PostApoc

by Liz Worth

  I get into a chugging contest with some girl named Sarah. Says she knows Chris but doesn’t say they’re friends. The wine that came with her and two other guys was lifted from some basement of a house they broke into along the way.

  I win the competition but it’s Sarah who’s stumbling around the room now, telling everyone, “You’re fucked out of your mind!”

  The guys are laughing but me and Aimee just look at each other. I want to leave, but before I get the words out to say so a guy with long brown hair and a beard to match walks over with an open hand and says, “This will help you girls.” It’s more grayline. We pop the pills in our mouths and this guy sits down, talks. His mouth moves but his lips are shooting blanks.

  Aimee shakes his hand, makes a deal I’m deaf to. He holds his hand out to me and I take it but can’t even say my name because my face is a seizure of light and shade, flicking on and off, a rhythm I can’t catch up to.

  The sun’s grim in the window and everyone’s hiding from it in the shadows until Chris pulls the curtains shut. The fluorescent flicker hits the whole room and that’s when I know I’m really tripping because there is no electricity today.

  Sarah stops and starts, goes from dancing to talking in thirty-second intervals, her movements disjointed by the in-out-in of bright to black.

  I need some air. I have to hold onto the arm of the couch to get up off the floor. A voice—Aimee’s, I’m guessing—is trying to break through the density around my skull, but its steady fall of consonants and vowels bump softly against my earlobes and can’t get far enough inside to be heard. A hand buffets my calf but I have to keep moving towards the door.

  The on-and-off light follows me through the hallway. It falls around the face of someone who’s just walked in: a guy with thin, stringy hair that’s still holding onto fading blue dye.

  It’s his words that penetrate. “You going outside?”

  He reaches for the door handle. My brain tells my head to nod but the body doesn’t get the signal. He keeps his hand where it is.

  “You’re not leaving, right? Just going outside?” That he knows this must mean he has ESP.

  I reach for the handle and his other hand comes up to stop me. His hand is warm. I want to hold it. I want to be held. Not by Mike or Chris. Not for a transaction but for comfort.

  I hold onto this guy’s hand and try to smile. Maybe he’ll come outside with me.

  “You have a cigarette?” he asks. This time my brain and body are back together and I nod.

  “Yes.”

  “K,” he says. “But let’s go out back. Chris doesn’t like people hanging out at the front. Besides, it’s dangerous.”

  He hooks his fingers through my belt loops and yanks me to him, catches me with his mouth. His fingers are fast, already kneading the crotch of my shorts, working the fly. He sticks two fingers inside of me and I know I’ve soaked him. I moan and push against him, a signal to increase the pressure.

  I reach for his zipper. He gets me up on the railing of the deck. He’s standing on my shorts. My panties are still on, pushed to the side. “I like the way you smell,” he says when I move to take them off.

  He slides into me and lifts me up. My legs wrap around his back. He’s got a ring through his eyebrow. The piercing looks fresh, or infected. The red of the swelling overwhelms the silver jewelry. I reach for his face, careful not to get too close to the inflamed loop. We’ve barely kissed and he’s already finished. I grind myself into his pubic hair to tell him I want more but he’s already lifting me away, putting me back down.

  It’s the first time I’m noticing how unfocused his eyes are. He must be as fucked up as I am.

  “I didn’t even get your name when I came in,” he says, zipping up his jeans.

  “I don’t care,” I tell him.

  Back inside, Sarah’s in the middle of the living room, dancing with her eyes closed. It’s just her and Aimee and the guy with the beard left.

  “Where’s everyone else?” I ask.

  “Upstairs,” Aimee says. There’s a needle in her voice. “You’ve been gone forever.”

  “I just went outside for a minute,” I tell her.

  “More like an hour,” Aimee says.

  Sarah stumbles out of step. I fall for the distraction. There is a stereo here but nothing to power it. The music is all coming from her, every movement curving into the next, expelling beats and extending rhythms. Her eyes stay shut the entire time, even when she loses her balance.

