The President reminds everyone to cooperate with FEMA officials…
Her voice was dry and hoarse, barely audible.
“Who is President now, anyway?” Greg asked her. She never answered his questions; she just smiled vacuously as she moved to the next item on the list. It didn’t matter. The important thing was that Greg could pretend that he had someone to talk to. At first he talked to himself, but gave that up after he saw Mrs. Szczepanski from upstairs waddling through the parking lot, engaged in a protracted shouting match with nobody in particular. Crazy people talk to themselves, he thought then, so he’d better not. Then again, if you do something crazy, and you know that it’s crazy, then you must not be crazy.
That had been nearly a month ago, only a day after the last FEMA patrol trundled through, navigating their battered green van through the clogged streets like a modern day plague cart. He was tired of sitting around, waiting for the goons in Hazmat suits to cart him off to one of the “Safety Zones” that the newsgirl talked about. The FEMA guys were the first real people he had talked to in days, though they seemed more like robots.
“Wait here. A truck to Bakersfield will be by in a few days,” the first robot had said.
“Do you have a gun?” the second asked.
“What’s going on?” Greg looked at their protective suits. “Is this some kind of disease? Is it communicable?” The FEMA things stared at him silently for what seemed like minutes.
“Don’t panic,” the first finally said. “Stay indoors. A truck will be by in a few days.”
“Do you have a gun?” the second repeated.
Greg had always liked Bakersfield, though. A year ago Greg had passed through Bakersfield on business, and after taking a wrong turn had found himself surrounded by beautiful, variegated hills. Flowers swirled together in great fractals of red, yellow, blue and purple, segmented here and there by trickling streams of sunlit grass. He felt a brief flash of enthusiasm, a profound appreciation of beauty, something perhaps analogous to religious ecstasy. It passed rapidly, bullied out of his mind by less ephemeral concerns: a letter from his credit card company, an overdue rent check, a gray and tired list of tired and gray clients in his office desk. For that shred of a moment, however, Greg knew where he most wanted to be in the world: within that impressionist’s dream, as a beautiful, eternal splotch.
A few days after the FEMAbots lumbered away, Greg left his apartment—partly to scrounge up some bottled water (what came out of his tap had started tasting bitter and strange), partly out of desperate boredom. On the steps of his complex he bumped into a haggard old geezer, the kind of fellow they liked to call a goddamn bum, back before everybody became goddamn bums. The tramp—who Greg liked to imagine had once been a city councilman, or comptroller, or something like that—looked at him, eyes wide and furry eyebrows raised, and thrust a dirty piece of newspaper towards him.
“Ya see this?” he shouted. “Ya see it?”
“Sure, yeah,” Greg said, cautiously scrutinizing the filthy scrap at a distance. It was the front page from three weeks before, smeared with dirt, grease and seemingly random pencil marks:
FEMA DECLARES PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCY
He took a couple of steps backward, but the old man managed to stay exactly too damn close. His breath was like hot garbage. Greg tried to unfold a small utility knife in his jacket pocket with one hand: a crude substitute for the recommended gun.
“I told ‘em! I said it! That Ronald Reagan, he did it! Now they’ve turned us all over to the New World Order!” The man shook the newspaper shred vigorously. He said Reagan like “ray gun.”
“Reagan’s dea—” Greg cringed. He shouldn’t talk to them, he thought, just nod and walk away. Words are how ideas get into a person’s brain, Greg had considered during his long hours alone, so maybe talking was how this thing spread. Even if that weren’t the case, only crazy people have anything to offer one another. Talking to a crazy person would be crazy, and Greg Bechard was definitively not crazy.
“Satellites. New-World-fuckin’-Order satellites, beamin’ propaganna straight inna our brains. Microwave guns scramblin’ our gray matters—” Greg walked away, but the old man followed, shouting at his back. “Run away, psycho! Nutjob! Wake up!” He was halfway down the block when the man bellowed out a final message to no one in particular: “A prophet has no honor in his own land! They’ll have your balls in a jar! Balls in a jar!”
Things had only gotten worse since then.
