The Last Weekend

by Nick Mamatas

  Finally, we were done again and without raising her hand or even waiting for a prompt from the teacher, Yvette responded first. “I think it’s a pretty good character study of a young alcoholic,” she deadpanned, “who is constantly afraid of everything and possibly even impotent. I thought the worry about getting home to his mother, even when his girlfriend encourages him to have all the sex he wants with anyone who’d have him, was a great little implied plot point. Sort of like Hemingway.”

  “Who was also an impotent alcoholic, right?” someone else said. And the worm turned on me. The story was praised more than any other I had submitted to the workshop.

  “Men don’t often write about utter losers that way; very refreshing,” one of Yvette’s cronies said.

  The older woman whose stories were always about her grown children not wanting to visit her got her licks in too: “I was ultimately very pleased that the story was read aloud to us twice. It was a good technique, since the second reading made it clearer to me which parts of Billy’s story were intentionally incoherent, and which he’ll actually need to work on during revisions.” Then she listed virtually every paragraph as needing revision.

  Even the freshman who wrote movie scripts about serial killers and the Devil, but all in prose form—“Cut to . . . an abandoned warehouse that smells of brimstone and fear”—praised me with faint damnation. “I could really identify with the inner turmoil and madness of the main character.”

  Yvette never looked up, never flashed anyone a smile. She was a few heartbeats away from needing to be strapped to a chair to be kept upright. Between the two readings and the effusive and extended comments from everyone, the theme of the session was me and what a drunken cretin I was. And that’s what I needed. A solid rhetorical beatdown; a half-dozen hits to the face with a lead pipe, just to make Yvette frown. I was drunk enough so that the bruises on my psyche wouldn’t surface for hours, maybe even years. She was really hurt, though. Despite the concerted if unconscious efforts of all our classmates to block me by surrounding her, I managed to exit shoulder to shoulder with Yvette.

  “What do you think?” I asked her and she told me:

  “I think we should talk.” We went back to her dorm and wordlessly fucked, or tried to, as both booze and the endless accusations of impotence weighed heavily on me. We found some other pleasures for Yvette, and finally we started talking after silently deciding to cut the rest of our classes for the day.

  “The reason I said I thought you and I should see other people is because—”

  “You want to fuck Stag.”

  “No, it’s because I’m going to transfer out. YSU sucks. The professors are all morons, the students are only here because the market for crystal meth manufacture is already supersaturated, and the whole town smells.”

  “How do you know the town smells? You live here and have all your life, just like me. A smell isn’t something you’d notice if you grew up with it.”

  “Remember, I was in Pennsylvania last summer, on that experimental farm. I haven’t been able to get the awful smell out of my nose ever since I returned. Also, I’m not being intellectually challenged here. So I want to transfer, to Boston.”

  “Ha!” I knew absolutely nothing about Boston, except that it was the setting for Cheers and even there it existed only as a gray and shadowed ocean from which Norm and the others came to sit at the bar and drink. That, and one could not park the car in Harvard Yard. I suspected that there was something about Boston that was still very much like the eighteenth century, with thick wooden furniture and men in white wigs plotting genteel revolutions—themselves to be the only beneficiaries—in the scratches of their feather quills.

  “Ha,” Yvette repeated.

  “Where in Boston?”

  “There are lots of colleges out there. A lot of culture. Maybe BU, maybe Boston College. They’re a Catholic school. My mother would get on board. Emerson. All sorts of places.”

  “So you’re just toying with this idea, then.” Yvette was going to go to Tanzania last year, got as far as Pennsylvania. Then there was the dropping out of school to apprentice to a Japanese tattoo artist, and culinary school, and South Africa. She’d also “tried” to go to New York to volunteer at Ground Zero, but her attempts had been limited to some late-night Googling, and a glance at the Greyhound map.