  “You ready to go yet?” Aimee asks.

  I think of things I could have today, and things I didn’t know I’ve been wanting: skin on skin, arms around me when I sleep, a wet spot in my pubic hair.

  I turn for the guy with the blue hair. For a look, maybe, a sign that I should stay, but he’s not around. Probably went upstairs to look for Chris. Everyone’s here for the same reason we are: to get high. I feel rejected anyway.

  I nod, keeping my eyes on my boots. “Yeah,” I say to Aimee. “We can go.”

  Back outside, the sun’s starting to go down. “At least we’ll get back before it’s dark,” Aimee says.

  Tara’s asleep in the closet again. We call her, watch her twitch into wakefulness.

  “You’re back!” She jumps up and onto my bed. “What’d you bring me?”

  I look at Aimee and feel even worse when I see that her face looks as sick as I suddenly feel.

  “Fuck.” The word comes out of me before I have time to even feel it working its way up, before I have any notice that it’s about to give us away.

  Tara’s face is melting with the slack of a lack of pills. Her jaw twists like something loosely oiled, a door about to fall off a hinge. Her neck hits an ugly angle. “You didn’t bring anything back, did you?” she says, and I cover a groan with a nervous laugh.

  “Ang,” Tara says, laying a hand on my arm, flexing her fingers to remind me of the long nails at the end of each of them. “Ang,” she says again, her voice pulling my heart into my throat. My jaw absorbs all the tension. It’s so tight I wonder if I’ll be able to speak.

  A dogfight rumbles up from the street. We’re three floors up but it sounds like they’re in the room with us, growls coming from the core. We don’t have to see their teeth to know what they look like. The sounds alone are more colour than we’ve seen in a month.

  I am tired. The exhaustion envelops me, takes me over. My head sinks to shoulder level and I rub my eyes which have gone sandpaper dry, as thirsty as my throat. The whole day’s passed by and I haven’t had any water. Any energy I’ve been running on today is just psychedelic residue.

  Face to face on the floor, Tara fingers the swelling above my cheeks. Sickness and fluids have all congealed in under-eye bags, where they wait to be flushed out.

  I lie to Tara: “I’m not as bad as I look.”

  She slides forward until her face is almost touching mine, close enough that when she speaks her words trip across the bridge of my nose. She looks at me like she’s been in my head for too long.

  “I can’t remember if you’re still who I expected you to be,” she says as I begin to fall asleep.

  I wake up. It’s dark but the moon has gone the bright white of a bare bulb, cold enough to burn.

  Tara is still up. She’s playing around with a long black evening glove, pulling it up to her elbow and then rolling it back down. Something silk and vintage, the lost half of a pair.

  “You’re not tired?” I ask, so tired myself that I’m still on the floor. I pull myself onto my mattress and feel an ache starting in my neck from sleeping on the hardwood.

  “I’m waiting for Aimee,” she says.

  “What for?” I ask.

  “She went back out.”

  “Back out where?”

  “Back to wherever you guys got that grayline earlier,” she says. “I told her I really needed some and she went out to get it. Felt bad that you forgot earlier.”

  “She went alone?” I ask.

  “Yeah.�
��

  I pretend to fall asleep but really I’m pretending to be somewhere else. In a club. Brief touches on a crowded dancefloor, colliding slightly with curving bodies, cold bottles brushing the backs of my arms.

  I fall asleep for real and dream that Tara’s been stashing pills, holding out on us. I dream that she’s had pills crawling down her throat all night because she’s so afraid of dipping below the highest high.

  In my dream she’s smoking a joint, still admiring her silk glove as she shows off a French inhale. She tells me that people have been catching narcolepsy, that it’s been going around lately, turned into a mutant pollution. “Anything can happen if you let your head dip below your chin.”

  In my dream I wish, distinctly, for Tara to be right in her diagnosis, to give me something that will keep me asleep as often as possible.

