The End Is Now

She gives me a look, mouth quirked and eyebrows crinkled, like I’m speaking with an accent she can just barely puzzle out. Or like she’s hearing two people shouting at once and can’t decide which to listen to. She lets me hand the jug back to her, holds it up to the light. Dark specks, like coffee grounds, float on the surface—flakes of shingle, I guess, from the roof.

She walks to the front of the house and dumps the water over the side, onto the dead lawn below. Something down there seems to spook her, because she steps back quickly, almost tripping over the corner of a panel. But by the time she gets back to the shade of the tarp, she’s smiling again, thanking me for the water, and I know that’s my cue to leave.

The plastic garbage lid with its yellow graffiti is still sitting on the sidewalk as I make my way down. I glimpse another flash of yellow at the end of the block, sideways on a fire hydrant. And again, on a manhole cover in the middle of the road. A ‘C’ turned on its back, with a row of circles clustered inside and the ends turned out, curling. Again and again, all the way out of Cat-piss Park. Bright as Day-Glo, yellow like the edge of nausea.

* * *

“A ship with two faces,” Cloud says when I show him a sketch of it. He’s standing on the bottom step of Felicity’s front porch, on his way out to find a new location for tonight’s music. He stopped over to check on Paëday, who spent the night on the two Ikea futons in Felicity’s living room. Meme has gone back to sleep, he says, in the upstairs bedroom that Felicity still refers to as Mia’s.

Mia is Felicity’s daughter. She’s twenty-two, four years older than me, and she hasn’t been in Chicago for years now. Whether Felicity thinks she’s ever coming back is a thing that shifts with the wind.

Paëday, Cloud says carefully, is fine, just shaken up—Meme especially, since she was standing closest to the part of the roof that caved in. The edge in Cloud’s voice makes me afraid to ask for details. Their generator is almost certainly lost, and most of the sound system with it. So now what are they going to do? What the fuck can they possibly do?

Isn’t that the question for all of us.

Cloud sees me thinking and he reaches up, puts a hand on my forearm, gentle as a kitten. He’s a different creature by daylight, without the drugs or the music. Years ago, in one of the month-to-month apartments where I lived with my mother, there was a janky light switch in the bathroom. The bulb only lit up while you were flipping it on or off—never when the switch was set all the way up or down, only for that split-second sweet spot in the middle, the undetectable moment of hesitation on the way from high to low or low to high. That’s what Cloud’s like, only bright in the middle. And the truth is, I like him best like this.

“Look,” he says now, tracing my sketch with the tip of his thumb. The other hand is still on my arm, warm and not too heavy. “It’s like a Viking ship. The circles are shields, and the curving ends are, what’s the word—beakheads? Although I’m not sure why there’s two of them.”

“Ship with two faces,” I repeat. Like the image itself, the phrase makes me faintly sick, although I couldn’t say why. Cloud hands me the scrap of paper with the sketch, and I push it down into the front pocket of my jeans. “Well,” I say finally, “I doubt it’s a gang sign. Unless we’ve got Viking gangs now.”

His brown eyes sparkle. “Strange days, Friday.”

“You got that fucking right.”

Track 3. Gray City

Cloud’s new venue, as it turns out, is a church.

“It’s abandoned, Friday,” he says, like that solves everything. Which it usually does. But I’m not worried about sacrilege as much as acoustics, and churches, in my experience, tend to appear in awfully residential areas.

Cloud tilts his head back, his smooth black ponytail swinging against his windbreaker. Exasperated, or pretending to be. “Trust me. We won’t have to worry about the neighbors.”

“Really. Why’s that?”

Surprisingly, it’s Felicity who answers, stepping into the kitchen with one hand at the nape of her neck, holding her poison green halter shirt together. “East side,” she says. “Flooding, probably. Now, one of you be a darling and tie this up for me.”

* * *

We pile into the open bed of her truck—Cloud and me, and a couple of Cloud’s stoner housemates that I only know by sight, strangely identical in chrome-studded vinyl jackets, black jeans, fingerless leather gloves. Thrift store stuff, once upon a time. The two of them have already started on the pills, leaning against the wheel wells and dry-swallowing. Cloud is holding off, since it’s his job to call direction to Felicity through the truck’s open window. He rests a huge flashlight on his knee, halogen blue, and he shines it up at street signs every now and then, checking them against some internal map.