Ubo

8

“UBO ISN’T A sentence. Alan didn’t come here because of what he did,” Falstaff insisted. They were standing by the door that led to the roof. “Besides, we don’t know how far it went. Maybe his wife is fine.”

“How do you know? How can you?”

“From observation. I’ve had scientific training. Whatever their method might be, the roaches are apparently able to track brain activity that signals aggression. Human beings often feel aggression without acting on it. Their equipment might not differentiate.”

“So, we’re here because we were aggressive. The roaches snatched us because of that.”

“That’s not what I said. Reasonable people feel aggression—but they don’t act aggressively unless necessary. Besides, I’m just speculating. I don’t really know. I’m sure they have their reasons, and no doubt they’re complex.”

“You seem to know quite a bit about the roaches.” He walked away before Falstaff could reply. Daniel would still ply him for information, even if the information wasn’t always reliable. But he’d learned a useful word during his travels through other people’s heads. Kapo. In the camps, it was a Jew who cooperated, who supervised the work of other Jews in exchange for privileges. That was Falstaff, he was almost sure.

He took advantage of the warm day and went up on the roof. So many others had the same idea he wondered if the roof could carry the load. They lounged like refugees waiting to be told where to go, and knowing wherever it was it wouldn’t be pleasant.

There were more roaches about than usual. For the most part they kept to the edges of the roof, to prevent escape or suicide or simply to block a clear view of the ground. Today, however, they lingered near the center where large numbers of residents had gathered. They seemed particularly interested in the couples. He had only recently witnessed this kind of pairing off—no doubt it had existed in the past, but the residents seemed to have been more discrete. The roaches still kept their distance, but Daniel could feel them watching. Maybe they considered courtship potential trouble.

A number of men were playing games with pieces of cardboard or plastic they’d written on. Bits of stone were tossed, and men cheered depending on the results. Sometimes pieces were moved across squares and ovals scratched into the dirt.

In other clusters people were singing, a few even dancing, singly or together, the roaches observing nearby. Wherever the roaches positioned themselves, the residents kept several feet away, backs turned.

Daniel searched for the boy he’d met earlier. He’d wondered about him often, thinking how remarkably cruel it was for the roaches to have snatched a child out of his life, away from his parents. There was no justification for it. He doubted they watched this child any closer than the others—certainly he’d been allowed to roam the rooftop free of supervision. He should do something about it, but what? Maybe take the boy to live alongside his group, if the roaches allowed it.

He could always ask Falstaff.

Daniel made his way past several gatherings of men performing exercises. It made perfect sense—you lay on your back most of the day, your mind in another world and another life, the body easily forgotten, simply something to prop up your head. So silent and intent, these men had gathered together for pushups and leg lifts, and weight training with any odd bit of brick or iron from the numerous piles of demolished material like industrial gravesites across the roof.

A large fellow in a rickety chair had set up camp near the center of the roof, surrounded by items he would pick up, examine, and put down again. This activity was casually paced, but constant, repeated over and over again. Now and then he would pause and glower at anyone standing nearby. This big fellow had become a fixture over the weeks Daniel had been visiting the roof. Every time Daniel saw him he looked angrier, particularly if you walked too closely in front of him, as if you had violated his invisible lawn space.

Moving through the more densely populated sections of the roof, Danielencountered more couples, both mixed and same sex, holding hands, talking intimately, occasionally kissing, using the other residents to shield them from the scrutiny of the roaches. It was all quite risky and appealing to Daniel. He moved past as quickly as possible, but still gathered bits and snippets of conversation.

“Do you love me?” she said, her finger against the tall fellow’s chest. “Because I don’t believe it.”

A man with a deep scar on one cheek, the tattoo on his arm resembling layer upon layer of obsessive writing, grabbed a smaller man by the shoulder. “I can’t live without you.” He looked angrier than sad.

“If you didn’t do those things,” another fellow said to a tired-looking older woman, “you wouldn’t have to be taught the lesson.”

And then a figure chasing another through the crowd. “Sweetheart, don’t be so upset. You don’t need to be so upset.”

It was frustrating, not being able to find the boy. There was always the possibility that something had happened to him down in the barracks. Scuffles were not unheard of—it was a tense environment. Bullying was often a factor. Or perhaps the boy simply hadn’t come back from a scenario. That happened with some regularity.

