The Last Weekend

by Nick Mamatas

He rolled his eyes at me and tried just that. It was a small store, but sufficiently crowded that I could hear what he was telling the cashier. He pointed at some muffins, and at the menu board. Then he came back, his eyes wild, and asked me if I could believe that they wouldn’t break a hundred-dollar bill.

  “I believe it.”

  “They won’t even accept them as currency. How is that even legal?” He turned back toward the row of cash registers, and raised his voice to say, “Is this legal?!” but the workers ignored him. They were good at that. I supposed they’d have to be to keep from pouring broken glass into the oatmeal.

  “You stay here!” he told me. “I’ll be right back.” I watched him rush across the street and nearly get hit by a car as he crossed against the light. Had Colin changed since that day he got me back to my house, or was this the genuine article—the minor conniver unused to inconvenience or being told no, and uninterested in kicking a friend an extra ten percent for a job well done? If he trusted me enough to be a rich little snot in my presence, that was just one more reason to leave town. Finally, he came back and handed me five ten-dollar bills.

  “My bank,” he said, by way of explanation. Then he patted the story. “Yvette’s going to love this.”

  “I bet she will,” I said. Whenever Colin mentioned Yvette, a fist closed around my heart, but this time the spasm was weaker. I liked the idea of Colin passing off my first meeting with Yvette as his own work.

  Then it redoubled in strength when Colin explained, “She told me all about your weird typewriter scheme. This is perfect.”

  “I thought you were going to…” I didn’t bother finishing the sentence. Colin bought the story for Yvette to publish as her own work, not his. He’d probably have his father’s secretary take care of the submissions too; what if Yvette didn’t like the way the glue on stamp backs tasted? We couldn’t have that. “Does she know you hired me?”

  “It was her idea!” Colin said. “Listen, she knows you’re not over her. She was worried you’d just volunteer to write the story without taking any money if she asked, or that you’d do something stupid like write it, then tear it up, or write about one of your, you know, intimate moments and try to embarrass her.”

  “Why can’t she do her own work? Has she been too busy sucking your cock to get any typing done?”

  Colin held up his hands. “Not cool, friend. She cares about you. Really, she’s worried about you. We both are. She needs this because, to be honest, she isn’t doing very well. And we wanted to help you out somehow. Plus,” he said, “you took the money. A contract is a contract is a contract, even when it’s a verbal one.”

  “Why isn’t she doing well? Too much cock?” I said. “Is all the semen upsetting her tummy? Did you spooge in her eye and accidentally blind her?”

  “You’re highly interested in my cock today, Bill,” Colin said. “You need to restrain yourself before you say something you regret.” He folded the manuscript in half and slipped it into the interior breast pocket of his suit jacket. How could he dress like that in the middle of a New England winter? Blue blood runs cold. “Let’s just call it a deal, and call it a day. All right? Spend the money however you wish, on anything you want.”

  “You said Yvette isn’t doing well. What happened? I have a right to know!”

  “No, you don’t have a right to any such thing. But I’ll tell you,” he said. Then, sotto voce, “She was pregnant. One of those things. It happens.” I was about to bring up his cock again when I caught the word was. Colin thought faster than I did. “She lost the fetus. It was the first trimester, it happens a lot. She didn’t even tell her parents. Honestly, we had a few arguments about her aborting it, but she wasn’t even sure whose it was, so she claimed I didn’t have any say in the issue.” He shrugged. “We have an open relationship. Anyway, the abortion topic is no longer relevant. Nor is this conversation. She’s fine, physically, just very upset. She needs a break.”

  “Open…”

  “It was my idea. She needs to have more experiences. You know, writers need experiences.”

  “We do,” I said. “We do. Can’t have Yvette running around with inadequate sexual experiences. And now a miscarriage. She’ll clearly be an award-winning writer one day. If only she’ll have an affair with a professor next, she’ll be golden.” I felt terrible the moment that bile left my mouth. “Oh God, I’m sorry. I’m so fucking terrible.” I looked out the window, at the traffic. “I should just throw myself in front of a bus. A poor fucking baby died in a woman’s womb and my first impulse was to score some asinine rhetorical point with it. God, why am I such a miserable shit?”

