Will McIntosh - Soft Apocalypse

Phoebe introduced me to her mom. “Is this your boyfriend?” she asked. She had one of those voices, sort of shrill and whiney, and she talked fast. Although most Doctor Happy people talked fast.

“I sure am,” I said as I took Phoebe’s mom’s hand.

As Phoebe introduced her mom around, I watched people eat. Everyone seemed friendly as hell, joking with each other, laughing. Even when nothing funny was being said people just burst into spontaneous laughter, occasionally propelling food from their mouths with the force of it.

Phoebe’s mom was astonished when she learned that we were not necessarily here to accept the Doctor Happy needle and be saved (forever, amen), but judging from Phoebe’s reaction I got the impression that this was nothing compared to how her old, non-Doctor Happified mother dealt with disagreements. Phoebe promised to find her mom again as soon as she could, and we moved on.

As we walked it occurred to me that Athens was pretty much scrubbed of any reminders of the outside world. There were no movie posters outside the theater, no ads, billboards, no stuffed Disney characters in the gift shop we passed. They seemed serious about making a new start. “So what is the plan for this place?” I asked. “How is it going to be so different from the past?”

“Well, we’re decentralizing power, for a start,” Sebastian said. “No crooked politicians for us. We’re borrowing a lot from other places that tried to make a clean start, looking at what worked and didn’t. External things, like shorter work days and a de-emphasis on material goods, is crucial, but we’re also working on the internals as well.”

“Such as?” I asked. I was truly interested in what they were putting together. In a sense, we could be living in year zero, seeing the beginning of something new. Assuming the Jumpy-Jumps didn’t plow the whole thing under.

Sebastian pulled a spiral notebook out of his pocket and held it up. “This is my liar’s notebook. Every time I tell a lie, I write it down. Everyone has one.”

“You’re all nuts,” Cortez said.

“What’s nuts is what’s going on out there,” Sebastian said, pointing over the city wall.

He led us through the old part of the university campus, where tall oak trees shaded a long stretch of lawn. People were lounging around like they were killing time between classes. It seemed so anachronistic, a scene from the time before everything went wrong.

“Everyone gets one day off a week,” Sebastian said. “Once everything is established we’ll start bumping that up, until it’s three or four.”

Colin and Jeannie were surveying the scene with the look of house hunters about to pull out a tape measure to see if their favorite sofa would fit.

As the last light bled out of the sky, Phoebe and I were tired, but couldn’t sleep.

“What happens now?” Phoebe asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Me neither.”

Murmurs drifted from the next tent, where Colin and Jeannie were also not sleeping. I wondered what they were saying. Joel let out a pathetic squeal of hunger. It was a heartbreaking sound, an intolerable sound. I would not ask them to wait another day; I felt guilty that I had asked for this one.

It was hard to think with my stomach so empty. What I really wanted to do right now was to clutch Phoebe to me and tell her that I loved her. I wanted to vanish the last bit of distance between us so we could face this together. But we hadn’t known each other long enough for that.

“There are things I wish we could talk about,” I said, hesitantly, “but they’re the sort of things you talk about when you’ve been together much longer than we have.”

Phoebe was quiet for a long moment. “Maybe we should talk about them anyway, given the circumstances?”

“Okay.” For a moment, my old, familiar insecurities reared up. Would I blow it by professing my undying love? Was Phoebe feeling the same for me, or was I just any port in a storm? Off in the distance a whimpering dog serenaded us; my psyche given voice.

The hell with it. What did I have to lose?

“I’m afraid Doctor Happy will change how I feel about you. If you love everyone, how do you parse your feelings for one person out of that giant vat of love?”

Phoebe laughed hysterically. For an instant I thought she was laughing at my profession of love. “Giant vat of love?”

“Yeah. Haven’t the Doctor Happy people told you about the giant vat of love?”

“No,” she said, wiping her eyes. “But I know what you’re saying, and I’ve thought about it too.”

“You have?”

“Mm hm. I’m afraid I won’t feel the same way about you if Doctor Happy changes us too dramatically.”

One of our stomachs growled. I was pretty sure it was mine.

“On the other hand,” Phoebe went on, “if we didn’t lose each other in the giant vat of love, Athens is a place where we could stop worrying about starving or being shot. It might give us the space to be together in a real, normal way. Out here it takes all of our energy just staying alive.”

“So, you do want to be together?”

“Yeah. I do.”

A flush of warmth swept over me. I wrapped my arms around Phoebe and kissed her.

“We’re not so broken,” she whispered. “The people we thought we were are just waiting for a chance to come back out.”

She was right. The evidence was right there—the two of us, falling in love, still able to fall in love after all we’d been through.

I was up most of the night, thinking, trying to sort through a tangle of conflicting emotions.

Early the next morning, music drifted across to us from Athens—something classical, with a lot of string instruments. It sounded live. Somehow it didn’t surprise me that Athens had accomplished musicians. They had everything else.

Phoebe and I crawled out of our tent with our possessions in plastic bags. My stomach did a flip, like I had just hit the big drop on a roller coaster. This was it, I realized.

Cortez was squatting beside his tent, the assault rifle across his thighs. I pulled the pistol out of my waistband and looked at it, thought about the two men I’d shot with it, thought about Ange screaming in pain while those boys held her down, about Tara Cohn telling Cortez that he sucked. What was so nuts about wanting all of that to stop? Maybe Sebastian was right, maybe they were the sane ones.

“You want this?” I said, holding out the pistol. The words seemed to come from a distance, somewhere over my head.

Cortez ignored the gun. “You’re going in?”

I nodded.

Colin and Jeannie crawled out of their tent. When he saw our stuff packed, I thought he might hug me. “Good. Great. The tribe will stay together.” He turned to Cortez. “How about you, Cortez? Come with us.”

Beyond the gates a trumpet rose out of the softer strings. It was a beautiful, golden sound. It had been so long since I’d heard live music that clear.

“Come on, take the leap.” I tried to smile, but the muscles in my face were stiff with fear. The edges of my mouth began to twitch and I gave it up.

Cortez folded his arms, shook his head. “I probably would take a leap. Off a water tower. It’s not for me. You all go ahead.”

“But what will you do?” Jeannie asked.

The trumpet bleated triumphant, soaring toward a crescendo. Cortez paused, waited for it to recede. The song was almost over. Funny how you can tell a song was ending, even if you’ve never heard it before.

“I’ll head home,” Cortez said. “Choose the sanest gangsters and join them. In these times there’s always work for warriors.” It made sense. Cortez was the only one of us who had the right resume now that civilization had collapsed.

One by one, we said goodbye to Cortez. When it was my turn, I hugged him fiercely and said, “You’ve been like a big brother to me, watching out for me, showing me how to get by. We’d all be dead if it wasn’t for you.”