Soft Apocalypse

Chapter 5 SOFT APOCALYPSE

I passed a lithe cormorant of a woman trying on gas masks at a street kiosk. She was gazing intently into a little round mirror mounted on a telephone pole, and wearing a cute round avocado-colored mask. I loved the way she moved, loved her librarian glasses and her buzz-cut. Was she too good-looking for me? I wasn’t sure.

The lanky beauty left my field of vision. I continued scanning, assessing each woman I passed as a potential girlfriend, labeling them as “yes” or “no” in a heartbeat. I couldn’t help it. All of the other features of the world receded—all the beautiful crumbling architecture, the colorful street vendors, the black diesel stink in the air—all of it shrank into the background as I obsessively evaluated each woman I passed, testing my heart for flutters, getting a sense of her from her walk, her expression, the bob of her breasts.

Not that I’d ever approach a woman on the street; I hated guys who did that. For me it served as some sort of rehearsal—practice for identifying my soul mate when she arrived. Or maybe it was a way to reassure myself that there were women in this city who could reignite that flame, if I could meet them.

Reignite? I wondered if I’d really ever had that flame ignited. Sophia had lit me up like the highlight screen at a baseball stadium, but that had never been a real relationship. Ange? Maybe. I could never quite put my finger on my feelings for Ange. Not that it mattered, given her feelings for me. Deirdre? Sometimes she was like a song stuck in my head, even two years later. Small, childlike, fish-faced Deirdre. What had she done with my photos?

Ange was probably the closest. I wondered what she was up to. We’d never officially “broken up,” if that term was applicable given our arrangement, but she spent so much time with her housemates that I barely knew her any more. Maybe she was seeing someone. Maybe Rami—they seemed to spend a lot of time together.

I slowed as I passed Jittery Joe’s Coffee, hoping against hope to score a cup. The “No Coffee Today” sign still hung on the board outside, as it had for the past three weeks. And there was a new, smaller sign below it: “No Milk.” I continued on, caffeine-free, toward my speed-date appointment.

I spied a sexy pair of legs in the crowd, strutting my way. I got a jolt when her face came into view. She was a survivor of the flesh-eating virus. One whole side of her face was caved in; the damage trailed down her neck, disappearing inside a silk blouse. I did my best to hold my smile when she glanced my way, but it felt stiff. Poor woman.

There was a bamboo outbreak on Gaston. I stopped to watch. Street doctors were tearing up the pavement with jackhammers, circling the affected area, racing to set up rhizome barriers before the bamboo could spread. Four Civil Defense officers with heat-rifles surrounded the perimeter, along with half a dozen of those little mechanical bodyguard rat-things, as if Jumpy-Jumps were going to try to interrupt their little street cleaning operation. Real terrorists didn’t give a shit about bamboo.

I tapped my waist-pouch to make sure my fold-up gas mask was there, just like the government public service cartoon taught us.

“ID?” An acne-scarred man in combat fatigues barked at me as I reached the gates leading to the rich part of town. There was a body lying nearby, half in the street, half on the sidewalk, one foot twisted at an odd angle. Vehicles swerved to avoid it.

I stood still while the guy scanned my eyes with his little silver wand. It bleeped. He glanced at the readout on the screen clipped to his thick utility belt.

“Okay,” he said, waving me on. I wasn’t sure what the criteria were for entry into Southside. Lack of a criminal record? Not on any government watch lists? That I had a job?

When I reached the SpeedMatch outlet on Victory Drive I dawdled outside, pretending to tie my shoe on a bench. I ducked through the revolving door when no one was looking. I felt like such a loser going in there—much like I used to feel when I was eighteen, skulking into porn shops. It’d been years since I’d resorted to a dating service. I couldn’t believe I was doing this again. And I couldn’t really afford it, but it was the only good way I could meet a bright, educated woman, given where I lived.

