by John Jodzio
“Humans can get used to anything, no matter how deplorable or sad. We just reset our expectations and find happiness in our revised baseline.”
“And that’s a good thing?” I scratched back.
Even though his face was heavily bandaged I could see Reichmann roll his eyes at me. And when I handed him back the writing stick to respond he snapped it in half over his knee. Face or no face, Reichmann was being a dick and I started to look for a new writing stick to tell him that fact.
“Forget about him,” Schliess motioned to me. “For once let’s just have a nice, quiet dinner.”
In his previous life Schliess worked at a shelter helping teenagers whose lives had gone awry. While the war had hardened him, there was a part of him it hadn’t touched, something soft in the way he moved his hands that could always calm me down.
“Fine,” I nodded.
For dinner, I smashed up a banana I’d picked from a roadside tree and poked it through the gap between my teeth with the wrong end of a plastic spoon. Reichmann crushed up a mango with his mortar and pestle and once everything was minced into a fruity sluice he used a straw to suck the slurry through that hole in his cheek he was currently calling his mouth. Schliess tore at a piece of beef jerky and then dabbed away all the blood from his gums with his sleeve. The sun wasn’t going down anytime soon, but when I finished eating I tied a rag over my eyes and laid down on the partially melted yoga mat that I’d recently found in a ditch.
Sleep came difficult for me now. Before the war I’d been a chemist, working on cholesterol meds at a pharmaceutical company. When the war started, I immediately volunteered my services to a lab inventing chemical weapons. Like everyone else in Canada, I was caught up in the fervor of defending our borders from the southern invaders who wanted our remaining water and cooler air. While I absolutely understood the potential applications of my work while I mixed compounds and ran my beta tests, it’s a different thing altogether when you see a chemical weapon you’ve invented, one I’d named Black Krezcent, get dropped on a regiment of Americans bedding down near Calgary. I watched on the video screen as the drone’s door opened and the metal canisters tumbled through the sky and cracked open in a field and a mist of odorless microparticles spread through the air and hit the Americans’ skin and then their mouths quickly opened in screams and their skin peeled away like husks and their bodies began to flop on the ground like pieces of bacon in hot grease. Yes, I drank the celebratory champagne just like everyone else in the lab, I screamed “Hooray!” and “Liberty!” with the correct gusto, slapped fives with my coworkers until my palms were nearly blistered, but when I closed my eyes that night and for every night since, those dying flopping fucking skinless American soldiers are the only thing I ever see.
The three of us were caught by an American patrolman on the fourth day of our trudge. He looked about sixteen. He’d just shot a toucan and he was filleting it when we came through the brush. The kid got the jump on us, grabbing his machine gun before we got to our knives. I thought we were done for, that we were headed to a prison camp or he’d gut shoot us and leave us to bake in the noonday sun, but then Reichmann got down on his knees and begged for mercy.
“Mercy?” the American asked. “Seriously?”
Reichmann gave him a number of exaggerated nods to convince the kid that he should grant us clemency, but the nods were punctuated by a bunch of gritty gauze flopping around on Reichmann’s face, which made everything less convincing.
“If you would’ve got the jump on me would you be so kind?” the American said. “The fuck you would.”
Even though he knew it was a lost cause, Reichmann kept begging. He handed the American the picture he’d drawn of his wife and the kid looked at the drawing and said, “Wow, does she have any sisters?” and Reichmann groaned and shook his head glumly and some ropey blood slid off what used to be his chin and onto the ground and the kid laughed at that, laughed at Reichmann’s missing face and his bad luck and the bad luck of the three of us. Fortunately, while the boy was distracted with his giggling, Schleiss yanked his throwing knife from his ankle sheath and chucked it into the kid’s throat and then Reichmann jumped on top of the kid and stabbed him over and over in the eyes and the chest. When he was dead, we sat around his fire and ate the remainder of his toucan and smoked the rest of his cigarettes.
