Page 151 of Life Out of Order

“What’s his name?” Zach’s hands are pressed flat against the table.

I try to tell him and I can’t, I physically cannot.

“Why did you lie to me?” Zach says this quietly, which somehow makes it worse. “Why did you lie for so long? Because this has been going on for a long time, hasn’t it?”

“Yes. I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.” Zach has never hit me, but I flinch. He stands abruptly and leaves the room. I follow, slowly. He’s in the bedroom, packing a suitcase.

“No,” I say. “I’ll go. You stay here.”

“Why?” He’s tossing things in randomly, socks, underwear, shirts.

“Because you have to be here.”

“What if I want to go? Are you saying I can’t?”

“Go, then.” I stand in the doorway, willing myself to stay here, to endure this.

He stops throwing clothes around and says, “What do you mean I ‘have to be here’?”

“There’s more going on than you and me.”

“Yeah, there’s the other guy.” Zach sits on the bed, next to his suitcase.

“I’ll go,” I say.

“How?” Zach says. “You don’t drive. Where are you going?”

“Can you take me to Mama and Beck’s?”

“All right.”

“All right.”

We don’t say much to each other on the drive, and when he drops me off Zach won’t look at me. I get out of the car, take my suitcase from the back seat and tell him goodbye. He mumbles something, I shut the door and watch him drive away. I want to sit down on the grass and never get up again. I want to die.

I let myself in the back door. No one is home. I call out for Isadora and get no answer, then remember that Isadora is gone. I leave a note to say I was here, then I lock up and walk to the Yellow House. It isn’t home, but it will have to do for now.

A Handbag Full of Rain

Wednesday, October 9, 2041 (Zach is 40)

Zach: It’s been thunder-storming all morning and I’m in bed. Alba is still gone, and it was hard to see the point of getting up, so instead of starting the day I just turned over and dozed through an hour or two. Now I’ve run out of sleep. I get up, put on clean underwear and yesterday’s clothes. There’s no point in shaving, nowhere to be and no one to impress. I’ve been organizing a new clothing bank for the 50th Ward, but now we’ve handed it over to the volunteers, and I’m between projects for a few days. I sit with my notebook, trying to record my thoughts, but I’m having trouble getting much onto the page. So I drink my coffee and watch the rain flooding our backyard yet again. The storm intensifies; trees are thrashing in the wind.

The City of Chicago has been trimming its budget again, now that we get nothing from the federal government, and the 50th Ward has been starved of funding for years. Gomez’s motto was, “Doing More with Less”; Rosa jokes grimly that our new motto is “Doing Less and Less with Less.” I don’t mind the lack of pay too much—because of Alba, we were able to build up our savings and stow it away safely before the stock market completely crashed—but right now I could use some distraction. I should just go in to work and see if Rosa has any projects for me. I miss Gomez.

It would have been nice to have a kid, or even a dog. I could still get a dog, I suppose. Instead of washing my cup and beginning my day, I could adopt a dog, find a new friend. I try to fire up the internet, but our connection is down; I wonder if the storm has brought down a tree? There’s the new thing, the Interstices, but it’s designed for bioware. Alba can’t get that, and I am too squeamish, plus neither of us are willing to have our brains invaded by Big Tech, so we haven’t switched over. Okay, no dog today. I guess I could just drive over to the shelter, but our street is like a river, and the drains are clogged with fallen leaves. I wonder if I should just go back to bed. Then the doorbell rings.

It’s indicative of my parched mental state that I bound over to the front door and open it without peeping through the peephole first; I don’t care who’s there, as long as it’s human. I open the door and am interested to see a middle-aged white woman. She doesn’t have an umbrella, and her coat is dark with rain: she’s soaked. She’s tall, attractive, somewhat plump, with straight wet blond hair, pale green eyes, a few freckles, no makeup. She’s conservatively dressed, as though she is selling insurance or Girl Scout cookies. Are there still Girl Scout cookies? Are there still Girl Scouts? The woman says, “Is Alba here?”

“Um, no. Would you like to leave a message?”

“Will she be back soon?”

“I have no idea. Not too soon, I would guess.”

The rain accelerates. The woman holds out her hand and watches the raindrops splashing off her palm. “May I come in?”