After the Plague: And Other Stories

  Achates McNeil

  My father is a writer. A pretty well-known one too. You’d recognize the name if I mentioned it, but I won’t mention it, I’m tired of mentioning it—every time I mention it I feel as if I’m suffocating, as if I’m in a burrow deep in the ground and all these fine grains of dirt are raining down on me. We studied him in school, in the tenth grade, a story of his in one of those all-purpose anthologies that dislocate your wrists and throw out your back just to lift them from the table, and then again this year, my freshman year, in college. I got into a Contemporary American Lit class second semester and they were doing two of his novels, along with a three-page list of novels and collections by his contemporaries, and I knew some of them too—or at least I’d seen them at the house. I kept my mouth shut though, especially after the professor, this blond poet in her thirties who once wrote a novel about a nymphomaniac pastry maker, made a joke the first day when she came to my name in the register.

  “Achates McNeil,” she called out.

  “Here,” I said, feeling hot and cold all over, as if I’d gone from a sauna into a snowbank and back again. I knew what was coming; I’d been through it before.

  She paused, looking up from her list to gaze out the window on the frozen wastes of the campus in the frozen skullcap of New York State, and then came back to me and held my eyes a minute. “You wouldn’t happen by any chance to be a relation of anybody on our reading list, would you?”

  I sat cramped in the hard wooden seat, thinking about the faceless legions who’d sat there before me, people who’d squirmed over exams and unfeeling professorial remarks and then gone on to become plastic surgeons, gas station attendants, insurance salesmen, bums and corpses. “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  She gave me a mysterious little smile. “I was thinking of Teresa Golub or maybe Irving Thalamus?” It was a joke. One or two of the literary cretins in back gave it a nervous snort and chuckle, and I began to wonder, not for the first time, if I was really cut out for academic life. This got me thinking about the various careers available to me as a college dropout—rock and roller, chairman of the board, center for the New York Knicks—and I missed the next couple of names, coming back to the world as the name Victoria Roethke descended on the room and hung in the air like the aftershock of a detonation in the upper atmosphere.

  She was sitting two rows up from me, and all I could see was her hair, draped in a Medusan snarl of wild demi-dreadlocks over everything within a three-foot radius. Her hair was red—red as in pink rather than carrot-top—and it tended to be darker on the ends but running to the color of the stuff they line Easter baskets with up close to her scalp. She didn’t say here or present or yes or even nod her amazing head. She just cleared her throat and announced, “He was my grandfather.”

  I stopped her in the hallway after class and saw that she had all the usual equipment as well as a nose ring and two eyes the color of the cardboard stiffeners you get as a consolation prize when you have to buy a new shirt. “Are you really—?” I began, thinking we had a lot in common, thinking we could commiserate, drown our sorrows together, have sex, whatever, but before I could finish the question, she said, “No, not really.”

  “You mean you—?”

  “That’s right.”

  I gave her a look of naked admiration. And she was looking at me, sly and composed, looking right into my eyes. “But aren’t you afraid you’re going to be on Professor What’s-Her-Face’s shitlist when she finds out?” I said finally.

  Victoria was still looking right into me. She fiddled with her hair, touched her nose ring and gave it a quick squeeze with a nervous flutter of her fingers. Her fingernails, I saw, were painted black. “Who’s going to tell her?” she said.

  We were complicitous. Instantly. Half a beat later she asked me if I wanted to buy her a cup of ramen noodles in the Student Union, and I said yeah, I did, as if it was something I had any choice about.

  We ran through a crust of dead snow in a stiff wind and temperatures that hadn’t risen above minus ten in the past two weeks, and there were a lot of people running with us, a whole thundering herd—up here everybody ran everywhere; it was a question of survival.

