 and then 2:00.

Earlier, after a dessert of tapioca pudding with mandarin orange slices fresh from the can, she and Sean had watched a costume drama on the public station that gave her a new appreciation for the term mediocre ( mediocre, as she observed to Sean, didn’t come easy — you had to work at it), and then she’d slipped into bed with her book while the station went into pledge-break mode and Sean sat there paralyzed on the couch. She hadn’t read two paragraphs before he tiptoed into the room, naked and in full amatory display. She left the light on, the better to admire him, but the book dropped to the floor, and then it didn’t matter. She felt new, re-created. His body was so familiar, but everything was different now — she’d never been so aroused, rising up again and again to hold him deep inside her in the place where the baby was. Afterward, immediately afterward, almost as if he’d been drugged, he fell asleep with his head on her breast, and it was left to her to reach up awkwardly and kill the lamp. They hadn’t discussed a thing.

But now — now there was chaos, and it erupted all at once. There was a thump overhead, the caustic burn of a man’s voice, and then another scream, and another, and Melanie was out of bed, the walls pale and vague, the dark shadow that was Sean lurching up mechanically, and “What?” he was saying. “What is it?”

Footsteps on the stairs. More screams. Melanie flicked on the light, and there was Sean, dressed only in his briefs, the long muscles of his legs, all that skin, and the gun in his hand, the pistol, the nasty gleaming black little thing he’d bought at a gun show six months ago and never bothered to tell her about. “Sean,” she said, “Sean, don’t!” but he was already out the door, racing down the hall in the sick yellow wash of the overhead light, already at the front door, the screams from above rising, rising. She was in her nightgown, barefooted, but she had no thought for anything but to get out that door and put an end to whatever this was.

There was a streetlight out front, but the fog had cupped a hand over it and blotted the light from the windows and the stairway too. Melanie shot a glance up the stairs to where Jessica stood bracing herself against the railing, in nothing but panties and a brassiere torn off one shoulder, and then she saw the glint of Sean’s back across the lawn where the cars threw up a bank of shadow against the curb. He was shouting something, ragged, angry syllables that could have made no sense to anyone, even a Theorist, and she saw then that there was somebody else there with him, a dark, shifting figure rallying round a shuffle of feet on the pavement. She was closer now, running, Sean’s feet glowing in the night, the long white stalks of his legs and expanse of his back — he seemed to be wrestling with a shadow, but no, it was an animate thing, a man, a dark little man in bum’s clothes with a shovel clenched in both hands and Sean fighting him for it. Where was the gun? There was no gun. Both Sean’s hands were on the shovel and both the little man’s, and now Jessica was screaming again. “The gun,” Sean said. “In the grass. Get the gun.”

In that moment the little man managed to wrench the shovel free, and in the next — it happened so quickly she wasn’t sure she actually saw it — he caught Sean under the chin with the haft, and then the blade, and Sean was on the ground. She never hesitated. Before the man could bring the blade down — and that was what he meant to do, no mistake about it, his arms already raised high for a savage stabbing thrust — she took hold of the haft with all the strength in her and pulled it tight to her chest.

She could smell him. She could feel him. He hung on, the little man, the bum, the one who’d been on the doorstep that afternoon with his reeking breath and greasy clothes, and then he jerked so violently at the shovel she almost pitched headlong into him, into the spill of his flesh and the dankness of the grass. But she didn’t. She jerked back, and Jessica screamed, and Sean, reeling like a drunk, began to pick himself up off the lawn, and for the instant before the man let go of the shovel and flung himself into the shadows across the street she was staring him full in the face — yes, but she wasn’t seeing the man on the TV or the man on the porch or any one of the army of bums lined up along the street in their all-purpose shirts and sweat-stained caps, she was seeing Dr. Toni Brinsley-Schneider, Dr. Brinsley-Schneider the bioethicist, just her.

There were two policemen. From where she was sitting at the end of the couch, Melanie could see their cruiser reined in at the curb, the interior a black pit, the slowly revolving light on top chopping up the night over and over again. They were built like runners or squash players, both of them — crisp, efficient men in their thirties who looked away from her bare legs and feet and into her eyes. “So you heard screams, and this was about what time?”

They’d already taken Jessica-something’s statement — Jessica Fortgang, and she had a name now: Ms. Fortgang, as the policemen referred to her — and Sean, hunched in the armchair with an angry red weal under his chin, had given his version of events too. The man in the night, the bum, the one who’d been the cause of all this, had escaped, at least for the time being, and they were denied the satisfaction of seeing him handcuffed in the back of the cruiser, bowed and contrite. Sean had been in a state when the police arrived, clenching his jaws as if he were biting down hard on something, gesturing with a closed fist and wide sweeps of his arm. “The railway killer, it was him, the railway killer,” he kept repeating, till the policeman with the mustache, the taller one, told him the railway killer had turned himself in at the Mexican border some fifteen hours earlier. “That was the Texas border,” he added, and then his partner, in a flat professional voice, said that they were treating this as an assault in any case, possibly an attempted rape. “Your neighbor, Ms. Fortgang? She apparently hired this individual to do some yard work this afternoon and then invited him in for iced tea and a sandwich when he was done. Then he comes back at night — and this is a cultural thing, you understand, a woman looks at one of these guys twice and he expects a whole lot more. He’s a transient, that’s all, nobody from around here. But we’ll get him.”

Melanie answered their questions patiently, though her heart was still jumping in her chest, and she kept glancing at Sean, as if for guidance. But Sean was sullen, distant, withdrawn into some corner of himself — the gun was an embarrassment, the man had knocked him down, he’d been involved in an ordinary altercation with an ordinary bum, and the railway killer had already given himself up. She saw the lines in his face, saw the way his lower lip pushed his chin down into the soft flesh beneath it. Theory couldn’t help here. Theory deconstructs, theory has no purpose, no point, no overview or consolation — it was a kind of intellectual masturbation. If she hadn’t known it before, she knew it now.