PostApoc

by Liz Worth

  Aimee pulls into a driveway in front of a line of row houses. I follow her around the back of number 133 and we knock three times, like her friend told her.

  The door pulls back, opens onto a dark basement hallway. A man’s moon-white face appears. The long black curls that fall around his cheeks add to the pallor. I’d guess him to be in his late thirties.

  “You want something to drink?” he asks.

  We smile, nod, stay silent. He steps aside and we go in.

  “You girls want one bottle or two?” he asks, settling into a dirty rose-coloured couch. The legs on it have collapsed so it sits flat on the floor, bringing the man’s knees up to the middle of his chest.

  I look at Aimee but she’s already formed an answer: “Two.”

  He nods. “Who’s first?”

  He brings me into a windowless room and tells me to get into bed. He closes the door, keeping the soft light from the hallway outside.

  “I keep a knife on me at all times and guns hidden in every room,” he says. “So don’t think you’re going to rip me off because I’ll have you dead in less than a minute.”

  He gets in beside me and the mattress sinks to my left, rolls me against him. “Put your back to me so we can spoon,” he says. I turn around and my ass crack fits against his penis. My heart drops, but bounces back again when his softness doesn’t change.

  He puts his head in my hair and breathes deep, sighs.

  “I had a girlfriend before,” he says. “I miss her.”

  “Oh?” I say. “What was her name?”

  “Natalie,” he says. “She had a body more like your friend: tall, curvy, strong.”

  “Uh huh,” I say, and then, “sorry,” not sure what I’m even apologizing for.

  “It’s all right,” he says. “You’re fine. I just like to feel someone next to me. I like skin on skin, you know?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I know.”

  “I’m losing my energy anyway,” he says. “I couldn’t get it up if you paid me. I heard that’s happening to other guys, too. Not that many of my friends are still around, but the ones who are …”

  “Oh?” I say, thinking it’s obviously not happening to Cam or Trevor. “What’s your name?” I add.

  “Mike,” he says.

  He’s quiet for a second, doesn’t ask my name. I remember Aimee’s warning, about falling asleep, so I keep going. “Where’d you and Natalie meet?”

  At a club, he tells me. Under the lights her mocha skin was red clay, and it cracked and flaked as she crawled across the floor. But when she looked up, smiled, she was whole again, her skin newly smooth, limbs fresh with movement. He was so high he probably didn’t have access to all parts of his eyes, but could feel the warm tightness of a packed club, the guardedness stiffening in his shoulders, the small of his back. He and every other man in there had his eyes on the patch and swell of this girl’s body. He remembers that he could smell the other men’s crotches, the salt between the legs of the girls. Or maybe that was just the acid, heightening his senses.

  He got a dance from her later, told her he loved her. Just another stoned creep at the strip club, but she went for it.

  “I felt like I was the luckiest man ever that night,” he says. “That night, and every night.”

  My jaw’s tight, keeps a seal around a flood of spit behind my teeth.

  Mike says his water’s working today, if I want to use the bathroom. I see Aimee go into the room next as I lean into the sink, elbows propped on either side of the porcelain. Breathing deep I tell myself, Don’t puke don’t puke don’t puke.

  Thin tentacles of black hair zigzag out of the drain, hundreds of strands attempting to clog the flow. I run the tap and light a cigarette, wait for the water to cool down. I cup my hands and fill them, hold my breath. Pretend to drown.

  The Bloor Street bridge was built above an altar, for sacrifices and worship. Below it is an eye that opens onto astral planes. The structure’s belly is a skeletal system, subway tracks and frail ladders, bloated with ghost trains, rolling whispers of phantom vibrations.

  My spine fits the width of the rail, the bump of each vertebrae bruising against the flat of the tracks. My shins are feathers, feet peppered with pins and needles. Beside me, Aimee dangles her legs over the edge, torso expertly balanced even with a bottle of vodka in hand. From all the way up here, you’d never believe that there’s such an empty hunger running from the stretch of space between the bridge and the road below.

  People used to come to this bridge to die. Jump, believing it would bring them to another world. The Eye, it only looks back at those who can see it.

