Slowly We Rot

by Bryan Smith

  It was in her role as volunteer that Noah first entered her orbit. She was circulating among the new students at an outdoor mixer when she noticed him reclining alone in a lounge chair by the swimming pool. Noah wasn’t a gloomy loner type, but he wasn’t what you could call a social butterfly either. Being in a loud and somewhat rowdy social setting with absolutely no one he knew around was something he didn’t know how to handle. He preferred to just hang out in the middle of it all and observe, thinking maybe he could get a feel for this mingling with strangers thing by osmosis.

  But then Lisa sat down next to him, sitting with her legs folded beneath her on the pool deck rather than in another of the lounge chairs. Without any preamble, she introduced herself and started interrogating Noah about his life and his plans at the university. Noah was slow to respond, doing a bit of half-coherent mumbling as he struggled to get his brain in gear. Part of the problem was that he was something of an introvert. The bigger factor by far, though, was that Lisa was one of the prettiest girls he’d ever seen.

  There had been a number of nice-looking girls at his high school, but every one of them was a hag compared to this incandescent angel with honey-blonde hair and sun-kissed skin. Like everyone else, she was in her swimsuit, in her case a blue bikini. She was wearing a white button-up shirt over the top piece, but it was hanging open in front. She was fit, but, as Noah’s dad would have said, had “curves in all the right places”.

  Noah had been sure he was coming off like a drooling moron and that the conversation would end awkwardly, but after a few minutes he settled down and started uttering coherent sentences. He was a witty guy, a strength he’d used to his advantage well in the past. Thankfully, it didn’t fail him this time, either, and soon he had her laughing almost non-stop. She queried him about his interests and asked him whether he had a girlfriend back home. He told a half-fib in response to the girlfriend question, saying that he and Carrie, the girl he’d dated throughout senior year, had broken up after graduation. In truth, the situation with Carrie was still up in the air. Breaking up seemed inevitable, but they had yet to make it official. Noah had seen no reason to tell Lisa that.

  In his mind, he had already marked Lisa as Carrie’s eventual replacement, this despite being aware of her status as a volunteer at the event. Like the other volunteers, she had an ID dangling from a lanyard around her neck. Engaging students who seemed a little ill at ease in their new surroundings was part of her duties. He knew this, but he was also sure they had a connection that went beyond that. The other volunteers flitted from place to place, interacting with people briefly before moving on to temporarily engage someone else. But Lisa sat there and chatted with him for almost a full hour. She eventually got up and excused herself with what seemed to Noah extreme reluctance. Before she belatedly resumed mingling, she wished him luck in the upcoming fall semester and told him to look her up on Facebook.

  Noah took his leave of the event shortly thereafter. By then he was already thinking of Lisa as his dream girl. They had a lot in common, including a similar belief system and overall worldview. In addition, they enjoyed many of the same books and movies, a lot of them pretty obscure. So, in addition to being beautiful, she was smart and had amazing taste. Basically, she was perfect.

  Later on, when he started looking back and trying to figure out just where things went wrong, he became sure his fate had been sealed that very night.

  After returning to the dorm room he’d been assigned for the weekend, he took out his laptop and looked her up on Facebook. Predictably, there were a lot of women named Lisa Thomas with Facebook pages, but finding the profile he was looking for wasn’t difficult. She was the first Lisa Thomas listed in the search results, possibly because they were enrolled at the same school. He clicked on her profile and was unsurprised to find she wasn’t from around these parts, hailing originally from Ventura, California. Her accent had been devoid of even the slightest trace of southern twang.

  Noah, worried about seeming too eager to connect with her again, tried to make himself wait until the next day to send her a friend request. He managed to hold off a full half hour before clicking the add friend button. Lisa approved the request almost immediately, not even a full minute elapsing before he saw the approval alert appear on his screen. This surprised him. He knew she must still be circulating at the orientation event, which meant she’d taken a moment in the midst of all that to look at Facebook on her phone, see that he’d sent the request, and approve it without hesitation. It was a little thing, the kind of thing people did all the time, but it made him giddy enough that he almost went back down to the event in hopes of running into her again. But he made himself stay in the room, not wanting to come off as a scary stalker guy right away.

  He stayed in touch with her on an almost daily basis over the course of that painfully long month between the end of orientation and check-in day at Richardson Towers, the dorm where he’d be living that fall semester. Though their relationship was a platonic one during that early stage, Noah assumed she knew he was smitten with her. She didn’t do anything to overtly encourage romantic feelings on his part, but she didn’t exactly discourage them, either. She sent him a message the day he arrived on campus, asking if he might want to “hang out” with her sometime soon. It was the only thing remotely resembling a stupid question she’d ever asked him.

  They got together at a diner near the university the next afternoon, having hamburgers and chocolate shakes at a booth with a scuffed and dented Formica table. Their rapport was, again, immediate and strong. It was as if only moments had passed since that night at orientation. As before, Noah was able to keep her laughing throughout the conversation. At several points during the meal, he noted the frank, searching way she was staring at him from the other side of the table. When it hit him that what he was seeing in her expression was intense sexual desire, he temporarily reverted to a tongue-tied mode of conversation.

