by Daphne Lamb
It seemed sketchy, what with the stray dogs circling it and a shadowy figure that would pop up every now and then, but my newly acquired phone buzzed. I pulled it out and saw a message from Randy.
No profile picture? That’s okay, he had written. We should meet up. Are you busy tonight? Kind of limited on where to go, so I guess you can come to my house.
Thank god, he didn’t grill me on Spider-Man, but had jumped to the meet-up point. So I messaged him back and asked for directions.
* * *
He didn’t live far, and it turns out he was holed up in a house with four other thirty something graphic novel enthusiasts. He warmly greeted me and ushered me inside.
Just like his picture, he had a soft doughy appearance, a face that was warm and seemed untouched by human hardship. His roommates all followed suit, grunted at me and seemed a little intimidated at a girl in their midst by the way they avoided eye contact with me.
The house was like the world before the Incident. There was a large comfy couch that I itched to curl up on, a wall with shelves stuffed with games and movies, and in the center of the living room was a massive flat screen TV, which was on and showing a violent action movie.
“You’re watching a movie?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Randy said. “We’ve been dying to see the director’s cut of Enter the Dragon, but Jeremy finally found the copy his mom sent him over a month ago. Ever seen it?”
“You have power,” I said truly in awe as I looked around. “This is amazing.”
“I guess. It’s just a generator,” he said. “Better news is, Jeremy just made parmesan pastry pups. Hungry?”
I stared, incredulous. “I thought the world was done,” I said. “There are people fighting to the death over Flamin’ Hot Cheetos just a few miles away.”
Randy shrugged and offered me a plate of pastry pups with a big smile. “They’re really good. You should have some.”
I took one and let my teeth bite into its deliciousness.
“So,” he said. “Walking into the house of strange men. What’s it like to do that with no fear?”
“Aren’t you worried that you’ll attract the wrong people?” I asked. “I just met you, but I’ve got a really interesting story about how I almost became a concubine because I took a UCLA sweatshirt. I could be a cannibal. They’re out there, you know.”
Randy shook his head at me. “No stories,” he said. “We’re all quite aware of what’s going on out there and we worked really hard to make this a safe zone. And no questions either. You seem like a cool girl, but I’d hate to send you back outside.”
I stopped and weighed the options. My gaze traveled upward, where there was a staircase and a lighted hall, whose wall space was covered in limited edition Lord of the Rings replica swords. I knew there had to be beds up there, and possibly real working bathrooms.
I smiled and took a pastry pup, squelching the desire to grab ten more. It was the perfect combination of flaky crust and salty sausage. I took a bite and enjoyed its saltiness.
“It’s really good,” I whispered. “And is that a framed Tron soundtrack over there?” I asked, pointing at the framed LP on the wall.
“You should tell Jeremy,” Randy said.
“Okay,” I said, turning to face Jeremy’s surly posture. “What’s up with the Tron soundtrack?”
“No,” Randy said. “I meant, he made the pastry puffs. You should tell him you like it.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks, Jeremy. They’re tasty.”
Jeremy sat in the corner of a room behind a table painting X-Men figures. He looked up and nodded at me.
“Jeremy’s a little upset at us,” Randy whispered.
“Why?” I asked. “What happened?”
He shrugged. “It was his week to invite a girl over and we had to sacrifice her because she made fun of Brett’s light saber, then used all the lotion on her legs.”
“You sacrificed her?” I tried to keep my voice calm. “That doesn’t mean what I think it does? Does that mean something different now?”
“I-It’s lotion,” he stammered. “You use it. And you don’t question when people want it!”
“Silly me.” I tried to mask the nervousness of what I might have just entered. “It’s strange any woman wouldn’t recognize that.”
“Seemed even stranger that she wouldn’t recognize the detailed craftsmanship of a light saber that Brett spent the last year making,” he said. “She had to go.”
“So she just went willingly?”
He shrugged again. “We dragged her to that Arby’s down the street and let the gang in there deal with her.”
My stomach turned over with a main course of nausea with a side of fear, but tried to play it cool. “Um,” I said. “That seems a little harsh.”
He looked confused. “How so?”
“Because –“ I started to explain what I thought was the obvious, but seeing Randy’s quizzical face left me speechless. So I made a joke instead. “Who would ever want to be stuck at an Arby’s, am I right? That weird horseradish sauce.”
He nodded, chuckling under his breath. “I know, right?”
I looked around at the contents of the house, marveling at how jam packed it was with so much lightness and fun.
“You still want to check out my Tron record?” he said. “It’s a first pressing.”
Randy led me to it, and I tried to hold my own in a conversation about Tron. At least I smiled and nodded to a lot of it.
“Mmm,” I said. “Neon rings and stuff.”
Randy laughed. It came out as sort of a choking, nasally sound that made his overly soft belly shake. “That’s funny,” he said.
“Is it?” I cleared my throat. “So what kind of work are we doing here?”
The question seemed offensive to him and he became suddenly abrupt.
“That sounds like a nosy question,” he said. “And we can’t allow that. So you should think about that by folding some laundry.”
