In a Perfect World (14 page)

J
iselle called Mark every day. On the other end of the phone, he always sounded no farther than a few yards away. He sounded as if he were in the other room, or as if he were out in the street, in the backyard—but when Jiselle went to the windows, holding the phone in her hand, listening to Mark’s voice on the other end, she’d see that the backyard was empty, as was the front yard, and, at the end of their driveway, the road.

He sounded close, but Mark was in Munich.

Mark was detained.

By the middle of March, he’d been detained for a month.

Some days, she
nearly
pined, lingering at their closet, trying to conjure the feeling she’d had that used to make her knees weak when she took his uniforms in her arms. But there was so much else to do. She certainly did not have the luxury of locking herself in the bedroom to cry now that the power, when it was on, could only be counted on to go out again. During these brief spells with electricity, Jiselle had to prepare for the much longer periods during which there would be no refrigerator, no lights, no outlets to use to recharge the little appliances one relied on. There were so many things to gather and prepare—and, at the same time, as always, the children needed the usual things they needed. The schools had closed early for spring break due to the power outages and fears of the Phoenix flu. But, after spring break, they did not reopen, and it was not made clear when they would open again.

“What is it like there?” Jiselle asked Mark.

“Efficient,” Mark said.

But she had meant the weather. At home, it was the kind of weather you would invent for a perfect early spring. On their walks into the ravine, Sam and Jiselle saw chipmunks under every leafy, unfurling fern. Their fat, cartoon cheeks looked full, and they were all but tame, scampering toward the two of them on the path, looking up expectantly. If Sam and Jiselle knelt down, the chipmunks would come right to them, seeming content to gaze into their eyes for as long as they liked. Sam and Jiselle started bringing bags of nuts along on their walks, and the chipmunks took them shyly, graciously, right from their hands.

When Jiselle told Mark about the weather at home, Mark told her it was dreamlike in Germany, too. The windows didn’t open in his room, but he could see that outside the Gesundheitsschutzhaus (which, he said, roughly translated to “Good Health House”), it was sunny, with a blue sky, day after day.

Jiselle tried to picture the scene he described. The distant snowcapped mountain, the foothills surrounding it. The way those hills appeared in the evenings to breathe slowly—sleepily, deeply, purple. There was a train track, Mark said, looking like a silver stream up the side of the mountain. He could see it shining sometimes in the early mornings, behind the pines. At four o’clock every afternoon the rushing glint of a train passed over the tracks.

“I’m learning patience,” Mark said. “And studying German.”

In the background she sometimes heard a woman say something—to Mark?—in German.

“It can’t be too much longer,” he told Jiselle. “Since not one of us has even shown symptoms, they’re not going to be able to justify quarantining us forever.”

“I love you,” she said. “I miss you.”

“My dearest,” he said. “My princess. My darling. Imagine I am kissing you.”

She closed her eyes.

She tried to imagine it, but the phone made an unnerving humming in her ear.

“Herr Dorn?”
someone called in the distance.

The woman.

“I have to go now,” Mark whispered. “It’s morning here. Time for breakfast.”

Bobby’s father, Paul Temple, gave Jiselle the extra generator he kept in his garage, and if Bobby wasn’t already there, he would come over during the longer outages, hook it up, fill it with gas, start it.

“Feel free to call on my son for anything you need,” Paul Temple said. “There’s nothing worse than a population of young men without enough to do. It’s the reason they launched the Crusades.”

As always, Paul Temple, the high school history teacher, seemed unable to keep himself from sharing his knowledge, and was embarrassed to have shared it. He looked away from Jiselle and scratched his sandy hair.

“Thank you,” she said.

Except for the mechanical purr under the kitchen window and the darkness of the neighbor’s house, it was as if nothing were different.

Every few days Jiselle would go over to the Schmidts’ to see how they were faring, but Brad Schmidt always waved her away.

She called her mother, who said, “Don’t worry about me, Jiselle.
You’re
the one with the problem.”

One morning, the first week of April, a flock of thousands of blackbirds flew out of the ravine behind the house, over the roof. The sound of them woke Jiselle, and even Sara roused herself to come onto the deck, look out. The sky was dark but shivering—all wings and fretful energy, as if the morning had been peeled back to expose its nervous system.

“Whoa, whoa!” Sam called, waving his arms over his head as if trying to stop them.

Sara said, “Holy shit.”

“Where are they going?” Jiselle wondered aloud, and the children looked from the birds to her as if they were surprised that she didn’t know.

