The Veil (Testaments I and II) Read online

  “If it wasn’t safe out there, Ike, what good would it do for you to be with us? Can you even fire a gun?”

  He shakes his head. The embarrassment, if that’s what it was, is gone.

  “I just hate the thought of you being out there. I hate the thought of—”

  “It’s fine with me,” says Trixie, like she’s the world’s greatest conversationalist. Like she’s some kind of goddamned social secretary. And then, as though this is nothing more than a shopping trip, she says, “We can bring back more stuff.”

  Ike’s blinking. I’m unable to speak. I’d like to take Trixie into the other room and chew her ear off. No, I’d like to paddle her meddlesome ass. Our ladies’ day out is history. The channeling of much needed healing will have to wait for a manless day. God knows when that will be. Although, you could argue that even with Ike there it’ll still be a manless day.

  “Fine,” I say. “Tag along if you want. But you’re taking a gun. And you’re taking a cart too.”

  I stomp toward the door and he gets out of the way just in time to avoid getting flattened.

  Ike Delgado. Just a stop on my journey but the fucking train’s broken down. No one knows if it’ll ever get going again. What pisses me off more than anything is the knowledge that a couple of days into my period, I’ll suddenly get over hating everything about Ike Delgado and I’ll stay that way for almost three weeks.

  This anger, this conflict. It isn’t really even me. Is it? Can I be permanently defined by what I am for only five or six days out of every month?

  You’re fucking right I can.

  Three miles out from the Station and not a single word has passed between us. If it had been just me and Trixie, that’s what I would have expected. With the three of us it’s different. There’s no point in pretending none of us know what this looks like: Mummy, Daddy and daughter. But even Ike, who wanted so much either to be with us or not to be left behind at the Station, even Ike is uncomfortable now that he’s here. Like me he wears his shotgun in a sling over his shoulder but unlike me he looks like he’s wearing a banana back there, not a lethal weapon. Out of nowhere, Ike starts singing:

  “In a town where I was born, lived a man who sailed to sea. And he told me of his life in the land of submarines…”

  Trixie looks at him. She looks shocked. But he doesn’t stop.

  “We all live in a yellow submarine, yellow submarine, yellow submarine. We all live in—”

  “Ike.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t.”

  “Am I off key?”

  I use my eyes to point to Trixie. I expect him to shut up now but he doesn’t. Far from it.

  “Hey, Trixie,” he says. “Does my singing bother you?”

  She looks away and doesn’t say anything. I already know she’s not going to say anything and I give him a silent I-told-you-so. She probably won’t speak for the whole of the day. If he hadn’t been here, she might have. I’m thinking about turning back when she says, “Did you make up those words?”

  “No. I wish I had.”

  “What about the tune? Did you invent it?”

  “Nuh uh. It’s an old song. A song from just before I was born. Do you like it?”

  She nods. And then she does something I hardly ever see her do. She smiles.

  “I’ve seen submarines on TV,” she says. And then she stops walking. We all stop. “I feel like we really are living in a submarine. Taking a walk like this, it’s like being deep-sea divers, isn’t it?”

  “It’s exactly like that,” says Ike. Me, I don’t know what to say. I keep my mouth shut for once.

  “Do you think—”

  She seems to lose confidence now. Like she’s already risked too much.

  “Do I think what?” asks Ike.

  She looks up at him.

  “Do you think they knew? The ones who wrote the song? Do you think they knew this would happen one day and they wrote the song so that we would know someone else understood what it was like to be here? To be like this?”

  Ike goes down on one knee and now he’s the same size as Trixie.

  He’s going to fuck this up badly. “Do you like the song?” She nods. Smiles again. “Do you like music?” She shrugs.

  “I don’t know. I never heard much of it.”

  “Well, you’re right in a way to ask the question. See, music is kind of a language and it’s a language that can speak to anyone, anywhere. Even any time. So, even though the people who wrote Yellow Submarine wrote it more than forty years ago, the song still speaks to us now. Even in these strange times. That means they were great musicians. Great communicators. Geniuses.”