We trudged on. All the lakes and rivers and marshes had dried up years ago and the ground was newly gouged from tanks and bitten by army boots. There was no such thing as dignity anymore so sometimes we stripped naked and found shade in one of the thicker dead oaks. If the biting flies weren’t horrible we rested, Reichmann pulling out his journal and using a charcoal pencil to render one of many massacres he’d witnessed over the last two years. Reichmann had been an abstract painter before the war, but now he only drew realistic black and whites. He never saved any of his drawings. Whenever he finished one he’d just tear it up or light it on fire.
“Why don’t you keep them?” I wrote to him once. “Someone needs to document the atrocities we’ve seen, don’t they?”
Reichmann paused for a second, but then he wrote back, “At least none of us has kids,” which was not exactly what I asked him but which was an appropriate response and something extremely fortunate.
When our sponges dry up, Reichmann and I pull down our pants and soak them again. Who knows where Schliess heard about it, but when he saw those sea sponges in that abandoned food coop his eyes lit up.
“Way better than regular tampons!” he wrote. “No possibility of toxic shock!”
While I’m bent over resoaking my sponge, a priest walks into the rectory. He’s holding a baseball bat but he drops it onto the marble floor when he sees I’ve got a machine gun pointed at his chest.
“What in the fuck, guys?” the priest says. “This is still God’s house.”
The priest is harmless and I lower the gun. Schleiss points the priest toward the bottle of vodka on the counter and he takes a long swallow. As the liquor passes over his tongue, I see him wince. Then he grabs his jowls and moans.
“Bad tooth?” I point.
“Killing me,” he says. “Can’t chew, can’t drink.”
“Hold on,” I motion and I go into my backpack and give him one of my extra drinking sponges.
“Soak it in vodka and shove it up your ass,” Reichmann explains.
The priest is reluctant, but we all spread our cheeks and show him we’re not fucking with him and finally he shrugs his shoulders and pulls down his black pants and shoves his sponge in there too.
We keep chugging. And like usual I get sad. I find a piece of paper and a pencil and I scribble a question to the priest.
“What if I’ve done unspeakable things?” I write. “Can I ever be forgiven?”
There’ve been dozens of Black Krezcent strikes since that first one. I can’t help but think if I hadn’t mixed those chemicals together I might be free of this crushing guilt. Schliess has written me long notes in the dirt trying to absolve me from blame, telling me that if I hadn’t invented it, someone else would have probably invented something worse. While I appreciate his attempts to cheer me up, no amount of Schliess’s dirt scribbling can get those images out of my head.
The priest isn’t answering my question, he’s staring out at a gutted-out train station across the street so I tap him on the shoulder. I hold the piece of paper with my question on it right in front of his face. You need to have a huge amount of faith to still wear the collar, especially in this heat, and when you start drinking it probably slips away just like for everyone else. Schliess and Reichmann shake their heads at me, so tired of how maudlin and sentimental I get when I’m blotto.
“For fuck’s sake,” Reichmann writes. “Leave the man alone so he can absorb the liquor through the blood vessels in his sphincter just like the rest of us.”
We wait until nightfall to go find Reichmann’s wife. The priest guides us through the sewer tunnels so we can avoid the American patro
ls. The heat underground is incredible and the rats down there look like loaves of waterlogged bread. We stumble over each other in the dim light until the priest tells us we’re here and then we all climb up a ladder and slide a manhole cover out of the way. Now that he’s standing in front of his house, I can see the fear in Reichmann’s eyes. He’s not sure he wants to go through with this.
“Maybe it’s best if she thinks I’m dead?” he motions to us. “Or maybe she’s already moved on? Or maybe she won’t believe it’s really me?”
While we’re waiting for Reichmann’s courage to kick in, Schleiss walks over and pounds on the door. Soon a woman yells out to us.
“We’ve got no more bread,” she says. “And no more vodka. And we all have raging cases of gonorrhea. Best to be on your way.”
