“Just tell him you had a personal tragedy, and you’ll have to do it another time,” I suggested. Charles seemed like the last thing Ange needed to worry about right now.
She stopped walking, stared at her sandals. “I don’t think so.” She hugged me briefly. “He picked the wrong day to crawl up my ass.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll see you later,” she called as she headed up Drayton.
Blood sloshed inside the water gun as I turned and headed in the opposite direction.
Behind a wrought-iron gate, a middle-aged man in an expensive power-suit supported a girl in her early teens who was vomiting onto an azalea bush in full bloom. The man was saying “Oh no” over and over. The vomit began to turn pink. I moved on.
I needed to disappear for about twelve hours. That wasn’t a problem; I had a lot of work to do in the store.
“What did you do to him?” I asked Ange, sitting on the edge of her bed. She was lying on the bed, one leg canted, staring out the window.
“I beat him,” she said.
“You hit him?”
She nodded absently. “Repeatedly. I think he probably had to go to the hospital, but I didn’t stick around to find out.”
Under other circumstances I would have laughed, but this was a somber time. In one day Ange had lost her closest companion and abandoned her greatest hope.
“Every few minutes I realize Uzi isn’t with me, and I worry that I left him tied somewhere,” she said. “Then I remember all over again that he’s gone.”
I nodded, not sure what to say. Maybe nothing needed to be said. Pain has its own half-life; words don’t change that.
There was a knock on Ange’s bedroom door. “Ange?” Chair pushed the door open a crack. “There’s someone here to see you.”
“Who?” she said.
Chair led her down the hall. “You’ve got to see for yourself.” I hopped off the bed and followed.
Ange froze at the front door. I caught up, looked out the open window.
Rumor was sitting on the steps. There was a puppy asleep in his arms. He gestured with his chin for Ange to come out, and, after a moment’s hesitation, she did. I followed. Rumor stood, smiled at me. The smile looked bizarre on his face, because it wasn’t a sneering, sarcastic smile; it was warm, wide, genuine.
“Hello, Little Peanut,” he said to Ange. His eyes were glassy, almost glowing. “I hope this little one will ease some of your pain.” Gently, he folded the puppy into Ange’s arms. “I’m very sorry for what I did.”
Ange didn’t look at the puppy, she just held it, stiffly. I was surprised she didn’t push it back at Rumor. I wanted to. There are situations where an apology and a puppy just aren’t good enough, and to me, this was one of those situations. Rumor didn’t deserve our forgiveness; if it wasn’t for Doctor Happy he’d still be terrorizing us, for no other reason than because he could.
Rumor turned to me. “Thank you.” He bowed his head, turned to leave, then paused. He reached into the pocket of the hunting jacket he wore, and set a vial on the porch railing. It was filled with blood. “If you ever decide to join us, I wish you would use my blood—”
“I don’t want it,” Ange said.
“Maybe you won’t, but keep it, just in case.” He headed down the steps. “Who knows how dark this night will get.”
Chapter 5:
Soft Apocalypse
Fall, 2030 (One year later)
I passed a lithe cormorant of a woman trying on gas masks at a street kiosk. She was gazing intently into a little round mirror mounted on a telephone pole, and wearing a cute round avocado-colored mask. I loved the way she moved, loved her librarian glasses and her buzz-cut. Was she too good-looking for me? I wasn’t sure.
The lanky beauty left my field of vision. I continued scanning, assessing each woman I passed as a potential girlfriend, labeling them as “yes” or “no” in a heartbeat. I couldn’t help it. All of the other features of the world receded—all the beautiful crumbling architecture, the colorful street vendors, the black diesel stink in the air—all of it shrank into the background as I obsessively evaluated each woman I passed, testing my heart for flutters, getting a sense of her from her walk, her expression, the bob of her breasts.
Not that I’d ever approach a woman on the street; I hated guys who did that. For me it served as some sort of rehearsal—practice for identifying my soul mate when she arrived. Or maybe it was a way to reassure myself that there were women in this city who could reignite that flame, if I could meet them.
