Then Dahlia laughed and they all started talking at once, Matt petting Xena, Mel cramming the whiskey in the ice chest and pulling out two Fat Tires for her and Rache, who was already complimenting them on their music, she just loved this album, it had such a real sound, you know, like her voice was just uncanny, wasn’t it great and did they know it was all just four-tracks?
Matt said, “Gotta check the grill,” and Mel followed, telling him all about their fridge crapping out. She explained to him the difference between the compressor, the compressor relay, and the overload, and how she hoped it would just turn out to be a bad circuit, but if they had an airflow problem around the condenser it’d mean tearing the whole goddamned thing apart and replacing it. Matt nodded and rubbed his sore lip. Condenser? Compressor? He asked about their plans for Halloween.
“We’re gonna spend the weekend with some friends down in Flag,” Mel said, “one of them big pagan-hippie things for Samhain. Like a naked dancing bonfire kind of deal. Rache loves that shit.”
“You sacrifice a goat?”
“Naw, man, vegetarian. Sacrifice a huge block of tofu.”
“Gotcha. Seitan worship.”
“Audible groan. You guys got plans?”
“You know, what if we just stayed home and handed out candy this year? Somebody has to, right? I feel too old to dress up, anyway. They say twenty-seven’s the new thirty-five.”
“Don’t stop believin’, bro. I think you’d make a great Bush. Hey Rache,” Mel shouted over to the picnic table, “wouldn’t Matt make a great Bush?”
“A what?” Rachel peered back, confused.
“Bush. Wouldn’t he make a great Bush?”
“You mean like a vagina?”
“No, like the president and shit.”
“He’s very photogenic.”
Mel shot her a thumbs-up and turned back to Matt: “See? Photogenic.”
“So Bush, huh? Not Kerry? You switch teams?”
“Aw, man, fuck that shit. Don’t even get me started. Fucking Democans and Republicrats. This is what democracy looks like, huh? At least Kerry feels bad about his war crimes. Me and Rache, we’ve been talking, man, and if Bush wins again, we’re moving to Canada. I don’t want to be hanging around when they start lining people up for the camps.”
“I’m already worried the school board wants to fire me,” Rachel said, coming over to the grill as Dahlia went inside.
“What?” Matt asked.
“It’s the fucking Mormons,” Mel said. “Fucking homophobic, misogynist bigots.”
“There’s concern about my lifestyle, but they can’t fire me just for that. So I have to be careful.”
“I’m saying sue their Mormon asses for discrimination.”
“I just have to be careful. I can’t say or do anything in class that could be construed as promoting, you know? So I can’t even really talk about Mel. There’ve been some remarks and the administration’s nervous.”
“I’m telling you, man, fucking Canada,” Mel said. “Or at least somewheres away from all these goddamned fundamentalists.”
Dahlia switched on lights room to room, switched them off as she left, checking to make sure everything was at least superficially neat, no condoms in the bathroom wastebasket, no dirty clothes on the floor. She stepped into the bedroom and went to the dresser, opened the small cherrywood box on top, took the weed and pipe, slipped them into the pocket of her skirt. She turned back and looked across the smooth waves of the comforter over their bed, gray in the gray light, thinking of waking tangled with him this morning, or yesterday morning, or any morning, the comfort of his body in the sun, his pleasant familiar funk, all the nights that had become mornings, could she really let that go?
Sure, he’s good, and soft, and comfortable. We’re all comfy where things are, another summer gone, the wars drag on, tomorrow Columbus Day and nothing changes. He still thinks that project’s—what? The future? And so listless lately, like he’s thinking… Wendy? Hardly. He could but he won’t. Anyone could do anything, but he’s too… or if he did, she’d… Imagine: him reaching, drunk—he’d have to be drunk—her snide laugh, his wounded pride, and would I be hurt? By him doing it? Or by her turning him down?
You’re terrible. Don’t be terrible. He’s a good guy. Not strong, but a good guy. Except for the fact you’re drifting in a spin from today to tomorrow, and then what?
She’d have to turn the lights on soon. Something would happen. They’d be here soon and it was important to have a nice party. She put the flowers on a tray to take outside.
“I felt my ears burning,” Dahlia said. “Y’all must’ve been talking about me.”
“Naw, shit. We’re talking about moving to Canada,” Mel said.
“That’s funny. We’ve been talking about moving too,” said Dahlia.
“We’ve been thinking about it,” Matt said.
“There’s no real work for me here.” Dahlia set the tray down and arranged the flowers and tabbouleh on the picnic table, then took the vegetables over to Matt. “Master’s degree in anthropology and I’m pouring coffee at Redrock Bagels, sometimes a week running the river.”
“I’ll get you more days on the river, babe,” Mel said.
“Thanks, sugar, but it’s not that. I had plans.”
“We talked about maybe moving when I finish my project.”
“By then we’ll be collecting social security,” Dahlia said, laughing. “Don’t you think you should start grilling, Matt? Start a little something, anyway.”
Matt frowned, nodding, as the three women turned to each other and he turned to the grill, focusing on the vegetables and blocks of tofu. Had it really been two years out here? And four years them together? It was funny to think of, when magical 2000 had loomed so large for so long. And they didn’t get any Jupiter space acid, no starbaby, but HAL had grown so vast and powerful we thought a time-stamp glitch could destroy civilization. He and Craig had laid in stores of bottled water, cans of beans, stacks and rows of toilet paper, then themed their New Year’s bash Beyond the Millennium! with decorations put together from visions of futures past: fins, chrome, glass tubes, and colored plastic. That night was the third time he and Dahlia had sex. The end of the world came and went.
And what if every decision you made was a mistake? What if computers had been a mistake and college had been a mistake and cyclopiscope.com had been a mistake and now Utah, too? The path had seemed so provisional, yet at the same time somehow fixed—when his parents got divorced and his mom got him a piano, his dad a Commodore 64, what would you expect but that he’d sink into his surrogate parental devices? He wasn’t a recluse. You couldn’t say he was a recluse. He just spent a lot of time on his own, developing an app whose main purpose was, jargon aside, to predict the apocalypse. Yeah, totally fucking rational.
He lashed more marinade on the tofu. Had he started another beer? Started and finished. The sun was down now for real. The steaks, juicy red, sat waiting.
Somebody watching: a lean man at the gate with black hair cut close, face taut and flat, lips compressed in a line like a trick of the fading light. The man stared with eyes so fierce, Matt’s heart hung dry a beat and he stepped back, fumbling his brush and dropping it. Say something.
Then Xena barked and Mel shouted “Wendy!” Matt scanned the ground, found his brush in the grass, bent to grab it, and when he rose again Dahlia was moving across the yard to the gate where Wendy stood with her man in the dusk, now smiling, composed of wholly other stuff. Matt noticed his black t-shirt printed in red—enemy combatant—and the way he held himself apart, like he wasn’t sure how he’d be greeted.