City of Ash and Red Read online

  “You hear that?”

  The man looked in the direction of the sound to show that he did.

  “Something needs to be done about it,” Eight continued.

  He heard Eight say something else that sounded like “if we don’t get rid,” but he couldn’t make out the next words. Eight’s voice was too low, and he kept glancing around uneasily and avoiding the man’s eyes, which made it impossible to read his lips. But he was able to guess the part he’d missed: if they didn’t get rid of the sick man, they would get sick too, and if that happened they were all dead.

  “He’s coughing up blood. And gagging. His face is red from fever.” Eight held up his book, the words spilling out in a rush. “I learned all about it from this. Fever is the first sign. I had a fever too. The lymph nodes in your armpits, groin, and throat swell, and your temperature goes way up. But that didn’t happen to me. It says that if the pathogens invade your nervous system, you slip in and out of consciousness and start to hallucinate. Toward the end, you vomit blood, your body leaks pus, and you convulse. Then you die. They say the virus is highly contagious and spreads through the air like pollen.”

  The man quietly took a step back, preferring not to stand too close to Eight. Nor was he interested in Eight’s declaration that he was not sick.

  “So anyone who catches it dies fast,” said one of the other vagrants, who had stolen over at some point. The man wasn’t sure, but he thought it might be Five. The others in the park, who ordinarily guarded their benches in silence, began to gather around them.

  “That’s right,” said Eight. “From fever to death, just like that! But if you survive, like me, then that shows you only had a cold.” He sounded proud of himself.

  “If those are the symptoms, does that mean we’ve all been infected?” muttered someone who might have been Seven. “That’s impossible.”

  “No way I’m infected,” said someone he assumed was Ten. “He’s the only one. I’m not going to die.”

  “I wish I were infected. Then I wouldn’t be knocking my brains out with worry over getting infected,” said Seven.

  “If that’s really your wish, then go stand next to him,” said Eight.

  Seven flinched and took a step back. Everyone turned to look at where Two was lying. Two must have been concealing his fever and nausea for some time, conscious of the other vagrants around him. If the skin beneath his filthy clothes had turned red and inflamed, then it was already too late. It was said that, in the final stages of this contagion, your blood burst through the capillary walls and turned your skin dark and bruised.

  While running a high fever, Two would have hurried to where the garbage was burned, and shoved and punched the other men to try to lay claim to the few scraps of food mixed in with the refuse. He would have had coughing fits that sent his spit flying through the air and, when winded, he would have leaned against whichever bench was closest to him, propping up his tired body with the same hands he had used to wipe away his spit. If anyone else in that park got sick, it would be Two’s fault.

  Two let out a long breath and trembled violently. According to Eight, the infected in the final stage of the illness would tear out their own hair, unable to bear even the mild pain brought on by the boils on their bodies. Their pulses would race, and then gradually slow, and then become thready and faint just before death took them.

  “But the good thing,” Eight said, “is that the pain doesn’t last too long. If there’s one blessing to this particular disease, it’s that it helps you meet your end quickly.”

  The group slunk toward Two with Eight in the lead. Not one of them offered that maybe Two just had a bad cold or that, even if he was infected, maybe they were going too far. Fear of contagion crowded out sympathy. They were already living like trash, but the disease was fatal, in that it took away their ability to choose between life and death. Not that they aspired to a great life. They simply feared death. Of course, it could be just a cold, nothing more than a simple fever, but it didn’t matter. This was the age of epidemics. You couldn’t be too careful. The fact that the routes of contagion were uncertain meant that you could catch the virus from the air or from a simple brush of skin. Disease to a vagrant meant certain death. If one of them was sick, then any of them could become sick. Therefore, anyone who was sick or was suspected of being sick had to leave the park, and if they did not leave voluntarily, or if they could not leave, then it stood to logic that they must be gotten rid of.

  While crossing the park, the man realized for the first time that the trees at the center were called camphor trees and that they normally had lush green leaves on branches that spread wide in all directions. Because of the fumigation, the leaves had withered black or dried to a yellowish brown and fallen, but new, pale green leaves were already sprouting. Each time the wind blew, the trees shook their branches as if to rid themselves of the lingering chemical haze.

  As they drew closer, the man saw Two’s long, matted hair, the untrimmed beard, the face blackened with dirt, and the filthy clothes and was taken aback by how much he resembled him. The only difference was that Two was sick while he was not yet sick. The realization broke his stride, but then he saw that he was noticeably lagging and picked up his pace.

  The clothes he wore had been picked out of the trash a few days earlier. He and Two, along with several of the other park vagrants, were wearing identically colored shirts with different names stitched on the front. A large garbage bag had held random fabric scraps along with a stack of shirts that seemed to be part of some team or group uniform: they had matching images on the front with the names of their intended owners stitched over the heart in gold thread. There were enough that the men could choose the size and name they wanted; he had chosen one stitched with the name MOL, realizing all over again how common the name was in that country.

