Pariah (11 page)

Though the sky was cloudy there was sufficient moonlight to see their roof, the tarnished reflective silver paint creating an eerie network of geometric outlines to follow. The other roofs, topped in traditional black tar paper, were invisible. It was like she was marooned on a trapezoidal island floating six stories above the ground.

Ellen padded across the rooftop and stood at the lip of the slight incline that led to the roof’s west-facing edge. The pitch of the acclivity was maybe thirty degrees or less, wheelchair accessible should someone confined to such a chair wish to roll themselves off the roof to their doom. She was sure that was not the intent of the slope. And besides, the only way up to the roof was the stairs.
There was no wall on the York-side end of the roof, just a faint rise of decorative cornice, then a straight drop. A fall from here might do the trick.

No, she didn’t want to join Mike.

Ellen lay on her back, staring up at the moon’s pitted face, almost full, but not quite. The air movement felt both invigorating and soothing. It was the middle of July and she wondered if any of them would live to see the fall. And those things on the street, how long would they continue to shamble around? How many survivors were there in Manhattan, or the outer boroughs? Were there other naked women lying on rooftops in the vicinity, staring up at the moon? Or clothed ones? Or men? Or children? If so, was that a comforting thought? What was comforting? That Alan was sleeping in her bed? She wanted Alan there so she wouldn’t have to be alone, yet here she was on the roof. Dabney didn’t count.

She used to define herself, like zillions of other people, by what she did for a living. Her career. Now her career was living to see the next day, for no discernable reason other than just to do it. Now she was defined by her sex. She and ancient Ruth were the only two females in the building—
maybe the world
. Gerri, the floating wild card, didn’t count. She came and went by and large unnoticed.

“Gettin’ a moon tan?” came a deep voice from the dark. Dabney.

Whether modesty was démodé or not Ellen felt the flush of embarrassment. It wasn’t like Dabney could see much, but her nudity made her feel vulnerable. Ellen shook her head. Like
she
was anything to look at—a flimsy rack of bones held together by a pallid veneer of skin, her slack abdominal skin lightly puckered by a petite frowning cesarean scar. What a fox. She didn’t see much of John, not being a habitué of the roof, but he still seemed formidable. At least that was her mental picture.

“S’okay,” Dabney said, his voice a baritone purr. “Moon rays don’t do any harm. Sun’ll just give you cancer, not that it much
matters. What’s cancer gonna do? Shave a few precious days, maybe hours, off your life?”

“I think I should be going,” Ellen said.

“Not on my account, I hope. Only visitors I get up here are the fellas. Nice to hear a sweet voice. One lacking testosterone.”

“Oh.” Ellen didn’t know what else to say.

“How’s your lesser half?” Dabney asked.

“Huh?”

“Your lesser half. I’m just joshing. Mike. How’s Mike? He hasn’t paid me a visit in a while.”

“Mike’s dead.”

A faint breeze filled the awkward silence. Dry leaves rustled in the corners of the roof.

“When did this happen?”

“This morning.”

“I didn’t know. I’m sorry. With everything on the avenue, nobody said anything. How did it . . . I’m sorry. I don’t mean to pry.”

“It’s okay. Mike fell out the window. I think he broke his neck. He just lay there as they ate him. He was still alive. But not anymore. Just like my baby.”

Dabney leaned against the stairwell housing, where he’d been all along, wondering if it was possible to suck all the air out of a room outdoors.

Answer:
YES
.

“You’re wasting candles,” Ruth scolded.

“I want to read.”

“In this light? You’ll ruin your eyes. Besides, since when are you a reader all of a sudden?”

“Since there’s nothing on television last I checked. Since I can’t sleep and I’m tired of inspecting the insides of my eyelids. It’s never too late to better yourself, right? So consider me bettering by the second.”

“
Ucch
. All right, but do you really need four candles burning?”

“You want I should get eyestrain? You’ve got me talking like a peasant.”

“That’s my fault?”