  When the city was built, did they think they could pave it shut? Maybe they couldn’t see it. Maybe it never woke up until the bridge was built over top, hundreds of feet above. Maybe that’s when the Eye knew it could finally feed.

  There were so many suicides here that the city put up a payphone at one end of the bridge, a big white sign above with the number for a crisis line. “WE LISTEN 24 HOURS A DAY,” the sign says, “CALL IF YOU NEED TO TALK.” But would the Eye wait? Or would it close in on you anyway?

  The payphone couldn’t have been enough because later the barriers went up, thick silver wires creating a cage, encouraging pacing and panic attacks. But still the bridge smells of anxiety, anticlimax.

  I imagine, below me now, the Eye opening through a slow, lazy spin, its size prehistoric, gaze preternatural. When the subway still ran through here I’d close my eyes as it shot out of the tunnel and into the cold shadow-light of the bridge’s underside, fifteen seconds of flying over a stream of cars. The train’s brakes would flare up, squeals pinging against the bridge’s metal legs, its stacked weight, and every time I’d think, This is it—today this train will go over the edge.

  Pictured from the ground up, a clumsy figure making an awkward arc in the air, its joints thick with stiffness, my own body boneless in a corner seat. An imprint, a smear of shadow, all that would be left behind.

  “Let’s call that number on the payphone, see what happens,” Aimee says, taking another swig of vodka. We decided to crack it now, before we got back to the house. We’ll tell the others we only got one bottle. No, we won’t tell them anything. These will be our bottles. The others can get their own.

  The bones in my back turn to chattering teeth bracing against the deep vibrations coating the belly of the bridge in goose bumps as a ghost train runs through me, as something old and dark rotates in its sleep under the crust of silent road below. I try to go boneless now but my flesh has gone tough, malnourishment cutting away at softness and curves.

  My hipbone is at its highest right now. The Eye, in its state of craving, has no sense of how little there is left of me to live. Aimee stands above me, foot between my legs and hand extended. “Come on,” she says.

  There is a tang to the phone’s mouthpiece, old words trapped in the holes of old plastic, misted spit turned sweat-sweet. The crisis line number is not toll-free: anyone without a quarter and the sense to call collect would have given up. The final confirmation that no one really wants to listen.

  “Here,” Aimee says, pulling a quarter out of a zipped pocket in her boot. There is no dial tone, but there is static, as if something is already there, eavesdropping on the other end. The quarter slides in, plunks against other coins at the bottom. Maybe we haven’t been the only ones here, in this spot. Maybe they just never bothered to collect the coins near the end, either not a priority or just forgotten.

  Dialing stiff buttons. Numbers three and nine crunch into their frames. Each entry still beeps through the earpiece, programmed in, maybe, rather than electrical.

  Aimee’s head close to mine, her ear leaning in to hear what will happen. I expect, “Please hang up and try your call again” or “We’re sorry, the number you have reached is not in service.” But there is only static, the chattering of more ghosts.

  Below, the Eye rolls.

  - 14 -

  STRANGERS IN THE HOUSE


  “My ass is going to explode,” Tara says, hand over her cramping abdomen. She gulps. “I don’t know if I can make it outside.” She lunges off the bedroom floor, sprints. Her boots clatter down the stairs.

  “One of us will have to go with her,” I say.

  Aimee sighs. “I’ll do it.”

  Because you can’t just go. Alone, I mean. Like cats who squat carefully and cover up, we too are vulnerable this way now. You don’t want a dog to come sniffing around when you’ve got your pants down in the yard. You don’t want your presence to linger, so you dig a hole and cover it up.

  You avoid digging into any earth that’s freshly turned, but it’s getting hard to find untouched soil. We’ve been using the garden by the back door but we’ll probably have to find another spot soon. That one’s easy for the buddy system because one person can sit on the back steps, weapon ready, watching. As long we can keep our backs against one wall, we figure we’ll be fine. There’s less to guard that way.

  Through the open window upstairs I can hear the pointed suck of air between Tara’s teeth as she pushes through a cramp. Something wet and violent follows. Eventually she crawls back onto the mattress next to mine, sweating slightly.

