Landry

She looked at him.
She looked at the way what was left of his jeans clung desperately to the prominent bones of his hips. She looked at the way he clutched his satchel to his chest, not in the way that someone held something valuable, but in the way that someone held the only thing in the world that mattered – the way that she herself was gripping the straps of her backpack. She looked at his floppy hat and the way it rested on his floppy hair and the way the circular brim cast shadows around his eyes and cheeks but not the tip of his too-big nose, on which sat a cherry-sized blister like an oasis amidst his otherwise pale skin. She thought, briefly, that he might have been handsome once, when handsome was a thing people were.
He looked at her.
And he screamed.

Her face contorted as her ears struggled to transition from the silence to the absence of it. She tried to tell him to shut up but the rusted words caught in her throat and she only managed a hacking cough.
The sound of the scream startled the man as well and he hiccupped on the involuntary noise and silence was restored as abruptly as it had been broken.
He shook his head to clear the ringing in his ears. When he looked forward again she was eyeing him with a wary annoyance.
He thought.
Reading emotion in the subtleties of the human face was a skill that had died along with most of humanity.
She looked at him impatiently.
“Sorry,” he offered.
“Shut up.” Her voice cracked and she scowled. At herself. At him.
“Oh.”
“Shut up,” she repeated, cleanly this time. There wasn’t any menace in her voice. He thought.
He lifted the hat off his head and ran a dirty hand through his hair. She watched.

He looked at the town around them, numb to emptiness by that point, and wondered why she was there. There were only a handful of buildings and none of them would’ve held more than a couple weeks’ worth of food to begin with and certainly wouldn’t have any food now. He didn’t think about the odds of running into her, or anybody, on the narrow road he’d followed since the highway lost his fancy almost ten miles back. There weren’t enough things that could happen to bother with odds anymore.
“Why here?” He asked.
“Why anywhere the fuck else?”
“Yeah.”
He kneaded his hat in his hands.
“So how are you?”
Her eyes widened and the corners of her mouth turned up. She started to speak but suddenly she was laughing uncontrollably. Her hands moved from the straps of her backpack to clasp her stomach as laughter wracked her body.
He tried to smile but wasn’t sure he remembered how, and he wasn’t sure what was so funny anyway.
She staggered back a few steps before the laughter finally subsided enough for her to take a deep breath and swipe at the tears that had streaked down her face.
“How am I,” she muttered – mirth, or maybe incredulity, still carving lines in her face. “I don’t really know that I’m anything. I don’t really think there’s anything for me to be.”
“Yeah.”
He looked at her as the lines on her face unfolded back into fleshy indistinction. Her hands were back on the straps of her backpack. The silence probably went on a little too long.

“Do you want to eat?” He asked.
She looked at the way his shoulders sank downward away from his neck, as though his body sought the inevitability his head continued to ignore.
“What do you got?”
“Beans.” Always beans. Too many beans.
She nodded. “Fine, follow me.”
She sidestepped past him and strode down the road in the direction he’d come from. He took one last look at the abandoned storefronts around him, all in various states of disrepair, then turned to follow her.

She moved quickly, with purpose, and he found that strange. The world was post purpose. The world was for wandering, and if one subscribed to the belief that there’s purpose for all things – which he did not – then the purpose of wandering was to wander. And if one was opposed to circular definitions – which he was not – the purpose of wandering was momentum. Movement precedes movement. He moved and he continues to move, but he doesn’t move because he needs to move, or because he has anywhere to be.
So he was unimpressed by her pace.
But he kept up, pushing his legs to move quicker than they’d moved in a hundred miles. She led them back the way he’d come for a spell before veering off the road in the middle of a straight without any distinguishable landmark or path. He saw only her fresh footprints in old dirt, and once that gave way to dry grass and weeds he saw no sign of anyone. It seemed a long way to go to eat beans.
She turned to verify his continued existence several times. He thought about saying something, it was really all he thought about, but everything had seemed too cosmetic, too unimportant. And now it was too late. Their relationship was defined by silence and movement. When the movement ended the silence could, too. But what would he say then? Maybe he’d tell her she should move slower, or ask her what she was in a hurry for anyway. Or what was in her backpack and why did he find her in a town already picked clean.

She was the second person he’d seen since the world reverted, almost two years now if he had to pick a single day. An anniversary. The first person he’d seen was much earlier on in all this and walked much slower. They’d been a man and they’d been fifty two years old and they’d been overweight. He realized now he’d never gotten their name. It was a brief coupling, back when no one knew anything. They were panicked, he could tell, but not the irrational, frenzied kind. An underlying ache they refused to acknowledge, instead choosing to manufacture purpose or, less cynically, have hope that they could overcome all this. And he guessed it was maybe the hope that bugged him. The world was post hope.
So they went off to San Diego where a group of survivalists were alleged by source unknown to have set up camp, and pleaded with him to come, to validate their denial of the world’s fuckedness. And call it clarity or fatalism but he knew whatever was happening was unconcerned with him. With all of them, everyone. The world was transitioning. Even if people were meant to continue, they were lifetimes away from collectively determining how to live as a people again.

