Colin muted the sound. “Just that it’s not airborne, so masks aren’t any help, and to wash your hands a lot,” Colin said.
“Have they said any more about Great Britain and Russia?” I asked Colin.
“No. It’s all about the virus.”
Since the trade winds had sputtered last fall, the temperatures in Britain had been plummeting, and Britain was not taking kindly to Russia’s decision to suspend all natural gas sales outside their borders. Britain’s navy was cruising up and down Russia’s border, and there had been some skirmishes. Britain had no chance in a war against Russia unless others jumped in, but I guess with tens of thousands of their people freezing to death, they were desperate.
We’d become total news junkies since getting the TV. Hard not to be when something awful was always going on.
“Every day it’s something else,” Jeannie said. “I’m so tired of it.”
“Things have to get better soon,” I said.
“It’s been years,” Jeannie muttered. She went over to our little kitchen corner, opened the chest that served as a kitchen cabinet, and peered in. “Does anyone mind if I eat a couple of rice cakes and some peanut butter?”
“No problem,” I said. It probably wasn’t necessary any more, to get an okay before you ate something, but it was a habit from our tribe days that we couldn’t quite shake.
Colin switched off the TV. “Jasper, what do you think about running the a/c for ten minutes before we go to sleep? Jeannie and I were thinking it would be worth it, to have it cool to get to sleep.”
I shrugged. “Sounds good to me.” We were getting by; I guess we could afford to buy a little more energy.
It was a long bike ride to Southside, but I had plenty of time.
I headed up Bull Street, cutting through the middle of the squares, looking at all the houses that used to be pretty when I was a kid. They called this the Historic District back then; it used to be the most expensive part of Savannah. Now they just called it downtown.
I tried not to reminisce about my life before things went bad, but sometimes I couldn’t resist. It’s hard to stifle memories when everything around you is heavy with your past. How could I walk down Bolton Street, past the house where I’d grown up, without seeing my dad washing his truck in the driveway? We’d been in Clary’s diner the night I told my parents I was switching my major from business to sociology. There’d been a baseball card store on the corner of Whitaker and York where John Kelly—who’d been my best friend in sixth grade—and I would buy twenty-year-old packs of baseball cards and open them on his stoop, our hands shaking, hoping to pull out a valuable rookie card. It was almost inconceivable now, the luxury of blowing fifteen bucks on a pack of baseball cards, but back then there always seemed to be enough money, an endless flow that just showed up from Mom’s purse, or from doing some easy afterschool job. Looking back, it seemed as if everyone was well-off; even the poorest kids could afford to buy a Big Mac at McDonald’s.
I stopped, dropped one foot to the pavement at the entrance to one of the alleys that stretched behind every row of houses as the roar and rattle of a muffler announced that a decrepit Volvo was pulling out. An old woman in the passenger seat looked at me, nervous eyes peering behind wire-rimmed glasses, her head bobbing a palsied rhythm.
The alley was scattered with homeless shelters. That’s what people had taken to calling the big green trash cans stamped City of Savannah that now mostly lay on their sides with people’s feet sticking out of them, amid heaps of trash and lumps of fly-ridden shit.
I didn’t dare cut through Forsyth Park, so I took the sidewalk along Whitaker. The tic tic tic of a central a/c unit caught my attention. I marveled at the sound, at the audacious expenditure of energy, cooling all of the rooms in an apartment at once. The shift in ambient sound was subtle as you moved uptown, the proportion of popping gunshots to humming machinery changing with each block.
Screams of a man in terrible pain burst from an open second-story window. I pedaled faster—thinking of the reports of the flesh-eating virus and silently wished the poor bastard well.
I hadn’t been to Southside in a long time. Very little had changed. In fact, if anything it looked nicer than it had the last time I’d been there. Through the tall steel gates surrounding the passing neighborhoods I could see that some of the lawns were mowed. I didn’t venture too close to the gates, lest some private police take offense at my shabby clothes (the best I owned, for my trip to Southside), and beat me for being in the wrong part of town.
