Ethan Chatagnier - Warnings from the Future

Whit closes his eyes and thinks: evidence, conclusion, assumption. Logical flaw. Parallel reasoning. Method of argument. The quietest times his mind has had in months have been during the practice tests he’s taken: perfect silence, the timer set for thirty-five minutes per section, with one question in front of him to be dispatched, and then the next. He wonders if they can spend the rest of the shift like this: camped out. Hiding out. If Vargas relaxes into a certain mood Whit might even be able to crack open the books.

But of course that’s a dream. Just after 3:30 a.m., the radio sparks to life again.

Is it possible to go crazy in the span of five hours? Whit’s mind keeps heating up until he thinks it will catch flame, then going blank and cold. He presses the button to roll down the window. Nothing happens. Vargas has the child lock on it. Whit tells him to roll down the window. Vargas tells him to calm down. “Roll down the fucking window,” Whit shouts. Vargas rolls it down halfway.

After the last radio call, Vargas said he wanted to get a damn donut. His eyes have reddened, and the sacks under them are puffy. It’s wearing on him too, Whit thinks, but not enough to exculpate him. They’re headed back north on a main avenue, and it feels like coming out of the depths, like coming up from a dive, even as Whit’s mind tangles itself with red thread. He’s thought already about all the things he could do: call someone at the Tribune ; go through the upper brass; document, document, document. These options all seem to have the weight of impossibility on them. But they don’t, he knows, and that doesn’t absolve him. They are all logistically simple. The impossibility is inside of himself.

As they pass back through Zombieland every soul they see is haunted in Whit’s mind by an officer with his pistol to the back of his head, and none of them has the slightest idea. There are fewer out now, few for whom 4 a.m. isn’t either too early or too late. They see the same bum sleeping next to his Christmas tree on the sidewalk, his basset hound using his thigh as a pillow. A few early bread trucks are out, something that’s always seemed out of place here, a relic of a charming old New York or Chicago, rather than this stripped-down urban wasteland. The lumberyard is closed, but under the security lights it looks like a dinosaur graveyard, and Whit watches one tired security guard patrolling the aisles.

“What’s that kid’s name?” Vargas asks. He’s keeping pace with a kid strolling on the right-hand sidewalk. Whit recognizes him.

“Gino.”

Vargas rolls Whit’s window the rest of the way down. “Go home, Gino,” he calls across Whit.

Gino stops and smirks at them. “Who’s Gino?” he asks. “My name’s Melvin.”

“Whatever the fuck your name is,” Vargas says, “you should go home.”

“Thanks, Mom. I mean ma’am. I mean officer.”

Vargas chuckles. If Whit knows him at all, he’s about to kneel on the kid’s back and cite him for something stupid and hard to dodge: urinating on a public building; graffiti; indecent exposure. Vargas is a turtle, but he can be a snapping turtle. But his voice shifts into a sincere register Whit hasn’t even heard him use to talk about his own kids.

“Trust me, kid. You want to be at home tonight.”

The kid is suspicious of his tone, but he shrugs and says he will, before starting up a slower stroll in the same direction. Vargas gets rolling again, and Whit watches the kid shrink away in his side mirror. Who cares? Donuts and coffee are only a few blocks away. Fuck the cliché. It’s two hours to sunrise, and Whit has been up since 5 p.m. yesterday. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Vargas makes a pudding of his coffee again. Whit puts in a hint of milk and about five grains of sugar. Vargas: a jelly donut and a maple bar. Whit: an apple fritter. Whit’s almost disappointed he won’t be around long enough to see Vargas develop the insulin routine he’s going to need in a few years. Whit’s been looking at schools nearby, and in a fifty-mile radius he’s got two reach schools, four safety schools, and a few in between, but he’s starting to see the virtue in distant kingdoms: Northwestern in foggy Chicago, Tulane in dirty New Orleans, Notre Dame tucked away in the corn.

“The question I’m keeping myself sane with,” Vargas says, “is ‘does it matter?’ Does it affect the situation in Egypt or Hong Kong? Does it drop more people into poverty? Does it sadden the nation?”

“Does it need to?”

“If you zoom out a little, three isn’t that much.”

“Jesus.”

“From a cosmic perspective.”

“Jesus fucking christ.”

Whit sits in silence. But this logic is viral. He feels it wiggling like a worm in his brain. It’s not rare to see a hundred or more violent deaths a year. Three in a week barely registers as an outlier. It is true: no one will be upset but a few stray family members. A part of Whit’s mind is telescoping out like a rising shot in a film, showing him a broader scope of land outside of which this quake won’t even register. For just a moment he wants to pull out his gun and put two into Vargas’s chest as he sits on that cheap plastic bench licking jelly off his lower lip. Unwilled, he imagines himself doing it.

Is it possible to go crazy in the span of five hours?

Whit closes his eyes, and again, he sees himself doing it: stand, draw, bang, bang.

He rises and bursts through the door of the donut shop into the bracing air. It takes him a moment to decipher what he sees: a statue five feet away from the open window of the squad car, letting loose an upward arc of urine through the open passenger window. Of course it’s no statue, though he stands remarkably still, with his hips arched forward like those cupids, and the stream has an impressive constancy. It’s Gino. It’s Melvin. Who knows what it says on his social security card?

Never afterward does he remember covering the fifteen feet between the shop door and the parking lot. Never afterward does he remember the tackle. It all happens like those rare, glorious moments he used to have on the wrestling mat, when his body moved perfectly without the brain’s approval—and suddenly he’s there: Gino’s on his back, and Whit’s elbow presses into his cheek, pinning his head to the ground, and Whit’s gun is in his hand, the muzzle against Gino’s temple. He’ll always remember it as someone else, someone with a voice the twin of his own, saying: “You little shit. Don’t you know what tonight is?” What he will remember, always, is looking into Gino’s eyes, waiting for the fear, needing to see the fear, but seeing none. He will remember Gino staring up at him with empty, empty eyes, and the realization, like being born, that the kid knew exactly what tonight was. That he’d always known what tonight was. That he’d known his whole life.

Sunsets from Apogee were not particularly impressive. The coastal range was so far west and so gentle, and so much smog hung in the intervening distance, that you couldn’t see the mountains. The sun, rather than truly setting, seemed to just get blurry and dim and then fade away. Nor was the view after dark any more exciting. None of the other towers in town were as tall as the old Fresno Bank Building, atop which our restaurant, perched like a kitsch flying saucer, slowly rotated. Several of the other skyscrapers were abandoned, and only the hospital was fully lit in the nighttime. The streetlights uptown were too distant and regular to be inspiring. The poorer neighborhoods nearby reminded us of their plight through their dimness. So when Iris called me at ten thirty on my Saturday off to let me know the rotator gears were filling the restaurant with the smell of raw tires and she’d had to shut the motor off, I didn’t jump out of bed.