White Horse Read online

  “What if you need to cut something?”

  “I thought you meant …”

  She’s staring toward the thin air above her uncle. The drawer beckons. A corkscrew. Good for taking out an eye. An adequate weapon for someone who doesn’t want to carry one.

  “Take this,” I say. Her fingers close around the helix. One presses against its point and she winces. “Just in case we find a great bottle of wine. This is Italy, remember?”

  We walk with my wheels between us. Lisa’s hand balances on the seat, using it to guide her path while I hold the handlebars and steer us true. She took the corkscrew without question and shoved it into her jeans pocket, where she reaches down and traces the outline every few dozen feet.

  This is the middle of nowhere, although its existence proves that it must be somewhere. So I pull out my compass and wait for the needle to still. Southeast. I want southeast. If we take a right at the farm’s entrance, that’s the road east. Good enough until we find a road that wanders south.

  We don’t speak until we’re at the white mailbox and the old planks that form a halfhearted attempt at a fence are behind us.

  Lisa cracks the silence. “I hope he’s okay. My dad.”

  “He’ll be fine.”

  “He’s my father.”

  “I know.”

  “You could have killed him.”

  “But I didn’t.”

  There’s a pause as she formulates the question. “Why?”

  “The world you knew, that we all knew, is gone. Humanity is mostly dead and what’s left is dying.”

  A ditch forms between her eyebrows, and it’s filled with ignorance.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I like being human.”

  The ditch digs a little deeper.

  “He did it because he loved me,” she says after a while. “That’s what I tell myself so I don’t hate him. He’s still my dad, and a person shouldn’t hate their dad. In a way, I feel like I owed him something. It was a hard job, looking after me out here, being blind and all.”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “It’s no excuse,” I tell her. “You didn’t owe him that.”

  She disappears inside herself for several moments before returning with a new question.

  “During sex, did you ever close your eyes and pretend it was someone else?”

  Did I? Maybe. When I was younger. Before I began having sex with someone other than myself.

  “Sure,” I say to make her feel better. “Probably everyone does that.”

  “I tried. It didn’t work very well.”

  “Honey, what he was doing to you wasn’t sex or love.”

  “Can I tell you a secret?” The question mark has a rhetorical curve, so I stay silent. When we reach the first crossroad stamped into the landscape, she says, “I think I’d still like being touched one day. By a man who likes me.”

  “I think you will, too.”

  “Do you have any secrets?”

  I look at her sideways, tell myself I won’t let this one come to harm when I’ve lost so many along the way. “No.”

  TWO

  DATE: THEN

  Dr. Rose opens a window. Sun and fresh air rush in like they’re in a hurry to go no place but here. This is their ultimate destination, their dream vacation.

  I hold my face up to the light, smile. “That could be symbolic.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of what you do here.”

  He smiles. “An optimist. That’s a step in the right direction. Often people who come see me look on therapy as a negative. A black mark against them.”

  “I called you, remember?”

  He gets up, goes out to the waiting room. “You want something to drink?”

  “Is this a trick question?”

  “Yes. I’m going to read your personality based on your beverage choices, so choose wisely.”

  I smile. I can’t help myself. This isn’t what I thought it would be. I expected a dry soul shoehorned into a somber setting.

  “Coffee with cream. Two sugars.”

  “Two?”

  “Okay, three.”

  “That’s more like it.” He returns with identical mugs, passes one to me. The liquid is hot, sweet, smooth. I alternate blowing and sipping until the first inch disappears.

  “What does this say about me?”

  He takes his own long sip, slurps a little, doesn’t apologize. When he’s satisfied he swaps the mug for a notepad and pen. “You like asking questions.”

  “My coffee tells you that?”

  The pen moves on the paper. “No, your questions do.”

  I laugh. “If you don’t ask, you may never know.”

  He smiles down at his paper. “Why don’t you tell me why you called me?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “I’m a therapist, not a psychic.”

  “That would make your job easier, no?”

  “Scarier.”

