Authors: Benjamin Parzybok
The Riot
Next came a man named Chris, in his mid-forties, thin and busy. He wore a baseball cap and worked incessantly at some invisible thing in his mouth, a stone or chipped tooth or perhaps his cheek. He was
quiet and
Renee could see it was painful for him to look her in the eyes, his own blue eyes big and hurt and uncomfortable. Julia said she knew of him from her old neighborhood.
“I’ve passed his block, seen him working in his yard,” Julia told Renee. “Always working, out there mowing. His yard was nice.”
“What do you want?” Renee asked him.
He shrugged. He’d seen her on the news, he said. He didn’t need a place to stay, he needed something to do. He’d been unemployed for three years and the restlessness was killing him. After that first day, he showed up at 8 a.m. every morning to work.
“Here,” he said. He pushed a full unit gallon into her arms and two days of rations and then stared at the floor. “I don’t need it.”
“Thank you,” Renee said. “But no, we can’t take that.”
He raised his hands, refusing to take it back. “Please. I know you can’t get any. You keep giving yours away, ha ha,” he said, and then blushed. “I want you to have it.”
She set him to work on the house, and he turned his nervous energy on it with fervor. He built an outhouse. He made bunk beds in preparation for more that might come, the wood pulled from the walls of abandoned houses. He cleaned out junk piles, fixed latches, sealed windows, whatever it was that needed doing. His projects spawned new projects, which spawned new projects, so that Renee would come in to find a lightbulb replacement task had resulted in part of the ceiling torn apart.
“Don’t fix any leaks,” Renee said. It was her running joke. If the roof leaked, they could all go home.
Then others came, drifting in off the street like leaves blown in. Some arrived fired up, kids in their twenties having found her, ranting about the Portland Water Act and distribution inequality and looking for ways to fight. Many truck robberies were proposed, and each time Renee pushed back. No, they were gathering. They were building. No need to flag themselves. They chipped their ration allotments into the communal meals and hung on. Some needed a place to stay—refugees in their own city—while others just came to take a look at her, she supposed. With each arrival she felt a greater need to live up to what they expected, but also a greater sense of who she was. Authority began to come more easily. Her visitors assumed she was in charge—and they seemed to need someone to be in charge. She placed each of them in some small routine, giving them a moment of purpose, allowing herself to believe they were all working toward something larger. As of yet she had only a vague idea of what that larger thing was.
Renee set Chris to work on creating an office for the house. She chose a medium-sized second story room across from where she slept, leaving for now the big room on the second floor empty. The office was not large—but perfect for private audiences. She’d churned the idea for the room about in her mind for a few days. First realizing she wanted it, then trying to get a feel for it, how it would look, the meaning it would impart to visitors. The office needed a big chair, an enormous chair to sit in, and a desk that spread nearly the width of the room. As if to say: Here everything is decided with the utmost solemnity. The office was spare and unadorned—though she amused herself with the thought of having Leroy scrawl
I am the motherfucking queen of Egypt
on the wall. On the desk she put a neat stack of blank paper on one side, and reserved a space for outgoing documents on the other side.
When it was done she shooed curious volunteers out and closed the door behind them. The walls were scuffed white, the floor was scarred fir. For a moment, she laughed at the whole project, the preposterousness of an office with a slot for outgoing papers. She stared out of a window that looked down on the big backyard. Then she sat at the desk in the big chair and stared at the door and rehearsed, quietly, a voice that was beginning to surface, someone else that she’d had hiding inside of her all along.
She thought about what Chris had said, the rumor that she was starting some kind of an organization. She pulled out a pencil and paper and wrote the word “OK” at the top of the page, and then double and triple-traced it. They needed water.
She thought of Josh on his way up from Zach’s house. She put off the fear of what they must do. Wait until Josh came, and then they could case the trucks that smuggled water. Josh and she could get a crew together. She’d be the new Robin Hood. She’d be Maid Marian.
Renee and Bea armed themselves and went scavenging for clothes. It was a mysterious process—standing in an abandoned house and sifting through clothes that had been strewn around like a great wind had whipped through the place. Sometimes there were feces on the
floor or the remains of campfires. And the clothes: Bea picked up a few pieces until she found clothes that fit her and she was done. Renee picked up each piece and marveled at it, trying to parse out who it was she was becoming and to match up those branching possibilities with the shirt that dangled from her fingers. A cowboy shirt with plastic-pearl buttons? A green canvas shirt from some past war? A pink tank top, a black tank top, a dress? Was she dressing for herself or Maid Marian?
