Among These Bones (Book 2): When It's No Longer Night Read online

  And touch, human touch. When my body was utterly overcome with fatigue accumulated after a week or so of no sleep, I would sleep, and in that sleep, I’d dream of someone holding me.

  I hadn’t had any meaningful companionship since I’d been awakened that day with Gary and the big nurse in the recovery room. Gary had touched me that day, and I’d wanted to cringe away. Now I’d pay a ransom for a side hug or a pat on the upper arm. When I handed him a glass, I’d try to arrange my grasp so that we’d touch fingers for a split second.

  I couldn’t go out much—there was nowhere to go, or at least nowhere I could go. There was unrest outside, trouble in the Zones. I couldn’t remember the last time I had a conversation, or was embraced, and that made it feel like it had been forever.

  I stood at the bedroom window as Gary slept on the couch. The bars cast a criss-crossing of shadows across my nightgown and the floor behind me. I don’t know how long I stood there, but after a while I went back to bed and lay there awake, wanting and needing to do something, my mind screaming at me to do something but knowing nothing, remembering nothing, and having no idea where to start.

  ***

  In the morning, Gary arose from the couch in the front room, folded the bedding, and set it on the floor to one side of the couch. He made almost no sound. I sat on the bed watching him. I could see only a narrow slice of the front room. I watched him cross the room and go into the kitchen, but I didn’t need to see him to know why he’d gone into the kitchen. Every day was the same. I could close my eyes and picture every move he made and every move he was going to make.

  Because every day was exactly the same.

  That’s not true—every day was almost exactly the same. There were small differences, variations. For one thing, we spoke a little less each day. We interacted less often with each passing week. But aside from such subtleties, the days were all alike.

  Except today.

  Today would be different.

  Today would be different because I would make it different.

  From my place on the bed, Gary was out of my view for the moment, but I knew he was filling a filter with coffee grounds and then he would turn on the coffee machine. I could count it down. Three, two, one—and the coffee machine hissed to life.

  Next he’ll come into the hallway, I thought, and a few seconds later there he was in the hallway. If I hadn’t watched this routine a few hundred times before, I might have said that he was limping down the hallway to the open bedroom door and straight to me. Like maybe he was coming to the bed to give my foot a friendly squeeze and to say good morning.

  But he wasn’t.

  I thought, will he look up this morning? Some mornings he looked up and sometimes not. It was one of the variations. At this step of his routine Gary sometimes looked up and made eye contact with me. Spotting and noting even small things like this had become part of my day.

  He didn’t look up. Ninth day in a row.

  Next he made a sharp left off the hallway and disappeared into the bathroom. He still made very nearly no sound. I sat on the bed, on the right side, because when I’d first come home to the apartment, Gary’s things were on the nightstand on the left. After a year I was still sleeping on one side of the bed.

  The toilet seat clunked open. The toilet seat clunked shut. The toilet flushed. Shower water running. Shower curtain rattling open. Shower off. Shower curtain shut. Like clockwork. Sink faucet on. Sink off.

  Only after he was showered and shaved did he come into the bedroom. He wore a bathrobe, and he shuffled into the room. At this point Gary finally established eye contact and gave me a head nod. It was the dying remnant of the more lengthy greetings he’d once given me each morning. At first he would tell me good morning and we’d exchange a few words, but that had devolved into a muttered “morning,” which had devolved over weeks to a mere “mm.” A few more months later it was just the eye contact and a nod, and I knew that sooner or later it would all vanish until there was no acknowledgment at all. What would that be like? To live with someone and simply never have any contact?

  But that day wasn’t today. Today would at least be much different from the last couple hundred. And maybe they’d be different from now on.

  From the closet Gary removed a pair of slacks and a shirt and his underwear. I could describe how he rotated through his pants and shirts so that he dressed alike each day but not exactly the same, and I even knew how he selected his underwear—it had taken me a while to piece that together, but even I had grown bored with tracking it.

  He returned to the bathroom to dress.

  Only a few more steps remained in the morning routine. I had made attempts to break him out of this strict regimen. I made him breakfast a few times, and he politely ate, but eventually he said, “You needn’t bother with all of this. I’m not a big breakfast eater. I have coffee and toast. That’s it.”

  Now I lay in bed as he moved through the same ten or twelve almost-silent steps with their four or five variations.

  I heard the toast pop up, and then the faint scratching of the butter knife against the bread, and I knew there was less than five minutes until he was gone. I looked at the clock. Four minutes and ten seconds later, Gary crossed the front room again, this time on his way to the front door.

  Before what Gary referred to as “the incident” (by which he meant the explosion that maimed him), he’d worked as a supervisor out in the Zones.

  “It was rough work,” he’d told me, “but I was making a difference. I really was. It was a job that mattered.” Then he had let his gaze fall, and I knew he was thinking of what he’d lost, what had been taken from him.

  He worked at a desk now, doing some kind of data entry and record keeping of people who lived in the Zones. I’d asked him about it several times but he seldom wanted to talk about it.

