Soft Apocalypse (29 page)

She was wearing a big floppy hat over wild, tangled auburn hair, Khaki shorts, and a white button-down sweater like my grandma used to wear. Still, she had a machete.

I raised my hands. “Okay. No problem.”

As my heart slowed I noticed that the woman was so scared the machete was shaking. She had a pretty bad cut on her shin—it was straight and fairly deep, like a slashing knife wound.

“We’re just looking for a place to—”

Behind her, the bedside table was adorned with knickknacks. A postcard of hula dancers caught my eye. The caption read
Everything’s Better in Metter
. It reminded me of something: I’d bought a postcard just like it once, at a convenience store when I was on a date.

A tingle washed over me—an honest to god tingle. I studied the woman carefully.

“Phoebe?”

Her look of surprise was priceless. She looked at me carefully; her eyes grew wide.

“Jasper, right?” She lowered the machete.

The rest of the tribe had rushed over when I cried out, and were crowded around the doorway and the big glassless window. I introduced everyone. Of course she’d already met Colin, Jeannie, and Cortez, but that was briefly, eight years ago.

She hadn’t changed much. She still had pretty green eyes and (despite the grime) refined, aristocratic features—high cheekbones, a perfectly shaped nose, a long, elegant neck. She could have been a young Harvard lit professor who specialized in Milton. She had nice legs—lean, shapely runner’s legs. Greyhound legs.

“That’s a pretty bad cut,” Colin said.

“I did it while hacking through the bamboo.” She looked chagrined. “I’m actually not as spastic as that suggests.”

“I’m sure the other ten thousand hacks were works of art. We all know what it’s like to swing that thing for hours.” We didn’t actually use a machete—we’d decided early on it was too energy-inefficient—but it seemed like the right thing to say. I took another look at the leg. “I hate to say this, but I think it needs to be stitched.”

Phoebe went a little white. “Really?”

“Definitely,” Cortez said. “It’s not going to heal right like that. Stuff will get in it. It’ll get infected.” He clapped my shoulder. “Colin and me will boil some water to clean the cut. I’ve got a needle and thread you can use to close it up.”

“Me?” I protested.

Cortez nodded. “You’ve performed major surgery. Compared to that, this will be a piece of cake.”

Phoebe looked confused. “You performed surgery?”

“I removed someone’s appendix once,” I said, feeling a blush of pride, but trying not to let it show.

I told Phoebe the story while the water boiled, then I cleaned out the cut with a bath towel. Colin had found a hundred of them in a linen closet in the manager’s office.

I picked up the needle, which Jeannie had dipped in the boiling water, thread and all. I may have done it once before, but I hadn’t enjoyed it, and I was still horrified at the idea of sewing up somebody’s skin. Someone had to do it, though. “I’m guessing this is going to hurt.”

Phoebe just nodded.

I poked the needle through clean, white skin. Phoebe hissed and squeezed her eyes shut. I had to resist the urge to close my eyes as well. I ran the needle under the skin on the other side of the gash, brought the needle out through the skin and pulled the thread through.

The rest of the tribe left to give Phoebe some privacy. I got her talking to take her mind off what I was doing. It got a little easier after the first stitch.

Phoebe had been living for the past couple of years in a little co-op carved out in Twin City, but had a falling out with her boyfriend and left. These details were conveyed in small pieces, punctuated with winces and a few tears. I filled her in on the low points of my life, then cast about for distractions.

“What are all those things on the night stand?” I asked. Beside the postcard, there were photos, little stuffed animals, figurines, a book, all carefully arranged.

“It’s my stuff,” she said, smiling sheepishly. “It calms me. Everywhere I stay, I arrange these things in the same way to make it feel more like a home.”

“What about if you’re sleeping outside?”

She gave an embarrassed shrug. “I still do it.”

I pictured her sleeping on a bed of leaves, her curios arranged on a cleared rectangle of ground beside her, a talisman against the icy blasts of loss and uncertainty.

“Familiar things help me cope with the anxiety. Even before things went bad I was anxious.” She squeezed her eyes shut to the pain. “Ouch. Sometimes it’s like I’m drowning—like there’s no air to breathe.” She blew a puff of air that brushed back a lock of her insanely curly hair. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to unload on you. I’ve been alone for a long time and I think it’s making me weird.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” I said. “Just keep talking. I’m almost done.”