As it turned out, they didn’t
go
anywhere. They flew from one end of the ravine and back again, and then they dispersed.

On the radio it was said that people in Chicago had reported the same thing. The birds went from park to park, circled, flew over the lake, and then were gone.

This incited some panic.

The birds looked healthy, but who knew what sort of secret viruses they carried, or what their circling and disappearance portended? Parents kept their children indoors and out of the parks—although flyers were posted all over the city and delivered door to door explaining that fear of birds was superstitious, not scientific.

But who was delivering these flyers, people wanted to know.

The government?

And why? To keep people from panicking or because there was something to hide?

The movie
The Birds
became the number one movie download of all time, and television psychologists had a hard time explaining its popularity. You would think no one would want to see a movie that so closely paralleled the fears of the time. But they did.

A week after the blackbirds, a white goose took up residence in the backyard—some escaped farm fowl, it seemed. At first, Jiselle considered shooing it away. It could be diseased. But it looked harmless and lost in the backyard. Its orange beak matched its orange feet, and it came and went from the ravine without flying, just waddling. When Jiselle and the children went out on the deck to watch it, the goose would look up and honk.

Sam wanted to make a pet of it, but whenever he stepped off the deck to try to approach it, the goose turned and headed down the slope into the ravine, disappearing in the shadows. Once or twice, Jiselle heard it outside in the middle of the night, honking right under the bedroom window as if it wanted something, but when she went to the window to look out, the goose seemed only to be wandering in awkward circles in the dark—a bright patch of reflected moonlight.

Within a few days of the blackbirds and the arrival of the goose, a small flock of swifts took up residence in the chimney, and they whirled and screamed, glistening blackly, like living ash, from the roof of the house to the leafy trees, coming and going all day long. And some finches built a nest in the oak that grew out of the deck in back. Soon there were eggs in the nest, which seemed to have been pieced together with twigs and toilet paper and also hair—Camilla’s? Golden strands of it glistened when sunlight hit the oak in the mornings.

Jiselle ignored Brad Schmidt’s advice to clear the birds out. He stood at the edge of his own yard, looking up. “They might as well be living in your house,” he said. “Whatever diseases they’ve got, you’ve got.”

But Jiselle could not bring herself to be worried about the birds. There were stories every day on the news now about celebrities who’d fled the country, entering other countries illegally. Jodie Foster was living with a long list of fellow celebrities in the Canadian wilderness. No one had seen the wife of the governor of California for months, so she was presumed to be dead of the flu. Reportedly there were hygienic bunkers built under Washington, D.C., in which the Supreme Court justices were being housed.

Closer to home, it was said that thousands of people had started an encampment at Millennium Park in Chicago to get out of the apartment buildings where there was illness and where the air was presumed to be infected, and that the Beluga whales at the Shedd Aquarium were refusing to eat. Marine biologists all over the world had been consulted, without success. Nothing could be done. A twenty-four-hour candlelight and prayer vigil was being held outside the aquarium, which had been closed to the public for weeks, for the whales, who were said also to be singing whale songs that had never been heard before. “They know what’s ahead for us,” one Chicago evangelist had told a television reporter, “and they are calling out to God.”

This theory was widely repeated, as if it were a fact, and poets and popular song writers had banded together in a movement called the Whale Prayer Project, which was dedicated to expressing in human language what the whales were trying to sing to God in their own language.

In the morning, the swifts sounded like wind chimes in the chimney, and Beatrice (the goose—Sara had named it, and the name stuck) heralded morning with a discordant squawk, and then waddled off across the yard into the ravine, disappearing in the dark foliage for the day and coming back after the sun set to walk in circles in the backyard. They never saw her fly.

In truth, they had no idea if Beatrice was female or male, but Camilla pointed out that the goose had a kind of feminine posture. She held her head high, as if proud of her neck, as if she thought it was much longer than it was. She had a habit of holding her wings away from her body an inch or two, shivering them in the sunlight. It seemed coquettish. Obviously, Beatrice
couldn’t
fly or she would have, but she enjoyed having wings nonetheless.

After Jiselle and Sam did some research on what geese liked to eat, they learned that the bread crumbs they’d been leaving were no good. The bread swelled up in the goose’s stomach, making her feel full without actually giving her enough nutrition to survive, so they went to the pet store and bought a sack of something that was supposed to be better: Fowl Feed Deluxe. In the morning, Sam hurried out of bed when the goose honked, ran out to the backyard, sprinkled the feed on the ground, and although the ingredients listed on the side of the bag seemed to be mostly oil and ash, Beatrice pecked happily at it before strolling back to the ravine.

