Soft Apocalypse

by Will McIntosh

  We got ourselves drinks and set up near the bar. Cortez asked if I’d seen Ange around, and I told him we were still in touch from time to time. I hated bending the truth like that, but what would be the point of telling him we’d had a friends-with-occasional-sex thing going for over a year? He might still have feelings for her. I caught him up on Ange’s progress on her Ph.D.

  “She ever mention me?” Cortez asked. He saw me hesitate, waved off my answer. “Never mind. She probably still hates me like running pus.”

  Their breakup had been about a bunch of little things, though the tipping point had come when Ange was accepted into the biotech doctoral program on a full scholarship, and Cortez didn’t fully embrace the idea. Ange’s take was that Cortez was threatened by it. Cortez said she used an offhanded comment he made about it not seeming practical as an excuse to break up with him. In any case, it hadn’t been the sort where you keep in touch. I knew how that was, and, given that no punches had been thrown in either direction, I didn’t feel a need to take sides. As far as I was concerned there were no bad guys when it came to breakups. Bad guys had guns, and forced you to eat things. I’d tell Ange I bumped into him. I doubted she would care much if Cortez and I became friends again. Ange didn’t seem to care who I was dating, let alone who my friends were. It amazed me how well she could handle the friends-with-sex thing; she never expected anything more from me than a good friend could expect, and she never gave any more, either.

  Cortez and I talked about the tribe, about the days when we were even poorer then we were now, about how humiliating it’d been to be homeless, and, finally, about that day, when the tribe had been forced to kill. It had been almost seven years, but I still rode a black wave at the mention of that day.

  That’s when Deirdre made her entrance.

  She’d changed clothes: from upper thigh to just below her armpits she was wrapped in a continuous strip of black leather. It must have been fifty feet long when it was unraveled. I thought for a moment about what it would be like to unravel it, then allowed reality to kick in. She was out of my league. I’m strictly minor league—double-A, maybe triple-A if I stretch. Deirdre was playing in the majors.

  A cadre of fifteen-year-olds circled her, sputtering about how she was pure poison, brilliant, vascular. She passed through them like they were gypsies asking for a handout and made her way to the bar, stopping right near me and Cortez. My stomach did a little somersault, the way it does when you’re near someone famous, which made me feel a little stupid, given that she was a chick who performed on two-by-fours in the park for handouts.

  An older guy, kind of short, with shiny shoes that announced he was a rich guy stepping outside the gates to slum, handed Deirdre a plastic cup of the home brew they were serving before she could ask for one.

  “She’s okay,” Cortez said, gesturing toward Deirdre. “Pays on time,” he held up his cup, “lets you party when you’re working for her as long as you don’t overdo it. She’s a little wild, but she’s okay.”

  Deirdre was asking Mister Shiny Shoes if he had any blow. The guy answered that he didn’t, but he had cash if Deirdre had connections.

  Cortez said something to me.

  “Good, good,” I answered, trying to listen to Deirdre’s conversation. The guy said that he thought Deirdre was very sexy, and that he wanted to fuck her, and handed her his business card. She took it like it was a dead rat.

  “She’s a good singer,” I said to Cortez. When your cognitive capacity is taken up by another task, the words that come out of your mouth tend to border on the inane. The guy was saying how he was good friends with Mayor Addams.

  Deirdre ran her tongue along the inside of her cheek as if she was trying to dislodge something trapped between her back teeth, then suggested he go find the mayor and fuck him instead.

  “Deirdre!” Cortez said as she broke off from the dumbfounded friend of the mayor. “I want you to meet my good friend Jasper. Jasper saved my ex-girlfriend from being raped by three war vets with rifles. Stabbed them to death with a kitchen knife.”

  “Now, that’s interesting,” she said, looking me up and down languidly, hands on hips. “You don’t look like a killer. Is Cortez bullshitting me?”

  “I wish he was,” I said. “I’m not particularly proud of it. And it wasn’t just me—there were five of us. And the vets with rifles had their pants around their ankles, and their rifles were leaned up against a china cabinet out of reach.”

