The Orchard, as it turns out, is not part of the Stadium's farming system. It's their one and only pub, or at least the closest thing they have to a pub in this new bastion of prohibition. Reaching its entrance requires an arduous vertical journey through the Stadium's Escheresque cityscape. First, we climb four flights of stairs in a ramshackle housing tower while the residents glare at us through their cracked apartment doors. This is followed by a vertiginous crossing to a neighbouring building - boys on the ground try to look up Nora's skirt as we wobble over a wire-mesh catwalk strung between the towers' support cables. Once inside the other building, we plod up three more flights of stairs before finally emerging onto a breezy patio high above the streets. The noise of crowds rumbles through the door at the other end: a wide slab of oak painted with a yellow tree.
The place is packed, but the mood is eerily subdued. No shouting, no high-fiving, no woozy requests for phone numbers. Despite the speakeasy secrecy of its obscure location, the Orchard doesn't serve alcohol.
'I ask you,' Julie says as we push our way through the well-behaved crowds, 'is there anything sillier than a bunch of ex-Marines and construction workers drowning their sorrows at a fucking juice bar? At least it's flask-friendly.'
The Orchard is the first building I've seen in this city with some trace of character. All the usual drinking accoutrements are here: dart boards, pool tables, flatscreen TVs with football games. At first I'm amazed to see these broadcasts - does entertainment still exist? Are there still people out there engaging in frivolity despite the times? But then, ten minutes into the third quarter, the images warp like VHS tape and switch to a different game, the teams and scores changing in the middle of a tackle. Five minutes later they switch again, with just a quick stutter to mark the splice. None of the sports fans seem to notice. They watch these abbreviated, eternally looping contests with blank eyes and sip their drinks like players in an historical reenactment.
A few of the patrons notice me staring at them and I look away. But then I look back. Something about this scene is burrowing into my mind. A thought is developing like a ghost on a Polaroid.
'Three grapefruits,' Julie tells the bartender, who looks vaguely embarrassed as he prepares the drinks. We settle in on bar stools and the two girls start talking. The music of their voices replaces the jangling classic rock on the jukebox, but then even this fades to a muffled drone. I'm staring at the TVs. I'm staring at the people. I can see the outline of their bones under their muscles. The edges of joints poking up under tight skin. I see their skeletons, and the idea taking shape in my head is something I hadn't expected: a blueprint of the Boneys. A glimpse into the their twisted, dried-up minds.
The universe is compressing. All memory and all possibility squeezing down to the smallest of points as the last of their flesh falls away. To exist in that singularity, trapped in one static state for eternity - this is the Boneys' world. They are dead-eyed ID photos, frozen at the precise moment they gave up their humanity. That hopeless instant when they snipped the last thread and dropped into the abyss. Now there's nothing left. No thought, no feeling, no past, no future. Nothing exists but the desperate need to keep things as they are, as they always have been. They must stay on the rails of their loop or be overwhelmed, set ablaze and consumed by the colours, the sounds, the wide-open sky.
And so the thought hums in my head, whispering through my nerves like voices through phone lines: what if we could derail them? We've already disrupted their structure enough to incite a blind rage. What if we could create a change so deep, so new and astonishing, they would simply break? Surrender? Crumble into dust and ride out of town on the wind?
'R,' Julie says, poking me in the arm. 'Where are you? Daydreaming again?'
I smile and shrug. Once again my vocabulary fails me. I'm going to need to find a way to let her into my head soon. Whatever this thing is I'm trying to do, I know it can't be done alone.
The bartender returns with our drinks. Julie grins at me and Nora as we appraise the three tumblers of pale yellow nectar. 'Remember how when we were kids, pure grapefruit juice was the tough-guy drink? Like the whiskey of kiddie beverages?'
'Right,' Nora laughs. 'Apple juice, Capri Sun, that stuff was for bitches.'
Julie raises her glass. 'To our new friend Archie.'
I lift my glass an inch off the bar and the girls clang theirs down against it. We drink. I don't exactly taste it, but the juice stings my mouth, finding its way into old cuts in my cheeks, bites I don't remember biting.
Julie orders another round, and when it arrives she hefts her messenger bag onto her shoulder and picks up all three glasses. She leans in close and gives me and Nora a wink. 'Be right back.' With the drinks in hand, she disappears into the bathroom.