“Excuse me?” I asked. “What—”
He pointed down the hall. “Laundry room’s over there. So you should probably get started on that.”
My reward for doing laundry without complaining was spending the night in a bed. A real bed. It had covers and sheets and everything. I also spent the night next to a framed picture of Randy’s family, all four of them chunky and clean, preserved in a magic minute of time where everything was fine in the world.
Before I went to sleep, Randy kindly offered me a shirt.
“Sometimes girls like to sleep in guy shirts,” he said, awkwardly, avoiding eye contact with me. “Something I’ve noticed. You could change into it after you have a shower.”
“A shower?” I asked. “With hot water?”
“Of course!” he said. “Is there any other kind?”
“Like a real shower,” I said. “What other kind is there?”
It was indeed a real shower with real hot water. While I shampooed my hair, I briefly considered never leaving it.
The best part was I got ten hours of sleep and Randy pulled no funny business. Maybe he wanted to, but maybe he just liked having someone next to him. I crawled into bed awkwardly, accepted that I may be the first girl there and I was going to negotiate some fumbling around. But instead, he flipped over and muttered, “Goodnight.” So I laid there and listened to him switch on his tablet that made sounds that sounded like girlish giggling.
I spent one week there. At least I’m pretty sure it was a week.
The first day, I spent pretty much taking everything in. The guys played video games, watched movies, marathoned TV shows and had spirited arguing matches about the Silver Surfer’s role in the Ultron saga while slumped into overstuffed couches. Every now and then I would pipe up with a stupid quip, sometimes they laughed and sometimes I was met with awkward silence,
to which I would get up to clear dishes and go into the kitchen to clean them.
“Hey, guys,” I said. “Howard the Duck wears pants and Donald Duck doesn’t? What’s up with that?”
That got a laugh and I felt comfortable enough to claim me a blanket to sit under on the couch.
“Black Manta?” I asked later on that day. “Isn’t it more PC to call it African-American Manta?”
One of the roommates wordlessly took the blanket away and I spent the rest of the evening scraping burnt cheese off a cookie sheet that had previously been used to bake six tier nachos on it.
If Jeremy left his table, it was always when I wasn’t looking. Usually, he was hard at work on his laptop, tapping furiously or preserving 80s era action figures all while constantly pushing his glasses up his nose.
Randy was sweet. He opened doors for me and made sure I had everything I needed. We talked about Star Wars, Star Trek and the vices of J.J. Abrams. He seemed afraid to touch me and was genuinely interested when I tried to recommend episodes of the Powerpuff Girls to him. It was hard to get him away from his phone and his computer. He was occupied with work—all members of the house were, but they were in no position to answer questions about what they were doing.
And there was food. Guh, so much food. They had converted the dining room into some kind of food storage shelter that was jam packed with anything you could possibly want or at least everything I’d been dreaming of since I had started my Survivalist Jesus Diet. Bags of Doritos, Twinkies, Pop-Tarts, cases upon cases of both regular Coke and Coke Zero—that being for one of the roommates who was trying to cut back. In the kitchen were two freezers, also filled to the brim with food—ice cream with Reese’s pieces shellacked inside, frozen pizzas, soba noodle bowls, which I had never tried, but since it was now a luxurious option, it had moved to the top of my must-eat list.
Randy pulled out a Coke from the refrigerator and handed it to me with a smile. “Sorry that this is all we’ve got,” he said. “There’s a shortage on everything else.”
I took the can and admired it, as if it were some valuable piece of art or one of those fancy expensive jars of face cream with things like cow placenta and gold that celebrities use.
“How are you getting all this?” I asked. “And how have the monsters outside not figured it out?”
He held a pouch of Capri Sun and stabbed it with a straw. He closed his eyes and gulped deeply from it. “We have our ways,” he said, smacking his lips, then licking all the drops of juice that had escaped out of the bottle. “But don’t worry about it. You should see the table top Pac Man we have upstairs.”
Day two was much of the same. I was still navigating my joke territory, but becoming more and more interested in what these guys were up to. They snacked constantly on everything rich, sugary and deep fried, which made me notice the parallels of what they were eating and how often the toilet got clogged. If they needed refills or anything from any part of the room, it was my job to jump up and get it. No one was interested in any kind of movement at all.
I got another shower and earned a place in the Super Smash Bros tournament for making a joke about The Walking Dead, which I was really thankful for being the one thing there that I was kind of familiar with. I was already getting cabin fever. No one left that house and the windows were sealed shut and covered in boards. It smelled the way you would expect a houseful of pop culture enthusiasts who never go outside world. I noticed there was a door leading to the backyard on the second day. I opened the door and drank in fresh air like a soldier desperate for water after long days in the desert. Jeremy was quick to shut it and give me a stern look.
Randy was getting more and more disinterested in me as the days were going by. I enjoyed not having to be awkward about sleeping arrangements, but this was the Apocalypse, and weren’t we supposed to be fearing extinction? Before the threat of our survival, I was maybe a six on a ten scale, but this should have definitely bumped me up to a seven or eight.
