Soft Apocalypse (3 page)

I dry-brushed my teeth with a dollop of the tribe’s toothpaste, then busied myself talking with my tribe, all the while feeling guilty about Sophia. I didn’t understand the rules there, either. Could I see other women, given that she was married and we weren’t sleeping together? I guess the bigger question was, did I want to? At the moment, yes, I did. I wanted to do something normal for a change. I wandered back over to get Phoebe.

She had put on lipstick and eyeliner, and lots of perfume. I felt a wave of gratitude that she would make the effort to look nice for our date.

“Ready to go?” I said.

She nodded, and we walked off, climbing the rise to the tracks and heading toward Metter.

We went through the “Where are you froms” and “What did you used to dos” (she had a Master’s degree in English lit—another unfortunate soul who had followed her heart), then talked music and movies. She had an easy confidence about her that, instead of radiating “I’m out of your league,” took me along, made me feel confident as well. I liked her, and felt happy that I was able to feel something for someone besides Sophia.

Which got me thinking about Sophia, got me wishing that I was laughing with Sophia. As we walked, my mind kept wandering away from Phoebe, and I kept struggling to bring it back.

We split a microwaved burrito at the Minute Mart, and bought candy bars for dessert. When she reached into her bag to get money, I offered to pay, but she said that she was happy to split it.

We sat on the curb in the parking lot among scattered cigarette butts, beside the air hose for inflating tires, as far away from the stink of the gasoline pumps as we could get.

A scrawny little Chihuahua came out from behind a green dumpster and started barking at me, flying backward with the force of his barks. He was half-starved, and seemed outraged that no one was feeding him. I broke off a piece of my Butterfinger and tossed it to him. He scarfed it down, then immediately took up barking again. He darted forward and nipped at my feet. Phoebe found this hilarious, especially the fact that he wasn’t bothering her at all, just me.

When we’d finished I popped back inside to use the bathroom. It occurred to me on the way out that it would be nice if I bought Phoebe something—a little gift of some sort. It would have to be really cheap, but I didn’t want to get her a toy, or gum. It should be something thoughtful.

A rack of postcards caught my eye. I spun them around, rejecting aerial views of Metter, pigs talking to each other. There was one with hula dancers—clearly a stock photo from Hawaii. The caption read
Everything’s Better in Metter
. Perfect.

“I bought you a gift,” I said as we started walking.

She took the card, examined it, and laughed. “It pictures the famed Metter hula dancing troupe! Thank you.”

The sky was dark blue. We passed a dilapidated Cinema 9 (which was probably now in reality a Cinema 2 or 3—no way they were showing movies on all of those screens), and I wished we could afford to see a movie. The last movie I’d seen had been with Sophia, probably six months ago. I’d kissed her in the dark, and she’d kissed me back, then after a moment she’d whispered, “I shouldn’t,” and squeezed my hand, and we’d watched the movie.

Sophia’s smiling face returned to its usual position, as the screen-saver of my mind, and now I felt guilty—like I was misleading Phoebe, because there was no room in my heart for her and she didn’t know that. If she liked me, she was probably worrying about making a good impression, hoping this could lead somewhere. But it couldn’t. Not now, anyway.

As if on cue, my phone jingled. I’d forgotten to take the god damned thing out of my pocket before we left, because it had been as attached to me as my ears for the past year.

“Do you have a call?” Phoebe asked.

“Text message,” I said. “I’ll check it later.”

“Wow, how does your tribe afford a phone?”

“For emergencies and stuff,” I muttered.

Phoebe reached out and took my hand; our fingers laced together easily. We reached the railroad tracks and headed into thick darkness and nighttime insect sounds.

Telling a lie is kind of like having a piece of food caught between your teeth. I tried to simply forget it and enjoy the date, but the whole date felt like a lie now.

“You know that text message? I wasn’t being honest about it.”

“I kind of figured. People don’t usually jerk when their phone rings.”

“The truth is…” What? I’m seeing someone else? I’m having an affair? “I’m emotionally involved with someone.”

