In a Perfect World (18 page)

V
ery little had been said about what actually happened to victims of the Phoenix flu. The only person who’d spoken of the suffering—the Surgeon General—had been criticized for fear-mongering and replaced by a quieter Surgeon General. But his words—“I’ve seen people die of cancer and seen them die of AIDS, and had no idea God could come up with even worse ways to die”—had been quoted and repeated a hundred thousand times before they could be suppressed.

But after Brad Schmidt died, the paramedics wouldn’t, or couldn’t, answer Jiselle’s question about what had happened to his eyes, so she was left to wonder. Had he scratched them out? Had they somehow swollen? Burst?

The paramedics said only that she shouldn’t touch any of his things and that they were going to board up the house.

After they’d taken Brad Schmidt’s body away, the officer in charge wanted to take Mrs. Schmidt to the Grove Home in the city, but Jiselle had heard such terrible things about the place—completely overcrowded, since so many nursing homes and halfway houses and mental institutions had been closed down, and also without staff. One of the Grove Homes had been investigated for euthanizing some of its patients when the generator failed and their oxygen was cut off.

“I suppose you think we should have just sat by and watched them strangle to death, flap around like fish for an hour until they suffocated in their beds?” the nurse in charge said as she was being handcuffed and taken away. “Well, I invite anyone who believes that a death like that would be more compassionate than a sedative and a lethal injection to come and volunteer at the nearest Grove Home.”

Paul Temple had said, shaking his head, “During the Black Death, parents abandoned their children, children abandoned their parents.”

Apparently, the Schmidts had never had children. If there were any living relatives, they could not be located.

“No,” Jiselle told the police officer, who stood on the front porch in his biohazard suit looking like a visitor from space. “She can stay with us.”

“It’s irregular,” he said, but objected no further. He seemed to make a note on a pad of paper, but when Jiselle glanced at the page, she saw nothing on it. There was, apparently, no ink in the officer’s pen. Still, he’d wanted to give the appearance of being official, of following a procedure.

Sara moved into Camilla’s room so that Mrs. Schmidt could sleep in Sara’s bed—but in the warm late weeks of the month, Mrs. Schmidt often fell asleep on the deck outside and could not be persuaded to come in.

Sometimes Jiselle would rise in the middle of the night, go to the windows, and see her standing in the backyard, grass almost to her hips, looking up at the moon. Sometimes she saw what must have been Beatrice at Diane Schmidt’s feet, looking like a smaller moon, buried in grass, reflecting that reflection.

Once, when Jiselle rose and went to the windows, she found that Diane Schmidt had taken off all her clothes and was standing completely naked in the backyard, arms spread wide. The power had been out again for a week, and without light pollution, the whole sky above Mrs. Schmidt seemed to fizz with stars—some of them falling, arcing through the dark—and it looked as if Diane Schmidt might be trying to catch them in her arms, and as if she might be able to do so if she waited long enough.

Having her in the house was no more trouble than having a cat. She spent most of her time outdoors. She ate whatever was offered to her, politely. She took her medicine—which Jiselle found in the Schmidts’ bathroom cabinet—without complaint. She was clean. She wiped the bathroom sink with a tissue after she used it and even went through the house once a day with the feather duster, whistling to herself as she dusted. When she slipped in and out at night, it was in complete silence, but she never left the yard. And some of the things she had to say struck Jiselle as deeply wise.

“‘We are put on this earth but a little space,’” Diane Schmidt said one afternoon at lunch, “‘that we might learn to bear the beams of love.’”

“That’s lovely,” Jiselle said.

“That’s Blake,” Diane Schmidt replied, and returned to eating her bowl of rice without dropping a single grain. “Once upon a time I was an English teacher.”

Paul Temple said, “You know you’re going to need wood. To burn. For heat. A lot of it. We all need to think about winter without electricity.”

Jiselle nodded. She told him, however, that she supposed, really, he should be chopping and stacking wood for himself, and for Bobby, for the winter. Tara Temple had never returned from her week-long visit to her mother, and Jiselle had quit asking Paul if she had or would.

He said, “If you wouldn’t object, it would be easier, if there’s no power, for us to spend the worst of the cold spells here. Better to heat one house than two, and you have more people to move than we do.”

“Of course,” Jiselle said. She felt her pulse quicken and was hoping she hadn’t blushed. They held each other’s eyes for a few seconds before they both looked up at the emptiness of the sky.

“That is,” Paul said, not meeting her eyes, “if…”

Jiselle held up a hand to keep him from saying anything else.

