The Deluge, page 33
Fred’s text landed two days later. Congratulations. I teased him about getting the job after sleeping with him (Coincidence?). Still, when he asked me if I was free on the weekend, that he would be in Chicago to meet with a client, I hesitated. Sleeping with a married man was one thing—all the premium shows were teaching us that open relationships and polyamory were no longer taboo, after all. But twice would mean we were having an affair. Twice would mean I’d probably spend the night in his hotel. Maybe even the one downtown, where long ago I’d followed an actor to his room.
Ultimately, I decided against it. Told him I had plans.
In my condo, I’d turned the master bedroom into my workspace while I did my sleeping in the guest room. I wanted to spend the weekend with storyboards, tags, and ad proposals. I only left for runs and yoga. The older I got, the more addicted I became to my exercise routine. Part of that might have been the vanity that accelerated with age, especially if one was still single.
That Saturday, I got back from a run. I drank a glass of water and ate a yogurt with my tablet on my thigh. The blue Earth spun, half in and half out of darkness. Lights winked on as the hemispheres changed from day to night. Translucent type floated across the screen. WE ARE THE GREEN NEW DEAL.
Not there yet. I drew arrows to elements I wanted to highlight, typed a few notes, and sent them back to the crew. I needed a break, so I got a glass of wine, slipped on my VR set, and found myself scanning through news of the actor’s full-blown career change.
Of course, I’d followed him over the years from afar ever since I left his hotel without giving him my number or even telling him my last name. I’d even gone to a few of his movies before he kept putting his foot in his mouth. His films were increasingly downgraded to the far reaches of cut-rate streaming services. His roles dried up, and he couldn’t appear in an interview without blaming diversity politics. Now I studied his clean, taut face almost unchanged in the intervening fifteen years. He meant something to me, yes, but not what one might suspect. I didn’t pine or ache for him in the slightest. He was more a totem of what I’d consciously changed about my life. After Jefferey, I made up my mind to never again allow a man to determine the course of my happiness. Maybe one forms scar tissue too thick for any more hurt to pierce them, but I likened it more to living on my own terms. There’d been a couple partners and several fleeting encounters since then, but mostly I slipped away, leaving behind a few wounded people myself. Don’t let yourself be sold and sold to like that, I wanted to tell these men. Love can often be a conjurer’s trick. J. Walter Thompson once said, “This is an age of faith. All ages have been ages of faith. Disbelief requires an effort of the will while belief requires only acquiescence.”
But this didn’t mean I couldn’t wonder if the actor ever thought of me.
“I had a vision of a plague, and when both my parents passed during Covid—a crisis I foresaw—that’s when I knew. I had to quit acting. I had to escape the secular media, go back home and begin rededicating myself to Jesus Christ.”
He sat on the edge of his garish CGI stage in his Slapdish worlde. It was a vulgar mix of a Gothic cathedral and a sports arena, titanic crossbeams soaring overhead (and there I was craning my neck to take it all in). He wore flowing white linen pants and a rugged tan shirt, his voice mournful. Despite years of owning the VR set, I found myself instinctively reaching up to touch his stubbled cheek. I was filled with sadness for this version of him. He wore the born-again shtick clownishly, his easy confidence replaced by the kind of evangelical desperation I’d seen in my childhood. It was hard not to be cynical about his motives—I vividly recalled his quick dismissiveness of religion—but maybe he thought it was a sincere transformation. One came to understand that we all purchased, voted, worshiped, and loved in unconscious obedience to narratives we thought were original, but which were largely dreamed up in sterile boardrooms like the one in New York. Then we went and called these stories our passions and dreams.
“We carry the sadness. The sadnesses of my life were drinking, loneliness, and walking away from my parents’ mission of carrying the news of Christ. I was on a journey to my judgment.”
His voice lowered. He looked as young as when I’d met him, but now he wore his hair slicked back. His eyes were still a deep and arresting blue from his contacts. His mic hand had a gold ring on the pinkie, glinting in the imaginary light of his virtual realm. I reached for the messaging function.
