by Nick Mamatas
“Let’s go home,” Thunder said. “I’m hungry.”
Dry goods and canned goods last forever, and are easy to buy down by the Embarcadero from Mexican fishing boats. So I had plenty of pasta and canned tomato sauce. Despite the whole new world for women that opened up along with the zombie apocalypse and the end of America, Thunder quickly volunteered to make us a late dinner. I found a little bottle of something—I keep stashes of miniature bottles around when I remember to buy them. It’s like finding an Easter egg out on grandma’s lawn, not that my yiayia ever had a lawn or believed in hiding Easter eggs. We boiled them and painted them red, for the blood of Christ, and played the traditional game of smacking end against end in an informal elimination tournament around the dinner table. Everything smelled like lamb, back then. I haven’t had leg of lamb in years, or avgolemono soup, but I figured I could at least reclaim the Easter egg hunt tradition for my own amusement. It’s hard to live alone. I guess I liked Thunder’s company, but that didn’t stop me from hiding the mini—a tiny Smirnoff—in my palm and then my lap so I wouldn’t have to share it with her. I could pass it off as water, maybe.
Thunder even put the food on plates and presented mine to me as grandly as she could, but holding it high in her left hand and bowing slightly. I took it and sat on one side of my coffee table. She plomped down on the floor across from me. I was pretty hungry, so ate easily, but Thunder just picked at her food.
“This looks like brains,” she said finally. “Just like the back of that old lady’s head. And . . .” Unspoken, I presumed, was “Magpie’s head.” “I’m not hungry, sorry. I don’t mean to waste your food.”
I graciously snatched up her plate and started eating off of it. My strategy was twofold—one, indeed no I didn’t want any food wasted, and two, by eating and keeping my mouth full I wouldn’t have to think of anything comforting or poignant to say. At the very least I wouldn’t say anything stupid that would upset her further. She rambled for a bit about Berkeley, how the dead outnumber the living there, how tough it was to make friends with some street kids just to see them shamble at you a week later. How at first her crew had gone down to the posh Claremont section of town and kicked in the door of a mansion to live in, but then some older people with guns showed up and threatened to kill everyone.
“I slept with a couple of them to get us out of there, honestly,” she said, clearly not completely honestly. No wonder she wanted a gun now. Finally I reached down under the table and brought the Smirnoff out.
Thunder sighed happily, smiled and said, “Thanks,” and then opened the bottle and drank it one inhalation. “I don’t want to fuck tonight,” she said, so we didn’t. I found another mini and drank that to keep myself even. We went to bed and didn’t have sex, and we didn’t hold one another or anything like that either. She sniffled a bit, but then got to snoring. Perhaps another reason why she was called Thunder? I was up for a long time, finally in a place where I didn’t have to constantly review my day for regrets and minor humiliations. Maybe it was that someone else, someone pretty friendly, had shown up and solved a problem I was facing. Maybe it was just exhaustion burning out my nerves so I couldn’t feel anything more, but I was able to sleep well for once.
Were this a novel, I suppose I’d write “And when I awoke, Thunder was gone.” But she wasn’t. Actually, she was packing. She had both guns, and had appropriated some Sterno cans, some chili, and a can opener. She also had emptied out a canvas bag of the books—Knut Hamsun, Kathy Acker, Charles Willeford—I’d been keeping in there. It was filled with a few more of my things.
“Is this it, then? Is it over?”
“Of course not, Billy,” she said. “Nothing’s ever over. I’ll see you again. You know what it’s like. People always run into one another in small towns.”
“Is there anything else you’d like to take from me?” It was all easy-come-easy-go junk, except the guns, which I wasn’t too fond of anyhow, but she could have asked. Or woke me like she did the morning before, at the very least.
“You don’t want to send me out there with nothing, dude,” she said. “I shouldn’t have both guns, maybe? I was planning to keep one and barter the other. Except for your computer, which I’d never take because you’re a writer—”
I laughed. “You didn’t think I was much of a writer last night!”