  In the Union she shook out her hair, and five minutes after we’d found a table in the corner and poured the hot water into the styrofoam containers of dehydrated mystery food I could still smell the cold she’d trapped there. Otherwise I smelled the multilayered festering odors of the place, generic to college cafeterias worldwide: coffee, twice-worn underwear, cream of tomato soup. If they enclosed the place in plastic and sealed it like a tomb, it’d smell the same two thousand years from now. I’d never been in the kitchen, but I remembered the kitchen from elementary school, with its big aluminum pots and microwave ovens and all the rest, and pictured them back there now, the cafeteria ladies with their dyed hair and their miserable small-town loutish-husband lives, boiling up big cauldrons of cream of tomato soup. Victoria’s nose was white from the cold, but right where the nose ring plunged in, over the flange of her left nostril, there was a spot of flesh as pink as the ends of her hair.

  “What happens when you get a cold?” I said. “I mean, I’ve always wondered.”

  She was blowing into her noodles, and she looked up to shoot me a quick glance out of her cardboard eyes. Her mouth was small, her teeth the size of individual kernels of niblet corn. When she smiled, as she did now, she showed acres of gum. “It’s a pain in the ass.” Half a beat: that was her method. “I suffer it all for beauty.”

  And of course this is where I got all gallant and silver-tongued and told her how striking it was, she was, her hair and her eyes and—but she cut me off. “You really are his son, aren’t you?” she said.

  There was a sudden eruption of jock-like noises from the far end of the room—some athletes with shaved heads making sure everybody knew they were there—and it gave me a minute to compose myself, aside from blowing into my noodles and adjusting my black watchcap with the Yankees logo for the fourteenth time, that is. I shrugged. Looked into her eyes and away again. “I really don’t want to talk about it.”

  But she was on her feet suddenly and people were staring at her and there was a look on her face like she’d just won the lottery or the trip for two to the luxurious Spermata Inn on the beach at Waikiki. “I don’t believe it,” she said, and her voice was as deep as mine, strange really, but with a just detectable breathiness or hollowness to it that made it recognizably feminine.

  I was holding onto my styrofoam container of hot noodles as if somebody was trying to snatch it away from me. A quick glance from side to side reassured me that the people around us had lost interest, absorbed once again in their plates of reheated stir fry, newspapers and cherry Cokes. I gave her a weak smile.

  “You mean, you’re like really Tom McNeil’s son, no bullshit?”

  “Yes,” I said, and though I liked the look of her, of her breasts clamped in the neat interwoven grid of a blue thermal undershirt and her little mouth and the menagerie of her hair, and I liked what she’d done in class too, my voice was cold. “And I have a whole other life too.”

  But she wasn’t listening. “Oh, my God!” she squealed, ignoring the sarcasm and all it was meant to imply. She did something with her hands, her face; her hair helicoptered round her head. “I can’t believe it. He’s my hero, he’s my god. I want to have his baby!”

  The noodles congealed in my mouth like wet confetti. I didn’t have the heart to point out that I was his baby, for better or worse.

  It wasn’t that I hated him exactly—it was far more complicated than that, and I guess it got pretty Freudian too, considering the way he treated my mother and the fact that I was thirteen and having problems of my own when he went out the door like a big cliché and my mother collapsed into herself as if her bones had suddenly melted. I’d seen him maybe three or four times since and always with some woman or other and a fistful of money and a face that looked like he’d just got done
licking up a pile of dogshit off the sidewalk. What did he want from me? What did he expect? At least he’d waited till my sister and brother were in college, at least they were out of the house when the cleaver fell, but what about me? I was the one who had to go into that classroom in the tenth grade and read that shitty story and have the teacher look at me like I had something to share, some intimate little anecdote I could relate about what it was like living with a genius—or having lived with a genius. And I was the one who had to see his face all over the newspapers and magazines when he published Blood Ties, his postmodernist take on the breakdown of the family, a comedy no less, and then read in the interviews about how his wife and children had held him back and stifled him—as if we were his jailers or something. As if I’d ever bothered him or dared to approach the sanctum of his upstairs office when his genius was percolating or asked him to go to a Little League game and sit in the stands and yabber along with the rest of the parents. Not me. No, I was the dutiful son of the big celebrity, and the funny thing was, I wouldn’t have even known he was a celebrity if he hadn’t packed up and left.

