In the Country of Last Things Read online

  Then came the oddest part of it. Just when it became clear to me that a few more moments of pressure would finish the job, I let go. It had nothing to do with weakness, nothing to do with pity. My grip around Ferdinand’s throat was like iron, and no amount of thrashing and kicking would ever have loosened it. What happened was that I suddenly became aware of the pleasure I was feeling. I don’t know how else to describe it, but right there at the end, as I lay on my back in the sweltering darkness, slowly squeezing the life out of Ferdinand, I understood that I was not killing him in self-defense—I was killing him for the pure pleasure of it. Horrible consciousness, horrible, horrible consciousness. I let go of Ferdinand’s throat and pushed him away from me as violently as I could. I felt nothing but disgust, nothing but outrage and bitterness. It almost didn’t matter that I had stopped. A few seconds either way was all it meant, but now I understood that I was no better than Ferdinand, no better than anyone else.

  A tremendous, wheezing gasp emerged from Ferdinand’s lungs, a miserable, inhuman sound like the braying of a donkey. He writhed around on the floor and clutched his throat, chest heaving in panic, desperately gulping air, sputtering, coughing, retching up the catastrophe all over himself. “Now you understand,” I said to him. “Now you know what you’re up against. The next time you try something like that, I won’t be so generous.”

  I didn’t even wait until he had fully recovered. He was going to live, and that was enough, that was more than enough. I scrambled into my clothes and left the apartment, walking down the stairs and out into the night. It had all happened so quickly. From beginning to end, I realized, the whole thing had taken just a few minutes. And Isabel had slept through it. That was a miracle in itself. I had come within an inch of killing her husband, and Isabel had not even stirred in her bed.

  I wandered aimlesly for two or three hours, then returned to the apartment. It was getting on toward 4:00 A.M., and Ferdinand and Isabel were both asleep in their usual corners. I figured I had until six before the craziness began: Ferdinand storming about the room, flapping his arms, frothing at the mouth, accusing me of one crime after another. There was no way that wasn’t going to happen. My only uncertainty was how Isabel would react to it. Instinct told me she would take my side, but I couldn’t be sure. One never knows what loyalties will surface at the critical moment, what conflicts can be churned up when you least expect them. I tried to prepare myself for the worst—knowing that if things went against me, I would be out on the street again that very day.

  Isabel woke first, as she usually did. It was not an easy business for her, since the pains in her legs were generally sharpest in the morning, and it often took twenty or thirty minutes before she found the courage to stand up. That morning was particularly grueling for her, and as she slowly went about the job of gathering herself together, I puttered around the apartment as I usually did, trying to act as though nothing had happened: boiling water, slicing bread, setting the table—just sticking to the normal routine. On most mornings, Ferdinand went on sleeping until the last possible moment, rarely budging until he could smell the porridge cooking on the stove, and neither one of us paid any attention to him now. His face was turned toward the wall, and to all appearances he was simply clinging to sleep a little more stubbornly than usual. Considering what he had been through the night before, that seemed logical enough, and I didn’t give it a second thought.

  Eventually, however, his silence became conspicuous. Isabel and I had both completed our various preparations and were ready to sit down to breakfast. Ordinarily, one of us would have roused Ferdinand by then, but on this morning of mornings neither one of us said a word. A curious kind of reluctance seemed to hover in the air, and after a while I began to sense that we were avoiding the subject on purpose, that each of us had decided to let the other speak first. I had my own reasons for keeping quiet, of course, but Isabel’s behavior was unprecedented. There was an eeriness at the core of it, a hint of defiance and jangled nerves, as though some imperceptible shift had taken place in her. I didn’t know what to make of it. Perhaps I had been wrong about last night, I thought. Perhaps she had been awake; perhaps her eyes had been open, and she had seen the whole nasty business.

  “Are you all right, Isabel?” I asked.

  “Yes, my dear. Of course I’m all right,” she said, giving me one of her dotty, cherubic smiles.

  “Don’t you think we should wake up Ferdinand? You know how he gets when we start without him. We don’t want him to think we’re cheating him out of his share.”

  “No, I don’t suppose we do,” she said, letting out a small sigh. “It’s just that I was enjoying this moment of companionship. We so rarely get to be alone anymore. There’s something magical about a silent house, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, Isabel, I do. But I also think it’s time to wake up Ferdinand.”

  “If you insist. I was only trying to delay the moment of reckoning. Life can be so wonderful, after all, even in times like these. It’s a pity that some people think only of spoiling it.”

  I said nothing in response to these cryptic remarks.

  Something was obviously not right, and I was beginning to suspect what it was. I walked over to Ferdinand’s corner, crouched down beside him, and put my hand on his shoulder. Nothing happened. I gave the shoulder a shake, and when Ferdinand still didn’t move, I rolled him over on his back. For the first instant or two, I didn’t see anything at all. There was only a sensation, an urgent tumult of sensation that came rushing through me. This is a dead man, I said to myself. Ferdinand is a dead man, and I am looking at him with my own two eyes. It was only then, after I had spoken these words to myself, that I actually saw the condition of his face: his eyes bulging in their sockets, his tongue sticking out of his mouth, the dried blood clotted around his nose. It was not possible that Ferdinand should be dead, I thought. He had been alive when I left the apartment, and there was no way my hands could have done this. I tried to close his mouth, but his jaws were already stiff, and I couldn’t move them. It would have meant breaking the bones in his face, and I didn’t have the strength for it.

