Sunday, and Hunter wanted pancakes.
The coffee machine gurgled and sighed like a sick horse.
“There’s no syrup,” Liz said.
Denis poured a cup and looked out the window at the backyard, which was too hopeless to even begin fixing up: loose netting, rusted metal rods, a square patch of dirt dug up for what was either going to be a garden or an underground bunker. There was so much he had wanted to do at the beginning of all this. He’d made a list. At the top of the list he wrote: Learn How To. And below that he wrote: Cook, Garden, Assess Commodities, Play Guitar, Write A Screenplay. He tacked the list to the inside of the bedroom closet door. It was still there, faded somewhat, like an admonishment of hope.
“Did you hear me?” Liz said.
“Yes, I heard you.”
“It’s the least we can do.”
Hunter was depressed. Denis didn’t know what to do for him because Denis was also depressed. Liz kept saying she didn’t know what she was anymore.
Denis looked at the crease in her lips, the thin watery line.
“Stop looking at me like that,” Liz said.
“Like what?”
“Like you know something no one else could possibly know.”
But Denis felt he knew even less about Liz than when they’d first met. He couldn’t recall where they’d met, either. What the circumstances were or if there was ever any talk about an elusive destiny?
What he remembered was that they were walking from one place to another and Liz said something funny about Pat Nixon. She said, “Did you know Pat Nixon was a slut?” Denis snorted. Then they laughed at the snort. They laughed like that for a few years at least.
Hunter slid his finger across the tablet screen like a spellbinder. With his head lowered, the top of his spine looked like a tree knot.
Denis motioned for him to take out his pods.
“Yeah, Dad?”
“How’d you sleep?”
“Good.”
“Any dreams?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know if you dreamed or you can’t remember?”
“One of those two.”
Denis had dreamed he was riding a giant turkey through the torch-lit hallways of an Irish castle, but he wasn’t willing to share that with Hunter.
“Dad?”
“What is it, Bud?”
“There’s no syrup.”
“I’m on it.”
When Hunter was little, he wanted to know about everything. What was death like? Why do horses eat apples? What’s beyond the universe? Denis made up the answers – like being stuck in a cloud; because horses can’t peel oranges; beyond the universe is another earth full of lots of other versions of us.
“Every choice you make is another version of you,” Denis had said once. “Remember that.”
Hunter no longer asked Denis about life or death or any of the stuff in between. Maybe Hunter didn’t trust him. What confidence had he inspired in the boy? People were dying in the thousands and in some places they were thrown into mass graves or dumped into the ocean or thrown into flames; meanwhile, the oceans were rising and pulling away land and the hills to the west were ablaze.
“Well,” Denis said.
Hunter gave a half-smile, put his pods in, and hung his head. His hair draped over the screen like a heavy curtain.
Denis used to dream distant but deliciously attainable other lives. They filled his belly like cold, clean water. He wanted to be big and strong and play professional football. He felt that everyone cheering for him would be a significant triumph. But he was short and doughy and couldn’t run fast. Soon, the distance between what he wanted to be and what he was grew as far as the cosmos and seemed as hopelessly out of reach.
For a moment, though, he stood at the threshold of the three-bedroom, vinyl-sided colonial at 1765 Park Forest Court, feeling dreamily heroic, arm raised against the relentless sun. He was on a mission of sorts. Syrup was not an essential item. They’d been warned not to leave unless absolutely necessary. But then they were all so low. Couldn’t it be that a small thing like a little syrup on Hunter’s pancakes might be just what all of them needed to rally towards the end? Was there going to be an end? Even if it all ended, something else would begin, and who knew if it was something you wanted to end or something you never wanted to end?
God, he was tired.
In order to get out of Park Forest Court, Denis had to turn right onto Park Forest Terrace and then take another right onto Park Forest Lane. The streets all merged into the main boulevard where all the shit was. Denis never cared much for the town. He and Liz had moved there for the schools, but now the schools were closed, so it didn’t matter. The one end looked like the other and the same stores were there, and in back of the stores were the same subdevelopments. The west side of town might as well have been the east, north, or south. There was no local square or old church or seasonal soft serve stand with one of those overflowing trashcans swarming with bees. Wherever you went, the food tasted the same. Every so often Denis had an urge to drive straight into the Friendly’s.
As he drove now he dreamed up the wooded dells from his childhood, where he walked with his mother through the snow, tapping the bark on black maples and setting buckets all around. They collected each bucket like a gift. He felt the cold air in his lungs, the sun reflected off the snow, the smell of mint and sap on his mother’s coat. He saw his mother lower her reddened face into the bucket and breathe in.
