Saturday, May 2

May Day. No more trips to the store, or anywhere. The entire country is now effectively under house arrest. I was able to load up on dried foods, spices, and plenty of garlic. Looking forward to making some new dishes. Thank God for the Internet. It’s a lifeline.

Wednesday, May 20

It’s hard to get exercise without walking. I miss the fresh air and the park. We got word that my sister and her family were sent to a quarantine camp. No news yet, but we remain hopeful. Next door, the Crowders were lounging on the deck Herb built last year, enjoying the fine spring weather. Becky was wearing a bikini and Molly made a joke about me putting my eyes back into my skull, laughing and swatting my fanny. It was good to see the old smiling Molly again.

Tuesday, May 26

Further restrictions have been announced. The days of unlimited internet are over. It’s been too slow to stream anything for some days now, so perhaps it’s better to have it gone altogether. Plenty of books. The food is holding out nicely, and the National Guard has started twice-weekly deliveries of ration boxes.

Wednesday, June 10

There was a notice on today’s ration box that we’ll now be getting one a week instead of two. The contents have changed, too. We were getting brand name canned goods like Chef Boy-Ar-Dee and Progresso, but now it’s white government cans and military MREs. The quality is poor, but I guess I shouldn’t complain. Our tax dollars at work.

Monday, June 15

Molly has been awfully quiet. I have to coax her into eating, even when I use the best remainders of our pantry such as the jar of pesto she bought in Naples or the organic bone broth from Whole Foods. She spends long hours staring out the window, hands in her lap. We hardly talk at lately, my pale attempts at conversation lapsing into stolid silence.

Sunday, June 21

Molly says she hasn’t seen the Crowders on their deck in a long time. We had a few days of rain last week, so I just figured they were staying indoors. The sun came back out Tuesday and I guess I forgot about them. I wish we had some way of reaching out. It’s impossible to keep track of people since the cellphones went down, even our next-door neighbors. We dare not go outside with the Guard watching. They’ve been announcing zero tolerance through the loudspeakers. I’ve even heard gunshots, though far away.

Monday, June 22

I woke this morning to the sound of Molly sobbing downstairs. She told me she’d gotten up before dawn and gone next door, using the key Becky gave her when we watched their cat last Christmas. She said the Crowders lying on their kitchen floor. Apparently they’d been dead for several days. I risked the Guard and walked over to their house to hang out the red flag they gave us for emergencies, crossing the yard with my hands in the air like a newly freed hostage. Even though my mission was grim, it was so nice to be outside again.

Thursday, June 25

The guard finally came for the Crowders this morning. Molly stayed in our bedroom. She’s inconsolable. After the bodies were removed, a hazmat team came and boarded all the windows and doors. I saw a vapor escaping from the roof vents, so I guess they fogged it. The stories about that are true.

Sunday, June 28th

Molly is hot to the touch. She smiled and told me she feels like a loaf of fresh-baked bread. Her breath rattles like a boy running a stick along a picket fence.

Saturday, July 4th

The quietest Fourth I can remember. Molly seems better. Coughing less, and she took a little soup for supper. I went out on the front porch and lit a sparkler in celebration, but a National Guard Humvee drove by and slowed down when they saw me, so I quickly put it out and went back inside.

Thursday, July 11

We used to love walking the dogs together. Now Molly just sits in her rocker, pale blue eyes staring out at nothing. Her fever has returned and her cough is worse.

Monday, July 20

I heard a surveillance drone hovering over the house last night. I once heard they had infra-red cameras that can see through walls, but I’m pretty sure that’s just paranoia. I know for a fact that they are equipped with super-sensitive microphones, so I hope they haven’t heard Molly coughing. It’s so loud now I can even hear her when I’m in the basement. All day long I kept peeking through the curtains to peer up the empty street, jumping at every noise real or imagined.

Tuesday, July 21

The Guard came to the house. Molly was upstairs, coughing and coughing. I told her to keep quiet, cover her face with a pillow, but she was only semi-conscious and didn’t understand. It didn’t matter anyway. I went downstairs and met them at the door, thinking I would try to bluff them. They weren’t fooled and forced their way past me, their boots thundering up the stairs. I stood in the bedroom doorway while two of them held her down and swabbed her nose and throat. She struggled wildly, then went so still I wondered if they had killed her. I moved to stop them, but one of the guards pushed me against the wall with his baton. I stared into my own face reflected in the silver of his mask and wondered if they intentionally designed the respirators to look evil. After they left I sat and held Molly’s hand. She was sobbing and coughing but eventually fell asleep. I sat a long time thinking. The incident had reminded me of something. Finally, I remembered. When I was sixteen I spent a summer on a Montana ranch. One frigid morning, the rancher told me they were going to geld the male calves to make them into steers. The terrified animals were herded into a corral where a bunch of local boys stood waiting. One would throw a rope around a calf and throw it, then another two jumped on it to pin it down. The rancher came over, squatted down and expertly slit its crotch with a curved blade. He yanked out the stringy testicles and dropped them steaming into a bucket, then cauterized the wound with the electric prod dangling from his belt. Throughout the ordeal, the animals invariably were stunned to silence.

