PostApoc (15 page)

We're laying down now and Tooth is pulling me close, arms around my chest. “I'm going to fall asleep like this,” I tell him and he says, “so am I.”

Me and Hunter always slept touching, his knees behind mine, face in my hair. I'd wake up sometimes with my head buried in his neck, or drooling on his chest.

I wake up and for a second forget where I am, who I'm with. I wake up and think we're here, me and Hunter, together, that we've been asleep this whole time. But Tooth has a different way of breathing, a different amount of pressure in his muscles, and my senses catch up to these discrepancies.

I expect to be disappointed, but I'm surprised instead by relief. To be here, in these arms. A small streak of guilt tries to work its way through me but I don't let it in, don't let myself think too long about confusing Tooth for Hunter.

There's a scratching in the walls, must be what woke me up. Tooth must be used to the sound because his breathing is steady, solid. I count his breaths and let them draw me back to sleep.

I dream of eating metal spoons. They melt halfway to my mouth. What I manage to get in dribbles hot metal down my chin. I pull layers of skin from my face trying to pick it off.

I dream of heavy boots laced tight along my arms. I walk on all fours, knees unprotected, feet bare. Crawl through roads until I am on my childhood street. Crawl to my old house but when I get there it's turned into the Mission. Jupiter's fallen so far out of the sky that it's only a foot away from the club's roof.
I hold the planet's knowledge and know it hasn't fallen as far as it needs to yet, but if anyone steps into the Mission I wouldn't be able to tell them how much more time they'd have before the planet crunches through the roof. I'm sworn to secrecy and will lose all powers if I say a thing. I go into the club anyway because I have no choice. It's how my story has to end.

I dream I am dressed in teeth, shoulders hard and on the defense. Aimee appears beside me. She bounces on the balls of her feet and so I do the same: speed buzz. The muscles of our calves are caught in the crosshairs of our fishnets. We both bounce as we wait for a red light to change to green because green means go.

We go.

I wake up and wonder: Where did Aimee and Tara go? I can't remember the last time I saw them at the party. I can't remember if we said goodbye.

The whiskey and grayline have left a hangover that reaches all the way to my eyebrows. There's a chemical sting in my sinuses, peroxide expulsions.

I slide away from Tooth, careful not to wake him. I sit up and find the house fits me like eyes from across the room, teasing each hair up off my arms.

The mirror in the hallway is cracked, only half of it still nailed to the wall. A black spatter runs through my reflection, falls in freckles across my cheeks. Halfway down the staircase I can hear two guys talking, going over their route to get to Montreal. I feel shy, don't want to be seen coming down without Tooth even though I know no one would care.

There are other bedrooms but no one's in them. It's hard to tell if they've already been packed up and cleared out of anything valuable. There are a few clothes, paperback books. It could be trash. It could be everything.

There's a small hole in the wall of a near empty bedroom. I crouch beside it, hoping for a sign of who was here before Shit Kitten. I feel around for a bobby pin, or a letter tucked away. Something rolls under my finger—a sow bug tucked into a ball maybe. I leave it where it is, wipe the dust on my leg and go back to Tooth. He's awake when I come in, but still in bed. His arm comes up, invites me back in.

“I'm leaving today,” he says.

“I know.”

We go out the back door. Tooth cups his hands into a bucket of rainwater and tells me to drink. When the water's gone I kiss his palm.

He drinks after me. We kiss with renewed mouths. “Where's your charm bracelet?” he asks.

I hold up my wrist and show him the bare silver links. “I lost all the charms a long time ago.”

He slides an earring out of his left ear. It's an eye. Blue, the same colour as his. “Someone gave this to me once,” he says. “For protection from bad luck.”

“I'll lose it, just like the other ones,” I tell him. “These things don't work for me anymore.”

“Wear it,” he says. “I want you to have it.”

I get on my bike. Aimee's and Tara's are gone. They must be at home.

“You don't have to stay here, you know,” Tooth says. “You could come with me.”

I could.

“I can't,” I tell him. “Not without Aimee, at least.”

“Why don't you both leave?”

I don't have an answer for this as I ride away. My head pounds in time with the push of my bike pedals and I need to stop every ten feet. On the front of a lawn sits a birdbath, its base thick with algae. I drink from it anyway, desperate.