  “Isabel,” I said in a quiet voice. “I think you’d better come over here.”

  “Is something wrong?” she asked. Her voice betrayed nothing, and I couldn’t tell if she knew what I was going to show her or not.

  “Just come here and see for yourself.”

  As she had been forced to do of late, Isabel shuffled across the room holding on to her chair for support. When she reached Ferdinand’s corner, she maneuvered herself back into the chair, paused to catch her breath, and then looked down at the corpse. For several moments she just stared at it, utterly detached, showing no emotion whatsoever. Then, very suddenly, without the smallest gesture or noise, she began to cry—almost unconsciously, it seemed, the tears just pouring out of her eyes and falling down her cheeks. It was the way young children sometimes cry—without any sobbing or shortness of breath: water flowing evenly from two identical spigots.

  “I don’t think Ferdinand is ever going to wake up again,” she said, still looking down at the body. It was as though she could not look anywhere else, as though her eyes would be fixed on that spot forever.

  “What do you think happened?”

  “Only God knows that, my dear. I wouldn’t even presume to guess.”

  “He must have died in his sleep.”

  “Yes, I suppose that makes sense. He must have died in his sleep.”

  “How do you feel, Isabel?”

  “I don’t know. It’s too early to tell. But right now I think I’m happy. I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but I think I’m very happy.”

  “It’s not terrible. You deserve a little peace as much as anyone else.”

  “No, my dear, it’s terrible. But I can’t help it. I hope God will forgive me. I hope he will find it in his heart not to punish me for the things I am feeling now.”

  Isabel spent the rest of the morning fussing o
ver Ferdinand’s body. She refused to let me help, and for several hours I just sat in my corner and watched her. It was pointless to put any clothes on Ferdinand, of course, but Isabel would not have it any other way. She wanted him to look like the man he had been years ago, before anger and self-pity had destroyed him.

  She washed him with soap and water, shaved off his beard, trimmed his nails, and then dressed him in the blue suit that he had worn on special occasions in the past. For several years she had kept this suit hidden under a loose floorboard, afraid that Ferdinand would bully her into selling it if he ever found out where it was. The suit was too big for him now, and she had to make a new notch in his belt to secure the pants around his waist. Isabel worked with incredible slowness, laboring over each detail with maddening precision, never once pausing, never once speeding up, and after a while it began to get on my nerves. I wanted everything to be done with as quickly as possible, but Isabel paid no attention to me. She was so wrapped up in what she was doing, I doubt that she even knew I was there. As she worked, she kept talking to Ferdinand, scolding him in a soft voice, rattling on as though he could hear her, as though he were listening to every word she said. With his face still locked in that horrible death-grimace, I don’t suppose he had much choice but to let her speak. It was her last chance, after all, and for once there was nothing he could do to stop her.

  She dragged it out until the end of the morning—combing his hair, brushing lint from his jacket, arranging and rearranging him as though she were grooming a doll. When it was finally over, we had to decide what to do with the body. I was for carrying Ferdinand down the stairs and leaving him on the street, but Isabel felt that was too heartless. At the very least, she said, we should put him in the scavenging cart and wheel him across the city to one of the Transformation Centers. I was against that on several counts. In the first place, Ferdinand was too big, and negotiating the cart through the streets would be hazardous. I imagined the cart tipping over, saw Ferdinand falling out, saw both Ferdinand and the cart being snatched away from us by Vultures. More importantly, Isabel did not have the strength for this kind of outing, and I was worried that she would do herself some real harm. A long day spent on her feet could destroy what little remained of her health, and I wouldn’t give in to her, no matter how much she cried and pleaded.

  Eventually, we hit on a solution of sorts. It seemed perfectly sensible at the time, but as I look back on it now, it strikes me as bizarre. After much dithering and hesitation, we decided to drag Ferdinand up to the roof and then push him off. The idea was to make him look like a Leaper. At least the neighbors would think that Ferdinand still had some fight left in him, Isabel said. They would look up at him flying off the roof and say to themselves that this was a man who had the courage to take matters into his own hands. It wasn’t hard to see how much this thought appealed to her. In our own minds, I said, we would pretend that we were throwing him overboard. That’s what happens when a sailor dies at sea: he is tossed into the water by his mates. Yes, Isabel liked that very much. We would climb to the roof and pretend that we were standing on the deck of a ship. The air would be the water, and the ground would be the ocean floor. Ferdinand would have a sailor’s burial, and from then on he would belong to the sea. There was something so right about this plan that it stopped all further discussion. Ferdinand would be laid to rest in Davy Jones’s locker, and the sharks would finally claim him as their own.