She picked up something blue and satiny and shied away from a stain on it that could only be blood. Bea stood by and scarred a dresser top with the point of her knife. She sighed impatiently.
“Stop it,” Renee snapped. “Go home if you want.”
“No, I’m staying.”
But Renee didn’t find anything in that house either.
As they walked down the block they looked for signs a house was abandoned. A front door off its hinges, windows smashed out, but these signs were not always telling.
At one such place, a small green house a block from their own, they stood on either side of the entrance and tried to peer in. The branches of a great dead tree did a poor job of shading the place. There was a screen door between them and the inside that had been spray painted black, the drips hardened into little black pearls. Through its few tiny holes it was too dim to see inside.
“Hello?” Renee called in. “Is this house empty?” The words came out muddy, her syllables dulled by a dry tongue.
There was no answer and they waited, listening.
Renee nodded and Bea opened the door. They stepped into the gloom and waited for their eyes to adjust. Sitting in a rocking chair was an obese white man in his forties or fifties. He held a shotgun pointed at them and did not move.
Renee screamed and dropped the few clothes she’d gathered—socks and underwear and a military beret. She turned and fled, banging back through the screen door and Bea followed.
As she ran she waited for the gunshot but it did not come.
They sprinted, panting with fear, back to the front of their own house and stood there in the street.
“Dude,” Bea said, “don’t fucking scream.”
Renee threw her hands up. “I didn’t! I mean don’t normally.” She paced back and forth. “Was he alive?”
“Yes,” Bea bent to catch her breath. “I don’t know.”
“We’ll have to send someone to check on him.”
“No way I’m going back there,” Bea said.
“Goddamnit,” Renee said. She sat on the porch and held her head in her hands. “If he isn’t, we can’t leave him there.” She went over the details in her mind. His eyes had been open, his head tilted just so. “What do we do?”
“Nothing,” Bea said.
“I have to know if he’s alive.”
“You’ve got no survival instinct.”
“Let’s go back.” Renee stood up.
“Seriously,” Bea said. “Come on.”
“Walk me back there, I’ve got to know.”
Bea swore and stood up. They walked cautiously back to the house, spooked now, as if every house held a man in a rocking chair with a shotgun.
Outside Renee snuck up to the side of the doorway while Bea stood out at the street.
“Please,” Bea said one last time. “Don’t.”
“Sir?” Renee said breathlessly through the screen door, keeping out of view. She worked at a piece of peeling paint in the doorframe with her thumbnail and felt an immobilizing wave of fear pass through her. She wanted to look into the dark room beyond but she couldn’t bring herself to do so. It was utterly silent inside. “Sir? I’m just checking on you. Making sure you’re OK. Just say something and I’ll go away.” There was no sound.
She snuck a look inside then. He was in the same chair, still. A violent chill shook her and her teeth began to chatter. She opened the screen door and approached. She was shaking now and she clenched her teeth to keep them still. He was massive, with an enormous, mostly bald head and a fleshy face. His eyes were open. She thought maybe she saw him breathe and she stumbled sideways and crashed objects off of a coffee table. He wore a blue T-shirt and blue jeans, dust-covered and sweat-stained. His eyes did not track. “Sir?” she whispered. She wanted to touch him for a heart rate but each time she got close to his neck she pulled back. His eyes were sunken and rimmed with dark, and his skin slack, his lips parted. She settled on the shotgun, grabbing the barrel and pulling it from him slowly. It slipped from his hands. She didn’t judge its weight properly and the butt clattered on the ground. She leaned it against the door, and then checked the pulse at his neck. The skin felt odd to the touch, as if he were wrapped in wax paper, and it depressed as if the insides were hollowed out. There was no pulse. Renee backed away a few paces and leaned over. For a moment she thought she would vomit. “Bea!” she yelled.
Renee grabbed the shotgun and stumbled outside. “Never mind,” she said. “Let’s go find a crew. We have to bury him.”
“Ah,” Bea said.
“Damnit,” Renee said. “Damnit.”
They stood there at the end of the walkway for a moment. The neighborhood was quiet. And then about five houses down they heard what sounded like hammering. “I wonder if—his neighbors?” Renee said.
“We’re not really on our feet here ourselves.” Bea eyed the house again.
