Palimi was on the end of a busy street, lodged next to a DVDs-and-shoes store closed for the night. DVDs and shoes? They stood at the dark glass for a moment to marvel at the randomness of the shoes on racks along one wall, the DVDs for sale on the other. Better light and Austin would have taken a picture. “Why not pizza and haircuts?”
“Oh, how disgusting!” Mamma said.
“How about dental checks and-”
“Dental checks! We’re overdue!” she cried. Austin moaned, since he hated going to the dentist. As a child, he put up such a fit that the dentist started gassing him with nitrous for routine check-ups.
It was dark and cold, so they traded the outside of DVDs and Shoes for the inside of Palimi. The ceiling was tall and hung with garden lamps in every color and style. People spoke at the tables and laughed at the bar, and waiters wound around the room with trays. The walls were painted with shelves packed with food, and a plaque said that this establishment had been a small corner grocery store for fifty years. Austin liked that, how what it had been in the past carried through to the present. Maybe one day in this place the restaurant would be painted on the walls of a pet store or art gallery.
Pizza. Nachos. Hamburger. Eaten in the dull gray halls with stains of old gum on the concrete. There was no comparison. This place smelled good.
The nose-ringed hostess at the podium seated them immediately at a table for two by the huge window overlooking the side street. Mist streaked by on the breeze, millions of droplets illuminated in the yellow glow of the streetlights, and Austin was caught in the beauty of it. He did not paint or write but hold these scenes forever in his memory. He wanted to tell Mamma to look up to the mist, but the comment got trapped in his filter. That might be construed as a less than manly observation, so he said, “I’m starving!” instead.
They had come at the right time, their orders ferried to the kitchen just as a joyful party of twelve came through the door to be seated. They were in their twenties and thirties, jeans and dresses, scarves and gloves and caps, and the man in the center was wearing a cardboard birthday hat. The door caught on something and one of the women rushed to close it before the cold swept into the restaurant. The breeze flipped up the hem of her long skirt, revealing slim brown legs, and her hurried steps jingled an ankle bracelet. Austin looked at her legs as the skirt settled, wondering what kind of coffee drink they would compare her to if she were murdered. Those reporters had enraged him! To cheapen the senseless loss of five boys’ lives with lame attempts at cleverness!
“Reservations for Tux,” said the man with the party hat, loudly and grandly, so everyone could note that it was his special day. “We’re a little early.”
“Oh, that’s all right, we’re setting up your tables now,” the hostess said. “It will just be a few minutes.”
Caps and gloves were pulled off, scarves unwound, the woman with the slim brown legs shook out her skirt and the birthday man unzipped his jacket. Austin watched them while Mamma paged through the wine list. Some of the people were holding presents, or the blue and purple handles of gift bags. One man was in sandals and socks, another with a tie over a T-shirt, and all of them had obviously been friends or coworkers for a long time. Two women were a couple, Austin saw that in the easy intimacy of how they helped each other out of jackets. Mamma had not seen it and that was good. What a waste, she should say. Pretty girls like those. A man already has to fight other men for women; he shouldn’t have to fight women on top of it!
“What are you thinking about?” Mamma asked. The wine list snapped shut.
“School,” Austin lied. Was it a lie? No. It was the part he played, and these were his lines. “I have to get up early again.”
“Do you have any classes with Elania?”
“I’ll find out on Monday morning.”
“You spent so little time with her this summer.”
He smiled. “Mamma, she has to take care of her brothers! It’s a madhouse of six-year-old boys over there.” One afternoon he went over for a visit and was mobbed by them. Rather than go to the movies with Elania, he’d ended up playing water gun war in the backyard.
Mamma muttered, “Triplets. Dear Lord, I would have gone insane. Remember that show we watched on TV last year, the family with the septuplets? Everywhere you looked was diapers. Diapers and screaming! No septuplets, Austin!”
“I won’t have septuplets, Mamma. I want mine in even numbers like eight.”
