Paleo / The Doomsday Prepper

by David Liss

  “Do you want something?” William set his jaw, planted his feet, trying to act all touch guy.

  “Just wanted to say hello,” Pete said. “Since we’re neighbors and all.”

  The thing was, Pete wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted now that he was here. Maybe he’d been hoping that William would be all freaked out seeing him here – the whole I know where you work thing – but it didn’t seem to impress him. In fact, now that he was here, Pete had to work hard not to let his doubt and embarrassment show.

  “William, let’s go,” the woman said, all agitated, like Pete was going to rape her or something.

  “No, it’s cool,” William said, his voice neutral, almost cold. “Pete is my neighbor.” He turned to Pete. “You look a little agitated, Pete. You have a rough day?”

  “Yeah, well that’s how it goes in my line of work.”

  William looked across the street to Pete’s truck, eying the sign on the side. “Home inspections, huh?”

  “That’s right,” Pete said.

  “I’ve seen the truck in your driveway.”

  Now he was expecting the usual crap: Can you check to see if we need more insulation; should I replace my pipes; how out of date is my wiring. All that bullshit.

  “Nice,” William said. “Look, I shouldn’t have given you such a hard time the other day. You caught me in the middle of something. I get the whole lawn thing from your point of view, and I realize you don’t get it from mine. So, maybe you should.”

  Now Pete was thrown. William was suddenly being all reasonable. That would be fine if he were backing down, maybe worried that Pete knew about the headless goat in the backyard, but that wasn’t it. He wasn’t giving an inch of turf. Pete recognized exactly what was going in. William was being magnanimous. He was condescending to be nice to his blue collar neighbor. It was a smart move, because now Pete couldn’t escalate things without looking like a dick, but if he didn’t, then he would be a pussy.

  Pete was seething, but still, he had to admire it. The guy had moves. He knew how to be tough in front of the hot Mexican girl without getting into a scrap and looking like an asshole.

  “Maybe I should what?” Pete finally said.

  “Maybe you should know what it’s all about.” He cracked the thinnest of smiles. “I like your attitude. A guy like you would fit right in.”

  Now he was sure the Douche was making fun of him. “What would I be fitting in with?”

  “You’ll see. Come on by my place tomorrow night at eleven. I know it’s late, but that’s what time we get started.”

  “Started with what?” Pete asked.

  “Mowing the lawn.”

  * * *

  Though he told himself a dozen times over he wasn’t going to do it, that he didn’t want any part of his asshole neighbor or his goat-draining religion, Pete ended up wandering over to William’s house at a quarter after eleven. There were cars parked up and down the street, and lights on at the house, but no noise escaped onto the stoop when Pete rang the bell.

  William opened the door, wearing his casual jeans and t-shirt combo. This did not surprise him. What surprised him were the William clones milling around the house, all of them fit, all of them wearing jeans and tight t-shirts. Some of the shirts named out-of-state schools, but most of the single-colored shirts were black. They stood in small groups, and each guy who was talking was acting like what he had to say was the most interesting thing anyone had ever uttered in the history of assholes shooting off their mouths. Most of them had goblets of red wine, though a few guys were doing shots of tequila they poured out of a weirdly-shaped bottle.

  William waved Pete inside, putting a hand on his shoulder as he quickly closed the door behind him. William ushered Pete inside the room, pressing him forward a little too forcefully for Pete’s comfort.

  “Listen up, guys,” William announced.

  The men ceased their conversation. They looked up from their drinks and important conversations and hilarious stories. They pointed their square jaws in his direction. Pete, who had once exuded his own feral confidence now felt like the basset hound among the wolves. He felt old and fat and bald, and he wished to hell he were somewhere else.

  “This is Pete,” William announced. “He lives across the street, and he came by over the weekend to request I cut my lawn.”

  The GQ set burst into cruel laughter.