Thunder scrunched up her face. “Hey, listen. I’m sorry. That story just wasn’t my cup of tea. You wrote it before all the shit hit the fan anyway. Keep working at it. Anyway, I know you like writing, how about that? And you have all those notepads full of writing.” She added quickly. “Don’t worry, I didn’t read it. I assumed it was a diary of some sort.”
“. . . plus you couldn’t, because my handwriting was so terrible?”
She blushed at that. “You just strike me as a loner. I need community. Like that neighborhood last night. They were all in it together. You ever drill a neighbor, or even look out a window to see what some noise is outside, to try and help?”
“Just take what you need and go. If I see you around, I’ll see you around.” My throat was also cracked and raspy. I needed a drink immediately, and didn’t want to give away any more hiding spots, or any more stuff. “I’m almost always home, you know. If you wanted to come by.”
She put down the bag, bent over the couch, and kissed me on the lips, slipping the very tip of her tongue between them, just for a second, to show that she meant it. Then she said, “I will. We’ll definitely see one another again very soon,” and then she picked up her bag, walked to the door, waved at me, and let herself out.
I stayed on the couch for a while, wrapped up in blankets that smelled like Thunder—baby powder and dirt and sweat and sugar. I barely knew Thunder, so I didn’t miss her much. The apartment seemed larger without her. I couldn’t help but feel that she was part of some secret of which I was only slowly becoming aware, that she was a single strand of an all-encompassing web of the sort my father would spend hours detailing from misremembered news reports and hearing our neighbors speak of politics. She had come to San Francisco from Berkeley for a reason. It may have had to do with me, or I might have just been some patsy to use and abuse for a few days, or maybe it was some kind of test for her. I didn’t know anything, but I was suddenly sure.
(11)
I never had a big blow-up with Yvette, thanks only partially to the T-riding and the drinking. Whenever I was around the Commons, where I might run into her on her way to or from a class, my hands would shake. Every girl in a pony-tail and sweatshirt looked like her, if only for a second. And in Boston, that was most girls. In winter the coats came out—slick girls in long black wool coats like something out of Prague, practical girls in puffy down insulated things that looked like bright blue waffles, sporty girls in purple soft shell jackets from REI. I grew even more agitated then, as I wouldn’t know Yvette till she was right on top of me.
I realize now that I spent a lot of time in those days daydreaming about stories other than the one I was living in. I’d rehearse what I’d do when I saw Yvette. Smile at her and strike up a conversation like everything was still cool; rush past her, hiding my face, and go home and beat myself up for it; or let my heart soar with joy when she called out after me; give a sharp nod and keep walking if she was with a guy other than Colin. She had agitated for opening up their relationship, which stressed Colin out quite a bit, and me even more.
But he was fine with it because, “Harvard guys get all the pussy they want,” he told me at one of the innumerable Au Bon Pains that littered the area around Harvard Square.
I laughed out loud. “Still trying to be ‘one of the guys,’ eh?” He was drinking tea. I had a cookie and lemonade. Sugar is a good substitute for booze, and it was 9:30 am.
He quirked his eyebrows. “Facts are facts, brother.” He smiled. “Is that any better?”
“I’m not really the most ‘authentic’ guy in the world myself,” I said. I even did air quotes over the word “authenti
c,” grinding a corner of my cookie to crumbs. “I can’t give you a blue-collar white dude ghetto pass or anything.”
“Do you ever stay up nights, wondering about what it means to be authentic?” Colin asked, suddenly serious. “Being an authentic person, an American, an individual? What it means to play a role for parents, or classmates, or just people you encounter on the street?”
“No, mostly I drink and read books.” I took a gulp of lemonade. “That sort of thing never even occurs to me.”
“I think you work it out in your writing. Have you been writing lately?”
“Uh…not lately.” I hated when he asked me about my work, which wasn’t going well, and which I didn’t like discussing even under the best of circumstances—and what those circumstances could even be was beyond the scope of my imagination.