  I take another half inch of coffee. “I’m not crazy.”

  “There are two ways to look at that. Either no one’s crazy, or we’re all crazy in our own way. As a great Greek philosopher once said: Man needs a little madness, or else he never dares cut the rope and be free.”

  “Socrates?”

  “Zorba.”

  Again with the laughter. “I don’t know, Doctor, it’s possible you might be crazier than me.”

  “Sometimes I talk to myself,” he admits. “Sometimes I even answer myself.”

  “Only child?”

  “Eldest. Of two. I have a brother.”

  “I have a younger sister. She had imaginary friends. And because my folks wouldn’t buy me a Ken doll, I drew a mustache and chest hair on one of my Barbies.”

  “Do you still do that?”

  “Only if my date turns out to be a woman.”

  The dimple in his cheek twitches. Am I serious and therefore nuts, or am I the perennial comedienne, stowing my pain under a funny blanket? Am I in dire need of analysis? Would I make a great research paper wedged somewhere between obsessive-compulsive plucking and multitasking personality disorder?

  “If this is ongoing, you should be in therapy,” he says.

  “Do you think?”

  “Why don’t you tell me why you’re here.”

  I lean back. Take a small sip. Arrange my lie.

  “I’ve been having this dream about a jar. Not the grape jelly kind—the old kind. It’s the color of scorched cream.”

  “How does it make you feel, this dream?”

  “Terrified. …”

  “It’s old,” James Witte tells me. Letters trail after his name, interspersed with periods to denote that he’s spent a whole lot of time with his head in books and his mind in the past. He’s an assistant curator at the National Museum. An old friend, although he looks the same as the day we graduated high school: thin, narrow-shouldered, pale. His eyes gleam as he circles the jar.

  “Really old.”

  “Is that a technical term?”

  He laughs. I get a flash of him sucking on a beer bong at a postgrad party. “Yeah, it’s technical. Translation: I don’t know how old it is, but it’s really fucking old.”

  “Wow. That is old.”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say it’s Greek. Maybe Roman. The curve of the handles, the way they attach to the tapering trunk … But there’s no design. Yet, it’s symmetrical, which would suggest it was made on a wheel. And everything made on the wheel had some design, be it painted or etched.”

  A soft shadow bats at the window. My next door neighbor’s cat, Stiffy. Because Ben’s a teenage boy living in the basement of a grown man’s body. The window barely has time to scrape against the frame before the marmalade beast’s squeezing underneath, launching his invasion.

  “Can I take it?” James asks. “I’ll bring it back. But I can give you a much better idea of when and where it’s from if I can inspect it in my own space. That wa
y I can get other opinions if I can’t figure it out. Our new intern sorts potsherds like some kind of savant. The other interns call him Rain Man.”

  I’d trust James with my life. We’ve been friends since tenth grade when he moved to the area from Phoenix. He’s steady. Loyal. Decent to the bone. So I tell him what I can’t tell Dr. Rose: that someone sneaked into my home and I’m driving myself slightly nuts wondering how and why. All except the fear. I hold that close to my bones lest it seem trite, thin.

  He listens intently. That’s how James has always listened. Every so often he asks a question and I do my best to answer it.

  “Why don’t you just open the thing?”

  “It’s not mine to open.”

  On the door, the locks feign innocence. Don’t blame us, the security system failed you. The panel blinks silently. It’s just a robot awaiting instructions from a mother ship in a building downtown.

  “Why not toss it in the dumpster?”

  “It’s not mine to throw away.”

  “Leave it to me.” He grins. “I love a good mystery. Worst case I’ll bring Rain Man here. I’ll tell him it’s a date.”

  Stiffy rubs against my skin, his purr vibrating all the way up to my knees as he figure-eights my shins.

  “Aha, so he’s cute, then?”

  “Tasty. And smart. Can’t beat that with a stick.”

  “Bring him over. I’ll make lasagna.”