  “Were they? How brave of you.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Maybe I can work as a bodyguard at your shows, in case someone unconscious looks like they may eventually wake up and get out of hand.”

  Deirdre burst out laughing. She looked straight into my eyes for a long moment, her eyes sort of sparkling. I struggled not to break eye contact, feeling like it was some sort of test. “I think I’m going to like you.”

  My legs had turned to jelly. I was grinning like an idiot and couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Music started up, heavy on bass. “Deirdre!” someone called.

  “Stick around,” Deirdre said over her shoulder, “I’d like to hear more about you stabbing people.” With her back to us, it was safe to stare.

  Cortez and I drank, and bonded, and drank more. Our eyes burned in the blue smoke of hand-rolled cigarettes.

  “I should have looked you up before this,” I said. “Funny how you just lose touch with good friends.” “Good friends” was probably a stretch, but the drinks were making me feel all warm and nostalgic.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Cortez said, “I could’ve looked you up too. We get caught up in things.”

  “Hey! Cortez’s friend!” Deirdre shouted from across the room. “Come party with me!” She waved me over. Cortez gave me a shove in her direction. As soon as I reached her she slid her arm under mine. Suddenly I felt eleven feet tall.

  “So what do you do?” Deirdre asked me.

  “I manage a convenience store,” I said. It was sort of true.

  “Did you keep stabbing the rapists until they were all dead, or did you stop once they couldn’t fight back?”

  “They kept fighting back until they were dead. Although I guess at some point they switched from fighting for advantage to fighting not to die.”

  Deirdre’s eyes narrowed. “I like that. Do you have a pen?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  A woman interrupted us. She was tall, with a way-short blue skirt and long, bright magenta hair.

  “You know those rings I was telling you about?”

  “Yeah?” Deirdre said, extracting her arm from mine.

  “Chetty’s found a connection.”

  “Oh really?”

  Suddenly I was on the outside of the conversation looking in—an all-too-familiar situation for me. Evidently my moment in the sun had ended. I’d had enough booze that I was willing to take one last stab, though. I touched Deirdre’s shoulder. She turned.

  “Do you have a phone?”

  She nodded absently, pulled a business card out of an unseen pocket and handed it to me. It was a nice card, with an electronic window that scrolled photos of Deirdre performing. I waved an unseen goodbye and left her to her talk of rings, clutching the card tight.

  “Can’t I just text her?” I asked.

  “No,” Ange groaned. “Call her.” Somehow she was following the conversation while simultaneously reading a microbiology textbook, one leg draped over the arm of the folding chair.

  “Call her,” Jeannie agreed.

  I’d spent an hour on my front porch composing and deleting text messages before Ange and Jeannie showed up. Now I wished I’d sent one of those messages before they got here. “But it’s awkward, and scary,” I said. “She’s a little scary.”

  “That’s part of the reason you do it. Look,” Ange closed her book, craned her neck to look at me, “if a man doesn’t have the courage to walk up and ask me out without a lot of tap dancing, I know there’s no way it’s going to wo
rk. He’s got to have a backbone.”

  “So it’s like a hoop I’m supposed to jump through,” I said, while mentally filing away what Ange had just said. Was that why she never let things escalate between us? Was I not confident enough for her?

  “It’s a bar you have to be able to jump over,” Ange countered.

  “Jasper, it sounds like she’s a pretty confident woman,” Jeannie said.

  “Yes. She’s incredible,” I said. She was the most dynamic, cool, confident, ballsy, exciting woman I’d ever met; it made me dizzy to imagine being with her.

  “Then you’ve got to call,” Jeannie said. “You know how much men like breasts? Women like confidence as much as men like breasts. Especially confident women.”

  “Oh,” I said. I was clearly a little autistic when it came to the nuances of love and dating.

  Out in the street, two twelve-or thirteen-year-old boys, one carrying a syringe filled with red fluid—blood, or more likely food dye—approached a third, younger boy in a mask playing in an abandoned truck.

  “Hey, c’mere a minute,” the boy with the syringe said, leaning in the broken driver’s side window, “you got a dollar I can borrow?”