I told her about Sophia. She was cool about it, very understanding. We talked about it as if we were friends, and after making some thoughtful comments and suggestions, she told me that she was still recovering from a painful breakup. She’d been dating a guy, and he left her a few months ago. He was a black guy, and her parents had disowned her and kicked her out of the house over it, so she and the guy left town and caught up with a tribe formed by some of his old high school friends. And now he was gone, and she had no one but the tribe.

“The ironic thing is, I don’t even smoke weed,” she said. “I barely drink. Not that I judge people who do, but I’ve always been pretty straight-laced, and I find myself in a tribe that gets by selling drugs.”

“Here I had you pegged as a wild child, getting high and living by your own rules.”

“I’m more the read a good book while drinking tea type.” I liked the way she said “tea.” There was a British lilt to it.

We walked in easy silence. Soon we could hear music drifting from the dual camps. It sounded like heavy metal.

Phoebe slowed, tugged me to a stop. “We should say goodnight here, before we have an audience.”

I wrapped my arms around her, and we kissed—a good, soft, date kiss. She was a good kisser. Her breath was sour, but I’m sure mine was too, probably worse than hers. We were getting used to smelling bad and having bad breath.

“This was fun,” she said. “Thanks for asking.”

“Can I get in touch with you somehow? Maybe we could get together again?”

“Hold on.” She squatted on the track to rummage in her bag. She pulled out a pen and a scrap of paper, jotted a number, and the name Crystal. “This is the number of a friend. It might take a few days, but I always check in with her eventually. I’ll send a message back through her.”

We walked into camp holding hands, let our fingers slip apart as we reached the midpoint between our tribes, and each went to join our own.

“So how’d it go?” Colin asked as soon as I sat in the flattened wild grass.

“She’s a really, really nice woman,” I said. I watched Phoebe, standing with a few of her tribe mates, probably discussing the date as well. “Sophia texted me right in the middle of the date. I forgot to turn off my phone.”

“Not good,” Colin said.

The music was coming from their camp, and some of them were dancing. The forty-something woman whose name I forgot pulled Phoebe by the elbow and got her dancing. She danced a little awkwardly, shyly, maybe because she felt self-conscious that I was watching.

“I should be interested in her, but I don’t want to lose Soph.”

“Um, you don’t have Soph,” Colin said. “She climbs into bed with her husband every night. You climb into your tent with your trusty right hand.”

“I’m a lefty,” I said, but the joke was reflex. I was stinging from the image of Sophia climbing into bed with her husband. I saw them kissing, his hand on her bare breast, couldn’t get the movie in my head to stop, even though the image was like lit cigarettes pressed to my eyes.

“I have to stop seeing her, don’t I?” I said. And there it was. I’d never said the words before; I hadn’t even allowed myself to think them. But this was killing me, it was torture.

“Yeah,” Colin said. “If she won’t leave her husband, what do you have? Phone calls and text messages. That’s never going to be enough.”

I nodded, my eyes filling with tears.

“I’m not saying Sophia’s a bad person,” he said. “Obviously she’s a very good person, trying to do her best. But you have to do what’s best for you.” He stood. “I can see you’re about to need someone to hold you and rock you and tell you everything will be all right, and I’m sure you don’t want that person to be me,” Colin said.

He went over to Ange, squatted beside her and said something. Ange looked over at me, then sprung up and headed my way. I was crying like a baby before she reached me, arms out, ready to enfold me.

“It’s been almost two years,” she said as she held me, “you don’t want to turn around one day and realize ten years have passed, and you’re still waiting by the phone. You’re a wonderful guy. You deserve a whole person, not one you have to share.”

But the whole person I wanted was Sophia.

“After you broke up with Tyler, how long did it take you to get over him?” I asked, speaking into her neck, which was wet with my tears.

“I never got over him. It got less painful, but even now, those emotions come crashing down sometimes, and it’s like we just broke up.”

I think everyone has a Sophia. When Ange first told me about Tyler, who she fell in love with when she was sixteen, she’d said “Don’t get me wrong, I love Cortez, but Tyler, he sunk to my bones.”

When you fall in love, really fall in love, the stakes are so high.

I took a walk down the tracks and called Sophia. She said she couldn’t talk, which meant her husband was there.

“Can you take a walk. I really need to talk.”

She was quiet for a long time. I knew she could hear in my tone, in my plugged up nose, that something was very wrong.

