8

The time for warning had come.

Susan had spent a loathsome afternoon at the office (Maudey had dropped in on her no less than three times to complain, solicitously, of her frequent absences: “But, sweetie, what on earth is going on? You’ve always been one of my stalwarts!”). Tara was no help (“Listen, hon, just between us, is something up between you and Lou? That kind of thing can make anything seem worse than it is. . . .”); and work was impossible (how many times can you sketch a bowl of peaches that consistently come out yellow apples?). And so at four-­thirty Susan left the office, guiltily looking around for Maudey, and made her way to the subway.

The uptown Broadway train was its usual bizarre self, the faces staring ahead, not wanting to look at you lest you take it as an insult, the straphangers wobbling back and forth for a secure position, the loud black and white and tan teenagers having fun as if it were a duty. And, of course, the obligatory weird one, sitting off alone, lecturing the air.

And then the train stopped at Sixty-­sixth Street and waited, doors closed.

Susan, sitting (a blessing) and facing the platform, watched the people standing at the door waiting to get in. A few of them looked confused (the train is in, why aren’t the doors opening?), a few annoyed, but most just dead, like the ones already in the train, in transit emotionally as well as literally.

She glanced around the platform, at the billboards (shows, girdles, cigarettes), at the evidence that “Juan of 136th Street” was still alive and well, to the booth where two middle-­aged black women in sweaters dispensed the tokens, to the door of the men’s room from which an elderly man emerged still zipping up his fly, to the row of phones on the wall . . .

One of which was dripping.

Susan looked around a man who had just taken the strap over her head to see it more clearly.

One phone among three. Dripping.

Rivulets moving down the tile wall behind it to the floor.

Red rivulets.

The color of Sweet William’s paw.

She did nothing.

And then the train pulled out, never opening its doors, leaving those inside wanting to get out, those outside wanting to get in, and Susan, staring, doing nothing.

Blood. And then locusts.

It was the next day, and Susan, having slept a total of three hours the night before, exhausted, confused, despairing, chose not to go to work. (What Maudey would think never even occurred to her.) Lou and Andrea gone, she wandered through the rooms of the apartment, made countless cups of tea (a learned response to feeling ill) and tried not to think.

But thoughts, nonetheless, were circling, joining together into theories and descending, hawklike, on her.

The maiming of animals (Sweet William, the squirrel).

The unexplainable things (the taxi driver with Brian Coleman’s name, the bleeding phone).

The Silence itself, which sought her out at the theater, the restaurant, anywhere.

Somewhere lay a meaning to all of it, an explanation she could tell Lou and Peter and the police—if only she could find it.

“Sweet William, what are you doing?” She heard him scratching at something in the living room. “Stop it.”

She was in the kitchen now, preparing another cup of tea, remembering how it was when she was little and sick and her mother would cater to her (as if she’d just discovered she had a daughter). There was a watercoloring set (her mother was right, after all) but it had only arrived after two days of the flu. And there was a set of Classic Comics (the measles?).

“Quit it!”

Andrea had worn the opal brooch to school that morning. Susan congratulated herself. The sins of the mother will not be passed on to the daughter.

“What is with you?” She turned off the stove—she didn’t really want another cup of tea—and went into the living room.

Sweet William was lying on his side under a table, scratching at the wall.

“Stop it, nut.” The dog ignored her. “Come on, S.W. . . .” Susan took him by the hind legs and pulled him out from under the table. “You hide a bone under there?”

He looked up at her, ashamed, drew his ears back and, in his characteristic and incredibly sweet way, pushed his face forward to be kissed. Susan sat cross-­legged on the floor and took the large old dog in her arms, forcing him backward into her lap so that his hind legs stood up in the air.

“You’re just a baby,” she said, kissing him. “You’re just Mommy’s crazy baby.”

He turned his face around and in one swipe drenched her cheek.

“Yuck,” she said, releasing him. “Go brush your teeth.”

Taking it as an admonishment, he flattened his ears again and pushed forward to be kissed, knocking Susan over on her side.

“Get away from me, you smelly thing,” she said, laughing, and he pushed into her, tail going as well as wet, odorous tongue.

Thus, temporarily rallied by the aptly named dog, Susan dressed and went marketing, her mind distracted. The price of groceries further distracted her (being, if not as disastrous as the Silence, at least on the same continuum), and as she left the supermarket, she felt somewhat repaired.

Homeostasis. The word came back to her in the elevator. Peter had explained it to her years before. Homeostasis. The body fighting to return to normal, to its balanced state. The mind must be homeostatic, too, she thought, counting what appeared to be her only blessing at that moment.

Sweet William met her at the door as he always did, hoping that something in the bag of groceries was for him. Together they went into the kitchen, and Susan started to unpack.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw it.

It was under the table, crawling.

Without so much as a shudder, she ripped off a length of paper toweling from the overhead rack and went to scoop up the roach (she was, after all, raised in New York).

It was a grasshopper.

She looked at it questioningly. A grasshopper in early spring on the eleventh floor of an apartment house on West End Avenue? With that, she brought the toweling down over it, balled it and tossed it in the trash pail.

Then she saw another, near the sink.

“What?” she said aloud, seeing a third crawl in from the hall.

And a fourth.

Had they been roaches, she would have felt a familiar revulsion, but grasshoppers reminded her of summer camp and Riverside Park, hardly creatures to be afraid of.

And a fifth entered from the hall.