Due to the deteriorating situation in major cities, curfew has been moved ahead to…
The Hawaiian newsgirl’s teeth still sparkled on the screen, but what she said was crap even when it was news. Due to the deteriorating situation in major cities, Greg mentally corrected, National Guardsmen had started shooting anything that moved after dark. And then before dark. And then they pretty much just started shooting everything. Each other, even. Greg remembered when a lone weekend warrior appeared on the street below his apartment, dry-firing his M-16 at the cowering loonies on the sidewalk while singing a jumbled top 40 tune. Lost like the rest.
In a weird way, though, that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst wasn’t even the AWOL Broke-Dicks who had working rifles. Thankfully it hadn’t been that bad in days. Greg rarely heard the distant gunshots anymore that used to keep him awake and shuddering. No, the worst were the people who were so out of it that they didn’t even know anything was wrong. There was this kid at a pharmacy in Kearny Mesa. He was a young guy, maybe 20, behind the counter. He looked up at Greg and smiled.
“Hello,” he said cheerfully.
Nobody had greeted him like that—or at all—in three months: before the emergency sanitariums, before the FEMA “Safety Zones,” before the (elected) President had his highly public snap and vowed to use America’s nuclear arsenal to purge the world of “heathens and witches.” So he froze.
“I’m sorry sir, but the pharmacist is out,” the kid said. “Besides, I’m not qualified to handle prescriptions. He should be back in,” he glanced at his watch, “an hour or so.” He sounded calm, even a little bored. For a brief, joyful moment, Greg mistook him for someone normal. The next-to-last sane man in the greater San Diego area.
“Just looking for some anti-anxiety pills,” Greg said.
The kid nodded dismissively and smiled, then resumed sorting multi-colored pills into seemingly random piles.
Of course. No normal person would be standing on the business side of the counter like that, Greg thought. He glanced over his shoulder, out the large front windows, and watched a fat woman in a filthy red coat chase an invisible object down the street, shrieking in terror. Not while that kind of thing was going on outside. He would be on the other end, with Greg, grocery bag in hand: a sane man.
Greg hopped the counter and began to rifle through the shelves behind the boy. He was looking for Xanax, but any anti-anxiety drug would do the trick.
The kid squealed. He jabbed at the panic button under the counter and then froze, as if he’d rehearsed what to do in case of a robbery, but only up to this point. When the police didn’t arrive instantaneously he seemed to become stuck, pressed up against the wall behind him.
The panic on his face made it clear: he really thought that the police were coming. Or maybe, at this point, hoped. His hands were shaking as he pressed them against his sides. To this kid, Greg was just some thieving pill-head who might shank him. Greg snatched the last of the pills, shot the kid a pitying glance, and then ran out into the anonymous dinge of the streets.
FEMA officials recommend that people stay in their homes and avoid contact with anyone displaying erratic …
The line between sane and insane is that thin, Greg thought as he continued watching the newsgirl go through her routine. That pharmacy kid was so out-of-the-park nutso that he’d come full circle and become sane again. Or at least he’d be considered sane if everyone else were. Maybe everyone was crazy all along, Greg wondered as he wrestled with his sack of stolen pills. Maybe he was crazy too, and now, just now, he’d gone and turned sane. Saner than the pharmacy kid, at least, because he knew that everyone else had lost it. Greg sucked down two pills with lukewarm bottled water, which he noticed now tasted like what came from the tap. It was a metallic taste. Copper? Blood tastes like copper, he remembered. But why would there be blood in bottled water? It didn’t look like it had blood in it.
He’d been prescribed anti-anxiety medication in simpler times, when his number one concerns in life were paying bills and getting laid. But that seemed as far removed from him now as Socrates.
The drugs helped keep Greg calm, especially now. Calm was good.
“Just in case,” he said to the newsgirl.
…effects including drowsiness, dizziness, irritability, excitability and hallucinations are known to occur with the use of benzodiazepines …
Greg thought he heard the newsgirl say something different, something she hadn’t been saying ad infinitum for nearly a week. He listened, but she continued on with the next scheduled story, about Air Force Two crashing into the capitol during the last emergency session. He was just tired. It seemed like he was always tired lately. He lay down on his bed, the voice of the newsgirl mumbling in another room. He closed his eyes and wondered what the VP’s last thoughts were as the nose of his 757 smashed through the capitol rotunda, and whether or not he was sane at the time, and whether or not that even mattered. Then he fell asleep, and dreamt of Bakersfield’s green, swaying trees, and kaleidoscopic hills.
