“Take your blue woman with you,” Mort says snobbishly. He doesn’t enjoy the blue woman’s presence either. Maybe he’s jealous.
“We’ll go with you, Leaf,” Nan says for Nan and Gin — Gin completely overrun by the flaky meat emotions. “I’m kinda getting sick of this place. These people are getting to me.” She looks straight at the walm people in the corner, unashamed of her rude, ugly smirk.
“I’ll go too,” Christian sputters, quiet.
Mort gets all rut-pissy. “Who is going to help me set up the stage and the equipment? I’m not doing it all by myself like the last show.”
Christian sighs. “Vodka will stay and help you.”
“No, he won’t,” Vodka says.
“You’re all a bunch of twats,” Mortician says.
We leave after an hour of drinking small scotch bottles and watching Scooby Dooby Doo — who the blue woman finds extremely fascinating. She seemed to understand how the news show was brought about, because they were real people. But she doesn’t seem to have a clue how animation came about. She doesn’t know about drawings or moving drawings, and she probably thinks they’re real creatures from some strange cartoon world on the other side of the universe. Captivation leaks out of her gluey, wet eyes. Of course, she probably likes Scooby Dooby Doo because she’s only four.
I thought I would’ve been able to leave the blue woman in the warehouse watching the cartoons, but she wouldn’t let me leave without her. Sleek-gloss in her eyes when I tried to lock her in my room, a look that almost made me cry. She sometimes seems emotionless, cold, but has an ability to push emotions into me. Love and regret are two of them. Obviously, she has control over the way I feel. Maybe I like it that way.
I didn’t want her coming with us. I was afraid she would run away or get lost or hurt.
Mortician is already on top of the concert preparations. He wheels around in my vision as a twisting robot worker. Spitting. And he doesn’t respond when we tell him goodbye and head back into the cruel streets of Rippington.
The first thing I notice as I get through the door is the gray blob of sky overhead, storm clouds moving in, vein-puffed and breathing. I walk and enjoy the cool air and the different colored street people. The crowd they make is everywhere. Thick with ugly. But I can enjoy it from the distance.
I just smile and say, “Nice day for a walk.”
Surprisingly, the tower shops are still open. We go there. But they’ve changed the place quite a bit since the beginning of the week. The upper levels now say, “OFF LIMITS,” due to the accidental assassination of the female baboon that was living up there, which means that the high area is vulnerable to scorpion fly attacks. And which means that the burrito stand that was up there no longer exists. The emotion monitor on the neck of my mind tells me that I do feel some sadness from this happening and I pretend that it feels good. “Sadness is better than nothing,” I whisper, and try to believe it.
Nan takes me to Sid’s Apple Barn,a place that looks like a toilet stall and is located up inside the brain-tangle section of the tower shops. It’s kind of a hangout for her almost-friends Liz and Toma and Sid, who owns the Apple Barn. Sid is a good guy, happy all the time; he’s one of the few people I look up to. A strong-headed man, violent like the color purple. He goes by the nickname, Boot Lips, and if you ask him why that’s his nickname he will make up a new reason just for you. His favorite one to say is this: “My skinhead friends always wrestle me when I’m drunk and they like to kick me in the face when I’m on the ground, right in the mouth with their combat boots. The morning after, my lips would get all swollen and purple. So my friends’d call me Boot Lips and think it was funny.”
I’m not sure about a place called Sid’s Apple Barn, but I’m no longer dead set on eating good food. Anything will suffice.
We see Nan, Leaf, and the unnamed blue woman go up to the counter, leaving Gin and Christian to find a table over in the Food Court Seating Area, which used to be called the Emergency Food Court Seating Area. Nobody ever ate or sat there unless the female baboon wasn’t on the rooftop. So with the female baboon permanently gone, the Emergency Food Court Seating Area is just called the Food Court Seating Area. But it’s very badly arranged with autocar seats and wood planks on piles of broken television sets or other useless appliances found in the streets.
The only good thing about the tower shops now is that there are still security guards that make sure that the walm people don’t crowd the place or turn it into their home. Which makes it a refreshing place to go. And they let some of the skinheads hang out, because they’re native Rippingtonians and have the driver’s licenses to prove they are.
Right now, there aren’t many skinheads around, just a small group of them, and one of that group’s members is Sid’s Girlfriend, Aggie, who never liked Nan because she screwed Sid once in ninth grade — long before she met Gin or any of us, and even before she became part of the skinhead crowd. Nan isn’t considered a skinhead anymore, at least not by other skinheads. But she still shaves her head and dresses and acts like one.
We go to Sid so Nan’s old friendship with him can rekindle. Nobody seems to notice that I’m here to order food. I just swirl the counter in my vision for fun, with the blue woman rubbing my elbow and smelling the dirtiness on my skin.
Aggie, coated with dark red paint and piercings like facial hair, leans against Sid’s counter. She curl-bobs her eyes at Nan, then coughs and pretends to be a nice person. She feels threatened by Nan, as always, because Aggie was Sid’s second choice — Nan being the first — way back in the day. Aggie feels even more threatened by my blue woman; Sid can’t help but stare in her direction between sentences. I don’t blame him. A naked woman with rare beauty and turquoise skin is hard to resist.
Nan and Sid and even Aggie spray some words back and forth, mostly about Gin, but my mind wanders and I don’t get to listen to them. I look at Sid’s menu and see that it’s full of apple-based foods with alcohol mixed in. It sounds strange to me that an ex-gutterpunk would open an apple barn, but Sid thinks he needs the money. His parents own an apple grove outside of town and he drives there to get bushels of red-yellow apples for his pies and ciders and casseroles all the time. “It’s the only work I could get,” he claims. And it’s a good business since overpopulation is making food places scarce. In a couple of months, I bet all restaurants and grocery stores will be gone, extinct, and everyone will have to kill themselves and become zombies like Gin so that they won’t need to eat anymore. Or maybe they’ll all get in line at Satan Burger and sell their soul to oblivion. If, that is, Satan Burger doesn’t go out of business before then, from losing its suppliers.
I order the apple-vodka cobbler — not sure how Sid got his hands on the vodka — and some fritters. I pay with some change I found in my second pair of pants, eighty cents away from becoming broke. Then we go to the table that Gin and Christian picked out. It’s a stripped pool table with no legs and chairs from the old high school, but there aren’t enough chairs for the blue woman who sits on my feet. Sid and Aggie come too, with Aggie’s two girlfriends who don’t speak at all and seem to have no soul left, or maybe they’re just goths who find it trendy to act that way.
Nan and Sid continue talking. Then Sid begins talking about what’s happened to the world around us. He still has lots of soul, it seems; he’s not hunched over or anything. It’s funny how he wants to talk about the human situation here. Most people try to ignore it or don’t have enough lifeforce to mind to it.