by Benjamin Fidler
(image c/o NASA)
This was way before all those bodies were splatted across the highway, back when you could still get a decent banana, buffets were still all-you-could-eat and not all-that-we-have, back when the moon was a lot brighter, more like a lightbulb than a pinhead. This was after Freddie, but before Ricky with the round butt. Before Andre with the rough hands. Back when it seemed to me the world could use a fox or two less. Granted I had a predisposition to be afraid of foxes. I blame that salty stray Red Ridinghood. I mean, who goes around throwing compliments about another person’s teeth? You’re just asking to get bit. And before you go there, yes, I know, it was a wolf. But samesame really. Wolf. Fox. Both slinking around acting like they own the whole damn gut pile.
I had a dog once. Well my ex Freddie had the dog, but I took care of it. It looked like a fox. Pointy nose. Spiky ears. Sneaked up right behind you and nipped your ankle when you were fist deep making a casserole because Freddie said he won’t eat shit unless it’s all mixed together and baked in a pan. So sure, maybe it’s a bit of Ridinghood, a bit of Freddie’s dog, but you get the point. Don’t trust a fox.
I was watching my afternoon shows, trying to find a channel that didn’t have that death scroll running over the bottom of the screen when I found an old rerun of Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction. I love that show but Dan doesn’t much care for it. Too garish he says. As if he even knows what that word means. I watch it mostly when he’s not around. But also, when he is. Just to piss him off.
Fact or Fiction: So this old man dies, right on a park bench in the middle of Central Park, and no one does jackshit. Like people on their phones passing by or whatever the late 90’s equivalent was. He’s there three days. Three days that guy is just sitting there rotting in the New York August sun. Stinking all to hell with maggots coming out his nose (I thought the reenactment was rather tasteful for what it really must have looked like). Then this little boy stops to wake the old man. His dad tells him to leave the old man alone, but the mom notices the man is dead and calls the police. This family was from some place out east—round, Middle America people. They were on vacation they tell the camera. Wanted to eat in Times Square, which, objectively (though they left this out) has the best restaurant in the world: Flavortown. Swing and a hit Guy Fieri. Then, a year later the little boy is out playing and rolls down a hill into a road and twists his ankle. A big truck comes barreling toward him, the camera pans and zooms in on a blurry pair of headlights, and right before the splat but right after the commercial break, a fox trots across the screen and drags the boy to the other side. Jonathan Frakes asks, Was the boy saved by the reincarnated soul of the old man? Fact or Fiction?
Fact.
Damn. That’s good stuff. Had it not been for the boy, the man may have remained unburied, rotting on that bench for all eternity. A bit of a stretch, sure. New York has a pretty stellar sanitation department, but I get the vibe. You save a soul to save your own.
✧
Dan opens the front door just as the boy is dragged to safety, right before the truck’s tires make flank steak out of his tiny twisted legs. I gasp as the door opens. Dan’s hair is all wet. He’s wearing Ray’s oversized shirt. It says Ray on the right breast.
“Jesus, what the hell?” I ask.
Dan gives me the finger and heads to the bathroom and I start doomscrolling my phone. Lol anyone got some preparation Earth. Looks like we got a raging case of Hem-isphere-roids. I heart it, even though ASS-troid was right there.
Dan’s a snaker. That’s what he’s called in the business. He’s the guy they send in to clear the drains whenever they clog up. But really, he’s called Soupy Dan because that’s what the guys down at the shop call him. He hates it.
He comes out of the bathroom after a shower and I ask him what happened again. He says he was snaking this new complex being built down along Oceanside Drive, constructed right into the mountain. Built in near-earth-object shelters complete with bidets. Fancy pants stuff, like walls that open and close by remote control like a folding fan. How does that even work?
“So this newly married couple moves into the place,” Dan says, “a couple west-coast doom techies, and a few days of using the shitter and suddenly they got a toilet bowl volcano. Nothing’s draining. Some apprentice failed to clear a knockout, dropped it right into the fucking pipe. No snaker was going to get it. So I had to cut it out.”
He walks into the kitchen and I can hear him digging through the fridge. He opens a beer.
“Well, shit flows downhill right?” he says, “and I find the goddamn logjam and get all set up to hack it and the newlyweds suddenly start panicking, like you’re not going to cut that pipe open right now are you? And I was like what you want me to do? Suck it out? You got a knockout blocking your drain. I can’t snake this!”
Dan takes a swig.
“This is gonna be a gusher, I say to Tim (this is Dan’s apprentice, a cousin or something of the owner who smokes pot in the van on his breaks) and I send him out to go get me another couple buckets from the van. He comes back, he sets them next to the ladder and right as I start the cut he trips and falls into me, so I grab the pipe for balance…” Dan takes another sip of his beer.
“Oh no,” I gasp. “Oh. No.”
Dan laughs and I have my hand over my mouth and he can’t stop laughing to take a drink.
“Fuck, the look on that ladies’ face. I mean I’m on the floor dodging this shitnami and Tim’s running in circles yelling ‘Awe fuck, Soupy Dan! Awe fuck, Soupy Dan!’ over and over. I could have killed that little shit had I not been asphyxiating on turds myself.”
