A scene played out in her head: Sam delivering the baby, Anna mopping her head with water from the cooler, Jackie holding her hand—
No, that wouldn’t work. The water from the cooler was almost out. They wouldn’t waste what was left on her.
She imagined lying on the floor, knees spread before her coworkers, the tile running red around her with amniotic fluid and blood and who knew what else. It was easy to imagine such a scene. Blood ran down her legs already from what she’d done to Alice. Two cubicles over for the last five years, and now she was the stickiness beneath Carmen’s maternity dress. Now Carmen’s belly bulged with more than one life.
The carpet beneath her feet was threadbare and stained. Coffee, ink toner, blood, cigarette burns, all from the past weeks: the panic, the fighting, the feeding. She roamed the same patches, the same winding circuit as the others, shuffling across a carpet that told stories, some gory impressionist painting.
Manet. What a beautiful name.
All around her, throughout the sea of neatly cubed personal spaces with their shoulder-high walls, the scent of the barely living stirred through lifeless vents and ducts. The odor caused Carmen and the others to gyre like leaves and sticks in a stream’s eddy, trapped but always moving.
Always moving.
A mere two days.
If she hadn’t insisted on working right up to the last moment, she might’ve been in Jersey with her mom right then. No bite. A doctor delivering her baby instead of Sam in the break room, instead of whatever would happen now. A hospital with food, water, the unimaginable glory of juice or any meal but meat. She’d be able to brush her teeth whenever she wanted. Take a shower. Talk. Say her baby’s name, hear what it sounded like in her ears rather than her mind. She couldn’t even whisper a name.
But she had insisted on working—she’d bragged about working right up to the last moment. She had fantasized about her water breaking at her desk. See? This was serious. An ambulance would come. A procedure had been scheduled. Maybe they would have to cut her open. It would require surgery.
So much to prove. So much guilt about being a mom, the maternity leave, the imagined whispers and the words she placed behind every glance at her belly. All Carmen could think of was the incredible amount of work the baby would mean for her, but what she imagined was everyone else thinking: Vacation. Leave time. Unfair. More work for us.
So much guilt. For what? For bringing life into the world?
Carmen fumed as her powerless meandering took her into Mr. Helm’s office. There was a vent in there that still oozed the smallest hint of life, probably from the break room, maybe from Louis’s antics in the ceiling. Bumping around the wide desk, arms wavering in front of her, she made a circuit past the tall windows, an executive’s reward for years of service, for never moving on to something better.
Through the expanse of glass, she spotted Jersey. Across the Hudson, where no boats stirred, no barges or ferries, the sun twinkling on ripples that gave her a sense of the forgotten and inaccessible wind. The buildings across the water stood like silent observers, like tourists huddled against a railing, their windows peeping eyeballs that scanned unblinking this new disaster across the way.
Carmen looked hard for signs of life while she had the chance. She scanned the shore, looking for little blips of people with binoculars, men talking into radios with a plan for saving them all, but it was perfectly still.
Perfectly still.
Hudson was a good name for a boy. Knowing the sex would be nice. It would narrow it down. But Carmen wanted to be surprised. She told everyone the child was a surprise.
Lumbering around the desk, she lost the view and stared at a wall, a calendar of appointments, a clock that still ticked on its little batteries. What did that glimpse of the far shore tell her? No movement. And what still moved anymore? Only the dead.
So Jersey must be alive, Carmen decided. Or was that simply what she wanted to believe? It was counterintuitive, this idea that stillness meant life and that movement across the water would just signify more shuffling and unthinking souls. This could be her wishful thinking, but she truly believed Jersey was alive for being able to remain quiet, able to hold its breath, to fall still. Jersey, and perhaps the rest of the country. Carmen thought it was just Manhattan that had succumbed. This is what she had pieced together with that occasional view. The rest were pulling back, keeping their distance, still able to choose where to go and choosing to go away.
Two days.
That’s how long, and she would’ve been there pulling back with them, clutching her precious baby, reading the headlines, wondering what horrible things her friends were going through, feeling guilty perhaps for leaving work, for leaving them behind to have a baby she always said she never wanted.
But no. She was here. And her legs were sticky with the guts of a friend. Her dress was a bib of gore. The flesh on her one hand was rotting away, charred black where Rhonda had gotten her through the door and the others had left her to become something else. And in her belly, in her belly, something stirred. A nameless baby moved.
It moved, she was sure of that now. And what still moved? What moved anymore in that wretched place?
It was counterintuitive, she knew. Or maybe it was just her fears. Carmen asked herself this question over and over as she lumbered around the island of cubicles once more, bumping into her coworkers, all of them dead just like her. Dead, and still moving. The only things that moved anymore.
34 • Rhoda Shay
clack. clack. thwump.
Central Park was covered in frost. Overgrown and unruly grass let off steam as the ground warmed, the sun slanting through trees oblivious to the ruin of the city all around this green patch. The trees stood as motionless sentinels in the calm air of daybreak, dark shapes flitting between their boughs, birds calling to one another, still thinking about sex and territory and food while monsters roamed below.
clack. thump.
Fallen and crisp leaves rustled with squirrels. Inured as ever to the presence of people, they sat on their haunches, cheeks twitching, and watched Rhoda stumble by. Desperately hungry, she occasionally lurched toward them when they ranged too close, but the squirrels could bolt out of reach in an instant. Her body felt as mindless and ineffectual as a dog, always thinking the next try would nab the impossible. Around a thick tree, two squirrels chased one another in furry spirals of clicking and scratching claws, a much more even match. Too even. They would never catch each other or truly get away.
clack. clack.
The joggers were the only thing missing. The joggers and those early risers who found the time to sit on park benches with coffees and newspapers and bagels, their suits and dresses lending them the air of the gainfully employed. Rhoda guessed it was between six and eight. The sun normally rose while she was slapping the snooze button or waking up in the shower. Of all the many and new powerless things, not knowing the time was just another. No cell phone to glance at. No one to ask. In ancient times, she imagined people just knew how far along the day was. One glance at the spinning constellations, and it was time to plant or harvest or head south.
Rhoda’s constellations had vanished. She didn’t even know they were there until they were gone. There were the joggers in the morning that let her know she would be early to work, kids being walked to school by their parents or older siblings, trucks squeaking to a stop by curbs so burly men could unload boxes of food and cases of beer. There were the subways full of people hurrying for trains, the express packed so full that the last ones in had to laugh, their skirts flapping between the rubber seals as the conductor—after four or five tries to get the doors together—finally zipped them away from the station.