“And how are you going to support eight?”
“Support them? They will support me! Austin’s Amazing Octuplets will be our act at the fair. I’ll juggle them and throw them through burning hoops and-”
“Quiet your hands.”
He slid his hands under the table and clasped his fingers tightly as a reminder not to be expressive. “-they will ride one tricycle sitting upon each other’s shoulders. I’ve worked out how to dress them without spending a dime.”
“And how is that?” Mamma said.
“We will live in a nudist colony,” Austin said, and she laughed.
You do not know how to feel things halfway, Micah once said. When you’re upset, you cry as if you are broken. When you’re happy, you laugh and light up the world. When you’re angry, you rip your target to shreds. Some boy is going to find this very, very sexy one day, a boy who feels halfway but wishes for whole.
Austin did not know what it meant to feel halfway, except that this was how Micah felt. Halfway interested in the world meant halfway disinterested in it, too. And how could someone be halfway interested in such an interesting world? Every day opened to an infinite new: archeological finds and old murders solved, a dog that woke his family in a fire and some fresh political tangle. Art and sports, science and history, movies and scandals, Mr. Yates being dickish at work, a silly shot of a pit bull snoozing with her face on a book and a pencil under her paw, there was so much going on in this blue-green spot in the heavens. Today someone might throw a message in a bottle to the sea that would wash ashore when Austin was an old man. One day he’d read that article, white-haired over his coffee, and wonder what he was doing back then when the bottle first touched the waves. For all of his life it bobbed the seas while he went about his business. He would take his halfway guy who wanted wholeness and show him this incredible world all about them. How could anyone see these vivid colors in black and white? How could you not feel the pulse? How could you not be in love?
“And now what are you thinking?” Mamma asked.
“I was naming my octuplets,” Austin said. “They should have rhyming names. Harry, Gary, Larry, and Barry for the boys; Mary, Perry, Cary, and Terry for the girls. It’s good to have that worked out in advance.”
“All right! Your tables are ready!” the hostess said to the big group waiting by the door. “Follow me.” But she did not move, and Austin followed her gaze to one of the twelve in the party. He was in the back behind the lesbian couple, like he did not want to be seen. A reedy guy in his early twenties and possibly gay, he had an angular face and a shock of spiky hair dyed blonde at the tips. Austin liked the symmetry of the angles in his face, as if God had taken extra care with His protractor while shaping them. This was a man whom eyes slid from, and then slid back in interest. Not pretty, not handsome, but striking like Micah was striking.
Skinny jeans, a vertically striped shirt at odds with his horizontally striped scarf, and he had not taken it off although everyone in his party had taken off theirs. Still wound around his neck, the purple-gray-black repeat hung over his shirt on both sides of his chest.
Austin wondered why this guy was so shy; that got his interest in a way the brash birthday man did not. He liked to think of cajoling a boy from a self-imposed shell, of coming into a room and seeing a guy with pensiveness caught in the angles of his face. What are you thinking, my love? Some people wore their thoughts across their foreheads like ticker tape, and some did not. Austin wanted to wonder, not read the tape. He wanted that boy caught in the angles of his
mind, not sloughing from the curves.
Still the hostess did not move, the menus gathered under her arm. Then she said, “Sir, I am afraid that I must ask you to remove your scarf.”
“Oh, but it matches his outfit!” said the birthday man brightly.
“I’m sorry. It’s company policy.”
The happiness among the party dissipated. The eyes upon the guy in the scarf made him uncomfortable, and he blurted, “I would prefer to keep it on.”
“Then I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” the hostess said.
The birthday man leaned over the podium and hissed angrily, “He’s only at six percent, do you understand? He isn’t dangerous!”
Austin and his mother stared in shock, as did the people at several other tables. A man with Sombra C was in this restaurant! The hostess looked around nervously for help. The oldest waiter on the floor stepped to the podium and said, “Perhaps you would like to order take-out? We cannot seat anyone with Sombra C, regardless of stage.”
