Eventually we got thirsty and stopped at a convenience store. The parking lot was crowded with people cursing and crying and looking up at the sky. A couple of unfriendly-looking dudes in Dallas Cowboys jerseys gawked at Keri as we walked by, and without my firearm I felt naked. Normally I conceal-carry, but I came to Dallas on a plane and I was too lazy to pack my piece the right way. Boy, did I regret that.
Before we went into the store, I told Keri to locate her bill of smallest denomination and hide the rest. She was carrying two grand of Jimmy’s money, in hundreds, but luckily found a couple of twenties in her roll. We were fortunate to have cash because the guy who ran the place was taking nothing else as payment. When she bent over the counter to pay for the water, I imagined what the two of us might do while we waited for the power to come back on.
Keri’s apartment was more like a loft, and from the outside it looked surprisingly upscale. Later I discovered she’d been making around three grand a week at Cinnamon. So you can understand my surprise when, as we walked in the front door, she stumbled over a stack of pizza boxes and nearly went sprawling across the floor. None of the window shades were open, and the only visible light was a bright rectangle thrown by the open door, but even so I could see dirty dishes and clutter everywhere.
“Did you throw a party?”
Keri thought I was joking and punched me on the arm.
“Oh, you,” she said, and kicked aside an empty PBR case that was blocking the way to the kitchen.
While she stumbled around, opening window blinds, throwing more light into a living room where war had seemingly been waged, the lust that been building inside me winked out like a match tossed into the toilet. If this was how Keri kept her house, what did that say about her personal hygiene?
Eventually she stumbled into her kitchen, which might have been home to entire bacterial civilizations, and found an enormous bottle of lemon-flavored vodka.
“I don’t want to think about what’s happening,” she said, her eyes wild and frightened. “Not yet, anyways. Let’s take a couple of shots and go upstairs.”
I know what you’re thinking: Why weren’t we trying to find out what had happened? How could we be so cavalier about a possible military attack or worse? Liberal elites might call our behavior a lack of intellectual curiosity, but the way I look at it, even though it was an awful situation, it was also out of our control. No one knew what was happening.
I swallowed a couple of ounces of vodka and followed her upstairs. As I watched her magical ass, eye level in front of me, I imagined a queen bed with a pink comforter, Keri bent over, tennis skirt yanked down past her thighs. Instead, at the top of the stairs, disorder was so profound I cried out in surprise.
“I know,” she said. “I need to straighten up. You don’t have to make a thing of it.”
Even now I’m not sure I can trust my memory of her bedroom. The only area of the floor not covered in clothes or junk was a path that connected the stairs to the bed and the bed to the bathroom. Every other square inch of carpet, every available surface in the room, in fact, was buried under an avalanche of discarded shirts and pants and jackets and bras that averaged something like twenty inches in depth. The only explanation for this mess was she never bothered to do laundry, that she wore each item one time and then cast it aside like trash.
When she led me to the bed, ready to turn my pornographic dreams into reality, I resisted.
“I still feel like shit,” I explained. “Maybe we should bring that vodka upstairs.”
“Good idea. Be right back.”
While she was gone I closed my eyes and pretended I was back at Cinnamon, which had looked pristine compared to this. Then Keri returned with the vodka and a handful of what looked like dead weeds.
“Let’s eat some of these, too,” she said. “I want to stop thinking about the world out there for a little while, don’t you?”
See what I mean? It’s not like we weren’t aware. We just didn’t care to worry.
“What are these? Mushrooms?”
“Yes, and they’re awesome. What do you say?”
“Sounds great,” I said, and washed down half a handful with more of the lemon vodka.
“You sound great,” Keri said and pulled me to the bed.
Later we drifted downstairs, our blood riding high on vodka and psilocybin, and I began to see the clutter of Keri’s loft as representative of a larger, more acute disorder of the world at large. We made our way outside and marveled at the new star, twinkling even in the light of the day. We lay in the front grass and watched the setting sun turn the sky violent with color. I was fairly sure I could hear smoke floating above us, billions of collisions between water and gas molecules producing a terrible, high-pitched screech that rattled my teeth.
“I’m not so sure this is a war,” Keri said.
“Me either. You think there would be troops or planes or something.”
“Maybe it’s aliens,” said Keri in an ominous and musical voice.
But I wasn’t sure about aliens, either. Instead, I was starting to wonder if it was God who had turned off the power and killed all the cars. Maybe He was trying to flush us down the toilet like He did in the days of Noah.
“I’m hungry,” Keri said. “Let’s go get something to eat.”
“What’s nearby?”
“Down the road there’s a KFC and a Whataburger and some restaurant. Saltgrass, I think?”
By now I know these restaurants are a quick walk of less than ten minutes from Keri’s loft, but that evening we seemed to wander toward them for hours. I kept expecting to see squares of light and color, KFC red, Whataburger orange, even though cognitively I knew the electricity was out. People were on the sidewalks and in the roads and a few of them spoke to us, but I don’t remember what they said. The smell of smoke was powerful. I felt like I was on the set of a post-apocalyptic movie filming the scene where survivors mill about with no clear understanding of what has happened or what’s coming next. Everyone seemed to be waiting to be told what to do.
Eventually we reached the intersection where the restaurants stood. The door to the Whataburger had been propped open and a line of people stretched around the building. There was no line at the adjacent KFC, so that’s the direction we headed. It never occurred to us to wonder why there was a giant line at one restaurant and not the other, at least not until someone waiting for a Whataburger called to us.
“Where the hell you going, man? Ain’t no chicken at KFC.”
“How do you know that?” I asked, stepping protectively in front of Keri.
“Look at the place, homey.”
I looked again and noticed the front door of KFC was not propped open. It was missing altogether.
“What happened?”
“The manager was a dick. He wouldn’t serve nobody and people didn’t like it. I heard someone shot him.”
“Shot him?” asked Keri. She threaded her arm through mine and pulled me close.
“That’s what I heard. Then some dudes stormed the place and took all the food. But turned out it was frozen.”
“They took a bunch of frozen chicken?” I said. This seemed unlikely, but then again the door to KFC was definitely not present. And no one was waiting in line.
“What about Whataburger?” I asked.
“They say he’s giving it away. The manager. Cooking all the frozen food on a propane grill. But as you can see the line ain’t moving so fast.”
I looked across the street at Saltgrass, where a shorter line snaked out the door and into the parking lot.
“Why aren’t you waiting over there?”
“Gotta have cash over there. I ain’t got no cash. Who carries cash anymore?”