by David Liss
I rolled down my window. “Sir!” I called. “Excuse me, sir! You’ll want to hang on to that bullion until stage three.” The man whipped around. He was big and lean, the absolute worst body type for even a short-term famine. I’m not a tall man, and I’d been strategically gaining weight as the storm clouds gathered, while Lisa is naturally pear shaped.
“Cody Johnson?” I said. It was only eight in the morning, but I knew nothing that happened on this historically surprising day would shock me more.
“Eric Estrada,” he said. You’ve got to hand it to him, he’s good with names. We’d only met the one time, when he came to address our preppers group.
“Yes! Man, I have read every single one of your books. Huge fan.”
Cody leaned into the window. His eyes were bleary. “You told me that night at the Cracker Barrel—an ear bending I won’t soon forget. I’ve got to move this bullion,” he said. His breath reeked of Midori. “One bar, five cantaloupe. My final offer.” The vendor shook her head; no fool she.
“Mr. Johnson,” I said, for the man was clearly in distress, “We’ve got to get you sobered up. Hop in.” Lisa was making slicing, nix-it motions across her neck, but Cody Johnson is one of my personal heroes. If my family and I survive this thing, it’ll be mostly because of him.
“So you can rob me of my gold, make me your slave, then feed on my flesh when your provisions run short?”
I laughed, but Cody Johnson was serious. He turned back to the fruit vendor. “Two bars, five cantaloupe, and I’ll throw in my windbreaker.” The vendor nodded and began bagging up the fruit. That was it. I pressed on the hazard lights and stepped out of the car.
“Cody, bullion is a failed strategy. You know this. It’s declining in value as we stand here.” The vendor was still holding the paper bag. “And your shirt,” she said. Cody pulled off his shirt.
“Wait!” I said. “This isn’t how this works. You hold your bullion until the new order emerges, and then you find yourself a potentate. Nobody else has any use for gold—there’s no intrinsic value there; just window dressing. But a potentate needs to advertise her power, and that’s where your bullion comes in. People will say, ‘Well, shit. That lady’s got herself some gold. She must be making out all right. Better not rise against her or take her generator, or I’ll get a boot in the ass... she’ll crush me.’ Do you see?”
The vendor nodded. “I’ll need the shoes, too,” she said.
“Why are you doing this?” Cody said.
A bit of soot drifted down onto my t-shirt and I brushed at it. “Because your books touched my life. Your books are the reason I’m ready for this day.”
“You want to make a necklace out of my bones, is that it?”
“Mr. Johnson. Cody… Cantaloupe is highly perishable! What are you thinking?”
“I’ve got a craving,” Cody said. “I want to bite into the flesh of a sweet melon just one more time before I die.” The vendor began to slice open the melons with a large curved knife.
Keep emotions in check; that’s the ground level of seeing your way through doomsday. But I had already had to deal with disrespect and non-compliance in the heart of my own family and my fuse was short. I got in Cody Johnson’s face. “You coward! You’re a disgrace to the movement,” I said.
And that’s when Cody Johnson demonstrated that he might still have what it took to make it. He grabbed the vendor’s knife and in one fluid motion, he raised the blade and brought it down on my thigh, slicing it open. I hobbled back into the car and put it in drive.
“That’s probably going to abscess,” Lisa said, as blood poured down my pant leg. I checked the mirror to see if Cody Johnson was going to chase us, but he was standing on the corner, naked but for a tiny pair of bicycle shorts, his arms full of cantaloupe.
* * *
Halfway to Blaine’s a call comes in, and it’s not Dr. Laramie. It was Parker Saenz. Our emotional affair had now raged for seven tortured days, though out of respect for Lisa, I’d refused to get physical.
“I guess that makes you a hero,” Lisa said, and I had to blush, because I’d been thinking out loud again. It was a habit I’d developed during the separation, all those lonely hours in my empty shelter. I switched both phone and internal monologue to silent. Hero? No, it doesn’t make me a hero per se, and yet, there are things less heroic than withstanding a relentless and highly sophisticated campaign for one’s sexual attention.