Saturday, September 26

The first of the leaves falling. It’s more than a month since they took Molly away. The guard has been by twice a week to draw my blood and make sure I’m not infected. I must be in the clear since they haven’t been back in at least ten days. I found my journal under a pile of old clothes and read back through the entries. I was almost done by the time I realized I was weeping. I know now that my wife is dead. Somehow I am still alive. Why?

Sunday, September 27

I’ve always thought of a journal as a series of letters to a future version of myself. By continuing to write entries, I therefore assert my belief that such an individual will exist, that I will survive all this. That it will mean something. Right now, I don’t know if any of that is true. The day outside looks the same as any other, save for the lack of people and cars. There are more birds and the occasional feral cat passing by my window. But there are also the armored Humvees that deliver the weekly ration boxes, men in camouflage suits with the wicked mirrored respirators and weapons at the ready. Once or twice I’ve heard the distant exchange of gunfire. I am alone in every way, and I don’t know if I want to live in such a world as this. I lack the conviction for either suicide or survival. It is a true dilemma.

Tuesday, October 6

This morning I saw myself in the mirror while changing clothes, so thin I resembled one of those photos of Holocaust survivors. It shamed me. Those people endured. I can too. I have decided to keep living, so I resume writing to my future self. Tell me, how does this turn out?

Wednesday, October 7

The power went off this morning. I wondered if it was permanent until an N.G.Humvee drove by. They don’t leave notes anymore, instead playing recorded messages through loudspeakers mounted on the roof. Usually it’s something about how the infection is almost over, how the president has done this or that. Today I was informed that to conserve resources we will now be allotted two hours of electricity per day. Our time is from ten AM to noon. Nothing about the other utilities.

Friday, October 8

Spent the day cleaning. I waited until 10 to vacuum, then spent the full two hours of power trying to fix the damned belt. I’ll try again tomorrow.

Sunday, October 10

Gave up on the vacuum and swept instead. Interesting thing. We’ve not had a dog since I gave Jounce away back in February, but there’s still an amazing amount of dog hair. everywhere, great balls of the stuff. I didn’t think of the dog at all while I swept it up, detached as if I was cleaning the house of a stranger. I also found Molly’s favorite Tiffany earring which she lost two years ago after a New Year’s party. Like the dog hair, it elicited no nostalgia in me at all, no feelings of any kind. I put the earring and the sweepings in a garbage bag and set it on the pile out back. I guess my heart is now officially sealed over.

Wednesday, October 15

The cleaning project is over. I wound up taking everything upstairs except the books and couch. It made quite a pile, filling the bedrooms and hall completely. No need to go up there ever again. I have blankets enough to stay warm, and a dresser full of durable clothes. I’m so glad I put in a gas water heater because hot showers are my one enduring luxury, though I imagine my consumption will eventually be noticed by the utility companies.

Sunday, October 18

A big storm blew through last night, the wind shrieking across the rooftops and ripping the bright autumn leaves from the trees. I woke to bare branches and streets covered with debris. One of the plywood sheets on the Crowder’s came off, leaving the black window behind. It looks like the house is winking at me. I was never a churchgoer, so Sundays aren’t special to me. I wonder how religious people are coping with this. Maybe they believe God is everywhere. I can’t see how they can now.

Monday, October 26

Kendra’s birthday. I came close to getting out her senior picture this morning, but decided against it. Best let sleeping dogs lie. When she was killed that horrible summer so long ago I never expected that I would look at the accident as a blessing. It is only because she and Molly are both gone that I can resign myself to this, whatever this is.

Wednesday, November 4

Frost came early this year. The Guard has been late with their ration boxes again. I’m sure sick of beans.

Wednesday, November 11

I’m not sure why I keep this journal up. When all this started I had ideas of how it would be, but none of it seems to matter. Every day is the same, so why even bother? But today I thought I’d write an entry because it’s Armistice Day. I’ve always called it that since I read Kurt Vonnegut as a kid. He thought it was more sacred than Veterans’ Day because when he was young most people believed that World War One really had ended all wars. I wish I could tell old Kurt that now finally managed to really do that, but not the way he hoped.