When Greg woke up the next morning, his TV showed only static. The pretty little Hawaiian girl was gone. Her freakishly ivory smile was gone. Her hoarse whispering of weeks old headlines was gone. Greg flipped through the channels for minutes, finding only static and isolated test patterns. For some uncertain reason, boiling up from some obscure corner of his psyche, he began to panic. He knew that the newsgirl had flipped long ago, of course, but as long as she was there, talking like a normal person, smiling like everything was fine… He panicked now because, for the first time, he felt as alone as he had always been.
He sat down at his kitchen table, his shaking fingers struggling to command brown and white pills. He wondered when that goddamned truck was going to show up. As he forced the pills into his mouth and then down his throat with a mouthful of ill-tasting water, a cruel thought slipped into his mind.
Citizens are advised that FEMA patrols will not be returning to affected areas. Fuck you.
Greg shot a glance at his TV. No, still static. He had gotten so used to the newsgirl’s voice, scratchy and feeble though it had become, that even his own thoughts had started to sound like her. Maybe his teeth would whiten up as well. He’d quit brushing them because the water tasted particularly disgusting when mixed with toothpaste. But the thought of being abandoned troubled him, and the more he thought about it the more he realized it was probably true. There was no truck. That’s why the second goon kept asking if he owned a gun: they never intended to come back. Greg, and who knew how many other poor jerks, were stranded out there. Left to die.
“Or worse,” Greg said aloud, then caught himself. If he stayed there he’d flip. Certainly. Just like Mrs. Szczepanski, and the old hobo, and the newsgirl, and the pharmacy kid. He wondered what his “thing” would be. Hopefully he wouldn’t end up like the kid, going to work every day like nothing is wrong, coming home to watch snow on the TV and talk to his girlfriend, who is sitting in the corner eating her own shit. That would be the one, he thought, the one he wouldn’t want. He’d rather be the poor bastard wandering around with a mouth full of his own waste, thinking who knows what. That it was normal, maybe. That everybody did it. That it’d get him into heaven. No, he’d get some things together—some clothes, some water, his knife—the pills, of course—and get the hell out. He’d get a car and drive north, to Bakersfield. See if the FEMA camp was really there, and if not… if not, well, he always liked Bakersfield. The trees would be green and beautiful.
Greg was on the road by the afternoon, his valuables stowed away in the trunk of a rebuilt Japanese compact that he swiped from the lot behind his apartment. The car was eighty-percent primer gray but ran well enough. He seemed to remember it belonging to a short, black fellow who lived on the floor below him. Greg struggled to remember his name, but all he could come up with was a short conversation they had about that very car: the man and his son built it together, virtually from scrap. It was going to be his son’s first car. Greg chewed on his tongue, ashamed that he couldn’t recall the man’s name. He might be the only person in the world who could remember, he thought as he passed the city limits sign into Riverside, and he can’t even do him the service—
“Right, of course,” Greg thought, relieved. Now he could finally focus on driving. He had deliberately avoided Los Angeles: some of the worst reports from the early days came out of there. LA was one of the first places to flip, if Greg remembered correctly. Either that or New York, he knew it was one of them. San Diego had been relatively lucky in that respect. Violence had been a problem, but not like it was in LA.
The National Guard has ceased all operations in Los Angeles, and FEMA has cancelled all future patrols into the city…
Yeah, something like that, Greg thought. Teeming, unorganized masses of the violently insane, wandering around the city like animals. And that was just Hollywood. He imagined himself, later that night in those Bakersfield hills, looking to the south and seeing an orange haze hanging low in the sky. It would be the city of Los Angeles burning. Greg, for one, wouldn’t miss it. He never liked LA.
By dusk Greg pulled into Barstow. It was a calculated risk, part of his plan to completely avoid Los Angeles at all costs. The streets were empty, and while he could see lights peering out of curtained windows here and there, the town seemed strangely deserted. Nothing at all like San Diego—no signs of violence, no decay—and for a moment he could almost imagine that this place had been spared. That whatever plague had struck the world was contained to the big urban centers—the final, inevitable, cataclysmic implosion of those steel-and-concrete cancers. He pulled off at a rusty gas station on the way out of town, to get some gas and give the car a chance to cool off before the big push to Bakersfield. His path took him through a corner of the Mojave, and he wasn’t entirely confident that his reconditioned ride would survive the trip without a break. More importantly, he wanted to see if this place had indeed missed out.