  Pete wanted to get the hell out of there. He wanted to run. He was actually afraid, afraid of the other guys, of getting beaten up. He suddenly had the feeling that it was going to be him out back, dangling from the scaffolding, his blood dripping into a metal bucket. It was going to be his head propped on a department store manikin. That’s why he’d been invited. He was the human sacrifice for their fucked up devil-worshiping religion, and Pete had walked right into it. He might as well have been wearing a shirt that pronounced ASK ME ABOUT BEING A SACRIFICE TO SATAN. It was ridiculous and impossible and depressing, but it was all undeniably true. But even more than he was afraid of staying, he was afraid of leaving, of being a total fucking coward who ran in terror from Douchebag William’s house. That was why he stayed put.

  William raised his hand good naturedly, like a politician on a stump speech after enumerating the wrong-headed ideas of the opponent. “I know. I know. I thought the same thing too. Pussy. Fat, old, bald guy comes to my house telling me what to do with my lawn? Give me a break, right?”

  There were murmurs of agreement. And more laughter. They were laughing at Pete, and that was fucking bullshit. He’d been feeling old just a second ago, but that was his feeling, and he had the right to it. He didn’t have more than ten years on most of these guys, so maybe they should all just shut the fuck up.

  Pete opened his mouth to explain to them the wisdom of doing exactly that. He was going to tell Douchebag William and his goblet-fondling metrosexual friends to fuck the hell off, but the thing was, he couldn’t speak. He felt as though he’d lost control of his throat muscles. He could breath, but no sounds were coming out. It was like one of those dreams where you try to scream but you can’t, except that this was real life, and there were a dozen alpha males standing around him, drinking expensive wine and staring at him, amused, while his eyes bulged.

  “But the thing is,” William continued, “he then showed up at my place of work. He found out where my office was, and he waited outside, and when I came out with a babe on my arm, he confronted me. He got in my face. He menaced me. In public.”

  Pete braced himself for more jeers, for more laughter and pointing and humiliation, but that’s not what happened. The Sunday-New-York-Times-readers weren’t jeering or smiling anymore. They were nodding at him, lips pressed together in approval. One guy took a big sip of wine and said, “Nice,” and his saying it was like a wizard waving a wand. The muscles in Pete’s throat relaxed. He knew he could speak, but he didn’t want to. He felt like he wanted to listen.

  “Yeah,” William agreed. “That’s what I thought. I said to myself, here’s a guy with a, a huge sack. Here’s a guy who doesn’t put up with someone fucking with him. Here’s a guy who is one of us.”

  The rest of the guys were nodding vigorously now. Some of them were raising their glasses to toast him.

  Pete now decided it was time to exercise his restored powers of speech. “One of you what?”

  William waved at one of the guys, who brought them both goblets of wine. “Couldn’t hurt to have a drink while I explain it.”

  Pete looked at the glass a little warily. He’d drink wine if he had to. It beat staying sober, especially at times like this, but he never much liked it. “Any chance I could get a beer.”

  William laughed, like Pete was a kid who said he wanted to be a space pirate when he grew up. “No, man, you can’t drink that garbage if you want to hang with us. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Me and the guys, we’re turning back the clock.” He raised his glass in salute. “You know what happened to the Neanderthals, Pete?”

&nbs
p; “How the fuck should I know that?” he asked, quite reasonably he believed.

  “People used to think our ancestors wiped them out, that we outfought them. Turns out that isn’t true. People today have around two percent Neanderthal DNA, which means we didn’t outfight them, we outfucked them. We interbred them out of existence. But that also means we’re them. We’re still cavemen. We have that within us. All of us here do HyperStrong. You ever heard of that?”

  Pete knew a couple of guys, contractors, who did HyperStrong. It was this crazy workout cult that was supposed to kick your ass. You had to join a special gym, which cost like $300 a month, and you could only go for scheduled classes where you would climb ropes and hit big tires with sledgehammers. It sounded like bullshit to Pete, but the guys he knew who did it were in great shape and they swore by it. Exercise classes never much appealed to Pete. He didn’t care how macho the equipment was, it still smacked of jazzercize. When he went to the gym, which he was meaning to start doing again real soon, he liked to lift on his own schedule, not when some dick with a stopwatch blew a whistle at him.