It was humbling to be starting over from scratch at thirty-five. How many more women would I have to tell all of my stories to—my funniest anecdotes, what music I like, how I got the scar over my eye? Three more? Eleven? Everyone else in the world seemed able to find someone long before they hit thirty-five, even if those relationships didn’t always last forever.

“I’m here for the ten o’clock,” I said to the receptionist, who sported the thick makeup of a woman too young to realize that sometimes less is more.

She led me to my room, showed me how to download my vitals and bio-video from the boost I’d brought, helped me put on the VR equipment, then shut the door behind her. My palms were sweating.

The VR landscape was hackneyed but impressive: I was sitting in a burgundy reading chair on a slate patio, in the center of a beautiful formal garden. To my left, water tattered from a winged water nymph reaching toward the sky from the center of a fountain. A bed of perfect yellow tulips bobbed in a slight breeze on the other side. The garden was in a valley, surrounded by towering white mountain peaks; a waterfall burst from a cave in one mountain, crashing into a lake in perfect white-noise harmony with the fountain.

“Five minutes till your first date,” a mellifluous female voice informed me from out of the sky. I wondered if women heard a man’s voice.

“Mirror, please,” I said, and checked to make sure I didn’t have a piece of dandruff dangling from one of my eyebrows. Everything was shiny and perfect inside the VR environment except us daters—exact replication of what you had was all you got.

“Thank you.” The mirror disappeared. Mirrors aren’t good things to have around on blind dates; the process makes you self-conscious enough.

In the air to my left, my first date’s vitals appeared, along with the lie-detector readout, currently flatlined. Her name was Maura (though that didn’t mean much; lots of women didn’t give their real names to minimize the lunatic stalker factor). She was thirty-six, a physician, lived in Trenton. Liked Fuzz-Jazz and Postal music, and freerunning. I took a few deep breaths, readying myself for thirty-eight three-minute dates.

Maura materialized in the chair across the table. She had bushy brows and a pointy chin. Long, thin nostrils that you couldn’t help but see into when you looked at her. Kind of aristocratic looking. Interesting.

“Hi Jasper. I have a few questions that I like to ask, then if you want you can ask me questions.” She talked fast, but with three minutes that was par.

“Sounds fine,” I said. Suddenly my nose itched; I resisted scratching it. Scratching, or any sort of face-touching for that matter, doesn’t convey the best first impression.

“How many times have you cheated on a wife or girlfriend?”

I gawked at her. She had to be joking. What kind of an opening question was that?

“Less than twelve,” I finally said.

She looked at me the way my grade school teachers used to when I was being bad and I knew it.

“Is your salary statement accurate?”

“Sometimes.” It wasn’t like my salary was all that impressive. If I was going to lie, I would have done better than what was listed. Maybe what she was asking was, “What are you doing here, given your pitiful salary? You’re obviously a poor downtowner.”

“Do you have any bizarre sexual interests?”

“Define bizarre.”

I knew her type. She’d had some bad dating experiences and now she focused more on what she didn’t want than what she did want. Avoidance dating. She was already angry with me for the thoughtless things I would potentially do if we dated.

When she finished I asked her a few questions: Have you ever stolen a shopping cart from a grocery store? What’s your favorite Drowned Mermaids song? You don’t know the Drowned Mermaids? Hmm. That could be a problem. I pretended to jot a note; she didn’t seem to realize I was being sarcastic. Maura faded away. I scratched my nose with a vengeance.

Next was Victoria. She was too fat: big and boxy—a rectangle over disproportionately skinny legs. As we talked I chided myself for being shallow, then I snapped back at the chiding voice: attraction matters; it’s not the only thing that matters, but it matters, and I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t matter to satisfy my less-than-attractive female acquaintances, who don’t want it to matter. A girlfriend had to be reasonably attractive, or at least reasonably attractive to me. I found gangly women with overbites terribly attractive. Also nerdy women—shy, socially awkward librarian types really did it for me.

