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Another lance, a lightning bolt, and Carmen’s shoulder bumped into the wall and knocked a motivational poster loose, the cheap frame bouncing to the floor. Donald from the sales department lumbered past, sniffing at the air, jostling against her. His face was a mess of parallel gashes from where a colleague had put up a fight. His head turned to follow Carmen as she staggered past. Her pain was intolerable.
Carmen regretted the lies. She thought Donald and the others could smell it on her, the lie of this pregnancy. She worried that her mother knew, that everyone knew this thing inside her was no accident, but rather a planned and pathetic secret.
The pain in her belly sent Carmen back to a game she used to play, a soothing game. Alone in the sandbox or at the beach, she remembered the calming scoops of sand, the way its cool heft conformed to her hand. Carmen used to love spilling that sand from palm to palm, marveling at the dwindling supply no matter how carefully she tried to catch it all. A mound would become a trickle, a pinch, and then a mere row of tiny grains caught in the two lines of her young hands.
She banged into the water cooler stand, the empty bottle long since knocked free, as pure agony dragged her from past to present like a dog shaking a toy with its teeth.
The game. The loose fist. Sand running out through the curl of her pinky to fall and pile up in her other palm. So careful and exacting, but it all disappeared. Forty passes, maybe fifty, the wind snatching it away invisibly.
A lurch in Carmen’s belly. A kick. The game had gone from soothing to sad as she grew older. She began to see it everywhere, could feel life mimic this obsession of hers. Time slipped away in a familiar manner, and love dwindled as it was tossed back and forth in the form of arguments. It could only go away, everything she saw and everywhere she looked. Money. It disappeared from her accounts no matter how hard she tried to save. Time and love and wealth and anything worth building or wrapping one’s arms around, trying to hold on to it all, eroding like the cascade of sand between two palms, stolen by the breeze.
Carmen was punched in the gut. She saw the thumb-like button of flesh protruding from her belly. A malformed hand was going to come out right where that button was, a tiny claw ripping her open from the inside. Carmen could feel her baby gnawing on her organs. At least, that’s what she thought this was. The pain was her little monster chewing through her, a grotesqueness that would emerge from her skin like some horror movie.
She silently wept.
She imagined her precious baby eating its way through her flesh and falling to the ground, helpless. She pictured it dragging behind her on its slimy cord, wailing and ignored, until it caught on the edge of a cubicle as she turned a corner.
Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.
She was scared enough being alone, having this baby by herself, her and some anonymous donor. She was terrified and tired from keeping the lies straight, the stories of one-night stands and ex-boyfriends, of not wanting anything to do with the father. The truth was pathetic: she just needed someone in her life, a person who couldn’t choose to go away.
Oh fuck. That someone was coming. A rage formed in her powerless limbs, a shuddering violence beneath her skin. It was that feeling she got in her legs sometimes, the need to shake them, to move them, but no amount of activity made the sensation go away. So she would try and hold still, to ride it out, but the pain would grow and grow until she was forced into paroxysms of jitteriness that still didn’t touch the need, that still left her feeling cramped with something worse than broken bones.
Carmen wanted to shout. She wanted to plunge from some great height. The torture in her abdomen grew worse. Her baby was alive. Both alive and undead. And she would not be giving birth to it so much as watching it emerge unbidden from a tear in her flesh.
A wave of blackness, pain so intolerable that Carmen came to on the carpet. Her body struggled to right itself. She moved to her knees, began to stand. And then a sudden release, another surprise urination, warm and sticky running down her legs.
Donald circled back and stood over her. Harris was there, kicking through spilled paperwork. The smell of blood, not urine, was in the air.
Her knees gave out once more, her shoulder striking the ground. She flopped onto her back. In the dim space between the cubicles and the copier room, Carmen lay gazing up at the ceiling, at the hole Louis had fallen through. There was the smell of blood in the air, the ripe smell of a thing alive in a space long devoid of such a scent. Pressure between her legs, the throb of something like a pulse, but Carmen had no pulse. She couldn’t see. Oh fuck, what was happening to her? She couldn’t see, but could feel a thing, a solid thing, press between her thighs. And she thought she heard, maybe, just barely, the cry of her unnamed child as its lungs filled with air for the first time, born into utter hell, not undead at all.