  “It’s busy-work,” he’d told me testily one day. “Okay? They’ve parked me at a desk, and they give me tasks that a monkey could handle.”

  I’d never been to his office, but I had a mental picture of it. The ubiquitous cinder block walls painted white, frosted plastic panels over fluorescent light tubes. Beige computer and keyboard. He sat there typing, pecking and poking at the keys because his injuries left him unable to properly home-row.

  I didn’t have a job.

  “There’s no need,” Gary said. “In fact, it’d be a bad idea. You’d have to travel to the Depot every day and there’s just so much trouble out there right now. It’s a weird time.”

  Terrorists had somehow made contact with me, which had led to the trouble he referred to. He never said it explicitly, but I knew he worried about it happening again. When I did occasionally leave our housing unit to pick up provisions or visit the doctor, Gary would question me.

  “Did you come straight home?” he’d say.

  “Yeah, of course,” I’d answer. “Where else would I go?”

  “I don’t know. Just expected you sooner.”

  “I went slow. The sidewalks are all covered in snow.”

  “Talk to anyone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “The dentist.”

  “He say anything?

  “That my gums look good.”

  “Maybe in a few months we can look for something you can do,” he’d said. “Maybe we can find something you can do here in the housing blocks.”

  “I’ll do anything,” I said. “Clean, wash windows. I’ll clean the toilets.”

  “My rank and position are more than sufficient for now.”

  He was right, but of course this had little to do with clothing or getting enough to eat. It would be nice to have a little income to put away in my account for extras like chocolate and mango-scented body wash, but what I really craved was some kind of break from the endless, quiet, event-less days. And contact with other people—if I’m being honest, that’s what I wanted most of all.

  There were people in t
he housing block to speak to, but most of them certainly must have known what had happened with Gary and me, and almost none of them would say more than a few words to me. I’d become acquainted with Mrs. Carlyle, a resident in our housing block, but she wasn’t a friend—she’d posted a note by the entrance of the commissary saying she was interested in someone to wash her linens for a pitiful weekly sum, and I’d responded immediately—mostly because it meant someone to speak to, but aside from a few brief conversations to set things up, she now communicated strictly through the written notes she’d pin to the laundry bags she left outside her door each Sunday morning.

  These days if I got a curt nod in the courtyard from one of the guards, I counted that a good morning. If one of them said, “Hey, Mrs. Gosford,” it made my day.

  Members of Gary’s old team would sometimes visit him, but I never spoke to any of them—barely even saw them.

  A few weeks after I’d first come home to the apartment, Gary sat me down and said, “Okay, a few of my old team are going to stop by later tonight.”

  “Oh, really?” I said. “I’ll make something for dinner. Beef stew, maybe. Or lasagna. We can go to the commissary and get ice cream—”

  “No, no. That’s not actually what I was getting at. They’re gonna stop by, and I’ll be leaving with them. We’ll be gone until late.”

  “Oh, I see. Of course. A night out with the boys, huh? That’ll be good for you. Sure.”

  “Right,” he continued, “but what I’m trying to tell you is that it might be best if you were in the bedroom when they get here. Or maybe at the commissary. We’ll only be a minute, and then we’ll be gone. My concern is that I don’t want you to feel awkward. So.”

  “I understand. I’ll be in the bedroom. It’s no problem.”

  “Good.”

  At first, the team came to get Gary a couple times a month, but soon it was pretty much every Friday, then Fridays and Saturdays. As his morning greetings became more curt, his nights out with his team became more frequent. After a few months he was gone more nights than he was home, and his absence became the new routine in these days that all looked alike.

  Today would be different.

  I heard the deadbolt unlatch, and the front door open. The final step of the morning checklist.

  “Have a good day, Gary!” I yelled.

  This was a variation of my own—provoking him into interacting with me. Sometimes he’d answer, “Yeah, you too,” and other times it was, “Okay, thanks.”

  I listened. I knew he’d heard me because there was no sound. I closed my eyes and I could picture him with one hand on the door knob and the door open, maybe halfway out the door already and looking over his shoulder, deciding how he’d reply.

  This time there was nothing. After a few more seconds, I heard the door close. No reply at all. That was new.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said under my breath. “Today’s gonna be full of surprises.”

  I got out of bed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  My only real responsibilities in Gary’s apartment were cleaning the house and preparing dinner. This meant that my only responsibilities in the entire world were cleaning and dinner. I suppose some people would think that wasn’t a bad deal. I heard of people who worked jobs that were much more difficult and distasteful than mine—backbreaking jobs, or jobs that simply never ended. I heard about Agency security personnel who spent three days marching on border patrol and then just two off before starting again. I heard about Agency drivers who were on call twenty-four hours a day and sometimes worked that long at a single stretch. There were those who worked in production facilities for twelve hours a day and more if told to. People in the Zones were given manual labor such as farming, construction, and road maintenance—without the benefit of machines and electrical power.

  And so I cooked little dinners for Gary and kept the already-tidy apartment tidy. I made casseroles and pot roasts and lasagna. It turned out I wasn’t much of a cook, but Gary was easy to please, despite his almost never paying me a compliment. With no kids or pets—which in a funny way made my simple chores even more challenging—there wasn’t enough to keep my mind occupied.

