The Last Weekend

by Nick Mamatas

  I looked at men too. I liked to whip up stories about their pasts—one old guy with a limp was a former bootlegger who still had a bullet wedged in his femur. A frantic young kid, who turned his pencil into a spaceship and used its lasers to disintegrate his mother with pshewpshew noises, would grow up to design death weapons for the Pentagon, giggling amorally at a spreadsheet full of protected bodycounts; one billion, two billion, three billion bodies—ah ha hahaha! He’d laugh like The Count from Sesame Street because that was his, and my, favorite character on that old show. But to women I gave no careers, granted no interesting pasts or compelling futures. They were just holes and tits.

  Soon I took to following women along their commutes. Rather than choosing what trains to take arbitrarily, I’d find a cute girl or an interestingly dressed old lady and just take whatever trains she took. It wasn’t quite stalking, since I never followed anyone off a train to a workplace or to a home. It was just a way of organizing my day, and saving money. On the T I wasn’t in a bookstore or a bar or in a restaurant I couldn’t afford. And I couldn’t afford any restaurant. I would ride and ride, and stop to eat at the Dunkin’ Donuts in the Harvard Square T stop when I found myself at that stop. Chocolate glazed—one in the morning, one in the afternoon. A few tokens a day. Then class in the evening, or back to my room and my eBay laptop, transcribing whatever snippets of overheard conversation I remembered, whatever fantasies I dared share with the workshop.

  To pay for my tokens and donuts, I signed up for psychological testing at Harvard. It wasn’t nearly as exciting as I’d hoped it would be—no electrodes, no megadoses of LSD or other experimental drugs. I made five or ten or twenty a pop playing boring perception and learning games. See a 7, type 7. See a 6, type 13. See a 5, type 11. Then it would speed up, and I’d lose my place and just frantically mash buttons till the graduate student came to save me and hand me a ten-dollar bill. The business school had experiments too, and those were mostly endless variations on the prisoner’s dilemma and other game theory notions. The business school paid well—up to fifty bucks if you did very well against the homeless people and eager Harvard undergrads who comprised the sample populations of virtually every experiment. I tried to read up on game theory on the Internet in order to guarantee bigger payouts, but the games always seemed tilted toward the Harvard kids. I could still make between seventy-five and one hundred dollars a week though, and I had enough money saved from typewriter sales and other shit jobs in Youngstown that I was able to keep up with the rent.

  I even got about twenty seconds of free psychological treatment once. I’d answered a question about death and how often I thought of it—my own death, the deaths of others—with a 4 out of 5. The grad student experimenter stood up and closed the door, then smiled at me.

  He said, “Four out of five, hmm. Often, but not always, that’s a sign of depression. Do you ever feel depressed? We have some resources if you do . . .” He was nervous. Very short too. Tall men tend to make short guys anxious—he was a thoughtful little chihuahua of a boy.

  I did think about death a lot. I should just kill myself whenever I missed a connecting train, or when I replayed old conversations from my college days, ancient embarrassments from childhood. A dozen times a day, maybe more. Then there was everyone else whose death would be a great relief.

  So I said, “I’m a writer. I’m working on a book. It’s sort of . . .” I let the rest of the sentence hang there so he could fill in the blank as he liked.

  “. . . a murder mystery?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “Okay,” he said. And he didn’t give me the list of phone numbers or public health department websites or whatever it was he was supposed to do. And that was that. I didn’t even want to peel my skin off and leave it on the work desk and run screaming, red and bleeding through the streets, like I often did when someone talked to me about me. I did spend the ten bucks from that day on some okay Chilean table wine.

  Between the T and the lab rat business, I was absolutely not getting laid. I grew expert at finding the cheap bars far from any of Boston’s zillion colleges, and nursing a single pint or shot for an hour or more. These weren’t places where someone like me—someone with most of his teeth, who wanted a girl with all of hers—could meet a woman. The old women in these bars were like the old men; chewed up and spat out by life, limbs and jaws moving only so much as needed to get ass to stool, booze to throat. Bags of unironed skin hiding the rusty works beneath. And they were all owned, these old gals. Drinking is not like a Bukowski novel. There are no sexual adventures with vibrant, crazy bitches, or even tedious workaday humping with aging whores who’ll spread for fifty bucks’ worth of fortified wine. The old women are all paired up with old men, and they don’t try to flirt with the young stud in the next booth to make their husband jealous, or care at all about anything but the glass in front of them, and finishing it.

  Drinking in an old man bar in Somerville, when the Celtic revival crap was on in the background, was like working in a Youngstown factory. Long hours of mind-numbing work, a trade of precious irreplaceable quanta of life for just enough fuel to continue at it. Our secondary sex organs slough off. We all wear shapeless garb a hard winter away from falling completely to tatters. There’s no jukebox, no dartboard, no pub food, not even little bowls of peanuts or pretzels. We don’t need the mass-produced fake joy to be compelled to lift our glasses, we don’t need the salt to swallow the next mouthful. After last call, we do our grocery shopping at the gas station—a can of ravioli, a packet of two aspirin, and a Mounds Bar. The coconut in it makes it the healthy option, surely. It’s a living, but barely.