  Colin wasn’t God, so he didn’t have an answer for me. He wasn’t wearing a sneer; instead he looked like he was about to cry as well. Like I was an angry puppy about to be put to sleep for my own good. Colin was a compassionate guy, but he only had one way of expressing himself—throwing cash around. It’s a blunt instrument, one that drives people mad. Yvette and I both did whatever Colin said, just because he was rich and nice about it. Write a story, fuck a ton of extraneous guys. We were born into it, trained since infancy to obey people with money. Colin didn’t even realize what he represented to us, to me. He was the velvet glove, the mythical nice guy; Santa Claus and a generous uncle, and a surprisingly large tax refund and a five-dollar bill found on the street with nobody else to claim it for miles around. No menace, no rage, and so giving. All you had to do was be entirely obedient. Colin had always gotten what he’d wanted, since the time he was a toddler, so he grew up with magical beliefs—desire and fulfillment were one and the same. For me, to desire was to fail. And that was why I was such a miserable shit. Colin explained that to me with a look, like a statue of the Buddha or a long evening watching the sun set into the sea.

  Instantly, a second epiphany. “Where does the sun set into the sea?” I said to myself, but loud enough to make Colin frown. “That’s where I need to be, to watch the day consume itself. That way I can leave behind the past, all the little humiliations and bullshit I keep stewing in. I’m so sorry to hear about Yvette. I won’t bother her anymore.”

  “You’ve not been bothering her. I think she might even want to hear from you more often. That’s part of why I asked you to write the story. I mean . . .” Colin said, but then he stopped.

  “No, no, I’m just living two lives. One full of daydreams and stupid fantasies and one where what . . . what do I do all day? I’ll tell you what I did earlier today. I sat in a computer lab and tried to figure out how to get a salesman to visit ten different houses in the fewest steps possible. There were a bunch of us trying, and our answers were averaged together to see if ‘parallel processing’ was smarter than individual thinking. I barely know what parallel processing means, but it seems to be a big deal. Everyone thinking the same thing all the time. I got twenty-five bucks for it. And that’s my day.” I took to my feet and wrestled my coat back on. “I shop at the gas station because I’m embarrassed to be seen leaving Family Dollar. It’s not like I’m fooling anyone. I don’t have a car, Colin!”

  “Maybe you should sit back down, take it easy. Let’s talk about this story a bit more,” Colin said. “Or we can go somewhere else?” I could see it on his lips. He was going to offer to take me to a bar, get me a drink, maybe some lunch. He liked bar and grill–type places that served quesadillas and spinach dip, and fish and chips and clam chowder along with great steins of beer. Colin drank while he ate to keep from getting tipsy, to keep from losing control. He had to practice self-control in order to successfully manipulate the rest of us.

  “No, I’m going home. I have to get this down. The sun eaten by the sea! There has to be a Greek myth about it. I should know these things, I’m Greek after all.” I headed out to the door and patted my pocket. “Thanks for the dough. Tell Yvette I . . . tell her to feel better, to stay strong.”

  I lasted about half a block before I vomited into a garbage can. The smell of the trash didn’t help me keep anything down,
either. I crossed the street and puked again. Yvette, pregnant. The story—a story of us, really—for her, midwived by Colin. Boston’s a big city, but it’s a small town. Like San Francisco. Hell, probably like New York and Athens and Cairo, too. We can’t be anonymous, we can’t lose ourselves in even the largest metropolis, or only deal with people on our own terms. We get caught in social webs from which there is no escape. The same eighty-five people, over and over, thanks to accidents of geography, demography, and psychography. No wonder writers and artists decamp for Majorca, Morocco, Paris. Places where they can’t be ensnared by the language of others. How great it must be to live in invincible ignorance of the world around you. To just tromp down the streets, consuming blindly and shitting just as blindly, not caring about a thing.

