The Fireman: A Novel Part 5

8.

Two days later her left arm was sheet music. Delicate black lines spooled around and around her forearm, bars as thin as the strands of a spiderweb, with what looked like golden notes scattered across them. She found herself pulling her sleeve back to look at it every few minutes. By the end of the following week, she was sketched in Dragonscale from wrist to shoulder.

One day she pulled her s.h.i.+rt off and glanced at herself in the mirror on the back of her armoire and saw a belt riding just above her hips, a tattoo in gold and black. When she got over feeling winded and sick, she had to admit to herself that it was curiously beautiful.

Sometimes she took off all her clothes except her underwear and examined her new ill.u.s.trated skin by candlelight. She wasn't sleeping much, and these inspections usually took place a little after midnight. Much as it was possible to imagine a visage in a flickering fire, or a figure in the grain of a wooden surface, she thought she saw half-finished images scrawled in the 'scale.

That was usually when Jakob called, from the dead man's trailer. He wasn't sleeping, either.

"Thought I ought to check in," he said. "See what you did with yourself today."

"Puttered around the house. Ate the last of the pasta. Made an effort not to turn into a heap of coals. How are you?"

"Hot. It's hot here. It's always hot."

"Open a window. It's cool out. I've got them all open and I'm fine."

"I've got them all open, too, and I'm roasting. It's like trying to sleep in an oven."

She didn't like the angry way he talked about not being able to cool off or the way he fixated on it, like the heat was a personal affront.

Harper distracted him by talking about her condition in a languid, almost breezy tone. "I've got a swirl of 'scale on the inside of my left arm that looks like an open umbrella. An umbrella sailing away on the wind. Do you think the spore has an artistic impulse? Do you think it reacts to the stuff you've got in your subconscious and tries to ink your skin with pictures you might like?"

"I don't want to talk about the s.h.i.+t you've got on you. I get shaky thinking about it, about that disgusting s.h.i.+t all over you."

"That makes me feel nice. Thank you."

He let out a harsh, angry breath. "I'm sorry. I'm-I'm not unsympathetic."

She laughed-surprising not just him, but herself. Good old Jakob used such smart, picky words sometimes. Unsympathetic. Before he dropped out of college he had been a philosophy major, and he still had the habit of hunting through his vocabulary for exactly the right term, which, somehow, inexplicably, always made it the wrong term. He corrected her spelling sometimes, too.

Harper wondered, idly, why it took getting contaminated to notice the marriage itself was sick.

He tried again. "I'm sorry. I am. I'm boiling. It's hard to be-thoughtful."

A cross-breeze fanned through the room, cool on her bare tummy. She didn't know how he could possibly be hot, wherever he was.

"I was wondering if the Dragonscale started doodling Mary Poppins's umbrella on my arm. You know how many times I've seen Mary Poppins?"

"The Dragonscale isn't reacting to your subconscious. You are. You're seeing the kinds of things you're already primed to see."

"That makes sense," she said. "But you know what? There was a gardener in the hospital who had swirls of this stuff up his legs that looked just like tattoos of crawling vines. You could see delicate individual leaves and everything. Everyone agreed it looked like ivy. Like the Dragonscale was making an artistic commentary on his life's work."

"That's just how it looks. Like strands of thorns. I don't want to talk about it."

"I guess it couldn't be in my brain yet, so it couldn't really know anything about me. It takes weeks to pa.s.s up the sinuses to the brain. We're still in the getting-to-know-each-other phase of the relations.h.i.+p."

"Christ," he said. "I'm burning alive over here."

"Boy, did you call the wrong person for sympathy," she said.

9.

A couple of nights later she poured herself a gla.s.s of red wine and read the first page of Jakob's book. She told herself if his novel was any good at all, the next time she talked to him she would admit she had looked at some of it and tell him how much she loved it. He couldn't be angry at her for breaking her promise never to look at the ma.n.u.script without permission. She had a fatal illness. That had to change the rules.

But after one page she knew it wasn't going to be any good and she left it, feeling bad again, as if she had wronged him somehow.

A while later, after a second gla.s.s of wine-two weren't going to do any harm to the baby-she read thirty pages. She had to quit there. She couldn't go any further and still be in love with him. In truth, maybe thirty pages had been three too many.

