by Kevin Shay
“On the horn to Atlanta every waking minute. So we’ll see you next month?”
“If that still works for you guys.”
“Looking forward to it. Here’s your sister.”
Nicole gets on. “Hello?”
“Hey there.”
“It’s about time you called. Where are you?”
“San Francisco. I’m at Rick’s place. Remember him?”
“Your guitar teacher? Sure,” she says, unenthused. Nicole was never a big fan. She found the music he taught me so mortifyingly uncool that she feared becoming lame by association and would flee to her room to avoid overhearing it. “How’s he doing?”
“Oh…old.” Unkind but succinct, and I don’t feel like going into detail.
She cluck-clucks for a minute about Dad—he’s worried about me, I ought to give him a ring. “You ever plan to tell me what the big fight was about?”
“I will. When I come to D.C.”
“And not a moment before?”
“I’d rather talk to you in person, that’s all.”
“Well, Morgan’s in the tub or I’d put him on.”
“How’s school?”
“Seems to have stabilized. They say he’s a mess for the first hour or so, but then he settles in.”
And then home for another dose of neuroses, so he can be a mess again tomorrow. “Tell him I say hi.”
“You should see his hair. It’s about four shades darker. Well, you’ll see him in a few weeks. How are you getting here, anyway?”
“Driving.”
“Where from?”
I hear the door open above and behind me. Bonnie steps onto the porch. I stand up.
“Nicole, I have to run.” I try to gauge Bonnie’s success from her face and body language. Not promising. A sad, faraway expression, wet eyes, drooping shoulders. I hand her the phone and she stares at it for a second, perplexed, until she figures out I was just giving it to her, not putting her on a call.
“Didn’t go so well?”
“Come on in.” She sounds defeated.
Rick sits on the couch playing a twelve-string guitar, gazing toward the window. A devilishly twisty piano rag few guitarists would dream of attempting, let alone on twelve-string, and he runs through it without even paying attention. He must realize I’ve come in, but gives no sign of it. I watch the fingers of his right hand, two of them permanently Pall Mall–tarred, fly over the strings. Bonnie and I stand and listen. Still playing, Rick turns his head and looks at me.
“You’re sure this shit’s gonna happen?”
“As sure as I’ve ever been about anything.”
“And it’ll really be that bad?” He doesn’t seem to doubt it. So what made Bonnie so glum?
“Nobody can say exactly. I think the best-case scenario’s a year of total chaos, where we have, you know, the power on one day and off the next. Then things quiet down a little but the world economy’s in a severe depression for, oh, ten years. Rationing, civil unrest, thirty percent unemployment.”
He snorts. “That’s the best case.”
“Unfortunately. And I don’t like our chances for that.”
He stops playing, damps the final chord with his palm. He exhales through his teeth, a long hiss like air leaving a slashed tire. “It’s a shame, Randall. It’s really a damn shame.”
“I know. I know. But look, you still have time to make some preparations.”
He shakes his head slowly. “No. I don’t think so.”
“Sure you do. I know it seems overwhelming, but if you start—”
“No. Listen. Listen to me, Randall. Look at me. I’m an old man.” I want to contradict him, but wasn’t that how I just described him to Nicole? I look to Bonnie, hoping she’ll jump in. She turns up her hands helplessly. Been down this road already. “I’m old and I’m sick. They’re gonna carve a tube into my arm so a machine can process my blood. I’m in no shape to be moving to some bomb shelter in fucking Idaho.”
“No! Who said anything about—You don’t have to move. Just ask—I don’t know, you must know someone who lives out in the country. Ask if you can stay with them for a while.” This is the part where I ought to have a concrete plan to offer. I’ve gotten a group together to ride it out at this place we bought, I should be able to say. No such luck.
“A while? Randall, listen to what you’re saying. If the situation’s as terrible as all that, there’s no going back. Things won’t get back to normal in my lifetime. True?”
“True, but—”
“Well, the hell with that. I don’t want to live in a world like that, Randall. This place is barely tolerable on a good day. If the end is coming, let it come.”
“You could at least lay in some supplies.”
He laughs. “If this…event turns out to be a small enough thing that a little bottled water can see you through it, then it really isn’t worth worrying about at all, is it?”
