my parents had gotten engaged thirty years ago—a ritual I’d begun the day I learned that they’d died. Only a few dappled spots of sunlight filtered through the branches of the massive live oaks that canopied the square.
A pigeon wobbled up to me hopefully, like I might pull out a bag of breadcrumbs. When was the last time anyone had fed a pigeon? How did they still remember that we used to? After a minute it wandered away, pecking at pebbles and popsicle sticks.
I stood, letting my fingers linger for a moment on the rough wood of the bench. Time to go home. I crossed the street, out the other side of the square, and headed down Bull Street.
All of the houses on our block were in disrepair, but the one that housed our apartment took the cake. The celery-green plaster on number five East Jones was cracked in places, exposing the original brick beneath. Our iron railing was not as ornate as most in the neighborhood, and it was canted at an angle. A little historical plaque said the house had been built in 1850. The yellowed Neighborhood Watch sign in one of the first-floor windows—replete with silhouette of a cloaked burglar—was a nice touch.
The screen door squealed when I opened it. Colin was in the living room. “That virus is spreading.” He motioned toward the TV.
As if Polio-X wasn’t enough, now there was a flesh-eating virus to worry about. From the brief clips of victims on the news, it did not look pleasant, and the only way to treat it was to cut out the infected areas before it spread, which didn’t sound pleasant either.
“If they ever catch the people who release these things, they should have them sodomized by Clydesdales on national TV,” Colin said without a hint of a smile.
“Are they saying anything new?” Jeannie asked, gliding out of their bedroom. She stopped to stare at the screen of the old 2-D TV that’d been one of our first purchases after we’d saved enough for rent.
Colin muted the sound. “Just that it’s not airborne, so masks aren’t any help, and to wash your hands a lot,” Colin said.
“Have they said any more about Great Britain and Russia?” I asked Colin.
“No. It’s all about the virus.”
Since the trade winds had sputtered last fall, the temperatures in Britain had been plummeting, and Britain was not taking kindly to Russia’s decision to suspend all natural gas sales outside their borders. Britain’s navy was cruising up and down Russia’s border, and there had been some skirmishes. Britain had no chance in a war against Russia unless others jumped in, but I guess with tens of thousands of their people freezing to death, they were desperate.
We’d become total news junkies since getting the TV. Hard not to be when something awful was always going on.
“Every day it’s something else,” Jeannie said. “I’m so tired of it.”
“Things have to get better soon,” I said.
“It’s been years,” Jeannie muttered. She went over to our little kitchen corner, opened the chest that served as a kitchen cabinet, and peered in. “Does anyone mind if I eat a couple of rice cakes and some peanut butter?”
“No problem,” I said. It probably wasn’t necessary any more, to get an okay before you ate something, but it was a habit from our tribe days that we couldn’t quite shake.
Colin switched off the TV. “Jasper, what do you think about running the a/c for ten minutes before we go to sleep? Jeannie and I were thinking it would be worth it, to have it cool to get to sleep.”
I shrugged. “Sounds good to me.” We were getting by; I guess we could afford to buy a little more energy.
It was a long bike ride to Southside, but I had plenty of time.
I headed up Bull Street, cutting through the middle of the squares, looking at all the houses that used to be pretty when I was a kid. They called this the Historic District back then; it used to be the most expensive part of Savannah. Now they just called it downtown.
I tried not to reminisce about my life before things went bad, but sometimes I couldn’t resist. It’s hard to stifle memories when everything around you is heavy with your past. How could I walk down Bolton Street, past the house where I’d grown up, without seeing my dad washing his truck in the driveway? We’d been in Clary’s diner the night I told my parents I was switching my major from business to sociology. There’d been a baseball card store on the corner of Whitaker and York where John Kelly—who’d been my best friend in sixth grade—and I would buy twenty-year-old packs of baseball cards and open them on his stoop, our hands shaking, hoping to pull out a valuable rookie card. It was almost inconceivable now, the luxury of blowing fifteen bucks on a pack of baseball cards, but back then there always seemed to be enough money, an endless flow that just showed up from Mom’s purse, or from doing some easy afterschool job. Looking back, it seemed as if everyone was well-off; even the poorest kids could afford to buy a Big Mac at McDonald’s.
I stopped, dropped one foot to the pavement at the entrance to one of the alleys that stretched behind every row of houses as the roar and rattle of a muffler announced that a decrepit Volvo was pulling out. An old woman in the passenger seat looked at me, nervous eyes peering behind wire-rimmed glasses, her head bobbing a palsied rhythm.
The alley was scattered with homeless shelters. That’s what people had taken to calling the big green trash cans stamped
I didn’t dare cut through Forsyth Park, so I took the sidewalk along Whitaker. The tic tic tic of a central a/c unit caught my attention. I marveled at the sound, at the audacious expenditure of energy, cooling all of the rooms in an apartment at once. The shift in ambient sound was subtle as you moved uptown, the proportion of popping gunshots to humming machinery changing with each block.
Screams of a man in terrible pain burst from an open second-story window. I pedaled faster—thinking of the reports of the flesh-eating virus and silently wished the poor bastard well.
I hadn’t been to Southside in a long time. Very little had changed. In fact, if anything it looked nicer than it had the last time I’d been there. Through the tall steel gates surrounding the passing neighborhoods I could see that some of the lawns were mowed. I didn’t venture too close to the gates, lest some private police take offense at my shabby clothes (the best I owned, for my trip to Southside), and beat me for being in the wrong part of town.
A car honked behind me. I moved to the side of the road and it whooshed past. I stayed by the side—there were more cars on the road up here, even a few trucks and SUVs.
When choices have to be made between oil to fuel luxury cars and oil for fertilizer to feed starving people, the choice is obvious: the oil goes to fuel the cars. Now that energy was scarce, consuming it ostentatiously was a status symbol. Leaving your porch light on announced to the world that you could afford to leave your porch light on.
Sometimes I hated these people, who lived so comfortably while the rest of us barely got by. Maybe I hated them because I always figured I would be one of them, I don’t know. We had nothing, and they had so much more than they needed. But they were just people, doing what people do, which is to try to keep what they have.
It cost me eight bucks to get into Snowstorm. If I hadn’t biked five miles to get there, I wouldn’t have paid it, and as it was I felt guilty. I didn’t have any business spending that kind of money when Jeannie was asking permission to eat some peanut butter. I went through big double doors and up a ramp that led to the club.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. I’d stepped into the Alps. There were ski slopes that rose out of sight, piles of snow all over, snowmen with drinks clutched in frozen hands. People were dancing on a frozen pond. It had to be holographic, but it was so perfect, so solid, that it took my breath away. I made a conscious effort to keep my yokel mouth from dropping open and strolled through the place like I’d seen it all before, but I hadn’t. I hadn’t realized how much the world was still progressing. Even through this awful time, people were still inventing things. I just wasn’t seeing it, just like people in third world countries never saw it.
There were cool rich kids everywhere, their hairstyles as varied as the flavors at Baskin Robbins: dreadlocks and Mohawks, Betty Page cuts, pigtails, red-and-white barber pole specials.
There was an Alpine bar perched in the corner thirty feet above the floor, on an icy cliff. It didn’t appear to be a holo, because the guys sitting at the bar weren’t that attractive. It looked like the place I’d be most comfortable. I watched a dude with blond little-Dutch-boy hair step on a steel plate that lifted him up to the bar, and I followed suit.