The novel was about a former philosophy student, J., who has an unfulfilling job at the Department of Public Works and an unfulfilling marriage with a cheerfully shallow blonde who can't spell, reads YA novels because she lacks the mental rigor for mature fiction, and has no sense whatsoever of her husband's tortured inner life. To a.s.suage his existential disappointment, J. engages in a series of casual affairs with women Harper had no trouble identifying: friends from college, teachers from the elementary, a former personal trainer. Harper decided these affairs were inventions . . . although the lies J. told his wife, about where he was and what he was doing when he was really with someone else, corresponded almost word for word with conversations Harper remembered having.

Somehow, though, the clinical reports of his affairs were not the worst of it. What she detested even more was the protagonist's contempt.

He hated the men who drove the trucks for Public Works. He hated their fat faces and their fat wives and their fat children. He hated the way they saved all year to buy tickets in nosebleed territory for a pro-football game. He hated how happy they were in the weeks after the game, and hated the way they would tell the story of the game over and over as if recounting the battle of Thermopylae.

He hated all of his wife's girlfriends-J. had no friends of his own-for not knowing Latin, drinking ma.s.s-produced beer instead of microbrews, and raising the next generation of overfed, overentertained human place-fillers. This did not stop him from f.u.c.king them, however.

He did not hate his wife, but felt for her the kind of affection a man usually reserves for an excitable puppy. Her immediate acceptance of his every opinion and observation was both disheartening and a little hilarious to him. There was not a single criticism he could offer that she would not immediately accept as true. He made a game out of it. If she worked all week to throw a dinner party, he would tell her everyone had hated it-even if it had been a wonderful time-and she would cry and agree he was right and immediately rush out to buy some books so she could learn to do a party right. No, he did not hate her. But he felt sorry for her and felt sorry for himself, because he was stuck with her. Also, she cried too easily, which suggested to him, paradoxically, a shallowness of feeling. A woman who got teary over commercials for the ASPCA could not be expected to wrestle with the deeper despair of being human in a cra.s.s age.

There was all this-his derisive rage and self-pity-and there was bad writing too. His paragraphs never ended. Neither did his sentences. Sometimes it could take him thirty words before he found his way to a verb. Every page or two he'd drop a line in Greek or French or German. The few times Harper was able to translate one of these bons mots, it always seemed like something he could've said just as well in English.

Harper thought, helplessly, of Bluebeard. She had gone and done it, she had looked in the forbidden room and seen what she was never supposed to see. She had discovered not corpses behind the locked door, but contempt. She thought hatred might've been easier to forgive. If you hated someone, she was at least worthy of your pa.s.sion.

He had never told her what the book was about, not in any concrete terms, although sometimes he would say something airy-fairy like, "It's about the terror of an ordinary life" or "It's the story of a man s.h.i.+pwrecked in his own mind." But the two of them had shared long postcoital discussions about what their lives would be like after the novel came out. He had hoped it would make them enough money so they could get a pied--terre in Manhattan (Harper was unclear on how this was different from an apartment, but a.s.sumed there had to be something). She had eagerly and breathlessly talked about how great he'd be on the radio, funny and clever and self-deprecating; she had hoped they would have him on NPR. They talked about things they wanted to buy and famous people they wanted to meet, and remembering it now, it all seemed shabby and sad and deluded. It was bad enough that she had been so utterly convinced he had a brilliant mind, but much worse to discover he was convinced of it, too, and on such thin evidence.

It amazed her, as well, that he had written something so appalling and then left it in plain sight, for years. But then he had been sure she wouldn't read it, because he had told her not to, and he understood she was inclined to obedience. Her entire self-worth depended on doing and being just what he wanted her to do and be. He had been right about that, of course. The novel would not have been so awful if it did not contain within it a certain degree of truth. She had only looked at Desolation's Plough because she was dying.

Harper put the novel back on his desk, cornering the edges of the ma.n.u.script so it stood in a neat, crisp pile. With its clean white t.i.tle page and clean white edges, it looked as immaculate as a freshly made bed in a luxury hotel. People did all sorts of unspeakable things in hotel beds.