“We’re here,” she said, and he could see they were. Somewhere, at least.
They stood before a gate, large and rusted and doing better than many gates he’d seen. Wrought iron bars flush with the ground, sprouting upward like teeth, pinched together slightly in the middle then diverging as they climbed up above his head, ending in tight hooks splayed wide. Ready to grab him. The gate connected two sections of wall – large and brick, devoid of any vines or foliage like he would’ve expected. Beyond the gate he could see a modest house, single level and wood and cute. More fitting for a forest than the grassy swells they’d been cresting. The grass inside the fence was cut lower than what he was standing on, a curious vanity that made him uneasy, and was bare aside from two trees – one on either side of the house, both reaching high above and across the flat roof.
She pushed open the gate and led them on the arrow-straight dirt path toward the house door. There was no lock, there was no rusted screech.
“What is this place?” He asked.
“Just a house,” she said.

She pulled open the door, also unlocked, and waved for him to go in first. He found himself, strangely, in the dining room. Or a room with a table and a couple of chairs. A faded blue cloth was draped over the center of the table, flanked by symmetrical panels of uncovered wood. An unused white-ish candle stood in the center. On the far wall was a framed painting of the house, everything slightly rounded as if viewed through a fisheye lens but detailed and accurate as far as he could tell. Except those trees that stood sentinel on either side, notably bright and lush as they’d walked in, were painted lifeless and black.
“Is this your house?” He asked.
“No,” she said, unshouldering her backpack. “Beans?”
“Yes, beans,” he said and swung his satchel in front of him. He removed a can of black beans, dinged and dented, and quickly closed the bag. But she was in another room. He poked his head through the doorway and saw her stoking the coals in an old fashioned wood stove. She wordlessly held out her hand and he placed the can of beans in it.
She slammed the top of the can hard against the edge of the stove with a mighty clang that he felt move through the full length of his body not all that pleasantly. She brought the can back in front of her and he saw the small puncture in the lid and then the sharp, metal protrusion on the stove that had created it. She placed the beans delicately on the coals.
She followed him back into the first room and he sat, facing the painting that was almost accurate. And then she sat, facing him.

“The beans won’t take too long,” he said.
“What are you doing?” She asked.
And it wasn’t quite right, he thought.
Not quite the right question. And she was now a little too focused on him, a little too interested.
“I’m just kinda moving,” he said. Not quite the right answer.
“Where?”
He shrugged. “I started toward New York.”
She kept looking at him.
He took a quick breath and continued. “Never been, figured it would have food and, you know, things. Things to do. But I was starting from North Carolina and this was a while after, ah… everything. I didn’t have a car or a plan, New York was just a nice thing to say. I made it pretty close but it was starting to get cold and it hit me I was going to a shithole that was a shithole even before the world went to shit.”
She smiled at that.
“For a bit I thought maybe I’d go back home, then it seemed pointless. And I’d already gone north, and there isn’t a whole lot more east, so I went west and…” he tried to read her, to see if he was saying the right things, “that’s really what I’ve been doing.”
“See anybody else?”
“One,” he said. “You?”
“Some,” she said. “Where’s yours?”
“They, well, they were going to San Diego.”
“Not you?”
He didn’t think she’d moved, but she felt closer. She was all he could see.
“Well, no,” he said, trailing off before he figured out he had nothing else to say.
She shrugged.
He waited a beat before, “Have you been here since?”
“Sort of,” she said.

He picked at the table, the part that wasn’t covered. There was an imperfection – a narrow crease, polished over but deep enough for his nail to get purchase.
“What does that mean?” he asked, looking again at the painting, at those trees.
“I move when I must move.”
He smiled at that.
“I move and I continue to move,” he said, softly.
Her head tilted.
“That’s different,” she said.
“Is it?” he said, still picking at the crease, harvesting tiny flecks of polish. “You said must, but I don’t think there’s a use for that word anymore.”
“You make it all sound pointless.”
He shrugged. She was staring at him intently, but he wasn’t sure what else to say. He moved his hands to his lap and leaned back, away from her. He started to wonder if she’d blinked yet. But just then she did, and sighed, and leaned back in her own chair.
“So what are you doing?” she asked again, after a beat. He saw her hands dip below the edge of the table, but he didn’t see them come to rest on the hilt of the gun tucked in the front of her pants and he didn’t see the left one turn the safety off with a familiar flick of the thumb.
He still didn’t know how to answer the question. Because it all kind of was pointless, really. But then it had all been kind of pointless before all this, too. Pointless didn’t mean unfulfilling. But he thought about the man he’d run into, convinced they’d find a return to normal in San Diego. Denying what the world had become.
“I guess I’m looking for context,” he tried, finally. And she didn’t seem sure what to make of that.
Her hands were still and she said nothing, so he continued. “The apocalypse wasn’t the end of the world, it was the end of everything but me.” His hands were more animated now, trying to shape an idea his words were unable to fully articulate. “There used to be a structure. And every achievement, every failure, every love, every decision, every thing happened within that structure. Society applied narrative to every object and action and now that’s gone. But I’m still here, so…”
He was looking at the table but lost in his own head.
“So I’m figuring out what I do now. Because nothing has really changed, as wrong as that sounds. I still feel all the same things and I experience things the same way, there are just… fewer things.”
He ran his hands over his face and sighed, still not quite looking at her.
“Does that make sense?”
“That depends,” she answered slowly, “because it’s been two years and it doesn’t seem like you’ve gotten anywhere.”
“That’s… harsh.”
“I just don’t want you to find out you’ve been lying to yourself.”
And again, he thought, that wasn’t quite right.
“Lying to myself about wanting to move on?” He asked.
Her eyes stared into him, explored his everything, weighed his worth. She was the most beautiful and terrifying thing he’d ever seen.
“Lying about being able to.”