Shopping carts were scattered across the supermarket parking lot like unmoored boats. Half of the windows were busted in and the others covered with plywood. Spray painted on the plywood were large hairy penises, numbers for local law firms, and signs and symbols Denis couldn’t understand. He hiked his mask up under his eyelids and smelled the petrichor of his breath, the subtle hints of decay.
Inside, stock-boys monitored the aisles like the adjutants of a dictator. Cans of pepper spray hung from their belts and they carried metal rods which they used for flogging looters. There was a major uptick in floggings these days. Hunchbacked and skittish, half the town crawled about, flinching at loud noises, and just as hungry.
Most of the shelves were empty. There wasn’t any syrup where the pancakes used to be. None in the specialty aisle. Flies buzzed around the frozen foods. Since he was here, Denis went to check for toilet paper. The last time they’d run out of toilet paper, they wet old magazines and Hunter got a cut on his anus and for a week Liz had to apply a cream from Papua New Guinea that cost a hundred and fifty dollars, plus shipping.
At the other end of the aisle, Denis saw Mac Johansen with his wife, Daisy, and twin baby girls. Mac was on his knees, lifting formula and sticking it in a diaper bag. Just as Denis went to say hello, two stock boys knocked Mac over and flogged him until something broke. Daisy took off with the babies and formula and one of the stock boys went after her while the other called for some help to drag Mac out of the way.
Keep your head down, Denis told himself. Be brave. Don’t stop. Remember Hunter. Remember how the doctors had to break his arm to pull him into the world. He was three pounds, seven ounces. Denis put his pinky in Hunter’s palm and he wrapped his gummy hand around it. Then the nurses wrapped Hunter in a blanket and placed him under a lamp. They strapped his broken wing to the side of the crib and covered his eyes with a piece of cloth with sunglasses stitched on the front. Hunter never cried. Pain was the first thing he knew.
The next supermarket was in flames. The fire engines that were sent to put out the supermarket were also in flames. A man on fire ran in front of Denis and he swerved and jumped the curb, spinning out across the parking lot. Everything slowed down. He could feel the grooves in the steering wheel pass through his unclenched fingers. This was perhaps the first time in a long time that he’d been at ease.
The car came to a stop in front of King Sushi. A piece of crowned salmon nigiri winked down at the smoldering hood. Denis moved his arms and legs and checked for blood. His teeth rang like he’d just bitten into a sheet of aluminum foil. He got out of the car to inspect the damage. He could feel the heat from the fire a few blocks away. This is what it will be like, he thought.
He got back in the car and tried the engine. All the lights on the dash blinked awake, but the car wouldn’t start. What was the point of risking everything you have if what you come home with was even less? He called a tow truck and gave them the address and then called a cab. When the driver showed up, Denis put on his mask and got in the back seat.
“Hot out,” the driver said.
“Yes, it is!” Denis said.
“Need some rest for the weary,” the driver said.
“Uh-huh,” Denis said.
After a while on the road, the driver laughed to himself.
“You know what I was thinking about just before I drove up?” he said.
“What?” Denis said.
“My father. I guess that’s not too strange. But, thing is, we haven’t spoken in years. We didn’t get along. I don’t even have his phone number. He doesn’t know he’s got two grandkids.”
“Uh-huh,” Denis said.
“All that aside, what I was thinking about was how he’d make sure I looked good whenever we went out to dinner, even if the place wasn’t all that special. He’d slap my shoulders and check my jacket with a quick snap, and then say, ‘You look dapper, Champ.’ I was thinking about how that word, dapper, seemed sort of mysterious, like it could open something better in me. Then my head got all light, and I was here.”
The driver kept looking at the road. He had the glassy eyes of someone entrenched in the past. Had Denis ever complimented Hunter in such a way? Next time they were able to go out somewhere, he would tell his son he looked dapper. Denis hoped that if anything ever happened to him, Hunter would remember a sweet thing he’d said.
At a stop light, Denis saw a gas station and asked for the driver to pull in.
“Want me to wait?”
“I’ll walk,” Denis said.
Inside the store, he considered the chips and candy bars, the beef sticks and mini muffins, the peanut butter crackers and Little Debbie’s Snacks. Sunlight lanced through the window and the dust rose from the odds and ends shelf, where, beside the motor oil and loose rolls of toilet paper, stood a single, slim bottle of maple syrup.
Unvanquished, Denis removed his mask and held it tight to the bottle as though it was a bar of gold and just as valuable. He hadn’t been to this particular gas station before and he thought that in order to get home he should probably keep heading the way the cab was going.
Cars sped by on the boulevard. The heat crept into his body, making him feel dense. The bottle grew slippery in his hand. In the distance, the smoke from the fires rushed across the sky like storm clouds. So much to fear. The visible and invisible.