Almost as an afterthought, she put a box of kitchen matches on top of it as a paperweight. If her Dragonscale started to smoke and itch, she wanted to have them close at hand. If she had to burn, she felt it only fair that the f.u.c.king book burn first.

10.

It was almost one in the morning the next time he called, but she was still up, working on a book of her own-her baby book. Her book began: h.e.l.lo! This is your mother, in book form. This is what I looked like before I was a book.

She had taped a picture of herself directly beneath. It was a photograph her father had taken of her, when she was nineteen years old and teaching archery for the Exeter Rec. Department. The kid in the photograph was a gangly girl with pale hair, ears that stuck out, bony boyish knees, and sc.r.a.pes on the insides of her arms from accidents with the bowstring. Pretty, though. In the photo, the sun was behind her, lighting her hair in a brilliant ring of gold. Jakob said it was her teen angel picture.

Below it she had taped a reflective silver square, something she had clipped out of a magazine ad. Beneath it she wrote: Do we look alike? She had a lot of ideas about what belonged in the book. Recipes. Instructions. At least one game. The lyrics of her favorite songs, which she would've sung to the baby if she'd had a chance: "Love Me Do," "My Favorite Things," "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head."

There would be no girly-girly tragic stuff if she could help it. As a school nurse, she had always modeled herself on Mary Poppins, aiming for an air of good-tempered calm, self-a.s.surance, a tolerance for play, but an expectation that the medicine would go down along with the spoonful of sugar. If the kids thought it was possible she might break into song and shoot fireworks from the tip of her umbrella, that was all right with her.

Such was the tone she was trying to nail in the baby book. The question was what a child wanted from his mother; her answer was Band-Aids for sc.r.a.pes, a song at bedtime, kindness, something sweet to eat after school, someone to help with homework, someone to cuddle with. She hadn't figured out how to make the book cuddly yet, but she had stapled a dozen Band-Aids into the inside cover, along with four prepackaged alcohol swabs. She felt the book-The Portable Mother-was off to a roaring good start.

When the phone rang, she was in front of the TV. The TV was always on. It had not been off in six months, except in the occasional spells when there was no power. She had electric at the moment and was parked in front of the screen, although she was working on the book, not really paying attention.

There was nothing to watch anyway. FOX was still broadcasting, but from Boston, not New York. NBC was on the air, but from Orlando. CNN was on the air, too, in Atlanta, but the evening news anchor was a man named Jim Joe Carter, a Baptist preacher, and his reports were always about people who had been saved from the spore by Jesus. All the rest of the channels were HSB, the Homeland Security Broadcast, or local news programs, or static. The HSB was broadcast from Quantico, Virginia. Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., was still burning. So was Manhattan. She had the TV tuned to FOX. The phone rang and she picked it up. She knew it was Jakob even before he spoke. His breath was strange and a little choked and he didn't say anything, not at first.

"Jakob," she said. "Jakob, talk to me. Say something."

"Do you have the TV on?"

She put down her pen. "What's wrong?"

Harper had not known how she would be with him, the next time they spoke. She worried she would not be able to keep the resentment out of her voice. If Jakob thought she sounded hostile, he would want to know why, and she would have to tell him. She could never keep anything from him. And Harper didn't want to talk about his book. She didn't even want to think about it. She was pregnant and crawling with a flammable fungus and she had recently learned Venice was burning, so now she was never going to get to see it by gondola. With all that going on, it was a bit much to expect her to provide a literary critique of his s.h.i.+tty novel.

But he laughed-roughly and unhappily-and the sound of it rattled her and caused her to forget her resentment, at least for the moment. A part of her thought, calmly, clinically: hysteria. G.o.d knew she had seen enough of it in the last half a year.

"That's the funniest thing anyone has said since I have no idea," he said. "What's wrong? You mean besides the world catching fire? Besides fifty million human beings turning into b.a.l.l.s of flame? Are you watching FOX?"

"I'm watching. What's wrong, Jakob? You're crying. Has something happened?" It was no wonder he held her in contempt. In ten seconds he had her worrying about him again, when five minutes ago she would've been glad not to hear from him for a month. It embarra.s.sed her, that she couldn't hang on to her rage.

