Quarantine Page 5

  I carried on further down the hall. I wanted to pick up a bottle of water, but I was also intrigued to see how the adults spent the dying hours of the day, once the children and the injured were safely tucked up in bed. The dining room was still abuzz with talk. Many bottles of wine and cans of beer had been and were being consumed. It was pretty clear that the arguments weren’t any closer to being resolved.

  Daniel and Tom stood up at the front. I was watching in the wings, the bottle of water steady in my hand. The difference between them was stark. Science versus God.

  “All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry,” Tom said, pleased with himself.

  “We are all free to choose our ways,” Daniel countered.

  “You can lead your friends into the unknown, I choose to stay here.”

  Paige’s father looked around the room at the people who had come to rely on them both, but who might have secretly chosen one allegiance over the other.

  “Nothing will get better if we stay here,” Daniel said. “Don’t you get that? It’s dangerous.” I got the sense that those who wanted to go with Daniel wanted just to be around him—they’d follow him anywhere.

  “Perhaps. But we are comfortable here, we are sheltered—”

  “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time, not for the better,” Daniel said. He considered the people around him, sitting and standing, listening and quietly talking among themselves. “We’ve been stuck here long enough.”

  “My outlook is more optimistic.”

  Daniel shook his head.

  We were all getting uncomfortable at what was not being said and could see that Tom was seething about it: why couldn’t those who wanted to leave, go, and those who wanted to stay, stay?

  If Bob were here, he’d be taping the meeting from the far corner. I wondered what he would do with all that footage, all those little memory cards he’d pilfered from a Radio Shack. Would he edit them together one day to tell a streamlined, structured narrative? Or was this it—a raw stream-of-consciousness thing, real, hyper-real even, shaped by us all? What was it like to see life through his lens?

  “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, these people here, they have the power in them to act,” Daniel said. “We are the change that we seek—it’s in us. You should know that.”

  “I agree with you, Thomas, I really do,” Daniel continued. “I would have liked consensus but I see that’s unlikely. You do what you have to do. I’m not stopping you from staying.”

  “You’re stopping them!”

  “We’re all free to choose,” Daniel reasoned. “All major religious traditions carry basically the same message—”

  “Spare us!”

  “That is love, compassion and forgiveness; the important thing is that they should be part of our daily lives. You know these people arrived here, they found us, and more arrive every day—”

  “You’re stopping her!”

  His voice was loud as a gunshot and suddenly, I turned to look at the object of the harsh accusation.

  Tom’s wife—Paige’s stepmother, Audrey—wanted to be wherever the preacher was. She seemed sad. She knew they were fighting but could not hear it. She watched these two men and she knew they’d spoken about her because so many in the room were looking at her, Tom and Daniel included. It must hurt Tom that she would rather be with Daniel than stay with him.

  The preacher’s words and oratory skills were impressive, but there was much more to him than that, and Audrey probably saw it better than anyone. Felt it. Maybe there was so much more, more than I could ever sense or see. I wondered what Caleb would have made of this power struggle. Maybe Rachel would be better equipped to handle it—this was animalistic, two bulls locking horns for supremacy.

  “To hell with you, priest! To hell with your whole goddamn business!”

  “Tom, I’m sorry you feel that way—”

  “Don’t you dare pity me!”

  “Please, Tom, you will wake the children—”

  “Don’t sermonize me, you sonofabitch!”

  “Tom, you’re being—”

  Screaming—a woman was screaming. The kind of scream you hoped you never heard, primal, life or death.

  Bang! Daniel hit the floor. The room was silent but for the sound of two men grunting and shuffling, the sound of a man being beaten, the hush of stunned onlookers as they computed what was going down and whether or not they should do anything about it.

  As I pushed through the gathered onlookers the silence broke. There were close on thirty people, several of them yelling and screaming.

  Tom was on top of Daniel, punching him in the face with his full force. Daniel was on his back on the floor. His head was bouncing off the tiles, and it sounded hollow and dangerous, like a coconut cracking. His face was a bloody pulp, becoming more and more swollen with every hit.

  “Get up! Go!” I said to Daniel, who rolled to his side. He stood up. Groggy. Swayed on his feet. His face was a bag of blood.

  “You—”

  Whatever Daniel was going to say was stopped by more violence.

  I grabbed Tom as he lunged at Daniel again. But the surgeon quickly broke my hold and was punching the preacher back down onto the ground, putting all his weight into turning Daniel’s face and head into a mess on the floor: a plastic surgeon undoing a lifetime’s work and destroying his tools at the same time. Past, present, and future, all intertwined through an act of violence.

  Maybe he was blaming this man of God for his wife’s injuries, for the city or country or world being like this . . .

  “What kind of god would let that happen?” Tom said. “Your god!”

  I knew that if I did nothing then Daniel would die. I had to intervene.

  I pulled Tom off Daniel by his shoulders. I put my hands under his armpits and hauled him back onto the hard ground. He was squirming but I had all my weight pulling down at him. He was angry, but had eyes for only one man, and he was getting up, reaching out to attack again . . .

