The Stand:BOOK I(68)

Impersonally, he supposed, it was the smell. It was coming in through the opening between the apartment living room and the balcony right now, riding the cool early morning breeze that would later give way to still, humid heat if this day was anything like the last three or four. The smell was hard to define in any way that could be correct yet less painful than the naked truth. You could say it was like, moldy oranges or spoiled fish or the smell you sometimes got in subway tunnels when the windows were open; none of them were exactly right. That it was the smell of rotting people, thousands of them, decomposing in the heat behind closed doors was putting it right, but you wanted to shy away from that.

The power was still on in Manhattan, but Larry didn't think it would be for much longer. It had gone out in most other places already. Last night he had stood on the balcony after Rita was asleep and from this high up you could see that the lights were out in better than half of Brooklyn and all of Queens. There was a dark pocket across 110th all the way to that end of Manhattan Island. Looking the other way you could still see bright lights in union      City and-maybe-Bayonne, but otherwise, New Jersey was black.

The blackness meant more than the loss of lights. Among other things it meant the loss of the air conditioning, the modern convenience that made it possible to live in this particular hardcore urban sprawl after the middle of June. It meant that all the people who had died quietly in their apartments and tenements were now rotting in ovens, and whenever he thought of that his mind returned to the thing he had seen in the comfort station on Transverse Number One. He had dreamed about that, and in his dreams that black, sweet treat came to life and beckoned him.

On a more personal level, he supposed she was troubled by what they had found when they walked down to the park yesterday. She had been laughing and chatty and gay when they started out, but coming back she had begun to be old.

The monster-shouter had been lying on one of the paths in a huge pool of his own blood. His glasses lay with both lenses shattered beside his stiff and outstretched left hand. Some monster had been abroad after all, apparently. The man had been stabbed repeatedly. To Larry's sickened eyes he looked like a human pincushion.

She had screamed and screamed, and when her hysteria had finally quieted, she insisted that they bury him. So they had. And going back to the apartment, she had been the woman he had found this morning.

"It's all right," he said. "Just a little scald. The skin's hardly red."

"I'll get the Unguentine. There's some in the medicine cabinet."

She started away, and he grabbed her firmly by the shoulders and made her sit down. She looked up at him from darkly circled eyes.

"What you're going to do is eat," he said. "Scrambled eggs, toast, coffee. Then we're going to get some maps and see what's the best way to get off Manhattan. We'll have to walk, you know."

"Yes …  I suppose we will."

He went into the kitchenette, not wanting to look at the mute need in her eyes anymore, and got the last two eggs from the refrigerator. He cracked them into a bowl, tossed the eggshells into the disposal, and began to beat them.

"Where do you want to go?" he asked.

"What? I don't … "

"Which way?" he said with a touch of impatience. He added milk to the eggs and put the skillet back on the stove. "North? New England's that way. South? I don't really see the point in that. We could go-"

A strangled sob. He turned and saw her looking at him, her hands warring with each other in her lap, her eyes shiny. She was trying to control herself and having no luck.

"What's the matter?" he asked, going to her. "What is it?"

"I don't think I can eat," she sobbed. "I know you want me to …  I'll try …  but the smell  … "

He crossed the living room, trundled the glass doors closed along their stainless steel tracks, then latched them firmly.

"There," he said lightly, hoping the annoyance he felt with her didn't show.

"Better?"

"Yes," she said eagerly. "That's a lot better. I can eat now."

He went back to the kitchenette and stirred the eggs, which had begun to bubble. There was a grater in the utensil drawer and he ran a block of American cheese along it, making a small pile that he sprinkled into the eggs. Behind him she moved and a moment later Debussy filled the apartment, too light and pretty for Larry's taste. He didn't care for light classical music. If you were going to have classical shit, you ought to go whole hog and have your Beethoven or your Wagner or someone like that. Why fuck around?

