by Joe Hill
Meggie’s a shape in the bed and he comes closer so he can see her face. There is someone in the bed with Meggie.
Ray looks at the demon lover and the demon lover looks back at Ray. Ray’s right hand rests on Meggie’s breast. Ray raises the other hand, beckons the demon lover closer.
The next morning is what you would predict. The crew of Who’s There? packs up to leave; Pilar discovers the text messages on her phone.
Did I do that? the demon lover says. I was drunk. I may have done that. Oh God, oh hell, oh fuck. He plays his part.
This may get messy. Oh, he knows how messy it can get. Pilar can make some real money with those texts. Fawn, if she wants, can use them against him in the divorce.
He doesn’t know how he gets in these situations.
Fawn has called Meggie. So there’s that, as well. Meggie waits to talk to him until almost everyone else has packed up and gone; it’s early afternoon now. Really, he should already have left. He has things he’ll need to do. Decisions to make about flights, a new phone. He needs to call his publicist, his agent. Time for them to earn their keep. He likes to keep them busy.
Ray is off somewhere. The demon lover isn’t too sorry about this.
It’s not a fun conversation. They’re up in the parking lot now, and one of the crew, he doesn’t recognize her with her clothes on, says to Meggie, “Need a lift?”
“I’ve got the thing in Tallahassee tomorrow, the morning show,” Meggie says. “Got someone picking me up any minute now.”
“’Kay,” the woman says. “See you in San Jose.” She gives the demon lover a dubious look—is Pilar already talking?—and then gets in her car and drives away.
“San Jose?” the demon lover says.
“Yeah,” Meggie says. “The Winchester House.”
“Huh,” the demon lover says. He doesn’t really care. He’s tired of this whole thing, Meggie, the borrowed T-shirt and cargo shorts, Lake Apopka, no-show ghosts, and bad publicity.
He knows what’s coming. Meggie rips into him. He lets her. There’s no point trying to talk to women when they get like this. He stands there and takes it all in. When she’s finally done, he doesn’t bother trying to defend himself. What’s the good of saying things? He’s so much better at saying things when there’s a script to keep him from deep water. There’s no script here.
Of course, he and Meggie will patch things up eventually. Old friends forgive old friends. Nothing is unforgivable. He’s wondering if this is untrue when a car comes into the meadow.
“Well,” Meggie says. “That’s my ride.”
She waits for him to speak, and when he doesn’t, she says, “Goodbye, Will.”
“I’ll call you,” the demon lover says at last. “It’ll be okay, Meggie.”
“Sure,” Meggie says. She’s not really making much of an effort. “Call me.”
She gets into the back of the car. The demon lover bends over, waves at the window where she is sitting. She’s looking straight ahead. The driver’s window is down, and okay, here’s Ray again. Of course! He looks out of the window at the demon lover. He raises an eyebrow, smiles, waves with that hand again, need a ride?
The demon lover steps away from the car. Feels a sense of overwhelming disgust and dread. A cloud of blackness and horror comes over him, something he hasn’t felt in many, many years. He recognizes the feeling at once.
And that’s that. The car drives away with Meggie inside it. The demon lover stands in the field for some period of time, he is never sure how long. Long enough that he is sure he will never catch up with the car with Meggie in it. And he doesn’t.
There’s a storm coming in.
The thing is this: Meggie never turns up for the morning show in Tallahassee. The other girl, Juliet Adeyemi, does reappear, but nobody ever sees Meggie again. She just vanishes. Her body is never found. The demon lover is a prime suspect in her disappearance. Of course he is. But there is no proof. No evidence.
No one is ever charged.
And Ray? When the demon lover explains everything to the police, to the media, on talk shows, he tells the same story over and over again. I went to see my old friend Meggie. I met her lover, Ray. They left together. He drove the car. But no one else supports this story. There is not a single person who will admit that Ray exists. There is not a frame of video with Ray in it. Ray was never there at all, no matter how many times the demon lover explains what happened. They say, What did he look like? Can you describe him? And the demon lover says, He looked like me.
As he is waiting for the third or maybe the fourth time to be questioned by the police, the demon lover thinks about how one day they will make a movie about all of this. About Meggie. But of course he will be too old to play the demon lover.