I join him, laughing. He’s never this happy after work. I mean, would you be if you did what he did all day? I pinch a fake joint between my fingers and yell in a high pitch voice, “Awe Soupy Dan!” just like Tim. I wait for Dan to tell me not to call him that but he doesn’t.
“So, that was my day.” He says and finishes his beer. “And I got fired.”
✧
That night Soupy Dan and I make love. It’s pretty good but it’s weird having Dan around the next morning. He’s usually out the door by five. He sits on the couch next to me and drinks his coffee. We hold hands like we used to back when first met and didn’t give a care about the mandatory biannual retinal scans.
“Chloe’s check come yet?”
“I haven’t seen it,” I say.
“It’s the 10th right? It should be here by now. I’ll run down.” and Dan heads out the door to the mailboxes downstairs.
I scroll through channels. One of the morning shows has a segment about getting the most out of your garden zucchinis. There’s a guest chef hurriedly chopping zucchinis and throwing them into glass bowls. He holds up a yellow, deckled, crook-necked fruit.
…Some of the new varietals, like this one, have been breed to take advantage of increased atmospheric Cesium-137. It’s called Fallout Pepoinies…
The host yeses this.
…But best of all—and this is why I think zucchinis are just so versatile—you can shred them and put them in soup as filler!
This the host really loves. What a great way to sneak some fiber into your diet! She says. I’ve never thought of this and I take a note on my phone. Dan comes back empty-handed. The zucchini segment is followed by a news update about the asteroid. The scientist gives her best guess for an impact date, August 23rd. She keeps calling it a “near-earth object” but according to her it’s over four million miles away.
“Not that near-earth,” I say.
Dan looks at the screen. “Fiction. But sure would make things a lot easier around here,” he says, then heads to the bathroom.
“Don’t clog the toilet Soupy Dan!” I don’t yell it. But I want to. How funny would that be?
✧
“When the cyborgs come we’re going to have to poke their greasy eyeballs out. Cut their Achilles cables. Kick them in the ball bearings. When the cyborgs come shit’s going to get real!” Soupy Dan yells. He grabs his electric saw—the one that moves back and forth like a turkey cutter—and starts running around the house in his underwear.
Chloe screams along and runs into her bedroom slamming the door behind her. Then she runs back out and rips the head off a plush bunny and starts to fake eat the stuffing.
“Let’s eat roast robot! Let’s drink their replicant blood!” Dan yells, and Chloe tears the head off another stuffed animal.
But it turns out in the future the robots don’t have replicant blood. They have hydrostatic fluorocarbon fluid. And they are way stronger than us. On Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction I see one rip the arms off an old lady, Chloe-style. Then they smack her dog with the lady’s old-ass arms. Robots chuckling to themselves like a gaggle of finance bros out for a drink at the Casa Lever.
Fact: hard to feel any sympathy for the future if that’s where the world is headed.
✧
I lied. That asteroid was never going to hit earth. Or cyborgs. Made that up too. Pretty good, huh? That stuff sells. Besides, I know we have a whole department of the Space Force looking for asteroids. I saw a bit on the evening news about the heroes keeping our skies safe. They called themselves “The Homo-Spacians.” They interviewed a general and in not so many words he said the minute we see one its blamo! We’re going to nuke that bitch. Turns out it was a good idea to keep all those nukes after all. That’s a win for Bush One and Gorbi.
I know the system works because the last asteroid that thought it could pockmark earth—the one I lied about—got blasted all to hell. Dan and I watched them nuke it, the remnants raining down all night in green and orange ribbons, tying together in neat little neon bows. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Dan took my hand as we laid on the grass and I knew at that moment, there under the falling sky, we would never be safe.
✧
“They’re guessing a week, maybe two.”
“Fuck, for real?” Dan asks.
“Yellowstone about to pop like a pimple,” I tell him.
The newscaster has been talking to a scientist all morning, and animations of the Yellowstone basin play over and over. First there is a zoom into the cauldron then a zoom out, a transition to an overhead shot with a bunch of facts and figures, and then a zoom back into the magma chamber boiling like a stew. There is a lot of lava. Like a lot.
“What’s going to happen?” Dan asks.
“They’re saying nuclear winter. The whole of the eastern U.S. could be covered in feet of ash and lava. It depends on the winds and the weather of course. But bye-bye New York.”
That afternoon Dan runs to the store. I ask him to get me a couple packs of zucchini seeds—the variety the chef was talking about, the fallout ones. He gets the seeds and a few cases of water, some boxes of mac and cheese, a banged-up years-long ration of fruit cocktail.
“It’s dented but the seals not broken,” he says. “It should hold.”
Fact: I am not making this up.
✧
Have you ever contemplated the workings of a clock? Have you ever left the scene of a crime? Have you ever married for money? Would you walk a thousand miles for a million dollars, on burning coals? Would you drink coffee from a cat’s ass? How long do you think you’ll live? How young is your soul? How many times will you forget where you put your keys? Have you ever begun a story “Once upon a time…”? Have you ever begun a story “No shit there I was…”? Have you ever stolen candy from a baby? Have you ever stolen money from a bank? Have you ever sold your soul to the devil? What was the exchange rate? Have you ever picked the wrong shopping cart, the one with the wiggly wheel, and used it, too lazy to return it? Have you ever considered this a metaphor for your life? Do you have children? Do you have a plan for the fallout? When was the last time you saw the moon? What about the sun? Do you have bedsores? When was the last time you left your bed for a better thing? Where will you be when the world ends?
