And I remember her wide eyes saying nothing but yes! Yes to what, I didn’t understand. I guess the look on my face questioned her. She nodded exuberantly. She reached out her hand and her eyebrows went convex with imploring.
“Join us!” she yelled. The wind whipping her hair to and fro. She didn’t implore long before she was scaling again, and about to reach the part of the fence that curls back over the pedestrian walkway.
“Hey! What are you doing?”
Over the bus rattle I could hear them struggling with effort. These people were not young. A few were not thin. A couple of the men wore cheap suits and Florsheims which slipped in the chain-link diamonds. The driver was up there too, fat ass swaying back and forth with each frenetic step up, arms shaking from the effort of maintaining his girth against gravity. Their determination frightened me. I couldn’t wrap my head around what was happening. I didn’t have time. Everything I did was a reaction and my heart raced and my head cleared from any concerns other than the right now. That’s really where I still am today, except when I’m talking into this thing. I’m right now, past and future extending in both directions away from me, totally and equally unknowable.
They climb and I watch, shouting, asking what’s going on, why. I ran to the bus door where I see a little girl, toddler age. She’d dropped her stuffed animal. I picked it up and tried to give it to her. She just looked at me.
That’s when it really hit me. A mother climbing a fence over an expressway as her child stands abandoned in a bus door, the chug and exhaust of the bus and the expressway roar. This dead-eyed child.
I had come down Mount Bonnell into a nightmare from which I would not escape. That’s what hit me with a flood of adrenaline flushing my brain and making me go a little weak in the legs, tingling at the extremities. I was in this now, whatever this was, until I was dead. Only then would it end.
I thought my life had sucked before—unsure if Kodie felt about me the way I felt about her; getting kicked off the marching band squad (we were to play the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade!); Martin riding my ass; Mom not caring that he’s riding it, her disappointment in me; Dad two thousand miles away and caring even less; Mr. English so pissed at me that he’s no longer pressuring me to submit my stories to journals; the SATs coming up; a stack of college applications on my desk.
But now I would learn what fear was, as one of the younger men got to the top of the fence and sat in a crouch above MoPac and bobbed up and down as if he were attaining the momentum to—
No.
(I didn’t yell it. I thought it: [no!].)
(Not a no for this man. A no that feared what this act meant.)
— jump. Which he did. As if into a pool, a swan dive thirty feet down. He plummeted, I ran to the fence, heard tires screeching and I saw this man faceplant into the windshield of a swerving car. A doll crumpling, tossed, and car pulped.
Yet the rest of them kept climbing.
And a police car raced past this scene, too, followed by big black Suburbans, a black helicopter tracing the sky above them heading in the same direction.
Then it’s the nurse who manages to get on top, having scratched herself bloody on the fence’s metal. She sits like a gargoyle right above me on the rounded top of the fence, bobbing in pre-dive. I shook my head fast, called out no and why and I cried out a wordless cry. She looked down at me and smiled that bright red smeared lipsticked smile, mouthing to me while vigorously nodding, it’s okay, it’s okay. Then she lifted her chin proudly, her eyes scanning the horizon, and jumped.
Tires screeching with temerity and the metal crunching. I vomited.
Remembering back now, what made me vomit was the sound that came from her as the first car hit her. It sounded like she had been punched in the stomach. Just had the wind knocked out of her. Whuh! Because I didn’t watch. I had turned my head and closed my eyes, but when I heard that sound along with the thud of her meat and bones slamming onto the vehicle. My mouth rushed with salt and I threw up and in there somewhere I cried but sucked it up quick.
Though I don’t remember much after that until I got to my street, I do know that I had no qualm leaving that toddler. I left her on the MoPac pedestrian bridge, standing there continuing to watch the space in the blue autumn sky where her mother had just been.
I do remember the cemetery on the way home, the big one where Michener’s buried. The blond rays cutting through the trees to spotlight groupings of markers, the obtuse slants of the headstones’ shadows. And, though I thought nothing of it at the time because I was hauling ass home with more on my mind, now I remember seeing children meandering around in the parking lot of the little Montessori school across the street from the cemetery. Johnny went there for a couple of years. It’s a seventies strip mall converted into a school. Shops became classrooms. Oftentimes I saw them being led to the playground by their teachers, all walking in straight lines along the breezeways.
But this morning there weren’t any teachers. The kids wandered around the parking lot looking dazed. The line of cars by the orange cones where the kids get dropped off stood still. An Odyssey had on hazards, the auto-sliding door wide open. A motionless woman’s arm hung out of the window of a silver Volvo midsize SUV.
My street was partially blocked by a garbage truck. Being Friday morning, the city trucks should be rushing through the neighborhoods, their breaks squealing, their motors roaring, but this one on my street was stopped in the middle, its huge robotic arm frozen mid-grab. The doors of the truck were open and that beeping noise came from it. I could just squeeze by, my tire scraping the curb. As I got even with the truck’s cabin, I slowed. On the CB I heard a man’s voice screaming through static. I slowly slalomed down my street around felled trash containers, my teeth set on edge at the static-laced screams. Countless asynchronous sounds of car and home alarms filled the morning air now.
In my car, the radio jingles had finally given way to someone speaking. The guy who normally read the morning headlines did so again but there was a personal, conversational tone to his voice. I turned it up. He said, something has happened this morning… everybody, something is definitely happening… this reporter can’t even begin to tell you what and I don’t even know if any of you are listening, or something like that. Then he said, “But something dire has befallen us and it isn’t just happening here in Austin. My station crew isn’t here. It’s just me. I don’t know where to begin and frankly I think I’m going to have to go. All I can tell you is that I’ve received reports that people are dying, and that there are mass numbers of accidents occurring, and, we, I don’t know if this is some sort of biochemical attack or a fast-acting virus… so this is probably my last broadcast for some time. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what else to say.” And that was it.
Way up the street I see this man in gray coveralls and yellow reflective vest. A trash guy swaying curb to curb. I drive up slowly. He turns his head and there’s a rill of blood running down his face, staining his coverall, bright on his reflective vest.
I asked if he was alright. My heart surged and snagged as I waited for the limping, bleeding, large garbage man to either answer me or lurch in my direction with his hands outstretched.