Soft Apocalypse

Chapter 2 ART SHOW

The buttery-sweet smell of the candy bars made me a little nuts as I stacked them in the wire receptacles near the register. I fantasized about squatting behind the counter, out of sight of Amos the Enforcer, and scarfing a few down. But I couldn’t afford to lose my job, and besides, I couldn’t steal from Ruplu. Weird as it was to have a nineteen-year-old boss, the guy was gold, and I owed him for hiring me. Plus my momma taught me not to steal.

Having so many different colorful packages in my line of sight hurt my brain after a while. Racks of chips and crackers, gums and sodas, cigarettes and beer, energy packs and water filters, magazines, 3-D porn—there was barely a square foot of blank space for my eyes to rest on.

Amos stared out the window, arms folded, pistol tucked into his belt.

“How’s it going, Amos?” I said.

“Just fine. Just fine,” he said without turning his head. Amos wasn’t much on talking. His qualifications for the job seemed to be that he owned a gun and was eager to use it.

The door jingled. An incredibly skinny woman came in, her hair so white it looked blonde, two fingers clutching a cigarette. She wandered the aisles, whispering to herself. From behind, you could easily mistake her for a girl in her twenties. If you did, her shrunken, wrinkled, toothless face would give you a jolt when she turned around. She walked with the knock-kneed energy of a godflash addict, which she probably was. She grabbed a packet of malted milk balls and brought them to the counter.

“I’m doing fine,” she said, holding out a five, taking a pull on her cigarette, not noticing that I hadn’t actually asked.

“That’s good to hear,” I said, handing back her change. Amos watched her go, alert to any sign of a grab and dash.

Another woman put a box of tampons on the counter, opened her overstuffed purse and dug through it.

“Twelve seventy-six,” I said. It still felt strange to hear my voice say convenience store cashier things, to watch my hands accept payment and make change from the register. I had figured I was done with these sorts of jobs the day I graduated from Emory.

The woman gave an exasperated sigh, pulled a couple of things out of her purse and set them on the counter: Wallet. Key ring. Heat Taser. She continued searching.

“Wouldn’t your money be in the wallet?” I asked.

She smiled. “You’d think so, but no.” Her bra strap was hanging out of her shirt sleeve. “Um, could you put that in a bag?” she said without looking up.

It took me a second to get why she was asking me to do what I was obviously going to do in a moment anyway. A seven a.m. purchase of tampons at a convenience store. Emergency. She didn’t relish everyone in the store knowing about her urgent feminine needs. “Oh.” I snared a plastic bag from under the counter and stuffed the tampons into it. “Sorry.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem.”

“Ah!” She handed me a twenty.

“I guess there are certain items that need to be bagged immediately,” I said as I snared coins out of the till with two fingers.

“Yes. Tampons, pregnancy kits…”

“Pornography,” I offered.

“Good one,” she said, pointing at me. She was pretty in a slightly harsh, Eastern European sort of way. Dirty-blonde hair, her front teeth crooked but white. A little older than me, thirty-three or so.

I tried to think of something else to say, but my mind was suddenly a vast wasteland. I thought we were flirting. I was pretty clueless when it came to flirting, but I thought maybe we were, and I was dropping the ball.

“Do you live around here?” she asked.

“About four blocks away, on East Jones,” I said, silently counting the bills into her hand. “Where do you live?”

“Southside.”

“Wow, you’re far from home.” Southside was a good four miles away. Usually I was leery about long-distance relationships, but it was so easy to look into her blue eyes; it felt like I could go hours without blinking if I could just keep looking into them.

“I was in class. SCAD.”

The Savannah College of Art and Design. Great reputation, outrageous tuition, no scholarships. Rich girl. I was probably misinterpreting polite kindness for flirtatious interest, given my station in life. I was wearing a name tag, for god’s sake.

“What are you studying?” I asked.

“Graphic design. Change of career—I worked in corporate recruiting for ten years.”

“Interesting.” There was another awkward pause. She hovered, waited for me to say something. The only other customers in the store were puttering in the back, searching for just the right flavor of Gatorade. Amos was staring into the street, watching for marauders.

“You ever make your way down here at night, to see bands or anything?” I asked. Why not, what did I have to lose?

“No. Too rough around here at night. I tend to hang out in Southside.”

“Mmm,” I said. If she knew the question was meant to test the waters, she wasn’t biting.

“You should come to Southside some time,” she said, shrugging the shoulder that had lost its bra strap.

“Where would I go, if I came to Southside?”

