Soft Apocalypse (2 page)

She laughed. “Subsistence rations.”

I ran my finger across the foil seal, held the breach to my nose and sniffed. I shut my eyes, sighed as the smell of freshly minted baseball cards triggered fond memories. I pulled out the cards. They felt so clean and slick in my filthy hands. “Chris Carroll,” I said, studying the first card. I flipped it over. “How’d he do last season? I didn’t get to see many games.”

And suddenly I was crying. Sophia threw her arms around me and cried with me. “I wish—” she said, but stopped herself. I knew what she wished. We stayed like that, huddled together, our wet faces buried in each other’s neck.

“I only have until two, then I have to… go home,” she said after a while. Which meant, that’s when Jean Paul would be home, and even at such an indirect mention of her husband, that familiar cocktail of jealousy/hurt/despair lanced my stomach.

Sophia didn’t lie to her husband about us. He was deeply hurt, and quietly angry, but he tolerated it, because he didn’t want Sophia to leave him. In other words, Sophia had all the power in the relationship, whether she wanted it or not.

As I see it, there are four types of relationships. There are those where you’re madly in love with someone, and her feelings are tepid. In that case she has the power, and you struggle to convince her to love you by trying to be witty and fascinating, forever seeking her approval for what you say and who you are, and grow increasingly pathetic in the process. That was where Jean Paul was.

There are those where the other person is in love with you, while you can only muster a warm and murky fondness for her. In this case you carry a knot of guilt, because you feel like a walking lie; you’re forever trying to feel what you don’t feel, and end up consumed by an existential emptiness, convinced that, not only can you not feel love for this person, you have become incapable of loving anyone. That’s where Sophia was with Jean Paul, and why there was enough room in her heart for me.

Third, there are those where you’re not in love with the other person, and she is not in love with you. There is a nice balance here; you’re on the same page, so there is no need to struggle, no one feels like a loser and no one feels guilty. There is a sadness, though. When you look into someone’s eyes and see the blandness you feel reflected there, it’s hard not to wonder why you’ve chosen to be in a relationship that’s the equivalent of a permanent Valium drip. This sort of relationship had always been my specialty, for reasons I don’t quite understand.

Then there is the fourth type. You are madly in love with someone who is madly in love with you. This is the perfect balance, energy in harmony. This is the kind we all want—it draws you into the moment and keeps you there. You don’t want to be anywhere else. The existential hum is silenced. Before I met Sophia, I’d never found one of these, and had begun to suspect they were mythical creatures, that I was as likely to happen upon a yeti as a woman who loved me as much as I loved her.

“We’d better get going,” Sophia said. She reached toward the back seat again, handed me another plastic bag. “Keep this safe for when you need it.”

It was a white dress shirt, wrapped in plastic and pinned to cardboard, and a lime-green tie. “For when you get an interview.”

Still sticky from the soda flung at me an hour earlier, I wanted to laugh at the absurdity of that sentiment, but I didn’t want to seem ungrateful of her gift.

“Watch out for immigration,” Sophia said as she pulled onto the highway. “They’re deporting homeless U.S. citizens to third world countries along with illegals.”

“You’re joking,” I said.

“They’re trying to defend it as retaliation for poor countries encouraging their people to come here. And they’re getting lots of support from people on the right.”

“Figures,” I said.

“And avoid Rincon—they’re lynching people, especially strangers.”

“Oh, Christ. We had a trading partner there.” Our list of reliable connections kept shrinking. Either the location was too dangerous, or they were going out of business.

“Uh-oh.” Sophia slowed as we approached my tribe. There was a police car pulled partway on the median by our camp, its red light flashing. I convinced Sophia to go, kissed her cheek, and thanked her for the things she had brought, then rejoined my tribe, which was clumped before a middle-aged, red-haired cop.

“We’re not doing anything illegal,” Cortez was saying, “the energy from passing cars is just being wasted. We’re not bothering anyone. We’re just trying to make an honest living! Since when was that illegal?”

“Vagrancy is illegal here in Metter,” the cop said. “Y’all need to move on.”

“Move on
where?
” Cortez said. “We don’t have homes.”