For a group of guys with anytime access to a shower, they weren’t keen on using it. They rarely got up to doing anything much less breaking a sweat. They were content to work on their laptops and stare at that big screen in the middle of the living room, occasionally breaking into arguments over which X-Men mutant power was better.
It was day five, maybe day six, and Jeremy had gotten up to make crab cakes for the group. Not me, though. I got caught rolling my eyes and was sent to think about what I’d done by organizing the storage closet. Jeremy was at his desk and saw my reaction through the reflection in a mirror. He stopped and stared at me as he stared at his screen. I hung back close just to get a glimpse of what he was doing. I craned my neck and expected to see something, anything other than what I saw, which was just lines and lines and lines of code.
“What are you doing?” Jeremy demanded.
“Uh, sorry,” I said. “I was curious.”
“Curious about what?” Jeremy asked, agitated. “You don’t know what it is.”
“No, no, no,” I said. “It’s just that I thought…”
I strained to think. This would make the difference between changing the batteries in the gaming controllers or getting carted off to Arby’s.
“…working on a novel,” I said.
He seemed to soften slightly at that. Maybe what worked for Bruce worked for every guy out there.
“Me?” he asked. “I wouldn’t be doing that. No, I’m not talented enough.” He rubbed his forehead. “I’ve tried. I really wanted to. Reading Game of Thrones makes me really want to, you know?”
I sympathetically shook my head. “Mmm hmm.”
He shook his head. “And then I think, what’s the point?”
I nodded. “Self-doubt,” I said. “We all get it.”
“But that’s no reason for you to look at my computer!” he exploded. He rose from his chair and pointed an angry finger at me. “Do you have any idea what damage you could have done? The whole network would have been screwed up!”
Randy rushed in. “What happened?”
“You’re never inviting another girl here. I don’t care how well she cleans the bathroom,” Jeremy announced as he pointed at me. “She was going to take down the Internet.”
I raised an eyebrow and snorted. “I doubt that. No one can take down the Internet.”
“We’re controlling it here,” Randy said. “It fell apart, and now we’re trying to put it back together. We only have small coverage, but it’s making a difference. It’s enough for your phone to find me, anyway.”
I was stunned. This was the new Garden of Eden. Life was starting over here.
“This is huge,” I said. “What are you doing with it? Are there scientists and architects working to rebuild? What happened with the Incident? Do they know what happened? Is there a cure to what’s killed so many people? Can I look up my parents? Marilyn and Steve Sonobe?”
Randy waved his arms at me. “Jeez,” he said. “Take it down a notch, would you?”
Jeremy snorted. “Scientists and architects.”
“We’ve got a network,” Randy said. “We’re in contact with people doing the same thing we are in different parts of the world. Also, Toronto is paying us to keep them connected to the Internet. It’s not much, but it’s keeping the lights on.”
He gave me a goofy grin as if he were bragging about third place in the junior high science fair.
“But we’re not rebuilding anything?” I asked. “Wouldn’t this help rebuild society?
“Rebuild?” he asked as stared at me with confusion. “Rebuild? Everything is here. We’re officially better than everyone else. The way it should be.”
“B-But,” I stammered. “What about things like life and families?”
Randy beamed. “I have a girlfriend in the Philippines. So I’m good.” He tapped an app on his tablet, summoning an anime girl who blew us a
kiss.
“Her name is Bernadette,” he said. “She likes carrot cake, the Clone Wars and thigh-high stockings.”
I shook my head. “All of that sounds made up.”
He shoved his tablet in front of my face where an anime girl blew me a kiss. Bernadette was very exotic-looking and wore some kind of uncomfortable-looking black leather boob strap with a matching bikini bottom and platform boots. She was also animated and did some kind of wink face over and over on a loop.
“You know she’s not real, right?”
He gave me a hurt look, as though I told him Attack of the Clones was a much better movie than Empire Strikes Back.
“Of course she’s real,” he said. “Look at her.”
He gestured fiercely at his laptop screen. “She’s looking at us now. Don’t be rude.”
“Randy,” I said.
He raised an eyebrow. “Oh, I get it,” he said. “Look, you’re a cute girl, but this is the love of my life.”
He looked me in the eye and cocked his head to the side in an “I understand” matter. “We’re still friends, right?” he asked.
“At the risk of getting banished to an Arby’s, it makes me wonder if you’ve lost the ability to connect,” I said. “And don’t flatter yourself.”
“Watch,” he said. “I can connect.” He typed in words in a dialogue box. “She’ll respond,” he said. “And if I was such a doubter like you, you would have never been allowed inside this house.”
“When was the last time you’ve been out?” I asked. “I think you’ve all gone stir crazy.”
He shrugged and then clapped with happiness when the laptop made a sound like a door chime.
“See!” he exclaimed. “She responded. Bet you feel silly now. Silly enough to make everyone in this house hot chocolate.”
“She has terrible grammar skills.” I pointed to the screen. “Not to mention the fact I highly doubt she’s spent today in her bikini having fun in the sun, considering it’s a sun that’s probably harmful.”