Paul Temple cleared his throat, ignoring—or not noticing—her hand. “That is, if Mark…”

“I haven’t heard from Mark since…” She couldn’t even say it. It had been a week. A woman answered the phone every day at the Gesundheitsschutzhaus and said, with a heavy German accent, “We have no phone service to the quarantine. You must stop calling here. Captain Dorn is perfectly well, and he will call you when he calls you.”

The airline had said nothing, would say nothing.

“I’ll get Bobby going on the wood. God knows the kid’s got nothing to do.”

Paul’s face was tanned and lined in the sun. His beard had grown out through the summer, and it was full now, gray and sandy-blond. With the ax over his shoulder, in jeans and a flannel shirt, he looked like a woodsman: muscular, rustic. His eyes, however, were watery and tired. He’d had that toothache now for weeks—the dull throbbing of a molar, which kept him up at night, pacing around his house. Of course there were no dentists doing business in St. Sophia. No drugstores were open; nor would there have been any aspirin left on the shelves if they were. Paul had agreed to take the bottle of Advil Jiselle offered him only after she assured him that she had several bottles stored in the cellar. He’d refused it at first: “Who knows when you might need this, or when or where you’ll be able to buy more?” But he took it when she insisted.

That week, Paul and Bobby repaired the chimney, too, and swept out the fireplace.

They shooed the swallows out and put a screen over the chimney so the birds couldn’t come back.

The birds circled the roof for hours afterward, but finally they flew off for good, built their nest somewhere else, it seemed. Jiselle knew their departure was a good thing, although, after their eviction, she looked up, watched them circle in gray and feathered confusion, and felt sorry that they couldn’t stay. “You don’t think,” she said to Paul, watching beside her, “that it could be…you know, bad luck, to send them away?”

Paul shook his head. He said, “No, Jiselle. Try not to think like that. When these superstitions start, and start being taken for truth, it’s a kind of final bell tolling for civilization. We can’t start believing in
luck.”

Jiselle was playing chess after midnight with Sam when Mrs. Schmidt came out of Sara’s bedroom, held up a finger, and said, “Listen.”

In the candlelight, she looked more than ever like a wraith. Her white nightgown was full of shadows, and her face was obscured by darkness. Jiselle assumed at first that she was in one of her sleepwalking states: Sometimes Mrs. Schmidt would wake from dreams and wander out of Sara’s room with something important to say, unable to recall what it was.

But Sam and Jiselle stopped their game to listen anyway.

Sam heard them first, and his eyes widened, and then Jiselle heard them, too.

At first, a distant yelp.

A womanish moan, far away, singular.

But then came a whole chorus of bawling and ululating cries, whines, plaintive and angry at the same time—and as if she were the first person to hear such a sound, as if she were a woman in a cave, a woman born before language, listening, Jiselle felt the fine blond hairs on her limbs rising away from her flesh in a feathery wave of foreboding, traveling up her body, her neck, and she stood and reached out instinctively for Sam, pulling him to her.

“Who is that?” Sam asked.

“We don’t know,” Jiselle said.

When Paul and Bobby arrived in the morning, Paul told her they had heard them, too, from their own house.

“Were they coyotes?” Jiselle asked.
“Wolves?”

Paul Temple said no, he didn’t think so. He believed they might simply be the hungry pets of St. Sophia residents who’d died or fled without their dogs.

Jiselle thought then of the first day that Mark had driven her into St. Sophia—the brick façades of the buildings downtown, the little boy on his red bicycle, the shining fire engine outside the station.

ST. SOPHIA—AMERICA’S HOMETOWN.

But like so many towns in America, St. Sophia was
no one’s
hometown. Their families were elsewhere, as were their jobs. It
looked
like a town, but in the months Jiselle had lived there, even after the plague began, the Temples were the only people she’d gotten to know, and they were not from St. Sophia, either.

When trouble came here, people went somewhere else.

They went
back.

They left their schools behind, their shining fire engine, their quaint downtown, their pets.

St. Sophia was just a town on a list given to people who needed a town, a town that could just as easily be crossed off the list and cease to exist.

After that, Jiselle heard them every night, and no matter how deeply asleep she was, the cries always woke her with her heart pounding and sent her hurrying to the doorway of Sam’s room to check on him, and then past the girls’ and Mrs. Schmidt’s rooms, to see that they were in their beds, and then to the window, to stare into the darkness draped over the ravine, imagining those pets, lost and changed, calling out for the ones who had abandoned them.