  There was a gas station girl I talked to. Her name was Aishwarya, according to her nametag. Short, light brown, no smile for me or anyone else, but her face was alive and she was paid to make eye contact with customers by her very own father and uncle, the co-owners of the Shell station. I was never a chatty drunk, these pages notwithstanding, and knew that small talk would fail. So I started heavy.

  “Do you have a lot of racism around here?” I asked her one night. It was snowing outside. Thick, swift flakes falling slashways across the lights by the gas pumps. Unlike the girls at Dunkin’ Donuts, Aishwarya never remembered my usual, which is just as well since she didn’t have to fetch the candy bar or canned pasta for me. Instead, she looked aghast at my selections every time, like I was some brand-new asshole each time.

  So when she asked, “Is this…it?” in that dubious way, I hit her with the racism question.

  “Excuse me?” she responded. She was probably pretty sure I had just said something racist, or called her a racist. Her accent was mostly American, and her English better than mine, so it wasn’t a gap in her understanding. I was just a drunk and mumbling freak, and my mouth was maybe a foot and a half over her head, closer to the growling heating vent than her ears.

  “Racism. Are you a victim of racism on your job? Do people call you names?”

  “Names…like what?”

  “Like, uhm…” Don’t be racist, don’t be racist, I thought. “Well, someone might call you a bitch, for example. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not calling you a bitch. I’m just using that as an example.”

  “‘Bitch’ is not a racist term, sir,” she said. She put my can in a little paper bag. I fell in love with Aishwarya in that moment. That bag would be destroyed in a moment out in the wet snow, but she soldiered on with her routine, fiercely refusing to accept the world as it was to keep my groceries dry. “It’s a sexist term.”

  “But, well, a bitch is a dog, meaning less than human,” I said. “And lots of dogs are brown . . .” Some sober part of my brain, way down deep in the stem of my spine, begged me to stop talking. Take out my keys and gouge out my eyes and the flesh of my face if need be, but just shut up, shut up. But those neurons were outnumbered. “So, isn’t it a kind of racism as well?”

  She said, “Nobody has ever called me a bitch here at work. Nor on the bus either coming to o
r leaving from work. You’re the first person to ever say that word in my presence, in this room, in any context whatsoever.” She had change for me. She put it on the countertop rather than holding out her hand to drop the money into my palm.

  Did I just ruin our relationship forever? My cheeks boiled with embarrassment. But as Aishwarya gave me the bag despite the futility of it all, I felt the need to continue.

  “Well, perhaps you’ve experienced other kinds of racism. Have you ever been called a dot-head? Have people mimicked Apu from The Simpsons and said, ‘Thank you, come again!’”—and here I did my own impression—“as they leave? Do they ask for Slushees?”

  “You seem rather interested in cataloging all the ways in which someone might like to insult me,” she said. Then she didn’t say anything else. She didn’t ask me what my problem was, or tell me to leave, or reach for her cell phone, or turn away and busy herself with the take-a-penny jar or the firearm surely hidden right under the countertop.

  “I’m a writer,” I blurted out. “I’m an observer of the human condition, an explorer of the world we all live in, but never truly examine. I’m interested in how people live, what challenges they face, how they get out of bed in the morning, and with whom they go to bed after a long evening. It’s about life, Aishwarya!” She glanced down at her own nametag for a moment. “That’s what I want to know. How do you live like this—and don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this is a bad way to live. It’s better than my life. I can barely talk to people anymore. I drink all the time, all the time. It’s like dipping my overclocked fried-out brain in Nyquil till the pot boils, then inhaling the vapors, you know? It’s the only thing that keeps me from melting into a puddle of anxiety and rage. I eat nothing but junk food but look like a scarecrow because of all the nervous energy buzzing away in the very marrow of my bones. And all I want to do, Aishwarya, is capture some authentic moment of reality, and put it down on paper, and send it forth into the wild moronic inferno we call America, so that someone, somewhere, can read it and realize that he—or she—is not alone.” I swallowed a hiccup right after. It tasted like sewage and rum.

  Aishwarya glanced outside at the snow swirling by the gas pumps and then looked back at me. “Perhaps you should consider that the writer’s best subject might be himself, and not some uninterested person who has troubles and concerns, and joys, of her own.”

  “I’d like to know about your joys,” I said. “Tell me about one.” I was just thrilled that she was still talking to me, that on some level she had listened.

  “I enjoy standing behind this counter all night, mostly by myself. Sometimes the door opens and a puff of cold air comes in along with a customer and brings gooseflesh to my arms. It takes only a few moments for my body temperature, and the heat of the air in this little box of a building, to bring my skin back to normal. But I like it, I suppose. It’s the little things. Call that a present, Mister, and take it with you. Come back a bit closer to sober next time, and you can be on your way back to your own nice warm house that much sooner.”