  - 21 -

  WE ALL HAVE STORIES LIKE THAT

  Aimee’s leg stretches towards me. I roll down her torn fishnets, shredded at the knees to match the skin below. Before now, hers was the only pair still perfectly intact. Parts of the stockings stick to the dried blood on her leg. I’m careful in those spots not to pull at a wound.

  Aimee sticks a hand out to help me, but all it can do is shake. I stick a cigarette in her fingers and tell her, “It’s okay, I got it.”

  Aimee disguises a sob with the drag of the smoke. If she starts crying again, I might, too. At least her chest isn’t heaving like it was when she first got here. She’d run through the house, torn up the stairs and woken me up before she even got to the bedroom. Her face purple streaks on her cheeks, impossible blotches of what I first thought was mascara. It was really just her head leaking pigments.

  She held her t-shirt together with one hand. Below her grasp, deep red flashed across her chest for a beat. “Aimee,” I said, “come here. What happened?” Her shirt was almost ripped in half, torn down to her navel. Trembling knuckles held the two flaps of fabric together.

  Now Aimee takes a sharp pull on the cigarette as I dab at the scrapes with a damp cloth. Black grit peppers the pink pulp of her knees where she fell, trying to get away. We speak in whispers, listening for the rest of the house. “I just don’t want to see Cam,” she’d said when I got her into the bathroom. “I shouldn’t have gone alone. He’ll ask why I did. He’ll tell me I made a mistake.” A pause, and then: “I don’t want to tell him what happened.”

  Aimee breathes hard through the pain again and I soften my voice for her and say “sorry” and “it’s okay” and “I’m almost done.” We find a rhythm between her breath and my words, a horrible little chant that fills the bathroom that somehow seems too small with both of us in it, sharing space with last night’s shadow that’s followed Aimee back here.

  I’ve filled the tub with rainwater. Cam gave me a look when he saw me carrying buckets upstairs. I shot him one back to keep him from asking questions. Besides, the sky looks like it’s darkening, getting heavy with more water to let loose on us. We’ll be fine if it rains within another day.

  I joke to Aimee to close her eyes and pretend the water’s steaming, pretend the room is filled with the pink scent of bubble bath. Channel decadence.

  I unzip the back of her skirt. It falls around her ankles. There’s a hard, dark blemish of blood gone brown at the back of it and her panties are missing. Or maybe she wasn’t wearing any. I don’t ask. Just kick the skirt behind me before she sees the stain.

  Aimee holds my hand as she steps into the tub. The heel of her palm is rough where the skin caught the pavement. She doesn’t flinch this time.

  I run water over her back, ignore the fruit flies that are already skirting the bath’s surface. I pick them out as I can so they don’t stick to Aimee or her open sores. We continue our quiet chant. Aimee’s breaks up with faltering sobs again. I maintain the softer chorus.

  Tara has smoothed the blankets over Aimee’s bed and laid out an oversized t-shirt for her to wear. It’s not anything that belongs to us, must have been left behind by one of the girls, or taken from Cam or Trevor. I bring it to my face, smell for dust or odour, any trace of potential infliction. It’s as clean as anything here can be. I help Aimee slide into it, feel guilty for noticing that she still has curves in certain places.

  Tara takes a brush to Aimee’s hair, starts working her way through. We stop talking. We’ve said enough before, at other times, when this happened to other girls we knew, or girls we’d heard of. At parties, or in their bedrooms. With boys they knew, boys they trusted, boys they’d just met. Except then there were more friends to call. There were mothers, sisters. There were hot showers and clean clothes. There were familiar kitchen tables and beds that had never belonged to the dead.

  Aimee’s already trying to look like she doesn’t give a fuck. Like everything is fine and it’s just another night. “This one might be the last,” she says, mickey in hand, but we’ve all said that before.

  “Doesn’t mean it’s not true this time,” Tara says, stealing my thoughts. We knock bottles together and each take a shot of warm rye. At least Aimee still got out of Chris’s with what she’d gone in there for.