JESS ROW
The Empties
FROM The New Yorker
SHE HAD NEVER perfected the trick of moistening the envelope flap with the tip of her tongue so it would stick and lie perfectly flat. In those days, perfect meant as if untouched by hands. Her flaps were always overwet and lumpy; when she pressed them down, she made them worse. Still, she loved folding the paper twice over, into three equal parts; she loved writing addresses, but especially her name and address in the upper-left corner. J. Seiden. 29 Portnock Road. The dignity, the businesslike efficiency of these slim objects, asking nothing, never disclosing more than they needed to. An envelope with only a check inside flapped like a flag, but an envelope containing a two-page letter had a solid integrity on every plane. A writer only in the sense that she loved having written. She slid the envelopes under the metal lid of the mailbox on her parents’ porch and stared at them for a few moments. Proof of her existence in the world. Proof the world existed. You could count on it: someone was coming to take them away. Proof you would be sent, proof you would arrive.
She’s sitting with Quentin at the Caf Café, set up under an enormous beech tree next to the South Royalton charging tower—a collection of salvaged plastic tables and chairs and a wheelbarrow cut up and welded into a wood-burning stove. The café serves mostly sassafras and stinging-nettle tea, but now and again there are red-market goods, unearthed from a collapsed house or a forgotten box in the pantry: half-rotted Lipton bags or dented cans of Bustelo two years past their expiration date. Dorrie, the owner, is a strict no-currency Vore, and you have to know her to get in on the bartering for the really good stuff. But it’s worth biking the seven miles just to bask in the shade of Quentin’s unrepentant optimism. Quentin is a Resurrectionist, a money hoarder. Before that, before the last supplies ran out, he traded unleaded on the red market. He’s the last one left in South Royalton with a working laptop, a silver incongruity whenever he takes it from its case and plugs the white cord into the charging tower’s concatenation of rusting cables. Five minutes of charge keeps the battery alive. People stare at him until he anxiously gathers the laptop up and slips away. Not that anyone would steal it. They just don’t want to be reminded. This isn’t fucking Starbucks, some crusty Vore always mutters.
She herself takes a bag of nails everywhere she goes, bound up with fraying rubber bands. Everybody needs nails, and the Rumsons left boxes and boxes of them, sorted by size and type, in the basement. Her basement. Though only in the most accidental sense: it was Nathan who’d found the house, as a caretaker gig on Craigslist.
Anyway, Quentin’s saying, I was down at the Grange listening to these guys arguing about the difference between dystopia and apocalypse. Can you believe that? One of them was saying that we were living in a dystopian novel, and the other guy, big bearded dude, from the West Rats Collective, said, No, dystopia means an imaginary place where everything is exactly wrong, and what we’re living in is a postapocalyptic, prelapsarian kind of thing, you know, a return to nature after the collapse of society as we knew it. Want some?
He unscrews a Burt’s Bees tin and holds it out to her. Pine sap—milky, resiny, the consistency of caramel. People say it’s almost as good as Nicorette. She shakes he
r head. He scoops some onto his thumbnail.
And I must have been three or four shots in—we were drinking Wayne Peters’s sweet-potato vodka—because I said, Look, kiddos, the truth is neither, because we have no idea what might happen, the infrastructure is still basically in place, especially if people from certain collectives hadn’t stripped out the copper over in White River—
No copper, no charging tower, she says.
—but my point is really that dystopian and postapocalyptic narratives are narratives, that is, stories: things that are inherently invented or collated ex post facto. Narratives are static. Real life is, is—
Kinetic?
The point is, we need to just let all that shit go, because, call it End Times or whatever you want, things are different now. None of the old endings played out, did they? So we have to imagine new endings. Hence the possibility for hope.
They must have gone easy on you.
They just started crying. That’s the sad thing. Haven’t seen so much crying since August of ’15. Some people, you get a little liquor in them and it’s all about the old times. They want to huddle up and sing Lady Gaga.
