Amsterdam 2012 (30 page)

I am weary beyond despair, beyond dizziness or nausea.
 
My bones ache.
 
I have never known this kind of exhaustion.
 
I turn and look across Ocean Avenue.
 
Eight blocks I need to walk.
 
There is no other way to get home.
 
I point myself in the right direction and start walking.
 
Taking the sidewalk would be faster and easier, but I go straight, through parking lots and alleys and backyards.
 
I don’t want to lose focus.

The door to our house is open, the lights are on.
 
My mother is kneeling prostrate on the lawn like a Muslim on a prayer rug.
 
Her keening is something awful, like a piglet being skewered alive.
 
I am too tired to run or pick up my pace.
 
Besides, I know what has happened.
 
I know there is nothing I can do.
  

I walk past my mother into the house, up the stairs to Cynthia’s bedroom.
 
My father is sitting on a chair, elbows on his knees,
head
in his hands.
 
His neck looks so vulnerable.
 
I touch it with my finger and he lifts his head.
 
He grabs me around the waist, buries his face, and cries.

If a beautiful child must die, she should die like Sleeping Beauty, her innocence untouched, her beauty timeless,
a
breathless smile on her lips.
 
Not like this.

Cynthia’s once flawless porcelain skin is sunken and splotched, her mouth contorted, blood splattered in her matted hair and nightgown, her fingers and lips blue, her eyes rimmed as if wearing red spectacles, her shoulders and chest half skeleton.
 

“Where is Cynthia?” I ask.
 
My father stops crying and looks up at me, not understanding.
 
But I do understand.
 
In an instant I know this wizened monstrous corpse has nothing to do with Cynthia.
 
It makes it easier to say what I say next.
 
“The truck passes our house at seven o’clock.
 
We need to get her bagged.”

I go to the garage and retrieve a blue body bag, which is folded neatly in a square.
 
I bring it to Cynthia’s bedroom.

The plastic creaks as we flatten it open, like a canvas tent that hasn’t been used in awhile.
 
We lay it beside her.
 
I yank the poster of
Buraq
from the wall.
 
We roll the poster around her, then lift her and place her in the body bag.
 
We tuck in her hair and the hem of her
nightie
, and zip it up.
 
My father takes her head, I take her feet.
 
We carry her downstairs and lay her in the driveway.

We stand there, silent, not moving.
 
The tinny recorded call of a muezzin slices through the stillness.
 
I weep in fury.

I want to blame Muslims for my dead sister, blame them for the death all around me,
blame
them for the millions of Americans who have died.
 
I want to blame Sara
Jiluwis
, whose daughter lived.
 

Don’t tell me they had nothing to do with it.
   

I need someone to hate.

Chapter Twelve

And then it was gone.

The queue for getting into the hospital disappeared almost over night.
 
As the dead were taken away, fewer and fewer took their places.
 
The hallways emptied.
 
The air itself seemed clearer, contagion and carbon dioxide replaced with a cool gentle breeze, filtered and oxygenated.

The virus burned itself out.
 
Eight and one half weeks after I brought Myra Applegate in, we were admitting only a dozen new patients each day.
 
Their symptoms were milder.
 
Few died.

The city and the country were in shambles, ravaged as if by civil war.
 
The young, the old, the rich, the poor—nearly every family bagged at least one member.
 
News reporters estimated the population of the United States had been cut by six percent.
 
Eighteen million died.
 
Thousands had lingering respiratory and neurological damage.

The cities where the virus hit first—before the virus began to mutate to mildness—suffered the worst losses.
 
Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Phoenix, Las Vegas, New York, and Washington.
 
In the middle of the country, nearly half of the population got infected but less than one percent died.
 
The later the virus hit a town or city, the milder it was.
 
Soon the Thai Flu was no more lethal than the average winter flu bug.

I thought about how psychologists say whatever we think will greatly alter our lives, usually doesn’t.
 
They call it the
principal of adaptation
.
 
The brain regulates extremes.
 
A pleasurable event or a tragedy soon becomes ordinary and routine, and then becomes unnoticed.
 
The new house, the new job you thought would change your life does not.
 
Life reverts to the mean.
 
You will be as happy as you were before, no happier, no sadder.
 

I didn’t think the principal of adaptation applied here.
 
This change was permanent.
 
Even as stores and businesses resumed, there was no bustle.
 
Places once frenetic with consumer energy—the Farmer’s Market, Costco, Trader Joe’s,
Gelsons
—had only a handful of careful shoppers. Everyone seemed listless and pensive, isolating themselves, passive in a way that seemed like a sickness.
 
It was as if they were waiting for the next wave to crash over them.
 
The whole city seemed to be suffering post traumatic disorder.

The city government was broke and barely functioning.
 
No tax revenues had come into the state or local coffers for nearly two months.
 
Even after the worst of the epidemic passed, nearly thirty percent of government employees failed to show up to work—some were dead, others were caring for family members, still others have taken more lucrative jobs vacated by their fellow citizens in the private sector.
 