“It’s okay,” the shy guy said in a voice little above a whisper. “All of you have a good time. I’ll just go home.” Austin felt his eyes sting with the guy’s shame.
“Our hands are tied,” the waiter said. “It’s bad for business.”
The guy with the scarf was already out the door, which caught again as it closed. The remaining eleven of the party looked at one another, and one of the lesbians said, “Jase, we can go somewhere else.”
“There’s nothing wrong with him!” the birthday man said to the waiter and hostess. “The dishwasher will kill anything on his utensils and you can’t catch it from sitting next to him at a restaurant! Do you spit-check everyone before letting them in? How many people in here could have Sombra C right this second? But you’re just going by the stamps! I’ve been coming here since this place opened, and if you won’t take my friend Loam, you won’t see me again.” Austin had not liked the birthday man much, the greediness for attention, but now he loved the man for such loyalty to his friend. Loam was more important than the celebration.
A busboy appeared with a rag and cleanser to rub off the doorknob. The waiter said, “I’m sorry. There isn’t anything we can do for him except take-out.”
The other lesbian said, “Fuck you, Palimi,” and walked out with her partner on her heels. The party filtered out the door, cursing and calling Loam! Loam, come back! Let’s get pizza! The hostess dropped the menus on accident. Flushed, she picked them up and the busboy began to clean the three chairs in the waiting area, even though the guy had never sat down.
“It’s okay, Austin, we’re safe,” Mamma said, misreading the tears in his eyes. She nodded in approval to the busboy scrubbing hard at the seats. But Austin wanted to run out that door to Loam, who must have been hurting so badly, embarrassed and exposed. Austin wanted to be in the company of such good friends, who would eat cheap pizza-nachos-hamburger with Loam rather than something exquisite without him.
“They should have seated him,” Austin blurted.
“They most certainly should not have seated him!” Mamma castigated, and he shrank internally from the blaze of her anger. “You want to eat off some fork that he’s used? Visit the toilets after he’s been in there? He could have gotten take-out; he didn’t need to stomp out the door like a baby! Palimi will meet him halfway. If they had the space, they could do as Brazen does, a banquet room with a back entrance they converted for the stamped. Plastic utensils, paper plates, and everyone is fine. But not every restaurant can do that.” Looking out the window as the party walked through the streaking mist, she added with disgust, “He probably got it from sex. Sickening.”
Mamma, this is Calvin.
Oh, he would be so proud of his guy, someone smart and handsome, who might be halfway but whose passions could be sparked. Austin didn’t care if the guy performed surgeries or arranged flowers. That wasn’t interesting, that wasn’t the point! Someone who wanted to feel alive, and someone who could see Austin feeling too alive as he watched the Squay 5 nightmare and flip off the television. Sweetie, this is the reality of the world. When you take it all to heart, you need to limit how much of it you see. Because there were such beautiful things, too, beautiful things that Austin could not remember when he was raging at the faces of Kenny and Ray, at blonde twit reporters debating coffee shades for people. He had to remember the warm embrace of his relationship with Mamma and not feel so keenly the tightrope beneath. He wanted his heart to ride around in someone else’s pocket.
But all of the fire he felt for his guy would have to be quenched around Mamma. And to this he raged. The party of twelve was gone now, a rude honking bursting out on the street and third fingers out the windows as they passed Palimi. He wanted to be with them, racing away into the darkness with fire in his veins, to share pizza with Loam and figure out if the Sombra C made him shy or if he had always been that way. Austin was not scared of Loam. You were careful and cautious but not neurotic. He had not stopped being human when he contracted Sombra C, and six percent was nothing. Austin had watched a thousand online videos since the outbreak began, crying parents, devastated lovers, orphaned children, and a thousand more since Zyllevir. One stuck with him especially, a young man with a stamp on his neck reading 29%, a man screaming I am still a human being! His graduate school had thrown him out, refusing to take any stamped, he was fired from his job at a restaurant and his fiancée was being held in a confinement point indefinitely as she was at 43%. No one would rent to him, forcing him to move back in with his parents and they did not want him to stay. No one would employ him or educate him. I am still a human being. Austin shivered at the force, at the fury of being thwarted at every turn, at the anger that propelled the man to shout why? Why should he take Zyllevir and prolong a life not worth living? Why should he not shoot himself in the head?