That week, Paul and Bobby stayed each night for dinner. Jiselle would make whatever she could from the cans and boxes she had. If the electricity was out, she would cook on the grill. Sometimes Diane Schmidt would sit with them, and sometimes Jiselle had to take a plate to her room or out to the yard, where she might be sitting beside Beatrice, watching the sun set. After dinner, Paul and Jiselle sat on the deck with their cups of tea. They said nothing about Mark, who had not called, but Paul confided in her that when Tara had not come back from Virginia, he’d felt mostly relieved. There had been trouble between them for years, but the Phoenix flu and the power outages had forced some things to the surface—like the fact that he and Tara had nothing in common, except for Bobby, who was getting older, getting on with his life.

He said that after Tara called to tell him she was going to stay longer, didn’t know when she’d be back, he couldn’t even find it in himself to feel surprised.

“She’d been ready to go for a long time.”

Jiselle thought then of Tara Temple in the line at the bank that day but said nothing.

“And all this hocus-pocus stuff she got into. I couldn’t stomach it. You know, during the Black Plague, these charlatans used to go door to door selling Abracadabras and charms and knots. People would give their last crust of bread for some worthless amulet. She wanted me to believe in her positive thinking and read her books, and I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

Bobby was the one who was grief-stricken. “He misses his mother, and he’s worried about her, of course. He’s afraid she’ll get sick in Virginia, and with no mail service and if the phone lines go completely—the way the electricity’s been going—how will we ever know?”

Jiselle nodded and bit her lip.

“Shit happens,” Paul said. “Look at Schmidt.” He nodded in the direction of Brad and Diane’s house, which had been covered by the county in yards and yards of yellow tape marked
BIOHAZARD.
Brad Schmidt had been gone only one week, and already the hedge between their houses had grown into a tangled thicket, a wild wall. Fat pink flowers bloomed on a few of the branches.

“Jesus Christ,” Sara said. “It’s a flowering hedge. Is that why he kept cutting it up? He was trying to keep the
flowers
from blooming?”

I
t seemed like a minor problem compared to the many other problems, but how could they simply watch her die? There was no more Fowl Feed Deluxe left in the can, and Beatrice would touch nothing else.

“Jiselle?” Sam said. “Can we go to the pet store?
Please?”

He stood at the sliding glass doors shivering in the damp morning breeze, his arms wrapped around his stomach. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, but he’d grown so much in the last few months that the sleeves ended between his elbows and his wrists. Soon, if they couldn’t go shopping, he would look like Huck Finn, a boy grown out of homespun clothes, barefoot.

“We have to get some goose food,” he said. He looked at Jiselle. His eyes were wide and beseeching. “What if she starves?”

Already, at the end of May, when she and Sam had last made a special trip to the pet store and bought the last bag of Fowl Feed Deluxe off the shelf, there had not been any of the usual things. No gerbils. No fish. No rabbits snuffling around in their cages. Certainly no parakeets or parrots. The pet shop owner had told them he thought he was going to close down until normal shipments could resume. That couldn’t be too far off, he’d said hopefully. Truckers would have to be allowed to cross state lines before too long, and if the economy improved, it would sway the tide of world opinion in the direction of resumed trade.

Jiselle was trying to knock the last few ashes out of the can of goose feed. She stepped inside, shaking the rain off her hair. Her hair, which she’d always kept long, had grown several inches in the months without a trip to the salon. Now it nearly reached her waist.

“I don’t know, Sam,” Jiselle said. “Gas. If we waste it, and the store’s not open…”

She had gone by herself into town three weeks earlier and found that even the stores that hadn’t been closed before—the office supply store, the hardware store—had dark windows, padlocked doors. Certainly, she thought, none of these would have reopened.

“But we have to see,” Sam said of the pet store. “We have to
try.”

“No, Sam. We—”

But as Sam stood looking out at Beatrice, Jiselle could see the ravine reflected in his eyes and also the rain falling in staticky gray light over it all. In the dampness, everything shone. Slippery. Slick. She imagined Sam imagining Beatrice retreating into the ravine, never returning to them, disappearing.

What, Jiselle wondered, did farm geese eat if there wasn’t any Fowl Feed Deluxe? She wished she’d asked the pet store owner the last time she and Sam had gone there. How wrong had it been to feed her from the beginning? She’d grown dependent on them, and now they had nothing for her.

Jiselle inhaled. She was having trouble looking into Sam’s deep, tear-filled eyes.

“Please?”

“Oh Sam,” she said.

There was, she knew, plenty of gas—for now. They’d siphoned the Cherokee’s tank, but what they had in the Mazda would have to last, and she did not know for how long. She hesitated, but then she said, “All right. Well. I guess we could at least go see. And if the pet store’s still closed, I’m sure we could find something at the grocery store. I’m sure Beatrice eats
something
besides”—she could find no words to describe the oil and ash of the food Beatrice ate—“and I have to go to the bank anyway.”

