“I can guess what you said.”
“I bet you can,” Ange said. She stopped in front of the Savannah College bio building. “This is where I get off.” She waved. “Bye, sweetie.”
I waved back. No public displays of affection. Somehow we’d made it work for four years, the friends-with-sex thing. Probably because neither of us had met anyone, or really wanted to meet anyone at this point. Things with Ange were comfortable and easy. Uncomplicated.
Truth be told, I was beginning to doubt that I would ever find someone to love in any case. I suspected that the sort of relationship I was looking for just wasn’t possible any more, that it was an artifact from the time when those photographs I missed so much were taken. There was a line drawn in my memory that separated my life before The Decline from my life after. I imagine everyone has that line. Everything else had changed after The Decline; there was no reason to think that love had some special dispensation.
I headed home. The sun was low in the sky, filtering through the twisted, moss-covered branches of the oaks, adding a gold tinge to the red brick path. I felt so bad for Ange. She was so close. A two-hour defense, three signatures, and she had a Ph.D. She could teach at a university, or continue her research for an agro corporation. The stakes were so high. Once upon a time if you didn’t make it into a lucrative career, there were plenty of semi- lucrative alternatives. Now it seemed as if the divide between rich and poor was a chasm. There was no middle class any more. On one side there were the rich—safe and comfortable, living in luxury—and on the other, on our side, it was a challenge just to stay alive.
As I approached Jackson Square, I stopped short. Sebastian was sitting on a bench in the square, with the Jumpy-Jump who had threatened us a half-hour earlier. They were laughing like old pals. Sebastian spotted me and waved; the Jumpy-Jump turned, smiled.
“Little Peanut’s big brother! Come join us.”
I headed toward the bench.
“You two know each other?” Sebastian said as I approached.
“Yes indeed,” the Jumpy-Jump said. He held out a bandaged hand without getting up, looking amused, as if we’d shared a joke rather than an altercation. I ignored his hand.
“We began our song with the wrong note, I fear.” He dropped his hand, stretched out on the bench and sighed contentedly. “So, Mister Peanut, what do
I’d read everything I could about the Jumpy-Jump movement since that night at the art show. It had started in Detroit, after the Foxtown Massacre, when the police broke up a protest using nerve gas. A Native American street singer named Dada Tanglefoot began preaching a weird mix of anarchism, Zen, and Dadaism that spoke to the people. Tanglefoot was assassinated in quick order, probably on orders from the feds, but her words spread like a virus through the poor and angry neighborhoods. As far as I could tell, the actual doctrine was incoherent bullshit. Maybe Tanglefoot’s teachings had gotten tangled as it passed from person to person.
“I understand why you’re angry, but I don’t think much of killing random people,” I said. “What do you expect to get out of it?”
“Me?”
“Jumpy-Jumps, I mean.”
“We don’t expect anything.” He shrugged, his eyes twinkling.
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“Does anything make sense? It’s all absurd. We’re just unleashing some vicious absurdity to underscore the point.” He stood, made a peace sign. “Sebastian, it was a pleasure.”
Sebastian returned the gesture. “Same here, Rumor.”
“Down is up, and sinners are saints, Mister Peanut,” Rumor said as he turned to leave.
“My name is Jasper.”
“Down is up, and sinners are saints, Jasper.”
Rumor stood at the edge of the square, waiting for a truck to pass, before sauntering between two abandoned gas hogs and across the street.
“Why were you talking to that asshole?” I asked Sebastian. “He threatened Ange and me just half an hour ago, waving a machete at us. If Uzi hadn’t been there we’d probably be lying dead with our throats cut.
“I’ll talk to pretty much anyone.” Sebastian said.
“Well hooray for you.”
He met my sarcasm with a big grin. “If you always keep things amiable you minimize the chance of ending up in the street with your throat cut.”
“Nothing minimizes the chances of getting your throat cut when it comes to Jumpy-Jumps—they’ll happily cut you open and pull your guts out while they sing you a love song.”
Sebastian laughed delightedly. “You almost sounded like a Jumpy-Jump when you said that.”
I smiled. It was difficult to hate the guy too much because of his demeanor. “So, what’s it like? The virus.”
“It’s invigorating.”
“Invigorating? So, you’re happy all the time, and you don’t want to hurt anyone? You’ll even have a friendly chat with a terrorist? It sounds like a lobotomy.”
“Oh, no.” He clasped his hands together and held them to his heart. “It’s the exact opposite of a lobotomy. You glimpse the infinite. Just a glimpse, but that’s enough. If I were cracked open any wider I might go mad—we’re not built to experience all that emptiness.”
“Oh, now I get it. You’re basically on a permanent acid trip.” I gave him the peace sign. “Peace, love, all-is- oneness.”
An ultralight copter buzzed low over the square. Sebastian waited till it passed before answering. “That’s about right, I guess.”
“How did you get infected?” I asked.
“I volunteered.”
“You’re shitting me. You volunteered to be infected with an incurable virus? Why would you do that?”
Sebastian sighed. “My wife and daughter were raped and killed in front of me during the Atlanta gas riots.” He gave me a wan smile, as if he were talking about an old friend he missed. “I was going to hang myself; what did I have to lose?”
How do you respond to something like that? “I’m sorry.” It was all I could think to say.
A tall, scrawny girl hurried past carrying a bucket of water, her body canted to compensate for the weight.
“What did you do in Atlanta?” I asked.
“Research and development. I’m a virologist.” He closed his eyes, turned his face up to the sun. “I led the team that developed Doctor Happy.”
“So what are you doing here? Why aren’t you back there working on other fabulous new viruses?”
He made a face like he’d just bit into something foul. “I don’t want to sit in a concrete room under artificial lights all day. I want to be around people, in the sunlight.”
“Well, if it’s people and sunlight you’re looking for, you came to the right place.”
The night of the bamboo party, Chair and his entourage dressed as homeless people, which basically meant getting a little dirtier than usual, looking a little more hopeless and depressed than usual, and taking along a couple of trash bags of what looked like their belongings. Only instead of just their belongings, the trash bags contained bamboo roots and containers of gray water, wrapped inside belongings.
The crickets were in full stereo as Ange, Cortez, and I crossed MLK and walked up the on-ramp to I-16. Vehicles rumbled past occasionally, the drivers taking no notice of us. It was nice to be invisible; I thought maybe I should haul a bag of shit around with me all the time.
“Do you ever find yourself envying Sebastian?” Cortez asked.
“Shit, no,” Ange said. “I crave a good buzz as much as anyone, but I want to come down after.” There was a slight breeze; it was almost bearable tonight.
“But nothing would ever bother you again. Doesn’t that sound even a little tempting?”
“It’s virus-induced,” I said. “Those little fuckers are doing things to his mind.” We reached the interstate, walked alongside, staying in the weeds well away from the road.
“Yeah. I’d never do it to myself, but still, sometimes I envy the bastard’s peace of mind,” Cortez said as he
