I had thought April was sleeping, but in the dim light her eyes were wide open and filmed. Her breath came in shallow rasps. Her skin was gray parchment and dried blood. She didn’t answer when we talked to her.
A vehicle was coming up the road, so I took the rifle and went outside. It was a dump truck with j white sheet draped over one side and a man standing in The back with a megaphone repeating, “Wounded. . . wounded.” I waved and the truck came in. They took April out on a makeshift litter and told us which hospital they were going to. We wanted to go along but there was simply no room; the bed of the truck was covered with people in various stages of disrepair.
Marygay didn’t want to go back inside because it was getting light enough to see the men she had killed so completely. I went back in to get some cigarettes and forced myself to look. It was messy enough, but just didn’t disturb me that much. That bothered me, to be confronted with a pile of human hamburger and mainly notice the flies and ants and smell. Death is so much neater in space.
We buried her father behind the house, and when the truck came back with April’s small body wrapped in a shroud, we buried her beside him. The commune’s sanitation truck came by a little later, and gas-masked men took care of the jumpers’ bodies.
We sat in the baking sun, and finally Marygay wept, for a long time, silently.
11
We got off the plane at Dulles and found a monorail to Columbia.
It was a pleasingly diverse jumble of various kinds of buildings, arranged around a lake, surrounded by trees. All of the buildings were connected by slidewalk to the largest place, a fullerdome with stores and schools and offices.
We could have taken the enclosed slidewalk to Mom’s place, but instead walked alongside it in the good cold air that smelled of fallen leaves. People slid by on the other side of the plastic, carefully not staring.
Mom didn’t answer her door, but she’d given me an entry card. Mom was asleep in the bedroom, so Marygay and I settled in the living room and read for a while.
We were startled suddenly by a loud fit of coughing from the bedroom. I raced over and knocked on the door.
“William? I didn’t-” coughing “-come in, I didn’t know you were…”
She was propped up in bed, the light on, surrounded by various nostrums. She looked ghastly, pale and lined.
She lit a joint and it seemed to quell the coughing. “When did you get in? I didn’t know…”
“Just a few minutes ago. .. . How long has this. . . have you been…”
“Oh, it’s just a bug I picked up after Rhonda went to see her kids. I’ll be fine in a couple of days.” She started coughing again, drank some thick red liquid from a bottle. All of her medicines seemed to be the commercial, patent variety.
“Have you seen a doctor?”
“Doctor? Heavens no, Willy. They don’t have.. . it’s not serious . . . don’t-”
“Not serious?” At eighty-four. “For Chrissake, mother.” I went to the phone in the kitchen and with some difficulty managed to get the hospital.
A plain girl in her twenties formed in the cube. “Nurse Donalson, general services.” She had a fixed smile, professional sincerity. But then everybody smiled.
“My mother needs to be looked at by a doctor. She has a-”
“Name and number, please.”
“Beth Mandella.” I spelled it. “What number?”
“Medical services number, of course,” she smiled.
I called into Mom and asked her what her number was. “She says she can’t remember.”
“That’s all right, sir, I’m sure I can find her records.”
She turned her smile to a keyboard beside her and punched out a code.
“Beth Mandella?” she said, her smile wrning quizzical.
“You’re her son? She must be in her eighties.”
“Please. It’s a long story. She really has to see a doctor.”
“Is this some kind of joke?”
“What do you mean?” Strangled coughing from the other room, the worst yet. “Really-this might be very serious, you’ve got to-“