Those city and government workers who did show up hadn’t been paid in three weeks, so each day a handful more failed to report to work.

Without a full police force, looters
rampaged
the city.
 
Shop owners defended their stores themselves, and a new epidemic swept into the hospitals—gunshot wounds.
 
The mayor imposed a curfew, but no one paid much attention.
 
The National Guard patrolled the streets, but there weren’t enough troops.
 
Schools didn’t reopen, trains stopped running, mail wasn’t delivered,
fires burned out of control, garbage wasn’t
picked up.
 

Gasoline wasn’t the only shortage now.
 
Anything that had to be trucked was expensive, especially food.
 
During the epidemic, migrant workers who lived in cramped quarters were hit hard.
 
Thousands of acres of vegetables and fruits went unpicked.
 
Miles and miles of strawberries rotted in the fields of Oxnard and the Central Valley.
 
Lettuce wilted, broccoli bolted to seed.
 
Ripe oranges, Valencia and Navel, fell to the ground.
 
We had mother’s vegetables to eat, but milk, butter, and meat were difficult to find.
 
Some farmers, or perhaps they were scavengers, drove into the city with trucks of tomatoes, peppers, or peas.
 
Whatever the produce, the trucks were mobbed, emptied within a half hour.

People were getting desperate.

One night I got home from the hospital at about 2:30 AM as usual.
 
I ate a bowl of corn flakes,
then
went to bed.
 
I was dozing when I heard someone thumping around in the living room.
 
I knew it couldn’t be Alex.
 
He was in Greece.

A burglar.

Fury grabbed hold of me.
 
How dare they?
 
All of us had tried so hard to help other people, tried so hard not to fall apart, and now there was someone in our living room trying to steal what little we had left.
 
Trembling, I threw off my covers and grabbed Alex’s tennis racquet.
 
I opened my door.
 
I heard the faint clatter of silverware, the opening of drawers.
 
Then, in the kitchen, the scraping sound of the top of the cookie jar being lifted.
 
And then the sound of the freezer door opening.

I stole down the hallway and flew at him, grabbing a knife from the butcher block as I passed.
 
I pounded him on the head with the racquet and stabbed him with the knife.
 
He spun around, a cookie in his mouth, eyes wide with fear.
 
He clobbered me with the back of his hand.
 
I stumbled back into the counter, my face burning.
 
As I sank to the floor, the man fled through the open door, our silver clanking against the side of our car in the garage as he banged past.
  

I bawled.
 
My head felt like it had been slammed with a baseball bat, but that was not why I cried.
 
I cried for Cynthia, whom I would never hold again.
 
I cried because I didn’t protect her.
 
I cried for trying so hard, yet nothing was getting better.
 
I cried for my mother’s weary face, and for all the corpses I had seen whose faces visited me every night.
 
I cried for Peter, who I imagined coughing to death in some miserable
jihadist
safe house.
 
I cried for the pathetic burglar who stole steaks from our freezer, while cramming his face with cookies.

An itchy, raw,
creeped
-out feeling lingered for days.
 
I felt violated and listless.
 
I couldn’t concentrate.
 
I could barely hold myself up.
 
I lost my appetite.
 
Nothing seemed worth the effort.

How could this happen to us?
 
Neighbors stealing from neighbors when only a few weeks ago we were helping each other.
 
Figures sneaking around corners.
 
Broken windows in the night.
 
Scavengers, desperate and hungry.
 
No one dared to leave their houses unattended.
 
If you disappeared for an hour or two, so did your things. I saw a man running a bicycle down the street.
 
Even our garden wasn’t safe, plants ripped from the ground by thieves too much in a hurry to cut the vegetables off with a knife.

After the burglary my dad, the peacenik anti-gun liberal, slept with a revolver on his nightstand.
 
Whenever there was a creak in the night, we all charged into the living room, murder in our hearts.

#

Whenever I looked into the yard, I thought of Cynthia performing her first prayer of the day in Mother’s rose garden, facing the sun as it peeked over the horizon, removing her shoes, covering her head with a scarf, unrolling her prayer rug, then—standing, sitting, bowing and prostrating herself—reciting the
shahada
.
 
La
ilaha
illa’Llah
.
 
“There is no god but God.”
 
Then she repeated the opening
sura
of the
Quran
.
 
Her lips smiled as she whispered the invocations.
 
There was such peace and gentleness about her.
 
Something luminous.
 
She was one with the sunrise, the pink glow of dawn’s lips on the roses and on her bowed head.

I felt responsible for Cynthia’s death, not because I may have brought the virus home, or because the anti-viral drugs I brought from the hospital didn’t work, but because of my envy.
 
She found peace in a foreign religion, a home that was not our home.
 
It touched her in a way I could not understand and resented.
 
It made something flow in her whereas I was choppy bits of ice in a frozen river.
 
Yes, sometimes she was a confused teenager, but when she was praying, she was a flamingo soaring into the sunrise.