✧
Chloe had a bit of an incident with grabby-hands-Gaston and now Disneyland is paying out to the tune of 20K a year so Soupy Dan isn’t too worried about making ends meet. We can make it a long time off that—and unemployment. After Dan is fired, we spend most our days watching reruns of Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction. He starts to warm up to Jonathan Frakes’s dulcet baritone. I tease Dan.
“You’re becoming a Ficfan!” I say. That’s what the fans of the show are called.
There is a blog online where Ficfans debate whether something on the show was actually fact or fiction. According to them, it’s almost always fact. There was a show about Bigfoot siphoning gas from tourist’s car in the northern California redwood forests and obviously it was fiction but Bobbybigdick69 uploaded a video of a squatch in the foothills of the Sierras and a bunch of classified files from the US Forest Service about an elite squatch-sniping team and that it was all a ploy to jack up prices at the pump. They don’t want you to know, Bobbybigdick69 wrote, but the truth will set your mind free.
With all those facts it was hard to doubt him.
✧
The summer before the world ended, we lounged around the house in our pajamas. I made a sourdough starter but it got moldy in the fridge. I learned to crochet, but only made half a trivet before I gave up. In the empty side lot next to the building, I cleared the broken glass and crumbling bricks from a small plot and grew a few zucchinis. But soon the freezer was full of Ziplock bags of the shredded stuff and we were getting sick of eating soup, so I let the rest rot on the plant.
At night, I would read to Chloe from an old book of folktales we bought at the Goodwill. The folktales were numbered and organized by character and theme. Organized by the country they came from. Storytelling turned Harvard outline. It was giant book.
Each night, I let Chloe pick the story she wanted to read. She especially liked the ones about the crows brewing beer. Most of them contained some pretty dire stuff. Chloe didn’t seem to mind and these days, what’s the point of trying to hide the world from your kid anyway? Not going to happen, especially with Bobbybigdick69 lobbing truth-bombs around.
On Saturdays, I would take Chloe to the park. One morning, we stopped at a Starbucks and I ordered a double mocha latte but got a caramel macchiato instead. I didn’t realize they had fucked up my order until we were at the park. Morning ruined.
Then this jackweed started yelling at me. “Your kid just threw a rock at my little girl!”
I was already pissy, and now this? I tried hard to channel the phycologist’s advice from the morning show segment about how to deal with the rise in fallout-induced macro-aggressions but I just couldn’t.
“What do you want me to do about it?” I said.
“Maybe discipline your goddamn child!” He yelled.
“Maybe tell your kid to learn to bob and weave. It’s a survival tactic!” I yelled right back in his ugly face.
For the record, I was bigger than him. I really wanted to rip his arms off and smack him in the face with his little hands. I could have done it too. I was pretty sure he wasn’t a cyborg, although, these days who can tell?
✧
I think it will be a lot more boring than we think. Let’s say, just for argument’s sake, we make it until the sun doesn’t. A tall order I know. But say we do. The sun, with its bloated paunch swimming into space, swallowing up Mercury, then Venus, then us. Just gobbling us down before it turns into another galactic whitehead. Or maybe we don’t get swallowed so much as we get vaporized. The hot gases boiling away the earth’s atmosphere long before it swallows us. We’ll all roast like summer weenies over hot coals. It will be the worst suntan of our lives.
When this comes up on Beyond Belief, Soupy Dan yells at the TV, “Bullshit. Fiction!”
He’s wrong. Jonathan Frakes tells him so. The hardest things to imagine are always the facts.
The night before it comes, I try a new recipe, one without zucchini. It’s called Omurice. It’s a ball of fried rice wrapped with an omelette. It’s Japanese and it looks like a miniature sun. I make it because a few days earlier Dan asked if I might want to go to Japan someday. “Sure,” I said, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought about the flights, the reservations, the planning, the required diffraction therapy, the war-induced border surcharge, the less I wanted to leave our sheltered house.
“Let’s eat outside,” I say, and Dan grabs the eggy rice bowls and I open a couple canvas folding chairs on the balcony. He cracks a beer. Below the night traffic is slow, a few horns honking, the smog, for once, lifting.
“You are supposed to put Kewpie mayo on it but all we have is ketchup,” I tell Dan. “It’s a special mayo, I think but the grocer didn’t have any because of the embargo.”
Dan studies the bowl then squirts a red zigzag over his egg.
It’s the most beautiful night ever. Shriveled zucchini plants sit in our little garden plot below the balcony. The sun sets over their shriveled brown leaves, its light catching broken glass, baking the lost earth. And in what little cool dirt is left below each plant, the worms inch along as if they already know they will be the last things gone.
✧
This is Benjamin Fidler’s first appearance at New Pop Lit.