She shrugged and smiled. “Snowstorm is fun.”

“You think you’ll be hanging out at Snowstorm Saturday night?”

“Possibly,” she said as she slung her purse over her shoulder. She waved, winked, and headed for the door. I was impressed—almost no one can wink without it seeming hokey and contrived, but she pulled it off.

My nineteen-year-old boss appeared on the sidewalk outside; he and the girl whose name I forgot to ask passed each other in the doorway.

“Hello, hello,” Ruplu said, grinning as he joined me behind the counter. “All is well?”

I nodded.

“Good. It’s payday. How many hours did you put in this week?” He opened the register.

I never had to remind Ruplu it was payday. “Forty-four,” I said. He counted two hundred forty-two dollars onto the counter. It was amazing, the way the guy trusted me. It was reckless. Lots of people thought they were reckless—fast drivers, kick boxers—but trusting a stranger to tell you how many hours he’d worked, that was truly reckless, and I admired him for it.

I namaste’d Ruplu and headed for the exit, squeezing the bills inside my pocket and fighting back tears. I tended to cry on payday. The first time Ruplu counted out those bills I blubbered like a babe. A job. My parents would’ve found a way to be proud, even if the job did involve mopping floors and stacking tins of sardines.

I’d known I was going to miss my parents terribly when they died, but I didn’t realize how I’d miss them. When something interesting happened, one of my first thoughts used to be how I had to call my folks in Arizona and fill them in. They had been omnipresent observers to the unfolding of my life. That day three years ago, when my sister called to tell me they’d been killed in a water riot, it was as if my third eye had been shut. No one was watching over my shoulder any more.

The street smelled damp and vaguely fecal. It had rained earlier; the people camped on the sidewalks were wet and miserable. Savannah was a magnet, pulling people to its streets clutching filthy blankets and packs filled with whatever they could carry from whichever small town they’d come. It was a relief to no longer be one of them, to be able to bathe occasionally (even if the water was cold), and to change my clothes occasionally (even if the clothes came from the Salvation Army thrift shop). It was nice to be in a place where a professional woman might want to go out with me.

I cut through Chippewa Square—the center of the universe as far as my life was concerned—and passed through the shadow cast by General Oglethorpe’s statue. A little boy was walking along the concrete skirting at the base of the statue, kicking garbage off it in a sort of game. Kids made me nervous—I had no idea what to say to them, didn’t understand their language.

There are twenty-four town squares in Savannah, most canopied by stands of the Live Oaks dripping Spanish moss—but Chippewa Square had always been special to me. I stopped and sat for a moment on the bench where my parents had gotten engaged thirty years ago—a ritual I’d begun the day I learned that they’d died. Only a few dappled spots of sunlight filtered through the branches of the massive live oaks that canopied the square.

A pigeon wobbled up to me hopefully, like I might pull out a bag of breadcrumbs. When was the last time anyone had fed a pigeon? How did they still remember that we used to? After a minute it wandered away, pecking at pebbles and popsicle sticks.

I stood, letting my fingers linger for a moment on the rough wood of the bench. Time to go home. I crossed the street, out the other side of the square, and headed down Bull Street.

All of the houses on our block were in disrepair, but the one that housed our apartment took the cake. The celery-green plaster on number five East Jones was cracked in places, exposing the original brick beneath. Our iron railing was not as ornate as most in the neighborhood, and it was canted at an angle. A little historical plaque said the house had been built in 1850. The yellowed Neighborhood Watch sign in one of the first-floor windows—replete with silhouette of a cloaked burglar—was a nice touch.

The screen door squealed when I opened it. Colin was in the living room. “That virus is spreading.” He motioned toward the TV.

As if Polio-X wasn’t enough, now there was a flesh-eating virus to worry about. From the brief clips of victims on the news, it did not look pleasant, and the only way to treat it was to cut out the infected areas before it spread, which didn’t sound pleasant either.

“If they ever catch the people who release these things, they should have them sodomized by Clydesdales on national TV,” Colin said without a hint of a smile.

“Are they saying anything new?” Jeannie asked, gliding out of their bedroom. She stopped to stare at the screen of the old 2-D TV that’d been one of our first purchases after we’d saved enough for rent.

Colin muted the sound. “Just that it’s not airborne, so masks aren’t any help, and to wash your hands a lot,” Colin said.

“Have they said any more about Great Britain and Russia?” I asked Colin.

“No. It’s all about the virus.”