'What's . . . she doing?' I ask Nora.
'Dunno. Stealing our drinks?'
We sit there in awkward silence, third-party friends lacking the connective tissue of Julie's presence. After a few minutes, Nora leans in and lowers her voice. 'You know why she said you were my boyfriend, right?'
I shrug one shoulder. 'Sure.'
'It didn't mean anything, she was just trying to deflect attention away from you. If she said you were her boyfriend, or her friend, or anything to do with her, Grigio would've grilled the fuck out of you. And obviously if he really looks at you . . . the make-up's not perfect.'
'I under . . . stand.'
'And by the way, just so you know? That was a pretty big deal that she took you to see her mom today.'
I raise my eyebrows.
'She doesn't tell people that stuff, ever. She didn't even tell Perry the whole story for like three years. I can't say exactly what that means for her, but . . . it's new.'
I study the bar top, embarrassed. A strangely fond smile spreads across Nora's face. 'You know you remind me a little of Perry?'
I tense. I begin to feel the hot remorse boiling up in my throat again.
'I don't know what it is, I mean, you're sure not the blowhard he was, but you have some of that same . . . sparkle he had when he was younger.'
I should stitch my mouth shut. Honesty is a compulsion that's damned me more than once. But I just can't hold it in any more. The words build and explode out of me like an uncontainable sneeze. 'I killed him. Ate . . . his brain.'
Nora purses her lips and nods slowly. 'Yeah . . . I thought you might have.'
My face goes blank. 'What?'
'I didn't see it happen but I've been putting two and two together. It makes sense.'
I look at her, stunned. 'Julie . . . knows?'
'I don't think so. But if she did, I'm pretty sure she'd be okay.' She touches my hand where it rests on the bar. 'You could tell her, R. I think she'd forgive you.'
'Why?'
'Same reason I forgive you.'
'Why?'
'Because it wasn't you. It was the plague.'
I wait for more. She watches the TV above the bar, pale green light flickering over her dark face. 'Did Julie ever tell you about when Perry cheated on her with that orphan girl?'
I hesitate, then nod.
'Yeah, well . . . that was me.'
My eyes dart towards the bathroom, but Nora doesn't seem to be hiding anything. 'I'd only been here a week,' she says. 'Didn't know Julie yet. That's how I met her, actually. I fucked her boyfriend, and she hated me, and then time passed and a lot happened, and somehow we came out the other side as friends. Crazy, right?' She upends her glass over her tongue to catch the last drops, then pushes it aside. 'What I'm trying to say is, it's a shitty world and shit happens, but we don't have to bathe in shit. Sixteen years old, R - my meth-head parents dumped me in the middle of a Dead-infested slum because they couldn't feed me any more. I wandered on my own for years before I found Citi Stadium, and I don't have enough fingers to count all the times I almost died.' She holds up her left hand and wiggles the half-gone finger like a bride-to-be showing off her diamond. 'What I'm saying is, when you have weight like that in your life, you have to start looking for the bigger picture or you are gonna sink.'
I peer into her eyes, failing to read her meaning like the illiterate I am. 'What's . . . the bigger picture . . . of me killing Perry?'
'R, come on,' she says, mock-slapping the side of my head. 'You're a zombie. You have the plague. Or at least you did when you killed Perry. Maybe you're different now, I sure hope you are, but back then you didn't know you had choices. This isn't "crime", it's not "murder", it's something way deeper and more inevitable.' She taps her temple. 'Me and Julie get that, okay? There's a Zen saying, "No praise, no blame, just so." We don't care about assigning blame for the human condition, we just want to cure it.'
Julie emerges from the bathroom and sets the drinks on the bar with a sly grin. 'Even grapefruit juice can use a little kick sometimes.'
Nora takes a test sip and turns away, covering her mouth. 'Holy . . . Lord!' she coughs. 'How much did you put in here?'
'Just a few minis of vodka,' Julie whispers with girlish innocence. 'Courtesy of our friend Archie, and Undead Airlines.'
'Way to go, Archie.'
I shake my head. 'Can please . . . stop calling me . . . ?'
