The Book of M. Peng Shepherd
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Название: The Book of M
Автор: Peng Shepherd
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Эзотерика
isbn: 9780008225629
isbn:
“Please,” the woman said again, but weaker this time. “No, it’s all right.”
“Has it reached Arlington yet?” Paul asked her gently. “We’re all—we’re on vacation. With our kids. We only just found out.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I think Maryland, at least. I saw something like that on the news. That’s when I came here. My sons are still at home.”
“It’s in D.C.,” the man in line ahead of us said. He held up his phone. “They caught a guy downtown near the Verizon Center this morning.”
The woman moaned. She sank lower over her cart.
“How are we going to pay for this?” I suddenly whispered to you. “I didn’t bring my purse.” It was probably a month’s worth of food, and all I had was a handful of crumpled bills in my jeans pocket from the day before, from when you had to pay a toll fee on the highway into Virginia from D.C., to reach Elk Cliffs.
“Put it on my card,” Imanuel said. “Wedding expenses.”
“Oh, God,” the woman behind us said suddenly. We turned to look at her. She was holding her wallet as if it were white-hot porcelain, searing her fingers, but too precious to drop. “Oh, God.” We all looked inside. The dark green ink on the bills had somehow vanished. The papers were completely blank.
“What the fuck,” Marion said in horror. “What is that?”
“My children,” the woman wailed. “I have to feed my children!”
“I’ll pay for it!” I gasped. I was crying, terrified. I tried to shove whatever bills were in my pocket at her, desperately pressing them against her chest. Far at the front of the line, a fight broke out. People began to yell. Then we all realized that my money had become the same impossible blank things as well.
Three days after that, reports said that almost everyone in D.C. was now shadowless. We sat in circles around the main ballroom TV, cutting marshmallows into tiny pieces and eating them slowly, to make them last. The brand on the front of the bags was a name I couldn’t read. The letters looked like they had once spelled something, but didn’t quite look like letters anymore. Rhino suggested we start trying to hunt game for food in the forest around the resort with the guns.
Philadelphia, Baltimore, then Arlington. After that, Elk Cliffs Resort lost power, because we were on the Arlington grid.
The day after there was no more electricity, Rhino and Marion returned from the far side of the mountain stumbling under the weight of a small elk. The wedding band made a fire in the fancy stone pit in the courtyard using the strange, empty dollar bills as kindling. We burned it all. Not a single person kept even one piece. We wanted it gone. They roasted the elk while you, me, and a couple of other guests from Paul’s side went through what was left in the kitchen and separated it into “eat tonight, before it goes off,” “eat within the next few days,” and “save as long as we can.”
The singer didn’t want to sing that night, or anymore. The rest of the band played something instrumental, and we all feasted on elk steak, shrimp, random fillets of fish, and a metric fuckton of ice cream.
Tomorrow was going to be a lot worse than today, I realized dimly as I sat in front of the fire, digging around in my own personal gallon of mint chocolate chip. There was so much that every single guest got their own container. And the day after tomorrow was going to be a lot worse than tomorrow. Today was probably the last good day. After I finished that ice cream and crawled under our blankets with you and fell asleep it was never going to go back up again. Only down.
“Want some rocky road?” you asked, and we swapped. The chocolate fudge was so gooey and sweet that it made the glands at the back of my jaw pinch painfully. That was probably never going to happen again either. A kind of sweetness so artificially strong that it could make my mouth ache.
Suddenly I was crying again, before I even knew what was happening.
“I have to pee,” I said hurriedly, and scrambled away from the fire before anyone else realized my eyes were swollen and red. I don’t think you saw.
I stopped as soon as I left the manicured part of the hill and hit the trees, and found myself gulping desperately as I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. I should have savored it more, I thought. I should have fought violently for my favorite flavor. Then I realized someone else was already out here, probably doing the same thing in the trees.
“The ice cream?” Marion asked through the darkness.
I nodded. “It just …”—I tried to clear my throat—“it was so fucking good.”
Marion snorted gently in agreement. I could tell she dug the toe of her shoe into the dirt only by the sound of it grinding.
“It’s the phones for me,” she murmured.
“Fuck,” I said. Her husband and daughter were still in San Diego. He’d had to skip the wedding to take care of their little girl who’d caught the flu. “Fuck, Marion.” I felt sick for having forgotten, in all the chaos. “What are you going to—”
“Don’t,” Marion said. “I can’t think of it directly. Not yet.”
I wanted to go to her, to hug her like we always did when one of us had just argued with a boyfriend or done poorly on an exam, but I didn’t know how to. We stood there for a while, pushing rocks around with our feet instead, not saying anything.
There was no more ice cream. There was no more of a lot of things. But there was still you, Ory, here with me. That was something. That was more than hope.
Marion’s outline, barely visible in the night, was leaning against a tree, holding some kind of leaf. It was so dark, I realized I couldn’t tell if either of us still had a shadow anymore. I think that was the first time it occurred to me to wonder, and the last time I could ever have that thought without compulsively checking to make sure my own was still there. Of being able to do nothing else, not even breathe, until I saw that it was still a part of me.
“What do you think—” Marion spoke suddenly. “What do you think caused this?”
“I don’t know,” I said. It was true. I didn’t—not for sure.
She laughed. It didn’t sound much like a laugh. “Rob and I separated,” she finally said. All the air went out of me. “Two weeks ago. Hallie doesn’t have the flu. I was going to tell you at the reception, once we were drunk enough. But then Boston happened.”
“Marion.”
“I know it’s not karma,” she interrupted, cutting me off. “That would be—stupid. But I just can’t help but …” She took a shaky breath. “You and Ory, Paul and Imanuel—happy. Here we all are at the end of the world, and you guys are here together. I’m the only one with marriage troubles—and СКАЧАТЬ