Back at the house Tara's on the front steps. I almost don't recognize her at first with her wig off and her black hair flattened to her scalp and stinking with sweat trapped for days under acrylic and nylon. She doesn't look up as I come towards the porch. Her face is ten years older and straight with pain, lit cigarette held to her arm.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

She doesn't answer immediately, just keeps her head down as the skin blisters up.

“Watch,” she says, moving to another burn on her arm, something that's a little less fresh than what she just made. She pulls a safety pin from her pocket and leaks the blister before carefully tearing open the flap of skin. She doesn't pull it all the way off, just makes an opening. She breaks open a cap of grayline and sprinkles it on, pulls the skin flap back down and rubs the powder into the blister.

“This is the best way to get a buzz,” she says. “Hits you way faster through a wound than through the stomach.”

Soon her arms will crawl with cuts and burns, bruises the size of quarters. In a dream I had a long time ago my skin turned into fossils pocked with the spirit shells of millipedes and crayfish. The fossils were soft to the touch and full of water, like sponges.

This is what I'm seeing in Tara right now as her eyes roll, her hands wander. She makes a vague motion for me to sit beside her. I come down to her level and she leans over, her face against mine. She licks my cheek and leaves a slow trail of shine leading to the corner of my lip.

Tara passes out on the porch minutes later. I pull her up, drag her in with me. Leaving her outside would mean leaving her for the dogs.

Cam is skinning an animal in the kitchen. The smell is more fecal than anything. He's mumbling the lyrics to a Shit Kitten song like the stink doesn't faze him. I recognize the tune to “PostApoc.” I have to cover my nose and mouth just to get past him.

“Aimee's still asleep,” he says.

Aimee never sleeps this long. “Is she sick?” I want to know, but Cam's already moved his attention back to the blood and bone on the kitchen floor.

Aimee's asleep in the same clothes she had on the night before. She doesn't move when I come into the room. I lie down beside her and shake her, gently.

She jumps awake. “How long have I been asleep for?” she asks.

“Not sure,” I tell her. “You okay?”

“I'm just really, really tired,” she says. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I stayed with Tooth.”

“They're probably on their way out of the city by now, huh?”

I brush something wet from my eye.

“Probably,” I say.

- 22 -
LIMP BESIDE ME

A
imee threw up this morning and has been sleeping ever since so me and Tara are on our own to pick up today.

My body's too rundown for this. I don't even want a drink and barely even want to smoke, but Tara's desperate and I can't let her go alone now, not after what happened to Aimee. Tara wanted to go to Chris's place because it's the closest option.

“What if they rape us, too?” I ask, reminding Tara of what Aimee told us later about what happened there: the force of strong hands over her abdomen, warm breath moving in at her ears, the smell of male whiskers that lingered on her face for days afterwards.

“Mike's isn't really that far,” I tell her. I feel like I have as much energy as Aimee does these days and don't want to be doing this at all, but Tara gives in to me and so does relief.

We push forward. Within three blocks of Mike's house we get circled anyway. Four men eye us, grab our handlebars. Tara goes limp beside me, ready to offer up the peaks of her hips.

Say something. Say anything, I tell myself. But the men only sniff and then back away in a blur of basic vocabulary. We are too thin, dried wafers with nothing for them, not even the energy to lift our heads, let alone theirs.

My adrenaline doesn't even kick in. My body must really be shutting down. I wonder if Mike has any food. I will cuddle with him just for that.

We pull up to Mike's as a girl climbs out of the dark dead bushes in his front yard. She's the only other person I've ever seen coming out of here, but I wonder if she was visiting with Mike, or just sleeping outside.

This girl's got a black eye and is wearing only one shoe. No makeup of course. Her legs are a patchwork of sores and her balance sputters. She flails, disrupts the air with every uneven step.

A second girl climbs out behind her. She leaves a scent of sticky fingerprints, private sheddings, genital mishaps. I blush as water rushes through my mouth.

The girls walk by as if they don't even see us. Maybe we're not really here. The sun's been stuck on sunset all day, but we're sweating. I've wrapped a black bandana around my breasts for a top. Tara's t-shirt is cropped by a knot at the waist.

Mike sizes up our bare stomachs when he sees us at the door. I look for a leer in his eyes but they shift too quickly as Tara practically pushes him into the bedroom. I wonder if she'll even bother waiting for me after she gets what she wants.

