Laurence felt as if he’d quit both caffeine and cigarettes. He woke up a few times a night, sweating and even crying. In his fucking sleep. He didn’t have that thing where he forgot for a second how fucked everything was, and then remembered, and then felt his heart break all over again—that would be too easy. Instead, he remembered always. He would feel stricken, doubled over, with grief and misery—and then he would remember how bad it really was and feel worse, as his brain took on a bit more of the weight.
Except sometimes, he read an article or saw a TV report about the latest sign that the world was screwed—a wall of dead babies, piled like stones at the outer boundary of some farmer’s pasture. And he would think, by reflex, Oh, thank goodness we’re building an escape route. And then it would flood back to him, the despair. The one actual good thing he’d done in his life, and it was scrap and ashes. It was more than enough to drive him mad.
Laurence didn’t think of Patricia, except to imagine her listening to the voicemail he’d left her. And laughing at how stupid he was. Maybe playing it for the whole wizard gang, when they were drunk on mystical cocktails together.
The only other time Laurence let himself think of Patricia was when he realized he couldn’t go to Seadonia, or anywhere else. People would ask too many questions about the attack, and it would get weird if Laurence kept refusing to say anything. So not only did Laurence have no girlfriend, he also had no friends, because nobody would ever understand about his vow of silence. Only Laurence had recognized Patricia in Denver, or else he’d be in a lot more trouble.
Other than those two things, Laurence didn’t think about Patricia at all.
Laurence got a big dark peacoat and wandered around the city with his shoulders up and his head down. He made believe he was a time traveler from the postapocalyptic future, looking in on the last days of civilization. Or maybe this was the postapocalyptic world, and he was visiting from a better past. He went days without speaking to another person. He checked in with his mom and dad, who were safely in Montana and Arizona, respectively, but blew off their questions. He sat up all night trying to write a new OS for the Caddy, one that would be fully open-source and user-configurable. He went to the hAckOllEctIvE, but left if anybody spoke to him. He trimmed his beard but did a half-assed job of it, so he had a lopsided Vandyke shaped like a profile of a duck. One time he sat in a tea shop and listened to one of those new groups sing madrigals, but then he started to cry, and really, fuck that, so he bailed.
Laurence got a job working for a bank that wanted to install a series of safeguards on its website preventing people from transferring too much of their money at once—which they were perfectly entitled to do, but the bank wanted to make it more complicated and also throw up as many distractions as possible during the process, like a series of notices tailored to the customers offering them things like painless refi or free overdraft protection. Anything to sidetrack the customers and keep the capital from flying away.
Maybe that was why the world was circling the drain. Maybe people’s short attention spans finally weren’t short enough.
At the end of a few weeks’ solitude, Laurence ran into Serafina, his ex-girlfriend, and got roped into going to dinner with her. At least she wouldn’t ask what happened in Denver. They went to a cavernous tapas place that was still hanging in there at 16th and Valencia, though its prices had gone way up.
Laurence drank too much sangria and looked into Serafina’s candle-lit face, her cheekbones thrown into relief, and he found himself saying, “You know, you’ll always be the one who got away.”
“You are so full of crap.” Serafina laughed, gnawing a rabbit’s leg. “The whole time we were together, you were looking for an excuse to dump me.”
“No! No, I wasn’t.”
“You would make stuff up, like that thing where I was putting you on ‘probation.’ Like you were trying to talk me into dumping you. You just didn’t want it to be your fault.”
This struck Laurence as massively revisionist history. But he couldn’t deny it fit all the facts. A mariachi group in matching little vests came around to try and serenade them. Including little children in teeny vests way past their bedtime. Laurence shooed them away, then felt guilty and ran after them and gave them a hundred bucks as they were leaving the restaurant. Shit. Little kids in teeny vests, out this late.
“I still don’t know what gave you the stones to dump me at last,” Serafina said when he got back. “Something happened, but I never knew what.”
Laurence thought of his grandmother’s ring and how Patricia had stolen it from him, and he choked up, right there at the dinner table. “I don’t,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
He went off to the men’s room and splashed water on his face. His duck beard looked worse than slovenly—it looked like he was failing to start a trend. It would be gone as soon as he got home.