  Two struggled to open his eyes. He must have heard them coming, or maybe he had finally gained control of the pain in his lungs. He had boils on his face, and blood and pus dripped like sweat from his forearm. Symptoms had taken up residence in his body, but whether they heralded deadly contagion or just a run-of-the-mill skin condition was unknowable. Eight approached Two and asked how he was feeling. His voice sounded friendly and considerate. It bore no trace of malice. Two made an effort to smile and nodded slowly. He started to say something, but he never got the chance. Before he could get a single word out, Eight threw a body bag over him. There had been rumors of corpses wrapped in body bags showing up in the dump. Some said the morgues were discarding unidentified bodies, and others said they were the corpses of the infected that the hospitals could not accommodate. Despite all the talk, the man himself had yet to see an actual body.

  Instead of the words he was going to say, Two let out a scream that was closer to a groan. But that was as far as he got. He was already zipped into the bag. His breathing grew rougher. He writhed in desperation like a trapped bug. The body bag clung to his face with each inhale and ballooned out with each exhale. If they left him in there long enough, he would suffocate before the disease took him.

  The man had been keeping his distance, but someone shoved him forward. Defenseless, he stumbled and fell to his knees next to the bag. Three others were volunteered the same way.

  “Pick it up.”

  The order came from someone with a low voice. Surprisingly firm, the voice brooked no disobedience. Their reluctance wasn’t because they didn’t want to harm the ailing man, it was simply fear of touching the infected. As they hesitated, a sprayer truck passed by. An enormous chemical cloud surged through the park and hid the men from each other. This somehow made it easier for them to hoist Two onto their shoulders. Two groaned and struggled.

  They had just begun to move toward the garbage fire when something grabbed the man’s arm. It was Two. He had wiggled the zipper open and slipped his hand out. His grip was strong, but what filled the man with horror was the damp, tacky feeling of Two’s palm. He pictured blood and pus. This, he thought, i
s what it would feel like to get sucked into a swamp. He flinched and shoved Two’s hand off of his arm. The other three men carrying the body bag jerked their hands away for fear of being touched. Two hit the ground with a loud moan and rolled back and forth, still wrapped in the bag. The man pulled his foot back and kicked Two, over and over.

  “Pick it up.”

  They were the first words he’d spoken aloud in the park. The other three looked cowed by his bullying tone and awkwardly lifted Two to their shoulders again.

  They heard a car not far off. It was the small car driven by the government employee in charge of minding the trash fire. By now, they were all adept at telling from the sound of the engine alone whether it was a sprayer truck, a garbage truck, or the employee’s car. With Two slung over their shoulders again, they started to move. They had to hurry. If there was a best time for throwing garbage on the fire, that time was now.

  The fire had been rekindled: a white haze of smoke was beginning to billow. Soon, red flames would flicker, and black smoke would mix with the white and climb above the fire. To keep Two from working his way out of the bag and coming after them in retaliation, the men rushed over to where the garbage was burned and waited until the flames were high and crackling, keeping a firm grip on the bag as Two writhed desperately, and then got as close as they could before throwing him onto the pyre. There was an audible thump, but it was nearly lost in the sounds of trash burning. As they walked away, the man thought he heard a scream. It sounded a little like someone crying for help. The yells faded into a pained groan. But it was just an auditory hallucination. By the time they returned to their benches, the only sound echoing around them was of garbage burning. Along with the sound, a cloud of black smoke crept through the park.

  Someone coughed. More coughs burst out here and there, as if they had all been holding them in. The smoke was making them cough. The man knew that it took about an hour and a half to cremate an adult male. For the hour and a half that Two would burn, his smoke would billow up and fill the air. He had never seen Two’s face. Had never spoken to him. But there he was, breathing him in.

  He reassured himself that it had not been his idea to get rid of Two. He was not the one who had thrown the body bag over him. He was not the first to give the order to pick him up. All he had done was be pushed by someone, and when he was overcome with fear at being grabbed by Two’s blood and pus-covered hand, had kicked him, and merely to overcome that fear, picked Two up again and ran with him to the trash fire.

  He knew he was afraid because he could hear his own heartbeat. This was not some moral twinge. Two had grabbed his arm hard, and now, for all he knew, he too would soon be overcome by fever and erupt in red sores bursting with pus. He wished he could chop off the arm that Two had touched.

  He flexed every muscle and willed every hole in his body to open. He let his jaw gape to allow the saliva to flow out, and he took deep gulps of the fumigant and the black smoke from the garbage fire that were floating in the air. The smoke was dark and burned his lungs, but it wasn’t much worse than any other day. He coughed until he thought his intestines were coming out of his mouth. His eyes welled with tears. The trash took longer to burn than usual. The embers glowed for a long time, illuminating the night, and the ash, lighter than air, floated about the park like souls until the sun came up.

