by Steven John
“Thomas. Hello.”
“Hey, Salk. How’ve you been?”
“Nothing has changed. Nothing changes.”
“Yeah … not even my attempts at friendly banter, right?”
He smiled and inclined his head, eyes closed. “I always appreciate your asking, just the same. And how are things with you?”
“Uh…” I legitimately thought for a moment. “Fine, I suppose. I mean I’m still here … still alive and in one piece. That’s about as good as it gets.”
He stood behind the thick glass etched with spiderweb cracks and said nothing for a moment. “Still having trouble sleeping?”
“Oh, only every night.”
“That’s too bad. Well, I’m sure we can help. Let’s just…” He subtly pointed to the elderly lady, who seemed to be through with her searching. I nodded and stepped aside as she shuffled up to the glass and held aloft one item for Salk to price. A large, brightly colored candle. Well, that’s pleasant, I thought to myself. As soon as the thought was fully formed in my head, I was struck by my own cynicism. It’s the little things in life, right? All the minute pleasant details that add up to a nice day or all the individual frustrations or contentions that lead to a life poorly lived—the sum of those equals the whole. So fuck me, not her.
I ambled around the store, feigning purpose. All I really wanted at this point was to get home and get not-sober fast. Salk’s canned goods section got as much action from me as any grocery store. I preferred dumping cans into pots and eating out of the latter with a spoon to multi-step, multi-ingredient preparation anyway. Fresh had become a relative term.
I picked up a rickety metal basket from a small table by the door, dropped in the bottles of booze and grabbed a few cans of this, a few of that. Whatever looked, from the label, like it had the most ingredients in it. To balance things out in the old digestive system. I stuffed as many foodstuffs as I could in the basket. Then I grabbed a few small candles. They smelled like apples. I grabbed a carton of cigarettes too.
The old woman was gone, so Salk and I got down to business. I heard several bolts click and rattle, and then he emerged from a narrow door beside the window. Salk surveyed the contents of my basket briefly, and then said, “Let’s call it thirty dollars.”
“Hey, I appreciate it, but the liquor alone must—”
“Thomas,” he interrupted gently, “everything here is subsidized by the government. I’m a licensed pharmacist—a civic employee, after all. No one has checked my inventory in years.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose, eyes shut tight as if fighting a tension headache. “And frankly, hardly anyone comes in anymore anyway. I’ve grown to not much mind it, though. I take what I want and sell what I can for however much I feel is fair.” He looked up at me. “And then, of course, there’s…”
“Yeah.” I handed him thirty dollars in rumpled bills and accepted a paper bag he handed me. I continued speaking while packing my cans, bottles, smokes, and the candles. “I need more. More than last time.”
* * *
The alley behind Salk’s pharmacy had no orbs and no streetlights pierced the swirling fog here. The air was gray black, and anything more than three feet from your face impossible to see. A very good place to do this kind of thing. Salk was convinced that the ancient camera in one corner of his store still worked and that the government knew who had prescriptions and who did not.
I was sure this was batshit, but there was no reason to ever press the issue. I stood leaning against the wet bricks next to the pharmacy’s back door and waited for him to emerge. After a minute or so, the door clicked open and pale yellow light spilled into the void. He leaned out, saw me, and then stepped into the alley and sealed the door behind him. I heard the rattle of a pill bottle in the darkness. His hand found my arm, and then he pressed the bottle into my open palm.
“It’s quite full.”
“Thanks.”
“You know, Thomas, I used to feel like I really helped people. Really … really connected…” He sighed and looked away.
“You help me.”
Salk laughed under his breath, a bitter little sound. “I do what I can. I like the sense of routine. What else is there?”
Not knowing how to respond, I dug in my pocket for a couple of bills. “This is a fifty and a twenty.”
“That will be fine, Thomas. I thank you,” he said with an almost noble, resigned air as he backed away. I heard the door click open, and then yellow light again softened the darkness. Salk said nothing more and did not pause or look back as he shut the door behind him and left me standing in the blackness of the alley, clutching a paper sack full of liquor and canned food in one hand and a bottle of pills in the other.
