“Slayer? What are they, rock?”
He shrugged. She didn’t even know Slayer? It came to him that she lived in a different world, but then everybody lived in a different world, boxed off, dead to life, the seas turned to acid and the Chinese taking over because they were the new hostiles and if you had ten million Colters you couldn’t beat them back. “Pantera,” he said. “You got any Pantera?”
She let out a laugh and he didn’t like that laugh, or not particularly, and she held out her hands, palms-up, as if he’d stumped her. “Why don’t I just put something on and you relax—you’ve had a hard day shopping and dog-liberating, right?” And here came the giggle again. “Chill,” she said, “just chill. I won’t be a minute.”
The dog was on the rug in front of the couch, inches from his boots. Dreadlocks. Dreadlock dog. That was cool. He thought of Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff, thought of his camp in the woods that nobody knew about, thought of ganja and opium and the poppy plants he was growing from seed in two hundred and twenty-seven black plastic pots so the gophers couldn’t get at them. He smelled onions. Garlic. Heard the sizzle of the pan and realized there was music playing, old-timey music, corny as corny can be, and felt his boner straining at his zipper the way it did when he was looking at porn when his grandma was out in the garden or at the supermarket or when she was dead, dead the way she was now, dead six months and he in that house still and still talking to her, at least when the wheel was spinning. When it wasn’t, when he was clear, he was out in the woods, tending his plants and building his bunker because it was all coming down, all the shit of the world and the pollution and the death of everything and he was going to be prepared for it, a mountain man himself and no two ways about it.
They ate right there in the living room with its white walls that were so bright they were like gunshots bursting in his ears till she turned the overhead light off and the yellow-glass lamp in the corner took over. She poured more wine and settled in beside him on the couch, her legs jackknifed under her and the soles of her bare feet showing dirt on the balls of her big toes and on her heels, the skin yellowed there and the other toes clenched like miniature fists clutching at the rim of a cliff that wasn’t a cliff but only a flat broad short-of-white couch pillow that connected with the couch pillow he was sitting on so that every time she bent forward to the coffee table which was really just a wooden chest with brass handles on either end he could feel the buoyancy of her as if they were both out in the ocean and treading water. And those black slashing things circling around them, those fins cutting the surface? They weren’t sharks, they were dolphins, grinning dolphins, happy dolphins, tail-walking dolphins showing off their tricks to such a degree that he felt nothing but gratitude for them and if she was touching him now, touching his jeans, his thighs, his crotch, that was all according to plan. He stopped treading water and her face was right there, closing in on his, and she kissed him, her lips soft as the inside of things and tasting of garlic and butter and what was that herb, that herb his mother put on everything till it tasted like soap? Cilantro. He hated cilantro. But not now, not on her lips, not while she was unzipping him and loosening his belt and putting her tongue in his mouth.
In the morning she wanted him to stay, fussing around in the kitchen with a coffeemaker and a hot griddle and talking at such a clip she barely drew breath, telling him about the seminars she’d taken in Redemption Theory and how they’d really opened her eyes. “Do you know that everybody born in this country has a straw man behind them worth six hundred and thirty thousand dollars, which is what allows the government, or what passes for government, to take out loans on the backs of us all?” she asked, or no, demanded of him as if he were arguing with her when he wasn’t, when he was clear and just sitting there at the kitchen table with a mug in one hand and a fork in the other. “Unless you call their bluff. Unless you stand up to them and write checks against your straw man and start to draw that money down and keep them off your back permanently—”