Falkirk thought to leave work early. Twenty years of practice made him one of the most efficient junior inventory managers at the Tightbind bandage company and though the position demanded a great deal of application, he’d finished earlier than usual, a disconcerting circumstance, but not as disconcerting as his sudden whim to leave. For the past hour he’d worked more and more slowly, taking far longer on his end-of-week invoice reconciliation than he should have, pausing for as long as he could bear at each tab on each file as he organized the printouts. He worked as a man underwater or on the moon, as a marionette free to dance according the liberty of a guiding touch. Unaccustomed to the vagaries of impulse, he breathed routine and worked 1
with the slow deliberation of one familiar with the red second hand of the time-clock. Elise would be astonished. “You left early,” she’d say then she’d whisper “You, sir, are just bad” and she’d wink. He’d strut a little, drop his briefcase to the floor carelessly and drape his jacket over the chair instead of hanging it up and then he’d shrug. At a quarter to five, Falkirk took his briefcase and sneaked to the stairwell at the near side of the office. He skipped down the stairs in the flickering fluorescent light and imagined the greeting Elise’s lips held in wait for him, her narrow, full mouth smiling, her proud lower lip tumbling toward her chin, the twin crowns of her upper lip gently falling into the angel's finger and the lower lip, stained Olympus Mons red, smiling and smiling. Through the narrow strips between the tops of the buildings outside, the thick, gray clouds rolled slowly over the city. The stacks billowed with white and gray smoke that blended with the clouds and the stacks appeared to either siphon the sky down to the buildings or pump the brick and stone into the sky. Despite the absence of workers marching home, Falkirk strolled up the sidewalk tight against the buildings as though the press of people still exerted a push, a repulsion, a habit of gravity perhaps. He found himself standing motionless in front of an ancient pipe bolted to the side of a tall brick building. Close to the ground a thick portion was shattered and disgorged a trickle of its contents. Decades of disintegration spilled from the black and 2
red rim of the fissure. The trickle looked like red sawdust, but a sawdust flecked with jagged gray and black flakes of metal mixed with the dusty detritus of generations of creatures who lived and disintegrated inside the pipe. Falkirk didn’t know how long he stood there, nor did he remember stopping to look at the pipe. He reached toward it and he didn’t want to and he reached for it anyway. Something swelled within the dark mound of corruption that hadn’t yet spilled from the pipe. It pushed out and up toward his fingers, a bubble of rot that exploded and sent a black and red cascade to the sidewalk and filled the air with a thin, gray dust. Falkirk staggered back from the cavity and a man running down the sidewalk stumbled over him, sending them both tumbling to the ground. Falkirk lay there for a moment on his back. The other man sprang back up and dashed away calling back sorry, sorry. Falkirk, upside down, watched him recede, stood, and noticed that the street now overflowed with people and cars. In the gray canyons, people on foot swarmed over and around the cars. They filled the sidewalks and medians and crawled over the large concrete planters that lined every street and avenue in the city. They all moved in the same direction as the man who’d bumped into him, toward the center of town. Before he realized what he was doing, Falkirk took several step with the crowd, but then stopped. He thought of Elise. 3
She waited at home. He’d come in and she’d usher him to the couch and the television. She’d bring him a glass of milk and show him the jigsaw puzzle she’d worked on that day. After dinner he’d help her with it and by the dim glow of the dining room light they’d laugh together at the wet-nosed kittens or the sorrowful-eyed puppies in the emerging picture. A fire would be nice and maybe a movie too, he thought. Falkirk turned and continued home, the pipe forgotten and the people scurrying toward the center of town of little interest. Let them have whatever it is they have, he thought. I’m going home. He clung tightly to the wall as he walked and the people crowding the sidewalk made the wall feel much more familiar. Despite his refusal to give in to the same magnetism as everyone else, his curiosity remained. Perhaps at the very least he should find out what was going on so he could tell Elise when he arrived home. Certainly she’d want to know all about it, as she wanted with most things, and whatever it was they could laugh at it over dinner. Behind a stalled delivery van, a tall woman in a short red dress popped out of the passenger side of a car and left the door ajar. She ran as well as she could in her heels and did a passable job of keeping pace with the crowd. Falkirk stopped and watched her black hair bounce and fall against her pale skin and dress. He blanched for a moment then colored, transfixed as he was with the volume and buoyancy of what her low-cut dress failed to conceal. Who better, he thought. 4