She had asked him in a casual manner what he did for a living …  the casual manner, he reflected with some resentment, of a person for whom anything so simple as "a living" had never been a problem. I was a rock and roll singer, he told her, slightly amazed at how painless that past tense was. Sing with this band for a while, then that one. Sometimes a studio gig. She had nodded and that was the end of it. He had no urge to tell her about "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?"-that was the past now. The gap between that life and this was so large he hadn't really comprehended it yet. In that life he had been running away from a cocaine dealer; in this one he could bury a man in Central Park and accept that (more or less) as a matter of course.

He put the eggs on a plate, added a cup of instant coffee with a lot of cream and sugar, the way she liked it (Larry himself subscribed to the trucker's credo of "if you wanted a cup of cream and sugar, whydja ask for coffee?"), and brought it to the table. She was sitting on a hassock, holding her elbows and facing the stereo. Debussy strained out of the speakers like melted butter.

"Soup's on," he called.

She came to the table with a wan smile, looked at the eggs the way a track and field runner might look at a series of hurdles, and began to eat.

"Good," she said. "You were right. Thank you."

"You're more than welcome," he said. "Now look. What I'm going to suggest is this. We go down Fifth to Thirty-ninth and turn west. Cross to New Jersey by the Lincoln Tunnel. We can follow 495 northwest to Passaic and …  those eggs okay? They're not spoiled?"

She smiled. "They're fine." She forked more into her mouth, followed it with a sip of coffee. "Just what I needed. Go ahead, I'm listening."

"From Passaic we just ankle it west until the roads are clear enough for us to drive. Then I thought we could turn northeast and head up to New England. Make kind of a buttonhook, do you see what I mean? It looks longer, but I think it'll end up saving us a lot of hassles. Maybe take a house on the ocean in Maine. Kittery, York, Wells, Ogunquit, maybe Scarborough or Boothbay Harbor. How does that sound?"

He had been looking out the window, thinking as he spoke, and now he turned back to her. What he saw frightened him badly for a moment-it was as if she'd gone insane. She was smiling, but it was a rictus of pain and horror. Sweat stood out on her face in big round droplets.

"Rita? Jesus, Rita, what-"

"-sorry-" She scrambled up, knocking her chair over, and fled across the living room. One foot hooked the hassock she had been sitting on and it rolled on its side like an oversized checker. She almost fell herself.

"Rita? "

Then she was in the bathroom and he could hear the industrial grinding sound of her breakfast coming up. He slammed his hand flat on the table in irritation, then got up and went in after her. God, he hated it when people puked. It always made you feel like puking yourself. The smell of slightly used American cheese in the bathroom made him want to gag. Rita was sitting on the robin's-egg-blue tile of the floor, her legs folded under her, her head still hanging weakly over the bowl.

She wiped her mouth with a swatch of toilet paper and then looked up at him supplicatingly, her face as pale as paper.

"I'm sorry, I just couldn't eat it, Larry. Really. I'm so sorry."

"Well Jesus, if you knew it was going to make you do that, why did you try?"

"Because you wanted me to. And I didn't want you to be angry with me. But you are, aren't you? You are angry with me."

His mind went back to last night. She had made love to him with such frantic energy that for the first time he had found himself thinking of her age and had been a little disgusted. It had been like being caught in one of those exercise machines. He had come quickly, almost in self-defense it seemed, and a long while later she had fallen back, panting and unfulfilled. Later, while he was on the borderline of sleep, she had drawn close to him and once again he had been able to smell her sachet, a more expensive version of scent his mother had always worn when they went out to the movies, and she had murmured the thing that had jerked him back from sleep and had kept him awake for another two hours: You won't leave me, will you? You won't leave me alone?

Before that she had been good in bed, so good that he was stunned. She had taken him back to this place after their lunch on the day they had met, and what had happened had happened quite naturally. He remembered an instant of disgust when he saw how her breasts sagged, and how the blue veins were prominent (it made him think of his mother's varicose veins), but he had forgotten all about that when her legs came up and her thighs pressed against his hips with amazing strength.