For instance, right now, with the social order collapsing, when a certain slippage of standards is inevitable, even necessary, was I running to the muscular arms of Parker, who both respects and desires me? Nope. I was letting that phone buzz forlornly on the console. Because once, under an arbor of plastic lilies, I’d promised to love only Lisa. I’d finger-fed her white cake from H-E-B. And now I was going to get through this thing or die trying, probably the latter, with the woman who, despite not having bothered to brush her hair this morning, was regarding me with 100 proof scorn.
If the atmosphere inside the sedan was tense, it was nothing compared to the situation in the streets. The rate of illegal u-turns, jaywalking, red-light-running and tailgating increased with a relentless doomsday rapidity, traffic laws being the first to go. We nearly head-onned a charter bus that made an illegal left onto our one-way street, and I began to worry we’d left it too late, having lost precious minutes while Lisa took a bath, a goddamned bath, in the middle of our evac protocol. I felt myself floundering toward another go-round with the blame-anger-remorse cycle, but per Dr. Laramie I took a deep inhale and imagined Lisa as someone deserving of love and protection, like a vulnerable baby panda.
“Well anyway, it’s a beautiful sky,” I said to the baby panda. She had dark circles of yesterday’s makeup around her eyes, which made the panda thing more workable.
“It’s blood-red, Eric,” the Lisa/panda said, as if there could only be one valid perspective here. Lisa’s seat was in max recline position and her feet were resting up on the dash. I recalled that I had not actually witnessed her put on underwear, and in fact there was little reason, given her current state of mind, to suspect she’d bothered with such niceties. But you apocalypse with the spouse you have, and so I refused to let her bare- and half-assed efforts weaken my resolve.
“Take a good look, girls. You’ll want to tell your grandchildren about this one day,” I said, referring, of course, to the shocking Armageddon hue of the horizon, and not to Lisa’s pantslessness. But their innocent faces were pressed against the glowing screen of their KidMinders. It was probably for the best. Birds were beginning to drop from the trees along the Riverwalk in clumps of sticky black feathers, and this amped up the panic level on the street.
I determined that now was the opportune moment to dispense with the speed limit, though I advised the girls that when they came of age in the new order, I would not want to hear of them hot-rodding around in any such manner. The remaining miles to Blaine’s were covered at maximum speed possible for a mid-range four-door family sedan in a near chaos scenario.
* * *
The apocalypse doesn’t discriminate. Rich or poor, when push comes to shove, it doesn’t make a bit of difference who you are. That’s the conventional wisdom. But I was betting that it would discriminate: cities might be levelled, but the playing field wouldn’t be, which was why we’d left our own neighborhood for Blaine’s and were bluffing our way into his loft.
“Erik Estrada?” The security guards at Blaine’s building peered at me with awe and confusion. “The Erik Estrada?” As predicted, the brewing unrest had yet to reach the city’s tonier districts, which is why the guards were lolling around with machine guns at half-mast.
“That’s right,” I said. Lisa gave me a look, as if I weren’t saving her life and the lives of our children with this simple subterfuge. Do not think that trading off the name of a middling celebrity thirty years older than myself has gained me a life of undeserved privilege, because it has not. Has it, on occasion, proved useful? Certain
ly.
“Huge fan,” the burlier of the guards said, opening the gate. When we were safely on the inside I leaned into his ear and whispered, “Now would be the time to initiate Protocol X.”
“Alexis, he’s calling it.”
“Can he do that?” This from the less burly colleague. I smiled in a way that broadcast authority, and the two of them conferred. “Well, Jesus. I guess we’d better.” With a faint mechanical hum, Protocol X went live.