  “What were they called?”

  “The Beatles.”

  “The beetles?”

  “Yeah.”

  A third smile from Trixie makes it a very special day. “That’s a really lame-assed name.”

  We reach the memorial park. It’s a huge parallelogram right in the center of the city, big enough that some of the main roads go right through it instead of around the outside. From here we can find the department store I have in mind for Trixie’s game raid, a place called Loopy’s. They were the place to buy stuff for kids before Toys ‘R’ Us came along. After we get the games, the same street will take us out to the suburbs and beyond if we have the time and the legs to try it.

  The grass in the park is brown. Not dead but not right either. The shrubs and trees have a similar look to them, like they’re hanging on through some kind of blight or drought. The thing is, there is no drought. It rains just as much now as it ever did. We skirt around the edge of the park, because who wants to walk through brown vegetation? I feel like we’d be walking through something dead. Except I know the park is still alive. This is going to sound unhinged but I don’t think I’d feel safe in there. What if the stuff in the plants gets into me? I start to think the park is very much the opposite of dead. It lives, it thinks, it observes. I don’t want to go in there.

  All is silence again between the three of us but it’s a good silence now, a silence we can all trust and rely on. It’s like a balloon we’re all leaning against from different directions. It holds us up and it holds us together.

  Outside Loopy’s, Ike surprises me.

  “I’m gonna stay out here while you get what you need. Just keep an eye out, you know?”

  “There’s nothing out here to keep an eye on, Ike.”

  “Yeah. I know. I’ll be right here when you come back. Take as long as you want.”

  Is that disappointment in Trixie’s eyes? I don’t believe what’s happening here. We push our two carts through the big, glass front doors and Ike leans against the wall. I just hear the rasp of a lighter as the doors shut behind us. He should know better. Smoking kills. It’s a bad example for Trixie.

  Inside, without power for the fluorescent lighting, it’s gloomy. There’s a minute film of dust over everything now. All that bright plastic and cellophane, all those colorful enticements and excitements are dull and purposeless. Who will use these toys and games now? Who will ride the scooters, skateboards and BMX bikes? Who will dress up as knights or witches? Who will spend hours leading Lara Croft to treasure through ancient ruins?

  I realize I’ve come to a stop. Staring at all the displays and unopened boxes stacked on the shelves, I’m standing like a mannequin abandoned in the wrong store. Up ahead Trixie looks back. She doesn’t speak, she beckons. And then she smiles in reassurance. This is getting to be a habit.

  ***

  A slender man leans against the bricks of a wall. His right hand brings a cigarette to his mouth, lingers and drops away. The hand is long-fingered, artistic. A long panatela would suit it better than a butt. After too long, the man exhales. There’s no wind. Somewhere in front of him the smoke evaporates.

  Around him rise the blocks of the city. A city built on money, trade and power. A city its dwellers were proud of. A city to be envied. His place in it has changed. He is an ant among tombs
tones, his colony almost destroyed.

  He looks around and he is glad, thankful for the silence. He could never have dreamed such a silence possible, did not even know he wanted it until it surrounded him.

  He smokes and listens to the silence.

  There must be a tune in his head, for soon he’s tapping a rhythm with his boot and drumming his fingers on his thighs, still leaning against the wall. He begins to scan the street, its shop fronts and doorways and second floor windows. When there were people here, this single street would have been home to a thousand secret acts, a million secret thoughts every day. Stories. It would have been full of stories. Now all the stories have gone.

  His eyes flicker across the street’s facades and he knows that’s what they always were. How the street looked and how it actually was were two very different things, things not necessarily related. And the people who once crowded this street – buying, selling, walking, driving, hustling, merely passing by – they were the same. They were constructions built to withstand the city but never strong enough to display the truth through undraped windows. What about now? Was it any different in his dwindling colony? He thought not. The buildings were different but the windows remained curtained or shuttered, and inside, deep in the cellars and high in the dusty attics, truth still hid. The man expected that was where it would remain until it died.