  He was my father. A skinny man in his late forties with kinky hair and a goatee who dressed like he was twenty-five and had a dead black morbid outlook on life and twisted everything into the kind of joke that made you squirm. I was proud of him. I loved him. But then I saw what a monster of ego he was, as if anybody could give two shits for literature anymore, as if he was the center of the universe while the real universe went on in the streets, on the Internet, on TV and in the movie theaters. Who the hell was he to reject me?

  So: Victoria Roethke.

  I told her I’d never licked anybody’s nose ring before and she asked me if I wanted to go over to her apartment and listen to music and have sex, and though I felt like shit, like my father’s son, like the negative image of something I didn’t want to be, I went. Oh, yes: I went.

  She lived in a cramped drafty ancient wreck of a nondescript house from the wood-burning era, about five blocks from campus. We ran all the way, of course—it was either that or freeze to the pavement—and the shared effort, the wheezing lungs and burning nostrils, got us over any awkwardness that might have ensued. We stood a minute in the superheated entryway that featured a row of tarnished brass coathooks, a dim hallway lined with doors coated in drab shiny paint and a smell of cat litter and old clothes. I followed her hair up a narrow stairway and into a one-room apartment not much bigger than a prison cell. It was dominated by a queen-size mattress laid out on the floor and a pair of speakers big enough to double as end tables, which they did. Bricks and boards for the bookcases that lined the walls and pinched them in like one of those shrinking rooms in a Sci-Fi flick, posters to cover up the faded nineteenth-century wallpaper, a greenish-looking aquarium with one pale bloated fish suspended like a mobile in the middle of it. The solitary window looked out on everything that was dead in the world. Bathroom down the hall.

  And what did her room smell like? Like an animal’s den, like a burrow or a hive. And female. Intensely female. I glanced at the pile of brassieres, panties, body stockings and sweatsocks in the corner, and she lit a joss stick, pulled the curtains and put on a CD by a band I don’t want to name here, but which I like—there was no problem with her taste or anything like that. Or so I thought.

  She straightened up from bending over the CD player and turned to me in the half-light of the curtained room and said, “You like this band?”

  We were standing there like strangers amidst the intensely personal detritus of her room, awkward and insecure. I didn’t know her. I’d never been there before. And I must have seemed like some weird growth sprung up on the unsuspecting flank of her personal space. “Yeah,” I said, “they’re hot,” and I was going to expand on that with some technical praise, just to let her see how hip and knowing I was, when she threw out a sigh and let her arms fall to her sides.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “what I really like is soul and gospel—especially gospel. I put this on for you.”

  I felt deflated suddenly, unhip and uncool. There she was, joss stick sweetening the air, her hair a world of its own, my father’s fan—my absent famous self-absorbed son of a bitch of a father actually pimping for me—and I didn’t know what to say. After an awkward pause, the familiar band slamming down their chords and yowling out their shopworn angst, I said, “Let’s hear some of your stuff then.”

  She looked pleased, her too-small mouth pushed up into something resembling a smile, and then she stepped forward and enveloped me in her hair. We kissed. She kissed me, actually, and I responded, and then she bounced the two steps to the CD player and put on Berna Berne and the Angeline Sisters, a slow thump of tinny drums and an organ that sounded like something fresh out of the muffler shop, followed by a high-pitched blur of semi-hysterical voices. “Like it?” she said.

  What could I say? “It’s different,” I said.

  She assured me it would grow on me, like anything else, if I gave it half a chance, ran down the other band for their pedestrian posturing, and invited me to get into her bed. “But don’t take off your clothes,” she said, “not yet.”

