Soft Apocalypse

by Will McIntosh

  A new profile came up. It was hard for me to concentrate on it. Danielle, thirty-one, Energy Consultant (whatever the hell that meant), a daughter, twelve years old. Widow. I wanted time to think.

  Danielle materialized across the table.

  “Jasper, so nice to meet you!” she said, wobbling her head enthusiastically. She was very bubbly, attractive in an Italian sort of way. Really nice lips.

  I tried unsuccessfully to keep up with her enthusiasm, and she didn’t seem to notice that I was speaking from inside a black funk. She asked about my job, I asked about hers. She dropped some flirtatious lines that I fumbled. I wondered how her husband had died.

  When I was young I’d taken for granted that, while there might be intermittent wars, disasters, economic downturns, overall things would remain about the same. But people had always inflicted suffering on other people, pretty much unceasingly, since the beginning of history. So as better ways to inflict suffering were developed, of course more suffering would be inflicted. Once biotechnology advanced to the point where a bright amateur could devise and release plagues on a shoestring budget, of course some would.

  And all of a sudden it seemed obvious. I was living through an apocalypse. I was at a dating service in the middle of a slow apocalypse. Things weren’t going to get better like the government said, they were going to keep getting worse.

  Danielle told me that she’d really enjoyed meeting me; I said me too, although I had no idea whether I’d enjoyed meeting her or not. There was a song spinning in my head now, some really old thing about how when the world was running down, make the best of what’s still around. It’s funny how apropos songs find their way into your head without you realizing.

  As Danielle faded, I looked at the water nymph stretching toward the sky, the plume of water pouring from her mouth. Her wings were too small for her body, giving the impression that if she were to fly, it would be a strenuous ordeal—not the soaring freedom of a gliding eagle, but the mad flapping of a fruit bat.

  The next few speed-dates went by in a fog. There was Savita, a tiny Indian woman with big doe-eyes and long black hair that she draped over one shoulder the way Indian women do. Keira, who had raccoon shadows under her eyes. I struggled to hear them over the winding-down of the world and the sound of tearing photos.

  Then came Emily, who made bad jokes and oozed desperation.

  Most people can’t stand being single. I see people get divorced, then immediately implement the “best available” strategy, desperately seeking the most viable single person they could find in the course of, say, three months, and then marrying that person. They can’t stand the idea of not being with someone. It’s like the light is too bright. They race to the nearest shade.

  When you’re unattached, you live life closer to the edge. A partner gives you a sense of security, and I think it can lead to complacency, to life-laziness, if you’re not careful. You don’t feel the need to live vividly. Being single means there’s no safety net. It’s riskier. If you lose a leg stepping on a street-mine, you won’t have a wife to wheel you around. If you drink milk laced with clotting factor and have a stroke, you won’t have a wife to wipe the drool off your chin. Despite my avid desire to meet a woman, I was proud of my ability to live in this time as a single person, to have the courage to wait for Ms. Right instead of running to the shelter of Ms. Best Available.

  The next woman’s name was Bodil Gustavson. Thirty-three, artist. She materialized. My heart started to pound, slow and hard.

  It was Deirdre. Jesus Christ, it was Deirdre.

  “Oh, this is going to be good,” she said. She was sucking on a green lollipop. It brought back images that I quickly shoved aside.

  Her cute little hands were fidgeting, as always, part of that childlike quality she had that had melted me like a creamsickle on a July sidewalk. But she was not childlike, not really. I reminded myself of her collection of 911 recordings—people screaming into the phone, people dying into the phone, six-year-old kids telling the 911 operator that mommy’s face had turned blue and foam was coming out of her mouth. Plus there was the song she wrote about my tribe.

  “So tell me—Jasper, is it?—what are you looking for in a woman?” she said, pointing the lollipop at me.

  “What did you do with my photos?”

  “Fuck you, Jasper.” The day I broke up with her, I’d been shocked by the anger Deirdre could express with her eyes. She gave me that same glare now.

  “So tell me, do you miss these?” She pulled up the conservative floral-patterned turtleneck shirt she was wearing and shook her breasts at me. I drank them in like a heroin addict welcoming the needle.