Since the trade winds had sputtered last fall, the temperatures in Britain had been plummeting, and Britain was not taking kindly to Russia’s decision to suspend all natural gas sales outside their borders. Britain’s navy was cruising up and down Russia’s border, and there had been some skirmishes. Britain had no chance in a war against Russia unless others jumped in, but I guess with tens of thousands of their people freezing to death, they were desperate.

We’d become total news junkies since getting the TV. Hard not to be when something awful was always going on.

“Every day it’s something else,” Jeannie said. “I’m so tired of it.”

“Things have to get better soon,” I said.

“It’s been years,” Jeannie muttered. She went over to our little kitchen corner, opened the chest that served as a kitchen cabinet, and peered in. “Does anyone mind if I eat a couple of rice cakes and some peanut butter?”

“No problem,” I said. It probably wasn’t necessary any more, to get an okay before you ate something, but it was a habit from our tribe days that we couldn’t quite shake.

Colin switched off the TV. “Jasper, what do you think about running the a/c for ten minutes before we go to sleep? Jeannie and I were thinking it would be worth it, to have it cool to get to sleep.”

I shrugged. “Sounds good to me.” We were getting by; I guess we could afford to buy a little more energy.

It was a long bike ride to Southside, but I had plenty of time.

I headed up Bull Street, cutting through the middle of the squares, looking at all the houses that used to be pretty when I was a kid. They called this the Historic District back then; it used to be the most expensive part of Savannah. Now they just called it downtown.

I tried not to reminisce about my life before things went bad, but sometimes I couldn’t resist. It’s hard to stifle memories when everything around you is heavy with your past. How could I walk down Bolton Street, past the house where I’d grown up, without seeing my dad washing his truck in the driveway? We’d been in Clary’s diner the night I told my parents I was switching my major from business to sociology. There’d been a baseball card store on the corner of Whitaker and York where John Kelly—who’d been my best friend in sixth grade—and I would buy twenty-year-old packs of baseball cards and open them on his stoop, our hands shaking, hoping to pull out a valuable rookie card. It was almost inconceivable now, the luxury of blowing fifteen bucks on a pack of baseball cards, but back then there always seemed to be enough money, an endless flow that just showed up from Mom’s purse, or from doing some easy afterschool job. Looking back, it seemed as if everyone was well-off; even the poorest kids could afford to buy a Big Mac at McDonald’s.

I stopped, dropped one foot to the pavement at the entrance to one of the alleys that stretched behind every row of houses as the roar and rattle of a muffler announced that a decrepit Volvo was pulling out. An old woman in the passenger seat looked at me, nervous eyes peering behind wire-rimmed glasses, her head bobbing a palsied rhythm.

The alley was scattered with homeless shelters. That’s what people had taken to calling the big green trash cans stamped City of Savannah that now mostly lay on their sides with people’s feet sticking out of them, amid heaps of trash and lumps of fly-ridden shit.

I didn’t dare cut through Forsyth Park, so I took the sidewalk along Whitaker. The tic tic tic of a central a/c unit caught my attention. I marveled at the sound, at the audacious expenditure of energy, cooling all of the rooms in an apartment at once. The shift in ambient sound was subtle as you moved uptown, the proportion of popping gunshots to humming machinery changing with each block.

Screams of a man in terrible pain burst from an open second-story window. I pedaled faster—thinking of the reports of the flesh-eating virus and silently wished the poor bastard well.

I hadn’t been to Southside in a long time. Very little had changed. In fact, if anything it looked nicer than it had the last time I’d been there. Through the tall steel gates surrounding the passing neighborhoods I could see that some of the lawns were mowed. I didn’t venture too close to the gates, lest some private police take offense at my shabby clothes (the best I owned, for my trip to Southside), and beat me for being in the wrong part of town.

A car honked behind me. I moved to the side of the road and it whooshed past. I stayed by the side—there were more cars on the road up here, even a few trucks and SUVs.

When choices have to be made between oil to fuel luxury cars and oil for fertilizer to feed starving people, the choice is obvious: the oil goes to fuel the cars. Now that energy was scarce, consuming it ostentatiously was a status symbol. Leaving your porch light on announced to the world that you could afford to leave your porch light on.

Sometimes I hated these people, who lived so comfortably while the rest of us barely got by. Maybe I hated them because I always figured I would be one of them, I don’t know. We had nothing, and they had so much more than they needed. But they were just people, doing what people do, which is to try to keep what they have.

