Life on the Preservation, US Edition (2 page)

She started to get up.

“Kylie, I want to sit by myself and think.”

She chewed her lip, said, “I love you,” throwing it out there like a ball he was supposed to swat back to her. She didn’t even believe herself. She was scared was all. Why couldn’t it be simple and real?

“Love you too,” he said.

“I doubt it.”

He looked back at her. “I really do, Kylie.”

“How about a beer?” she said. There was plenty of beer in town, since Father Jim told everyone God didn’t want them to drink ‘spirits’. Billy never quit, though. Billy didn’t give a shit what Father Jim said. And Billy was
so
much better with the beer.

“Naw,” he said, “I’m sick of warm beer.”

There was plenty of beer but the fire-extinguishers had run out ages ago. Billy had used the fire-extinguishers to cool off six-packs. He didn’t want to waste generator fuel running a refrigerator. Because Father Jim had told everybody God wanted them to live simply, without electricity (“God’s a real killjoy in this town,” Billy liked to say), Billy was the only one using a generator; but sooner or later the gas would be gone, and that would be the end of movie night.

“Anyway,” he said.

He pulled the door shut behind him. She felt like everything was ruined from the inside out. Kylie stared at the door like she was staring at some pain inside her secret heart, which she was.

A
LONE IN BED
, she listened to the deep-well silence and fought off tears. Crying didn’t do any good. The town dentist, Dr. Lee, had cried himself crazy after The Judgment left him standing but killed his wife and kids. Eventually his crazy tears got
him
killed, too, which Kylie guessed was all right with Dr. Lee.

She thought about getting up and closing the blinds. Instead she rolled onto her side, yawning, drawing her knees up, exhausted. Random pictures drifted through her mind, like clouds in a foreign sky, and she passed into sleep.

Some time later the sound of the generator entered her awareness and putt-putted her awake. She opened her eyes, not fully conscious. The candle, bed and girl floated in the black glass, and something else. Kylie blinked slowly, not really taking anything in, her mind mostly asleep. But she had to pee, and she got up and padded out of the room.

Billy was watching the TV. She could hear it while she was in the bathroom, squatting over a bucket. Her pee rang against the galvanized tin. She struggled to remember something on the edge of her mind. Had she dreamed of the normal days again? Somehow remembering those days didn’t hurt but dreaming about them left her feeling disoriented – almost as if her dreams were real and her reality a bad dream.

She finished peeing, covered the bucket with a towel, pulled on a pair of tight black Levi’s, and went down the hall. Billy lay on the sofa, facing away from the set, the light shifting on the broad back of his wrinkly shirt. Seven or eight bottles of the beer he was so sick of stood empty, guarding a tower of DVDs. Billy’s favorite Western was playing.
Tombstone
. The volume was low, but she heard Val Kilmer say, “I’m your huckleberry,” followed by a gunshot. Kylie touched Billy’s shoulder.

“Are you awake?” she said

“Yeah.” He rolled over and faced her, his eyes bleary. He reached for a bottle, like a reflex.

“Are you still sad?” Kylie asked.

“More like drunk. But don’t worry – I’m turning over a new leaf as of right now. Anyway, I am as soon as the beer wears off.”

She sat on the edge of the sofa. “What new leaf?”

“Kylie, if that crazy priest knew what we were up to he’d probably chop my head off. You know how he’s always blathering about ‘purity’ and all that shit. Besides, I think he’d like to chop my head off just on general principles, since I’m the only one around here besides you not falling into lock-step.”

Father Jim delivered weekly sermons standing in the bed of a burned out F-350 in the middle of Main Street. He really worked on those sermons – and the sermons really worked on
him
. Like everybody else in town, except Billy, Kylie showed up to listen. There was pressure to do so, an un-stated threat if you didn’t. Nevertheless, she would have quit going except that Billy told her that was a bad idea, told her it would draw attention to her. Father Jim’s early sermons had been almost incoherent, filled with emotion and desperation. But over the last few months the priest seemed to be
building
something. To Kylie it sounded like he was building the world from the inside of his head. The Judgment had come sheeting out of the sky like a vast white lightning, killing billions in an instant, transforming most of the world into blasted destruction and leaving the survivors to fade into a slower, more cruel death. In his sermons Father Jim was practically writing a new book for the Bible. The Word According To Jim made sense out of what didn’t make sense.

