The Age Read online

  Above the wind in her ears, a whir rises. She tries to place the sound, rhythmic and buzzy like a cloud of bees. She pedals faster. The lights at the edge of the park stay stubbornly fixed. Something snaps and flutters above her head. She shuts her eyes, flattens, chest to handlebars to avoid a brush of feathers or, worse, leathery skin. Her heart knocks near her throat. The whirring gets louder, breathy and mechanical. A man’s laugh startles her with its closeness. Before she can turn, a weight on her back, a hard snag. Her bike flies out from under her.

  Through blackness pricked with stars, she sees herself swan-dive, reach for a trapeze bar that floats beyond her fingers then falls away. She plummets, looks down for a net, but sees only the hard deck of an aircraft carrier. The grapple of hands on her body wakes her. Hurried words, shit, wallet, motherfucker. She plays dead, lies still, eyes closed. Silent with relief when the hands withdraw, she listens, waits for their retreat.

  The first kick jolts her, crushes into her stomach, vacuums her lungs. The second spears her back, raises water in her eyes, triggers a dry, sucking gasp. Voices shout for her to stand. Her hands push at the ground. Beyond their legs, she sees her bike, frame contorted, wheels bent. She raises an elbow over the pain in her head, draws her knees to her chest. A hand cradles her jaw as if to comfort her, then lands two hard punches. A shoe clips the brim of her cap. Fingers reach into her hair. It’s a fucking girl. The scuff of shoes, the scrabble of tires.

  She tells herself to get up and run.

  ON THE SIDEWALK IN FRONT OF HER HOUSE, Gerry pauses to straighten her gait, tightens the right side of her body, tries to lift her feet instead of drag. She makes a huh sound to clear her throat and swallows a coppery slug of mucus. Elbow clenched against her sharpened ribs, she turns her key in the lock, braces for maternal hysterics.

  Symphonic music swells as she steps into the foyer, the warmth of the house consoling and exhausting at once. In the living room, Randy’s tall, broad back blocks Gerry’s view of the couch. Her mom’s nyloned feet cross at the end of the coffee table, the rest of her hidden, tucked down in front him. On TV, a camera sweeps over craggy cliffs, pans a green field. Gerry holds the front door, eases it into its frame.

  “You’re late.” Her mom’s hand waves from Randy’s body.

  “I know.”

  “Randy brought over his VCR. We rented a movie.” The tip of her mom’s chin peeks out from Randy’s arm. “Come watch with us.”

  Gerry faces the coat hooks, fiddles with the pockets on her jacket as she senses her mom about to turn in her seat, stretch to get a glimpse of her. Gerry soaks her voice in sarcasm. “Um, thanks, but no thanks.” She punctuates with a snicker that fires a spark through her face.

  Her mom sighs. “Suit yourself.”

  Gerry clings to a hanging sleeve, counts the seconds before she can turn around again. She checks over her shoulder.

  On the screen, a blond actress in a hooded cape runs through a crowded train station; fevered music matches her steps. Randy’s gaze catches Gerry by surprise, his stare, blank and stricken with alarm.

  She tries to smile. Blood percolates behind her nose. She raises her shoulders in an agonizing shrug. Her index finger quivers as she lifts it to her lips, shakes her head in slow motion. “I’m going to bed now,” she calls to her mom.

  Her mom’s fingers waggle in the air. “Sleep tight.”

  Steam churns inside the small room as the bathtub fills. She bends at the sink, water like needles, rinses her mouth and nose, the gash above her eyebrow. Just below her right eye, a gel sack of wine-coloured blood forms a grotesque supermodel cheekbone. She presses the taut, swollen surface, flinches, swallows the trickle that crawls down her throat.

  The mirror steams over and her distorted self disappears. She smears herself back. They could have done worse. Panic shakes through her legs. She coughs, bows her head, and waits for the hot fist of her stomach to jam up in her throat, splatter the circling water with blood. Instead, a sob breaks in her chest and she bawls into the sink, the night rushing out of her.

  A knock at the door dissolves in the tub’s rumble.

  “I’m having a bath,” she shouts.

  “Open up.” Randy’s beefy husk.