He got out of the car to see that the gas pumps were off and that there was a single, dim light on inside the station, behind the counter. The main door was locked. Greg circled around to the back of the station.
“You tryin’ to get in?” someone asked.
Greg spun around, nearly tripping in the process.
“Are you tryin’ to get in?” repeated the voice, which he could now see belonged to a dirty, half-naked man with a shovel, standing a few wide steps behind him. He smiled a broad, phony smile, and his mouth was full of brown rot. His eyes darted back and forth in his sockets, on the lookout for... something.
“You want in? Yeah?” he asked again as he took a step forward.
“Yeah,” Greg said. He looked around to see if there were any others around.
“Yeah, me too” Rot-tooth said. “Bitch is hole up in there with a radio. Race traitor.” He sniffed the air. “I can smell it. You know the smell.”
Greg reached to unfold the utility knife in his pocket, but it wasn’t there. With a silent curse and a surge of panic he realized that he had left the knife in the car’s cup holder. He frantically started to plan a route back to the car, wondering if he could get to it before getting brained.
“They don’t smell like us,” the guy continued, rubbing the back of his right hand against his sweaty chest. “’Cause they’s made of rubber. To look like us. Only it ain’t exactly rubber. It come from babies that were aborted. Like skin. Like that. Smells like sin. Sin-skin.”
Forget the knife, throttle this psycho before he flattens your skull. Cross your thumbs over his trachea and squeeze until you hear it crunch—
“You better get out of here,” said a voice from behind the station’s metal back door, “or I’ll… melt your brain. With my mind.” The man with the shovel jumped back several steps at the sound of the voice, and Greg took the opportunity to bolt for his car. He fumbled with the car door, jerked it open and grabbed the knife, flipping the chrome blade out into business position. As he started to back out of the car he looked up, through the passenger side window, and saw them standing across the road, desert dust swirling about their feet: two green Hazmat suits. One of them pointed in his direction. Greg slid out of the car just in time to see advanced dental decay bearing down on him, his shovel raised high like a kendo champ, wailing in an unearthly voice about clones. Greg fell to the pavement, knife still in hand, as the shovel clanged hard against the roof of the car. He scrambled away and to his feet, trying to get into something that could pass for a fighting position. But by the time he stood the shovel was swinging back in his direction. Greg was vaguely aware of the dull pang sound the shovel made as it connected with the side of his head.
“Mister Bechard? Can you hear me?” Greg opened his eyes and found himself staring into the glossy black faceplate of a Hazmat suit.
“Here’s the jar we put your testicles in,” the masked figure said.
“What? Why—?” Greg’s head pulsed painfully. “Why would you do that?” His vision was blurry, and he had a horrible taste in his mouth. Like the water.
“I said you suffered a concussion, but you’ll be fine.”
“What about my… balls?” He reached down under the thin hospital sheet and was surprised and relieved to find everything intact. The figure turned slightly in the direction of another suited figure behind him.
“They’re fine, as far as we know, Mr. Bechard. Relax.”
Greg tried to look around. He was lying on a hospital bed, surrounded by hospital walls, and hospital tables full of hospital tools. Everything was white and bright, like the newsgirl’s teeth.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“A Safety Zone, near Bakersfield. Everything is fine, Mr. Bechard. Relax.”
A second Hazmat face appeared in his view.
“Do you own a gun, Mr. Bechard?” it asked.
“Mr. Bechard, you’re experiencing auditory hallucinations. Probably visual ones as well. We’ll be starting you on Haldol or Thorazine as soon as you’re cleared—”
“No, no, that isn’t right,” Greg protested. “Those are crazy pills. That’s not right. I’m just fine. Everybody else is—”
“Try to relax, Mr. Bechard. You’ll be given something to help you sleep.”
Greg felt a needle slip into his arm and was vaguely aware of a plunger being depressed by a small, brown hand.
“What’s happening? What’s happened to everyone?” he asked pitifully.
“An epidemic breakdown in cognitive function,” the robot said, distantly and dispassionately, “like a malignant equation inserted into a fractal, spreading geometrically, devouring our ability to tell the real from the unreal. Like--” It paused, perhaps in thought. “Ontological cancer.”
