The Last Weekend

by Nick Mamatas

  I liked Schroeder’s a lot, I decided, because a waitress in Oktoberfest garb whisks away one’s glass the moment it is dry and replaces it on a nod. One drink in front of me all night long, it’s like I wasn’t indulging at all. How many was it, eight or ten? We were long past DeVoto’s famous hour of six o’clock, when a man should never be alone, and deep into a Bukowski evening. Was I keeping pace with everyone, or outdrinking them all? Nobody seemed to care; they were all intent on rearranging the contents of the minds of their tablemates. As if apocalypse were a matter of consensus.

  “May as well blame Cthulhu,” I said finally, but nobody got the joke so then I had to explain what Cthulhu was and how it wasn’t a real thing or even really mythological, and how in the old days Cthulhu ran for President every four years—remember “Why vote for the lesser evil?”?—and how he and his tentacles were even put on pairs of fuzzy slippers worn exclusively by nerds.

  Then Alexa said I was a writer and had even published a science fiction story. The table erupted in semi-interested murmurs and grunting, as if I was surrounded by extras in a film. Rhubarbrhubarbsciencefictionrhubarbscifirhubarb . . .

  “Why Mister Kostopolos,” the social worker said, “you didn’t mention your artistic inclinations when we screened you for your city job. So, what do you think about this brave new world and how it works?”

  In a flash, a theory of my own was poured into my head like a pitcher full of milk. It wasn’t about the reanimates, but about the normal workaday human being. Nothing there but us little wind-up toys.

  “Figuring out how the world works in an old bar, eh?” I said. “Isn’t that always the way? The Sons of Liberty met in taverns in Boston, New York, and Philly, hashing out a revolution and a new kind of government like they were computing a tip. Lenin probably knocked back a vodka or two with Trotsky and Stalin too, I bet. I’m sure Socrates—a cousin of mine, if you believe my father, and I don’t—passed around a wineskin between philosophy and buggery.

  “But it didn’t matter, none of it did. Are the reanimated dead inexplicable? Of course, as are the unanimated living. We never knew how the world worked. Was Freud right that we were just all little personalities bobbing on the black sea of the unconsciousness, not knowing where the routes and winds would take us?” I was on a roll.

  Schroeder’s felt so warm. I wished they still served food; I wanted something we could all tuck in to, like the Harvard boys used to in the bowels of their secret societies. I could almost taste the breading of a schnitzel on my tongue.

  “Or Marx, or the Frankfurt School or game theorists? That’s all the stuff we learn in college and then we forget all but five minutes worth of conversation about it, because none of it is useful in our daily lives.” This being San Francisco, somebody muttered something about postmodernism. I snorted at that. “Postmodernism. Postmodernism, that’s just the no-it-ain’t-so-times-infinity of politics—Ah, maybe we’re all determined by economics, well, uh, conversations about economics. No, no, thinking about conversations about economics. Well, okay, maybe nothing determines us at all, but anything you can possibly conceive of has some little impact on us, and now here’s a list of my personal favorite conceptions. So nyahnyah, I win for losing!”

  The social worker smiled. “Zhou Enlai—first premier of post-Liberation China—was once asked about the French Revolution, and what he felt about its impact. He said, ‘It’s too soon to say.’” Zhou Enlai’s job description was surely for my benefit only. Everyone else smiled knowingly. Ah, the wisdom of the Chinese Communist Party! The perfect bon mot for a San Francisco dinner party.

  It was too choice a quote. Nobody at the table could think of anything to say to keep the conversation going. I didn’t think the social worker got that quote right, and had no idea what she was hinting at. If anybody else at the table did, they found silent contemplation of the remnant food on their plates more interesting. My jaw felt heavy now, my head elongated. I’d never felt like this, not from drinking anyway. I was a cruiserweight if not a heavyweight; I knew how to nurse a drink, and when I decided against doing so I knew how to keep oblivion at arm’s length, like a handy banister down a flight of steep steps.

  I looked up at the ceiling. Schroeder’s had high ones, criss-crossed with decorative wooden beams. Then I just remembered something I’d read once on a flyer wheatpasted to a lamppost a few blocks away.

