The Last New Year (8 page)

I try a call to
Thwacker
as I
leave Zee's final resting place and start toward the apartment, but a polite
recording tells me that all the switches are currently busy and to try again
later. I hang up with a shrug at nothing. Fair enough.

I guess people are gumming up the works trying to get in
touch with their loved ones: to say goodbye or whatever. And I never really get
functionally reliable service in this neighborhood anyway.

So I keep moving. He's just going to have to deal with me
dropping by unannounced.

I pass a small park. Sitting on a bench facing the street is
a young Hispanic woman listening to a radio. It's an old fashioned transistor
thing, and she has it pressed to her ear. I can faintly hear the hiss of static
underlying whatever she is listening to.

I approach her warily. I'm a little concerned I might
startle her given the situation, but she just glances up at me,
fails
to register any noticeable impression, and goes back
to staring off into the middle distance. Behind her, in the park, I see what
looks to be a person dangling from the end of a rope hung on a tree branch.
This is getting ridiculous, people. Can we just try to be cool about things?

"Is it still happening?" I ask the lady.

She purses her lips, doesn't remove the radio. "All I'm
getting from this thing is Emergency Broadcast shit. But
a
old guy came by earlier and said Greece is
gone." She laughs bitterly.
"
Fuckin
'
Greece.
Who cares about Greece?"

I shrug, "Greeks, I guess."

"I guess."

"Are there any instructions from the Emergency
Broadcast people?" I look around, not knowing why I ask this question as I
can't imagine how it would have any bearing on my situation. This used to be a
nice park. It still is, really, hanging guy notwithstanding. There's a
playground for little kids and a grassy area for people's dogs to shit and for
them to pick it up in plastic bags. There's a great big statue of Abraham
Lincoln with an African slave kneeling at his feet and thanking him up and down
for what Mr. President did for them. I don't know, this statue always struck me
as a little condescending, but I suspect whoever sculpted it meant well. I
generally don't formulate strong opinions on publicly-funded statuary.

"'Stay
calm.'"

"What?" I say. There I go again.

"Now they're saying, 'Stay calm. Stay in your homes. By
leaving your homes you could be exposing yourself to greater danger. Looting
will not be tolerated.'"

"Oh. Okay." I will keep that in mind.

"Also the president just said some stuff about coming
together in a time of tragedy."

For some reason this makes me feel sad all over again. I
say, "Very presidential. Great, thanks."

"Whatever." She ignores me pointedly.

I walk back to the sidewalk, stepping in a small pile of
unbagged
dog shit. I start to get annoyed as I scrape my
shoe on the curb, but then I realize it's a bit late in the game to be getting
worked up over dog shit.

As I leave the park and my taciturn intermediary behind,
it's still eerily quiet in the neighborhood. I imagine most people are actually
paying attention to the broadcasts: remaining inside and presumably staying
calm. Which is good for me, I suppose. I don't really have any desire to deal with
more people today than I have to. It doesn't really make any sense to try to
form any lasting friendships.

And despite my last couple of more or less reasonable
interactions, I remember the screaming guy and his violent end at the hands of
an invisible murderer. Not to mention, I think, suddenly
weirded
out, I didn't see his body when Zee and I made it to the street.

My mind strays to roving bands of apocalyptic cannibals
harvesting bodies for meat, but then I think that worrying about cannibalism
might be a bit premature. It's not been long enough for people to get much more
than mildly
peckish
. Maybe somebody saw the guy and
took him to a hospital or something.

I glance at a street sign: I'm only about a block from
Thwacker's
building. Thinking about the party there last
night reminds me of all the people who have died today already, and how it's
going to be me pretty soon. I strain my compassion circuits, but for some
reason, all those dead people still don't bother me all that much, and I'm
really not scared or anything.

I mean, I guess I'm ok for the most part with being alive,
and it's pretty much all I've ever known, so I'm used to it, but this whole
thing about humanity being wiped out and me with it, it's not really
registering. From what I can tell, it doesn't look like there's going to be
much to stick around for, so who cares? It's not even like I'm going to have to
miss
anybody,
or them me. If there's a place we go
when we die, then everyone I know is going to be there. I kind of miss Zee at
the moment, I guess, but even that won't be for too much longer now. I wonder
if he'll go to a different place since his parents are
Muslim?
Doesn't matter.
Maybe we can visit.

