slam myself into the back wall, padded with bubbly packages of junk food. I let them rain down on me from the upper shelves. I clamber to my feet and circle the store toward your voice, upending sundries as I go. I hear you rustling behind a nearby shelf. You scream, “AERIAL ATTACK!” and something shatters at my feet.
“Jesus Christ!”
“Oh shit, it’s a second barrage!” Another item hits the floor, and a third cracks against my head. I go down onto my hands and knees.
“Fuck! Joey!” My palms pick up little shards of glass and paint-smelling liquid. Something cool oozes down my forehead, hardening in the air. I hear sirens. “We have to go,” I say, as the synthetic, faintly peroxidal liquid trickles into my eye. “We have to go.”
Another shout—“BOMBS AWAY!”—but this time it sounds like it’s from the street. Still, it must act as a trigger because you launch another bottle from the adjacent aisle. It ricochets off my back before breaking open on the floor.
My vicinity now smells very strongly of chemical flowers, something created in a laboratory without context.
Through the imperfect black paint on the windows, spears of bright light trickle through. The hole in the sliding door glows orange, then red, like an unearthly halo. The sirens are right out front. When you shout “CATAPULT!” I’m sensible enough to roll out of the way, and whatever you’ve thrown lands just to my left—it clatters like something cheap and plastic, easily broken apart, I guess probably a hair dryer.
A roar—from a car, I’m sure—tears through the wall, and I hear signs of an escalating conflict outside. My right eye is glued shut.
“Joey, we have to get out of here.” By now, I’m speaking mostly to the ground.
One aisle over, however, you are having way too much fun. “Quick! They’re mounting! I hear them at the gates!”
A handful of glass containers hits the tile by my head—the expensive nail polish, I think.
“What do you say, John? Are you hurting yet?”
Something explodes by my ear and I’m misted with glass particles and a scent so concentrated and powerful that I choke on it. My body reacts as if to vomit, but there’s nothing to bring up; my chest goes rigid against the gray tile and my throat clenches repeatedly, mouth open, struggling to find something to expel. I get up ropy spit and drool until the convulsions subside, breathing shallowly, like the air can’t find a deeper way into my lungs. I roll helplessly onto my back and look up at the ceiling. I chew a few times on nothing, slowly and carefully, like I’m working into a motion I haven’t performed in a long time. Through an indeterminate haze drifting in through flaws in the black windows, I can just make out the shapes of the fluorescent lights above, empty and dead. The darkness is tinged with red, presumably from a safety light—no matter where you are, somewhere, something still has power. The memory of the gun rises up within me, a memory I’ve fought to keep buried: it was on a frantic night like this that it appeared in my hand, that the weapon revealed itself. I hear your footsteps first, and then watch you loom into view above me.
Earlier on in our days of exploration, when we were dividing the city into neighborhoods, you once got off the train at one station while I stayed aboard, bound for somewhere else. Immediately after the doors closed behind you, I turned to flirt unabashedly with the woman sitting next to me. In my head, it was a terrific joke of detachment—this complete stranger had been sitting next to us the entire time, had watched you rest your head on my shoulder and kiss me goodbye; it was unfailingly clear that you and I were a pronounced and public couple. Yet as I dug into this woman over the next several minutes—her book, her music, her destination, her home—my attempt at affecting her became, for all practical purposes, serious, the comedic timing apparent to no one but myself, and thus it slipped from my supposedly lighthearted, obvious joke into something else, something sinister that felt awfully like real damage, that felt like menace. When I noticed the shift—this dangerous, unaccountable shift—I removed myself from the train, I pulled back.
You did not. “I told you there was going to be a war,” you say, standing over me, your feet at either shoulder, arms crossed, bearing of statue. “Just listen.”
From the sound of it, your lions have come alive outside. You haul me up in the faulty non-light. I’ve got sea-legs, as in they don’t work at all. The top half of my body slumps into yours.
“You’ve dribbled down your front, bless you. Let’s get you home.”
With that innocuous final word, I feel a shiver in your chest—transmitted through us both—indicating that every time we say it now, no matter how often, it will be an accident.
The good thing is: I smell like flowers, and they no longer seem that fake.
Together, we shoulder through the blacked-out doors and into the street, now lit by a false, electric daylight, the tone of a parking garage. My eyes are stinging, tearing up from the perfume and polish and sudden light, one of them stuck fast. Close at hand, I make out the shape of something burning beneath a glaze, hear a pattern of thunderous crashes, human yelling.
Beside me, you whisper, “I told you.”
I want to tell you that I suspect it’s not as big as you think it is, or that it’s much bigger than you think it is, that violence creeps up in the oddest, most convenient places—but it sounds too much like a truism, especially from someone who can’t effectively see anything. Still, I consider the heightened sense of smell particular to the big cats. And all at once, my legs are working just fine.
*
We move eastward, away from the fires, toward the northbound subway—not running, exactly, but walking quickly, as fast as you can walk away from a situation without looking suspicious. Beyond the immediate perimeter of the store, the burning and mounting whatever, the streets are empty—no traffic, no human bodies, no cops. The concrete-bordered avenue is bathed in a glow of red light that seems to come from beyond above, or to occlude the above, as if someone’s put the entire bubble of existence here into lockdown. As if, all at one time, the city has finally decided to address itself. The air is close, busy with the sense of mass movement somewhere just out of view, but a distinct, concentrated chill pipes through the streets and directly into our faces, giving the impression that we’re still indoors, that some controlled substance is being filtered in to appear natural, that the streets themselves are part of a greater structure. I look up—the persistent flow of air now pushing on my throat—and am not surprised: the sky, or whatever is beyond the glow, is matte black, no stars, so uniform as to seem artificial—again, this feeling of shuttering on an immense scale, a dome sliding over.
As we walk against this wind—which feels in its benign constancy like the static gust of an air conditioner—I notice that to either side of us several of the gated storefronts glow orange from within, as if someone had set fires inside them. The light reflects through the gates in pixelated patterns on the sidewalk. The color is inviting, like hearth.
Your commentary is constant, endlessly speculative about the nature of these changes, yet strangely offhand, as if the consequences lacked real effect, could only be interpreted symbolically: a class war, a changing of colors. I’m not listening specifically. I peel my eyelids apart into a clouded right field as a flaming figure hurtles around the corner, running toward us in rapidly increasing resolution. It takes a moment to put it fully together, build it up from an animal: it’s a man on fire.
We tighten our grip on each other and jolt to the side, stepping toward the fires that aren’t burning
