At 3AM someone grabbed his T shirt sleeve. He was walking past an alley; overhead a sign with Garfield promising whores. Massage massage. She looked like his ex’s junior high school portrait. The one that got away. How old are you, he said.
Nineteen.
I can’t.
If you don’t like you get massage from my sister.
Behind her the sister leaned on a dumpster, made up in raccoon eyes. She was his ex’s fifth grade portrait. Her hips hadn’t come in. She pouted, licked her lips.
Nineteen huh? You have family?
Yes, she said, one baby. You want to see? She pulled out her phone. The boy was half white. Had his eyes.
Who takes care of him?
My father, but he is alcoholic.
And your mother?
She has mentally ill. You want massage, 500.
I can’t honey, he said. I gotta go.
Wait, she said. You have both, 800. He paused. Down the street monsoon clouds miles high. Something black flapped across the moon.
Festival of Savings
He dreamed he was walking. Looked down and his hands were holding papers. Folders of mistakes he’d made. It was the day of his annual review. In one or more areas he had not been Very Satisfactory. He woke up thinking he was late. Then remembered. There had been a nuclear holocaust.
Thank God, he thought.
Then felt bad. Millions dead. Millions more burned. Irradiated. Trapped even now, lungs half crushed choking on smoke. Pinned in flaming rubble. Can’t even scream, and if they did– who would come.
Still. It felt like a snow day.
They were in the car. The front seats of the 1979 Mercedes 300SD reclined fully. If you removed the headrests they lined up with the back seats. Formed beds. The Germans thought of everything. Marcy asleep on the passenger side. Really she ought to have taken the seat with the steering wheel, at five foot five. But she’d had a rough day. Sex roles persist.
They hadn’t made it far. Trees in the roads. Phone poles but no live wires. He dropped a stop sign across two downed cables to see if it would spark. No light, no cracking sound. Just shrieking black winds, car alarms slowly drowning into dead battery moans. It rained. This is good, he told her. Less fallout. He had no idea if it was true. When the sun seemed to go down behind staticky black clouds the headlights picked out shapes like huge dark demons running. Outside the car you couldn’t see your hands in front of you. They pulled over in a lean-to formed by a collapsed billboard. It said your partner might be lying about HIV.
The sun was rising now. He reached back, pulled an Activia from the tote bag in the back seat. Strawberry banana. Realized he’d forgotten utensils. Peeled back the top and raised the 8 oz. cup to drink it. But the product was made to hold its shape pleasingly in a spoon. The yogurt flopped out around his mouth in a gelid hunk. Ran chilly down his neck. Billions of probiotic organisms died in open air. Marcy moved. She turned toward him. Black dust smears around her nostrils, mouth and eyes. Where are we, she said.
We’re still in Sherman Oaks.
Why am I in a car with you.
We’re the only two who lived. There was a bomb.
That’s right– you wanted this–
I didn’t. I didn’t do it.
But you wanted to.
I don’t know anything Marcy. I don’t even know if it was the same people. I shouldn’t have said anything–
You killed everybody!
I fucking TOLD YOU I didn’t go through with it. If you don’t believe me, you can get out of the car and you can FUCKING DIE too.
When he yelled she got scared. That too felt good for a second.
Why, she said…
I–
Why do you have pink stuff on your face.
It’s Activia.
… are you trying to shit?
No, it’s… it was the only food in the office.
You didn’t take the broccoli?
I didn’t.
We need to get food, she said. We need to find people.
The Safeway shared a parking lot with a Pet Smart and a Chinese massage spa where he’d once tried to get a handjob on his lunch break. The woman was 50, pink terrycloth track suit with silver letters across the ass spelling JUICY. Police come, she explained. Massage only. He looked it up after. Three sheriff’s deputies had been masturbated. Their masseurs deported. District Attorney Takes Down Human Trafficking Ring. She ran for senate. The election would have been next week.
They were parked on a hill. He’d insisted they look first. He had binoculars in the trunk, next to his paperback of Birds of Los Angeles. On the back cover a Western scrub jay and Bullock’s oriole perched together by the Hollywood sign. Below, the Safeway was smoke black, glass blown in but largely intact. And in the parking lot, among the ash-streaked cars: people. Living people. Maybe 20, 30. A big white sheet with a red cross crudely painted on hung in front of the corral of pumpkins. Some stood guard. Others waited in line at a jagged hole that had been the Safeway door. A group went in, three at a time.
You were right, he said. I didn’t think it would be like this. He held out the binoculars so she could see. I’m still not gonna stay here, he said. I’ll drop you off. He couldn’t keep a hitch out of his voice. Like he was fourteen. For a long moment she looked.
Something’s wrong, she said.
What.
Why is it only men.
It’s not.
Look. She handed back the binoculars.
She was right. Women and children in line but only men at the door. Men by the ersatz first aid tent. Men keeping the line orderly. Maybe we’re back to gender roles, he said. Maybe the women are safer inside.
It’s not like that, she said.
Well we need food, he said. There’s medicine. I’ll take a gun. I’ll go down around the back and look. If it’s OK I’ll come out front and wave. I’m going to leave you the keys. If I don’t come back, take the car.
He waited for her to say no, I’m coming with you. There weren’t even crickets.
No one was guarding the back of the Safeway. He was able to hoist himself up on the concrete loading dock. Duck through a half open rolling steel door. Collapsed pallets of Lucky Charms scattering blue moons, purple horseshoes in the darkness. .45 tucked in back of his pants, as seen on TV. Past half charred towers of Angel Soft Family Paks double doors led into the retail space. A man was yelling inside. Echoing in the quiet without electrical hum. He held his breath and put his eye to the door crack.
He saw a giant naked man in a hockey mask. Back hair coated with sweat, rank even over the smell of the meat. In front of him on a waist high display of pumpkin pie filling cans a young girl bent over, naked and sobbing. The floor tiles slick and red. Ten men in a circle stood guard with machetes, axes, Bushmaster AR-15’s, cackling. Heads and limbs of men, boys and old women hacked up and kicked into piles at the feet of shelves still half stocked with bags of Fun Size Snickers bars. Kneeling by the guards were the young girls who’d lived. Some weeping, others with dead empty eyes. A dark eyed man stroked a girl’s cheek with a spiny king crab leg.
The fat man pumped at the girl furiously. It had been his voice through the doors. He bellowed LIVIN’ THE DREAM, BABY! Looked around for approval. In the mask his blue eye caught the door crack. Stopped.
He ran backwards. Slipped on scattered Lucky Charms. Hit his arm hard on the polished concrete but pulled the pistol out as he staggered back up. The doors thundered open and the naked fat man stood laughing, his cock quivering and blood red. The gun wouldn’t go off. Just like in his dreams. The safety was on. The others’ eyes on him now. Some raising rifles. He scrambled back under the cargo door, hit the asphalt hard with his knees and palms, sprinted what felt like miles to the back of the Pet Smart with the wind howling. The fire exit hung open and he ducked in and slammed the door shut and waited.