Daniel felt echoes of the heightened alert he’d experienced as Gordon’s father. They never knew when their son would have a spell of difficult breathing. More often than not it would be in the middle of the night, and the monitor he’d had since he was a baby picked up his distress. They’d race into his room to find him gray-faced and grunting, his nostrils flaring as his body struggled for air. He’d been born with holes between the heart chambers, abnormalities in the blood vessels and in the aorta. These things made him smaller, paler than other kids.

Daniel’s anxiety rose, making him move more swiftly through the crowd. He became careless, running into people, never wise in a population exposed so intensely to violence. Someone shoved back. Others became involved. The roaches moved in, their dark insect limbs grabbing, throwing.

He glimpsed the hunched, sitting form out beyond the edge of the struggling crowd. Daniel made his way through and trotted toward the boy, who was sorting through a variety of small charred bits. The boy looked up, said “Hi,” but didn’t smile.

“Hello, I was looking for you.”

The boy still didn’t smile. “Why? Why would you do that?”

“I just wanted to make sure you were safe. What have you got there?”

“Just stuff I found in the building. Nothing you’d want.”

“What’s yours is yours. I wouldn’t take anything that belonged to you. I just want to be your friend, really.”

The boy looked at him suspiciously. “If you say so.”

“Do the other residents take things from you?”

“Sometimes. But sometimes when they wake up, they’re not who they were before. They get confused. And a little, I don’t know, grabby?”

“Can you keep yourself safe?”

“I try to hide when they first wake up. Then it’s okay.”

“I have some friends—they’re pretty trustworthy.” Daniel hoped that was still true. “Maybe you could move into our section.”

The boy studied him nervously. Then he looked away. “Are we on an alien planet?”

Daniel was okay with changing the subject—anything to keep him in the conversation. “I don’t know that any of us really know where this is.” Except perhaps Falstaff, he thought.

“But they want us to think that, right? I mean the dream? The flying dream? The big bugs carrying us here? They want us to think we’re out in space somewhere, right?”

“I’m just not sure.”

“I’ve been picking up all kinds of stuff. I’ve been going through the junk in the rooms, all that broken junk. And the roof?” He held up a small dull metal disk. “I found this. See, it’s all rusted and stained.” The boy put the circular bit of metal into Daniel’s palm. “It’s a coin, isn’t it?”

Daniel prodded and scraped at it with his fingernail. George Washington. It was an American quarter. “Where—” But the boy stared past him, looking troubled. “Anything wrong?”

“That lady, she’s been staring at me all day. I don’t—I don’t like it.”

Daniel turned and saw a woman sitting by herself. She looked away instantly. “Stay here. I’m just going to talk to her for a minute.”

The woman, red-faced, weathered skin, looked alarmed when Daniel walked up to her. “Excuse me. My young friend over there says you’re making him nervous. Is there anything I can do?”

She shook her head, her eyes cast down. “I didn’t mean to scare him, but he—he reminds me of my son Paul. I guess I was staring like some kind of weird-o?”

“He’s just scared. I can’t imagine a child being here, going through these scenarios.”

“Oh, that’s bad.” She shook her head, bowed as if it weighed a thousand pounds. “Bad enough for an adult.” She started to get up, “Won’t bother you—anymore.”

“I haven’t met many women here. Is it the same for you? How often do the women do the scenarios?”

She sat back down, looking tired but not entirely unwelcoming. “Sometimes once a week. For a while most every day, with a break, sometimes.”

“Same as it is for the rest of us.”

She looked at him with seeming disinterest. But she responded. He believed it was automatic, that she would have responded to anything he said. “Is it?”

“Yes. But I guess I’m not as familiar with the history of violent women. What roles have you played, if you don’t mind my asking?”

She stared off past him then, her eyes looking intently at something, some distant event. “Bonnie Parker.” She glanced at him quickly, and away. “As in Bonnie and Clyde, you know? Then there was Myra Hindley. And Belle Gunness in America—she killed husbands, kids for the life insurance. A cold woman. I don’t think she cared for anyone, including herself. Ilse Koch—the roaches are obsessed with the Nazis, have you noticed? And of course the Countess Elizabeth Bathory—that one was fuzzy, as if they weren’t giving me enough information to work with, you know? I just kept killing all these girls, killing after killing, and I was never quite sure why. It became habitual, like the way you snack when you’re nervous, you know? Is that an insensitive thing to say? You know it’s bad, but you’re helpless, you can’t stop. And you don’t want to stop, not really.

