Will McIntosh - Soft Apocalypse

“Jasper, right?” She lowered the machete.

The rest of the tribe had rushed over when I cried out, and were crowded around the doorway and the big glassless window. I introduced everyone. Of course she’d already met Colin, Jeannie, and Cortez, but that was briefly, eight years ago.

She hadn’t changed much. She still had pretty green eyes and (despite the grime) refined, aristocratic features—high cheekbones, a perfectly shaped nose, a long, elegant neck. She could have been a young Harvard lit professor who specialized in Milton. She had nice legs—lean, shapely runner’s legs. Greyhound legs.

“That’s a pretty bad cut,” Colin said.

“I did it while hacking through the bamboo.” She looked chagrined. “I’m actually not as spastic as that suggests.”

“I’m sure the other ten thousand hacks were works of art. We all know what it’s like to swing that thing for hours.” We didn’t actually use a machete—we’d decided early on it was too energy-inefficient—but it seemed like the right thing to say. I took another look at the leg. “I hate to say this, but I think it needs to be stitched.”

Phoebe went a little white. “Really?”

“Definitely,” Cortez said. “It’s not going to heal right like that. Stuff will get in it. It’ll get infected.” He clapped my shoulder. “Colin and me will boil some water to clean the cut. I’ve got a needle and thread you can use to close it up.”

“Me?” I protested.

Cortez nodded. “You’ve performed major surgery. Compared to that, this will be a piece of cake.”

Phoebe looked confused. “You performed surgery?”

“I removed someone’s appendix once,” I said, feeling a blush of pride, but trying not to let it show.

I told Phoebe the story while the water boiled, then I cleaned out the cut with a bath towel. Colin had found a hundred of them in a linen closet in the manager’s office.

I picked up the needle, which Jeannie had dipped in the boiling water, thread and all. I may have done it once before, but I hadn’t enjoyed it, and I was still horrified at the idea of sewing up somebody’s skin. Someone had to do it, though. “I’m guessing this is going to hurt.”

Phoebe just nodded.

I poked the needle through clean, white skin. Phoebe hissed and squeezed her eyes shut. I had to resist the urge to close my eyes as well. I ran the needle under the skin on the other side of the gash, brought the needle out through the skin and pulled the thread through.

The rest of the tribe left to give Phoebe some privacy. I got her talking to take her mind off what I was doing. It got a little easier after the first stitch.

Phoebe had been living for the past couple of years in a little co-op carved out in Twin City, but had a falling out with her boyfriend and left. These details were conveyed in small pieces, punctuated with winces and a few tears. I filled her in on the low points of my life, then cast about for distractions.

“What are all those things on the night stand?” I asked. Beside the postcard, there were photos, little stuffed animals, figurines, a book, all carefully arranged.

“It’s my stuff,” she said, smiling sheepishly. “It calms me. Everywhere I stay, I arrange these things in the same way to make it feel more like a home.”

“What about if you’re sleeping outside?”

She gave an embarrassed shrug. “I still do it.”

I pictured her sleeping on a bed of leaves, her curios arranged on a cleared rectangle of ground beside her, a talisman against the icy blasts of loss and uncertainty.

“Familiar things help me cope with the anxiety. Even before things went bad I was anxious.” She squeezed her eyes shut to the pain. “Ouch. Sometimes it’s like I’m drowning—like there’s no air to breathe.” She blew a puff of air that brushed back a lock of her insanely curly hair. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to unload on you. I’ve been alone for a long time and I think it’s making me weird.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” I said. “Just keep talking. I’m almost done.”

I glanced at her curio table. There was a photo of a girl and an elderly woman. The girl was in a numbered jersey, and they were at a sporting event of some sort. “Is that you?”

Phoebe looked over my shoulder. “Mm hm. With my nana, at a track meet.”

“There,” I said, leaning back and letting my aching shoulders relax. The needle dangled against her leg on the end of an inch of thread. I cut it with a pocket knife Cortez had left beside me, and taped some gauze over the wound. We didn’t have any bandages.

“Thanks, Doctor,” she said. “I don’t have my checkbook with me, but you can bill me to this address.”

“Have you been here long?” I asked.

“A couple of days.”

I picked up a little stuffed pig from the night stand.

“Sir Francis Bacon,” Phoebe said.

I tapped the postcard with my fingernail. “I’m touched that you kept my gift in your memento collection.”

Phoebe laughed. “Yes, it’s almost like having it on display in a museum.”

Memories of those days washed over me—the music playing in the camp, the first Polio-X victims, the cops chasing us out of town. I’d been so conflicted about that date, because of my “relationship” with Sophia. Ironic that the woman I’d been so hung up on back then was right outside. I didn’t feel like I was old enough to be nostalgic for an earlier time, and those certainly weren’t good times, but I still felt an indescribable longing.

“I can’t believe we didn’t even recognize each other,” Phoebe said.

“It was, what? Ten or eleven years ago?” I said.

“It feels like such a long, long time,” she said. “Can I really be only thirty-five years old?”

“My mom once told me that I’d be shocked by how fast life flew by,” I said. “I don’t think that happens when you’re scared most of the time.”

Phoebe stood. “Shall we join the others?” We went outside.

We all lounged in the parking lot talking for a long time. Phoebe told us about Stephan, her husband of sorts who’d ditched her in the middle of nowhere, trading her in for a relationship that bordered on pedophilia. We told her about Jeannie’s delivery, and Ange, though not everything about Ange.

Finally, Jeannie stood, and the rest of us followed suit and went off to sleep. I went to my dark, empty room and sat on scraps of carpet, among the components of a smashed TV. Right before bed was the worst time. The first few months after Ange’s death had been filled with flashbacks of the killing—images I kept from everyone else. The flashbacks had grown less frequent, but I still missed her terribly. I missed talking to her, having her there. I had never really loved her, nor she me, but that didn’t diminish the incredibly strong friendship we’d had.

Colin knocked on the door frame. “So, what do you think?”

“I think we should invite her to join us, if it’s okay with the others. She has nobody, and she’s a good person.”

He nodded. “I’ll ask them.” I’m sure he could hear the depression in my voice. “Nothing else, though?”

He didn’t need to lay it out for me. I knew what he was getting at. “You know, you never see love stories set in concentration camps, and I think there’s a reason for that.”

He nodded. “You might feel different in a few months. You never know.”

I shrugged. “I doubt it.”

Colin left me alone. I stared at the wall. Laughter drifted in from a few stragglers leaving the parking lot. There was a thrumming in my eardrums, a pressure. I wanted to sleep, but I wasn’t tired.

The morning was hot and smoky, the aphids buzzing in the wild grass out past the parking lot.