I woke up in the middle of the night disoriented. I lay for a few moments watching dark shadows on the wall and smelling foreign smells. I got up, put on my shorts and quietly slipped out the front door and upstairs one flight to the roof. At this point, the storm had quieted to a steady drizzle. The rusty door gave way, unlocked. I’d lucked out. Since childhood, my favorite escapes have been rooftops. When my mom would go into her creative trance where nothing mattered except what she was working on, I would amuse myself on the roof. The air always smelled better up there. Rooftops were a place where I didn’t feel like I always had to hold my breath, or prove anything to anyone. It was where I could just be me. That’s where I learned about the night, boys, and drugs. I thought, maybe that is the only thing I really missed about New York—the rooftops with all their hiding places and secrets.
A pigeon took off and I heard a voice behind me say, “I beat you here.” Out of the shadows, Doris walked toward me draped in a black shawl. I wondered if it had been stuffed in her knitting bag.
“Yes, you did. I didn’t mean to interrupt… I couldn’t sleep,” I said starting to turn away.
“No, don’t go. Stay, please.” She stood near the door.
I nodded, not wanting to be as rude as I had been before the night of eating and talking downstairs. I looked at her more closely now; her brown eyes looked thoughtful and her whole demeanor was calmer and more contemplative than before. The rash continued to advance across her face, the tail of the spiral stopping above her lips. My mom would have wanted to draw her. I could care less about drawing, but my mother did teach me to notice and pay attention though I could forget to do it.
After a few minutes of silence, I offered, “Why do you think this virus is special?”
“I feel it growing inside me, whatever it is, and it’s strong. It’s a presence, a life force. It needs us. It’s not stupid.”
I immediately regretted I had asked her anything.
She kept on in a hushed voice about a “presence,” I listened but my mind wandered off to Aspen. I missed my routine of hiking in the morning, three or five skiing lessons in the afternoon, and then my time on the slopes. I missed the weekends, enjoying more of my own time on the mountains. I didn’t know what I wanted forever, but nostalgia about rooftops aside, I was damned sure that whatever I wanted wasn’t in this hot-ass dirty, cavernous city that had devoured everything I cared about, and had given me this disgusting rash.
“And then when I’m sleeping, it wakes me.” Doris continued her ramblings.
I yawned, not even bothering to cover my inattentiveness and boredom.
Doris just kept watching me closely, like she was waiting for something. I stared right back at her, seeing all the crazies of New York reflected in her face. I’m talking about the people who drink their own urine, wear aluminum foil hats huddled in cardboard boxes in alleyways, or think there is a conspiracy behind every crisis… and have mysterious leathery rashes covering their faces that talk to them in their sleep.
“And you know it needs us as a group or unit don’t you?” Doris said.
“What?”
“That’s why we couldn’t stay at the Health Department. Other people were beginning to bother us. It needs the five of us. Just the five of us. I think it works better in small groups.”
Ok, this lady was fully entering delusional territory. I mumbled something vague about being on the lookout for her observations and left the rooftop in a hurry. Of all the things I could have caught in NYC, of all the people I could have been stuck with, I had to get this hallucinating, delusional weirdo. I should have been glad that I caught this instead of something else. A virus is a virus is a virus, I thought. Surely the rash would disappear over time—I hadn’t even looked at my face since last night. It might be better now. Or the CDC or the clinic might have a cure for the virus. It’s just a virus. Even as I thought this, a part of me felt like a marked woman, changed forever.
I awoke the next morning to a scream, followed by wailing. Constancia, I thought to myself. I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, and rushed out into the living room.
“Hector’s dead. He’s dead. My baby, my baby!” Constancia wailed while doubled over. Yesterday’s prominent iridescent green eyeshadow had faded and now just a few green sparkles dotted her eyelids, but her lipstick was smudged red on her chin, her mascara running down her face in black and blue streaks. Her rash looked an angry purple, similar to mine in that it clustered around our hairlines.