  “No, I got into all three of those schools.” Yvette slid her hand between her bed and the wall and came up with some torn envelopes, acceptance letters still inside. “I’m going to move this summer. Boston’s crazy; everyone leaves right after Memorial Day. You can furnish an entire apartment just on the cast-offs left on the streets. It’s like a neutron bomb hit. And then September 1 is Moving Day. The streets are packed with Ryder trucks and U-Hauls. I even found a website that offers odds on how many trucks will be stuck under overpasses. It sounds like a riot. And there are a ton of bookstores, lots of local music, arthouse cinema, it’s a major market for events. The Charles River!” That last she shouted like she was at a geography bee. “Did you know that it is entirely devoted to recreation?”

  “Isn’t Boston Harbor supposed to be gross and disgusting?” I’d been a kid during the Dukakis run for President, but just seeing a real live Greek on TV, with the eyebrows and the surname and the great helmet of hair like my uncle Yianni’s, was electrifying. I couldn’t believe he’d demanded a waiver of the Clean Water Act. My father blamed the Mafia on this act of cowardice, and the Irish Mafia was also implicated somehow in my father’s Formica countertop rants about the election back then. I’d eat French Fries and catch only every eighth word of the rapid-fire Greek of the unofficial Dukakis Brain Trust of Youngstown, Ohio. On Election Day, my father stayed home and waited nervously for the returns to start coming in, though he never even thought to register to vote himself. He was worried the FBI would be able to find him more easily then, and that this would somehow lead to the diner being torched.

  “Everything’s clean now,” Yvette said. “Everything’s perfect. I always wanted to take up rowing.”

  “I’m coming with you,” I told her.

  She snorted. “You’re half a semester away from graduating. You can’t transfer now.”

  “I’ll go to grad school. I’ll get my MFA.”

  “MFA!” Yvette was the queen of this masculine gambit. Forget the relationships and emotional connections people have, and just move right into the bald practicalities of a situation. If she hadn’t been an unrepentant Nader voter, Yvette probably just would have married the gaptoothed chinless son of a steel magnate. Was that why she was going off to Boston, for a superior pool of dorm-room fucks?

  “You hate MFA students. You rant about them all the time,” she said. She sat up on her elbow, tucked her chin in a bit and deepened her voice. “Did Bukowski get an MFA? Did Celine have a master’s degree? Harlan Ellison even failed freshman English, and at Ohio State too. Blah blah, I’m awesome like them so I don’t need an MFA. Also the New Yorker can suck my balls, not that I’d ever submit, because technology hasn’t found a way for me to email my balls to them so that they might more efficiently suck!” Then, back to her natural voice. “Plus, you can’t apply now; it’s already too late for September. And your parents would kill you. What would they do without their prince?”

  “Do you get why I suddenly decided to try for an MFA?” I asked her. “It’s just a reason to go with you on Uncle Sam’s dime. I’ll take out loans and write whatever I was planning on writing anyway, and maybe I can end up teaching community college instead of high school. Look at it this way, you convinced me. Boston’s great! We can drink the water, and they have movies there . . . strange and mysterious films that nobody in Ohio could ever imagine.”

  “Oh, Billy,” Yvette said. “I think you really just don’t get it.”

  I didn’t get it, but neither did she. I didn’t want to make it easy for Yvette, I didn’t want her to win by palming me off on someone else. In that moment, I only thought Let the acid of my anger co
rrode me more than it does her; let me dig two graves on my mission of revenge. Boston ruined me for years afterward. How many nights did I spend awake thinking about debt and disaster and wishing some quantum tunnel into existence that could bore a hole in time just large enough for me to whisper, “Back down! Don’t do this!”

  And I did hear just those words, in my own voice, in my head, at that very moment. In my less lucid moments I even dreamed that old sci-fi dream that I would one day happen upon a method to communicate with the past. I’m no scientist; never took more than the usual Physics for Poets class and two semesters of calc, but anything could happen in the future, I thought. A freelance journalist gig, a stray particle too small to be held in the amber of time sliding through a half-mile of cement and lead and cementing itself in my brain . . . too many comic books as a kid.