On Tuesday, Mark sounded wistful. “Do you remember Paris, my love? Zurich? Copenhagen? Will we ever see places like that again?”

Indeed, those places seemed far away, impossibly remote, charming villages from another time.

It was hard to hear him over the noises of the household. Camilla and Bobby were starting up the generator again, and it made high whining noises outside the kitchen window. Sara was listening to her music in her bedroom—a man shouting obscenities over the sounds of guitars and garbage can lids being smashed together. Sam was waiting in the family room for Jiselle to get off the phone so they could go for a hike in the ravine. Mark told Jiselle not to tell the kids that she was talking to him. He said he didn’t want to hear their voices, that it only depressed him.

But Wednesday he was angry. “The world’s going to hell. I could be stuck here forever.”

“No!” Jiselle said. “Don’t—”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But you don’t understand. Every fucking day here seems to last a week.”

“I love you,” Jiselle said.

He said, “I know that.”

F
or Easter, Jiselle and Sam dyed hard-boiled eggs, and stuffed candies into plastic eggs, and hid them all around the house and the front and backyards, all the way to the edge of the ravine. It took Sara and Camilla two hours to find them all—wandering barefoot through the bright green grass in the late morning sunshine, languid, but laughing.

That afternoon, Jiselle took them in to the city to meet her mother at Duke’s Palace Inn. The power had been on for a week without interruption, and the weather was glorious.

The restaurant was decorated in pastels for the holiday. There were pots of hibiscus and paperwhites everywhere, and pale green and pink papier-mâché eggs were strung from the ceilings. The brunch tables circled the entire dining room. Crystal bowls overflowed with sweet rolls. There was a fresh fruit platter—melon balls and mango, gigantic strawberries. At the center of it all, a chocolate fountain bubbled: three tiers of melted chocolate spilling over, gathering in a rich, dark pool.

The fragrance of that fountain wafted through the whole restaurant like a decadent, delicious pall, while a young woman in a yellow chiffon dress floated from table to table with a white cloth and an ever-replenishing bottle of champagne. She poured champagne into Camilla’s glass, and Sara’s, and even tried to fill Sam’s glass, until Jiselle’s mother fixed first Jiselle and then the woman in the yellow dress with an outraged stare. “You’re going to let the boy drink
champagne?
He can’t keep
root beer
down.”

“Of course not,” Jiselle said, putting her hand over Sam’s champagne glass. The woman shrugged noncommittally and sashayed to another table.

The rest of the brunch was uneventful. The girls, perhaps a little tipsy, laughed out loud at the story Jiselle told of the woman on the flight to Scotland who’d grabbed her hand and told her fortune. Sara had agreed that morning, grudgingly, to wear a white T-shirt with her black leather miniskirt, and because her bare legs in fishnet stockings were under the table, from the waist up she looked like a girl dressed for Easter brunch, if informally.

They took the back roads and highways home instead of the freeway, which was congested with all the post-Easter brunchers (the lights at Duke’s Palace Inn had flickered twice during brunch, and Jiselle presumed this had happened all over the city, and people were worried, heading for home), and Sam and the girls laughed at the enormous inflated bunnies in front yards as they passed through each small town. There were neon-bright plastic eggs strung from trees. Plastic rabbits hanging from clotheslines. Pink and yellow streamers waving from telephone poles. Newscasters had linked the serious outbreaks of the flu in California and the rumors of war on a second front to the extra significance given this year to the Lenten season. Believers weren’t just giving up candy; they were giving up sex. They were giving up cell phones. They were giving up pleasures and conveniences of all kinds. The police had been called in to end a parade of flagellants in San Francisco on Ash Wednesday. In New Mexico, three men had been roped to crosses outside a church and left there overnight. The nation was looking forward to Easter and to the end of this nonsense.

They passed through one town at the Illinois-Wisconsin border where there had apparently been a parade earlier in the day. It had left shredded pink and purple paper all over the road. A few Easter baskets rolled, lost, along the sidewalk. A kind of throne had been built outside the courthouse for, it seemed, the Easter Bunny—a trellis decorated with tissue roses and green crêpe paper and a chair draped in pink and purple velour. It was empty now, but there was still a trail of crushed candies and pale blue candy wrappers where the children must have stood in line waiting for a chance to sit on the Easter Bunny’s lap.