“I know what you’re going to say. I don’t want to hear it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

I heard her close her front door. “Please don’t,” she said. She was crying, which made me cry harder. “You’re the only thing in my life that makes me happy.”

We talked for hours. I said if she was never going to leave him (I could never say his name, I just called him “him”), what was the point? She said she didn’t know what the point was, she didn’t need a point, she just needed to hear my voice every day. I told her we were just torturing ourselves.

In the end, she said she understood, but she still didn’t want me to go. We told each other “I love you” about fifty times. And then I held a dead phone.

You go a little crazy after a breakup; you know you’re a little crazy, that your thinking is all askew and can’t be trusted, but you can’t do anything about it besides wait it out. I’ve learned it’s best not to make any substantive decisions during this time, because they’re mostly going to turn out to be bad ones.

So I followed my tribe, one foot in front of the other, feeling bleak, tortured by guilt at the thought of the pain I was causing Sophia, knowing I could stop it by calling her and saying I was sorry and wanted things back the way they’d been.

We headed toward Vidalia, working rivers along the way with our hydropower collectors, roadsides with our windmills, spread solar blankets whenever we stopped and the sun was out.

“Nietzsche said ‘What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger,’” Jim said to me as we slogged along another trash-strewn roadside."

“Yeah, right,” I said. “How about radiation?”

Bob Marley came on the portable radio Cortez was carrying. I went over and stabbed the power button as that aching sadness ripped through me. Marley was one of Sophia’s favorites. Cortez looked at me funny, but didn’t say anything. They were all cutting me a wad of slack.

I’d loved Marley long before I met Soph. We used to play it during our high school poker games. That got me thinking of my folks, who put up with our loud late-night poker games in their basement, who had died in the water riots in Arizona. I turned the power back on. She couldn’t have Bob Marley.

Cracks of gunfire sounded in the distance, and a police siren. Or maybe an ambulance siren. It occurred to me that I couldn’t tell the difference. I looked around for Colin. The Winn-Dixie was getting close; I decided there wasn’t enough time to get into the nuances of sirens.

The Winn Dixie was almost empty. Cortez and Jim and I went in—they were less likely to refuse our business if there were only a few of us. The sole woman at the row of checkout counters looked agitated as we pushed open the electric doors, but she didn’t say anything. We set about shopping.

“Hey, what about these?” Cortez said, holding up a package of Oreos.

“We should stick to the list,”Jim said, closing his eyes as he spoke—a classic Jim mannerism. “We can’t afford to buy empty calories.”

Cortez tossed them back on the shelf, huffing. “We’ve got to enjoy ourselves a little, or we might as well be dead.”

A shrill voice up by the registers grabbed our attention. We hurried to the front of the aisle to see what was going on.

The checkout girl was tossing stuff into a cart, and she looked scared as hell.

“Stay!” she shouted, pointing at a woman standing near the entrance.“Don’t come in,just stay!” The woman looked like she was in excruciating pain—she was moaning and gasping for breath, weaving noticeably, her hands dangling loosely at her sides.

“Jesus, what’s wrong with her?” Cortez whispered.

“Here.” The checkout girl pushed the shopping cart toward the woman. It rattled along part of the way, then veered into a cake mix display, knocking boxes to the floor. “Just take it and leave!”

The woman took a flaccid, spastic step toward the cart, then another. It was horrible, the way she walked. Her teeth were gritted in pain, her cheeks wet. She latched onto the cart, used it to steady herself as she jerked slowly, slowly toward the door.

Cortez ran to get the door for her.

“Are you crazy?” checkout girl screamed. “Stay away from her!” Cortez’s sneakers screeched on the linoleum as he stopped short.

“What’s wrong with her?” he asked.

“Just get out of here before I call the police.”

“Fine, fine, we’re going,” I said. “But we need this stuff.” It wasn’t half of what we needed. “Just let us check out first.”

“Twenty bucks. Leave it on the counter and go,” she said without looking into the cart Jim was pushing. Cortez pulled a twenty out of the pocket of his jeans and dropped it on the counter. The checkout girl was looking off to one side, tears in her eyes, biting her bottom lip.