Page 106 of The End of the World As We Know It
“Nah.” Mole smiled ruefully. “My father was, but I get seasick. Never could find my legs and quit pukin’. I’m a carpenter. Built us a shack right here while he went out on the water, and we lived in it until he died. Not from the flu, thank God. Long before these devilish times. Heart attack.”
Seth wished he could say the same. Both of his parents had been active and healthy until they caught the flu. His father had gone first, one of the early wave of Vineyard deaths that had prompted calls tosuspend ferry service and close off the island. His mother had survived a couple of weeks longer, but then she got sick, too. She had clawed at her swollen throat until Seth caught her hands and pulled them away; then they trembled like frightened birds in his grasp and she was gone.
“I worked at Bunch of Grapes, the bookstore in Vineyard Haven,” Seth said, though the old man hadn’t asked. “It was a great job, but it didn’t really, you know, prepare me for the end of the world. When people started heading to the mainland, I figured I had everything I needed here, and I just decided to stay.”
Everything I neededwasn’t strictly true, since the hospital had shut down, but Seth had a good supply of his antiretroviral medication. That was, if he decided to start taking it again. He’d tested positive for HIV during a routine blood draw in the spring, but felt fine until he started on the AZT, which sometimes made him violently ill and always left him low-grade nauseated. His doctor had stressed the need to keep taking it as a preventative, but the doctor was dead now and here was Seth on the beach, feeling fine even though he hadn’t taken AZT in a month. He had come to believe he wasn’t going to catch the flu, had even wondered whether HIV conferred some kind of immunity.
Mole picked up the Jenny Haniver and shook a skirl of sand off it. The thing’s desiccated skin had the look of a rawhide toy, and Seth felt an unexpected pang. The dogs were all dead, too, including Lucy Vincent, the collie his family had had since he was nine.
“They make these things in Japan as well,” Mole said. “Your mum might have known about them, but probably not. Most people don’t. My father took a particular interest in mermaids. He said the Japanese ones were more like Feejee mermaids, you know, those things they used to cobble together out of a dead monkey’s top and a dried fish’s tail?”
Seth shook his head, mystified.
“Well, it don’t matter. Point is, they were supposed topredictepidemics, and they were supposed toprotectpeople from epidemics. The Japanese kept them in temples and prayed to them. Some of the stories even said eating one was supposed to make a person immortal. Now, if you could go out there”—Mole nodded at the sound—“and catch a mermaid dinner that would make you live forever, would you do it?”
“I don’t know. Wouldn’t that be murder?”
“Guess it depends on which end you hooked,” Mole said, and cackled at his own joke.
Seth laughed a little, too. The old guy was a weirdo, but his irascible good humor was catching. Soon all but the last bloody sliver of sun had sunk below the horizon. Nothing in Seth’s years had prepared him for the darkness of an island without electricity, and he wanted to get home.
“Well,” he said. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”
“Likely so. Stay well.”
As Seth headed back toward his car, he heard Mole crooning a song whose words he couldn’t make out, but whose tune had a dirgelike flavor. He imagined that the old man was singing to the dried thing he held in his hands, and a shudder ran up his spine like the first touch of September frost.
The moon was rising by the time Mole walked back up the beach. It cast its stark illumination over the little fishing town and across the waters of Menemsha Bight, making him think of the coming winter. The season would be no worse than usual for him, as he had plenty of fuel and canned food, but he suspected it might send some of the Vineyard’s remaining residents packing for the mainland. Playing pioneer was easy enough in the blessed summer weather.
An island winter might chap their asses. He’d been a boy in 1934, the year seawater froze all around the island. His father and a couple of other men had walked from Edgartown Harbor to Cape Pogue Pond and back, just for the novelty of it, no doubt passing a flaskand laughing the whole way. He’d wanted to go with them, but his mother put paid to that.
Mole climbed the stairs of the raised shack, which he still thought of as his father’s place, although the old cob had been gone forty years. He trod the risers easily enough in the dark, and why not? He had built them himself. The wood had silvered in the salt air, but the place was still strong. He let himself in and lit an oil lamp. The big aquarium against the far wall bubbled softly. He had it running on a small generator, but didn’t use the power to light the shack’s one big room; he didn’t like the idea of being a bright beacon visible to any who might come.
Meeting the boy today had been a good thing, or so he hoped. He’d never been a gregarious man, but these days he talked to anyone he saw. Had to; he didn’t expect to live through the coming winter. The Jenny Haniver he carried was one of many his father had left behind, mostly his own handiwork, but a few he’d collected in various strange ports through the years. Yes, old Daddy Mole had definitely found some strange ports. He snickered a little. A burbling sound came from the aquarium, rather like a pigeon’s coo, but more liquid.
“Yeah, yeah, keep your hair on. Not that you’ve got any.”