  After their lunch date, Lisa took Noah to her off-campus apartment, where they had sex for the first time. Her roommate, an attractive blonde named Melanie, was there when they arrived, but she departed after a whispered word from Lisa. Noah guessed they had an understanding when it came to things like this. It was a small place. He supposed having the roommate present when sexual activity was on the agenda could be awkward.

  That first fast and frenzied coupling set the tone for much of what was to come. The entirety of their short-lived relationship was just as intense. They became obsessed with each other and spent as much time together as possible. In those first weeks, they carved out time for being together between class and work schedules. The slipping began before September was half over, the mutual obsession becoming nearly all-consuming. Classes were skipped for the first time, assignments ignored. At first it was just a class here and there, an occasional missed bit of homework. By the time October rolled around, they had ceased showing up for any of their classes.

  They craved one another in a way that wasn’t unlike drug addiction, an observation Lisa’s roommate made toward the end of September. It wasn’t long before Melanie, together with several of Lisa’s other friends, started trying to intervene. They sought to protect her from what they saw as a highly negative influence. Lisa had gone from being a tireless, motivated student and worker to something resembling the exact opposite of that in a very short span of time. Conversely, Noah, having spent the vast majority of his time since arriving at the university in Lisa’s company, had almost no other friendly acquaintances and thus had no one to stand up and defend him. The obsession went both ways, but Lisa’s friends saw him as the bad guy in the equation.

  In truth, Noah had also become deeply concerned about the state of things by October. His first semester at college was slipping away from him. He still had time to recover at that point, but he’d be on the verge of failing all his classes if he didn’t turn things around soon. He tried broaching the subject with Lisa, suggesting maybe they should start focusing on their coursework
before it was too late. It should be no big deal, because they could still spend all their free time together. But Lisa was in even deeper than he was, it seemed, and refused to listen. They were having a once in a lifetime love affair, she told him, the kind most people never get to have. She thought it was important to live passionately and embrace what they had together with no thought to the future, which would take care of itself anyway.

  She was very adamant, but Noah did persist just a bit more, repeating the things he’d already said, his tone becoming increasingly desperate each time. He might even have swayed her eventually if not for the drinking. Lisa had already learned she could easily distract Noah with alcohol. In October she began doing so on a much more regular basis.

  Until that time, there had been no hint of real darkness in their mutual obsession. The way Noah saw it, even then, the obsession was a thing that would ease up in time, and they would soon resume something resembling normal life.

  But Noah was wrong about that.

  The drinking got out of hand starting early in October. Noah would later recognize this as the beginning of the end. Lisa had a credit card her father had given her. Until then, she’d used it almost exclusively for living expenses. Suddenly, though, she was racking up huge liquor store purchases with it. They drank heavily throughout that month, getting hammered every day. They attended no classes. Lisa’s friends again tried to intervene, but the borderline violent way she lashed out at them for trying ensured it wouldn’t happen again. By the middle of October, there was a definite tinge of darkness to all of it. The intensity of the mutual obsession had not lessened, but there was now a grim, desperate edge to it.

  The day before Halloween, Noah returned to his dorm room for the first time in weeks to retrieve some things he needed. He was exhausted from weeks of light sleeping and decided to lie down for a nap. When he woke up, several hours had passed and it was now nighttime. He checked his phone and saw that Lisa had sent him dozens of text messages, each seemingly more distraught than the previous one. None of them specified what the problem was.

  Noah called her number and got no answer. It was almost nine pm by the time he finally got over to Lisa’s apartment. He knocked on the door, but no one answered. There were no lights on inside. He checked the parking lot and saw no sign of Lisa’s Chevy Malibu. He then went to a campus pub he’d frequented with her that semester, hoping to find her there. Again, he came up empty. He asked around, but no one knew anything. He went back to her apartment and tried again. The lights were still out. His knocks on the door again went unanswered. He decided to sit outside her door and wait for her. While he waited, he checked his phone again, reviewing her flurry of texts. The last one had been sent six hours ago. Before the cutoff, she’d been sending them at a clip of roughly every five minutes. The more he stewed over it, the more the long silence worried him.

  When one in the morning rolled around with no sign of Lisa or her roommate, Noah returned to his dorm for a night of fitful sleep. He woke up at eight in the morning, got dressed, and headed back to Lisa’s apartment. There were still no new messages on his phone.

  His heart was racing as he ran up the stairs to her second floor apartment and banged on the door. This time the door opened almost right away. A surge of delirious relief shot through him as he heard the lock turn. When the door opened, however, it was Melanie standing there in the doorway. The grim, wary look on her face killed his relief on sight.

  “Where is she?”

  Melanie shook her head. “She’s gone.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?” Noah held up his phone and thrust it at her. “She sent me a hundred fucking messages yesterday, all of them begging me to contact her, and all you can say is ‘She’s gone’? You’re gonna have to do better than that. I’m not leaving until I know what the fuck’s going on.”

  Melanie scowled at him. “Her parents were killed in an accident yesterday. Okay? She had to go home.”

