“They know. Evan Kenerly was there. They made us all leave. They know we can’t say no. They know we’re scared.” My hands tremble on the bar. I pull out my last hundred and shove it at the bartender. “Another.”
Julie grabs the bill and stuffs it in her pocket.
“I need another!” My voice … I’ve never heard it so loud. It trembles in time with my hands. The TVs are screaming at me. A baseball highlight reel cuts to the middle of an R&B chorus, a wailing, showboating singer doing vocal runs. “They’re liars, they’re going to eat everything we built, they’re—”
Julie takes my face in her hands and kisses me. My lips don’t move, but she puts passion into it, kissing like she’s kissing her lover instead of the stiff, open-eyed face of a lunatic. The noise around me softens. The noise inside me softens. The room stops spinning and centres around the lovely face pressed hard against mine, our brains as close to touching as they can ever get.
She pulls back and locks her eyes on me, still holding my face.
“Focus on my eyes, okay?” she whispers. “Just look at my eyes and take a few breaths.”
I look at her eyes. They are huge and round and the bar’s lights reflect in their blue centres like distant stars. I take a breath.
“Breathing is good,” she says. “It’s soothing. I know it’s new to you, but try to remember. Breathe and think about breathing.”
My focus narrows until everything behind her is a blur. I think about breathing. My lungs are still sore from years of disuse, but they’re slowly warming up and resuming their duties, extracting pure, sweet O2 and sending it to my brain to power Living thoughts. Whatever dark fuel my brain once used was better suited to commands and urges than the lovely complexity of a human personality, human hopes and dreams.
I have these, I tell myself as I float in the muteness of space, holding on to Julie like a tether. I am allowed these. No one can take them.
“Good,” she says. “Keep breathing. We’re going to be okay. Whatever this is, we can handle it. We don’t have anything we can’t live without.”
“Can we leave?” I say during a slow exhalation. “Do we need this city?”
“Where would we go?”
“Far away. A cabin in the hills. Just us.”
“R,” she says, and the tone in that one syllable is enough to reveal the cowardice of my question. “We don’t need the city, but we need the people. And they need us.”
“Why?”
“We’re trying to build something, remember? You’re the one who told me we can’t run away.”
My face sags into her grip. “But I’m tired.”
“You’re not tired,” she says with a wry smile. “You’re just drunk.”
She releases my face and I drift. My eyes roam the bar, tracing the faces of the patrons as they stare up at the five TVs, their skin tinted grey by the glow of the screens.
“R?” Julie says, trying to pull me back to earth. “Can you tell me what happened at the meeting?”
A late-era rap song: boasts about wealth and luxury delivered with a grim wink over a distant, desolate beat that may have been played on trash cans.
“Rosy’s walkie is off. Should we check on him? It’s been two hours.”
A staticky fuzz begins to creep into the audio from the TVs, drowning out the rapper’s mournful fantasies.
“Where was the meeting? At the community centre?”
I twist my neck to look at the nearest screen. The audio has been completely replaced by static and now the image begins to stutter—the rapper opens a briefcase; it’s full of money; he sets it on fire and warms his hands—the image goes black.
A howl of protest rises from everyone in the room. Someone throws a tumbler at the TV, misses, hits the liquor shelf. Whiskey and glass sprinkles the bar. But the screen remains black for only a few seconds. It flickers, there’s a loud pop, and a new image appears.
A grainy security camera feed, a fish-eye lens gazing down at a man in a white shirt tinkering with a large instrument panel. Another man in a white shirt is faintly visible in the shadows, and ‘Captain’ Timothy Balt stands between them, looking uncertain for the first time since I’ve known him.
“What is this place?” he says, glancing into the shadows around them. “How’d you know this was down here?”
The man at the panel notices something in front of him and his eyes dart up to the camera, the fish-eye lens warping his face into a bulbous horror. He pulls a cable out of a nearby jack and the image goes black again.
“What the hell’s going on …?” Julie says.
A harsh squeal erupts from all the TVs, and while everyone covers their ears, something flashes on the screen. It’s there for barely a single frame, too brief for me to fully grasp, but my brain rings like a gong. I see the door again, its rusty metal corners poking out behind crumbling plaster. I hear the drone behind the door, the churning throb of sub-audible bass rumbling up from the basement, rattling the door in its frame, sending chips of plaster flying off like popcorn.
My eyes squeeze shut. My mind is dark and the image blinks in the shadows with maddening brevity, its contours just out of reach, teasing me. I feel my hand moving.
“R …?”
I grab a martini glass and smash it against the bar. I grip the stem like a dagger.
“R! What the fuck!”