Its piercing squeal sucks the lust out of the room like an open airlock. A ringing phone is not the dismissible annoyance it once was. The phone is an intercom, routed directly into the stadium’s command offices, and every call is urgent.
Julie hops off me and runs upstairs, throwing on her shirt as she goes, and I trudge behind her, trying not to feel relieved.
“Julie Cabernet,” she says into the bulky receiver by the bed.
I hear Lawrence Rosso’s voice on the other end, his words indecipherable but tense. I was supposed to meet him this evening for another of our little chats—he has questions about the Dead and I have even more about the Living—but Julie’s darkening expression tells me tonight’s tea will go cold.
“What do you mean?” she asks, then listens. “Okay. Yeah. We’ll be there.” She hangs up and looks at the wall, twisting her hair again.
“What’s going on?”
“Not sure,” she says. “Traffic.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Traffic?”
“?‘Disconcerting traffic’ around Goldman Dome. He’s calling a community meeting to talk about it.”
“Is that all he said?”
“He didn’t want to go into it over the phone.”
I hesitate. “Should we be worried?”
She considers this for a moment. “Rosy’s not paranoid. When we were on the road he was always the one inviting strangers to share our wine while Dad waved his gun and demanded IDs . . .” She wraps her hair into a tight ringlet, then releases it. “But he has gotten a little more protective since . . . what happened.” She forces an easy smile. “Maybe ‘disconcerting traffic’ is just some Goldman kids drag racing the corridor.”
She snatches the car keys off the dresser a little too fast and descends the stairs with the tempo of a tap dance. I shouldn’t have asked the question. I have plenty of worries inside my own head; I don’t need any more from outside.
I glance back at the house as we approach the car and feel another wave of guilty relief to be leaving it. This is my home, but it’s also my wrestling ring, the site of all my trials and humiliations as I stumble toward humanity. Whatever is happening in the city, at least it won’t be about me.
“I’ll drive,” I say, crossing in front of her.
She eyes me dubiously. “Are you sure?”
Her reaction is fair—I still have a habit of using other cars for parking brakes—but after this latest disappointment in the bedroom, I feel a need to recover some manhood.
“I’m getting better.”
She smiles. “If you say so, road warrior.” She tosses me the keys.
I start the car and put it into gear, and after a few jerks and sputters and minor fender benders, I drive us out of the cul-de-sac, ignoring the soldiers’ laughter. Embarrassment is just one of the many perils I accepted when I made the choice to live. Living is awkward. Living hurts. Did I ever expect otherwise?
Once upon a time, in a short-and-sweet fairy tale, I might have. I was a child then, a newborn baby piloting a man. But I am rapidly growing up, and the Frank Sinatra fantasies are fading. I do not have the world on a string and Julie is not my funny valentine. We are an asthmatic orphan and a recovering corpse driving a rusty car into a rabid world, and Evan Kenerly was right: we don’t know anything.
WE
WE FEEL THE CURRENTS flowing in the earth. We see the movement beneath the stillness. We watch the people sitting alone in their homes, and we hear the molten rivers in their heads.
A short man sinks deep in his recliner. He has not moved in sixteen days. This would not be unusual if he were simply dead, but he is also Dead, a condition of much greater interest to us. The dead have evaporated and we have breathed them in, but the Dead remain weighty and agentive. To be dead is to be gone from this world. To be Dead is to be marked with death’s brand and conscripted into its army, but still here, still blessed and cursed with a body, and thus still awash with choice.
When asked his name, the Dead man presses his lips together and produces a percussive stutter. His neighbor, a small Living female, has dubbed him “B.” But this is the extent of his interaction with this woman and her pale friend with the baffling scent—the electric sweetness of life with a note of death’s smothering null. And under this . . . something else. Something very distant but very large. When B smells this third scent, he feels motion beneath his feet. He feels a vastness opening up around him. He feels awe and terror, so he stops breathing until his neighbors go away and the scent fades.