  My father would growl, “That junk is for the retarded children. Are you telling me that you are retarded?” But so much of it stayed with me—knuckled fists with a starburst and pow beneath, the narcissistic audacity of the villains. I still doodle muscle-bound men on the margins of my foolscap when the words won’t come. For a long time every long walk I took home from a job was fodder for the daydream of finding a magic ring and using it to fly to the black tar roof of whatever crappy little apartment building Yvette had been living, when I decided to join her in Boston. After the troops had woke me on my couch, four days into the new world of the walking dead, I left behind my ridiculous little daydream. Surely, I would have warned my past self in that post-coital haze not about Boston, but about the living dead and San Francisco’s great secret.

  (6)

  I soon discovered that Alexa was paranoid, like many Greeks, and also a wreck, like many alcoholics. She had all the zines and books and print-outs one could want about the reanimates, which she kept in plastic garbage bags in her bedroom closet. It took her almost twenty minutes to sort it all out, on her hands and knees on the floor. The crumpled papers looked a bit like an avant-garde form of carpeting.

  She spoke rapidly while she worked. The gun was on the nightstand. I briefly considered picking it up to feel its heft, or just tucking it into my pants, which I had slid back into as the night grew cool. Alexa probably had another firearm somewhere, but that was also the problem—Alexa probably had another firearm.

  “Look,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s odd that there aren’t any cemeteries in the city, and even when an old off-map burial ground was discovered, the settlers almost invariably exhumed the corpses and put them somewhere outside city limits?”

  “I do think it’s odd. Everything’s odd. I’ve read all this junk, too.”

  “What I’ve been doing,” Alexa said, “is boiling down all the information, all the theories, to find out what elements and narrative strings they have in common. And I think I have a semi-useful theory as to why the events of the past few years have occurred.”

  The events of the past few years—what a phrase. It reminded me of 9/12, when I went to my local bank branch as my father was screaming that we needed to get all our cash out and convert it to “wearable gold” immediately because martial law was coming and coming soon, and the bank was closed, according to the handwritten sign “due to circumstances.” That just set papa off even worse. He nearly took a hacksaw to our heat registers in a mad drive to sell the copper pipes within for folding money.

  Alexa went on with the same sort of frantic energy I’m already so familiar with, the sort of passion that heats up my brain so fast and so hard that I have to douse it in gin, in beer, even in wine by the jug. She was sure that the ’49ers had known something, and that whatever they had discovered either in their mines or mills or just in their wandering of the city’s hills had been hidden in City Hall. Even thinking about rye was enough to get me in a poetic frame of mind.

  “You know, City Hall was destroyed in the big quake in 1906,” I told her when she finally caught my attention by saying City Hall. “Why would anything from before that time still be in there, like in an old Hitchcock film where the drama always unfolds around a landmark?”

  “Because the city just seemed ready, somehow. For all of the twentieth century. So we should do something.” Alexa had the endearing habit of blowing her hair out of her eyes with a twisted lip and a ffft noise. She did that then, and it worked.

  “Kidnap a bigwig and make him talk? Poke around in the basement? Climb the underside of the rotunda?”

  “Whatever it takes.”

  “It’s not going to take anything, girl,” I told her. She bristled at girl, but that was the sort of thing I liked to say. “Your theory is just another thought-fox; you convinced yourself it’s real with a few details, but it’s nothing but scribbles on a page.”

  “Thought-fox?”

  “It’s a poem by Ted Hughes?” If Alexa had said Who is Ted Hughes I would have left just there and then, even though Greek girls usually surrender the anal sex on the fifth or sixth date.

  But she said, “I don’t know the poem, but Ted Hughes . . . world’s worst husband, right?”

  “And father!”

  She laughed for a moment, then swallowed the rest of it to say, “I need to know what’s going on in the world, and in the city. It’s just too neat. I have to figure it out.” She spat the out, practically.

