PostApoc (11 page)

Ang: Translation:
It will chew you up and shit you out.

Shelley: But you are not alone.

Anadin: We are not alone.

Shelley: Choices are facing extinction. Soon there will only be basic instinct and muscle memory to carry you when The End nears the final phase of its cycle. And it will come. Possible psychological effects might include guilt, anxiety, depression, suicidal tendencies. Guaranteed psychological effects include alcohol and drug abuse. Possible physical effects include life, or death.

Ang: It's my body and I'll die if I want to.

- 18 -
POST-SACRED

M
y head is a bubble of hypoglycemia, but at the beach that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that I don't have parents anymore, either, because here I can at least have sisters.

I am curled in Anadin's lap, her hand in my hair, twisting strands around her finger. My hair has never been this long before. Never long enough to play with. I've spent what felt like a night here and now it's warm outside but Anadin and Shelley are both still in furs. I can smell the skins, primordial in their early rot.

Shelley is silent. “Observing,” Anadin says.

“Observing what?” I ask.

“We are post-sacred now,” Anadin says. And then: “What a time to be living in.”

My chest vibrates with a bronchial cough. Anadin smoothes my forehead. I pretend the air is full of sea salt, that breathing alone is enough to cleanse me, cure me.

There is a vile trail where the tide shriveled up, as if the shoreline was shaken with the dense hack of its own infected lungs. The sky's peeling back a shade, an animal lightening its coat of water. I ask Anadin, “Do you sleep?” I don't know why I ask this. It's not until after it's out of me that I realize it's even on my mind.

“Sometimes,” she says. “We get tired from dancing to our own images in a mirror.”

A mild chill runs through my left arm but the rest of my body still sweats. Anadin twirls another chunk of hair and I drift somewhere close to half-sleep, something deep enough to dream. In my dream Shelley and Anadin are gone. I'm looking down the beach to see if I can spot them. The sand's smooth, no sign of footprints, as if a phantom tide has come and cleared everything away. I want to make a wish. I twirl a grain of sand between my thumb and finger and focus on what I want. I worry that because I can't ask for just one thing my wish won't come true.

I wake up. My head's in Shelley's lap now. Anadin's kneeling by my ankles. Her hands are at my waist, pulling my skirt up, my panties off.

She smiles at me and I smile back as the cotton slides down my thighs, over my knees. I kick my underwear away when they get around my feet.

Anadin's fingers disappear into the cavern between my thighs.
There's nothing left in there. The End sucked it all up. Anadin's fist disappears inside me and I don't even feel it, but I want to.

She pulls out and opens up her hand. In her palm, a silver charm in the shape of a heart. “For luck,” she says. “Remember?”

I fall asleep again and a storm rolls in. Drenches the beach, the streets. Shelley and Anadin are gone. So are my panties. It's a warm rain. I stay where I am and let the water run over me.

I get back to the house after the rains. I walk straight to the back, grab a bike, and go before anyone sees me. I break my promise with Aimee and go see Mike. As I ride away, a dog's bark is muffled inside the walls of the old Victorian.

When I lie down my skirt hikes up. The room's probably too dark for Mike to see, but I wonder what he can feel through his cargo shorts.

The scent of his hair is stronger today, foul with oil. I hold each breath for as long as possible as he climbs against me.

His arm comes across my chest. His nose rests against the back of my neck. He sighs, and then says, “Tell me a story.”

I wasn't expecting this again. I just thought he'd talk for a while, or that we'd just lie here.

“Really?” I say.

“Yeah,” he says. “You're picking up for your friends, too, right? There's extra for that.”

“What do you want me to tell you about?” I ask.

“Anything,” he says. “It'll help me not to think too much for a while.”

I tell him it was a peep-toe peepshow back at this place I lived in for a summer, above a dive bar with no name, just a big Labatt Blue sign in their window.

