Quarantime
Quarantime is a short fiction collection by Javy Gwaltney intended to be an impressionistic look at living in pandemic-stricken America. The majority of Quarantime was edited by Blake Hester.
You can also download PDF version of the collection here if you’d prefer to read it that way.
Content Warning: be advised several of these stories touch on mature themes including despair, sexuality, and confronting an uncertain future.
The author asks if you appreciate these free stories that you consider donating to one of the following charities:
Atlanta Solidarity Fund
Black Visions Collective
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National Bail Out Fund
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Real Hero
Rent was due. Past due, actually. To his credit, Noah wasn’t as much of a swine as other landlords. Noah had read the news, told his tenants he was giving them another three weeks to figure out how to pay him. No Mario Salerno, this guy. But still, Terrence got it. Noah had his bills, a mother in the retirement home to look after — child support to boot. Everybody’s got their struggles.
Terrence was already barely making rent and utilities when his theater closed. No butts in seats, no tickets sold, no wages. That sort of thing. Chris, the theater manager, told him and the other two ushers he hoped that they’d be back in business by the end of April.
This was two weeks ago. Terrence was skeptical, suspected that job was done, but he wasn’t quite ready to start looking for another gig yet. His co-workers were fineish and he had gotten used to not paying for movies. Another week before surrendering and finding a replacement, he decided. He had the attendant job to handle bills in the meantime. With Noah’s extra weeks, he’d make the amount, and hopefully the stimulus check would cover May. If it ever came in.
He covered his face with a dust mask (for all the good it would do) and put on a pair of latex gloves. Nikki down the hall had brought a ton of boxes filled with gloves just as everything was going down and left one box outside everyone in the building’s apartment. “Don’t let me catch you in the lobby without these on,” said the post-it-note attached to his box. Nikki had immunocompromised family, so the message had been loud and clear. If you get me or my mom sick, I’ll beat your ass to death. Terrence didn’t need to be told once, much less twice.
He stepped outside. There were a few people out and about. Lyle at the corner was still sitting on his bench. He wasn’t homeless or anything. He just liked sitting at the corner, chewing on peanuts and sipping his thermos of coffee, talking to anyone who came around before he went to work the evening shift down at the assembly plant as a security guard. He had done so for 22 years and no “silly little virus” was gonna change a routine so firmly ingrained. He had started wearing a mask at least. Terrence supposed that counted for something.
He got to the gas station 30 minutes before his shift started and told Merle, a chain smoker in his 50s, he could go on home. He’d take the shift early and wouldn’t tell their manager, who was a prick of the highest order.
“Alright then,” said Merle. His way of saying thanks.
Terrence stepped in the booth up behind the plexiglass. The booth was a tiny thing with walls adorned with cigarettes, boxes of Snickers, and other merchandise. He couldn’t even stretch without his hands going into the wall, but there wasn’t much to complain about other than that. He could sit there and read comics on his iPhone until customers came up. Given that most of them preferred to deal with the pump themselves and paid with card, Terrence was free to spend most of his day in the company of his pals Moon Knight, Squirrel Girl, and Swamp Thing. The phone wasn’t the ideal method to reading comics, especially given the cracked screen made tiny text even more difficult to read, but it was a way to pass the hours.
He was halfway through Shazam! The Power Of Hope when the woman came up to the booth. She looked like she was in her 40s. She had blonde hair and was red in the face. She wore sweatpants and a shirt that said Well-Behaved Women Rarely Make History. The shirt had a bad and faded drawing of Marilyn Monroe’s face on it.
“Hand sanitizer,” she demanded, out of breath.
He didn’t have to look to his left where the bottles of sanitizer usually were to know they were out, but he pantomimed the movement anyway just so she could see. “I’m sorry ma’am, we’re out.”
“Fuck,” she screamed suddenly. Her voice was a gunshot. She slammed her hands on the counter outside of the glass. He kept his face blank. He learned years ago not to give these people an inch or they’d just cling for dear life until they got what they wanted. No matter what they did, no matter what they called you, you did not give them the satisfaction. You did not let them think they own you.
“Are you telling me,” she said. “You don’t have some sanitizer bottles up there under the register. Even just for yourself?”
“No ma’am, I do not.”
“I’d be willing to pay you a lot for it. I’ve got kids at home,” she said. “I need to protect them. I can give you 30 dollars for any sanitizer. Even travel-sized.”
“Ma’am,” he told her. “I appreciate your situation, but we just don’t have the sanitizer.”
“Fucking shit,” she said, slapping the counter.
“Please don’t d—”
“I’ve been walking around this entire city for hours and none of the places have anything I need. Not the Walgreens, not the CVS, even all the goddamn gas stations,” she said. “No hand sanitizer, no masks, nothing.” She was crying now.
He tried to think of something to say. The words were not coming to him. He felt naked and strange. He looked up and saw now there was a man behind the woman, eight feet away, watching the whole scene. The man was bald and wore a polo shirt. Terrence couldn’t make out the brand but could tell it was a flashy and expensive shirt.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said. He wasn’t sure if she was talking to him or the counter or some god in the sky. She hadn’t seen the man behind her, so Terrence knew she wasn’t talking to him. “My babies,” she was saying. “I have to take care of them. They’re six.”
“Ma’am, I understand you’re stressed. It’s a scary time. I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what else to say. I’m sorry. I wish I had the hand sanitizer to sell you.”
She stopped crying. In that instance, she seemed to take stock of where she was. She was looking at him, the young man behind the plexiglass, and taking deep breaths.
“Go fuck yourself,” she heaved at last, before turning. She saw the other man there now, and she told him to go fuck himself too. And then she walked away from the gas station. The bald man waited for a few seconds and stepped to the window. He let out a whistle.
“COVID shit is bringing out the worst in everyone, huh?” he said. Terrence could see the wrinkles in his face now, placed him in the same age bracket as the woman.
“Yeah, tell me about it.”
“I wouldn’t have handled that kind of nonsense: someone yelling at me like that. That’s like real-hero level shit, the kind of zen you’ve got.”
“I guess so,” Terrence said. “Lady’s got problems. I hope she’s okay.”
“We all got problems. Doesn’t mean she gets to treat you like dog crap. Can I get a pack of American Spirits?”
“Out of those.”
“Ah. You got Marlboros?”
“Six dollars and 34 cents please.”
Terrence took down the red pack and handed it through the hole in the glass. The man passed him a ten.
“You can keep the change,” the man said. “Tip for a real hero.”
Terrence watched as the bald man pocketed his cigarettes in his coat and then walked away satisfied with himself. He looked down at the crinkled ten-dollar bill laid out in the palm of his latex hand.
He stared at it.
A Meal So Fine
She had been cooking every night for two months. Alyssa had brought a cookware set during a case of confused ennui a year ago and damn if they weren’t finally getting some use. When the panic started getting real, right before supplies started vanishing, she gave her partner Kyle a grocery list of canned goods, vegetables, and spices to fetch. He did so in multiple trips spread out across three days, masked, standing in line with dozens of other people – all the carts overflowing with cans, milk jugs, and microwavable dinners.
They were both working from home during the crisis. She was an associate professor in the English department at a local university. Alyssa’s job was to teach students how to string together sentences and tell them why Virginia Woolf was still important all these years later. It was a job Alyssa didn’t know if she believed in anymore. To make matters worse, she suddenly had to adapt to online teaching midway through the semester – a switch-up neither her or her class greeted with enthusiasm. She had started browsing job listings, even considered taking an online college course in coding. Occasional ripples of guilt worked their way across her mind, but it was hard to be faithful to a profession that had no future. The program’s budget was already on rocky ground before the virus arrived. She held little doubt the associate professors would go first when the beat counters dragged out their guillotine.
Cooking was her escape. She would spend hours of her day researching recipes online, modifying them based on her emerging culinary instincts and what was available in the pantry. She’d cut vegetables into precise slices with the nice but overpriced knife Kyle bought her from Kitchen Window. She’d simmer broths and sprinkle red pepper flakes and sea salt on lasagna. When cooking, she didn’t have to think about her job or the future or the president being a piece of shit or anything except her hand working all these disparate pieces to make something unified and delicious.
Which is why she got cross when Kyle wanted to order in.
“I want to order from Curry Palace tonight,” he said, just as she was pulling out the cutting board. He was lying on the couch, exhausted from back-to-back virtual conferences with clients. He was a freelance web developer. He was quite good at it, truth be told.
“I can make curry,” she told him. “I’ve got several recipes.”
“Yeah,” he said, “but I want Curry Palace in particular.”
“Why?”
“Your cooking is good,” he said. “Real good.”
“But….”
“But it’s not the same. I don’t know how to explain it.”
“We bought all this canned food and ingredients. We’ve been saving so much money,” she said. “I’m proud of that.”
“And I’m proud of you for it. But can’t we take a break for a night and just have some take out?”
She gave up. “Fine.”
“Oh no. I know what that fine means.”
“No, I actually mean fine. If you want to do that. But you’re paying for all of it.”
“Done.”
“And you’re wiping down the cartons with the cleaning spray. I don’t want any Trojan horse sickness in this apartment.”
“CNN says we don’t have to do that. The virus doesn’t spread like that.”
“Don’t care. Do it anyway.”
“Aye Aye captain.” He pulled up his phone. “What do you want?”
She told him the usual. Chicken Masala Curry. “A woman of taste,” he said, punching in the order on the app. “I’ll get the same. It’ll be here in an hour.”
She sat down to listlessly grade some papers and watched Kyle out of the corner of her eye. He moved around the apartment with a bit more zest than usual, tidying up the living room and the bedroom, petting their corgi as he walked past its little bed. Soon he was pulling out bowls for the table, the nice porcelain ones his mother had given them, and silverware.
“You having fun over there?” she asked, watching from her tiny desk in the living room. Her little grading prison.
“Don’t be like that. Your cooking is wonderful. Look, tomorrow you can reign supreme in the kitchen again. I just really want this tonight is all.”
“You could bear to be a little less excited about it.”
His face fell. “Oh damn. I’ve hurt your feelings.”
“Just a smidge,” she said, playfully closing her index finger and thumb.
He approached the desk and put his arms around her. He planted a kiss on her on her forehead, just beneath her Widow’s Peak. “What can I do to make it up to you?”
“You could stop running a one-man show over there. Invite me. Maybe put on some music for both of us.”
“I can do that. Would you mind getting the sauce out while I set the mood?”
“Alright,” she said. She got up and went to the liquor cabinet, pulling out some mixers and bitters. He was putting a vinyl on the record player.
Bob started talking on the vinyl, stretching out all his words like playdoh:
Well, that big dumb blonde with her wheel in the gorge
And Turtle, that friend of hers, with his checks all forged
And his cheeks in a chunk, and his cheese in the cash
They’re all gonna be there at that million dollar bash
“That’ll work,” she said. She mixed his drink while he walked the dog. When he came back, he had not only the dog, but the food itself in bags. He put the dog up in their room and set to wiping down the containers with Clorox wipes. He brought the boxes to the table and poured their curries into bowls while Alyssa finished making his cocktail. She put down the Manhattan in front of his plate and then poured herself a glass of merlot.
It’s a wicked life but what the hell
Everybody's got to eat
And I'm just the same as anyone else
When it comes to scratching for my meat
They seated themselves across from one another at their small table. They sat there for a minute, smelling all the spices coming off their bowls. Kyle lifted his drink and took a sip. He swished it around his tongue, tasting the smoothness, before swallowing.
“Best Manhattan in the whole fucking county,” he told her.
She smiled, sipped her wine, satisfied.
They dug in. Both ate slowly, masticating the tender chicken and relishing the creamy curry soaking the rice. She could feel the ginger floating up into her nose and eyes. Her heart was beating faster. She closed her eyes. A memory of a night months ago drifted into the darkness, splashing color and light all around her mind. It all came together forming a series of pictures clicking through her mind.
Scenes from a birthday party.
The bash had taken place a few weeks after Kyle had been let go from his corporate gig and he was scrambling to set up something new. They had gone out to be among friends. The birthday girl had wanted tandoori, so the whole group had grabbed a long table at Curry Palace. Alyssa could make out the features of their faces with alarming clarity: the beauty mark above Felicia’s lip, the strands of grey among Shadi’s black hair. Laughter rang in her ears. She saw hands passing plates of samosas and pakoras down the table: a kind of communion she had not felt since, except for this one brief instance — the glory of days gone by swirling in her mouth.
And then the picture show went away as quickly as it had come. She found herself staring at her plate of curry. Her partner was talking. She looked up to see him at the other end of the table. He was smiling but seemed like he was a thousand miles away from her somehow.
“Well,” Kyle was saying. “Does this taste as good to you as it does to me?”
“It does,” she confessed. “It really does.”
She took another bite. She waited.
Dick Pic
Kaylee lived across town, over on 7th street near the Fogo de Chão. Ben had been seeing her for a week. Well, he hadn’t seen her in the traditional sense. They had met through Tinder a few months into the pandemic. She was brunette with a pixie cut and blue eyes that made him think of clear skies. In her pictures she wore patterned button dresses and overalls that made her seem artsy. He was fairly sure he had seen her in real life a couple of times at the coffee shop he worked at…well, the one he worked at before civilization came apart and his life had been reduced to browsing dating apps for thrills while waiting for some miraculous check from the government.
Kaylee’s profile said she was into The Talking Heads and that her favorite movie was Repo Man. He swiped right. The two of them matched and exchanged numbers. They texted from time to time about their favorite coffee roasts and missing smoking cigarettes at crowded bars on Saturday night. He found himself fantasizing about watching movies together at one of their apartments (hopefully hers because hoo boy, his ratty one-room with a mattress on the floor wasn’t exactly what you’d called romantic). In the shower, he’d think about fucking her. In bed. In a car. His hands fumbling at bra straps, her sharp teeth sinking into his shoulder. She seemed like a biter.
He got drunk one night off a fifth of Evan Williams and texted her these things in a moment of equal parts stupidity and passion. He woke up in the morning, nursing a hangover and dreading what the text messages in his phone would say. He opened the conversation box, bracing for impact.
Well go on, it read.
So he did. He told her he’d like to go out to a movie and then take her back home and fuck the night away. He didn’t brag about his abilities as a lover (what was there to brag about?) or make a case for her to fuck him. He just laid his desire out bare, stringing together fantasies and working them into language. He watched, heart in his throat, the tell-tale ellipses in the chat box that meant she was typing a response.
That might be nice. Once everything is over. I miss having someone touch me in that way, the message said.
A few minutes later she sent him a picture: her left arm tastefully folded across her bare chest, teeth biting into her lower lip. Black and white filter, of course.
Holy shit, he wrote back. He added a smiling face emoji. Because he was stupid.
Your turn, the message said.
He stared at the words. A minute went by.
Well? She wrote.
He replied with the first thing that came to mind: A decidedly unsexy Sure! Just give me a bit.
Ben ran to the bathroom and pulled down his pants to stare at his dick. It was a flaccid, unimpressive noodle protruding from a jungle of wild brown hair.
“Fuck,” he proclaimed to the world.
He hopped in the shower and spread cold shaving cream along his groin before mowing down the field of hair with a razor. He got out and dried himself. His heart sank when he looked into the mirror. Everything somehow looked worse: the brown hair had at least hidden the pale hilly terrain his dick was hanging from. Looking down at all that uncovered flesh, dotted with red splotches from shaving too fast, made him feel like a potbellied Grey Alien more than a man. Who would ever want to lay claim to such a body?
“Fuck meeeeee,” he said. Time to hit the panic button.
He texted Alex, who had moved away and lived in Des Moines now. Alex had always been better with women.
I need help.
Your boy’s here, Alex wrote back. What’s up?
There’s a girl.
You’re seeing someone in all of this!????
Just on Tinder. Hoping to maybe get something going on after the lockdown ends.
Is she hot?
He sent Alex a screenshot of her Tinder profile.
Oh shit, yeah she’s too hot for you.
Fuck you.
Hahahaha I kid. What’s the problem?
She wants a dick pic.
Well send a dick pic.
I’ve never sent a dick pic before.
Son….are you fucking serious?
Don’t be an asshole. Yes.
Ahahahahaha.
Fuck you.
Okay, okay. I can help you out. Show me what you’re working with.