  “It’s probably something with the fault lines and whatnot. Some old Indians wandering the fissures and the white man’s muskets couldn’t kill them, but we know the reanimated are no good for climbing. Why it suddenly started spreading, who knows? Diseases hit a tipping point like anything else.”

  “That’s it!” Alexa said.

  “No chance in hell,” said an older woman. “We were just talking about that one.” Not the social worker, who steadfastly refused to introduce herself by name even as she traded on her passine acquaintance, but a woman next to her; a leathery prune who may have fought her way here from Los Angeles. A tough old bitch; she probably wanted to brain me just on general principles.

  “Maybe a chance,” I said. “Maybe hell.”

  “How can we go about proving it? It’s not falsifiable,” said the reasonable fellow. Then I noticed that the social worker had left her seat and on the table half a glass of peppermint schnapps. How I wanted it so badly at that moment, that old lady drink. Ol’ Leathery was looking toward the door with a frown. I was a pile of desires. I leaned toward Alexa, aiming to kiss the nape of her neck—a purely proprietary gesture, with no affection involved—when I slid off my chair. I went down easy, like a little cloud had been under my butt the entire time. Then Alexa was next to me on the floor and it rained glass and shouting. Two hands on my ankles pulled me under the table and that’s when I realized that there was a pretty bad earthquake hitting us, and it wasn’t stopping.

  Earthquakes were usually hard for the Midwesterner and I was still a stupid Ohio boy, experience of the world notwithstanding. Quakes just felt to me like a truck rumbling by, most of them. This one, though, was like a truck hitting the building, and then another truck hitting that truck, then backing up and quickly slamming forward again. And again. It smelled like schnapps under the table, and other liquors besides. The lights didn’t go out. Schroeder’s had a generator.

  “Will there be a fire?” I tried to ask, but my voice had been separated from my body by the vibrations and buckling of the floorboards beneath me.

  I’m still missing some time. The next few days were ash and chaos. I remember walking down a wide street, probably Market. Buildings, façades covered the sidewalks like dirty slush. Drillers were called out and deployed as part of “rescue squads,” but the most efficient thing to do was to simply wait for people to die under the rubble, then crush their heads with a handful of concrete or a piece of wood. Fog City was under a thicker shroud than usual, a burial shroud. At sunset the sky burned red, but for much of the rest of the days that followed the quake—and those weeks were a montage of sameness, like a Warhol film I’d read about but never seen—I felt like I was trapped in a single black and white frame, mostly shadows and grays, with one flaming bright spot just on the edge of my vision. That was probably just from a concussion or hemorrhage.

  The drillers were a motley crew; mostly drawn from the pre-animation underclass of desperate blacks and Latinos the city had always seen as their great and untamable enemy. When the dead began to rise, they’d been recruited. Folks like me—flâneurs I’d call them when feeling generous to myself, white vanilla losers on most days—came and went. It was the Youngstown boy in me that kept me going. I was a proletarian without a dark satanic mill to serve, but now I had a whole city full of the dead and dying, all writhing and reaching for me. Like the work processes at any day job, the hours blurred together. There was sunset, and that meant a break in a bar, and other than that there was not much at all to disrupt the monotony.

  Our phones didn’t work. There was some vestigial impulse, like
a twitch of a tail looking to burst through the flesh of, I don’t know, municipal pride? We had tools, we had to be good for something. So we showed up at City Hall and waited for orders. Most of us were hung over, a couple still crusty with blood from minor wounds. I was both, and somehow I’d lost a tooth. I couldn’t stop probing the gap with my tongue, wincing whenever I hit the nerve. That just excited me; I’d jab and jab at it, trying to get used to the thud-sting of pain. Someone finally came out and set us in “squads,” though the squads were really just a direction to go back to our own neighborhoods.

