“Praying for peace?” Faust quipped.

“You want to know about the future?” he said, arms now flexed, the COURAGE on his tee almost glowing. “I’m afraid there’s nothing but a blob on the horizon.”

“Is it made of whipped cream?” Faust quipped again. “I heard some dairy cows were milked during an earthquake.” Nobody laughed. Frankenstein, recovering his aplomb, raised his eyebrows and cupped a trembling, misshapen hand over one ear. Everyone groaned predictably. He relaxed.

I didn’t. I had never seen him in such bad shape.

The prophet seemed oblivious to the ruckus. He pulled out a scarf from someplace and draped it over one shoulder, the kind of item you get from the local dollar store. “America must repay its psychic debts . . . debts . . . ,” he said. The echo amplified his powerful timbre. “Your karma is overloaded; you carry it all on your back, an albatross. I see a corpse dripping blood from its mouth. I see refugee families dying of thirst in the desert; I see pink mucus mutants crawling from your cellars, your attics, fastening to your throats like leeches. I see an infestation of rats. I see another virus become another plague. I see women forced to bear babies sold into slavery. It happens again and again. It never stops. It’s the Never-Ending Virus.” He had the audience under his thumb. He had once been a member of the ruling party before seeing the light and converting to Chrislam, the new, hot religion. “The strobe lights of tracers,” he said, “the napalm, the quick fix of a mushroom cloud. Seawater taking over the land. A virus in every pot of soup. Everyone a terrorist. A vast bloodletting. The Earth shedding its humans like vermin. Back to the source: the trees, the bugs, the vermin, the amoeba.”

The crowd started getting pissed at his deranged Debbie Downer schtick, and I could only hear part of what he said. It was social media and conspiracy theory brought to life. “Hijacked missiles, blowtorches, pocket computers wired to bombs, firestorms, children turned to cinders, pain, pain, pain. Pedophiles everywhere! In every pizza box! You’ll love it, lap at it like the dogs you are, do the dirty to your own kids, false pleasures, the Dark Age of the psyche. This country has no inward motion. All is lost!”

“Throw out da goddamn bum!” That crazed voice again. You could see Frankenstein turn pale at his desk. He rubbed his eyes. He frowned down at his notes. When he looked up again, his eyes grew wide like bowling balls.

A thing as much ape as man charged down the aisle. It had on a faded John Deere cap and overalls and waved a tiny red-white-and-blue flag. Under the overalls was a red-and-gold sweatshirt that featured an embossed ear of corn. “Lemme at him!” the ape screamed. “You traitor! Lemme at him!”

“Go get him, ya big Cobber!” the guy next to me shouted, ripping off his own shirt. There was a flag tattooed on his chest. Red. White. Blue.

“To hell with that,” a woman behind me shouted. She wore a faded Frankenstein tee from the old days. I swiveled to see her whale the guy with her heavy purse the size and shape of a watermelon. There must have been bricks in it. The guy dropped like a shot and lay still. She gave me a thumbs-up sign. “Go Faust!” she shouted. “Go Frankenstein!” She held out a hand to high-five me. I complied, my eyes on the purse.

The ape roared past us like freight. “Ya bum! It’s all over!” I couldn’t tell if it was half human, half ape, or what. A mutant of some kind. It had enough hair for the zoo. Jesus God Almighty, I thought, get Frankenstein and Faust to a safe place; even the border would be better than this. Good God in heaven, not them too. “Abort, abort!” I cried into my phone. “Abort!”

The berets and Viking helmets were back. They pulled out nightsticks and charged into the bleacher crowd. A few in the crowd with more brawn than brain splintered plyboard seats for weapons. I heard gunshots. A beret went down. The others opened fire.

The ape gathered momentum.

Some kid with a pistol stepped into the aisle to face the creature approaching him and took aim. The gun went off. But the creature, even with a blossom of blood on a shoulder, didn’t stop. He trampled over the kid, stopping to stomp on his head, left him lying like a log in the aisle. On the edge of the stage a guard had aligned himself with the center aisle. He crouched in a three-point stance and braced himself. “Hup! Hup!” he screamed, muscles tight as a firing pin. I remembered that he had once been a tackle on the local Bison football team.