You’re serious?
We roomed together in college, Ben. I’ve seen your beanie weenies. It’s fine. Show me the goods.
He took a picture of his dick and sent it to Alex. A few seconds went by.
Oh no, you just shaved downstairs didn’t you?
Yes. Is it obvious?
Well….
Fuck me.
Okay. Don’t panic. We can salvage this. You’ve got enough to work with. You’re gonna need to switch up the angles though. Portrait shot, not landscape. Set a timer. You need to capture your body and face in the shot. Show off the whole sculpture. Make yourself hard and grip that motherfucker like you’re proud of it. Women don’t want to look at your dick like it’s some weird hotdog just dangling there.
LMAO this is so weird.
Hey man! You wanted advice.
Yep, totally fair. And I appreciate it.
Good. Now take a shot and send me it.
What?
I need to make sure you’re sending her a good one! Send me another picture of your dick, god damn it.
Fine.
Ben closed his eyes and made himself hard thinking about Kaylee. He imagined the sounds she’d make in bed, felt the warmth of her skin against his. When he was stiff, he went into his bedroom and set the camera timer on his phone. He leaned the phone up against his bookshelf and ran to the bed. He posed, chest puffed out, hand holding his dick. He made sure he was standing in the light cutting through his window and hoped the neighbors across the way weren’t looking outside at this very moment. The phone camera clicked. He grabbed his phone and sent the picture to Alex without looking.
He waited. He checked the conversation box with Kaylee to see she had sent him a gif of Sonic The Hedgehog tapping his foot impatiently. Alex messaged him.
Hold on. I’m getting a second opinion from my roommate, Jake.
YOU’RE SHOWING A STRANGER MY DICK!?
Relax. I just need some unbiased perspective. I’m very emotionally attached to the man this dick is attached to. I need to make sure I’m taking that into account. Dick pics are a science: they should be peer-reviewed.
You fucker.
Jake says it’s a good picture mostly. He agrees with me though. You need to grip your piece tighter.
Jesus Christ.
Trust me. Grip that dick like you own it. It’ll make a difference.
Okay. I will do that. Thanks!
Good luck! Let me know how it goes!
Ben made himself hard again and took another picture, this time holding his dick tight like a vice. It hurt. He brought up the editing app on his phone and adjusted the lighting, applied a Vivid filter to hide the splotches as best he could. He stared at the picture for another minute, making sure that everything was as good as it could be, like an artist fiddling with their miniature display before presenting to the world. At long last, he hit send. He waited. The afternoon melted into night. The days curdled into a week.
She left him on read.
Chelsea’s Turn
She had known for months it was coming. In journalism, everyone got a turn. Chelsea felt the inevitability of it all bearing down when management fired Erica, the woman who had hired Chelsea to work the entertainment news beat. Restructuring, the higher ups said during the first round of layoffs. Pivoting. All the keywords of a reckoning coming for everyone. Women were the first to go, of course, especially women who weren’t white.
Even knowing all of this, the horror of watching colleagues’ names disappear from the SizzleTrend’s Slack channel one by one was no easier to take on round two. Her fear was only matched by her disgust at such a profane violation of civility. Everyone had joked there, shared memes, confided their fears in one another. The chatroom was a safe space as much as a work platform, and now they were watching each other be removed from it one by one, with everyone wondering who would be next and if anyone would be left standing.
“Today sucks. And I’ll miss working with you all,” said Matt Rickles, SizzleTrend’s comic book section editor just seconds before management deleted him from the channel.
Chelsea watched from her home office as friends and colleagues posted that they had been laid off on Twitter and were looking for new work. Mentors. Friends. People who were much better at their job than Chelsea was at hers, she felt. Valeria, the social media reporter, margarita queen and hell of a human being. Ryan, video editor, so nice even if he has too many opinions about The Fast and The Furious. Countless others. Just an entire family being torn down. She watched SizzleTrend’s union tweet a statement saying it abhorred how heartless the publisher had been in surprising the staff with yet another round of layoffs.
Chelsea had two stories due today, one on Onward’s box office performance and another about Netflix complying with government censorship requests. She could not make herself write them. She didn’t see the point. They were just going to fire her anyway.
And they did. At 12:07 PM. First, they cut off her access to Slack. And then someone called her phone. A man in HR was speaking to her. He told her his name. She had never met him before, assumed he was one of the guys who had come on after last year’s buyout – right when things were starting to go downhill. The man told her he was sorry, that SizzleTrend was eliminating several positions in wake of the damage COVID-19 was causing to ad revenue. As he told her these things, she thought about how the site had never had better traffic and of how her and her compatriots had worked themselves beyond the breaking point to keep the flow of content steady and strong. She thought of all the in-depth analyses she had churned out only to be met by a constant chorus of very brave and anonymous men calling her a stupid bitch in the comments section or all the times she watched as people who worked half as hard as she did got promotions she’d applied for.
The man in HR told her she’d be given a generous severance package. He said she would be mailed a packet on how to apply for unemployment. He told her that after travel restrictions lifted, she could come into the office and clean out her desk properly. She wished to tell him how much she wanted him to die, but she resisted.
After the call was done, she wrote a tweet and sent it out to her 4,239 followers. In keeping true to her online persona, she tried to be earnest and sad and jokey all at once in what she wrote. The tweet said:
I’m sad to say that after three years at SizzleTrend, I’ve been let go. It sucks! If you’re looking for a passionate reporter with several years’ experience in the entertainment industry, let me know.
I’m going to go turn my feelings into a pizza and eat them! Bye.
She retweeted some of her former colleagues’ Surprise I’ve Been Laid Off tweets and looked down at her phone to see her boss...well, former boss, the editor-in-chief had texted her. I’m so sorry. The fucking pigs, the text said. The message went on. All the expected things. You’re wonderful. If you ever need a recommendation. That sort of thing. She didn’t answer. Instead, she ordered her pizza and called her mother.
“I’m so sorry honey. You worked so hard.”
“I know,” Chelsea said.
“You deserve better.”
“I know that too,” Chelsea said. “God, it sucks.”
She was crying now, into the phone. She hoped she wasn’t so loud that her three roommates could hear her. “It all sucks so much, mom.”
“I know, baby,” her mother said.
“I wish I could go home,” she admitted. “I wish I could be there with you and dad.” Her parents were more than a thousand miles away in New Orleans.
“We’ll have to do something once all of this is over with. Do you have money? I can send you money.”
“I’m okay for now. I’ve got some savings. And severance is coming in. Supposedly.”
“Still. I’ll send you some money, okay? Treat yourself to something nice.”
“Okay. I’ll do that. Thank you.”
“Hey,” her mother said. “You’re so incredibly talented. You will get through this and then you will thrive, okay? I promise. Better things are ahead.”
Chelsea didn’t believe her, but she said “Okay” anyway and “I love you,” and then she hung up the phone. The pizza came a few minutes later and was left outside the door. The pie was a Royal from Joe & Pat’s. Chelsea was a vegetarian, but she didn’t care today. Today she wanted fucking pepperoni and she would have it.
She scrolled through Twitter on her phone as she ate. There was one dickhead who was tweeting at everyone who been laid off to tell them to “learn how to code.” On the bright side, there were also loads of people tweeting at her, telling her how smart she was, and how she deserved so much better and how stupid SizzleTrend was for letting her go. The outpouring of praise made her feel substantially better.
Chelsea ate some more slices of pizza and poured herself whiskey. Straight. Her mood was climbing. Maybe her mother was right, she thought, staring out the window at Washington Heights to see stoops and chipped sidewalks, a few ambling bodies wearing white masks. An ambulance zoomed by, sirens screeching. Perhaps the job had been holding her back. She had become complacent, comfortable. The hunger that had marked her early 20s had dissipated beneath a comfortable salary. She had wanted to do so many things just a few short years ago: pen a biography on Eartha Kitt, start a podcast dedicated to shoegaze, learn to paint and so on.
Maybe there would be time now, yes. Time for all the things she had abandoned for the sake of comfort. This was not a tragedy but instead a chance to separate her passion from her day job and rediscover the independence of her youth. She would reach out to her contacts, see if she could pull together content-writing gigs. She could do PR or freelance blog content for corporations. Sure. Why not? All ways to bring in the rent and then, in the evenings, she would devote herself wholly to whatever she wished.
Chelsea would set her own hours and work to her satisfaction. In the evenings, she would binge entire seasons of Glow and Barry or write whatever her heart desired as rain dripped down her window. She’d take up fringe hobbies, like learning to pick locks and make soap. When the pandemic was over, she’d go out to be among friends once more – sipping suds, exchanging stories and embraces. She’d tip heavy and find adventure in every bar she wandered into. To hell with nine-to-five office jobs and promotions. She would never allow any corporation to buy her happiness for the privilege of being abused, passed over, and disregarded again. Her time would be her own now. She would not waste this opportunity.
Chelsea sipped her whiskey. She tasted deliverance.
The Wedding In Mouseville
The thing you need to know about Joan is that Joan did not give a good goddamn what anybody thought about her. Except her Momma, of course. But Momma had been dead a long time, and in the wake of her death, Joan had emerged as an ornery and ungovernable force set upon the world. She went to Spartanburg Community College instead of regular college even though she could have easily nabbed a scholarship for her Four-Oh GPA. She became a dental hygienist, so she could make money and stay close to home. Joan had seen too many sad fools think the key to finding happiness was leaving home; she was smarter than that. She threw away all her flats and only wore Ariat cowgirl boots, stayed out late at FR8yard to drink with friends and listen to whatever band had wandered into town to play for the hicks. She did not suffer fools well and when she ran into them, she was sure to tell them how much suffering they caused her.
Her aura of rebellion made her seem like a game to many men (and maybe a woman or two), all of whom tried to strong-arm her into loving them with games of wit and control. She wasn’t about that shit, though. It’s why she settled down with Marcus, y’know? Marcus wasn’t interested in fighting for control. When he was five-years old, he had seen a stunning tornado demolish his uncle’s farm, sucking up floorboards and glass and even a John Deere, only to spit it out miles and miles away from where the farm had been. From then on he had accepted that he had no control over most things in the world, and that in fact those things were more beautiful because he could not control them. He looked at Joan and saw a free-wheeling miracle of existence, and he dreaded saying or doing anything that would infringe on that kind of temperament.
She loved him for that consideration. She loved that he was an artist and sketched whatever came to mind: portraits of customers he saw during his job down at AutoZone as a mechanic, fan art of characters from Marvel movies – even her relatives when they popped in for a visit. She loved him for the fact he was humble about his talents and totally unashamed he didn’t have a college degree, that he knew what he was about and accepted who that person was. Less than a couple of years after meeting, the two of them started renting a house together in Lyman, South Carolina.
The place was tiny, more a shack than a house, but they made it theirs. She decorated the living room with his sketches – framing them and hanging them behind the couch and over their bed – and bought double-decker boot holders to hang on the back of her closet door. In the evenings they ate Red Baron pizza and oven-cooked frozen dinners as they watched anime on the Crunchyroll App. They particularly liked Yuri On Ice and My Hero Academia. Joan got Marcus into video games, with one night’s impulsive co-op Halo 2 campaign on her Xbox 360 eventually morphing into PlayStation 4s for the both of them and two subscriptions to Final Fantasy XIV. Neither of them felt the need to get rich or have kids or any of that. They had the world in their little house and in each other.
They were both lucky when the pandemic came down, professionally speaking. It turned out that the odd tooth pain was still enough to get people into the doctor’s chair even during a plague. Sure, there were less customers at the AutoZone but not a whole lot less: Marcus lost maybe a few hours a week. Between them, they had enough money in the bank to hold over for a bit. Mostly because they had been putting some of their paychecks into a savings account for the past year to help with their eventual wedding.
They were supposed to be married in August, down in Charleston somewhere. Joan’s Daddy and his wife had said they’d help cover the cost, but she didn’t like taking handouts, especially one from her uptight Stepmother. Plus, now that she had really set to thinking about it, she wondered if anyone would even show up in August. Once travel restrictions had lifted across the country, would their extended families still even want to come out? And even if the did, would that be wise?
She thought about all the old folks; she thought about their lungs. She thought of wheezing and ventilators. Weddings weren’t worth dying over. The more she considered it, the more a wedding seemed like an annoyance she had to deal with rather than an event that held some emotional significance. It was something Joan was doing for other people and not herself, which she could not abide by.
And then one day she read a Time article her friend Ashley had shared on Facebook about a couple who had gotten married in a video game called Animal Crossing. She showed it to Marcus, who paused his episode of Iron Blooded Orphans to read it over.
“We could do that,” Joan told him.
“I guess we could.”
“It’d save a lot of money.”
“Sure would.”
“We could buy another HD TV with that money so we could both have one. And we’d still have a lot of cash left over.”
“You don’t have to sell me on it, baby. I’m already here.”
“You think your family would go for it?”
He shrugged.
“Some of them might be sad but they want me to be happy in the end, I think.”
“Would you be happy with this?”
“I’m happy when you’re happy.”
“Good answer.”
She kissed him on the forehead and did some research on the old Dell PC she had owned since her freshman year of college and now took up a corner in the kitchen due to limited space. She figured Animal Crossing wouldn’t work, given none of her extended family even knew what a Nintendo Switch was much less owned one. She thought about Grandma Diane trying to fiddle with clicking the Joycons into the console and laughed.
Eventually, she found the perfect game. An in-browser MMO called Mouseville from 2004. In Mouseville, you played a mouse who owned a house. You found a job. You went to work one of several jobs – including cheesemaker or fishermouse – and saved up money to buy improvements for your house. Or you could just use real-world money to buy virtual currency to build those improvements. Moreover, you could also reserve spaces in Mouseville to hold events for up to 100 users. All you needed was 75 dollars.
She thought about the cost of catering, of reserving a venue, of DJs and bands, of hidden fees for a real-life wedding. Thousands of dollars. It only took her a couple of minutes to make up her mind.
“Okay,” she told Marcus. “We’re doing it.”
“I guess we’re doing it then.”
“Get me a list of all your relatives’ emails you want to invite.”
“Some of them don’t use email. They’re old.”
“Well, you can just call them and let them know.”
“Now that I think about it I’m kind of worried they aren’t computer literate enough to do this.”
“We can record the ceremony. It’ll be fine.” She was caught up in the frenzy of the idea. Too late to turn back now.
“Alright then,” he told her. Marcus knew how it was. The matter was beyond debate at this point.
She wrote up the email. She had Marcus read it over. He left her some feedback. She ignored most of it but made a few changes. The email was frank and talked about the seriousness of the pandemic and how she didn’t want to waste money on an event that people would be afraid to turn up to or, even worse, would show up to and put their health at risk. She said she was sorry if they were disappointed but reassured them that she and Marcus were happy to do this instead of postponing their marriage to some day in the untold distance of the future.
“I love this man,” she wrote. “I do not want to wait years for the privilege of calling him my husband.”
She set the wedding date two weeks into May. She wrote down detailed instructions for creating a Mouseville account, their character, and which server they’d need to join to attend the wedding. She added that they should write her back if they need help at all.
She sent the email.
Only Beth, her Stepmother, wrote back to express disappointment. Joan promptly sent her email to the virtual trash bin. All the other responses were from people in both families telling her how excited they were and what strange times they lived in. There were a few who didn’t answer back, because although they were unhappy with the shift in plans, they also knew the reality of the situation: once Joan had made her mind up, that was that.
The next two weeks went by in a blur. She and Marcus went to the courthouse, put in the application, and got the license the next day. She paid the deposit for the in-game town square and let Mouseville know it was for a wedding. They congratulated her and said they’d decorate the space appropriately. They lived up to that. When she logged into Mouseville on the big day, she saw the town square now had white arches hanging over the middle of the square. The ground was covered in cherry blossom petals, and there two rows of chairs 50-deep. She took several screenshots of square in all its pixelated glory.
“How’s it look?” Marcus asked.
He was out in the living room with a laptop, logging in. Peering over, she could see he had worn a button-up shirt and jeans. He was freshly shaved. She looked down at the gym shorts and T-shirt she was wearing. The shirt had crusted marinara sauce at the bottom.
“Looks fantastic. I didn’t know you were getting dressed up for this. Now I feel bad.”
