"It's hard to believe," Emmit said, staring at the man's Jack O’ Lantern mouth, "but I remember that much. He was impeached, but they didn't convict him."
Roy wiped tears from his eyes.
"Oh, thank you for that," he said, his deep voice sounding like the whine of a whimpering wolf. "But when I arrived here, the president was Bill Clinton."
Emmit was stunned. He could remember Clinton and his wife, his sleepy sounding voice and tired eyes, and the famous blowjob scandal of course. But he hadn't been in office since 2001.
"You've been here for nineteen years?" Emmit asked Roy, unable to comprehend the thought of anyone spending two decades in this hellish place. He had been here for a matter of hours and it had already felt like an eternity, and he was certain that once he remembered everything that had been wiped from his brain, the need to get back to normalcy would be agonizing. "Do you know about 9/11? Or COVID-19?"
"COVID-19?" The handsome black man asked, looking confused. "Is that some kind of a weapon?"
"It's a gang, dumbass," said Poke, and for the first time Emmit got a chance to really look at the trashy little man. He was sickly skinny, almost skinny enough to resemble one of the zombies milling around outside. He had no gouges in his cheek, but he did have a plethora of tattoos that he could only have gotten in prison: a badly drawn marijuana leaf under his right eye, the word TWEAKER in sloppy cursive under his left. Tattooed over his Adam's apple was what looked like a grinning demon's face, but most of the ink hadn't held and instead it resembled a moldy apple. The rest of his scarecrow body was hidden beneath his clothes, but Emmit assumed the rest of him was covered in bad ink as well. He stared back at Emmit with a predatory smile that made him immediately uncomfortable. Emmit looked forward to popping his inflated ego.
"Actually, it's a virus," he said, somehow keeping a straight face as Poke's morphed into expressions of shock, as if stunned that he, of all people, could ever be wrong. "Before I got here it had killed nearly 200,000 people, and lots of places are..."
"Damn," Roy said as Emmit trailed off, "That's some heavy shit."
"God in heaven," Handsome black man said, crossing himself with his fingers and lowering his eyes.
"A lot of places are what?" Came the voice of a young kid, incredibly young. Emmit didn't bother to look at him; he was lost, deep in the fractures and crevices of his own barren mind. He had been able to recall the COVID-19 outbreak with no effort at all; why the hell was everything else still a blank? His brain now felt more like a big black grab bag of random junk, rather than the wall of locked gears he had envisioned before. If he tried, reaching deep and concentrating with the help of a keyword or two, he could pull random thoughts and memories out of the murk. He was digging deep now, thinking of the virus and how it could possibly have been connected to him. He stared at a single whirl of wood grain on the floor as he thought, tracing the pattern with his eyes. Somehow, the virus was linked to the crime that had apparently landed him here.
"A lot of places are what, man?" The kid demanded again, clapping his hands briskly.
"Let him fucking think for a minute, Pup," snarled Roy. "We're not gonna learn anything if you keep running your cocksucker."
Emmit's chest tightened as a swift and brutal panic attack tore through him like a giant clawed hand. He clenched his eyes tight and panted as he brought his hands to his face and covered it, as if trying to shield himself from the memories that were suddenly pouring into his brain like a firehose spraying acid. It felt like he was being raped by his own mind.
Images flashed like lightning in a late-night thunderstorm. He saw himself slumped on a sagging and battered couch, wearing nothing but thin boxer shorts. Rain pattered against the window of his living room, which was cracked and crudely taped together with yellowing duct tape. Thunder growled outside, startling him each time it followed a lightning strike and vibrated the apartment building he called home.
In one hand he saw a mostly drained bottle of Atomic Red, and in his memories he could smell it, could feel it burning his nostrils and throat with powerful cinnamon. Clenched in his other hand, pulled into a shaking fist, was a hand-written letter from his landlord. He could see the sloppy handwriting, the misspellings, the coffee stains on the paper.
EMMIT—
YOUR NOT GETTING ANY MORE FAVORS FROM ME. YOU ARE THREE MONTHS LATE ON RENT. I HAVE GIVEN YOU MORE EXTENSHONS THAN ANY OTHER TENNENT AND IT HAS TO STOP. PAY IN FULL BY THE FIRST OF THE MONTH OR I WILL BEGIN EVICTION PRECEEDINGS. CASH ONLY PLEASE.
—BILL H, SUPER
Emmit thrashed his head from side to side like a boxer who had just taken a solid punch right on the button.
"Most places were closed down," he said distantly, "it was too dangerous to leave them open. Movie theaters, tattoo shops, gyms, restaurants. Places where people gather. They closed them down, and because of that, I lost my job. I was behind on rent, way behind, and I was about to lose my apartment too."
"Ah," Roy said, stroking his beard and nodding knowledgeably. "That explains the bank robbery."
"A crime, but not a malicious one," said the handsome black man. "You weren’t selling heroin needles to wayward kids, nothing like that."
"Fuck off," growled Poke, his inked face drawn in with scorn. "I