I had no air conditioning and the city was exhausted with the summer. Exhumed. It was so hot everything stuck to us, whole days swirled down the shower drain daily.

Me and Aimee dealt with it in short-shorts and hot pink underwear, t-shirts that snuggled lightly around our breasts but never traveled much further. She'd come over and we'd get drunk, hang our legs out the window and let the men in the bar downstairs howl up at our feet spiked in metallic stilettos: gold for me, silver for Aimee. The ridges of the window tract dug into the backs of our knees, but we made sure to stay drunk enough not to feel it.

“Was your life always fun like that?” Mike asks.

“Sometimes,” I say.
“Sometimes.”

I tell him about how it might have been different if I hadn't left a corpse of ego out by the ocean. I tell him I was happiest when I had forgotten there was a world before
2PM
. I tell him about small, crowded stages. I tell him about songs shrouded in reverberation. I tell him about bands I used to know and love that didn't play music: they played our lives, connected knees to shins at all angles. I tell him about words that nudged and smudged the shine of our eyelids in a silver preamble, lyrics built out of the gradient of recovered memories and the breakdown of exposure. I tell him that we wore it all like a shield. Still do, though mostly only in our heads now, reduced to what we can remember. I tell him too much, but in the end he gives me everything I want: vodka, cigarettes and half a sheet of acid.

“It sounds like you've been through enough to know where this stuff can take you,” he says.

I ride back slowly, stopping to drink. I'll share everything with Aimee and some with Trevor and Tara, but I need a little for myself after everything I put into this.

Aimee's in the kitchen, where there's a miracle of a blue gas flame in the stove.

“Cam found some food,” she says, pointing to powdered eggs and dried milk, a bag of flour full of dead moths. “We'll just pick them out,” she adds.

My mouth thickens with appetite. The pan sizzles. Aimee stirs but the fork's prongs come away tinged with pink.

“What the fuck?” she says.

The powdered eggs are turning red in the heat. In their center a bird fetus, as if the food's processing has started to reverse.

I take a shot of vodka and feel it splash against the empty walls of my stomach. I hold the bottle out to Aimee and she takes a quick chug, tells me to hide it.

“Cam'll want some if he knows you have it,” she says.

The alcohol's taking all my edges away and, for a second, I don't care.

“He ever explain what his problem was?” I ask, hearing a slur in my words already.

“No,” she says. “I didn't ask him, either, though. You hungry?” She takes the bloodied pan off the stove. “We'll have to bury this really good,” she says. “Cam's keeping that dog he knocked out, says he wants to train it to be our guard dog. The thing snapped at me twice today.” She rolls up her plaid sleeve to show shallow gouges and red welts where teeth grazed her forearm.

Aimee's second attempt with the powdered eggs works. She cooks for all of us. We sit in the living room together, the way friends would.

“There's a show tonight,” Trevor says.
We hear of these things by watching for writing on dusty windows and handwritten posters pegged into the telephone poles with the stems of lost earrings and old staples.

I am craving a blackout period, something that will make me shudder out slight harmony, finality.

“Who's playing?” Aimee asks.

“Some band called Salt,” Trevor says.

“Does it really matter who they are?” Brandy says. “It's not like there's anything else happening.”

We make an exception for tonight and use some of the rainwater and soap to clean up. We don't tell anyone we're doing this, just lock ourselves in the bathroom—me, Aimee and Tara—and clean up as best we can.

Aimee gets in the tub first and we run wet cloths over her back, lather up the thin bar of soap. Tara's on her knees beside me and when she moves I can smell the soft yellow scent of her crotch. When she undresses I see that discharge has stuck to the back of her fly. The odour is like something between sex and recycled cardboard.

Our bodies are clean but our clothes are filthy—panties skidmarked and sleeves hard and dark at the pits. We try to hold onto our soapy skin as long as possible by rubbing patchouli under each arm and into our pubic hair. Tara even rubs it into the cap of her blue wig before pulling it on.

