TW: r*pe culture
You don’t need to know his name.
He’s a figure gazing out a super-efficient triple-paned polycarbonate seventh-story bedroom window at a city skyline shimmering and winking five miles away. Or maybe it’s twenty.
This isn’t, he’s already noted, the night of tumbling flames and writhing smoke plumes. Of swarming helicopters riding jittery spotlight beams. Of what-the-fuck blackout making ghostly silhouettes of the glass towers.
Should he be more embarrassed he keeps imagining it?
Pink dawn tinges the sky.
He lowers the comically rickety rice-paper blind over the window. Does fifty pull-ups on the bar in the walk-in closet. Brushes and flosses. Washes his face.
Goes to bed.
After midnight now.
He swings the still-new VW around the concrete island in front of the J. Crew outlet. Aims for Bank of America in the far corner of the empty lot.
In the ATM lane stands a mammoth pickup truck. Facing the wrong way. Diagonally positioned for maximum obstruction. Headlights blazing.
He brakes. Palms the VW into a U-turn, studying the situation as it revolves around him. Stops in a spot near P.F. Chang’s.
Ten minutes he sits, faking interest in his phone. Glancing up casual-like every so often.
The pickup doesn’t move, though its stovepipe exhausts breathe soot wisps into the chilly night.
He puts the Jetta back in drive. Leaves.
He’s spotted. Perusing LED bulbs at Lowe’s at 9:15 on a fucking Saturday night.
It’s his old grad-school classmate Brian. Balding now. In a tattered sweatshirt with the alma mater’s name across the chest. Mildly brave these days.
“It’s all going to shit,” Brian says.
“And you’re buying what as it does?”
“Spackle. Foam brushes. Jenny and I are selling the house. We head for Ireland in February.”
“To do what?”
“Job hunt, for starters. We’ll stay with her cousin outside Dublin a while.”
Nice of him to point out the trainwreck he’s leaping from.
“You still with Mizumi?” Brian asks.
He answers by shrugging brows, shoulders.
“It’s complicated,” he adds, not wanting to be rude.
“Where is she?”
“Sendai. Taking care of her dad.”
“Can you go there?”
Lord.
They bump elbows at the mouth of the lighting aisle. Two men in surgical masks.
“What’s with the suit, anyway?” Brian asks.
Something very familiar about her.
Could be he’s been seeing her here a while. In the supermarket. Weeks or months. Peripherally. Glimpsing her from far ends of aisles. That cotton-candy-pink hair smudging the air around her.
Except it’s not the hair. It’s the eyes above the surgical mask he half-knows. Ludicrously beautiful. Things that simply shouldn’t exist outside CGI or manga.
Maybe it’s that whiff of Japanese-ness. Only it’s not the eyes either. As if he could have forgotten them to need reacquainting.
No: it’s the hips inside the black work slacks. The chest inside the Oxford shirt.
The slightly-too-narrow hips. The slightly-too-flat chest.
These, somehow, he recognizes. Not in a first-time-seeing-someone-in-forever way. More in a mirror-where-you-didn’t-expect-one way.
He sees her when he turns compulsively to find who they’re looking at. The three boys who have just hurricaned into the place. Ten at night. All unmasked. All dressed for July, never mind it’s forty degrees out. One of them miming, like, raping another, grinding his track-panted crotch into his buddy’s lurching ass, all three staring crane-necked at someone who must be right beside him, behind him, dying for reaction, one humping frantically for it, the other getting humped, the third and otherwise unoccupied one grinning maniacally in anticipation, and he stops waving sardine cans over the laser scanner to seek the muse, and it’s this kid—store employee—with bright pink hair, sunrise pink, minding the self-check-out lanes from the little kiosk, and Jesus Christ the eyes, and of course they want her attention, and then he sees the bit-too-narrow hips, the bit-too-flat chest, and he’s trying to place her, to see into some foggy mirror, when he notes the thing that will most stay with him for weeks: her gaze, aimed at the dark nothing of the parking lot outside the store’s massive plate-glass windows, dreamy, vacant, blissed out, a hundred percent beatifically oblivious—the big glistening deer eyes—to him, his sardines, the peanut-gallery shenanigans a pebble’s toss away, the ’80s pop tune raining down from the speakers up in the steel rafters, the nightmare of a stinking-rich country full of everything anyone could want in life barreling off the rails.
