PostApoc (6 page)

- 11 -
WHAT WE COULD HAVE HAD

T
he doors are locked when I get there and the windows are still intact. I can't let myself take it as a sign that anyone's home, though, so I distract myself with other possibilities: were the suburbs completely wiped out, even of looters? Or is everything here still so sleepy that no one's even noticed what's happening around them?

But no, these streets can't be untouched. There are too many locked-out cats darting under dry bushes, too much grass turned golden. And the silence here is just as deep as downtown, like a hand covering an open mouth to stifle a scream.

The spare key is still dangling from a wind chime on the back deck. I brace for death stench to hit me but all I get when I walk in is air gone stagnant. I know the house is empty, can feel it before I even call out. There's something about the bearing of the walls, as if they've exhaled and forgot to start breathing again.

“Hello?” I say, but it comes out quieter than I want it to. “Mom?”

There's a tremor in the word. I don't have control over my voice in here. But then I never did.

Upstairs, the beds are made. My old room turned guest bedroom, untouched. My parents' bed, perfect, as if they'd gotten up, like usual, on their last day, as if they'd assumed it would end just like every other day. On their nightstand, a photograph of the four of us, me and my brother in the middle. I lean across the bed for it and find the pillows have held onto the oils of my parents' hair. I pull both of them to me, bury myself.

Instead of them, though, I think of Hunter—what we knew of each other, what we had trusted. Our connection was held together by morbidity and attraction. There must have been more to it than that but you know, it's getting hard for me to remember. Not because I can't recall it but because I don't know that I want to.

Hunter, the details of your face, even, I sometimes think about letting them slip away. I am slipping away. I had a dream you were here. Outside on the street. With you was a dog, big but friendly. Somehow you'd found me. We considered it magic, ESP. You let your dog do the talking. It licked my hair, licked the shine and dirt off my face. Its tongue was very, very soft.

Hunter, would we have been happy?
Would we have been happy if we had made different decisions? If we'd chosen life instead?

Would we have had a house like this one someday, Hunter? Would we have had comfort and routine? I wasn't ready for what happened the day of our pact. I wasn't ready for the rest of my life.

Did it happen to you, too? Did you feel the same fear I did? Death took you over so fast, I never got to ask. Maybe you were strong enough to push through it. Did I give in to weakness, cave to hesitation too soon? Did my adrenaline convince me to fight for a life I'd never wanted? Even now, I don't have the energy or confidence to fight my body's craving for life. Even now, still, I don't have the energy to fight my cowardice at calling
911
as soon as your eyes closed.

I will not go to my brother's basement bedroom. Instead, I fill my bag with my mom's underwear, my dad's socks. The drawers are lined with tiny hotel soaps, something my mom used to do to keep things scented. I take them all.

There's a stash of matches in a shoebox at the bottom of the closet, souvenirs from bars and hotels they'd visited, most from a time before I was born. I poke through my mom's jewelry but only take one thing, a gold necklace with a heart-shaped locket, a gift I'd picked out with my dad for her birthday when I was in Grade
5
. She'd left the locket empty. I breathe into it, make a wish.

The kitchen cupboards are full of pots and pans but little food: a half-eaten box of saltines, salt and pepper, two cans of soup. I take it all. Then I lock up and take the spare key, too.

- 12 -
A BEAUTIFUL CORPSE

S
hit Kitten is playing in an old brick factory at the edge of an urban forest. All I want is to get there, but Tara wants to do complicated things and won't let me leave.

She suggests the choking game. Believes I can handle it because although she's lost some of her history she knows mine immediately, knows what I've done and where it led. But I don't have enough breath left to apply pressure to a throat. Tara just answers with a kiss thick with deep throat saliva, something that tastes like an old push for survival. In her grip I am dust on a lens. Eyes open but unclear. She knows I only pretend to half-remember my past.

Tara says her memory is like an awkward grind, forever up against the rough fabric of a crotch, riding a sticky lap. Beyond that admission she says nothing.

“Okay,” I say. “You're right. I'm sorry.”

We can see into each other, both having been halfway to the other side. Her eyes sparkle with the moment before a kiss. Mine, shocked with the insecurity they surrender. I knot that nervous energy in a pack of hair, hang it in a window. Hope its light reaches me.

Tara casts a darkening crown upon herself as she pulls the blue wig over her head. Along with it comes the smell of sweat embedded in the nylon hairline. She's encased in torn silk and black lace. She wears no bra and the nubs that were her breasts peek through the top of her thin camisole like a hot implication.

She keeps her last tube of burnt orange lipstick sitting tight in the pocket of her black leather shorts. When she leans into the corner of the cracked mirror to colour her lips there's enough of a wink from the tops of her thighs to know she's not wearing underwear.