  There was a scream to my right. A piercing shriek.

  Audrey.

  “Nooooo!”

  Paige stood by the door to the hallway, neither entirely in nor out of the room, watching us. She had my pistol in her hand. It was loaded. I pulled at Tom. He fell back, wide-eyed.

  Paige brought my pistol up, fired a shot into the ceiling.

  Everyone froze. The sound of that gunshot resonated in me, thunder in my heart.

  Tom looked around, dazed, out of it. He’d spun off the planet.

  Daniel’s face looked as if he’d put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. There was a mess of blood on the floor.

  The next sound was a kid crying in the bedroom. Then other people joined in. Some were screaming, some vomiting, many had fled the room.

  I let go of Tom and walked to Paige. “It’s over,” I said. “Go and help Daniel.”

  She put an arm out and held onto mine. I stopped, looked down at her, and I had the flash recall of seeing the lifeless eyes of Anna, glass marbles on an abattoir floor. But they were unalike, really. I reminded myself of Paige’s Californian tan and light, sun-bleached hair, whereas Anna’s hair was shiny and dark, a legacy of her Indian parentage. I blinked myself back into the now as Paige passed me the gun she was holding in her other hand.

  Four men from the crowd came and hauled Daniel to the medical room. His body, being carried like that, looked like a big broken doll. Others pulled Tom away. All the fight had left him a second after that gunshot.

  My hands were bloody—blood dripped and flowed off my knuckles where I’d scraped hard against the rough tiled floor in the struggle. My knees were grazed. I felt no pain. I could only think of how the sound of other people’s crying had worn me out.

  9

  I woke up and it was still dark outside. On the bed next to me Paige was asleep on her back, her quilt down around her waist. Her California-tanned arm contrasted wi
th the white sheets. She looked like an angel, an angel in vivid colors. I covered her, relieved that the need to talk about last night was postponed. There had to be more to say, didn’t there? There had to be so much to work through . . .

  I dressed quietly, and headed out. In the dining room, a few of the people were up, eating cereal. The gas burners and bottles seemed to be rationed to a hot lunch and dinner every day, and they heated water for bathing only at night. A gas heater took the edge off the room’s chill but my breath still fogged in front of me. The few people awake seemed quiet and solemn, the events of last night fresh. Perhaps they’d not slept. None looked me in the eye as I took a bottle of water and a banana. The fruit was turning brown but would still be good.

  There was the faintest glow of sunrise on the outside terrace and a rolling mist close to the ground at street level, but it seemed as if the Hudson’s flow was the more powerful force. The pier was nearly completely covered by a blanket of fresh snow, a long slab of brilliant white jutting out into the Hudson, a lonely island of green plastic turf up against the building.

  Daniel was sitting in a chair, rugged up against the cold, his eyes dark and swollen in a bandaged face, as if he were an Egyptian mummy. Bob was beside him. Two guys sitting as if they were watching the river flow by and not much to care about, if you didn’t know better.

  As I neared I could tell they were talking about something serious. Bob’s face was tight, like he was holding back. Anger, no doubt.

  “Sorry,” I said, as both faced me. I shouldn’t be here. “Just getting some air.”

  “It’s cool,” Bob said.

  “I’ll come back.”

  “Sit with us.” Daniel motioned to a plastic chair near theirs. His voice was slightly slurred, because of his swollen lips.

  “Thanks,” I said, dragging the chair around to face the river. In that moment I didn’t know whether to call him Father, or Daniel, or what. “I think the worst of the storm’s passed.”

  “Maybe,” Bob replied. He poured me a steaming coffee from a thermos. It had milk and a little sugar. “You rest well?”

  “Yeah, very well,” I said.

  Daniel’s eyes remained friendly. Bob’s features were scary-looking in this cold dim light, like someone who’d seen it all and then some. I got the sense that this was maybe a second chance for him, some kind of fate bringing him and Daniel together. Maybe there was a guard above . . .

  “I think I’ll head back to the zoo today,” I said, looking out at the river. The men were silent.

  “You’re welcome to stay with us as long as you want,” Daniel said, his smiling face turning from me back to the river. “Not that it’s my right to offer—I just want you to know that you’d be welcomed into the group. It’s your choice.”

  “Thanks,” I replied. I watched my cup of coffee steam and swirl. “Are you okay, Daniel?”

  “I’m fine,” he replied. “Don’t worry about me.”

  We sat in silence.

  “What is it?” Bob asked me. Looking more closely, I could see he looked pained, maybe close to tears, like he felt it all so raw. There was something about his eyes, not their color or their size or shape, just something about them that made me feel like they were reading deep into me. Had he killed someone? Did he recognize himself in me? Did he see me more honestly than I saw myself?

  “Talk to us,” Daniel said. “We’ll listen.”

  I nodded. But I didn’t know how to say it, how to admit it, a confession. “Just, I’ve—last night, it reminded me of things I’ve done—”

  Bob said: “We’ve all done things.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “We know what you mean,” Bob said. And the way he said it, he knew exactly.

