Those That Wake

THE INTRUDER

THE NEXT MORNING, the bus came and took Laura and Mal for a five-hour ride. It stopped at towns here and there, each one getting progressively larger until they were on a thruway and through a tunnel and finally onto streets suffocated by long gray shadows cast off of towering gray buildings.

At Port Authority, the silvery gazes of MCT officers greeted them. The subway headed downtown was dense with faceless, preoccupied figures, and Laura found herself hyper-aware of any person glancing at them for a second too long. It seemed to Laura as if everyone was gazing at her intently from behind her back or just out of her peripheral vision.

The last time Laura had come to the city—the last time before her life fell apart—had been for an impromptu weekend shopping jaunt with her mother. She had been in one of these vast rat-and-cockroach warrens the city referred to as the subway when the car had ground to a halt and sat there in the dingy tunnel for nearly an hour. She remembered with disturbing clarity the dull looks on the other passengers’ faces, more resigned than upset, really. The dead faces, many retreating into the comforting companionship of their cells, waited for the MCT to come through the dark tunnel and haul them all out. Laura had wondered then if no help had come or if the train hadn’t started up again, would those other passengers have bothered to get off their asses and hike out? Or had the Con Edison attack robbed them of something so integral that they would have just sat there, tapping away at their cells until they starved to death?

“When did this city give up?” Laura asked Mal, looking sideways at the numb faces around her now.

Mal watched them, too, staring at their cells or at the HDs, or at nothing at all.

“After Big Black,” he said, “the lights went back on, but…”

“But they never came out of the dark,” she said.

“Dark. Yes. Enough to eat us all alive.”

She closed her eyes and rested her head on Mal and searched for his heartbeat.


The sign was well faded, but it still said JERICHO’S. They went up the dirty steps and into the big room, where the smell of worn leather and honest effort brought him comfort. They stood at the door, Laura soaking in the atmosphere with a curious expression and a crinkled nose, watching someone pound the bag, another man jump rope, neither of whom had turned to see Mal yet. And there in the office, amidst a fog of cigar smoke, sat a gruff, stubby-looking man.

“That’s Stoagie,” Mal whispered, his eyes fixed on the man. She could see the anticipation travel down his body like a physical sensation. He grabbed Laura’s hand and hurried them toward the office.

By the window was a wall displaying pictures and trophies. It was crowded, and many of the images held a young Mal in their frames. He was ten, shaking hands with Stoagie in front of the gym. He was fifteen, sweating and with a bruise on his face, and on either side of him Stoagie and a man who must have been Max were holding up his gloved hands. He was a little boy, giving his father a sock on the chin, his father pretending to reel backward from it. Laura looked at the younger face—fewer scars, brighter eyes—and tried to find the Mal she knew in it.

Stoagie had come out of the office and was standing outside in slacks and shirtsleeves. Mal had described him on the bus ride, an old coach and corner man. He looked every inch of it, grizzled and mean and invincible.

Stoagie eyed the incongruous young lady and nodded at Mal’s approach. Mal had stopped dead, not receiving the smile and gruff hug he had expected as greeting.

“Ben Carmichael,” Stoagie said, offering his hand. “Welcome. You interested in our place?”

Mal forced his hand out, cold and numb, and swallowed weakly as he shook the other man’s.

“You look like you’ve done some boxing in your life,” Stoagie said. “Whereabouts?”

“Around,” Mal said in a tone that was rigid and hollow. Stoagie nodded, waiting for more. Mal looked at the wall near them. “Is it true Max Jericho used to coach here?”

“Sure. Used to own a piece of it. That’s why his name’s over the door.”

“What about Max Jericho’s son?”

“Sorry?” Stoagie squinted.

“Didn’t Max Jericho have a son?”

“Not that I know of,” Stoagie said, “and I knew him for a long time. So, no.”

Laura could see that it would have been less painful if he had struck Mal with a sledgehammer in the gut. Mal’s hands actually went to his stomach, and she could feel his suddenly labored breathing through the hand she had put gently on his back.

“Who’s this boy in the picture?” Laura asked. Stoagie came around and squinted at the images in question.

“That’s Max,” he said of the picture where Mal was punching his father. “Don’t know which boy you mean.”

Mal stared at this old man he had known all his life, now a collaborator or a pawn or something even worse.

“I’m a friend of Nikolai Brath’s,” Mal finally came up with in a voice so weak, Laura barely recognized it. “Seen him around lately?”

“You know Brath?” Stoagie looked mildly interested. “I haven’t seen him in a bunch a days, actually.”

“I haven’t seen him, either,” Mal said, and Laura saw his eyes shining with moisture. “That’s why I came around.”

“Ah.” Stoagie stuck his cigar into his mouth and munched it in thought. “Well, if you see him, tell him we’re looking for him.”