He has a point, one that’s crossed my mind before. If by some bizarre miracle the rollover goes basically OK, everyone will be fine, prepared or not. And if the shit hits the fan, a modicum of preparation will be no better than none at all. I can’t see a middle-ground scenario where a few days’ worth of supplies would do any good.
“No, I guess not.”
“Look. I’ve had a fine life, Randall. A full life. Full of what, exactly, I couldn’t tell you, but full. A long life? Long enough. Longer than a lot of people get who are a hell of a lot more careful than me. I’ve made twenty-six albums. Five of them are still in print, even. If I can have another few years of peace and quiet, wonderful. But I don’t need more years if I have to claw my way through them reading by kerosene lamplight and eating a cold can of ravioli. Which probably has fucking potassium.”
“And what about me, Rick?” Bonnie says, a new angry note in her voice. “Do I have any say in how many more years I get?”
Rick explodes. “Did anyone tell you I was thirty when you met me?” With a savage shove, he hurls the guitar from his lap. The neck bounces off the coffee table—crack! It stays in one piece, but something definitely broke. The guitar lands face up on the floor at his feet, strings humming, detuned by the impact.
“Jesus, Rick!” Bonnie puts her hands to her head, clutches fistfuls of hair.
He’s just getting started. Old-school Rick, but with shot lungs. Red-faced, short of breath, he spits out vicious clauses between gasps. “Were you under the impression—that you somehow would not—have to bury me? Well, excuse my selfishness—but if you want me to hang out on—a morphine drip with tubes coming—out of every goddamn hole—so you can postpone—your widowhood—fucking forget it!”
And dissolves into a spasm of choking coughs. Bonnie has turned away, heading for the door, fleeing his nasty diatribe, but rushes to him when she hears the coughing. I run to the kitchen for water. By the time I come back with a glass, he’s brought himself under control. Bonnie sits next to him, her arms around him, crying as she murmurs soothing reassurances. I hand him the glass, which I’ve filled too full. Grabbing it with a shaky hand, he spills a few ounces onto the ailing guitar.
“Randall,” he says, still not breathing well. “Thank you. But for God’s sake. Get me a glass. Of bourbon. Please.”
I look at Bonnie for guidance. She shakes her head in disgust. “Fine. Whatever, Rick. Left cabinet above the sink.”
I go back to the kitchen, open the cabinet, and stand there for a minute, staring at the Jim Beam bottle, trying to organize my thoughts. I’ve grown used to contending with people who stubbornly refuse to get it. But getting it and choosing not to do a damn thing about it—that kind of fatalism never figured into my plans. And obviously I busted into a deep well of bitterness Rick harbors about his failing health that has nothing to do with any computer problem. So now what? How do you restore someone’s survival instinct once they’ve lost it? I take the bottle from the cabinet.
A sudden long shriek of car brakes from the street almost makes me drop the bottle. Then a huge hear
t-stopping crunch of metal and glass, then more brakes, then another sickening impact.
“Oh my God!” Bonnie is up and running out the door. I follow her outside. Wait—still holding the bourbon. I set the bottle on the porch. It takes me a minute to decipher what I see in the street. A red Chevy pickup, its hood severely dented. A stunned-looking guy getting out of the truck. And about ten feet in front of the Chevy, on the sidewalk, my Custom Cruiser. Almost unrecognizable, rear end mangled, the whole driver’s side staved in by the telephone pole the truck sent it into.
“Oh, fuck. No, no, no,” I think I say as I bolt down the stairs, passing Bonnie, heading for my ex-car. Liability, I only got the liability coverage, the minimal package, how stupid was that? “No, no, no, no, no.” The dazed driver retreats behind his truck. Thinks I’m coming after him. Dude, I could give a rat’s ass about you, I just need to make some sense of this crushed Oldsmobile.
And then I’m yelling at the top of my lungs. “This isn’t right! This is wrong! This is all totally fucking wrong!” But I don’t just mean the car. I mean my whole stupid project, this worthless hopeless trip. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I see it now. How could I have been so blind, so optimistic? Did I really think I could gather all my loved ones into some sort of Y2K preparation club, create a sanctuary from scratch by sheer force of will? You fool, you absolute fool. Jesus, I’m just wandering around the country alienating everyone I’ve ever cared about. We got ourselves a regular Johnny Doomsday-seed over here. And today, for the coup de grâce, I’ve made a sick man more miserable, filled a nice woman with dread, and set them at each other’s throats. What an imbecile I was, to presume I could save anyone, could fix anything. The car is broken, the software is broken, the world is broken, I’m broken. Irreparable, all of the above.