“Da bum’s through!” the creature yelled. The guard leaped into its flailing fists. Their delirious screams were wonderful to hear for some, I could tell—a true catharsis, like the slow-motion metal-on-metal wrench of a car wreck. The crowd brawling near the stage stopped fighting for a moment to watch. Frankenstein was trying to hustle the prophet away. It was just like him, to think of others first, the compassionate pilgrim in Africa or on the border giving his all for the cause, but it was too late. The prophet, as if atoning for his Neanderthal opinions in the old language times, ripped off his T-shirt to expose his neon tattoo, which read “THOU SHALT NOT,” and gave the brawling crowd some sort of farewell blessing before his head exploded. Then someone hit the fuses.

If this is a stupid pet trick, I thought, remembering the long-ago heyday of David Letterman, it’s not working.

Imagine watching a program on the tube, sipping on a brew, maybe snuggling up to your Molly (may she rest in peace). Then you’re inside the tube, with some goon pointing a bazooka at your head. By the time I stumbled out of the civic center, where pandemonium was still raging, sirens and gunshots filled the air and there was a light dusting of snow on the streets. It was below the freezing point, approaching the doughnut hole, zero Fahrenheit; I zipped up my fleece and my teeth still chattered.

The burned-out hulk of a bus was smoking. I hit the pavement, flattened myself against a building whenever a car or group of punks cruised by. Behind me a helicopter took off. Maybe that was Frankenstein and Faust, getting out alive, I thought, though it turned out not to be so. The rotors faded away into the heavens, and I lost faith.

Nobody gets out alive. It’s time, I thought, to try Tulsa, to do some good there.

I stumbled over an unconscious man, blood all over his body, his face the color of caulk. It was the shooter from inside who had zinged Faust in the foot. The berets had done him over good. The body, dead I now realized, appeared to be turning white, but it was only the snow.

A midget in an Elmer Fudd cap stepped from the shadows near the body and shifted a brick from hand to hand. “Terrible, ain’t it?” he said. “They kicked him in the ribs. Put a rifle butt in his face. Then the knife, zooie.” He spit and paused to breathe heavy. “Watcha doing on the streets dis time a night, by the way?”

“Walking to my karate class. Black belt. Hands that can kill.”

He slapped one of his own hands onto my shoulder. “Why don’t cha stop for a sec? Look, here’s my problem,” he said. He wasn’t wearing a mask. “I got cancer. It hurts, you know? I need some comfort.” He rubbed his hand on my upper thigh and winked. “I like Marines, and Marines sure as hell like me. You ever been a Marine?”

An old battered Buick screeched around a corner, nearly lost control on the slick, wet asphalt, and braked at the curb. A crew of thugs in ducktails, leather jackets, and pointed boots whooped out like vampires. They swung tire chains and machetes and baseball bats. Each had on a beret or an armband. “There’s the dwarf!” one screamed.

He took off. A greaser blew the horn twice. They all piled back in the car and somebody who looked like Faust stuck his head out the window. “You can run, you fucking dwarf, but you can’t hide!” He saw me, winked, and gave the thumbs-up.

That was about it.

Back home I turned on the tube. So what if the world figures America is a wreck that needs a tow? More room for you and more room for me. Some sort of accident, the newscaster claimed. Something big blew up and the Pacific Northwest territory is entirely radioactive. It wasn’t deliberate, the president said, but hey, shit happens. He clicked his bottle of Coca-Cola against the camera, a close-up, and wrapped a shoulder around a stuffed grizzly bear standing tall on its hind legs in his nuclear-safe hideaway inside a mountain.

So what if illegals were dying by the thousands on account of the new law? Women being flailed with whips for disobedience? If the Cold War had turned hot? Frankenstein and Faust, coming out of retirement, that was the real news, but Frankenstein’s obituary would be tomorrow’s sidebar, wouldn’t it? The late Mr. Frankenstein, part of that great comedy club in the sky, all his body parts returning to the source, giving it all up, like Jesus, sacrificing his own life to redeem us all.

And global warming? An afterthought. Fake news.

What global warming? When I stare from my window, everything is white and clean. It’s damned cold up here this time of year.

There’s got to be something better than this. Tulsa, here I come.

PART TWO

Sharp Objects

Dark Times

The family of six reached the shotgun shack at dusk. “Oh, my God,” said Sharon, who was six. Tina, her mother, once a homecoming queen, now having one of her typical bad days, didn’t react. Her breathing sounded shallow.

