Soft Apocalypse Read online

  SOFT Apocalypse

  Will McIntosh

  Night Shade Books

  San Francisco

  Soft Apocalypse © 2011 by Will McIntosh

  This edition of Soft Apocalypse © 2011 by Night Shade Books

  Cover art by Nonie Nelson

  Cover design by Rebecca Silvers

  Interior layout and design by Ross E. Lockhart

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59780-276-5

  E-ISBN: 978-1-59780-307-6

  Night Shade Books

  Please visit us on the web at

  http://www.nightshadebooks.com

  The first one is for my parents, William and Blanche McIntosh.

  Chapter 1:

  Tribe

  Spring, 2023

  We passed a tribe of Mexicans heading the other way, wading through the knee-high weeds along the side of the highway. Or maybe they were Ecuadorans, or Puerto Ricans. I don’t know. There were about twenty of them, and they were in bad shape. One woman was unconscious; she was being carried by two men. One of the children looked to have flu.

  A small brown man with orphan eyes and no front teeth spoke for them. “Por favor, dinero o comida?”

  “Lo siento,” I said, holding my hands palm up, “no tengo nada.”

  The man nodded, his head slung low.

  Colin and I walked on in silence, feeling like shit. If we had enough to spare, we’d have given them something.

  If you’re not starving, but you may be in a month, is it wrong not to give food to people who are starving now? Where’s the line? How poor do you have to be before you’re not a selfish bastard for letting others starve?

  “It’s so hard to believe,” Colin said as we crossed the steaming, empty parking lot toward the bowling alley.

  “What?”

  “That we’re poor. That we’re homeless.”

  “I know.

  “I mean, we have college degrees,” he said.

  “I know,” I said.

  There was an ancient miniature golf course choked in weeds alongside the bowling alley. The astroturf had completely rotted away in places. The windmill had one spoke. We looked it over for a minute (both of us had once been avid mini golfers), then continued toward the door.

  “You know what I’d pay money to see?” Colin said.

  “Yes,” I said. He ignored me and carried on.

  “I’d pay to see a golf tournament for really terrible golfers, with a million dollar prize. The best part of watching golf is seeing guys choke under the pressure, digging up divots that go farther than the ball.”

  “Now that would be worth watching,” I said, stepping around a small, decomposing animal of some sort. “By the way, we’re not homeless, we’re nomads. Keep your labels straight.”

  “Ah, yes, I forgot.” Colin had always been a master of the sarcastic tone, even in grade school. He reached the door first, pulled it open and waved me through.

  Given all of the bowling leagues I’d been in as a kid, it surprised me that the clatter of bowling pins didn’t stir any nostalgic feelings. Maybe it was because this bowling alley was in semi-darkness. The only light was what filtered through the doors and windows.

  A guy with a bushy beard was hunched to make his shot in the lane nearest the door. He missed the spare, then walked down the lane into deep shadow to reset the pins by hand.

  This was promising; if they weren’t even running the automatic pin-setters, they needed power badly. A half-dozen fans of various shapes and sizes were spread around, buzzing like model airplanes. They appeared to be the only things hooked up to the generator.

  Colin stopped short. “Do you have the cell? I hope you brought it, because I forgot all about it.”

  I pulled the storage cell from my pocket and held it in front of Colin’s nose.

  “Well that’s a relief,” Colin said. “I was not looking forward to walking all the way back to get it. Let’s take care of this and get out of here.”

  My cell phone jingled, alerting me to an incoming text-message. I jolted, dug the phone out of my pocket while trying not to appear as eager as I felt. I had to tilt the phone toward the windows to read it.

  Miss you, the message said.

  Miss you too. Love you, I typed back.

  Sophia and I talked in awful clichés, but somehow words that made me wince when others said them seemed fresh and powerful when we said them. Love you so much. Thought about you all day. I would die for you. Pure poetry.