Reichmann walks over and pushes the note he’s written through the mail slot. In a minute the door swings open and Reichmann’s wife is standing in front of us. She keeps looking up at Reichmann’s bandaged face and then back down at the note. She’s shaking her head like it can’t be true, but then Reichmann holds out his hand and she studies it, takes her fingers and runs it over the lines crisscrossing his palm. And then she throws her arms around Reichmann’s neck and sobs. The priest is bawling now too, as most normal people would be, but Schliess starts to giggle and I join him, snorting like I do, because while this reunion is certainly poignant, Reichmann really pulled one over on us—his wife is flat-chested as fuck.
We’re all hustled inside. Sitting at the dining room table are two other women. Schleiss and I find out that Reichmann’s wife actually does have sisters, nice friendly ones. The dark-haired one is named Elyse and the blonde one is Cara.
Slowly the night turns into a party, not like the drunken keggers we used to have when we were young, but a decent party just the same. At some point Cara pulls a guitar out from the crawl space and all of us climb up to the rooftop terrace. While we stand there there’s a quick northerly breeze full of fresh flowery goodness that fills our nostrils for just a second and Cara starts to strum her guitar and we do whatever it is we do in lieu of singing, we hum or we lightly moan or we slap our knees or we just close our eyes, shut the hell up, and listen.
OUR MOM-AND-POP OPIUM DEN
Our mom-and-pop opium den is being forced out of business by a big-box opium den. Our regulars are pissed. My father and I are despondent. I stare across the street at the “Grand Opening” banner spread across Opium Depot’s facade, at the huge inflatable gorilla tethered to their roof, at their strolling mariachis, at their free hot dogs and free pony rides. I wonder if we’ll be out of business in weeks or just days.
“Fuck Opium Depot,” Jake Stensman tells me. “Screw those corporate fucks.”
Jake’s twenty-three years old, a Marine just back from Afghanistan. He’s wearing a gray T-shirt with the words “Semper Fi Mofo” silkscreened on the front of it. The tattooed names of his dead friends scroll down his tanned arms like a royal proclamation. Last week he told me he hears his dead friends screaming whenever he closes his eyes. His dead friends scream and scream and they don’t ever stop.
“Live local! Buy local!” he yells across the street.
Jake’s red-faced now, but soon he’ll be so high that all the ruddiness and anger in his body will float away. In a few minutes, he’ll be lying in one of our smoking beds and the only thing he’ll care about is taking an occasional breath.
“How about a protest?” Allen Cho suggests. “How about we walk around in a circle in front of their entrance wearing sandwich boards and chanting?”
Allen Cho’s daughter drowned in a lake two years ago. Allen sees his daughter in his dreams, her long, reedy arms reaching out to pull him down into the murky deep. There’s always lots of mud on her face and algae and sticks intertwined into her billowing hair. Other than some bloating, Allen says, her face looks exactly the same as the day she died.
“If it didn’t look like her,” he jokes, “I wouldn’t need to be here, right?”
While everyone looks across the street, I sit down at my desk to decide which bills to pay this month. Electric or water? Gas or phone? I wonder if our power got turned off would anyone notice? Could I light some scented candles from my dead mother’s curio cabinet and just tell everyone I’m trying for more ambiance?
I rip up a past due notice about our mortgage and my father pads around stuffing everyone’s pipes. The doctors tell me to surround him with familiar things, to keep him on a regular schedule. The doctors tell me he will have good and bad days. At first, they tell me, the bad days will be equally bad for both him and me. Then the bad days will get subtly better for him and significantly worse for me. At some point my father’s realization of what a bad day is or isn’t will slide from his consciousness and this fact will cleave my heart into a number of tiny pieces but luckily leave him unfazed. He’ll get a lot better when he gets a little worse, the doctors say.
“How about a huge sale?” Jennie Frontiere asks. “Show their asses you’re here for the long haul.”
None of our asses is here for the long haul, especially Jennie’s. She’s got bone cancer and opium is the only thing that deadens the ache in her arms and legs. Sometimes she tries to knit mittens for her grandchildren, but after a hit on the pipe her knitting needles slide out of her fingers and clatter to the floor.