  “Do you still have my photos? What did you do with them?” She dropped her shirt, smoothed it back into place.

  “All those pepper seeds we planted on the balcony?” she said. “They all came up. Red ones and green ones and purple ones… they were pretty.”

  That had been a good day, Deirdre planting peppers naked, strips of sunlight filtering between the slats of the fire escape stairs.

  And for the briefest instant, I considered getting back on the horse and riding the chaos that was life with Deirdre, surrendering to her dark charm, allowing my personal life to mirror the violence that was all around me. If nothing else, I could stop feeling guilty for dumping her.

  I realized that as soon as I sleep with a woman I feel responsible for her happiness. Pretty much for the rest of my life. I’ve no idea why that is. Two or three years of therapy would probably uncover the reasons.

  I thought of the 911 collection, of her complete lack of distress as she played calls for me. It was a soothing methadone that killed thoughts of reconciliation. Besides that, Colin and Jeannie would never speak to me again if I got back with Deirdre.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  And Deirdre was gone.

  I downloaded her bio-vid. I couldn’t resist. How would Deirdre present herself to a prospective date? Would it be raunchy sex scenes? Footage from one of her flash concerts? I wasn’t sure she’d emphasize the rock star part of her life, given what had happened at her last concert.

  I couldn’t wait—I played her bio-vid during the sixty-second break before my next date. It opened with an eleven-or twelve-year-old Deirdre squatting in a little garden on the side of a garage, a wood pile in the background. She pulled a big red tomato and held it up, grinning. The scene drifted into another: An eight-year-old Deirdre sitting cross-legged on a hardwood floor in pajamas, working on a puzzle, pieces spread all around her. Then Deirdre buried in Christmas gifts and torn wrapping paper, sitting beside my sister, Jilly, in front of our tree, both of them grinning wildly. Deirdre, getting on my school bus on the first day of kindergarten, waving goodbye to my mother. Pedaling a three-wheeled bike, my cousin Jerome standing in the big basket on the back, his hands on her shoulders. On vacation with my family in Puerto Rico, sunburned in a restaurant with half a dozen leis around her neck. Sitting on the porch of my childhood home, before a hurricane tore it apart.

  It was beautifully done, brief moment drifting into brief moment, all of them happy, nostalgic, all of them scenes adapted from my photos, with Deirdre in my place.

  I cried as I watched. It was so pathetic. My heart broke for her. Suddenly I wished I could give her some of that childhood—that garden, that puzzle, that vacation, instead of whatever it was she’d really gotten. I didn’t like to imagine what she’d gotten. I’d once asked her about the little scar under her chin, and she said it came from the button-eye on her teddy bear, when her stepfather hit her with it. Maybe she was actually doing well, given the memories she was trying to keep crammed into the basement of her mind. I don’t know.

  As the images faded to black, I thought again of my conversation with the wheelchair woman, whatever her name had been—Maya. There would be no more childhoods like that for anyone, not when a kid had to carry a gas mask, pass through security checkpoints, run from a hungry stray dog out of fear that someone h
ad surgically implanted a bomb in it.

  A lovely red-haired woman materialized. I was a wet, sobbing mess. I wiped my eyes. She tried not to notice.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m not feeling very well. I’m going to discontinue. No offense.”

  I terminated my session.

  The room seemed dingy and scuffed after the virtual garden. I went on crying. I felt my hope for a better tomorrow, for blue skies and a button-nosed girlfriend, slough off like dead skin, leaving me pink and raw.

  I felt like I’d been struggling in every aspect of my life for a hundred years—struggling to earn enough money to survive, struggling to find love, struggling to not die a violent death. The weight of all of that was crashing down as I considered the possibility of things actually getting worse.

  The selection screen dropped down, startling me. For a long time I just stared at the little pictures of all the women I’d met. Then I started tapping profiles. I didn’t look at any of their bio-vids, I just started tapping away at the women I would be interested in dating. Danielle, the Italian happiness-machine; Savita, the Indian princess; three, four, five others.