He snickered again, walked across the single big room, and gazed into the tank. She appeared wide-awake, her four huge eyes glowing faintly. A rippling movement thrust her body up at him. Mole slipped his hand into the aquarium’s warm water. She rose against him, and he used two fingers to gently part the slippery petals that comprised most of her body. He probed deeper, slipped his fingers into the inner opening. At its upper reaches was a small firm node that trembled against his touch, and it was this he used to satisfy her, stroking and rubbing it until her body blossomed like a time-lapse film of a flower.
He sighed. He had once found this exciting, but she wanted it every day and night, languished and appeared to be dying if she didn’t get it. She did not eat, did not appear to excrete; this was what she lived on.
He extinguished the lamp, got into the hammock where he slept, and lay gazing across at the aquarium. The moonlight streaming in through a high window was bright enough that he could still see her, a ruffled midnight-blue shape with gold spangles that seemed lit from within.
After his mother died, Seth had left their little rental house near the Oak Bluffs lagoon pond and set up housekeeping in what Vineyarders called the Campground, a circle of Victorian cottages at the heart of the town. He had always wanted to live in one of these, and while the superflu had a lot of downsides, it had vastly improved the cost of living in his hometown. The houses were built around a shady little park, their eaves dripping with gingerbread trim, variously painted peppermint pink and buttery yellow and seafoam green. Seth had chosen a pale lavender one with raspberry-colored trim and a swing on its cozy porch. Crucially, it was uninhabited when the superflu hit, as was the one to its right. Seth had done the necessary maintenance to the house on the left: found the bodies (just two), bundled them up in their bedclothes, and hauled them down to the mass grave in Ocean Park. There were bodies in some of the other cottages, but no one else was close enough for Seth to smell when he was at home. He supposed he had gone a little nose-blind. Probably everyone who survived had.
A few days after meeting the old man, Seth woke up in a rank sweat, his sheets soaked. Half-remembered dreams clouded his mind, and he realized that his throat was sore. He lay in bed for twenty minutes, afraid to get up and check the mirror for the purplish-black smudges under the chin that were one of the earliest symptoms of the flu. Finally, he dragged himself into the bathroom and looked. The marks weren’t there, but the glands in his throat felt lumpy and swollen.
There were several bottles of AZT in the vanity drawer. He tookone out, considered it, then shook several of the blue-and-white capsules into his hand. His stomach did a slow roll at the sight of them, and he had to stifle his gag reflex. He knew exactly how they would make him feel, the headaches and drizzling shits, the somehow greasy waves of nausea.
Mermaid can keep you from getting sick, he heard Mole say, and smiled a little as he put the pills back in the drawer.
The previous owners of his cottage had a pretty good library, lots of fiction, lots of travel writing. Seth had always enjoyed travel narratives, but found that he no longer did: it was too bleak picturing all those exotic destinations emptied by flu, or full of rotting bodies. Fiction was still good, though. Sometimes he stopped by Bunch of Grapes, always reflecting that his employee discount was now one hundred percent. These two sources provided him with plenty of reading, the only thing that made the nights bearable. But the conversation with Mole had gotten him thinking about a book of his mother’s, an oversized collection of Japanese folk legends and supernatural creatures. Some of the colorful illustrations had frightened and fascinated him as a child. He would dare himself to look at them, knowing they guaranteed a sleepless night, but unable to resist their siren call. He particularly remembered thechochin’obake, a thing like a torn-open paper lantern with mournful, red-rimmed eyes and a long hanging tongue. Hadn’t there been some sort of mermaid, too?
He didn’t want to go to his parents’ house. He was forbidden to go to his parents’ house, not by any authority but by his own fear. He could handle coming across strangers’ bodies. His mother’s body was a different matter. His father had died in the island’s one hospital, but it had been overwhelmed by the time his mother got sick, and she had died at home. When he left her there, tucked into her own bed, she had still been fresh. She wouldn’t be now.
Seth tried to quit thinking about the book. It wasn’t as if he had nothing to do; he ought to go over to Katama and check on the few people still there. They weren’t as old as the man from the beach, butthey weren’t young, and he worried about them getting hurt or running out of food. One man was still hauling lobster traps, making grilled lobster and lobster stew for the group. It sounded like a luxurious diet, but Seth knew you could get tired of eating lobster, if lobster was all you had. Instead of doing that, he drove to Vineyard Haven and spent the morning trolling aimlessly through the little shops on Main Street, picking things up—scented candles, glass figurines, shark T-shirts—and putting them down again. There was nothing he needed here.
He got back in the car and drove without a destination in mind. The motion calmed him, as did the land itself, woodland drawing in close on the roadsides, then opening up to long green vistas. The island was at its seductive best, the meadows sweet with Queen Anne’s lace, blazing yellow coreopsis, purple spikes of lupine. He saw a family of wild turkeys crossing the road near the airport. It still amazed him that such natural beauty could exist alongside the horrors of the past few months. How could anyone stand to leave this world?