Driving through that little town with the pastel trash and the spring flowers in bloom—the daffodils and tulips and all the flowering trees in their whites and pinks—reminded Jiselle of the sugar Easter eggs her mother used to buy for her when she was a child. You would look inside the bright sugar cave to find a perfect little village with emerald green grass and cozy bungalows for rabbits and ducklings made of more sugar.

Usually, Jiselle had kept those on a shelf until her mother, around the Fourth of July, would point out that they were attracting ants. But, one year, she’d decided to taste the egg.

Although the first broken-off bit of the bric-a-brac on the eggshell had tasted stale, Jiselle couldn’t resist another nibble, and another, until eventually she’d managed to nibble away the whole exquisite egg and the peaceful scene inside it, too.

As the length of his detainment dragged on, Jiselle began to call Mark several times a day. If he didn’t answer, she left long messages on his voice mail:

“I’m sitting on the deck. The kids are inside. Sam’s been building a tower in his room out of Legos. Sara and Camilla have been downloading songs, now that the power’s back on. I baked a loaf of bread and washed the sheets. Every night I hold your pillow in my arms and pretend it’s you.”

“Sweetheart,” Mark said. “It’s important not to ramble on the voice mail. It costs just as much as talking to me in person, and I think we should be as conservative as we can. Who knows how long this will go on.”

“But…what about the lawyers? I thought you were sure—”

“What’s
sure
in this life, Jiselle? I love you, and I know this is hard for you, but it’s harder for
me.”

“Of course,” she said. “I know that, Mark. It’s—”

“Shhh,”
he said. “I love you. You are the love of my life. I have to go.”

Summer came in early, mild and sweet. The air smelled of cake, yeasty and moist. There was the usual seasonal sense of something new beginning again, except that with the weather growing warm and humid so early, it was as if a step in the process of the seasons had been skipped. By the middle of May, teenage girls and their mothers had taken equally to wearing what looked like lingerie in the middle of the day—to the grocery store, to the bank. Black camisoles. Satin halter tops. Short shorts.

Seeing them in St. Sophia, with its tulips lined up in straight rows outside the public buildings and its flags flapping overhead, those girls and women looked to Jiselle as if they’d stumbled on to the wrong set—parading their call girl costumes through the filming of a 1950s TV show.

The power outages, it seemed, and the shortages, and the fears of the flu had inspired a portion of the population to toss off its old morality and to live for the moment. Drug use and promiscuity were said to be at an all-time high among teenagers. Small communes were forming, in the Western states especially—enclaves devoted to free love, spiritual growth, and the pleasures of the flesh. It was said that Dr. Springwell was not, after all, in the Canary Islands but on a ranch in Wyoming, where he led a cult of young people who were devoted to sexual experimentation.

But other groups formed, too.

After it was noted in the press how few Phoenix flu deaths had been reported among the Amish, the New Amish groups sprang up. They blamed cell phones for the power outages and the flu: the radiation emitted by the towers was blanketing the country in poisonous, invisible vibrations that disrupted the environment, driving the birds into a frenzy. This was also the reason for the visibility in recent months of so many rodents. They had been driven out of the ground. They had lost all sense of direction because of the effect of the vibrations on their inner ears.

The radiation was causing the human immune system to go haywire, the New Amish said. They lived in sod houses and made their own clothes and utensils from found materials.

But most of the people Jiselle saw around town simply seemed bored. There had never been so many people in St. Sophia. Stuck in St. Sophia. Spending their days in St. Sophia. Without school, without sports, without work, without the malls in the city and suburbs open, they were wired with energy and exhausted at the same time. They actually sat on the park benches, which had seemed to be merely decorations to Jiselle until then. Mothers pushed children on the swings in the park. They walked on the sidewalks.

One morning, as she stood in line at the St. Sophia Credit Union (Mark had told her to go, to make sure the airline was still depositing his checks and to get some cash “in case”), she saw ahead of her in the line, which snaked out the door and around the corner of the bank’s brick façade, Bobby’s mother, Tara Temple. She was wearing patent leather high heels. Black, they glinted in the sun bouncing off the sidewalk and sent thin beams of light straight up the insides of her long, tanned legs. She was wearing shorts so short that Jiselle could see the fold between her thigh and her buttocks, and, on the inside of one sleek thigh, a little rose, which looked like either a temporary tattoo or a brand-new one.