  “Hey,” I yelled over. “Get lost, leave him alone.”

  The kid pulled his head out of the window. All three of them looked my way. “What’s it to you?” Needle boy said.

  I reached for a baseball bat propped by the door. They moved on.

  “Thanks, mister,” the kid in the truck said when they were out of earshot.

  “No problem,” I said, looking down at my phone.

  “Do women like Deirdre even date?” I asked. “It’s hard to imagine walking her to the door and kissing her goodnight.”

  “Only one way to find out, sweetie,”Ange said. She was back reading her book. How could this not bother her? I’d been eager to tell Ange about Deirdre, hoping she would be at least a little jealous.

  “Crap,” I said. I climbed down the creaky porch stairs and went into the narrow alley beside our house to have some privacy, then paced a while, memorizing the first couple of things I would say to get the conversation going.

  I dialed her number. My heart was rocketing—I was going to stumble all over my words.

  The phone rang, then again. It clicked; my sinuses cleared from the rush of adrenaline before I realized it was her voice mail.

  “This is Deirdre.” The phone beeped. It took me a second to realize that was the whole message.

  “Hi, Deirdre,” I said, “this is Jasper, we met last night at the bar. I was wondering if you might want to go out sometime—”

  “No!” Ange shouted from the porch. “Not ‘sometime.’ Name a day.” I didn’t think she could hear me.

  “So, just call me if you get this, and maybe we can go out Friday?”

  “Not maybe!” Ange called.

  “Bye,” I said into the phone and disconnected. “Thanks!” I shouted at Ange. “Now I sound like a complete idiot, and there’s a woman in the background critiquing my message as I leave it. That ought to go over well!”

  Ange burst out laughing. “Aw, honey, I couldn’t make it too much worse than it was going to be anyway.”

  Deirdre didn’t call back. I waited three days, my stomach somersaulting every time the phone rang. I decided to send a text. Screw Ange and Jeannie’s advice. There was nothing wrong with texting.

  Does your non-reply mean “fuck off,” or is there a possibility I could still convince you to go out with me?

  Her lack of a reply was a reply in itself—I knew that—but I was so wound up in fantasies of me and Deirdre that I couldn’t let it go, couldn’t just walk away without trying. I paced the porch. I had a meeting in two hours with a woman who was interested in selling her fruit preserves in Ruplu’s store. I would probably spend the two hours wearing down the wood on the porch. I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. I sat on the moldy weight bench and stared down the alley, at the rusty grill tangled in chest-high weeds next to a rotting outbuilding, a small stack of two-by-fours leaned against it, some do-it-yourselfer’s long-forgotten ambition.

  My phone jingled. My palms sweated as I read the reply:

  Ok. Friday at 6. Don’t be boring.

  I leapt to my feet, threw my fists in the air. I had a date with Deirdre. Me—she was going out with me. Not shiny-shoed I-know-the mayor, but me. And she’d answered my text message, not my phone message. Ange and Jeannie did not know as much as they thought about dating.

  I got to work immediately—I sat on the porch and mentally rehearsed interesting things to say, imagining what Deirdre would say back, as the sun sank behind the DeSoto Hilton, its sign emblazoned at the top of the building, just visible over the houses across the street.

  The first thing Deirdre said after opening the door was “What’s your name again?”

  I told her. She nodded. We started walking. I had no idea what to do with my hands; they suddenly felt all wrong just dangling there.

  “I was thinking we could go to the Firefly Café,” I said, stuffing them into my back pockets.

  “I don’t want to go to a restaurant,” Deirdre said.

  I was speechless for a moment. “Well, what would you like to do then?” I finally asked.

  Deirdre thought about it. “Let’s get some apples and some Lucky Charms, and find a way up to the roof of the Hilton and watch the city from up there.”

  I hoped the vast confusion I felt didn’t register on my face. Apples and Lucky Charms? “You’re a woman with very precise tastes,” I said.

  “Yes, I am.”

  I was already feeling in over my head with this woman. I needed to relax, to play along with her. “I’ve got to admit, your plan sounds more fun than mine.”