Raising his index finger, he said, “Excuse me,” as she passed. She slowed and spared a momentary glance at him. The crowd behind her did not slow and she was pushed into the wall beside Falkirk. She stood a head taller than he and from this distance he could see her lipstick extended past the natural boundaries of her lips, painted high on her philtral columns giving her an unnaturally voluptuous Cupid’s bow. She craned her neck as though if she stretched hard enough she could see over the buildings and over the smoke. Falkirk realized his gaze had been fixed on the chasm presented by her dress. He forced his eyes up, embarrassed, but the woman took no notice of his attentions. “Of course I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am,” said Falkirk, “but you seem to be heading in the same direction as all these other people.” “What?” she stammered, but still gazed down the street. “Everyone is walking that way. If it wouldn’t be too much trouble,” he said, “would you mind telling me why?” “Shouldn’t you know?” she said, finally looking at him. She leaned over him as though the wrong answer would draw a physical rebuke. “As you say, I’m quite sure I should, ma’am, but the sad fact is that in this case I’m thoroughly ignorant.” He smiled hoping his smile would look deferential. “Don’t you know anything? You must be embarrassed,” she said and looked back down the street. He tried to keep his eyes on her face and failed. 5
“The gasworks. Some sort of bomber. With hostages.” She giggled once, but quickly regained her gravity. “He’s a what?” Falkirk asked and took a step toward the woman and she stepped back quickly, her head recoiling on her long neck as if she smelled something decomposing. “Get back,” she said. “Yes. Sorry. But what does he want, this bomber?” asked Falkirk. The woman shrugged and took a small step away from him. “Listen to me, ma’am!, he said, suddenly understanding what the word “bomber” implied. “Don't go that way! What do you think will happen?” “It’ll blow up, of course,” she said, now taking several more shuffling steps. “I have to go,” she said and turned. As she disappeared into the crowd, Falkirk yelled to her “Why do you have to go?” and she looked back at him with pity. Falkirk turned and ran toward home. He imagined the population of the city crowded around the gasworks, pressed against the iron bars, and the bomb erupting, shattering the stone building and sending fragments hurtling into the crowd, tearing through the meat, killing instantly as a piece of facade drilled through the wet eye of perhaps the woman in red and exiting through a rupture at the back of her skull and taking most of the bone with it allowing whatever little remained inside to dribble slowly over her neck and her back. He’d tell Elise. She wouldn’t understand either, but she would tell him his failure to understand was right. He ran from the center of town. 6
Keeping to the smaller streets did nothing to help him escape the press. The streets flowed with people. The cars moved only in fits, bumping into one another as a matter of course. At the end of March Street a sedan and a compact both tried to turn and both accelerated at the same time. Unlike the slight bumps Falkirk saw on the way there, these two struck as if they were trying to cleave together. The sedan smashed into the front end of the compact, which jumped the sidewalk and came to a rest in an elevated planter on the sidewalk, snapping a bare tree as it did so, the top half of the tree crushing the top of the compact. Even though his face was clearly cut, a small man jumped out of the compact and rushed to the side of the sedan. He tore the door open and hauled the other driver out by his hair. They fought and while they fought a short woman emerged from the passenger side of the sedan and stumbled away toward the gasworks. After a short exchange, the sedan driver wrestled the other man to the ground and, grabbing his head by each side, slammed it into the pavement three quick times, then jumped up and ran after the woman. Everyone else continued to walk past, but Falkirk dashed to the fallen man’s side. He lay still. His left eye was black and streaked bright red with blood and burst vessels. Falkirk hovered over him. He bent to examine the man, but realized he had no expertise to offer him. Falkirk stood again and thought to call for help, but realized no one would listen. 7
After a few moments the man on the ground began moving, rolling gently from side to side. He struggled to sit up and Falkirk helped him. “No, sir. Stay still. Sir, you’ve been in an accident,” Falkirk told him and the man looked up at him as though he was unsure what Falkirk could be. “Do you think you can walk? If you can walk we can get you to the hospital.” Rising slowly with the injured man, Falkirk tucked himself under the man’s arm. Falkirk was pleased with the small victory in the midst of such turmoil. He tried to remember where the closest hospital might be. The man convulsed, rigid then slack then rigid and Falkirk thought something had broken inside the man. They’d never make it to the hospital. He wished Elise was there, then they could both carry the man, but then he was happy she wasn’t there so she wouldn’t have to help carry the man. After a few staggering steps, the man’s seizures became too much for Falkirk to bear and he let go of him. Instead of continuing his fit as Falkirk had expected, the man shuffled toward the center of town, occasionally bouncing against a car bumper or streetlight on his left, but never hard enough to force him to abandon his path. He kept up with the pace set by the others crowding the street. The dead branches on the trees were still. The garbage in the gutters lay immobile. When he looked up the man had vanished into the mass of cars and pedestrians, the cars all black and gray, the pedestrians all black and gray. 8