Tara Temple had met Jiselle only those two or three times (the last time was when she’d brought over the Wholeness book) and didn’t appear to recognize her. Between them, a man in a necktie and Bermuda shorts stood very close to Tara, and Jiselle watched as, saying nothing, he reached behind Tara and smoothed three fingers down the small of her back to the place where her tailbone clefted into her tight shorts.

Jiselle looked quickly away. Bobby’s mother had to have been at least ten years older than she, but standing behind her in that line, wearing flat black sandals and one of Mark’s baggy T-shirts over a pair of worn-out khaki shorts, Jiselle felt old, and maternal, and disapproving. She liked Paul Temple, Bobby’s father, who had stopped by several times recently to help Bobby with the yard work, which Bobby had agreed to take on for forty dollars a week. (He’d wanted to do it for free—because “I eat like five meals a day here!”—but Jiselle had insisted on paying him.) Because Paul Temple taught history at St. Sophia High, he’d had nothing to do since the schools closed down. A week earlier, he and Bobby had spent the whole day cutting down dead brush between the lawn and the ravine for her, and then they’d burned it in a barrel in the backyard. It had been an especially great day for Sam, who adored Mr. Temple, who liked to punch Sam in the shoulder and call him Bud.

A bank teller came out then and announced that the computers had frozen, and the wait could be “days.” She strongly suggested their leaving and coming back another time.

Jiselle watched as Tara Temple turned to look at the man behind her.

They smiled sleepily at each other and left the line together.

GOODBYE TO THE NECKTIE
was a news bulletin for days. Men were being encouraged to go without them. The “New Businessman” had an open collar and short sleeves. He wore cargo pants or shorts, carried a satchel instead of a briefcase. There was some joyful speculation that the days of eight-to-five were over forever, replaced by siestas, long vacations—an entirely different way of life having been glimpsed in this brief, strange period. It was a side benefit to the collapse of the economy, the devastation wrought by the Phoenix flu. The rules for behavior of all kinds had changed overnight—or changed while Jiselle had been making grilled cheese sandwiches for Sam and reading novels at home.

Camilla had hauled out all the books she’d been assigned in her Advanced Placement English course that year, lining them up in the order she thought would be most educational and appealing. Jiselle had just finished
Tess of the d’Urbervilles,
which had left her weeping in the bathtub the night she’d finished it. Now, she was halfway through
Mrs. Dalloway,
which kept her in a kind of dreamy reverie long after she put it down.

“I can’t believe you didn’t read this stuff in high school,” Camilla said, and Jiselle felt the familiar prickle of her skin at one of Camilla’s seemingly harmless observations. “Or at least in college.”

Jiselle looked up at her. Camilla was looking at her curiously from the couch. For the first time, perhaps, Jiselle noticed that the girl had a very fine, blond down on her shoulders and arms. She was wearing a sundress with thin straps, and no makeup, and Jiselle felt as if she were looking at a stranger.

“I never finished college,” Jiselle said. She opened her mouth again and realized that she was about to tell Camilla about her father, about Ellen, about the accident, as if that explained why she’d left college, but then she closed her mouth again and gave a little apologetic smile.

“That’s no biggie,” Camilla said. “Some of the dumbest people I know finished college.”

The second week of May, there were the first officially confirmed reports of massive outbreaks of hemorrhagic zoonosis in Arizona, Nevada, and Idaho. Some newscasters used the word
hundreds.
Others said
thousands.
All nonessential government services nationwide were closed down by executive order, although there was grumbling about this in the Midwest and on the East Coast. Wasn’t this clearly, mostly, a Western disease? Wouldn’t the most prudent thing be to limit travel over and across the Mississippi until the cause of the illness, the source of the contagion, could be determined? Why shouldn’t people in Ohio be allowed to keep their post offices and libraries open if they wanted to?
They
weren’t infected with hemorrhagic zoonosis.

People in the Western states thought the same things about the East.

“During the Black Plague the English called it the French disease, the French called it the Italian disease, and so on and so on. People blaming other people for the plague is nothing new,” Paul Temple said. He’d started coming by most days around five o’clock, if he wasn’t already there working on the yard, walking the two miles from his own house. He’d knock politely on the door and wait for Jiselle or one of the children to open it for him, although Jiselle had told him it was fine just to come in. When she opened the door, he’d smile apologetically and say he was “just looking for something to do. With the schools closed, not a big demand for history teachers in St. Sophia.”