"I can't answer that, Karen. You know how the deal works."

"You do know something then."

"Come here, Karen—open the door." Karen opens the door. "Swing out your legs," I command, and she does. "Here—" I approach Karen and kneel before her. I kiss both her shins and then rise. "Stand up," I say, and Karen, coltish and unsure, steps down onto the parking lot. "Run," I say.

And she runs—around the van and then around the lot, whooping with joy. Her legs are whole again.

"I love you, Jared," she says, to which I reply, in words she can't hear because she is now so far away, "I love you, too."

28 THE FUTURE IS

Inside the blackened supermarket, scores of animals, birds, and insects have made the building their home. Shit of all types splotches the floor, as do tussles of feathers, fur, bones, and soil. Squirrels and raccoons have reduced the cereal aisle to fiber while the meat department's offerings have been entirely looted by wildlife. The smell of rot, a year later, is ebbing away, masked by the smell of shampoos and cosmetics fallen to the floor in a small earthquake six months prior. Birds rustle in the ceiling while down below flashlights carried by Richard, Hamilton, and Pam klieg their way across the store's floor. The trio daintily minuet above the muck and locate the pharmacy in the middle of the store. A white-smocked Leaker sits at the counter—a beef jerky skeleton.

"Lord, I am sick of these things," Hamilton says, draping the corpse with a spare smock. "I, Hef, last of the Famous International Playboys have no time for rot. Agnelli, Niarchos, the Prince of Wales—all gone now. I alone must keep up their grand tradition. Voulez-vous un Cadillac car? I live solely for nightclubs, hooch, and rides on the Concorde."

"Hamilton, f'Chrissake, shut up," Richard says. "Did you bring the awl and hammer?"

"Presto."

"Thank you."

Richard and Pam prod and jimmy a locked cupboard storing untold pharmaceutical gems. After some expert elbow grease, it flies open, causing plastic tubs to tumble onto the floor.

" Brush me, Daddy-O!"

"Just give me the rucksack, Hef," Richard says as a shadow runs across his feet. "Squirrel alert."

"Oh look! Look—it's so sweet," Pam says. "We can take it to Babe Paley's place in Bermuda for dinner."

"It's Jamaica, dear. Who's on the guest list?"

"Twiggy. The Sex Pistols. Jackson Pollock. Linda Evangelista."

"You two are driving me up the fucking wall with your fantasies," says Richard.

"If having a fantasy is a crime, I stand guilty as accused." Hamilton makes a big huffy sniff of the air and then quickly regrets it.

Richard ignores this. "Aye yi yi. Oh, look—bingo!—two thousand Vicodins." Something screams and scampers across the store down Aisle 3. "Oh, man, this place is a creep show. Let's grab and scram. Hamilton, go get a shopping cart for the loot."

"Roger." In the greeting card section, Hamilton finds an abandoned cart. It squeaks and rubs across the sludgy floor. Richard and Pam pile the pharmaceuticals into the cart.

"Oh, Christ. Karen wants some cotton balls and a hot oil treatment. Where are they?" "Next aisle over."The trio walks slowly through the store's cobwebbed, stinky carcass, and the farther away they get from the front, the blacker it gets. They pass two Leakers along the way, but of course, after all this time they are casual about such a sight. Slowly, slowly they move when suddenly they bump into three raccoons who hiss and try to escape, scaling a Matterhorn of soggy paper towels. "Oh shit…"

"Do I hear Karen calling us from outside?"

Koonk-koonk.

The lights in the ceiling pulse into operation, scorching brighter than daylight—the light all the more painful for its unexpectedness, illuminating the store and casting all of the wildlife into shrieks of panic, revealing the extent of devastation.

My friends scream and look up above, where they see me, Jared, in the rafters. "It's me," I say, and I tell them, "I've come back to you to bring you light."

"You prick," Hamilton bellows, "—the light almost blinded us!"

"Whoopsy daisy, guys. I was trying to put on a light show for you. It fell kinda flat. See you later this afternoon."

"Light show?" Pam says.

"He's technically sixteen, Pam," adds Hamilton.

"Oh yeah," she muses, "He's younger than Karen."

Wendy is hesitantly meandering through the browning forest behind her house, armed with a twelve-gauge rifle should feral dogs attack. Her hair is washed and styled in a manner considered fetching by 1997, and, for that matter, 1978, standards and beneath her thick beige raincoat clings a saucy frilled lingerie getup fetched earlier that morning from a Marine Drive naughty shop. She's calling me: "Jared? Jared?" She's worried I won't hear her call—or that I won't respond—but I do.

"Hey, Wendy." I appear a stone's throw away, floating in the air, golden and light, weaving my way between the tall dwindling stands of firs and hemlocks on this steep canyon slope. I arrive and stand before her.

"You came.""Fuckin' right, I did. How ya doing, Wendy? We never got our date, did we?" A silence passes between us. I let her be the one to break it.

"I've missed you. You helped me that horrible night last year when everything was falling apart—and then you went… away. Why?"

"I knew I'd be back."

She slowly walks nearer to me. "What's it like to be dead, Jared? I don't mean to be blunt, but I'm frightened and I'm also a doctor. In school and later at the hospital I looked at every corpse and I wondered the same thing: Dead—what next? And then the world shut down and all I saw—all I continue to see—are dead bodies. It's all we see down here—dead bodies. We have a 'clean zone' around the houses, but everywhere else is one big pauper's grave."

"Death isn't death, Wendy—blackness forever—if that's what you mean. But it's not my place to say anything more to you beyond that. It's a big deal. I have to be quiet."

"What about heaven?"

"Okay, sure. I give you that."

Standing almost in front of me, she says, "Were you scared in the hospital? I visited you all those times. I brought you all those cookies I baked myself. You were sweet. And your eyes were far away. You never lost your beauty—even at the end when I think you maybe lost your hope."

"I was too young to be really afraid of death. But my cancer was my Great Experience, and I don't begrudge it."

"Bullshit."

"Okay, you're right. I was scared shitless. What else was I supposed to do? Everyone kept descending on me and kept making all these brave little faces and handing me muffins and teddy bears. No matter how scared you get you have to make that same brave little face back in return. It's like, the law."

"Jared—did you ever … you know, think about me?" Her arms are crossed protectively.

"Yeah. You know I did. We missed our date—I never showed you my candy.""Were you in love with Cheryl Anderson?"

"Wha—Cheryl Anderson?"

"Don't look so surprised. She had a big mouth."

"Hmmm. We liked each other a lot. But it wasn't love, no. I was a jock so everybody thought I had to be a sex machine—and so I became one. It was great. It's different now totally different."

"How?"

"I'm no longer incarnate. But I can still—you know, get it on. In my own way."

She begins to whimper: "Jared, can you please just take me away? Please? Put me in your arms and drive me to the sun. I'm so lonely. And I can't kill myself, even though I think about it all the time. There's no point to the world now. It just erodes and becomes chaotic and poisoned. Look at the trees around us. Brown. Probably radiation from a North Korean reactor gone wrong. Or Chinese. Or Ukrainian. Or … Just take me away, damnit! You're a ghost, Jared. Prove it."