“Baby, wear what you want. I don’t care. I just wanted to dress nice for me, not for you.”
“Well, damn if you’re gonna put it like that – fine then.”
She sipped her mug of Folgers and looked at her little mouse wearing a white bridal gown. A few seconds later, Marcus’ mouse popped into the square. He was wearing a tux.
“Wow,” Marcus said from the living room. “This does look nice.”
“Right? Not bad for 75 dollars.”
They stood in the square and waited for 10 AM to arrive. Guests started popping in before. All their usernames were their names in all caps. She went over to her cousin LILLYBETH and did a dancing emoji. LILLYBETH clapped.
More people arrived. Joan hadn’t enabled the chatbox yet so there was no way for anyone to say anything, so everyone settled for clapping and dancing to celebrate the occasion. Names like BUCK, LATANYA, and DANNY flooded into the game. For those relatives with common names, numbers were added to their usernames. This is how Joan found herself surrounded by PAM (1), PAM (2), and PAM (3), all of them stamping their feet in frustration as Joan’s mouse clapped.
Eventually people stopped arriving and most of the chairs were filled with mice. Marcus and Joan took their place under the arches. Joan noticed with some satisfaction that her Stepmother was nowhere to be seen, despite Daddy being among the crowd.
The pastor Joan had reached out to over at First Baptist took his place between them. He typed his bit in the chatbox.
PASTORFELIX: DEARLY BELOVED, WE ARE GATHERED….
Joan looked around the square. She took several screenshots, and then let out a sigh.
“God damn it,” she said.
“What,” Marcus said from the living room.
“I forgot all about the bridesmaids. I’m supposed to have maids.”
“Well I’m supposed to have groomsmen. I didn’t bring any.”
“Oh, that’s true.”
“We’re fine. The rules are out the window. Just enjoy this.”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
She took another ship of her coffee and waited for the pastor to get to where he was going.
PASTORFELIX: DO YOU MARCUS DAVIS TAKE THIS WOMAN TO BE YOUR WEDDED WIFE; AND DO YOU SOLEMNLY PROMISE BEFORE GOD AND THESE WITNESSES TO LOVE, CHERISH, HONOR AND PROTECT HER: TO FORSAKE ALL OTHERS FOR HER SAKE; TO CLEAVE UNTO HER, AND HER ONLY, UNTIL DEATH SHALL PART YOU?
MARCUS: I DO.
PASTORFELIX: DO YOU JOAN GIDDENS TAKE THIS MAN TO BE YOUR WEDDED HUSBAND; AND DO YOU SOLEMNLY PROMISE BEFORE GOD AND THESE WITNESSES TO LOVE, CHERISH, HONOR AND PROTECT HIM, TO FORSAKE ALL OTHERS FOR HIS SAKE; TO CLEAVE UNTO HIM AND HIM ONLY, AND HIM FOREVER UNTIL DEATH SHALL PART YOU?
JOAN: I DO.
The mice in the chairs started using the crying emoji. The vows went on. Joan felt herself getting bored.
“I want the Beacon after this,” she said. The Beacon was a fast-food joint in the city. It was greasy and delicious.
“I can go pick it up,” he said. “What do you want?”
“Fried ham sandwich. And a pimento grilled cheese.”
“Okay. I’ll go as soon as this is done.”
“I’m glad I’m tolerable enough you won’t abandon me at the altar for fast food.”
“The thought crossed my mind.”
She threw an empty soda can at him. He laughed, tilting his head out of the way to dodge it.
Eventually the pastor deemed them man and wife, mouse and mousette.
MAY I PRESENT TO YOU MISTER DAVIS AND MISS GIDENS, UNITED IN HOLY MATRIMONY
“United in holy matrimony,” Marcus repeated. “Sounds like we’re combining our powers to take on a boss in a game.”
“It does,” she laughed. “This is ridiculous. I love it.”
All the mice clapped. Some of them kept crying. Joan moved quickly to wrap up the ceremony. She thanked everyone in the chat box for attending and making time for her and Marcus’ big day. She watched as the mice in attendance popped out of existence one by one. Daddy’s mouse came over to do a little dance in front of her before popping away.
“Go get the food,” she told Marcus. “I’ll stay here until everybody’s gone.”
“Alright.”
“Don’t forget your mask.”
“Oh. Right.”
She watched him leave and then continued to dance with the remaining mice until everyone was gone and her mouse was alone in the square. She looked at the cherry blossoms on the ground. They blew in the artificial wind and looked so nice, even pixelated.
When Marcus came back home, she logged off the server and went to go sit on the couch with him. He handed her the fried ham sandwich from the wrinkled brown bag.
“Being married means I can just make you go get food for me like this all the time now right?”
“Oh absolutely,” he said. “All you have to do is just snap your fingers and off I go.”
“Perks.” She pulled on his arm. “Come here.”
“What?”
“Come here, dumb-dumb. I want to kiss you before my breath smells like ham.”
She pulled him closer to her and locked lips with him. She kissed him for a long time and then pulled back.
“That was nice,” he told her, unwrapping his cheeseburger. “So what do you want to do today? What do people do when they get married in the middle of a pandemic anyway?
“Well, we’re going to bang later. Obviously.”
“But besides that.”
She shrugged. “I dunno. I kind of just like the idea of sitting here and watching shows with you for the rest of the day. We need to catch up on Better Call Saul, right?”
“And Ozark.”
“Shit. And Riverdale too.”
“Hey,” she said through a mouth of fried ham.
“What?”
“Do you think it was a mistake? Getting married like that?”
“I’m happy.”
“I am too. For now. But like, you know, what if we get sad later because didn’t have the bridesmaids and the cake and a dance party and all that shit?”
“Did you want those things?”
“No. Not really. But maybe one day I will.”
“Then we can just do it again later.”
“I don’t think that’s how it works.”
“There are no rules, remember? I will marry you as many times as you want,” he said.
“I’ll hold you to that.”
She leaned into his arm. He brought up Netflix and flipped on Riverdale. She felt the warmth of his arm against hers. Reaching down she grasped his fingers with her free hand and rested her head against his shoulder, letting the eventful day settle into her.
This was the life.
A Whole New Form Of Life
The meeting took place in the storeroom, tucked between the deli shop and frozen goods aisle. The proceedings lasted almost five minutes. Brett stood in the back of the cramped room as Linda, the manager, told the rest of them how important it was to wear masks. She was chewing out Kyle, of course, who hadn’t been wearing his mask during most of his shift the day before, but she was chewing him out in that particular Midwestern way of blaming without placing blame. “I’m not gonna say who but someone,” and so on. Everyone knew it was Kyle. How could it be anyone other than Kyle? Stupid Kyle.
They all left the storeroom of Lenny’s Fine Foods, named after the founder (rest his departed soul), and returned to their duties. For Brett, this meant stepping behind the cash register and check-out conveyor belt. If you had asked Brett, he would have told you he didn’t mind the mask so much. It hid his bad cheek acne and soda-eroded teeth so that people weren’t at least partially wincing when they looked at him. He pretended he was a wanderer in Fallout, strapping on a mask before taking on the radioactive mutants of the wasteland.
What he did mind, however, was the strange panes of plexiglass they had erected in front of and behind him. He knew it was for his safety as well as the customers’, and yet it made him feel like some Orwellian booth stooge, seconds away from demanding a passport to look over for suspicious forgeries and other hints of insurgency.
At least the customers were in a hurry now. They didn’t make time for chatter anymore, choosing instead to grab their bags of groceries as quickly as possible and head out of what was probably a hotbed for COVID contamination. He liked that. He hated talking to people. Brett was one of those men who preferred to live in his own head. He liked talking to himself about movies he had watched on Amazon Prime or a new album he had listened to after he had given his mother her medicine and tucked her into bed. He often thought about the internet café and comic book shop he had owned a long time ago.
Brett had funded the place with what his dad had left him after he passed. It was profitable for a while thanks to exorbitant hourly fees for using the computers. He had all kinds coming in to use the computers: accountants, artists, World Of Warcraft subscribers who needed a better internet connection than what they had at home. He even had to ask some pervs to leave when he saw them unabashedly pulling up porn.
Lots of kids (and men and women) came to play in trading card game tournaments in the basement. He never made much money off booster packs and nobody bought the comics. They’d just read the books and put them back, and he didn’t have the heart to tell the kids his store was a store and not a library. He was always a fragile thing, Brett. His mother told him that all the time.
He remembered when he knew he’d have to close up shop for good. As soon as it was possible to browse the internet on the phone, the business was over. No more people coming in to do research or accounting because they couldn’t afford PCs anymore. He sold all the inventory. He made out okay. He decided he was gonna go to college, get a degree in something useful. Then Mom got sick, in body and mind. Adiós education fund. Hello menial job and caretaking.
He wasn’t bitter about it anymore. He’d kicked that when he kicked the drinking. He was where he was in life, he had decided, and most of it hadn’t been his fault. Just another American casualty living in the gutter, barely getting by. But at least he was getting by.
Brett watched the clock hanging above the bakery in the corner of the store. He was waiting for it to happen. The moment he anticipated every day, the one he could see off in the distance, growing ever closer. Between now and then he’d greet customers, ring them up, handle their gallons of milk and plastic packages of hams with care, going out of his way to make sure they saw his mask and latex gloves. When there were no customers, he’d talk with himself until he tired his brain out or distract himself with tasks. Today, he made time to jot down a list of things to get for Mom, including her meds from the pharmacy and a Whopper from Burger King. Mom fucking loved Whoppers. Couldn’t get enough of them. He was finishing up the list for her when it happened.
He saw the blur of blue out his eye, the cuff of shorts passing quickly, and cursed himself for almost missing it entirely. He looked up and saw the man. He didn’t know the man’s name, just knew that he walked by every day wearing tight shorts and a polo shirt that did nothing to conceal his biceps, that he was a postal worker. In his mind, Brett called the man James because his strong chin and Greek nose made him think of a young James Remar.
He watched James go by, picking through various letters in his hand soon to be delivered, until he was out of sight. Images flashed in Brett’s head, each one a strike of lightning inflicting his body with eruptions of warmth. He saw himself laying in a bed he had never slept in before next to James, the pair of them nude but modestly covered by blankets. He watched himself and James cuddle up next to one another on the couch as they tried to decide what to watch on Netflix.
He saw both of them weeks after the pandemic was finally over, eating out at the Noodle Hut on Bowdoin Way – James’ treat, of course. James was chewing Udon noodles, obviously, while Brett sipped his favorite, the coconut lime soup. Brett would leave his mask on even after the pandemic was over, he decided. He liked how he looked with the mask, even though James didn’t care about the teeth and the acne.
“You’re unbearably beautiful,” James would say. He was very nice, James. He didn’t mind that Brett’s mother was kind of kooky in the head and had to be bathed otherwise she’d smelled funny at the dinner table. James would always be there, no matter what.
Brett was thinking of James when Linda came up behind him and rapped gently on the plexiglass pane behind him. The orange of late afternoon sunlight was shining through the windows of the grocery store.
“It’s past five,” she was saying. “You can go home.”
He didn’t move. She rapped again.
“Brett?”
He didn’t hear her. He was somewhere else.
Lockdown
The constipation was unreal. Aaron hadn’t shit in four days, and nothing was working: apples, fiber powder, gallons of water – nada. He wasn’t sleeping either. He knew what it was all about. That time of year again. The body would be off-key for another week, properly punctuated with a panic attack at some point that would serve to reset everything. But the mind? Three years after and he was still waiting for that to go back to normal.
Aaron tried to push another shit, clasping the stem of the toilet with his feet for support. Nothing. He washed his hands and got ready. He put on the golden flannel shirt Tommy had gotten him. It was old and covered in coffee stains, had some rips near the elbow, so he only wore it on special days like this. He grabbed the saddle bag and stuffed into it his multikit, bike lock, a couple of granola bars, and some extra face masks.
He quietly filled his water bottle in the kitchen and then went into his parents’ garage. He was being quiet so he wouldn’t wake them. He strapped the saddle bag to the seat of his hand-me down Schwinn. Aaron took a second and sighed, before pushing the bike out the garage’s side door into the light of the moon.
It was going to be a long night.
*
Debra – that’s Tommy’s mother – was in the kitchen waiting for him. Her mask was strapped beneath her chin. She was sitting at that little kitchen table of hers, having a cigarette with her coffee. The door was already unlocked. Debra had come to expect his visits, the ritual of it.
She was wearing a t-shirt from Padget’s. Padget’s was the diner she worked at, but it had been closed for the past two months because of the pandemic. Aaron knew she had saved up some money over the past two years, looking to get away and all that, so she would be fine financially for the time being. Still, he worried.
“Three years,” she said, when he took a seat across the way from her. “You know how many days that is?”
“One thousand and ninety-five,” he said.
“Yeah,” Debra said, putting out the cigarette. “That many days.” She looked at him, and he could see the crow’s feet around her blue eyes. The lines had grown more pronounced the past few years.
She continued: “You know, you don’t have to come every year. I appreciate the gesture, but you don’t have to.”
“I come because I want to. I can stop if it makes you uncomfortable.”
“No, I love seeing you. I just don’t want to be that old woman who’s someone’s obligation, you know?”
“For sure,” he said.
“Can I get you anything? Coffee? I might have some pancake mix.”
“I’m okay. Just checking in.”
“Right. Just checking in.” She sipped her coffee. “I read on CNN they’re using tear gas on people now down in the city,” she said, meaning Seattle.
“Yeah, I heard about that.”
“Cops,” she said venomously. “Fucking cops.”
He watched her pull another cigarette from her pack of American Spirits. “You know it was them, right?” she said.
Aaron didn’t answer. He knew this was her moment to talk, let it out. It was why he was here.
“Tommy had been biking all up and down those roads since he was seven. "She lit up her cigarette. “They knew he had been in contact with the APTP, that he made posters and held meetings trying to sell Seattle on defunding the department. He was so fucking charismatic. People were listening, showing up to demonstrations, speaking out against them. So of course they killed him.”
She saw him looking at her. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”
“No,” he said, just as he had told her the two times before. “I don’t.”
“But you think it’s as they say it is. That a trucker hit him in the dead of night and then just drove off. Conveniently no camera footage of the accident even though they’ve got a camera at the intersection. We’re just supposed to take their word for it. Because they’re in charge. You buy that?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t think you’re crazy.”
She chuckled, blew a puff of smoke. “That’s something, I guess.” She paused a second, calmed down. “You and the others doing your circuit today?”
He nodded. “Meeting at Agape’s and then…uh,” he couldn’t finish.
“Right,” she said. “Hold on a second.”
She got up and walked out of the kitchen. While she was gone, he sat looking at the walls. Saw smears of pasta sauce, dents from where someone had thrown something. The sink was filled with dishes that hadn’t been washed in weeks.
She came back a few minutes later and laid a Polaroid on the table. The picture was faded. Aaron looked it over and saw Tommy with a balding man who looked vaguely familiar. They were standing outside somewhere, beaming for the camera. Tommy was wearing a little blue and green polo, and he was standing next to a red bike.
“He had blonde hair then,” Aaron said.
“Yeah. He was little, maybe six. My brother took him up to Green River Gorge.”
“He’s got that little devious smile. Some things never change, I guess.”
She laughed. “Yeah, he always had that. His dad gave him that.” He watched the joy in her face fade, the curl of her lips turning into a straight line once more. “You take that and lay it out for me?”
“Of course.” He pocketed the Polaroid.
“They’re gonna be out and about.” There was urgency in her voice. “It’s past curfew.”
He nodded. “I know.”
“You’re gonna have the others with you, right? Ashley, Russ, and Neil?”
“Yep. All of them.”
“Good. Give them my love.”
“Of course.”
“I’ll stop keeping you. I’m sure you’ve gotta go. I’d hug you but…”
“I know.”
He stood up and waved awkwardly. He thought of saying something, promising to come back before next year and help her out, maybe tidy the place, but she already seemed so exhausted by everything. He left it alone.
“See you again soon,” he told her, as he had the two years before.
“Stay safe,” Debra answered, watching him walk out of the kitchen and into the dark.
When he was gone, she lit up a cigarette she promised herself would be the last of the night. She took a seat at the table to listen to the crickets outside of her window.
They sang.