Reignite? I wondered if I’d really ever had that flame ignited. Sophia had lit me up like the highlight screen at a baseball stadium, but that had never been a real relationship. Ange? Maybe. I could never quite put my finger on my feelings for Ange. Not that it mattered, given her feelings for me. Deirdre? Sometimes she was like a song stuck in my head, even two years later. Small, childlike, fish-faced Deirdre. What had she done with my photos?
Ange was probably the closest. I wondered what she was up to. We’d never officially “broken up,” if that term was applicable given our arrangement, but she spent so much time with her housemates that I barely knew her any more. Maybe she was seeing someone. Maybe Rami—they seemed to spend a lot of time together.
I slowed as I passed Jittery Joe’s Coffee, hoping against hope to score a cup. The “No Coffee Today” sign still hung on the board outside, as it had for the past three weeks. And there was a new, smaller sign below it: “No Milk.” I continued on, caffeine-free, toward my speed-date appointment.
I spied a sexy pair of legs in the crowd, strutting my way. I got a jolt when her face came into view. She was a survivor of the flesh-eating virus. One whole side of her face was caved in; the damage trailed down her neck, disappearing inside a silk blouse. I did my best to hold my smile when she glanced my way, but it felt stiff. Poor woman.
There was a bamboo outbreak on Gaston. I stopped to watch. Street doctors were tearing up the pavement with jackhammers, circling the affected area, racing to set up rhizome barriers before the bamboo could spread. Four Civil Defense officers with heat-rifles surrounded the perimeter, along with half a dozen of those little mechanical bodyguard rat-things, as if Jumpy-Jumps were going to try to interrupt their little street cleaning operation. Real terrorists didn’t give a shit about bamboo.
I tapped my waist-pouch to make sure my fold-up gas mask was there, just like the government public service cartoon taught us.
“ID?” An acne-scarred man in combat fatigues barked at me as I reached the gates leading to the rich part of town. There was a body lying nearby, half in the street, half on the sidewalk, one foot twisted at an odd angle. Vehicles swerved to avoid it.
I stood still while the guy scanned my eyes with his little silver wand. It bleeped. He glanced at the readout on the screen clipped to his thick utility belt.
“Okay,” he said, waving me on. I wasn’t sure what the criteria were for entry into Southside. Lack of a criminal record? Not on any government watch lists? That I had a job?
When I reached the SpeedMatch outlet on Victory Drive I dawdled outside, pretending to tie my shoe on a bench. I ducked through the revolving door when no one was looking. I felt like such a loser going in there—much like I used to feel when I was eighteen, skulking into porn shops. It’d been years since I’d resorted to a dating service. I couldn’t believe I was doing this again. And I couldn’t really afford it, but it was the only good way I could meet a bright, educated woman, given where I lived.
It was humbling to be starting over from scratch at thirty-five. How many more women would I have to tell all of my stories to—my funniest anecdotes, what music I like, how I got the scar over my eye? Three more? Eleven? Everyone else in the world seemed able to find someone long before they hit thirty-five, even if those relationships didn’t always last forever.
“I’m here for the ten o’clock,” I said to the receptionist, who sported the thic
k makeup of a woman too young to realize that sometimes less is more.
She led me to my room, showed me how to download my vitals and bio-video from the boost I’d brought, helped me put on the VR equipment, then shut the door behind her. My palms were sweating.
The VR landscape was hackneyed but impressive: I was sitting in a burgundy reading chair on a slate patio, in the center of a beautiful formal garden. To my left, water tattered from a winged water nymph reaching toward the sky from the center of a fountain. A bed of perfect yellow tulips bobbed in a slight breeze on the other side. The garden was in a valley, surrounded by towering white mountain peaks; a waterfall burst from a cave in one mountain, crashing into a lake in perfect white-noise harmony with the fountain.
“Five minutes till your first date,” a mellifluous female voice informed me from out of the sky. I wondered if women heard a man’s voice.