* * *
Blaine Raddax came to the door wearing a vest and a pair of leather pants. He had on a number of studded leather bracelets and a tattoo of a skull with eagle wings took the place of a shirt. He looked like the rock god he was, and immediately I felt self-conscious on behalf of the entire Estrada crew. Lisa looked like a heroin addict, but without the svelteness so often associated with that condition. She was basically nude and possibly not entirely sober. The girls were wearing the first things they’d pulled from their drawers. I had not thought to check whether they matched. They didn’t. The little one had her shoes on the wrong feet. My too-tight pants were also an inch too short, one leg was blood soaked, and the waistband was cutting a red band into my belly. In short, the Estradas were starting at rag-tag; our only hope was that the rest of the survivors would sink rapidly to our level.
“So this is your family,” Blaine said.
“Sure is,” I said. I shrugged in kind of a what can you do? manner. He ushered us in the door. Blaine was once an insurer’s nightmare, a liability who walked the earth in leather pants, smashing collectible guitars, trashing hotel rooms, wrecking expensive vehicles. But he’d mellowed with age. Now Blaine’s passion was art; he collected mostly outsize paintings of jungle cats or attractive women posing with or like jungle cats. I heard Lisa snort at the art that lined his walls. I elbowed her; good manners only become more important when the fabric of society begins to fray. Luckily Blaine did not notice her rudeness.
Blaine’s loft is only one of his residences and I tried not to focus on its opulence and on what might have been, how my family and I might be tucked safe and secure in an impenetrable luxury condo of our own instead of crashing here, house guests in Blaine’s downtown loft. But I’d quit the band when I met Lisa, who didn’t care for percussion, and sold my drum kit and tasseled leather gloves to attend Alamo U with her. The Lords of Doom had gone on to fame without me, and when metal started to seem like a joke they retired. At thirty.
The girls began leaping between Blaine’s velvet chaise and leopard print sofa with bizarre animal shrieks, like they were completely keeping pace with the collapse of manners and customs that was raging in the streets below us.
“Girls! Operation Silent Night!” I said. The girls stopped, dropped, and stretched out on the flokati, feigning sleep, with only minimal giggling.
* * *
Blaine used to tutor me in Algebra, but years of the rock and roll lifestyle had left him slow on the uptake. “This whole thing is going to blow over in 24 hours. Twenty four hours max. We’re going to laugh about this someday,” he kept saying. I had squeezed into a pair of Blaine’s suede shorts and was wrapping my leg in gauze. I needed stitches, and without the adrenaline that had gotten me through the drive over, the pain was becoming considerable.
“Most of Dallas is gone. They’ve abandoned Austin,” Lisa said. “I know it’s hard to believe that Eric was right, but a lot of people have lost their lives. The least you can do is acknowledge what’s happening. Show some respect.”
After so many years of denial, I felt gratified to hear Lisa acknowledge the truth about the civilizational disasters I’d so long predicted, but I wished she wouldn’t take that tone with our host.
Blaine twisted his long hair into a loose topknot. “Look, man. I’ve toured the world. I’ve played sold out shows in Stockholm and Tokyo. I’m not what you would call the quote-unquote average citizen. And I’ve learned to be cynical, okay? What they say—that’s not the real story. All of this, everything you think you’ve seen, has been engineered to keep us from questioning our leaders.”
“There are no leaders anymore,” I pointed out. Last night, the President had found it to be a convenient moment to grant one of the petitions for secession we were always sending up to D.C. We were a republic again, for two and a half glorious hours, before our leaders had been forced to evacuate the Texas capitol.
“Oh, aren’t there?” Blaine said. “Think about that man. Think about what you just said. The puppet masters have got you exactly where they want you.”
* * *
“Holy shit,” Blaine said. “Holy shit.” The three of us were listening to the intermittent broadcasts on my shortwave radio, or rather, Blaine and I were listening. Lisa had fallen asleep on the couch. She was snoring softly and drooling on one of Blaine’s throw pillows and I was ashamed of her, though I tried not to let Blaine see it. I saw him looking at my wife of ten years and feeling vindicated in his choices, which were mostly very short term arrangements with “girls who liked to party.”