*
He took the back paths, through the woods and along dirt roads to avoid cruisers on patrol. He didn’t imagine there were enough out and about that they would give him trouble, but it was better to be safe than sorry.
As he rode, he thought about the words he might say. He thought about talking about how he and Tommy had learned to ride together at Greenlake. He saw pictures in his mind. He and Tommy playing Mario Kart 64 on a rainy afternoon, of camping out at Gothic Basin and grilling hot dogs over a fire, the time they spent nearly all their summer earnings to get killer seats at an Arcade Fire concert. To Aaron it seemed that Tommy somehow encompassed the entirety of his childhood and adolescence, that the man had been as vital to him as one of the organs in his body.
He didn’t know the words to convey how he felt. They were caught somewhere, held down in his brain. He struggled to string together pitiful phrases of vague sorrow as he wheeled his way down the paths. The ride took him about 45 minutes and when he got to the restaurant, nestled between a gas station and a Wells Fargo, he saw Russ and Alice’s bikes locked onto the rack. He added his bike to the bunch with his lock, unhooked his saddle bag, and went up to the door. The restaurant looked closed, but Aaron could see two figures walking around in the muted light behind the window.
He knocked and listened, could hear shuffling, the lock turning over.
“Were you followed?” said a gruff voice from within.
“Fuck off,” Aaron answered, chuckling and pushing against the door. He stepped inside the building and saw Alice behind the counter, shaving lamb off the twirling spit. Russ was a couple of feet away from him, having stepped away when he opened the door. Aaron’s first instinct was to hug his friend, but his brain checked him, told him to resist the urge. Just in case. He was relieved to see both of them were wearing their masks.
“Good to see you, butthead,” Alice told him.
“You too. Nick?”
“Curfew,” Russ explained. “Left the key under the mat. Said we could just put the cash near the register. Clean up once we were done.”
“Good guy,” Aaron said, heading over to the cash register and putting the money next to it. He placed his saddle bag next to Alice and Russ’ bookbags on the counter. “Even if he charges a fucking arm and leg for gyros.”
“The ingredients are authentic,” Alice said. “It’s worth the money. You know that.” She shaved off some more slices of lamb and laid them across three plates. She opened the salad bar and made her gyro, filling the pita with the meat and sweet onions, some slices of tomato and lettuce. Then she squeezed the tzatziki sauce on thick before stepping away from the counter. “Alright, whoever wants next.”
Aaron watched Russ make his gyro. Alice took a seat at the far end of the bar.
“Three plates,” Aaron said. “What about Neil?”
Russ shrugged. “He texted. Said he didn’t want to fuck with curfew. He’s got priors and all that.”
“For possession, the little punk,” Alice grumbled. “It’s not like the cops are arresting anyone for being out.”
“Prior is a prior,” Aaron said. “Don’t give them a reason. I get it.”
Russ finished making his gyro, came around the counter and sat at one of the tables, far away from either Alice and Aaron.
Aaron took his turn. “You cut this meat real well,” he said. “So thick.”
“I mean we worked here for like three summers. You don’t forget how to do something like that.”
“It was four,” Russ said.
Alice took a bite of her gyro and shook her head. “The three of you worked here for a summer before me.”
“Oh yeah,” Russ said. “That’s right.”
“Yeah, I didn’t start here until Tommy and I were dating. He convinced Nick to hire me,” she replied.
“That was a disaster,” Aaron chimed in with a little laugh. He finished prepping the gyro and closed the salad bar.
Alice shrugged. “It wasn’t the worst relationship I’ve had. Wasn’t the best but it wasn’t the worst.”
Aaron sat at the other end of the bar. They were all so far away from one another, he felt. It seemed wrong but he didn’t say anything, knew it was just the heart being sentimental.
“You go see Debra?” Russ asked after a minute had gone by without anyone saying anything. Aaron nodded.
“How is she?”
“Well. The same. But worse.”
“She still thinks the cops killed him?” Russ asked.
“Yeah. She does.”
“Sometimes I wonder myself, to be honest. I used to think it was just the grief, but sometimes I really consider it now, especially with how they’ve been handling all this riot shit. Keeps me up at night, the wondering.”
“I’ve thought about going to see her,” Alice said, “but she never really liked me when Tommy and I were a thing. Would probably just bring up some bad memories.”
“She needs to get away,” Russ said. “Once this COVID bullshit is over with. Go south. I think she has family in Texas.”
“Maybe,” Alice said. “But maybe there are things you can’t come back from, y’know?”
Aaron swallowed a bite of gyro, decided to change the subject. He nodded at Russ. “How’s your sis?”
“Well, she finally got over being furloughed and then the protests started happening.”
“Shit. I forgot she’s in the city. Is she near them?”
“Her and her partner’s apartment is a couple of blocks from Westlake, yeah. Nothing bad has happened to them or their place, but she said they can hear ambulances screaming by every night. She had a friend get his nose bashed in by a policeman.”
“Jesus,” Alice said.
“Rough stuff,” Russ said.
“Can’t blame the protestors though,” Aaron interjected. He finished off his gyro.
“No,” Russ agreed. “You can’t. Enough’s enough. They murdered Floyd and thought they could get away with it. Not to mention the countless others they did just like him.”
“All my dad can talk about is how they’re destroying businesses,” Alice told them. “The asshole.”
The three of them kept on talking for a while, mostly about what they were going to do after the pandemic was over. Russ wanted to get back to building his photography business. He was hoping whenever people started having weddings again, he’d make bank. Alice was IT for one of the bigger hospitals, so things hadn’t changed much except she was working remotely instead of in-office. She kind of preferred it. “I do miss vacations,” she confessed. “Brenna and I were planning a trip to Ireland when this virus shot that down. Hopefully we’ll still be able to make it happen a few years down the road.”
Aaron told them how he wanted to go back to grad school and finish his architecture degree. He was in the middle of telling them how much he wanted to move out of his parents’ basement when they saw the flashing lights. Red. Blue.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Russ said.
They watched through the window as the cruiser pulled up and the cop got out. He was barrel-chested and walked like an asshole. He wasn’t wearing a mask.
“Must have seen the light from the road. Shit.”
Aaron got up to do something, but Russ was the first at the door. He opened it slowly.
“Evening officer,” Russ said politely.
“It’s past curfew,” the officer said as he approached, tapping his wrist watch to emphasize the point. “Two hours past in fact.”
“Officer —"
“How many of you?”
Aaron and Alice stepped in the view as Russ opened the door wider. “Just three,” Russ told him.
“What are you doing here?”
“We were cleaning up,” Aaron said. “We work here.”
“That so?” the man said. “I stop by here a few times a month. I’ve never seen you here. And you all look a little old to be working part-time at a joint like this.”
“You can call the owner,” Russ said. “Nick Karras. His cellphone number is on one of those business cards on the counter there. He’ll vouch for us.”
“Maybe I’ll do that,” the officer said. He came in. In the dim light of the restaurant, Aaron could see the man was a fair bit older than any of them, had grey in his beard and lines in his face. He was standing too close to Aaron for comfort.
“You all cyclists?”
“Yes,” Russ said. Aaron could hear the politeness fading from his tone. The officer looked around, saw the three bags on the counter. He walked over to Aaron’s saddlebag and unzipped it.
“What are you doing? He didn’t tell you could go in his bag,” Alice said.
“Is there something in one of these bags I should be worried about?”
Aaron had his eyes fixed on the pistol in the man’s holster. He thought about how it was the three of them and him and his gun. He thought about his word against theirs, whatever happened. “Go ahead, officer,” Aaron said.
The three of them watched the man go through their bags, methodically examining every pouch and pocket. Aaron could see him feeling out spaces with his finger for hidden compartments. “I know this might seem unfair, but I’m being thorough. Some men and women have been running around with Molotov cocktails and other dangerous paraphernalia, you understand?”
“Of course,” Aaron answered.
He dug around in Russ’ bag for a while and dug out two small red sticks. He shook them. “Flares? Lighter fluid?”
“I go hiking sometimes. I just keep them on me in case something happens, y’know?”
The officer grunted and stuffed them back in. He walked over to the counter and picked up one of the business cards. He turned back to Russ. “So if I call this number, the owner will say you’re supposed to be here?”
“Cleaning up, yes.”
“I see.”
The officer looked at the card for a second and then put it back down. “Are you done ‘cleaning up?’”
“Yes, officer,” Aaron volunteered. “We were all just about to head home.”
The officer looked at them for a few seconds and then nodded. “Alright. Don’t get caught staying after curfew again. Let’s go.”
Alice took their plates to the sink and came back. The officer watched as they grabbed their bags and then all four of them went out into the night. Russ locked up the door and left the key in the soil of one of the potted plants near the door. They unhooked their bikes and then, without another word to the officer, they rode away into the darkness.
Though Aaron refused to look over his shoulder, he could feel the officer’s eyes burrowing into the back of his neck.
*
The three of them rode for 20 minutes until their destination was in view and then they pulled off the road. They walked their bikes the rest of the way, talking as they went.
“That prick,” Alice said.
“Dude was on a power trip,” Russ said. “Nobody’s actually enforcing this curfew. He’s just being an asshole.”
“And what was that shit about Molotov cocktails?” Alice laughed. “That man was pulling every excuse out just to mess with us.”
“We weren’t doing anything,” Aaron said. “He should have just left us alone. We weren’t bothering anybody. Today’s important for fuck’s sake.”
“Yeah,” Alice answered, the mirth leaving her voice. “It is.”
They reached the pole next to the intersection and laid their bikes against nearby trees. Aaron unstrapped his saddle bag and carried it under his arm.
The wood of the pole was gnarled and at the top power lines ran through it. At the base, a bike that had been painted ghost white was chained to the pole. Decayed lilies and roses were poking through open spaces in the frame and around the spokes. Atop of the seat was a picture of Tommy. His brown hair was cut short and jagged, jutting from his forehead like a cliff. He was wearing glasses and giving a big old gap-toothed smile. He was 21-years old in the picture. Aaron knew because he had taken it.
“Hey pal,” Aaron said to the picture. It didn’t say anything back.
They all got to work. Alice dug the flowers out of her bag and began to place them around the bike as Russ removed the dead ones. After all the dead flowers were gone, Russ placed three mini circular candles in front of the bike and lit them up with his lighter. The small flames burned orange.
Aaron took the Polaroid out of his saddle bag and inserted it in the spoke, making sure it was tight enough between the metal lines that it wouldn’t fly away in the wind. He noticed, getting to his feet, that he, Alice, and Russ were standing close, huddled together almost. He thought of saying something about making sure to keep their distance, but he didn’t have it in him. He wanted to be close to his friends.
“Third year doing this, and I still have no idea what to say,” Russ said.
“Join the club,” Aaron answered.
“We miss you,” Alice told the picture. “Every day. It wasn’t right what got taken from you. It wasn’t right that you got taken from us.” She sniffed and rubbed her eye with her sleeve.
Taken. The word loosened the rubble of his mind. He knew what to say now. Yes. He had the words, his own words. They were flowing now, water bursting through the dam. The grief would leave him, finally, even if just for a bit. Aaron opened his mouth to say what he had to say, but a bright light suddenly pierced his eyes, blinding him.
“What the fuck is that?” he heard Russ say. Suddenly, there was a loud honking sound. Someone was blaring their horn.
The bright light went by quickly and Aaron saw a blue 18-wheeler pulling off to the side of the road, stopping just short of them and the memorial. The thing had a huge cargo trailer on the back of it and looked like a damn train. The truck honked again, twice, after it had pulled over. Aaron could see two men in the driver’s compartment. The passenger was smiling, amused. The driver looked pissed.
Aaron watched as the driver got out and hopped to the ground. He came around the front of the truck. He was a skinny man who towered over all three of them. He had a long nose and big hat, was wearing a denim jacket. He stood a few feet apart from them while the lights of his truck shined down the road, lighting up the intersection. Aaron could smell the beer off him from where he was standing. Cheap shit. Coors Light or something.
“The fuck y’all doing out here,” he said. “It’s past curfew.”
“What’s it look like? We’re paying our respects,” Russ said. “Go away.”
“You sure as shit ain’t social distancing. You wanna get the rest of us sick? You want this thing to go on for years?”
Alice flipped him off. “Man, we’re not bothering you. Get back in your truck and go.”
Aaron could feel his heart pounding. His blood was hot. The words he was going to say to Tommy – they were gone now. This stranger – this disgusting old bastard – had taken them from him.
The truck’s passenger rolled down his window. He was laughing. “Bill, leave those kids alone.”
“Screw you Peter, I do what I want,” the man named Bill said. “They’re posing a health hazard for the rest of us.”
“Dude, how you can be this much of an asshole,” Russ yelled. “Let us grieve in peace.”
Bill peered over at the memorial, snorted. “The three of you need to get up on your bikes and be on your way before the same thing that happened to your buddy there happens to one of you. Standing out in in the middle of the road at night like idiots.” His voice was getting louder.
“The fuck did you say,” Alice said.
Aaron turned. He was walking. His hand was already in his saddle bag.
“I said what I fucking said, princess. Your friend probably got ran over because he was being a dipsh—”
Aaron slammed the bike lock across the man’s face with all his strength. Aaron felt the wetness first, a slight rain across his forearm, and then heard a sickening crack as his arm vibrated from the blow. Bill stumbled back, one foot tumbling atop the other, and collapsed awkwardly on the road. A second passed. No one said anything, and then the man began to wail as red poured down into his eyes and mouth.
“My face,” he cried. “I’m blind. I’m fucking blind!”
Aaron didn’t drop the bike lock in horror or disgust. He walked over to Bill with purpose, knelt on the road next to him, and brought the lock down on his skull again. Another crack. The man feebly tried to grab Aaron’s face to fight back but his fingers only grasped air.
Russ and Alice both stared for a moment at the man and what their friend was doing to him. It took them both less than a second to make their choice. Alice joined in first, stomping at Bill’s legs. Russ followed shortly with his fists.
“What are you doing?” the passenger screamed, getting out of the car to help his friend.
Here’s what they did:
They kicked Bill’s teeth down his throat and caved his skull in. Then they grabbed the man named Peter, held him down while he cried, and beat him until he lay still and wet. When that was done, Russ took the flares and lighter fluid from his bag. He and Aaron doused both bodies and the driver’s compartment of the truck and set it all aflame.
The fire spread. It ate the men quickly, devouring their clothes and their flesh, licking their ears and singeing their hair. It kissed their lips before peeling them away like wrapping paper.
Aaron tried to listen for the sound of sirens in the distance. Part of him knew they would come eventually, but he couldn’t hear anything — not even the crackling of the fire. Everything was being drowned out by the pounding of his own heart. It was the loudest sound he had ever heard in his life. It was so loud and encompassing he felt himself slipping inside of it. The sound told him in a language he had never heard before but somehow understood that it would build a cage around him and that the cage would last him all his days to come.
He accepted that.
The three of them stood next to the memorial, drenched in the insides of the dead men, watching everything burn. They all breathed in and out as the smoke of the departed rose higher and higher to mingle with the trees.
They didn’t care what came next.
The Woman In The Tower
Caroline was waiting. She stirred the NutraSweet in her coffee and stared out the window. She lived alone on the second floor of the apartment complex and had a good view out toward the street. The neighborhood was in the north of town and was pretty quiet. Caroline used to dream about moving into one of those houses, a few years back, but the apartment had grown on her.
Sure the place was small but over the years she had decorated the walls with an assortment of album covers from The Cranberries and My Bloody Valentine as well as movie posters for La Dolce Vita and My Own Private Idaho. Her multiple Blu-ray cabinet took nearly half her living room, filled to the brim with Criterion Collection and Scream Factory discs galore, not to mention full seasons of TV.
When the pandemic arrived, she was naturally scared just like everyone else. Of losing her job as an administrative assistant. Of getting sick. Of dying. But a couple of weeks went by, work gave her the go-ahead to do her duties from home. And then one by one, she finally began to go through her collection of blu-rays in the background as she worked. The days sped by as she zipped through Brazil, The 400 Blows, Grey Gardens, even managed to gobble up Breaking Bad and The Sopranos. Soon she’d start watching all of the Kurosawa movies in her backlog and then move on to Bergman.