'Right, right,' Julie says. 'No more Archie. But what do we toast to this time? It's your booze, R, you decide.'
I hold the glass in front of me. I sniff it, insisting to myself that I can still smell things besides death and potential death, that I'm still human, still whole. A citrus tang pricks my nostrils. Glowing Florida orchards in summer. The toast that enters my head seems unbearably corny, but it comes out anyway. 'To . . . life.'
Nora stifles a laugh. 'Really?'
Julie shrugs. 'Unbearably corny, but what the hell.' She raises her glass and clinks it against mine. 'To life, Mr Zombie.'
'L'chaim!' Nora bellows, and drains her glass.
Julie drains her glass.
I drain my glass.
The vodka slams into my brain like a round of buckshot. This time it's no placebo. The drink is strong and I feel it. I am feeling it. How is that possible?
Julie orders another round of grapefruits, then promptly converts them into Greyhounds, and she is generous with the pours. I expect the girls to be as lightweight as I am, since alcohol is contraband here, but I realise it's probably quite routine to visit the liquor store while out salvaging the city. They quickly outpace me as I sip my second drink, marvelling at the sensations that swirl through my body. The noise of the bar fades and I just watch Julie, the focal point in my blurry composition. She is laughing. A free, unreserved kind of laugh that I don't think I've heard before, throwing her head back and letting it just cascade out of her. She and Nora are recounting some shared memory. She turns to me and says something, inviting me into the joke with a word and a flash of white teeth, but I don't respond. I just look at her, resting my chin in my hand, my elbow on the bar, smiling.
Contentment. Is this what it might feel like?
After finishing my drink I feel a pressure in my lower regions, and I realise I have to piss. Since the Dead don't drink, urination is a rare event. I hope I can remember how to do it.
I wobble into the bathroom and lean my forehead against the wall in front of the urinal. I unzip, and I look down, and there it is. That mythical instrument of life and death and first-date back-seat fucking. It hangs limp, useless now, silently judging me for all the ways I've misused it over the years. I think of my wife and her new lover, slapping their cold bodies together like poultry in a packing plant. I think of the anonymous blurs in my past life, probably all dead or Dead by now. Then I think of Julie curled next to me in that king-sized bed. I think of her body in that comically mismatched underwear, her breath against my eyes as I study every line in her face, wondering what mysteries lie in the glowing nuclei of her each and every cell.
There in the bathroom, surrounded by the stench of piss and shit, I wonder: Is it too late for me? Can I somehow snatch another chance from the skymouth's grinding teeth? I want a new past, new memories, a new first-handshake with love. I want to start over, in every possible way.
When I come out of the bathroom the floor is spinning. Voices are muffled. Julie and Nora are deep in conversation, leaning close and laughing. A man in his early thirties approaches the bar and makes some kind of leering comment to Julie. Nora glares at him and says something that looks sarcastic, and Julie shoos him away. The man shrugs and retreats to the pool table where his friend is waiting. Julie calls out something insulting and the friend laughs, but the man just grins coldly and calls back a retort. Julie looks frozen for a moment, then she and Nora turn their backs to the pool table and Nora starts whispering in Julie's ear.
'What's . . . wrong?' I ask, approaching the bar. I can sense both men at the pool table watching me.
'Nothing,' Julie says, but she sounds shaken. 'It's fine.'
'R, could you give us a quick minute?' Nora asks.
I look back and forth between them. They wait. I turn and walk out of the bar, feeling too many things at once. On the patio I slump against the railing, the streets a dizzying seven floors down. Most of the city's lights are out, but the street lamps flicker and pulse like bioluminescence. Julie's mini-cassette recorder is an insistent weight in my shirt pocket. I pull it out and stare at it. I know I shouldn't but I'm . . . I feel like I just need -
Closing my eyes, swaying gently with one arm on the railing, I rewind the tape for a moment and press play.
' - really that crazy? Just because he's . . . whatever he is? I
mean, isn't "zombie" just a silly name we - '
I press rewind again and it occurs to me that the gap between the beginning of this entry and the end of the previous one comprises the entire time I've known Julie. Every meaningful moment of my life fits inside a few seconds of tape hiss.
I press stop, then play.
