Authors: Benjamin Parzybok
She couldn’t bring herself to look any closer at the house for fear of finding remains. She sat at the side of the road and put her head in her hands. She wasn’t sure where to go next.
“We need to find a house fast,” Bea said. “Back to Lisa’s?”
“We don’t know what we’re doing,” Renee said. She pictured Zach, how sometimes the look on his face made her feel like she was telling him the greatest story ever told. She wondered about turning back and stabbed at the ground with the heel of her boot.
“Renee,” Bea said, and took hold of her arm.
Four men came toward them from the end of the block, walking hurriedly. It wasn’t easy to determine their ages for the grime and hollow eyes and untamed beards. They were armed with crude weapons, pipes and knives.
“Now, Renee.” Bea put her hand out to help her friend up.
They mounted their bikes and the men broke into a run.
Renee turned and flipped them off and they pedaled hard to the end of the block. At the intersection she looked back. A shot rang out and the men scattered, ducking low and running toward the side of the road. One of them fell writhing on the ground.
They rode hard for a couple more blocks, putting space in between them and whatever conflict was behind. Every part of her ached, her injured ribs made the intake of breath a chore. She felt like crying. At Forty-seventh and Cully they stopped and Renee leaned over and breathed hard. “Fuck this.” She wrapped her hand around the rebar she’d strapped to her handlebars as a weapon and listened.
A group of three kids in torn, dirty clothing approached them, speaking Spanish between themselves. Two twin girls of about six or seven, and a little brother. Renee and Bea waited.
“Hola, niños,” Renee said. “Tengan cuidado en la calle, no? Donde están sus padres?”
“We speak English,” one of the twins said indignantly. The children gripped hold of Renee’s bicycle, the boy laced his fingers through the spokes. They stared up at her.
Renee looked back from where they’d come but they weren’t being followed.
“Where are you going?” one of the twins asked. She wore a soiled baseball cap that said
Go Organic!
Both of the girls had their hair inexpertly cut short, as if they’d worked at each other’s heads with a pair of child’s scissors. The boy’s hair was grown long. All three of them wore half a dozen pin-on buttons each, advertising some long-gone political campaign.
“We don’t know,” Renee said. “I like your buttons.”
“Do you have any food?”
Renee pulled a nut bar out of her pack and broke it between them, and they devoured it instantly.
After the boy licked his fingers clean he studiously unpinned one of his buttons and handed it to Renee.
She pinned it to her own shirt. It said:
Ascend together!—¡Suben Juntos! Muskogee for Senate.
“How does it look?” she asked.
They stared at her blankly, too shy perhaps to tell her it was on wrong or didn’t suit her. “Where are your parents?”
The girl with the hat pointed at a house down the block. “My dad is working.”
“What does he do?”
“He runs for Gregor. Do you know Gregor?”
“He’s the boss,” the boy said.
“The boss of what?” Renee said.
They looked at each other in silent conference. “
Every
thing,” the boy said.
“No,” the girl with the hat said.
“Not at all,” the other girl said.
“What’s he like?” Renee asked.
“Nice. Fat,” one of the girls said. Her thin shoulders rose in a shrug. “I don’t know.”
“And your mom? Who takes care of you during the day?”
“She’s dead,” the boy said.
“We don’t need taken care of,” the girl with the hat said. “We take care of our dad. We saw you on the TV.”
“I wish I could show you my hiding place,” the boy said mournfully.
“Are you going to get another water truck?” the other girl said.
“
Pow!
” the boy said.
Renee glanced at Bea and raised her eyebrows and said
phew
. Bea told her they should get going.
The children had her bike ensnared in a spider’s web of small fingers, their eyes expectant and hopeful at the thought of being included on future adventures. Renee assured them next time they would definitely be enlisted.
“Do you have any water?” the boy asked.