She thought she heard the cry. It was impossible to tell. All was drowned out by the hungry gurgles and shuffling feet as her coworkers converged on their prize, on this thing they had secretly hated her for and now desired to have for their own.
37 • Rhoda Shay
The eating wasn’t too bad. It was better than the walking. It meant kneeling down and taking the weight off her glass slippers. And besides, as foul as the taste was, Rhoda had prepared for this. Life in the aftermath meant eating for sustenance, not for pleasure. It meant holding one’s breath and forcing down dry and pre-packaged meals. It meant eating bugs, which Rhoda had done in abundance to prepare herself. Six times, she had taken that tour with the smelly guy from Craigslist who for twenty bucks would turn over logs in Central Park and show you what you could and couldn’t eat. They tasted like peanuts, he said, and Rhoda hadn’t believed him. Just like peanuts. He’d been right. The power of suggestion, perhaps.
Rhoda told herself that this feast would be like sushi. It was a game show. All she had to do to win a million dollars was gobble it down and keep it down. Which she knew wouldn’t be a problem, she just needed to forgive the taste.
Two jumpers. She’d seen the remnants of another jumper a week ago, but it’d been at night and after a soft rain and much of the mess was gone before her nose led her to the smear. This was fresh. Two others were already there, lapping up pink globs amid scraps of clothes. The bodies had exploded, the clothing shredded. Like a bomb going off. Maybe they’d gone from the top. A man and a woman, judging by the clotted tangle of hair at the end of one mess and the beard on what looked like a chin a pace away.
The insides were everywhere. Made it easy. Like finding a buffet on the pavement. Scrambled human. Rhoda fell to her knees, so thankful to her body for doing so, and the pressure and pain in her mangled feet lessened. The perpetual burning became a distant hum. Eating meant forgetting these other things. Being disgusted lessened her physical pain.
A crowd headed their way in the distance. Rhoda ate while she could. Two jumpers. She wondered if they’d gone together, a lover’s leap. Maybe they’d held hands. It was hard to tell where their hands were. The man’s arm had split open like a lobster tail cooked too long, a neat rupture from impact, a baked potato with all the fixings.
This was ketchup, Rhoda said to herself as she buried her nose in the gash and ate. She chewed down to the bone—the plate, she corrected herself. It wasn’t bad. The constant jolt of electricity in her feet receded to a thrum. It was amazing what one ill could do for another. Amazing what could be justified.
Rhoda ate her way from the man to the woman, ate in that place where the two mingled. The birds plucked scraps of flesh from a dozen feet away, little pink worms. They squawked at each other as the crowds grew closer, and Rhoda thought of the jumpers she’d seen on TV once. Little black shapes falling. Like swooping birds. They caught her eye before the anchor noticed, before the cameraman zoomed in. Yes, those where what the anchorman thought they were. A jacket rippling in the wind, trailing the falling man like a shadow, peeled away as it left one arm and then the other.
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Several of them. She had watched, horrified, while they showed it live. A man in a pike position, head at his knees, turning over and over.
Rhoda never understood why.
Why?
Why jump?
But now she knew. It was the glass in her feet, the little shards of wisdom grinding into her bones. She ate warm muscle, teeth scraping on the insides of the skin—a baked potato, she reminded herself. It wasn’t that bad. Not as bad as the walking.
Rhoda remembered the jumpers. Why leap like that? Because the sitting had to’ve been worse. Trapped in there, the heat intolerable, mangled bodies of people they’d worked with for years, getting hotter and hotter. The only relief was by the shattered windows, the breeze that sucked at the wrecked filing cabinets, the whoosh of winds high above the streets.
Cool by the window, but growing warmer. Fires advancing. No way out. Like slippers of glass and just wanting to fall to one’s knees, to do anything but suffer.
Rhoda ate. If she could have done it with grace, she would have. She pictured herself in a glorious pike, high over a shimmering pool of water, flying down like the swooping bird that stopped, cawed, and with its perfect beak, caught the eye of that plummeting jumper.
