Love in the Time of Fridges

by Tim Scott

  Then I felt her grab my collar and drag me out of the apartment as the drug swept away more of my consciousness.

  “Don’t pass out,” she cried as we crashed out onto the street and I fell heavily, but felt nothing.

  I could see her mouth shouting, but the words didn’t make any noise. The drug was shutting down my senses, and the whole of the world was slipping to some other place. Behind me, Health and Safety people were everywhere.

  Now we were moving.

  The sensation had gone from my feet, so I threw my legs into as close a proximity to running as I could manage.

  A raven screeched, watching me with its huge black eyes.

  chapter

  FIFTY-FIVE

  Nena forced me down the alley. I stumbled and came face-to-face with a kid, and I found it hard to tell whether he was real or imaginary. He was poring over the gutted remains of a coffee table.

  “There are some great insurance deals out there,” the coffee table said, its voice booming wildly around my head. “And a fixed-bond income might be just what you’re looking for.”

  The child yanked at another wire and the thing went dead. Then I felt a hand pull at my collar and I was dragged on.

  The alley got narrower. Washing hung from the higher stories, as if it had been put out months before and left as a signal.

  Now the child was at my side, walking in fast step with me as though he was marching, and I felt the drug make me euphoric. Then I found we had stopped in a small square surrounded by high walls, all smothered in hundreds of peeling posters.

  I heard shouts somewhere far away, as though they were coming from another life.

  The world was spinning and I felt the energy sap from my legs as I stumbled backward against a wall and collapsed, scrabbling at the posters for support. But they tore from the wall and I fell. Up above, ravens screeched.

  I lay on the ground.

  When I opened my eyes, I saw Nena ripping at the walls. I stumbled over to her and saw she had found a handle. She pulled it, and the thick layer of bills ripped as the door opened. Then she hauled me through and clanked it shut.

  Darkness.

  chapter

  FIFTY-SIX

  Mendes awoke with a start, sitting in the chair at his desk, and found he was bathed in sweat. A bag was now sitting in front of him, and he recalled sending Sara out to get something for his fever.

  “An irony virus?” he said out loud. “How could this goddamn computer have caught a virus that makes it start acting ironically?”

  He’d wanted fuck-off strong drugs that would just kill his fever stone dead even if it destroyed the rest of his insides in the process and made him sleep for a week, but judging by the bag she’d gone to the health fair. He looked inside and found a bottle of elderflower, yarrow flower, peppermint tea, and an infusion of ginkgo and feverfew. He opened it and smelled the contents gingerly. The strength of the vapor took him by surprise and he pushed it away. He tipped out the remains of the bag, and a sheaf of papers and a rock clonked onto his desk. He picked it up, then set it down again.

  He shuffled through the pamphlets and brochures, hoping for some straightforward pills, but there weren’t any. Then he picked up a business card that had been tucked into one of the leaflets.

  “Pulitzer,” he said.

  chapter

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  I tried to focus my eyes, but the drug gave an aching, slurring tail to all my thoughts, so they overlapped without any apparent beginning or end.

  Somewhere a picture screen was pumping away a game show. The audio echoed.

  “‘Pish pash! Take the cash!’” said a smooth unseen voice. “Or is it, ‘Pash pish, ask the fish’? Perhaps the fish has the money. What’s your hunch? Is it ‘pish pash’? Or ‘pash pish’?”

  I edged forward, feeling an overwhelming sense that we had fallen into a crack of normality.

  “Pish pash!” cried some. “Pash pish!” said others.

  Ahead I saw a faint pool of flickering light.

  “What’s your choice?” said the smooth voice.

  “Pish pesh,” said a woman.

  “What?”

  “Pish pesh!”

  “There is no ‘pish pesh.’ It’s either ‘pish pash’ or ‘pash pish.’”

  “But I thought there was a ‘pish pesh.’”