When Victoria faded I downloaded her bio-video out of courtesy. I probably wouldn’t watch it, but she seemed nice and I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. A few seconds later she downloaded mine as well.

The next woman materialized, interrupting my reverie. She was in a wheelchair.

The first time I’d done this speed-dating thing, I’d figured the difficult part would be trying to seem clever and kind and confident, all in the space of three minutes. But the truly difficult part was masking disappointment and disinterest.

For the third time today, I struggled to keep a stiff smile pasted on my face as we danced through the “nice to meet yous.”

From the rubbery, slight movement of greeting she made with her hand, Maya was a victim of Polio-X, that top 40 dial-a-virus that swept the nation in ’23. She had some nerve, I thought, getting on a dating service, inflicting us with guilt for rejecting her because she had a disability. Then I got hold of my irrational lizard brain and realized how incredibly unfair that was. She wasn’t twisting anyone’s arm. But there was no way I could be with her. A wheelchair was just too much baggage. I was not the sacrificing type, willing to wipe a woman’s butt if that’s what she needed. It just wasn’t me. Maybe I’m not giving and self-sacrificing enough to ever have a truly successful relationship. At least I was honest about it.

“So you’re an economist?” I said, seeking a polite topic that would pass the time, while hopefully conveying that I thought she was interesting, but that I wasn’t interested. “Any insights to offer on the current state of affairs? When do you think the market’s going to turn around?” Not that I had a dime to invest in the market.

“Wow, that’s kind of a personal question, don’t you think?” Her voice dripped sarcasm—she saw what I was doing, and was calling me on it.

I laughed uncomfortably.

“It’s not going to turn around,” she said. “It’s going to get worse, and then it’s going to collapse completely.”

I laughed uncomfortably again.

“You think I’m kidding,” she said.

“It’s got to turn around eventually.”

“No it doesn’t,” she said. “It didn’t for the dinosaurs.”

“Okay,” I said. Next she’d probably tell me about the end of days, and ask if I’d made my peace with Jesus Christ.

“I can see you don’t believe me,” she said, gesturing toward the lie-detector, not unkindly.

“It’s not a question of believing. I can see you believe what you’re saying, and I’m sure you’re good at what you do, but how sure can you be about something like this? Honestly?”

“Every Nobel Prize-winning economist who’s still alive is sure of it,” she said. “The economy is slowly collapsing. Remember all those dire warnings about global warming, overpopulation, resource depletion, the rain forest, nuclear fallout, save the whales? Any of that ring a bell?”

“Uh huh,” I said mildly. I’d evidently picked the wrong topic. How much time did I have left with her? One minute, forty-six seconds.

“They weren’t kidding. Billions of people are going to die before this is over.” She gestured at my lie-detector readout with her chin. I looked at it. Ninety-seven percent honesty. Not even a hint of exaggeration. Billions of people, she said. It was the same estimate that Sebastian had given, back when he was convincing people to make our lives even more miserable by planting voracious bamboo.

She had an interesting face. Big, wide mouth showing lots of teeth—what I’d always thought of as a shark-mouth—and scary light blue eyes, like see-through gossamer fabric draped over sky. If it wasn’t for the wheelchair. Well, if it wasn’t for the wheelchair she’d be out of my league. I suppose if I was okay with the wheelchair, it would be one of those reasonable tradeoffs that we all pretend don’t really enter into love and relationships: she settles for a somewhat immature, big-nosed, skinny guy, and I get a woman who is more attractive than I could reasonably have hoped for, but in a wheelchair, with arms and legs that were mostly useless.

“Why haven’t they warned people?” I asked, not really wanting to hear the answer, but needing to say something because I’d been silent for three or four seconds.

She laughed. “They’ve been shouting it from the rooftops for years! There was an article in the New York Times just a few weeks ago. Nobody listens to academics. Smart is passé.”