  The city was better in silence for in silence no lies could be told. Nor could brave attempts to tell the truth fail.

  Something takes the man’s attention more specifically. A large white car parked like all the others. It doesn’t belong in the scene. The other cars on the street are saloons and sports cars and practical run-arounds designed for city traffic. They are city-slab shades in the main – grey, gunmetal, black, blue, brown – with only occasional flourishes of color. But this car is the only white vehicle in the street, as far as the man can look in either direction.

  It is also larger than most of the other cars because it is not meant for city use. This is a car that would transport tribal warriors across Afghanistan, or insurgents with rocket propelled grenades across a desert. It was a truck really. High suspension, tires so knobbly they’d grab the dirt, a huge covered bed for equipment in the back. Four doors. Bull bars like iron gates protecting the grille. There wasn’t a speck of dirt on the car, nor, he noticed, was there a license plate.

  The man had never needed a car in the city and, even if he had, he couldn’t have afforded to run one. Now, if he wanted, he could at least find out what it felt like to sit in one. What the hell. Half embarrassed, even though there was no one around to see him, and grinning like a kid on Christmas morning, he crosses the street, unable to stop himself from looking around to see if anyone’s watching.

  The closer he gets to the truck the bigger it is. When he gets to it, it towers above him. He stops beside the Hilux feeling a thrill of guilt and even though he tells himself not to be so goddamned stupid, the feeling doesn’t go away. He’s pleased. He reaches for the door handle, presses the button and pulls. The door opens. It’s a big step up to the driver’s seat but there’s a big step to help him get there. He pulls himself inside, shifts in the seat and pulls the door shut. The car smells brand new and synthetic inside. Maybe it smells of some kind of adhesive, he’s not sure. He alters the distance of the seat from the wheel, adjusts the angle of the backrest and places both hands on the steering wheel.

  From his high place he looks down on all the other vehicles.

  He imagines himself not in the city, dominating other drivers, but out on a highway heading for a country road and from there a dirt road and from there a track until finally he comes to a stone farmhouse very far from the city, very far from anywhere. This is where he’d really like to be. Away from Commuters and Stoppers alike. Somewhere quiet but in a different way to the quiet of the city. Maybe there would be animals out there, wild but normal. Maybe the trees out there would be green and spreading and healthy like the trees in the park used to be, only bigger, better, more beautiful.

  The kinds of trees you could build a little tree house in.

  And here he stops himself from imagining any more.

  His hands fall limp from the steering wheel to rest either side of his lap. All the strength has gone out of them. Ahead all he sees is the dead city in all its abandonment. The imagination is dangerous. There is a difference between hope and illusion. That difference must be respected because within it worms the root of suicide.

  The man looks across the street at the shop where the girl and the woman will be exploring, taking clever items from the shelves, items that wear away time and induce momentary forgetfulness of reality. More lies spreading from the old world into the new. For there is no barrier against untruth. It is a disease all are born with, one the man knows he carries just like everyone else. No cataclysm will eradicate it, there is no cure for lies, and he is full of them.

  The man notices the keys are in the ignition and, because he can’t think of anything else to do while he waits, he turns them.

  The Hilux grumbles to life at the touch of his slim fingers.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Trixie’s shopping cart is piled high. In it she has placed three two-thousand-piece jigsaws. Stacked beside them is Monopoly, Cluedo, Mousetrap, Chess and Battleship – all deluxe editions. She has puzzle books by the dozen, especially word-searches and logic problems. There’s a jump rope and a Cabbage Patch Kid, a Sea Monkey ‘kingdom’ with years of food supply.

