dying isn’t easy

alex egervary

1 the meadowlands

Everything outside the town is dead. There are roads that go for miles through the forests, cutting straight paths through the maze of deadwood. They go every direction, each one stretching toward a horizon off in the distance that approaches but never nears. You could drive for hours and nothing would change. You would pass what seemed like the same stretch of trees a dozen times. And after a while, there would be no more spurs or intersections or mileposts to prove you wrong. The sun would have sunk well below that far-off horizon by now, and you would have to turn on your high beams. The woods on either side of your car would swallow up the light, and you would squint through your windshield, looking for traffic signs or highway markers. Eventually, you would give up. You would make a three-point turn in the middle of the road, hoping that there was no one coming up behind you. And you would go back where you came from, pulling into your driveway either very late at night or very early in the morning. If someone asked you where you were, you would tell them that you got lost somewhere in town.

The town is at the bottom of a wide, shallow valley. For a few miles on every side of the town, the land slopes up gently, as small hillocks begin to dot the increasingly sparse landscape. When the last warehouses and manufacturing plants die out at the edge of town, the ground inclines sharply for several hundred yards before it levels off again. That’s where the forests begin – at first, the low ground cover of the suburbs continues, only thicker. Once the lights of the town begin to fade in your rearview mirror, the bushes and scrubs give way to the trees. Most are rotting shells that remain standing only because there is nothing to knock them down. Some are kept just on this side of death by symbiotic vines that come up out of the thick layer of fallen leaves and branches on the forest floor; vines that grow around and through the trunks and branches; thick vines as wide around as your wrist. They have no leaves, no flowers, but stretch blindly up toward the sky from the dense compost of the ground, climbing over or through whatever is in their way.

The highest point in town is the roof of the high school. The high school is only three stories high at its peak, but it sits on top of a small hill just outside the center of town. From the roof, you can see the town spread out all around you. If you were to face westward as the sun sets, the center of town would be directly in front of you. You would be able to see the steeple of the cathedral just a few blocks ahead, the distant face of Christ on the crucifix at its tip on eye level with you atop the roof, its slender height casting a long shadow across the adjacent rooftops. At your back would be the commercial areas: strip malls, grocery stores, supermarkets, department stores, and beyond them, just inside the town limits, warehouses and factories and corporate offices. To the north and south are the housing developments. The setting sun glinting off skylights or weathervanes might distract you as you stand there on the roof, and you would turn to your left or right to see what had caught your eye. But as you were turned, the sun would set, and most of the town would fall into darkness.

If you stayed up on the roof after the sun set, you could watch the town fall asleep. You would sit on a lawn chair that you brought up with you earlier and drink a six-pack of beer from a cooler that you dragged up the three flights of stairs with you that afternoon. You might have brought a radio with you, tuned to one of the local stations. 88.4 – alternative rock. 91.4 – r & b. 100.4 – classic rock. 115.4 – easy listening. There are no AM stations in town. After the sun set, you would turn off your radio, kill another beer, and watch the lights go off. You would face to the east first, watching the stores shut down, the brightly lit oversized signs marking their territory dimming, the rows of fluorescent lights inside each store flickering out behind the plate glass windows. You would watch the headlights of departing employees etching their routes home on your retinas, some to your left or right, but most behind you to the row houses and apartments downtown. As the parking lots empty, the east would darken and blink out, leaving only the late-night fast food restaurants and 24-hour convenience stores lighting the night. Then you would slowly turn, finished with the alcohol now, just watching the night take over all around you. It would be quiet up on top of the roof, with only the occasional Doppler whoosh of a car traveling by below breaking the silence. The suburbs would go out to either side of you, first floor lights dimming, then the second. Downtown stays alive longest, the streets staying lit long after every window goes dark. Then, very late at night, if you were still awake, you would see the street lamps flicker and die. And then, if you were really dedicated, you might see the sun rise.

I live in the suburbs, on what would have been your left from the top of the high school. I live on the second floor of my parents’ house. I drive a 1998 dark green domestic sedan, and the passenger side rearview mirror is broken. I go to the high school every morning and come home every afternoon. Sometimes at night I drive as far as I can in any direction until I have to drive back, and every night I watch the lights go out across town from my window on the second floor of my parents’ house. On the weekends, I go to the movie theater or the bowling alley downtown, or sit around in a friend’s basement and drink his parents’ beer. I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. When I graduate from high school, I’ll get a job somewhere here and move out of my parents’ house. I’ll rent an apartment downtown and live there, maybe with a friend from high school. After a few years, I’ll move out to the suburbs. I’ll marry the girl that sits next to me in Spanish class named Erica, and we’ll live together in a two-story house with a deck out back. We will have two kids who will live on the second floor and go to school every morning and come home every afternoon. When I die, and my life flashes before my eyes, I will see all this, and I’ll say to Erica, where did we go? And she’ll hold my hand tight in the hospital bed while the EKG beeps unsteadily in the background and answer, I didn’t go anywhere, I’m right here, don’t worry, because she didn’t understand what I was asking her. And I’ll look out the hospital room window and watch the lights go out across town. Trust me, this is all important. This is all about context. I want you to understand where I come from for the rest of my story.