It was a reasonable argument. And for the past ten years things had only gotten worse. Blackouts, war, fifty-seven varieties of terrorists, water shortages, plagues. It reminded me of a story about frogs: if you put them in an open pot of water and turn on the burner, they just sit there and boil to death, because they’re not equipped to recognize and respond to gradual changes in water temperature. They could jump out at any time, but there never comes a time when their little brains judge it’s time to jump. So they cook.

I looked into her earnest, translucent eyes, and tried on her hopeless, empty version of the future, filled with plagues and hunger, flies buzzing over corpses, thick-necked men with guns.

Could things really just keep getting worse? Could the economy really collapse? Now I wasn’t sure.

“This could be terrible,” was all I could think to say.

She checked the readout, softly nodded agreement. “I’m sorry I dumped this in your lap. It’s not why we’re here. But you asked.”

She took a deep breath, and smiled at me, showing all those teeth.

“Actually, I think what you asked for was financial advice,” she said. “Put all of your money in ammo.”

I laughed, and for a moment I thought maybe. There was something about her that gave me a warm, almost nostalgic feeling.

We sat in silence, listening to the patter of the fountain.

“So,” she said, clearing her throat. “Know any jokes?”

I laughed. “Yeah. There was this guy who could be kind of a jerk…”

Maya faded away, which was fortunate, because I didn’t know how the joke ended.

A new profile came up. It was hard for me to concentrate on it. Danielle, thirty-one, Energy Consultant (whatever the hell that meant), a daughter, twelve years old. Widow. I wanted time to think.

Danielle materialized across the table.

“Jasper, so nice to meet you!” she said, wobbling her head enthusiastically. She was very bubbly, attractive in an Italian sort of way. Really nice lips.

I tried unsuccessfully to keep up with her enthusiasm, and she didn’t seem to notice that I was speaking from inside a black funk. She asked about my job, I asked about hers. She dropped some flirtatious lines that I fumbled. I wondered how her husband had died.

When I was young I’d taken for granted that, while there might be intermittent wars, disasters, economic downturns, overall things would remain about the same. But people had always inflicted suffering on other people, pretty much unceasingly, since the beginning of history. So as better ways to inflict suffering were developed, of course more suffering would be inflicted. Once biotechnology advanced to the point where a bright amateur could devise and release plagues on a shoestring budget, of course some would.

And all of a sudden it seemed obvious. I was living through an apocalypse. I was at a dating service in the middle of a slow apocalypse. Things weren’t going to get better like the government said, they were going to keep getting worse.

Danielle told me that she’d really enjoyed meeting me; I said me too, although I had no idea whether I’d enjoyed meeting her or not. There was a song spinning in my head now, some really old thing about how when the world was running down, make the best of what’s still around. It’s funny how apropos songs find their way into your head without you realizing.

As Danielle faded, I looked at the water nymph stretching toward the sky, the plume of water pouring from her mouth. Her wings were too small for her body, giving the impression that if she were to fly, it would be a strenuous ordeal—not the soaring freedom of a gliding eagle, but the mad flapping of a fruit bat.

The next few speed-dates went by in a fog. There was Savita, a tiny Indian woman with big doe-eyes and long black hair that she draped over one shoulder the way Indian women do. Keira, who had raccoon shadows under her eyes. I struggled to hear them over the winding-down of the world and the sound of tearing photos.

Then came Emily, who made bad jokes and oozed desperation.

Most people can’t stand being single. I see people get divorced, then immediately implement the “best available” strategy, desperately seeking the most viable single person they could find in the course of, say, three months, and then marrying that person. They can’t stand the idea of not being with someone. It’s like the light is too bright. They race to the nearest shade.