  He awoke from a deep sleep to see legs surrounding him in the haze. He couldn’t make them out clearly. There were a lot of them, looking like they were out for a stroll in the park, their torsos lost in the chemical fog. But you could never be too careful. He stifled a cough and tried to stand, a slight ache lighting up different areas of his body. When he thought he was fully upright, he found himself being forced back down again. A hand pressed hard on his shoulder. His body tensed. Frightened, he opened his eyes wider, but something covered his face, and he couldn’t see. All at once, he realized he’d been stuffed into a body bag just like Two. Each time he opened his mouth to breathe, the fabric suctioned to his face. He felt his body rise into the air. He squirmed inside the sack. As he struggled, his opaque future turned transparent. He was about to be tossed into darkness.

  TWO

  He and his ex-wife went to the tropics once. It was the first trip they had taken together since their honeymoon. And though he did not know it at the time, it would turn out to be their last. They had tried taking other trips together, but their plans fell apart each time. He’d assumed that this trip, too, would come to nothing, but his ex-wife had surprised him by putting her foot down. He told her he couldn’t take time off of work, and rather than accept his answer as she ordinarily would have, she declared she would go alone. In retrospect, that might have been when she’d sensed that his suspicions of her were taking over. And so, under the glaring eyes of Trout and his other coworkers, he requested time off and accompanied his wife. He took the risk of missing work because he figured this trip might be his last chance to repair his marriage.

  It didn’t have to be that country, but there weren’t many options that fit their travel dates and could be booked last minute. Besides, neither of them actually cared where they went. They booked a guided tour, just as they had on their honeymoon. Though traveling with a guide meant being hustled along from site to site, as if each place were merely another item to be checked off a list, and herded into oversized tourist shopping centers where they would endure long sales pitches for latex foam bedding, sapphires, rubies, medicinal mushrooms, and other local goods sold by immigrants and have no choice but to buy those shoddy products at inflated prices just to keep their guide happy, it was still better than the awkwardness of being on their own all day with no itinerary at all. As it turned out, they were the only ones on the group tour.

  Not only were they in the subtropics, it was the rainy season and the humidity was high. It was so hot that they had to keep fanning away the sweat even inside the air-conditioned van. When he wouldn’t stop grumbling about the heat, the guide jokingly scolded him and asked why, then, had he decided to come there in the hot summer.

  “Hot summer? Isn’t it always hot summer here?”

  “We have two seasons: summer and hot summer.”

  The guide spoke a simplified version of their language. His wife tittered.

  “Some say three seasons,” the guide added. “Summer, hot summer, and really hot summer.”

  His wife laughed and asked, “Then which season is this?”

  “Really hot summer.”

  As it turned out, they were traveling right in between the ultimately indistinguishable seasons of hot summer and really hot summer. The weather would go from boiling hot to rain coming down in buckets, and after a while the sun would beat down again until their rain-soaked clothes gave off steam. He didn’t know if it was the unpredictable weather or the annoying way in which his wife kept staring off into space, lost in thought, her face stony, but his mood turned prickly and he became stubborn about every little thing.

  It was the same in the monkey forest. On the last day of their trip, right around noon, the rain started drumming down, as loud as hailstones, so the guide suggested they skip elephant trekking and sightsee downtown instead. His wife readily agreed. But he pulled a face and told the guide exactly how sick and tired he was of being dragged around to tourist traps and asked if there wasn’t some quiet, secluded spot where the locals went. He was planning to use just such a spot to talk to his wife. They had been sticking to the itinerary, rushing from place to place and returning to their hotel room at night only to exaggerate how exhausted they were in order to go right to sleep. Already they were scheduled to return home the next day. If they wasted another half day shopping, he would lose the opportunity to tell her how he really felt, and to make her tell him how she felt.

  “Quiet place? Like a temple?” the guide asked.

  “Temples are okay, but that last one you took us to was overrun with tourists. I don’t want to go there. I want some place that isn’t well known, something off the beat
en path.”

  “Go north a hundred and fifty kilometers, there’s a forest temple. Lots of monkeys, hardly any people. Good?”

  His wife wrinkled her nose at the word monkeys.

  “How deserted is this place?” she asked.

  “Very. No one knows it. Lots of monkeys. It’s called Monkey Forest.”

  “Can you imagine how many monkeys there must be for it to be called that? That sounds scary. Let’s go somewhere else,” she said firmly.

  “What’s so scary about monkeys?” the man said. “People go there, too. I bet the monkeys are more afraid of the people.”

  He told the guide to take them there.

  His wife stared out the window and did not say a word during the whole two-hour drive. He kept glancing over at the side of her face and inwardly regretting his stubbornness, while at the same time feeling such despair that he wished the van would get there faster so that he and his wife would finally have some time to themselves.

  The guide let them off at the entrance to the dense forest without much in the way of instructions. As they stepped out of the van, he heard a flock of birds in the distance. Only later, when they were inside the forest, did he realize those weren’t birdcalls but rather the screeching of monkeys.

  They had just stepped into the shadow of the trees when the guide, who had told them he would wait for them in the van, called them back.

  “Lots of monkeys. Scary. Understand?”

  “I can’t do this,” his wife said. “Let’s just go.”

  She gave him a look that said she meant it. But he avoided her eyes and said, “You don’t really think you’re going to be killed by a monkey, do you?”