  I hesitated at wheelchair woman.

  I sniffed, wiped my nose on my sleeve, stared at her smiling picture.

  I had a connection to her. She was my sensei—she’d whapped me with a stick, and I’d awakened to the truth. I tapped her profile. What the hell.

  Then I came to Deirdre’s profile.

  I didn’t tap it, and my tape of neurotic Deirdre-thoughts didn’t start playing. I felt a warm sadness—that was all.

  I read somewhere that we choose to date people for reasons that are lost in our personal histories, and we keep making the same choices—the same mistakes—till we figure out why.

  The Civil Defense alarm went off while I was walking home. I pulled out my gas mask and flipped it over my nose and mouth in one deft motion, a gunslinger fast on the draw. People raced in-doors—their masks (in a wide variety of colors and styles) and their tight, hunched shoulders made them look like strange chimps.

  Six boys in red-brick camouflage ran by clutching short, square weapons that swung from their fists like lunchboxes. I stepped out of their way. Shit, they were recruiting them younger and younger. I had no idea who they worked for—police, CD, Jumpy-Jump, fire department. They were all pretty much the same now—gangs fighting for power.

  I walked on, enjoying the sun on my face, the light afternoon breeze. I realized that my mood had shifted—I felt light and empty. I took a deep, easy breath. I fished my phone out of one pocket, the printout of phone numbers for my speed-date matches out of another.

  “That was quick,” Maya said.

  “I don’t think I can handle the wheelchair; I want to be honest about that and I hope it doesn’t hurt your feelings,” I said. The honking of the alarm went on in the background.

  “Okay. Is that what you called to tell me?”

  “I just don’t want to waste your time. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I—”

  I wanted to tell her that the world was fleeting and beautiful. I wanted to tell her that the white windmills on the roofs of the exhaust-blackened buildings were all turning in unison, and that somehow she was responsible for me seeing this.

  “I’d like to ask you to spend some of your time with me. If you give me some of your time, your precious time, I won’t waste it.”

  She didn’t answer. I heard a sniffle and thought she might be crying.

  “I’m good at that part—the now part,” I added.

  I was right, she was crying. It sounded like she was wiping her nose with a tissue. Then I realized that wasn’t possible.

  “I think I’ll pass,” she said.

  “Fair enough,” I said, both disappointed and relieved.

  “I’m looking for someone I can count on. I’ve had enough of casual to last a lifetime.”

  So was I. It was the wheelchair. It was dumb in a way, rejecting someone out of hand for being in a wheelchair. I’d never dated someone in a wheelchair, how did I know I wouldn’t be fine with it?

  Because I knew. I didn’t want a woman of these times. I wanted Ms. Right.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “No problem.” She hung up.

  I stuck my phone in my pocket and headed home.

  There was a crowd gathered in Chippewa Square. I peered through the heads into the open space by the statue of Oglethorpe, and felt a sick sinking sensation: they were carrying out executions, right near my home. Six or seven members of the DeSoto Police—the local segment of the Civil Defense that was controlled by “Mayor” Duck Adams—were conducting them. (Three or four other “Mayors” had control over smaller sections of the city, last time I checked.)

  A fat DeSoto thug with a flattop shoved a gas gun—the kind with a black mask on the end of the barrel—into the screaming face of an old lady while two other gas-masked DeSotos held her. The gun squealed; the old lady went stiff as a board, then dropped to the cobblestones, twitching and jerking like all the muscles in her body had spasmed at once (which they had). Her mouth formed a rictus “O”; her eyes were rolled up, exposing red veins on white.

  “Wicked shit,” a kid next tome who couldn’t be more than thirteen said with a mix of disgust and excitement in his voice. “She probably figured she was gonna die of a heart ailment or something.” White foam gushed out of her mouth, spewing five feet, hissing and steaming on the pavement.

  “What the fuck could that old lady have done to deserve that?” I said, keeping my voice low. It was sick, everyone standing there watching people get gassed.

  “It’s what you say, not what you do,” the kid said.