  When I complained of boredom and tedium, Gary replied, “Find meaning in the things you do each day. You can’t just sleepwalk through your tasks. We all have a part to play in this project, and even if those tasks seem inconsequential, we have to believe in them.”

  This was much easier to say than to do, of course.

  Without true human companionship, it all seemed pointless. The rooms were clean but not comfortable, the food adequate but not a source of any kind of satisfaction. It was what I imagined a prison hospital would be like—not a dismal place, not a desolate place, but hospitable only in the barest sense of the word.

  I tried to find a purpose in my existence, but what I arrived at more easily were small moments of distraction. In the courtyard I sometimes fed food scraps to the ravens and magpies that lived around the apartment block. If I put my ear to the heater vents I could sometimes hear my neighbors bickering about petty things. He accused her of being too critical. She told him he was lazy. He said she was rude. She said he didn’t spend enough time with her kids. They never shouted at one another, but they were sharp and they hurled the most shocking insults. I listened to them, not caring who was right but wishing to be with someone who cared enough to raise an objection or to argue and shout.

  And then there was the bathroom window.

  The bathroom had only one window—in the wall where the shower was, and it was made of frosted glass—you couldn’t see out of it unless it was open. But scaly deposits of hard water residue built up on the inside every week, and the outside would become grimy with tiny spiderwebs and windblown dust. So I removed the window every so often to clean it.

  The window looked out on an alley between two apartment buildings—the view was just another wall of windows. But one day I removed the window panes and heard voices and shouted commands down below. I put my head out the window and at the open end of the canyon between the two adjacent buildings, there was a crowd of people.

  It turned out to be a queuing station where some of the people from the nearby Zone came to collect their weekly rations and supplies. I couldn’t see the entire line, but if I looked out at just the right angle, I could see the front of the line and the Agency people who dispensed food and other needs.

  Even from that distance I could see that they were shabby and tired-looking. Men, women, young people, old people. They came with their frowzy sacks and busted baskets to collect whatever was on offer. Sometimes it was packets of food or coarse bundles of vegetables, sometimes bundles of clothing, sometimes cans of fuel.

  When I figured out this was a weekly event, I set my bathroom window cleaning schedule to match it, and I would watch them for an hour or more at a time, thinking of who they might be and how they got along. Sometimes the schedule changed, and on days when there was no queue, I wondered how they could get by without a weekly re-supply.

  One night, in an attempt to make conversation, I asked Gary about it.

  “You watch them from the bathroom window?” he asked, eyebrows raised.

  “Yeah. Well, I saw them by accident, but now I watch them sometimes after I take the windows out.”

  “Don’t do that anymore,” he said. “If the security personnel see you, they might think you’re up to something. They’ll come and question you.”

  “I’m just looking out my own window.”

  “Don’t do it anymore.”

  “They seem so sad. So broken. Those people down there.”

  “Most of them are lazy,” said Gary. “Or they have no useful skills. They’re weak, unproductive. Freeloaders.”

  I deduced that I used to be one of them. Gary didn’t say so, and I couldn’t remember, but I’d been told that we all began in the Starting Zones. And when Gary had first brought me home to the apartment, I’d
shown obvious signs of malnutrition. I was underweight and my heart palpated at times. My gums were shrunken, like they were drying out. My hands were hard, cracked, and calloused. My fingernails were grimy and worn down to mere patches of rough keratin. I used to be one of them, out there beneath my bathroom window. I was watching myself down there.

  When the people reached the front of the line, they’d bow their heads. I couldn’t make out what this meant at first, but then I figured out that the guards were passing a wand over the backs of their necks to read an implant of some kind that held their identity. Only after being identified could they have their rations.

  These tiny distractions and the slight variations in the routine of Gary’s comings and goings didn’t seem to hold any real significance, but they were in fact the only things keeping me from losing the will to even get out of bed.

  But that was about to end. That is what I’d told myself. Today was the day I would change things between Gary and me. And I was partially right—things were about to change, but not in the way I thought.

  As soon as Gary was out of the apartment, I was up. I had coffee with toast and eggs and I even allowed myself a few curls of bacon. The apartment was already fairly tidy, but I cleaned it from top to bottom anyway. Then I showered, set my hair in curlers, and retrieved the cardboard box I’d hidden under my side of the bed. Inside the box were a few items I’d bought from the commissary with the money I’d earned by doing my neighbor’s laundry every Sunday.

  First out of the box was a pair of simple, open-toed shoes. I had only two other pairs of shoes—a pair of gray sneaker-type sensible shoes like the ones nurses wear, and a pair of brown work boots that I wore when it was cold out. My new shoes were made of navy blue canvas with white piping and a cork wedge sole. I thought they would be good for the summer, for a walk on a beach. They were shopworn, or more probably they were previously owned, but I liked the way they looked on my feet.

  Next was a simple dress with cap sleeves and a pattern of white and blue flowers. It didn’t exactly match the shoes, but I thought it was reasonably flattering.