Renee pulled out her water bottle and she heard Bea exhale in disgust. She poured a couple of teaspoonfuls into each of their open mouths. Little motherless birds, she thought, and tried to keep despair at bay. “Would you kids do me a favor? Tell your dad to pass on a message to Gregor. Tell him Maid Marian wants to meet with him.”
“’Kay,” the girl with the hat said. The kids all looked down the street toward their house, and the meeting seemed suddenly over.
“You got it?” Renee said. “What’s the message?”
“You want to meet him!” the girl snapped. “Bye!” The children ran back in the direction of their house.
Renee watched them disappear between houses and felt anxious for them. “Was there some kind of dog whistle we missed, or did they just get bored?” she said.
After the kids, the block went quiet. A slight breeze shifted the big dead trees dryly over them. Renee stared up into the eerie branches and listened. There was no human sound.
Renee pointed with her chin toward a house down the street. It was obscured behind a wiry mass of leafless shrubbery.
The house was a Craftsman, but it had been built as if, Renee thought, the builder didn’t understand the scale represented on the blueprints. Everything about the house was big, and it dwarfed the other houses on the block. It stood three stories tall and occupied a massive footprint. Like other houses in the neighborhood, it sat on a big lot, in this case a full acre. An eight-foot chain-link fence and the remains of a thickly treed perimeter encased it like an urban fortress.
Zach did the poster layout over lunch. He was cautious, but he knew he didn’t need to be. No one would look at his machine except Berger, a project manager, who liked to glide around like some kind of inter-office eel and look at everyone’s screens. But Berger had contracted E. coli and was in the hospital. Renee’s group fled after warrants were put out for their arrests, their identities pieced tog
ether by video-tape and surveillance. They didn’t dare use any traceable medium to try and contact each other. So he and Renee had schemed up the coded poster. Before becoming a copywriter he’d been a graphic artist and had enjoyed the work.
He hand-drew a robin with a leather aviator hood. Across the robin was strapped a quiver full of slender water vials. He scanned and colorized the drawing and along the bottom he typed 147S@LHURST@9, which he hoped would translate to: The Robin Hoods (or, the robbing hoods, as it were) who lived at 147 Skidmore meet at the Laurelhurst Theater at 9 p.m. Then Zach would post vigil in front of the theater for a few minutes every night, waiting for one of them to materialize, unsure if this was what he really wanted in the first place. He could recognize them by sight, and some nights the theater still worked, showing a single short film, whatever they managed to get going while the power was on, imported from the East Coast or from their archives.
He was helping Renee, but were he honest with himself he could care less about the rest of her activist-crew. He felt certain they would only suck her more deeply into trouble—something she was fairly capable of doing already. He wasn’t sure any of them were bright enough to turn his obscure poster into a private message anyway. And he felt it highly likely that he was endangering Renee rather than helping her. He leaned back from the design and appreciated his work. All things aside, it was, he saw, really fucking good.
Still, he had to help somehow. He thought of her constantly, up in some strange, dangerous neighborhood. He’d do whatever he could.
Zach stood up in his cube and eyed the printer down at the end of the hall. There were six office doorways—three sets, one on each side of the hall—to pass by in order to retrieve the side project from the large-format color printer. A layout of this size would occupy the printer for about three minutes. Zach stretched and then walked casually down to the printer. As he went he tried to eye which offices were occupied and which weren’t, a thing he could never remember. A few had permanently closed doors, colleagues who’d migrated away, or in one case, died. The printer was off the break room, where Nevel appeared to be cleaning furiously, and so Zach turned around self-consciously and shuffled back to his desk. He hated this. He pulled out a legal pad of paper and quickly scratched out half a dozen word associations so there was evidence of work on his desk. They were trying to pitch a satellite telecommunications firm that sold equipment to the Middle East. One of the few companies with energy exemptions. Business must go on. One must work under the premise that the apocalypse was not nigh. And it seemed to him that money was sought after even more feverishly as people died, as if a wage, or the pursuit of, were some kind of shield against their own mortalities. They were all dying of thirst; money was one elixir.