  Most of these opinions he kept to himself, however. “Yeah, I’ve heard of it.”

  “We do the paleo diet, too. You ever hear of that?”

  Pete shook his head.

  “We eat only what cavemen ate. Meat – what we hunt ourselves or grass-fed beef, not that factory-farmed bullshit, which is full of antibiotics and hormones. Organic fruits and vegetables, and that’s it. No grains. No beans. No packaged foods. No beer. No booze at all except wine and tequila.”

  “Jesus,” said Pete, who did not think a life without Big Macs and cold brews was worth living. “No wonder the cavemen went extinct.”

  “There’s a period of adjustment,” William agreed, “but then you know what you feel?”

  “Like you want to order a pizza?” Pete asked.

  “You feel strong. You feel fit. You feel like a man, Pete. When was the last time you felt like a real man?”

  Pete opened his mouth to object, but he saw these guys staring at him, all of them with their perfect bods and chiseled good looks.

  “We weren’t always this fit,” William said. “I used to weigh 250 pounds. I was a lardass, and I couldn’t get a girl to save my life. Look at me now.”

  “And you became a real man because you exercised and changed what you ate?” Pete asked.

  “That’s just two of the three things,” William said.

  Pete sensed he was supposed to ask, and he hated to be made to perform like a monkey, but he had to know. “What was the third?”

  “Our religion.”

  Pete looked William in the eye. He weighed too much because he drank too much beer and ate too much crap, but so the hell what? He was an American, and he could do what the fuck he wanted. He was not going to let this guy intimidate him with his cult bullshit.

  “Is that the religion that doesn’t let you cut your lawn but does let you hang a headless goat in your backyard?”

  William met his gaze and grinned. “That’s the one.”

  * * *

  They were sitting in a dark room. It was upstairs, and it seemed to have been designed for this exact purpose, for rituals. There were benches along the wall, and a fire pit right in the center of the floor, with a chimney opened above it. There was an altar of some kind, too, made of pale rock, on which sat a stone bowl, like the kind they use to make guacamole at your table in fancy Mexican restaurants. Next to it stood the manikin, the one he’d seen outside. It still had the goat head propped on its neck.

  Their religion was like their diet, William had explained while they were still downstairs. It was paleo. It turned out they weren’t Satanists, they were animists, and they summoned and commanded and served – not worshipped – the spirits of things. Everything has a spirit, William said. Plants and animals, and even mechanical things, like cars and computers. He didn’t know why – if they had them naturally, the way people had souls, or if spirits attached themselves to things and took on characteristics of the new home. Both theories were much debated in animist circles, but William made it clear that he really didn’t give a shit either way. He didn’t know how his cell phone worked either. The why wasn’t important. What mattered was that you could make these spirits work for you.

  “That’s why I’ve been letting my lawn grow,” William explained. “I’ve been cultivating its spirit.”

  “The lawn has a spirit?” Pete repeated.

  “That’s right.”

  “So, why don’t the, like, blades of grass each have their own spirit?”

  A couple of the guys murmured. “That’s a really good question,” one said.

  “He’s like a professor or something,” said another.

  “We don’t really know the answer to that,” William said. “As near as I can tell, it’s because we think of the lawn as one thing, rather than paying attention to each blade of grass, and somehow humans will play a role here. The point is that we cultivate the spirit of the lawn, we feed it by letting the lawn grow, we pay homage to it, and then we sacrifice its physical form. In so doing, we take on the properties of that spirit and bring them into our lives. In this case, growth, fecundity, abundance.”

  “That’s fucking bullshit,” Pete opined.

  William smiled.

  Pete might have walked out, but he didn’t. Instead, when William announced it was time, he walked upstairs with the others. They sat by the fire in the dark, and they chanted Lawn, Lawn, Lawn, over and over again. Each of them took turns throwing a handful of grass into the flames. When they had done this for a good hour, William stood and said, “Who shall make the sacrifice and reap the greatest share of the spirit’s blessings?”