When it's my turn, I ask Mike if he can feed me and he says he's got dried kidney beans and a bit of brown rice but that he needs to eat, too, so we'll have to split something. We count the beans. We'll get ten each.

He doesn't ask me to tell him anything but I do anyway, about how I forgot about food when I was out in Vancouver. We all did. When we did eat, though, it was packaged cakes, a lot like the ones Cam and Trevor found a while back.
We'd smoke half a cigarette, stub it out, and bite into something vanilla with white icing in the middle.

I'd watch as Hunter would stab an index finger—dirty nail and skin nicotine yellow—into the soft melt of sugar to bring a drop of icing taste to my tongue. One poke at a time, until the two halves of the cake were clean. Then we'd smoke the other half of the cigarette we'd stubbed out and, with shiny fingers, pick at the golden yellow sponge between drags, neither of us ever eating a whole cake by ourselves.

By Christmas of that year we were all twelve pounds lighter and had black-on-black vision, eyeliner thick to keep details relegated to the interconnectedness of depth and death perception. I can't remember what the rest of the band and their girlfriends did, but me and Hunter spent Christmas Day at a rep cinema, paid two dollars each to see
The Man Who Fell to Earth.
My bottom lip trembled until the last credit rolled but my eyes never spilled over. Dehydrated. Just like now.

We didn't know where else to go after the movie because everything was closed, so we stayed in our seats. Hunter presented me with a gift of oil paints, a small palette of violence and despair. Together we read the names of each hue slowly:

Gash

Bruise

Solitude

Corpse

We were killing time until we killed ourselves.

Mike's kitchen table is plastic, not the welcoming wood of Aimee's old table but good enough. As I expected, Tara is already gone when I come out of the bedroom.

“More food for us then,” Mike says as I look out the front window for her.

Mike wants to eat together. I'm so hungry that I will say yes to anything. He builds a fire in the backyard to boil water for the rice. “It'll take a while,” he says.

“I don't care.
That's fine.”

I eat my food in two bites. Mike talks, says everyone he knew is gone now, no friends left.

“Maybe you could be my friend,” he says.

“Maybe,” I shrug. I have to remind myself to add a smile.

My body doesn't have the energy to digest everything, so I ask Mike if I can sleep here. He wants to sleep beside me. I let him.

It's dark out when I wake up. The sun has finally gone down but there's no way to measure what time it might actually be. Beside me, Mike is talking in his sleep, repeating, “I can't do this anymore. I can't do this anymore. I can't do this anymore.”

I can't do this anymore, either.

I slip away, out of the bedroom, out of the house, and I ride. The beginning of a new cold is scratching at the back of my throat when I get back to the Victorian to find Tara in the closet again, hoarding her own trip.

Aimee's rubbing a bloated belly. I ask her how she's feeling and she says there must have been something off with the meat Cam and Trevor caught the other day. “Now I know how you feel,” she says.

In another eight hours my sinuses will be clogged. I lie down and imagine a fever tingling along the back of my neck. I know it's more in my head than anything but I can't stop making myself sweat.

Aimee closes the door on Tara so we can have some privacy. She slides down beside me and says, “Remember what it was like to be thirteen? I had a fantasy then. Maybe my first fantasy. About boys. No one in particular, just in general. I liked to think about them as skinny with long hair, chains coming out of their back pockets. I liked to think of them as depressed or damaged, as people I could save. The boys in my mind always smoked and always drank and always listened to music when they were alone and thinking too much, too hard.

“I liked to fantasize that they would gravitate to me. Need me above anyone else, that somehow they would know I could instantly understand them.

“I used to look for these boys outside convenience stores or in parking lots, or standing in line to get into a show. I would hope we could spend the whole day together. I'd let them put their heads in my lap and I would just stroke their hair and listen to everything they had to tell me.”

“Did you ever kiss in your fantasies?” I ask.

“Not usually, no. We would just hug, hold each other, be platonic soulmates, instantly connected.”

“Like you and me.”

“Yeah, Ang. Just like you and me.”

Aimee falls asleep and leaves me thinking about how it felt to be thirteen. It's a memory that tastes like doughnuts and premium cigarettes. It's something the colour of cherry red hair dye and a blue spring sky.

I touch Aimee's hair and she whimpers. I swallow and my throat fights it.