  The cat detaches himself from my legs and saunters over to the jar. He circles it twice, then sits a foot away, tail tucked neatly around him in a protective ring. With a fascination bordering on obsession, he stares at the jar.

  “Curiosity killed the cat,” James says.

  DATE: NOW

  On the second morning after we leave the farmhouse, Lisa vomits. The sky is dim through the thickly leaved canopy that conceals us from the road and sky. Under here, the weather is mostly dry, with a chance of frigid drips.

  For once, I don’t. Cold beans scooped from a can with a jagged edge settle in my stomach in a nourishing gelatinous lump.

  Up ahead is a village. Maybe two miles away. It’s a black dot on a map, nameless but present. We should go around, avoid contact if there’s any to be made. I look at Lisa bent at the waist, unleashing her beans onto the ground. Her hair is in my hands. Poor kid. Although I run the risk of making myself sick, I glance at the mess she’s made. No blood. At least not yet.

  Vitamins. They might have vitamins in the town. We could both use them.

  “I’m sorry.”

  The retching travels all the way from her toes.

  “Don’t be. You can’t help it.”

  Her thin shoulders shake. “Do you think I’ve got White Horse?”

  White Horse. The plague that killed the world’s population. Some preacher down south with a too-big mouth and a popular cable TV show heard voices from God telling him these were the end-times. Dying people had nothing better to do, so they watched. It was that or listen to the static that used to be daytime television.

  That preacher named the virus White Horse.

  “The first seal is opened and the white horse has come with its deadly rider to test us with Satan’s disease. Any man, woman, or child who doesn’t believe and accept Jesus Christ as his or her savior will die from this White Horse. The nonbelievers will burn in the pits of hell, wishing they’d had the courage to accept the Lord. They will writhe and burn, their souls thick with maggots. This plague is the white horse. And the other three are coming. …”

  Everyone assumed it would be a flu-like illness that would knock us out of the evolutionary tree, but it wasn’t anything so merciful. White Horse was like nothing in the medical books except maybe late-stage cancer. The CDC and WHO barely had time to react when people began running to their doctors in droves, toting sick bags and buckets, begging for something to stop the nausea. The vomit turned bloody as the protective cells, designed to stop the stomach acids from burning holes and leaking into the body, sloughed away. Within days the vomiting quit, only to be replaced with nonspecific aches, some more severe than others.

  Then a scientist came forward and told us what we had no way of guessing.

  “White Horse is not a disease as such. It’s a mutation. Some outside source has flipped switches in our DNA, turning on some genes, turning off others.” He struggled to keep the words simple enough for the public to understand. Speech faded to mumbles when time came for the media to ask their questions. Enlightenment sans illumination.

  I could lie and tell her no, or I could lie and tell her yes. So I take the chickenshit truth route.

  “I don’t know.”

  She speaks through the bile foam. “I don’t want to die.”

  I pull a tissue from my pocket so she can wipe her lips.

  “We all die sooner or later.”

  “Later sounds better.”

  “We should make a bucket list,” I say.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a list of everything we want to do before we die at the ripe old age of three digits. Like skydiving. Or swimming in a waterfall.”

  “What’s the point?”

  The absurdity of our situation fills my eyes with hot tears. Two women standing alone at the end of the world, talking about things we want to do before we die. We’ll be lucky to get one last hot meal.

  “Fun,” I tell her. “There’s a village up ahead. I thought maybe we’d check it out. What do you think?”

  “What would you do if I wasn’t here?”

  “Probably go around.”

  “So, why aren’t we?”

  “Because they might have medicine.”

  “Do you think I’m going to die soon?”

  I shake my head, let the rain take my tears where it will.

  “I want to get married and have a family,” she says. “I’m going to put that on my list.”

  DATE: THEN

  “Forget it,” I tell Jenny.

  My sister’s voice is Minnie Mouse with a dash of fingernails down a chalkboard, but only when she wants to bend me to her will.

  “But he’s really nice. You’ll love him. Or maybe you’ll just love him a time or two.” I picture her waggling her eyebrows as she encourages me to have casual sex. Our mother would love that.