We’s in yo head!
, he wrote, and then sketched a satellite with a lightning bolt coming out of it and straight into a stick-figure’s head. He kept his ears out for Nevel.
Sputnik is thirsty for more.
The all-seeing eye.
He penciled out a quick sketch of Renee, giving her braids and a tin-foil hat. He remembered the first time he’d seen her in the cafe, joking with somebody at the counter, a warm wit to her. She gestured her arms wide as she made a customer laugh. When his turn in line came, he’d been struck with her spell. He’d lingered there, deciding long over the scones, as she spoke about the qualities of each, how this scone, with the chocolate, was for sadness, for mornings when you wake up and there’s an unspeakable shadow right here—she tapped above her own heart—and this with the cranberries would be fire in the belly, like locomotive fuel, and this one with the apricot bits was for love, the finding and keeping of it.
He bought the one for love, red-faced and smiling and she put it in its paper sheath and drew on a heart with a Sharpie. Let me know how it goes, she’d said conspiratorially, sly with smile.
It had gone well, at least until now.
He admired his drawing and then became conscious of the fact that he’d just sketched the fugitive and written her name below it. He gave her a Frida mustache and unibrow and drew satellites and buildings and other bits around her, embedding and obscuring her in the image.
He didn’t know what this satellite company was even selling nor to whom, though with the power issues most other sources of communication had gone dark, so he could probably figure it out. At any rate, they gave him the brand to steer, not a product to pitch. He decided to take the chance, Russian roulette style, and hit the print button. He would either get caught or he wouldn’t. It was the designer’s printer, he could always intimate that the poster belonged to her. And if the poster showed up in the news and on the police blotter the next day, well then fuck. Maybe he’d follow her up north. He made himself count to thirty, during which time he drew a giant eye on his scratch pad, spying down on civilian hordes, then he walked briskly down the hall toward the printer. Halfway there Nevel exited the kitchen and Zach started.
“Drought up,” Nevel said on his way by. Nevel’s office joke was that all anybody ever talked about anymore was the drought, so why not replace every word with that one?
“Drought up,” Zach answered.
He could feel his face and neck grow hot as he watched as the printer head painstakingly snail-danced across the paper, the poster’s tongue rooted in the cogs, so he could not make a run for it. From the back, his neck must surely look burned. But it printed, and it was lovely. He was, he thought as he admired it, a genius.
A few minutes later in the copy room he punched in 300 color copies. No one would ask what he was doing, he repeated to himself, everyone else had something to hide. He was working, there was no need for his skin to blaze fire-engine red.
“Hey, you’re everywhere today,” Nevel said.
Zach felt the copy room couldn’t adequately hold two people. He knew his personal space requirements were on the high side, but still.
“How many are you going to print here, tree-killer? Should I go on vacation? You printing your novel or something?” Nevel leaned against the wall, blocking the door, in a manner that suggested he might be there until nightfall.
“No,” Zach said. “I’m not even writing a novel.”
“Oh? I thought everyone was,” Nevel said. “What is it then, poster for your girlfriend?”
The container known as the skull which held Zach’s brain expanded spontaneously a thousand feet in every direction, leaving his brain wet and small on the floor, amid a cavernous space, and it was there in that container that he wondered how in the hell Nevel knew what he was up to. He felt that in this new space where his brain sat in its own slippery goo, troops marched toward him, and his brain with all its power and inventiveness fought futilely to invent some utterly obvious reason why he would be copying a revolutionary poster for his fugitive girlfriend that would only prove to demonstrate his superior commitment to this very job. After a great long while, punctuated by the shuffling beat of the copier spitting out copy after copy, Zach said darkly: “It’s for work.” He couldn’t think of one single damn time that he’d ever been called on in his history of working at Patel & Grummus to make a photocopy.