“What about promotional punch cards?” Jake suggests. “Ten pipes, the eleventh is free?”
The line snaking out Opium Depot’s door curls down our block. I scan it for familiar faces, for any customers of ours they’ve already poached. My dad keeps busy. He fluffs pillows, brews a fresh pot of decaf.
Our place looks almost exactly the same as when he opened the doors thirty years ago. Red and gold walls. Silk tassels hanging from every goddamn thing. I’ve worked the register since I was eight and for the last twenty years I’ve watched hundreds of people kill themselves slowly and convincingly. It makes me sad to think I probably won’t get to see our current group of regulars meet their maker too.
My father pushes dirty sheets into the washing machine, pulls clean ones from the dryer. Outside our doors, all bets are off, but inside here, he’s still a huge help to me. Inside here, he can sometimes make me forget he forgets.
“We’ve outlasted everyone before,” he says. “We’ll just do it again, right?”
The memory loss chatrooms tell me to pick my battles, to try to keep his stress level low. All the commenters advise me to conserve my energy for the long haul ahead. Why deliver bad news when you’ll need to deliver the same bad news in five minutes, they say, and then again two minutes after that?
“Of course we will,” I say. “We’ll bring those assholes to their knees.”
Allen, Jake, and Jennie shuffle back to their beds, jonesing for their next hit. I walk around and light their pipes. When I’m done I flop down on an open bed and my father lights me up.
“Maybe this will clarify things,” I yell out to everyone before I inhale. “Maybe we’ll get some better ideas after this.”
So yes, instead of fighting Opium Depot, what we decide to do in this case is to wait it out, hope for strength or illumination to descend from above. What we do in this case is smoke.
In this case?
In every case.
When I wake up later there’s a bright yellow piece of paper stuffed into my mouth. It’s a promotional flyer from Opium Depot. All my regulars have them in their mouths too. Someone from Opium Depot waltzed through our doors while we were zonked out and leafleted our asses.
My father’s asleep on his cot. He used to be a light sleeper, awakened by the tiniest floorboard creak. Now you have to poke him in the chest for a minute straight before he’ll open his eyes.
“Help me gather up those flyers before everyone wakes up,” I tell him. “If they find out how cheap it is over there, we’re finished.”
My father rubs the sleep from his eyes, threads his toes into his flip-flops. I grab his forearm, stea
dy him as he stands. His knees are bad from all the up and down that occurs in this business. He had his right knee replaced last year. His left one is giving him trouble now, clicking and popping. I wonder if we should just skip replacing it. Maybe he’ll just forget he’s in pain? Or maybe soon he’ll forget what pain even is? I jot down a note to ask the doctors about this at our next appointment.
While we grab the flyers, I look over at the counter and see that while I was nodding off my dad bought a huge bag of fortune cookies at the Asian market down the street, snapped the cookies in half, and then pulled out all the fortunes. There are at least a hundred fortunes spitballed on the counter. This is the second time my father’s done this in the last week, leaving crumbs all over the countertop and the floor. Lately he treats fortune cookies like they’re pull tabs or scratch-offs, like one of them will be a winner, like he’s searching for a phrase he’s waited his entire life to be told.
“Dad,” I say. “We talked about you leaving here alone, right?”
“I went out for a little bit,” he says. “I needed a break. I needed some goddamn sunshine.”
After our visit to the doctor last week, my father and I had a frank discussion about his condition, about the safety measures we needed to implement to keep him safe. The doctors keep suggesting I put him in assisted care, with prepared meals and around-the-clock care. Strangely, the doctors always clam up whenever I ask them where to get the money to pay for all that.
“I don’t like the new rules either,” I tell him, “but we need to keep you alive.”
My dad opens and closes his hands while we talk, balling his fingers into fists and then fanning them out wide. The doctors warned me there might be some initial frustration when the new rules were put in place, that things between the two of us might get physical. My guard is up. My dad’s in good shape, he still looks like he could land a decent uppercut.
“Are you forbidding me to come and go?” he asks.