“Let me cut to the chase, Bill. Want to make some money?”
“Always.”
“Sell me a story.”
“For what?” I asked. “Starting a magazine?”
“No, I want you to ghostwrite something,” he said. “Maybe ghostwriting isn’t the right word…”
“You want me to write a story—about anything that sounds ‘authentic,’ I suspect—and then you can put your name on it and show it to Yvette…? Is that right?”
“And if it’s good, publish it.”
“Publish it. Under your name,” I said.
“Yes, but remember, most journals only pay in contributor copies. I’m ready to pay you five hundred dollars up front,” he said. “And! I promise not to enter it into any contests that will pay out more than you’d earn for writing it. I really just want to submit it to—” and he named some journal I’d never heard of. I made a mental note to see if the Harvard Coop carried it on its newsstand.
I wasn’t prepared for this at all. Was I being taken advantage of?—well, that went without saying. Nobody makes an offer to anyone without perceiving himself as better off after the trade is made. It’s just up to the sucker to accept the deal. On the other hand, lab-ratting was about to end for the semester, and it would be three long dark months before I was able to make five bucks answering surveys about how suicidal I was. I’d rank that ideation as four out of ten, and climbing. Five hundred bucks could buy a lot of oblivion, and nearly as much self-loathing. On the third hand, which I often grow when contemplating alternatives, a deadline is always a good motivation.
“Okay. But you take what you get. No revisions. I’m not going to write a story just to have you give me a zillion notes on it, like ‘Make it more compelling’ or ‘Give the milkman more shading.’”
“There’s going to be a milkman in my story?”
My story rankled me. I nearly threw my lemonade at him. “No, I guarantee that there won’t be one. There won’t even be milk, okay?”
“And no suicides.”
“God no.” I was so thirsty, suddenly. “I want half up front.”
“No,” Colin said. “How about fifty bucks up front. That’s what that sci-fi magazine paid you for a whole story, right? I mean, with two-fifty, you can leave town…” He must have seen the expression on my face, because he then added, “Kidding! I mean, with two-fifty you can probably get someone else to write you the story, and then hand it in to me as your own work.”
“I’m not going to leave town, and fifty is fine.” Leaving town, yes, that’s what I’d do. But I’d need the whole five hundred bucks. That was plane ticket money, or On The Road money. A cheap-ass car, bus, the train tickets, fleabag motels. I could make it anywhere.
“I’ll have it in a week.”
Colin shook his head. “No, no, take your time, I want your best work.”
“You’ll have it in a week,” I said. “That’ll be my best work. I’m enthusiastic, excited. I’m a professional.”
Colin slipped a fresh fifty-dollar bill out of his pocket and slid it across the table. He had come prepared. “You’re a professional now,” he said. And with that, Colin has purchased me, like an ascot or a yacht, or a highball or a call girl, or whatever else wealthy people buy. And he was the nicest guy I knew. He couldn’t help himself. He was born and bred to see everyone and everything around him as a commodity. No wonder he stayed up all night, biting his pillow, wondering about his authenticity…and then he turned around and proved what a plastic, empty shell of a man he was by buying me, to wear me, to pretend to be me.
I headed back over the river, stocked up on some staples—vodka, pineapple juice, rum, and beer, and got started. I drank two PBRs to start, to get me up. I was free, free to write whatever I wanted, since I wouldn’t be showing the story to anyone, not to the workshop, not to Yvette. Let Colin take the lumps. It’s not like anything I ever wrote got me anything but lumps, and even those were from the omnipresent fists of indifference. I wrote about the Y2K scheme I’d been a part of in Youngstown, and those crazy typewriters. Yvette knew the story, of course; Colin didn’t. Nasty of me, eh? But nobody takes a deal without thinking they can somehow get one over on the party of the first part. It wasn’t bad, the story. Just around 2500 words, and some of the paragraphs I managed to commit to memory. They’re in the pages above. I was enthusiastic, jittery. Not just maintaining, the fluid in my spine was boiling.