Her lipstick is down to a nub. It seeps at her mouth. There's no more makeup to buy, it being one of the first things that ran out, one of the first things we noticed was missing off the store shelves. Not enough of a necessity over batteries and lighter fluid and dried foods, even though everyone still wanted to paint their faces. We've held on to whatever we could: dried up compacts, flaking palettes, lipsticks down to their final strokes.

In our dreams we have everything. In our hands we hold the things we really want and believe them to be ours. It's not until we start to wake up that we remember dream objects can't travel back to the waking world. We don't get to keep them. The only way we can get them again is to stay asleep and we try, but that sleep won't stay on us.

I sit on the floor beside Tara, squeeze my face into a slit of glass, smoke a stub of eyeliner across my lids, smudge it with cigarette ash to make it stretch. The glass of the mirror is tinged with yellow; it reflects the room back three shades darker, makes us look even more tired than we are. Tara's face takes over the mirror, shoving me out.

“I used to watch you, you know,” she says. “You and the other Valium girls. Some of my friends wanted to make up a name for all of you. The Valleys or something. Ha! That would've been pretty stupid. Well some of the other girls thought you were pretty stupid. I'd hear them in the bathroom, talking. They were waiting for any of you to fuck it up, make the wrong move and kill your relationships. It was all jealousy, though. Everyone knew you were the most beautiful girls. You had the best style. Everyone wanted to be you, but that made it hard to like you, you know? Because you had this thing we all wanted. The scene itself could have felt like a family, but you were part of this inner circle that some people thought was hard to become a part of. It was almost like you were on the outside for a lot of us, even though you were in the center of everything.”

Tara talks at me through the mirror. It slants her face, brings one eye higher than the other.

“I heard Hunter wasn't always nice to everyone,” she says, “but he was nice to me.”

Tara turns to me now, with her face back on straight. We both nod, an unspoken understanding that we are each other's reluctant links to the past.

Shit Kitten's playing tonight, running on generators or finding a bump in the thin power grid. We don't care how the music happens just so long as it does, so long as their sound can still slam through bodies so our bodies can slam together.

The building's old and full of stone, properly absorbent, abandoned years before we ever found it. People used to have parties here. I heard, a long time ago, that a girl fell off the catwalk one time and died. That was years back, though. Nobody could come around for months after. The cops kept it guarded, warned people away.

If any of us die tonight, no one will ever know. I like this privacy, fold it into the palm of my hand as we take a shortcut through the trees, down the hill, knives and sticks pointed, ready for anything. Around us the forest is a backdrop of kindling—bare trees rubbing their branches together—eager trembling hands.

Instead of an opening band there's a ritual chanted out by a thin girl in a long, loose-knit sweater; its collar looped around her shoulders, runs in the fabric zigzagging all the way down her arms. The sleeves bunch at her wrists, cover her hands. She doesn't wear pants, only black underwear and motorcycle boots. Her lips are stretched, like they don't fit her face. She keeps her mouth on the microphone as a high, honeyed chant rises up from below her navel.

The girl arcs her neck as a guttural moan shakes through her, forces her head back so we can see there's a second set of teeth growing from the roof of her mouth, each ending in fine points. Beside her is a guy, hair blonde and long enough to touch his waist. He's shirtless: on his chest shines a scar, fresh. As people file past, some of them touch the raised tissue, pause to fully flatten their palms over the inverted star carved there.

There is nothing but noise building behind them, a beaten up synthesizer pushing out a tantalizing wave of fuzz tinged with migraine—just enough to keep us cuddled in a cold canopy of sound. The girl's voice has risen again and the guy joins her, his vocal chords stretching to reach hers until they sound identical, interchangeable.

Someone has made a bar out of milk crates and cinder blocks. Tara comes away with plastic cups in each hand, deep purple liquid streaking the backs of her hands.

“Tooth found a shitload of Kool-Aid, apparently,” she says, handing me a cup of homemade vodka with a splash of grape. It's been so long since I've had a drink with this much sugar, even this small amount. Granules of sweet crunch against my teeth. I know I'll have a headache tomorrow but right now all I want is the extra few beats the vodka is kicking into my heart.

Aimee's moved off into the crowd and Tara's turning to me to talk, touching me with every other word tonight. “Things find you,” she says, and I don't know if she's talking about me or about herself or about this place. Whichever it is, she's right, and as the vodka hits the back of my neck with a rush of warmth I know there is nothing else we need to say.

Cam's hair is getting long, keeps getting in his eyes. It's how I recognize him coming up behind Tara. He won't take his hand off of her to brush the strands away.
Tara's hand glides over his eyebrow, tucks an angled tuft behind his right ear.

“Thanks,” he says, smiling without looking at me.

He and Tara act like they slept together once, like they would do it again the way he's distracted by the curve of her waist, his fingers pumping to underline a point. My eyes are on his collarbone; a chin could fit there, nose slipping under his jaw, eyelashes tickling the back of his ear. A shiver could pass between him and a girl then, if he'd let anyone be so close.

“You excited?” Tara asks him.

“Of course,” Cam says. “I was made for these times.”

