Dating : Three Deaths

Lilly

When they thought that the world was coming to an end, Danny and Anika made a pact. They told each other that if either of their deaths seemed imminent, they would give each other permission to start smoking again. They had been married for seven years. Anika always fell asleep first, and Danny always woke her up with big questions.

“Anika.” Danny reached for the cigarettes on his nightstand in the darkness of the bedroom. “Anika.” A match erupted and cast an orange glow on Danny’s face, his brow pursed in concentration, a cigarette dangling from his lips. “Anika!”

Anika, now aroused from her sleep, rolled away from Danny, and with a raspy voice, pleaded with him. “No, Danny. No.”

Several seconds passed and Anika rolled back over again towards Danny, her voice still groggy. “Danny. I’m sleeping.”

“Baby. What was the best day of your life?”

Anika croaked back, “Oh my God, Danny. Are you really doing this right now?”

“No, seriously. What was the best day of your life?”

“Really? I don’t know. That’s such a big question. You can’t just pull someone out of R.E.M. and expect them to answer that.”

“Why don’t you know? Shouldn’t you just know?”

Anika, now fully awake, sighed deeply. “Well what was the best day of your life, smart ass?”

“I asked you first.”

Anika wriggled herself up into a seated position and rested her back against the headboard. A second match erupted. Danny’s face glowed again in the darkness, a second cigarette dangling from his lips. Anika routinely took it from his mouth and placed it in hers and drew.

Danny ashed over the side of the bed onto the terra cotta floor. “Okay then. If that’s too hard of a question, let’s try this one. What was the last really good day that you had? The last really good day before all this shit happened?”

“Okay, well, that’s much easier to answer.” Anika ashed into a half empty wine stem on her nightstand. “It was the last time we took Lilly to White Sands. The week before she got sick.”

Danny looked towards Anika in the darkness of the room, and though he couldn’t make out her face in the darkness, he nodded slowly towards the sound of her voice. “That was one of my best days, too,” he said, drawing from his cigarette. “Yeah. That was one of my best days, too.”

They finished smoking in silence as the gray moonlight shone over El Paso, through their bedroom window and onto a wooden dresser that sat across from their bed. On the surface of that dresser sat only two items: a framed picture of a little girl with pigtails, and a small wooden urn.

Anika dropped the butt of her cigarette into the bottom of the wine stem and the cherry extinguished with a hiss. She wriggled herself back down into the mattress and sheets. “Goodnight, Danny. I love you.”

A third match erupted in the darkness as Danny lit another cigarette for himself. “Goodnight, Anika. I love you, too.”

Anika

Lilly was one of the first ones to die. She died before anyone else in the family. She died before her grandparents. She died before her classmates. She died when the virus first mutated beyond the scope of treatment; when it morphed from COVID-19 into COVID-22. Anika had been paralyzed by grief, and after the wake she became despondent. Because of this, Danny had to bathe her and feed her for several weeks. Danny knew Anika would never be the same. He knew that he would never be the same either. But instead of taking care of himself and his own grief, Danny took care of Anika, because that was easier. Because that was actually possible.

But then the recovery from grief came in the most unexpected form. More people started dying of the new mutation and dying in rapid succession. At first it was a coworker. A distant relative. And then death came even closer. Parents. Siblings. Friends. And then everyone they didn’t care about started to fall ill. Politicians, athletes, etc. The whole damn world. Strangely, that was the point where Anika started getting better. The absurdity was that the more that others died, the less pain Anika and Danny felt. It was as though the pain of Lilly’s death was diluted by the deaths of everyone else; as though the deaths of eighty-seven percent of the population was a kind of vengeance against a world that was cruel enough to take Lilly away from them. By 2023, everyone they knew was gone. Everyone they knew besides each other.

Anika was in the kitchen washing dishes. She yelled to Danny who was on the other side of the house. “Wasn’t it Beckett that said, ‘This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, yada, yada, yada?’ What play was that in?”

Danny yelled back, “I thought that was Eliot. And it was in a poem, not a play. I don’t think Beckett ever said that.”

“Whatever, Mr. know-it-all. Mr. Harold Bloom,” Anika teased.

Danny sparred back. “What do you mean, whatever? You’re the one who asked. I’m just telling you the correct answer.”

Anika responded with a loud chant, “This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends.”

“Stop saying that,” Danny yelled back through a smile.

“Not with a bang, but a sink full of dirty dishes.”

Anika and Danny both erupted in laughter from each side of the house.

After that, they both partook in this apocalyptic recitation as a way to cope with the world that they had unwittingly been thrown into.