The hollow her fingers made in the man’s neck was stuck in her mind. She wiped her hand on her jeans again, and then again. “I know.” She shrugged. “I can’t leave him there.”
His name was Harold, or at least the ID at his house claimed so. They buried Harry the Giant, as they’d taken to calling him, dubbing him with a friendly title to insulate them from the gruesome task. They dug four feet down into the dry earth, the best they could do before dark for the size of the hole. Someone turned up a cart for hauling lumber, and the lot of them, every resident of the house on Going Street, transported him out of his house and onto the cart and through the streets to the Rose City Cemetery. The ta
sk took most of a day, and they walked through the streets with him atop their cart like a tiny parade with one float. Renee felt people watch as they passed.
For a moment, as they put Harry in the ground, she hovered between satisfaction and sadness. She wanted to spring up and search other houses for the dead. As if inside her were a bell, and having done one ennobling thing, that bell rang clear and loud and her body hummed with it.
Later that night, with the job finished, she stood in her room and inspected each item of clothing she’d scavenged. Each had a memory to it, the ghost of its previous owner still inhabiting it. There was something wrong with all of them. They came from the past, from the dead and a dead era. As soon as possible, she resolved to have someone make her clothes. She needed to look it. Were she to be what they asked of her, chieftain of this new tribe, she needed to part ways with the past.
In the end, she chose a black T-shirt that had a hole in its sleeve and blue jeans that had the worn mark of a wallet in the front pocket. Men’s jeans. For shoes, she’d had a lucky find in a pair of worn boots that thudded reassuringly against the wooden floor when she walked. They would know she was coming. The outfit would have to do for now.
In the mirror behind her door she looked at herself. There was a long thin scratch down her right cheek that she had no memory of getting. The blood had smeared, starting bold and red and fanning out on the end like a comet.
Downstairs, atop their listing table, someone had pencil-drawn a likeness of her. No body, just her face, the extra dark eyebrows, the twin braids she wore all the time now—the face looked sad, she thought, or angry, and yet there was an expression she didn’t understand. She stared at it self-consciously, as if come face-to-face with a living, breathing dopplegänger of herself, someone who might know her thoughts before she spoke them. There was a hardness about her.
And then she realized it was not of her. It was a drawing of Maid Marian.
Zach sat perched on the sto
ne edge of his building’s top, a three-story drop to the sidewalk below him. A capricious, unsteady wind blew from all directions. Gusts of it pushed him this way and that. It was most apparent in the street below, where heaps of detritus that had rotted in place for weeks suddenly moved, rose Frankenstein-like from their resting places into cyclone characters that stumbled down the street, reanimated and careening, an instant army of the undead, until their life-sparks moved on and they settled back into newly rearranged piles.
Dust particles bit at Zach’s face and stuck to him. He sighed and gripped the letter and sighted down the street toward the city where, later, he would be expected to show up at work. He thought about not going. He thought maybe he’d curl up and reread the letter all day.
In the distance, to the east, the big mountains rose from the ground brown and lifeless—Mount Saint Helens and Mount Hood, and beyond, Mount Adams and Mount Rainier and Mount Jefferson, lost in a dust horizon. With the snow gone, they’d lost their beauty. Just looming piles of dirt now.
Hey Boyfriend!
So it’s been by my count ~8 days, aka 11,520 minutes (since I know these sorts of exacting numbers make you hot: 691,200 seconds, plus or minus, and every last one of them more dull/less good/more boring/less happy/more horny/less sexy) since I left your front porch and bicycled my way up here into the wasteland of the NE. Each of these days, for lack of Zach, I’ve had to share a bed with Bea, who snores not a little, I do not hesitate to inform you. And I’m not talking about the soft, thoughtful—even somnulent(sp?)-inducing—hum-buzz of my boyfriend’s snore, but a rip-roaring, jake-brakes outside your trailer home type snore, that rattles the window panes and makes your teeth chatter into rearrangement, bless the girl.
In the morning, in front of the mirror, it is not unusual that this narrator needs to re-position her molars back to their starting gates. Just saying.
How are you? I wish you could stop by to [redacted] me so [redacted] that I [redacted] all night making [redacted redacted redacted]. Right? I mean come on, how long must this separation last? With the dry tongue and the anxious looks over one’s shoulder and occasional—cannot deny, it must be told—masturbatory episodes in the rare moments of free time to oneself? How long?