I always thought the word “desperate” was very hard to use. What would qualify as “desperate times”? When Evie died, I thought I tasted despair. Then Teena and the girls died, with ninety percent of the population of New York. Within a week, it went from nine millions to nine hundred thousand. It’s not like it was something clean neither, people didn’t just vanished. New York quickly transformed into a gigantic, gnarly mass grave. Building became mausoleums that sealed rotten corpses, infection and poisoned water. The American government declared quarantine over New York City. Each exit was barricaded by tanks, soldiers and snipers with gas masks. The toxicity level in the air was too high for them to breathe the same air than us. We didn’t get to wear any gas mark though, we were like leper. We had to stay quarantined and at least twenty meters away from the military; the toxins gave a dry cough that was highly contagious.
Inside Marcus’s place, things were going on almost normally. We sealed the doorways, the windows and installed a homemade filter for the AC. Everything seemed normal minus the fact that both of our lives went down the drain within a matter of weeks. Marcus went from trying to be helpful to almost catatonic within the three first days after the gas attacks. It was Potassium Cyanide, the TV said, the same gas used to kill inmates in the gas chamber, but this time, poured all over the city. One of New York's new attributes...a gas chamber.
Marcus barely ate, he didn’t wash, he was just sitting in front of the TV, watching CNN in a loop, hoping to see the girls pop out of the metro or whatever miracle he was expecting. Meanwhile, I just tried to keep the house as tidy as I could. It was a way to keep my mind busy while minimizing the risks of intoxication. Eight days after Joey Holloway died on our porch, Marcus finally spoke to me: “You know Cliff, I’m jealous of you.”
“Why is that?” I asked, sitting next to him on the couch.
“Your pain is yours man, when you lost Evie, everyone could mourn her and try to make it easier for you.”
I was quite confused, and I thought he was too. There was nothing awesome about losing my fiancée, nothing to be jealous about. I asked for some better explanation, politely: “What do you mean?”
“I mean that I feel bad to mourn. Everyone died Clifford. People are falling like flies all over the city. My loss is not special, I can’t mourn my wife and my kids without having to mourn eight million people. I can't cry my people if I can't cry all people.” he said, looking directly at the wooden floor.
I knew where he was coming from with that. There was something unspeakable about what was happening to New York, it was too big to be sad about, too incredible to be real. If our wives and my nieces would be locked in the loft with us, it could have been like any other day.
“Marcus, here’s how I see things…” I said, not knowing where I was going with it. “You’re my brother and you’re all I got left. Let’s just make sure we don’t lose each other man.”
Marcus did something I haven’t seen him do in many years. He shed a tear and held my hand. My proud big brother finally stopped bottling everything up and let go of a little steam. It was good to have broken the silence he often walled himself up in. Marcus, despite my big brother, was always smaller and weaker than I was. He was the brains of the family and I was the brawns. I had my mother’s genes. My uncles on the side of my mom were all big and strong workers as my dad’s side was more intellectual. Marcus wasn’t small by any means, but he was never an athlete and after I turned ten years old, he could no longer perform big brother protection duties.
He found himself other sources of strength. Self-sufficiency was one of them. Marcus always took great pride from being his own man, his only contributor to his own success. He liked to lecture me on this when I went to dinner at his house with Evie. She hated that, but whatever made my brother proud made me happy. Evie never understood how Marcus felt lonely and inapt for a big part of his life. She knew him on the verge of the opening of “Whitmore Books”. She never knew the other Marcus. I knew him; I lived with the other Marcus for most of my life. It was him that I was staring at, quietly crying in his living room couch, contemplating the ashes of his little kingdom. It was breaking my heart to see what he worked so hard for turned into shreds by what the media called “an unclaimed terrorist attack”. Marcus was right, I had my own pain, but I still had my life and my two feet on the ground. His whole life had been vaporized by a toxic gas attack. His family, his business, everything he worked at was destroyed.
Marcus wiped off his tears and said: “You’re right baby brother. You’re all I have left too. We go through this together or we go down together. Deal?”
“Deal” I said, bumping his knuckles.
“Let’s go read on the internet about Potassium Cyanide” Marcus said, going for the computer. Wikipedia had the answers we needed. What I could gather from the explanations given was that the wide spread of the tragedy was due to the fact that Potassium Cyanide was highly soluble in the water. In fact, we survived so long due to Marcus’s acute tastes for Evian bottled water. Since he was a child he had the aqueduct water in horror.
That and the fact we didn’t wash probably made for us still being alive. Airwave poisoning was pretty dangerous too, at high concentrations; just being outside in the open could get you killed within two hours. Marcus and I looked at each other after reading the article, probably thinking the same thing. There were only two packs of Evian water left. We’d eventually need to go out and replenish on stock. Was that was desperation about? The need to live? We were two brothers, abandoned by life and together, back against the wall, the only thing we could think about was to live a little bit older.
Desperation is not like in the movies, at least not ours. This is an intimate concept. Our whole apocalypse had something very intimate. We had something against the death and destruction surrounding us. There was no more tears, no screams, no panic. Our desperation came in the form of a well planned scheme to find neat food and clear water. Marcus got down to the book store to get one of these maps of Queens he was selling. A big hit, as he always said.
We suspected that Queens was particularly devastated by the attacks because we saw casualties of it way before it was announced on the news. We barred from our list of places to check out the local groceries. They were small and probably looted by the time we’d go out. Marcus pointed out a canning factory and the city reservoir of purified water, which was sealed in the case of horrible cases like the one we were living. Sadly, we hoped everyone before us who tried to access it, died trying. It was a question of survival.
We also improvised gas masks with tissues and scarves. I did that in construction to prevent from inhaling all kind of particles. The important was to put as much layers as we could. Marcus brought bandanas and his nine millimeter pistol. He’d be happy to wield it as he was the only one of us who knew how to shoot. He learned it from the cadets when he was a teenager. One of his many attempts at finding the strengths he so desperately seeked.
There was serenity, almost a joy in our preparation. We were two brothers, preparing to go play outside, like in the old days. Stripped of everything we had, we turned on to the essential, each other. I didn’t really care if I’d survive. The only thing I’d want to live for was to not leave my brother alone.
Outside it was dark. I felt like it was always dark. The clocks were still going on in New York City, but everybody stopped paying attention to them. Time, the abstract construction of human mind had fell out of place. There was no time anymore, no rules, no one. There is only time where there are humans to see it pass by. When everybody dies, it doesn’t matter what time it is. What matters is how much time is left…
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