Soft Apocalypse

her? I’d been eager to tell Ange about Deirdre, hoping she would be at least a little jealous.

“Crap,” I said. I climbed down the creaky porch stairs and went into the narrow alley beside our house to have some privacy, then paced a while, memorizing the first couple of things I would say to get the conversation going.

I dialed her number. My heart was rocketing—I was going to stumble all over my words.

The phone rang, then again. It clicked; my sinuses cleared from the rush of adrenaline before I realized it was her voice mail.

“This is Deirdre.” The phone beeped. It took me a second to realize that was the whole message.

“Hi, Deirdre,” I said, “this is Jasper, we met last night at the bar. I was wondering if you might want to go out sometime—”

“No!” Ange shouted from the porch. “Not ‘sometime.’ Name a day.” I didn’t think she could hear me.

“So, just call me if you get this, and maybe we can go out Friday?”

“Not maybe!” Ange called.

“Bye,” I said into the phone and disconnected. “Thanks!” I shouted at Ange. “Now I sound like a complete idiot, and there’s a woman in the background critiquing my message as I leave it. That ought to go over well!”

Ange burst out laughing. “Aw, honey, I couldn’t make it too much worse than it was going to be anyway.”

Deirdre didn’t call back. I waited three days, my stomach somersaulting every time the phone rang. I decided to send a text. Screw Ange and Jeannie’s advice. There was nothing wrong with texting.

Does your non-reply mean “fuck off,” or is there a possibility I could still convince you to go out with me?

Her lack of a reply was a reply in itself—I knew that—but I was so wound up in fantasies of me and Deirdre that I couldn’t let it go, couldn’t just walk away without trying. I paced the porch. I had a meeting in two hours with a woman who was interested in selling her fruit preserves in Ruplu’s store. I would probably spend the two hours wearing down the wood on the porch. I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. I sat on the moldy weight bench and stared down the alley, at the rusty grill tangled in chest-high weeds next to a rotting outbuilding, a small stack of two-by-fours leaned against it, some do-it-yourselfer’s long-forgotten ambition.

My phone jingled. My palms sweated as I read the reply:

Ok. Friday at 6. Don’t be boring.

I leapt to my feet, threw my fists in the air. I had a date with Deirdre. Me—she was going out with me. Not shiny-shoed I-know-the mayor, but me. And she’d answered my text message, not my phone message. Ange and Jeannie did not know as much as they thought about dating.

I got to work immediately—I sat on the porch and mentally rehearsed interesting things to say, imagining what Deirdre would say back, as the sun sank behind the DeSoto Hilton, its sign emblazoned at the top of the building, just visible over the houses across the street.

The first thing Deirdre said after opening the door was “What’s your name again?”

I told her. She nodded. We started walking. I had no idea what to do with my hands; they suddenly felt all wrong just dangling there.

“I was thinking we could go to the Firefly Cafe,” I said, stuffing them into my back pockets.

“I don’t want to go to a restaurant,” Deirdre said.

I was speechless for a moment. “Well, what would you like to do then?” I finally asked.

Deirdre thought about it. “Let’s get some apples and some Lucky Charms, and find a way up to the roof of the Hilton and watch the city from up there.”

I hoped the vast confusion I felt didn’t register on my face. Apples and Lucky Charms? “You’re a woman with very precise tastes,” I said.

“Yes, I am.”

I was already feeling in over my head with this woman. I needed to relax, to play along with her. “I’ve got to admit, your plan sounds more fun than mine.”

Deirdre grinned, and looked at me for the first time. “Good.”

We headed toward Wal-Mart on the east side of town, winding around camped-out tribes of homeless, stepping over people sleeping in filthy clothes.

“Scary stuff, what’s going on between Russia and China, huh?”

Deirdre looked at me blankly. “What?”

“You didn’t hear?” I said. “Russia dropped a nuke on Chinese troops massed at their border.”

“A nuke? That seems excessive.”

“Hey, honey, kill the loser and come marvel with a real man,” a dude with gang scars on his neck called. He was sitting on a porch swing hung under stark steel fire escape stairs. I cringed as Deirdre gave him the finger without even looking. Mercifully, he stayed put, and we kept moving.

Wal-Mart was packed, probably because of the nuclear exchange between China and Russia. Every time there was a disaster, no matter how far removed, people flocked to the Wal-Mart to buy stuff. And not just water and flashlights, but Barbies and bath mats, tube socks and dental floss as well.

I thought that was a fairly entertaining observation, so I mentally rehearsed it a few times, then said it to Deirdre.

“People are pretty fucking stupid. Especially in the south,” she said as she yanked a plastic produce bag from the dispenser and dug her delicious little fingers into the apples.

A little Hispanic guy eyed Deirdre up and down as he went by. Guys had been gawking since I picked her up. Each time it happened I felt a childish swell of pride at being with her.

There was a buzzing in the crowd over by the broccoli and bell peppers, so I went over to investigate. A Wal-Mart employee was crossing out prices and writing in new ones by hand with a black marker. Higher prices— like twice as high. A security guy hovered close to her, a pistol holstered in his red Wal-Mart belt.

The buzzing got louder.

“What the fuck?” I said. Normally I would say “What the hell?” but I was trying to keep up with Deirdre.

Over in the bread area a group of angry shoppers had surrounded an employee who was also shadowed by a security guard. This guy was middle-aged and male, so I figured he must be management. I went over to listen.

“Hey, I’m very sorry,” he said, “the new viral crisis has caused disruptions in shipping, and we can’t predict when distribution and delivery will return to normal. Prices will be higher until then. It’s not under our control.”

I ran back to Deirdre, who was picking out apples. I yanked the plastic price rectangle out of its holder and handed it to her. “I’ll get the Lucky Charms—don’t let the bitch with the marker get this.”

No one had gotten to the cereal aisle yet. I ran up and down, looking for Lucky Charms, certain that Cocoa Puffs or Gummy Grabbers would not be acceptable. I spotted them low on the shelf, grabbed two boxes and the price rectangle, and met Deirdre up at the register.

“Twenty-four sixty,” the girl at the register said. It should have been about fifteen bucks.

“No,” I said. I showed her the price labels. “See—they haven’t raised the prices on these yet.”

“They haven’t posted them, but they’re already in the system,” she said.

“That’s bullshit!” I said. “You can’t raise the prices at the register without posting them first!”

“I just work here,” she said, just as loudly. “You think I like this? How am I going to feed my little boy?”

We stared at each other for a moment. She was chewing gum— probably her last piece for a while, because it was now about three bucks a pack, and she had her little boy to think about.

“This is bullshit!” I repeated.

Deirdre fished an apple out of the bag, reared back and fired it toward the produce department. “Bullshit!” she shouted.

She had a good arm. The apple sailed over the management guy’s head and nailed a shelf of bread, sending loaves scattering. She grabbed two more apples. A security guy ran toward us, fumbling with the clasp on his holster.

Deirdre threw an apple at him. He ducked.

“Bullshit!” a young guy in surgeon’s scrubs two registers down screamed. With his shoulder-length white hair, he was clearly not a surgeon—he was a Jumpy-Jump. He hurled a can of soup at the security guard. It hit the guard above the eye. The guard doubled over, clutching his face while the Jumpy-Jump reached for another can.