When I was seven my grandmother died; she just sort of
withered to a husk in a hospital until she quit. At the funeral everyone was
all broken up and crying about everything, and I just didn't get what there was
to freak out about. It wasn't just that she was really
really
old and seemed exhausted and checked out the last time few times I saw her. I
mean, I was just a little kid so what did I know? Maybe in there somewhere she
wanted to be alive more than anything.

What I really didn't get was that about 90% of the people at
the funeral were Jesus freaks.
Gramma
was the same
way of course, so as far as these dipshits' religion was concerned she had
Jesus in her heart and was having the time of her life on the waterslides or
whatever they have in Heaven.

(I distinctly remember calling them "dipshits" in
my head, actually, now that I think about it. I guess I must have just heard
the word from my Dad or something. Everybody was a dipshit for a couple of
months there.)

But these dipshits weren't being happy for
Gramma
in Heaven with Jesus having a gay old eternal time.
They were acting all sad and crying and talking about what a tragedy it was
(even then I knew it wasn't really) instead of what an awesome reconstituted
God-pal she was now.

So I decided right then that deep down they didn't really
believe their own bullshit. They could talk about eternal life and Heaven
forever, but they'd still be scared as crap if they got cancer or AIDS or
whatever.

I turn onto
Thwacker's
block and
glance up out of my
Gramma's
funeral.

The building is on fire.

Son of a bitch.

It's a big, two-story house, renovated into a trio of
apartments.
A really nice place, if a little creaky and
drafty in the winter.
It's also surprisingly roomy, which is why it's
where the parties always happen. And none of the neighbors seem to mind a bunch
of people stomping around drunkenly and belly-flopping across the hallway
floors. I was always a little jealous. My apartment building has all the charm
and personality of a small pile of talcum powder on a sheet of loose-leaf
notebook paper.

Only now I see one of the major disadvantages of living in a
big rickety wooden house: it's the threat of a big, hot, energetically
crackling thing that rhymes with "
flire
"
and is currently devouring most of the second floor.

Wait, I realize. I need to be in there. My coffee cup is in
there! With her address on it! My paper coffee cup! Fire eats paper!

I have to... I have to...

What the fuck
am
I supposed to do?

I'm abruptly in full-on panic mode, adrenaline bubbling its
way through my bloodstream. I am so paralyzed and distracted I don't even
notice that a man is standing not ten feet away from me, right there in the
front yard, looking intently at the fire. I'd tell you what he looks like
except I haven't really noticed him yet.

But then I do notice him and I see he's about average height
and slope-shouldered, with balding ginger hair and a pathetic mustache. It
looks like a cheese curl died on his upper lip. He is very pale and his
glittering eyes are fixed on the flames. He wears a red scarf wound tightly
around his neck, clashing horribly with his complexion.

"Hey," I say. "Hey, man."

He doesn't respond. A tear runs down one cheek, a rivulet of
gold reflecting the fire and the slanting late afternoon sun.

I step over to him. "Hey, man. Did you see anybody get
out of there?"

He seems to come out of a trance or something. He wipes the
tear away when he looks at me. "I don't think anyone was home. Nobody's
come out," he sniffles.

Well, that's something. I look over at the building. While
there is more fire than I'm usually comfortable with (i.e. zero: zero amount of
fire), I see now it's mostly smoke and not a raging inferno. My mind starts
picking through possibilities.

"Do you have any idea when it started?"

The man glances over sharply, obviously annoyed at my
constant interruptions. He looks at his watch. "Twenty-seven minutes
ago."

"You sound pretty sure."

"That's when I started it."

Oh, ok. That makes sense. That's when you—

"Wait. What? Started it?"

"I've always loved this house," he says thickly.
"Always wondered what it would look like painted with orange and red and
gray and black. But I never had the guts before."

I blink at him for a long moment as he goes back to ignoring
everything but his beautiful creation.