It cost me eight bucks to get into Snowstorm. If I hadn’t biked five miles to get there, I wouldn’t have paid it, and as it was I felt guilty. I didn’t have any business spending that kind of money when Jeannie was asking permission to eat some peanut butter. I went through big double doors and up a ramp that led to the club.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. I’d stepped into the Alps. There were ski slopes that rose out of sight, piles of snow all over, snowmen with drinks clutched in frozen hands. People were dancing on a frozen pond. It had to be holographic, but it was so perfect, so solid, that it took my breath away. I made a conscious effort to keep my yokel mouth from dropping open and strolled through the place like I’d seen it all before, but I hadn’t. I hadn’t realized how much the world was still progressing. Even through this awful time, people were still inventing things. I just wasn’t seeing it, just like people in third world countries never saw it.

There were cool rich kids everywhere, their hairstyles as varied as the flavors at Baskin Robbins: dreadlocks and Mohawks, Betty Page cuts, pigtails, red-and-white barber pole specials.

There was an Alpine bar perched in the corner thirty feet above the floor, on an icy cliff. It didn’t appear to be a holo, because the guys sitting at the bar weren’t that attractive. It looked like the place I’d be most comfortable. I watched a dude with blond little-Dutch-boy hair step on a steel plate that lifted him up to the bar, and I followed suit.

I took a stool next to a guy in his sixties with droopy red eyes and thinning white hair. There was a TV mounted among the bottles behind the bar, tuned to MSNBC. They were showing refugees pouring into California from Arizona and New Mexico.

“I just came from there,” the guy said, to no one in particular.

“From California?” I asked.

“Arizona,” he said.

“I’ve heard things aren’t good in Arizona.”

“It’s bad in Arizona,” he said.

A big-eared guy in a business suit turned around. “It’s bad everywhere, man,” he said.

The old guy fixed him with a shaky stare, his face a little blue from the flickering TV screen. “Mister, you got no idea what bad is. You want bad? There’s no water there. None. Everyone with a car left months ago. They drove right over the bodies lying in the—”

“Okay! All right! Shut the fuck up, will you?” The guy turned away. “Christ in heaven.”

“It’s bad in Arizona,” the guy said, shaking his head. We sat quietly for a while, watching the soundless TV, listening to the music.

Most Americans hadn’t known what suffering was until the depression of ’13. In school we used to hear about the so-called “Great Depression,” as if having a lot of unemployed people who were reasonably well-fed was this terrible holocaust. We were wimps. We’re not any more—we’ve learned how to eat bitterness, as the Chinese say.

“I’ve heard things are even worse in China,” I said.

“China?” the guy said. “Let ’em rot in hell. My nephew died over there. Let ’em rot.” He took a drink, shook his head. “This isn’t how things are supposed to be. I had mutual funds for retirement. I had my house and my card games, money for whores.”

I scanned the crowd, looking for my SCAD woman, but instead my attention was drawn toward a black woman on the ice pond dance floor, her hands over her head, her hips gyrating in tight circles.

Sophia.

She was dancing with two other women, gyrating her hips frenetically—whining, they called it on the islands. She looked incredible.

I went back to ground level, heart in my throat, and threaded through the crowd. As I approached, the music changed suddenly, from contemporary to Island Thump, as if I’d walked through an invisible membrane that held in sound. Another New Thing. I stopped a dozen feet from the dance floor and watched.

When she recognized me she stopped dancing, mouthed a silent “Oh my God.” She didn’t seem to know what to do. Finally, she came over.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” I said. “What are the odds?”

“I don’t know, I’m not good at math,” she said, breathless from dancing, her nostrils flaring like a colt’s. “I’m nervous. My legs are shaking.”

“Mine too.”

“How’re you?”

“Much better. Thank you for getting me the job. It changed our lives. Jeannie found a little work too, at a salvage center, stripping parts. Colin gets work on the docks sometimes.”

“That’s wonderful!” Sophia smiled, but there was distress in her eyes. I’d imagined this moment a hundred times. Now I couldn’t think of anything of substance to say.

“I’m sorry things worked out the way they did,” I said.

She shrugged. “Life is. What are you gonna do?”

“I guess.”

A tall, slim black man in a white silk shirt approached us holding two drinks in tall flute glasses. “Do you want another?” he said to Sophia.

“Oh, thanks,” she said, taking it. “Um, Jasper, this is Jean Paul.” Her husband was five inches taller than me, and better looking.

I nodded. He stared back with a smirk. “My mipwi,” he said.

“What does that mean?” I asked, looking to Sophia.

“It means,” she considered for a moment, “his competition.”