It was true. She was out of cash, and although there was really nothing she needed to spend cash on anyway, it made her nervous to have none. The idea of an “emergency” was still alive in her, even now that she realized how few emergencies could be averted with cash. You could not eat cash. You couldn’t use it to heat your house, reduce a fever. Still, Jiselle had stayed in the habit of going to the bank once a month to make sure Mark’s check had been deposited. So far, it had.

“You have to stay here, though, okay?” she said to Sam.

In the last week, Jiselle had heard from Paul Temple and on the radio about carjackings and violence in cities—particularly on the West Coast—over gasoline and batteries. She’d begun to worry about her mother, living alone. Her mother had been fine through the power outages, making her own fires, cooking over them. (“I grew up in worse conditions than this,” she’d said. “You have no clue, Jiselle, what life on a real farm is like.”) But if there were violence, if there were thieves?

Her mother had said, as she had said before, “Don’t worry about me, Jiselle. You’re the one with the problems.”

That things would deteriorate—slowly but certainly—seemed to be what most people believed. There would be more illness, more violence, before things got better—although most people also believed that the Midwest would fare better than the coasts. The last time Jiselle had been in town, the fountain was still bubbling at the center of the park and the flag was still flying (never again at half-mast) outside the post office, even after it had been closed down. Until mid-July they’d even kept the pool open. “We will not participate in Doomsday thinking!” a spokeswoman for the town was quoted in the newspaper as saying.

The newspaper, which had been a weekly, was now coming out only sporadically, but when Jiselle had bought it the month before, it was full of uplifting stories about canned food drives and Boy Scouts cleaning up the streets. There was no longer any obituary section at all.

When she went to the kitchen table to pick up her car keys, Jiselle found Sara standing there. She’d overheard Jiselle telling Sam she would go into town, and she said, “Well, you’re not going by yourself. I’ll go with you.”

“No,” Jiselle said. “I’ll be fine. You stay, and—”

“I
want
to go,” Sara said and turned into the bedroom, as if that were the end of the conversation.

“Will you be okay here alone?” Jiselle asked Sam. Camilla and Bobby were gone, helping Paul deliver firewood to some of his elderly neighbors.

“Sure,” he said. “Besides, I’m not alone.”

They were quiet for a minute and could hear, in Sara’s old room, the light voice of Mrs. Schmidt singing some old, familiar song.

The drive into St. Sophia was accompanied by the radio’s static-filled starts and stops. Jiselle turned it first to the oldies station, but there was nothing there but a series of beeps. Morse code? The only other station they could find that wasn’t religious sounded as if it were being transmitted from the moon—a few memorable bars of a song (“Miss American Pie,” “Tea for the Tillerman”) interrupted by fuzz.

Finally, they turned the radio off.

After the early morning rain, the sky had turned a dazzling white, and Jiselle took the Mazda’s top down before they left. The air felt soft, and although there was less light, and the sun seemed to have crept farther away from the earth, a radiance was draped over everything. Summer cast its last, bright shadow on the ground. In the previous weeks, there had been a strange influx of hummingbirds, and also sandhill cranes. Paul thought that these species were stopping by from some more northern place, or that they were confused, detoured, blown off track, or had miscalculated and were headed south too soon.

For the hummingbirds, Sara had concocted her own recipe for nectar, melting down some stale cotton candy she’d found in the back of her closet, left over in a plastic bag from a carnival a million years before, and she left little saucers of it out on the railing around the deck. One night at dusk, there’d been masses of them swarming those saucers, glistening and iridescent and beating their wings in a supernatural blur. They zigzagged through the air around the house as if they were working together to sew an elaborate net, tying the house to the ground.

Sara managed to stand still long enough with a saucer of nectar held up in her palm that two of the hummingbirds—ruby-throated, soft, and motorized gems—landed on her fingers, dipping their long beaks into the dish, and stayed that way for several seconds before humming away, chasing one another off with angry stabs.

“Oh my god!” Sara said, turning to the doorway, where Sam and Jiselle and Camilla stood watching, holding their breaths.

Sara rested her elbow on the car door. Her fawn-colored hair flew around her face in a shining blur as they passed through the outskirts of town and into St. Sophia. It had been less than three weeks since Jiselle had been there, but the town looked strange to her. Had she simply not noted, then, the gradual changes that had resulted in this more
complete
change?