  Deirdre grinned, and looked at me for the first time. “Good.”

  We headed toward Wal-Mart on the east side of town, winding around camped-out tribes of homeless, stepping over people sleeping in filthy clothes.

  “Scary stuff, what’s going on between Russia and China, huh?”

  Deirdre looked at me blankly. “What?”

  “You didn’t hear?” I said. “Russia dropped a nuke on Chinese troops massed at their border.”

  “A nuke? That seems excessive.”

  “Hey, honey, kill the loser and come marvel with a real man,” a dude with gang scars on his neck called. He was sitting on a porch swing hung under stark steel fire escape stairs. I cringed as Deirdre gave him the finger without even looking. Mercifully, he stayed put, and we kept moving.

  Wal-Mart was packed, probably because of the nuclear exchange between China and Russia. Every time there was a disaster, no matter how far removed, people flocked to the Wal-Mart to buy stuff. And not just water and flashlights, but Barbies and bath mats, tube socks and dental floss as well.

  I thought that was a fairly entertaining observation, so I mentally rehearsed it a few times, then said it to Deirdre.

  “People are pretty fucking stupid. Especially in the south,” she said as she yanked a plastic produce bag from the dispenser and dug her delicious little fingers into the apples.

  A little Hispanic guy eyed Deirdre up and down as he went by. Guys had been gawking since I picked her up. Each time it happened I felt a childish swell of pride at being with her.

  There was a buzzing in the crowd over by the broccoli and bell peppers, so I went over to investigate. A Wal-Mart employee was crossing out prices and writing in new ones by hand with a black marker. Higher prices—like twice as high. A security guy hovered close to her, a pistol holstered in his red Wal-Mart belt.

  The buzzing got louder.

  “What the fuck?” I said. Normally I would say “What the hell?” but I was trying to keep up with Deirdre.

  Over in the bread area a group of angry shoppers had surrounded an employee who was also shadowed by a security guard. This guy was middle-aged and male, so I figured he must be management. I went over to listen.

  “Hey, I’m very s
orry,” he said, “the new viral crisis has caused disruptions in shipping, and we can’t predict when distribution and delivery will return to normal. Prices will be higher until then. It’s not under our control.”

  I ran back to Deirdre, who was picking out apples. I yanked the plastic price rectangle out of its holder and handed it to her. “I’ll get the Lucky Charms—don’t let the bitch with the marker get this.”

  No one had gotten to the cereal aisle yet. I ran up and down, looking for Lucky Charms, certain that Cocoa Puffs or Gummy Grabbers would not be acceptable. I spotted them low on the shelf, grabbed two boxes and the price rectangle, and met Deirdre up at the register.

  “Twenty-four sixty,” the girl at the register said. It should have been about fifteen bucks.

  “No,” I said. I showed her the price labels. “See—they haven’t raised the prices on these yet.”

  “They haven’t posted them, but they’re already in the system,” she said.

  “That’s bullshit!” I said. “You can’t raise the prices at the register without posting them first!”

  “I just work here,” she said, just as loudly. “You think I like this? How am I going to feed my little boy?”

  We stared at each other for a moment. She was chewing gum— probably her last piece for a while, because it was now about three bucks a pack, and she had her little boy to think about.

  “This is bullshit!” I repeated.

  Deirdre fished an apple out of the bag, reared back and fired it toward the produce department. “Bullshit!” she shouted.

  She had a good arm. The apple sailed over the management guy’s head and nailed a shelf of bread, sending loaves scattering. She grabbed two more apples. A security guy ran toward us, fumbling with the clasp on his holster.

  Deirdre threw an apple at him. He ducked.

  “Bullshit!” a young guy in surgeon’s scrubs two registers down screamed. With his shoulder-length white hair, he was clearly not a surgeon—he was a Jumpy-Jump. He hurled a can of soup at the security guard. It hit the guard above the eye. The guard doubled over, clutching his face while the Jumpy-Jump reached for another can.

  Deirdre threw more apples, rapid-fire, toward the back of the store, laughing with delight.