On the outskirts of the city Falkirk rested. Here the lanes grew wider, but still people filled the lanes, each person slowed only by the others, the unlucky ones scraped against the buildings by the compacted mass of flesh, then drawn under the others' legs, under the frantic march, and each left a mark on the wall, a horizontal marker like a red signature no one thinks to read. Falkirk kept to the alley and the planters, scaling the concrete boxes and springing from one to the next, then scurrying into the darkened narrow passages, a pause beside a gray dumpster streaked with black, then down into a boiler room stairway then vaulting the guardrail before a quick dash through the street to the next safe, dark, empty place. Falkirk felt like a fugitive and young, split from the populace and nimble from the separation. He came to a small store several blocks from home that he and Elise frequented, run by a man who’d become their friend over the many years of their patronage. She was almost within reach now and the horrors would soon be gone. Now nothing but her green eyes with a worried crease between them, nothing but her hair, short, black and combed flat against her scalp. Nothing but her pointed chin and her broad forehead, the heart of her upper lip and the pout of her lower lip and the fissure between the two, Valles Marineris dark, and all that mattered now, all that mattered was home and her and they would hide under the bed together and when they were tired of hiding under the bed they’d hide on top of the bed, the television off, the shades drawn, a perpetual starless, moonless night in their bedroom. Perhaps 9
her eyes would glow green in the dark and they’d examine the carpeting together by the light of her starless eyes and search for some small space in which to hide and escape and be alone. A scar on her shoulder in the shape of a moon, a tranquil fracture, large and surrounded by pale white that he sees only in the green light of her eyes and he laps at her shoulder while holding her in front of him. His fingers depressing her pale stomach then harder and harder leaving marks now, a catena of depressions, and she smiles to see them. Veering back from the canyons, the caverns, the small world to the large dark world of their room. She’ll lock the door and pet his hair. Even through the window, the shopkeeper’s bald head shone brightly in the glare of the fluorescent lighting as he waved to Falkirk with both hands, frantically. For a moment, Falkirk, perched atop a concrete planter, maintaining his balance by clutching the bare limb of a tree, pretended not to see the shopkeeper. Falkirk thought only of home now, only home. The flapping and fluttering hands were of no consequence, despite the duration of their friendship, despite the milk and raspberries on credit or for free and newspapers whenever they’d want, no charge on little things for friends, my boy, you know better. Despite the Christmas gifts and birthday gifts and dinners, the affectionate appellation of “uncle” used by the shopkeeper’s children, all now grown, applied to Falkirk and “auntie” to Elise. 10
Only then Falkirk dashed across the sidewalk and tumbled through the door because if he ignored the man with the fluttering bird hands he ignored Elise. She’d be scared for him, he was certain, but no matter what the shopkeeper needed, it would not take long, he’d make sure it wouldn’t take long, and he’d explain how he helped their friend and she’d be proud, so proud and before he knew it his face would be covered with her pomegranate red lipstick and they’d laugh at what a mess he was. Raising him to his feet, the shopkeeper brushed at Falkirk’s clothing. “Goodness, that’s a lot of people out there,” he said. “Can you believe it?” “Only because I’ve been fighting them for so long,” Falkirk replied. “They’re all insane. To a person, all insane.” “Too true. You look like you’ve been fighting. Why don’t you have a drink?” he asked. “Some coffee maybe? Would that be good, some coffee?” The shopkeeper stood at the front window, his still hands pressed against it framing his face. Falkirk nodded and walked to the back of the store where the long fluorescent track lights flickered. “It’s been like this for more than an hour. And what could it be?” the shopkeeper asked. “More people passed by in an hour than I think have ever passed by. And not a single customer.” “Never seen anything of the kind,” said Falkirk as he poured himself a cup of black coffee from the steel canister. The shopkeeper turned his head from the window and looked at Falkirk sternly. 11