The lawns, which had been so neatly trimmed and bordered with petunias and impatiens, and the gardens dotted with pansies, seemed to have overgrown in crazed and unexpected ways. The grass and weeds in the lawns were hip high. The petunias in the gardens were tangled in poison ivy. The domesticated faces of those pansies were entwined with wildflowers—sweet pea, thistle. She slowed down to the twenty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit in town and saw a rocking chair on a front porch completely covered in vines that bore a kind of spiky purple flower she’d never seen. Windowboxes spilled their contents—long ropes of blossoms and leaves flowing out of them down the sides of houses. All the cars were parked, and no one was on the sidewalks or coming in or out of the houses. A thin black cat sat on the hood of a pickup truck parked next to the post office, licking its paw. It looked up when Jiselle and Sara drove by, seeming to watch them with distaste as they passed.

Farther into town, in the business district, no stores at all were open. The jewelry store where Jiselle had bought the bracelet for her mother, and outside of which she’d seen the reindeer, appeared to have been vandalized. The plate glass was shattered, and the shards and diamonds of the destruction glittered in the sunlight.

The bank was closed, too—the lobby windows dark—but Jiselle was happy to see that the drive-up appeared to be open. A little sign reading
PULL FORWARD
was illuminated over one of the lanes. She did. Behind the Plexiglas, a young woman was sitting very still, barely visible in the glare. Either the young woman was very deep in thought, or she was listening carefully to something. When she didn’t move or look in their direction, Jiselle pressed the green button for service, and the bank teller jumped, snapped to attention. “Yes?” she said into her intercom.

“I just need some cash,” Jiselle said. “And to check my balance.”

“Okay,” she said.

Jiselle could see the young woman more clearly now. Really, she was a girl. No older than Camilla. Maybe closer to Sara’s age. Jiselle put her bank card and her driver’s license into the metal tube, hit the Send button, and in seconds the tube had shot across the empty parking lot and into the darkened bank.

“I go to school with that girl,” Sara said. “Or
went
to school with her. Her father manages this bank. I wonder where he is.”

Jiselle looked toward the bank. It did not look like a place that needed a manager. It was impossible, really, even to think of it as the same place where she’d stood in a long line the day she’d seen Tara Temple. Or, before that, the professional-looking men and women in their glass offices, signing papers, fingers flashing over keyboards, the appearance of important transactions taking place, official forms needing to be filled out. After what seemed like a long time, the girl came back and said, over the intercom, “Mrs. Dorn?”

“Yes?” Jiselle said.

“This account has been closed. There’s nothing in it.”

“What?” Jiselle asked.

“The account’s closed,” the girl said. “Someone closed it.”

Beside Jiselle, Sara shook her head.
“Asshole,”
she said under her breath, and then to Jiselle, touching her shoulder gently, “Let’s just go. We don’t need money. There’s nothing to spend it on anyway.”

Jiselle said nothing. She was too stunned to speak. The girl raised her hand, as if in apology. She said, “Bye, you guys.”

At the pet shop, Jiselle didn’t even bother to slow down. The biohazard tape was draped across the front window and wound around the entrance.

“He did this to my mom, too,” Sara said. “He was always fucking around, of course. Captain Cliché. He cut her off completely just before she died. We were eating nothing but peanut butter. My dad was pretty much out of our lives until she died. I mean, he loved you, Jiselle, I’m sure. But. I’m sorry. My dad is—with women. My dad is a—”

“Fool for love,” Jiselle whispered after a long silence between them. She was trembling, and tears fell in large drops from her eyes and onto her bare arms. She pulled over outside the smashed glass of the pharmacy and turned the car off to save gasoline. She got out, walked around to the passenger side, and asked Sara to drive. She’d turned sixteen the month before, and although, with the secretary of state’s office closed down, Sara had been unable to get a license, she’d known how to drive for years.

Why, Jiselle thought, looking down at her empty hands in her lap, was she surprised? What kind of fuzzy logic had made her think that he would keep the money in the bank account for her, that he would not find some new love of his life, on a plane, in a foreign city, in the back of a taxi careening through narrow European streets, or quarantined at the Gesundheitsschutzhaus?

She heard her mother’s voice:

Don’t be even more of a fool than you’ve already been, Jiselle.

She remembered what she’d said in the car on the way to the wedding:

Look, your father was fucking Ellen since the two of you were fifteen years old.

Before starting up the Mazda, Sara said, “We understand. We understand if you want to go.” She turned her face to the windshield and began to pull the car into the road. Jiselle reached over and grabbed Sara’s hand so quickly she hadn’t realized she’d done it. Sara didn’t turn to look at her, but let Jiselle’s hand rest on her own on the steering wheel, and Jiselle saw a tear slip down her perfect nose and drip from the end of it, disappear onto the upholstery.