  Noah felt like the world was about to give way beneath him. “I have to talk to her. I have to…help her. I’m her boyfriend, that’s what I’m supposed to do.”

  Melanie shook her head. “You can’t help her, Noah.”

  “When do you think she’ll be back?”

  “I don’t know. She might not come back at all.”

  Before he could say anything to that, Melanie closed the door in his face. He heard the lock turn again. After staring in shock at the door a few moments, he banged on it so loudly that an angry neighbor popped out next door and threatened to call the police if he didn’t stop.

  Noah gave up and went back to the dorm. He spent the rest of the day trying every possible way he could think of to contact Lisa, starting with an attempt to pull up her Facebook page. Here, though, was another shock. The page had been deactivated. After that, he tried calling her again. The call went straight to voicemail. Several more calls throughout the day met with the same result. He didn’t know it at the time, but hearing her voicemail message was the last time he would hear her voice. After that, he tried contacting mutual acquaintances for information, but no one would talk to him.

  He hit the same unyielding brick wall no matter what he tried.

  Days passed with no word from Lisa. Her friends remained utterly uncommunicative. Eventually, he came to understand the painful truth. It was as Melanie had said that first day. She was gone and she wasn’t coming back. He’d probably never see her again.

  And he’d probably never know why.

  Some other guys in Noah’s dorm noticed his abject despondency and took pity on him. They got him drunk. They bought him as much booze as he wanted and he wanted a lot. Noah never attended another class at the University of Memphis. He returned home in December in shame and despair.

  11 .

  Noah woke early the next day and spent several hours preparing for his departure. The only backpack he had on hand was an old-fashioned one with a large external aluminum frame. He loaded it with an array of things, including a pup tent, a sleeping bag, food supplies, extra clothes, some of the old western paperbacks from his cache, an old road atlas, and as much extra ammunition for the rifle and the two handguns he’d also be bringing with him as he could cram into it. The rest of his gear, which included, among other things, two large canteens and a hunting knife, would be stored on a sturdy utility belt.

  After a fierce bit of internal debate, he reopened the pack and shifted things around as best he could to make room for two fifth bottles of Maker’s Mark. He also bundled up about a pound of weed and stored that in the pack, too. The wisdom of taking these things with him was iffy at best, but it was going to be a long trip. Something to take the edge off now and then seemed necessary.

  When he was done with his preparations, Noah carried the pack out to the porch and leaned it against the rail. After strapping on the utility belt, he went back inside to fetch the rifle. He took a final look around at the cabin’s interior, thinking back on the lonely years he’d spent here. Despite his pride in the survival skills he’d developed during his time in this place, he was surprised to realize how little he would actually miss it. There were no good memories here. This was a desolate place, a hermit’s sad refuge.

  Back out on the porch, he leaned the rifle against the rail next to the backpack and took a seat on the top step. After squinting out at the bright sunlight for a moment, he took the revolver from the holster on his utility belt and set it next to him on the porch. Then he dug into his hip pocket and took out the only picture he had left of Lisa Thomas.

  This picture was from one of those photo booth strips. Like every other young couple who’d ever sat in one of those booths together, he and Lisa had mugged for the camera. Only in this picture, the one at the bottom of the strip, had Lisa’s expression been somewhat normal. It showed her smirking and looking every bit as beautiful as he remembered. She looked sexy and mischievous, precisely as he remembered her. He stared at the seven-year-old image and wondered how much she might have cha
nged in their long time apart, assuming she was still alive.

  Noah wasn’t deluding himself on that count. He knew she was almost certainly dead, but he couldn’t help speculating. If she had somehow survived the apocalypse, it was likely she had spent the years since then locked in a desperate, never-ending struggle to stay alive. She would be a harder, tougher person now, but that probably would have been true even if the old world hadn’t ended. The unexpected death of her parents had to have been devastating, had likely crushed her innocence in one fell swoop. It was something he'd thought about ceaselessly in the first several months after slouching back home from school in defeat. He’d yearned desperately to hold and comfort her, to be her shoulder to lean on in her time of need.

  Looking back on it now, the idea of being strong for her was ridiculous. He hadn’t been capable of inner strength back then at all. More likely, he would have made things worse, dragging her down with his neediness. The other thing about looking back from this distance of years was the cynicism he felt now, which made it difficult to keep seeing the whole period as some kind of sweeping romantic tragedy. He now wondered if the story about her parents dying was some kind of carefully engineered ruse. There had been something too neat in the almost surgically precise way she’d been entirely cut off from him. His gut feeling was that Lisa’s parents hadn’t died at all, not back then, anyway. Instead, maybe they’d gotten together with some of her closest friends at the university and had worked out a way to more forcefully intervene. She’d been called back home, and Noah had been walled off from her in the most ruthlessly efficient way imaginable.

  The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became this was close to the truth. A part of him felt like he should be angry about the deception, but he couldn’t muster the emotion. This was a different world now, after all. Hanging onto ancient grudges was senseless. But there was more to it than that. He wasn’t a kid anymore. If her parents had acted in the way he suspected, he couldn’t blame them. It’d been the right thing to do.