“Foot traffic is the lifeblood of a business like mine,” he said, then slowly turned back to the window and pressed his face against it. “What could they want?” said the shopkeeper quietly. “Whatever could they all want?” Falkirk was surprised at how pleased he was that he could offer some insight. He reported to his friend what the woman in the red dress had told him, about the bomber and the gasworks. The shopkeeper said nothing when Falkirk finished speaking. Instead he turned, this time his body followed his head, slowly rotating like the display of inexpensive watches on the counter. Under the shopkeeper’s lips, something shifted. His face fell slack, muscleless, tendonless, cartelidgeless, his bright lower lip failing to mask the arching row of gray teeth in his jaw. His eyes were alert, however, wide and full, harsher than the fluorescent lights, the veins protruding around the sockets, the thin worms of blood pulsing around his eyes. Cradling his styrene cup, Falkirk took a step toward his friend. He held out his hand. “What’s wrong?” he asked and before he’d finished the last word his friend the shopkeeper bolted through the door, slamming it open so hard the safety glass in the bottom half popped into a carpet of glistening, glittering, gray pebbles. It took Falkirk several seconds to understand what he’d just seen, but when he recovered his senses he dashed toward the door after his friend, slipped on the glass, and landed hard on his back. His head bounced on the floor and glass punctured his scalp. 12
He lay dazed for a moment then sat up and felt at the back of his head. He found three fragments that had imbedded themselves and plucked them out. His fingers were red, but only the fingers, not the palms or wrists or arms. There wasn’t nearly as much as he’d expected, though he felt a thin strip dribble down the back of his collar. He hauled himself up on the door frame and pushed his face against the window. He friend was gone, disappeared in the wall of flesh and metal on the sidewalks and street still pushing toward the center of town. Across the street from the shop Falkirk saw a woman slumped against one of the planters, though this planter contained no leafless tree. Instead, it held only a rectangle of dirt, hardened and bleached by the frost. The woman sat rigidly, her back perfectly straight against the concrete, her head bowed forward, her legs bent at the knees. She wore a light gray skirt and a white blouse with an elaborate white bow at the throat. The woman’s eyes were wide, straining against the limitations of their orbits. She didn’t blink. The eyes shifted slowly to the left then to the right as if she searched for something, something vital, but couldn’t find it and couldn’t remember what it was she’d lost. A line extended from her scalp to her nose, bisecting her forehead. From his vantage point, it took Falkirk some time to understand what this was even after he noticed the trickle of fluid tumbling from the tip of her nose. 13
Very little seemed to come from her head. The wound couldn’t be too big, he thought, if it only disgorged a trickle, but maybe it was deep and maybe it wasn’t just her life cascading from her head but the black and gray generations of thought she’d accumulated and he felt at the back of his head again and was comforted when his fingers were only red. In any case she’d sat there for quite some time, Falkirk surmised, judging by the dark pool that accumulated in her lap and crawled up to her stomach and spread out to encase her thighs, wicked through the fibers of the gray skirt to surround her, soon to spread up through her white blouse and down through her stockings to fill her heels. Soon now, anytime now, it might soak into her skin, into her delicate, still throat and crawl its way up past her lips, into her nose and eyes and finally back into the scalp that poured so freely. The last thing to turn red would be the bow. Tossing the pebbles of glass aside, he pushed himself out of the store and forced his way through the surging mass to the edge of the road. She wouldn’t last long, he thought. I’ll just bring her home. If the hospitals are anything like everything else, then she’ll be best off with us. And she seems in no shape to struggle. Yesterday was different, but now it seems that’s the only way to help someone and she’s the only someone to help. The cars, though slowed by the volume of traffic, still moved at a rapid clip with scarcely a gap between one and the next. 14
Falkirk waited and waited and when he saw his opportunity he leapt into the street, narrowly avoiding a white compact that sped in to fill the space behind him and a panel van blocking his progress. He stood in a corridor barely thicker than his body and tried to draw his flesh tight against his bones, willing himself to be thin if only for the time it took to race across the street and as he did so another car’s side mirror clipped him on his right elbow. Falkirk fell back to the sidewalk, his arm both numb and aching, dull, dull brittle thickness and the slow, creeping shards in a deep bruise. He propped himself against a planter. Across the street the woman still sat where he’d seen her last. Her eyes no longer shifted, but remained fixed and stared at him. They watched each other through the flickering gaps between the machines. Sound vanished and Falkirk was lost. Silence, with no traffic, no people, with full green trees and above a sky accented by tall, tall clouds and otherwise clear and a drop trembled at the tip of her nose. It hung then fell and spun and the gray of the sky and smoke that filled the sky reflected from its uniform, red sides, ready to add its weight and mass to her skirt. Midway to her skirt it abruptly turned in a tight arc and flew down the street with the cars and the people and his friend and the woman in the red dress and everyone else except the woman whose blood he watched. And except him. He ran and he knew he was the only one who would have done 15
