Keep Me Alive

It took me six days of living with Anya to realize that she didn't know how to read. Six days of spending every waking moment with her, apart from the time we spent in the bathroom or the few minutes everyday that she talked in private with Ryan, and I never noticed that she couldn't read. I felt like such an idiot for not knowing, but in my defense, she looked at books all the time. Every time we walked into a house, she went straight for the books and flipped through them, discarding the fiction and the historical stuff and keeping the ones with technical information. She would look carefully at the pictures, and I thought she was reading the labels, but I guess she was just deciding if they looked useful. I didn't even figure out that she was illiterate on my own; I got curious and listened in on one of her conversations with Ryan. She handed him one of the books she had picked up from the houses we had been to that afternoon and he quickly glanced at the title before saying, "It's about electric generators." She put the book back in her bag and took out the next one. "Instructions on fun physics experiments for kids," Ryan said, and Anya tossed the book over the boat's edge, into the water.

I did not bring it up with her because I saw no point. It did not change anything, and it certainly did not change the fact that both Ryan and I depended on her for our survival. Ryan was better off than I was, because he was as strong and intimidating as a grizzly bear. Without Anya, Ryan might have survived a few weeks through sheer brute strength before he did something stupid enough to get him killed. I, though, wouldn't have lasted more than a few days. I knew this fact well enough before I even knew they existed. I knew that if I stayed alone any longer, I would starve to death or kill myself or electrocute myself by accident or something. I'm the type of man who was made for the regular world, who was made to work in an office and take the subway to work and watch reality television in the evenings. I was not made for the world I ended up in.

The day Anya and Ryan broke into my house, I thought I had finally gone crazy. I could hear them speaking, but could not make out what they were saying and I thought that all those weeks of solitude had finally broken my mind down, that I was making people up. But then Anya laughed and it was such a deliciously human noise that I stopped dead in my tracks at the door between the living room and the dining room. They walked in, talking and laughing, and only stopped when I started sobbing.

"Shit, there's someone here," Ryan said, and took a step back.

Anya did not seem entirely surprised, even when I dropped down on my knees. "Look, he is half-dead," she said. "Help him up."

Ryan turned to her. "What if he's sick? What if he caught it?"

"He would be dead by now," she said. She walked up to me and put a hand under my chin, lifting my face up so that I could see her better. I had not seen a morsel of food in eight days, but she was plump and very tan. "You have books? In the house?" she asked.
At the time, I did not even think it was a strange question. Perhaps I was so grateful that there was anyone around to ask me a question that it did not matter what that question was. "I burned them all," I said, my throat dry, "to keep warm."

She looked disappointed, but did not say anything. After a moment, Ryan came over and lifted me up and together they walked me out of the house. The wind was rough that day and kicked up the smell of all the bodies still strewn in the street. Without Ryan's help, I probably would not have been able to walk. Their bodies were warm and their arms, covered in layers of scratchy fabric, were wrapped around my torso to keep me upright. I could barely keep my head up, and asked them where we were going.

"To boat," Anya said. "We have food. Also clothes and medicines. We can fix you up very quick."

I tried to clear my throat but could not muster the energy, "No, I mean, where are we going?"

"Canada," Ryan said, looking straight ahead. He would not look down at the bodies. "There are still some towns up there that made it through. Heard it on the CB radio. Can't use the roads, they're too clogged up with bodies and cars, so we got a boat sittin' in the harbor."

I fell in love with them the way only someone pulled back from the very brink of death could. I loved them because they saved me; I loved them because they were the only other people still alive that I knew of; I loved them because they were the first people I had spoken to in months. They were like angels who had arrived just when I thought there was nothing left to save me. And so it did not matter that Anya could not read, not in English or Russian, and it did not matter that Ryan was so scared of a disease he was obviously immune to that he washed his hands and face every half hour, because I would love them for as long as I could remember them.

Ryan died a week before we reached the town that had sent out the radio signal. He fell through the rotted floor of a house we were searching and broke his neck. Anya made me help her as she buried the body and when we were done, she stopped speaking. She would not say a word, not to say good morning or ask if I was feeling better or anything. Her thoughts had receded so deeply and quickly into her mind that in their haste they had taken her words with them. I had never had a chance to ask how she and Ryan met.

We did not break into homes after that, but she became so fierce in all her actions that I would not have been surprised to see her clothes catch on fire. She cooked our food and cleaned our quarters and guided the boat with such an intensity that I was sure Ryan's death had narrowed her focus to keeping the two of us alive. It was not until we arrived in the town to find it already abandoned that I realized the truth. As she screamed and cried and tossed stones at all the windows that were still whole, I realized that although I loved her with all the painful force that I had loved Ryan with, she did not love me back. Anya had never seen me the way I saw her: she was not thankful to have another human around. With each window she shattered I knew that she had never seen me as anything other than a thing she needed to keep alive, and now that she did not know how to do that, she would hate me for torturing her with my presence.