  Unfortunately, it was not as simple as it seemed. The apartment was on the top floor of the building, but there was no staircase to the roof. The only access was by way of a narrow iron ladder that led to a hatch in the ceiling—a kind of trapdoor that could be opened by pushing up from the inside. The ladder had about a dozen rungs and was no more than seven or eight feet high, but this still meant that Ferdinand had to be carried straight up with one hand, since the other hand had to hang on for balance. Isabel couldn’t offer much help, and so I had to do it all myself. I tried pushing from the bottom, and then I tried pulling from the top, but I just didn’t seem to have the strength for it. He was too heavy for me, too big, too awkward, and there in the stifling summer heat, with the sweat dripping into my eyes, I didn’t see how it could be done. I began to wonder if we could not produce a similar effect by dragging Ferdinand back into the apartment and pushing him out the window. It would not be as dramatic, of course, but under the circumstances it seemed like a plausible alternative. Just as I was about to give up, however, Isabel had an idea. We would wrap Ferdinand in a sheet, she said, then tie another sheet to that one and use it as a rope to pull the bundle up. That was not a simple matter either, but at least I did not have to climb and carry simultaneously. I went to the roof and pulled up Ferdinand one rung at a time. With Isabel standing below, steering the bundle and making sure it did not get stuck, the body finally made it to the top. Then I lay flat on my stomach, reached my hand back down into the darkness, and helped Isabel climb up to the roof as well. I won’t talk about the slips, the near disasters, the difficulties of hanging on. When she finally crawled through the trap door and inched her way over to me, we were both so exhausted that we collapsed onto the hot tar surface, unable to get up for several minutes, unable to move at all. I remember lying on my back and looking up at the sky, thinking I was about to float out of my body, struggling to catch my breath, feeling entirely crushed by the bright, insanely beating sun.

  The building was not especially tall, but it was the first time I had been so far off the ground since coming to the city. A small breeze began to stir things back and forth, and when I finally got to my feet and looked down into the jumbled world below, I was startled to discover the ocean—way out there at the edge, a strip of gray-blue light shimmering in the far distance. It was a strange thing to see the ocean like that, and I can’t tell you the effect it had on me. For the first time since my arrival, I had proof that the city was not everywhere, that something existed beyond it, that there were other worlds besides this one. It was like a revelation, like a rush of oxygen into my lungs, and it almost made me dizzy to think about it. I saw one rooftop after another. I saw the smoke rising from the crematoria and the power plants. I heard an explosion from a nearby street. I saw people walking below, too small to be human anymore. I felt the wind on my face and smelled the stench in the air. Everything seemed alien to me, and as I stood there on the roof next to Isabel, still too exhausted to say anything, I suddenly felt that I was dead, as dead as Ferdinand in his blue suit, as dead as the people who were burning into smoke at the edges of the city. I became calmer than I had been in a long time, almost happy in fact, but happy in an impalpable sort of way, as though that happiness had nothing to do with me. Then, out of nowhere, I started to cry—I mean really cry, sobbing deep in my chest, my breath broken, the air all choked out of me—bawling in a way I had not done since I was a little girl. Isabel put her arms around me, and I kept my face hidden in her shoulder for a long time, sobbing my heart out for no good reason at all. I have no idea where those tears came from, but for several months after that I did not feel like myself anymore. I continued to live and breathe, to move from one place to another, but I could not escape the thought that I was dead, that nothing could ever bring me to life again.

  At some point we returned to our business on the roof. It was late afternoon by then, and the heat had begun to melt the tar, dissolving it into a thick, glutinous cushion. Ferdinand’s suit had not fared well during the journey up the ladder, and once we had extricated him from the sheet, Isabel went through another long bout of preparation and grooming. When the moment finally came to carry him to the edge, Isabel insisted that he should be upright. Otherwise, the purpose of the charade would be lost. We had to create the illusion that Ferdinand was a Leaper, she said, and Leapers didn’t crawl, they walked boldly to the precipice with their heads held high. There was no arguing with this logic, and so we spent the next several minutes wrestling with Ferdinand’s inert body, pushing and tugging at him until we
got him shakily to his feet. It was a gruesome little comedy, I can tell you. The dead Ferdinand was standing between us, wobbling like some giant windup toy—hair blowing in the wind, pants sliding down his hips, and that startled, horrified expression still on his face. As we walked him toward the corner of the roof, his knees kept buckling and dragging, and by the time we got there both his shoes had fallen off. Neither one of us felt brave enough to get very close to the edge, and so we could never be sure if anyone was down in the street to see what happened. About a yard from the edge, not daring to go any further, we counted in unison to synchronize our efforts and then gave Ferdinand a hard shove, falling backward immediately so the momentum would not carry us over with him. His stomach hit the edge first, which made him bounce a little, and then he toppled off. I remember listening for the sound of the body landing on the pavement, but I never heard anything but my own pulse, the sound of my heart beating in my head. That was the last we ever saw of Ferdinand. Neither one of us went down to the street for the rest of the day, and when I went out the next morning to begin my rounds with the cart, Ferdinand was gone, along with everything he had been wearing.