  She splashes her face with water, grabs a towel and holds a corner of it over her nose and mouth, cradles the rest against her body. Standing as straight as she can, she opens the door, catches it with her foot. She tries to see past Randy’s bulk filling the doorway. “Where is she?”

  He looks over his shoulder. “In the kitchen. Making popcorn.”

  “Intermission.”

  “What happened to you? You need the hospital?”

  “I got in a fight.” She lowers the towel to give him a peek at her face. “Don’t tell, okay?”

  “Gerry.” Randy groans, raises his arm on the doorframe, rests his forehead in his palm. His hand reminds her of a catcher’s mitt.

  She feels light-headed with the effort of standing. Her fingers search for the counter.

  Randy reaches out to steady her, the mitt on her shoulder. “Christ,” he says.

  “I feel like shit right now, and I totally can’t handle her flipping out.” She has never looked at him this close. His face calms her, furrowed and toughened, yet round at the edges. “Just don’t say anything, okay? And. I won’t tell her you lost your job.”

  His hand drops from her shoulder as he leans away.

  “I saw you at the doughnut place last week. You were circling want ads.”

  “I was looking for a car.”

  “She’s dumped guys for way less.”

  His nostrils flare. His face reminds her of a cartoon bull and she imagines leading him by a chain, a large metal ring through his nose. Randy sighs and taps the door. “Yeah. Well.” He nods as he turns for the stairs. “Don’t die in your sleep.”

  She closes the door and shuffles toward the bathtub. As she passes the sink, she catches a glimpse of herself in the fog, alien, unrecognizable.

  The Hurting scratches thin and twangy from the record player. Flat on her bed, swaddled in towels, she stares at the ceiling. Above her, Trinity’s radioactive mushroom explodes in grainy black and white. A blink of tears blurs, then sharpens the poster. Her body trembles with the New Mexico sagebrush, the aftershock of overdue adrenalin. Air on her skin like chipped ice, she gathers the blankets around her.

  They might have beaten her dead, left her on the path in a bloody heap. A carnival of police lights, a lullaby of sirens, her mom folding to the ground in grief. Gerry’s mind, adept at substitutions, casts a TV dad in the obvious void. A dad who stalks off in the night with a shotgun or grips a baseball bat as he scours the streets. Who rigs traps of razor wire and spikes, then organizes work buddies with chains and crowbars. A dad who calls the police, then pays to take a lead pipe into the back of a paddy wagon. A dad who blames himself, finishes his days at the bottom of a whisky bottle.

  She dabs her eyes with the bedsheet. A pulse throbs under the tight swell of her face. Eight years gone and her father has a house in Santa Clara, a swimming pool, a wife, and twin boys. It would take a miracle for him to blame himself. Instead, she has Randy, a lousy stand-in, rough and dumb, and even he couldn’t care less, ready to tempt fate with his warning: a jellied clot blocking her windpipe as she dreams, a splintered rib slicing her heart, blood seeping from her brain into the nest of her skull.

  The poster dissolves into particles, the great cloud fracturing over wasted desert while miles away, scientists, haunted already by ash shadows of children, sip champagne to dull their guilt. She eases a pillow under her neck, flexes a bicep, slowly, to feel the flare in her chest. The pain, predictable now, leaves her glassy and hollow-headed. She flexes again, imagines that overnight her muscles will fuse, harden over wounds, tighten around her like fleshy armour.

  Dying in her sleep would be a blessing, a pardon. She knows her death comes prearranged, the end of a decades-long physics experiment: a bright, sunny day, a missile in t
he sky. She once watched a TV program on phobias, how people afraid of spiders should try to imagine spiders, a spider across the room, a spider at their feet, in their lap, in their hand, and somehow these thoughts would make them less afraid. So she rehearses. At first it was a view from space, the planet’s watery curves retreating against a sea of pitch, surface drawn in impossible detail, undulating trees, mountain range scars, white-tipped ocean, and scabs of desert. On cue, soundless columns of fire would rise. Later, she pictured an old black-and-white television set, soundless atrocities from a camera’s perspective, devastation contained behind the curved glass screen. Now it begins at a bus stop.

  Her mind is mischievous. Primed for nightmares, disturbances, it casts her in the body of a boy. A slight boy, without bulging muscles or bristles of hair, a subtle evolution that unsettles her, heats her with shame and excitement. Her inner self still her self but distilled to only strengths, all her curves and weakness cut away.

