by Steven John
I hardly remember how our unique business relationship began—a bar and some drunken conspiring, I’d wager. It certainly was strange: All he had on me was that I bought government-controlled substances, and all I had on him was that he sold them. It was a vicious, beautiful cycle that kept us both fucked and both safe.
Those were the best kind of partnerships to have.
I popped two pills and sat down on my ratty couch to have a smoke. It usually took about two cigarettes’ time until the drugs got to work. Those few minutes always got very strange. Right before I passed out, almost invariably, I thought of life before the fog.
I had been twenty-eight the last time I saw the sun. Fifteen years ago. And that had been just a chance parting in the mist. It took months for it to go from clear to hazy to socked in. I was so used to it that it rarely occurred to me just how different things were. But those first days—those had been horrible times. Everyone gripped by a sense of despair. Suicides ran rampant. Fear was everywhere. As the sickness spread and they started shutting down cities, quarantining us by the thousands, the fog started in and changed everything. Fucked everything up.
I hadn’t driven a car, thrown a baseball, lounged on a bench … nothing like any of that in a decade and a half. It’s amazing how little you can do when you can’t see a goddamn thing.
The pills started taking hold before I was finished with my cigarette, but I still wanted a second so I lit another off the embers of the first and inhaled deeply. I loved that little burn at the back of my throat when I took in a lot of smoke. Let me know I was doing something. Killing myself, sure. But fuck it—I was in charge. I was aware.
I pulled open the window and lay on my back in the middle of the floor. After a minute, damp gray air crept across my body. It was cold tonight. I smoked my cigarette and looked at its little orange tip, my own personal orb, glowing in my own personal haze. My thighs and stomach grew chill and wet as the heavy air passed over the hairs of my body. I shivered, smiling like a half-wit, and ran my left palm across my chest and down along my torso, blowing smoke into the mist.
The sun always used to bother me. When it shone in my eyes, I hated it. As a carefree kid, I hated when it heated my shoulders, or later baked my fatigues while I was out on exercise runs … when it cooked our backs while we did push-ups out in the grass.
And the grass made my flesh itch. I missed diving into cool water, though, stepping into the river, being wet and cold all over. I ran my hands over my face and thoughts and shoulders and clinched the cigarette butt between my teeth. Fucking sun. I had hated it and the grass, but I missed it all. I would gladly have gotten a thousand little cuts and itching, sticking grass all over my body and rolled in the sun now, but it was never anything but the mist and no more cool blue lakes and no more deep blue. Just fog and a world at arm’s reach. Around the corner was a million miles away. So fucking pathetic. Goddamn disgusting just blubbering and jacking off there lying on the floor in the fucking mist in my own little chambers and running hands all over my body until I was lost in the pills and dreams I never recalled after a few minutes when I’m awake and grasping for them and they drift away.…
* * *
Oatmeal and coffee and some bar that was supposed to have fruit and vitamins and shit in it. All I tasted was the shit. That was my morning routine. That followed by pushing the heels of my hands against my head to hold the pounding headaches at bay. I knew I did it to myself, but somehow the painful pragmatism of avoiding morning hangovers never beat out the gratification of a good drinking session at night. Ever.
For some twisted reason, I did my best thinking hungover. So in a backwards way, enjoying myself at night usually led to a productive day. If drinking alone and stumbling around in alleys and popping pills can be called enjoying myself, that is.
I had a beer with the last bites of my bland-ass oatmeal. “I need a woman to keep me from doing shit like this,” I mumbled aloud. A woman would have been nice for sex too. And, well, companionship. I got over the sentimentality of the latter thought fast enough whenever it popped up. Keep it down, Tommy. It’s just you and the bad people out there in the foggy city.
I had been finding myself more work as a strongman than as an investigator. Clients paid to have me scare people into paying up, or into not straying too far from their marital bed, or to stop asking questions.