  “You’ve really got it bad,” Colin said. He was sweating like a pig, his shirt soaked dark down the center from his neck to his belly.

  “I know. I know it’s pointless, but I just can’t get unhooked from her.”

  “You haven’t suffered enough yet. Once you have, you’ll get unhooked.”

  My phone jingled again. Colin chuckled.

  Love you too, the message said. I put the phone away. It took effort. I could picture Sophia sitting at her desk at work, glancing at her phone, waiting for it to burble. Mine jingled, hers burbled. Actually, both of the phones were hers. She paid the bills, anyway.

  It wasn’t an affair in the usual sense of the word. She had too much integrity for that. I’d like to think I do as well, but she never made the offer, so I can’t be sure. Maybe part of having integrity is surrounding yourself with people who have integrity, so that yours is never tested.

  “All done?” Colin asked. “Now can we get this over with?” I followed Colin to the front desk, where a gray-haired woman was spraying disinfectant into blue and red shoes that lined the counter.

  “Excuse me, are you interested in trading some water or food for energy?” Colin held up the storage cell.

  The woman went on spraying.

  “Excuse me?” Colin said, louder. She didn’t look up.

  A pair of bowlers put their scorecard down on the counter. The woman went right over and rang them up.

  “Excuse me,” we said simultaneously as she walked right past us and resumed her battle with stinky shoes. We looked at each other.

  “Hey!” I said. Nothing. I looked around the alley to see if anyone else was witnessing this. Four people, evidently on a double-date, looked away as I looked at them. One of the women said something

  to the others and they laughed.

  “Take a hint,” someone shouted from one of the far alleys.

  My heart was thudding. “You know, we’ve got eight other people depending on us. They’re dehydrated and close to starving. We’re not asking for a handout, just a fair trade.”

  The woman sprayed some more shoes.

  “Come on Jasper, let’s go,” Colin said.

  My phone jingled. We turned to go. I stopped and turned around.

  “Fuck you, you ugly old bigot piece of shit,” I said. She smirked, shook her head, but didn’t look at me.

  It was a long walk, across that gum-stained carpet to the doors. I suddenly felt so self-conscious I could barely walk—one of my legs felt longer than the other, and my hands were too big.

  “Fucking gypsies!” someone yelled as the door closed.

  Outside, a guy on a mountain bike rolled up, dropped a foot that skidded to a stop on the cigarette-littered pavement. He ignored us as he slung a bowling bag off his shoulder.

  My phone jingled.

  “Go ahead,” Colin said. “I won’t be offended.”

  The text message said, What r u doing?

  I called Sophia and told her what had happened. She cried for me, and told me she loved me very, very much, and not to let it get to me, that I was a brilliant, wonderful person in a bad situation. I felt a little better. Sophia was good at making people feel better. The first time I ever met
her, she was handing out Christmas presents to the children of illegals down by the river in Savannah. I was down there coordinating an effort to give the children tuberculosis shots, but I was getting paid.

  Whenever anything bad happened, my first thought was to call Sophia. I don’t know why—she didn’t have much spare time to give me solace, between her job and her husband.

  How do you look into the future when you plan to spend it with someone you don’t love? It boggled my mind. It frustrated the hell out of me that she wouldn’t leave him (because he was a nice guy and would fall apart if she left), even though she loved me, not him. Even though every fiber in our souls pulled us toward each other.

  I had thought that same string of thoughts a thousand times, and still it kept looping, day after day, digging a pit in my mind. Shit.

  We cleared a rise and caught sight of the rest of our tribe lounging in the shade on the grassy median of the highway. Jim had all six of our little windmills working, bless his soul. The guy was pushing sixty, twice the age of most of the rest of us, but he was always working. The windmills were set as close to traffic as possible to harvest the wind of passing vehicles. They spun pretty good each time a vehicle passed. The tribe had also spread a couple of the smaller solar blankets on the sunny spots in the grass, and pitched our tents.

  Jeannie met Colin with a hug, and a “How’d it go?”