“That’s not my problem. You need to move outside the city limits.” He pointed west, down the highway. “Six miles that way. You can pitch your tents there.” Before anyone could protest further, he wheeled and headed toward his cruiser.

“Metter is closed, ladies and gentlemen,” he said before closing the door. “Gypsies spread disease.”

We packed up and started moving. It was Jim and Carrie’s turn on the bikes; the rest of us hoofed it. Mercifully, it had clouded over and cooled a little.

“We need some sort of plan,” Cortez said, throwing his free hand in the air. “This is no good, wandering around aimlessly. We need a better business model.”

And what’s the plan, what’s our fucking business model?
I wanted to shout. I kept my mouth shut. Cortez was always talking about angles and plans, but every day we still humped everything we owned somewhere else, looking for places to skim some energy, places to trade it for what we needed to live.

I caught up with Colin and Jeannie, and we slogged through the weeds. It was going to be a long six miles.

A dilapidated Saturn slowed, and the window rolled down. “Hey sweetie, let me see your tits!” a skinny black guy with bad teeth yelled.

Ange gave him the finger without turning.

“Hey,” Jeannie shouted as the car rode off, “how do you know he wanted to see
your
tits? Maybe he was talking to me!”

Ange spun around, pulled up her shirt, and waggled her tits at Jeannie. I’d never seen them before—they were smallish, but pretty fabulous, like Ange herself. I was disappointed when she dropped her shirt and turned back around.

“He may well have been talking to you,” I said to Jeannie. “You have fabulous tits.”

“Shut up,” Colin said as Jeannie laughed.

“No, really,” I persisted, “they’re beautiful. Big, firm, Italian coconuts.”

Jeannie laughed harder.

“No, really, stop talking about my wife’s fabulous tits,” Colin said over the laughter. They
were
fabulous, though Jeannie wasn’t the type to yank up her shirt and waggle them. Which was a shame, really. She kissed Colin’s cheek, still laughing, and trotted to catch up to Ange, giving her a little shove on the shoulder.

“You know what’s wrong with that guy in the car, and all the rest like him?” I said.

“What?” Colin said.

“They don’t masturbate often enough. They sacrifice every shred of dignity for the Lotto chance that some woman is going to respond to that shit and actually screw them, which would temporarily quiet the lizard brain that’s screaming at them, because they don’t shut it the hell up themselves by jerking off.”

“Ah. That’s profound,” Colin said. “Thanks, I love talking about other men’s masturbatory habits.”

It started drizzling. Everybody scrambled. Some of us grabbed the tarps and spread them across the weeds, angling them so the rainwater formed canals and spilled toward one point. Others grabbed our plastic milk jugs and began collecting.

“We’re a well-oiled machine, you know that?” Cortez said, his head tilted up to catch drops.

The rain fell harder. The tribe whooped.

Not ten minutes later, the flashing red light of officer asshole’s cruiser was reflecting off the puddles in the road.

“What did I tell y’all?” he said as soon as his head was out of the car. “Pack all this shit up and move on, and I’m not gonna tell you again!”

“Please, officer, we need this water badly,” Jeannie said. “We won’t be here long, and we’ll leave as soon as we’re finished.” The rest of us kept working.

The cop unsnapped his holster and took out his pistol. He held it at his side, angled just slightly in our direction. “I’m not gonna say it again.”

We rolled up the tarps. Ange started to say something to the cop, who was watching us like a parent making sure the kids clean up their room. Four or five of us shot her a warning glance. She shut up. We got moving. Officer asshole drove away.

We tried to hurry, to get out of town before the rain let up, but it’s hard to hurry when you’re carrying a pack filled with forty pounds of shit and you’re dehydrated.

“Hey!” Cortez said, pointing at a railroad track that disappeared into the woods to our right. “Why don’t we head along the track? We can go a mile or two and set up camp. The bulls won’t even know we’re there.”

Nobody had objections, so we climbed down a rocky gully and set out along the tracks. The gravel made for a bumpy ride on the mountain bikes, but for the rest of us it was easier than trudging through wet weeds.

The sounds of the highway receded, leaving nothing but the patter of rain. Long-leaf pines crowded close, littering the raised tracks with golden needles.

My phone jingled.
So wonderful 2 see u. U okay?
Both of us tended to suffer from severe post-visit depression.