The one actual case I had been working before Rebecca came along was a robbery. A big one that had taken a whole hell of a lot of planning. Over four years, in fact. The police had given up and so the guy had come to me. Eddie Vessel. Thin shoulders and pale skin. He ran a business that housed information for other businesses and for individuals, and someone had been stealing info and money. And staplers and pens and such, but that wasn’t why he hired me.
See, the police either tried really hard and didn’t quit until they nabbed a perpetrator—it didn’t matter much if they were guilty or not—or, if the case didn’t affect the government, they dusted a door handle for prints and then said, “Good luck, asshole. Investigation closed.” And there weren’t many cops. Or at least not walking the beat or taking down reports. Military squads patrolled the streets now and again, just enough to make their presence known—and believe me, when forty men in dark gray uniforms holding rifles across their chests materialize from the fog, you think twice about your next move.
Granted, there were transients and bums out there, but it’s not exactly squatting when you’re hiding out in a misty abandoned building with broken windows and no electricity. Sure, there were plenty of would-be thieves lurking, but what did it matter when there was nothing worth stealing? Or buying. Even if you could get your hands on a pile of cash, the only commodities worth much were food and drink. That’s all I ever saved up for, at any rate, with a heavy focus on the latter.
The police, on the other hand, weren’t so much there to protect people from danger as they were to coerce us into not causing trouble in the first place. They were the ones who came to you by night, not some thief or killer. I guess they got the job done in their own twisted way, though. People kept pretty much in line. And when something did go bump in the dark, when someone got beaten or stabbed or, every once in a while, ended up dead, a man like me was a pretty hot commodity. I’m goddamn good at what I do. In a city afraid to ask questions, I made my living asking them.
Following people around in the foggy streets, putting together profiles of their movements. Their habits. Who they talked to and when and all that detective stuff. Research, I guess—that word makes it feel more legitimate. But at the end of the day, I usually solved things by asking people questions they didn’t expect and watching them squirm. It’s amazing how much you can get out of people if they think you already have it. And it gets almost too easy when one slap or a good shaking is enough to terrify.
Eddie Vessel had maybe fifteen, twenty employees, and one of them had been stealing a few things a month for years and lots of things a day for weeks. The police accused the Eddie of robbing himself and advised him to leave them alone. He had narrowed it down to a few guys, and I narrowed it down beyond that. It was either this stupid-looking tall drink of water named Watley or a dark-haired, dark-skinned guy named Thurmond. They both had access to the company ledger, both had access to all the files, and both had a motive to steal: The world sucks. I had no idea why so many people still fell in line.
Watley was a family man; Thurmond, a drunken loser. So I figured Watley was the crook. Thurmond could get drunk enough off his salary. But if you had more than one mouth to feed, that could lead a man to rob the place he worked. With everything grown in greenhouses and every drop of water run through purification plants, it got more expensive to eat all the time.
I had no interest in the case, but I felt sorry for Eddie. Most of his business came from ordinary citizens, folks trying to preserve memories. His warehouse was full of audio recordings and paper documents and pictures that families wanted kept safe. I had dug through the pla
ce a few times on weekends, Eddie wringing his hands and following me around, dusting here and organizing there and trying to keep busy. Everything he stored was pre-fog. Pictures of husbands holding wives in bright, sunlit fields. Old videos of beaches and oceans or mountain ranges. That sort of stuff. Depressing.
I guess really it wasn’t that I had no interest, but that the more time I spent there, the more knotted up my stomach would get. Seeing all that … beauty … from the past. I don’t know how he and the people who worked there took it. I guess one asshole couldn’t. At first I thought maybe it was sentimentality. Of the few government or business files Eddie housed, only one file had been tampered with, and it seemed nothing had been stolen. Some cash, but not much, had gone missing too.