  “Why?”

  Alexa said, “I want to do something with my life. I want to be remembered. I want a statue, Billy, what can I say? And for a long time there was nothing I could have done at all. My dreams got smaller—from ballerina-astronaut performing the first ever Swan Lake on the moon–”

  “Ha! Really?”

  “Shut the fuck up,” she said. “And yes, really. From that to being just another one of the world’s B-minus students. Ooh, maybe I could be a project manager at a non-evil environmental clean-up firm.” She threw up her arms. “Well, the Great Recession killed that dream, too. Maybe I could dress up and stick my tits out and keep my cunt waxed and maybe meet a nice dot.com CEO and just have babies? It turns out they mostly like blondes and girls who can shut up on command. And then the world ended and the game reset. What did Chairman Mao say? ‘There is great chaos under heaven, and the situation is excellent.’” People in California loved quoting Chinese Communists for some reason. I told myself it was because they weren’t clever enough to memorize quotes from novels, like I did. Nobody reads anymore.

  “Excellent chaos? I’ll buy that,” she continued. “Now I have a chance again to do something nobody else ever has. Find out what happened, for real, and maybe even do something about it.”

  I had nothing to say but what I always say. “I’ll buy you a drink. Do you know a place around here?” I wanted out of Alexa’s apartment immediately, since we clearly weren’t going to be going another round that night.

  “Schroeder’s; used to be a German place with schnitzel and everything. Now it’s just a German place with beer and electricity 24/7. They have solar batteries. They’re a smart bunch.”

  So we went. Beer isn’t often my drink, but six o’clock is my hour. Schroeder’s was a social place, with long tables and bright lights. It was a chatty bunch. The social worker I’d seen in my home and then again when I applied for the driller job was even there, drinking schnapps and holding a tiny court. There were a few small plates featuring actual food as well. She saw us and waved us over to join her table, which we did. She even raised her glass to me. With German efficiency my drink was served and I broke out a little Bernard DeVoto for the occasion.

  “‘Nothing stopped us from sea to shining sea,” I said, “nothing could stop us, the jug was plugged tight with the corncob, and we built new commonwealths and constitutions and distilleries as we travelled, the world gaped, and destiny said here’s how.’” I got applause and nods. Not quite the usual bar experience, but I was on a date of sorts with Alexa so I was almost able to relax.

  “We’re talking about our theories,” the man sitting next to me said. He was an ordinary fellow—going a
little bald, getting a little fat, his smile hinting at little wrinkles to come. The nice sort of guy one hopes one’s sister marries, because he’ll be happy to mow his in-laws’ lawn. “It’s our weekly meeting.”

  “Wonderful,” I said. “Alexa has a theory.” With the bear trap thus sprung on her little brown ass, I leaned back and relaxed.

  Alexa started recruiting for a raid on City Hall. There was something there that could have been apprehended even in the nineteenth century, which she said was why the City was still relatively safe today. The usual objections were raised to her goal and her theory. Why did the dead arise only in America, even to the point of respecting the borders with Canada and Mexico? Had to be a foreign force—the North Koreans, the Chinese, al-Qaeda, “Haitian voodoo.”

  Makes no sense, though someone else asked what sort of technology could possibly do this, and ruining America ruined the world’s economy more or less indefinitely. Not that the bokor of Haiti would have noticed worldwide economic collapse, but if they had the power why wait two hundred and fifty years to unleash it? That was the ordinary fellow on my left. Pollution, or Jesus Christ simply offering a Revelation unlike any we’d have ever expected. An ancient yet recurring and cyclical catastrophe that we were just unfortunately alive to experience though ageless history is too young for any record of it. Harvey Milk, now that was a strand of conspiracy pretty much unheard outside the Castro, but there was that old gay specter haunting the table. The teleological blather I’d already heard from that guy William—that must have been catching on somehow, probably through a zine I’d not yet read.