The phone.
He pauses before answering, seeing the name on the screen.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Sarah says.
“No—no,” heel of palm to brow. Maybe ten minutes he’s been awake.
“I know you hate texting and I haven’t heard from you in ages.”
“Nuh-uh. I know. How are you?”
“All right,” she says. “Considering.”
“You all still in Tampa?”
“David’s been summoned to San Jose,” she says. “We’re packing.”
He steps to the bedroom window. Looks out at the sunset-drenched city.
“It’s lucky,” Sarah says.
“Yeah?”
“We’ve got to get Kevin out.”
“Why?”
She sighs. Takes a moment.
“There’s no raising a queer kid in Florida at this point. You know?”
He rests his forearm on the chilly glass. His forehead on his forearm.
“David’s boss has been offering him Germany forever. I think it’s on the horizon. Year after next, maybe. I’m pushing for it.”
“Germany,” he says.
“Where are you and Mizumi now?”
“I’m in a drywall palace.”
“A what?”
“A condo,” he says, turning to look at it. The empty walls. “Bought it a few months ago. Probably stupid except the coming onrush.”
Another pause. Her alarm is palpable, digitized, bounced off satellites.
“Where’s Mizumi?”
“Japan.”
More dead air.
“Her father’s in bad shape,” he adds.
He hears her breathing. His long-ago ex-girlfriend who’s always, for whatever reason, stayed in touch. One of those people with an endless capacity for worry on others’ behalf.
“Is she coming back?”
What’s with the suit?
Fuck you is what.
To men.
Men in beards. Men in fatigues. Men in backward baseball caps. Men in wrap-around oil-slick shades. Men in grimy neck bandanas. Men in mustard-stained basketball shorts. Men in flip-flops. Men in shooting-range accessory vests. Men in bicep-clenching T-shirts with “Come and Take It” decaled on their chests.
Men in horse blinders so fucking thick they couldn’t see they’d turned this into a first-rate place to get the fuck out of, refusing what their own grandfathers had had the decency, the dignity, the good sense, the balls to do: comport themselves, out in public, just a little more like women.
A tatami mat.
A little squarish shoji lamp glowing a soulful amber by the wall.
The only objects in his living room. Remnants of his last apartment with Mizumi.
In the kitchen, gleaming marble countertops. Recessed lights. A stainless-steel fridge and a dishwasher controllable from a smartphone. A restaurant-grade induction stove he’s never touched.
A wreck out on the commercial strip. At that nightmarish Bed Bath & Beyond intersection.
A behemoth Cadillac SUV has clobbered a Hyundai. Smashed it up, spun it around.
There are hot-pink flares on the pavement. People wrapped in blankets standing on the side of the road, exhaling fog.
No cops. No blue lights. No dog-yelp sirens.
He does an actual double-take when he sees the bearded shitheel in camo shorts and Reeboks standing in the sparkling, glass-strewn left-turn lane. Directing traffic with a Maglite. An AR-15 strapped to his gut.
Grinding his crotch into his buddy’s out-thrust ass, and all three are stretch-necked and desperate for her reaction to—
To what? A queer slur? Is that what it is? Or just a vulgar salute to that hot girl—that particular one—from their high school, their community college?
One thing’s for sure: the fact he can’t tell means he’s too old for her.
Six days now since he spoke to anyone.
The dude at the VW service desk, it was.
Shit. Maybe it’s a week.
Men who floor it in un-mufflered Camaros. Men who start knuckle-rapping the horn the instant the light turns green. Men who wear Glocks on their hips. In rawhide holsters with “We the People” branded into them. In Rite Aid.