If there had still been functioning banks or insurance agencies or whatever, it would have been much easier to lock the situation down. But there was only cash, and it had been that way for years … maybe ten, eleven years, in fact. I never really understood the factors of inflation and free market economies, the bullshit that mattered in the global world I grew up in, but in the mist, a dollar was a dollar: a piece of paper I held until I spent it on scotch or stuck it in a hole next to my bathtub.
I liked it that way. The last bills were printed well over a decade ago, so whenever you’d exchange money, you were guaranteed it would be worn, soft, and faded. It was oddly comforting. A touch of before. Seems like it should have been worthless, but we were all so damn nostalgic for some semblance of order that we bought it, so to speak. Funny what a few rectangular pieces of paper can do. Or make one do.
I sighed, resolved to review my notes, and got my little gray plastic tape recorder out of a cabinet, setting it by an outlet next to the couch. There were only two outlets in my apartment. I plugged my sun sphere into one and whatever else I needed rotated in and out of the other. You could see where there used to be five outlets in the place, but with power as precious as it was now, a residence as small as mine got only two. Some buildings had been taken off the grid altogether and left to molder; some—mostly government facilities—were aglow at all hours of the day. Not sure who made the decisions, but the lights always came on when I flipped the switch, so why bother wondering? At least we didn’t pay for electricity anymore. My parents used to get on my case for leaving lights on or the television playing. I missed them, but was glad they died before everything changed. When I thought of them, it was in a perfect vacuum of then, never touching now.
They both got sick, like most everyone else, and died mercifully fast. At least Dad did. I hoped she did too. I wasn’t with her at the very end. I still wondered sometimes if they had lived longer whether I would have been different. But just as soon as they were gone I joined the service, and deep down I was so fucking bitter about it all that I never thought about them for long. They were from before, after all. Thinking of them meant thinking of it all.
So Eddie. Poor Eddie losing money and data that led to more money lost as tearful, indignant families took their files and pictures and film and videos elsewhere. I flipped on the tape recorder and pressed rewind, planning to relisten to all my notes and observations and then make a decision over whom I’d try to scare a confession out of first.
A few photographs and documents he’d let me borrow lay littered about on the coffee table. In only one of the dozen-odd pictures was there even a trace of the fog. It was a picture of a gnarled little pine tree. The sun still fell upon the grass around the tree, but it was soft, diffuse. The picture must have been taken in the last few days of light.
I cracked another beer and sat down to listen to my canned voice mumbling out observations and hypotheses. I reused my tapes so much, their quality was always shot and a scratchy, humming white noise played under my every word, but before long, I wasn’t paying any attention anyway. I was thinking about her. Rebecca. It’s strange how quickly you’ll start to assemble fantastic notions about people you don’t know from a hole in the ground. Before long, I was picturing things she might say and how I might respond. I pictured her smiling at me, wearing that red dress here in my shitty little apartment. Then she was in blue jeans and a tight T-shirt—nothing fancy—the opposite of how she had dressed and acted, in fact. Laughing, talking to me about things, about life in the past. Christ, I bet she hardly remembered the past. Before.
I imagined her telling me she had no case, no money for me … it was all just an act and she was scared and lonely and spent her last cash on those drinks she bought at Albergue. I would hold her and gently rub the small of her back and breathe in her scent and she would be crying when she pulled away from me and would tell me they were tears of happiness … relief.
“I need to get fuckin’ laid,” I said aloud, standing up and shaking my head at the bullshit fantasies. It had been maybe six or seven months, and I couldn’t even remember her name. Carol or Carrie or something? I left while she was still in bed, awake, and she knew I was going and was not at all upset by it. I couldn’t blame her. It was Carol. I nodded wistfully to myself, remembering her long chestnut hair streaked gray. She was maybe five years my senior, maybe more. We met while buying the same kind of soup, and in both our eyes was the same simple desire: flesh. After we fucked a few times, it was painfully clear that behind our eyes were irreconcilably different people.
