Will McIntosh: Soft Apocalypse

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.