  The dim column of light fell from above. I shivered as the drug eased further into my blood. I didn’t like this place. It had a touch of death about it.

  “Ask the fish if he has the money or take the cash on offer. Those are the choices. What’s it to be?”

  The light seemed more hesitant the closer we got, as though the connection back to the real world had become flimsy.

  “So there’s definitely no ‘pish pesh’?”

  “No. It’s ‘pish pash, take the cash!’ ‘Pash pish, ask the fish.’ Those are the choices. The lady in the pink top there thinks it’s ‘pish pash.’ Are you going with her? Or what about this gentleman with the prosthetic arm who thinks it ‘pash pish’?”

  “Well, I don’t think I can ask the fish.”

  “No?”

  “No. Fish, what are they really? Trout for example? What are they?”

  “They’re fish.”

  “Yeah, but what does that mean?”

  “It means they’re fish!”

  The audio faded away as though it had been sucked back into the real world and our steps echoed around the chamber in the hollow silence. After some indefinable length of time, we reached the base of the column of light. There was a ladder of rungs welded into the wall that led up into the flicking dim glow above.

  “You have to climb it. Don’t pass out! You understand?” Nena said.

  I grasped the first rung and felt the cold slippery rust of the metal momentarily cut through the drugged haze.

  I began to climb. Hand over hand. Now I could hear music. Jazz.

  My mind wandered.

  I tried to concentrate on the feel of my hands on the rough flaking iron rungs; on each little pitted nodule that poked from the wet slime that coated the metal, so that by force of will I could nullify the drug.

  My breathing became staccato.

  Then a massive metallic clank of a heavy door slammed below. The echo ran through the place and I felt the vibration shuddering through my cold hands.

  Then silence.

  “Keep going, Huck,” called Nena, and I realized I had stopped. I looked up at the rungs vanishing above me into the gloom, and I lost focus. My arms ached. I was clinging to the soft underbelly of life. Scrabbling around in no-man’s-land where nothing seemed to matter. I pushed myself on, trying to feel my hands on the rungs, but there was only the faintest of sensations. I tried to tell myself that this was all there was between me and falling into that abyss, but the word abyss had lost its meaning. It just hung in the dark, mocking me.

  How had my life led me here? Climbing a rusting ladder in the cloying dark? The harsh, inhumane quality to this place seeped into every pore of my body. If I died here, my soul would be crushed.

  I craved to be in a warm room in a house, with a fire that snapped and crackled with wood, and a kitchen filled with the smell of fresh washing. And a cat that sat with neat paws. And a girl curled up reading a book at my side. Why was I not living that life?

  I tried to focus on the feel of my hands on the rungs as my thoughts sprawled and then I felt a waft of fresh air. I was near a vent and the noise of the game show clawed its way around me again.

  “And then there’s herring. What would you say they are?” said the woman.

  “They’re fish as well,” said the host.

  “You say they’re ‘fish,’ but what does that really mean?”

  The audio faded. My lips felt dry and cracked and my arms were so tired they screamed with pain. The metal rungs flaked paint in the darkness.

  Then abruptly one rung gave and I swung out with a cry.

  Time seemed to slow and then sto
p.

  I hung.

  My mind sidestepped away from me. I felt a dark presence rear up and I fought it. It leered in a shapeless roar. I flailed for another moment and then grasped for the next rung, clawing at the stale air.

  Long staccato breaths.

  I was shaking. I forced myself to climb again.

  But my breathing was stretched.

  More rungs.

  Then, abruptly, I emerged through a wide hole in a floor and found myself in a tiny, grim room.

  I stepped off the ladder and stood bent over breathing in lungfuls of air. That had been an awful climb.

  I was shaking partly from fear and partly from exhaustion. A grubby picture screen in one corner was churning out flickering lines of static and that was the source of the light we had seen below.

  The walls were made of rusty iron and the room was entirely empty. On the opposite side was a metal door.