Perplexed, Susan stepped over it (still unafraid) and went into the hall.

There were dozens there, streaming out from the living room.

Now she was frightened.

She crossed over them (jumping; crushing one) and looked in the living room.

Hundreds.

All crawling out from under the table where Sweet William had been scratching earlier. An army of grasshoppers, crawling and hopping into her home. She could hear them now—the clicking of their legs.

She hurried back into the kitchen (jumping from space to space, nonetheless crushing some) and got a broom. Then, sweeping her way to the living-­room table, she looked under it.

Sweet William had dislodged a small metal box that was attached to the wall. From the box an electrical cord led to . . .

The phone.

And from the hole behind the box, now uncovered, came the grasshoppers. As Susan watched, they fought their way out, another dozen, green, chirping, mandibles clicking, spindly awkward legs pulling them out.

“Oh, Christ!” she screamed. “Christ!”

She grabbed the first thing she saw (a clock on the table), pushed the box back over the hole, lodged the clock in front of it. She had cut one of the grasshoppers in half; its head hung out, bodyless, from behind the box.

She got up quickly, fearing they would get on her, and fled the apartment.

Outside in the hall, breathless, stunned, shaking, she rang for the elevator and took it to the basement. Tito, the handyman, a round-­faced good-­natured Cuban, was hauling trash.

“Morning, Mrs.,” he said, never sure of any of the tenants’ names. “Nice day, huh?”

“Tito, I need your help!”

It was not the first time he’d seen a Mrs. in that state of anxiety; usually it was brought on by a leak or a blown fuse just before company was due. Once an elderly Mrs. fetched him in tears over nothing more serious than a stopped-­up pilot light. Tito had seen it all.

But he had never seen this before.

Susan led him to the apartment and, refusing to enter herself, waited in the hall while he cleaned them up. Then, leaving with a plastic garbage bag full of them, he said, “You can go in now, Mrs., I think I got ’em all.” He avoided asking where the grasshoppers had come from. It did no good to ask too many questions: tenants liked their privacy. (She probably brought them in herself. Why? Rich North Americans are crazy, that’s why.)

Tentatively Susan entered the apartment. Sweet William, the cause of it all, was sleeping. Slowly she made herself a cup of tea, and even more slowly she understood.

“Enough already, Susan, please,” Lou said, later in the evening, when Susan told him.

“Please, Lou, don’t fight with me. . . .”

“Susan, listen to what you’re saying!”

“I know what I’m saying. . . .” And she tried to be quiet so that Andrea wouldn’t hear them from her room.

“Christ,” Lou muttered, pacing the kitchen, fully aware that his wife was in the midst of a breakdown, a breakdown they would all pay for.

“It’s in the Bible,” she said for the hundredth time.

“Don’t give me that crap about the Bible!” Then, softening, he went to her. “Honey, you don’t really believe any of this, do you?”

She had wanted to cry for days, and now, finally, she permitted it.

“Honey, don’t . . .”

“I’m not crazy, Lou . . .”

“Nobody said you were, but . . .”

“It’s in the Bible.” And she buried her face in his chest, sobbing.

He held her, felt the wave of sympathy and love for her, which gave way too quickly to thoughts of doctors (hospitals?), treatment, taking care of Andrea on his own, the whole dreadful litany of a home broken apart by illness.

“I can prove it,” she said suddenly, pushing away from him, going to the back door.

“Honey, don’t . . .” But before she could hear him, Susan was out the door. She rang for the service elevator as Lou followed her out of the apartment.

“Come inside.”

“No, I want to prove it.”

“Susan, please, we can deal with it ourselves” (without the building’s staff telling the other tenants).

“No.”

“Please . . .”

“No!”

The service elevator screeched into motion and in a moment, the door was opened by a gray-­haired man.

“Abe,” Susan said, “is Tito still here?”

“No, Mrs. Reed. Tito’s gone. Is there anything I can do?”

“Is he on tomorrow?”

“Tito? Didn’t you hear?”

“Hear what?” And she saw, in her mind, Tito destroyed so that he couldn’t help her. Destroyed, struck down, smote.

“Tito retired. Today was his last day. I thought everybody knew.”

They went back into the apartment, Susan, grateful that Tito hadn’t been harmed (he could have been, now she knew that), Lou, almost sick with worry himself.

And the phone rang.

“Don’t answer it,” Susan said.

“Honey . . .”

“Don’t answer it!”

He did. It was Susan’s mother. He held the phone out to her and at first she refused it, but then, knowing she had to win him over, she did as he asked her.

“Hello.” And she tried not to listen, not to hear what might be on the other end of the line (now that she alone could hear it).

“Susan?” It was as Lou said, her mother’s voice. “I have bad news.”

“What?” and though she asked, she had a sickening feeling she already knew.

“It’s Jimmy,” the older woman went on, herself crying. “It’s Jimmy.”

Susan listened, numb, and when her mother had finished, she said, “Take something, Momma. Take something and lie down. I’ll come over,” and she hung up.

Seeing her face, ashen, in shock, Lou asked, “What?”

“My cousin,” she said, almost without emotion. “He was in a car accident.”

“Jesus, honey . . .” He started toward her.

“And the firstborn will die.”

“What?”

She looked up at him. How could he still not understand? But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Her body was pumped full of glandular secretions which, added to the lack of sleep, prevented any further stress.

“It’s in the Bible,” she said. “The plagues Moses brought against Egypt.” And she yearned for sleep.