  One of the men said, “Let it be our new brother!” They all pointed and chanted Pete, Pete, Pete.

  William beckoned him forward, and Pete stood by the fire. William handed him a handful of grass, and Pete threw it onto the flames. Then William put his hand in a stone bowl, and it came out dark and dripping. In the flickering light, Pete could see the hand was covered with blood, and he had no doubt it was the blood from the sacrificed goat.

  William smeared some of the blood on Pete’s head, but most of his attention was given to the images he made on the altar, using his finger to paint with blood. He made three designs, like spiraling circles, and then, in the center of them, he pressed his hand, dripping with blood, to make a print.

  “The powers that surround us have been summoned,” William said. “They attend us. Let us destroy what we have created in homage to them. Our brother Pete will have the honor.”

  That was how, at two in the morning, Pete ended up outside William’s house, mowing the lawn with an old fashioned hand-push mower. Sweat poured down his back while inside the house the HyperStrong crew drank wine and, he was sure, laughed at him. He knew he ought to throw down the mower and walk away. He was being made fun of, made a fool of, but he kept mowing all the same until the grass was shorn and Pete was exhausted and resentful.

  Angry and humiliated, ready to fight one of them – or all of them – Pete walked through the front door. His clothes were dripping with sweat. His eyes stung and his muscles ached. William and his friends looked at him, but they did not laugh. They raised their goblets of wine in a toast, and somehow that simple gesture seemed to drain Pete of all his anger.

  “I think you’re really going to like what happens next,” William said.

  “What’s going to happen?” Pete asked.

  “Growth.”

  * * *

  Back in his own house, Pete slipped through the darkness to the refrigerator. It was almost three in the morning, and all was quiet. He took out a beer, pulled the tab from the can and sank back in the kitchen chair. He didn’t give a crap that beer was made from grains and wasn’t what some hooting Neanderthal would drink. They didn’t drink it because they didn’t have it. If someone had offered a thirsty caveman a can of beer, he’d drink the shit out of it. That
was what Pete did.

  He still felt the slight buzz of shame. How had he participated in that completely gay ritual, and let an asshole smear him with goat blood? That was bad enough, but how had he allowed himself to be talked into mowing the lawn? He would have been sure that William and his friend were mocking him, except they’d seemed so damn serious about it all. After he’d left, he’d even pressed his ear to the front door, expecting to hear the sound of uproarious laughter, but there had only been solemn murmurings. If it had not all been a practical joke, then it meant that they had been serious about the whole thing, and maybe that was even worse.

  He finished his beer and tore open another and sat in the dark, still catching his breath and cooling off. In the distance, he listened to the dog slinking along the wooden floors, its nails clicking with each step. Only after he’d thrown away his third can of beer, undressed, and climbed into bed did he remember that the dog had been dead for more than a year.

  * * *

  Jenny was furious. Pete had tracked grass all through the house, and the sheets were strained with streaks of green and there was something brown on the pillow. “What the hell were you doing?” she demanded, but walked out of the bedroom before Pete could answer. The answer, he realized, wasn’t the point. Demanding an answer was the point.

  Pete sat at the breakfast table with Addison. Jenny was too angry at having had to sweep grass off the floor to bring herself to join them. Addison, as usual, made a fuss about having to eat breakfast, and did a lot of sighing over her cereal.

  “Come on,” Pete told her. “Eat something. You don’t want to be hungry all day.”

  She looked up at him, like she was ready to flash one of her looks of exasperation, to roll her eyes and shoot daggers with her eyes.

  He’d become jumpy at the prospect of talking to his own daughter. Anything might set her off. He knew it was just a part of growing up, but she used to be his little girl. He used to take her to the park and to Missions games, and now she looked at him as though he were the most embarrassing thing in the world. He wanted her to be sweet again.