  I staggered over in the gloom and felt the surface of it with my fingers as it shed leaves of rust.

  After a moment I found it was bolted from the inside and I hammered back the rusting arms with the palm of my hand until they gave in metal-flaking lurches. Then I pushed with my shoulder. The thing was heavy and grated, as though I had woken it from some deep children’s storybook sleep.

  Nena joined me and forced it farther until finally it swung in a shuddering whine letting in a shamble of shadows, light. It was just wide enough to squeeze onto the other side.

  We were in a warehouse. It reverberated with a heavy, musty smell so full of the past it felt as though it might burst. Silence lay in piles.

  And dust covered everything with a milky sheen. The roof was pitted with cobwebbed windows so that the sunlight fell from above in soft, sagging plumes. A dry stench made it feel as though the whole place was on the edge of the world’s consciousness.

  My vision began to fade. I tried desperately to stay alert. In front of me was a sign. It said: “Do not let your girlfriend cut your hair. Ever.”

  chapter

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Nena pilfered a pile of metal signs, carving a groove through the dust and soft planks, and jammed them against the door.

  “This way,” she said, pushing me forward, and our footsteps hung in the silence, mocking us.

  An old drongle had been slung up near the ceiling so that it hung like a dead bee in a web. The sunlight seemed to imbalance my senses and they swung in and out of my grasp, sometimes making everything loud and garish, and sometimes faint and lost.

  I stumbled. “Don’t trip over these annoying cables,” said a sign stamped with the New Seattle Health and Safety logo. Then we came to a whole stack that declared: “Trying to dig out a tree stump will take days and make you look stupid.” I felt my eyes close and Nena grabbed me.

  In front of us was a grand piano. As my veins ran with the drug, she helped me forward and I slumped onto the piano stool. My vision swooped. A raven screeched, staring from the roof.

  “Stay here. I’ll be back,” she said.

  I leaned across the keys and a discordant chord rang out, swirling uncertainly around me. Then I began to hear a piece Abigail had loved to play. The notes swung around my mind, and I sank into the music, letting it hold me and take me where it chose.

  And the memories coursed through my veins.

  chapter

  FIFTY-NINE

  I was there.

  I was holding Abigail’s limp, soft body in my arms and crying. Crying stupid, big, childlike tears because I would not see her smile again. She still seemed so full of sleepy life. And I screamed to myself that she wasn’t gone, that she would never be gone. That when I saw the surf break at dawn over at Higgins Beach, or when the butterflies were swooping around the bushes, she would be there. Because her passion for such things had burned so stupidly fiercely that it had become a part of me, too. And part of her passion would always burn like a hot coal inside of me. I cried at myself to believe that was really true.

  It was all I had.

  And I wanted something of her to remain so much. I wanted that essence that was her to be something I could always touch whenever I was lost or sad or confused. I wanted it to be with me in a form so pure it could swallow me up with its intensity.

  I had opened my soul to her and she had understood. And now I held her limp body, which still seemed so full of sleepy life.

  And I realized that death was how the story ended.

  But it’s how all our stories end.

  Larkin wrote somewhere that what will survive of us is love. He didn’t mean it as simply as that because he was all wound up in irony and other poetic crap.

  But he should have done.

  Because love is the echo we leave behind from our lives. In that moment I felt that more clearly than I ever would have thought possible. It is the legacy we leave to those around us. And that was what Abigail had left me. It was a beautiful and sad gift and I felt humbled.

  I closed my eyes and tried to feel thankful that I had had the chance to love her. That we had walked upon earth together. That I had felt the steady beat-beat of her heart as we had lain one summer’s night wrapped in a blanket on the beach.

  chapter

  SIXTY

  A clash of metal.

  Tolling like a church bell ringing out for the passing of another soul.

  I opened my eyes and stared like a mesmerized seven-year-old toward the door as it banged against the signs.

  “Abigail?” I called, but it came out swallowed. “Abigail?”