Jeannette and Isabel had opened the doors of Blaine’s mirrored closets and were dressing themselves in the studded leather and feathery coats he wore when he played arena shows.
“Turn it up,” Blaine said. On the radio, they were calling it a regional disaster, but concern was mounting that it might not just be Texas that was going down in flames. For hours we’d had to endure smug chickens-coming-home-to-roost narratives put out by the coastal chatterers, but the scale of the disaster had shut them up. The same jerks who couldn’t hide their satisfaction in watching the Lone Star state go down in flames were now weeping on air for the “fate of all humanity,” etc. Because now it wasn’t just Wal-Mart shoppers and men in camo sweats and fishing glasses who were freaking. The panic was spreading. Whatever was happening, it was dire. Frantic scientists of uncertain credentials speculated that a major disruption had occurred in earth’s core and now perhaps our entire planet was undergoing geologic death, just leaking out its energy like a dying battery. The industry put out a statement calling for the end of the finger-pointing. This was all just part of a natural process. I wasn’t sure they were wrong, the industry shills. The dinosaurs had been blasted from the face of the earth by a natural process, so who was to say?
The leading theory seemed to be that the earth was just going to shut down and go cold after all the pyrotechnics and shaking were done; these death throes might stretch between several weeks or a hundred or more years. It was as vague as a delivery window, but the product we were all waiting on was total planetary death.
“We’re all going to die,” Blaine said.
I shushed him. “The girls,” I whispered. “And anyway we might not die.”
“No, it’s over. This is truly the end of the road. But I’m ready,” Blaine said. “I have prepared for this day.”
“You have?” I said. I hoped he meant in a practical way, and not just spiritually, because I didn’t care for the thought of being subjected to a lot of prayer beads and chanting or what have you.
Blaine left the room. I followed. “Do you have MREs or weapons or what?” Foresight was typically the first brain function destroyed by regular drug use. The long ago night when he’d peed on the Alamo, there was already evidence of his inability to anticipate consequences and prepare for the future. And Blaine had worked his way through an ocean of narcotics and amphetamines between that night and the one, years later, his rock bottom moment, when his heart stopped inside a Vegas strip club. They’d shocked him back to life in front of the buffet and he’d been clean and sober ever since.
“Better than that, my friend. First let me get Andrea,” he said.
“You can’t open the door, Blaine!” We were safe, or safe-ish high above the streets, behind a door of industrial strength steel, but it was no time to go traipsing through the hallways. Protocol X meant that nobody would be allowed in or out of the building until the all clear sounded. But soon enough the guards would realize the all clear was
never going to sound; they would be abandoning their posts to go to their own families at any moment, if they hadn’t already, and then our best hope was to hunker down until the dust settled.
“Relax,” Blaine said. “Careful with your weapon, I’ve got breakables in here.” I stood in the doorway with an arrow primed as Blaine went out into hall in his bare feet and knocked on the door across the way.
* * *
“Don Cheevers. Let me tell you something about Don Cheevers,” Andrea said. She had owned a high-end real estate company back when there was a housing market and her contempt for the Cheevers brand of luxury shelters was absolute. “I wouldn’t buy anything from that guy. I mean, nothing. I wouldn’t even buy, I don’t know… Like I wouldn’t even buy—”
“Drugs,” Blaine suggested, wiping his nose.
“Exactly. I wouldn’t buy drugs from Don Cheevers.”
Like many recovering addicts, Blaine kept a doomsday stash. That was the extent of his preparations. Initially I’d been disgusted by this, by the cynical hedonism of it, but once I’d agreed to join them, I had more respect for this decision. I’d forgotten how drugs made you feel—divorced from all your failures, and like your most hopeless day was still the best party ever. But I’d done only enough to be civil and to take the edge off the agony of my hacked-up thigh, while the girls were busy eating cookies and watching Bugs Bunny cartoons from Blaine’s video library. Lisa was still asleep.