One connection after the other. This is how we learn.
I pull into the stadium parking lot and find a spot between two Hummers, sliding in with only a few scrapes. As we head toward the gate, I glance back at our flamboyant red roadster and my brows knit with sympathy. It looks distinctly uncomfortable huddled between those two olive drab hulks. But despite Julie’s tendency to humanize the inanimate, despite assigning it a name and a personality—the strong, silent type—Mercey is just a car, and its “discomfort” is just a projection of mine. Like that shiny red classic surrounded by armored trucks, I have struggled to find my place in this sensible society. The incongruity runs through every layer of who and what I am, but it starts on the outermost surface: my clothes.
Fashion has been a problem for me.
At first, Julie tried to persuade me to keep dressing sharp. My original graveclothes clearly had to go—no amount of laundering could remove their grisly history—but she begged me to keep the red tie, which was still in surprisingly good condition.
“It’s a statement,” she said. “It says there’s more to you than work and war.”
“I’m not ready to make a statement,” I said, shrinking under the incredulous stares of the soldiers, and eventually she relented. She took me shopping. We sifted through the rubble of a bomb-blasted Target and I emerged from a dressing room in brown canvas pants, a gray Henley, and the same black boots I died in—always an odd pairing with my old business wear but perfect for this grim ensemble.
“Fine,” Julie sighed. “You look fine.”
Despite the resignation it indicates, my neutral appearance is a comfort as we approach the stadium gate. Dressing vibrantly takes a courage I don’t yet have. After all those years prowling the outskirts of humanity, all I want now is to blend in.
“Hi, Ted,” Julie says, nodding to the immigration officer.
“Hi, Ted,” I say, trying to make my tone deliver all the signals required for my presence here. Remorse. Harmlessness. Tentative camaraderie.
Ted says nothing, which is probably the best I can hope for. He opens the gate, and we enter the stadium.
? ? ?
Dog shit on lumpy asphalt. Makeshift pens of bony goats and cattle. The filthy faces of children peering from overgrown shanties that wobble like houses of cards, held barely upright by a web of cables anchored to the stadium walls. Julie and I broke no evil spell when we kissed. No purifying wave of magic washed the stadium white and transformed its gargoyles into angels. One might even say we had the opposite effect, because the streets are now crawling with corpses. The “Nearly Living” as I’ve heard some optimists calling them. Not the classically murderous All Dead, not the lost and searching Mostly Dead like our friend B, but not yet fully alive like I allegedly am. Our purgatory is an endless wall of gray paint swatches, and it takes a sharp eye to spot the difference between “Stone” and “Slate,” “Fog” and “Smoke.”
The Nearlies roam the stadium freely now, having proven themselves through a probationary month of close observation, but of course that doesn’t mean they blend in. They float through the population in bubbles of fearful avoidance. People read the cues—stiff gait, bad teeth, pale skin tinted purple by half-oxygenated blood—and the flow of foot traffic opens wide around them.
They nod to us as we pass. Julie nods back with an earnest smile, but the look in their eyes makes me shrink inward. Respect. Even reverence. Somehow, they’ve gotten it into their rotten heads that Julie and I are special. That we ended the plague and are here to usher in a new age. They can’t seem to understand that we did nothing they didn’t do, we just did it first. And we have no idea what to do next.
? ? ?
Despite my distaste for stadium life, I have to admit the place feels a little less grim under its new management. Rosso has scaled Security back to pre-Grigio levels, reassigning some personnel to largely forgotten community services like education. Former teachers are dusting off their books and teaching arcane knowledge like history, science, and basic literacy. With fewer infection patrols and fewer guns aimed at the old and sick, the city feels a little less like a quarantine camp. Some areas have an atmosphere that could almost be called idyllic. I smile at a young boy playing with a puppy in the green grass of his front lawn, trying to ignore the scars on his face and the pistol in his pocket and the fact that the grass is Astroturf.
Anytown, USA.
“Hey Julie,” the boy says when he notices us.
“Hey Wally, how’s that beast of yours?”
He ignores the question and regards me nervously. “Is he . . . still alive?”
Julie’s smile cools. “Yes, Wally, he’s still alive.”
“My mom said . . .”
“Your mom said what?”
The boy pulls his eyes away from me and resumes playing with his dog. “Nothing.”
“Tell your mom R is a warm and wonderful human being and he’s not going to stop being one. And neither are the others.”