Mark Falkin - The Late Bloomer

I’m calm right now. Talking to you helps me. You’re like my shrink, dear reader, my analyst nodding at my problems. As I talk this out, I feel warm and soothed like I’m floating in the womb of the world. I think I’ve said that before, the womb of the world . Of course, I am actually floating southbound on this turgid river.

Water. Womb. World. Whalesounds. Waves. Warm.

Not a whimper but a whuh!

We made our way down Sixth and zoomed up onto MoPac. No merging. It was all ours and its emptiness made my stomach sour.

“You see her, Bass?” I asked.

“Who?” Bass had spaced out a bit, snapped back. “Huh? Oh, uh, no. No suicide brides on the fifth floor.”

I’ll never forget the way he looked at me after he said that. It came out as such an obvious lie that I laughed out loud at him. When I saw his face, I stifled it. Though my heart raced with his look, keeping things light, I’d said, “Well, thanks for wasting our time.”

The windows are down, for we are ever listening, and we’re flying up MoPac and he turns and looks at me again, his face pallid and drawn, his eyes saucer-huge. It was enough to shut me up.

Such weirdness compounded here at the end of the world: My eyes whipping open this morning and then I’m chasing a train. Bass U-turning and running upstairs into an old hotel to see a ghost. Kodie and I compelled to go to Rebecca’s house. Some random dying man’s request. Now Johnny’s gone. But for Rebecca, he’d probably still be with us.

What will be the repercussions of my compulsion to train-chase, Bass’s attempted ghost-spotting, Kodie’s need to stay with Rebecca, her siren’s dance to Legend: The Best of Bob Marley and the Wailers ?

We knew they were coming and we waited for them—the repercussions. That’s all we could do.

Belaboring how things looked in the days after, the bodies, the piles of stones here and there, the slow degradation of things—little things at first like the accumulation of trash and leaves in places where you’d normally not see it, at places of business, hospitals, and here, the Lowe’s—gets monotonous so I won’t bother with the apocalyptic tourism.

The corpses and the stink and the fear. It’s all there, know that. That ever-increasing deathsmell hangs as omnipresent fog. The sweetness, the tang. So thick you almost think you can see the amalgamated fumes.

So there we were at the Lowe’s up on Shoal Creek. Our talk and cries of shock and disgust at the sights echoed throughout the massive still building. Lowe’s opened at 6:00 a.m., so folks had been here at daybreak. Employees and all those early-risen construction workers and painters in their speckled chinos. The handful of bodies were mostly chokers-of-the-white, but there were a couple of suicides (nail gun, saw).

We acquired two generators, an ass-load of batteries and flashlights and lanterns, a couple of those big portable space heaters (November cold after Halloween), and then we got gasoline in about fifty red plastic two-gallon containers. It took all afternoon. But we were doing something. Being proactive, Martin would say.

Doors unlocked, we just walked into the Hummer dealer, found the drawer where they kept all the keys. No bodies and no piles.

Our shoes squeaked on the glossy cement showroom floor. We weren’t agog or excited. Acquiring some material thing in the new world held no meaning. It was big, shiny, so what. Maybe we should just go take over one of the palace homes overlooking the lake. We talked about it. Maybe we would, some place that’s all windows facing west and a wine cellar and beer fridge stocked to make Bacchus blush. Take over the W Hotel downtown, run amok, stay drunk. Maybe we would.

“There she is,” Bass said with put-on drawling pride in his voice. The Hummer Bass chose was black on black, tinted windows, a tricked-out, violent rap video’s ride. Bass hopped in. Over the harsh echo of the door slamming shut he put his wrist on the steering wheel, looked out the window and said, “Dig my ride, bitches?” I didn’t answer. Kodie shook her head slowly, smirking at Bass.

We figured out how to roll up the front garage door. Before driving off, Bass stopped, powered down his window again, and threw me the Bronco keys. I bobbled and dropped them. As I bent over, he said, “It’s yours, bud. But, I don’t get it. Why don’t you just take one of these? Get something else tomorrow? The next day. I mean, who cares?”

I shrugged.

“Maybe tomorrow.”

I drove home in Bass’s Bronco. He didn’t even hang and wait for me. Kodie, clearly not feeling well, jumped in with him.

Maybe Bass was right: Who cares?

I followed them for a bit, but turned off. Guess they didn’t notice.

Driving alone in someone else’s car, this muffler’s death rattle caroming off every building back into my ears, I felt what it may be like for me sooner than I wanted to believe: Roaming these streets alone, hiding from the children as if they’re killers, no girlfriend’s hand to clutch, no little brother to hug, no compatriot in Bass. Nobody.

I had this impulse to drive away from everything fast but I jerked the wheel into the neighborhood where the elementary school where I used to play youth soccer was on a whim, to see if there were any kids milling around. Hoping there would be. Seeing anything like that, any humanness in them, confusion, fear, would have been better than to believe what we saw this morning at Butler Park.

I circled the grounds. They contained no life, no death, not a single stone cairn in the parking lots.

I wasn’t a great soccer player when I was ten, but I was decent. I wasn’t a thumbsucker and I tried hard. My coach liked that. This was when my dad was still around. He only came to about half the games. They were in the mornings on Saturdays and he and Mom seemed to always be at each other, if silently. But when he did come out, he got into it and cheered for me, saying nice job when it was over. He didn’t say ‘champ’ or ‘big guy’ like the other cheese-ass dads.

But the cheese-ass dads came to every game and didn’t move to North Carolina forever with some bitch named Beth. In retrospect, I’d’ve taken a ‘way to go champ’ any day. Go ahead, cheese-ass dad, tousle my hair and tell me ‘we’ll get ’em next time, big guy.’

I walked out onto a green field marked with faded lines for games that should have been played today and stood out among them. I paced a little and fought off despair. From my pocket I pulled out Mr. Fleming’s yellow note and reread it.

I KNOW YOU WILL SURVIVE…. I KNOW THAT YOU’LL NOT BE STAYING HERE FOR LONG…. THE DARK SIDE OF THE HELIX… THE WORLD WILL STILL NEED ITS STORYTELLERS…. IT’S YOUR WORLD NOW…. STUMBLED ONTO SOMETHING WE SHOULDN’T HAVE?…. IT NEEDS YOU TO NEED IT….

When I drove over there I had considered just driving away, never to return. Overwhelmed with that feeling, by those dark smiling teeth. But the turn into this neighborhood, then these fields, changed that. I’m glad I had his letter on me. The gist of his note wasn’t just ‘please bury us’ but ‘keep going, you’re the one who can’t give up’.

Late afternoon when I pulled up to the Flemings’ house. I opened the Bronco’s tailgate and then went steaming in. The smell intensified on the way back to the bedroom, almost overwhelming now just hours later. The imminent rot of the world tormented me, how all was going to become a decomposing slush.

He leaned against the wall under the window, his jaw unhinged and frozen. I grabbed his feet and through his socks I felt cold hard flesh and I bellowed in gall.

The eyes show you things. The nose pronounces it with depth. But when you touch, you come to know certainty.