“You used to say I didn’t read enough, that reading would better me. So here I am, reading, and now it’s ‘don’t read, you’ll ruin your eyes.’ You’re talking out both sides of your mouth, and with your teeth out it’s particularly repulsive.”

“Why are you so cruel?”

“It’s all I have left.
Feh
. You need your beauty sleep, fine. I’ll adjourn to the sitting room, your majesty.”

A clap of rainless thunder taunted them as Abe grabbed the platter on which the candles were arranged and left the room.
Tsuris
he did not need. He’d borrowed a couple of books from the kid in 3A, some cockamamie science-fiction
chozzerai,
but it was diverting enough. The writer, a fellow named Philip K. Dick, seemed bent on doling out as much torture as possible to his characters. Abe enjoyed others suffering even worse than he. At least Abe knew where the hell he was—he was situated in his misery. The poor schmuck in Dick’s book didn’t know whether he was coming or going; his reality kept shifting on him. What a lousy predicament. It was a riot.

Another sequence of rolling thunder followed him down the hall. “So rain already,” he griped. “Enough with the foreplay.”

Mixed in with the thunder were other sounds. A crash followed by the peppering of ruptured safety glass on pavement. That accompanied by the plaint of countless zombies.

“The natives are restless,” Abe said with a smirk. “It’s a regular hootenanny out there.”

In the bedroom, Ruth stared into the void. Abe wasn’t always easy to deal with, but at least he wasn’t always such a bastard, either. She’d been spoiled, she realized, by all his years away at work. She’d kept a few jobs here and there in her younger days, but they were usually part-time and often for relatives. Sure it was nepotism, but for such lousy pay, who’d make a fuss? She worked a little at a travel agency (Uncle Judah); a printing plant (cousin Sol); a catering hall (cousin Moshe); a small-time talent agency (cousin Tobias). When Abe came along she became a full-time housewife, then an overtime mother. Three children she’d raised, almost single-handedly.

That wasn’t a job?

Abe made her feel like she was living the pampered life of a queen because she didn’t have to schlep to an official place of work. Sure, Abe brought home the bacon—all right, not bacon; they kept kosher, give or take—but Ruth slaved, too. And for the meager allowance Abe doled out? It was indentured servitude. Even when they got along she’d prayed for liberation. Where was her own personal Moses to lead her to the Promised Land? Three children, and God only knows where they were or what their fates were. Was it too much to ask of God to at least know? Were Miriam, Hannah, and David even among the living? In her head she thought it possible, but in her heart, and more persuasively in her gut, she doubted it. So that meant the grandchildren were gone, too.

When God doled out the punishment he really laid it on thick, but she
believed
.

Ruth believed because of the absoluteness of the fate of mankind. The scientists had their theories, back in the first few weeks, before the television and the radio were kaput, but the theories didn’t hold much water. Biotoxins. Germ warfare. Terrorism. Advanced mutated Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Anthropoid spongiform encephalopathy.

No.

This was the work of a vengeful god. This was the work of a god who’d had enough, and who could blame Him? People had been doing terrible things ever since they arrived on the scene, but in just the span of her lifetime it went from not so good to bad to worse to unimaginable. Politicians got slimier and greedier and less trustworthy. Wars weren’t waged for noble causes, they were pecuniary agendas. The younger generations kept getting stupider and more selfish and less humane. Popular culture was all in the toilet. Bad language was rampant. Overt pornographic imagery had infiltrated regular television—Ruth didn’t know from cable firsthand, but
from what she’d heard it had been the telecast version of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Craziness.

Gone were any kind of values one could hold dear. The people of her generation were shunned by society. The only ones who cared at all about them were the politicians, and that was only because the older generation still got out and voted. So, politicians and the pharmaceutical companies. Everyone else just was biding their time waiting for all the seniors to drop dead and vacate apartments like this one. Geriatrics and gentrification didn’t often cozy up. But that was just a personal beef. Donald Trump and his ilk didn’t erect the real estate that mattered. The Tower of Babel had been built again, at least metaphorically, and this time God was playing for keeps.