In spite of everything, she was full of life. Slender and toned, her skin healthy if a bit thinned by age, she used to walk around her apartment naked, telling me about the myriad paintings on her wall. I never once let her into my shithole of a home. The way she would moan and close her eyes so tightly, a tear sometimes sliding down one cheek while I grunted and dripped with stale whiskey sweat above her—I couldn’t take it. I think she pitied me, and that made it all the worse.
It went on for maybe a month. Probably less. The morning I left, we didn’t speak a word. And I’d hardly thought of her in all the months in between.
I stood before the window wearing just a pair of shorts. There was a breeze up this morning, and every once in a while I could make out the street a story below me. The orb posts, dark for now, pierced up through the mist. Squinting at where I knew an alley opened onto my street down to the left, I thought I could discern the shape of a person. The form was unmoving, and through the slowly drifting mists, I couldn’t be sure if it was anyone or even anything at all … maybe just a shadow. I strained to see but never got a clear look.
I thought of going downstairs and outside to check, just to satisfy my curiosity as I was sure it was nothing, but decided to drop it and sat back down beside my tape recorder. At least the little incident had gotten my mind off women and my underused genitalia. I pressed play.
“Saturday, the … the sixteenth, and I have now been, uh … it’s been three weeks since I began profiling the employees here.…”
I leaned back on the couch, groaning at my own tedium. Most of the tapes I had so far were filled with minutiae and fruitless conjecture. Every session ended with me creating more of the same. And when I went down to see Eddie, forget about it … hours of fucking notes I’d sit and drink to later.
* * *
An hour had passed, and still I sat listening to my notes and scratching down highlights and thoughts on a little yellow pad of paper. Frankly, all my recordings usually came in as nothing more than tokens. I’d play snippets out of context for clients and show them notes scratched here and there on my yellow pads of paper. (I’d bought a massive stack of the notebooks from the shitshop years ago and still never filled them all.) I’d talk about this tendency of such and such person or this bit of anecdotal bullshit and ask a few questions that I couldn’t care less about and then I’d stop whoever I thought was stealing or the errant husband or whatever in some lonely alley and shake what I wanted out of them. It worked, so why not? Also, if you surprise someone a few times in the same place, then wait a few weeks and do it once or twice more, they’ll be on edge for months, if not forever.
We’re so attuned to patterns t
hat it’s easy to create them for people. I’d say, “I’ll be watching you,” do so for a little bit, and then I was. Always. I saw the old Asian woman from the shop below me at the same times every day. She kept a schedule of when to scowl out at the world, to press her round cheeks between the metal slats of the grate and her forehead against the thick glass.
I stuck to my various routines because I wanted to, not because of any exterior pressures. We were all just rats in the maze. Me. Rebecca. All of us. When I was a kid, I spent one afternoon out in a field near my parents’ house screwing with this ant colony. I watched them for over an hour as they built a massive anthill. It seemed like it was two feet high, though really it was probably only eight or nine inches. I was barely four feet tall then, so things were bigger to me.
When their work had died down for a while and they seemed satisfied, I jammed a stick in there, plugging up their hole. Suddenly there were more ants than ever, running here and there and digging and scrambling over one another, and in minutes there was a new hole right next to the one I’d blocked. Next, I watched as they filed past one another in a perfect line, one by one maintaining the lanes of their ant highway. I put a rock right in the middle of their path, and at first they all rushed around and over it and then soon they were passing one another again in a perfect line, two inches left of the rock barrier I’d created. To them it must have seemed a mountain, but they just ran around it.
Sometimes I felt bad for the ants I’d crushed and blocked. Sometimes I felt more sorrow for having caused them suffering than I did for having hurt human beings. Any man I’d crossed or injured and any woman I’d slighted or cheated had at least made choices. And I had made choices too, so I could never feel sorry for myself. But for the stupid little ants who just kept running, there was no choice but to do so, and I felt rotten for having played any part in stopping that.
