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Imagine you are Iain Monroe.
Imagine you have a beautiful, sensitive, intelligent little boy and you couldn’t love him more than you do right now, you couldn’t possibly. You drive him into the city a few times a year to see the races because he’s always loved cars, and you’ve always loved the way he turns to you with his bright blue eyes and toothy smile after the finish line is crossed. Soon this little boy grows up and he is even more beautiful, and sensitive, and intelligent, but he grows up sad as well, and distant. And yet you love him even more, you couldn’t possibly love him more than you do right now. That’s what you tell your wife, teary-eyed, when you see him off at the train station. She smiles, and nods, and cries into your shoulder. She thinks he’s too young to leave, and you agree, and you try to remember what you were like at seventeen.
For the first time in longer than you can remember, dinner is just the two of you that evening. You don’t eat much, and neither does she; maybe because your muscle memory is telling you to wait for your son to join you at the table. She says she can’t get the thought out of her head that he looked like he was shipping off to war. You start to wonder if you made a horrible mistake. You tell her he’ll be okay.
He comes home every Christmas and Easter and he seems well, but preoccupied, and your wife always bakes too much, her joy in seeing her baby boy again evident in the roasts and pies, her worry that he isn’t taking care of himself almost tangible in the casseroles and cakes. She always asks him if the city isn’t too big and loud for him, and he always laughs politely and casts his eyes downward, and he never really says anything and maybe he doesn’t seem that well at all, now that you think about it.
He says once that he’s going to America because apparently the city wasn’t big or loud enough, and a couple Christmases pass without him. Your wife prays every night, she always has, but now you join her. You were never a very religious man, but if it can bring her comfort, maybe it would do the same for you. When he returns from America emptier than before, your wife continues to pray alone.
It’s a rainy afternoon in March when the phone rings. You answer it and an unfamiliar voice apologizes, and tells you what hospital he’s at, and apologizes again. The static on the line crawls into your ear and burrows behind your eyes and your sluggish heart beating in your chest just feels like the other shoe dropping.
You need her but she’s not there; out for groceries or at her book club, you’re not sure where, so you are the only one to hear the noise that comes from your throat after hanging up the phone. Either you are shaking like a leaf or the rest of the world is, but somehow you make it into his room and you sit on his bed, and you pick up the framed photograph of the two people who make up your entire world. One of them you’ll never see again. After a while you hear the front door opening and she is humming as she takes her shoes off in the hallway and your bones are too heavy to move so you wait until she finds you. You idly wonder how long he waited until someone found him.
She finds you. She finds you and looks at you and she just knows. She says nothing as she sits down besides you and takes the photograph so that you are both holding it now, you are both holding it now. You put your head on her shoulder and everything is quiet and still. The two of you stay there for hours.
When the Rising happens you are afraid, but afraid in the same way you are afraid in a nightmare, in which the terror is almost sickening but somewhere in your mind you can sense that it’s not real. Except this time it is real and though the voices on the radio tell you that it’s relatively safe here, the neighbors claimed to have seen a few just wandering in the street last night, and and soon enough there is an attack at the restaurant where you and - where you used to get fish n’ chips. You sit down with her that night in the living room and the two of you discuss what to do. You hesitate before telling her you want to move, that you’ve heard about the safe houses they built in the city, but she cuts you off in that quiet way she’s always had. She says, simply, that she can’t leave this house, and as she says this you know you never could, either, and that’s the end of that. You continue talking through the night, at first about whether the rations were going to hold out, but then your words turn to times gone past, memories that make her smile and make your heart feel like a heart again. Eventually she falls asleep in your arms and you say a prayer for the first time in a long time, a silent gratitude that nights like this could still exist in this nightmare world.
