The Apocalypse Reader (7 page)

Then Gary did a wonderful thing. He flew out the window and returned an hour later with a large chunk of birdseed molded into the shape of a bell. The hard seeds felt like they would crack my teeth, but I ate, grinding them into a fine paste and adding more and more, saving it all on my tongue until I had built up enough to feel it in there, heavy and warm. It was only a teaspoon worth of seed paste, but when I swallowed it was like a fine porridge, a delicious meal, enough to give me the strength to go on. We gave Gary little pieces, but not quite enough and soon he was out the window and back with another huge chunk of seed. Gary saved us, really. We ate birdseed for a month and then one day he returned with an empty beak. Our hunger was stronger than before, more determined.

Lionel said, "We all love you Gary. Please, know that we love you." Then he produced two mallets and swung them again and again, flattening Gary's head against the windowsill. Lionel donned his carpenter's belt and, after a slight meal of bird meat, painted a likeness of Gary onto the rough leather around his waist while the rest of us snapped Gary's bones and sucked out the marrow.

We felt as if we were sinking into the floorboards. Invaders showed up periodically, but we had prepared for them. When the door was breached, we screamed and threw books at our enemies. Lionel would stand in the middle of the room, using what strength he had left to raise a samurai sword in the air and shake it in a threatening manner. If the invaders persisted, Lionel would light a flash bomb or a smoke grenade from his magician's kit. One day there were no more bombs. Sven Ronsen kicked down the door and stared at us.

"Would you look at you," Sven Ronsen said. He was wearing a chinless yellow motorcycle helmet and a tank top that said
Whack-a-doo!
"Look at how helpless you all are. Bless you forever. It breaks the heart is what it does."

He picked us up. He was incredibly strong. I could feel his muscles cradling me. I must have weighed no more than eighty pounds. The others looked like dolls with their dull skin and gigantic glistening eyes. I had the feeling that we were being harvested, like livestock, that we were being driven out of the pasture of our apartment and would soon be on our way to some horrible slaughterhouse. Sven Ronsen carried us all downstairs and loaded us into a small wooden cart. He took Lionel's samurai sword and strapped it to his back. He grabbed the cart's rusted ball joint with his bare hands and pulled us down the road.

The streets were filled with trash and bones picked clean. The city smelled like it had died and been taken over by a powerful fungus. Sven Ronsen pulled us into an alleyway, opened a door, and wheeled us down a ramp into the basement of a barricaded health food store. There were half a dozen others inside, organizing shelves and taking inventory.

"Idiot!" someone screamed out. "You cannot bring more people, shithead!"

"These are the beautiful people," said Sven Ronsen. "We have plenty of food."

"I will not tolerate it," the man said. He walked over and slapped Sven Ronsen hard across the face. Sven Ronsen stood stunned. Then he reached back and drew out Lionel's sword and brought it down in a casual onehanded style. It was odd how the blade neatly clipped off the Frenchman's ear, then sank an inch or so into his shoulder. Sven Ronsen looked over at us.

"I won't let you guys down," he said. "Ever."

We didn't have the strength to respond. Sven Ronsen walked through the aisles swinging his blade, separating heads from necks. The sword edge followed on through his targets and split open pill bottles and boxes of medicinal powder, filling the store with an earth-tone confetti and lending a celebratory air to the massacre. The whooshing of the blade was crisp. Occasionally it would clank off a metal display rack, gonging away.

"I feel great," Sven Ronsen said as he slipped his swordpoint into the belly of a belching, mustachioed Asian.

When the room had been cleared, Sven Ronsen looked over at us, panting, his chest smeared with blood.

"Oh," he said. "I forgot you guys were here."

WE WERE IN the health food store for many months. We ate vitamins and granola bars, soy milk and vegetarian jerky. No one went outside except Sven Ronsen, who would sometimes return with board games and fancy clothes.

One day we heard a terrible rumbling, and a great cloud of dust came billowing into the store. We waved the chalky air from our eyes and saw that our only exit was buried under mounds of red brick.

Sven Ronsen looked at the blockaded exit. "Let's get to work and clear the way."

The process took a couple of weeks. When we went outside, everything was silent, not even a bird in the sky. Sven Ronsen said that nothing was wrong. He said that if the Earth was suddenly quiet and still it was because we were entering a new Silent Age. He said the Earth was always right, that we must adapt to her ways. When I asked Claudia what she thought she said, "We are no longer on the planet Earth."

