A Small Gray Dot

LIFE STAGGERED ON. HEADING INTO THE eighth year after the day the world took a dive down the sewer, and much to everyone’s amazement, our government was still hanging on though it was by a thread.

When I began my tracking career, I got a lot of business, but about a year ago, things got… let’s just say the slide continued and work slacked off.

Not getting as many tracking assignments was a pain in the ass. I saved when I could but since saving wasn’t one of my strong points, I sometimes had to do other work to get by. Working as a guard was my first choice for a side job but when that wasn’t available I took others, such as dishwashing, or street sweeping, for instance – anything but grave digging, though had it come down to it and there was nothing else available, or I had nothing to sell, I suppose I would’ve done it again.

Doing work outside my main line was what took me to Blue Heaven. It was a subdivision within the city limits positioned near the eastern border, but it managed to avoid being a part of it, mostly because of the wide gully and stone wall that separated it from everything. I hadn’t thought about it since the Event but once I got there, I remembered it was the neighborhood in which Zoni and I had been thinking of one day buying a condo.

Don’t ask me how the place got that name. It was probably one of those cutesy designations the developer came up with. I’d never gone there and I don’t know how it was before, but by the time I went, it was about as far from being Heaven as any place could get without actually being Hell.

On my first visit, I observed that, while things were slowly slipping down through shit everywhere, in Blue Heaven, the descent was faster. It was a neighborhood that seemed to have travelled farther in that shitty direction than anywhere else.

Of all the shitty places in this city, Blue Heaven was probably the shittiest. The only reason somebody wouldn’t have agreed would be because they’d never been there. Of course, outside the immediate vicinity, most didn’t know much about the place, and those that did never had a whole lot to say about it.

Yes, I know that was a lot of shitting, but, I feel it was justified. The only thing I knew about the place at first was only what everyone else knew – that hours after the Event, the heavy fog that pervaded everywhere lifted, and the weather went back to normal. Except in Blue Heaven.

When the sun was shining brightly in the rest of the city, the skies over Blue Heaven were always dim, as though occluded by an unseen something that cast a perpetual shadow. It was not as thick or as low-lying as the original fog but it was there. Anyone who happened to look in that direction saw the mist but nobody discussed it. This marker, a leftover, was an unwanted reminder of the day it all began, and it was enough to cause most folk, including me, to avoid the place.

I only learned other unpleasant facts about Blue Heaven when I went there to make a delivery. Afterwards, I could attest to the fact that whatever else, it was an exceptionally bewildering pile of sh— okay, I’ve used that word enough for now. I’ll just say that it was a complicated dump. In spite of that, surprisingly, much of the usual crime in the city never happened there, so you’d think it wouldn’t be such a bad place to live. But, as I found out during my initial visit, you’d be wrong because there was a reason for its low crime statistics and that reason made it a rather disagreeable place to live.

Making that delivery was a simple job, one that wouldn’t take long. I would’ve done it for free if I hadn’t been in need of a little cash at the time, because I was doing it for that writer-turned-agent-turned-courier friend, Adam Jones. I’d helped him out before, and he would hand me fifty or sixty bucks for my trouble when he thought I needed it but that time he said he’d give me a hundred and fifty. I didn’t ask him why he was paying me so much more simply to deliver an envelope. I needed the money and I figured he knew it and was doing it to help me out. I’d done the same for folk I knew during my more prosperous times.

Blue Heaven was not a particularly large area – there were much larger subdivisions around – but, as I learned, finding your way through the neighborhood could be difficult and confusing, even in daylight. If you weren’t familiar with the locale, or if you were inattentive or careless, you could get lost. I’m well familiar with that because that’s what happened to me on my first trip there. It was one of the unpleasant facts about the place and one that made it not such a great place to live.