“Ah, fuckit.” Matt threw the box in the cart, adjusted the strap he’d rigged to his shotgun, and pushed his spoils down the aisle. “Better get your head together and grab some shit,” he called over his shoulder. “You ain’t eating nothin’ of mine!”
Dennis was left alone with his sticky sleeve. A bag of coffee tumbled off the shelf across from him and landed with a sad thud on the ground, the contents spilling out in a brown avalanche. Lisa was still digging through something on the other side. He could hear her cussing about the batteries in another iPod running dry. They were going through them like packs of gum. Stupid.
He looked down at his arm.
So fucking stupid.
It was getting more and more difficult to move. He had assumed it would be like a light switch when it came, like the Incredible Hulk turning green and ripping his shirt off, some kind of instant morphing into his own permanent Mr. Hyde. But it had started with a slow paralysis, a gradual fatigue that turned into frozen limbs. He could move his wounded arm if he wanted to—he was pretty sure he could lift it up over his head if he really wanted to—but he couldn’t make himself want to. Staring down at it, Dennis tried to give his own body a weak command. It felt locked. Pinned. He tried harder. Some part of him was still there, was telling him that if he produced a sudden burst of energy, if he just tried hard enough, it would be like breaking out of some kind of packed sand.
That’s what this was. It was the time his older brothers had buried him in the sand at Virginia Beach. Everything had been funny until he wasn’t sure if he could get out or not. They would’ve made fun of him if he had panicked and tried, but he would die if he couldn’t be sure. So Dennis would twitch and wiggle just enough to crack the sand, enough to see if he could still move, and his brothers would laugh and pack it back down, slapping the ground with the flats of their shovels, making the cool sand tight against his chest.
When the sand had been up to his neck and Dennis had realized he couldn’t move at all, he’d gotten scared. He had begged them, tears running down his face, salt in his mouth, to please dig him out. And they had laughed. Laughed until his screaming had summoned their mother from the water and their scowls had told Dennis that he would never live this down.
For the second time in his life, Dennis couldn’t move. He couldn’t lift his hand. Couldn’t even twitch his little finger.
He sat there among the cereal boxes, terrified. This time he wouldn’t cry. He couldn’t cry. He wasn’t able.
But then his head moved. It moved of its own accord. Someone else was doing it, pulling strings. And the coffee, the open bag of spilled coffee sitting across from him—Dennis couldn’t smell it anymore.
He couldn’t smell the coffee. But he could smell Lisa.
19 • Chiang Xian
There was meat hanging in the window. Chickens strung up by their necks, pigs wrapped in twine with their little hooves in prayer, fish frozen mid-dive, their dull scales cracking off and fluttering to the ground like silver blossoms. The meat was rotten. The air in the tiny shop was heavy with the stench of it after being locked tight for days and days. Clouds of flies gathered and maggots squirmed. The meat had long since ceased to be appetizing.
Two chairs lay tipped over beneath the meat, old and ornate chairs of carved wood. The shop owners had used those chairs to hang their daily offerings and to adjust the signs on which prices fluctuated daily. Chiang Xhen now roamed that shop in meandering circles, bumping into tables, her inhuman and lonely grunts filling the darkened space, her young eyes occasionally falling to the fragile chairs lying on their sides, her thoughts drifting toward her parents.
The crowded city made for a strange life for a young Chinese girl. Her parents had been born in China whereas she had been born in this tiny microcosm, this span of city blocks made to look like someone else’s home.
Sure, she got out of Chinatown occasionally, but not often. Her parents took her to museums and concerts. They stood before large canvases while her mother showed Chiang how other people made brush strokes, what a hand both confident and relaxed could produce. Both of her parents stressed hours of practice. There, look at how that woman in the first chair plays violin, how her hand lays over to the side with just the edges of her fingers sliding up and down the strings.
Chiang complained after one concert that she was only ten, that it hurt her fingers to twist them that way. And when they got home that night, Chiang’s mother uncovered her own feet and pointed to them, and Chiang kept future discomforts to herself.