“What am I supposed to do now?” I ask my ruined station wagon. I feel a hand on my shoulder.
“I mean, what the hell am I supposed to do now, Bobbie?”
chapter 8
426
Days
FlockWatcher, what do you look like? Are you that retiree in the powder-blue sweater and tweed cap who just ordered hot tea? Doubtful, but I can’t be sure. For all I know, you’re a precocious twelve-year-old girl. You could be anyone in this coffeeshop, which by the way is too mundane and brightly lit for a clandestine assignation. A back alley at 3 A.M. would be the right touch. Two points off for banality. But plus three for warning me:
The place has a big picture window. I’ll be able to look in before I enter. If I see anything I don’t like, I’m out of there.
He seems to suspect I’m trying to lure him in for some kind of sting operation. Weird, since we’re not doing anything illegal. Maybe just paranoid on general principle. I leaf through my FlockWatcher file, a manila folder of printouts of our email correspondence and some of his newsgroup posts. These pages paint several dissonant pictures of the man. Sometimes he’s in nuts-and-bolts survivalist mode:
Ted, you mentioned my “arsenal,” possibly in jest, but I’ll answer you anyway. I have sixteen rifles at the moment. That’smodern, working rifles. I don’t include my small collection of antiques, which I’d only fire on an experimental basis. I won’t bore you with the full list, but some highlights follow. There’s my Galil, not the classic Israeli assault rifle but the modified “sniper” model. A misnomer, because the accuracy isn’t what you’d want for true sniper purposes, but a goodweapon, and pleasingly formidable in appearance. If I needed pinpoint precision I’d go with my Dakota Longbow (cost me $3000, and a bargain at that!) or the Remington 700. I’m a Bushmaster fan from way back, but I’ve only got two at the moment: a DCM Competition and an XM15 E2S “Dissipator.”
If hungries encroach on my compound, which of these lovely pieces of precision machinery might I choose to greet them with? It’s a moot point, because they won’t make it past my perimeter traps, but the Remington is near and dear to my heart for reasons I may divulge at a later date. Anyway, on to the handguns.
Reading this, or his side of a friendly argument about the best way to deoxygenate food for dry storage (nitrogen, dry ice, or absorber packets?), I envision a rugged outdoorsman, bearded, brawny, getting up at dawn to feed the chickens and check the tripwires. But there’s also his techie side. He was a programmer in Silicon Valley and hit enough of a stock-option jackpot to retire and head for the wilderness. His inner geek occasionally reveals itself, as in his explanation of his handle when asked if he might by chance be a pastor:
Sorry to disappoint you, but the name has no religious connotations whatsoever. flock() is a system call (pronounced “efflock,” at least by me). Long ago in another life I wrote a filesystem monitoring script I happened to name flock_watcher, and decided I liked the sound of it.
This calls up an image of a skinny balding dude carefully peering down his rifle sight through wire-rimmed glasses. And sometimes an uglier face peeks through:
The die-off of a few million welfare recipients and the immolation of some urban jungles isn’t my idea of the end of the world. To the contrary, it fills my heart with gladitude.
Which suggests a sneering cruel-eyed skinhead FlockWatcher, certainly nobody whose path I’d want to cross in a normal world. But strange times make strange bedfellows. Would you buy a used laptop from this man? I’m about to.
My life has come to this: meeting a pseudonymous cryptoracist gun nut in a café in Roanoke, Virginia. Somehow I feel no apprehension. What’s the worst that could happen? He comes in shooting? That’d at least be a change of pace. Mostly, at the moment, I’m relieved to be off the Greyhound, unkinking my muscles after nine hours shrunk into two thirds of my seat, the other third serving as overflow for the behemoth sitting next to me. At three in the morning at a roadside Roy Rogers he bought a small coffee to legitimize his presence at the Fixin’s Bar, then stuffed his takeout bag brimful of tomato slices and pickle chips. Back on the bus, he ate his purloined morsels slice by sloppy slice, transferring them rhythmically from sack to mouth. Could he not afford an actual sandwich? I’d gladly have bought him one to avoid experiencing his feast of Fixin’s. It still lingers in my nose, the vinegar tang of the pickles mingled with the rancid Greyhound air—take equal parts body odor, fast food, and on-board latrine and recirculate over dry heat overnight. Not my worst ride in recent weeks, but a joy to disembark from. Although the hike from the bus station to the motel nearly did me in. Thought I’d found a place within walking distance, but the usual definition of “walking distance” doesn’t take into account a guitar and a forty-pound duffel bag crammed with all the worldly possessions I currently have access to. And now if this meeting comes off I’ll have to find room in there for the computer. Only 5.6 pounds, FlockWatcher has assured me, and I don’t doubt he’s weighed it. The rest of my stuff—except my backup guitar, which was totaled along with the station wagon—is in boxes in the back of Rick and Bonnie’s closet. Bonnie will ship the boxes, on my credit card, whenever I give the word.