Suddenly I am full of rage. This asshole STARTED it? This
guy wanting to get his firebug kicks means I'm going to spend my last moments
on Earth alone? For the first time today, I feel something. Specifically, I
feel really, really angry.
Brutally, tongue-
swallowingly
furious.

With an annoyed grunt, I grab the guy's scarf, put my foot
against his hip and kick as hard as I can. The guy lurches away from me, but
since I'm hanging onto the end of the scarf he spins twice before hitting the
ground and releasing the length of cloth to my grip.

I want to scream at him, I want to destroy him with words so
cunning and withering that his entire being
will
shrivel to a tiny pinprick of remorse and shame. I want to convey to him the
agony and hopelessness he has unwittingly thrust upon my innocent person by his
selfish actions.

"Not cool, dude!" is what I come up with.

I bound across the lawn toward the front door of the
building, stopping at a water-filled flower pot on the stoop that has filmed
over with ice. I crunch through it with my fist, stuff as much of the scarf
into the water as I can fit, and wrap it around and around my face. It's
painfully cold and drips down my shirt, but that might be a good thing.

I turn to the door, and give it a tremendous movie-cop kick.
It rattles some and I nearly break my foot, but it stays closed.
So much for that.
I reach for the knob, bracing for it to be
blisteringly hot. Fortunately it's just warm and it opens and I see the short
hallway, obscured by smoke, but still clear of actual flames. I read somewhere
that it's not the fire that kills you, but the smoke. However I am still
relieved, as I know for a fact that fire hurts more than smoke when it's
between you and the stairs.

I make it through the smoke, up the stairs, and down the
upstairs hall to
Thwacker's
place. The door is half
open, and I see a paper plate stuck onto it with what looks like Dijon mustard.

HEADING WEST!
it
says. GOOD LUCK!

"You too, Thwack," I mumble and enter the
apartment. Oh dear. Not good in here at all. Down the hall I can see that
Thwacker's
room is engulfed in flame, and the smoke is
worse in here than downstairs. Does it
rise
, smoke? I
can't remember, and now's not the time to worry about physics. I go to the far
wall and try to open the window. It's painted over, annoyingly. I can see
through the glass the now
scarfless
man on the lawn
still watching the building. He waves to me. I give him the finger.

Okay, I think. I'm here. Now to get the cup and get the hell
back to—

It occurs to me that I have no idea where the cup is.
Memories of the day before after arriving at
Thwacker's
are vague at best, and there was a lot going on.

The fire is intensifying.
The smoke too.
It's getting hard to breathe, despite the scarf over my mouth and nose. Wet
knitted wool can only do so much, I guess. I turn and kick the shit out of the
window, again movie-cop style. The window is less resilient than the door and
wood and glass blows outward, twinkling into the winter afternoon. Fresh cold
air flows in from outside and I take a deep, invigorating breath. I start to
have a nagging feeling, though.

I realize too late that the influx of oxygen into the
apartment is going to give the fire more fuel to burn. I know this from movies,
but forgot it until just now.

As if to remind me what an idiot I am, the fire in the
bedroom rears up and charges down the hallway. It doesn't quite make it to me,
but it's definitely on the advance. I have to get my cup and get out of here.

Ok, I think. Ok.
The cup.
It's a
cup.
With an address on it.
That I need very badly.
That I am currently risking my life for.
Where is it? I hid
it. I know I hid it, because I didn't want anyone stealing it or urinating on
it or anything. So I hid it someplace safe that I knew no one would bother it.
And somewhere I could get to. So not Thwack's room, because any number of foul
things could be going on in there at a given point. It might be locked, there
might be fluids flying about, it could be—

Ok, wait. Calm down, forget Thwack's room. It's not there.
Where else? Where else? Where have I hidden stuff before? Behind the couch!

I look at the couch. It is currently turning black beneath
consuming flames, the cigarette burns quickly becoming irrelevant.

Ok, so not the couch. Where else?
The
bathroom?
No, same problems as with the bedroom (though probably
different fluids with some overlap maybe)—THE KITCHEN!