* * *
I sat staring at the tape player. Chopin was poised and ready to fill the room and reduce me to a blubbering pile. I was drunk, but not very. I looked up and thought to rise and eat something, to bathe—anything to keep me from pressing play and unleashing the music on myself. Unconsciously, my eyes locked on to a black smudge on the wall across from my threadbare couch. I sat staring at this little patch of filth and hummed to myself off-key.
The ash from my cigarette snapped me from a trance as it fell onto my fingers. The smoke had burned itself out. I shook my hand, startled, and then threw the wasted butt into the overflowing ashtray. I rose and yanked the tape player’s plug from the wall, resolved not to listen to music tonight. I paced around the small room, needing something to do.
Nothing added up about what Rebecca had told me. I considered backing out of the whole thing. Eddie was a poor, honest sap—if I could figure out who was ripping him off, it’d pay the bills and keep me drunk for a couple of months and I was sure to find some desperate, spurned wife or a debtor to shake down or something. I’d lived by my instincts all my life. More so after the fog settled in. Most everyone looks out for themselves—it’s depressing, it’s bitter, it’s true. There were still a few churches out there and some support groups and places where people could gather and actually talk to one another, but none of it was right for me. I’d never been able to trust people; and it was even harder now. I walked over to the window and stood mumbling to myself, half out loud, at times silently. Nothing felt right, and really, the only reason I’d agreed to meet with Becca a third time was curiosity. And a little sense of excitement, I guess. And hey, I could always run off down some gray street and never look back when the walls started closing in.
She had told me more about him. Fallon. Told me lots of non-intimate details. He sounded like an asshole to me. He sounded like a pushover—worked in a big office of the power company. A drone. I had already come to hate this man because she loved him. Because he had something beautiful. But regardless of that and regardless of her description, office drones don’t end up framed for murder. They shopped at the grocery stores on big, blown-out avenues and spent money at bars in one of the few restaurants uptown. There was more to him. And I was going to find out about it.
Then there was Samuel Ayers.… There was at least one advantage to the ever-centralizing, growing bureaucracy of this city: the bureaucrats who answered the phones were experts at inadvertently giving away information. If you wanted to find someone you called the city. Every call for everything started at the same place: City Central. One of the thousand glassy-eyed, soulless pen pushers at Central took your call. You asked for an individual, a department, a business—anything. More often than not, that’s where your search ended. They hardly ever gave you the info you needed; they gave a curt take on fuck you very much, and you’re left holding a dead phone to your ear. But if you were looking for a government employee, things were a bit easier.
I had called Central shortly after Rebecca left my office and asked for Samuel Ayers. The woman on the other end mumbled and clicked at her console and eventually said that rarely heard word: “Transferring.” I had interrupted, asking to which department, and she replied, “Science and Development Research. Transferring.”
Once I got the phone-answering drone in the Science and Development Department, my trail had, not surprisingly, gone cold. When I had asked for Ayers, the man on the other end of the line clicked at his console, then asked me to repeat the name. He typed more, the line was silent for a minute, and then he came back on, saying, “We have no information to distribute on a Samuel Ayers. Good day.”
I’d learned long ago not to start making assumptions when the facts aren’t in, as often one will start to treat the two as equals, but still it brought up intriguing questions. Was he a scientist? They didn’t tend to have many enemies.
I stood looking out at the gray curtain sliding past my window, doing what I did best—drinking and letting my mind wander. I decided on going to the Science and Development Research Department the next day and trying to talk my way into more information on Ayers. I’d go to the police station and hit up the few guys who didn’t shut doors on me for details on Fallon. But for now, I was done working. Done focusing. With a real case like this—not some shakedown bullshit work—I put the pieces together mostly when I wasn’t trying to. I’d often wake up with a new idea or click two pieces together while finishing a scotch at Albergue.
