Soft Apocalypse

appliances.

“Well damn,” Phoebe said, letting the tent flap fall.

I wondered if, given a different past, this afternoon, in this abandoned carnival with Phoebe, could have been one of those magically romantic days that you never forget.

“You okay?” Phoebe asked. “You got quiet suddenly.”

“I’m fine. I just got thinking about something that happened to me a long time ago,” I said, covering my trail.

“What was it, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Why don’t we stop and eat, and I’ll tell you?”

We ate wild mushrooms and nettle in the merry-go-round, in a chariot. Cherubs in silver diapers and women in flowing burgundy robes were carved into its sides. The carvings were exquisitely detailed, though the fingers on one cherub’s hand, which was reaching toward the sky, were missing. While we ate I told Phoebe about my first encounter with Rumor, at the art gallery. It was the first thing that came to mind to mask what I’d really been thinking.

Phoebe reached out and stroked the hoof of the horse closest to her. Its front legs were curled under it in mid-gallop, its mouth open, tongue jutting out between square teeth.

“I can see how that would haunt you, even after all these years. The bad things get tattooed on your brain, don’t they? Even though they’re in the past, it’s like they’re not, like they’re still happening somewhere.”

“They do,” I agreed. “I wish I could take just three or four days of my life and cut them out. I would feel so much better.”

Phoebe continued absently stroking the hoof. “I know what mine would be.” She looked off into the carnival, her face turned away from me.

“Which would they be? Unless you don’t want to say.”

Phoebe didn’t say anything for a long time.

“I haven’t told anyone,” she finally whispered.

“If you want to tell someone, I’m a good listener.” I waited, studied the red Tilt-A-Whirl choked with weeds.

Phoebe laced her fingers together, looked down at her feet, and began a story.

“After I left Stephan, the guy who wanted me to share him with a fifteen-year-old, I went off to find my parents. I hadn’t seen them in over ten years, since the day I left home to live with Marlowe, a black guy, and they effectively disowned me. It took me a month to reach my parents’ house, and when I got there I found my mother in worse shape than I. She had just carried on as if nothing was happening—planting flowers in her garden, watching crap on TV, until there was no more food or power. I took her out of there, but of course I had no idea where to go. We headed east, toward Savannah.

“She hadn’t changed much in ten years. All she did was complain. Her feet hurt, she was hungry, why had I taken her out of her home to drag her across the countryside. All day long she complained.

“Then one day we were walking through the main drag of a small town, and the McDonald’s had a cardboard sign up in the window that said ‘Open,’ so I left Mom in the shade, because I wasn’t sure it was safe, and I went inside.

“The man inside was selling hamburgers made with some sort of critter meat, but he didn’t accept cash, only precious metals or guns and the like. I didn’t have anything like that, and I started to leave, and he suggested —”

She choked up. I considered putting a reassuring hand on her back, or squeezing her shoulder, but sensed that wasn’t the right thing, so I just waited.

“He suggested a trade: he’d give me the hamburgers if I’d sleep with him. I told him no and hurried out, but I was starving, and my mother was starving.” She wiped her eyes and sniffed; her nose was badly clogged. “So I did it. Behind the counter. I tried not to cry, but I couldn’t help it, and he said to me, ‘Just think about how good those hamburgers are going to taste.’” She laughed, although it was partially a sob, and now I did press my palm to her back and rub just a little to reassure her, and it seemed to work. She took a few deep breaths and calmed down.

“Two times after that, I left Mom somewhere, telling her I was going to buy food. Then I would approach a man with food and offer sex for food.

“The last time, the man did it, then called me a whore and threw me out without giving me the food.”

Phoebe wiped something from the side of her nose with a trembling hand. I wanted her to look up, to see that I was hearing her, that I wasn’t judging her, that she’d done nothing wrong, but she kept her eyes on her sneakers.

“When I went back to my mother that last time, she told me that she had figured out what I was doing to get the food. She said it was disgusting. When I asked her if she’d rather starve, she said yes, she’d rather starve.

“The next time we stopped, I sat her in the shade under a tree…” Fresh tears rolled down her cheeks; her shoulders heaved. “I told her I was going to look for food.” She struggled to get the words out. “And I left her.”

She looked up at me. “I left my mother.”

I nodded, simply nodded understanding. I wasn’t sure how to respond, didn’t trust myself to respond, because it seemed like any response would be either trite or judgmental.

She leaned back in the little seat, looked up at the wood-slatted ceiling, her cheeks wet with tears. “She walked so damned slowly. Each step seemed to require this huge effort. So I left her.” She sniffed, wiped her nose on the sleeve of her sweater. “Half a day later I couldn’t stand the guilt any longer and I went back to look for her, but she was gone.”

I had to respond; I couldn’t leave her hanging there on those words, but I felt like I’d been struck mute. So I reached over and hugged her. She hugged me back, tightly, and we went on hugging until it wasn’t a hug any more, it was more like a seated slow dance. I rocked her ever so slightly while she cried into my neck.

Finally, we separated, looking off into the mad decay of the carnival. I peered up into the steel framework of the Ferris wheel towering nearby, a series of shrinking Xs, thinking about the courage it had taken for Phoebe to tell me what she had just told me, and realized what my response should be.

I took a ragged breath, and began my own story. “One day two years ago I got it in my head to steal a pig from a farm.” I choked up almost immediately. I wondered how I would get through the story if I couldn’t even make it through the first sentence.

I did get through it, though. I told her what really happened to Ange, something I’d never told another living soul. I cried through most of it, but when it was out the relief I felt surprised me.

I didn’t stop there. I told her about how Cortez had killed Tara Cohn, and my part in that, and the time we stabbed the men who were raping Ange, and got through both of those without any tears. I was all cried out, and besides, awful as they were, neither of those events tortured me the way Ange’s death did.

We just sat for a while then. I felt drained to the point of numbness.

“I love the word ‘calliope,’” Phoebe finally said, sounding far away. “It’s so festive.”

“Mmm,” I said.

“But it’s not a cheap, simple, primary-color sort of festive, like ‘confetti’ is.”

“No. Never.”

Phoebe fidgeted with a button on her shirt, her gaze far away. She had such beautiful, delicate wrists. “When we went on that date all those years ago, I was a virgin. I was a virgin until I was twenty-six,” she said. “That’s who I am.”

“That not hard to believe, given the sweaters and all.”

Phoebe laughed. “I can’t help wondering, though: is that really who I am? I never thought I was capable of doing what I did to my mother. Now that I know I am, how can I still think of myself as the person I thought I was?”

I nodded understanding. “You wonder if doing something awful makes you an awful person, even if you didn’t have a choice,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“I’m so afraid sometimes, that this world has turned me into a monster, capable of horrible things. Or it’s exposed me for the monster I am.”