“We are living through yet another scourge, a plague, this one borne not on the back of a virus but a plague of consumption, addiction, and poverty of the soul, and man oh man, the times they just grow darker and darker, don’t they? And it means something, my friends. It does.”
“Text Linda Holiday,” I told my VR set. “What about this guy who just changed his name to The Pastor? Might be a good candidate for Emii and the gang. His Slapdish ratings are big. Send.”
“The times we live in—what we are seeing—call to mind Matthew twenty-four, six through eight: ‘And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines and pestilences and droughts and great storms. All these are the beginning of sorrows.’ ”
A text bubble popped up in my peripheral vision, but it wasn’t Linda replying. It was Fred: Flight got canceled. Tornado watch. What if we got a drink?
Pulling the bright scene from my eyes, The Pastor’s voice fading, I suddenly wanted company. Ached for it. While I slid toward J. Walter’s acquiescence, the sound of the rain came on like a switch. My living room had a view of the Chicago River and the former Trump Tower. Rain streaked down on the city. I texted Fred back to say there was no way I was going out in this.
Then I’ll come to you.
When he arrived, neither of us had the patience for the pretense of wine. He was soaked, his hair matted. He dripped water onto my hardwood floor. “This is just from the car to your lobby,” he said, and the part of me that felt how transactional this encounter could be was excited by it rather than guilty. Fred took his jacket off and kissed me with his hand fastened to my jaw, holding my face like a prize.
The wind and rain beat against the window. I led him to my bed and flipped the lights off. I hated having sex with the lights on—something to do with the way I could see the little blue veins in my breasts; a sign of age they hadn’t invented a cosmetic solution for yet. With the room dark, the city glittered, and gusts of wind sent hard sheets of rain through the light in eerie pulses.
“Was your flight really canceled?” I asked when we finished. He tried to put an arm around me, but I gently took it away. “Give me a minute. I’m sweaty.”
“I didn’t even leave my hotel. It was canceled when they saw the storm coming in.”
“You don’t have your ring on this time.”
He was quiet a moment. “I was thinking I should stop wearing it.”
“Pick up more women you work with that way?”
“It’s not like that.”
“Whatever.” I crawled out of bed onto the floor and pushed myself into an up-dog pose, feeling the stretch in my lower back and glutes. “You did a number on me.”
“Sorry—question mark.”
“No.” I grunted, feeling my hip pop. He’d had my knees at my ears. “It’s a good thing, trust me. My last relationship. I’ll just say I was never good and sated. You’re a sater. A satist.”
He chuckled.
“What client were you meeting with?” I asked, coming out of up-dog.
“It’s an ag company.”
“In trouble?” I slipped back into bed and let him curl beside me. He was still wearing the condom he’d produced from his sports coat, and I could feel the latex on my leg.
“I’ve never seen a cultural environment worse for business than right now. Everyone should be watching their backs.”
“It’s probably the same guys my dad sold the farm to,” I said.
Ice-blue lightning cracked the sky, sweeping the bedroom in staccato flashbulbs. The cannon fire of the thunder soon followed. When it was over, he said, “You know after this campaign, I’m looking to cash out and start this new thing. How do you like New York?”
“I’m more of a Midwest girl.”
“So maybe it’s time for a change of pace. This is me trying to say I really like the work you do. You think outside the box, and that’s becoming increasingly hard to find. I’m moving into finance. I’ve hooked up with some sharp people, and it really could be worth a fortune—”
“Hey,” I touched his shoulder. “Can we not talk shop? If you want to stay, that’s fine,” I said, hoping he heard the opposite in my voice. “I can’t leave Chicago anyway. My father passed away, and my mom’s not doing well with it.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
More lightning, now with the thunder right behind. We were quiet for a while. I thought he might be asleep, but then suddenly out of the dark, he said, “You should know that this is not about me being bored in my marriage. I told you my wife and I are living apart now.”
“Okay.”
“It’s complicated.”
“It usually is.”
“Our son has had problems.”