Her angular face now possessed a softness and vulnerability that only a grave injury could have coaxed from it. Pearlie held and rocked the young woman. Constancia now wore a scarf wrapped around her head, covering the rash and what was left of her hair; I guess Pearlie had given her one.
Sandra paced with slow, deliberate steps that carried a meditative quality to them. Doris was looking out the window and shaking her head. “Weather’s bad again today, too.”
“What happened? What’s she talking about?” I asked.
“Constancia’s received, oh, just awful news, Kat,” Sandra’s said.
“She called her house this morning...” Pearlie’s voice trailed off.
“Last night, he had come back to the house to wait for me! My brother let him sleep there. My brother said this thing, what we have was… was all over his body, he was bleeding from his ears, his eyes! He had come over looking for me. The police are there now with some doctors. They want to find out where I am. What am I going to do? Oh Dios mío! Oh Dios mío!”
“Honey, you haven’t done anything wrong.” Pearlie reassured.
Constancia hit her stomach a few times shouting, “Why him? Why is he dead? How could this happen?” Her red-rimmed eyes closed tightly for a moment, then opened wide with shock. her nostrils flared, and her mouth opened and closed seemingly without conscious control.
Pearlie, holding the hysterical Constancia calmly said, “Sandra, will you put on some coffee and get some of the doughnuts in the refrigerator for the girls?” To Constancia she murmured, “You’ve got to rest for a minute. Lay down in my lap.” Obediently, Constancia laid her head in Pearlie’s lap turning away from us, allowing her despair to flood into Pearlie.
Sandra gave me a quick glance, nodded and dutifully followed Pearlie’s suggestion.
I sat down on the couch and tried to think. Peggy came up to me and pushed my hand with her nose. I rubbed the back of her neck, roughly. Taking this as encouragement she licked my knee.
“Constancia, I’m so sorry. I just don’t know what to say,” I exhaled sharply.
In a moment Sandra came to the kitchen door holding a box of doughnuts listlessly in her hands. “The virus is mutating. Isn’t that what this means?”
“It lives through us,” Doris said.
“Will you please be quiet?” I growled.
“There haven’t been any other fatalities. There’s no reason to think that the virus...” Pearlie trailed off weakly, unable to finish her sentence.
“That we know of,” Sandra said.
The rain continued. The house took on a gloomy cast.
Constancia rose up, turning to face us. “Hector’s dead! Covered with the same thing I have. That we have. Yesterday, he was alive. Can’t you see, mamis? We are all going to die.”
“Maybe. . . we shouldn’t have left.” Sandra said.
Even though I was thinking the same thing, I thought better not to say it. “Everybody calm down,” I reasoned. “We can go back to the Health Department or another hospital if want. We can go to the emergency room if we need to. Our first concern, however, is Constancia.” Though I didn’t particularly like her, this new turn of events just felt so awful and surreal I thought that we should get her together so she could at least face her family. That was the only decent thing to do. She didn’t strike me as the most stable young woman—this situation might drive her right over the edge.
“He was the only one I had, mi corazón...mi corazón. The only one who ever cared,” she moaned, covering her face.
We put Constancia to bed, with Sandra offering to sit watch with her first. Outside, the rain kept coming down. Periodically the strong wind gusts rattled the old windows of the apartment. A dark gray day, promising to get worse. I bit into a stale doughnut and thought about Ro.
Pearlie turned on the television news to see if there was anything useful we could find out, but there was nothing being reported about Reenu-You.
The gloom that had descended upon us after the news of Constancia’s boyfriend didn’t break until late afternoon. I tried to make grilled cheese and bacon sandwiches for lunch, offering to help as Pearlie looked so tired. I burned two sandwiches because my mind kept returning to Ro. Why hadn’t I heard from her? I checked messages on my mother’s answering machine and my home phone in Aspen. It was silly to worry, I told myself. She was one of the healthiest people I knew. She hadn’t caught any of the childhood diseases (except chickenpox) and in all the years I’d known her, I could count on one hand the times she had been sick. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling something was wrong.
