She opened her eyes and looked into his face. “Jakob. I can feel you’re hot, but I don’t see any marks on you. How can you be sure you’re infected?”
He shook his head. “My hip. It started yesterday and it’s got worse and worse. My whole hip is on fire.”
Jakob had his right arm loosely around her waist, the gun grazing her spine. He reached up with his other hand and drew his knuckles along her cheek in a gentle, smoothing gesture. She shivered helplessly.
“Let’s go sit down. Let’s have it like we talked about. Let’s have it nice, just like we both wanted.”
14
He steered her into the den, where, half a year before, they had sat together drinking white wine and watching people jump from the top of the Space Needle. He gripped her upper arm like he was preparing to disjoint it, twist it loose from her body the way a person might wrench a drumstick off a roast chicken. Then he seemed to realize he was hurting her and he let go and slipped his palm—gently, almost tenderly—along her biceps.
The shadows in the room shifted this way and that in the red candlelight.
“Let’s sit,” said the shadow beside her, one among the many. “Let’s talk.”
Jakob sank into his favorite chair, the Great Egg of Jakob . . . a chair made of wicker with an egg-shaped frame and a hole in the side, a cushion nestled within. He was a small man and he could cross his legs Buddha-style and still fit himself entirely within the wicker teardrop. He put the gun in his lap.
She perched on the edge of the coffee table to face him. “I want to look at your hip. I want to see the ’scale.”
“You want to tell me I don’t have it, but I know I have it.”
“Will you show me your hip?”
He paused, then stretched one leg out through the egg, and rolled a little onto his side. Jakob pushed down the elastic waistband of his track pants, to show her the hollow of his right hip, which was a bloody, abraded mess. The flesh was yellowish-black beneath a cross-hatching of deep scratches. It appalled her to look at it.
“Oh, Jakob. What did you do? I told you, if you find a mark on you, leave it alone.”
“I can’t stand to look at it. I can’t stand to have it on me. I don’t know how you can bear it. I get a little nuts. I tried scraping it off with a razor.” He made a choked, ragged noise that could not quite pass for laughter.
Harper narrowed her eyes, looking it over, “The ’scale calcifies into bright flecks. I don’t see any flecks.”
“It’s yellow. All around the edges.”
“That’s bruise. That’s just bruise. Jakob . . . is this the only mark on you?”
“On the inside of my knee. And an elbow. Don’t ask to see them. I’m not here for a medical exam.” He turned to sit properly and allowed the waistband of his track pants to snap back into place.
“Are they all like that?”
“I scratched them up the same. I got hysterical. I’m ashamed of that now, but it’s true.”
“I don’t think that’s Dragonscale. I’ve seen a lot of it, I should know. And Jakob: you’ve been out of this house six weeks. Almost seven. If you don’t have it yet, that probably means—”
“It means you’ll say anything to stop what happens next. I knew you’d try and tell me I wasn’t sick. I could’ve scripted this entire conversation. You think I don’t know what a burn feels like? It hurts all the time.”
“It’s infected, Jakob, but not with the trychophyton. It’s infected because you clawed yourself up and it hasn’t been treated or dressed. Jakob. Please. You’re healthy. You should leave. You should go right now.”
“Stop it. Stop bargaining and stop lying. I don’t want to hate you right now, but every time you tell me another lie, to try and save yourself, I just want to shut you up.”
“When was the last time you ate?”
“I don’t know how you can even talk about food. Maybe I should just do it right now. This is awful. This isn’t like we talked about. We talked about making love and having music and reading our favorite poems to each other. We talked about making it nice, a little party for two. But you’re just scared, and if I didn’t have this gun you’d run away. You’d run and let me die by myself. Without a shred of guilt about what you did to me. About passing it to me. That’s the real reason you keep telling me I’m okay, I think. You’re not just lying to me. You’re lying to yourself. You can’t face it. What you did.”
His voice was serene, without the slightest trace of the hysteria she had heard when they talked on the phone. His gaze was serene, too. He watched her with the sort of glassy calm Harper associated with the mentally ill, people who sat on park benches chatting gaily with invisible friends.
His newfound calm did not entirely surprise her. Terror was a fire that held you trapped in the top floor of a burning building; the only way to escape it was to jump. He had been stoking himself up to this last leap for weeks. She had heard it in his voice, every time they talked on the phone, even if she didn’t recognize it at the time. He had made his choice at last and it had brought him the peace he was looking for. He was ready to go out the window; he wanted only to be holding her hand on the way down.
What did surprise her was her own calm. She wondered at it. In the days before the Earth began to burn, she had carried anxiety with her to work every morning and brought it home with her every night; a nameless, inconsiderate companion that had a habit of poking her in the ribs whenever she was trying to relax. And yet in those days there was nothing really to be anxious about. Her head would spin at the thought of defaulting on her student loans, of getting into another yelling match with her neighbor about his dog’s habit of tearing open garbage and spreading it all over her lawn. And now she had a baby in her, and sickness crawling on her skin, and Jakob was crazy, sitting there watching her with his gun, and there was only this quiet readiness, which she irrationally believed had been waiting for her all her life.
At the end, I get to be the person I always wanted to be, she thought.
“Is that really so terrible?” she asked. “Is it really so awful that I wanted to believe you didn’t have it? I wanted you and the baby to make it. I wanted that more than I ever wanted anything, Jake.”
Something seemed to dim in his eyes. His shoulders drooped.
“Well, that was stupid. No one is going to make it. The whole world is toast. Literally. The planet is going to be a cinder by the time we’re done with it. Everyone is going to die. This is the last generation. I think we always knew that. Even before Dragonscale. We knew we were going to choke on our pollution and run out of food and air and all the rest of it.”
He could not resist lecturing her, even in the last minutes of her life, and it came to her then that she hadn’t been in love with him for years. He was a tiresome know-it-all. This was followed by a second, startling notion that she wasn’t quite ready to process, which was that she hadn’t gone to work in the hospital hoping to be Florence Nightingale, no matter what he said. She had gone to work there because she wasn’t interested in her own life anymore. She had never felt she was putting anything of great value at risk.
This was followed by a slow throb of anger, which she felt as a hot prickle in her Dragonscale. Jakob had done that to her—plunged his philosophical syringe into her life and tried to suck all the simple happiness out of it. In a sense, he had been trying to kill her for years.
She felt herself getting ready. She didn’t even know for what. She was gathering her courage for some act that was as yet unclear to her, but which she felt was coming, rushing toward her.