Greg went to sleep again.
Greg woke up in the dark. The air smelled like stale cleaning chemicals and gasoline.
A light came on nearby. Greg sat up and saw the familiar surroundings of the inside of a gas station. He was on the floor near one of the front windows. Back behind the counter was a silhouette, outlined by the light from a tiny camp lantern.
“Am I okay? Where’s the nut?”
“I ran him off,” said a female voice from behind the counter. “He’s scared of me. Thinks I’m some lizard alien liberal abortion doctor.” Greg noticed a pinpoint of red light waving around in front of the silhouette, maybe a lit cigarette.
“Thanks then,” Greg said. “I tried to get my knife, but…” Greg fumbled in his pockets.
“You shouldn’t have let me stay unconscious,” he said. “I could have had a concussion. Where’s my knife?”
“Well I’m not a doctor, and I have your knife. Just in case.”
“I’m just trying to get to Bakersfield—shit, the car!” Greg turned to look out the window. He could feel the blood sloshing around in his head, making him queasy. He could barely make out the vehicle in the dark, but at least it was still there.
“Bakersfield?” the voice said. “What’s in Bakersfield?”
“A FEMA… Safety Zone. Something.” Suddenly it was all very hazy in his mind.
“Oh, right. Come over here, you can have some gas station coffee.”
Greg stood up slowly and hobbled over to the counter. “I thought I was just there—” He stopped himself. It was a hallucination. A dream. He wondered what the difference was. Hallucinate while you’re awake and you’re crazy. Do it while you’re asleep and you’re a totally normal Joe.
“Where?” the woman asked.
“Nothing. Nowhere. Who are you?”
“I’m Alex. And you’re Greg.” A small, dark hand slid his wallet across the counter. A cup of coffee followed, and the woman leaned over. Her face was dark, Pacific islander, Greg thought. Her smile was wide and shiny, with perfect rows of teeth the color of correction fluid. Just like the newsgirl, or at least how she had looked at the beginning.
“Outside,” Greg said, pausing to look back out the window behind him, “did you see anyone else outside?”
“Besides you and the Cavity Creep?”
Greg nodded and tried a sip of the coffee. It was too hot.
Alex shook her head. “No. Just you two until I got out there with my phaser.” She pointed to a caulking gun on the table next to his knife.
Greg took his wallet and stuffed it back in his pants. “Can I have my knife back?”
“Not yet,” she said. “Who should I have seen besides you two?”
“No aliens. I just thought… I just want to get to Bakersfield.”
Alex smiled her superhuman smile.
Greg took a moment to absently shovel some pills into his mouth, followed closely by the rank coffee.
Alex asked if he was a thieving pill head with her big, brown eyes.
“Anti-anxiety. I have a prescription,” Greg replied. “And a shitload of anxiety.”
“So what do the anxious, but totally not crazy hope to find in Bakersfield?”
Greg shrugged. “Not sure. Others, like me. Like you, I guess.”
“You don’t seem crazy.” Greg stopped and rubbed his eyes. He remembered the pharmacy kid. She didn’t seem like that, at least. She wasn’t trying to sell him lottery tickets and Steel Reserve. “I don’t even know what’s going on anymore, to be honest. I haven’t had the luxury of clarity in a long time.”
“I blame television,” Alex said with a grin, “and the lyrics to bad love songs.”
“Frank Zappa said that teen suicides were the fault of bad love songs. He was being facetious. Mostly.”
“Well, that’s Zappa for you,” Greg said as he muscled down some more of the noxious brew.
“Not really. More of a well-wisher.”
“Should have wished harder, then,” Alex said. Greg said nothing. “Anyway, I’ve had a lot of time here, alone, to think about it,” Alex continued, “and I think there’s something to it.”
“Bad love songs are why there’s a man behind my building carving the names of TV characters into his arms?”
“Not exactly. Mass media in general. I’d like to say there was a time when fact and fiction were distinct, but that’s a dream. They’ve always been two parts of the same story. But I think we’ve finally hit a point where the lies have reached critical mass and are overwhelming the truth. They’re finally so much more compelling that everybody’s opted for solipsism: every person adopts his or her own private reality.” She leaned over to stub out her cigarette. “I used to be in advertising,” she said. “It was my job to slowly drive people crazy like that.”