  “Nice,” I say.

  “And dreamy gorgeous.”

  “I have to wash my hair that night.”

  “I already told him about you. You have to come.”

  “Then untell him.”

  There’s a gap in her chatter. “You almost had me for a second. I can’t. That would be rude. You have to come.”

  “I won’t,” I say, and hang up.

  My mother rolls out the guilt parade and slaps my buttons like my psyche is a game of Whac-A-Mole.

  “… two years,” she drones on. “That’s how long it felt. You were the stubbornest baby ever. Not like your sister. At least she had the courtesy to come two weeks early. Three hours. She wanted to come out. Not like you. That was the longest thirty-six hours of my life. …”

  I have two choices: attend my sister’s dinner party or tie a plastic sack around my mother’s head until she runs out of nagging. I choose the evil that doesn’t come with a felony conviction.

  THREE

  DATE: NOW

  The village appears over the road’s hump: Aphrodite rising from the water. She steps through the never-ending drizzle to greet us. There’s no knowing whether she’s friend or foe, but I guess she could say the same about us. In this world everything is a fat question mark. Taxes are no longer certain—only death.

  We pass under a stone arch, the reddish brown of clay earth. The whole village is garbed in this same shade: clusters of earthen cottages with shallow porches and roughly shingled roofs; a handful of shops with wares gathering dust behind grimy windows; a church with its windows shuttered and high wooden doors bolted.

  There is a calm that feels anything but peaceful.

  We stop. Turn. Ins
pect the deserted street. Nothing moves. Not even a twitch of lace in a window.

  “There isn’t anybody here.” Lisa cups her hands, yells through them. “Hello?” Her words ricochet off the deserted buildings.

  “Don’t.”

  Her hands fall away. “I didn’t think.”

  “It’s okay. It’s just best to be quiet, that’s all.”

  “Why? What do you think is out there?”

  “Desperate people.” And monsters.

  “My dad said that’s why we had to stay at the farm. Because at least there we had food and no one was trying to fight us for it.”

  “He was right.”

  “Do you think we should go back?”

  I don’t answer. My attention is on what appears to be a small grocery store. Neat stacks of preserves in ribbon-wrapped jars fill the lower third of the window display. Fruit and sugar. Our bodies could use both.

  “Do you hear anything?”

  She listens. “No.”

  “Wait here,” I say. Someone needs to protect what we’ve already got.

  The bell barely trembles as I ease the door open like I’m handling dynamite. I’m standing in what passes for a 7-Eleven in this part of the world. Or maybe it’s a souvenir shop. That would explain all the woven baskets and cross-stitchings clinging to the walls inside cheap frames. I fill two baskets with preserves: strawberry, peach, cherry. The other shops are useless. A butcher and a produce store, both with rotted wares. There’s no medicine here—not even an antacid. The houses are just as selfish: they give me nothing I can use to heal. What these people had is long gone.

  Against one wall I find a broom resting, waiting to be of use. So I grant it that wish, twist its head from its neck, assign it a new occupation.

  Outside, Lisa is scuffing her boot on the stone steps leading up to the door. Her mouth droops at the edges as though she’s sinking into darker thoughts.

  “Jam,” I announce as loud as I dare, and imbue the word with what I hope is a smile rather than a grimace. “Who needs bread? We can pretend we’re kids and eat it straight out of the jar.”

  “Can we go? I don’t like it here. It’s too quiet, if that makes sense.”

  A year ago this village would have teemed with life. Tourists oohing and ahhing over the postcard-perfect scenery as they spent too much money for a commemorative trinket that would wind up in a drawer the moment their suitcases were unpacked. Locals smiling at their heavier purses, grateful the road through their village was more heavily traveled, thanks to a popular movie and a spate of wall calendars. Even in her dark world, Lisa would have loved it then. I would have, too. I used to have one of those calendars, and the movie went great with a quart of Ben and Jerry’s.