How the hell was I supposed to respond to that? Jean Paul smirked down at me. “So, did you follow my wife here?” He didn’t open his mouth wide enough when he talked. It made him seem shifty. You couldn’t trust someone who rarely lets you see his front teeth.

“I’m meeting someone,” I said. “I have a date.” I scanned the bar, praying for a sign of the SCAD woman so I could escape from this nightmare with some dignity. Sophia was managing a smile, but looked uncomfortable as hell. I stared hard at a woman tucked in a nearby booth, with three other women. Her hair was up, but I thought it looked like her. I’d only seen her once for a minute or so. She turned a little and I got a better look: yes, that was her.

“There she is,” I said. I told Sophia it was good to see her, nodded tightly to her husband, and headed for the table, feeling their eyes on me. The music shifted again, to an old Carbon Leaf song. My dad used to love Carbon Leaf.

“Hello,” I said, standing over the table. All four women looked at me.

“Oh, hi,” she said. She was dressed in a long, white peasant dress with ruffles on the sleeves. She looked good.

“Thought I’d check out your hangout,” I said.

“Right. How are you?” she said, not making any attempt to stand.

“Good, great. How are you?”

“Fine. How’d you get out here?”

I shrugged. “Bike.”

“Great. Well, it was good seeing you again.” She turned back toward her friends.

I hovered for a second, then I turned. Sophia’s husband was watching. He said something in Sophia’s ear; she glanced at me, said something back to Jean Paul, frowning, and turned to join her friends at a bar tucked into a snowbank.

I glanced back toward the table where my “date” was sitting, in the feeble hope that I’d misinterpreted her brush-off and she would suddenly be interested in me the way she’d been at the convenience store. She kept her gaze pointed straight across the table, toward her friends. Why had she struck up that conversation with me? What was the wink about, if I wasn’t worth a lousy five-minute conversation? Was she embarrassed to admit she knew me in front of her friends?

I walked back over to her table. Finally, she looked up at me. I cast about for a clever put-down, but my mind had gone blank.

“I can’t help wondering why you invited me here,” I finally said.

“I didn’t invite you. I don’t even know you.” She gave me the lip curl, the one that said I was a pathetic pest.

I puffed out a sarcastic breath. “Yeah.”

The woman across the table from her stood and gestured past me. “Mickey!”

A second later a guy dressed in a black t-shirt was at my elbow.

“He’s harassing us,” the girl said, pointing at me.

“I am not,” I protested.

Without a word the guy grabbed me by the neck and the elbow and yanked me away from the table. I tried to yank free, shouted at him to let go as he propelled me through the bar, toward the red exit sign in the corner. Everyone in the bar was staring. I spotted Jean Paul, laughing. Sophia stood next to him, her head down. The bouncer shoved me through the door, into the sticky-hot air of the street. Two girls hanging out on the sidewalk laughed as I lurched forward before regaining my balance. The door slammed closed behind me.

I unchained my bike from the rack and pushed off into the street, watched the road wind under my front wheel, my face still red. I swerved to avoid the porcelain remnants of a shattered toilet, ran over a fast food paper cup.

My hands on the handlebars looked strange, unfamiliar. I felt vaguely numb, and wished there was some way to wash away that feeling.

Jean Paul was probably still laughing. Sophia hadn’t even tried to intervene. My only solace was that I would probably never see either of them again.

Bright lights and voices on a side street caught my attention. I took a right and rolled by a little crowd lounging outside a freshly painted storefront with big windows. It was an art opening. Christ, there were still art openings uptown.

What the hell. I didn’t want to go home, didn’t want to hear Colin ask “How’d it go?” I didn’t want to recount the humiliation that even now made it hard for me to look passing strangers in the eye. I needed to get lost in distraction for a while. I pulled onto the curb, chained my bike to a street sign, and wandered in through the wide open door.

The gallery was a dimly lit, cavernous room that had once been a dairy, or an auto showroom, or something like that. A line of ghostly, featureless, emaciated figures made of papier-mâché were mounted to the high concrete walls. The figures were all facing the back of the gallery, and were posed as if they were moving, marching toward some faraway destination that they did not have the strength to reach. It was an eerie scene, lifelike despite the otherworldly look of the anonymous figures. They reminded me of my tribe, and made me wonder what I was thinking, coming to this part of town thinking a SCAD woman was interested in dating me.

There was a commotion at the front of the gallery. I turned to see a priest standing in the doorway holding an assault rifle in one hand, an unlit cigar in the other. He looked like he was part East Indian or Arab. His dyed white hair was set in a sumo wrestler’s bun.