“Mirror, please,” I said, and checked to make sure I didn’t have a piece of dandruff dangling from one of my eyebrows. Everything was shiny and perfect inside the VR environment except us daters—exact replication of what you had was all you got.
“Thank you.” The mirror disappeared. Mirrors aren’t good things to have around on blind dates; the process makes you self-conscious enough.
In the air to my left, my first date’s vitals appeared, along with the lie-detector readout, currently flatlined. Her name was Maura (though that didn’t mean much; lots of women didn’t give their real names to minimize the lunatic stalker factor). She was thirty-six, a physician, lived in Trenton. Liked Fuzz-Jazz and Postal music, and freerunning. I took a few deep breaths, readying myself for thirty-eight three-minute dates.
Maura materialized in the chair across the table. She had bushy brows and a pointy chin. Long, thin nostrils that you couldn’t help but see into when you looked at her. Kind of aristocratic looking. Interesting.
“Hi Jasper. I have a few questions that I like to ask, then if you want you can ask me questions.” She talked fast, but with three minutes that was par.
“Sounds fine,” I said. Suddenly my nose itched; I resisted scratching it. Scratching, or any sort of face-touching for that matter, doesn’t convey the best first impression.
“How many times have you cheated on a wife or girlfriend?”
I gawked at her. She had to be joking. What kind of an opening question was that?
“Less than twelve,” I finally said.
She looked at me the way my grade school teachers used to when I was being bad and I knew it.
“Is your salary statement accurate?”
“Sometimes.” It wasn’t like my salary was all that impressive. If I was going to lie, I would have done better than what was listed. Maybe what she was asking was, “What are you doing here, given your pitiful salary? You’re obviously a poor downtowner.”
“Do you have any bizarre sexual interests?”
“Define bizarre.”
I knew her type. She’d had some bad dating experiences and now she focused more on what she didn’t want than what she did want. Avoidance dating. She was already angry with me for the thoughtless things I would potentially do if we dated.
When she finished I asked her a few questions: Have you ever stolen a shopping cart from a grocery store? What’s your favorite Drowned Mermaids song? You don’t know the Drowned Mermaids? Hmm. That could be a problem. I pretended to jot a note; she didn’t seem to realize I was being sarcastic. Maura faded away. I scratched my nose with a vengeance.
Next was Victoria. She was too fat: big and boxy—a rectangle over disproportionately skinny legs. As we talked I chided myself for being shallow, then I snapped back at the chiding voice: attraction matters; it’s not the only thing that matters, but it matters, and I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t matter to satisfy my less-than-attractive female acquaintances, who don’t want it to matter. A girlfriend had to be reasonably attractive, or at least reasonably attractive to me. I found gangly women with overbites terribly attractive. Also nerdy women—shy, socially awkward librarian types really did it for me.
When Victoria faded I downloaded her bio-video out of courtesy. I probably wouldn’t watch it, but she seemed nice and I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. A few seconds later she downloaded mine as well.
The next woman materialized, interrupting my reverie. She was in a wheelchair.
The first time I’d done this speed-dating thing, I’d figured the difficult part would be trying to seem clever and kind and confident, all in the space of three minutes. But the truly difficult part was masking disappointment and disinterest.
For the third time today, I struggled to keep a stiff smile pasted on my face as we danced through the “nice to meet yous.”
From the rubbery, slight movement of greeting she made with her hand, Maya was a victim of Polio-X, that top 40 dial-a-virus that swept the nation in ’23. She had some nerve, I thought, getting on a dating service, inflicting us with guilt for rejecting her because she had a disability. Then I got hold of my irrational lizard brain and realized how incredibly unfair that was. She wasn’t twisting anyone’s arm. But there was no way I could be with her. A wheelchair was just too much baggage. I was not the sacrificing type, willing to wipe a woman’s butt if that’s what she needed. It just wasn’t me. Maybe I’m not giving and self-sacrificing enough to ever have a truly successful relationship. At least I was honest about it.
