Forever, in Pieces Read online

  I honked the horn a thousand times, gritted my teeth, and sped to our hotel as quickly as possible. After checking in, throwing our suitcases in the rooms, and grabbing some chilled drinks, we ventured out to the beach. It was only a few blocks from where we were staying, so we walked.

  As we crested the tiny dunes that separated the ocean from our sight, Nick let out a startled “Whoa!” Although not religious by any sense of the word, Cara murmured “My god.” Sam simply continued playing with the toy in his hand, oblivious to non-material wonder. For my own part, I froze, mouth agape, and felt a soothing blankness descend over my being.

  What lay before us was unreal. It was strangely alien and intensely personal. The water had been transformed. It was as if waves of shimmering gemstones pounded the shoreline, shifting color as they rolled in. Red then blue, yellow then green. Purple. Orange. Back to red. A rippling kaleidoscope. Hypnotizing and exhilarating at once. The entire visual spectrum had been rendered into a field of fluidity; this phenomenon, whatever its cause or its purpose, was certainly more than a mere tincture in the tides. It was beauty. It was art. If I hadn’t known it was the ocean—the real, phenomenal ocean—I would have sworn that the waves, which seemed to stretch out beyond the bounds of eternity, were a masterful expressionist canvas somehow charged with motion.

  Cara, Nick, and Sam couldn’t wait to wade in and stake out a spot next to the hundreds of men, women, and children already flailing about in the water. They practically sprinted to join the dripping throngs. I, however, was exhausted from the nonstop drive, so I found an open space among the patchwork quilt of beach-blankets and sunbathers, set up a lounge chair and an umbrella, and tried to relax.

  Laughter rode the breeze. The heavy sweetness of tanning lotion hung over passing bodies. My chair hugged me snugly. All was peace. All was perfection.

  Except for the lack of birds.

  I didn’t notice at first, but there were no gulls on the shore, nor any gliding through the air over the coast. No pelicans bobbed atop the surface of the gulf, either. I knew from news reports that this was to be expected. Birds, fish, crustaceans, manatees and dolphins: the whole aquatic community had disappeared when the tides turned vibrant. But to see its effect, to experience it firsthand and realize the traumatic breadth of the chasm that had split normalcy to allow magic and wonder free passage, was wholly different than reading a website in the transparent mundaneness of my living room.

  Despite the unsettling lack of fauna, I managed to drift off to sleep for maybe half an hour or forty-five minutes. No one bothered me. I was floating in a joyously extended moment somewhere between Florida and oblivion.

  Then the screaming began.

  At first, it was only an annoyance, an unswattable gnat buzzing in my outer ear. I awoke, grumbled, and readjusted my position; surely, I assumed, the ambient noise would soon return to pleasing uniformity. Any screaming must have been the result of a misbehaving child or a domestic dispute. It would subside. There was no doubt that it would subside.

  But it didn’t.

  The screaming continued, and it grew louder, more primal, more frantic. I opened my eyes and squinted against the harsh noonday rays. Cara was sitting on a blanket beside me, staring at something in the distance; the boys had apparently been digging tunnels in the sand but had stopped to watch the same thing that held Cara’s attention. I followed their gaze along the shoreline to a spot maybe fifty or sixty yards away. There, knee-deep in the sparkling rainbow water, a middle-aged woman wearing a retina-searing floral print sundress grappled with a generously tanned man wrapped in what appeared to be a pink bathrobe. The woman was alternately shrieking and sobbing incoherent words and phrases while tugging on the man’s arm in what seemed to be an attempt to pull him back to the beach. He was unresponsive, though, and continued to stand frozen in place, facing the vibrantly stricken gulf. Not once did his focus shift to the woman.

  The scene confirmed my suspicions of domestic disturbance.

  “Trouble in paradise,” I muttered to Cara.

  She shook her head.