He adjusts the rearview so he sees his own eyes. Glances at the empty road ahead. Looks back at the mirror.
“Of the two of us, motherfucker,” he says, “I’m the one who doesn’t make kids he doesn’t want.”
His dreams turn not just hyper-vivid but pungently social. Like if he won’t spend time with other human beings in waking hours, his evolution-addled brain will force him to every unconscious one.
People, people, people. A goddamn parade from the moment his head hits the pillow each sun-up to when he lifts it exhausted again at dusk. Former bosses and coworkers. Old buddies and ex-girlfriends. Uncles, cousins. His goddamn parents. People, people, people. Visions so eidetic they wake him every fifteen minutes.
Total strangers glimpsed in his building’s lobby. At Wawa. In other cars at stoplights. Glimpsed and now he’s got to listen to them bare their fucking souls. Or endure their interrogations about his. Elementary-school classmates he hasn’t seen in God knows how many years, and sometimes they’re his age now but more often than not they’re still children needing babysitting when they show up in his high-tech apartment with the goofy rice-paper blinds over the windows.
Weird: never Mizumi.
Never.
Two crotch-rocket motorcycles scream past the Jetta on the Parkway.
The hell-noise shakes loose a memory of a dream. A plunging 747. He and his favorite undergrad professor on it, watching cracks spread through the fuselage.
So strange.
What if it hadn’t come back to him? What was the point of a dream you never remembered?
He imagines kneeling in front of her. Unbuckling, unbuttoning, unzipping her. Kissing the dusting of blonde hairs below her navel. Tugging down the black work slacks. Being totally fine with whatever.
“Her.”
What’s he doing thinking he knows her pronouns?
Odd preoccupations take hold of him now.
He keeps remembering his grad-school library. A certain spot in it. A niche under a ponderous concrete staircase, a sleek chrome-and-leather sofa in it.
It hadn’t seemed especially charmed years ago. When he spent whole afternoons. Now he’s powerless not to answer its summons. Not to make the two-hour drive.
A twenty-four-hour library, conveniently.
He street-parks the Jetta. Studies the brutalist behemoth as he walks toward it, its T- and L-shaped windows aglow. A thing out of a ’70s dystopian sci-fi flick. An obnoxious geometry problem posed in cement and glass.
Inside, it’s all gone. Staircase, niche, sofa. A glistening new stainless-steel-ribbed computer lab grafted to the building’s flank has supplanted all.
He stands in roughly the place where the stairs used to be.
It’s not even midnight. Shouldn’t there be students here somewhere?
A slow loop around the beat old high-rise apartment building up the hill from the supermarket.
Cracked colonnades. Buzzy lamppost lights. A thousand sunbaked, crumbling balconies with jiggly aluminum handrails.
Edge-city history.
There was a barbershop on the ground floor once. A florist. A superette.
She lives here.
He doesn’t know how he knows but he knows.
Except he doesn’t know.
Except he knows.
He stares up at the place through the windshield, his mind entering the apartment she shares with her mother.
Tired Ikea furniture. Dusty flat-screen TV and Xbox. Giant brandy snifter half-filled with purpled corks.
She’s in bed asleep. Of course. At this hour. That lotus-pink hair splashed everywhere, obscuring her face.
Enough.
Fifteen days. Or seventeen. Something like that.
He senses the guy in the pilot’s uniform in his building’s elevator wanting to talk.
Everyone on Earth is a situation to be managed.
He hadn’t seen its charm. Not back then.
Not so weird, though, its burbling back to top of consciousness now. These years later.
What a bulwark, that place. A talisman. Against exactly the future that’s overtaken him, Mizumi. Everyone he knows.
Books.
By the hundreds of thousands. The millions.
The authority, the gravity, the unassailability of books.
Unreal now. Borderline crazy. That he spent so many days, months, years with his face in those things.
How can it still be here in the world, that fortress, its contents, and be so totally gone, too?
Mizumi.
All the hours they spent in that niche. On that sofa. Studying. Reading. The sun setting in the big windows across the room, between the stacks. Stonehengesque.
