He tilts the plate and slides the jellied juice into his mouth. A few drops splash onto his shirt, but most of the blood goes down his throat. It’s salty and makes his thirst worse. He shows her the plate, empty except for a few red smears. He expects her to tell him to eat that, too—to scoop it up with his finger and suck it like a clot lollipop—but she doesn’t. She tips the bottle of Dasani on its side and uses the push broom to roll it to the flap and through. Jorge seizes it, twists the cap, and drinks half in a series of gulps.
Ecstasy!
She leans the broom back against the side of the stairs and starts up.
“What do you want? Tell me what you want and I’ll do it! Swear to God!”
She pauses for a moment, long enough to say a single word: “Maricon.” Then she continues up the stairs. The door shuts. The lock snaps.
July 22, 2021
1
Zoom has gotten sophisticated since the advent of Covid-19. When Holly started using it—in February of 2020, which seems much longer than seventeen months ago—it was apt to drop the connection if you so much as looked at it crosseyed. Sometimes you could see your fellow Zoomers; sometimes you couldn’t; sometimes they flickered back and forth in a headache-inducing frenzy.
Quite the movie fan is Holly Gibney (although she hasn’t been in an actual theater since the previous spring), and she enjoys Hollywood tentpole movies every bit as much as art films. One of her faves from the eighties is Conan the Barbarian, and her favorite line from that film is spoken by a minor character. “Two or three years ago,” the peddler says of Set and his followers, “they were just another snake cult. Now they’re everywhere.”
Zoom is sort of like that. In 2019 it was just another app, struggling for breathing room with competitors like FaceTime and GoTo Meeting. Now, thanks to Covid, Zoom is as ubiquitous as the Snake Cult of Set. It’s not just the tech that’s improved, either. Production values have, as well. The Zoom funeral Holly is attending could almost be a scene in a TV drama. The focus is on each speaker eulogizing the dear departed, of course, but there are also occasional cuts to various grieving mourners in their homes.
Not to Holly, though. She’s blocked her video. She’s a better, stronger person than she once was, but she’s still a deeply private person. She knows it’s okay for people to be sad at funerals, to cry and choke up, but she doesn’t want anyone to see her that way, especially not her business partner or her friends. She doesn’t want them to see her red eyes, her tangled hair, or her shaking hands as she reads her own eulogy, which is both short and as honest as she could make it. Most of all she doesn’t want them to see her smoking a cigarette—after seventeen months of Covid, she’s fallen off the wagon.
Now, at the end of the service, her screen begins showing a kinescope featuring the dear departed in various poses at various locations while Frank Sinatra sings “Thanks for the Memory.” Holly can’t stand it and clicks LEAVE. She takes one more drag on her cigarette, and as she’s butting it out, her phone rings.
She doesn’t want to talk to anyone, but it’s Barbara Robinson, and that’s a call she has to take.
“You left,” Barbara says. “Not even a black square with your name on it.”
“I’ve never cared for that particular song. And it was over, anyway.”
“But you’re okay, right?”
“Yes.” Not exactly true; Holly doesn’t know if she’s okay or not. “But right now, I need to…” What’s the word that Barbara will accept? That will enable Holly to end this call before she breaks down? “I need to process.”
“Understood,” Barbara says. “I’ll come over in a heartbeat if you want, lockdown or no lockdown.”
It’s a de facto lockdown instead of a real one, and they both know it; their governor is determined to protect individual freedoms no matter how many thousands have to sicken or die to support the idea. Most people are taking precautions anyway, thank God.
“No need for that.”
“Okay. I know this is bad, Hols—a bad time—but hang in there. We’ve been through worse.” Maybe—almost certainly—thinking about Chet Ondowsky, who took a short and lethal trip down an elevator shaft late last year. “And booster vaccines are coming. First for people with bad immune systems and people over sixty-five, but I’m hearing at school that by fall it’ll be everyone.”
“That sounds right,” Holly says.
“And bonus! Trump’s gone.”
Leaving behind a country at war with itself, Holly thinks. And who’s to say he won’t reappear in 2024? She thinks of Arnie’s promise from The Terminator: “I’ll be back.”
“Hols? You there?”
“I am. Just thinking.” Thinking about another cigarette, as it happens. Now that she’s started again she can’t seem to get enough of them.
“Okay. I love you, and I understand you need your space, but if you don’t call back tonight or tomorrow I’ll call you again. Fair warning.”
“Roger that,” Holly says, and ends the call.
She reaches for her cigarettes, then pushes them away and puts her head down on her crossed arms and begins to cry. She’s cried so much lately. Tears of relief after Biden won the election. Tears of horror and belated reaction after Chet Ondowsky, a monster pretending to be human, went down the elevator shaft. She cried during and after the Capitol riot—those were tears of rage. Today, tears of grief and loss. Except they are also tears of relief. That’s awful, but she supposes it’s also human.
In March of 2020, Covid swept through almost all of the nursing homes in the state where Holly grew up and can’t seem to leave. That wasn’t a problem for Holly’s Uncle Henry, because at that time he was still living with Holly’s mother in Meadowbrook Estates. Even then Uncle Henry had been losing his marbles, a fact of which Holly had been blissfully unaware. He’d seemed pretty much okay on her occasional visits, and Charlotte Gibney kept her own concerns about her brother strictly to herself, following one of the great unspoken rules of that lady’s life: if you don’t talk about something, if you don’t acknowledge it, it isn’t there. Holly supposes that’s why her mother never sat her down and had The Conversation with her when she was thirteen and started to develop breasts.
By December of last year Charlotte was no longer able to ignore the elephant in the room, which was no elephant but her gaga older brother. Around the time Holly was beginning to suspect Chet Ondowsky might be something more than a local TV reporter, Charlotte enlisted her daughter and her daughter’s friend Jerome to help her transport Uncle Henry to the Rolling Hills Elder Care facility. This was around the time the first cases of the so-called Delta variant began to appear in the United States.
A Rolling Hills orderly tested positive for this new and more communicable version of Covid. The orderly had refused the vaccinations, claiming they contained bits of fetal tissue from aborted babies—he had read this on the Internet. He was sent home, but the damage was done. Delta was loose in Rolling Hills, and soon over forty of the oldies were suffering various degrees of the illness. A dozen died. Holly’s Uncle Henry wasn’t one of them. He didn’t even get sick. He had been double-vaxxed—Charlotte protested but Holly insisted—and although he tested positive, he never got so much as the sniffles.