Her parents had been born in China and had brought much of it over with them. But it was a warped version of home, Chiang discovered. The more she talked to her friends, the more she found that her parents held in their hearts a fantasy version of their homeland. Chiang was now eleven, and had only that year discovered that dragons weren’t real. They never had been. It made her question the dinosaurs from that museum, too.
At her one-room school over a noisy restaurant, with the banging of pots and pans in the background, they learned a lot of politics. Her teacher didn’t know English. She spoke more of the news in China than she did of the city in which they lived. Chiang learned without meaning to that she was lucky to be alive. Back home, her parents may have decided to not keep her. But here, she could have all the brothers and sisters she wanted.
She didn’t argue with her teacher, didn’t mention her mother’s feet or the way her father looked at her with sadness. She had only begged for a little brother once. Her parents had yelled at one another all night, making it impossible to sleep. So whenever her teacher spoke of such things, Chiang gazed out the window at something else.
Usually, it was at the bold stripes on the flags of Little Italy, which every year her people encroached more and more. When she mentioned this to her father once—that she felt badly for the Italians—he had shrugged. Pounding a flank of meat with his wooden hammer, he had explained to her that some people care more about where they come from than others. He told her to feel sorry for them about that while he hammered the meat with more anger.
Chiang had felt sorry for her father that day, and for the meat.
She made another circuit of the shop, her parents‘ shop. She had never been so hungry in all her life. The days had gotten away from her—not for lack of counting or so grand a number, but because her mind wandered as it grew dark and light again outside. Strangers occasionally pressed against the glass, eying the meat, deciding it wasn’t for them. This much hadn’t changed. Tourists, turning their noses up at delicacies. Laughing and taking pictures. Only, they didn’t take pictures anymore. They paused with their horrible wounds. The disgusting display was in reverse, now. And then they lumbered onward, these tourists who had become grosser than the things they used to mock.
Chiang wondered how long this would last, how long before everyone died for good. She ran that last day over and over in her head. School had been cancelled suddenly, parents arriving for their children, people running in the streets. Only, they hadn’t been screaming. That scared her the most, the wide eyes and slack jaws of the adults hurrying away with their children in their arms. In the movies, they were always screaming as loudly as they could while a Chinese version of Godzilla crushed buildings beneath its scaly feet. Instead, there had been silence, which was unnerving because it wasn’t right. The people simply scattered, legs hurrying, no time for screams at all.
Or maybe they didn’t want to draw attention. The sick were already in the streets. It was difficult to see them, for they moved slowly. They didn’t stand out. Not until you bumped into them, looking for your parents, fighting the crowds to get home, when a kind stranger takes your hand, bends down to see if you need help, and bites off your fingers.
Chiang made another lap of the shop. She had never been so hungry before. Even waiting until the last customer was served before her mother made something in the back had never been this bad. Nothing had. She’d lost count of the days spent circling the shop, but it had been three since she’d had anything to eat. Three days with the hunger driving her mad, the feeling of her insides turning out.
A newspaper fluttered by outside and pressed itself to the glass. It was like a tourist, peeping in. Headlines from those last days were spread across its face—news of an outbreak entirely under control. Until it wasn’t. Chiang wondered what was happening in China. She thought of her school teacher and all her friends and wondered what had happened to them. As the people passed, she looked for anyone she knew, but they were all tourists.
The newspaper flapped away on the breeze. Where it had pressed, Chinese characters painted with a young and unsure hand could be seen against the fading backlight of another counted day. The characters were supposed to say:
Rénshēng. Life.
Outside, it would have read this way. To the tourists, of course, it meant nothing. Just part of the backdrop that lent Chinatown its authenticity. For locals, however, it promised something: healthy ingredients and traditional medicines. Eternal life.
Chiang had laughed when she’d first seen it from the inside. After she had drawn it for the third time, washing off each attempt with a bucket of water and a rag as she attempted to satisfy her mother’s exacting standards, she saw what it meant in reverse. From the inside, the brush strokes were backwards. It looked more like:
Shēngrén. Stranger.