How did he forget this?
Not long after they first started hanging out together, studying together, she put her head down on his lap on that sofa.
He stroked her hair.
She fell fast asleep.
He knew he had her.
Instant shitass karma, probably, for enjoying, there on his phone, the latest in the exciting new news genre of celebrities announcing they’re leaving. Or maybe just what he gets for being dumb enough to ride the train alone. At night.
The two boys seated opposite him are discussing him. Loudly enough it finally seems imprudent not to look up.
“My man. Yo. You gotta let me try on the jacket.”
“I’m good,” he answers. Whatever that means.
“What is that? That’s Armani?”
“That ain’t Armani.” The second one. “That’s Hyooo-go fuckin’ Boss. I got five American dollars on it.”
“You don’t get threads like those at Marshall’s.”
“Marshall’s,” the second one laughs. “Dude, you are trash.”
“What trash, bitch? Think I don’t know about the Men’s Wearhouse?”
“Ho-lee shit,” stamping a sneakered foot. “White fuckin’ trash.”
The first one returns his attention to him. “Bro. One minute. That’s all.”
The young woman four seats away watches from the corner of her eye.
“Man, he ain’t gonna let you.”
“Just one minute, bro. Just so my homey gets a snap. I’m neck-deep in strudel this weekend it sees me in that jacket.”
“You need the fuckin’ assist, too.”
“Fuck you, I do. My man. My man. I’ll give it right back. Just for a minute. Swear to God.”
Maybe sixty seconds this goes on, maybe half an hour. His brain too cortisol-soaked to tell.
The young woman in the peacoat gets up. Leaves the car.
His strategy, when it reveals itself, surprises him.
“Hey,” he says to the blonde one. The bitch. With five American dollars. “Hey. Look at me,” he says. “Your buddy’s not trying on my jacket.”
“Oh, shit, D. I told you.”
“Don’t look at him,” he says to the blonde. He’s leaning forward now, elbows on knees, phone in one hand. Picturing his father. “Look at me.”
He’s startled the kid. If nothing else.
Sweatpants he wears. A muscle shirt. It’s late November outside the train. Early December isn’t out of the question.
“He says I should look at him.”
“Look at me.”
“I’m lookin’. What am I seein’?”
“You know what I do if I get you alone? Don’t look at him.”
“Hugo Boss is a tough guy. Bruce Wayne motherfucker.”
“Look at me. You know what I do if I get you alone?”
“What do you do you get me alone?”
“You know what I do?”
The dark-haired kid with the rhinestone earrings who wants his jacket is loving this. Watching tennis.
“What do you do?”
“You want to know what I do?”
“What do you do, suit?”
“I rape you.”
Ridiculous. Of course. All of it.
Fires. Plumes. Helicopters. Blackouts.
The day everyone figures it out—that the world has already ended—will be a day like any other. Just a little stupider. A little blanker. A little more paratactic.
Best Buy. Outback Steakhouse. The Gap. Verizon Wireless. Your local Lexus dealer.
He remembers the vacuum in that beautiful kid’s eyes and it dawns on him everyone knows it already.
Probably he was among the last to figure it out.
Him and his ilk.
The end of the world is a queer thing.
He’s awake, up on one elbow instantly, squinting into the dark for whatever is—
The pink-haired kid from the supermarket. Sitting on the foot of the bed. Staring at him.
She wears her surgical mask. Same as in the store. The rest of it, too: black pants, pale-blue Oxford.
The big green eyes shine in the city skyline light beaming through the uncovered window.
He stares at her, breathing like he just got done with the pull-up bar. Free hand clutching his forehead.
She waits a bit. Maybe for his heart to stop pounding so hard she can hear it five feet away. Then:
“Mizumi’s not coming back,” she says.
He looks off at the bedroom doorway.
The shoji lamp must be on in the living room. He can see its amber glow, the one corner of the tatami mat illuminated on the floor.
“I know,” he says.
He stares at the tatami a while. Then realizes he’s crying.