Between San Francisco and here, a dozen Greyhound rides, four puppet shows, and three more failed annunciations. First, Carson. After I saw him I not only Xed his name but crossed him off the list altogether. I’m through with Carson. He made it pretty clear he was through with me when we met for dinner in Minneapolis. At a restaurant, because he pointedly did not invite me to his home. And what did we used to have in common, anyway? A sense of humor a little drier and maturer than most of our peers had, maybe, or an enjoyment of Ultimate Frisbee. Hard to remember. Carson’s wedding was when, ’96? Most of his friends by then were his fellow med students, and a handful of us from high school clustered in a corner, a little shamed by the whole affair. Here was our classmate, a pediatrician-to-be starting a career and a marriage, and we were nobody starting nothing. And now two years later I’m semiemployed and single, while Dr. and Mrs. Carson are about to have a baby. Over dinner my old friend gave the distinct impression he was catching a bad scent from my direction. The sour smell of nonsuccess, my inexplicable fa
ilure to Achieve. So of course he took my Y2K warning for just another symptom of my lack of productive focus. I brought up medical devices, and Carson echoed Uncle Frank, confident that the boys in the basement would take care of everything. He paid for dinner in a high-handed way, then said he had to get home to the wife, then dropped me off at a motel he thought would “be about right” for me, meaning a place he thought I could afford, meaning a shit-hole. I doubt we’ll speak again.
From there to Ohio, that creepy hickish county on the Lake Erie shore where Colby and Julian, late of my freshman dorm, have taken up residence. A thriving resort community during the summer, I guess, but off-season it’s downright tumbleweedy, a place you feel like you could die and not be found for years. The rurality helps them work, they claim, she on her plays and he on his short stories. But the isolation has left them no throats to be at but each other’s. Anyone can see they’re a disastrous couple, but they’ve been together since college and will face some serious withdrawal shakes when they finally snap the yoke, so inertia keeps them together. At night they bicker over bottles of Bud in redneck dives that time forgot and drive home drunk on unlit roads I’d be afraid to try sober. At one of those bars, shouting over the Alan Jackson–centric jukebox, I explained TEOTWAWKI to my old pals. Colby quizzed me on the details with a strange avidity—ready to believe it, I thought at first, but then it clicked that she was sizing me up to use as material. A quirky supporting character in one of her darkly witty chamber pieces. Julian, meanwhile, conveyed his deep concern for my psychiatric well-being. A few people I’ve tried to tell about Y2K have thought me slightly unhinged, but Julian decided I had a genuine screw loose. Would’ve committed me right then and there, given power of attorney.
My visit to Rob in Philadelphia, two days ago, was the closest to fruitful. If only Lisa hadn’t been in the way the whole time. His sparkling trainwreck of a new girlfriend, a young lady with a dazzling face, a delightful figure, and an eggshell psyche. Who took it as a personal affront whenever Rob or I made mention of any individual or event from our mutual past without giving her a comprehensive background briefing so she could fully appreciate the reference. I’ve known Rob since Little League, and we have a lot of past to rehash. But if he left some fraction of a reminiscence unexplained, Lisa would flip into a vindictive sulk that cast a black pall over the room until he appeased her with info. Eventually this made catching up with Rob impossible, because Lisa also clung to his side like Chang to Eng, maybe fearing he might sneak off and have more experiences unshared by her. But lo and behold, when I ran Y2K up the flagpole, Rob didn’t exactly salute but didn’t tear it down and desecrate it either. So I blew forty bucks at Kinko’s printing out page after page of sobering stuff. Which I maybe could have pared down, but he’s a legal assistant and must be used to wading through lots of paper.