  “I’m not so sure. They came from back toward the city and sprinted across the beach to the water. She was chasing him. I mean, I don’t get it. Why is he wearing a bathrobe? And, look, it’s only pink in the middle and the bottom. The top is white. I think he’s bleeding or was around someone who was bleeding.”

  Cara was always more inquisitive than me. She wanted to know, to understand, to experience. I just wanted to be.

  I sat up and studied the man in more detail. She was right. His robe was only pink up to the shoulders. Odd, but still, what did it matter? It was a wife and husband, fighting while on vacation. Nothing new or interesting in any way. I heard sirens in the distance but assumed no connection. Given the vast number of people that meandered on and around the beach, there was bound to be rowdy, drunken debauchery, petty crime, and minor accidents. Again, I was unconcerned.

  I was about to lie back and relax when the screaming woman yanked hard on the man’s arm and tore away his robe, revealing the hidden reality of his torso. It was a glistening mass of exposed muscle, fat, and bone. From the top of the man’s chest to the middle of his abdomen ran a gaping wound, ragged around the edges, as if a predatory animal had gnawed at his body. I thought I saw part of a bruised purple organ—his liver or stomach, possibly—partially hanging out in the salty air.

  Cara gasped and ordered the boys to “come here.”

  The sirens grew louder.

  The tanned man seemed ignorant of his horrific injury. He did nothing other than stare unflinchingly at the horizon. I couldn’t believe he was on his feet and conscious; how a person could survive an injury of such magnitude was beyond my meager comprehension.

  A lifeguard and two paramedics came running from the direction of the wailing emergency vehicles. They approached the couple and immediately set to work. The lifeguard quieted the woman while the paramedics attempted to usher the man back toward dry land. He didn’t budge.

  A sizable crowd had begun to form around the scene and it was increasingly difficult to see what was happening as more and more gawkers came to stare. A wall of bodies teetered between my family and the couple, so what happened next I only caught in glimpses and sound bytes.

  The paramedics had, apparently, tried to pick up the injured man and carry him away from the water. But they never reached dry sand. Instead, a series of frantic splashes wet the air and were immediately followed by a gristly ripping noise and a single male scream. An echoed chorus of screams burst from the dense crowd. The gawkers began scattering. I stood, but could only see the tanned man walking back into the waves, one of his hands shining red. There was more screaming.

  As a pair of police officers forged their way past us, through the dispersing crowd, one of the paramedics dragged the other one, unconscious, onto the beach. Half his face was missing. His nose was a black, bubbling hole. One eye dangled from its socket. His skull was exposed entirely. I could even see his tongue working inside his mouth. By then, I couldn’t think; I could only react.

  I reached down, grabbed Cara’s hand, squeezed, and yelled “Get Sam. We’re going back to the hotel. Now.”

  Despite their weight, we each picked up a child and jogged away from the violence. We didn’t stop until, panting and near cardiopulmonary collapse, we reached the motel.

  That night, tired, angry, and confused, we sat our room and watched the news. The incident we had witnessed had played out in various forms up and down the gulf coast. Along Clearwater’s beaches alone, thirty-six instances of similar “severe physical trauma” followed by “psychotic fixation on the water” had occurred. Experts assured the viewing audience that the coloration phenomenon had no bearing on these incidents.

  Under the order of the CDC, all the beaches along the gulf coast of Florida were, once again, closed until further notice.

  I remember standing on the tiny balcony of our motel that evening, long after Nick and Sam and Cara had
fallen asleep. I looked to the west, to the sky, and I saw the full scope of the miracle. I saw the breathtaking beauty; I saw the alienness; I saw what was to become the symbol of pure horror. And I was mesmerized by it. The tides lit the firmament and blotted out the stars. In the glowing bursts of primary color, I wondered if God existed. I wondered if I existed.

  I knew there were no answers.