  Cortez asked if I wanted to go to the Minute Mart with him and Ange to buy food. I told him I’d pass, that we only had two bikes, so they could travel faster alone. Truth was I didn’t care much for Cortez, though I loved Ange to death. Cortez was too aggressive-salesmany for me, and had the sort of thick, meaty lips that would make any man look like a thug. I didn’t understand what Ange saw in him, although I don’t know, maybe I was just jealous because Ange was so damned hot and she was with Cortez.

  I sat up against a tree and typed a message to Sophia as cars whooshed past and the windmills spun.

  Thinking about you, I wrote.

  Love u so much. Miss u like crazy. Going hm to sleep, she wrote.

  Why did I always have the urge to find a printer and print out her messages? It was as if I wanted hard evidence, something I could show to someone to prove that this beautiful woman loved me. Am I that insecure? Some part of me is, yes, especially now that I’m a bum.

  Another message came through:

  Can I see u?

  I could barely type fast enough. Yes! Rt. 301 N, median strip, W of Metter.

  See you in 40 min. : ) Can’t wait!!!!!

  I leapt to my feet, grinning like an idiot.

  A passing truck slowed; a plastic fast-food cup flew out the passenger window and hit me in the neck. Soda splashed across my face and chest.

  “Faggot!” a woman screamed out the window as the truck sped off. She had to be sixty.

  “Fat ugly bitch!” I screamed, though she wasn’t fat, and couldn’t hear me anyway.

  Jim handed me a filthy hand towel. “Don’t let it get to you,” he said in his calm Zen voice. I located the cleanest spot on the towel and wiped my chest with it.

  “What the hell is going on?” I said. “We’re not illegals. Now it’s anyone who doesn’t have a home?”

  Jim could only shrug and return to his windmills. Well, our windmills. Everything was common property; everything was shared. Capitalism was a luxury we could not afford. It’s amazing how quickly your deeply held values crumble when the cupboards are bare.

  Thirty minutes later I spotted Sophia’s silver Honda in the distance. I could barely stand to wait for the car to cover the distance between us. I stepped to the edge of the curb and watched as her face became distinct, a big smile on her beautiful brown lips. I hopped in before she came to a complete stop, reveled in the cool air as I waved goodbye to my tribe.

  Sophia leaned over and gave me a wet kiss by my ear, struggling to watch the road at the same time. “Hi there.”

  “Hi,” I said, taking her free hand in mine, enjoying the contrast of our brown and white fingers laced together. “How was work?”

  “It sucked ass,” she said. She always said that. But she also knew she was damned lucky to have a job. Accountants were mostly still employable, even with a forty-something percent unemployment rate (which didn’t count the millions of refugees who were landing on beaches and hopping over fences every day). Sociology majors, on the other hand, were eminently unemployable. I should have listened to my parents. Although, come to think of it, when I was struggling to decide on a major my parents told me to follow my heart. There were eighty million artists, blackjack dealers, documentary filmmakers, florists, and fellow sociology majors who were very sorry they’d followed their hearts.

  Sophia pulled into the Wal-Mart parking lot, parked in the far corner and left the car running, for the air conditioning.

  “I brought you some things,” she said. I loved her beautiful island accent. She twisted to pull a plastic shopping bag out of the back seat and toss it casually into my lap. She tried so hard to make it seem like nothing, to keep our relationship on equal footing. I opened the bag and peered inside: soap, bug spray, vitamins, aspirin, protein bars, and a twenty dollar bill. Whenever I saw her, she had supplies for the tribe. She was a god damned saint.

  A waxy package caught my eye. I pulled it from the bag and smiled.

  “Baseball cards?” Like an idiot, I used to buy them every spring—a rite of passage into baseball season left over from childhood. When we first met, when I still had a job and the world was as it had always been, I bought a pack in a coffee shop and opened them at the table, introducing her to the players as I thumbed through their cards. She’d been a cricket fan on Dominica—in desperate need, as I saw it, of an introduction to the greatest bat and ball game in the universe.