“I wonder,” Billy said, “how that idiot felt about purity
before
God took the steel out of his dick. “

“He felt guilty, I think.”

Billy grunted. Father Jim had been a pilot in the Marines, and he still retained a private license. The way he started with Kylie was by giving her flying lessons in his Cessna. Eventually that’s what they called it when they were going to meet for the other things: flying lessons.

“That was just him grooming you,” Billy told her. “Like he did practically your whole life. The bastard.”

She had told Billy about Father Jim. The priest had always been around, but the grown up part, the really bad part, began when she was sixteen and ended, abruptly, a year later when the world did the same.

What she hadn’t told Billy was how
crazy
Jim had sometimes acted. Once, they had sex on the day bed in her mother’s basement. Her mother, a nurse, had been at work. Father Jim pulled out of Kylie before he finished, disappeared into the bathroom, and stayed there a long time. Kylie got up to see what was wrong. (Of course at this point, deep down, she knew
everything
was wrong). The door was open a little, so she said his name and pushed it open wider. Jim stood there naked, his half-erect cock bloody from multiple nicks. He held a Gillette blade between his thumb and forefinger, the tab of blue steel shining in the fluorescent light. He had taken it out of the pink safety razor her mother used to shave her legs. She always shaved in the downstairs bathroom because the light was better. The empty razor now sat on the edge of the sink behind Jim. He stared at Kylie with guilt-stricken eyes and said, “What we do isn’t
right
. I have to mortify my appetites.” Shocked, Kylie couldn’t look away. That was probably a mistake. Jim seemed to get something out of her looking at him. In moments the superficial little cuts ceased to effectively mortify his ‘appetites’. He pushed her back to the bed and took her, grunting with pain and animal excitement. No, it hadn’t been anything like Lloyd and Diane.

“Mom says The Judgment unbalanced him,” Kylie said to Billy.

“Yeah. Unbalanced like Charlie Manson. Don’t forget the dentist.”

Instead of Dr. Lee she pictured a sign that used to hang in the dentist’s waiting room:
A smile is your first hello!
Near the end, the man used to stand on the roof of the Ace Hardware store yelling at God. Father Jim hadn’t appreciated that blasphemy. He hadn’t actually chopped Dr. Lee’s head off, but he
had
whacked it pretty hard with a baseball bat.

“I doubt that idiot appreciates you living with me.”

“Who cares what he appreciates,” Kylie said.

Billy picked up a DVD case.
The Dong of Man
. There were two naked ‘cave women’ on the cover, also a guy with a thick black mustache wearing a bear pelt, or maybe it was just his own chest. Billy had found the pornos on top of a bookshelf. The two bedroom ranch house had belonged to Billy’s father, a retired history professor and Oakdale’s only resident atheist. Growing up in Oakdale, Billy liked to say, was like growing up a leper in Mayberry. Billy had one of his gloomy quiet days when he found
The Dong of Man
and the other pornos. He didn’t talk about it, but Kylie guessed the videos made him think of his history prof dad in a way he didn’t like to think of him.

“It used to be everybody got off once in a while,” Billy said, waving the DVD. “Now it’s only you.”

“Have another beer,” Kylie said, hoping that yet
more
alcohol would cheer him up.

“No. Listen, we have to talk seriously.”

“What about?” Something was nagging at the back of her mind and had been since she woke to the sound of the generator. Something she had seen. It seemed to her she must have seen it in a dream, this scary thing that she couldn’t quite recall, couldn’t quite bring into focus.

“Leaving Oakdale,” Billy said.

She stared at him. “But it’s too dangerous outside of town.”

“It’s getting too dangerous
inside
of town. I’ve been planning this since everybody started paying too much attention to that lunatic priest. You said yourself he’s even started mentioning me in his sermons-on-the-Ford.”

“But where would you go?”