The dark is thickening now. Dorrie clanks her step stool from one low-hanging branch to another, lighting the candles inside each red glass globe. Tomas, the glassblower, held out for almost two years, firing the furnace with the last of his stored LPG, then with wood, making thick, indestructible goblets and candle lanterns, heavy and irregular as stones. He’d had exhibits at the Met and the Louvre, had made Christmas ornaments for the White House; now he’s buried under a cairn up on Hull Mountain, dead of spring dysentery.
He’s right, she’s thinking, we have no story for ourselves, we’ve outlasted the predictions, we’re too boring to be apocalyptic. But what would hope mean, after all that’s happened? Hope for whom? Quentin’s current theory has something to do with Caspar Weinberger, fallout shelters, server farms, and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. I’m the town crank, he told her once, swigging from a gallon jug of cider on her porch, his face ribboned with tears.
If she didn’t want to spare his feelings she would tell him—the way only one liberal-arts college graduate can say to another—that the problem isn’t just narrative. It’s theory. The era of sense-making itself has passed. We don’t need an analyst, she thinks, or an oracle, God forbid; we need a chronicler, a town recorder, a church Bible full of births and deaths. An inventory with a few highlights, one or two safety tips. A bit of incidental knowledge for whoever comes along next. But who has the hours to sit parked at a desk, smithing words, when there’s ten pounds of berries in buckets on the porch, waiting to be picked over and dried on sheets in the sun?
I do.
It’s nearly September. Two years ET, they’ve taken to saying, End Times, as versus BET, Before End Times. Most days the café is empty, Dorrie asleep under a canopy stitched together from banner ads she salvaged from the Catamounts’ baseball field: Petco, Ledyard Bank, Murphy’s Ace Lumber, National Life. Work now or starve in March. But I, she thinks, I’ve hit the jackpot, haven’t I? Only my one mouth to feed, a roof that doesn’t leak, three cords of seasoned wood in the barn, a stone-solid immune system, and hands striated and shiny with scar tissue, hands that can pluck a boiled Mason jar out of a scalding bath. Hands no man would ever love.
The charging towers themselves—top-heavy, buttressed with scrap girders, bits of fencing, broken truck axles—hold ten or twelve solar panels each. The larger ones, like Royalton, have a turbine, too. Whirligigs, Quentin says, works of folk art, the last temples, the only evidence they’ll find when we’re gone. Built last summer, the second summer, by a group of restless contractors who’d commandeered the Cumberland Farms and its gas tanks. There was a retired engineer from NBC, Davis something, who’d insisted on welding a radio and a TV antenna to each one. She was there the day they flipped the switch. There was only static, snow, the white-noise waterfall of empty air. People wept. Davis left his equipment to rust where it stood and vanished from town. Died later that summer, people said, eating bad freshwater crabs out of the Winooski.
At first there were long lines to charge every conceivable device—battery-powered fans were a big one, of course, PlayStation Portables, dialysis machines (how could anyone survive a year without one?), even vibrators. Twenty minutes a turn, no questions asked. Now the towers sit unused much of the time. Only the diehard and desperate rely on anything electric. There’s a nurse from Woodstock who pedals nearly thirty miles with a homemade charger for hearing-aid batteries.
When Dorrie set up the Caf Café, she had a supply of light bulbs and a working refrigerator; a hundred people camped out under the tree every night, holding out for a glass of weak tea with one precious ice cube. There were jugglers, Dobro players, fire eaters, reciters of Shakespeare. Caffeine brought out the best in people. There were plans, speeches, meetings. There was going to be a new society in the ashes of the old. But then August rolled into September: you didn’t need a calendar to smell the change in the air. Wood-gathering season. Nothing like the terror of that first night, when the cold lapped under the blankets like a rising sea. People all went back to their holes, Dorrie said to her. Back to their bathtub whiskey and skunk weed. They remember what last winter was like. We’ll lose another twenty percent this year, that’s my prediction. It’s the winnowing.
She thought of the smell a body has after it’s lain outside all winter, frozen in a block, even the eyes frozen, the vitreous humor turned to marble, and then the spring thaw hits.
Lucky it’s only me, then, she said, and I’ve been splitting maple all summer.
Oh, honey, Dorrie said. I didn’t mean you. God knows I didn’t mean you.
