You Heard Me

He was a sniper before, in the war before this. In the war that, for all its chaos and meaninglessness, still made more sense than this. On the rooftop now, a breeze blew and it kicked up the scent of diesel fuel from an overturned 18-wheeler on the highway. The smell reminded him of that other war, of the mountainous Afghan town where he was stationed, of the diesel trucks and generators powering everything from street vendors’ carts to a newly-built school’s lights on dark winter mornings.  He remembered the twin boys from that school who would ask to try on his gear. He remembered them, tried to guess their ages at the time. Ten, maybe eleven at most. But with the brutal muscularity that boys have in places where strength is necessary. Tiny men’s bodies. Tiny soldier’s bodies.

The diesel smell was just one of the scents the Albuquerque wind brought to his rooftop. For a while, it was just the one smell. The decaying smell. The putrefaction of all of the bodies in the Red Cross’s makeshift emergency room. The military was able to hold off the sickened masses from the repurposed recreation center for an admirable amount of time. But as he’d seen in the other war, too, desperation makes men and women both stronger and weaker than they could ever imagine. Before long, stores of food and water were running out and even the Marines were fighting among themselves. He had watched from the rooftop as the people inside made an attempt to escape, and as they were devoured by the sickened. He had watched their bodies bake and bleach in the New Mexico sun, a few reanimating to scavenge the streets. For days the death-stench would waft upward to his post, but as the desert heat intensified into the midsummer months, and as the monsoons washed their blood into the gutters, the sage-filled, sandy, summer smell returned. The smell of his childhood at his grandfather’s ranch in Bernalillo. And of course, the smell of teenage summertimes, parked in the desert, making love to her in the backseat of his Chevy Nova.

He arched his back, stretched his muscles, tried to focus on the pain in his back instead of the pain all over that every memory of her would always inspire. He stared intently through the scope of the sniper rifle, hoping that a target would make itself plain, something he could take down. Usually popping a sickened or two would take his mind off of her. It didn’t last long, but it helped get him through the day. The roof of the high-school-turned-lofts had a splendid view of downtown, offering a vantage point for most of Central Boulevard and parts of the surrounding neighborhoods. Usually there was something to kill. And nothing short of killing something kept her from creeping back into his mind.

Today was tougher, though. It was October now, and the leaves on the few deciduous trees downtown were changing to a fierce yellow. The breeze tossed the leaves like confetti into the air, and imbued it with the bitter, tea-like perfume of autumn. He didn’t know what day of the month it was, and even “October” was a tenuous guess, but it was close enough. He remembered seeing her for the first time in her wedding dress, walking under the Old Town Square trees to the gazebo, a slow cascade of yellow leaves falling around her as she walked. Must have been almost ten years ago, he thought, desperately scanning the boulevards for a sickened to take down. He remembered her black hair gently blowing back from her bare, freckled shoulders as she approached him. He remembered her smile, all red lipstick and crooked teeth and nervousness. He remembered kissing the bride.

Pop.

An elderly sickened emerged from an underpass and immediately slumped to the ground. The soldier’s mind refocused for a moment. He took another breath and began to scan the arroyos.

It had to be close to their anniversary. Which meant it was also close to the ten-year-mark of when he was shipped off. Which meant it was close to the eight-year mark of when she started fucking his stepbrother. He hunched his shoulders.

Movement, then, faint at first but growing louder. He strained to hear. A familiar shuffling and muted, bestial howls. There were a lot of them, somewhere close and getting closer. First just a few were visible, walking the middle of a dry arroyo. Then dozens, then maybe a hundred. He tried to calculate how much ammunition was still available in the sporting goods store down the street, the one he’d been raiding for months now. It was pretty picked-over when he got there, but it had sustained him this far. His mind briefly alighted on a long-term plan. How much longer would he stay, picking off the sickened, passively waiting for signs of healthy life while feeding off the canned goods left in the lofts below? He walked to the opposite corner of the rooftop, toward the direction of the wailing sounds of the sickened. They had someone, he thought. They always howled like that when they were hunting live prey.

Then he saw her. Through the scope it was unclear at first, then his heart swelled into his throat and beat at a rabbit’s pace. She was bitten. Probably only hours from sickening. They were after her. She was limping down the arroyo, trying at times to walk up the the sides, but it only slowed her down. Her hair blew around her face as the breeze gusted into a full-blown desert wind. Dust and sand obscured her for a moment, then she was clear in the frame of the rifle scope.

He remembered the first night they slept together. Blake’s burgers and a sunset, vanilla cokes, driving to the top of Sandia, finding a dark spot to pull over, making love in the way only teenagers do, as if death were coming and only their fumbling passion could hold it off another day. He remembered the last time he’d seen her before today. The day he came home. A party with American flags and his grandmother’s tamales. And her, making an obligatory, wounding appearance, smiling sadly at his friends and family. It had all been said by then, of course. She was young, she couldn’t wait or him, they both had changed, Ernesto had been there for her, but could they please still be friends? The same cliches he’d seen with half his platoon. Young men, young women, impatience. Love that, when tested by PTSD, amputations and every kind of distance, doesn’t survive.