  That was rhetorical judo of sufficient skill that I left without another word, without even a nod of my head, but with a smile and a backwards step that I hoped connoted respect. She was wrong though—I didn’t have a nice warm house. I had a poorly insulated room up a flight of steps in a two-family home. Rear entrance. My feet sank in the snow drift in the backyard up to my shins. The house was never quite dark, as the old Greek lady who lived downstairs kept late hours herself, and when she fell asleep it was on her couch in front of the huge black and white TV that must have cost a mint back when she bought it in 1963. Infomercials, Jesus Christ. At least drinking . . . No, not at least drinking.

  My room upstairs was nearly pitch black, as usual, as I had to use one of my two blankets to cover the window and keep out winter. The only light that greeted me was the little green one on my laptop. I turned on the light, peeled off my pants and left them to puddle on the floor, switched into sweatpants and started to write. It was about nothing, really. Yvette had liked to shower when she was cold, to warm up. That never made any sense to me. I dreaded nakedness, both before the bath and after it. Before, I shivered. After, I was resigned, and would just throw open the curtain and step out into the frigid air and reach for the towel. Nothing in the bath ever comforted me, made me want to linger in the tub reading a book or playing with bubbles. I always felt like I was either a piece of meat being rinsed off, or already part of a human stew. There was no joy for anything else either. Not exercise—I hated the smell, the strain, the way my muscles felt dead hanging from my bones afterwards. Not spending money—never had any dough anyway, and there was never a charge in either bargain-hunting or buying something expensive. Even sex was always at least a minor disappointment, more similar to performing some poorly understood magic trick than a communion between two people. It was always better, harder, dirtier, in my head. All I had was books and booze. My two prescriptions for staying alive.

  It was enough for a dumb little vignette. Couple showers together; girl loves the water, man shivers just outside of the stream. They fumble a bit to switch places because the tub is narrow and the dude a little portly. No mention of her pubic hair or of waxing—a bit of maturity there, as Yvette rocked what she called the runway and what I called “Hitler’s mustache” when we were together, and it would have been so easy to throw in a reference—or anything explicit. Just them showering together, giggling about the awkwardness of it, and then quickly turning off the water, throwing the curtain open, and jumping out into the cold of the bathroom. She howls that she’s cold and miserable now. He says that so is he. Being cold and miserable during the writing helped. I grabbed some dry, dirty clothes off the floor and poured them over the one blanket on my bed. I saved the file, emailed it to my web mail account in case my laptop died in its, and my, sleep, and went to bed. I forgot to make my can of ravioli. I was hungry, but colder than hungry, and too cold to get up or even proofread, so I slept. The next morning I took the T to Boston and was the slightest bit kinder to the women opposite me.

  (10)

  Thunder came home with me. We didn’t talk about why. It was pretty clear that Berkeley was the exclusive precinct of lunatics and the living dead, that life was better in the City.

  In the traincar she asked me about myself, what I’d done before the apocalypse, what brought me to the Bay Area. She was born up in Hayward, and just gravitated toward Berkeley because the street kids seemed friendly and the weather was nicer. Her nickname came from her claim to have never ever heard any thunder. It’s true that there aren’t many thunderstorms in the Bay.

  We didn’t fuck the first night, as it took so long to pick our way back to my apartment. We didn’t bother pretending that we weren’t going to fuck, so we squeezed together on my couch as best we could, with her atop me, my left arm reaching toward the floor. It was warm under her. She woke me with her mouth in the morning, which was a weird and pleasant surprise. I even tried to push her away, though my heart wasn’t in it.

  After she finished, she looked up at me and said, “I want to kill zombies. Breakfast, and zombies.” She didn’t try to kiss me, which I appreciated.

  We had shopping to do. The Pill is a remnant of the old world, except for illicit imports from Mexico, which could be anything. Condoms are somewhat easier to find since they last a long time and there’s no percentage in adulterating them, but there are plenty of local kiosks that sell prophylactics made from repurposed plastic bags. It’s San Francisco, and people will buy anything that promises simultaneous conspicuous social responsibility and the possibility of orgasm. In some neighborhoods, it’s like one big stupid Burning Man. We settled on some eggs instead, cooked for us and served in tiny paper cups that would have held ice cream in better times.

  “There’s a lot of life here,” Thunder said. “Why hasn’t anyone organized a force to take back the East Bay from the dead? There are so many resources in Berkeley and Oakland alone that nobody ca
n get to.”

  “You know,” I told her. “Snobs. Half of them didn’t care about the East Bay before, and half of them are in no condition to help anyone else out anyway.”

  “Fucking snobs,” she said, like she had expected the answer, even though it was oversimplified to the point of inaccuracy.

  “You know, if you wanted to kill revenants, you’d have an easier time of it in Berkeley. We don’t have too many here.”

  “That’s what you think,” Thunder said. “The campus people get pretty pissed when people end a zombie. They want to study their unlife cycle or something, and so they need to go unmolested by the rest of us. Even in self-defense.” She slurped down her eggs like it was a jello shot. “We’re supposed to run. They have cameras everywhere.”

  “So they knew we were coming…”