  “You okay?” I ask.

  “I think so,” she says. “I just hope I got it all out.”

  Aimee comes in with a stick still in her hand, now halved, its pale wood splintered at the break. “Almost got me,” she says, the loose collar of her light grey t-shirt sliding off her shoulder. Her left bicep flexes below an anchor tattooed in navy blue.

  “Shit,” I say.

  “Told you we should just kill those dogs,” Aimee says. “I have no idea why Cam will only let us hurt them if we have to.”

  Voices from below. Strangers in the house.

  “Who’s that?” Aimee asks.

  “It better not be anyone wanting to stay,” I say. “We’ve got enough people here already.”

  “And they could steal our stuff,” Aimee says.

  But downstairs it’s all slow smiles, the grace of the trashed.

  “These girls are cool,” Cam says, as if he heard us talking upstairs. “They’re living in an old club downtown.” Cam’s eyes are glazed, the movements of his mouth struggling through slack.

  “Oh hey,” one of the girls says. Her blonde hair is so greasy it looks wet and two shades darker than it should be.

  “They brought presents,” Cam says, turning to the girls. “Didn’t you? Show them your presents.”

  A girl with a kitten on her shoulder holds out pinched fingers gripping soft plastic caps of grayline.

  Again? I think, but then I see Aimee swallow hers.

  The girl who told us her name is Brianne is showing me how to put patchouli in my pits, on the crotch of my jeans, or a light sprinkle in the pubic hair. “Keeps the scents covered, something I learned from a squeegee punk I got drunk with on Bathurst Street one summer,” she says.

  My fingers touch, end to end, around my forearm. Starvation. I get up and patchouli follows.

  Tara has her face pressed against the window, looking to be soothed. The grayline is kicking at us hard, making us writhe. Tara’s ribs show under the thin black lace of her shirt. She twists, pouts, confuses the night’s slouching stars for something close to snow.

  I can’t remember now when the last time was we had a full day. Something that had a beginning and an end. There’s no sunset we’ve seen recently, no moon. The stars are there, though, constellations dropping so much light there’s barely any dark left to cover ourselves with. We measure time now in cigarettes and bottles and guesses, while we’ve still got them.

  Dragged down, briefly, into a swimming blackout.

  Aimee’s at my elbow. “Stand up and breathe,” she says, but it sounds like she’s talking to Tara. Takes me a second to understand she’s talking to me. In the living room Cam is drunk, sitting at the head of a circle. His words are sparks and glue. People nod, listen, rise and shout. I can’t understand what he’s saying but it doesn’t seem like he’s speaking to me anyway. He’s preaching some story that’s only meant to stay within his circle.

  Aimee just smiles, oblivious, and flicks an eyebrow. Everyone is tripping tonight. “You feel it? You feel good?”

  I do, I feel good. Except, suddenly, the back of my neck’s got five pounds of hair on it and even when I hold it back phantom filaments cloak my shoulders. I can’t get away from the heat.

  And then a spin of the head and spots across the eyes. Outside now, puking up black string. My legs are limp behind me, sacks of fluid. Aimee’s out here helping, holding me up, holding hair back while dark strands and foam hang from my chin.

  Three cigarettes later a smaller darkness has come out of my head, a tangle of spiders’ legs. My stomach rolls again and fresh strands fight to get past the back of my tongue. You’d never think a body could be this violent. This persistent. I don’t know how I’m still puking up reams of black mass and froth on no food, nothing substantial at least. Every time another heave comes Aimee gasps for me, pants like this is trying to pull everything out of her, too.

  I am a dead bulk; Aimee can barely hold me up. My eyes are mostly closed, rolling back. The night air is cold but my body holds heat throughout the trance. A narrow stream of sweat runs out of a patch of underarm hair, gets absorbed into Aimee’s shoulder. She says when it hits her it’s like ice, but everything I’m feeling is like fever, skin slippery, even at the knees of my jeans, spattered with foam and bile.