When you’re unattached, you live life closer to the edge. A partner gives you a sense of security, and I think it can lead to complacency, to life-laziness, if you’re not careful. You don’t feel the need to live vividly. Being single means there’s no safety net. It’s riskier. If you lose a leg stepping on a street-mine, you won’t have a wife to wheel you around. If you drink milk laced with clotting factor and have a stroke, you won’t have a wife to wipe the drool off your chin. Despite my avid desire to meet a woman, I was proud of my ability to live in this time as a single person, to have the courage to wait for Ms. Right instead of running to the shelter of Ms. Best Available.

The next woman’s name was Bodil Gustavson. Thirty-three, artist. She materialized. My heart started to pound, slow and hard.

It was Deirdre. Jesus Christ, it was Deirdre.

“Oh, this is going to be good,” she said. She was sucking on a green lollipop. It brought back images that I quickly shoved aside.

Her cute little hands were fidgeting, as always, part of that childlike quality she had that had melted me like a creamsickle on a July sidewalk. But she was not childlike, not really. I reminded myself of her collection of 911 recordings—people screaming into the phone, people dying into the phone, six-year-old kids telling the 911 operator that mommy’s face had turned blue and foam was coming out of her mouth. Plus there was the song she wrote about my tribe.

“So tell me—Jasper, is it?—what are you looking for in a woman?” she said, pointing the lollipop at me.

“What did you do with my photos?”

“Fuck you, Jasper.” The day I broke up with her, I’d been shocked by the anger Deirdre could express with her eyes. She gave me that same glare now.

“So tell me, do you miss these?” She pulled up the conservative floral-patterned turtleneck shirt she was wearing and shook her breasts at me. I drank them in like a heroin addict welcoming the needle.

“Do you still have my photos? What did you do with them?” She dropped her shirt, smoothed it back into place.

“All those pepper seeds we planted on the balcony?” she said. “They all came up. Red ones and green ones and purple ones… they were pretty.”

That had been a good day, Deirdre planting peppers naked, strips of sunlight filtering between the slats of the fire escape stairs.

And for the briefest instant, I considered getting back on the horse and riding the chaos that was life with Deirdre, surrendering to her dark charm, allowing my personal life to mirror the violence that was all around me. If nothing else, I could stop feeling guilty for dumping her.

I realized that as soon as I sleep with a woman I feel responsible for her happiness. Pretty much for the rest of my life. I’ve no idea why that is. Two or three years of therapy would probably uncover the reasons.

I thought of the 911 collection, of her complete lack of distress as she played calls for me. It was a soothing methadone that killed thoughts of reconciliation. Besides that, Colin and Jeannie would never speak to me again if I got back with Deirdre.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

And Deirdre was gone.

I downloaded her bio-vid. I couldn’t resist. How would Deirdre present herself to a prospective date? Would it be raunchy sex scenes? Footage from one of her flash concerts? I wasn’t sure she’d emphasize the rock star part of her life, given what had happened at her last concert.

I couldn’t wait—I played her bio-vid during the sixty-second break before my next date. It opened with an eleven-or twelve-year-old Deirdre squatting in a little garden on the side of a garage, a wood pile in the background. She pulled a big red tomato and held it up, grinning. The scene drifted into another: An eight-year-old Deirdre sitting cross-legged on a hardwood floor in pajamas, working on a puzzle, pieces spread all around her. Then Deirdre buried in Christmas gifts and torn wrapping paper, sitting beside my sister, Jilly, in front of our tree, both of them grinning wildly. Deirdre, getting on my school bus on the first day of kindergarten, waving goodbye to my mother. Pedaling a three-wheeled bike, my cousin Jerome standing in the big basket on the back, his hands on her shoulders. On vacation with my family in Puerto Rico, sunburned in a restaurant with half a dozen leis around her neck. Sitting on the porch of my childhood home, before a hurricane tore it apart.

It was beautifully done, brief moment drifting into brief moment, all of them happy, nostalgic, all of them scenes adapted from my photos, with Deirdre in my place.