So even as the first draft of Colin’s story was printing out, I opened my web browser and started looking for plane tickets. They were more expensive than William Shatner and that travel gnome had let on. I could get to Chicago pretty easily, but I’d been there on school trips and such, and it never captured my imagination. And it was cold. I didn’t need a plane ticket to get to New York, but five hundred bucks wouldn’t last me a week down there, even if I took the cheapo Chinatown bus, even if I got a room at the Chelsea Hotel like every other booze-pickled cliché from the hinterlands. Then I realized that any trip I’d take would be one way. I wouldn’t be flying back to Boston, or visiting home in Youngstown any time soon. Five hundred bucks was just enough to not be enough. I made myself a pair of Hawaiian Screws with the pineapple juice and vodka and went to bed, but I could not sleep.
Did Colin do this on purpose? Implant the notion of leaving town in my mind, and then offer me just enough money for it to be torture? Then he could have Yvette all to himself—and where was she anyway? Hiding from me purposefully? I was growing paranoid, hysterical. I was so tempted to simply delete the story, rip up the print-out, but I hated the idea of wasting so much time and effort. I finally settled on a concept that would keep my hatred at a slow simmer and allow me to keep the money and hand over the story with my integrity intact. Clearly, Colin was oblivious, not malevolent, and probably thought he was really helping me out. And I did have to get out of Boston. There was nothing here for me anymore.
I took a couple of days to proofread and edit the story. I rode the T, but didn’t spend much time ogling women and sexually humiliating them in my mind. Donuts yes, booze yes. Had to keep warm. By midweek, the print-out looked like a CIA-redacted document, covered in black and scratch-outs. The second draft was a bit more leisurely. I typed till I got bored, then took a nap, or drank a bit more, or just watched the snow fall and fill up the tire tread marks on the driveway below. I needed to find some little kernel inside myself, some remnant of self-control that I could cultivate. Five hundred extra dollars, if it couldn’t free me, could kill me. Liquor, hard drugs, the wrong sort of whore with a straight razor hidden in her bra and murder on her mind. Not that I ever paid for sex. It seemed like a common enough activity, if novels from a certain type of writer—confessional, boozed-up, masculinist—were to be believed, but I had no idea how to even behave on a phone to an escort service.
I was sure the girl on the other end of the line would say, “So you’d like an escort, Mister Kostopolos? And what event is it you’ll be attending?” despite all logic and reason. A call girl would laugh at my little room, the pile of clothes on the floor, the yellowed and flaking paperbacks bought from street peddlers. And if I paid for a night in a hotel, well th
ere would go half the five hundred bucks before I even earned it. Streetwalkers were beyond imagining. I was sure they all had AIDS and crabs. Every thought I had ended in disaster. Money would just empower those fantasies, and bring them into reality.
Colin liked the story. Of course he did; he had good taste. His parents had made sure of that. His parents also taught him to closely inspect the work he paid for in front of the artisan, and to hmm and hrrm and snort and tap his finger against the page when confused or intrigued as well, I’m sure. He did that plenty. Only after he read the story and pointed out three typos that I’d missed—homophonic errors are the death of me—did he hand over five one-hundred dollar bills. We were in an Au Bon Pain again. Another one, on the other side of Harvard Square. It was small, not bright and with a wall full of windows like the one we’d met in a week ago.
“A bonus?” I said, pocketing the bills.
“What…oh, wait. No. You can’t change a hundred?”
“No,” I said. My cheeks burned for a moment. “You can’t change a hundred either, obviously. Or you would have.”
Colin grew impatient via quantum mechanics. He went from calm to pissy in an instant without passing through any intermediate stages. “Give me one of those back,” he snapped. “I’ll get change.”
I slipped a bill out of my pocket. “Don’t think you can go up to the counter and break a C-note.”