“Most of the others were anonymous women no one ever heard of, the countless, nameless women of history, a lot of them partners, accomplices to their murdering men. Some of them gone crazy, haunted by their own obsessive thoughts. And child-killers, lots of women child-killers. I guess if more men stayed home they’d be the child-killers, but they haven’t, in general, so that dirty job has gone to the women. Because you’re cooped up with them all day. Some days they’re the only human beings you see. So, of course, who else are you going to kill?”

“I’m sorry.” He didn’t know what else to say.

“Why? How do you know? Am I that obvious?” She looked anything but disinterested now, her eyes dark and shiny as she rose into a crouch as if to spring at him.

“I was talking about the scenarios, how hard it is to get past some of them, to shake them off. Believe me, I know.”

“You know, do you?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend—”

“Do you know what it’s like to kill your own kids?” She staggered upright, awkwardly, almost falling over until Daniel reached out to grab her arm and steady her. She shook his hand off furiously. “Off! I didn’t say you could touch me!”

Both stood silent and shaking. “I’ll just go on my way now.” Daniel took a step away.

“Do you know how it works?” she asked.

“What? I don’t understand?”

“All this.” She ran her forefinger in a circle. “How all this works, what the rules are?”

He thought seriously of telling her to talk to Falstaff. “Not really. An insight here and there, but I don’t know much at all.”

“Can you tell me why they took me away from my kids before I could find out if they were dead or not? Before I could find out if I’d really killed them? Are they sick in the head or something? Who would do that to a mother?”

Daniel didn’t want to hear this story. But he couldn’t just walk away. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

She shrugged, and her face suddenly distorted, and she looked away, bowed and crying, which left her body off-balance and somewhat grotesque. He kept waiting for her to collapse, but she didn’t.

“They’d driven me crazy all day, but they were always driving me crazy, you know?”

He nodded. “Sometimes—they can be a handful. And they go right for your buttons.”

“For a long time I didn’t think I even wanted kids. I wanted a career, I wanted to feel like I was making some kind of difference in the world. Not that being a mother isn’t making a difference, not if you do it right, but I wanted to see what I could be first, without a family, with nobody else but me standing there.

“So I worked my way up, I became a manager. Then I was laid off, and that gave me time to think, and to wonder what it was I had to show for all I’d done. And you know that’s a hard question to answer—there are so many intangibles, but what I finally decided was, it didn’t feel like nearly enough. I don’t care how much logic you throw at it—if it doesn’t feel like enough it isn’t enough. I was living alone then, and I decided I didn’t like living alone. I wanted to have kids. The first guy, Paul’s dad, he turned out to be pretty much a disaster. Good riddance, and I’d still say that. Joey’s dad, he was very sweet, but we argued about the silliest things. That was me, mostly. I was disappointed, and I know I’m hard to live with when I’m disappointed. He finally couldn’t handle it and left.

“And little TJ, well, I’ll be honest, I drank a bit after Joey’s dad left. I don’t know who TJ’s father is. Listen to me, I sound like a damn soap opera.”

“No, it’s okay.”

“I sound like I’m just talking about ordinary crap!” She started crying. “I’m talking like nothing terrible happened!”

“Really, you’re okay. You’re just trying to tell your story. We all sound like that when we’re just trying to tell our stories.”

She nodded hesitantly, but he could tell by her eyes she didn’t really agree. He thought she might even be trying to offer him a smile, but she couldn’t quite pull it off. “I don’t know why I thought I could be a good mother—I guess I thought once the kids were there it would just come out of me naturally. I kept thinking about how it was going to be with them, how I’d make them happy and content and how appreciative they’d be, and the loving things they’d say. And even when they weren’t like that—Paul had such a rotten mouth on him, and Joey was always throwing tantrums and breaking things, and TJ, that baby just couldn’t stop crying—I kept telling myself that one day we’d be this unbelievable family I’d imagined, if only I did the right things.

“But I didn’t even know what the right things were.”

“I know—there’s no rule book. You just have to do the best you can.” She looked at him again as if surprised he’d spoken, surprised he was even there.

“They’d been driving me crazy all day,” she said again. “Paul was in one of his aggravating moods. He was always so bright, so clever. Math was easy for him, and he was always taking things apart, putting them back together again. He could fix pretty much anything. Smarter than me, and he knew it. He only listened to me when it suited him.

“He’d been doing this thing all day. Working up the two little ones, tickling them, then making them cry, then tickling them again. Between the tickling and the crying and the screaming they were so red-faced I thought they were going to pass out. He really knew how to play them, like they were his instruments. And they let him. If he let them rest for just thirty seconds they’d say ‘more’ or ‘again,’ so out of breath you could hardly understand them. They loved it. They loved it.