  IT HAPPENS WITHOUT WARNING. A sunny day. Nothing on television. No escalating tensions, no rogue states in crisis, no awkward catch in the morning newscaster’s voice. Slouched over his knapsack in the shade of a wooden bus shelter, the boy in the mud-splattered high-tops plays with the frayed edge of his fatigue jacket, nods to the urgent tide of “Eclipse” on his Walkman. Beside him on the bench, a man in a short-sleeved shirt and tie reads the paper. A woman in a sundress and high-heeled sandals stands by the bus stop marker, denim jacket hanging from her shoulders like a cape. She shimmies her legs, rubs her powder white arms against the chill. The smell of her morning routine, shampoo, hairspray, perfume, teases the boy, helps him imagine her naked.

  Pink Floyd’s chorus swells inside him, then fades in a final chord of voices. Beneath the trailing notes, an unfamiliar sound. A low vibration that thrums in his head, then seems to push up through the bench beneath him. He slips his headphones down to his neck. The muffled world comes clear. Sirens rise in a dizzy spiral.

  Traffic continues, drivers busy with coffee, eyeliner, toasted breakfast. At the bus stop, people turn their heads, faces posed as question marks, curious, ready to reassure or dismiss. An elderly woman opens and closes her purse. The sundress woman smiles. The man in the tie folds his newspaper. They wonder at the sky, look to one another and shrug.

  The boy stands and something happens to his eyes. A sheet of light flashed with purple, a dim milky haze, as if a circuit in his brain has flared and fizzled. Confused, he blinks, then squints to see. He expects people to stare, to ask, What is wrong with that boy? But no one looks at him. The man in the tie sits with his mouth open, the sundress woman squeezes the edges of her jacket, they stare at the horizon.

  The sound shocks him. Thunder so loud and deep, he cannot imagine anything louder, until it sucks the breath from him, the moisture from his eyes, a massive, suffocating bass in his chest. The noise suspends him like water.

  A cloud rises from the south, a funnel of fire, the horizon dwarfed beneath its expanding plume. Transfixed, he tries to guess its height in feet, office buildings, miles.

  Traffic slows, then stops. Drivers climb out of their cars and gawk at the sky, others sit bewildered, punch buttons on their radios. A hand grabs his arm. The sundress woman shouts, Run! He wants to tell her, It’s no good, you can’t run from that. She pulls until his legs obey.

  They run north as an equal tide of bodies runs against them. The woman glances back, second-guessing their route, trips on her sandals and tumbles forward. Her jacket catches over her arms. The boy waits for her to stand. The sky darkens, the air grows cold. He studies the cloud spread, miles wide. And as he tries to calculate the landmass below it, another flashbulb explodes to the south, then one to the west, and another, and another.

  SLEEP SETTLES COLD AND BLACK, pondwater at night. Submerged, Gerry shivers, liquid pressure aching in her chest and hands, her face thick with tangled weeds. She surfaces once, in the grey morning, her mom’s soft knock on the door, a blade of light from the hallway. Gerry covers her head with the comforter.

  “I have to go in early, someone tripped an alarm at the lab.”

  Too waterlogged to respond, she curls into herself, imagines floating.

  “I don’t want you wasting your day with Henry. Spring break or not, you’ve got chores to do.”

  “Light,” Gerry moans. Through the blanket she feels the room go dim.

  Her mom sighs in the dark. “Did you hear me?”

  She wonders who her mom is talking to.

  “Have a good day. I’ll miss you.” The door bumps in its frame.

  Later, Gerry wakes to the hum of daylight, her face a mask of thorns and splinters. The sound of a faraway hammer thumps in her head. She lies still, teases crust from the corners of her eyes. A short, tentative sniff spears through her nose, into her temples. Her eyes water as she holds her arm to her ribs to sit up, tries to steady the filaments of pain in her chest and back, keep her breath shallow. She stands, tests her weight, limps a slow arc around the bed.

  She opens her window, lets the morning rinse over her. Low clouds hang in a dingy sky. The hammer starts again, pounding on the front door that echoes up through the house. Across the street, her grandfather’s brown Audi.