“Ontological cancer,” Greg said, half to himself. Where had he heard that before?
“Catchy. If you still want to go to Bakersfield, I’ll go with you,” she said. It was a statement of fact, not so much a request. “See what we can see.”
“Okay,” Greg said. “Why?”
“Carl Jung said ‘Show me a sane man, and I will cure him for you.’” She paused to put out her tenth cigarette. “Besides, I like the idea of having a mission. Feels cinematic.”
“I’ve got troubles of my own,” I said, “and you can’t help me out.” So, take your meditations and your preparations and ram it up your snout!
Greg was drowsy from the pills, so he took up Alex on her offer to drive. It was still dark when they left. He estimated they’d get to Bakersfield just before sunup. He drifted in and out of sleep as they drove. In between, he saw robots in Hazmat suits.
“Mr. Bechard? How are you feeling today?” asked one. Greg hated them. He couldn’t see their faces behind the masks. It was like talking to a wasp, something without a human soul.
“Are you still having hallucinations?”
“We’ll up your Thorazine, see what happens.”
“You look tired,” the robot continued. “Try to go back to sleep; we’ll check on you in a few hours.”
Greg looked over through blurred eyes. The lights on the console bounced up and down as the car moved, the soft blue lights reflecting off the driver’s face, leaving tracers in the air. It was soothing, wholly hypnotic. Things felt somewhat normal again. He didn’t care if he made it to Bakersfield or not. He wanted to keep going, through and past Bakersfield, past Sacramento, through Oregon and Washington, into Canada… it was too cold to be crazy up north, he thought. Maybe farther. All the way to the pole. Live with the penguins. He giggled at the thought. They’d need matching tuxedoes. Alex looked over and saw he was awake. Her neon smile left tracers in the air.
“Gregory Bechard, 30—or thereabout—office worker from San Diego,” a robot voice said. “Not a dangerous case, but the benzodiazepine abuse isn’t doing him any favors.”
“Are we even bothering with treatment anymore?” asked a second voice.
“On a case by case basis. I still favor letting this run its course.”
“Assuming it does. I’m thinking of giving up the drugs myself. See how it is on the other side.”
“Tired of playing asylum keeper?”
One of the robots laughed. It was a horrible, unnatural sound.
“Welcome to Bakersfield,” Alex said into Greg’s ear, a little bit too loud. The car was stopped and she was leaning in the passenger side door. Greg slid out of his seat and stretched his legs. It was still dark. The car was parked on a hill and Alex stood several feet away, where the ground disappeared into the receding darkness.
“You know, I’ve never seen a sunrise in my entire life. I’m almost 30 years old,” Alex said over her shoulder. She stood, hands behind her back, facing the rising sun. Greg hobbled over and stood next to her. He could already feel the warmth of the morning on his face. Below them was the city of Bakersfield, still lit for night. Cars roamed up and down the streets, slowly, deliberately, like lines of ants with burning eyes.
All around them the hills sprang to chromatic life, awakened by the early morning light. Shadows peeled back to reveal an intricate weave of red, yellow, blue and purple flowers. Greg found himself easing into that world: two great strokes of navy topped by a swatch of beige, all crowned by a thick, stringy glob of black. He waved his arms in the dawn haze, tracing flesh-colored paths across the pale blue sky, blotting out parts of the city as if with a great brush. He looked over at Alex. Where he was all blobs and streaks, she was all perfect and symmetrical geometry. The lines of her thin body cut through the sun-splattered hills. Her hair streaked out behind her in a zigzag of obtuse angles. A perfect crescent moon glittered between her lips. She was like a cut-out from a modernist masterpiece, expertly pasted into his multicolored hills.
“If everyone else is crazy, why are you and I okay?” Greg asked. Alex looked at him out of the corner of her eye.
“Who says we are?” she asked.
“Do you think you’re crazy?” he asked.
Greg looked at his hands for a long time. He smooshed his fingers together into a single peach colored blob, then spread them out again into distinct digits. Tiny sparks lit up the spaces between. “So I must be crazy too,” he finally said.
“No more than anybody else, Greg,” she said.
They both watched, transfixed, as the sun emerged in full from behind the earth and the city lights slowly flickered out, one by one.