2 there’s no end in sight

Four hours into the school day is 11:30, and that’s about what time it was. The electricity was out and the clocks had all stopped at half past eight. I was in a chemistry lab with a dozen other students, sitting on the floor between a row of lab tables and the tall windows. The shades were pulled down almost all the way, and the sunlight coming into the room only lit the few feet where we were sitting. Here is what you would have seen if you were there: all thirteen of us were sitting motionless on the tile floor. No one spoke, and most just stared at the ground. I was leaning against one of the lab tables with my eyes closed. One of the windows was open, and there was a slight wind that blew the window shade back and forth, making a steady clicking noise. Other than that, the classroom was very quiet. Some had been crying earlier, boys and girls, but not any more. Some of us were listening, and some of us were watching.

We had been there since half past eight when the electricity went out. We had been there before 8:30, actually, because class started a few minutes before eight. A few students had left when the power died, and the teacher did as well. We had not seen them since so we stayed where we were. It had been somewhat uneventful, but a few things had happened. A little after nine (we could tell time by wristwatches, at least at that point) we heard noises from the classroom next door. Around 9:30, the lights flickered on for a second before going back out. At quarter past ten exactly, all the other electronics stopped working. Watches, cell phones, everything died. Then at eleven, we heard people running down the hallway. And that was everything up to 11:30.

The noises next door started everything. The power outage was part of it, and the other students leaving was too, but the noises were really odd. First it was like fingernails on a blackboard, then shouting that nobody could make out, then a door slamming, and then glass breaking. That was it. Then nobody wanted to leave the classroom any more. After the teacher had left, it was like a free period; everybody talking to their friends and getting out of their seats. When we heard the noises, we moved away from the door and toward the windows, at first just standing around talking and laughing somewhat nervously, glancing toward the door or the wall where we heard the noises.

When the lights came on again, we were all fooled. Some of us had sat down on the floor by the windows, and the talking and laughing had mostly died out. I had been sitting on the floor, and my back and my ass were getting sore, so I jumped up, as did two or three others. We looked at each other and tried to laugh at the anxious expressions we saw reflected in each others’ faces. You could see the emotional change run through the group, muscles relaxing, teeth unclenching, uncertainty changing to cautious excitement. The class started moving away from the windows when the lights went out again, this time frightening at least four or five of us. Somebody screamed, somebody tripped over a desk and fell. I cursed. We had been in the classroom for over an hour. We were all angry, scared, bored, tired. Andy, the one who tripped over the desk, cut his lip and was bleeding on the floor. When we sat back down by the windows, he sat apart from the rest of us with a paper towel over his lip, staring at the wall.

Then everything else stopped working. I don’t remember exactly who noticed it first, but after he did, we all panicked, even more than we did before. Because it just doesn’t make sense, for a whole classroom full of watches and cell phones and pagers to go out at once. We all sat there, stunned. Then Andy started talking about an atomic bomb. He said there was some kind of electromagnetic effect that killed electrical devices. He had to pause every few words to wipe the blood off his lips. He was smirking at the expressions on our faces, but his eyes looked afraid. He kept swiveling his head around, staring behind him for a second before he turned back to us to continue. Nobody wanted to hear his theories. A girl started to sob quietly. Some of the others argued with him briefly, but I don’t think anybody was serious, not even Andy. There was no reason for something like that to happen in our town.

3 scary kids scaring kids

After what seemed like forever but must have been only twenty minutes or so, Andy really lost it. He had been sitting slightly apart from everyone else since he cut his lip. And after the atom bomb thing, he wouldn’t talk to anybody. When he suddenly started shouting at us, I think we were more surprised than anything else. He stood up and threw the bloody paper towel he still had pressed to his mouth on the floor. It started as an incoherent rant, and the rest of us listened. He accused everybody sitting there: of tripping him, breaking his watch; of turning out the lights, keying up his car; of stealing his girlfriend, cheating off his test last week; of anything else he came up with. His lip was still bleeding, and blood dripped down his chin and the front of his shirt. Then someone started shouting back, and the whole group joined in. That was when we heard the running in the hallway.