The rest of our group was in the living room talking about the Department of Health. We all knew, I suppose, the right thing to do was to march ourselves to a hospital to be quarantined or something. It’s hard to say what was keeping us from doing it. It was Saturday and they were closed was the easy reason. But, I guess we all had our reasons. Personally, I harbored deep suspicions about New York City health agencies and hospitals as generally incompetent, but I knew I had decent doctors I could call on back home in Aspen.
In Pearlie’s home, it felt like we had escaped to a new emotional territory, a comfort zone in the city. I could feel the ever growing pull to stay, as if my body would resist all other options. It felt familiar. Yet how was that possible? None of us had known each other before yesterday. Here I was cooking—or at least trying to cook—in Pearlie’s apartment. I didn’t even like cooking in my own apartment. Yet here we were. No one was making a move quite yet. None of us felt sick, though we looked terrible.
Scrounging around in Pearlie’s refrigerator, I found two small tomatoes. I chopped those into thin slices and added them to the platter of food I was about to present; grilled cheese and bacon sandwiches, roasted almonds, tomatoes, and Jerkins pickles. “Okay, this is the best I can do on short notice,” I said. “I hope you’re hungry.”
“You’ve saved the day,” Pearlie said clapping her hands. The others made their way to her dining table. Doris went in to the kitchen to retrieve napkins. I called out, “Doris, can you bring my cup of coffee in?”
“Sure,” she said. In a minute we assembled and ate.
“Don’t you think they’ll be calling for us here? Didn’t they see us leave with you? You told them we were with you, right?” Sandra asked.
“I did no such thing!” Pearlie exclaimed.
Now I was surprised. “You didn’t?”
“I sure don’t like the idea of us being poked and pricked,” Doris said.
“Oh, now don’t you worry about that,” Pearlie said. “Not only did I not tell them that we were going to my house, but they have no way to get in touch with me. Those officials don’t have my address,” Pearlie replied with the first real smile of the day.
We all busted out laughing so hard I had to put down my second cup of coffee. The absurdity of the moment made us fall over. The Department of Health people let us waltz out and Pearlie assisted them with wrong information, so that if they wanted to find us they couldn’t. We—a group of five sick, obscenely-rashed brown and black women, with wine and purplish scabs, green-purple scales on our faces, and hair falling out possibly due to an evil chemical relaxer—have temporarily disappeared.
“We’ve been kidnapped by Pearlie,” Sandra said.
“How ironic that a purveyor of records keeps no record of herself,” I said.
“The world is filled with mysteries,” she winked back at me.
“You don’t trust doctors?” Sandra asked incredulous.
“Should I?” Pearlie retorted.
“But, they must have some record of you? Don’t you have insurance?” Sandra pressed.
“Oh, I used to trust everyone. I don’t think I got wise to anything until my fifties. I gave everything I loved to this city and when my husband got cancer it was like I had worked for nothing. We used to live in Queens in a beautiful little house and all of that. I haven’t always lived here, like this.” She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment and I wasn’t sure if she was trying to snatch back a memory or push one away. We grew quiet.
“We went to so many hospitals and treatment centers, I used to dream of them. I couldn’t escape them. Back and forth. I took care of my sister who also died of cancer and a cousin who died of cancer. What did doctors and hospitals offer any of them? Looking at their watches all the goddamn time, explaining nothing and talking down to me and mine like stupid children,” she shook her head. “My husband died from a complication from his medications—a medical error, they called it. In the end it wasn’t the cancer that got him, it was some doctor who simply wasn’t paying attention to what he was supposed to be doing.”
“Did you sue?” Doris asked.
“Yeah, I did,” she replied. “That’s why I’m living in these lovely digs now.”