“So you’re an economist?” I said, seeking a polite topic that would pass the time, while hopefully conveying that I thought she was interesting, but that I wasn’t interested. “Any insights to offer on the current state of affairs? When do you think the market’s going to turn around?” Not that I had a dime to invest in the market.
“Wow, that’s kind of a personal question, don’t you think?” Her voice dripped sarcasm—she saw what I was doing, and was calling me on it.
I laughed uncomfortably.
“It’s not going to turn around,” she said. “It’s going to get worse, and then it’s going to collapse completely.”
I laughed uncomfortably again.
“You think I’m kidding,” she said.
“It’s got to turn around eventually.”
“No it doesn’t,” she said. “It didn’t for the dinosaurs.”
“Okay,” I said. Next she’d probably tell me about the end of days, and ask if I’d made my peace with Jesus Christ.
“I can see you don’t believe me,” she said, gesturing toward the lie-detector, not unkindly.
“It’s not a question of believing. I can see you believe what you’re saying, and I’m sure you’re good at what you do, but how sure can you be about something like this? Honestly?”
“Every Nobel Prize-winning economist who’s still alive is sure of it,” she said. “The economy is slowly collapsing. Remember all those dire warnings about global warming, overpopulation, resource depletion, the rain forest, nuclear fallout, save the whales? Any of that ring a bell?”
“Uh huh,” I said mildly. I’d evidently picked the wrong topic. How much time did I have left with her? One minute, forty-six seconds.
“They weren’t kidding. Billions of people are going to die before this is over.” She gestured at my lie-detector readout with her chin. I looked at it. Ninety-seven percent honesty. Not even a hint of exaggeration. Billions of people, she said. It was the same estimate that Sebastian had given, back when he was convincing people to make our lives even more miserable by planting voracious bamboo.
She had an interesting face. Big, wide mouth showing lots of teeth—what I’d always thought of as a shark-mouth—and scary light blue eyes, like see-through gossamer fabric draped over sky. If it wasn’t for the wheelchair. Well, if it wasn’t for the wheelchair she’d be out of my league. I suppose if I was okay with the wheelchair, it would be one of those reasonable tradeoffs that we all pretend don’t really enter into love and relationships: she settles for a somewhat immature, big-nosed, skinny guy, and I get a woman who is m
ore attractive than I could reasonably have hoped for, but in a wheelchair, with arms and legs that were mostly useless.
“Why haven’t they warned people?” I asked, not really wanting to hear the answer, but needing to say something because I’d been silent for three or four seconds.
She laughed. “They’ve been shouting it from the rooftops for years! There was an article in the New York Times just a few weeks ago. Nobody listens to academics. Smart is passé.”
It was a reasonable argument. And for the past ten years things had only gotten worse. Blackouts, war, fifty-seven varieties of terrorists, water shortages, plagues. It reminded me of a story about frogs: if you put them in an open pot of water and turn on the burner, they just sit there and boil to death, because they’re not equipped to recognize and respond to gradual changes in water temperature. They could jump out at any time, but there never comes a time when their little brains judge it’s time to jump. So they cook.
I looked into her earnest, translucent eyes, and tried on her hopeless, empty version of the future, filled with plagues and hunger, flies buzzing over corpses, thick-necked men with guns.
Could things really just keep getting worse? Could the economy really collapse? Now I wasn’t sure.
“This could be terrible,” was all I could think to say.
She checked the readout, softly nodded agreement. “I’m sorry I dumped this in your lap. It’s not why we’re here. But you asked.”
She took a deep breath, and smiled at me, showing all those teeth.
“Actually, I think what you asked for was financial advice,” she said. “Put all of your money in ammo.”
I laughed, and for a moment I thought maybe. There was something about her that gave me a warm, almost nostalgic feeling.
We sat in silence, listening to the patter of the fountain.
“So,” she said, clearing her throat. “Know any jokes?”
I laughed. “Yeah. There was this guy who could be kind of a jerk…”
Maya faded away, which was fortunate, because I didn’t know how the joke ended.
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