“Outside. Everyone outside,” he said, waving the rifle in a sweeping motion toward the back of the room.

The people nearest him scurried away. I retreated into the shadows at the back of the gallery. There were stacks of folding tables and chairs in the corner—I considered trying to hide behind them, but it wasn’t much of a hiding place. A woman cried out.

“Everyone out the back door!” the priest said.

The back door flew open and everyone poured out. I followed, into a dark alley.

There were two men waiting in the alley wearing round gas masks over mouth and nose.

“Against the wall,” one shouted, gesturing with a gas gun. He was dressed in an old-fashioned army officer’s uniform—epaulets on the shoulders and color-coded commendations embroidered on his chest. The other was dressed in a mailman’s uniform. I stood facing the brick wall.

“What’s happening?” a woman sobbed.

“Shut up. Turn around. Face the wall,” the mailman said. He wasn’t really a mailman—I’d heard stories about a gang, a violent political movement called the Jumpy-Jumps, who dressed in outfits and hurt people, and these guys fit the bill.

I heard the guy dressed as a priest come out the back door. He said something I couldn’t hear to the woman lined up closest to him. She murmured something back.

I only had three dollars on me. If these guys were robbing us, I wondered if they’d be angry that I didn’t have more. I didn’t have a watch or a ring, nothing of value.

I jumped at the sound of a gunshot. Others cried out, startled. I looked over and saw the woman crumple to the pavement, blood leaking from her temple. I turned my head the other way, pressed my cheek against the rough brick and stifled a sob.

“God, what is this?” a man said. I couldn’t see him; I was afraid to turn and look. The priest said something to him, low and emphatic.

“What?” the man against the wall said. “I don’t understand what you’re saying to me. I don’t understand what you want.”

The priest said something else.

“Please. I don’t understand.”

I heard the squeal of a gas gun. Then someone falling, and strangled vomiting. People screamed. Someone was trying to answer a question from one of the other men with guns.

I didn’t understand what was happening; it sounded like they were interrogating people, but not giving them a chance to answer.

The priest walked passed me, went to the person next to me—a black guy in his forties. I strained to listen to what he was asking the guy. If I knew what the questions were, maybe I could figure out the right answer, the response that would convince him not to kill me.

Part of me knew there were no right answers. This was just how they did it, to make it more awful.

I risked glancing around, to see if I might be able to run for it. The alley was long and desolate. They would have plenty of time to shoot me before I reached cover.

“How many graves are in Saint Bonaventure Cemetery?” the priest asked.

“I don’t… please, don’t kill me,” the black guy said.

The priest walked away. He came back a moment later carrying a bucket.

He stopped beside me.

“How many graves?” he asked. His mouth was close to my ear, his breath tickling my neck.

I wanted to tell him he’d made a mistake, that he had been questioning the guy next to me. He poured the bucket over my head. It stank—it was piss, or sewage.

He took a step back, looked me up and down. “Where do you live?” he asked.

“East Jones Street,” I said quickly. I was relieved to know the answer. I wanted to cooperate. I craved his approval.

He raised the gas gun, held it to the side of my nose.

“How many steps is it from here to the Oglethorpe Mall?”

“I don’t know what the right answer is.”

“Are you ready to die?”

“I don’t want to die.”

The blast from the gas gun was coming. He was almost finished with the precursors, then he would push the black mask on the end of the gun over my face and pull the trigger. I tried to think of some way to stretch it out, to get him to ask me more questions, to switch to someone else, even if only for a moment. I didn’t want to die. Through my terror I found myself trying to grasp that this was real. There would be a very painful few moments of dying, and then my life would end.

“Eat this.” He held a plastic lid up to my face. There was a stringy, slimy, whitish thing on it, with lidded eyes, little arms curled in toward a torso. It was a fetus, maybe a rat fetus, or a cat. I lifted it off the lid with my tongue, and I ate it. It was horrible; it was chewy and slimy. I bit what may have been the head, and felt fluid squirt across my tongue. I swallowed dramatically, so he’d know that I’d done what he told me.

“How many cats prowl this city?”

“I’m not sure,” I whimpered.

He smacked me in the back of the head, hard. “Run away now,” he said. “We’re not killing mice in rags today.”

I was running before his words fully registered, my shoulders pulled toward my ears, waiting to feel bullets rip into my back. I sprinted out of the alley, turned down the street with the rush of wind in my ears and a horrible taste in my mouth. I was making some sound as I ran, a sound I didn’t recognize and before this moment wouldn’t have believed was within my vocal range.