Thursday, December 17

Bulldozers have been through the neighborhood knocking down all the Red Flag houses and putting the wreckage into dump trucks and carting it away. The crews aren’t National Guard, but civilian workers in bright green suits with full respirators attached to their hard hats. It looks like my house is one of three left on the block. Interesting that they’re leaving the trees, as though someday they’ll build again.

Sunday, December 20

It’s been so long since I heard anything other than the loudspeaker announcements. I keep thinking I’ll drag out the record player, but I just don’t have the energy. I don’t even talk to myself.

Friday, December 25th

My grandmother told me that when she was little they draped all the mirrors in the house in black fabric whenever somebody died. I’d planned on doing that with the holidays, shrouding them and walking past without looking, but was astonished when I opened the front door to find not the usual Guard ration box but a Dean & Deluca holiday basket containing a tin of smoked turkey, several boxes of crackers, chocolate, hard candy, cans of Danish Cheese, and even a canned Virginia Ham. Best of all was an unopened fifth of Johnny Walker Red. I never was much of a drinker, but I went right away to get a glass from the kitchen and poured myself a generous knock and took it right down, feeling the delicious warmth spread through me like the fountain of youth. I had some crackers and cheese and a bit of the ham. It’s salted and should last a few days. The kitchen is almost as cold as a refrigerator anyway. I have no idea who left this treasure for me, but God bless you.

Friday, January 1

I should mention that there were no elections last year. That should be obvious to the reader, assuming history is still being written. From my window I can see the enormous billboard of his face superimposed against an American flag that towers over what’s left of this neighborhood. The loudspeakers now broadcast in the president’s voice.

Monday, January 18

Fever these past two weeks. It broke last night. My chest feels like a horse is standing on it, but I can somewhat breathe now.

Tuesday, January 19

Perhaps I am going live after all.

Hard Pussy was the one who pointed it out to me. She ran the bar at Butch’s, a narrow joint wedged between the deathtraps and bum flops in Old Town. Butch’s was the first place in the state to buck the local ordinances and offer, as the neon said, LIVE GIRLS TOTALLY NUDE ONSTAGE.  Another neon featured a curvy dancer swiveling her hips. You could see it for blocks.

The stage wasn’t much, a single platform thrusting like a dock between the tables. There was no pole or any of that fancy crap that newer clubs had. There wasn’t even a DJ, just an old Seeburg jukebox at the back of the stage, its arc of yellow lights glowing through the haze.

Hard Pussy had been in the Merchant Marine during the war, cutting her hair and passing as a man for the duration. She said her real identity “never came up.” She had a face like a work glove, meaty hands and a genuine Sailor Jerry tattoo on her arm. She’d worked at Butch’s since it opened in 1948, so long that most people thought that she herself was Butch. She’d set them straight on that score if they asked. Most didn’t. There may have been a real Butch, but I never met him.

Butch’s did good business, even in the daytime. There would be at least three or four men in the joint fifteen minutes after it opened at 11, guys with outside sales jobs, cops and firemen, construction workers on lunch. For the talent, Butch’s was either the first rung on the ladder or the last, depending on the dancer’s age and ability. Once in a while there was somebody extraordinary, like the black girl with a bass clef tattooed on her ankle who went on to play with a famous jazz trumpet player in New York City. It was rare, but it happened.

Pretta was a girl like that. I thought so, anyway. She was my favorite. I was in love with her, I realize now. I was twenty-three, new in town. I had no friends, an outside sales job I hated, and the start of a drinking problem. It was a cliché for me to fall for a stripper, but there you have it.

I’d come in and watch her, try to figure out what she was thinking. I knew she was smart because sometimes she’d sit with me and make jokes. I never got to know her at all, but you couldn’t have convinced me of that at the time.

I loved how she leaned against the jukebox,  fingers in her mouth while she flipped through the selections. It didn’t matter how carefully she picked.  Her music was always shitty. Some dancers have a knack for picking the perfect song, but with Pretta it was just the opposite. The music never fit the mood and was always inappropriate for her style of dancing, if you could even call it a style. Lena Horne and a fast gyration. The Electric Prunes and a slow swivel. It was always just wrong.

I guess she was maybe 20, with a the lovelest face I ever saw in my life. Long black hair like a crow’s wing  spilling over high cheekbones and huge dark eyes that seemed half asleep. And a body without flaw, smooth and pearly in the smoke, a figure carved of ivory by a Chinese master. Pretta habitually wore an expression of intriguing blankness, a canvas upon which anything might be written. Sister. Daughter. Whore. Maybe all three.

Hard Pussy gave me my drink, rye and ginger in a beer mug. I offered her a smoke and we lit up. “Say, Charlie,” she said in that diesel voice, low and rattling,  “I think you’re shit out of luck. Your honey’s taken up with Doctor Bob.”