A car honked behind me. I moved to the side of the road and it whooshed past. I stayed by the side—there were more cars on the road up here, even a few trucks and SUVs.
When choices have to be made between oil to fuel luxury cars and oil for fertilizer to feed starving people, the choice is obvious: the oil goes to fuel the cars. Now that energy was scarce, consuming it ostentatiously was a status symbol. Leaving your porch light on announced to the world that you could afford to leave your porch light on.
Sometimes I hated these people, who lived so comfortably while the rest of us barely got by. Maybe I hated them because I always figured I would be one of them, I don’t know. We had nothing, and they had so much more than they needed. But they were just people, doing what people do, which is to try to keep what they have.
It cost me eight bucks to get into Snowstorm. If I hadn’t biked five miles to get there, I wouldn’t have paid it, and as it was I felt guilty. I didn’t have any business spending that kind of money when Jeannie was asking permission to eat some peanut butter. I went through big double doors and up a ramp that led to the club.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. I’d stepped into the Alps. There were ski slopes that rose out of sight, piles of snow all over, snowmen with drinks clutched in frozen hands. People were dancing on a frozen pond. It had to be holographic, but it was so perfect, so solid, that it took my breath away. I made a conscious effort to keep my yokel mouth from dropping open and strolled through the place like I’d seen it all before, but I hadn’t. I hadn’t realized how much the world was still progressing. Even through this awful time, people were still inventing things. I just wasn’t seeing it, just like people in third world countries never saw it.
There were cool rich kids everywhere, their hairstyles as varied as the flavors at Baskin Robbins: dreadlocks and Mohawks, Betty Page cuts, pigtails, red-and-white barber pole specials.
There was an Alpine bar perched in the corner thirty feet above the floor, on an icy cliff. It didn’t appear to be a holo, because the guys sitting at the bar weren’t that attractive. It looked like the place I’d be most comfortable. I watched a dude with blond little-Dutch-boy hair step on a steel plate that lifted him up to the bar, and I followed suit.
I took a stool next to a guy in his sixties with droopy red eyes and thinning white hair. There was a TV mounted among the bottles behind the bar, tuned to MSNBC. They were showing refugees pouring into California from Arizona and New Mexico.
“I just came from there,” the guy said, to no one in particular.
“From California?” I asked.
“Arizona,” he said.
“I’ve heard things aren’t good in Arizona.”
“It’s bad in Arizona,” he said.
A big-eared guy in a business suit turned around. “It’s bad everywhere, man,” he said.
The old guy fixed him with a shaky stare, his face a little blue from the flickering TV screen. “Mister, you got no idea what bad is. You want bad? There’s no water there. None. Everyone with a car left months ago. They drove right over the bodies lying in the—”
“Okay! All right! Shut the fuck up, will you?” The guy turned away. “Christ in heaven.”
“It’s bad in Arizona,” the guy said, shaking his head. We sat quietly for a while, watching the soundless TV, listening to the music.
Most Americans hadn’t known what suffering was until the depression of ’13. In school we used to hear about the
so-called “Great Depression,” as if having a lot of unemployed people who were reasonably well-fed was this terrible holocaust. We were wimps. We’re not any more—we’ve learned how to eat bitterness, as the Chinese say.
“I’ve heard things are even worse in China,” I said.
“China?” the guy said. “Let ’em rot in hell. My nephew died over there. Let ’em rot.” He took a drink, shook his head. “This isn’t how things are supposed to be. I had mutual funds for retirement. I had my house and my card games, money for whores.”
I scanned the crowd, looking for my SCAD woman, but instead my attention was drawn toward a black woman on the ice pond dance floor, her hands over her head, her hips gyrating in tight circles.
Sophia.
She was dancing with two other women, gyrating her hips frenetically—whining, they called it on the islands. She looked incredible.