I cried as I watched. It was so pathetic. My heart broke for her. Suddenly I wished I could give her some of that childhood—that garden, that puzzle, that vacation, instead of whatever it was she’d really gotten. I didn’t like to imagine what she’d gotten. I’d once asked her about the little scar under her chin, and she said it came from the button-eye on her teddy bear, when her stepfather hit her with it. Maybe she was actually doing well, given the memories she was trying to keep crammed into the basement of her mind. I don’t know.

As the images faded to black, I thought again of my conversation with the wheelchair woman, whatever her name had been—Maya. There would be no more childhoods like that for anyone, not when a kid had to carry a gas mask, pass through security checkpoints, run from a hungry stray dog out of fear that someone had surgically implanted a bomb in it.

A lovely red-haired woman materialized. I was a wet, sobbing mess. I wiped my eyes. She tried not to notice.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m not feeling very well. I’m going to discontinue. No offense.”

I terminated my session.

The room seemed dingy and scuffed after the virtual garden. I went on crying. I felt my hope for a better tomorrow, for blue skies and a button-nosed girlfriend, slough off like dead skin, leaving me pink and raw.

I felt like I’d been struggling in every aspect of my life for a hundred years—struggling to earn enough money to survive, struggling to find love, struggling to not die a violent death. The weight of all of that was crashing down as I considered the possibility of things actually getting worse.

The selection screen dropped down, startling me. For a long time I just stared at the little pictures of all the women I’d met. Then I started tapping profiles. I didn’t look at any of their bio-vids, I just started tapping away at the women I would be interested in dating. Danielle, the Italian happiness-machine; Savita, the Indian princess; three, four, five others.

I hesitated at wheelchair woman.

I sniffed, wiped my nose on my sleeve, stared at her smiling picture.

I had a connection to her. She was my sensei—she’d whapped me with a stick, and I’d awakened to the truth. I tapped her profile. What the hell.

Then I came to Deirdre’s profile.

I didn’t tap it, and my tape of neurotic Deirdre-thoughts didn’t start playing. I felt a warm sadness—that was all.

I read somewhere that we choose to date people for reasons that are lost in our personal histories, and we keep making the same choices—the same mistakes—till we figure out why.

The Civil Defense alarm went off while I was walking home. I pulled out my gas mask and flipped it over my nose and mouth in one deft motion, a gunslinger fast on the draw. People raced in-doors—their masks (in a wide variety of colors and styles) and their tight, hunched shoulders made them look like strange chimps.

Six boys in red-brick camouflage ran by clutching short, square weapons that swung from their fists like lunchboxes. I stepped out of their way. Shit, they were recruiting them younger and younger. I had no idea who they worked for—police, CD, Jumpy-Jump, fire department. They were all pretty much the same now—gangs fighting for power.

I walked on, enjoying the sun on my face, the light afternoon breeze. I realized that my mood had shifted—I felt light and empty. I took a deep, easy breath. I fished my phone out of one pocket, the printout of phone numbers for my speed-date matches out of another.

“That was quick,” Maya said.

“I don’t think I can handle the wheelchair; I want to be honest about that and I hope it doesn’t hurt your feelings,” I said. The honking of the alarm went on in the background.

“Okay. Is that what you called to tell me?”

“I just don’t want to waste your time. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I—”

I wanted to tell her that the world was fleeting and beautiful. I wanted to tell her that the white windmills on the roofs of the exhaust-blackened buildings were all turning in unison, and that somehow she was responsible for me seeing this.

“I’d like to ask you to spend some of your time with me. If you give me some of your time, your precious time, I won’t waste it.”

She didn’t answer. I heard a sniffle and thought she might be crying.

“I’m good at that part—the now part,” I added.

I was right, she was crying. It sounded like she was wiping her nose with a tissue. Then I realized that wasn’t possible.

“I think I’ll pass,” she said.

“Fair enough,” I said, both disappointed and relieved.

“I’m looking for someone I can count on. I’ve had enough of casual to last a lifetime.”