A few blocks away I spotted two police officers on horseback. I waved and shouted to get their attention.

“They’re killing people, behind an art gallery!” I pointed back up Abercorn.

“Where?” a female officer asked.

I pointed. “Three blocks up, I think, then right—”

“That’s not our jurisdiction.”

“No, but three men with guns are lining people up in an alley and shooting them! Right now!”

“Get lost,” the officer said. She made a clicking sound, kicked her horse in the ribs. In a nonchalant tone she picked up the thread of whatever conversation they’d been having when I interrupted.

I looked back over my shoulder, heard distant gunshots. What could I do to help those people who’d only gone to look at art? Nothing. I could do nothing. I could save myself.

I was afraid to go back for my bike, so I ran as long as I could, then I walked. As I got close to home I stopped at a table set up in the alley off Drayton and bought a bottle of home brew with my three dollars. The guy didn’t ask why I was shaking so badly, or why I stank of piss. The alcohol washed some of the rancid taste out of my mouth.

Colin and Jeannie weren’t home. I didn’t want to be alone; I couldn’t even bring myself to go inside to change, because our apartment was dark and I was afraid. I headed toward Ange’s.

The pattering of water behind a wrought-iron gate caught my attention. I stopped and peered through the gate at a perfectly manicured garden. The shrubs were trimmed in perfect arcs; there was an oval reflecting pool in the center. In the pool was a statue of a woman perched on the edge of a fountain, drinking, sharing the flow with birds in flight. It was so calm, so beautiful. I would have given anything to spend an hour in there.

I kept going, swigging from my bottle every few steps.

When I reached Ange’s house I pounded on the door with the flat of my fist.

Chair, the guy in the wheelchair, opened it. He called to Ange. She took one look at me, shouted my name, and burst forward, tilting off-balance. She’d been drinking, too.

“What happened? Are you all right? Are you hurt?” She touched my arms, my sides, looking for wounds. I didn’t know how to describe what had happened. I did, but I didn’t know how to make it not sound humiliating. I felt like I’d been raped.

Ange led me to the bathroom, past roommates trying not to stare, which was worse than if they’d stared. She reached behind the shower curtain and turned on the water. I got in, still dressed, and splashed water on my face. The water at my feet was sewer brown as it slid down the drain.

“Do you want to tell me what happened? It’s okay if you don’t,” Ange said from outside, her words a little slurred.

I ran my fingers through my filthy hair. “I stopped at an art opening uptown,” I began. I unbuttoned my shirt with trembling plastic fingers, peeled it off and let it drop.

“Go ahead, honey,” Ange said. “I know it was bad. You’ll feel better when you tell it.”

I told it. I gagged and almost vomited when I got to the part about being forced to eat the fetus. I opened my mouth to the precious water, let it spray my gums and teeth, then rinsed and spit.

The shower curtain drew back, and Ange stepped in. She was naked.

She pressed her face into my neck.

“This is just a thing, okay?” she said. “A little distraction. Just some grown up fun. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

We stumbled out of the tub, letting the water dribble onto the ancient Formica, our legs moving in step like slow-dancers. We fell onto Ange’s mattress soaking wet.

Maybe it’s shallow and male, to be able to set aside something awful because a woman takes off her clothes, to forget that retching death-gag echoing through the alley and instead focus on erect nipples. I don’t care. It worked. Ange transformed those first hours from hellish to tolerable.

And I think it worked like an aspirin administered right after a heart attack, minimizing the long-term damage. There was going to be damage—no one sees what I saw and walks away clean—but Ange slipped an aspirin under my tongue just when I needed it most.

I knew it would cost us later. Some women know they can’t do the friends-with-sex thing without getting emotionally attached. Other women think they can do it, but they really can’t. That’s it—all women fit into one of those two categories. But I wasn’t totally opposed to the possibility of it turning into more than friends-with-sex, so maybe it would turn out okay, for a while, at least. Right then I didn’t care.

I dragged myself out of Ange’s bed at six a.m., feeling the grit of old wood under my feet. I’m not good at mornings. The dog-eared posters covering Ange’s walls were not quite perceptible in the hint of gray light filtering through the blinds.

Ange rolled over, opened her eyes.

“I have to get to work,” I whispered.

She nodded, took a big breath and let it out. “You doing okay?”

“I’m good,” I said. I got out of bed, headed for the door.

“Bye, sweetie. I love you, but I don’t love you.”