Hard Pussy knew I had it bad for Pretta and teased me about it whenever I came in. I tried to always be there when Pretta was working, so lately she’d had plenty of opportunity.

The news about Dr. Bob was bad, but I can’t say it was a surprise. I’d been around long enough to see it happen a few times. Sooner or later Dr. Bob would come in to check out the new girl. He’d stand and watch the stage from across the room, sipping his bottled tonic and not tipping a dime, leaning his pointy elbows on the tall table like he was at a livestock auction. Then he’d leave. This would go on for a while, but one time he’d saunter across the bar and drop a hundred at the dancer’s feet, looking at her face from behind his tinted glasses.

Some girls would fawn all over such big money, but the cooler customers would ignore it like it was fifty cents. It was his test. If the dancer treated the money like shit, then the Doctor would be interested. If she so much as presented her ass to him he’d have nothing more to do with her. More girls than you might think passed the test.

Later, he’d have them over for a table dance or two, talking quietly to them all the while. Hard Pussy frowned on table dances, except for Doctor Bob. He paid for that unique privilege.

Within a few days, the dancer would belong to Dr. Bob. She’d still get up on the stage to do her set, but afterwards she wouldn’t sit at the bar with the other customers. She’d sit with the Doctor and ignore any other overtures.

Hard Pussy didn’t mind because even though Dr. Bob only drank tonic water, he would always drop a hundred or two  every time he came in. Hard Pussy didn’t pay the girls. They worked  for tips. Some of them cleared five hundred a night.

Usually, Doctor Bob’s chosen would start to put on airs, showing off some new ring,  necklace or a dress. Before long she’d be staying up at his house.  Sometimes she would disappear for a week or two, showing back up with a cosmetic improvement like new tits or a nose job.

And then she’d be gone altogether. A month or two. Maybe longer. But then she would come back, looking like she’d been though the wars. Hard Pussy told me the longest any girl had stayed  gone was six months. That was Jaqui, whose father was a lawyer. Jaqui  was hard as rocks about getting her way,  an amazon, six-two with red hair and eyes like a pirate. “But even she came back, ” Hard Pussy said. “And she looked worse than all the rest of ’em put together. That Dr. Bob knows how to tear down a woman, chew her up so small she chokes on herself.”

Hard Pussy wouldn’t say  what went on up at the Doctor’s house, but I found out later he was a trust-fund MD who didn’t need to practice. He had particular tastes, most of which he’d keep to himself until the moment was right.

With each new girl he would create the illusion that she was the one.  And so it would go, Dr. Bob asking more and more until one day she’d refuse him, refuse to allow a further escalation. The next thing the dancer knew she was outside the front gate, lucky if she’d been able to grab an outfit or cabfare. Plenty of girls knew the humiliation of flapping down the streets of the affluent Hills neighborhood in slippers and a teddy, cried-out mascara giving her raccoon eyes as she squinted in the harsh sun. These broken girls would usually dance for maybe a month or two, shadows of their former selves.  Then be gone for good.

I figured I knew  what Pretta’s fate would be with the Doctor. Everybody did,  except Pretta herself. It was like the last act of a farce where all the actors but one are in on the secret and the audience laughs along with them at the fool who hasn’t figured out the obvious. Pretta was mindlessly picking out her music because the poor kid actually thought that her ship had come in. She was positive that within a year she’d be driving around in a Mercedes , a pink poodle on her lap.

My take is this: a guy like Dr. Bob only feels alive when he ruins something beautiful, like a vandal who slashes a Monet. I guess up until he met Pretta, he never found one he couldn’t destroy. Maybe that was why he did what he did.

I was out of town when it happened, but it was spectacular enough that it made it onto the evening news. The neighbors had heard the screaming and called the cops and one of those nightcrawler vultures with a police scanner got there before the police and took that footage that made it to the crime show.  Most of it had to be heavily edited because it was too much even for cable, but the blood on the walls and the carpet told enough.

The picture they ran of Pretta must have been from her high school annual. She looked about fifteen, but her eyes still had that look, that never-touch-me stare like she stood alone on some island you could never get to.  That look could make a man fall in love, or worse.  They gave her real name, too. A little girl’s name. It didn’t fit her. I could see why she had changed it.

I never said goodbye to Hard Pussy. I got a regular job in another town, quit drinking, and settled down with a girl I met at church.

With her long black hair and big dark eyes, my wife looks like she might be Pretta’s sister. But her eyes are different. They invite you in and ask you questions.

It’s not the same kind of love I had for Pretta. It may not be love at all.

But it’ll do.