Paleo / The Doomsday Prepper

by David Liss

  “Jeff Robert brought me here,” she said.

  “Oh, and where is he?”

  Marissa smiled and the various parts of her began to stretch and fade. The outline of her shape hung a minute in the air like the shimmer and smoke just after a firework, and then that was gone, too. There was nothing on the hood of my car but the glare.

  * * *

  “You should get that insured,” I said to the woman behind the desk at Hyguard Property Management, Marissa’s workplace. I pointed to the painting behind her head. I couldn’t stop myself. I was selling relentlessly, because here in the home stretch every dollar counted, but now my goal was also just to engage her in conversation till Marissa walked through the door. My story was thin, and she hadn’t yet asked outright why I was still standing at the desk and not exiting the building, but I could see it wouldn’t be long.

  Marissa was in today, her assistant explained, she was simply unavailable at the moment and anyway—she had explained this twice now, speaking very slowly as if I might be insane or not quite fluent in English—Marissa didn’t handle HOA regulations. That was Marc’s beat. Marc was an affable man with a knit cap and a shark tooth necklace who waved at me from his desk, but I refused to have any dealings with him. I felt the need to see Marissa with my own eyes, alive and well. “I would most definitely get that insured,” I said.

  “Insure that?” the woman said, looking at the painting behind her. Two nude cowboys strutted across the large canvas. They were standing in their stirrups, pointing their horses toward hills of cactus. Where were these cowboys going wearing nothing but their hats? How did they plan to survive sin ropa in the harsh climate of the Sonoran desert? A little plaque beneath it read Galloping Nudes by T. Crawford Picks.

  “I’ll get you a very good rate,” I said, sliding my card across the counter and winking like I would have done in the old days. Then I blushed. I forget sometimes that I am no longer a handsome man.

  She raised an eyebrow. “So like I said, I don’t see that we have any complaint on file about your structure. But you haven’t been permitted, so I expect it’s just a matter of time before one of your neighbors blows the whistle. And then you’ll get served notice from the HOA.”

  “And what then?”

  “You can appeal. But you’ll lose, eventually. And then it will have to come down.” She tossed her hair, which was a lustrous dark brown. I wondered what type of shampoo she used and if it would be creepy to ask.

  “Well,” I said. “I’m not too worried about eventually anymore.”

  This caught her attention. “Parker Saenz,” the woman said, introducing herself. Nobody had smiled at me that way in a long time. We shook hands. Hers was tiny, but she had an unusually strong grip, and she pressed her thumbnail into my palm in a way that meant—well, I wasn’t entirely sure. Now that our business was concluded, she was appraising me according to some different criteria and I got the idea she liked what she saw.

  It had been quite some time since Lisa had let her magazine drop on her bedside table and thrown a leg over mine. Our therapist, Dr. Laramie, has encouraged me to find beauty in Lisa’s slovenliness, and to “make a welcome of indifference,” as she put it, and I’ve done so as best I can, but Parker Saenz’s eyes on me took my skin from flush to sizzle. I left the office in a hurry, feeling confused.

  * * *

  I took to sleeping in my workout clothes, wearing the key to the locker where I kept my crossbow on a chain around my neck. This did not go over well with Lisa, but I could not rest easy unless I felt that key against my skin. My crossbow was too deadly to keep casually on the garage shelf, but too necessary to secure in the backyard shelter. When the time came, I’d need it fast.

  “So now you’re wearing a key necklace. And you sleep in those,” Lisa said, pointing to my burnt orange athletic shorts. “That’s what we’ve come to.”

  “Hmmh,” I said, noncommittally.

  “So what’s in it?”

  “Baseball cards,” I blurted. I spit a gob of toothpaste into the sink. God, what a stupid thing to say. The lie was transparent to the point of being insulting.

  “Baseball cards.” Lisa was removing her eye makeup with these little oily pads she uses. She’d accidentally smeared some under her eye like a football player, but even so, she looked pretty good.

  “They’re potentially valuable,” I said, while my face was obscured with a washcloth .