“Back to the Big Boat.” The Big Boat was what Billy called the
USS Carl Vinson,
an aircraft carrier stranded in sudden shallows after The Judgment. A small number of survivors lived on the carrier, most of them Navy personnel, though there were also some stragglers like Billy. Billy had been living in Seattle but was visiting a friend in Bremerton, a port town south of Oakdale, when the world ended. “Kylie, I thought you might–”

“But why would you go there? You said everybody was dying and some of them were crazy. Just like here.”

“Take it easy–”

“I don’t want you to
go
.”

“Come with me. There’s more to the world even now than this stupid hick town. Don’t you want to see the Dome? It’s pretty close to the Big Boat. At night you can see the glow.”

Billy had talked about the giant Dome before, how it stood over the place where Seattle had been, but it was so fantastic and Billy was usually so drunk, that she hardly believed him.

“Come on, Billy. That can’t be real.”

“It’s real.” Billy looked at her seriously. “It covers the whole city, and you can see through it a little bit. Like you can see the buildings and water, but everything is all wavy and dim, like looking through thick green glass.” He held his empty beer bottle, bottom-up, to Kylie’s eye. “Kind of like this. Kylie, there’s a reason I want you to come with me.”

“Because you love me so much?”

“Yeah, sure. But–”

She pushed the bottle aside. “I couldn’t leave my mom, Billy. She’d be all alone.”

“She’s as frightened as everybody else.” Billy swung his feet to the floor, fumbled for the clicker and turned
Tombstone
off. “But Kylie, I
have
to go – and soon. We both do, before Jim gets your neighbors whipped into a real mob. And everybody being afraid of the world outside Oakdale can work in our favor.”

“They aren’t a
mob
,” Kylie said, deeply distracted now, looking around the room to make sure the blinds were all closed; the thing she had seen without registering was coming closer. She could almost remember.

“They aren’t yet,” Billy said. “But it’s only a matter of time before– What’s wrong?”

Kylie stood up. The thing had finally come forward. In the bedroom’s black glass mirror window: a bed, a candle, herself... and behind the reflections a face swam into view, and Kylie caught her breath.

“I think Father Jim is outside.”

THE NOBLE CORPSE

T
O BECOME HIMSELF,
Travis Dugan had to leave himself. At age twenty-three he started by leaving his name, then his family (who after all had already left him, his mother weeping and his father stone-faced in the cyclone wind of Travis’s coming out politically and sexually), and finally Chewelah, Washington.

He shed ‘Travis Dugan’ like a dun-colored humpback carapace he’d been forced to wear his whole life, a name that defined him in the schoolyard pecking order and the expectations of small-town gossips. His new name was Charles Noble, who had been a minor character in a minor French novel. A Spokane County superior court judge signed the necessary document, the clerk stamped the paperwork, and Charles Noble was re-born in the real world.

But Travis was not reborn out of his isolation. Twelve years later, modestly prosperous but alone, Charles remained a minor character in his own life, the carapace invisible but intact, shielding his truest identity from the world – and most especially from one Curtis Sarmir, proprietor of the bookshop next door. At 10:30 in the morning of October fifth, 2012 on a shabby by-street of Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood, in the small apartment in the back of the art gallery he owned, Charles removed his clothes and hanged himself.

It wasn’t the first time.

But it was the first time the act proved fatal. Charles Noble’s corpse swayed forward on its knees, the noose buried in its fleshy neck, the rope stretched taut behind it, knotted to a three-foot bar of doweling in the open closet. The corpse’s tongue, swollen and purple, protruded like a fig from its pale lips.

L
ATER THE CORPSE
opened its eyes and sat back on folded legs, making the rope go slack between the noose and the closet doweling. The noose glowed briefly, blackened, unraveled in wisps of smoke, became a ring of ashes and flaked away. Noble’s strangled airway swelled open, drawing air into collapsed lungs. The body heaved, chest expanding, tendons cracking, then fell heavily forward, a fading red circlet around its neck. Neurons sparked through the brain, chemical transmitters re-activated, and dead matter became enlivened. The heart muscle labored, then discovered its accustomed rhythm. Arterial circulation resumed. Livid bruises caused by pooled blood faded, were gone.

What had been Charles Noble stood up and got dressed.

CHAPTER TWO

SEATTLE, OCTOBER 5, 2012