Part V • The Lippmans
38 • Darnell Lippman
Darnell told Lewis something like this would happen. She told him. Probably happened all the time. Who knew how often New York City went through this sort of thing without word ever reaching Homer? Alaska was practically a world apart. The East Coast was a foreign land where their days slipped by before Darnell’s had even begun. Coming here was his idea. He wanted to see Ground Zero, see the new tower going up, had found a deal on tickets. But Darnell had told him something like this would happen. She knew it. They’d get crushed by the traffic, mugged, lost, separated. She knew they’d get separated, torn apart by the crowds. She wouldn’t be able to find him and would be stranded there forever, she knew it. And now look.
As soon as they’d landed, she’d had this feeling. Was it three weeks ago? It was in Times Square, that’s when the real panic had started, when she just knew she’d lose him. They’d taken a cab straight from the airport, suitcases and all. Lewis said he couldn’t wait, said they could just walk to the hotel from there. He’d wanted to see this since he was a kid, all the lights and those big video screens. It was where the New Year was ushered in. Prematurely, as far as Darnell was concerned. A new year just in time for dinner back in Homer.
But Darnell had gone along just like she always did. Anything to see him happy. But the crowds! The throngs. Streets packed from sidewalk to sidewalk, closed to traffic, and not even a holiday! Just the regular mob. The daily flow. As crazy as if salmon spawned year-round, like flapping fish that didn’t know when to quit.
She had chased him for blocks, her suitcase swerving behind her and nearly twisting out of her grip, wrist still sore from getting through that crazy airport with a bazillion foreigners, losing sight of him over and over, his balding head a tiny raft bobbing on a sea of pedestrians.
And that’s why the green hat she’d bought him. The “I LOVE NY” hat that used a heart in place of “LOVE. ” Darnell made him stop right there in Times Square and try it on. She told him it was his color. She told him he needed it, that he looked so handsome.
Lewis asked if he was going bald, if that had anything to do with the sudden interest. She told him “no. ” The street vendor took their money and stopped Lewis from taking the sticker off the brim, said he was supposed to leave that on. Lewis narrowed his eyes, and Darnell knew he would be peeling it off as soon as he got away. She didn’t care. All she wanted was a bright canopy on that bobbing raft, a flag on his head like the one that always helped her spot his boat when he pulled back into the harbor.
They had dragged their suitcases—still cool from the altitude—through a New York night throbbing with neon and noise and a frightening amount of life. And Darnell had watched for the green hat. She had followed along, a few paces behind, no idea where they were going, no idea what she would do if they got separated. Would he hear his phone ring over all that noise? Would she know how to hail a cab? She didn’t even know where the hotel was. This was her nightmare, the flashing billboards, videos and commercials the size of football fields, people waving tickets at her, asking her if she liked comedy, no safe way to clutch her purse and still drag her bag, the jostling and bumping, people looking at her, Lewis disappearing between two people ahead, that way cinching shut, have to jump the curb, hurrying down a street closed off to cars, a cop on a clomping and snorting horse, where did he go?
And Lewis, meanwhile, darting merrily through the crowd, oblivious to her fears, looking up at the flashing billboard of a practically nude woman illuminated with countless lights, his mouth hanging open like he’d passed out drunk on the recliner.
The green hat, Darnell told herself.
Don’t lose it.
The green hat.
It bobbed on a sea of the dead, on a crowd of a different kind.
Darnell could see it rise up in the distance, then slink out of sight. It had been knocked askew during the last day or two. She didn’t think it would stay on much longer, wondered if the sticker was still there, that hologram of authenticity.
She followed numbly, but it wasn’t Lewis she seemed to be after. Her limbs lurched of their own accord, an unknown number of days passing, losing sight of him and then regaining it.
That green hat.
Darnell didn’t heart anything about New York. Not now, not even before this nightmare. She knew something like this would happen. As the sun gradually rose on another day of being trapped, of unholy horror, she felt resigned to never seeing home again. She would have woken up by now if this were a dream. She had given up on thinking this hell wasn’t real.
The sun rose and lit the faces of impossibly tall buildings, but not her. Not yet. Darnell was thankful for the night, for the cold that reminded her of Alaska. The smell lessened at night, the shuffle of the mob seemed to slow, the hunger abated. And while there was no sleep, time seemed to pass in long jerks of unconsciousness.