Her voice caught on the last part of her story. I felt a sense of despair and frustration, but not bitterness.
“So, no, whatever this is,” she continued, “I’m going to find out in my own time. Pray on it. I’m not running to the doctors again. I gave up my old identity. I started living under different aliases. You know how easy it is for a librarian to have access to information?” Pearlie shook her head and laughed. “No, you have no idea. Well, it would make your head spin. I retreated from data sources, passwords, and access codes. To the Department of Health, I am Mrs. Cranbill.” Pearlie got up and grabbed a small pillow from the sofa, put it behind her back and adjusted herself.
“Now, I’m not stupid and I’m not a thief. When I got this virus, or whatever this is, I wanted to find out some basic information so I went to the Department of Health. I found you all yesterday and that was good. I haven’t had a normal conversation in almost three years. Most of my friends gave up on me. I retreated and started living like a hermit crab, really. There’s no excuse for that.”
She paused and looked solemnly at each of us around the table. “I’m not telling anyone one here what else to do,” she said. “Before I boss people around, I at least like to get to know them at least a few days. But I want you all to know you’re welcome to stay a while, or go as you see fit.”
All of us were quiet, absorbing her story. Sandra pushed back from the table, stretched, and went over to sit in the rocking chair with her legs pulled up underneath her. Doris had stopped her knitting and stared at Pearlie.
“Is your name really Pearlie,” Doris asked, her tone grave.
Pearlie leaned her head back and laughed heartily. “Of course! And, Peggy’s is really hers, too.”
At the sound of her name, Peggy barked from her resting place underneath the large dining room table. The serious mood broke, we laughed again, and started to eat.
I wondered what my ski friends might think of me now as I sat around a table of women who were so unlike me but whom I liked. I wasn’t their token “black friend”—aka a non-threatening black woman, separate from those “other” kinds of black people, who skis and hangs out in Aspen with other (white) Aspen people. I always told those friends that I despised the city and its inhabitants, that I preferred the conformity of the ski community. I wondered what part of me was talking then. Could it have been the part of me that wanted to run away from my mother? To punish her? She would have relished the hijinks of Pearlie and found some way to paint both her and her dog. My mother always tried to live free without dependence on anyone—not the state, or a man, or even me. Sitting there I felt I could almost hear her whisper to me, “Stay a while longer and find out the rest of Pearlie’s and the other women’s stories.”
The conversation moved on but I gently tried to ask Pearlie more questions about her past and her decisions. She just as gently (and much more deftly) deflected them back at me.
“The past is unimportant. I’ve got to move forward,” she said with finality.
“No, you’re wrong, Pearlie. The past makes us who we are,” Doris said.
Not being able to figure out how to get Pearlie to open up more, I realized then I was not as good as my mother listening or asking people questions about themselves. Yeah, I could give directions to students on the slopes; that felt natural. When I wasn’t teaching, I was usually by myself. I had so much to learn from my mother and now I never would. This self-knowledge saddened and unsettled me.
The conversation through the late afternoon kept going. It was my fault—it started out so casual. I kept telling them how much they would like Aspen, and how beautiful it is in the mornings. And, how Aspen air was a good contrast to the sticky, humid weather of New York. I had my Ford Explorer with me and I kept saying how great it would be if they could see it. Hell, the fresh air alone might do wonders for this virus. Weren’t we all going a little crazy not knowing what else to do?
Pearlie finally said, “So are you inviting us or what?”
I swallowed hard, a three-day trip without many stops with four other diseased women. I must be crazy.
“Sure. We’re all in this together. After we find out what is wrong with us.”
“Even Constancia, if she wants to come?”
“Only if she seriously behaves herself,” I said with a look over to Sandra.
It wasn’t like we knew each other for our whole lives, but it was an almost intimate familiarity.
“We shall have to leave Pearlie’s house sometime. Her generosity won’t last forever,” Sandra said.