I glanced at her curio table. There was a photo of a girl and an elderly woman. The girl was in a numbered jersey, and they were at a sporting event of some sort. “Is that you?”

Phoebe looked over my shoulder. “Mm hm. With my nana, at a track meet.”

“There,” I said, leaning back and letting my aching shoulders relax. The needle dangled against her leg on the end of an inch of thread. I cut it with a pocket knife Cortez had left beside me, and taped some gauze over the wound. We didn’t have any bandages.

“Thanks, Doctor,” she said. “I don’t have my checkbook with me, but you can bill me to this address.”

“Have you been here long?” I asked.

“A couple of days.”

I picked up a little stuffed pig from the night stand.

“Sir Francis Bacon,” Phoebe said.

I tapped the postcard with my fingernail. “I’m touched that you kept my gift in your memento collection.”

Phoebe laughed. “Yes, it’s almost like having it on display in a museum.”

Memories of those days washed over me—the music playing in the camp, the first Polio-X victims, the cops chasing us out of town. I’d been so conflicted about that date, because of my “relationship” with Sophia. Ironic that the woman I’d been so hung up on back then was right outside. I didn’t feel like I was old enough to be nostalgic for an earlier time, and those certainly weren’t good times, but I still felt an indescribable longing.

“I can’t believe we didn’t even recognize each other,” Phoebe said.

“It was, what? Ten or eleven years ago?” I said.

“It feels like such a long, long time,” she said. “Can I really be only thirty-five years old?”

“My mom once told me that I’d be shocked by how fast life flew by,” I said. “I don’t think that happens when you’re scared most of the time.”

Phoebe stood. “Shall we join the others?” We went outside.

We all lounged in the parking lot talking for a long time. Phoebe told us about Stephan, her husband of sorts who’d ditched her in the middle of nowhere, trading her in for a relationship that bordered on pedophilia. We told her about Jeannie’s delivery, and Ange, though not everything about Ange.

Finally, Jeannie stood, and the rest of us followed suit and went off to sleep. I went to my dark, empty room and sat on scraps of carpet, among the components of a smashed TV. Right before bed was the worst time. The first few months after Ange’s death had been filled with flashbacks of the killing—images I kept from everyone else. The flashbacks had grown less frequent, but I still missed her terribly. I missed talking to her, having her there. I had never really loved her, nor she me, but that didn’t diminish the incredibly strong friendship we’d had.

Colin knocked on the door frame. “So, what do you think?”

“I think we should invite her to join us, if it’s okay with the others. She has nobody, and she’s a good person.”

He nodded. “I’ll ask them.” I’m sure he could hear the depression in my voice. “Nothing else, though?”

He didn’t need to lay it out for me. I knew what he was getting at. “You know, you never see love stories set in concentration camps, and I think there’s a reason for that.”

He nodded. “You might feel different in a few months. You never know.”

I shrugged. “I doubt it.”

Colin left me alone. I stared at the wall. Laughter drifted in from a few stragglers leaving the parking lot. There was a thrumming in my eardrums, a pressure. I wanted to sleep, but I wasn’t tired.

The morning was hot and smoky, the aphids buzzing in the wild grass out past the parking lot.

Cortez leaned in my window. “We took a vote. We want Phoebe to join us. You want to ask her?” I took a big, sleepy breath and nodded.

When I stepped into Colin and Jeannie’s room, Phoebe was telling them what she’d heard about Athens. It sounded like the Doctor Happy crowd had lured thousands to join them. Maybe they could establish a beachhead to get things stabilized in the region, who knew? As long as they didn’t come my way with their needles, that was fine with me.

“I’m going to get some air,” Phoebe said after a while. She grabbed her sweater and headed for the parking lot.

“She’s such a sweetheart,” Sophia said. “I came in to check on her last night, and we talked for a long time. I told Jean Paul if we didn’t take her with us, I was staying with her.” Jean Paul smiled sardonically.

“I’ll go ask her,” I said.

Phoebe was sitting on a concrete step, her knees pressed together, her feet pigeon-toed, reading an old waterlogged book:
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
.

“You don’t see many people reading these days, except the newspaper,” I said.