  She laughed. “Subsistence rations.”

  I ran my finger across the foil seal, held the breach to my nose and sniffed. I shut my eyes, sighed as the smell of freshly minted baseball cards triggered fond memories. I pulled out the cards. They felt so clean and slick in my filthy hands. “Chris Carroll,” I said, studying the first card. I flipped it over. “How’d he do last season? I didn’t get to see many games.”

  And suddenly I was crying. Sophia threw her arms around me and cried with me. “I wish—” she said, but stopped herself. I knew what she wished. We stayed like that, huddled together, our wet faces buried in each other’s neck.

  “I only have until two, then I have to… go home,” she said after a while. Which meant, that’s when Jean Paul would be home, and even at such an indirect mention of her husband, that familiar cocktail of jealousy/hurt/despair lanced my stomach.

  Sophia didn’t lie to her husband about us. He was deeply hurt, and quietly angry, but he tolerated it, because he didn’t want Sophia to leave him. In other words, Sophia had all the power in the relationship, whether she wanted it or not.

  As I see it, there are four types of relationships. There are those where you’re madly in love with someone, and her feelings are tepid. In that case she has the power, and you struggle to convince her to love you by trying to be witty and fascinating, forever seeking her approval for what you say and who you are, and grow increasingly pathetic in the process. That was where Jean Paul was.

  There are those where the other person is in love with you, while you can only muster a warm and murky fondness for her. In this case you carry a knot of guilt, because you feel like a walking lie; you’re forever trying to feel what you don’t feel, and end up consumed by an existential emptiness, convinced that, not only can you not feel love for this person, you have become incapable of loving anyone. That’s where Sophia was with Jean Paul, and why there was enough room in her heart for me.

  Third, there are those where you’re not in love with the other person, and she is not in love with you. There is a nice balance here; you’re on the same page, so there is no need to struggle, no one feels like a loser and no one feels guilty. There is a sadness, though. When you
look into someone’s eyes and see the blandness you feel reflected there, it’s hard not to wonder why you’ve chosen to be in a relationship that’s the equivalent of a permanent Valium drip. This sort of relationship had always been my specialty, for reasons I don’t quite understand.

  Then there is the fourth type. You are madly in love with someone who is madly in love with you. This is the perfect balance, energy in harmony. This is the kind we all want—it draws you into the moment and keeps you there. You don’t want to be anywhere else. The existential hum is silenced. Before I met Sophia, I’d never found one of these, and had begun to suspect they were mythical creatures, that I was as likely to happen upon a yeti as a woman who loved me as much as I loved her.

  “We’d better get going,” Sophia said. She reached toward the back seat again, handed me another plastic bag. “Keep this safe for when you need it.”

  It was a white dress shirt, wrapped in plastic and pinned to cardboard, and a lime-green tie. “For when you get an interview.”

  Still sticky from the soda flung at me an hour earlier, I wanted to laugh at the absurdity of that sentiment, but I didn’t want to seem ungrateful of her gift.

  “Watch out for immigration,” Sophia said as she pulled onto the highway. “They’re deporting homeless U.S. citizens to third world countries along with illegals.”

  “You’re joking,” I said.

  “They’re trying to defend it as retaliation for poor countries encouraging their people to come here. And they’re getting lots of support from people on the right.”

  “Figures,” I said.

  “And avoid Rincon—they’re lynching people, especially strangers.”

  “Oh, Christ. We had a trading partner there.” Our list of reliable connections kept shrinking. Either the location was too dangerous, or they were going out of business.

  “Uh-oh.” Sophia slowed as we approached my tribe. There was a police car pulled partway on the median by our camp, its red light flashing. I convinced Sophia to go, kissed her cheek, and thanked her for the things she had brought, then rejoined my tribe, which was clumped before a middle-aged, red-haired cop.