  “You’re wearing the key to the locker where you keep your baseball cards—your valuable baseball cards that I’ve never heard a word about in ten years of marriage—you’re wearing that around your neck all the time.” She has a way of making every little thing I do seem like evidence of my so-called “mental condition.”

  “That’s right,” I said. I got into bed and pulled the quilt over my head.

  “Oh hell no,” Lisa said.

  “What? I’m on my side.” I knew better than to try to start anything romantic with Lisa while she was in her current frame of mind. I just wanted to fall asleep before she could ask any more questions.

  Lisa ripped the quilt off me. “I have put up with a lot in this marriage. But I draw the line at sleeping next to a man who is wearing the key to his baseball card collection around his rapidly disappearing neck. Either take off the key, Eric, or go sleep on the couch.”

  “Lees,” I said, but it was no use. I grabbed my pillow and headed to the couch. The sound of the bedroom door slamming echoed through our house. I settled into the cushions beneath an afghan knitted by Lisa’s grandmother. On the wall opposite hung a framed candid from our wedding—the old Eric grinned at me behind a tiered cake,or rather, the young one did. He was nearly as beautiful as the bride. Both their faces were lit with elation that hadn’t been seen under this roof in years.

  I twirled the key at my neck. The more I tried not to think of Parker Saenz, the more I thought of her. The way her hair swung when she walked between her desk and the filing cabinet. Her thumbnail, which had left a brief crescent in my palm. Her mysterious perfume, which might well have been nothing but grocery store deodorant. I’d called the office three times, assuming different names, and each time Parker Saenz told me that Ms. Beal was unavailable to take my call. That voice. Of course, I knew nothing about her. But she wasn’t my beloved, familiar wife, who was sickened and enraged by the sight of me. She was a stranger and she really seemed to like me. There was no future in it—but then, there was most likely no future in anything.

  I pulled a book from the shelf, The Five People You Meet in The End Times by Cody M. Johnson, and settled back into the couch. I more or less had the thing memorized, but it was soothing to flip through it, and after a while I drifted off. But I must have been dreaming of Parker Saenz, because when I heard the key turning in the front door lock, I sat up, groggy, and whispered her name.

  Parker Saenz stepped toward me through the darkness. Her hair was wild, and there was a bit of blood at her temple. She was standing in my darkened living room wearing a full skirted party dress and this could only mean one thing.

  “Has it started? Am I missing it?” I began to get up from the couch but Parker put her finger to her lips and I sank back into the pillows. If we had to keep our voices down, then the clock hadn’t yet run out.

  “You’re mine, understand?”

  “Whaa?” I said, rubbing my eyes. I was almost sure I was dreaming but the next moment Parker Saenz was sitting on me. She was solid. She was radiating heat. I could hear her breathing. It was definitely happening. Parker Saenz had stolen a key to my house for the offices of the HOA and now she had come for me. She shifted slightly, driving her knee uncomfortably into my ribs, and smoothed her skirt over my lumpen blanketed form. I was too terrified to move.

  “You belong to me,” she whispered, punctuating each word with a rough poke of my chest. “Tell the others. Tell them not to put a hand on you.”

  I did not like the sound of that. “What others?” I said.

  Parker Sa
enz smiled and began to play with the key hanging at my neck. Her free hand roamed over my chest, sort of massaging it, but painfully, grabbing handfuls of flesh and squeezing. It was very unpleasant, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Nor did I want to encourage her—it was all a bit terrifying, really. But sales is all about self-presentation.

  “Well, it’s been great to see you, Parker,” I said with easy confidence, as if wrapping up some appointment we’d had, “but it’s pretty late—”

  She grabbed the key and pulled till the chain cut into my neck and snapped. I made a sound of protest, muffled by her strong hand over my mouth. She dangled the key over my head. “When they come, what will you tell them, Eric?”

  I shrugged, or attempted to, under her weight. For a small, trim woman, she was improbably dense.

  “You tell them you’re mine. Understand?” She lifted her finger from my lips to let me respond.

  “I understand,” I said.

  “Good.” She dropped the key on my bare chest. “Find me on the last day. There’s a place for you, Eric. But only you.”