“They don’t know what they’re missing,” she said. It had to be in the 80s, but she was still wearing her sweater.

“You read a lot?”

“I read all the time. I always have.”

“What are you reading?”

She looked down at her lap, marked her spot with a finger, held the book up so I could see the cover. “It’s about Savannah, back in the nineteen nineties.”

“Really? Is it good?”

She wobbled her head. “It’s okay. I’ve read it before—I like that I know most of the places he writes about.”

“Hm. Maybe I could borrow it when you’re done.”

Phoebe knotted her eyebrows at that.

“We’d like you to join us, if you’re interested.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “That’s really kind of you.” She looked directly at me, something she didn’t do very often. “Thanks,” she said. “I was hoping you might ask. It’s difficult being alone out here.”

We ate a hellish mix of bitter grass, wild onions, and mint leaves I’d harvested since we got clear of the bamboo and there was more biodiversity. Afterward we relaxed in the parking lot. Cortez settled on the tailgate of a truck, plugged our energy pack into the radio

and took his daily stroll up and down the dial.

We all bolted upright when a voice leapt out of the static.

“The Wasteman was having a bubble, I tell ya.” The speaker had a Jumpy-Jump accent mixed with a southern twang. “Told her he was issuing a batybwoy warning on Paddy.”

A second adolescent voice laughed raucously. “Paddy’s always using a toe to do a thumb’s job.”

They rambled on, gossiping in their incoherent slang about the Wasteman and Paddy, about who better watch out, and who should represent themselves physically at the radio station.

“Come on, say something helpful,” Jean Paul growled.

More crap. Termite was working for the firemen, so he needed to be drenched.

“At least it tells us there’s something left of Savannah,” Colin said.

“Let’s go home,” I said. “I’m tired of this.”

“It could be worse there than here,” Cortez said.

“The last I heard when I was still in Twin City was that Savannah was a very bad place to be. We were in short-wave communication with people there,” Phoebe said. “Of course that was almost six months ago.”

We fell into disappointed silence, listening to the two boys talk about killing.

“I don’t care,” I said. “I’m sick of these ghost towns.”

“Where would we live if we went back?” Colin asked. “With so many people dead, there might be more places to live, or there may be less because so much was burned, but it doesn’t matter, because we have no way to pay rent.”

“The Poohbah’s making a zigzag that’s likely to terminate Twig’s hall pass,” the broadcaster said.

We looked at each other; we looked at the floor.

“Well, if Savannah’s infrastructure is intact, I can certainly provide you with all the money you need to get started,” Jean Paul said. “But I doubt that’s the case.”

I guess I could have interpreted that as a generous offer, but to me it reeked of condescension.

“Why don’t we just head in that direction?” I suggested. “We don’t want to head west toward Athens, or Atlanta, which is bound to be worse than Savannah. South is going to be hotter and dryer. North is where all those rifles are. We can scout out Savannah, and if it’s bad we could head north up the coast.”

No one had any better ideas, so we headed in the general direction of home.

“There is no such word as ‘jerkin.’ I’ve never heard or seen the word ‘jerkin’ in my life,” Phoebe said as she jumped from the roof of an SUV, crashed through bamboo stalks and onto the hood of a sedan.

“There is,” I said. “It’s from back in Conan the Barbarian times—it’s like a leather vest. You can store your quiver of arrows in it.”

“I’m going to find a dictionary. You want to make a bet?”

“It won’t be in a little pocket dictionary, but if you can find one of those giant dictionaries that could fell a charging ox, I’ll bet you. I wish there was still an Internet. We could just Google it.”

I caught a glimpse of color in the distance, felt the stirrings of a thrill deeply conditioned in me from childhood. Bright multicolor flags, red-and-white-striped awnings. A Ferris wheel, stretching high above the bamboo. “Oh my,” I said. “The carnival is in town.”

Phoebe looked confused for a moment, then she saw what I was looking at and broke into a big smile. “Oh man, do I love a good seedy carnival.”

“Me too,” I said. “You think the owners left any good salvage when they abandoned it?”

“Probably not. They were probably traveling light, moving from town to town.” She slapped at something behind her ear, looked at her hand. “Then again, the only way to know for sure would be to make a quick trip over there.”