“What the hell, R, what happened with the meeting? I still haven’t heard from Rosy, why didn’t you come find me?”
I can see that she’s upset. I can see that it’s strange, me coming here to drink alone in the middle of a crisis. I can see that she is beautiful, her strawberry lips and blueberry eyes, the peach fuzz on her cheeks. I can see the television behind her. The disorienting montage of unrelated images. A few plays of football, a few airbrushed models, a juicy tenderloin, a cute baby, a syrupy quote from a pop philosopher with a stock-footage sunrise behind it.
“R!”
The basement door that insists it’s not there. The coat of white plaster and all the cracks creeping through it. When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar! When it’s aflame! When it’s asunder! A polite laugh track from a classic sitcom whose cast died decades ago; fat, stupid men with gorgeous wives.
Julie sits down next to me. Which trope are we? The gun-toting teenage orphan and her hapless amnesiac boyfriend? Where is the box we can climb into? It’s cold out here.
She touches my arm. “R. Are you okay? What happened?”
“I left him with them,” I hear myself saying. “They’re not what they say. They want to eat us and I left him with them.”
“They want to eat us? What are you talking about?”
“I know them,” I mumble. “I know them, I know them.”
No one in the Orchard is watching me anymore. At some point after the initial shock of my entrance, they all drifted back to their conversations, or to their blank study of the televisions flashing that nerve-shredding culture collage from every spare nook in the room. A quote over a shot of hand-shaking businessmen, read aloud for any illiterates in the room: Don’t ask what’s in it for you. Ask what you’re in it for.
A shirtless rock climber. Some fluffy clouds. A Corvette.
I reach for my glass and try to coax a final drop onto my tongue.
Julie snatches it out of my hand and slides it down the bar. “R, stop it! I need you to focus. Slow down and tell me what’s happening. Should I alert Security?”
“They know. Evan Kenerly was there. They made us all leave. They know we can’t say no. They know we’re scared.” My hands tremble on the bar. I pull out my last hundred and shove it at the bartender. “Another.”
Julie grabs the bill and stuffs it in her pocket.
“I need another!” My voice . . . I’ve never heard it so loud. It trembles in time with my hands. The TVs are screaming at me. A baseball highlight reel cuts to the middle of an R&B chorus, a wailing, showboating singer doing vocal runs. “They’re liars, they’re going to eat everything we built, they’re—”
Julie takes my face in her hands and kisses me. My lips don’t move, but she puts passion into it, kissing like she’s kissing her lover instead of the stiff, open-eyed face of a lunatic. The noise around me softens. The noise inside me softens. The room stops spinning and centers around the lovely face pressed hard against mine, our brains as close to touching as they can ever get.
She pulls back and locks her eyes on me, still holding my face.
“Focus on my eyes, okay?” she whispers. “Just look at my eyes and take a few breaths.”
I look at her eyes. They are huge and round and the bar’s lights reflect in their blue centers like distant stars. I take a breath.
“Breathing is good,” she says. “It’s soothing. I know it’s new to you, but try to remember. Breathe and think about breathing.”
My focus narrows until everything behind her is a blur. I think about breathing. My lungs are still sore from years of disuse, but they’re slowly warming up and resuming their duties, extracting pure, sweet O2 and sending it to my brain to power Living thoughts. Whatever dark fuel my brain once used was better suited to commands and urges than the lovely complexity of a human personality, human hopes and dreams.
I have these, I tell myself as I float in the muteness of space, holding on to Julie like a tether. I am allowed these. No one can take them.
“Good,” she says. “Keep breathing. We’re going to be okay. Whatever this is, we can handle it. We don’t have anything we can’t live without.”
“Can we leave?” I say during a slow exhalation. “Do we need this city?”
“Where would we go?”
“Far away. A cabin in the hills. Just us.”
“R,” she says, and the tone in that one syllable is enough to reveal the cowardice of my question. “We don’t need the city, but we need the people. And they need us.”
“Why?”
“We’re trying to build something, remember? You’re the one who told me we can’t run away.”
My face sags into her grip. “But I’m tired.”
“You’re not tired,” she says with a wry smile. “You’re just drunk.”
She releases my face and I drift. My eyes roam the bar, tracing the faces of the patrons as they stare up at the five TVs, their skin tinted gray by the glow of the screens.
“R?” Julie says, trying to pull me back to earth. “Can you tell me what happened at the meeting?”