That sounds right! I rush across the living room to the
kitchen and stand there, the rush of remembering I was hoping for not
happening. It's getting really smoky and my eyes are stinging and watering.
The oven?
No, what if someone turned it on?
Drawers?
I check them quickly. No.

Wait, wait. Think. It's a cup. Where do cups go? Where the
fuck else? I almost say "Duh" out loud, and open the cupboard,
triumphantly revealing:

Cups.
But not my
cup.

I almost start crying but my eyes are full of tears from the
smoke so what's the point? I take a glass from the cupboard and turn on the
faucet. My throat is parched and feels like I've been gargling cat claws. I
bring the glass to my lips.

Ugh.
A hair in the glass.
A short, curly black one.
I drop it in the sink and reach up
to the top shelf, where I hide glasses to use when I come over so
Thwacker
doesn't sweat or sneeze or spew hair on them. I
feel around for a glass, instead feel something crumple slightly under my grip.

Oh.
Of course.

It's so obvious in retrospect that I don't even react, but
there it is.

This time I do say it: "Duh."

The highest shelf of the cupboard.
That's where I always hide stuff. I take the cup down and feel sheepishly
gratified to see it is still there and
unburnt
and
readable.

Then I just feel mortified by my own slowness. It took me so
long to remember the thing that I always do when I'm here that I am now
standing in a wooden house that is fast approaching the dictionary definition
of "conflagration". I imagine I should do something about that.

Carefully but swiftly moving to the open front door, I see
that the hallway to the stairs to the exit is engulfed in orange, mocking
flames. Oh, there you go: the stairs collapse.
Great.

I notice too that the floor around me has begun to buckle.
Even better! So everything is going to collapse in a fiery heap and here I'll
be feeling stupid as I burn to death a full six or so hours before I was
scheduled to burn to death. What are the odds?

I take a step away from the door, counting my options. I get
to one when I feel the floor sink alarmingly under my feet. That's it for
options, I guess.

So I take two faltering steps on a collapsing floor and dive
head first out the window.

The first thing I feel is a delicious coolness on my skin as
I transition from the inferno to the crisp late December air. It's wonderfully
pleasant, and I can't believe I even hesitated to do this earlier. Then I
remember that being 18 or so feet above the ground is not a naturally tenable
situation for a human being without a pool or a haystack beneath him to be in.

I'm falling in earnest now. My stomach rises to my throat
and I realize that thing you realize when you're falling and suddenly you've
been falling for too long and probably it's going to hurt when you stop
falling. Generally I prefer hopping off a curb or skipping the last stair.
Those are falling distances I can comfortably deal with. This is not.

I twist in the air, trying to get into some semblance of a
defensive falling posture. Roll with it, maybe. But my legs are too far above
my head and the rest of me
is
sort of parallel to the
ground. Speaking of which, shouldn't that be coming up pretty soon?

I look up/downward, and instead of the ground I see the
gratifyingly stupefied face of Mr. Ginger Arsonist staring open-mouthed back at
me.

I land on him with a bone-jarring thud. He collapses, much
like a cardboard box in one of those movie stunts, and slows my descent enough
so that it TOTALLY SUCKS, but nothing appears to be damaged in a major way.
On me, anyway.
I roll off the guy and suck wind, trying to
be okay with the plethora of new pains that are vying for my attention. I
wiggle my fingers and toes like they tell you to do if they think you might
have a spinal injury. Everything wiggles obediently.

The guy moans in a heap. He's not dead, obviously, but he
doesn't sound particularly well. I stand up, feeling an ache in my hip, but
otherwise
ok,
and I nudge him with my foot.
"Thanks for the scarf," I say, and drop it on him. It slithers down
to the ground and lays there like an underachieving milk snake.

Behind me, as I limp away from the scene,
Thwacker's
building collapses into itself, sending a huge
plume of ash and cinders into the air. I can hear the man weeping with
either joy
, pain, or despair.
Maybe all
three.
I could care less.

I check the cup in my hand. "GET BENT" it still
says.

I came pretty close to getting bent, that's for sure. But
now I've got my destination. I read the address on the cup. It's not terribly
far, I don't think. Far enough, though. I check my phone to see what time it
is.

1
MISSED CALL
.