“This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends.” And this is the way the world ends, they told each other: with feral dogs running in the streets. So many dogs, everywhere. Packs of them. And flocks of birds everywhere, too. Nature had advanced where humanity had receded. And this is the way the world ends, they said: with a return to true darkness at night. With the moon functioning as light again, and with every nearby star made visible by the darkening of cities. And this is the way the world ends, they said: with the absence of technological sound. No phones, no cars, no planes. And no more clacking of train tracks behind their house. The fruits of every industrial revolution, muted. And at night there was only the moon and the stars, and at day there was only the sun and the clouds. And between the long pulls of silence there was only the barking of dogs and the voices of birds. Weeds and vines grew gnarly and blossomed with no one to prune them. All that was green became greener, and all that was blue became bluer, and all of the colors and shapes and sounds and smells of the world became sharper. The end of the world was really quite beautiful, they said. But then Anika started coughing.

Danny

Danny stared at her body for hours. Anika lying on the bed. Lilly sitting on the dresser. Danny standing in between. Standing in between what remained of his family. Standing and staring until his legs fell asleep, until he collapsed to the floor, catatonic, despondent. Sitting cross-legged and hunched over in shock as the sun set over Juarez and as the moon rose over El Paso. And he wasn’t aware of the time, or even of Time itself; that there was something that would come next, that there would be any further succession of events. Danny forgot to eat and drink. He forgot to smoke. He forgot to piss. And even though he sat awake through the night, he didn’t hear the sounds of the dogs fighting in the street, or the brood of owls hooting high up in the Juniper tree in the backyard, or the creaking and quaking of the house in the currents of the high desert winds — their gusts flitting grains of sand that tapped against the window panes.

When the sun rose that next morning, it projected a violent square of white light through the bedroom window that shone onto the wall across from where Danny sat, and it slowly slid down and across the room until it pressed onto the bed where Anika’s body laid. Danny had sat motionless on the floor all night, but as soon as the white square had traversed to touch one of Anika’s hands-her fingers curled upwards as though receiving the Eucharist or something even more unintelligible-it was as though Danny was suddenly turned on by a motor.

Danny abruptly rose from the bedroom floor and wrapped Anika’s body in the blankets and sheets from the bed and he carried her out to the truck in the driveway. He laid her down ever so softly in the truck bed. He loaded the cab with a shovel, an empty gas can, and a siphoning hose. He wore his .9 mm pistol on a hip holster. He had already checked it for rounds. There were ten in the magazine and one in the chamber. He took three more filled magazines and tossed them onto the passenger seat before sitting in the driver seat and placing Lilly’s urn between his legs and turning the engine. The engine started strong and the fuel gauge read just under a quarter; enough to get to where he needed to go, and most likely enough to get him back. He could siphon on the way back if he needed to. When there’s no one left to bury the dead, you bury your own.

He backed out of the driveway and set out from El Paso, Texas towards White Sands, New Mexico down old US-54 East. The roads were still drivable but already crumbling after three years without maintenance, and a fine brown dust already covered the asphalt in a coin-thin layer, the earth beginning the process of erasing the roads, rendering them into another palimpsest of civilization.

The spring sun was now at its highest point in the sky. As Danny drove north he looked into his rearview mirror at the city of El Paso now shrinking behind him, and pulled down the sun visor as he drove across the Texas-New Mexico state line following the sandy highway between the Organs and Franklins, following it past an old post office, past small abandoned towns, dilapidated trailer parks, and abandoned cars. After an hour of driving he saw the gleam of the white sand desert as it shone up from the bottom of the Tularosa Basin.

When he arrived at White Sands, he parked at the foot of the dune where they took Lilly the week before she got sick, the dune where they three ate hot dogs and chocolate cake and watched the sun set pink before driving back home. He took the shovel from the truck and walked to the top of the dune and peered out over the expanse of the surrounding horizon. After he saw there was no one in sight he kicked the shovel into the ground and started digging.

When he had dug about three feet down, the sand became hard and the sun was already edging towards the horizon. Winded from digging, Danny dropped his shovel and caught his breath and brushed the sand from his brow. He then looked down from the dune towards his truck. Standing atop his F-150 were three coyotes; one on the hood, one the roof, and one in the bed standing directly over Anika’s body. He quickly pulled his pistol from his hip and fired it three times into the air-pop-pop-pop-the rapid discharges startling the coyotes into a scatter as they cantered back into the desert.

“Fuckers,” he muttered, with pursed brow. “They were gonna try and take her.” From the top of the dune-its peak as high as a three-story house-he walked down to the truck and took Anika’s body out of the bed and carried her with some struggle back up to the top and laid her several feet away from the half-dug grave. He picked up the shovel again and kicked it back into the ground and continued digging and digging. The sun was now set and he had almost dug down another foot when he saw something out of place in his periphery. The coyotes had returned, but this time with two more. Now there were five of them and they stood statue still on the same dune as he and Anika, about thirty yards away from the grave.

“Fuckers!”