' - thinks no one knows but everyone knows, they're just afraid to do anything. He's getting worse, too. He said he loved me tonight. Actually said those words. Said I was beautiful and I was everything he loved about Mom and if anything ever happened to me he'd lose his mind. And I know he meant it, I know all of that's really there inside him . . . but the fact that he had to be raging shitfaced drunk to let any of it out . . . it just made the whole thing seem sick. I fucking hated it.'
There is a long pause on the tape. I glance over my shoulder at the bar door, feeling ashamed but desperate. I know these are confidences I should have to earn through months of slow intimacy, but I can't help myself. I just want to listen to her.
'I've thought about making a report,' she continues. 'March into the community centre and make Rosy go arrest him. I mean, I'm all for drinking, I love it, but with Dad it's . . . different. It's not a celebration for him, it seems like it's painful and scary, like he's numbing himself for some horrible medieval surgery. And yeah . . . I know why, and it's not like I haven't done worse stuff for the same reasons, but it's just . . . it's so . . .' Her voice wavers and breaks off, and she sniffles hard like a self-rebuke. 'God,' she whispers. 'Shit.'
Several seconds of tape hiss. I listen closer. Then the door flies open and I whirl around, tossing the recorder out into the dark. But it's not Julie. It's the two men from the pool table. They stumble out the door, jostling each other and laughing through the sides of their mouths as they light up cigarettes.
'Hey,' the one who was talking to Julie calls to me, and he and his friend start ambling in my direction. He's tall, good-looking, his muscular arms sleeved in tattoos: snakes and skeletons and the logos of extinct rock bands. 'What's up, man? You Nora's new guy?'
I hesitate, then shrug. They both laugh like I've made a dirty joke.
'Yeah, who ever knows with that chick, right?' He punches his friend in the chest while continuing to saunter towards me. 'So you know Julie, man? You Julie's friend?'
I nod.
'Known her long?'
I shrug, but I feel a coil inside me tensing.
He stops a few feet away from me and leans against the wall, taking a slow drag on his cigarette. 'That one used to be pretty wild, too, a few years back. I was her firearms teacher.'
I need to leave. I need to turn around right now and leave.
'She got all pure after she started dating that Kelvin kid, but man, for a year or so she was ripe fruit.' His exhalations form a haze of smoke that stings my dry eyes. 'A hundred bucks won't even buy a pack of cigarettes any more, but it sure went a long way with that bitch.'
I lunge forward and crack his head into the wall. It's easy, I just palm his face and thrust forward, punching the wall with the back of his skull. I don't know if I've killed him and I don't care. When his friend tries to grab me I do the exact same to him, two big dents in the Orchard's aluminium siding. Both men slump to the ground. I wobble my way down the stairs and out onto the catwalk. Some kids leaning on the support cables smoking joints stare at me as I shove past them. Excuse me, I try to say, but I can't seem to find the syllables. I slide down the four apartment floors and lurch out onto Fairy Street or Tinkerbell Street or whatever the fuck it's called. I just need to get away from all these people for a minute, collect my thoughts. I'm so hungry. God, I'm starving.
After a few minutes of wandering, I'm completely lost and disorientated. A light rain is falling and I'm alone on some dark narrow street. The asphalt glitters black and wet under the crooked street lamps. Up ahead, two guards converse in a rain-flecked cone of light, grunting to each other with the affected toughness of scared boys straining to be men.
'. . . out in Corridor 2 all last week, pouring foundations. We're less than a mile away from Goldman Dome but we've barely got a fuckin' crew any more. Grigio keeps pulling guys off Construction and dumping 'em into Security.'
'What about the Goldman crew? How's their end coming?'
'Goldman is shit. They're barely out their front door. I've been hearing the merger's in bad shape anyway, thanks to Grigio's bad diplomacy. Starting to wonder if he even wants the mergers any more, the way he handled Corridor 1. Wouldn't surprise me if he arranged the collapse himself.'
'You know that's bullshit. Don't be spreading that story around.'
'Yeah, well, either way, Construction's gone to shit since Kelvin got squished. We're just digging holes and filling 'em in.'
'I'd still rather be out building something than playing rent-a-cop in here all night. You get any action out there?'
'Just a couple of Fleshies wandering out of the woods. Pop, pop, game over.'