  And then a voice was shouting from down the warehouse.

  “Huck! Come on!”

  I turned and stared, feeling my consciousness segue between memory and reality.

  I looked back at the door.

  “Abigail?”

  “Health and Safety,” cried a voice. “Open up or I will shoot the hell out of this place.” And a hand appeared through the gap, holding a red gun, and a round ricocheted down the warehouse. A second later, the piano creaked and then abruptly collapsed in an implosion of noise, notes, and dust. The cacophony folded out in waves, shaking the floor. The mounds of metal signs shivered and slid as I staggered away through the billowing dust cloud toward Nena.

  “This is the Anchovy Emporium,” said the drongle slung up in the roof. “Please alight from the drongle. Your lucky word in Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky is the word the on page 264.”

  I tripped and regained my balance as more shots recoiled and snickered off the metal signs.

  Stairs.

  They swung down flight after flight, and my legs staggered over them in a hobbled rhythm trying to catch Nena. A large sign up along the way said: “Please do not die for no reason! What’s the point? Right?”

  There was no point.

  The thought ran through me.

  I came down the last flight, to find Nena waiting.

  “There was no point,” I said as she grabbed me, pushing me headfirst into a small hole, and then I was falling through darkness.

  “There was no point!” I cried as I was scooped up and tossed around, through remnants of garbage.

  My head caught the side, and I felt the shape of my skull as it bounced. The air echoed with the shrill empty thud, and I gasped as reality fell away. I hung suspended, weightless. The chill of the wind snapped at my jacket.

  The blurred outline of buildings.

  Then I dropped heavily into a mound of rotting refuse and my back arched with shock. I lay gasping, watching my breath pool in vapor clouds above me.

  And then Nena was there, pulling me off the discarded crates and rotting garbage.

  She pushed me to run, but my legs groaned with cold pain. After a hundred yards, we took a left down another alley and then another turn.

  And another.

  Eventually she stopped, and I was breathing madly, hardly able to walk. I bent double pulling at the air. My mind swung about inside my head, blurring my vision and I staggered, catching at a drainpipe
for support before sinking to the ground and closing my eyes. I counted in my head so I wouldn’t pass out.

  I forced my eyes open and saw the blue sky of the afternoon opened up over me in a floorless panorama. And there were more ravens circling overhead. So many ravens.

  “I need pastries,” I said almost inaudibly, as the thought rebounded about my head and gained momentum.

  I had to get to my feet and find pastries. They were only a little thing. But right now they were important.

  chapter

  SIXTY-ONE

  The man looked more out of place than ever. It wasn’t just that he was too neat for the surroundings to cope with; there was some other dimension that seemed to set him apart.

  “What’s wrong with the café?” he said.

  “I saw some spies meet in a park once in a film,” said Maddox, “and they fed some ducks.” His worn shoes were getting splattered with mud. They walked toward the remains of the gutless fountain that had once proudly spurted looping spools of water, but it was hard to imagine now.

  “You get the fridge?” said the man in black.

  “We head hacked Lindbergh. But they couldn’t find any memories of the fridge. Seems someone had done a job on his memory. He ended up getting wiped.”

  The man in black took this in. “What a mess. He didn’t deserve that.” He walked on gingerly, taking in the surroundings with distaste.

  The whole of Cal Anderson Park was little more than a scathing rant of windblown litter and overused syringes. Its main feature was a slab of grass, which hunkered down between a slurry of blocks that had been redeveloped so many times over the years that the buildings had forgotten which city they were supposed to be in.

  And frankly, they really didn’t care, because they were those cocky-little-fucker-type of buildings. But the park was their conscience. It carried with it all that was left of the soul of this neighborhood. The only vaguely tangible evidence that the past had once existed around here and was not simply a myth made up by historians for their own casual amusement.

  Perhaps that’s why the cop had wanted to meet here, because it was reassuringly human.