“I’d read it,” Taylor said. And then: “You’ll be okay, Terry. I know it.”
Terry was quiet for a little while, staring out over the city.
“And you, Taylor?” he finally asked, turning back toward her. “You’re strong, but I don’t think strong matters much anymore. Are you going to be okay? Can I convince you to come with me to Olympia?” After a moment, he gestured toward me. “And Dean, too, of course. If that’s what it takes, if that’s what you want.”
“You know I can’t do that. I can’t leave them.” “Them”—her parents.
“Yeah,” Terry said. “I know. You are your own woman. And when your mind is set, your mind is set.”
Taylor laughed. “Yeah, that tautology … you’re starting to sound like Mickey there. Maybe it is time for you to go.”
“Yeah,” Terry said, with a shrug. “Fuck, yeah.”
Then he gestured toward the charcoal grill standing next to his tent and the curl of smoke stretching up into the dark sky. “While you’re here, you might as well stay for dinner, though. Right?” He offered a weary smile. “It seems I’ve got more food in the city than I’ve got time, and I don’t want it going to waste.”
Taylor took me up into the tower while Terry cooked dinner.
When we reached the eighth floor, she gestured to an empty doorway across from the stairwell. “This was my room,” she said. “After my parents … well, after my mom kicked me out, Weasel took me to Terry and Terry put me up here.”
It was a boring room: maroon hotel carpeting, heavy drapes pulled away from a dirty window, nightstand, chest of drawers with an empty TV nook. The bed was a single stripped mattress hanging half off its frame. I inhaled deeply. Underneath a musty layer of abandonment, the room smelled faintly like Taylor.
“I wasn’t in a very good state,” she said. She moved about the room absently. After making a complete circuit, she approached the bed and nudged the mattress back into place atop its box spring. “Weasel found me in the park, camped out on the steps. I couldn’t leave the city—I just couldn’t—and I didn’t know where else to go.”
“It’s good to have friends,” I said. I crossed the room and looked out the window. The window faced the neighboring building, and four floors down, I could see Terry standing at the grill in his rooftop camp.
“Yeah, it was.”
I turned and looked back at her. She was sitting on the edge of her bed now, staring blankly at the wall. “He used to hold meetings,” she said. Her face lit up at the memory, a smile surfacing on her lips. “A couple of times, in the first weeks, he held them down in the hotel ballroom, just off the lobby.” She pointed down at the carpeting, toward a room eight floors beneath our feet. “It’s a big room, down there, and there were a lot of people back then—this was back when everybody still thought they needed a community in order to survive, in order to buck the government—and Terry refused to yell. He’d stand on stage in this huge room, in front of a sea of people, and he’d talk in his normal conversational voice. And I swear, everyone held their breath, trying desperately to hear what he had to say. He set up committees and scavenging groups, put people in charge of research—figuring out electricity, how to grow food, how to communicate and get supplies in from the outside world. He was magnificent back then. He was a complete government packed into a single body.” She sighed, and her smile dimmed. “It’s hard to believe that that was just a month ago.”
I looked down at Terry. He was just a lonely old man down there, standing in front of his grill, flipping burgers.
“Maybe that’s our attention span now,” she said. “Maybe that’s civilization, sped up to its natural end. Entropy. Apathy. And he’s gone now. He’s leaving.”
I didn’t know what to say. I stood at the window and watched her face move from emotion to emotion, from wry amusement to melancholy sadness. And then, whispering, she continued: “What happens, Dean, when the people you’re close to don’t want to be close to you anymore? What happens to me in this world?”
“You go on,” I said. I moved closer, tentative at first but gaining confidence as I sat down at her side. She didn’t cringe or move away. I got the feeling that she needed me right then, needed me at her side. “Besides, you’ve got me. And the people you’re losing … you aren’t really losing them. Your mom still loves you, and Terry— it’s obvious he still cares. It’s just, things come between us—that’s how it happens. People move along their own trajectories. Terry’s got places he needs to be, and your mother … she just wants to protect you.” I didn’t mention her father. He was gone now—I was sure of that—and there was absolutely no way I could put a gloss on that horror.
She shook her head. The violent motion dislodged tears from her cheeks, and I watched one hit the mattress next to her leg. Then she looked at me, and a gentle smile surfaced on her lips. “Like I said, Dean, there’s something wrong with you. Something deeply and truly wrong.” But the way she said it, it was gentle and warm.
She reached out and rested her hand on my leg. It was only a brief moment of contact, but it filled me with confidence. It felt like I was doing my job here. I was lifting some of her burden, and that made me happy.
I nodded toward the window, indicating Terry down below. “The food should be ready by now.”
Taylor nodded and wiped the tears from her cheeks. Then she started a last circuit around the room, idly trailing her fingers along the hotel walls. Her expression was distant as she moved slowly through memory.
When she reached the chest of drawers under the empty TV nook, she idly pulled open the top drawer and her breath hitched in surprise. She stood still for a moment, transfixed by whatever she’d found inside.
“What is it?” I asked. And, after a moment of silence: “Taylor?”
She shook her head. I stood up and moved to her side, but her hand quickly darted into the drawer, pulling back whatever it was before I could get a good look. It looked like a piece of paper, but she quickly turned away, blocking it from view. Her hand disappeared into her pocket, and when she turned back, the piece of paper was gone. Her face was set, secretive and angry.
“What is it?” I repeated.
“It’s mine,” she said gruffly. “It’s mine.”
Then she shouldered me aside and headed toward the door.
Dinner was good. Terry served us hamburgers—fresh meat on home-baked bread, crisp lettuce, and fragrant cheese—and a selection of grilled vegetables, including squash, zucchini, carrots, and tiny potatoes. I don’t know if he grew the vegetables himself or if he’d found them somewhere in the city. Despite his plans, despite his book, I hadn’t seen any crops growing up here in the Homestead. Maybe he got them from Mama Cass.
Before we ate, he produced bottles of microbrew beer from an ice-filled cooler and toasted the city mockingly. “To this pile of crap at the end of the world,” he said, “and to my well-deserved escape.” But his tone wasn’t joyous.
Taylor seemed distant throughout dinner. When she wasn’t working at her food, she kept her jaw clenched, and she looked angry. It was frustrating. Up in the tower, I’d managed to help her drop one of her burdens, I think. But in that drawer she’d picked up another.
And this one seemed heavier, something she didn’t want to share.
She hugged Terry for a long time before we parted. There were no tears, but I heard her voice crack as she said good-bye. Terry gave her a nod and a smile, and then we left.
When we reached the stairwell, I cast a glance back over my shoulder. Terry was standing in the middle of the roof, once again staring up at the overcast sky.
That was the last I saw of him.
Taylor didn’t look back.
We found a new poem on the way home. Taylor wasn’t speaking to me then. Once again, a distance had formed between us, a gulf as wide as the city. And she was standing alone on the other shore.
It was frustrating.
One step forward, twelve steps back.
The poem was on Riverside Avenue, painted on the side wall of an apartment building. There was a basketball hoop bolted next to the ten-foot-tall block of text, and a half-court boundary filled the space between the buildings. The poem was drawn in bright red paint—shiny acrylic—and it couldn’t have been more than an hour old. The paint was still wet and dripping, and the smell of aerosol still hung in the air.
