When we were finished eating—me having had thirds and slopped up every last dollop of roux with the puppies—but before we settled in to watch Mystery! on PBS with our pie plates heaped, she asked me to play something. She knew we’d already started rehearsing for the next football season and probably expected to hear me play something from that. But for no reason at all, other than I’d been rehearsing it all day and that it had burrowed into my mind like an earworm, I ripped into this sublime jazzy version of The Saints, trying to ape the way I’d heard Trombone Shorty do it at a Tulane commencement I’d seen on YouTube.
Oh—how her eyes lit up. She clapped with her hands barely touching to the beat of the song and she swayed in her chair and when I came around to those refrains her eyes closed and then came that beatific smile of hers, the thing I maybe loved about her most, her eyebrows lifting convex, searching for that highest note just before I hit it.
When I was finished, she sighed and said that was her favorite song and asked did I know that? I shook my head and said no, that I’d just picked it up the other day and couldn’t get it out of my head. Wasn’t that a coincidence, I’d asked her. She shook her head and said stonily, “No, sweetie. No. There are no coincidences.”
Four days after that, she had a stroke. She died a week later.
Days after that, Grandma Lucille’s beatific smile morphed into the dark smiling teeth within the recesses in my mind and thus began the summerdreams. I’d go to bed after the rising shrieks of new cicadas lulled for the night, and those dreams came—night after night, the same thing. And in the background, a muted soundtrack—The Saints.
At her funeral I played The Saints. Not a dry eye in the church. I barely got through it, my emotion catching in the instrument, but I plowed on with verve determined to see it through as if Grandma were sitting next to me, lightly touching her fingertips in a silent clap to the beat. I played it in a standard way, leaning toward a dirge, keeping the second line version between me and her.
I felt safe with Bass walking next to me across the sloping field of what would have been an expanded cemetery even though he was wearing his football helmet and was stoned to the bejesus. Bass was security in bulk, an entire head taller than me with gladiatorial shoulders and calves.
“I have no idea,” I’d answered to his what the hell? I still don’t, not really.
The distance was much farther than I remembered. We walked an incline and then sloped to the treeline. Johnny and Kodie would be out of sight.
“Really a dumbass thing to do, smoking. Okay, I need to sober up.” He clapped his hands together hard once and then rubbed them, getting down to business. As if in pregame psych ritual, he smacked his palms on the sides of his helmet and huffed and puffed. Not that he ever played beyond kick coverage when the Paladins had some team so by the throat that the scrubs got in. “So, what we know is: one, everybody who’s hit puberty but me and you and Kodie look to be dead. I mean… the whole world??” Bass wasn’t the only one to talk glibly. We all did at times. Subconscious comic relief.
He continued, “Do you think it’s possible it’s just the US? Maybe once we get communication going—”
“No,” I said, my tone flat and certain. “Did you see TV at all? I didn’t really.”
“A bit just before I took off exploring. Net, everything crashed quick. Then I came here. All I saw was cable news running raw footage. People on their knees in the New York subway, choking.”
I didn’t even want to get into what Professor Fleming had told me. “It’s worldwide. It’s… just got to be. It’s too…”
“What?”
“How can…? You saw how people died?”
Bass drew in a measured breath. “Saw my folks. Watched them.”
Our banter quit. We stopped walking. “But you just said—”
“I know. I don’t know why I said I found them.”
“Sorry. I’m so sorry. You don’t have to tell me.”
“No. We’ve got to fetter this out. What we know because that’s all we have. No matrix in the sky is going to tell us anything.”
I nodded, tight-lipped, already a frocked member of the choir to which he preached. We walked and talked. Bass said, “We’ve gone soft. That’s what my dad used to say. I used to think he was just a crank talking about self-reliance, the grid going down one day. He wasn’t a shelter-digging survivalist, but he was definitely sympathetic—the economy collapsing, and with it society; sun flares knocking out the world’s power; some super-flu or whatever. Bet none of them saw this coming. How could you?”
“No kidding. I still can’t believe I’m awake. That you and I walk through a graveyard talking about what happened to the world. Still in shock I guess.” I’d say this is still true. Nothing’s worn off, just grown more profound.
“Tell me about it. I’m the stoned one wearing the helmet. Ever seen a more textbook specimen of shell shock?”
“PTSD.”
“Yeah, that.”
We shuffled a few more steps. I checked back over my shoulder, my car still in view. Residual morning dew collected flecks of new mown grass on our shoes and made their smoother parts glisten.
Bass readied himself. “Okay.” He straightened up and took in a deep breath and blew it out. “My parents both died within minutes of each other. They… suffocated… God, I don’t even know. I couldn’t help them.” We heard a low faraway boom and lifted our heads to it but kept walking. “Both of them still in their sleepwear, they said they didn’t feel well, were going to call in to work sick. At first I thought it was kind of funny, the two of them such a pair. I put them in bed but within minutes they grew restless. They couldn’t lie still and then very quickly came the wheezing which became too much. The panic in their eyes. Oh, God, Kevin. It was… I cannot believe it. I just can’t.”
We walked in silence for twenty yards or so. After sniffing, sighing, and clearing his throat, he continued. “They tried to hug each other and be together, and to be with me, because they knew something was very wrong, but their struggle was too much and they ended up going outside, separately, Dad to the backyard and Mom to the front. Like, they had to go outside.
“My mom staggered into the middle of the yard when she collapsed to her knees and that’s when I ran out to her. She was on her hands and knees with her face to the ground. I thought she was going to vomit but it was a long thirty seconds or so of this crackling… wheezing… like I’ve never heard. I mean, Kev, she had bad chronic asthma, my mom, and I’ve spent many a day with her feeding her hot drinks to try to keep the breathing passages open, to keep her afloat until the prednisone I shot into her hip kicked in. I’ve seen her turn blue and heard her make deathly rasps before, but this… this was, ah, Jesus.”
I thought, lacking in specificity.
“It gripped her so fast she couldn’t even say goodbye to me. I was crouching down to talk to her and she was just shaking her head wildly… shit, Kev.”
I patted him on the back as he wept. He yanked off the helmet by the face mask and threw it ahead of him. It clacked and rolled to a stop. We walked down to it and he took a knee like you see them do, gripping the face mask and leaning on the helmet. I got up on my tiptoes to look over the incline to the car. I saw their two heads inside.
Still kneeling and looking off into the middle distance, Bass, stone-faced now, not stoned, said, “She grabbed my leg and held on as she struggled for breath. She fell over onto her side. I wonder if she thought it was just another asthma attack. Her eyes found mine, and we just looked at each other as I screamed out at her. And then the life left her eyes.”