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A fella once said that to tell a story the right way, you need a gun and a clock. So that’s how we’ll start.
With a gun. And a clock.
The gun is suggested. The gun is concealed. It will come back around. Watch and wait. It moves between holster and hand. See how it teases us: unseen; revealed. In my hand, Lucy’s finger caressing the trigger. In the holster, hidden. When you get right down to it, repetition is a gimmick to appeal to our pattern-seeking monkey brains. It makes us feel smart. Ah, you say. I recognize that gun! For our purposes, the gun is a threat of things to come.
You still with me? Good.
The clock ticks. It’s a metaphor, sure, but don’t let the fact that it doesn’t exist in the corporeal world confuse you. That fucker is counting down whether or not it is a tangible thing. It doesn’t give a shit. And neither should we: the amount of time we’ve got left isn’t something that we can see and know and feel. It’s abstract.
Until it’s not.
When I was on the plane to Alaska, that big military plane packed full of marines and materiel, I overheard two of the other fellas talking. I knew them in passing, well enough to recognize but not so good as to know their names. Their faces are blurred to time, something I guess my brain decided was irrelevant information and has redacted for the sake of making more room. But their conversation stuck with me for some reason, and it comes back to me now. One of them had broken up with his girl a few months earlier, and was seeing a new lady. He was talking about her some, then asked his buddy: Do you think a man can be in love with two women? I guess I expected the other guy to make some smartass remark, but instead he was quiet, thinking it over. And then he said, Yeah, I do believe that is possible. You love both of your parents. Different kinda love, sure. But it’s love. You love your siblings, your kids, your friends. You can love lots of people. It’s not a finite resource. He said, I do not know what any of us would do if we couldn’t love more than one person. It’s what you do about that love that gets you in trouble, romance-wise, he’d said, then both of them laughed.
A gun and a clock. A killer and a countdown. A threat and a guarantee.
These are your simple instructions on how to survive the end of the world. Four simple steps. An easy dance. Let’s call it the Texas two step. One two. Three Four. One two. Three four.
One: you find a purpose to live and you hold the fuck onto that purpose as tight as possible. Tighter than possible. You make that need impossible, and you push it even further. More than what can be held inside the body of one person. You turn that need into the world--your world. The whole world. All things serve this purpose. All these strangers are background noise, rungs on a ladder. Your world is the only one that matters. They are all that matters. Your wife. Your kid.
Purpose.
Two: you separate who you were from who you need to be. You inhabit the body of a necessary man, the man you wouldn’t be otherwise. You do not think about this. At all. You keep your head down and you just do what needs to be done. You treat it like your sworn duty. Because it now is.
Diverge.
Here’s the hesitation, the pause in your Texas two step. Long enough for your heart to go through its own motions. Contraction. Relaxation. Lub dub. That’s supposed to be a beating heart. Forgive me, I’m not sure if I even have a heart any more. It has been a while.
Hesitation over. Contraction time.
Step three: you fuckin survive. You do this even if it buries part of you. You do not think about the things you do because this is not really you doing it. It’s the Ghoul. The Ghoul is a reflection. I’m an inverted image. I can’t kill the other man because, truth be told, I don’t know if I’ll be able to resurrect him when necessary. And I will need to resurrect him, God willing, when he finds his family. So I put Cooper Howard on ice. Seal him up and bury him deep underground. That dumb bastard may as well be in the same vault as his wife and kids. Refer back to Step Two for further clarification.
Survive.
Step four is. . . shit. You don’t know what it is yet, do you. You fuckin moron. You have purpose. You’ve diverged your two selves. You survive. And then what? What happens when you find them? You all live together in this hellscape? You watch them get sick, starve. You watch them become casualties of an endless war? You watch them die. You witness the horror in their eyes when they see you for the first time and think you’re a monster. You can’t tell them about the things you’ve done, because then they’ll know you’re a monster. You rot from the inside out. So let’s just say we’re still workin out what the fuck step four is. We ain’t gonna ruminate on that one yet. We’re just gonna take it as it comes.
A gun and a clock: love and the time we have left until those goddamn bombs fall.
Forty thousand feet in the air and tracing the scrawl of the Cascade mountains north from California to Alaska, from home to the front line, Cooper Howard had thought: the only woman I can love is my wife.
But I am not Cooper Howard. I buried him down there in a Cryo-Tech chamber. That is the man who loves his wife. And sure, I ain’t him, but also I am not fuckin stupid: there’s a nebulous kind of string that attaches me to him, something that I can only see when the light catches it just so. And I know he’s me. Of course I know that’s me. And I know that because he loves Barb. Barb is that man’s wife, though. She ain’t mine. But because the idealistic fool wants me to do anything for that woman and their child, I will. The only benevolence I thought I was capable of was complying with the wishes of that other man, the man I both am and am not. The Ghoul is an automaton sent to wander the earth, doing Cooper Howard’s bidding. The Ghoul doesn’t love anyone or anything. The Ghoul is a wraith. The Ghoul is a sacrificial goat sent to wander the earth, carrying the sins of man into the wilderness.