Do it, egged on those who commented. Infected shit.
“What are you thinking now?” Mamma asked. She liked the part he played for her; she did not like him. She desired only this fakery, and she could watch the video of the man at 29% over Austin’s shoulder and feel nothing. Most people had to try to get Sombra C, she believed, doing things they shouldn’t be doing like sleeping around, being homosexual, or shooting up. So she had no sympathy. Austin did not know how one could look at that man and not be overcome with sympathy, no matter how he got infected.
“I’m working out which days I should take shifts,” Austin said as their meals were placed down, a symphony of color and texture and scent. This was for him and not Loam, the white plate ringed with gold, warm beside the straight line of utensils. Loam was reduced to cardboard take-out boxes now, or the chemical smack of pizza-nachos-hamburgers from a drive-thru. He could not have this resonance upon the plate, the garden lamps overhead, the black tiles on the floor. But he had a huge group of loyal friends to soften the blow. “I need to have time for homework and my college applications, but I like the money I make there. Mr. Yates needs coverage for weekday afternoons from three to eight.”
“Is he still stealing from your paycheck?”
“I make copies of my time card like you said. Last week I showed it to him to prove there was a missing hour and pretended it must have been a mistake. He pretended to be embarrassed and said he’ll add it to my next paycheck.” That was how Austin dealt with it; Micah lined up ice cream sandwiches like bowling pins on the edge of the back counter and rolled a container of vanilla at them. The mess of the strike had been incredible. Those were the moments she wasn’t halfway, when she was doing something she shouldn’t have been doing at all. Then she was as alive as Austin, his weirdo little sister.
On Monday he’d have to step back into character at school, slapping hyena-laugh Monty and arrogant Kader on the back, talking about tits and Pizza Whippers, putting his arm around Elania once or twice when they walked in the hallways. Rudy French still called him queer, having known Austin since elementary school, and Austin would say well, your mom wasn’t calling me queer when I gav
e her eight inches of pipe last weekend. Fighting words to other guys, but Rudy had transformed from the bully looming over Austin in grade school to a short, squat sniper in high school. That was all he had, pimples and verbal abuse, a guy no one either male or female would look at twice. He was a joke now. At least at lunch Austin could go to Welcome Mat and hang out there with guys like Corbin, who didn’t posture. Too bad that meant Sally Wang would be there, too. In the few weeks at the end of last semester she’d come to their lunches, she got on Austin’s nerves like no other girl in creation. How Corbin could date her was ludicrous, this nice, down-to-earth guy with Queen Whine.
“I bet you’re excited to see Elania,” Mamma said.
And Austin nodded, thinking of Loam.
Set Two
Zaley
The pancake was ringed with strawberry slices to make it look like the sun, and it bore a smiley face created from blueberries and banana chunks. Zaley felt the magma rising from her trunk to the cone of her throat, the pressure building as it throttled there. Seeking vent and when Mom said tremulously, “Do you want me to drive you? On your very last first day of school?” Zaley opened her mouth to an ash cloud.
“I’m seventeen! I’m too goddamned old for you to drive me to school!” She shoved away the plate and snatched her backpack from the next chair, dressed (as she had been since a quarter to six) and ready to leave. Storming to the front door, she undid the chains and deadbolts and latches. It would have been far more satisfying to yank open the door and slam it, but no, first she had to unsnap all of Dad’s insanity. His vest hung on a hook by the door, with the Shepherd patch sewn to it. He did paces three times a week, at night from ten to two. The gun was on the bookshelves.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 11