Will McIntosh - Soft Apocalypse

I passed two guys wearing CD armbands—Civil Defense. Everywhere you looked they seemed to be popping up, and every other blank concrete surface either had a poster encouraging you to volunteer, or a stencil of their logo—an eagle in flight, carrying a rat in its claws. The rat was supposed to represent the Jumpy-Jumps, and criminals of every ilk, but more and more it seemed the substantial fee Ruplu was paying the CD protected Ruplu from the CD itself, not the so-called bad guys.

The honey woman shook my hand with both of hers. She was old—eighty at least. I was pretty sure the sundress she wore had been made out of old curtains. She took me to the roof of her house, which had a three-sided corner dormer with a steep peaked roof, hugged by an ancient red brick chimney.

I didn’t know anything about bees and wasn’t particularly interested in learning about them, but the woman gave me an enthusiastic, long-winded dissertation on beekeeping and her hives. Afterward we went down to her living room to talk about the details. She said she could supply about thirty jars a week during the season. I held the sample jar she had given to me up to the light streaming in through the curtainless picture window. Little chips of honeycomb, dust, and even what looked to be a bee’s wing were suspended in the golden goo. It still made my mouth water, but I’d found that people would pay way more for things that looked mass-produced.

An old Mickey Mouse coloring book was stuffed in a magazine rack by the woman’s reclining chair. I pulled it out, took a good look of the image of Mickey on the cover, then held the coloring book up and pointed at Mickey. “Here’s what I’d like you to do. Take this book to Mark Parcells at Whitaker Print Shop, and get him to make labels with this picture and ‘Mickey Mouse Honey’ on them. The honey will sell much better that way.”

“Oh,” the woman said, sounding less than enthused. “But isn’t that a copyright violation?”

I chuckled, shook my head. “Disney isn’t going to bother you, I promise.” Ah, the good old days, when Disney had the time and energy to sue people for selling unlicensed products.

If there was any bright side to The Decline (as the media often referred to it), it had to be the neutering of corporate America. Back in the old days they were such a huge presence; today it took all of their energy and resources just to produce their products and get them onto store shelves.

Pleased to have secured another product for the store, I headed home. If I’d been able to whistle worth a damn, I might have whistled.

Bull Street was almost deserted in the afternoon heat. From an open second-floor window, an old woman with no front teeth stared at me, her mouth curled in suspicion. She reminded me of my great aunt, who had believed for the last ten years of her life that I and all the rest of her relatives were trying to kill her.

Two blocks ahead, a woman turned the corner and headed in my direction. It was Deirdre.

I bolted into the doorway of an abandoned storefront. Why I was hiding, I couldn’t say. Deirdre still had all of my childhood photos (assuming she hadn’t burned them). I should have confronted her, maybe twisted her little arm behind her back until she told me where they were. Instead I did my best to fold into the crack between the door and the boarded-up window.

What had she done with my photos? Sometimes I still lay awake wondering. There had been no cut-up pile greeting me when I finally built up the nerve to use my key to sneak into her place while she was out. No charred corners mixed with the ashes in the fireplace (showing a tantalizing hint of a sneaker; the ornament-laden branches of a Christmas tree…). They were just gone. Did she toss them in a dumpster? Did she still have them? I missed them to my bones. I had no proof now, that I had a past, that I’d once been a child. I never would have guessed it would hurt so much to lose them. Evidently Deirdre had.

Deirdre strutted past, oblivious to my cowering form. I was not afraid of her, I told myself. I just didn’t want to deal with her. I waited a couple of minutes, then went on my way, still thinking about her.

At home I found Colin and Jeannie parked in front of the TV, watching the news. We might as well ditch the remote—our TV was always tuned to MSNBC. With times so dark there was always something new, always people dying. Egypt was systematically exterminating the population of the rest of Northern Africa. Why? Because the population of Northern Africa ate. Fewer people meant less competition for food and energy, and Egypt had the biggest guns. Bad as it was in the U.S., some other parts of the world were turning into nothing but giant concentration camps and killing fields. It was both mesmerizing and depressing.

I took a deep breath and turned away from the TV. I would have liked to go to sleep, but Colin and Jeannie were sitting on my bed watching TV, so I went into their room to do a little bookkeeping for the store.

“I have to say, Cortez was a natural,” Ange said. “He’d stop to look at a table of sorry-looking pistols, then turn and bump into some guy in an expensive suit, grabbing the guy’s shoulders like he was steadying himself. The guy didn’t even flinch from the stick. He was slapping people on the back, even pulled it off with a couple of cops and soldiers.”

Uzi tugged on his leash, panting and wagging his tail, trying to pull Ange across the street toward Jackson Square and its Live Oaks. “Uzi, no,” Ange said, as if that would faze him. He lived to pee on those massive trunks.

“You want me to take a turn?” I offered, knowing she didn’t. Ange shook her head. “Are we talking regular U.S. soldiers from Fort Stewart, or those private mercenary guys?” I asked.

“Regular. He’s not suicidal.”

There were more people in the park than usual. More adults, anyway. The kids were always there, playing their incomprehensible game, jumping among big colored dots laid along the squares and sidewalks, alternately frowning in concentration and laughing like hell, dousing each other with industrial-strength water guns, rolling dice the size of baseballs. Now there were also groups of adults, sitting in circles, cooking in pots on open fires, laughing their heads off. They were infected with Doctor Happy.

Doctor Happy had made the local evening news three days after Chair and Sebastian’s infection party. They called it a strange new virus that results in “disorientation, amotivation, and giddiness.” Sebastian had said the government wasn’t going to like this virus at all. Authoritarian types are uncomfortable with people altering their consciousness—they’d rather see them vomit blood.

An ultralight helicopter buzzed overhead, casting a drifting shadow on the street. Probably some rich jerk going for a martini at Rooftop Elysium.

“What I wouldn’t give for a rocket launcher,” Ange said, her neck craned.

“Maybe you’ll have one of your own once you get your Ph.D.,” I laughed. “At the very least you’ll be able to live in a gated community.”

Ange glared at me. “I’d never become one of them. I’d live in a better place, sure, but never in one of those obnoxious gated fortresses.” Ange kicked a soda can out of her way. “It doesn’t matter anyway, because I’m not getting my Ph.D.”

I stopped in my tracks. “What?”

She let her head loll back until she was staring at the sky. “I had that meeting with Charles, my thesis advisor. A dinner meeting, of course. At the Pink House.”

“Typical,” I muttered. The Pink House was a silk tablecloth, sniff- the-wine-cork place.

“Yeah. It was his usual shit—the grope-hug greeting, reaching over to brush my hair out of my eyes, all the sexual innuendo crap. I asked if we could schedule my defense, and he said no, he thinks I need to run another fucking study. Then he pulls out his appointment calendar and says his wife will be out of town the first half of next week, and why don’t I come over to his place Tuesday night for dinner, to discuss the new study?”