  “I’m getting ready,” she calls down. The words vibrate through her face, leave her nauseated.

  Leather-soled shoes brush the pavement, Henry steps back onto the walk, grey hair a moulded shape, the lines of his suit pressed into tight corners. Hands in his pockets, he gazes up but doesn’t spot her. He talks to the sky. “I’ll wait in the car, then.”

  She takes her time in the bathroom, dabs dried blood with a warm washcloth to unveil the darkened skin beneath, brushes her teeth, hypnotized as the paste foams pink. With the tips of her fingers, she pats her mom’s liquid foundation over the worst of it, tempers the angry purple with tawny beige. She leaves her hair down as camouflage, draws a brush through it, careful not to graze her scalp.

  The door handle is cold and tricky in her fingers. The car unleashes an overheated waft of aftershave, stale old man, and FM classical. She keeps herself angled away as she settles in the passenger seat. When she turns to face him, Henry’s brows crowd together like scruffy caterpillars. The edges of his mouth sink into his jowls. Then, like a cycle of bad weather, the expression clears. “Close your door.” He puts the car into gear. His nonchalance impresses her. She tries not to smile as they pull away from the curb.

  “Face like that usually comes with a play-by-play.”

  “I was in a fight.”

  “I’ll have to tell your dad.”

  Gerry shrugs as she calculates what her father should know. “The other girl got it worse.” The imaginary win buoys her.

  “You see a doctor?”

  “What for?”

  Henry smiles. “Your father was scrappy. The first Mrs. tried to coddle it out of him, turn the other cheek and all that, but the instinct to fight is one hundred percent pure Cross.”

  She rolls down her window, reassured by the certainty of genetics.

  Houses pass like a filmstrip. Ahead on the block, two figures perch on Ian’s front steps. Ian and Lark kissing. As the car drifts by, Lark’s sprayed-out hair glints in the sun, her skinny arms draped around Ian’s neck.

  “Friends of yours?”

  Gerry slumps back in her seat. “As if.”

  Gerry doesn’t mind the newsroom, the dreary chaos, the bell rattle of phones, desks clad in fake wood panelling, their narrow metal legs threatening to buckle under the weight of file trays and hooded IBM Selectrics, the chance to spin in Henry’s chair. Scorched ashtrays send up trails of smoke, soot the ceiling tiles black. Near the far wall, a tile popped open like a hatch. Where news people go to die. Gerry pictures them climbing a tall, wooden ladder, crawling into the ceiling on their hands and knees. She imagines skiffs of bones overhead as she leans back against Henry’s suit jacket.

  Beneath a bank of wall clocks, each displaying a different time, Elaine, the weath
ergirl, perches at her desk, red lipstick, red highlights in her permed hair. She twirls a pen, glasses at the end of her nose. A red stiletto dangles from her stockinged foot. Gerry searches for evidence she’s a lesbian as Henry claims. Perhaps the bony square of her shoulders, the chain on her glasses, the man-sized watch on her wrist. None of it seems like proof.

  Henry’s desk is a single, teetering mound of papers, files, and debris that date back to the Mesozoic Era. Time has compressed the layers closest to the bottom into a nondescript wad. Gerry pinches the corner of a pink, carbon-printed sheet near the middle, shimmies it slowly while monitoring the pile for the hint of an avalanche. The paper comes free and she raises her arms, makes a soft, airy stadium cheer in her mouth, then lays the paper on top, a flat pink cherry.

  At the end of the room, Henry stands inside the news director’s glass-walled office. Stripped of jackets, both men are stout, barrel-chested. They pace and lumber about, wave their arms to the sides, above their heads. They remind her of cavemen or gorillas. Each pauses to unbutton his cuffs, roll his shirtsleeves, shake his head, each makes the other wait for a reply. For a few seconds, they both yell at once, slap the backs of their hands into their palms. Her grandfather appears a stranger, made anonymous by the blur of his features, his perplexing resemblance to his boss.

  The two men hulk out of the office together, sweaty and red-faced as if from a sauna. The news director cuts a sharp right. Henry stalks toward his desk, tosses a ruffle of papers onto the mound. Gerry holds her breath as the pages flutter and wobble, then settle to a perfect balance on the pile.