He rolled a small bit of polish between his fingers, trying to look away from her but not finding the strength. They stared in silence. In his peripherals the dead trees grew larger, the branches now interlocking and wrapping themselves around the curved house.
“That’s not quite right,” he said, finally. “We’re not using the right words.”
She smiled softly. “They’re all we’ve got.”
“It’s not about lying to myself, it’s not about moving on. My life, my existence, is a straight line. Everything else,” he gestured at her, at the painting, at the shifting of the goddamn tectonic plates, “is something existing along its own line and intersecting with mine. The apocalypse was just another line.”
“Pretty thick line, then.”
He put his hands on his head and leaned back further. “What I’m saying is that I exist regardless of all these lines, all these intersections.”
“So, destiny?” She asked.
“Less romantic than that.”

Her hands fiddled with the gun below the table as she tried to put his pieces together.
He spoke again. “My destiny is me. Internal. It’s whoever I am and whoever I become, it’s not about what I do or what gets done to me.”
There was a pause, she thought he’d say more.
“Or what doesn’t happen to you,” she added, eventually. “In this case.”
“That’s fair,” he sighed. He flicked the ball of polish away and took a deep breath. The room seemed to shrink. He looked at the painting and the trees had released the house, now standing sentinel again on either side. “Does that make sense?”
And she smiled, but differently this time. Not a superficial face mask but true expression from somewhere deeper.
“It’s different,” she said after a few beats. “But it does.” He saw her hands were on the table now. He didn’t see that the safety was back on and her shirt was pulled back over the end of the gun.

Then she stood up. “Beans are done.”
“What’s your name?” he asked as she moved to the kitchen.
“Landry,” she said.
“That’s the name of the city.”
“Only one name for you to remember then,” she said.
He paused. “Is it your name?”
“Sure.”
She came back to the table and placed the beans in the center of it, the ends of two spoons poked from the top.

They swapped bites until it was empty and didn’t talk much after that. She went to bed early and he guessed he did as well. There was a room in the back with only a mattress and a small table. When he woke she was sitting at the table underneath the painting of the house filling up a page in a very large, very tattered journal. He pulled another can of beans from his satchel and they ate that. She went back to her journal and he held his satchel and stood in the doorway facing her for a few moments before turning and leaving – continuing his long movement to nowhere in particular.
For weeks after he wondered why he hadn’t asked to stay longer or hadn’t asked if she would want to move along with him. And after that he wondered, more loosely, what had happened that night, and if anything had actually happened at all. And after that he found it hard to hold on to the memory. She was there, but too shaded to get a glimpse of her face, too quiet to hear the sound of her voice.

She finished the page in the journal and hesitated, thinking about what he’d related to her the night before. It picked at the strings of her memory but returned only a vague recollection and she flipped back through the worn pages.
She found the man a few hundred pages back.
Older, overweight, and very determined but for all the wrong reasons. They held their head high and spoke unbroken about what they’d find and what they’d do when they made it to the coast. Even then, in the presence of her and in the absence of everything else, she saw the fatal need for validation. They’d tried to convince her to go with them – to chase how the world had used to be.

She closed the journal and replaced it in her backpack. She walked outside and splashed her face with water from the rain barrel that seemed to never diminish. She looked toward and beyond the back wall, where the sinless hills bore the weight of the obstinate and the lost. The day was hot but she took her time walking back into town, studying further the small features and quirks of the path she’d moved along countless times. She made it to the slanted buildings and wondered, as she often did, why she was chosen to stay in this lightly developed blip of a place. Somewhere that might as well have been nothing before everyplace else became nothing, too. But the buildings had no answers, and she had no complaints, and so they carried on together.

She drew closer to the furthest reach of the town, and through a clouded sun haze she saw the misshapen outline of a person. They were moving slowly, limping slightly. As they came into focus she could tell they were a man. Hairier than the last one but not the hairiest she’d seen. She took a deep breath and cleared her mind, as she’d done countless times. The breeze tugged at her clothes and seemed to almost lift her forward – weightless she walked, closer and closer.

And she looked at him.