“Where will you be?”
He asks: “When?”
“At the apocalypse.”
He snorts, and rolls his head back.
She continues to look at him, unmoving; deadpan.
“Oh.”
They dangle their legs over the concrete ledge, close to the lapping canal water. Dead scum floats beneath their feet and it smells faintly of harbour when the tide rolls out. They watch light dancing against the blank underbelly of the bridge, carrying traffic. About them, the detritus of shattered industry; a burnt out car, rusted steel drums, puddles made iridescent with a thin veneer of oil. A halo of fast food packaging flutters in the wind. Few boats wander past. Crickets chatter.
He thinks about what it would be like, to see the world end. Would it be quick, or drawn out? Could he make a last phone call? He lays out his final moments, placing himself on hard concrete. The sun above becomes a searing explosion erasing his body. He’d be dead, then: one permanent shadow amongst many. He notices how her silhouette blots out the sun’s warmth. She’d be one of them.
“With my family then, I guess.”
She sighs.
“I don’t think you understand.” She looks down at him. “It’s not about where you want to be, but where you will be.”
He sits up.
“It’s not such an easy question, is it?” She holds her hands out, palms up as though the concept were an object for him to see. Her naked feet form a Newton’s cradle. The sound of skin kissing bounces off the water and concrete. And he is reminded, for a moment, of sitting by the municipal pool as a child, listening to the unreal sounds of water slapping and voices ricocheting.
He draws his eyes down, shuttering them from the sun.
“I’d be at home then,” he says: “Sleeping and it would all be over by the time I woke up; or rather I would never wake up because I miss important events. Always do,” he adds, quieter.
“I like that.” She pulls a loose hair from his cheek and blows it away. “Permanent sleep. I wonder if you’d carry on dreaming.”
“Probably not.” He bites his lip
“There wouldn’t be anyone you’d want to say goodbye to?”
“Like I said – my family.”
“No-one else, I mean: no-one you would need to say one last word to?”
He shakes his head.
“Okay.”
She brushes back one side of her hair, tucking it behind an ear. She cranes her head a little. The chug of a pleasure boat rolls around from a distant meander.
“I think I’ll be in a supermarket,” she says. “And I’ll be the only one smiling. Have you ever noticed that? That people never smile in supermarkets? They all carry expressions of boredom; or else annoyance, or inconvenience. I saw this woman once, in the queue and she was worried, you know? Like something was distressing her. She had the face of a trapped animal.”
“I’ve never noticed anything like that.”
“Well I have. And that’s where I’ll be, with all those people and I don’t think their expressions will be any different.”
“Why do you think that?” He asks.
“Why don’t you?”
“That’s not what I was asking.”
She shakes her head, and lets her gaze drop away from him.
“I want your coke.”
“What?” He frowns.
“I want it. It looks refreshing.”
She knocks into his shoulder, tilts her head and slips her eyes toward his.
He stutters a moment.
Her eyes drop to the cup and then back up.
“It’s hot. I’m hot.”
“Alright, take it. I’m not thirsty.”
She leans into him, pressing their chests together as though to swap heart beats. She grabs his drink without thanking him and he watches as she starts to draw on the tall cup, as her eyes lock with his. The red swell of her lips begins to glisten in the sunlight. He shifts a little. She licks the last drop before it can roll down her chin, a laugh in her eyes.
“Done?” he asks.
She nods, leaning back.
“This is what I think,” she says. “All those people in the supermarket: the reason they won’t change their expressions is because they can’t – they don’t realise what’s happening to them; the idea that they will all die, that no-one will be there to remember them, will be too much to handle. They won’t be able to comprehend it, so they’ll carry on as if nothing is wrong.”
“You’re a pessimist.”
“I’m not deluding myself. There’s a difference.”
“But what if they did realise?”
“They’d laugh. Really hard.”
“And then?”
“It’d be too late, the apocalypse will have happened.”
Monthly Archives: November 2009
Apocalypse
ALONE AGAIN, OR (Excerpt)
It was the usual thing, an estate sale, and the three of us, my mom and my step-father John and me were standing there, conspiring in the hallway of somebody else’s home about how best to rip them off. It wasn’t going so well.