  My cart is empty. If there was a firearm department in this store, I’d be looking at the guns, filling the cart with ammo. I would feel as though I were stealing gold bars. But there’s no gun counter here. Maybe there’ll be time for that later.

  The only noise as we survey the aisles is the rubbery squeak of our boots on the waxy floor and the occasional cage-rattle of something being dumped into my cart now that Trixie’s is full. We’ll share some of the stuff out back at the Station. I wonder how we’ll feel using all these things. Do we still understand about fun? Can there be anything to these games other than passing our trapped time?

  My stomach rumbles. I haven’t eaten anything interesting for weeks and weeks. Somewhere on this street is a deli, I seem to remember. There’s more growling inside as I think about what we might find.

  “Hey, Trix. I’d like to get out of here now. There’s some other places I’d like to go before we head back.”

  Trixie looks over her shoulder at me and then into her cart.

  “Did I take too much stuff?”

  “No, honey. But we’ll need a little space in case we find some other good things. Come on, let’s get going.”

  We haven’t gone up to the next floor – all electronic and computer stuff that’s useless now – or the floor above that for every kind of sports equipment. There’ll be another day and Trixie’s mature enough to realize it. I even think she’s beginning to understand the need for delaying gratification.

  It’s as we approach the front door to leave that we hear a sound like a cough and we stop to listen because we both know that’s not what it is. The cough becomes a confident rumble then three higher-pitched whines. Just as unexpectedly, the sound stops. We’re both running, carts forgotten behind us.

  Coming back to the Station is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I thought I knew what it meant to be conflicted because of my relationship with Ike. Just goes to show how wrong a person can be.

  All the various theories the Stoppers have about what’s really going on, they represent the natural craving for knowledge and answers that humans have always displayed. The thing about knowledge is you can’t unknow it. Finding answers isn’t always what you hope it will be. Especially when the answers aren’t the ones you’d wished for. The three of us return to the Station with knowledge. Some is good. Some is not.

  On the way back we pass by the park and I stop to study the things that still grow there. I stop for a long time. There’s something in there, something good
I’m hoping, that may take away some of my unease. Something from the old world. I almost don’t believe it’s possible.

  “What is it, Sherri?”

  Both of them have been watching me stare into the park but it’s Ike that gives way to his curiosity. Maybe Trixie is still too overwhelmed by what she’s seen to give a shit about my fixation with a patch of ground in the memorial park.

  “Something I haven’t seen for months.” I turn to Ike. “You still keep track of the calendar?”

  “Sure. I mark the days off.”

  “I gave up doing that… shit, I don’t even remember when. So what day is it?”

  “It’s the third of April. Thursday. Why?”

  “Because it’s spring, Ike. Those are flowers over there. Can you see them?”

  I point.

  “Are you sure? They don’t look much like flowers.”

  “Well, they’re the best nature appears able to do under the circumstances. I want some for my apartment.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Fucking watch me, Ike.”

  I leave them both standing there and march to the nearest park entrance. I cross the threshold, no longer concerned about the way the trees and grass look. Flowers. God damn it, I’m going to have flowers. Even if they have browny-red petals and weedy looking stalks. I’m having them and that’s the end of it.

  And you know what else? Maybe me coming back with some live flowers will go some way toward explaining why the three of us are back early and why we look so fucking spooked.

  The flowers are in a bed where roses used to grow. I get the creeps walking on the shit-colored grass to reach them because it feels too resilient beneath my feet. I imagine each blade of grass is squirming under my soles to avoid being crushed by my weight.

  At the border of the flowerbed, I pause. Guess I’m having second thoughts about this idea. For a start, I don’t have the equipment I need to dig the flowers up and I haven’t anything to put them in for the walk home. Not far away is a green trash receptacle. I go over to it and lift out the black trash bag inside. There is no waste inside at all and I can’t help but imagine a group of wailing Commuters reaching in and eating handfuls of rotten garbage, tears pouring down their faces all the while. The bag is clean, unused. I remove it.