  “Yes,” I said. “And what you know.” Right now Savannah wasn’t a healthy place for educated people, especially those who wrote articles for the underground papers, or made milk-crate speeches in the squares.

  “The wolves are always at the doors,” the kid added as the DeSotos picked up the old lady’s body, carried it to a flatbed truck, and tossed it on top of a pile of twisted corpses.

  “This isn’t right! This isn’t right!” a guy with out-of-date two-pocket pants and a button-down shirt shouted from the group still to be gassed. A DeSoto chopped him in the neck with the butt of his gun; he fell into the guy in front of him, grabbed hold of the guy to keep from falling. I turned to leave, then paused. The guy who’d shouted seemed familiar. I turned back and studied him, trying to think of how I might know him. It had to have been a long time ago.

  The guy sniffed—a nervous habit—and suddenly I had it: he’d been a teacher at my high school. Mr. Swift, my English teacher in eleventh grade. That had been a million years ago, in a time when there was always enough food in the refrigerator and you let the crystal-clean water keep running and running out of the tap while you washed your hands. Mr. Swift had been a nice guy, had taken a liking to me. That had been rare. I’d been a quiet student, bright but not at the top of the class, and not ingratiating enough to draw attention from my teachers. Mr. Swift had been the exception—he always seemed to pay special attention to me, and it had felt good.

  Mr. Swift looked toward the crowd. “Somebody help us.Somebody stop this.” Nobody moved.

  Then he looked right at me.

  “I know you. Don’t I? Please.” Thirteen, fourteen years later and he still remembered my face.

  “Is he talking to you?” the kid next to me asked.

  “I don’t know,” I muttered. I felt awful. There was nothing I could do. If I opened my mouth I could very well end up in line behind Mr. Swift. So I just stood there, too ashamed to simply turn and walk away, watching them pull people from the little crowd of condemned until it was Mr. Swift’s turn.

  “This is tyranny!” Mr. Swift shouted as they dragged him out. He got a face full of the vapors.

  Poor Mr. Swift. There wasn’t a bad bone in him. The wolves were always at the door—that was the truth.

  I left the edge of the crowd, my mood
pitch-black. Had I really just been to a dating service? How could there still be dating services when people were being murdered in the streets?

  The wave of hopelessness I’d felt at the dating service returned, pounded me so hard that I sank to the curb, pressed my palm on the hot, gum-stained pavement to steady myself. Was this it? Was there nothing ahead, nothing but heat and boredom, viruses and bamboo? Just more and more of this and then everything would collapse completely? What could I do? I forced myself to get up, and moved on.

  I accidentally kicked a bony, blue-veined ankle as I stepped around a group of sleeping homeless people spilling out of an alley onto the sidewalk.

  “Sorry,” I said. My victim didn’t answer, just drew her ankle under a black plastic tarp that was her home.

  I passed the coffee shop, the Dog’s Ear bookstore.

  I paused, backtracked to the window of the bookstore. The display was mostly gardening, DIY manuals, cookbooks, but there were a few others: Existential Philosophy: An Introduction, Socialism Revisited, Light of the Warrior-Sage.

  Years ago Mr. Swift had told me that whatever I do, keep reading. I’d read in college, but after that I pretty much stopped, except for newspapers. I rarely saw people reading books any more. Maybe I should do some reading, in memory of Mr. Swift.

  The bookstore was closed—permanently, by the looks of it. I went into the alley, stepping between people sleeping out the heat of the day, and climbed in a broken bathroom window in the back. The bathroom was beyond odious; the toilet looked like it had been used a hundred times after the water had been turned off.

  I hurried into the bookstore, opened the blinds on a side window, and held books up to read the titles by the sunlight streaking through. Most of the dusty books were in heaps on the floor, but they were still pretty much sorted by classification. I didn’t know what I was looking for; I just wanted some way to get Mr. Swift’s voice out of my head.

  I gave the store a careful once-over when my eyes had adjusted to the dimness. Rough wooden beams and fat pipes ran the length of the ceiling. Pipes. It blew my mind that they used to be filled with drinkable water.