I went back to ground level, heart in my throat, and threaded through the crowd. As I approached, the music changed suddenly, from contemporary to Island Thump, as if I’d walked through an invisible membrane that held in sound. Another New Thing. I stopped a dozen feet from the dance floor and watched.
When she recognized me she stopped dancing, mouthed a silent “Oh my God.” She didn’t seem to know what to do. Finally, she came over.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” I said. “What are the odds?”
“I don’t know, I’m not good at math,” she said, breathless from dancing, her nostrils flaring like a colt’s. “I’m nervous. My legs are shaking.”
“Mine too.”
“How’re you?”
“Much better. Thank you for getting me the job. It changed our lives. Jeannie found a little work too, at a salvage center, stripping parts. Colin gets work on the docks sometimes.”
“That’s wonderful!” Sophia smiled, but there was distress in her eyes. I’d imagined this moment a hundred times. Now I couldn’t think of anything of substance to say.
“I’m sorry things worked out the way they did,” I said.
She shrugged. “Life is. What are you gonna do?”
“I guess.”
A tall, slim black man in a white silk shirt approached us holding two drinks in tall flute glasses. “Do you want another?” he said to Sophia.
“Oh, thanks,” she said, taking it. “Um, Jasper, this is Jean Paul.” Her husband was five inches taller than me, and better looking.
I nodded. He stared back with a smirk. “My mipwi,” he said.
“What does that mean?” I asked, looking to Sophia.
“It means,” she considered for a moment, “his competition.”
How the hell was I supposed to respond to that? Jean Paul smirked down at me. “So, did you follow my wife here?” He didn’t open his mouth wide enough when he talked. It made him seem shifty. You couldn’t trust someone who rarely lets you see his front teeth.
“I’m meeting someone,” I said. “I have a date.” I scanned the bar, praying for a sign of the SCAD woman so I could escape from this nightmare with some dignity. Sophia was managing a smile, but looked uncomfortable as hell. I stared hard at a woman tucked in a nearby booth, with three other women. Her hair was up, but I thought it looked like her. I’d only seen her once for a minute or so. She turned a little and I got a better look: yes, that was her.
“There she is,” I said. I told Sophia it was good to see her, nodded tightly to her husband, and headed for the table, feeling their eyes on me. The music shifted again, to an old Carbon Leaf song. My dad used to love Carbon Leaf.
“Hello,” I said, standing over the table. All four women looked at me.
“Oh, hi,” she said. She was dressed in a long, white peasant dress with ruffles on the sleeves. She looked good.
“Thought I’d check out your hangout,” I said.
“Right. How are you?” she said, not making any attempt to stand.
“Good, great. How are you?”
“Fine. How’d you get out here?”
I shrugged. “Bike.”
“Great. Well, it was good seeing you again.” She turned back toward her friends.
I hovered for a second, then I turned. Sophia’s husband was watching. He said something in Sophia’s ear; she glanced at me, said something back to Jean Paul, frowning, and turned to join her friends at a bar tucked into a snowbank.
I glanced back toward the table where my “date” was sitting, in the feeble hope that I’d misinterpreted her brush-off and she would suddenly be interested in me the way she’d been at the convenience store. She kept her gaze pointed straight across the table, toward her friends. Why had she struck up that conversation with me? What was the wink about, if I wasn’t worth a lousy five-minute conversation? Was she embarrassed to admit she knew me in front of her friends?
I walked back over to her table. Finally, she looked up at me. I cast about for a clever put-down, but my mind had gone blank.
“I can’t help wondering why you invited me here,” I finally said.
“I didn’t invite you. I don’t even know you.” She gave me the lip curl, the one that said I was a pathetic pest.
I puffed out a sarcastic breath. “Yeah.”
The woman across the table from her stood and gestured past me. “Mickey!”
A second later a guy dressed in a black t-shirt was at my elbow.
“He’s harassing us,” the girl said, pointing at me.
“I am not,” I protested.