Tara picks up a pair of light blue cutoffs and rubs an extra drop onto the inseam where the denim's stained and stiff. She tops it with her black lace camisole, which has torn at the ribs and neckline.

There is no more orange lipstick, but Tara keeps the empty tube in her purse anyway, in case she's dreaming. To improvise, she wets a finger and dips it in a bowl of ashes on the floor. I resist the urge to lick the bowl after I see her doing this, my body trying to convince itself that anything could be food right now. Tara rubs the ash along her lips, tinting them charcoal, pulls her purse strap across her chest. It crushes against her small breasts.

“Ready to go?” she asks.

We ride, following Trevor and Cam. Brandy and Carrie are trailing behind us.
We pass by an empty van that someone decorated by hand.
VOLTRON RAINY NIGHTZ
is spraypainted on one side. Tara brakes, touches these words as if they have power.

Cam and Trevor don't notice that we've stopped. Brandy and Carrie get ahead of us. They don't say anything as they go by.

“It's all right,” Aimee says. “I know where they're going.”

I pull out a few tabs of acid and ask them if they want one hit or two. We chase it all down with a shot of vodka.

The show's at an old strip club uptown. Someone's lit the place with candles around the sinks, baseboards, backs of the toilets. Two fingers on the mirror and Bloody Mary could be here.

Salt are already on the stage, getting ready for their first song. There are only ten other people here, not including the ones we live with. They all look vaguely familiar.

The singers take either side of the pole and it shimmers between them. I remember these girls, Jade and Leah. They used to be different people, had different identities. Jade was from a band called White Eagle and Leah from a band called Girl. Both groups lived in the same jam space, before The End came. They always threw the best parties.

I'd heard Jade and Leah both woke up one day with their hair turned white, all the way through, and they were both missing an eye—Leah her right and Jade her left. Their other band members were all in comas, flesh at their earlobes and inner elbows turning to cinders. I heard that they waited for seven nights for someone to wake up before moving the bodies outside.

Tonight they're doing an acoustic set, two girls spinning notes out of rusty strings and rigid bodies.

“You will live through this,” they sing, but there's no conviction from the singers or the audience. We all remember it as an old lyric from a different time. We all subconsciously answer it with defiance.

It's my body and I'll die if I want to.

Cam comes up to Aimee with a double-dose of grayline as an apology for what happened earlier with the dog. “I thought I could teach him faster than it's taking,” Cam says.

Aimee thanks him and takes a pill for herself, gives the other to me when he's not looking. It kicks in with the acid all at once and suddenly this club is an envelope that I am being stuffed into.

My chest constricts until I get outside, get some air. Light a cigarette and lean against the outside wall of the club.

The moon's low again. It feels like it's been full for days now, its cycle broken like everything else. It provides enough light to show the name of the club on the brick: Baby's, written in bright pink cursive.

The temperature plummets in the time it takes me to finish my smoke. It starts to snow. My cigarette hisses as it's extinguished by a heavy flake. We all came out tonight in bare arms. If the snow sticks, we might have to walk our bikes back.

I go inside to see if Aimee wants to get going. “They only have two more songs left,” she says. “Let's go after that.”

I don't want to stay but I sit down anyway. Tara's digging patterns into the tabletop with her nails: deep swirls and crosses. She catches me watching her and says, “I have to draw twenty of each symbol,” she says, “or else.”

“Or else what?” I ask, but her head's already back down, driven by whatever the drugs are dictating.

As Salt move through their last song, a girl slips onto the stage, starts twisting around the pole between them. Her hair hangs over one half of her face. She spins around the pole awkwardly on a broken heel. When she spins back around towards the room, her hair falls away from her face, uncovering a blank left side—no eye, no lips, no nostril.

“Shit,” Aimee says when we get outside. “Why didn't you tell us it was snowing this bad?”

“I did,” I tell her. “Not my fault you didn't listen.”