“I love you, but I don’t love you, too,” I said. I considered kissing her goodbye, decided that was a bad idea, and slipped out.

Two of Ange’s roommates—Chair and an Indian guy named Rami—were in the living room, hunched over the coffee table, which was covered with charts and notes. Chair blocked my view of the table, gave me a look that made it clear I should keep moving. They always seemed to be working, but they didn’t seem to be students. I had no idea what they did. I needed to remember to ask Ange what these guys were doing.

I walked in the street; it was easier than navigating the homeless asleep on the sidewalks, hugging their possessions.

On York I passed an emaciated little girl sitting on a stone curb, her chin on her knees, ten feet from a woman selling walnuts out of an old doorless refrigerator tipped on its back. A woman appeared around the corner of Whitaker Street and waved to the little girl. The woman had just swallowed something. She ran her tongue over her teeth, then smiled at her little girl, held out her hand for the girl to grasp.

I cut through Chippewa Square, rounded the corner onto Liberty, and stopped in my tracks.

The front of the Timesaver was a sea of broken glass. I broke into a run, flew into the Timesaver and found Ruplu sitting on the counter, staring at his ransacked store.

“Amos is dead, they’ve already taken him away,” Ruplu said, gesturing at blood streaked across the floor by the window. He turned and looked at me with red-rimmed eyes. He’d probably been there half the night. “Can you work a double shift and help me get things back in order?”

“As long as you need me, I’m here” I said. Work was just what I needed right now; something to get lost in. I went to the supply closet and pulled out a broom.

“Can I ask you something? Do you think they did this because I’m Indian?” Ruplu asked.

“Yes and no,” I said. “People around here hate foreigners, so your store becomes an appealing target. They also hate rich people—”

“But I’m not rich,” Ruplu interrupted. “My family lives in a six-room house, nine of us. This store doesn’t make that much.”

I swept loose chips of glass wedged under the beverage cases that long ago used to be refrigerated. “I know, but they don’t understand that. They don’t want to understand it. They wanted what was inside your store, so it becomes a handy excuse.”

I stopped at the puddle of blood. Both the broom and the mop would only smear the blood. I looked around, spied a busted bag of kitty litter on a low shelf. I retrieved the bag and poured it over the blood. Poor Amos. He probably didn’t even get a chance to draw his gun. I realized now that he was just for show, that when someone really wanted to rip off the Timesaver, all it took was a few sweeps from an assault rifle.

“I pay the local Civil Defense people eight hundred dollars a month to protect the store,” Ruplu said, piling cases of soda that the thieves had not had time to cart away. “Do they offer to make reparations when I tell them my store was shot up while it was supposed to be under their protection? No. They just remind me that my next eight hundred is due in four days.”

“I think Civil Defense is starting to be more of a problem than a solution in this city,” I said.

“I think you’re right. And they’re not my only problem.” Ruplu sat on the stack of soda cases. “Every week, there’s less and less merchandise I can get delivered. No more coffee. Pepsi doesn’t distribute this far south starting in November. No aspirin in months.” He shrugged his helplessness. “What can I do?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “Maybe you should look into making deals with locals to sell their things—peanuts, preserves, home-made blankets, things like that.”

Ruplu nodded, thinking. “The problem is locating these people and arranging all these separate deals. It takes all the time just to run the sales end.”

“I could work on that end—”

Ruplu shook his head. “I can’t afford to pay you for that many more hours,” he said.

“Pay me whatever, or nothing,” I said. “This job saved my life; I’m grateful to you, I’ll do anything I can to help your store be successful.”

I thought Ruplu was going to cry. He clapped me on the shoulder, gulped back tears.

“You are my good friend,” he said. “All right. If I make money from business you find me, I share some with you. Okay?”

“Sounds good,” I said. We shook hands.

Ruplu clapped me on the shoulder again, and I got back to work.

I felt a little taller as I swept. I didn’t want to feel too tall, because a man had died here this morning, but I couldn’t help but feel some hope rising. This could be a door opening for me, a chance to do more than count change into people’s palms. If I could help Ruplu, I knew he’d give me my fair share of the profit. I could become sort of a limited partner.

My head was spinning from the last twenty-four hours. I felt great and awful, exhausted and exhilarated. Afterimages of Ange in the shower were superimposed with the priest feeding me from a beverage lid. Now the puddle of blood where Amos had fallen swirled with this opportunity. I guess I needed to take my joys where I could find them, and the hell with the notion that it was selfish to be happy amidst suffering. There was always suffering.