Without a word the guy grabbed me by the neck and the elbow and yanked me away from the table. I tried to yank free, shouted at him to let go as he propelled me through the bar, toward the red exit sign in the corner. Everyone in the bar was staring. I spotted Jean Paul, laughing. Sophia stood next to him, her head down. The bouncer shoved me through the door, into the sticky-hot air of the street. Two girls hanging out on the sidewalk laughed as I lurched forward before regaining my balance. The door slammed closed behind me.
I unchained my bike from the rack and pushed off into the street, watched the road wind under my front wheel, my face still red. I swerved to avoid the porcelain remnants of a shattered toilet, ran over a fast food paper cup.
My hands on the handlebars looked strange, unfamiliar. I felt vaguely numb, and wished there was some way to wash away that feeling.
Jean Paul was probably still laughing. Sophia hadn’t even tried to intervene. My only solace was that I would probably never see either of them again.
Bright lights and voices on a side street caught my attention. I took a right and rolled by a little crowd lounging outside a freshly painted storefront with big windows. It was an art opening. Christ, there were still art openings uptown.
What the hell. I didn’t want to go home, didn’t want to hear Colin ask “How’d it go?” I didn’t want to recount the humiliation that even now made it hard for me to look passing strangers in the eye. I needed to get lost in distraction for a while. I pulled onto the curb, chained my bike to a street sign, and wandered in through the wide open door.
The gallery was a dimly lit, cavernous room that had once been a dairy, or an auto showroom, or something like that. A line of ghostly, featureless, emaciated figures made of papier-mâché were mounted to the high concrete walls. The figures were all facing the back of the gallery, and were posed as if they were moving, marching toward some faraway destination that they did not have the strength to reach. It was an eerie scene, lifelike despite the otherworldly look of the anonymous figures. They reminded me of my tribe, and made me wonder what I was thinking, coming to this part of town thinking a SCAD woman was interested in dating me.
There was a commotion at the front of the gallery. I turned to see a priest standing in the doorway holding an assault rifle in one hand, an unlit cigar in the other. He looked like he was part East Indian or Arab. His dyed white hair was set in a sumo wrestler’s bun.
“Outside. Everyone outside,” he said, waving the rifle in a sweeping motion toward the back of the room.
/> The people nearest him scurried away. I retreated into the shadows at the back of the gallery. There were stacks of folding tables and chairs in the corner—I considered trying to hide behind them, but it wasn’t much of a hiding place. A woman cried out.
“Everyone out the back door!” the priest said.
The back door flew open and everyone poured out. I followed, into a dark alley.
There were two men waiting in the alley wearing round gas masks over mouth and nose.
“Against the wall,” one shouted, gesturing with a gas gun. He was dressed in an old-fashioned army officer’s uniform—epaulets on the shoulders and color-coded commendations embroidered on his chest. The other was dressed in a mailman’s uniform. I stood facing the brick wall.
“What’s happening?” a woman sobbed.
“Shut up. Turn around. Face the wall,” the mailman said. He wasn’t really a mailman—I’d heard stories about a gang, a violent political movement called the Jumpy-Jumps, who dressed in outfits and hurt people, and these guys fit the bill.
I heard the guy dressed as a priest come out the back door. He said something I couldn’t hear to the woman lined up closest to him. She murmured something back.
I only had three dollars on me. If these guys were robbing us, I wondered if they’d be angry that I didn’t have more. I didn’t have a watch or a ring, nothing of value.
I jumped at the sound of a gunshot. Others cried out, startled. I looked over and saw the woman crumple to the pavement, blood leaking from her temple. I turned my head the other way, pressed my cheek against the rough brick and stifled a sob.
“God, what is this?” a man said. I couldn’t see him; I was afraid to turn and look. The priest said something to him, low and emphatic.
“What?” the man against the wall said. “I don’t understand what you’re saying to me. I don’t understand what you want.”
The priest said something else.
“Please. I don’t understand.”
I heard the squeal of a gas gun. Then someone falling, and strangled vomiting. People screamed. Someone was trying to answer a question from one of the other men with guns.
Soft Apocalypse Page 5