"You seeing this?"

She stared at the TV, jittery footage of a meadow somewhere. A few men in yellow rain slickers and elbow-high rubber gloves and gas masks, carrying Bushmaster a.s.sault rifles, were on the far side of the field. The tall yellow gra.s.s undulated in a soft rain. Beyond the men in the rain slickers was a line of trees. Off to the left was a highway. A car shushed over a rise and swept past, headlights glowing in the half dusk.

"-cell phone camera," said the newscaster. "We caution you, this footage is graphic." That was hardly worth mentioning. It was all graphic these days.

They were bringing people out of the woods. Kids, mostly, although there were some women with them. Some of the kids were naked. One of the women was naked, too, but clutching a dress to the front of her body.

"They've been showing this one all night," Jakob said. "The news loves this. Look. Look at the cars."

The field was in full view of the highway. Another car came over the rise, and then a pickup. Both vehicles slowed as they pa.s.sed the field, then sped up again.

The women and children who had been marched out of the trees were bunched together into a tight group. The children were crying. From the distance, their voices, all together, sounded like the first keening wind of fall. One of the women took a small boy in her arms, lifted him up, and squeezed him to her. Watching it go down, Harper was struck with a brief but intense wave of dej vu, the improbable certainty that she was watching herself, at some future point. She was seeing how she herself would die.

The woman who had been stripped, and who was clutching her dress, lunged toward one of the rain-slicker men. At a distance, her bare back looked as if it had been slashed, then st.i.tched up with brilliant gold thread: the Dragonscale. She let go of her dress and careened, naked, toward an a.s.sault rifle.

"You can't," she howled. "Let us go! This is Ameri-"

The first gun might've gone off by accident. Harper wasn't sure. But then, they had brought them to the field to shoot them, so maybe it was wrong to think anyone was shot there by accident. Prematurely was, perhaps, the more accurate word for it. The muzzle of a gun flashed. The naked woman kept coming, one step, two, then tilted forward into the gra.s.s and disappeared.

There followed an instant-just enough time to draw a single breath-of surprised, baffled silence. Another car came over the rise and began to slow.

The other guns went off, all together, firecrackers on a July night. Muzzles flashed, like paparazzi snapping shots of George Clooney as he climbed out of his limousine. Although George Clooney was dead, had burned to death while on a humanitarian aid mission to New York City.

The car pa.s.sing by on the highway slowed to a crawl, so the driver could watch. The women and their children fell while the guns stuttered in the September rain. The car accelerated away.

The rain-slicker men had missed one person, a little girl, slipping, spritelike, across the field toward the hidden observer with the cell phone. She rushed across the meadow as fast as the shadow of a cloud. Harper watched, gripping her baby book in both hands, holding her breath, sending out a silent wish: Let her go. Let her get away. But then the girl folded in on herself and tumbled forward and collapsed and Harper realized it had never been a person at all. The thing racing across the field had been the dress that the naked woman had been holding. The wind had made it dance for a moment, that was all. Now the dance was over.

The program cut back to the studio. The newsman stood in front of a wide-screen TV, replaying the footage. He kept his back to it and spoke in a smooth, calm voice. Harper couldn't hear what he was saying. Jakob was talking, too, but she couldn't hear what he was saying, either.

She spoke over both of them. "Did you think she looked like me?"

Jakob said, "What are you talking about?"

"The woman who was hugging the little boy. I thought she looked like me."

The newscaster was saying, "-ill.u.s.trates the dangers of people who have been infected and who don't seek-"

"I didn't notice," Jakob said. His voice was strangled with emotion.

"Jakob. Tell me what's wrong."

"I'm sick."

She felt as if she had stood up too quickly, although she hadn't moved. She perched on the edge of the couch, light-headed and a little faint.

"You've got a stripe?"

"I've got a fever."

"Okay. But do you have marks on you?"

"It's on my foot. I thought it was a bruise. I dropped a sandbag on my foot yesterday and I thought it was just a bruise." For a moment he sounded close to crying.

"Oh, Jakob. Send me a picture. I want to look at it."

"I don't need you to look at it."

"Please. For me."

"I know what it is."

"Please, Jake."