I’m good. Run off by cop. On the move again.

Head west. Toward me. : )

“What’s that?” Carrie said, pointing up the track. Someone was coming toward us, waving a sheet or something. The track began to hum as the figure came into focus.

“Oh, I don’t fucking believe this,” Ange said.

The guy was windsurfing on the track. He shifted from side to side, picking up the swirling winds of the storm, one side of his contraption lifting off the tracks, then the other, as if he were riding waves. The clack of well-oiled wheels grew louder as he approached.

We split to either side to let him pass. He waved, and pointed back the way he’d come. “About a mile,” he shouted, then sped off on an energetic burst of wind.

“About a mile to what?” I said.

We stopped first, to harvest what water we could. The rain lasted another twenty minutes, then we pushed on with our milk jugs filled a few inches.

A mile on, another tribe was camped in a cleared strip created to allow power lines to run through. Four more of the railroad windsurfing contraptions were lined up beside the tracks. Most of the tribe were lounging in the shade, but a couple stood behind a folding table set up near one of the big, silver power line towers.

Two women hopped up to meet us, smiling and waving. One was in her mid-forties, though she may have been younger than she looked. Pale white skin is great when you’re young, but it doesn’t wear well, especially if you live in a tent and spend all day in the sun with no sunblock.

The other was probably twenty-five. She had a willowy-waifish look, tall and slim, reddish hair. Skinny as hell with no breasts to speak of, but damned sexy nonetheless. She had sort of an English look. I watched her walk toward us: she had a grace about her that made me wish I could sit and watch her all day.

“Are you here to buy weed?” the older woman asked, motioning toward the folding table.

“No, we just happened to be heading this way,” Jeannie said.

“Where you heading?” the younger one asked.

“I don’t think we know yet,” I said. “We just got flushed out of Metter.” I held out my hand to her. “Jasper.”

“Phoebe, nice to meet you,” she said.

The other woman introduced herself, and I immediately forgot her name. I suck that way sometimes.

A guy with a pointy red beard and wire-rimmed glasses came over to join us. “Have you heard rumors about a new designer virus that’s going around?”

“No. Is it a bad one?”

The guy’s tongue darted out, licked the corner of his mouth. “We don’t know. Another tribe told us about it, but they only heard about it secondhand themselves. It’s supposed to give you muscle-spasms.”

“Terrific,” I said. “You heard any news about what’s going on out west?” Last we’d heard, a rogue army from Mexico had invaded southern Texas.

“We heard that U.S. troops had been sent down there, but we haven’t heard what happened,” Phoebe offered.

We went on talking for a while, and eventually just about everyone from both tribes were huddled in groups, exchanging news and information. It was amazing, really, how well and quickly tribes got along. They invited us to make camp with them and stay a while.

“She seems like your type,” Colin said as we unpacked the tents from the bikes. “Kind of elven. I wouldn’t be surprised if her ears were a little pointy.”

“I must admit, she caught my eye. Made my heart go pit-a-pat.” An image of Sophia, smiling wide, shot through my mind.

“You should go talk to her. Ask her out.”

“Maybe I will.”

But how do you ask a woman out when you have no car, no place to live, and no money to go to a movie, even if you could get there? I didn’t understand the rules. Maybe there weren’t any rules; maybe they were still being worked out.

I volunteered to wander over to their camp when Cortez suggested we ask if they had anything to store energy in, and anything besides drugs to trade. Ange thought trading for a little weed would be good for our dispositions (Ange had spent a year in rehab for coke, eight years ago, when she was fifteen), but she was voted down.

They didn’t have anything for energy storage, so that was a bust, but I used the opportunity to sidle over to Phoebe and get chatting, and eventually I got up the nerve to ask.

“Hey,” I said, trying to sound as if an idea had just occurred to me, “you want to go into town a little later, maybe get a candy bar, kick around downtown?” I always felt stupid asking a woman out, like I was trying to trick her into something. I had issues, no question about it.

“Okay,” she said. Just like that.

“Great,” I said, trying to sound pleased but not surprised. “I’ll come find you in a while?” Something like “pick you up at seven?” might have been clearer, but neither of us had a watch, and I wasn’t really going to pick her up in anything.