I roll my eyes. Cam doesn't know what it's like to live through a lost identity. He hasn't yet accepted that there will be no news stories about all this, no books in the aftermath, praising us survivors as heroes. There will be no after at all.

Tara's left hand pecks nervously at her right, pulls at a hangnail on her middle finger. She's slipped her boots off to wrap and unwrap her toes around her Achilles tendons. She sees someone she thinks is familiar, opens her mouth as he walks by but it's a false memory. She tells me she thought it was a guy she might have almost slept with this one time—kind of nice, kind of smart, but boring. “Boring boring boring,” she says, “an automatic write-off.” They got as close as forehead to forehead, staring and smiling at each other in pre-kiss state. Except his head had an extra layer of fat, enough padding that it felt like she was leaning her head against the heel of a hand instead of the smooth bone of a skull. “Still,” she says, “if it was now, I'd sleep with him, considering the circumstances.”

Shit Kitten is three songs into its set. We stay sitting because this is where we feel the music the most, conducted through the floor. Aimee finds us, sits, too, because this how it gets into you, beats the shit out of you. It comes crawling up from the earth and simultaneously dives right into your heart head-on, hits your chest from top and bottom, fists a cardiac hole and then fucks your aorta, ventricles, pummels your blood. By the speaker is where the abuse happens, where you give yourself up for this, give yourself over to the music, to the music's mind.

There's a tail coiled in my left side, burning above my pubic bone. It twitches, like an animal dreaming.

Aimee asks, “You feeling okay?”

The tip of the tail tickles my stomach into a slow flip. Tara offers me a drink from her cup. I shake my head, keep my mouth closed. Not that it really matters what goes in, what comes out, where it lands. Rattail used to keep a bucket in front of his mic stand for when he had to puke. His blood was made mostly of a mix of speed and mushrooms, alcohol and a dab of heroin that he said he used “here and there.” In Shit Kitten's early days he said it was nerves, that he had to get so fucked up just to sing, his stomach knotting up under the crunch of his abdomen, the strain on his vocal chords pushing down so hard that he just couldn't keep anything down. But we never really believed that. He had too much confidence for it to be nerves, and if you were ever hanging out with the band before or after, you probably saw Rattail's eyes roll all the way up into his head, so far in fact that whole minutes would pass by before you saw him come back again, a testament to just how wasted he could get.

Another song in and my nausea passes, the belly-deep tail settling enough for another splash of purple and vodka. Someone's passing around grayline and my dose collects in a chemical drip at the back of my throat; I can feel the slow pull every time I swallow.

Rattail's crawling through the next song, almost crying through the words. There is no stage, just a circle of dirt where the concrete floor ends.

The back of Rattail's t-shirt is shredding, mostly hanging off his chest, front-heavy. He flops onto his side, a tired dog, and whimpers out a few lines. People around us are electric, with so much heat running between them that it's melted the soles of their shoes to the floor. Their bodies collide but never move from their places.

Rattail's voice might have gone from aluminum thunder to a serrated lullaby but the guitars are still at full roar, still have us in their jaws. Cam's in front of us, on his knees in the dirt, listening for the quietest words. He's holding his hair back now, face serious, concentrating on the messages in the music; his knuckles huge and almost black they're so dirty, an eye drawn on the back of his hand, watching.

I can't tell if Shit Kitten's still playing the same song or if they've moved on. It's all a swirl of destroyed sound now, revving distortion, a razorblade grazing a thin black stocking.

Rattail's not moving anymore, hasn't sang or even whispered a note in I don't know how long. Feels like it's been at least an hour but Cam's inked eye is still staring, unblinking, from the back of his hand. He's still crouched there, same position. No one could stay like that for so long, could they?

Cam always says drugs slow your time down because they bring you closer to death, and the closer to death you are the slower everything gets. Time only accelerates when you are at your most alive. By that logic we'll be dead any minute now.

The guitars do stop, finally, fade out and disappear like a screen gone to black. The tail's slipped out of my stomach to twist through the crowd, a purple trail chasing loose hems. Outside, someone's gotten a fire going.
The heat is bright enough to bathe us. It crisps the skin of my face, makes me feel the cleanest I've been in weeks.

A thick fog hangs low over the trees, three-quarters of the way over their peaks. If we weren't all in t-shirts you could believe it was almost close to something like cold out here. A semicircle of people crowd around the fire. The chanting girl that opened is there, too, sitting on a dented folding chair. I don't recognize her until the tip of her cigarette lights up her face. Her leather boots are rotted through across the tops where her toes bend, the heels worn into upward curves. The intake of smoke from her cigarette sparks an orange puff of light across the bottom half of her face. At the corner of her eye, crisscrossing up to her temple is a dark sparkle, a charcoal swirl.

“I can paint your face, too,” she says. That's when I notice she doesn't blink, that her eyes are only white with black, the eyes of something that once lived in deep water.