  A day passed and news crews swarmed Clearwater, interviewing anyone with an opinion. Dire rumors began circulating across the internet. People came forward with startling information. Self-identified family members and friends of the violent beachgoers claimed that their unfortunate loved ones had contracted a disease that dissolved organic tissue. The phrases “flesh-eating bacteria,” “radioactive waste,” and “acidic pollution” were all batted about. The disease, these people said, began as a tiny spot of irritation—like a bug bite—but quickly developed into a full-blown invasion of the body, consuming flesh and muscle as it went. Nerve fibers, said the families and friends, were left untouched. Medical personnel who had treated the apparently infected individuals remained silent.

  Darker yet were the stirrings in the depths of the digital sea that suggested that the infected had, in fact, succumbed to the illness before bolting for the gulf. Reanimated dead, some said. Zombies.

  Ridiculous.

  Impossible.

  Impossible as unexplainable glowing waves.

  Cara and the boys and I drove south to St. Petersburg and took in a Rays game that second day. It wasn’t on our itinerary, but both Cara and I needed to put some distance between ourselves and the gulf. Nick and Sam didn’t care one way or the other. To them, new was new, interesting was interesting; they didn’t carry the weight of multiplicitous signification yet.

  While we were at the game, several hundred more people had wandered into the water off Clearwater beach in what was being called “a dazed, near-catatonic state.” The CDC wrangled them all and placed them in quarantine at an undisclosed location.

  We ate at a pizza buffet for dinner. I kissed Cara and hugged the boys. We talked about pirates and sea monsters. We laughed. This was our vacation.

  That night, Nick woke from a fitful sleep and complained that he felt tingly. Cara found a bright yellow spot on his shoulder unlike any rash or pimple or insect bite I’d ever seen. Near dawn, I heard Cara vomiting in the bathroom. Sammy slept for sixteen hours.

  And still hundreds more limped and shuffled their way into the waves.

  The National Guard was called in to barricade the beach; they stretched out lines of razor wire and posted armed sentries every five hundred feet. Even with these precautions, droves of the potentially comatose or possibly dead managed to slip through undetected. Footage from news helicopters revealed that the number of “watchers,” as they had been labeled by the media, was growing exponentially. On the beaches of some of the more populous coastal cities and towns, they stood elbow to elbow.

  The third afternoon of our vacation, we played miniature golf and licked ice cream cones. Nick kept scratching his back. Cara rushed to the restroom several times. Sam barely moved. After dark, we saw a new Pixar movie and gazed at the illuminated sky. We all spoke in hushed timbres. Lying in bed with Cara’s shallow, strangely musty breath on my neck, I hoped that a cure for “the Tide”—or, at very least, a cause—would soon be discovered. I could feel a shroud hanging between my family and myself, but I lacked the tools to slice through it. I felt like a gravedigger waiting for the funeral party to arrive.

  By then, the condition had finally had garnered a painfully vague and obvious name within the popular vernacular: the “Tide.” Special news coverage kicked into hyperdrive. Every TV station and news website was running the same story. It went something like this: the infected “watchers” were largely unaggressive and only attacked when forcibly removed from the water, so the National Guard was going to institute a new policy—those infected by the Tide were allowed to reach the beach unencumbered; anyone uninfected, however, was to be prevented from coming into contact with the water at all costs. “Shoot to injure” was the slogan of choice.

  The fourth day we ventured across the bulbous Tampa Bay to Busch Gardens. Sam had to lie down several times. Cara didn’t eat or drink. Nick was jumpy, a livewire of uncontrollably nervous energy. No one wanted to ride anything. I had no problem with that. The screams of the people on the roller coasters reverberated in the primeval pit where I stored my fear. Fun was too close to terror. We saw some exotic animals, bought some t-shirts, and returned to the motel.

  That was the last time we went out.

  When I watched the evening news, all the talk concerned the revelation that the “watchers” were verifiably deceased. Their major organs had ceased functioning. One minor caveat existed, though: a portion of the temporal lobe of their brains remained active. Somehow, electrical charges were still firing in a tiny node deep within their gray matter. Scientists didn’t know how or why it was occurring; they also had no idea how it related to the pathological ocean “watching” behavior. It was a certainty, however, that contact with the prismatic water was the culprit. In an instant, the miraculous became the diabolic.

