Will McIntosh - Soft Apocalypse

There was a long pause. I glanced back, wondering if he’d heard me.

“They couldn’t,” he said.

“Bullshit,” I shot back.

“They couldn’t. There has to be some die-back in the population—the resources left on the planet can’t support anything close to the current population.”

“So, you purposely made it inedible?” I stumbled, clutched at a clump of bamboo to keep from falling and fell anyway, the bamboo bending to slow my descent to comic slow-motion. I’d tripped over a curb. Sometimes you didn’t know where the road was until you were on it.

“Welcome to Statesboro,” Sebastian said. “And to answer your question, yes, they did it on purpose. As I’ve been saying all along, one to two billion people are going to die by the time this is over. The idea is to keep it from becoming four or five billion.”

I told Sebastian that the whole thing sounded like demagoguery to me before falling into angry silence.

We passed a guy in a hammock who was either sleeping or dead. He didn’t open his eyes to look at who was passing, so he might have been dead, but he wasn’t sallow or decomposing, so he might have been sleeping.

Ange picked out an old Southern mansion on Main Street for us to squat in for the night. She loved old houses. It had a wide green porch and a massive magnolia tree in the front yard, and it sat in the shadow of the town’s massive water tower, a fat kettle wearing a conical hat resting on five legs.

The front door opened into an ornate living room—gold stuffed chairs with flower patterns, a huge mirror with a rococo gold frame. A table was covered in framed family photos, some of them recent, some ancient. Sometimes it was easy to forget that people had lived entire lives in these houses.

The biggest photo was also the oldest, maybe from the late 1800s. A family of seven were posed outside this exact house. Dad was seated in the center, scowling, hands on knees, in his Sunday best. Two older women, one probably his wife, the other maybe a sister, were seated on either side of him. One woman was holding a book, the other a sorry little bouquet of wildflowers. A row of teenaged children stood behind them. No one was smiling; the two teenaged girls had stark, haunted eyes; the others just looked exhausted.

Most of the color pictures were happy ones: a father with a round belly holding a toddler at the beach; a woman dressed in black regalia accepting a degree; a new bride clutching a colorful bouquet of roses. Everyone looked bright-eyed and ridiculously healthy.

There were only a few recent photos. The people in them looked a lot like the people in the oldest photo, only in color.

“I wish we had a chance to talk. There are so many things I want to say to you.” Sophia said softly. I turned away from the photos to face her. She glanced toward the hallway.

“Maybe we’ll get the chance,” I said, knowing I should discourage any suggestion that something remained between us, but nonetheless dying to know what Sophia might want to say to me.

Cortez put his duffel on the coffee table, then disappeared into the kitchen. He came out clutching eight stemmed glasses and set them around the table.

“Hey guys?” he called. “Everyone?” People filed into the room, and Cortez encouraged everyone to take a seat. He pulled a nearly full bottle of gin from his pack.

“You are a god,” I said as he started pouring. “Where’s Deirdre?”

I called, but got no answer. Two or three others shouted her name, including Sebastian, who sang her name more than called it.

“What you want?” she said. She was standing at the top of the stairs wearing a silk nightgown, munching on a chocolate bar, a bottle of pills in her other hand.

“That’s my nightgown!” Jeannie said.

“Hey, that’s our chocolate!” Jean Paul said.

Deirdre took a big bite of the chocolate. “No, we’re a tribe, so it’s all our stuff. Look at all this great stuff I found stashed in the bottom of people’s packs! Ange even had some Valium to share.”

“You went through our stuff?” Ange said. “You piece of shit.”

“Oh, I’m the piece of shit? I can’t use my own energy because it’s for the tribe to share, but you can have your own little personal stashes of chocolate and drugs hidden in your packs? Fuck you all.” She disappeared down the hall.

“We were going to share that chocolate,” Jean Paul said. “We were waiting for the right time, like Cortez with his gin.”

“You don’t need to explain yourself, we trust you,” Cortez said. “Let’s not let Deirdre poison us. Let’s drink, and have a good time.”

I lifted my glass. “To Cortez, who brought us booze, and dog.”

“To Cortez!” everyone said.

“Dog?” Ange said. “Fuck, were we eating dog?” She took a long swallow from her glass.

We had a good evening. We played a game of Truth or Dare by candlelight, and found out that Cortez had had the most lovers in his life (about forty, he estimated) and Colin had had the least (four—that’s what happens when you married at twenty-six and were a dweeb in high school). We learned that Jeannie thought her best feature was her boobs, and Sebastian thought he had perfect toes.

It felt bad to be laughing and having fun while Deirdre sat alone, listening to us, but three different people (Sebastian, then Cortez, then I) made pilgrimages to her door and implored her to join us. Her answer was the same each time: Fuck you.

Jean Paul didn’t play either. He hadn’t said a word to me since they joined us. He hadn’t even looked at me. I think he’d enjoyed confronting me at that nightclub years ago because he’d been in his element, among his friends. Here, he was the outsider.

When the Truth or Dare game petered out, Jeannie got everyone singing. I felt like a little moonlight and solitude, so I slipped out the back door.

The swimming pool was empty, and filled with bamboo, but there was a concrete patio that must have been poured extra-thick, because the bamboo hadn’t penetrated. I stared up at the sky. I loved the night sky, because the moon didn’t have chipping paint or rust and wasn’t sprouting weeds, and the stars weren’t flickering out due to a lack of power. On the contrary—the stars had been growing progressively brighter as the lights on terra firma went out, and now the night sky was breathtaking. I could see the Milky Way, a spectacular swirl of silver tinged with blue and red.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Sophia said behind me.

I took a sip of gin. “It’s the one thing that gets better as everything else gets worse.”

“For sure,” she said. She moved up to stand beside me. The crickets chirped in the bamboo, their cadence cold, almost mechanical.

“It’s been a long time since I last saw you,” I said. “You haven’t aged at all, it’s remarkable.”

“Thanks. You haven’t either.” I knew that was a kind lie. I’d lost one of my bottom teeth since I last saw Sophia, just for starters. “And actually, I’ve seen you a couple of times since then.”

I looked at her, questioning.

“When you first moved back to Savannah, I found out where you lived from Ruplu’s father,” Sophia said. “Once in a while I would drive past your apartment and watch for you. I saw you a few times, walking to work or going out with your friends.”

“Why didn’t you stop and say hello?” I asked.

“Because you asked me to stay out of your life, and I owed you that much.” There were four white plastic lawn chairs around a plastic table on the patio. Sophia pulled one out and sat. “I never got a chance to say how sorry I was for what happened the night I bumped into you at that bar. I wanted to go after you when they threw you out. I felt terrible.”