I drew a deep, tepid bath and lowered myself into my rust-stained tub. The cool water felt excellent—refreshing and relaxing. It was funny how often on nights when the fog was bad I’d get home damp and sweating, and immediately get into the shower or bath. Water washing away water. I think part of the reason I like bathing so much is that it forces you to do nothing. Or at most very little. Cigarettes and tubs go very well together, especially with a glass of whiskey on the side. But you can’t really work; if you think of something you want to do, it’s a process—get up, dry off, dress—so anything that can be put off is.
Head back, I closed my eyes and dipped the smoke I was holding into the water, and then tossed the butt away. My mind was blissfully blank. I sat perfectly still in the cool water for a long time.
* * *
With a ragged gasp, I awoke and sat bolt upright in bed. My eyes went immediately to the Sun Sphere—3:00 A.M. on the dot. I caught my breath and dropped back down onto the sweat-soaked mattress, throwing the rumpled sheets and blanket off my body. Had I just been dreaming? I felt thoughts slipping away from me … images in the offing and memory on the horizon. A bright green field. People walking toward me from very far away … Heller’s face.
I let out a long, slow breath, giving up. Whatever had been in my head, I’d lost it. Which was just as well—usually my dreams were less than pleasant. I was pretty sure I knew what dream it had been anyway, and I tried not to think about it. But sleep would not take me back, so in the familiar haze of Salk’s drugs, still working their way throughout my bloodstream, I let the thoughts in.
The worst thing I’ve ever had to do was shoot the sick. I’d cursed myself a million times for not joining the army at nineteen like I had originally planned; had I not put it off those few short years, I would have been done and out by the time the virus came. They stationed us out on the roads and made it very simple: People heading out of the city were to be turned back—people approaching the city were to be shot.
No one knew what it was, but it spread fast, and the afflicted seemed to melt from within over a few short days. Hair falling out, skin turning moist and gray and then shedding off. Bones and teeth brittle and cracking. I’ve almost suppressed the last glimpse I caught of my mother, frail and rotting, as she was loaded onto a bus and driven off to die. Dad was gone when I woke up the morning before.
I had enlisted within forty-eight hours. Push-ups and square meals and cots. Within the month, as the virus spread ever farther, ever faster, my cursory training was over and I was rated with a .223 rifle and small arms and detonators.
They gave us gas masks and lots of ammunition and the captains spoke with the sergeants and then the sergeants shouted at us. So along with a bunch of other teenaged or twenty-something young men, I laced up my boots, pulled down my mask, and climbed on top of a truck parked across the highway. It had been a pleasant late winter, early spring day. The air was cool but the sun was warm.
When the first few of the dying approached, we fired into the air above them, waved our arms at them to go back. It was a group made up of three women and an older man. Stumbling, they inched ever closer, weak and delirious with sickness. When they were less than a hundred yards away, one of the younger guys, just a hothead kid too young to buy a beer, opened up on them. Then like rabid dogs unleashed, we all did. Shot and killed them where they stood.
At first I tried to blame that kid who opened fire—who opened the way for me to do the same.… But really, I should have thanked him. He freed us all to do what I suppose we had to. And it was mercy, really, shooting those sorry bastards. If he had shot my own mother and father, I would have thanked him. It was awful, what happened to those people, what happened to most everyone. I guess that helped me square up what I thought was righteous against all the rotting, living bodies I’d filled with bullets.
By the third day, things were organized enough to blow the bridges. While some soldier-children kept scanning the roads and occasionally picking off the walking dead, a few other guys and I were lucky enough to be ordered to lay down our arms and scurry around placing charges on each concrete pylon that ran down into the river. No sooner had we finished connecting all the detonation cables than a stone-faced captain connected two wires, flipped a switch, and—not even looking—brought the last bridge crumbling down into the water below. The blast was deafening. As it thundered across the land and a great cloud of dust curled up into the sky, none of us knew how final that act of destruction would prove to be. From that moment on, we were cut off.