  Not that I could afford to go anywhere like that, save Mexico. In the end, I was a coward. Chester Himes and Dennis Cooper were both expatriates in Paris, but I wasn’t as slick as either of those writers, not in any way. I was gangly, bad with both women and men, a dumb shy hick. My parents had been brave enough to come to America, but I was too frightened to leave it. California was close enough. It was a different America. A newer, fresher America.

  (12)

  Alexa found me in Sweetie’s up by Telegraph Hill. I took another drill gig, and it had actually been uneventful. Some kids—Chinese versus Italians, the same old story—shot each other up over some bullshit, and I came in to give them each a silver dollar–sized hole in their foreheads so they wouldn’t wake up and go after one another all over again. Maybe before the collapse they would have survived their wounds with treatment, gone to prison, and carried on their feuds for another generation. I didn’t even feel sorry for them for throwing their lives away.

  I was writing on a legal pad when Alexa walked in. Sweetie’s was always a quiet place, even before the rise of the dead. Every head turned, and she spotted me immediately and sat down across from me. I said hello, and worked on my sentence. She said hello and when I didn’t look back up, she picked up my pad and then smacked it against the tabletop. Her hair was in a severe bun, her face a little dirty.

  “I’m working on a new chapter,” I said.

  “Billy, why would a book told in the first person even have chapters?” She tapped the pad with her fingernails, all chewed and ragged. “Why would it stop and start again? Whenever he goes to sleep and wakes up?”

  I shrugged. “The narrator’s read a lot of novels, and decided he liked the format maybe?”

  That satisfied her. “Sorry about the other day,” she said.

  “Sorry for pitching a fit, or killing someone?”

  “I’m sorry for both…but, really, why on Earth would someone jump out at an armed—” She caught herself. “Never mind. I’ve not been sleeping well. How have you been?”

  I was tempted to tell her about Thunder. How she was in bed, how she had the same taste for violence that Alexa had, and about Thunder’s theory of postapocalyptic women. I told her instead about the dead teens I’d been called upon to drill, how I took the gig because I knew it was close to Sweetie’s, how one of the cops had laughed at the bodies as they laid them out for me and said aloud, “What a waste of cock.”

  “I knew you’d be here,” Alexa said. Then she held up a clunky old cell phone. She was on the job.

  “Lady driller, eh?”

  “Amusingly, the city is actually running low on drills. They gave me the phone and pager, but no other equipment yet. That’s government work for you, I suppose.”

  “I suppose…” I glanced around the room. As is typical when I’m drinking with a notepad and a power drill on the table, all eyes were on me. “Do you think you’re up for it?”

  “After the Berkeley thing, yes. Seeing that kid, just dead meat, literally, finally jerk off the ground like a marionette being yanked by a string. I mean, I’d seen it before, but only for a moment. Usually I’m running, like everyone else.”

  “It’s true. I’ll never get over it,” I said. I picked up my pen. “Every time is different—the reanimate dead are like snowflakes, no two are the same.” It was difficult to say one thing while writing something else entirely, but I impressed myself with my ability to do it. On the pad, I wrote is this about city hall??

  “Oh yes,” Alexa said. “Definitely.”

  “I can’t help but remember what the priest told me when my papou died. At the wake I said, ‘He’s dead, he’s dead—I don’t want to see a dead person,’ and started crying and wailing, just like my mother was. And the priest looked at me and said, ‘There are no dead people. Not anymore. They’re only sleeping.’ Not that I ever understood Greek Orthodox theology that well, but it always seemed weird and heavy to me.” And I wrote if you still want me, I’m in.

  “Yes, obviously,” Alexa said. “Growing up Greek was so strange, but I guess you can say it prepared you for your job—as a driller—just as it did me, right? Right?” She was emoting like a girl playing a sunflower in the third-grade play. Then her cell phone beeper went off and she looked at it.

  “They found you a drill?”

  “No, a . . . sleeper.” She grinned. “I’ll borrow yours, okay?” Without waiting for an answer—which would have been no—she grabbed the drill box by the handle and hefted it. “I had a feeling there’d be some hazing involved in this gig.”

  “Well, it might just have been bureaucratic incompetence,” I said. “Or supercompetence! Maybe they can track us with the phones, or have a chip in the drill, and realized you could just use mine.” Even dumb jokes began to feel strangely likely. I reached for my beer.