A sickness slid through me. I felt it first at the top of my head and then bubbling through the veins of my scalp down through my neck, lungs, and heart, only to settle somewhere in the bowels.
“That’s too bad.”
“We’ve been apart almost since it happened. This was two years ago now. My son’s always been a kind of… I don’t know, a handful, I guess you’d say. He has moments where he can be really sweet, but then he’ll do things—just behavioral problems. We thought he was maturing for a while, and then— You know, I thought he was just being a kid. And then he did something truly…”
It slipped out of my mouth before I could catch it, this bit of the sickness coming up like bile. “What?”
“There was a kid a year younger than him, a sixth-grader, who he picked on. He hurt him pretty bad. After school. So they took my son away.”
Maybe he’d shared this with me so I would tell him something. About my father’s death or his mistress or my mother or siblings or the actor. But it wasn’t a game I wanted to play. Instead I said, “Sometimes I have this… I guess you’d call it a nostalgia. A nostalgia for the worst moments of my life.”
“That sounds terrible,” he whispered.
“No, it’s not. I like remembering them. Because those moments—that’s what’s vivid. Unforgettable.”
He pulled me closer, and I let him. Outside, the thunder shook the whole building, and the lightning spiked again, and this time the entire sky raged with electric-blue fire.
Book III
WITH SPEED AND VIOLENCE
THE DERECHO AND THE LIGHT
2030
It was the third such storm of the summer, and the pattern was becoming familiar. The thermometer soared toward triple digits, the sky darkened, the air turned that jaundiced green, and then, as though a vacuum cleaner sucked up the heat, the temperature plummeted. The wind and rain started up, and as Casey Wheeler explained, “Brother, you better be off the road and taking cover, ’cause who goddamn knows what’s coming out the sky.”
The first time you were coming home from work, and it was like a whiteout with rain. A five-minute drive turned into a twenty-minute white-knuckle-grip ordeal. You inched along in the battering-ram wind, tires sluicing through deepening water, until reaching the safety of your driveway. You’ve heard them called derechos, but a “land hurricane” is more apt. And tonight, when you get home to find Toby mashing a fistful of peas into pulp and Raquel anxiously watching the Weather Channel, you know another superstorm is on its way.
“They ain’t even cleaned nothing up from the last one,” Raquel bitches.
After putting Toby down, you climb into bed, exhausted, and drift off for what feels like a blink.
Then you wake to the wind. It’s the sound of driving through a tunnel under a mountain. It surrounds your two-bedroom rental, the one you and Raquel worked so hard for so you could get out of the trailer court. As during the last two storms, you worry if the heap will hold together. The house has no basement, let alone a storm shelter. The rain begins, pummeling the siding. Raquel stirs. You lie in the dark and wait. The storm grows louder.
Finally, light flashes outside and the rattle of distant thunder wakes Toby, whose wails match the intensity of the storm.
“Baby,” says Raquel, as a way of asking you to get him. And that’s fine. You can’t sleep through this shit anyway.
Pulling the howling Toby from his crib, his frightened hands grope for you. As you hoist him into your arms, the power goes out, and he screams louder.
You take him to the living room where the window looks out over the road, train tracks, and a small field. The streetlamp is out, along with electricity for the rest of the block, and you and Toby can only stare into a wall of darkness. Toby hates the thunder, and you can’t really blame him. With each crack, you can hear the plates in the cupboards, the silverware in the drawers, jittering.
Lightning strikes and it blesses the whole neighborhood with a moment of purple daylight. In that instant you catch a glimpse of a figure across the tracks, struggling down the side of the road. You hope the guy is smart enough to get indoors fast. The last two storms, they were talking eighty-, ninety-mile-per-hour winds. When the lightning comes again, he’s gone.
Toby moans at each boom, but he also appears fascinated by the lightning. He sucks on his fingers and watches wide-eyed for each round of illumination. His black hair has turned kinkier, but he has a smattering of your freckles. He reminds you of the picture on your mom’s refrigerator, the one from Soak City Water Park.
“That’s lightning, Toby. See, nothing to be scared of. Just lightning. Just rain.”