  She bent low so that her dark hair fell around the sides of my face and she licked me from my stubbly chin to my temple. Then she slid off and left through the front door without another word.

  I got up and turned the deadbolt in the lock. I stretched out on the couch, wiping Parker’s saliva from my face with Lisa’s grandma’s blanket, and went back to sleep.

  * * *

  I sat at the breakfast table rubbing my stiff back and eating one of the low-calorie yogurts Lisa had been buying me. I’d have to stop for donuts on the way to the office, as usual. Nearly every day I stopped at the Donut Barn for a Morning Party Pack “for the office,” and ate them all myself, as many as I could stand, before I pulled into the lot. The Donut Barn people probably understood I was lying, but they were professionals. They kept their hair tucked up behind netting and paper hats and they knew how to look the other way.

  The girls were tromping up the stairs to get their school books and Lisa was looking at me—really looking at me for the first time in weeks.

  “So your cousin Marissa—any news from her lately?” I said.

  “What?” Lisa said, the way she does when a question of mine is too stupid to be dealt with. I spooned the last of the yogurt. Time to get to work. Sitting here at the breakfast table, I was just asking for trouble. The best way to stay married was to stay out of Lisa’s way. I pushed my chair under the table.

  “I’d at least like to know her name,” she said. “The woman who was in my house last night.”

  I dropped my yogurt spoon into the sink. I had nearly convinced myself that Parker Saenz’s nocturnal visit was a hallucination, a delayed effect of all the groundsmoke I’d huffed at the storage facility with the disrespectful teens.

  “I saw you on the couch with her, under MeeMaw’s blanket, no less.” It was a bad sign that she wasn’t hysterical. She’d been expecting something like this. I stayed out late. I made unexplained purchases. It all added up to an affair, didn’t it? And now she’d seen it with her own eyes, so she thought.

  “That was just Parker—she’s from the HOA,” I said. “She’s troubled. We should change the locks, I think.”

  Lisa didn’t respond; I had the sense that she had already chosen her words and whatever I said, she was not going to alter her little speech. “I stopped by your gym yesterday. And, funny thing, you’re not a member. So why don’t you tell me what you’ve been doing every Tuesday night. I want to know what cost us this marriage.”

  “Oh God,” I said. If only I had joined that stupid gym. No matter how bold the plan, the smallest oversight can undo us. This was it—it was truly the end. This was the last time I would ever have breakfast with my college sweetheart, the mother of my children. I fell to my knees on the tiles. “I’ve been prepping again,” I said.

  “Oh Jesus,” Lisa said. “Eric, how could you?”

  “I tried to stop but, Lees, the signs are clear. The tremors, the groundsmoke, the stuff with the birds—”

  She cut me off. “What happened on Y2K?”

  I stared at the grout, unable to answer.

  “What happened, Eric?”

  “Nothing happened,” I muttered.

  “No. We rang in the millennium in an unheated van full of energy shakes and shotgun shells in the goddamned middle of nowhere; that’s what happened.”

  I cringed at the memory. Energy shakes! I’d been such an amateur; still just a kid, really. I’d learned so much since then.

  “I can’t do this again. You need to leave.”

  “Now? You can’t throw me out now.” I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but this seemed to enrage her further.

  “Now’s not good for you?”

  “It’s terrible timing. We have got to stick this out until after the—”

  “Don’t say it,” Lisa said.

  “But Lees, I promise you, we are just on the cusp—”

  “I’m warning you, Eric.”

  “God damn it, Lisa! This thing is happening and without me, you and the girls won’t last a single day!” I stood up. I was shouting. My finger was pointed right in her face—she hates that.

  “Get out, Eric.”

  “I can’t leave you Lisa. Not now.”

  “You will leave or I’ll call Dad.”

  “Go ahead and call him,” I said and fled the scene. We keep a pair of handcuffs in the entryway bureau. They were worn by rock legend Blaine Raddax the night he peed on the Alamo—it was the thing that brought Lisa and me together, actually. Now I snatched the cuffs and ran with them to our bedroom. I slipped one around my wrist and one around the bed post. I dropped the key between the bedframe and the wall. Elias would not be removing me from my own home without a fight.