The Ghoul is a bit fuckin conflicted at the moment, because Lucy MacClean’s head rests on his shoulder and her arm drapes around him. This woman is soft and warm and feels so real. He hasn’t had much reason to wish he could still smell, but now? Yeah, now he misses that. He imagines that she smells of blood and sweat and dust. She would smell of the wasteland, the place where he was conjured and tempered. The only place he’s known. His world, his home. Lucy, he imagines, would smell like home. At least to someone like him.
To me.
Her hip presses hard against his hand. My hand.
I cannot recall the last time I touched a person like this, or was touched in return. My whole being is perplexed by it: this is not a fight. This is not survival. This is a touch of comfort and camaraderie. I ain’t a thing made for touching. Even so, Lucy holds me tight, and does not let go. She’ll have to eventually. We both will.
This cannot last.
So how’s this for a fuckin clock. Those ominous hands are a-tickin down: a few more seconds until she recoils, a few more minutes until she leaves. Or, you suppose, you leave her. It’s gonna have to happen. One or the other. For both of your sakes. Ain’t no other way for this to end other than leaving.
Behind us, Legion soldiers have their little war. Beside me, Lucy is silent, that deep-in-thought look furrows her brow and pulls the corners of her lips just so. Almost a frown. She’s got her own war going on in her head. Don’t we all.
“You know,” she says, and tilts her head all the way back to look me in the eyes. “I don’t even know your name. All this time together.”
Now there is a whole tin of Cram that we ain’t gonna open.
Well maybe that’s because you don’t need to know it. That’s what I say back. She rolls her eyes and leans more weight against me and my God I have not had to exercise this amount of self-control in my life. I want to pick her up, carry her. Hold her close. Feel the ghost whisper of her soft hair against my throat, the solid weight of her, the give of her flesh beneath my fingers and the firmness of muscle beneath. Her heartbeat lub-dubbing away under my palm.
Nothing happens. I mean--that ain’t true. Everything happens. Everything that does happen, happens. By nothing happens, I mean, I do not scoop her into my arms like a bride. I do not press my mouth to hers and feel her sigh with desire. She does not wrap her limbs around me and sob out my name with the same ravenous need that I feel. None of those things happen. None of those things can happen.
For starters, as we have previously established, she ain’t gonna know my name.
Everything that does happen is: we walk. She rests. I give her water. She drinks. We talk. We talk. We talk. She discovers the pleasure of chems. We fight. Together--we fight side by side, rather than on opposite teams. I miss that simple pleasure, of knowing someone has my back, of knowing they trust me enough to have theirs. Cooper Howard misses that, specifically. Not the Ghoul. To the Ghoul, this is something new and incomprehensible. Somewhere deep below the earth, Cooper Howard twitches, the neurons in his brain firing off. Remembering.
Every time I touch her, it’s a clean and cold drink of water to a man lost in the desert. And then, as the Ghoul does, he fucks it up. I think it’s the Ghoul. I surely do not know who to pin Lucy’s betrayal on. If it is Cooper who is guilty of such treachery, and if so, is he really a good man? Can he be good if he does some wretched thing for a noble reason? Or is it the Ghoul who sells her out--because if it’s that bastard’s fault, then he is doing it for a family that isn’t even his. He’s sacrificing the only person he’s ever cared about for the sake of three people he doesn’t really know. And let’s be honest for the moment if we can: he doesn’t know Cooper, or Barb, or Janey. They may as well be characters in a movie. So fuck it. Both men have done this. So both men will save Lucy and give her a choice. The smallest bit of redemption he can earn.
These are your simple instructions on how to survive falling in love with Lucy MacLean:
One: you fuckin don’t.
Two: you do not.
Three: you stupid motherfucker you cannot.
Four: you leave.
As promised--here is the gun.
The knuckleduster slides across the floor and straight into Lucy’s waiting hand. I don’t want to be here because I know how this shit is gonna end. The only possible way it could.
Here is the clock, and it is counting down.
Four.
Three.
Lucy picks up the little pistol, and for a heartbeat, in the infinite space of a whole heartbeat--the contraction, hesitation, the relaxation--I think she’s gonna come with me. The way her eyes widen, the way her lower lip trembles, and her whole body leans toward me and God help me but in that moment I do not know if I want this or not, these two men I’ve been are overlapping and I know that yes, a man can love two women at the same time. And that yeah, fine, fuck you, maybe the Ghoul does have a fuckin heart. Lucy steadies herself, planting herself in her own sense of duty. He imagines then that maybe she has her own set of rules for survival.
This is the way it ends.
Two.
One.
He walks away.