The Encyclopedia of Exes Read online

  The sky was dark. The sound of conversation and clinking glasses was soon subsumed by the hum of distant traffic and the hushed riot of insects at night. All the other houses were quiet behind their tall white walls. Cubes of yellow light spilled from windows here and there. The mountainside above them was mostly dark. They walked along the uneven sidewalk. Grass sprouted from jagged fissures in the concrete slabs. At the end of the block, they stopped beside a municipal electric box. He was talking about Cape Town, how it had changed, and she said she wouldn’t really know, being from Johannesburg. Of course, he nodded, as if that were the explanation to a riddle.

  It was there, beside the tall electrical box, that they touched each other’s hands, and he moved closer and she felt his fingers on her shoulder. And then she was kissing him, breasts flattened against his woven vest, his beard and mustache prickling her skin, smelling him, tasting his man-mouth taste, the red wine and coffee, his tongue slippery and big, making her think of sushi and other kisses, of tablecloths and rain and waking up beside someone in the morning.

  LAST

  Richard Rushfield

  (lăst) adj 1: being, coming, or placed after all others; final: the last game of the season 2: being the only one left: his last nickel; as a last resort; last man on earth 3: just past; most recent: last year; the last time I checked 4: highest in extent or degree; utmost: to the last measure of human endurance 5: a: least likely or expected: the last person we would have suspected b: the least desirable or suitable: the last man for the job b: being the latest possible: waited until the last second before boarding the train 7: lowest in rank or importance: last prize; last place 8: a: of or relating to a terminal period or stage, as of life: the last days of the dinosaurs b: administered just before death: the last sacraments

  It’s typical of my life that the world came to an end on the day I finally started looking for work. For five months since getting fired, I’d been loafing around, watching cable TV, playing Ms. Pac-Man at the local convenience store, running up a massive credit card bill, and swearing every night that the next day I was going to take steps to find a job. Then finally, after kicking myself nightly for not taking action, I did something. I shelled out fifty cents for the local paper down at the store. I took the paper home and spread it out on the kitchen table. I went to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of my precious reserve of vintage Raspberry Mocha Alarm soda, the last bottle from the last remaining six-pack, the end of the crate I’d won on eBay back when I still had a job. I opened the bottle, uncapped a black marker to circle the appropriate jobs, rolled up my sleeves and prepared to take a hard look at the help wanted section. And that was when the bombs went off.

  I guess the irony of it is that my parents had gotten so sick of hearing me say I was going to look for work that they had stopped listening. That night I was going to show them the circled ads and turn it all around but of course I never got to, because they were killed in the explosions like everybody else. So they died thinking I was a deadbeat, which was technically still true but was about to become maybe untrue. I woke up lying on a pile of rubble that had once been my parents’ house. I could tell because my Raspberry-Mocha-Alarm bottle was lying right next to me. Still stunned, I picked it up to take a sip but the contents had spilled out in the blast.

  Determining no one else was alive was no easy trick; for weeks and weeks I walked across the city yelling “Hello! Can anybody hear me?” But after doing that about a million times and getting no response, I began to take the hint; there was no one left but me.

  I had no theories about why I survived when everyone died. I have a reasonably healthy level of self-confidence, but I never figured myself as the type that might outlast everyone on Earth. I had never been in the top percentile of anything. Actually, not even the top twentieth percentile, now that you mention it. I’d lived a decent, but uncelebrated life, winning no great contests and achieving little acclaim. As a child, I marched with my school color guard in the local Veterans Day parade and that is about as much applause as I’ve ever received, divided thirty-seven ways between me and the other kids. Whatever scientific explanations there might be about my body chemistry or DNA were useless to me. Despite my extensive collection of science-fiction paraphernalia, I didn’t know science fact from my tennis shoes, and there was no one around to explain anything to me. So eventually I just accepted this was how it was. I had lived and everyone else was gone. Fair or not, that’s how it shakes out sometimes.

  I devoted myself to two things: eating and looking to see if I was really, really the only person left alive. Eating was fairly easy. There were lots of canned goods around that survived the blasts and here and there I found things growing on trees. Not the most exciting cuisine, but I’ve never been picky about food. Confirming that I was the only person left alive was pretty easy, too. I continued to spend my days wandering around shouting, “Is anyone there?” or “Yooohooo!” or sometimes just singing. No one ever answered. At night, I’d make a fire out of a destroyed house and try to remember my old friends, replay in my mind the stuff we used to do, or just try and remember all their names.

  But mostly I’d try to picture who I’d like to have here with me and what we’d do together. I thought about Marion, the one real girlfriend I’d had in life, and it was nice to picture her sitting beside me sometimes. But when I focused on that image too closely, I’d remember how quickly we ran out of stuff to talk about back then, and how we really got on each other’s nerves, and I’d realize there was no reason to imagine it would be any easier now that everyone was dead. I tried a lot to come up with my dream girl, invent the perfect companion for myself and while I could imagine many of her attributes (long hair, kind of awkward, loves sci-fi) I was never able to bring all those pieces together in my mind, wrap them around one complete image to keep myself company with. I’d try to draw her on the ground with a stick, but I’m not much of an artist and the results would never look like anyone you’d want to have around, much less make out with.

