In the Wasteland
The only building left standing was the gas station. Everything else had crumbled in the storm, bricks and wood squashed like peanuts on a barfloor.
Whether the gasoline or the Red 40 in the junk food provided the building’s resilience I don’t know, but something protected it as the catastrophe unfolded. The storm was fast, appearing suddenly in a perfectly blue sky, raining down destruction and scattering the remnants, crushing the markers of commerce and security. Only fuel remained. And the sky returned to calm.
There were no injuries.
Frankie stared at the rubble of our house, her eyes too dry for the occasion. “I guess we need to go to my mother’s house,” she said. Her voice was gravelly. I always notice the condition of her voice. Gravelly meant she was thinking things she wasn’t saying.
“Yeah,” I said. “Do you want me to call her?”
“I’ll text her.”
Frankie didn’t seem upset. Everything we had was gone, and Frankie seemed fine with it.
We passed the gas station on our way out of what was once our town. It was creepy just sitting there like nothing had happened. Surrounded by the detritus of a community. Like it was a normal Tuesday.
Frankie drove, which was for the best. My eyes kept getting watery, a kind of pre-cry that never quite got there, a hazy blurring of light. I was strangely attentive to the condition of my eyes.
A lot of people were leaving town. I guess that makes sense. We all would need a place to regroup. I wondered how many people were going to their in-laws’ houses. I wondered what it would be like if I didn’t get along with my mother-in-law. What if the closest family was family you hated? We were lucky. I need to remember that.
Beth’s house was about 45 minutes away, so we had time to panic. I had time to panic, I should say. Frankie seemed calm. I couldn’t figure out what to say, what question I could ask to produce an answer that could slow the thudding in my chest. So, I closed my eyes and counted.
The counting became a rhythm. I needed to focus on the rhythm. A gasp of an upbeat and a hard pounding downbeat. Over and over. Up, down. Pounding, repeating.
Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, pounding, repeating, moving foward. Da-dum, da-dum. Propelled, Pounding. Repeating.
A counter-rhythm emerged. I needed to focus on the rhythm, on the time, so I added new rhythms, filler subdivisions, adding. Repeating. Building.
Beth already had her laptop on the kitchen table when we got there. She shot up as we walked in the door, grabbing us both in a bear hug. “Oh god, guys. Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“Just things,” Frankie said, her voice sounding lower than it had an hour ago.
“Yeah, we’re safe. It’s okay,” I said. “Thanks for putting us up.”
“Give me a break, Carl,” Beth said, smiling a little. “You want a beer?”
“Correct.”
Frankie sat at the table. “Mom, can I use your computer?”
“Of course,” Beth said as she handed me a beer. “You want a drink, honey?”
“No thanks,” Frankie replied, her glasses reflecting the insurance company’s login page.
Frankie filed a claim, or whatever. I never understood the financial stuff and left it to her. She didn’t mind. Her brain was better with numbers.
Beth and I watched news coverage in the den while Frankie worked in the kitchen. There hadn't been any injuries. It was bizarre. The meteorologists were perplexed. It was unsettling to see the weather lady seeming confused. Even when they’re wrong, they usually have some kind of rationale, percentages and probabilities. This thing had been some weird explosion of violence, sparing no building but the gas station, while harming nobody physically.
“It’s so fucked up,” Beth said. I didn’t really have a response. It was fucked up.
I was tempted to make the whole thing some kind of allegory of capitalism, the persistent durability of commercialism spitting in the face of human connection and safety. The pernicious, roach-like interminability of the fossil fuel industry. The apocalyptic consequence of our flippancy toward both nature and humanity.
It was probably just fucked up.
***
The next morning, Beth made pancakes. While she was cooking, Frankie checked email and I threw on my headphones. I had a weird desire to listen to Father John Misty’s “Buddy’s Rendezvous.” A compulsion.
The saxophone was like a warm drip of water on my spine. The piano massaged my brain.
“I kind of want to go to the gas station,” Beth said as she set down a plate of pancakes.
I pulled my headphones off. “I kind of do too,” I said. “I don’t really know why.”
“We can drive by, I guess,” Frankie said. She hadn’t cried last night.
It was almost 2:00 before we got it together to leave. It was always like that with Beth. She just kind of slowed things down.
Beth made sandwiches for the road and Frankie drove. We’d driven that route, the three of us, more times than I could fathom, going between houses. Now one of them was gone. The thought just kind of hung in the car, suspended from Frankie’s dreamcatcher hanging from the rearview mirror.
“I can’t fucking believe this,” Frankie said, out of the blue.
“I know. I know,” Beth said.
“No, like I really can’t fucking believe it. Fuck.”
My neck throbbed a little. I fondled my headphones in my hand.
“I just . . . I don’t know,” Frankie said. Her voice was quiet but clear.
“Yeah,” I said.
Traffic picked up as we got closer. People returning with their in-laws in tow, to survey the damage. FEMA. A few news vans.
Car upon car upon truck weaving around the Subaru, a fugue of anxiety. This is why Frankie drove.
***
It was a weirdly windy day. I’m not sure why the wind struck me as odd. It just seemed like the air should have run out of energy or something.
There weren’t as many people sifting through debris as I expected. That’s another weird thing. Maybe they’d come and gone. We only saw a handful of people digging through their former lives, which raised the tricky question of where all the cars and trucks had faded away to.
I stuck that question in a secondary box in my brain, though. I have limits.
The news vans hadn’t faded away with the other vehicles, at any rate. They surrounded the gas station, a phalanx of information distribution pinning down the oddity. Like they could extract some knowledge from the grungy old place through sheer force of reporting.
“Why are we here, again?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” Beth said.
“I guess to see it,” Frankie said.
“So . . . we saw it,” Beth said.
“Come up short and end up on the news,” I sang.
“What’s that,” Beth asked.
“Song’s stuck in me head. Sorry.”
“No, don’t be sorry! Sing for us!” She insisted.
“I’m not going to do that Beth,” I laughed.
“You suck.”
“So, um . . . I guess we go back?” Frankie asked unconfidently, staring at the gas station.
“I guess,” I said.
“Should we go by the house?” She asked. Her voice was clear. She was calm.
“Yeah. I guess we should.”
***
Frankie sat on the concrete remnants of the porch. Beth stood in the street, her hands on her hips. I put on my headphones and walked to the lot line between our place and the Sullivans’. You used to be able to see into our bedroom from this vantage point. I always liked how the sun fell on this side of the house in the morning.
When “Buddy’s Rendezvous” ended, I hit repeat before my phone could move to the next track.
“When can I see you again?” I sang. I didn’t know I was singing until Frankie asked, “What?”
“My destruction is an hour late,” I sang louder.
The song ends with fading strings. It should end with the saxophone.