  San Francisco is like a bunch of little islands. Had I ever been to Parkside or Dogpatch, to name just two bits of town that I only even bothered to think about after they were destroyed? Hell, I didn’t even know anybody who’d ever been to those neighborhoods. Whoever lived there, whatever demographic that was, they hadn’t ever been recruited into the drillers. Half the squad went back to the Mission and that’s only because we left a lot of them behind in the Tenderloin or SOMA. Most of my crew went to City Bar—I couldn’t even bear to see if it survived the quake, the ramshackle old piece of shit. I swallowed my pride and I think I went to Elixir. I remember approaching the bar, my gut on fire, my jaw throbbing, but then nothing.

  Once, I was walking alone and came across an overturned MUNI bus right by where Buena Vista Park meets Haight Street. The dead were animated, but they stayed near the bus for the most part. A couple, on their hands and knees, were on the grassy hill at the edge of the park, slowly crawling toward…something. One slid down the hill as I watched, and just started crawling slowly back up like a determined baby. The reanimates on the street milled around the bus, ignoring me. I’d felt like I was visiting the zoo and peering past the bars at an extended family of howler monkeys or bonobos who didn’t register my existence. Nine of them altogether. Perhaps the first to reanimate had consumed the corpses that were a little slower to revive, or those too mangled to have their lidded eyes flip open with that familiar burning idiocy. And they were sated, for now. Maybe, but maybe it was something else.

  In the old days, when the buses were almost always on time, I’d wait like anyone else on the corner or in a Plexiglas kiosk, not saying a word, with a crowd of people also not saying a word. And the climbers—well, this is still San Francisco, there are always climbers. 5 a.m. pilates, in the office by six to be able to pick up calls from New York on the very first ring, salads and lean chicken breast for lunch, back to gym after work, then off to save the whales or do performance art or build a giant fishmobile for Burning Man. And those were the minor functionaries, the walls of flesh deployed to fill up space in meetings, the men and women whose only role was to stand between the rest of us and answers.

  I heard the roar of a motorcycle coming up behind me, but didn’t turn around. The reanimates didn’t look up or past my shoulder, not until the very last moment. Then I saw it, or thought I did. Not the baring of teeth and the wild lurching, no jerk stepping or feral glare, but fear. Eyes wide, mouths agape, a shiver from one, arms up from another, and then the motorcycle tore past and from the sidecar a man in black leather threw a pair of Molotov cocktails, one at a reanimate, the other at the carcass of the bus. And the dead howled and screamed and stumbled and thrashed into the flames. I ran onto the sidewalk and stepped up onto the hill proper. The reanimates on the hill had turned to watch the flames.

  It was hard to tell the living from the dead. Only the living drank, but other than that, I wandered the valley of Das Unheimliche. Were the reanimates slowly learning how to learn, were their emotions and feelings chained to the walls of the rotting cages of their brains? Or was I just shellshocked and confused?

  My apartment building was uninhabitable, but there was still plenty of real estate going spare in the Mission. I missed my books, but whenever I tried to read a paper or a zine I couldn’t focus my eyes. I couldn’t sleep either, not at all, which was hard because great swaths of the city were entirely without power. In my neighborhood, only trash can fires lit the streets, but the bars stayed open. I drank by candlelight shoulder-to-shoulder with the other ash-soaked survivors. For once I didn’t get grief for being a driller, though I don’t remember ever taking out my drill at all during those dark weeks. The case was a passport.

  I drilled a couple. They were young. I don’t remember how I got the call, or if I did, but they were living in Golden Gate Park, on the eastern end in a mews off Stanyan Street. They’d salvaged a nice tent, or maybe even had just owned one in the old days, and they must have made enough friends to go unmolested. I saw a light on, but no silhouettes.

  “No wonder they mistake marsh fires for light, or when they find a light believe that it is the only one,” I said to myself. It was courage, as Bernard DeVoto had said about the supporters of inappropriate cocktails. Like Manhattans. Ah, Manhattan, the city I’d truly wanted to live in, but never could. The pair were dead on either side of a kerosene lamp. I was at my most efficient. It was eerie—for a moment I wondered if they were the first dead to stay dead. Should I have waited to find out? Of course not. Too many marks did that already; the lucky ones had been consumed so thoroughly they only existed as the subjects of poorly sourced rumors. How do you know that’s how Jimmy died? Just because you never saw him again?