  And then one day, she appeared.

  I was sitting on a pile of rubble eating a can of tuna fish with my fingers. I had my thumb and index finger stuck into my mouth, swallowing a pinch of fish, when I noticed her standing in front of me. She had snuck up and stood there looking at me. She wore black patent leather shoes, kneesocks, a kilted skirt, and a T-shirt with a picture of Dirk Benedict as Lieutenant Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica shooting a Cylon, with the words Frac Cylon Tyranny! emblazoned below. Her long brown hair was tied in pigtails, and she wore black framed glasses. We looked at each other, not saying anything. I remember thinking, It’s so quiet, like all sound had left the earth along with the people.

  I swallowed the tuna fish in my mouth and she said, “You’re alive.”

  “That’s right.” I nodded. “I am.”

  “Well, why? How’d you survive?”

  “I just did. How about you?”

  “I have no idea.” We gawked some more. She was not just alive; she was beautiful. When he was alive, my friend Josh used to say at every party even if there is no babe, there is always one babe by default; the prettiest girl there, even if she’s not really very pretty, gets surrounded by tons of guys. But this situation was not like that. Even if the world had been filled with girls, this one would’ve been exceptionally hot. I tried not to stare at her knees.

  “Would you like to sit down?” I finally asked. She did, taking a place on the rubble near me.

  “Are there others of you or are you alone?” she asked.

  “It’s just me.” I told her. “All the others are gone.” I saw a wave of disappointment screw up her mouth and eyebrows, but she tried to hide it when she saw me looking.

  We stayed up all night talking, setting a collapsed house on fire every hour or so to stay warm. Darby (that was her name) and I soon found we had everything in common. Unbelievably, before the bombs she had worked in a comic book shop and was a serious reader. Like me, she collected early Dar
edevils, from the pre–Frank Miller period. Even though we had lived in different cities, we went back through our travels and found we even knew people in common, or recognized them anyway, like the six-foot-four fat guy who always came dressed as Wolverine to every convention. I had always wondered about him and it turned out that Darby had actually been to parties at his house, and he was a really cool guy when you got to know him.

  I could not believe my luck. Not only had I found another living human being (and a first-rate babe at that), but someone who I could talk to! It sort of made me in a way feel glad that the world had blown up because being alone with a girl like this wasn’t something that happened to me too often in the old days.

  Late, late in the evening when we were both too tired from talking to start a new fire, conversation turned to the bombs. “So why do you think you survived?” she asked me.

  “The more I think about it, the more sure I am that I don’t know why.”

  Darby shook her head. “There must be some reason. Something. What were you doing when they went off?”

  I told her about the help wanted ads.

  “No,” she agreed. “That doesn’t sound like anything that would save your life.”

  “What were you doing?” I asked.

  “I was at work. It was slow, so I was just sitting at the counter, doodling, nibbling on my lunch a little early.”

  “Hmmmmm . . .” If figuring out why I had survived was confusing, with two people involved it had become twice as hard to figure. “What were you doodling?” I asked.

  “Just shapes. Maybe some faces, I draw those a lot. I think I was drawing a cat face when the bombs exploded.” I shook my head. “I don’t think that would’ve helped. What were you eating?”

  She scrunched her forehead in such a cute way that I almost kissed her right then. “Let me think . . . I think I had some carrot sticks and maybe I was drinking a soda.”

  “A soda . . . What kind?” I held my breath.

  “The only kind I ever drink, Raspberry Mocha Alarm, of course.”

  I almost screamed. “You like Raspberry Mocha Alarm!?!”

  “No way! You, too? Nobody likes Raspberry Mocha Alarm!” Darby and I leapt to our feet and grabbed each other’s arms.

  “I buy it off eBay!”

  “Wait a second, you’re not Calrissian2817?” she asked.

  “Electra53!?!” After all these years, I had met my worthiest eBay bidding competitor. This was so weird.

  “And when they went off, were you . . . ?” I nodded my head. After all the hits I took for my favorite soda, it turned out to be worth something after all.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said. “The only two people on Earth who still drink that stuff and here we are.”

  “I always said that soda was powerful,” I nodded. We smiled at each other, tired and feeling goofy with nothing much more to say. The embers of the neighborhood we had burned crackled and fizzed. I leaned toward her, my mouth drawn magnetically to hers. It was the perfect moment. And then she turned away.

  “Why do we have to do that?” she asked, a touch of annoyance in her voice.

  “I don’t know. It just seemed like, you know, the perfect moment.”

  “But I just met you.”

  “I know, but it seemed like we had a connection . . .”

  “Maybe we did, but what’s the rush? Why don’t we take our time and see where it leads?”

  I nodded solemnly, turning away from her. I squinted into the embers. “Good idea. I think that’s very smart.”

  “I know it is. Don’t worry. It’s not like I have anyplace to go. It’s just that this has been such a great day, finding someone else alive. I don’t want to screw it up.”