But you know this isn’t true because you can feel your blood racing with the fear of the storm. And when a bolt of lightning splits the sky and strikes a tree across the road, Toby screams, and you can’t help but grip him against your chest in a full-body recoil. The tree explodes in sparks and splinters, half of it crashing onto the telephone wires. Your heart is as loud in your ears as the thunder.
You’ve never seen lightning that close before. It was more weapon than weather.
After an hour the storm passes, and Toby drifts off on your shoulder. You put him back in his crib. You think of going to bed, but you’re too awake. Your skin too itchy.
Instead, you get a paper bag from the kitchen. Then you get a can of Raquel’s hairspray. In the bathroom, you sit on the toilet and spray, gathering fumes. You hold it to your face and breathe. You do it again. It’s a cheap high, but it helps. You sit back against the toilet, and in the blackness, you see that blue-purple bolt of lightning shredding that tree over and over.
* * *
In the morning, you have a headache from the hairspray. There’s still no electricity, and the heat of the day is already descending. Raquel snaps at you when you open the freezer because the food might spoil. There are only a couple of soggy microwave dinners, though. The window AC units are useless, so Raquel will have to take Toby somewhere with air-conditioning, probably the Walmart with its generators. You’re late for work because there are downed trees everywhere, and only so many road crews to clear them. You think with all these storms, maybe there’s better work doing tree cleanup or repair, but this is your typical dead-end thinking. Ideas you’ll never do anything about. You pass a house where the kids’ trampoline has blown onto the roof and snagged on the chimney. Another house has a tree shot through its upper floor; an upstairs bedroom now exposed. Through downtown, past empty storefronts where the windows have soap cataracts, multiple cars have been crushed by fallen trees. One SUV has been cut nearly in half; the sturdy oak now embedded in its middle seat. You edge past a busted recliner mid-street. There are more stray dogs than ever, nosing through trash.
The Kroger is packed. People buying food and water while the power is out. Still, you’d almost rather be here with the store’s generator-powered AC than stuck in your house, which you know is cooking. Julian, your manager, finds you.
“Could’ve used you on time today, Keeper.”
You gesture back to the road. “You got any way to clear about a thousand trees, lemme know.” You lost a tooth five months ago. There’s another molar throbbing in your jaw, but you haven’t had the money to go to the dentist to see about getting it pulled. It gives you this faggy, wisping lisp that you hate, especially in conversations with the doughy Julian, a guy you would beat up on a playground if adults could do such things.
“We’re telling people, maximum of two bags,” he says. “But I want you stocking for now.”
The shelves are already picked over. You roll up your sleeves, exposing the crucifix on your arm, and get to work, thinking about how things could be worse.
When you met Raquel in the parking lot of the blood bank on Christmas Eve, both of you were sagging toward rock bottom. You were snowed in for five days, and you spent the Come to Jesus Storm fucking and shooting up, then the next six months becoming a full-blown heroin addict. Until you found a fentanyl connection. Far more economical and a lightning high. Raquel made for nice company. She didn’t talk much, but she liked cooking and could whip up a decent meal. You hadn’t been with anyone in a while, and it was nice. Then you got the bright idea to break into a shoe store downtown. Coming out, the Coshocton PD had been waiting for you. You’d heard tell of a way to avoid withdrawal in jail, and you tried cutting a gash in your thigh and rubbing in the last of your score. All it did was leave you bloody and in withdrawal—aching, cramping, shitting, barfing in a cell—anyway.
You served your sentence where the loneliness got bad. Why bother with anything. Do your time, get free, get the purest product you could on the street, and go OD somewhere. Out in eleven months for good behavior, and you figured you’d never see Raquel again. To your surprise, she was waiting when you got out. She’d somehow come by a car but didn’t say how. The two of you drove straight home to score, and you OD’d. Not such a big deal, though, first responders carried Narcan everywhere now. It only felt like a strange blackout. Then you and Raquel were back in a motel, eating off a hot plate, getting fucked up every day on the dope you’d buy from Tawrny.