***********
Only this morning my mom had asked me “What do you want to do today?”
I was on my bed, in my t-shirt and boxers, reading Spider-Man.
“Let’s go to Santa Monica beach.” Lately I had been remembering all the good times when I was younger and it was just me and her and she used to drive us up through the canyon and down to the beach in her yellow VW bug, steering the wheel with her knees while she smoothed sunscreen over her brown legs.
I realized why she wanted us out of the house. Yesterday she had told the landlord he could come by today for the overdue rent and almost four weeks ago she had negotiated to pay double this month. All she needed was a little extra time. By the way she had been desperately tearing through the mail for the last week, I figured some money she was counting on still hadn’t arrived. I hated seeing her upset that way.
She liked my beach idea, which made me happy, and when she asked my step-father Johnny also I was surprised that he agreed to Santa Monica, said “Sure, Christine, let’s go to the beach. The three of us.”
We left the house at 9 a.m. and hopped into Johnny’s blue T-Bird that he had spent eight years restoring. He went through the usual routine of lighting his camel, cupping one hand around the other. Johnny couldn’t drive if he didn’t have a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. I could barely see over his head from the back. Johnny was tall, with slicked back hair and a handle-bar moustache. His left arm dangled from the open window, pounding out in rhythm to Foghat or whatever hard rock classics were playing on KLOS-FM. He had tattoos of dragons with peacock feathers and weird shit like that up both of his big arms. Johnny had a way of scaring off other cars around him. I knew the feeling.
He looked up, squinting at the sky. “Too cloudy for the beach today. Maybe next week.” My mom just shrugged, but I don’t think she really agreed with him either.
So Johnny decided to take us to IHOP even though I had already eaten breakfast. We sat down at the royal blue formica table and Johnny ordered a couple of cups of burnt-smelling coffee while my mom bought a paper. She spent the next half hour circling ads. Not ‘Help Wanted’ ads, which would have made sense since she had been laid off almost sixth months ago from UPS. That would have taken too much time and been too disappointing. Instead, my mom had taken her four-in-one Bic pen and was marking off the addresses of garage and estate sales in red.
She could tell by the way I was shooting the paper covers off of all the straws that I was less than enthused.
“Come on, Matt. It’s something fun we can do. All of us together. As a family.”
She stuck her lower lip out and smiled at me in that goofy way she always did when she didn’t want me to be mad at her.
**************************
Her being a single parent and all, my mom and I had been pretty close most of the time growing up. We looked out for each other. Even when I was in elementary school, if anyone ever picked on me there she was. “Nobody pushes my kid around or they answer to me.” I knew about her temper: Grandma said that she was a scrapper, that she had given aunt Marty lots of black eyes and bloody noses growing up.
Like about 5 years ago, when I was in fourth or fifth grade. There was this bully named Harry Amos, who I called Hairy Anus. I thought it was real funny, but Harry didn’t. He said he was going to beat me up after school on Friday. I didn’t tell anybody about it except my grandma, but she told me I was going to have to learn to fight my own battles at some point.
On Friday afternoon, I hesitated leaving school and looked around for a few friends that might be able to walk home with me, but there weren’t any around. When I finally dragged myself out the school gates, sure enough Harry was there, waiting. But so was my mom.
It was a half hour before she normally got off work, and she was leaning against her VW door with her arms crossed and talking to Harry this real intense way. His eyes were wide as I approached them and he looked like he was scared as he hitched his backpack over his shoulder. He walked away, fast.
I opened the car door, dropped myself down into the passenger seat and crossed my arms, not bothering with the seat belt. “I’m not a pussy, I can fight my own fights, Mom.”
“I know. I just told the Anus how crazy you are when you get angry.”
She leaned over and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of the glove compartment. She lit a Tiparillo and continued with her story, acting totally serious, “I said that you sent some seventh grader from the Catholic school to the emergency room last month with a ruptured spleen and a gash all the way down his face. The kid is still in a coma over at County, from what I hear. Oh, and I told the Anus to be careful because you carry a knife.”