“I will.”

And Mal stood, uncertain what exactly to do, until Laura’s hand curled around his and she led him toward the stairs. The men there watched them go, but no one said a word.

***

“I’m so sorry,” she said to him when they were back on the subway. She was holding his hand as tight as she could, but his had gone slack. “We need to find someone else, someone at school, maybe.”

Mal shook his head. It was a life she could hardly imagine herself, going somewhere every day with no friends, no one to talk to, just whiling away the hours.

“Your foster parents?”

“If they got Stoagie, the Fosters won’t know me, either. They barely knew me before all this.”

“What do you mean?”

“When my father died, I was supposed to go back to my mother. I could see the problem with that, but it seemed like it might be a way back to Tommy, too, to make up for leaving. And to have at least part of a family again. My own family. It didn’t matter, though. She wouldn’t take me. She filed papers with the court, said I was threatening and abusive.”

“They believed her?” Laura was incredulous.

Mal’s jaw was tight, fighting the explanation.

“Tommy,” he said, “gave testimony backing her up.”

“Oh, Mal.” She touched his face.

“That was the last thing I ever heard about him, before all this started.” Mal’s face was a flat blank. “So I went into foster care. It didn’t really take. I snuck out sometimes. When I came back a little beat up, they thought I was into drugs or something. They kicked me out after a few months. The next one, the father knew who my dad was, wanted to see if I was as tough. I learned. I learned that I don’t have to get to know them or let them get to know me. I learned we don’t actually have to be a family, that I can stick it out until I’m eighteen. It’s less than a year now, then no more school, no more foster parents. I just go and live my life.”

She looked at Mal. He didn’t put up a fight, he had said. But that’s exactly what he was doing. Not with his mother, maybe, but with his own life. He could easily have bunked in the gym, asked Stoagie or even Brath for help. But he stuck it out in foster care and at school, both of which clearly held no interest for him, because to walk away from them would be giving up.

“Then there’s only one place to go, isn’t there?” she said quietly.


They came to the eastern edge of Manhattan, where the huge gray dome shone dully, like a bug’s carapace. Its bloated body, the size of a tidal wave, loomed over everything and looked as if it were preparing to swallow buildings whole. The creature’s shadow spread across the surrounding neighborhood, and the air smelled of something nauseatingly metallic. The buildings around Mal and Laura were cracked and decrepit, as though the shade of the thing were eroding them, and they could feel its presence like a physical weight. People had scrawled their despair low down on the shell’s surface. We got what we deserved, claimed one message in bleeding paint. The Old Man did this—what will He do next? asked another fading entreaty.

Mal led her finally to a squatting, dirty building, and they stopped at the metal door with the wire-reinforced window. He stared at it long enough that Laura put her hand on his arm and squeezed it softly.

“Do you want me to come up with you?”

He stood silent, then shook his head once and pushed his way in.


The city was running out of Starbucks. The vast corporate dynamo seemed to have given up on the city as the city had started to give up on itself. Once ubiquitous, these commercial shrines to coffee-worship were now so sparse as to be nearly forgotten. But here, amid the cracking buildings, in sight of the dome itself, Laura had found one, remaining perhaps as an outpost to witness the final decline and internment of the city and its people.

She sat sipping coffee that was too sweet, looking around her. Remak had said to find places that were crowded and anonymous. She had shelled out five dollars and forty-eight cents from their dwindling supply of cash and had to suffer for it, too, because paying cash meant having to type your order and feed your money into the sticky and neglected manual order-station.

Other people beamed their orders from their cells to the express order-station and lined up to collect their drinks. Then they sat around, sipping, engaging with the same cells, looking up distractedly from time to time, blinking at the flickering HDs mounted on each of the walls. Laura stared at one absently, showing a dignified man with perfect hair speaking soundlessly from in front of rows and rows of body bags laid out in the background. A picture of Isabel, a hole over her left eye, burned unexpectedly into Laura’s head.

The world was slipping away from them. Now, with their regular food and drink orders digitized into their cells, they could simply use the order stations and didn’t even have to bother with the most rudimentary human contact of asking for something to eat or drink. The world was slipping away from these people, all right, and something else was slipping in. They were forgetting to care. When they finally bothered to look up, there would be nothing to keep them going. They’d never even put up a fight, because they let desolation consume them bit by bit without even knowing it.

Shadow poured in the window instead of light. The vast smudge of the dome was nearly all you could see through the window. If you bothered to look out at it. Laura’s eyes moved from face to face, wanting one of them to look up from a cell and out, to see the darkness infecting them; just see it.

She rose and tossed her coffee disgustedly into the garbage. She walked out and went to wait for Mal, unconsciously huddling her body as she walked along the edge of the dome.



