The Cabin at the End of the World(70)
Andrew says, “All right. Let’s go. Maybe I should carry Wen.” Andrew hates the defeat and need in his voice.
“No, I have her. I can do it. I can make it.” In his head, Eric prays for the strength to carry Wen until his strength is no longer needed. For a few weeks after her third birthday, Wen went through a phase insisting we carry her on endless jaunts around our condo so she could count the number of laps as a measure of how strong we were. We would both purposefully complete the same number of laps, which frustrated Wen greatly, and she reacted like we were keeping a secret from her. We would jokingly tell her that our arms were always at the same strength level and we only got tired because she was growing, getting bigger by the second as we held her in our faux-shaky arms.
Andrew says, “I know you can. Just—let me know.” Wen’s body is all but made shapeless by the sheet he wrapped around her. He wants to hold her again, right now, and he wonders if her arms, which he’d carefully positioned at her sides, have shifted or bent, and he wonders what her hands are doing, and her feet, and maybe he should unwrap her and make sure she’s okay underneath, and then kiss her forehead and not look at the lower half of her face.
Eric says, “I will.”
Andrew is weeping. “All right. I’m sorry.” For as long as he lives, Andrew will wonder if Eric partly blames him for Wen’s death because of his unwitting part in the hellish Rube Goldberg device that took over our lives, because he snuck the gun up to the cabin, because the gun was in his hand, because his finger was on the trigger, because he couldn’t stop the trigger from being pulled. The lump of the handgun, the cold machine, is in his back pocket. Andrew’s hands are currently filled with the wooden handle of the cursed weapon O’Bannon made. He wishes to hold Wen instead.
“Why are you sorry?” Eric doesn’t know what to say to him. He wants to tell Andrew that he loves him but is afraid that it would sound final.
Andrew doesn’t explain and says, “I’m sorry,” again. He doesn’t like how Eric stands, wavers, leaning one way and then the other, or how he talks with no inflection. He doesn’t like how inscrutable Eric’s eyes are. It’s more than the concussion and dilated pupils and the shock of everything. Does he look this way because he has given up?
Eric says, “I said we can go now.”
“I know. We’re going.”
We say the right words again, but we don’t move. We stand there. Now that Sabrina is the only one of them left and unarmed, we’re more afraid of what we are thinking and of what the other one of us is thinking. We’re afraid for each other and we’re afraid of ourselves. How can we go on? At this shared thought, we turn away from the television screen and away from each other.
Sabrina is behind Leonard with a mask stretched between her hands. She pulls it down over the pulpified, eroded mass of his head. The mesh conforms to his new, unrecognizable physiognomy, and the white immediately reddens. His concealed and misshapen head is grotesquely small, a bump atop the mountain range of his broad shoulders and prairie-wide chest, which strains to be contained within the looped ropes. His grisly, trussed corpse is a garish cartoon, a ludicrous exaggeration of the human form.
Andrew motions at Sabrina. “You and I are going out onto the deck first.”
Sabrina asks, “Why?”
“To check O’Bannon’s pockets for the truck keys.”
“They’re not there. I told you we hid them under a flat rock, and I promise I’ll help you find them.” She looks at Eric and her half smile turns into a wince as though she’s ashamed, guilty to be appealing to him for support.
Andrew says, “There’s no way a wannabe redneck like that would leave behind his truck keys.”
Sabrina doesn’t argue or protest. She walks the line between the kitchen and the common room to the deck and straddles Adriane’s supine body as she fumbles with the screen slider, which stubbornly continues to reject its track.
“Just take it off and chuck it outside.”
Sabrina carries the screen door onto the deck and stashes it between the picnic table and cabin wall. Andrew instructs her to stand next to O’Bannon and with her back against the wooden railing. Once she follows his directions, Andrew joins her on the deck. The air is warm and humid, ready to burst. Wind rattles through the trees and small waves lap at the lakeshore below. The gray sky is a smear, a Neuromancer sky, dead and anachronistic.
Eric walks behind Leonard and in full view of the doorway so he can see what’s happening on the deck. The sun is muzzled, but the sky’s grayness is too bright for him. He doesn’t hear any birds chirping or whistling, only flies gathering on Leonard’s corpse. He tries to drown out the buzzing with silent prayers and entreaties and what do we dos. Planes are falling in his head; one dives into the lake and sinks to the bottom, the water is nothing more than a curtain to be brushed aside.
Andrew says, “Lift the blanket and check his pockets.” He hopes against hope that the keys are with O’Bannon. If they are, then he will have caught Sabrina in a lie and it will be easier to convince Eric she and the others have been lying all along and all this end-of-theworld bargaining insanity is in fact insanity.
Sabrina peels the blanket up from O’Bannon’s lower half. She coughs and recoils from the release of a rancid, cloying, fecal smell that brutally imperializes the deck. Andrew reels backward. He holds a forearm over his nose and mouth, a gesture as feckless as building a wall of sand to hold back high tide.