  I couldn’t articulate it yet. Instead, I cried. Big, heaving, silent sobs. Bob took the cup from me. I leaned against him and he put a hand on my head and left it there, so gentle, so caring. I cried for a few minutes. Then I breathed deep, found composure. Tears and snot ran onto the ground between my feet. Daniel passed me some tissues.

  “Thanks,” I said. We sat in silence, for five, maybe ten minutes. Just the three of us out here in the elements.

  It felt as if hours had passed—in a good way. As if last night’s events hadn’t happened. They each topped up their coffees, waited, patient. They gave me the space to sort out what I needed to share.

  “I killed one of them,” I said. It was an admission, a confession, as much to myself as to them. “One of the Chasers. He was coming at me. He was right at me. I had to—I didn’t think I had any other . . .”

  I looked at the floor through my interlinked trembling fingers, those hands that had killed. Bob nodded.

  “I don’t think I had a choice,” I said. “But there’s always a choice, isn’t there? It was him or me. I chose, and I killed him dead, like that.”

  “God is ready and waiting to forgive anyone who asks—”

  “I don’t want forgiveness,” I said, looking Daniel in the eye, then felt guilty at my tone. There was no judgment there, no pity nor compassion. Simple understanding. I had to live with this, to feel it, forever, that was my burden alone. Some things no amount of belief should shroud. “I just want you to know . . . that I’m sorry. That I think about it every day. I see his face, I hear the shots. I lie awake at night and it’s the final thing I see. This follows me because it was me, it is me.”

  “Your future actions may cleanse you of this guilt,” Daniel said, his voice so soft and quiet that he could have said anything and it would have given some comfort for us to reside in. “You can be pure again, for you have admitted a shameful deed so that it need no longer haunt you day and night.”

  “Thanks.”

  “If we confess our sins to Him,” Bob added, perhaps repeating words he’d heard from Daniel, and whether he was speaking of himself or for me I would never know and it didn’t matter, “He can be depended on to forgive us and to cleanse us from every wrong.”

  I nodded, but I felt like a phony coming to their God now, my hands outstretched, waiting for an offering, asking for so much in return for—what? What have I ever given? Besides, to join their flock now was to admit defeat, right? Was it that more than simply being alone, I wanted to be alone?

  “I’m going to leave today,” I said. “I have to get back to my friends, make plans to get out of the city somehow.”

  Bob nodded. He looked at the sky. “Weather’s moving in,” he said. “You won’t make it far out there today.”

  I stood and looked around: he was right—the wind was blowing a gale and the morning sky was becoming dark as night.

  “Why don’t you come with us?” he said. “Drop you a few blocks out.”

  “You guys are going out for supplies?”

  Daniel gave Bob a look of approval, then the younger man said, “We’re going to check something out, if you want to come.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Not long,” Bob replied. “And I promise you this—it ain’t no waste of time.”

  10

  “Jesse, keep a sharp eye out,” Bob said as he drove. I liked riding high, in this sturdy cocoon. Bob had brought a shotgun, and I felt safe. Outside the vehicle the wind was now so strong that pieces of debris were flying through the air and occasionally smashing against the side of the truck.

  After fifteen minutes we pulled up outside a small church. Bob killed the engine, but we all stayed put for a bit, watching.

  “Nothing but an empty white street,” Bob said. “No one will be prowling around here in this weather.”

  To accentuate the point a large plastic bin blew across the street in front of us like tumbleweed.

  I asked Daniel, “Was this your church?”

  “No,” he said, looking at me in the rearview mirror. “My friend was the priest here.”

  “Do you know where he is?” I asked.

  “No longer with us,” Daniel said, his voice matter-of-fact.

 
; We got out of the vehicle; walking was near-impossible as we leaned into the wind and pushed ahead, Bob leading the way. Inside the church the darkness retreated in the beams of our powerful flashlights.

  “I take it we’re not on another food trip?” I said as we made our way towards the altar.

  “Something even more important,” Daniel said.

  “Especially to you,” Bob added with a chuckle.

  I followed them closely. Daniel knew where he was going and a minute later, we’d gone down two flights of stone stairs to a damp basement with the sound of...

  Running water?

  There was a stream running right through the stone floor. It was old, clearly pre-dating the building, as the floor was two feet or so above the water level and ended with rough-hewn stone walls.

  “There are stories of priests here . . .” Daniel looked wistful as he spoke. “They’d come down and fish in this stream.”

  “No way!” I said.

  “I’d believe it,” Bob said, “and there are heaps of watercourses like this throughout the city, some of them real big. They feed out of the rivers, through what was once wetlands, and back into the river system. There’d be fish swimming through here, for sure.”

  “The water here’s usually much lower than this,” Daniel said, crouching down and shining his light into the water, and we could see the dark stain a good three feet below the present waterline. “See?”

  “Yeah, I can see that,” Bob said, down on his hands and knees and peering into the openings at each side of the wall where the little underground stream flashed through—quite quickly. “Yep—I’d say I was right.”