HARRIET BECAME SVEN Ronsen's girlfriend. They'd go to the back room, what used to be the manager's office, and Sven Ronsen would pull down his jeans while Harriet went to her knees. One day Lionel told them he knew what they were doing in there. Their response was to perform the same act, at all hours, whenever the mood struck them, in full view of everyone.

"Sven Ronsen is a moron," said Lionel. "She's sucking the protein right out of him. He won't last."

I wasn't so sure, but Sven Ronsen did, in fact, grow weak. He became listless, his movements syrupy. Sometimes he would open his mouth, as if to begin speaking, but no words would come out and he would stand there like that, looking around as if nothing was unusual.

While Sven Ronsen went fallow, Harriet became strong and took over our little group. It was her idea to move into the Odeon.

It was a large stone building with a colonnade. Inside was a grand hall filled with Doric columns and shining black and white tiles that led to a rotunda supported by caryatids and sphinges. The auditorium was circular with multiple balconies. The stage was enormous, a hundred flylines imitating sea rope. The seats were immaculate and comfortable. All of these beautiful things were installed-I learned from a book in the gift shop at the request of Napoleon after a terrible fire in 1799.

Sven Ronsen was now weak and thin. He spent all day lying down while Harriet sucked the life out of him. He was delirious, but Harriet just kept working away. She had begun a morning exercise routine and she lifted weights. Her biceps kept growing and soon she was pushing all of us around.

"Maybe you should leave him alone today," I said to her once. Sven Ronsen had become a skeletal fool, quivering in the corners of the theater.

"I know what's best for him," Harriet said.

When I gave her a look she socked me in the mouth. Harriet was stronger than all of us.

BY THE TIME Sven Ronsen passed away we had amassed a giant chest full of jewels. Rare stones had become completely devalued when the sun went bad, but we kept stockpiling them for some reason. It was hard to grasp the idea that they were worthless.

We decided to drop Sven Ronsen into the Seine, but Lionel could imagine how rough it would look: a couple of us heaving a body over the edge, the thing landing with a splash in the shallows, perhaps a foot sticking up out of the muck. So we built a long plastic slide that would slip the body out into the middle of the river and we dressed Sven Ronsen in a fine Italian suit from one of the designer shops on the rue du Fauborg Saint-Honoré. We looped diamond necklaces around him so that he shone like a giant brooch. Sven Ronsen's body slipped like a frozen turkey down the slide and shot into the air. It hit the river dead center and vanished.

I realized any one of us could be next. Lionel's cheeks were sinking into his face, slowly revealing the shape of his skull. My pants had long ceased to fit and yet I insisted on wearing them, cinching my belt tighter and tighter, finally punching new holes into the leather so that the extra length hung off my hip, long and ridiculous, like a brown snake. It could have been any one of us. It could have been Claudia, though she seemed to be in good health. One night she grabbed me by the hand and took me to a balcony and ran her fingers over my bony body. She kissed me lightly on the neck and cried above me, our noses touching, so that her brilliant tears dripped into my dull pupils.

Among the items we scavenged when Claudia began to swoon: Spray adhesive, sapphires, safari outfits, and a jumbo pack of disposable razors. Lionel and I had never been fans of sculpted facial hair, but the demands of our production asked that we rise above our bias.

AU REVOIR, CLAUDIA

THE SCENE:

Sun rises. A jungle. An impeccably dressed explorer (Lionel) is shining his boots. His sideburns extend to his jaw line. He whistles a light-hearted tune. His camp is clean. On a spit above an expired fire, the carcass of last night's meal, a wild boar. A few feet away lies the explorer's stunning wife (Claudia). She is weak, stricken with some deadly, yet beautiful, jungle disease. Her left arm has already succumbed, covered from elbow to fingertips in glimmering sapphires. Soon she will be nothing but shining stone.

EXPLORER

Worry not, sweet wife, the cure is on the way.

WIFE

I'm unsure that I will last.

EXPLORER

Look yonder, our scout approaches.

Tucker (Me) arrives with a vial of butterscotch-colored liquid. He kneels beside the explorer's wife.

EXPLORER

Ah, just in time. Apply the remedy. We must prepare for a feast with the natives this evening. We are the guests of honor, in recognition of my wife's fine aim with a rifle. She was able to eliminate a tiger that had menaced the tribe for many years and-

TUCKER

She's fucking dead, Lionel.

EXPLORER

Don't break character.

END.

Lionel woke up one morning with Harriet looming over him, zipping up his pants, her breath hot and seedy. They exchanged a look but nothing more. Later that afternoon Lionel had a flash memory of his uncle's house in the country and of the vintage fruit preserves collection his uncle kept in a vast cellar.