I was sitting on the edge of my bed, feet on the cold floor. Pressing the heels of my hands into my eyes, I rose and walked stiffly into the living room. I clicked open the locks on the window and slid it open a couple of feet. Then I pushed the coffee table to one side and lay down flat on my back. The fog crept slowly into the room.
Sometimes in some truly horrific chapters of history you hear about survivors envying the dead. I guess a lot of that depends on how they died. It may be selfish, but beyond my family and the few I was close enough with to call friends, I wouldn’t have traded any life for the agonizing days of that death. Envying the dead, though … who knows? Maybe there is a heaven or a hell. Maybe both. Probably neither, but I knew goddamn well that this life was purgatory, peopled by the lucky few—the saved, the spared … the survivor captives. Out of the fire and into perpetual gray. The funny thing is the suicide rate reached its plateau after only a year or two. At least a doctor told me that during my discharge physical. I doubt anyone had conducted a study in years. Still, we managed to adapt fairly well to the sensory depriving maze. Yet even in the gray new world, every once in a while, people got shot in the back in alleys, just like they always have.
I took in long, slow breaths of the damp, heavy air. My palms found my chest and thighs and cheeks and I let myself believe they were not my hands. They say the first real job was prostitution? Wrong. The first real job was killing in the dark and taking what you wanted.
* * *
It was 7 A.M. I was drunk, sitting on the john, taking a shit. Sleep had not come back, so I had turned again to the bottle. Whiskey had kept me company all through the early-morning hours with one shot of vodka on the side. The vodka was a sort of houseguest. It was just passing through my routine, and I felt sick and pathetic for having bought it. In my mind, a red-dress-wearing Rebecca would be sitting in my candlelit box of a home, sipping liquor and smoking black cigarettes.
But she didn’t smoke. Probably didn’t drink vodka, either. It was just an illusion she had spun that first night, and I didn’t know her from Adam but I had bought the vodka and more food than I had in months even after she’d shown up wearing the trousers and blazer of a prep school prude.
I swayed back and forth on my lonely porcelain throne humm
ing without melody. Then came the worst part, wiping, as bad as it can be. I got the littlest bit of shit on my hand. I almost had a goddamn breakdown right there on the can. I was so fucking pathetic. “Hi, Rebecca,” I said aloud, waving at no one with my fouled right hand. I took a long, noisy pull off the fifth of scotch sitting beside me and then washed my hands repeatedly.
I stumbled into my living room and toppled down onto the couch. Diffuse gray light filled the room, and I thought to rise and take the seven or so steps to bed, knowing I’d soon pass out, but it was just too much.
* * *
There was a pounding on the door. I didn’t realize I wasn’t dreaming until I was already fumbling with the locks and it was too late to stop. I looked down, established that I was dressed, and then slapped myself once good and hard across the face before opening the door slowly. Eddie stood there on the landing, looking like hell. I never gave anyone my home address.… Had I given it to poor old Eddie? Too foggy, I had no idea what to make of it. Still drunk and confused. I played it cool.
He came right in. I shuffled aside awkwardly and stood there unsteadily as Eddie surveyed my living arrangements. There was a bottle of scotch lying on its side on the table, uncorked and with a few belts left in it. The rest had poured into me or onto the floor. A pill bottle lay open beside it. Eddie looked at me with deep, sorrowful eyes. His dark brows pressed together as he repeated, “It’s so awful, Tom. It’s just so awful.”
I shut my door and lurched past him, dropping roughly onto the couch. Head pounding … my mouth tasted like pennies and vinegar. Dry as a bone. My right hand kept trembling, and I was sure he was staring at it.
“What, uh … What seems to be the problem, Ed?” I mumbled hoarsely.
“It’s all gone now. So awful. All of it gone or thrown across the floor. My life has been taken from me and thrown across the floor. I can’t believe it.”
“Care for a drink?” I smiled beneath bleary eyes, righting the whiskey bottle and sliding it toward him.