His diaphragm spasms as he wipes his face with his palm.
“Her father died a few weeks ago,” the kid says.
He mouth-breathes some, staring into the bedcovers.
“You’re a font of good news,” he tells her.
The eyes smile. “Maybe you should go to her.”
He shakes his head. Counts three slow breaths to stabilize his voice.
“There’s no point,” he says. “I can’t give her what she wants.”
She reaches out a multi-ringed hand. Smooths the comforter cover.
“Children?”
The word is a gut-punch.
“Yes,” he says.
“Really, really can’t?”
“Really, really won’t.”
She looks at him. The eyes so stunning it feels a little impertinent to stare back.
“You’re not your father, you know,” she says.
He sighs. Theatrically.
“What?”
“It’s exactly what my therapist always said,” he says. “Back when there was still some point to all that.”
She’s quiet.
“He’s right here, though,” he says. “Right inside me. Coiled and waiting.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Yeah? Then why did I say that fucked-up thing to that kid? On that train?”
She puffs air out her nose behind the mask. Amused. “Because he was asking for it?”
“A kid,” he says. “You don’t talk that way to a kid. Any kid. But the very first chance that presents itself. There he is. In me. The eternal and ineluctable you-know-what.”
“What?”
“Male,” he says.
She stares at him.
“You don’t get it,” he says. “Mizumi will run a traditional-as-fuck family. Never mind she marches on Dobbs-v.-Jackson day. Never mind she reads Hélène Cixous. She’ll be the female and that leaves me the other job and I’m not gonna do it. Especially not in this shithole where being a man means joining some sort of—self-lobotomizing—fucking—death cult.”
“You could start a family there.”
He looks off into a corner.
“It could get you out of here,” she says.
The window blind is pulled all the way up. He can’t see the city from the bed but its gauzy light fills the window frame.
“I’ve been to Japan,” he says. “Guess who was there when I got there.”
She waits.
“Me,” he says. “Ergo him. Waiting. Waiting.”
She looks around the bedroom. The empty walls.
“This is what you want, then?” she says. “This place? This life?”
“Hermitting?” He looks around, too. “It’s what’s left. That’s all. I’m not gonna mix with those disgusting people out there.”
She stares at him. A strand of pink hair has fallen over her face.
“My philosophy on Americans at this point is don’t make eye contact,” he says. “Half of them put a knife in this place’s back and the other half let them do it. Too busy with their Netflix and their—what the fuck is it. TikTok.”
“Should you go back to work?”
He wipes his nose on the back of his hand. Last wet remnants of his cry.
“No way,” he says. “The pictures of all those shot-to-pieces kids got out and that was it for me. I’m done.”
Quiet.
“Imagine bringing children into this goat-fuck,” he says.
More quiet. He listens to her breathe behind her mask.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I know you’re trying to help.”
She doesn’t answer.
“You’ve done it already, though,” he says.
“Yeah?”
“This’ll sound crazy but I saw you in that store—what. Two, three weeks ago. And your eyes,” he says. “In that one moment. Numinous. I’m not even kidding. A whole way of being in the world you showed me there.”
She stares blankly at him.
“It’s what my own little hermit practice here is all about now.”
She still stares. “What did you see?”
“Detachment,” he says. “Perfect and serene. Inviolable. I mean those three jackasses over there. Doing whatever. And you don’t even notice them.”
Her brow knits itself. “Are you kidding?”
He watches her.
“I was scared to death,” she says. “That one asshole Josh has been like a pox in my life since I was in sixth grade.”
He still looks at her.
“Him and those two—henchmen of his,” she says. “I’ve told my boss twice now.”
His breathing has stopped. Pure, unadulterated rage.
“I’ll kill them if you want,” he hears himself say.
It changes her expression to something that floods his brain with shame. Same as fury swamped it seconds earlier. The two biochemical potions swirl like coffee and milk in his cortex.
They sit in silence a full minute.
Two cars honk at each other somewhere down under the window. Short-short, long-longer. Someone peels rubber.