A stranger life. Life as a stranger. A girl growing up in a home away from home, people she didn’t know peering through the glass, taking pictures of and pointing at the delicacies hanging in the window. It was funny how that worked out. Like the characters knew all along that this was coming. A secret only they were privy to.
Chiang laughed in her mind. It was the only place she could laugh or cry anymore. She wanted out. She wanted to run, to skip and shout and scream, but knotted chains hung from the doors of the little shop. Her parents had locked her inside with them, had locked away their one precious girl while she grew sicker and sicker, and they worried more and more.
The sun slanted through the window, casting shadows of words in reverse, and little motes of dust dipped and swirled like fairies with a life of their own. There were two chairs of ornate wood tipped on their sides, catching the sun. The flesh up past the knees might sate Chiang’s painful hunger, but she could circle and circle and wave her arms and never reach any more. She had eaten all that she could. She was powerfully hungry and all alone, and meat hung in the window of her parents’ shop.
20 • Dennis Newland
“It’s the end of the fucking world,” Matt had told Dennis, holding out a smoking roach, the day before they’d made a run at the grocery store, the day before Dennis had been bit.
They were still in that office building where they’d been rationing candy bars. They’d just killed a group of survivors eerily similar to their own foursome, another pair of couples thrown together by the nightmare of the world. This other group had been surviving noisily one floor above, carrying on, acting like maniacs. After a long discussion about whether to bring trouble or wait for it to come to them, Dennis and Matt had opted for the latter. They convinced Lisa and Sarah that it was best, that this other group would bring death upon them all. And so they rehearsed and checked their gear and went on the offensive for the very first time.
“It’s like that episode of Seinfeld,” Sarah had joked, sizing up the two young couples they’d murdered in their sleep. She thought they looked like them. It took some explaining before any of the rest of them got the joke. Sarah was the only one who watched old sitcoms. And besides: nothing much was funny after you’d shot a living person, not while you were digging through their pockets and the bodies were still warm.
Matt was the one who’d discovered the stash. Later that night, he’d held out that roach, the ember fading, telling Dennis to take a hit, that it’d be good for him, that it was the end of the fucking world and to stop being such a pussy.
Dennis had passed. He always did. He mumbled something about asthma, his old and entirely made-up excuse to not smoke. Matt had shrugged and had given life to that ember with a noisy intake of air.
Dennis had no problem lying to friends. He was used to keeping secrets, was skilled at keeping things from others. The sticky wound beneath his sleeve was just the latest. Later that night, while their cubicle fortress filled with smoke, Dennis had found an empty cubicle down the endless row. He had shuffled through the scattered supplies and loose paper like snowdrifts from some weeks-old panic and made himself comfortable in quiet solitude.
He didn’t know how to explain to his new friends what getting stoned felt like to him. Hell, he’d been with Lisa for years and had never even told her. He was pretty sure it was a singular reaction, that everyone else must feel something different, but to him getting stoned was a scary place, not a soothing one.
The first time he’d smoked up, he was convinced he would die. The high had lasted for hours, for most of the damn day. He remembered standing in Lisa’s kitchen, the cabinet open, hand on the knob, looking at an assortment of glasses. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there. Must’ve teleported from the living room. The TV and the laughter from his friends were faraway sounds. He was disconnected from everything.
Later, sitting under a cold shower, praying impatiently for the numbness that had crawled into his veins to crawl the fuck back out, he had watched the hair on his legs wave as the water rained down from the faucet. The hair stirred like the seaweed at the breaker’s edge on Far Rockaway, like small arms pushing out of his skin and trying to get his attention, trying to wiggle free. A million dead things buried alive and working to escape their epidermal graves.
Dennis had become terrified that he would always be like that. The pot had permanently dumbed him. Hours later, lying perfectly still on the bathroom floor, his thoughts had begun to clear. He could analyze what had gone wrong. But summoning his thoughts seemed to make his flesh melt away, his body go perfectly numb. And if he tried to move, the opposite happened. He could feel again, but now he couldn’t think.