Of course, nobody heard it at first because it was just too loud inside the classroom and the footsteps were too far away then. I remember noticing some kind of subtle rhythmic noise, and turning away from the rest of the group to see what the noise was. A few other people turned, and then a few more. The noise grew louder until we could tell what it was. The rest of the group turned, one by one, until we were all facing the classroom door and hearing the steps approach. Andy stood there, silenced, blood still dripping from his lip and tracing a sloppy vertical line down the front of his shirt. The footsteps were moving quickly, and they were incredibly loud. It could have been a large group of people, maybe some of the other students. But they would have been running down the hallway very fast. The steps reached the door of the classroom, and suddenly stopped. A girl named Danielle started to scream until Andy grabbed her arm, his finger pressed to his bloody lips. I don’t know if she understood what he meant or was just afraid of him. We all ducked down behind the lab tables and waited.

We stayed there, motionless and silent, until 11:30 or so. My eyes were closed, so I didn’t see who stood up first, but when I opened them, I saw four kids standing and watching another two walk quietly toward the classroom door. Andy was standing near the four watchers and making dramatic gestures at the pair heading toward the door. His lip had stopped bleeding, but it was swollen, and the blood on his face and shirt was drying quickly, staining his skin and clothing. The two reached the door and stood there for a minute or two, first looking through the pane of glass, and then trying to see through the gap along the floor. They stood, and looked back at us. One of them was Danielle, and the other was a guy I didn’t know very well who played tennis for the school team. Danielle opened the door quietly, and the tennis player stuck his head out. He pulled it back in quickly, and looked back at us. By now, all of us by the windows were standing and watching, Andy with his arms crossed and an irritated look on his face. The tennis player motioned for us to come to the door, and we went. All of us.

The hallways were empty. The lights were out, of course, and all the classrooms were dark. We checked the first few rooms for other students, but they were all empty and we stopped checking. We reached the stairwell as a group, the thirteen of us in a tight clump with the tennis player at the front and Andy walking a half-step slower than the rest, making barely audible derisive comments. We stopped at the foot of the stairs. The nearest exit was on the ground floor, one floor above the basement where the chemistry labs were. We made sure that we were all still together, and we headed up the stairs.

The ground floor seemed even darker, and we walked down the empty hallway quickly. Some of the lockers along the walls hung open. There were ceiling tiles on the floor that had fallen from the ceiling, exposing the electrical wires and water pipes that followed us seven feet above our heads. We were about halfway down the hallway when the door to our right burst open. It happened quickly, so quickly that even now I can’t really make out what happened in my mind. You hear sometimes that in pressure situations, you get a rush of adrenaline or something that slows things down. It didn’t work that way this time.

I don’t remember seeing anything. I only heard things. I heard the door fly open and hit the wall, shattering the inset window. I heard Danielle (I think) scream, and I heard shouts coming from our group and from the darkened classroom. I heard a fight that I think I participated in, dull thuds of punches landing and the exhalations of exertion and pain resulting. I heard Andy shouting I told you so! I told you so! and I heard people’s names and Help and Motherfucker and Get off me and Let’s get the fuck out of here, and even though I didn’t know who it was that shouted the last one at the top of their lungs, I was sprinting away down the hallway. I wasn’t alone – I saw Andy running next to me, grinning widely with a broken nose. The tennis player was there too, with a black eye. He was pulling a girl who wasn’t Danielle along with him. There were more following us, or chasing us.

We all reached the front doors and shoved them open, falling over our own feet as we were blinded by the midday sun. I saw purple and black fractals spreading across my eyes and squeezed them shut. I collapsed on the grass, gasping for air. One of my knuckles was split and bleeding, and my ears were ringing. I heard someone laughing behind me. After a while I sat up and looked around, counting heads. There must have been fifteen kids sprawled out on the grass, some moaning painfully and holding their wrists, others sitting with their hands in their laps, smiling stupidly up at the sun.

It seemed like we made it out and everything was okay. Only everything wasn’t, of course. Danielle wasn’t there. A girl walked around outside the school for hours after we got out, calling for someone named Brad. I don’t think Andy was ever really the same again. He dropped out of school at the end of the year. Nobody really talked about any of it, though. School was closed for a month, and then it opened up again. So I went to school in the morning and came home in the afternoon.

One afternoon I walked up to the roof of the school and sat on one of the lawn chairs that people leave up there sometimes and watched the sun set. I saw a car heading west, and I could see its taillights flickering between the trees for a while after dusk. Eventually they were gone, and so I turned to the east to watch the minimum wage workers heading home from their jobs. When I was tired, I went home and went to sleep. And that’s the end of the story. Night falls, the day dies. Then the next one begins.