  I saw Alexa again, but she didn’t speak of her plan to infiltrate City Hall. Not with all the tents set up in the United Nations Plaza and that crazy park with all the artificial trees right in front of City Hall. She said instead—and this is strange; as I write, I cannot picture where we are at all, but I imagine her standing before a foggy black and white street in a film noir—that she was sad and that she knew that the world was really near its end.

  “Do you know, Billy,” she said, “did you even notice at all, that we don’t have a name for the earthquake that just happened? Not the Hayward Fault Quake, or The Big One, or Five-Fifteen or M-Fifteen or whatever little dating nomenclature we’ve all been using for more than a decade. There’s no more mass media, so no more instant mass language—”

  “And that’s a bad thing?”

  “It’s history, it’s important. You’re not going to give me one of those San Francisco, ‘We don’t need The System anymore’ lines of bullshit. Big deal, CNN got to name disasters. Manufacturing slogans to manufacture consent, but at least we all had something to agree on. The way the world worked is better than the way it doesn’t.”

  “History’s written by the winners,” I said, “and there ain’t any winners anymore, so it’s the end of history. Welcome to it.” My mouth tasted of whisky; Teacher’s or some other blended shit. Was there a bottle weighing down one of the pockets of my overcoat? Alexa was wearing a business blazer of some sort with lapels that could carry her to Angel Island if she jumped off the pier. I took hold of one. It just felt important. “I haven’t slept, or don’t think I have, in days. How did I even get out of Schroeder’s?”

  “I don’t know—I came to outside. We were pulled out; the building didn’t collapse or anything. The Financial District is still in pretty good shape. You were long gone by the time I was on my feet.”

  “Could it have been…a reanimate? That pulled us to safety, that is?” I asked. I told her about the bus and the faces I’d seen, and the other things too that I had forgotten till then. The reanimate I stalked for three blocks, because I noticed it waited for the light to change at the crosswalk. Rubble that had been removed so quickly and then piled in the plazas at the old BART stations on 16th and 24th Street in my neighborhood—there weren’t even enough people left in the Mission to move the tons of concrete and steel, much less to fill the multi-story escalator and staircase wells with the stuff. The dead had to have had a hand in it.

  “They’re regaining their consciousnesses, somehow. Maybe just the most recently reanimated, maybe because we’re still challenging them, so they have to evolve here even if everywhere else in America they’re just a shambling and slavering horde. They’re going to win,” I told her,
“because they’re getting smarter.” Alexa pulled herself out of my grip. “Soon they’ll be able to blend in, maybe even talk!”

  “Oh, don’t start,” Alexa said. “And you said I was credulous when I showed you my files. You’re just a hupper.” Hysterical uncanny perceptions—HUP. Lots of people saw a glimmer of recognition or experienced a moment of confusion when faced with a reanimate, especially when it wore the body of a relative or friend. It also happened when men were confronted by the moving body of a woman, or when women encountered dead children or teens with wide eyes and high growls. It wasn’t a real disorder or psychological thing, just a three-letter acronym coined in some broadsheet or website somewhere that took off because it still happened every day somewhere or other, because humans were hardwired to try to find a spark of life somewhere in the dead. It used to keep us sane, that impulse, now it was very strongly selected against by evolution. God, we were all dying. I knew there was something different about what I had seen, though.

  “I’m not a hupper. You need to have had a relationship with the reanimate, of some sort, to be a hupper. I’m a student of human nature, a trained observer. A driller. I’ve seen a thousand faces—”

  “And you rocked ’em all?” Alexa laughed at her own joke, a harsh sea lion bark. She must have been drunk too, but I don’t remember buying her a drink or passing her my bottle. My bottle, yes, of course. I dug out the Teacher’s and took a long swig. Alexa went on. “You haven’t bathed in days. You’ve been out all night, every night, probably. HUP and alcohol-induced delirium. It’s a disease of the night, you know? Delirium is a disease of the night,” she repeated. Then she smirked and told me she could quote from fancy books, too, but I couldn’t place her reference.