  “I’ll bring this back to your apartment later,” Alexa said, of the drill.

  “I’ll be here all night. Just return it here.”

  “The apartment it is.”

  “I won’t be at the apartment,” I said. “Bring the drill here when you’re done.”

  “You have to be at the apartment to collect your drill. It’s city property—you’re responsible for it. I’ll be by later. Wait for me,” Alexa said.

  “Come back here with it,” I said, annoyed.

  “The apartment it is!” And with that she left. The second she turned the corner, I was worried she would die. Alexa was too cocky, too eager for some dramatic bloodspray. Was I supposed to follow her? Is that why she made a big deal about meeting me at the apartment later? Was she just waiting for me around the corner, maybe stewing as I dawdled, maybe ready to take off on her own anyway—or was she already gone?

  An old guy sitting at the bar, half-turned in his seat, sneered at me and said, “Maricon!” I blinked at him stupidly. “Faggot!”

  “I know what maricon means, poustis!” I said. I snatched up my pen and pad, threw some shiny change made out of an old watch at the bar and ran out the door. On the corner, in a bicycle rickshaw, Alexa was waiting for me, my drill on her lap.

  The gig, in SoMa in one of the ramshackle rowhouses, was another easy one. A man had called in to say that his partner was dying, and that it wouldn’t be much longer now. Then he tied the dying man to his bed, rather expertly, with the bondage gear he had lying around. The man passed before we arrived, but the caller had opened his mouth and put in a ball gag for safety’s sake.

  “It wasn’t AIDS,” he greeted us with. He was an older guy, of the right stratum to still be as horrified by AIDS as we all were with what was going on in the US now, so he had to be sure to warn us. “I have some fabric, if you want it?” he said. And he did have a long bolt of some stretchy Spandex or other synthetic, that he seemed too eager to wrap us in.

  Alexa mumbled something about official business and safety. I just shrugged.

  “Her first day, you know. I’ve been working for the city . . .” I said, as one should never say “driller” in front of a client, “for a while now. You’re very conscientious. Thank you so much for all your preparations.” Teary, he explained that cancer had taken his lover, and reiterated that it wasn’t AIDS. And then I decided that it probably was AID
S, which roared back to life here after the collapse of the pharmaceutical trade domestically and its relocation to Africa. Now we were paying for AIDS drugs with gold, gram for gram.

  Alexa had the drill bit on the dead man’s forehead when I walked in. I closed the door behind me.

  “Do not wait. Do it now. There’s actually more splatter when it’s slow. But don’t go too fast either! And keep your mouth closed, but your eyes open!” I tried to keep it as quiet as possible, but somehow my lungs made my voice too loud.

  Alexa had on gloves and a surgical mask. She shuddered, winced, inhaled sharply, and started the drill. “Shit!” she said, through teeth I presumed were clenched. It was a sharp bit—I’d put a new one on after the morning’s drilling—and it bit right into the poor sap’s head. It only took a few seconds to reach the brain, then tear into it. Some blood sluiced through the spiral of the bit, but didn’t spray the room. Behind me, the client started banging on the door, weeping and crying for his Jerome, for his poor poor Jerome.

  Alexa said, “Lock the door and help me clean him up. This guy doesn’t need any more grief.” The bottom of the drill box had some gauze and wipes and antiseptic sprays—all stuff like the gloves and masks I had never bothered to use, given how I live. I figured it was like letting a little kid get dirty to make him stronger. Overprotect him and he grows up to be a wheezing, allergic asthmatic. Not that I’m a doctor or anything.

  Looking at Alexa deftly clean up the blood, then lift the head of the deceased to flip his pillow over to hide the streak of spray on the pillowcase, reminded me of how little I did for my clients. Was letting the blood splatter where it will just another low-key suicide attempt on my part? I looked down at my shirt. Dried blood from this morning. I hadn’t even considered it when I went to the bar right afterward to start drinking. Did I always look like a bloodsoaked wreck, like Death himself wandering in to check out the scene? The client started jiggling the doorknob and calling for us to open the door.