  We stretched out on a couple of old mattresses we’d found, the dying fire still keeping us warm. It’s amazing how many stars you can see when a city is gone. Darby passed out almost instantly and smiled happily all night while she let out the softest, barely perceptible snores. I know because I sat up all night watching her, sleeping the furthest thing from my mind.

  The next day we wandered together, throwing rocks and stuff. We talked about comics, our favorite TV shows, and movie villains, but by lunch it was like we were almost running out of things to talk about. By midday, talk was becoming an absolute effort and we fell into silences, walking side by side, with long gaps between words.

  That night by the campfire, I tried to kiss Darby again.

  “Why do you have to keep doing that?”

  “Wouldn’t it be cool? Here we are the last people on Earth. When you think about it, it’s up to us to, like, repopulate.”

  “You mean sex? You seriously think I’m going to put out on the second day I’ve known you?”

  “No. I mean I guess, I thought, maybe it would be okay if I just kissed you once.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re hot.”

  “I don’t just kiss every guy who thinks I’m hot.”

  “You’re my perfect girl. Look at you! You’re a total babe!”

  Darby got off her rubble seat and sat on the ground in front of me. “Look at me,” she said, staring into my eyes so directly it made me kind of uncomfortable. “Tell me. What is it you really like about me?”

  “Ummm . . . well, you’re hot.”

  “We covered that. Is that all?”

  “No. I mean, you like comic books. You can quote Battlestar Galactica. You’ve been to the fat Wolverine’s house for Christ’s sake! What could be sexier than that?”

  “Those are all just surface things.”

  “They are?”

  “Everything you mentioned is just about what I look like and do for fun. None of those things show you the real me.”

  “But they seem to show—”

  “Look, I think you’ve got some ideal image of me that the reality can’t live up to. Why don’t we just take some more time and if it’s meant to be, then it will happen.”

  For the second night in a row, I got no sleep.

  In the following weeks, conversation went from bad to nothing. When all the world’s entertainment has been blown up and there’s nothing to do but talk, you find that, well, that’s a lot of talking. After a few days we had dug so deep for every “funny thing that happened in elementary school” story in our arsenals, that I caught myself repeating one. Actually, I suppose it was Darby who caught me.

  “You’ve told me that story already.”

  “I did?” They were all blending together. “When?”

  “Like this morning I think. Like, seven times before that.”

  “Oh,” I said. We stared at a dead fish floating on the surface of a pond.

  “So explain to me again why you got fired,” she said.

  “I guess I wasn’t making much of an effort. I never really got into being a temp.”

  “So what did you really want to do?”

  I thought for a moment. “I was still working that out.”

  “What was your dream, dream job?”

  “I guess to be a supervillain.”

  “Okay, right. But what was your realistic, sort of dream job? Wasn’t there anything you really wanted to do?”

  I thought about it. “What did you really want to do?” I asked her.

  “I was saving up to go to design school.”

  “Oh, wow. Right.”

  “You didn’t have anything like that? You weren’t working toward anything?”

  “Well, look at it this way. You were saving up and working and I was playing video games and it got us both to the same place, so what’s the difference?”

  She didn’t say anything. I thought that I might have been too harsh, but I didn’t apologize. It was hot and from the way she was dipping her feet in the water, I could tell that Darby sort of wanted to swim but didn’t want to take her clothes off around me. We didn’t say anything for a long time, then finally I asked. “How do you think things are going?”

  “What do you mean?”r />
  “Like between us?”

  Darby sighed, took a deep breath, and didn’t look at me. “Fine,” she said.

  “I mean, do you think we’re getting any closer? Are you finding any chemistry?”

  “Look.” She rose to her feet. “We’re not going to develop any chemistry if you keep asking about it. Don’t you think I want to find some? Don’t you think that since we’re stuck together, I’d like it to work out?”

  “I hadn’t . . .”

  “Yeah, you hadn’t. So quit bugging me about it. Let’s not talk about it anymore.”

  I could see she was serious so I didn’t bring the subject up again until dinnertime. Sitting in silence around the campfire, staring at the way her clumps of hair clung to her neck and slipped under the opening of her T-shirt, I just had to ask, “Don’t you think this would be a lot more fun if we were having sex?”

  “You’re not fucking serious,” she glared at me.

  “I mean, isn’t that what people dream about, being the last people on Earth and getting it on all the time?”

  “You know, you talking like this won’t help that to happen at all.”

  “I know. I just had to ask.”

  “Well, don’t.” She got up and took the first of what would become frequent long walks by herself.

  From that point on, I dropped all pretense of dropping the subject. Looking at her, having her so close to me all day long, there was nothing else I could think about and I could no longer pretend otherwise.

  “What about now? Are you feeling anything?” I’d ask.

  “Shut up,” she’d say. “Please, please, shut up,” and she’d walk away from me. When she’d come back at night, she stopped saying hi or looking at me, she’d just sit down, clenching her body tight as though preparing herself for what I was going to say. And though I’d vowed all day not to say anything, seeing her again, I’d blurt out. “You look really, really sexy today.”