God had had enough of his naughty children.

Death was near, Ruth felt. Abe would be in for a rude surprise when he found out his soul would continue to exist even after his mortal form didn’t. In the next world—
Olam HaEmet
: “the World of Truth”—he’d have to answer for all his bile when they played back his life for him. Abe wasn’t a bad person—mean, maybe, but not evil—but his lack of faith would surely not be looked on with favor.
Gehenom
awaited Abe. It wasn’t hell, and he could move on, but he’d have to do some serious soul-searching—literally—to purify his untidy soul.

The depiction of the afterlife wasn’t explicit in the Torah. That’s where the goyim had it made. It was so black and white. They got scary fire and brimstone if they were bad or the Pearly Gates and Paradise if they were good. The Torah was more enigmatic. As a good Jew you were supposed to focus on your role in this, the material world. An eternal reward was a vague but effective motivator to stay on the correct path. All Ruth knew was that the soul went on for eternity and that was good enough for her. She just hoped that
Abe would get his act together and make peace with God so they could link up in this nebulous afterlife.

And the children and grandkids.

And maybe Cary Grant.

Sure he was
treyf
, but
oof.

Abe held the book close to the candle, straining to read the small print. Though he enjoyed Dick kicking the crap out of his poor deluded bozos in their subterranean Martian hovels, drugged to the gills with their little Perky Pat doll setups, the pain in his eyeballs negated the pleasure. Besides, he was actually envious of these fictional characters. Sure they’d been forcibly evicted to live on Mars—which was a complete crudhole—but at least they could get bombed out of their gourds and have these collective fantasy trips courtesy of some kooky hallucinogenic drug called Can-D. Or was it Chew-Z? It was both. Whatever. It was a crazy book, but Abe found himself embroiled in its labyrinthine plot. Dick was a nut, but an imaginative nut.

He put the book down and closed his eyes and rubbed them—hard. With spots and tiny patterns of organic hieroglyphs swimming on his orbits, Abe sat back in the chair by the window and enjoyed the fireworks. Abe rubbed some more, even though it was supposedly bad for you. When he pulled his hands away and opened his eyes again, flashes of light joined the spots and indecipherable microscopic pictographs. A distant clap of thunder echoed throughout the dead city, followed by a chorus of idiot groans from the undead. Abe blinked and pretended he was crocked on Dick’s wonderdrugs.

“I’m on Mars,” he whispered. “I’m in my hovel. Where’s my dolly?”

As the spots and runes melted away Abe realized the light
wasn’t self-induced. Lightning? No, this flash of light cut right across his ceiling. From below.
What the hell?
Abe manually uncrossed his sleeping legs, flung himself out of his chair and hobbled on limbs of pins and needles toward the window. Just as he hung his head out a swath of light was cutting across the tops of all the cabbage-heads, forging south—
a flashlight beam!

“Jesus H. Christ! Jesus H. Christ!” Abe gasped. He ducked his head back in and shouted, “Ruth! Hey! Ruth!” Another small thunderclap swallowed his thin voice. “God damn it!
Ruuuuuth!
”

“What? What is it already?” Ruth screeched from the bedroom. “You’ll wake everyone!”

“Good! Come in here! Quick!”

“What is it?”

“Come in here!”

Abe was trembling all over. He leaned back out the window and shouted at the departing beam of light. As it receded down York the horde seemed to spread out before it, creating a path.

“Hey, wait!” he shouted, his frail voice swallowed by another burst of thunder. In his ferment he launched into a convulsive coughing fit, his watery eyes following the light until it disappeared from sight. Now his coughing tears mixed with tears of despair.

“What’s the commotion?” Ruth whined. Though she was shrouded in darkness Abe could picture her bitter, disbelieving face. “What’re you dragging me out of bed for?” Her mental image of Cary Grant faded into nothingness.

“There was a light out there!” Abe said, gesturing at the street below, wiping his eyes.