You see, she had made a spreadsheet of all of the movies and shows in her collection she needed to watch, adding columns for movies she wanted to revisit, and movies she enjoyed so much she would watch the special features on the disc and then read as many essays as she could about them. She ordered more movies, alongside bags of coffee and potato chips, from Amazon.
That’s what she was doing right now, by the way. She was waiting for her movie. The movie was called Lady Snowblood. It was about a woman seeking revenge against people who had done her family wrong. A user on Letterboxd named TangyToes said that it had inspired Kill Bill, which sold Caroline on the movie alone.
She sipped her coffee. No one was outside. The whole world was quiet. The truth was she kind of liked it that way. She didn’t miss people. Not coworkers. Not her family, who had written her off when she told them she was into women. She missed places, sure. The ambiance of hole-in-the-wall bars (not the loud places where men operated under the assumption they had carte blanche to feel you up though, fuck those places), of drinking a shot of whiskey and writing down little thoughts in her journal. Poems. Observations. Sometimes she had written fanfiction for her favorite show, The Expanse, while out and about, feeling like she was getting away with a silly crime of some sort.
But people? Eh. Take ‘em or leave ‘em. Sure, she felt some guilt. Of course. Who wouldn’t? Countless people across the world were having their insides riddled away by some invisible monster and here she was, living her best life, away from everyone. But she wasn’t the villain here, no. She just happened to profit from a bad situation, that’s all. At least, that’s what she told herself whenever she felt the creeping discomfort at the back of her head.
She finished her coffee and put on another pot. While it brewed, she danced to “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” and “This Modern Love” blaring on her phone’s speaker. She stepped in front of the window just in time to see Jason coming down the way in his little blue shorts, carrying a white box filled with packages, the postal truck parked a few feet away. She grabbed her mask and went down. She got to the landing of the steps in the lobby and saw he was putting packages into tenants’ postal slots.
He looked up at her.
“Hey Caroline,” he said through his mask.
“Hey Jason.”
“I got nothing for ya today.”
“Ah damn. Really? Amazon said I had something coming today.” She took a seat on the steps.
“Yeah. Maybe they’re having one of their delivery folks do it.”
“Maybe.”
He struggled to get a larger package into one of the slots but managed to push it through. “Waiting on another movie?”
“Yeah. Lady Snowblood.”
“Sounds badass.”
“Have you watched anything interesting lately?”
“My girlfriend had us watch this thing on Netflix. What was it called? Uncut Diamonds?”
“Gems. Uncut Gems.”
“Oh right. I thought it was going to be a comedy because Adam Sandler was in it.”
She laughed.
“Exactly,” Jason said. “I was in for a surprise. Pretty good, though. I appreciated it.”
He closed the door hanging over the mail slots. “Well,” he said. “I hope your package comes today.”
“Yeah. You stay safe, Jason.”
He picked up the box. “You know it. Later, Caroline.”
She watched him go and then went upstairs to her little apartment. She thought about putting on The Americans or Broadcast News. Instead, she grabbed her lukewarm coffee and took up her post at the window again.
She was waiting.
Where We Going From Here?
The plate did it. It wasn’t just about the plate, of course, but the dish had been the final note in the song. George had hated the damn thing ever since him and Hannah had married and moved in to the house together. She said her aunt, one of those old Kentucky women who passed humid summers spinning tales in a rocking chair, had told her it was a relic from the civil war. That her great grandad had it in his pack when he was shot in the nose at Vicksburg. Horseshit. She had probably bought it at some flea market and conjured up a backstory like all the old women do. The dusty, chipped porcelain white circle – rim decorated with blue flowers – was a shrine to deception and fabrications, and as such, George couldn’t stand it.
Hannah was shouting at him when he grabbed it. About money. About how he had treated her with stony silence. She was starting in on him about the drink when he reached into the decorative cabinet showcasing all her ceramic dishes and grabbed the plate. Without a word, he flung it through the dining room window. He was sure the neighbors across the street could hear it shatter, but he didn’t care. The Bennetts had always been the worst sort of busybodies. Let ‘em watch, the shitlickers, he had thought, turning away from the glass.
He and Hannah stared at each other for what felt like centuries. Her mouth was agape, eyes looking back at the shattered window and then at him in disbelief. A cold breeze strolled in where the glass had once been. It was October, the season of death, and he felt powerful. This was it. This was his last chance.
He moved quickly and without a word, heading into the hallway and then ascending the staircase into the attic. She burst into tears.
“Go then,” she was yelling. “Just go.”
He removed the board over the hole in the floor where the duffel bag had been and reached down, grabbing the strap and pulling it over his shoulder. He checked the contents – clothes, some cash, several packs of N95 masks he stowed a couple of weeks ago – and then came back down the stairs. His wife was sitting on the couch, staring at her phone. It was laying across her bare knees, brought closely together. She was glaring at him.
“If you go, I’m not coming after you again,” Hannah said. “I’m done with that.”
“Good, because I’m done with it too.”
“You think I didn’t know about that bug-out bag? Always a Boy Scout, even when you’re a coward.”
“I’m going to the hotel,” he told her spitefully, knowing she knew the meaning.
She didn’t say another word. She didn’t even watch him go. It wasn’t until George was in the SUV that he heard a cry come up from the house, but he had already come this far. He turned the key in the ignition and pulled out onto the road.
He made a phone call, and then he put on Styx’s "Greatest Hits" for the brief drive. A few months back, in the days following the funeral, George had been standing in his father’s apartment. It had been one of those small sad apartment communities on the edge of town for seniors getting near the end of the line but too stubborn and lucid to live in a retirement home. The pathetic bachelor pad was gray and conjoined to a bathroom and a kitchen. He hadn’t had room for a couch, and George felt that detail was the saddest thing of all, his father going all those years watching Kentucky Wildcats games from his bed instead of a couch. He had been thinking about the old man’s refusal to his offer to help him buy another apartment when he saw the Styx case sticking out from beneath the nightstand.
The two of them used to listen that CD on road trips all the time when he was seven or so, mouthing the words to “Crystal Ball” as they made their way to the campgrounds at Dale Hallow in Southern Kentucky. His father had always made it seem that they were on the lam, away from an overbearing mother and the chains of homework and into the heart of some great adventure. Sure, it always amounted to burnt marshmallows and mosquito bites, but still, they had briefly felt free from the routines they were both expected to play out.
Now, as the headlights of George’s truck cut into the darkness toward the hotel, there was excitement dancing up and down his arms. Looking in the rearview at the duffel bag, he saw an endless world of possibilities. A short stay at a lakeside Airbnb cabin. A new apartment out west in Santa Monica or something. Free, truly free, in the way his father had never been.
“Come sail away with me,” George sang along. Yes. Yes indeed.
He got to the Days Inn around 10 PM. Andreas, a balding man with a wispy mustache and a drooping eye, was still the manager. He greeted him with a smile. At least, George thought he did. He couldn’t tell because of the mask. It was a surgical mask, not an N95, like his. Cheap, in other words.
“Mister Delworth,” he said. “It’s been some time.”
“It has. Times treating you well?”
Andreas shrugged. “About as well as they’re treating anyone.”
George laughed his practiced polite laugh. “I hear that. Is my regular available?”
“I’m afraid 107 is taken up tonight. 109 is available, however.”
“Damn shame. Any big differences between the two?”
“Just the view.”
“I’ll grab that for the night then.”
Andreas ran his credit card and then gave him the keycard to the room. “I’ll keep the other one for her,” he told him, flashing the card.
“Thanks buddy.” George went to his room and took off his clothes and put on a denim shirt and jeans he grabbed from the bag. He liked how he looked in the shirt – it hid his paunch. He dug the bottle of Jim from out of the bottom of the bag and put it on the table. He looked around. The room was cheap in that corporate chipped white wall way that all budget franchise motels were, but it was his for the night. He felt safe and empowered within that temporary ownership of this place, however dinky it might be.
He grabbed the small plastic bucket, went down to the icemaker in the hallway, and filled it up to the brim – listening to the growl of the grinder. He brought it back, plucked two cubes off the top of the pile, and put them in his glass. He poured himself two fingers, drank it in a gulp, and then poured himself another pair. George knew he shouldn’t get loaded but decided he would make himself a little loose for what was to come. Get the kinks out of his nerves and all that jazz.
An hour went by. He drank the glass and poured himself another. He could wait it out. He knew she would come. She liked to keep him waiting, mess with him a bit, but she’d show. All the women in George’s life had been like that: imprisoned to patterns. They’d put up a fuss when he acted out of turn, but in the end they couldn’t resist the intrigue, to see what dark and delightful places his whims would take them. They had to know. He couldn’t blame them. He was like that too. All interesting people were. If you knew there was something curious around the corner but you couldn’t work up the interest or courage to check it out, well by George’s standards, you weren’t even alive.
He heard the click of the key reader a little after midnight. She stepped inside. Blonde hair tied up into a bun, stunning cobalt-colored eyes. Her N95 mask hid what he imagined was a familiar and disapproving frown he always found sexy. She was wearing jeans that had a hole over the left knee and a T-shirt with Jack Skellington’s face on it. It was an old shirt. She had had it for years, at least since they were in high school.
She stared at him for a couple of seconds, sitting there in the chair with a glass of bourbon in his hand, before tossing down her purse on the bed in exasperation.
“Well, your wrists aren’t slit, so that’s something I guess.”
“It’s a little late, but I think Domino's is still open if you want to order pizza,” he said.
“What are you thinking calling me at 10 at night? You woke me up. You almost woke Terry up.”
“Fuck Terry.”
“No fuck you, George. I gotta get up in the morning to open the salon, y’know? You don’t get to call me up in the middle of the night anymore. This has been dead. For a long time. You were the one who cut things off and now you’re calling me up.”
“I was being stupid when I ended things, okay?”
“Well being stupid is your whole life story, George, but that’s not my problem.”
He took a sip of his whiskey. “Why you gotta be like this? I called you. I was vulnerable and I called you.”
“Is that supposed to be a privilege or something? Be a big boy. Get a therapist. Or a prostitute. Or whatever the hell it is you need and leave me out of it.”
“Can’t you just listen to me for a few minutes?”
“George, it’s midnight. I came out here because I was worried about you.”
“Maggie, listen. Just look at the bag.”
She looked over at the bag on the edge of the bed.
“Okay. I’m looking. I see an old-ass duffel bag.”
“It’s got my clothes in it. Some masks. Money. I was thinking we could do that thing we always talked about for all them years, y’know? Since we was in high school?”
“What thing, George?”
He downed his glass. “We get out, Maggie. We go west. To California or some shit.”
She laughed. “In the middle of a pandemic.”
“That’s what the masks are for! And why not now? My job’s gone to shit. They’re probably going to start firing all of us soon. Gas is cheap. Hotels are cheap.” He changed his tone, lightened it so it came across as pleading. “We can get away, Maggie. Finally. Go live somewhere where civilization amounts to more than a dying mall and an Outback Steakhouse.”
“We’re both married,” she said. George’s heart started racing. She wasn’t angry anymore. She was considering things. Still opposed but considering. He had an in.
“We’re married but we don’t love the people we’re with. And neither of us have kids.”
She shot him that look: the one that says Don’t Tell Me Things About Myself. “How do you know who and who I don’t love?”
“Maggie. Tell me, God’s honest truth, do you go home and look at Terry the same way you’ve looked at me all these years?”
“And how do you think I look at you?” she said spitefully.
“Angry and hungry and more than a little sad.”
“Well you sure seem to think a lot about yourself, don’t you?”
“Don’t give me that. You know I feel the same way about you.”
“Oh I do, do I?”
He poured himself another drink and then grabbed another glass.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“I’m pouring you a drink,” he told her.
“I’m off the stuff. Have been.”
“For how long?”
She shrugged. “Two years, I guess. Ever since our thing was done.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh. See? That’s what I mean.”
He was getting anxious. He could feel control slipping away. “I don’t know what you mean, Maggie. What do you mean?”
“You say you love me, but you don’t even know something important like that about me?”
“It’s not like you were advertising it. Jesus Christ.”
She looked him directly in his eyes, stared for several seconds without saying anything, and then: “You haven’t even reached out. Haven’t talked to me, none. You talk about love, but you don’t love me. You don’t want to be with me. You’re in love with a bunch of moments that happened a long time ago when we were young and drunk and stupid. I love them too, but they’re gone now. You understand that? Those people, they’re not here, we’re not them. We’re never going to be them again.”
“Maggie, come on.” He took a sip.
She gave him a look. “I’m real sorry your life is hard right now. I’m sorry about your daddy and your job and the pandemic, but have you thought at all about how Hannah feels about all this? How things are hard on her too? Do you even ask her how her day’s been?”
“I don’t care what Hannah wants. She’s an asshole from a family of assholes.”
“No, she isn’t.”
“She is. You don’t know her like I know her. Always resenting me. Always needing things from me when I just want to be left alone. When I want to be out in the world, doing things, instead of dying in this excuse of a town.”
“None of that’s her fault. She’s a good person.”
“I want out. I want out of things with her. I want out of things in this boonies-ass place. I know you gotta feel the same itch. Maggie, where we going from here? We either spend all our years here with people maybe we shouldn’t be with, like our parents did, or we go now and get to live free on our terms.”
She looked at the bottle, back to him. “Miss me with that Born to Run crap. What do you think is going to be different out in California or wherever the hell you end up? And let’s say I did go with you. How long do you think it would take for me to get on your nerves or for some pretty thing to catch your eye and you to drop me like a bad habit too? Would we even make it across Oklahoma before you dumped my ass at a gas station?”
“Of course not,” he said but not meeting her eye.
“Of course not he says. Of course not. How many times have you told Hannah that you wouldn’t leave her. That kind of person, knowing what you’ve done, I know she’s asked it. How many times?”
He didn’t say anything. He tried to take another sip of his bourbon but there wasn’t any left in the glass.
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s what I thought.”
“Maggie.”
“Maggie nothing,” she said, coming around to sit on the edge of the bed, near him. “What would you do right now if I went into that bathroom and came out naked.”
She gave him a few seconds to answer. He said nothing.
“Anything? No. You don’t even want to fuck me. You just think you do. You just like the fantasy of it, the running away from what is into what could be. There’s no shame in that. But people grow up, George. We’re in our 30s,” she said, gently putting her hand on his knee. “We had our time. It was a very good time. We were young and I loved you. I don’t know if you ever loved me. I don’t know if you’ve ever been capable of really loving another person, but I did love you and I still love the things we had together, you understand? But it’s all gone. You went left and I went right, and then we came back together for a bit, and we went our ways for good. If something was meant to happen, it would have happened.”
“But something could still happen. We could have that life, y’know?” He reached for the drink but she grabbed his hand. “Stop,” she said. “Baby,” she said in that old, gentle way she used to say things. “Stop.”
“It just feels like all the good things I told myself I’d have when I was older – they didn’t happen. I was gonna leave and go to a university, become a lawyer or something, move somewhere far away with a woman I love. New York. Los Angeles. Hell, I’d take Atlanta: There’s still culture there. Instead what did I do? I’m a middle manager at a cold calling company who’s about to get axed.”
Maggie took a breath. “You think it’s any better on my end? How many people come to get haircuts during a pandemic? I tell you, not many.”
“Why did we settle, Maggie? Tell me that? We were so feisty, yeah? We wanted the world.”
“I don’t think of it as settling,” she told him. “I think of it as dismantling.”
“Say what?”
She took her hand back. “We were told all these things, right? About how important it is to be rich and shit or have a family and kids. I started thinking about that. It’s someone else’s idea of happiness, not mine. Everyone just tried to make it my idea of being happy.”
“Well, what is your idea of happy then?”
She shrugged. “More or less what I got now.”
“You don’t love him. Terry, I mean.”
“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. I care about him. I want him to be happy. He wants me to be happy. We eat dinners in, we watch our favorite Netflix shows every night. We’re stable. It’s comfortable. I feel like I wake up and walk across still ground every morning on the way to make breakfast. It was never that way with you.”
“How suburban of you.”
“You don’t have to get nasty. There’s no need for it.”
“Isn’t there the slightest chance that you could come away with me, and we could be happy?” He could hear himself begging now. He felt weak. He felt disgusting.
“Sure. But for how long, George. Really? How long?”
