Zone One

He stripped off his poncho and dropped his pack. He laid his weapon on the bar and walked to the wall. He’d forgotten the homilies in silver frames scattered among the paraphernalia. “Love to one, friendship to many, and good will to all.” “Every guest leaves happy.” “To the good old days, which we are having right now.” Text-size affirmations. The antecedents of his coffee-company dispatches, as communication caught up with the tried-and-true commonplaces and the benighted adopted the ways of the old sages. Keep it brief and keep on message, please. Use the symbols. It’s how we speak to each other these days.

He missed the stupid stuff everyone missed, the wifi and the workhorse chromium toasters, mass transportation and gratis transfers, rubbing cheese-puff dust on his trousers and calculating which checkout line was shortest, he missed the things unconjurable in reconstruction. That which will escape. His people. His family and friends and twinkly-eyed lunchtime counterfolk. The dead. He missed the extinct. The unfit had been wiped out, how else to put it, and now all that remained were ruined like him. He missed the women he’d never get to sleep with. On the other side of the room, tantalizing at the next table, that miracle passing by the taqueria window giving serious wake. They wore too much makeup or projected complex emotions onto small animals, smiled exactly so, took his side when no one else would, listened when no one else cared to. They were old money or fretted over ludicrously improbable economic disasters, teetotaled or drank like sailors, pecked like baby birds at his lips or ate him up greedily. They carried slim vocabularies or stooped to conquer in the wordsmith board games he never got the hang of. They were all gone, these faceless unknowables his life’s curator had been saving for just the right moment, to impart a lesson he’d probably never learn. He missed pussies that were raring to go when he slipped a hand beneath the elastic rim of the night-out underwear and he missed tentative but coaxable recesses, stubbled armpits and whorled ankle coins, birthmarks on the ass shaped like Ohio, said resemblance he had to be informed of because he didn’t know what Ohio looked like. The sighs. They were sweet-eyed or sad-eyed or so successful in commanding their inner turbulence so that he could not see the shadows. Flaking toenail polish and the passing remark about the scent of a nouveau cream that initiated a monologue about its provenance, special ingredients, magic powers, and dominance over all the other creams. The alien dent impressed by a freshly removed bra strap, a garment fancy or not fancy but unleashing big or small breasts either way. He liked big breasts and he liked small breasts; small breasts were just another way of doing breasts. Brains a plus but negotiable. Especially at 3:00 a.m., downtown. A fine fur tracing an earlobe, moles in exactly the right spot, imperfections in their divine coordination. He missed the dead he’d never lose himself in, be surprised by, disappointed in.

He missed shame and guilt and a time when something higher than dumb instinct directed his actions.

He dropped two quarters into the nearest tabletop jukebox. He didn’t have two quarters but that was okay. The jukebox started up without complaint and he listened to the concert of secret levers shifting the 45 into its berth above the dust. The lights in the machine blinked on sprightly, the ones in the corner sconce by the bathrooms, over the bar, in the booths one by one, and then all the lights vocalized.