“Yuck!” the two older kids screamed in unison. The infant started to bawl.

Tom, their father, laughed the sort of laugh designed to irritate his family to the edge of derangement. Once, he had played high school football with Chuck and played cornet in the school band, a double whammy that gave him a reputation as a Renaissance kid; those glory days were long gone. “Now, now, brown cow,” he said. “What’s good for the goose is good for the baba ghanoush.” It was sadistic, he knew, to tease them like that, repeating nonsense stuck in his head, but he could see paint peeling from the cypress walls and needed to do something to break the spell of marital ennui. “That’s good wood,” he said.

Inside, the bed liner was worn. The place smelled like mothballs. An air-conditioning unit rattled in one window. A stream of water dripped from it, but the machine cooled the room, or at least kept the Mississippi Delta heat at bay.

“Oh, Daddy,” Sharon said. “This is yucky. Why they call it a shotgun shack?”

“All the rooms and doors are one behind the next. If somebody shot a shotgun through the door, the shot would go all the way out back.” Tom was manic. He unloaded suitcases from the car. His wife sat like a zombie on one of three double beds. What the hell. Each had bedspreads quilted together with squares that looked like fabric from an American flag. The shacks were not cheap, but Tom insisted on staying two nights for the atmosphere on the way to Orlando and Disneyworld. It was his treat to himself. Afterward, he would reunite with his role as a good family man and again become the religious zealot his wife now expected.

Lately, she was in a very dark place. That was one reason for the vacation, to get her out of the house and away from nosy Fargo neighbors, especially one who called Tom at work. “She needs help now. Now, Tom. Why aren’t you doing anything?” Tom would excuse himself and ask his secretary to screen calls from the woman. He would telephone his wife at home and sweet-talk her for a few minutes. “I’m doing what I can for her,” he explained to the doctor he consulted, one who put her on strong medication that she didn’t always take. “We have the Bible. Scripture. The best medicine available.”

The doc stared, his hands steepled and chin resting on his thumbs. “Make her take the pills, Tom. God helps those who help themselves.”

The shack had a tin roof. Later that evening, they sat at a wooden table in the kitchen eating barbecue Tom had brought back from a take-out place and juke joint up the road. A rainstorm passed. They heard clatter on the tin roof. It was the strangest sound. “Like a new kind of music,” Tom said. He was delirious with happiness, despite the bawling of the infant and his wife’s catatonia. Sharon was the only one interested in his stories about great bluesmen like Robert Johnson, who sold his soul to the devil just down the road.

With a finger, Sharon traced the numbers on the license plate that covered a hole in the wall. Though the place was quaint—a nice word for it—and reservations had been difficult to get, only his six-year-old daughter appreciated it. “You’re Daddy’s girl,” Tom said. She lay her head in his lap and he stroked her long golden hair. After a time, she slept. He carried her to a bed and lay her down next to her sister, who had crawled under the covers on her own. He wiped Sharon’s fingers, still greasy from barbecue, and eased off her underpants, did his best to Velcro a plastic diaper into place.

The baby had cried herself to sleep. The oldest, Ben, had claimed the bed in the back room and closed the door. Tom knocked, reminded him to read his Scripture, and said goodnight. There was nothing left now except the patter of rain and his wife’s guttural yelps.

“What’s that?” Tom asked. She had refused to eat ribs, stared at them as if they were crawling with maggots.

“They’re unclean,” she said. She ate cereal instead. Cornflakes were scattered on the cypress floor around her.

He swept them up with a piece of cardboard. “You all right?”

She said nothing. He went to the suitcase and foraged for her medicine. He fingered out a dose and offered the pills with a glass of water. She stared up at him. Once, he might have reached over, touched her, but that time had passed. The growing dystopia in the world around them paled in comparison to his marriage and its gloom. Any contact made her flinch. She had become depressed when the infant came with God’s glory into the world and couldn’t—or wouldn’t, Tom suspected, out of sheer obstinacy—snap out of it.

“Look, honey,” Tom said, too manic to sit for long, “there’s a juke joint down the road. Mind if I take in a set?” Blues music was his vice. He admitted as much, but had promised himself a taste on the way to Orlando. He would put it behind him soon enough.