  I had a three o’clock class in psychology, the first meeting of the semester, and I suspected I was going to miss it. I was right. Victoria made a real ritual of the whole thing, clothes coming off with the masturbatory dalliance of a strip show, the covers rolling back periodically to show this patch of flesh or that, strategically revealed. I discovered her breasts one at a time, admired the tattoo on her ankle (a backward S that proved, according to her, that she was a reincarnated Norse skald), and saw that she really was a redhead in the conventional sense. Her lips were dry, her tongue was unstoppable, her hair a primal encounter. When we were done, she sat up and I saw that her breasts pointed in two different directions, and that was human in a way I can’t really express, a very personal thing, as if she was letting me in on a secret that was more intimate than the sex itself. I was touched. I admit it. I looked at those mismatched breasts and they meant more to me than her lips and her eyes and the deep thrumming instrument of her voice, if you know what I mean.

  “So,” she said, sipping from a mug of water she produced from somewhere amongst a stack of books and papers scattered beside the mattress, “what do I call you? I mean, Achates—right?—that’s a real mouthful.”

  “That’s my father,” I said. “One of his bullshit affectations—how could the great one have a kid called Joe or Evan or Jim-Bob or Dickie?” My head was on the pillow, my eyes were on the ceiling. “You know what my name means? It means ‘faithful companion,’ can you believe that?”

  She was silent a moment, her gray eyes locked on me over the lip of the cup, her breasts dimpling with the cold. “Yeah,” she said, “I can see what you mean,” and she pulled the covers up to her throat. “But what do people call you?”

  I stared bleakly across the room, fastening on nothing, and when I exhaled I could see my breath. Berna Berne and the Angeline Sisters were still at it, punishing the rhythm section and charging after the vocals till you’d think somebody had set their dresses on fire. “My father calls me Ake,” I said finally, “or at least he used to when I used to know him. And in case you’re wondering how you spell that, that’s Ake with a k.”

  Victoria dropped out of the blond poet-novelist’s lit class, but I knew where she lived and you couldn’t miss her hair jogging across the tundra. I saw her maybe two or three times a week, especially on weekends. When things began to get to me—life, exams, too many shooters of Jack or tequila, my mother’s zombielike voice on the telephone—I sank into the den of Victoria’s room with its animal funk and shrinking walls as if I’d never climb back out, and it was nothing like the cold, dry burrow I thought of when I thought of my father. Just the opposite: Victoria’s room, with Victoria in it, was positively tropical, whether you could see your breath or not. I even began to develop a tolerance for the Angeline Sisters.

  I avoided class the day we d
issected the McNeil canon, but I was there for Delmore Schwartz and his amazing re-creation of his parents’ courtship unfolding on a movie screen in his head. In dreams begin responsibilities—yes, sure, but whose responsibility was I? And how long would I have to wait before we got to the sequel and my dreams? I’d looked through the photo albums, my mother an open-faced hippie in cutoffs and serape with her seamless blond hair and Slavic cheekbones and my father cocky and staring into the lens out of the shining halo of his hair, everything a performance, even a simple photograph, even then. The sperm and the egg, that was a biological concept, that was something I could envision up there on the big screen, the wriggling clot of life, the wet glowing ball of the egg, but picturing them coming together, his coldness, his arrogance, his total absorption in himself, that was beyond me. Chalk it up to reticence. To DNA. To the grandiosity of the patriarchal cock. But then he was me and I was him and how else could you account for it?

  It was Victoria who called my attention to the poster. The posters, that is, about six million of them plastered all over every stationary object within a two-mile orbit of the campus as if he was a rock star or something, as if he really counted for anything, as if anybody could even read anymore let alone give half a shit about a balding, leather-jacketed, ex-hippie wordmeister who worried about his image first, his groin second, and nothing else after that. How did I miss it? A nearsighted dwarf couldn’t have missed it—in fact, all the nearsighted dwarves on campus had already seen it and were lining up with everybody even vaguely ambulatory for their $2.50 Student Activities Board–sponsored tickets:

  TOM McNEIL

  READING FROM ELECTRONIC

  ORPHANS & BLOOD TIES

  FEB. 28, 8:00 P.M.