Cataclysm Baby

Travis, Travon, Tremaine

When we are sure the hospital is empty, only then do we leave the youngest to hold the mother’s hand, to stroke the clammy baldness of her head while the rest of us search and scavenge, bulge backpacks to bursting with clean gauze, ample medicines, new needles for her drips and fresh inserts for her catheters, everything else we will need for her care.

For ourselves, we take just what last food remains in the commissary, what few blankets we cannot go without.

We take as little as possible, because their mother is already so much to carry.

At the top of the spiral stairs we collapse her gurney, fold its wheels beneath its chassis, and then we lift, each as much as he can: Myself at the bottom, walking the heavy end backward into the decline, and then my small sons at the head of the bed, doing the best their little bodies can do.

At each landing, I bark orders, beg my boys to lift, lift higher, over the railing and around the corner, and then again we descend, again we dive through the deep toward the new dark below.

For twenty floors, we do this. We do this for two hundred vertical feet, and then we are in the lobby, then across the paper-strewn reception, then through the handprint-smeared glass doors and out onto the street.

What destruction greets us, surrounds us, hangs above us: The high-rises swaying in their foundations. The towers towering. The diseased dead crashed everywhere, up and over and around all the abandoned cars and trucks, the overturned carts and stalls.

And then the sky spitting black rain, and then my boys each opening their umbrellas, crowding in close to keep their sick mother dry.

I drag their mother. I drag their mother’s gurney. I drag the gurney flat like a sledge, with their mother atop it, with the boys and their umbrellas huddled close because the rain never stops.

At every rest, we do what the doctors once did, what they taught us to do before they fled: My boys know the names of their mother’s medicines, have learned every sequenced step involved in her care. Beneath their umbrellas they change her dressings, inject appropriate doses into her ports, pour cans of gray formula into her feeding tube until her belly bloats, until her waste-bag is ready for the emptying.

One after the other, they pump her legs to keep the muscles straight, flex her arms to do the same, because still they believe she might one day need them, because on our long walk I tell the boys that when I am gone she might once again carry them, as we have carried her so far.

We make weeks of slow progress across the city, until one morning I wake up fevered, the sound of my new cough enough to set my youngest to bawling, to clutching at my pant leg. By the next morning, my muscles have already begun to tighten, as the boy’s mother complained hers did, back when no doctor knew what these signs portended.

I look around at my three boys, my exhausted sons arrayed, each smaller than the next, each spaced too far apart to fill another’s shoes, let alone mine, and then I do the only thing I can: I take my oldest son aside, and I tell him that I will go on alone, that alone I will enter the rumble and ramble to prepare the way for their passage.

Through my hacking cough, I tell him that I love him, and that I love his brothers, and that he is the one who must watch over the others from now on.

Don’t go, he says. We need you yet.

No, I say. He has his mother, still alive, still sleeping. He has his brothers.

He has enough, I tell him. What he has, it will have to be enough.

And then he is the man of the family, and then I tell him so: Two separate events, happening so close together that I can barely separate them afterward, when I am crawling alone through streets of panic-crushed cars, disease-fat corpses, caught up in the tight spaces the mother-laden gurney would never have fit, no matter how hard I tugged.

And then the sins of the spirit, punished upon the flesh; until I cannot move, until my muscles clutch into paralysis.

How much later is it when I hear their voices following, coming behind me through the dark, shouting my name, my title, reminders of my renounced fatherhood?

And then their little hands lifting me onto the empty gurney.

And then their ignoring me when I ask or try to ask, Where is your mother?

In silence the younger two move my joints, bend my elbows and shoulders and knees to busy me while the oldest wipes clean a used needle on his stained trousers, then seeks its entrance to my veins. As they prepare me for transit, all I see are their determined faces, foreheads bent with their decision to trade one near-dead parent for the other—and also the mistake they have made, leaving behind the only person they were ever tasked with caring for, all so that they might preserve what’s left of me, this shell of an undeserving father, who tried so hard to abandon them first.