I had to laugh. My Swiss army knife that she bought me those three months I had been in Cub Scouts. I felt pretty good right then about what my mom had done for me. I knew that there was someone around who would always have my back.
********************
So today was going to be like every other Saturday. All the weekends lately were the same, with Mom and Johnny and me cruising around the west San Fernando Valley and up into Ventura county, going to flea markets and garage sales, looking for that lucky break. Something to get rich quick.
When we got to this place it was just a big suburban house, and we could see that it obviously wasn’t an estate sale – not like things were catalogued and that there was someone running the show or even like they knew what they had. We figured that some old woman had died, since she was nowhere in sight, and her husband (who was in a wheelchair) was pretty much an invalid. My mom said the kids were probably trying to sell whatever they could to clear out the house before sending him off to a nursing home.
There was a picture of the dead woman and the husband on the wall, overseeing the proceedings. It was one of those portraits you have done at the mall and it didn’t seem very old. The husband, heavy and grey, looked exactly the same in the picture as he did today, except that now he was in a wheelchair. The wife had kind of Indian features, with black eyes and a silky braid of hair falling over a red and gold blouse. She had dark and oily circles around her eyes and I guessed that she had been sick for a while and that they wanted to have the photo done as one last way of remembering their life together.
**********************
When I first met John Fooshee, I was eleven years old and pretty hesitant. My mom had gone out with a lot of losers: Rabbit, who my mom told me later was a coke dealer and liked wearing her bras; Arthur, who had left her one night at the Sagebrush Cantina and stolen her car; and my dad, who was in jail back in Florida. None of them stayed.
Now I was fourteen and Johnny had been around for three years and been married to my mom over two. It was kind of cool, with Johnny around it was sort of like I had a real dad. My mom’s family felt relieved to see her settled down, finally.
**********************
“She was an ugly broad,” Johnny whispered to my mom and motioned up to that family portrait of the old couple. He made an imaginary dot on his forehead. When I didn’t laugh, Johnny shrugged his shoulders and motioned for us to follow him. My mom and I looked at each other and laughed at Johnny, how stupid he could sometimes be. I knew that I wasn’t always very nice to Johnny. Of the three of us, he was pretty clearly the outsider. My mom and I told a lot of inside jokes, a lot of the time at his expense.
I didn’t like encouraging him when he was acting like this, making fun of the people who owned the house we were in. I mean, at least they had family photos. Now that there were three of us, we would get pictures taken with the extended family at Christmas and other get-togethers, but I never saw a single one of them framed or on a wall or nightstand in our apartment. Despite what my mom had hoped for, that just wasn’t the type of family we would ever be.
Filed under Fiction
His Cancer and Remission
His Cancer
A dead
apple drops, lodges itself
inside the body.
Next morning:
grackle outside the window, dog
asleep in the closet, dobsonfly rising from
the bottom of the Susquehanna.
Those contemporary love poems
you were so fond of leave you
in another place: mud banks, abandoned
lots, airport restaurants with their cold
coffee, whole bodies stashed in
roll-away suitcases, what
Mel taught you about birds, how
when it rains they
never leave the ground.
Remission
Two summers after Mel’s death, the sky
darkens just the same—a cold, mildewed shawl
draped over the earth’s shoulders. A far corner
of evening is left exposed. Here skin
is worn so thin that the clavicle has breached,
coming up for oxygen, a chance
at redemption, sheer curiosity.
Filed under Poetry
WHEN IT’S SUNNY THEY PUSH THE BUTTON
and the sky
through the oval aperture
above your head in the form
of light that bounces
a little then rests on the curved walls
and also in the form
of whatever colors you can see and maybe
if you’re lucky clouds
pours through
maybe it’s obvious
and peacefully alien like a young nun
walking past the local establishments
in a university town in summer
where it’s always despite the superficial changes
the same time
even the rain
feels like rain after the evacuation
and even happiness
feels like having survived something
I can’t remember