So was I. It was the wheelchair. It was dumb in a way, rejecting someone out of hand for being in a wheelchair. I’d never dated someone in a wheelchair, how did I know I wouldn’t be fine with it?

Because I knew. I didn’t want a woman of these times. I wanted Ms. Right.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“No problem.” She hung up.

I stuck my phone in my pocket and headed home.

There was a crowd gathered in Chippewa Square. I peered through the heads into the open space by the statue of Oglethorpe, and felt a sick sinking sensation: they were carrying out executions, right near my home. Six or seven members of the DeSoto Police—the local segment of the Civil Defense that was controlled by “Mayor” Duck Adams—were conducting them. (Three or four other “Mayors” had control over smaller sections of the city, last time I checked.)

A fat DeSoto thug with a flattop shoved a gas gun—the kind with a black mask on the end of the barrel—into the screaming face of an old lady while two other gas-masked DeSotos held her. The gun squealed; the old lady went stiff as a board, then dropped to the cobblestones, twitching and jerking like all the muscles in her body had spasmed at once (which they had). Her mouth formed a rictus “O”; her eyes were rolled up, exposing red veins on white.

“Wicked shit,” a kid next tome who couldn’t be more than thirteen said with a mix of disgust and excitement in his voice. “She probably figured she was gonna die of a heart ailment or something.” White foam gushed out of her mouth, spewing five feet, hissing and steaming on the pavement.

“What the fuck could that old lady have done to deserve that?” I said, keeping my voice low. It was sick, everyone standing there watching people get gassed.

“It’s what you say, not what you do,” the kid said.

“Yes,” I said. “And what you know.” Right now Savannah wasn’t a healthy place for educated people, especially those who wrote articles for the underground papers, or made milk-crate speeches in the squares.

“The wolves are always at the doors,” the kid added as the DeSotos picked up the old lady’s body, carried it to a flatbed truck, and tossed it on top of a pile of twisted corpses.

“This isn’t right! This isn’t right!” a guy with out-of-date two-pocket pants and a button-down shirt shouted from the group still to be gassed. A DeSoto chopped him in the neck with the butt of his gun; he fell into the guy in front of him, grabbed hold of the guy to keep from falling. I turned to leave, then paused. The guy who’d shouted seemed familiar. I turned back and studied him, trying to think of how I might know him. It had to have been a long time ago.

The guy sniffed—a nervous habit—and suddenly I had it: he’d been a teacher at my high school. Mr. Swift, my English teacher in eleventh grade. That had been a million years ago, in a time when there was always enough food in the refrigerator and you let the crystal-clean water keep running and running out of the tap while you washed your hands. Mr. Swift had been a nice guy, had taken a liking to me. That had been rare. I’d been a quiet student, bright but not at the top of the class, and not ingratiating enough to draw attention from my teachers. Mr. Swift had been the exception—he always seemed to pay special attention to me, and it had felt good.

Mr. Swift looked toward the crowd. “Somebody help us.Somebody stop this.” Nobody moved.

Then he looked right at me.

“I know you. Don’t I? Please.” Thirteen, fourteen years later and he still remembered my face.

“Is he talking to you?” the kid next to me asked.

“I don’t know,” I muttered. I felt awful. There was nothing I could do. If I opened my mouth I could very well end up in line behind Mr. Swift. So I just stood there, too ashamed to simply turn and walk away, watching them pull people from the little crowd of condemned until it was Mr. Swift’s turn.

“This is tyranny!” Mr. Swift shouted as they dragged him out. He got a face full of the vapors.

Poor Mr. Swift. There wasn’t a bad bone in him. The wolves were always at the door—that was the truth.

I left the edge of the crowd, my mood pitch-black. Had I really just been to a dating service? How could there still be dating services when people were being murdered in the streets?