At the sound of the bell, Sharon Graham pulled herself away from the flickering faces on the television and, more painfully, from the glistening bottle sitting on the counter.

On the other side of the door was a big man with broad shoulders wearing dirty cargo pants and a dirty T-shirt. He was a kid, really, but his face was bruised and marked like he’d gone fifteen rounds with a pro or three. He was looking at her queerly, expectantly.

“Yeah?” she said, when he offered nothing but his mute gaze.

“Sharon,” he said, as though trying to shake her out of a trance.

“Yeah?” She had a buzz starting, a warm light suffusing the edges of her vision. But she would surely have recognized someone who looked like this, and she’d never seen him before in her life.

The look on his face got stranger still, from shock to—almost too briefly to discern it—desperation, to disgust, and hell if she was going to stand in her own goddamned doorway and let some stranger be disgusted with her. She swung the door closed, but his hand came up fast and stopped it dead.

“It’s Mal,” he said in a hard voice, and when she only squinted back, his body shifted, loosened, lost some of its tension. She wondered briefly and distantly why she would be so acutely aware of the expressions and body language of a total stranger, and particularly in her state. “My name is Mal,” he said again, in a softer tone.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Mal?” She hoped the sarcasm came through.

“I’m”—he blinked twice—”I’m looking for Tommy. I’m a friend of his. It’s very important that I see him.”

“Good luck,” she said. “I have no idea where he is.”

She flinched back as utter rage reddened his face. He poured into the room, shoving her casually out of his way, and when she felt his strength, she realized if he’d pushed harder, he could easily have broken her against the wall.

“What the hell are you doing?” she shouted after him, her voice both slurred and shaking. “My husband will be home any minute!” What a joke that was. George was about a third this kid’s size.

The intruder stopped in her living room, looking left and right, searching for something.

“Pictures,” he demanded.

“What?”

“Pictures, photos, an album you have of your family.”

“I don’t have—”

“Show them to me!” he thundered.

She grabbed her cell from the tabletop, keyed for the album. He ripped it from her hand, glared down at it, then threw it on the floor.

“Older pictures,” he demanded. “From your first marriage.”

Who the hell was this kid? Her body worked almost mechanically, went to the small closet, removed a thick book with hard photos crammed into it, and held it out before him.

He took it, opened it to a page.

“Who is this?” he said, pointing at a picture of her and Max, long ago, sitting at a table in a restaurant where they used to go to dance after a night at the fights.

“That’s my first husband, Max,” she told him.

He whipped through more pictures.

“This.” He jabbed at another picture. She looked down and saw little Tommy playing with her sister Nancy’s two girls from years and years ago. She hadn’t seen them, or her sister, in person for more than a decade.

“Tommy and my nieces. They—”

“No!” he screamed in her face. “That’s my brother and me!”

She shook her head desperately at him, her mouth agape. Was he saying that she and Max had been his parents? She and Max had Tommy, and that was it for them, more than enough. The trouble that kid caused, who would ever want another? The intruder flung both albums away. He pulled a picture from his pocket, Tommy and a girl she had never seen before.

“How dare you give up on him?” he said, his voice suddenly as quiet as death, conveying far more rage and danger than his hollering had.

She was sure he was going to hammer her into a bloody pulp with those terrible, jagged knuckles of his.

“Hello?” came George’s voice from the hall, and she was blessedly relieved for just an instant until she saw that her visitor had taken George’s arrival as a cue to start looking through the house again. He walked straight by her, ignoring the figure in the hall, and went into the bedroom.

“George.” She hurried to him.

“What the hell is going on?” George saw the man and her obvious consternation.

She explained to him what she could while the intruder walked back past her, with George, ineffectually stuttering threats, storming after him. George could yell at the guy and threaten to call the police, but that was about it. Some men would fight even knowing they couldn’t win, or fool themselves into thinking they could win. But George was not that kind of man. Sometimes she hated him for it and sometimes she loved him for it, but she never wondered how she ended up with him. Her father had been a quiet man with vast reservoirs of violence tumbling beneath. George was a quiet man with vast reservoirs of more quiet beneath.

“Time for you to get out of my house,” George said from a safe distance of nine or ten feet.

The intruder had stopped in the kitchen, staring at the bottle sitting on the counter. He glared at Sharon briefly, then turned back and snatched up the bottle by its neck. George stumbled backwards, putting his arms out in an attempt to protect his wife, as the intruder turned it over, clear liquid pulsing out and splashing on the floor, then flung it as hard as he could against a far wall.

It blasted apart, showering glass and liquor in a wide area. George and Sharon stared, paralyzed, as the intruder walked up to them.

“How could you let this happen?” He burned them with his glare. “You’re supposed to protect your children.”

He walked away and slammed the door behind him so hard that their ears rang with the harsh echo of it.