  A full, unfettered realization smacked me across the forehead. Cara and the boys had been in the gulf waters. They were going to die. They were going to end up as watchers. It was just a matter of time.

  I didn’t close my eyes that night.

  The next day it rained. Cara threw up blood. Sam didn’t leave the bed. Nick’s yellow spot had turned gangrenously dark and now covered his entire flank. He scratched until it oozed black pus. I tried to take care of my family, but I was useless. I could bring take-out back to the motel; I could get them ice; I could fluff the pillows. I couldn’t tell them it would be okay.

  Late in the afternoon, they all fell asleep and I silently crept away to the beach. I had to see the future.

  The streets were somber as hospital corridors. Families strolled by without definite purpose. The psychics and paranormal experts were still around, but rather than offering theories they offered counseling and reassurances of otherworldly realms; the self-ordained preachers remained as well, now ministering exclusively from the Book of Revelation.

  The road running north and south along the beachhead gave the sensation of a war zone. Guardsmen cradling automatic rifles stood before the luxury hotels and high-rise condominiums. Two coils of razor wire four or five feet high ran the length of the road and separated the beach from the town. Throngs of people crowded along the barricade. Small breaks in the wire divider—checkpoints where “watchers” could enter, I supposed—led onto the beach.

  Visions of internment camps danced in my head.

  Through the wire, I glimpsed a group of the dead. They gazed out and over the delightfully sparkling waves, unmoving and unspeaking, a dozen zen masters achieving peace, harmony, and unity through death.

  I wondered if they were waiting for something. I wondered if I should be watching, too.

  I sauntered back to the motel and partook in my own morbid waiting game.

  Over the next two days, I had several pleading conversations with Cara.

  “I want you to go to the hospital. I want to take Nick and Sam,” I’d cajole.

  Blood running down the corner of her mouth, she’d shake her head and croak, “No. There’s nothing they can do. They’ll stick us in a room and study us. They can’t heal us.”

  It was true. No medicinal breakthroughs were forthcoming. But I didn’t want to let my family die in a fifty-nine dollar per night motel. They deserved something better, something I couldn’t provide.

  As the end of the week neared, they collapsed. Within six hours, I lost them all. I can barely manage to recount those hours, even in abbreviation. I don’t want to. But I have to face the truth. If I tell it quickly and give only the most basic details, I can manage.

  Sam was the first to go. He winked out in the middle of the night. Simply stopped breathing. A pool of bloo
d had formed under his tiny, spindly body. I flipped him over and discovered that he had been bleeding from his nether regions. He’d been consumed from the inside, like Cara, who went in the morning. On her shaking way to the bathroom, she doubled over and fell to one side. Blood gushed from her mouth. I carried her beautiful, shapely form back to our bed and laid it among the pillows. Nick was the last. He’d scratched his way through skin and was working on tearing back muscle when he spasmed hard and fast, then went completely limp. I checked his pulse; it was missing. They were gone. None of them had groaned or screamed or made the slightest sound. That fact still bothers me. Why didn’t they rage against the Tide? Why didn’t they fight the hideous beauty that had seeped into their pores? Why, goddamnit?

  I didn’t have the capacity to sob then. I was utterly drained, a shell as devoid of emotion as the corpses of my family. I kept thinking How could this happen? How are they all dead? We were happy and excited just a week ago. How did the universe invert so rapidly?

  I’ve cried many times since then, but not the day they died.

  After Nick had passed, I sat on the edge of the room’s radiator and waited. I flicked on the news; I flicked off the news. I thought about the calls I’d have to make. Fifteen minutes ticked by. Maybe half an hour. Then they stirred.

  Each one rose slowly, achingly. I could hear ligaments popping and tearing. These bodies were not meant to push forward; they were meant to decompose. There was no fuel to propel them, no flowing oil to lubricate their gears. My wife and my sons were broken machines being dragged to a fantastic scrap heap.