Here is a thing that happened today, she wrote at the top of every page of a kelly-green Kate Spade journal, those first few weeks after the blackout. It had been a twenty-first-birthday gift, too pretty to throw away, though she rarely wrote anything by hand, so it had stayed at the bottom of one closet after another for fifteen years. Once her laptop went dead, she unearthed it and afterward kept it under her shirt at all times, in a special sling made of two Eat More Kale T-shirts sewn together. Here is a thing that happened today. It was the only possible way to begin when the last of the cell towers stopped working. Spoke to Mom in California yesterday, she wrote, should have tried again. Russell Tyson had his pickup parked on the town green with three generators running in the back, and people were paying twenty dollars for ten minutes of battery life, coaxing their phones back to a single bar, running fingers through their newly matted hair.
A few days later, the gravel around the green was littered with shards of thin, luminous glass: shattered smartphone screens, as disposable now as crack vials had been on North Avenue back in high school.
In those dirty days, she thinks, we were all Resurrectionists—even the most dyed-in-the-wool vegan bicyclists still had Tumblrs to update, still needed ice in their fair-trade coffee on an August afternoon, and a monthly refill of Ritalin in a stapled paper bag from the Rite Aid in Norwich. What was it like to spend every moment a little on edge, thinking that any time now the radio would beep, the air conditioner begin to whir, the lights flood the sullen filthy rooms? What it was like, as a practical matter, was stinky. No one wanting to admit that they needed to go take a bath in the creek. No one wanting to volunteer to build the town latrine. No one who knew how to build a latrine. After the third week, people pissed and shat by the side of the road, in the open. It was Elizabethan. And left little white flags of TP everywhere you looked.
That was the worst of it: the weeks of withdrawal when the coffee had run out, then the tea, the cigarettes, the Adderall, the Wellbutrin and Ativan, the Paxil and Zoloft. Here is a thing that happened today. She did a tally and counted twenty-three suicides. People disappeared into the woods, carrying knives, plastic bags, rubber bands. Or jumped off the White River Bridge on I-91. It was September, Indian summer, the leaves flaming out, the first nippy nights. The comm
uters, the office workers, the secretaries and actuaries and lawyers, walked around the town green in a daze, waiting for a sign. The farmers were all hard at work, running out the last diesel in their tractors. Some kids moved into the United Church and hung out a banner: OCCUPY BLACKOUT.
There was a girl, she remembers, who went up on the grassy hillside behind the Montessori school with a basket of scraps and a pair of scissors and began recreating her Pinterest page, squares of bright cloth for each jpeg, strips of blue sheet for the toolbar and browser frame.
One night at the beginning of that first winter—it must have been early in December, Nathan out laying the useless snares he’d built from an illustration in The Homesteader’s Manual—she panicked when the fire wouldn’t start in the kitchen stove and tore out pages in the journal, two or three at a time, as tinder. The living-room shelves sagged with books she could have used for the same purpose—The Road Less Traveled, Italy on $5 a Day—but at that moment, she thinks, forgiving herself, no one would have wanted to move a single extra muscle. In the winter, when you’re cold, the world extends no more than a foot in any direction. Anyway, she thinks, no one cares about that stuff. The cheap pathos of children losing their toys. Not about the old dead life: only about the life that took its place.
She finds Matilda Barnstone in her rocking chair on the library porch, smoking a pipe, her sawed-off shotgun resting comfortably across the floral sprigs of her lap. The library is the only building left in town with a working lock, chicken wire nailed across the windows. People might share their last finger of motor oil, Matilda says, break a four-inch candle in two, divide a pot of beans to serve eight, but they’ll kill you for a book. She sleeps in the basement with a Glock under her pillow. No lending anymore; all books stay on the premises, which means an old schoolhouse groaning on its joists, two floors, people in every nook, sweating, stinking, swatting flies, licking their thumbs as they page through Maeve Binchy and C. P. Snow, Louis L’Amour and George Santayana. Everyone gets patted down before leaving. Matilda blows out a blue cloud of corn-silk smoke and says, Haven’t seen you here in an age. Still working through the stash at the Rumsons’?