Up ahead, he saw tall trees and an opening between a stone wall, with steps leading down into a forest. Denis remembered the boys who shouted, “Catch the Fatty Laddie!” and chased him over moss covered stones, up muddy hills, and into the towering trees, where the boughs were so high the sunlight shuttered through the leaves. When they caught Denis, they pinned his arms to the ground, wrapped his jeans around his ankles, and spanked him with sticks.
In embellished Irish accents, they sang:
“The lad is plump and the branch is stiff!
Fatty Laddie, you can’t ever miss!”
Denis braced against a spruce tree and took deep breaths through his nose, exhaling slowly out of his mouth. Then he breathed in through his mouth and out through his nose. He couldn’t remember which was supposed to settle his heart. The armies of his other lives seemed to find him no matter.
He continued down the path and walked to where felled trees crossed on top of each other from the late summer storms. The ancient capsules buried underground. Soon, he thought, Hunter might sneak off here for his first kiss.
“Mud bombs!” shouted a wild one, the eco-renegades, who had been terrorizing the remaining parks. Their cry: Let us grow!
The wet mounds struck Denis in the shoulder and chest. He dug his sneakers into the hillside and tried to pull himself up. A chunk of mud struck his head and he fell on his back. The wild ones gathered around him. They all had long, crooked spines.
The syrup, he thought, as they beat on him with all of their earned rage.
Denis woke to the early evening sunlight sparkling through the leaves. His body had hardened around the lumps and bruises. He found a path that wound up to the sidewalk. It was dark by the time he reached the boulevard. As he walked, he thought of how he’d never be able to explain his failure. He wanted Liz to feel loved again, even if it couldn’t be like it once was, before the contagion, before Hunter, when their lights had found each other and all of their divinations were in reach.
Exhausted, he finally reached the sub-development. But it wasn’t the sub-development where he lived. Denis couldn’t tell the difference. The streets, the houses, and the square patches of lawn were all the same.
The door had been left open and the lights were dim. Denis rested on the couch in the living room that wasn’t his living room. For a while he sat there and let the blood find its way to the parts of him that needed healing. He then noticed the faint smell of peppermint and drier sheets, and the moonlight that came in through a skylight. He noticed the unfamiliar books and the photographs of strangers. The living room was on the left side of the kitchen and not the right.
He flinched at the sound of small feet pattering across the kitchen floor. The sharp light from the refrigerator fell across the hall. A boy appeared beside the couch with a cup of water in his hand and cookie crumbs around his lips.
“Who are you?” the boy said.
“My name’s Denis,” he said gently, not wanting to scare the boy. “What’s your name?”
“Harry.”
“That’s a good name. Old fashioned.”
“What does old fashioned mean?”
“It means that a name like Harry was common long ago.”
“Yeah, but now kids call me Harry Dingle.”
“Is your last name Dingle?”
The boy shook his head.
“So why don’t you use your proper name?”
“What’s the proper name?”
“Harold. No one’s going to laugh at a Harold Dingle.”
“Can I do that?”
“You can do whatever you want, Bud.”
The boy smiled and took Denis’s hand.
“Can you help me back to bed?”
Harold put out his arms and Denis scooped him up against his chest and carried him up the stairs. The boy was soft and plump, and his hair smelled like warm cotton, like Hunter’s had when he was little.
In the bedroom, Denis pulled back the covers stitched with superhero emblems, and lay Harold down on the narrow twin mattress. His feet splayed out and he began to unfurl in this familiar space. Denis pulled the sheets up over him and tucked the ends around his feet and shoulders so that he was snug.
In the next room, Harold’s mother was asleep, curled inside the sheets with her back facing Denis. He took off his shoes and climbed into bed. He felt content to stay a while. It seemed so natural to slip into this other man’s life. Here he could sleep for hours, days, years. He closed his eyes and saw the low steam settle over a plate of pancakes. Beside the pancakes, a bowl of berries, a dish of butter, and syrup, straight from the tree, boiled and refined. Denis poured a cup of coffee now, and sat, ready for the boy to relay his dreams.
+++
Patrick Dacey is the author of two books of fiction, The Outer Cape: a Novel and We’ve Already Gone This Far: Stories, published by Henry Holt and Company. He holds an MFA from Syracuse University, and his work has been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts, and in The Paris Review, Zoetrope All-Story, Guernica, The Kenyon Review, and Harper’s, among other publications. Patrick has taught at several universities in the U.S. and Mexico and has worked as a reporter and substance abuse counselor. He is a recipient of the 2022 Pushcart Prize.