  We don’t mention last night, though. We don’t look at the bruise rising on Aimee’s left cheekbone. We don’t let the scab on her chin distract our eyes. We don’t act like there’s anything different in the way she lowers herself to sit, carefully, slowly, bracing for pain.

  We get drunk while we get dressed for Shit Kitten’s going away party. Rattail came by earlier to invite us. I pull on my gold panties because it’s a special occasion. The elastic stings as it hugs a blister on my hip. I don’t remember how it got there.

  “Probably from sleeping on the floor,” Tara offers. Or from rubbing up against that guy I met yesterday. Doesn’t matter. Another shot and the pain will be gone.

  Shit Kitten have been living in a place called the Heebie Jeebies house. It’s had that name as long as anyone can remember. Haunted, just like everything else in this city these days.

  The plaque outside says it was built in 1858. Someone’s scratched into it, though, generations of squatters and punks and hobos making their mark, leaving their names and messages carved into the metal so others could find them here. Some of the names are barely legible in the brass which has turned orange, green, turquoise. A new history with every fresh dig and nick and now it’s all for nothing; it only means something if someone’s here to see it.

  The word SLAUGHTERHOUSE is spraypainted on the living room wall. Heebie Jeebies house was first a home, then a slaughterhouse, then a rooming house, then abandoned. It has been a squat ever since and remains so today. A building for transients and transience.

  Tooth squatted here for a while before The End. At least this is the story he’s telling me now, beside me on the floor. He pushes a dose of grayline into my palm when no one’s looking and asks, “You want to hear something crazy?”

  His eyes are blue. If he were to live to be older, the lines around them would be deep but friendly. He’s kept his hair short, the ends uneven where he’s cut them with a knife.

  He’s smiling, waiting for me to answer.

  “Yeah,” I tell him. “I want to hear something crazy.”

  So he says there’s something in this house called the Love Object. It lives in the walls. At night they can hear it dragging its hind legs, its spirit immolated to the room’s past. Overtaken by heartworm, it sags so heavily its crawls drag like wrought iron on a raw wood floor. He says at night sometimes they hear groaning animals. He’s heard hooves clop on the floorboards. He says when he was squatting here a few years back, someone tried to put carpet down once, when the noise was particularly bad. The next day, though, someone was cutting lines of cocaine and knocked it all onto the floor by accident, lost all the coke in the carpet fibers so it was back to bare floors after that. He says there was a girl here around that same time who’d locked herself in one of the rooms and slit her wrists. Two days passed before anyone thought to break the door down.

>   “And you were here for that?” I ask.

  “Yeah, I was living here, but I was in Buffalo, playing a show when that happened. I helped break into the room when I got back, though.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “Yeah, I knew her. She was cool. Quiet, kind of.”

  “Do you think you could have stopped her?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I tried not to think about that too much after it happened.”

  “Do you think it had something to do with the house?” I ask.

  “Yeah, actually,” he says. “Bad energy. I’ve heard of stuff like that getting to people.” He pauses to chug from a bottle. “I mean, I’d like to think that I could have helped that girl, but I don’t know. Can you ever really stop anyone who really wants to die?”

  “If they really want to die, and you stop them anyway, they kill themselves in other ways,” I say. “But if they want to be saved, then yeah, you can stop them.” As I say this, I still don’t know which of these is true for me.

  Tooth has a joint between his lips and an arm around my shoulder. I think of the first time I was in a car with Hunter. He was driving and put his arm around the headrest of my seat to back up out of a driveway. I knew he was just doing what he had to do but I still wanted to believe there was meaning in that gesture, that it was a way for him to get closer to me.

  Tooth says it feels like I’m holding him upright and I wonder if he’s thinking of anyone else right now. I can’t remember ever seeing him with a girlfriend. I don’t know if he has family, if he has a sister or a brother. I only ever saw him with the rest of his band, or with people from the Mission.