He couldn’t answer her. He tried to lie but he couldn’t. Not about that. It wasn’t in him. He felt the walls within himself closing. The last flame was flickering now.
“I’m going with or without you,” he said at long last. “I really want you to come with me.”
She looked at him. It was the saddest look anyone had ever given him that he could recall. “I’m not going to enable you. I can’t stop you. I wish I could. The least I can do is not help you hurt other people. I can’t build my happiness on someone else’s misery. Nobody can. I hope you learn that. I really do.”
She got up and took her purse.
“Maggie,” he said. But she was already out the door.
He was alone again. For a while he just stared at the door, waiting for her to come back. After he did that for half an hour, he kept watching his phone for messages. Anything from her or Hannah. From his family. Nobody was calling him. Nobody wanted anything to do with him.
“Fine. Fuck ‘em,” George said. He picked up the glass and hurled it across the room. It shattered against the pinstripe pattern on the wall, spraying shards of glass everywhere. He took three big gulps from the bottle and then, after a big belch, stood up and collapsed onto the bed next to his duffel bag.
When he woke up, it was seven. The sun was just starting to rise. His head felt as big as a melon, and his stomach was gurgling. George managed to fight the urge to vomit and packed the whiskey bottle into his bag. He had a handful of fingers left in there and it was crime to waste good drink.
Andreas was waiting in the lobby.
“You’re still here,” he said.
“Graveyard shift. I get off soon. Your lady left last night. Everything okay?”
“We had a bit of a fight. Listen: I lost my temper and threw one of the glasses against the wall. Any damages, you just charge them to my card, yeah?”
Andreas nodded. “Don’t worry about it. We all lose ourselves from time to time. We go through so many of those glasses every week.”
“Thanks. You take it easy.”
“Hope to see you again soon, sir.”
George nodded and headed out to his SUV. He threw his bag in the back of the vehicle. It wasn’t until he came around to the driver’s side that he saw the small sheet of yellow notepad paper held in place by the windshield wipers. Gently he plucked it from beneath the wiper and unfolded it. JUST COME HOME PLEASE, it said in painfully familiar curves and angles.
He stretched the paper out, ready to tear it up and sacrifice it to the wind. He stopped. Who would that cruelty serve, really? He’d just feel bad about it later. He threw the note in the passenger seat and then pulled onto the road, heading in the direction of the interstate. He put on Styx again and drummed his fingers on the wheel. He figured if he drove all day could make it down to Evansville and sleep there for the night. Work would call later, of course, leave voicemails. Ask why he wasn’t answering emails. He smiled imagining the look on his boss’ face when he realized that George had flown the coop before the guillotine could come down on him and the rest of the fall guys.
He came to the intersection. A couple of cars lined up behind him. All he had to do was turn left. Then all that would be separating him from all he had been and what he could be was a few thousand miles of road.
The light blinked yellow. He looked to the right, over at the passenger seat. The note screamed at him in capital letters, begging. He looked above the note, through the passenger-side window, in the direction of Hannah and home and everything he had ever known.
The light flashed green. He tried to lift his foot off the brake. But it was heavy. Heavy as an anvil locked inside a safe. He bit his lip.
All he had to do –
Behind him, someone honked their car horn. Then someone else’s car horn went off. George lifted his foot off the brake.
He turned.
Off Road
Jodie was a runner. He didn’t run track or anything like that. He just ran from things, from people. His parents, being good parents, tried to get him interested in subjects that would make him a lot of money, like programming or engineering, but that just made him take up reading fiction and studying paintings even more.
He’d run everyday after school, through Georgia woods and backroads until he reached his safe place. It was a rundown garden shack that had been around twice as long as he had at the very least. He didn’t know who it had belonged to, didn’t even know of any crumbling estates nearby, but he had turned it into his sanctuary nonetheless. There he spent his high school afternoons thumbing through the classics. A Clockwork Orange, The Sound and the Fury, Ulysses, Crime And Punishment, Lolita. He much preferred being among portraits of humanity and all its failings rather than engaging with people one-on-one. They made him nervous. That’s where his legs were always taking him, he felt – away from the trappings of man.
Things changed in college. He didn’t really care for his peers, but he set up a Facebook account because he felt some unspoken social requirement to do so. One day he was looking at the profile page for Dennis from Introduction To American Literature and saw Dennis was arguing with another man. Dennis had written a post about how boring Song Of Solomon was (because Dennis was very stupid) and the stranger had responded with a lengthy essay-sized comment on the post explaining that the book wasn’t bad but that Dennis, being white and rich, wasn’t coming from a place where he could appropriately appreciate it. He ended his regal, eloquent comment with the sign-off “Now stop being a little bitch and open your mind to other perspectives.”
Jodie clicked on the stranger’s profile picture. His name was Mel. He was tan and lean, had long hair that flowed over his shoulders, and a button nose. He was smiling. Tucked under his arm was a short story collection of Anton Chekhov’s. He debated for a few minutes saying anything at all – it seemed absurd to – but he put aside The Fear and composed a short message telling the man named Mel how he had appreciated his reply to Dennis’ whining and how he loved Song Of Solomon. His heart was when in his throat he sent the message.
The next morning, he woke up to a pleasant reply. They quickly struck up a friendship. They messaged one another about what they were reading. Mel would beautifully describe chapters from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Jodie, as though he were returning a volley in tennis, would encourage his new friend to read Midnight’s Children.
Soon they moved past books. He learned that Mel wasn’t in college. He had done a semester down at Augusta Technical but money issues and a general disinterest in learning “marketable” skills nipped any notion of getting a degree in the bud. He bussed tables at Applebee’s and stocked shelves at Lowes in the day and spent whatever free money he had on grabbing used novels at the book exchange on Gordon Highway. In the evenings, he retreated to a well-kept bedroom in an otherwise messy house he shared with two other tech school dropouts.
Mel talked about his dissatisfaction for all things modern. “Fucking smartphones,” He messaged one day out of the blue. “I hate ‘em. They just ruin everything. Everybody’s glued to social media or tapping away at games. Nobody reads anymore. We’re all just stuck inside, whittling away our days, growing dumber by the minute.”
“Yeah,” Jodie had written back, uncertain of what else to say. He didn’t agree entirely with the assessment of technology and modernity, but he also didn’t want to give his only friend reason to dislike him. He felt, for whatever reason, he was walking on eggshells.
“I just want to get away, y’know? I want to run across the country and see everything.”
“Yeah,” Jodie typed again, but this time he meant it.
*
The University of Georgia suspended its classes on March 16 because of the virus, but Jodie had already been gone for nearly a month. When the pandemic started to really hit, he and Mel had quickly worked out a plan.
“This might be the end of everything,” Mel messaged him at three in the morning. “This could be our last chance to see beyond the horizon.”
“Well let’s do it then,” Jodie wrote back. “Let’s make fantasy reality.”
Jodie left early a few mornings later. He didn’t tell his roommate. He didn’t call to tell his parents either. He did opt to leave a note on his desk explaining where he was going and apologizing to his folks. He left his cellphone as well, to really commit to the whole thing.
He wore a denim jacket over a shirt featuring the book cover for The Sun Also Rises and jeans. He wanted to look nice but not like he was trying to impress anyone. He packed a bag with a week’s worth of clothing and crept downstairs as the sky slowly filled with the orange overture of dawn.
Jodie got into the hand-me-down blue Camry his parents had given him a few years back and pulled out of the university’s parking garage. He drove down to the Quiktrip on Oconee and spent 30 bucks on bags of chips, candies, and energy pills. He filled up the car and then rode down US-78 for a bit before turning onto I-20 and heading into Augusta proper.
He reached Mel’s house at a little past 8 AM. Mel was sitting outside the house on a bench, behind him was a suitcase, some sleeping bags, and a cardboard box. He was smiling. Jodie got out of the car and the two embraced. Mel’s long arms wrapped around him, and he felt the man’s hard chest against his face.
He felt safe.
“I see you’re packed,” Jodie said.
“Just the bare essentials for the end of the world. Clothes. Sleeping bags. Bottles upon bottles of cheap bourbon.”
“Fuck yeah,” Jodie said because it sounded like a cool thing to say in his head. It came out sounding much less cool. They grabbed the box and put it in the trunk next to the suitcase.
In the car, Mel pulled out the map of interstates. It was marked up in red sharpie, a red zigzagging line shooting across Nebraska, Utah, Idaho, all the way up to Oregon.
“40 hours in total,” Mel said. “Think the car can make it?”
Jodie shrugged. “It’s only five years old. Got some work done a couple of years ago. Should be good.”
“Yeah,” Mel said. “If nothing else, we can always take a Greyhound if we get stranded somewhere.”
Jodie nodded, terrified and exhilarated at the thought of being truly lost in America.
“Hey,” Mel said, touching his shoulder gently. “It’s okay if you don’t want to go. I can just catch a ride with someone else.”
“No,” Jodie said. “I’m here. You were right. This whole COVID shit – it might change everything. This could be our last chance, y’know, to see this country like Whitman and Kerouac did.”
“To witness the nation’s nerves and contours splayed before us. To come to terms with the shape of a country.”
“That’s beautiful. Who wrote that?”
“Mel Bishop did,” Mel said, satisfied and cocky.
“That motherfucker can write,” Jodie said.
“Some days he can. Alright, enough shit-shooting. Let’s get this show on the road.”
“Sounds good to me. Direct me,” Jodie said, putting the car in reverse.
“Take a left. Let’s get to Atlanta today and then stop off in Marietta. Gotta pick something up.”
“What the hell are we picking up out in Marietta?”
Mel smiled. “You’ll see.”
*
Something turned out to be a girl. She was black and thin, had her hair done up pixie-style with blonde highlights. She was wearing a paisley skirt and a black shirt that read ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS with a smiley face right below the text.
She had come barreling out of the suburban house they had stopped outside of, a blue duffel in hand. She tossed it, and then herself, into the back seat before yelling “GO GO GO” at Jodie, who floored it. Mel beamed the whole time.
“An introduction would not go amiss here,” Jodie said, as the car screeched out of the neighborhood and back towards the interstate.
“Jodie, Ashlee. Ashlee, Jodie.” Simple. To the point. Very Mel.
“Ashlee with an e, not a y,” Ashlee explained.
“Nice to meet you, Ashlee with an e,” Jodie said, though in truth he didn’t feel very nice about the whole situation. He had assumed it would be him and Mel cutting it across the country, just the two of them alone. He didn’t have anything against women – god knows he found them easier to talk to when he was forced to interact with people – but he still felt disappointed deep down.
“Sorry for the rocket launch there,” Ashlee said. “I thought my parents would be out when you rolled up, but they ended up working from home today.”
“No shit?” Mel said.
“Yeah. Dad’s talking about how that’s going to be the norm for most people for the next year or so. All work from home.”
“Shit’s going down for sure,” Mel said, looking in the rearview mirror at Ashlee. He was smiling. She was looking at Jodie though. “How’d you two meet?” Jodie asked.
“Same as how we met,” Mel said.
“Mark Zuckerberg,” she said. “The great unifier.”
Mel chucked sincerely; Jodie politely.
“We should all get to know each other a little more,” Ashlee said. “Where are you from, Jodie?”
“Macon.”
“Macon’s….”
“It’s fine. We can all be honest here,” Mel said. “Small towns in The South ain’t for folks like us.”
“Macon sucks,” Jodie said.
“Yes it does,” Ashlee answered.
The three talked for a while about their favorite books. Ashlee loved The Left Hand Of Darkness and White Teeth, and Jodie found what she was saying about them interesting. He talked for a little bit about how he liked Smith’s other works a bit better but appreciated White Teeth. They went back and forth, moving from novel to novel, author to author, as the sun set over The South and the car continued to eat more and more road. Jodie could feel an uneasy peace drifting amongst the three of them. He both appreciated and resented it. He had wanted a reason to hate the newcomer, to justify the turmoil stirring inside him, but she was well-spoken, intelligent, and likeable.
How dare she.
It was getting late when Mel gently touched Jodie’s shoulder, nodded in the direction of a rest stop off the road.
“Let’s pull over there for the night.”
“We’re almost to Dalton. We can probably just grab a hotel room there.”
Mel made a face. “Where’s your adventuring spirit? We can get our sleeping bags, have some booze, sleep in the woods behind the stop.”
“What if the cops—”
“We’re in the middle of a pandemic. Cops got better things to do than fuck with our car. Come on. It’s our first night. Let’s make it special, yeah?”
Mel was smiling at him, one of the man’s front teeth digging into his bottom lip. “Okay,” Jodie said, nodding. “Okay.”
“Hell yeah roughing itttttt,” Ashlee said.
They pulled into the rest stop, which featured many parking spots, a couple of wooden tables, and restrooms. Behind the restrooms was a brief scattering of trees facing a pond. The three of them retrieved their sleeping bags from the trunk, one of the bottles of whiskey, and several snack-sized bags of Cheetos that Mel had packed.
The three of them laid down all next to one another at the tree line to stare out at the pond. The moon was shining down, nearly as bright as the sun, and Jodie could see the light’s reflection rippling across the water.
“We don’t need to put on a fire, it’s so bright. Dang.” Mel said. He unscrewed the bottle and took a swig. “That’s the shit. Y’all want some?”
Ashlee reached over and grabbed the bottle. She lifted it to the moon. “To our odyssey,” she said, before taking a swig. She passed it back to Mel, who put it to Jodie.
Jodie stared at the bottle for a few seconds. He had never had liquor before. He was thinking about telling them that but then saw Mel’s face. Mel wanted him to take the drink so bad, so that the three of them could be in this moment together. That it would mean something. “This is our blood oath,” those blue eyes were saying.
He took the bottle in his hands and took a big gulp. It burned on the way down as it splashed his throat, but he managed not to cough.
“Damn son!” Mel cried, his accent cutting through the night. “That’s my boy, holy shit.”
He passed the bottle back to Mel. “To our odyssey,” he repeated, looking at them both.
They talked for a time, passing the bottle, their bodies bathed in the lunar light. Ashlee told them how she couldn’t stand suburban living, school, any of it. She didn’t like how capitalism and technology had turned comfort and convenience into daily prisons. She had always felt alienated from her friends, who stared at their phones every day and feigned excitement for going on dates with men they didn’t even like in the first place.
“I bought a survival guide last year and kept thinking I’d go out and live in the woods somewhere, y’know, like that guy did?” she said.
“Which guy?” Mel said.
“The Into The Wild guy. Except I wouldn’t be stupid. I’d pull it off.”
“Well, why didn’t you?” Jodie asked, not to be mean, but because he was curious.
He watched her think on it for a few seconds. She shrugged. “I just don’t think I had the courage – to run away on my own.”
“Well, we’re here. The three of us together.” Mel said, taking a sip of the bottle. Always the right words Mel had.
“Yes,” Jodie said, smiling. “We are.”
*
It took them the better part of the day to reach Nashville. They had to keep stopping to take bathroom breaks. Jodie was bugged, because he didn’t like to drag behind expectations, but Mel and Ashlee seemed fine with it, so he didn’t bitch. Besides, it’s not like they were under a deadline.
When they got to the city, Mel and Ashlee bickered.
“I wanna go to a bar,” Mel was saying. “Real dive place. I wanna find out where Johnny Cash and Shel Silverstein drank. I wanna just sit there. I want to be in it, feel where they were. Soak up that energy.”
“We can go to a shitty bar in any old city. Let’s go to the museum they’ve got. The one about country music.”
Mel laughed. “So we can read a bunch of stuffy placards and look at dull photos and knick knacks? I’ll never understand museums. An entire industry built on things you can find in your parent’s attic.”
Ashlee looked at Jodie. “Well, I want to go. What about you?”
“I don’t care.”
“Well you have to care. Pick.”
Jodie resented being put on the spot. He looked in the rearview at Ashlee and then Mel. He lingered a little longer on Mel’s grin. “Both,” he said. “Let’s do both. We’ve got time.”
They stopped at the first bar they saw that looked skeevy but not too skeevy. It was a little wooden building, painted brown, with metal wire frames over the windows. People were outside smoking. THE POINT, the sign hanging over the building said.
Jodie pulled into the parking lot. Mel started to get out.
“Wait,” Jodie said. “Don’t forget your mask.”