  Aimee’s got a hand on the bone between the places my breasts used to be and can feel every expansion of my lungs hitting the ribs beneath her palm. My body pitches forward again. Aimee keeps holding. Another stream trickles down from the arc of my neck. Aimee says I’m so pale I’m almost blue. Eyelids purple, blood vessels bursting from the pressure against my esophagus. My torso spasms, cheeks working up a slow spit. I ball out a final knot off the tip of my tongue. And then unconsciousness.

  In my heart’s left ventricle spins a dream of a small dog tied up outside a coffee shop. I bend to pet it and it jumps up, pulls against its leash. My palms cup to offer the dog something to lean into, to take the pressure off its neck. Wet winter fur between its black calloused toes lands mid-palm, as if the dog’s been walking through snow, even though this dream world is as dry as the real one. This is what happens when the body craves cold: its thirst comes through in dreams, snippets of past memories cutting through the steam.

  I wake, now sweating against the bedroom floor. If I could move you’d probably find a damp imprint, moisture pooled underneath my right side. I’m sure, too, that there’s a black ring of filth around the outsides of my lips, like makeup gone rotten. Something’s sticky and dry there but my arm’s too heavy to wipe it away.

  There’s a white pain in my stomach, which always hurts anyway so I shouldn’t really care. I try to roll onto my back but my head spins too much. I press my ear against the floor and it gets pierced by a woman’s voice from somewhere else in the house. Human or spirit, I can’t be sure. Either way, her moan has a violent arrow quivering through it. A scrap of my brain signals fear, but I can’t run and I can’t fight. I can’t do anything except ease into the chill that those female cries are sending through me.

  I dream within a dream, see myself talking in my sleep, saying, “What gets under the skin, what’s released from your pores.”

  I am in my old bed, my home bed, the one before Valium, before Aimee, before now. On top of the covers, because it’s too hot to be under them. I dream within a dream, see myself talking in my sleep, saying, “Unclean. Defile. Clench. Release.” My astral shoulder should be at the ceiling but even my soul-body is too sick to move.

  I break out of the second layer of sleep when I hear, “Wake up.” I’m still on my old bed.

  “Wake up,” someone says again.

  The window’s thrown a piece of clouded sun over me. Even though the light’s gone grey behind the hovering smog its stickines
s is still potent. The neck of my t-shirt is ringed in sweat, and the small of my back soaks through the fabric. My eyes close and my head fills with conversations, rapid-fire and hallucinatory. Time folds over itself, elapsing.

  My neck is a stiff bridge, its foundations a tired ache. I turn my head and put my ear against the floor. When my cheek rolls onto the hardwood I’m braced for a drop in temperature but it’s holding just as much heat as my body’s fighting off. Still, I don’t turn away—not yet.

  Downstairs, there’s no more screaming. No sound comes through the floor now, except irregular footsteps, weak scuffles operating on vitamin deficiencies and hangovers. Five feet away, cobwebs flutter in the ribs of the old radiator, moved by a draft I can’t feel. I turn flat on my back again and something crunches in my neck. Up above, a fat black spider drops from the rafters, adding to an already enormous web full of silver spun sacks, fattened dead things.

  I need a cigarette but I won’t even try to walk. No one expects me to have my shit together and I don’t. My knees cut a path through the dust of the floor and my hands are picking up pebbles, stones pressing into my flesh.

  Downstairs, Aimee helps me into a chair. When she grabs me by the pits I find strength in my legs and probably don’t need her to do this. But it feels good to be touched so I let her.

  She brushes hair away from my face before turning to her frying pan full of something bubbling and grim. “You hungry?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” I answer, lighting a cigarette from the pack sticking out of her back pocket.

  “There’s some bread left, peanut butter.”

  She must have been out to City Hall earlier, picking up another care package. At least we’ll have something for another few days.

  Aimee scrapes a strip of peanut butter from the side of the jar, careful not to dip too far in just yet. We don’t want to run out too soon. She gets enough on the knife to spread a thin layer across a crust of bread. She tears a spot of mold off another slice and presses it all together. My stomach growls unexpectedly as she holds the food out to me. I didn’t feel hungry until now. I bite in, barely tasting the peanut butter, rushing into the next bite even though the bread’s dry enough to make me choke.