THE WEATHER IN THERE
I called it Michelle-think. I had tried to limit its effect on me, but her pessimisms were contagious, and by that winter they had infected me. Apartment buildings were sweeping outside the cities. Soon, they would come upon us and ruin our medium-sized town. The Aventura was bad enough. We’d break more ground. Our property taxes would go up. Schools would become hard to get into. Taco Bell instead of Tulio’s Mex. It would be dangerous to bike around town with all the traffic.
Never mind that none of these seemingly important but, ultimately, they weren’t even speed bumps, and no one noticed them. The future would funnel out of everyone’s minds, and people wouldn’t recognize the changes unless they were driving a visitor around town, telling them, “That’s new, that’s new,” the most alienating of observations. Parking lots stay the same. I sit in them, trying to find a station.
“Where are you?” Michelle said over the phone.
“I’m just following this guy. I’m at Exit 22, with the Costco.”
“Oh, I know where you are. You’re doing what?”
“Never mind,” I said. “I’m behind a Winnebago and he’s going too slow.”
“Go around him. Which way are you going?”
“Easterly.”
“I’m home.”
“I know.”
“Text when you’re close.”
An apple core materialized, bouncing in the flow of traffic before me. It flew under my car. I heard and felt its impact in the wheel well under my left foot. I got the Winnebago’s license plate number. I memorized everything, worried I might miss something. It’s so easy to concentrate on these pills. Thank you, modern-day shamans, for bringing them to us. The cowboy had driven in from Glassbie County, a retiree haven twenty minutes south of Dayton. I could have gone anywhere. I was free to pursue the man down a stretch of four-lane highway I could drive blindfolded. I had work everywhere, always signatures to stamp, tax data to copy in-person, biometrics to gather.
“I have to make a few calls first,” I said. “See what’s on my plate.”
“Put me on that plate.”
“Then Xavier’s coming.”
“Oh, shit. I forgot about that. He always fucks you up, Richard.”
The next day, my oldest but estranged friend was coming to Dayton. Michelle called Xavier’s effect on me enervating. I told him I would pick him up at the airport and not to make me look nervous.
I had never taken his threats to visit me seriously. This, then, was the reason Xavier was coming. I cleaned, I hid my sci-fi books and movies and bought music. I wondered if he would fly in a suit. I thought he might, having embraced his job as a futures trader chameleon-like, in an instant changing from a half-hearted punk to an adult in business, who was suddenly intolerant of science fiction among other things we loved together as kids. He would fit in with the small crowds of elderly visitors, who always dress up. Nobody comes to Dayton unless someone is dying or has already died. Over the holidays, it was the Aventura victims, their families and all the world’s media crew, their carry-ons bulging with video equipment. Now we have circled back to the old. They sit very still in their airplane chairs in the sky, land and search the bewildering airport for their families’ faces.
The last time I saw him was before Aventura, at a wedding of a mutual friend. He looked on me as a sad person but an easy problem to solve. Xavier pulled me to the grassy perimeter of the wedding reception tent and said, “Leave Dayton now.” And in a whisper, “And for fuck’s sake, leave Michelle behind.”
After we graduated from Arizona State, Xavier demanded that I follow him to Chicago, but I came back home to Dayton. I told him that it wouldn’t be for all time, that I just had to clear up some things: mostly, get my father off pain meds, and then I would move out. I don’t know how much of that I truly meant. Probably none of it at the time.
Two years later Michelle still disliked him, and I sometimes suspected she’d been standing or dancing close enough to hear what Xavier had said to me at the wedding. I had my own doubts about him. He wouldn’t understand the importance of the cowboy stealing the newspapers, which was missing between us.
Following the Winnebago, I imagined I sat in my car at the Golden Apple, bathed by slanting sunlight. Xavier would sit in the passenger seat, bored and surly, and glare at the parking lot I’d come to know perfectly. In the daydream, we would watch a man steal what remained of all the newspapers in the world. Then my dad would take the last of the pain medications in the pharmacy.
“Still, come over,” Michelle said.
“I will if I can,” I said. I didn’t know how long the distraction of stalking the Winnebago was going to last. My panic felt far away, and I wanted that freedom from worry to remain.
“Gotta go.”
“Love you,” she said.
The Winnebago took the Aventura off-ramp. I followed the truck off the highway and to a parking space a hundred yards from the mall’s east entrance, far from the other cars. I parked a few empty rows down. Long streaks of golden cloud cover stretched over the Aventura and the parking lot, brushing the dashboard and my hands resting on the steering wheel a dusty bronze. The days felt short, the sun barely glanced at us from the horizon, never really rising, a day-long bloom.
The cowboy knelt on the asphalt and spread the newspapers around himself in a semi-circle. The boy came around the other side of the Winnebago, carrying a hunter-orange cooler. The cowboy opened the cooler and pulled out a long pink fish, then reached around to a black sheath clipped to his belt, drew a slim knife, and started cleaning the fish over the papers. Glistening innards fell from the fish as the boy passed the man whole fish and the old cowboy returned to him sliced flaps of the ones he had cleaned. The girl watched from the rear window.
Michelle texted me one word, Albuquerque. She had been asking me for years to take her to Chicago, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, it didn’t matter where we moved. But recently she had stopped asking. She’d given up, I thought, but the text seemed to indicate that she had picked up the thread again.
I didn’t see any difference in where. Places remained places, parking lots were still parking lots, but I’d started to see what was happening, living here. It was clearer among the cars and the shoppers moving to and from the Golden Apple and the Staples and Payless. Nothing was at home anymore since those kids and the balloons. The lots in front of the stores, familiar as a friend, had become like strangers. The sun seemed to set before it was natural. I didn’t think I was the only one who couldn’t get their radio to work.
Despite believing this, I thought there must have been something off with my biorhythms, or maybe it was a touch of hypoglycemia. It didn’t work, I couldn’t blame my thinking on spacy science or blood sugar levels, nor the gummy appliqué to the mirror, which should have told me when I was. The changes only told me the elderly would never stop coming to Dayton and would never die.
The man and the boy gathered the cleaned fish and the cooler, climbed back into the Winnebago and drove off, leaving the newspapers and the guts behind. I waited until they were out of sight, then got out of my car and approached the mess.
A splay of sacks and pouches and long bloody strands lay scattered across USAToday’s ten-day weather forecasts. There came a tightness in my lungs, some internal static, a closing in of the body and the sky. The idea of future would dissolve soon. It was an old feeling; it was a panic attack rising, so I did my breathing, in the nose, out the mouth, stared at the sun for a fraction of a second, and told myself the panic had been triggered by the anticipation of Xavier coming home to judge me.
I made a cell phone video of the fish guts, panning across them, then took my dad’s pills from my jeans’ coin pocket and dry-swallowed a couple.
To be continued.
Art through AI
I provide only "the most alienating of observations". Love that line. Is the narrator a haruspex (had to look that up)? Can't wait to see where the fish guts lead.
He's entitled to think of himself as a haruspex, certainly, for a little while.