“Yeah, yeah, good point,” Mel said, grabbing the bit of fabric from the back of the chair. Ashlee and Jodie put on theirs too.
They stepped inside. Something hung in the air, thick, like smoke. Scent of a bygone era. Mel was enthralled with it, closing his eyes as he stepped through it. Even Jodie could feel it.
They pushed past the billiard tables, where a couple of mask-less men were playing a game, and up to the bar. The bartender had grey hairs and a drooping face, a wispy mustache sat somehow skewed between his nose and upper lip.
“Help you?” he said.
“Did Johnny Cash drink here?” Mel said.
“What? I can’t hear you through that mask.”
Mel spoke up. “I said: ‘Did Johnny Cash drink here?’”
“Son, I’m only 34 years old and I’ve only been at this dump five of those years. How the hell am I going to know?”
“Yeah,” Mel said, “well you don’t look a day over 50.”
“At least don’t look like I’m wearing women’s underpants on my face.” He looked at Ashlee. “No offense,” he added. She made a face at him.
Mel waved his hand dismissively and turned. “Let’s go.”
They left and went to the museum. After they parked, Ashlee danced up the steps of the massive building, only to stop awkwardly in front of the doors.
“There’s a sign,” she called out to Jodie and Mel, still laboring up the steps.
“What’s it say?” Jodie said.
“The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum is temporarily closed in order for preparations to be taken so that the museum is in line with all health and government mandates related to COVID-19. Your safety is our utmost concern. We hope to open again next week.”
They had reached her while she was reading. She let out a frustrated sigh after she was done. Mel peeked over her shoulder to read the text for himself.
“Well, I guess that’s that,” he said.
*
The same night they stopped over outside of St Elmo, a few hours down the road. There were plenty of trees and a great view of the mountains. They found a site an hour before sunset, built a fire, and counted the money they had pooled between them.
“Six hundred dollars,” Mel said, piling the cash together into a single stack with his fingers. The bills were ratty and some of them had holes, but in America they still meant something regardless.
“Is that enough? Ashlee said.
“Oh hell yeah girl,” Mel said. “More than enough if we’re wise.”
Mel poked some marshmallows on sticks he had gathered, passed them around. Jodie coughed, asked: “Either of you ever been?”
“Been where?” Ashlee replied.
“You know. Portland.”
“I’ve never been out of the state,” Ashlee said.
Mel shook his head. “No. I have a friend who lives up there, though.” He took a bite of his marshmallow. “She’s always talking about how great is. How there are tattoo parlors and bars on every corner. Everyone bikes. They’re all vegans, all civilized and shit. Literary motherfuckers, Portlanders. Different world from ours. Sounds like heaven.”
“Whoa,” Jodie said.
“Indeed.”
“Do you think it’s really like that,” Ashlee said. “Or is she fronting?”
Mel shrugged. “Maybe. Hell if I’m not gonna find out for myself real soon though.”
They went to sleep shortly after sunset. Taking turns driving and their adventures in Nashville had exhausted them all.
Jodie woke up and saw that he was just a couple of inches away from Mel, also sleeping. He could make his companion’s face out in the moonlight.
Jodie stared at the face for a while, longer than he should have felt comfortable. He was so close to Mel, he could smell him. He smelled like creek bed and yellow birch bark.
Jodie felt sick in places he didn’t know he could feel sick in. He told himself he would have to make peace with the wanting and hoped it would go away.
He watched for a little while longer, studying Mel’s nose and the curve of his face, and then forced himself to fall back asleep.
*
They spent the greater part of a week driving down interstates and making camp outside of small towns when the evening was coming on. It took a few days, but the three of them managed to get into a steady rhythm, knowing when to talk and when to sit in silence, admiring the lush country speeding past them.
Beyond books, they talked about their favorite movies, their childhoods, favorite pizza toppings, the stupidity of the president, and how the pandemic had started poking holes in the lives they had known.
Except Mel. Mel never talked about anything but books, poetry, and the future. He was going to soak up the consciousness of the nation, he told them, and write great poetry about it. He had no interest in discussing or even acknowledging his own history. The past was some ancient world he had come from that he seemed ashamed of. All he wanted to do was talk about literature and how he was going to make his mark on the world. Neither Jodie or Ashlee pressed him to veer from the subject. He talked so beautifully anyway. They could (and did) listen to him for weeks.
The three would make stops at gas stations to fill up on both car fuel and body fuel, with Mel heading inside to buy boxes of candy bars and hostess cakes alongside a couple of tasteless fruits just to prop up some kind of illusion they were being healthy.
Even playing it safe and avoiding fast food joints, by the time they reached Nebraska they only had about 150 dollars left. None of them brought it up. The trio was too transfixed, watching the hills and cornfields race by. They had been at the mercy of the radio stations for the whole trip and now, deep in the Midwest nowhere, they found they were sandwiched between stations that blared Aerosmith or soft Christian rock.
They chose a mixture of conversation and silence instead and were all happier for that.
“I hope my parents aren’t too worried,” Ashlee said.
“They probably are,” Mel said. “You left a note though, right?”
“…Uh.”
“You didn’t leave a note!?” Jodie yelled.
“Maybe not,” Ashlee said, flustered.
Mel laughed. “Holy shit.”
“They probably think you’re dead,” Jodie said.
“They might be having a funeral and everything!” Mel said. He sound excited by the prospect of it, the absurdity of a funeral for a young woman running around the country on the adventure of a lifetime.
“Shit. I’ll call them the next time we stop.”
“With what? A payphone? This isn’t 1985. Not every gas station has one,” Mel said, still chuckling.
“Shut up,” Ashlee told him. “I’ll figure it out.”
They fell into silence, though Mel was still smirking.
They pulled over at a gas station a couple miles down the road. Even in the middle of a world-wide plague, some kind soul let her use their phone to call home. She left a message letting her parents know that she was, in fact, not deceased and hoped they were doing okay.
“Feel better?” Jodie asked, when she hopped into the driver’s seat.
Ashlee nodded. “Yeah, I do. Thanks for asking. Nice to know someone cares.”
Jodie could see she was glaring at Mel in the rearview, but he was too busy stuffing his face with pepperoni pizza-flavored Combos to notice.
They drove onward.
*
They were filling up in Twin Falls, Idaho when Mel saw the flyer attached to the brick wall of the gas station. He yanked it and brought it back to the car. Jodie stared at the flyer. It was a particularly obnoxious, eye-catching shade of pink.
“Come join us in a show of solidarity to say Fuck You to COVID-19 and party the night away,” Mel read aloud.
“Who are they?”
“Bunch of students at College of Southern Idaho. Everyone is invited as long as you’re masked and bring a case of beer.”
“They sound like morons,” Jodie said.
“Exactly,” Mel said. “These assholes are going to be getting a particular level of drunk. I say we show up, keep our wits about us, wait for our hosts to exhaust themselves. Then we help ourselves to any loose cash lying about.”
“Trojan horse-style!” Ashlee said.
“Exactly.”
Jodie frowned. “You want us to steal from these people? What have they ever done to us?”
“We’ve got 40 dollars and some change to get us fed and fuel the rest of the trip. Math doesn’t work out. We need some cash. Plus, look at this flyer. Look at that shade of pink. Assholes. Complete assholes.”
Jodie did not disagree about the flyer.
“And it’s not like we’re stealing their life savings right?” Ashlee offered. “Just some gas money.”
“Exactly.”
Jodie looked from Ashlee to Mel. They had come this far. They couldn’t turn back now.
He said nothing, but he nodded.
*
The house was duplex, painted white. Looked like a nice place to raise a family but it was rented to college students instead. As Mel, Jodie, and Ashlee walked up the steps, they could hear Dua Lipa blaring from the living room and saw bright colorful lights flashing in the living room. Jodie could make out shapes and silhouettes talking and dancing amidst the lights.
“Oh they’re already so gone,” Ashlee said.
“Remember the plan,” Mel said. “You two mingle. I hunt. Got it?”
“Yeah,” Jodie said, trying to hide is nervousness. “Yeah.”
Mel knocked on the door. Nobody answered. He turned the doorknob and the door opened. The three of them stepped inside the den of cigarette smoke and lights. People were laughing as the music blared. Someone had already vomited on the floor. Nobody seemed to notice the new arrivals. They were too busy partying like it was the end of the world.
Jodie brought the case of beer to the kitchen table and opened it. Some stranger wearing a beanie gave him a thumbs up and went back to a conversation. Jodie took one of the beers, twisted off the top, and headed into the living room.
It was less a party and more a smorgasbord of smells, sounds, and human appendages rubbing on furniture and other limbs. Jodie took a seat on the couch and watched all the forms mingling with one another. He heard people pressing their lips to other lips. Squelching. The occasional moan managing to rise above the thumping music of the stereo.
Jodie had never felt like he belonged anywhere but that feeling was particularly intense here. He sat for a while, occasionally lowering his mask to sip a beer he didn’t care for. He knew he should be out trying to distract people as Mel had instructed him to, but they all seemed so lost in a haze that it was pointless.
After a while, Ashlee came by. She wasn’t wearing a mask anymore. She sat down next to him and smiled. It took him a few seconds to realize she was drunk. He wasn’t sure if she had just gotten drunk quickly or if an hour had flown by while he was encased in this collegiate smog of second-basers and drunks.
Ashlee said something. He couldn’t hear her over the music. He asked her to say it again. She leaned in. “You’re really handsome,” she yelled in his ear. He winced.
He tried to thank her for her compliment, but she was already ripping off his mask. Her lips were on his suddenly, and then she was in his lap. She started to lean down to kiss his neck, but he pushed her off. As he looked at the horrified expression on her face, he felt ice water flood his veins. He opened his mouth to say something, but the sound of a car backfiring filled the house. All the shapes in the living room stopped moving.
A second crept by and then he numbly realized that what he had heard was a gunshot. Upstairs, someone was yelling. And then another gunshot. People began to scream. Among the forms hurrying through the living room, he saw Mel’s silhouette rushing down the stairs. Jodie grabbed Ashlee’s hand and pulled her toward the door. They mingled with the sea of bodies flooding through the entrance. Upstairs, he could hear more screaming. From multiple people.
Jodie and Ashlee ran onto the lawn and saw Mel starting the Camry at the curb. Jodie opened the back-left door and ushered her into the back seat.
“Come on!” Mel screamed.
He hopped into the front seat, and Mel floored the accelerator. Jodie numbly watched as they sped past kids fleeing from the house. He turned to get a look at Mel. He reached over and patted his shoulder.
“You okay? You hurt?” he said.
“I’m just fine.” Mel shoved a stack of bills from his pocket into Jodie’s hands. He was grinning.
“Holy shit.”
“Right?’
“How much is it?” Ashlee asked.
“Three, four hundred at least.”
Jodie looked back at Ashlee, but she wasn’t looking at him or Mel. She was looking down at the floorboard of the backseat.
“Oh my god,” she said.
Jodie looked too. It was a pistol. Black. Beretta. Jodie knew because his father kept one in a lockbox in the closet. Just in case.
“Mel,” Jodie said.
“Huh?”
“The gun.”
“Oh yeah,” he said plainly. “Guy tried to shoot me.”
They were driving out of the city limits now. Jodie thought he could hear sirens in the distance, but didn’t know if it was his fear playing tricks on him.
“Mel. What the fuck happened?”
Mel shrugged. Like it was no big deal. “Well, I went into this room and this guy and his lady were going at it in the bed. It was dark. I went over to the dresser and found his wallet, started pulling cash from it and the woman saw it. Screamed. And apparently this motherfucker had a gun nearby even though he was buck-ass naked. Took a shot at me, missed. I went over and punched him. And ran.”
“There were two shots.”
“What?”
“Two gunshots.”
“Oh yeah,” Mel said. “He took a second shot at me while I was running over to him. Missed because it was total fucking darkness, y’know?”
“You knock him out?”
“I dunno. I hit him hard but not hard enough to kill him. Hard enough my hand hurts though.”
“Jesus,” Ashlee said.
“It’s fine. He’ll just wake up with a headache.”
“Uh huh,” Jodie said, eyes on the gun.
“Jodie,” Mel said. “Look at me.”
He looked Mel straight in his eyes, so blue, those eyes. “I swear to whatever god is out there: I’m telling you the truth. Nobody got seriously hurt. Do you believe me?”
Jodie thought about the gun. He thought about it lying there. Then he thought about being just inches away from Mel, watching him sleep.
“I believe you,” he said.
Ashlee didn’t say anything, opting instead to silently sink into the backseat. They drove on like this for the rest of the night, not bothering to stop until they had crossed over into Oregon.
*
They had traveled for some time through the night, headlights bouncing over the green hills of the state. They made camp on the outskirts of Huntington, laying their sleeping bags down by Snake River. Ashlee quickly went to sleep. Jodie watched from his sleeping bag as Mel disassembled the Beretta – tossing the receiver, the magazine, barrel, and all the rest into the river one by one. When Mel turned, Jodie closed his eyes and made like he was sleeping, until he actually was.
In the morning, he woke up to find Ashlee sitting next to him. She had made him some instant coffee in one of the cheap red plastic cups they had with them. The drink was cold, but he appreciated the gesture. He sat up next to her.
“Where’s Mel?” he asked.
She shrugged, sipped out of her own cup. “Out, I guess.” She nodded toward the green hills beneath the grey morning. “Wandering, I think. Probably writing pretty poetry in his little book.”
He chuckled. “Thanks for the coffee.”
“Sure.”
He thought about what to say for a bit, but she beat him to it. “Sorry about last night. I got drunk and…that’s just not who I am.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings. I just…it’s not you. You’re very attractive. I just don’t um…” He tried to find the words. He knew they were inside him somewhere, suspended in his throat, immobilized.
“I get it,” she told him. “We don’t have to talk about it anymore. Besides, I can do better anyway.”
He chuckled again. Relief flooded his body.
“We’re getting close,” she said.
“How close?”
“Mel said maybe another day or two.”
“I don’t even know what we’re going to do when we get there,” he confessed.
“I want tofu.”
“What?”
“Tofu. I’ve never had it. I think it’s all over the place there. My mom says it tastes like garbage, but I want to find out for myself.”
“I think I might want to go buy a book and sit in a coffee shop and read for a bit.”
“How exciting.”
“A quiet, pleasant end to a road trip.”
“Are you gonna go back?” she asked. “To your folks.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, I’ll see them again. But I don’t want to go back home. I wanna make a life out of whatever we find there.”
“What do you mean when you say ‘we’?”
“Uh, you know. The three of us.”
She laughed.
“You think we’re going to what? Find jobs. Live in an apartment together or something?”
“It could be nice. Drink wine every night, read books together in the living room. Get a dog to share. Make Mel read us his poetry every night so we can make fun of him.”
“That could be a good life,” she admitted. She turned her head. “Speak of the devil.”
He looked up to see Mel coming back down one of the hills in the distance. He waved at them.
“Guess that’s our cue,” Jodie said. He drank the rest of his cold coffee and then rolled up his sleeping bag. Ashlee followed suit. Within five minutes, everyone was in the car and they were on the road again.
*
They were grabbing food at the McDonald’s in Stanfield when Jodie noticed it for the first time: a dryness in his throat. It hurt a little to swallow his fries. He gave a little cough and downed it with water.
“You okay,” Mel asked from the driver’s seat.
“Just went down the wrong tube,” he told them. He hoped.
Nobody said anything else about it.
They drove on.
*
They made their way into Portland by way of Troutdale, from the east. It was midafternoon. Jodie was at the wheel. They were driving down Pine Street. The three of them looked around wildly in awed silence. Vietnamese restaurants and oyster bars, bistros galore. Jodie parallel parked and they got out, masks on. They walked past mom and pop bookstores and record shops, a church for Scientology.
“They’ve got a whole fucking store dedicated to skateboards,” Ashlee yelled, pointing toward a brick storefront with a green sign that read CAL SKATE SKATEBOARDS. They walked further. More independent coffee shops than they could count. A Jewish history museum. They watched masked people walk by with their dogs. Their hair was wild, often multi-colored: a parade of bobs, mohawks, pixie cuts, curly crops, jagged bangs, and more.
Jodie felt as though he had entered a completely different universe. He was not alone. He could feel the excitement radiating off his companions. They had made it. The three of them had taken a daring risk and made a long pioneer’s journey to the promised land. It was their right to bask in this glory.