anything for her and he ran away. This would be a secret from Elise, not the first, but to Falkirk the most ugly. Delicate fences with gates rarely used surrounded the yards and houses. In his neighborhood no cars drove on the streets and no one, save Falkirk himself, walked the sidewalks. His neighbor’s child had left his tricycle in Falkirk’s driveway and while he would usually pick up the tiny vehicle and ring his neighbor’s doorbell, maybe chat about lawn care or the bandage business for a time, today he dashed past it without even allowing it to remind him of his neighbor or the child. He clutched his arm to his side and, as he had done for the remainder of the walk since he left the wounded woman alone, he dreamed of Elise’s ministrations and of lying on the couch while she fussed over him with ice packs and heating pads, ginger ale and anti-inflammatory medication. Turning the key with his left hand was strange and difficult as though he was trying to describe to someone else how to do it without using the names of things. He called her name and no one answered. Standing in the foyer, the gray light streaming in through the arched window above the front door, he called again and no one answered. In the living room he found the television on. A glass of milk sat on the coffee table beside a small white plate. Halfway between the living room entry and the table, a sandwich lay on the carpet surrounded by a corona of strawberry jelly. He picked it up. Two bites were 16
missing. On the carpet he saw the sandwich in negative space like a crater, a breach in the floor, the gradation of jelly thick at the immediate borders of the bread, then each tendril thinning until it disappeared. He called again and no one answered. On the television a reporter stood before a crowd that surrounded a multistoried gray stone building. White smoke puffed from the one thin chimney in the image. The image flickered, distended, rolled for a moment. The people still filled the square around the building and now black smoke drifted from the thin chimney. Falkirk tossed the sandwich onto the plate and wiped the residue on his pants. His arm hurt, but at least it functioned. He strode to the front door. He stood on his concrete stoop flanked by white imitations of classical columns. A full garbage bag tumbled by on his lawn. It was filled in part by glass judging by the sound. As it advanced across his lawn the glass inside tore at the black plastic membrane, shredding it, creating a multitude of black fissures through which the confined refuse escaped. It tumbled out freely, the bag disemboweled by its own essential parts, and now free, these parts tumbled and floated and skipped along in lockstep with the emaciated black bag. He ran after Elise. Ahead of him the tricycle rolled and the pedals revolved independent of any operator. Though Falkirk ran as quickly as he could, the tricycle was much faster and disappeared in the distance. All 17
around him Falkirk was passed by objects like broken umbrellas, the ribs cracked and skin torn, or the limbs of trees flying down the road leaving a trail of their flesh behind, rapidly reduced by the abrasion of the asphalt. The trees themselves, even in his neighborhood, bent dramatically toward town, what bare limbs remained stretched horizontally as if trying to escape the grasp of the trunks. He entered the city and the trees were uprooted and sliding along the street leaving the planters empty. Where they encountered cars they punctured them, impaling the vehicles, which themselves tumbled along. The glass in the windows popped and the tires sheared off on the edges of buildings or public art, which was bent straight, but bolted too deeply to the concrete slabs to do any more than desperately stretch toward the object of attraction. Not Falkirk. Liberated by Elise’s absence, he built momentum to pursue her. He could be like everyone else now that she was like everyone else. He ran after her and toward himself, no longer bound by the unrelenting will to exist. The buildings themselves bent toward the center of town leaning low, an endless field of kneeling old men bent at their waists. The sides nearest to their destination crumpled and the far sides tore. Papers and office furniture tumbled down from the wounds in the gray buildings, but long before they reached the ground they turned and flew to the gasworks. Far above Falkirk the endless white and black smoke gathered and swirled. It formed a column 18
over the gasworks and spun down and down and endlessly spun down. Someday the explosion would come, but that time was endlessly distant. Falkirk bounded over cars and shuddering dams of mesh trashcans and shopping carts. All he had to do was throw himself into the air and he was drawn over any obstacle and could rely on his own body to slowly pull him back to the ground. Each jump carried him farther than the one before like an astronaut on a shrinking, red moon. He ran after Elise, the pain in his arm forgotten, but each time he jumped he laughed and laughed with the secret thrill of yielding to gravity.
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