He again quickly drew his pistol and fired the rest of the rounds at the coyotes as they dispersed back into the desert, not one of them getting hit. He then reloaded with a fresh magazine.

And in that moment Danny came to understand that the coyotes had smelled the nourishment of death, and that they were not going to leave the dune without being satiated. Even if he buried Anika, the coyotes would still dig her up as soon as he left, just as the street dogs had done to the mass graves at the height of the pandemic before the living started cremating all of their dead. Danny now knew that Anika would have to be cremated, too. He scanned the dunes for fuel, and they were mostly barren save for a few dozen small branches of desert driftwood. He panned the desert and then looked down from the top of the dune towards his truck and saw the gas can and siphoning hose through the window lying on the backseat of the cab. He quickly scanned back across the horizon to see if the coyotes were still gone. They were nowhere in sight.

Danny jogged from the top of the dune back down to the truck and inserted the siphoning hose into the truck’s fuel tank and sucked the gas out with his mouth, funneling it into the gas can until it was almost filled and there was nothing left in the truck’s tank. He then collected everything from the truck that could be used as fuel for a pyre: blankets, floor mats, books, an owner’s manual, old speeding tickets, maps, a spare tire, a sweatshirt. He carried these to the top of the dune in several trips and gathered all the desert driftwood in the vicinity of the dune and ambled back down to the truck and grabbed a book of matches and Lilly’s urn and paced back to the top of the dune.

He then formed a pyre in the pit of the half dug grave. Any remnants of blue and gray in the sky were now quickly falling into deeper shades of shale, and the first fleck of stars now pierced into the evening sky. Danny wept bitterly and placed Anika’s body atop of the makeshift pyre in the half dug grave and he kissed her face through the layers of blankets and sheets, and he took off his wedding ring and placed it in Lilly’s urn and he placed Lilly’s urn on the pyre, too, and then he emptied the entire can of gas over the pyre and tore a match from the book and struck it across the red phosphorous strip and dropped it on top of the pyre, and the pyre exploded into a plume of blue and orange light. The fire blazed from atop the dune like some terrible torch in the darkness of the cold moonscape, and Danny fell down to the earth and clawed at the sand and wept.

It had now been dark for over an hour, but the fire was still blazing strong. Danny was still half awake when he again noticed something in his periphery. Just beyond the halo of the firelight’s reach, several pairs of yellow eyes appeared from the blackness of the desert and floated in it, blinking and gleaming like fool’s gold from the bottom of a stream. The coyotes had returned. Danny rubbed his eyes and squinted, blinking back into the pairs of eyes that were blinking at him. And then sitting up, Danny drew his pistol and pointed it into the swarm of eyes and fired several rounds into the darkness, causing them to vanish only before returning just seconds later, just outside the fire’s halo — blinking, staring. Danny then loaded a fresh magazine into his pistol and stumbled into a standing position and aimed at just one of the pairs of eyes, and taking his time and bracing his pistol with both hands, he emptied the entire magazine into the darkness between that one pair, ten rapid pops puncturing the cold, black air. After the magazine was spent, guttural yelps erupted from beyond the halo, and a demonic chorus of squeals tore through the night before making a decrescendo into the rolling dunes until all became silent again save the crackling of the pyre. Danny’s ears were still ringing from the shots as he turned back towards the blaze, the pyre now just starting to dwindle. As he stared into the fire, its flames imprinted strange geometries into his retinas, and he fell unconscious in its glow and lied supine in its warmth for the rest of the night.

The next morning the sun rose over the Sacramento Mountains and Danny sat up and squinted into the remnants of the pyre. The morning sun blotted out the lesser lights of the still smoldering embers, and a morning breeze had already scattered gray ashes from the pyre across the dune, dispersing them across the surface until they intermingled with the sand, and until they became a part of the sand as everything in the desert someday does. Beyond the dune, white rippling hills spread endlessly in every direction. Danny looked over the expanse into the clear sky, as deep and as blue as an ocean inverted over the surface of the earth. He looked upwards as far as he could see and directing his gaze towards some remote point in space beyond the reach of his vision, he thought about Anika’s smile. He thought about her scent. And he thought about Lilly’s hair, and about how it slipped soft and smooth like silk when he ran his fingers through its strands.

Danny then pulled himself up from the dune into a stance. He brushed the white sand from his face and body as he squinted into the rising sun. He grabbed his pistol off his hip and flung it to the desert floor. He looked down at the ashes, the wind continuing to splay them over the dune, and then he turned away. Looking out towards the northern horizon Danny began walking. Walking away from his pistol. Away from the dune. Away from the cities and towns and the truck and the highway. Away from El Paso and Juarez. Away from the embers of Lilly and Anika. He walked, and he walked away from the world. Away from everything that had been, and away from everything that would be. Away from it all, and into infinite layers of white.