“But I’d had enough. I was ready to scream. All day, you know? All damn day. I told him nicely at first to cut it out, and he did for a little bit. He even said ‘sorry.’ But he didn’t mean it—fifteen minutes later he started up again. I used to spank him when he pulled that crap, when he was smaller. It never stopped him for more than five minutes. Joey too—never did a bit of good. It became a part of their game—it was just part of the story of the day. You scream, you run around, Mom spanks you and you cry and rub your behind, and then you run around screaming even more than before. Joey’s eyes would get all puffy from crying, and his face bright red. I swear sometimes he’d be laughing and crying at the same time, like some kind of crazy person. I’d still spank him—I didn’t know what else to do. And when they pulled that crap in public—which they often did—I just couldn’t take it. I’d just lose it, and spank them as hard as I could. Paul would usually just laugh, but the others would bawl. I never wanted them to be afraid of me, but they have to be a little afraid of me, don’t they, if they’re going to obey? One time one woman even called the cops on me. Made me furious, but later, I couldn’t really blame her.”

She stopped then and he looked around. The sun was going down. The distant ruined city glowed red. Most of the residents had gone back down inside the building. It would be feeding time soon, and that was the last thing you wanted to miss. But Daniel didn’t believe she was thinking about eating. A few roaches still wandered the edges of the roof, gazing at the residents, gazing at the uneven tear of the horizon.

“By sunset I was exhausted, but Paul was still at it, winding up the other two until they were screeching like they were in pain, and maybe they were. When you’re a kid, so much feels like pain, don’t you think? I’d had it and I just wanted to lie down for a few minutes. I told Paul to keep a lid on things and I went into the bedroom to lie down.

“I shouldn’t have taken that nap for lots of reasons. Mostof all because I always feel strange after one of those naps, like I’m not all there. My dreams that afternoon were as high-pitched and jangly as my day had been. When I woke up and walked into the room I wasn’t quite sure what I was seeing. They were all three giggling, actually more peaceful than they’d been all day.

“All three of them were sitting in the window. Paul and my two babies. All of them, my babies. More than that, they were straddling the window sill like a horse, one leg in and one leg dangling out. We’re three stories up. Paul glanced over at me and smiled, patting Joey on the head, like he was proud of what he’d done.

“‘Paul! That’s dangerous! Get them off there!’ I yelled, but not as loud as I might have. I didn’t want to startle them.

“He just looked at me and frowned. And then he said, ‘Don’t be stupid.’ That’s what he said to me, his mother.

“All I wanted was to show Paul how dangerous it was so that he wouldn’t do it again. Sometimes you have to be creative—that’s what some of the other mothers in the building had told me. I don’t know. Sometimes you get these ideas and you don’t know where they came from but they sound good for some reason. So I ran at him, saying ‘You want to fly out of that window? Is that what you want?’ Trying to scare him, you know?

“He looked up just as I got there, his eyes so big and his face so white? I had my palm out like I was going to push him. And he just naturally leaned away, and then he was gone, and the babies, and the babies were holding on to him.”

Daniel found himself taking a step back from her, as if she were something deadly. But she appeared not to notice. She was too focused on remembering, capturing and conveying every detail.

“I screamed, I guess, although I don’t think I ever actually heard the scream. My head went all white inside, like the inside of an explosion. I didn’t look out the window. I couldn’t. I just turned and ran out into the hall, and down those long flights of steps, my legs pounding like some kind of athlete.

“And on the way down, I kept thinking about how it all might turn out okay. There were some canvas awnings above the first floor, and I remembered how the upholsterer on the block used to leave his waste bin nearby, so they always might land on something soft, and the babies, babies have flexible bones, don’t they? That’s what people are always saying. But I couldn’t remember exactly where all those things were, so I couldn’t quite make myself feel better, no matter how hard I tried.”

She stopped then. He waited, but she didn’t say anything more. And although he didn’t want to ask, he finally did ask, “What did you find, when you got to the bottom floor, when you got outside?”

She looked at him with a vaguely puzzled expression, as if he should already know. “I didn’t get to the bottom floor. I didn’t get off those stairs. I woke up here. I thought maybe I’d fallen, going so fast. I thought maybe I’d fallen off those stairs and died and woke up here in Hell, not knowing, never knowing whether my babies died or not.”

Then she was up and running for the edge of the roof. He couldn’t stop her. But the roaches closed in, and she screamed when they touched her, wrapped her in their segmented legs, and bore her down.

The boy was nowhere to be seen.