  “Goodbye girls!” I yelled as I heard them loading up for school. “Daddy loves you!”

  “Goodbye, Daddy!”

  As I waited for my father-in-law to show, my hand began to go numb. The handcuffs were a poor strategy, I realized. The party with greater mobility is always going to defeat the one barricaded, given enough time. Remember the Alamo? I could have kicked myself.

  “You are such a dumb shit,” Elias said, echoing my own thoughts. He was wearing an old guy track suit and he drank from a steaming cup of coffee. You could tell at a glance he was retired police. “What I would have done to you back in the day. A hippie like you.” He sat on the edge of the bed.

  “I was never a hippie,” I said. “We were a metal band.”

  “You’re still a hippie. Where’s the key, Eric?”

  “I swallowed it.”

  “I halfway believe you, Fatty. But only halfway.” He finished the coffee and set it down on Lisa’s bedside table. “Okay then.” He lowered himself to the carpet and I could hear each individual bone creak. “Got to be here somewhere.” He crawled under the bed. After a minute he inched out, holding the key in his teeth.

  He was winded when he got up and I didn’t have the heart to struggle. He had still been a terrifying brute the night he busted me and the Lords of Doom at the Alamo, though already somewhat past his prime. Now it was clear to me that I could have killed him just by sitting on him.

  “I’ll go peaceably,” I said, as he unlocked the cuffs. I didn’t want to humiliate the old man. Elias followed me out my own front door and we stood together in my driveway.

  “So what is it this time? Maya comet?”

  “Don’t think so,” I said, blushing. That comet thing had seemed air tight.

  “What then?”

  “It’s the fracking, I think.”

  “Fracking? Hippie,” Elias said. “What’s fracking got to do with it?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “Then what the hell are you doing this for?”

  “Man, just look,” I said, pointing down to the drainage ditch beneath us. A thin black smoke wafted out, slow but continuous, disappearing almost instantly as it rose in the bright
air.

  * * *

  My own home had been off-limits to me for a week when Trip Edmonds leaned his head in my office and asked if I had a sec, never a good thing. I told him of course, and he settled into one of the leather horn chairs opposite my desk, grinning. There’s a widely held belief among the agents of Alamo Mutual that the duration of Trip’s grins is proportional to the depth of shit the grinned-at agent is in. His face was still stretched ear to ear. I feared I might soon be gathering up my things in a cardboard box.

  “What can I do for you, boss?” I said.

  A large black bird flew smack into the window. We both jumped at the sound, but neither of us said a word. Trip didn’t even turn his head to look. All the building’s windows were marked with the greasy wingprints of bird impacts, but it wasn’t something we talked about. Last week at the neighbor’s barbecue, while we all stood around a blazing grill, a bird—a cardinal, I think—flew right into the flames. Then it plummeted to the patio concrete and lay there, sizzling and smoking, and we all drank our beers and said nothing. After a moment somebody made an idle remark about “this time next year” and a woman kicked the bird carcass into the grass with the tip of her tennis shoe. Then people began to talk freely again, about the everyday and their nothing plans.

  “I understand you’re going through a rough spot,” Trip said. I was sleeping every night on a foam mattress and staring up at the corrugated roof of my backyard shelter, a do-it-yourself piece of garbage I’d devoted many weekends to constructing a few years ago, for the Maya thing. When that didn’t pan out, I’d sworn on anything I could think of not to prep again. I only wish Lisa understood how badly I’d wanted to keep that promise. There are preppers who long for the E.O.D., but I am not among them. If it were up to me, I’d rather the status quo.

  Anyway, it certainly was not my preference to be sleeping alone in my un-air-conditioned pipe. Parker Saenz called me most nights and we talked until I fell asleep but I ignored her hints about keeping me company. I was spending every spare moment reinforcing it to withstand heat and quakes, stocking it, outfitting it with all the supplies and weapons we’d need. It was no Don Cheevers, but it was coming along. Cody Johnson’s latest, Apocalypse How? Survival Strategies for Every Budget, was taking me through it, step by step. Lisa had said she’d rather die than spend in a night in it, but we’d soon find out one way or the other.