Even if I wasn’t afraid to die, starvation seemed like a pointless way to go about it.
I climbed to my feet and found my way upstairs, twice nearly tripping over junk on the floor. But eventually I located the bed, and the adjacent night stand, where the bottle of lemon vodka stood. I took a generous pull and sat down with my head in my hands.
When I finally looked up again, I noticed something strange—an orange glow that seemed to be hovering in front of my face. At first I thought it was a mirage, or maybe a dream, but when I turned around I could see the same orange through the window behind me. I’d been looking at a mirror.
From the vantage point of the second floor, it was clear the horizon was on fire. The idea that an American city in the 21st century might be devoured by an inferno opened a hole inside me that threated to swallow my physical hunger. The only way I could see to fill this emptiness was pour vodka into it, and with each swallow the world swam further away from me. It had been a mistake to visit the H-E-B. I should never have listened to that high school nerd explain why everything was broken, why the store shelves would never be restocked. What did he know? A country of 330 million people did not survive on a one-day food supply. There had to be more somewhere, if only—
And that’s when it occurred to me: the idea that reshaped the trajectory of my life (and this story) forever.
The next morning, Keri and I went looking for Jimmy Jameson.
NINE
I awoke to the sounds of searching, a frantic rattling like someone shaking a bottle of pills. The room was bright and pink with color, the slopes of laundry piles thrown into relief by sunrise. Keri was in the bathroom, kneeling on the floor, her head pushed into the cabinets below the sink. “What are you doing?”
She didn’t respond or appear to hear me.
“Keri?”
“Fuck,” she replied. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!”
She stood up, not bothering to close the cabinet, and marched in my direction. Grabbed her weed pipe from the nightstand and took a long, powerful hit. Her eyes closed and she held the smoke in for so long I thought she had swallowed it. Her hands were shaking noticeably.
“What’s wrong?”
She looked at me with narrow eyes. This was not the same woman who yesterday morning had brought me a joint and a Bloody Mary.
“I’m hungry. I see you had dinner without me.”
She glanced down at the vodka. It was a large bottle, but I had put a serious dent in it the night before.
“And you drank my booze.”
“I ate one chicken nugget and a few pieces of edamame,” I said, which wasn’t exactly the truth but close enough for this conversation. “Then I felt so guilty I put them back in the freezer.”
“You should have eaten them. They’re totally gross now. And how did you like the habanero peppers?”
No wonder my mouth had gone into nuclear meltdown.
“You couldn’t even get the lid back on the bottle. Did you eat them straight?”
When I chuckled at my ignorance, Keri cracked a tiny smile.
“So what are we going to do?” she asked. “My stomach feels like it’s digesting itself.”
“Do you not have family nearby? Someone who might have food?”
“My mom moved to Waco with some asshole. Which might as well be California since we have to walk.”
“Well,” I said. “Then we’ll have to see what else we can find.”
“Why would there be anything today if there wasn’t yesterday?”
“Probably there won’t. But I have a plan.”
“And what is that?”
“Do you know how to get to Jimmy’s place?”
She thought for a moment, her eyes looking out the window.
“I think so. I’ve been over there a few times to swim. But why would we walk so far?”
When I explained my idea, Keri’s face brightened, as if it had been covered by rain clouds that were now melting away. Still, her hands shook so noticeably that she stuffed them into her pockets.
“You think he’ll go along with it?” she asked me.
“I don’t know why not. He’s going to starve like the rest of us if he doesn’t do something.”
“Well, shit,” she said. “Let’s go!”
The streets were less crowded than the day before. We saw a woman walking a tiny dog, a bearded guy rollerblading, some dude in a blue jumpsuit looking through garbage cans. The sky was partly smoky and even at ground level there floated a fine haze that, if not for the acrid smell, could have been mistaken for fog. The roads looked like they had been staged for a science fiction film, cars frozen in place as if time had been intentionally stopped. Keri was a slow walker and puffed on a joint as we crept along. I took a couple of hits myself to dilute the passage of time.
We brought the dwindling bottle of vodka with us, loaded into a plastic Walmart bag along with the pasta and the graham cracker crumbs. My hunger was desperate, alive, a parasite eating me from the inside.
I’m young enough to have come of age when the Internet had already changed the world. I researched college projects on Yahoo! and followed current events at FoxNews.com. I’ve never subscribed to a newspaper. My first cell phone was a high school graduation gift, a handset in a black bag I carried with me everywhere and charged with the cigarette lighter of my car. Text messaging was an even bigger game-changer, because then I could connect with friends and family without the burden of speaking to them. By the time smartphones arrived I was sending and receiving thousands of these messages a month. I became a chronic email checker and Facebook poster and sometimes I wrote hateful comments on liberal Web sites to piss off those smug bastards. And it’s not like my experience was unique. You were probably the same as me.
So the silence we endured that morning wasn’t simply the absence of sound. It was a profound isolation, a sense of withdrawal not unlike being denied a drug your body had come to depend on. In the most basic sense we understood what had happened to the world, but all the complementary information was missing. How many people were dead? What was being done to restore power? Was anyone in charge?
After we walked a half hour or so, Keri wanted to alter our route.
“I think it’s more that way,” she said, pointing with a trembling hand. “‘Cause when you leave the club you turn right. I think.”
“How can you not know your way around better than this?”
“I feel like shit,” she said. “I’ve only been to his place a couple of times and always at night.”
A couple of times we heard a car engine or engines, the sound floating to us over the tops of houses, distant and surreal. I wanted to believe these engines belonged to military personnel that would eventually deliver news to us, but we never saw the vehicles, so I couldn’t say for sure what they were.
For the first time since the power went out I wondered about my sister. Jessica lives in downtown Kansas City and we hadn’t spoken since my mother passed away, which was a little more than three years ago. Our falling out was a product of my not visiting Mom in the hospital before she died. I’d already stayed a week with her in the ICU, sleeping awkwardly in that little recliner every night, bloated on tepid hospital hamburgers. By the time she went in for a routine checkup three weeks later, I was already back in Houston. So when Jessica called to say Mom was back in the ICU, I complained I couldn’t fly to Kansas City every time she went in for another test. The next day, I was stroking a six-foot putt for birdie when my phone buzzed in my back pocket. I missed the putt, grabbed angrily for the phone, and refused to answer when I saw it was my sister. She called two more times before finally sending a text message, two words only: MOM’S DEAD. At the funeral Jessica wouldn’t look in my direction, despite my attempts at apology, and she communicated the disposition of our mother’s affairs through an attorney.