But now what? Jodie thought.
*
They bought bagels from Bowery and then got back in the car. Between them, they had two hundred dollars and seventy-two cents.
“That’s maybe enough for a night or two at a hotel.”
“I’ve got it taken care of. We just need to find a phone.”
They drove around for a bit. Mel would lean out the window and ask random people if they knew where a payphone was. Most of them ignored him or flipped him off, but one kind person let him know they could find them at the light rail stations. So they drove to one. Mel got out and ran into the station to use it.
Jodie and Ashlee sat in the car, waiting for him.
“This place is too fucking cool,” she said.
“Isn’t it?” He coughed. “Can you pass me a water bottle? Throat’s dry.”
Mel came back grinning from ear to eat. “We’re set. Let me drive,” he told them.
He explained on the way, told them he had called up his old friend who lived in the area, Jewel, and she told him how folks had a community camp set up down one of the trails near the edge of town. They stopped at a store on the way and bought a cheap tent.
When they got near the trail, they pulled the car off road and hid it near some trees, hoping for the best. The three of them walked the tent and the sleeping bag to the trail and, seeing some other tents in the distance, pitched it nearby in a clearing. A few folks watched with polite smiles while Mel pitched the tent, but they didn’t say anything. Looking around, Jodie saw there were 30, maybe 40 tents dotting the green landscape.
“Wonder how many are out of sight,” he said to Ashlee and Mel. Ashlee didn’t answer. She just looked at all the tents sadly.
By nightfall, they had their tent set up and a little spot dug for a campfire. They were inside the tent discussing how they would go get lawn chairs and some new books in the morning when they heard someone outside softly say, “Excuse me.”
Mel unzipped the tent to find a round woman’s masked face looking at them. She looked to be in her 30s and had sharp green eyes.
“Hello,” he told her.
“Hi. My name’s Cheryl. We’re going to be making some S’mores over at our tent just over there if you newcomers want to join us.”
“For sure,” Mel said. “My name is Mel. This is Jodie and Ashlee.”
“Ashlee with an e,” Ashlee said.
“Nice to meet all of you. We’ll be starting in 20 minutes or so.”
“Thank you so much Cheryl. That’s so very kind of you,” Mel said, laying on his accent thick. “We’ll see you over there.”
“That was nice of her,” Jodie said when she left.
“Sure was,” Ashlee said. “Wish we had some food to take over and contribute.”
Mel waved his hand. “We’ll grab some weenies for the next one or host our own to pay them back.”
They went out to join the camp a few minutes later and found at least ten people over there, including Cheryl. To Jodie’s relief, they were all masked. She waved them over and introduced them to the group as “The new neighbors.” In turn, she introduced her folks to them one by one. A lot of their names passed through his mind as quickly as she said them, their relationship to their owners’ faces being severed immediately – Tim, Alicia, Darren, and so on. However, one of them, a bespectacled white guy wearing black frame glasses, she called Naysayer. That one stuck.
The trio sat down next to their neighbors and took the sticks and marshmallows Cheryl passed to them. A large cardboard box was being used as a table to hold up two graham cracker boxes and large bag of Hershey’s chocolate as a sort of Make Your Own S’mores station. They all talked for an hour or so, swapping stories as they stuffed themselves with puffy, sticky sweetness.
It turned out most of the group weren’t locals either but drifters. Darren had been married in Chicago. Then he got laid off. Then the wife left. Then the drinking came, and then the wandering. Alice never wanted to live more anywhere more than a year. Portland was just the latest stop in her journey. Cheryl was the only one who could claim to be Portland born and raised.
“I managed a nice shop over on Hawthorne Avenue. Yarn and knitting and all that. I was making ends meet. Wasn’t rich or anything but I did okay. Had a decent little apartment. A cat and all that. Then my mom got sick. Then she died. Then my dad got sick a few months later before he joined her too. Went beyond broke trying to keep them alive,” she said, without emotion, as though it was simply a fact and not something she had lived through. “Didn’t really function well after that. Stopped caring about bills. Gave the cat away to my cousin when the eviction came through, so on and so forth. Everybody’s got their sob stories. We’re all in the same boat.”
But they weren’t. Jodie was suddenly seized by guilt. He was just some white college kid on a glorified field trip. He didn’t know true pain or suffering. He was embarrassed to be in this woman’s company. She had felt the full wrath of life’s indifference and was still so kind. What did he know about anything?
“It’s all fucked,” the one called Naysayer said. “Donald fucking Trump. Climate change. It’s all shit.”
“We have each other though,” Cheryl said. “We have community.”
“What good is that going to do when the planet boils over?”
“You’ll have to forgive our friend here,” someone said. “He’s perpetually pouty.”
“Motherfucker, I just see things as they are,” Naysayer snapped. “Our parents and grandparents coasted along on a rigged economy and sucking blood out of the planet like fat vampires, and now we’ve got to pay the price for that hubris. They left us to deal with an infrastructure they inherited but never bothered to maintain much less improve. It’s all over. For everyone.”
“I think it’s kind of exciting to be honest,” Mel said.
Everyone turned to look at him. Naysayer blinked in his direction. Even Jodie felt a bit taken aback.
“I mean, he’s right,” Mel said. “but it’s kind of exciting to have front show seats to the end of the empire, isn’t it? What’s going to be the finale? I don’t know. Nobody here knows, nobody anywhere knows, but we’re probably going to find out. There’s something exciting about that. Perverse? Sure. But exciting, god yes. I can’t wait to see all the writing that comes out about it. If I live to see it, I guess.”
There was a long moment of silence.
“Well, that’s certainly an interesting viewpoint,” Cheryl said.
“What the hell is the matter with you,” Ashlee hissed. “This isn’t a story. We’re talking about people’s lives. Our lives. Those things have value.”
“Sure,” Mel said, shrugging. “Everybody’s lives have value. I’m not disputing that. But we’re also participants in the story of human history. There are plot beats. Beginnings. Arcs. And most importantly, there are endings. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being excited to see how a long-running story ends, yeah?”
“I like you,” Naysayer said suddenly. “Yeah. You’re awful, but you don’t even bother to hide it. There’s some kind of honor in that.”
Mel grinned, stuck his hot marshmallow on top of another piece of chocolate. “I’ll take it,” he said.
Jodie coughed.
*
The week went by slowly. Sometimes they would venture into town to buy books and food. Mel brought some seeds to try and grow tomatoes near the tent but he never planted them. Mostly the three of them read in the sunlight and drank booze. Jodie knew it was the kind of life most people would look down on but he was happy. He wanted nothing more than to look up from his copy of The Trial to see Mel in the sunlight, drinking a beer and scribbling poetry in a notebook.
He found himself daydreaming about the three of them taking odd jobs once the pandemic was over and renting a house somewhere, like he and Ashlee had talked about. He thought maybe he’d work in a coffeeshop and start writing in the evenings. Mel wrote. Why couldn’t he and Ashlee? Maybe he’d write fiction or essays. Maybe he’d even be good at it. The three of them could take turns reading their writing to each other and tell one another how great they all were. He kept dreaming. It gave him something to look forward to. At least, until Mel cornered him one morning.
It was a nearly two weeks into their stay in Portland. Ashlee had gone into the city to get another book. They were in the tent. Instant coffee in both their cups.
“How you feeling about all this?” Mel had asked him.
“Pretty good.”
“Pretty good,” he repeated back. “Me too. But..is ‘pretty good’ enough?”
“What do you mean?”
Mel shrugged. “I’m just kind…I’m not ready to be done moving I guess.”
“What are you saying?”
Another shrug. “These past few weeks, when we’ve been on the road, camping out and living by our wits, I’ve felt so free. And it’s given me so much good material to write about, y’know?”
“Sure.”
“I was thinking maybe we pack up and go on. Keep the trip going on for a while longer. I mean…have we really seen everything the country has to offer if we haven’t been to Los Angeles? To Las Vegas?”
“Oh.”
“Does that idea bother you?”
“No,” Jodie said, heart sinking. “No. Just surprising, I guess. Seemed like all three of us were happy.”
Mel kept going. “I was thinking we pack up and head to San Diego. See what’s that like? Maybe hop to San Francisco, then Seattle. Go frolic in a vineyard at some point. Do a whole west coast loop. And who knows? Maybe we can go to Texas after that. I hear Austin is rad as hell.”
Jodie’s chest felt tight. “When would we go?”
“Couple of days from now probably.”
“I mean…if that’s what you want to do. I guess…”
“It is what I want to do,” Mel said. “And I want you to come with me. You’re important to me,” he said. “Feels like you’re my best fucking friend in the world.”
Jodie smiled, felt a splotch of warmth in his chest. “That’s nice to hear. I guess, we’ll tell Ashlee when—”
Mel made a noise that sounded like eh. “I was thinking that maybe three’s a bit too much company but the two of us, y’know? That seems right.”
“What?”
“Well, if it’s just you and me, we’ll use less money, cover more ground that way. Plus, I don’t think Ashlee really gels with what you and I have going on, does she?”
“I…”
“I mean, if I’m wrong here, you can let me know.” Mel watched him. Jodie felt like the whole universe hinged on what he answered next.
“We can’t just leave her here without any notice or cash,” he said at long last.
“Oh, we won’t. Totally. What do you think I am, Jodie? A monster.”
“No, of course not.”
“Yeah, we’ll leave her some cash.”
“We don’t have that much though.”
“I’ll get some. We’ll work it out. Promise.”
“I…”
“Trust me. It’s better this way. For everybody.”
He looked at Mel for a few seconds and turned his head away.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
*
There was another gathering the next night. Jodie, Ashlee, and Mel brought hot dogs, veggie dogs, buns, and a couple bottles of Jack Daniels. Everyone in the group seemed so happy, even Naysayer was laughing.
They were talking about something, maybe something Ashlee had seen in town, but he couldn’t pay attention to whatever they were saying. There was a ringing in his ears. His heart was pounding. Jodie looked from Mel to Ashlee. She was smiling so big he could see all her white teeth. His stomach was sick. His head was cold despite the fire crackling right in front of him. Jodie drank more and more of the whiskey to try and dull the pain in his head. It was like he had been turned inside out.
He swung in and out of lucidity. Words would be a stream of noise only to take proper form a few seconds later. He directed all his effort into tuning into the language flying by him. He heard Mel’s voice, rough as granite, and clung to it.
“So yeah, I was in the dark and this naked motherfucker, he had a gun!”
Everyone except Ashlee gasped. Jodie looked over to see her looking at back at him nervously.
Mel was laughing. “So we were on the ground and I got a hold of the gun and we were duking it out for a bit like it was some James Bond shit, y’know?”
“What are you doing,” Jodie muttered drunkenly. “What are you telling them?”
No one could hear him.
“So the gun goes off, right? Shoots him right in his knee. BANG! He’s laying there bleeding, his woman all boo-hooing over him. And I take off, because, what else are you going to do? But I make sure to Looney Tune reverse it back into the room to grab his wallet.”
“Jesus,” Cheryl said. Jodie could see the horror in her eyes. His stomach turned some more.
“Hell of a thing, right?” Mel said. He lowered his mask and drank some more of his own whiskey. A lot of it.
“You lied,” Jodie whispered. “You said no one got hurt that badly.”
“See, that’s what I’m talking about,” Naysayer said. “People are just fucking evil, right down to the core. Every one of us. Beyond saving. Deep down we’re all like you, Mel. The only difference is you’re a proud motherfucker about it. That shit’s hilarious to me. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s all just a story we should watch and applaud as we pitch head-long into the abyss.”
“Not funny,” Jodie screamed suddenly.
Everyone fell into silence.
He was staring daggers at Naysayer. He felt nothing but hatred for him all of a sudden. The loathing had come upon him with no notice. Was it jealousy, that he should entertain Mel in such a way? No, something different. Roots deeper.
“People are good,” Jodie said. “They’re not bad.” His head was swaying, vision getting blurry, but he took a breath and repeated what he said.
“Whatever you say,” Naysayer replied. “Real interesting company you keep with that perspective though.”
“People are good. They can do bad things. But most people are good, and the people who are bad can come back from it.” He looked to Mel, then to Ashlee, then to Mel again. He pleaded him with his eyes. Mel kept on grinning. He looked like a completely different person. Jodie felt tears welling up behind his eyes.
Naysayer spat. “It’s all a toilet, and we’re the shit circling the drain.”
The whiskey bottle flew from Jodie’s hand before he knew what he was doing. It shattered on the ground, inches away from Naysayer’s foot.
“Motherfucker!” Naysayer yelled, jumping to his feet.
Mel roared with laughter. “Now that’s what I’m talking about!”
Jodie was rising, slowly, head growing colder, raising his hands when Naysayer’s fist connected with his head. People screamed in surprise. He heard Ashlee say “No!”
He took a step back only to get another fist, this time in the stomach. He felt the wind leave him.
“Stupid asshole,” Naysayer was yelling, landing another blow on Jodie’s cheek. Jodie smelled nickels: his mouth was wet and his mask was in the dirt.
“Do something!” Ashlee yelled.
“His fight,” Mel said. “It’s his fight.”
Jodie started coughing. Giant, wretched hacks. Wet. Red. There was volcanic heat in his nose. He saw his attacker backing away.
“Holy shit!” Naysayer screamed. “He’s sick! He’s getting it all over me. He’s got it all over all of us.”
The world went lopsided. He felt the vibration of his face hitting the ground but didn’t feel any pain.
“Jodie!” Ashlee said.
The world was dark.
“Don’t touch him,” he could hear Mel saying calmly. “Leave him.”
And then he heard nothing at all.
*
The first thing Jodie saw when he opened his eyes was the white plaster ceiling. The second thing was the bed he was in, then the gown he was wearing, then the tile floor, and so on. It didn’t take him long to put everything together.
He reached over to the call button on the side of his bed and pressed it. Then he laid there, waiting. His abdomen was on fire; his head felt like an anvil had been dropped on it. The nurse came in. She was a woman in her late forties. She had brown hair was wearing a serious scowl on her face.
“Good to see you’re awake,” she said, with more than a little venom.
“What hospital am I at?”
“OHSU.” She said, spelling out each letter.
“Where is that?”
“Great. A tourist. Portland. Oregon.”
He sat up.
“How long will I be here?”
“However long enough it takes you to put your clothes on, vacate that bed, and pay at the desk outside.”
“Did I do something, ma’am? You seem angry.”
“Your friends dropped you off screaming you had COVID, so we prioritized your treatment.”
His heart sank. “Do…”
“No. You have a nasty cold, and a couple of bruised ribs.”
“…A cold in the spring?”
“It happens more frequently than you think. Now please, put your clothes on, and leave, so we can give this room to someone who actually needs it.”
He nodded. “Sorry,” he said sheepishly.
She left without another word.
He got up and immediately regretted it. His chest hurt. His stomach hurt. His throat hurt. The only thing that didn’t hurt was his legs. He went over to a metal table with his belongings stretched out across them. There wasn’t much there outside of his bloodstained clothes. A new mask had been supplied to him. His keys were gone. He opened his wallet to find the few dollars had had to his name he had been taken. Inside, there was only a tiny note written on a Post-it-Note.
SORRY – ASHLEE, the note said. Nothing from Mel. He folded the note and put it in his jean pockets, where he also found a few quarters.
He got dressed and looked in the mirror. He had a black eye and a busted lip, but he felt worse than he looked, all things considered.
Ambling out into the hall, he saw countless people waiting in chairs. Some of them were coughing, others crying. He stepped past legs and people lying on the floor toward the entrance. He walked right past the front desk. They were so swarmed with people trying to be seen, no one stopped him.
Near the entryway of the hospital, he saw a couple of payphones. He stepped inside one of them and dug into his pocket. He had put one quarter into the phone and was in the middle of grabbing another when he stopped. Looking outside, he saw the trees moving gently in the breeze above the parking garage across from the entrance.
He hung up the phone. He walked outside the hospital and watched a few cars go by. Some people stepping past him and into the hospital looked at his black eye. He ignored them, peering down the road, which sharply curved into the belly of a straight line that stretched on through more trees and toward mountains in the distance.
He took off, one foot in front of the other.
Jodie was a runner. It was all he had ever known.