Some weeks later you are brushing your teeth before bed when you hear a noise downstairs. You pause, thinking it might be her book falling to the floor because she falls asleep reading sometimes, and think nothing more of it as you head back into the bedroom, but then you hear another noise. Like stuttering footsteps, nothing like your wife’s graceful, quiet-as-a-mouse movements. A shock of fear shoots through you like whiskey. You try not to gag on it, grabbing the crossbow you keep at your bedside and taking the stairs two at a time until you trip and tumble down the rest of the way. She doesn’t call out to ask if you’re okay, or even to laugh at your clumsiness, or to scold you for overreacting and tell you to put that horrible thing away and come to bed, which is why it takes you a few minutes to summon the strength to stand up again and face whatever is awaiting you in the living room. Your cloudy thoughts spill into your mouth and you say her name aloud.
She’s just lying there, parts of her, lying there, wake up, you have to wake up, and he’s there, wake up, and your muddled mind flashes to those roasts she would make for him for Christmas and you vomit onto the carpet. The acid in your throat tells you you’re awake.
He’s waiting for you when you come back up, just standing there, and you want to ask her what to do but you can’t. And he’s, it’s, this isn't your son, this is some sickness of the earth, but it looks an awful lot like your Simon, doesn't it? There’s a resemblance, it’s not just a hallucination or the outward imagined sum of fears so deep down you never knew you had them, but this thing - it is not beautiful or sensitive or intelligent, and you do not love it, not at all, and yet you still freeze with your homemade crossbow clutched in your trembling hands as this thing-that-is-not-Simon stares at you and into you. All you can do is scream. You don’t feel like yourself anymore; rather, some animal, some remnant that does not exist outside of a pained, inhuman wail. You scream until your lungs give out and some part of you registers that the thing runs off at this sudden noise but you keep screaming until your insides burn, and then after you can’t scream anymore, you weep for all that you've lost.
Nothing happens after that.
The television says it was a disease. The television says they’re being treated. The television says they’re coming home. The phone rings.
He’s sitting across the table from you and he’s speaking but you’re having a hard time hearing him over the brightness of this place and the darkness in your head. You’ve had plenty of time over the years to imagine what you would say to him if you had another chance. I’m sorry, you would say first, and then I wish I had never let you leave, and I should have known you were hurting. You don’t say any of those things. Instead you are busy trying to convince yourself that this is a good thing that's finally happening to you but you’re distracted because you can’t remember what that grinning boy at the racetrack looked like. He asks about her. I can’t do this, you say.
You bring him home because that’s what they tell you to do, and because there’s still some small hope in your mind that this really is your boy. There's an even smaller hope that this isn't, but you try not to think about that. Either way, the second he steps inside the house the air around you becomes heavy and hard to breathe. It's a gut reaction, a violation, a walking flashback to somewhere you never want to be again, and you are acutely aware that he’s watching you. You can see now that it doesn't matter what you hope - the facts are, he is here and she is not, and his eyes are the wrong shade of blue.
He is in the house with you for nine hours before you come to a decision. It’s not formed in your mind, or even in your heart, but instead formed of one too many sleepless nights, and the smell of her hand lotion, and the images that have been burned into your mind like scar tissue. You’ve run out of happiness and you’ve run out of sadness and you’ve run out of fear and all that is left inside you is rage so you get up in the night and enter his room. You are not sure what you’ve come here to do until you begin throwing his things in a bag - you throw your things in the bag too, the parts of you that loved your son, the parts that made you leave the front door unlocked years after he left home the first time, and the last. You stop only when you find yourself picking up the framed photograph of the two people who make up your entire world. One of them you’ll never see again. The other won't stop haunting you.
You don't even have to touch him. You scream at him until he runs away and you wonder why you must keep repeating these same scenes over and over, in the places where your life folds over his, of you staying and waiting and him leaving and returning and leaving again, and you think maybe he feels the same because he doesn't fight back. He doesn't say a word to you, just takes his bag and walks out the door. You watch him as he leaves, and you would feel shame if your body wasn't already filled and shaking with anger. You know she wouldn't have wanted this, but you can't afford to think like that anymore.
After he is gone you realize you’ve cut yourself on the broken picture frame you were holding so you go into the bathroom. You watch your hand bleed for a moment before running it under the sink, waiting for the water to get hot so you might feel it. You happen to glance at yourself in the mirror and see a look in your eye that reminds you of a seventeen year old boy at a train station.