“There was something else you thought that night in the store,” she says. “Something about a—foggy mirror.”
He’s still up on his one elbow.
“What was it?” she says.
“Was I wrong to think it?”
“I don’t know.”
“That we’re alike?” he says. “In some way? That there’s something we both refuse?”
She looks off at the bedroom door. Head tilted in the same vacuous way as in the supermarket. The deer eyes.
He follows her gaze.
The shoji lamp is off now. The tatami no longer visible.
“What are you really asking?” she says.
He stares into the dark of the next room. “Nothing that’s any of my business.”
She reaches out. Holds his ankle, friendly-like, through the comforter.
“It could be your business,” she says.
He studies her hand. The dully glinting rings.
“I’m too old for you,” he says.
She’s quiet a moment. Then moves closer to him. Holds up her hand.
There’s no explaining this but her palm is a mirror. And in it he sees—as clear and well-lit as if he were walking across campus on a sunny day—his own face from years ago. From the Age of Books.
She leans down. Kisses him.
Her mask is between their mouths but it doesn’t seem strange somehow.
She unties her Chuck Taylors. Toe-wrenches them off. He raises the bed covers and she climbs in beside him.
She clings to him and he kisses her neck and forehead and ears, the lids and corners of the preposterous eyes, brushing flare-pink hair aside wherever it’s in his way.
He feels her hard-on against his thigh and that solves that little mystery.
It’s so good it’s berserk. A little bit of an outrage. And in its later stages and phases he has the unnerving feeling there’s going to be some price to pay.
In the distance beyond the window a helicopter chops and churns the December air.
They sleep. For several hours, maybe. He’s hazy on clock-time ever since those two pricks on that train got his phone.
When he wakes he raises himself on his elbow again in the dark. Waits for her eyes to open.
“You must want to get out of here yourself,” he whispers.
The eyes smile.
“I can’t afford to,” she says. “You’ve seen where I live.”
He kisses her jaw at the mask’s edge.
“We’ll go together,” he whispers. “I’ve got plenty of money. And I don’t want to go alone.”
She seems to consider.
“All right,” she whispers.
They sleep more.
He wakes again and it’s still dark. This is odd, it occurs to him, what with his being so nocturnal lately and all.
She’s gone from beside him.
He raises his head. Finds her standing at the window, looking out. The narrow hips.
The skyline light outside has gone an eerie orange.
He gets up. Goes to her. She’s naked except for the mask. A little taller than he’d realized.
They stand together, looking out.
The city—maybe five miles away, maybe twenty—is on fire. Helicopters swarm it, aim jittery spotlights at it, at the dark glass towers silhouetted against roiling clouds.
The only other light is from the monstrous, smoky flames.
A dream wakes him. Shocker. Right at dusk. Right on schedule.
His aunt this time. Trying desperately to convince him to move into her old antique-filled house. He’s spent hours, it feels like, explaining to her there’s no point, this place is done, he’s packing up now to move to Japan.
He gets up. Pulls the cord to raise the rickety rice-paper blind. Looks out at the city soaked in gloaming.
Some other dream, too. An apocalypse dream. The skyscrapers out there burning. Someone standing here beside him, watching with him.
Stupid.
He heads for the kitchen to make coffee. After that, shower and shave.
He wants to get to Target before it closes. He’s made long lists of movies to watch, TV shows to catch up on, albums to hear. And there isn’t even a TV in this place. Not even a decent set of headphones.
This will keep him busy a while. Until Mizumi makes her glorious return.
Until you and I, failing that, join him in the precincts of the very near future.
Stevie doCarmo grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, USA, and lives in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. He teaches literature and writing at Bucks County Community College in suburban Philadelphia and holds a PhD in modern American literature from Lehigh University. His fiction has appeared at BULL, Literally Stories, Squawk Back, Books & Pieces, The Spotlong Review, and in the 2022 edition of TulipTree Publishing’s Stories That Need to Be Told anthology.
Punt Volat 