I shrug.
She hops down and approaches me with a hint of caution. “You okay?”
I consider offering some explanation—just taking a piss—but I shrug and continue walking. She walks with me.
We have a couple hours before nightfall, but the rocks and wiry brush are starting to cast long shadows. I try to imagine being alone out here at night, submerged in that viscous blackness… Would the ground even hold me? Would I fall through into some indeterminate abyss?
“R,” Julie says, “can I talk about Perry for a minute?”
My wandering thoughts screech to a halt. Of all the subjects I thought might come up tonight, that wasn’t one of them.
“Not about…you and him,” she adds quickly. “About me and him.”
I’m confused and more than a little apprehensive, but I shrug. “Okay…”
She watches the cracked pavement scroll past her feet for a moment. “It was hard, dating him. Really hard.” Her hands are stuffed in her pockets and her bare arms are pressed against her sides. She looks cold, and I wonder if the furnace blast from the west is only in my head. “He’d been through a lot and he…had a lot of baggage. No more than me, but two messes don’t cancel each other out, you know? They just make a bigger mess.”
I glance back at the RV. It has shrunk to the size of a van, but I’m not seeing any holes in reality yet. I keep walking.
“Even when it was good, even when we were really in love, we fought all the time. He found so many things to get angry about, so many triggers and insecurities, and he brought mine out, too…” She shakes her head. “It was hell. Like one of those Bosch paintings, just a big, smashed-together mess of demons.” She weaves her fingers into a twisted knot to illustrate this, and the half-healed stump of her ring finger lends authentic horror to the image. She’s giving an accurate summary of what I’ve seen in Perry’s memories…but where could she be going with it?
“So when I met you…” Her face loosens and lightens and she takes in a deep breath. “You were like a wide open field. A Monet. No baggage, no history, no collection of neuroses, you were just this…presence. I could sit and talk to you for hours and unpack everything I’d been holding in, and you were just there, solid and simple. Once I was sure you weren’t going to eat me, anyway.” She tries to crack a smile but it falters into a grimace. “I liked that you were blank. I didn’t have to think about who you were or what you wanted, your ideas or your qualities. All that mattered was how you made me feel, and you made me feel safe. You loved me, you were there for me, and that was it.”
My pace has been slowing as she talks, my brows lowering, and now she stops and grabs my shoulder with one hand, staring me in the eyes. “I’m telling you that as a confession, okay? It was a fucked up way to look at a person—like you weren’t a person. Like you were comfortable furniture. But that’s what I thought I needed then.”
“And now?”
“Now I need a person. And…now that’s what you are.”
I hadn’t realized I was clenching for a blow until I feel myself relaxing.
“I want to meet you,” she says, looking up at me with round eyes that are starting to glisten. “I do. But I’m scared you’ll be a stranger.”
I stand still for a moment. I’m scared too, but the relief of this sudden openness is softening the fear, neutralizing the acid in my stomach like a wash of cold milk. “How can I make it easier? How should I…introduce myself?”
She looks at the ground for a moment, then back up to me. “Slowly.” She takes my hands and holds them in front of her. “Ease me into it.”
She releases my hands and steps off the road. We stroll into the desert, our boots kicking up puffs of dust from the baked earth.
“Ask me something,” I suggest.
She thinks for a few paces. “I want to ask what your name was…”
“Not that.”
“…but I’m not going to,” she continues, “because it’d be weird to just suddenly know that, after all this time. It’d be confusing. And kind of…sad?”
I nod, relieved that she understands. “My name is R.”
“Okay. So…” She eyes me up and down as we walk. “How old are you, R?”
I consider this. Scanning my fragmented past, I’m not even sure I know the answer. And does she mean how long have I existed, or how long have I lived? Do I count the seven or eight years I spent in the coma of the plague? Am I the actual age of my body, or is it my mind that defines me?
I clear my throat. “How about…yes or no questions.”
She laughs. “Okay, sure. Make it fun. Are you…under twenty-five?”
“No.”
“Over thirty-five?”
I pause to do some blurry math. “Probably not.”
“Okay. I can live with that range.” She hesitates. “Married?”
“No.”
She nods. “Girlfriend?”
“You mean…ever?”
“When you died. Did you have someone? Did you leave someone behind?”
I hesitate, then shake my head. “No.”
She releases a breath. “Okay. That would’ve been tough.”
She doesn’t need to hear about Rosa today. She doesn’t need to hear that one of Axiom’s glorified prostitutes was the closest I ever got to “having someone,” or that I watched her die in a forest while she cursed me with her last breath. No, that wouldn’t be “easing her into it.” That wouldn’t be “making it fun.”
Julie punts a dirt clod and it spins off into the desert. “Okay, let’s just get this one out of the way so I don’t have to keep wondering…are you a virg—”
“No.”
She looks at me with raised eyebrows. “Wow. Didn’t have to think about that one. Are you, like…very not a virgin?”
I grit my teeth in a cringing grin. “Yes?”
Her brows rise further. “How many?”
“Yes or no questions.”
“More than fifty?”
“I don’t remember the number.”
“But more than fifty.”
“Well…probably.”
“Wow.” She nods, jutting her lower lip. “You’re full of surprises, Mr. Zombie.”
I wince at this understatement. If something as benign as my sex life shocks her, what will the rest of my history do? Maybe we should stop. Maybe it’s too soon, too fast, she said “slowly” and I sense us gaining speed, maybe we should—
“Did you work for Axiom?”
I have a flash of panic, but there’s a surprising lack of accusation in her tone.
“I mean you obviously did. That’s no secret. So did Abram and Marcus, so did a lot of people. Who cares?” She’s not looking at me as she says all this, but now she glances sideways, grimacing with dread. “But you weren’t…one of those ‘pitchmen’ were you?”
“No.” An easy one. There were no such creatures in my day. Although was the creature I was any less loathsome?
“Okay,” she says, “I’m starting to get a picture here. Hotshot young Axiom employee, living large, fucking all the bitches…but secretly guilty and tormented, right?”
I nod.
“Yeah,” she agrees. “If you weren’t tormented, then you really are a stranger to me.”
“Very tormented.”
I glance behind us. The RV has shrunk to the size of a small car, and the sun is about to slip behind the mountains. Now would be a good time to turn back, before we drift any further into the encroaching shadows. I open my mouth to suggest this, but Julie is still digging.