The wave of hopelessness I’d felt at the dating service returned, pounded me so hard that I sank to the curb, pressed my palm on the hot, gum-stained pavement to steady myself. Was this it? Was there nothing ahead, nothing but heat and boredom, viruses and bamboo? Just more and more of this and then everything would collapse completely? What could I do? I forced myself to get up, and moved on.

I accidentally kicked a bony, blue-veined ankle as I stepped around a group of sleeping homeless people spilling out of an alley onto the sidewalk.

“Sorry,” I said. My victim didn’t answer, just drew her ankle under a black plastic tarp that was her home.

I passed the coffee shop, the Dog’s Ear bookstore.

I paused, backtracked to the window of the bookstore. The display was mostly gardening, DIY manuals, cookbooks, but there were a few others: Existential Philosophy: An Introduction, Socialism Revisited, Light of the Warrior-Sage.

Years ago Mr. Swift had told me that whatever I do, keep reading. I’d read in college, but after that I pretty much stopped, except for newspapers. I rarely saw people reading books any more. Maybe I should do some reading, in memory of Mr. Swift.

The bookstore was closed—permanently, by the looks of it. I went into the alley, stepping between people sleeping out the heat of the day, and climbed in a broken bathroom window in the back. The bathroom was beyond odious; the toilet looked like it had been used a hundred times after the water had been turned off.

I hurried into the bookstore, opened the blinds on a side window, and held books up to read the titles by the sunlight streaking through. Most of the dusty books were in heaps on the floor, but they were still pretty much sorted by classification. I didn’t know what I was looking for; I just wanted some way to get Mr. Swift’s voice out of my head.

I gave the store a careful once-over when my eyes had adjusted to the dimness. Rough wooden beams and fat pipes ran the length of the ceiling. Pipes. It blew my mind that they used to be filled with drinkable water.

Books reminded me of Ange. She’d always had a book in her hand when she was in grad school. I dug around in anthropology, tossing titles over my shoulder, stacking a few possibilities to the side.

I picked up a book titled A Field Guide to Medicinal Herbs and Plants of Eastern and Central North America. I opened it at random; the names of the herbs were bolded in the text: Echinacea, Golden Seal, Eucalyptus, Feverfew. In the back were lists of herbs and their medicinal uses. Pain relief. Inflammation. Enlarged prostate. Ruplu was finding it impossible to stock medicine, and no one could manufacture it locally. We hadn’t had any aspirin in two years. I wondered if there was a market for this sort of stuff, or if I could create one? Back in the day, herbal remedies had been sort of a rich yuppie thing, but that was when all you had to do if you had a headache was grab a bottle of Tylenol.

The last thing I grabbed was Light of the Warrior-Sage, from out of the window display. I liked that phrase, warrior-sage. I found a plastic bag behind the counter, stuffed the books into it, and took off.

As I turned onto Jefferson Street I caught a whiff of the river. Even ten blocks away, when the wind was right the stench of dead seafood and ammonia cut right through the city’s default smell of piss on brick.

When no one was watching I pulled open the steel cellar hatch in the sidewalk in front of a burned-out storefront. I ducked down the steep staircase, crossed a damp basement, pushed out another hatch, and popped out into my secret retreat—a little courtyard surrounded by four-story walls which shaded the tiled floor most of the day. It had been part of a bar many years earlier. I tipped a mattress that was leaned up against a wall, spread my books and lay down to do some reading.

Mostly I read about medicinal herbs. Some of them grew wild. I imagined making forays out of Savannah to hunt for them in the vast bamboo jungle beyond. I’d have to learn how to prepare them—I knew nothing about herbs, I didn’t know if you dried them, or what.

My phone jangled. I checked the number, wondering if Maya was

calling back. No—it was Ange.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey, sweetie! How are you? I was just thinking about how I never

see you any more. I miss you!”

The words felt so good. I wanted her to say them over and over. “I miss you, too,” I said.

“You doing anything right now? Want to hang out?”

Yes, I did. I asked where she wanted to meet.