She and the mob were much closer now, and now; he was positive it was her. She was thinner, like everyone who had survived. She was flushed and obviously weakened. Blood stained her dark green pants near a wound on her thigh. She was losing ground to the sickened. She must know from the bite that she has no hope of survival, he thought. She knows… but she’s still running. But then, what choice does she have? Their peculiar, plaintive calls echoed from the bowl of the arroyo.

He arched his back, stood up. He stretched his neck from side to side. There was the familiar anger within him, the anger that had fueled the killing of dozens of insurgents and by now, God knows how many sickened. Before he had found out about her and Ernesto, the killing had been harder. He shook when he aimed. He’d shake for hours afterward. He was told he would never be a sniper and they suspended his training, tried to figure out how to use him. But once the divorce papers were signed, the trigger nearly pulled itself. He was a bullet-delivery unit. A conduit for swift and accurate death. The best sniper they had, they said. When they redeployed him, time and time again, it didn’t matter. She wasn’t his anymore. And since then, the only world he cared about was the one he saw in the crosshairs.

Squaring his shoulders again, he took aim, tracking her down the arroyo. She was almost walking directly toward the lofts, slower now, as the sickened, and the sickness, began to close in on her. Desperately, she was looking around her, as if trying to see everything she could before she could see nothing at all. A gust picked up, and a shower of locust leaves, yellow and small, fell around her, onto the sickened, all around. She looked up. It was almost as if she was looking at him, her black hair swirling around her face. He breathed out and squeezed the trigger. The shot was clean. Her neck arched, and she fell back. The locust leaves fell gently onto her body.  

He took to the matter of the rest. Mechanically, accurately, he took them down as they converged on her motionless body. He exhausted a clip before the sickened began to disperse. They would eventually move off, he’d discovered, if the smell of their own dead overwhelmed that of the fresh. They wandered away from her body, their howls quieting into the grunts and growls signifying a failed hunt.

He turned around and slumped to the ground, leaning his back against the short wall of the rooftop. He shook. Shaking as though it were his first kill. Shaking like after that moment on Sandia. He took the barrel of the rifle in his mouth a moment, shaking, sobbing, the butt of the gun resting between his feet. How to pull the trigger now?

No. Not yet.

He threw the rifle to his side. It skittered and spun on the rooftop, landing with the scope and barrel pointed toward him. He folded his arms on his knees and sobbed heavily, like a child. He arched his neck and screamed, the sound of it echoing through the silent, ruined city. As the sound faded, he sat in silence, breathing deeply, looking straight ahead. The sun hung full and low behind him, though it was only afternoon. Shadows of trees, buildings, his own shadow, were stretched long against the low orange cast of the autumn sunshine. It would be winter soon. He had to make a choice.

He walked over, picked up the rifle and slung it over his shoulder. He walked to his pack of food and water, nestled in a corner of the rooftop’s low, brick wall, and picked it up. He looked down, the long way down to Central Boulevard. Time to go, he thought. Maybe there was nothing left, maybe he would die in the desert. But he had to get the hell out of Albuquerque.

One of my favorite tweeps, Rob Delaney, recently posted a story for Vice Magazine where he walked down memory lane and told his readers why he thought each presidential candidate he’d ever voted for was worth his ballot. While Rob is a hilarious man and he has the 140-character tweet format down to a virtuosic science, his long-form story here was not only funny but thoughtful and profound as well. The part that really stuck out to me is this:

“I placed so much stock in Edwards’ health plan because I am unable to shake the belief that there is anything more important to our nation’s future than A. access to affordable healthcare and B. education. Make it easier for your citizens to be healthy and smart and they will save you in ways you have yet to imagine.“

Rob is right. But right now we live in a culture that is detrimental in almost every possible way to our health. Healthy food is perceived to be out-of-reach for working, poorer Americans. Healthcare and insurance remain too expensive for many Americans, though strides are being made and the Affordable Care Act (presuming we’ll see it be all it can be) will help eventually. Our lives are fortified with cheap refined sugars and flours, kept sedate and inactive, and the cost or even the time investment it takes to make a priority out of preventive care ensures that many Americans never get the care they truly need. And by extension, they never reach their full potential.

And now, there is an even more pervasive problem: the idea that health is simply not an “American” virtue. Like education, multiculturalism and being informed, being healthy is becoming yet another very positive part of the human experience that is being dismissed as an “elitist” activity, which “Real” Americans can’t be concerned with. Take, for example, the recent scuffle between Anthony Bourdain and Paula Deen. Now, Bourdain already has a couple strikes against him in this battle. He’s a high-end chef and restaurateur in the French discipline (we all know that you can’t get too cozy with the French, or you make the Statue of Liberty cry… oh, wait…). He says the fuck-word a lot and tends to make snyde comments about his godlessness and cocaine-fueled indiscretions. He travels all over the world (i.e., places outside of America, which, as any True American knows, is highly unnecessary). But he really screwed the suckling pig when he lashed out on The Food Network’s very own white Aunt Jemima, Paula Deen, calling her the “worst, most dangerous person to America.”

Now, that is classic Bourdain-style hyperbole, and it overstates his point. But he does have a point: a woman who has built a media empire around recipes such as this monstrosity might consider the fallout of putting a burger between two Krispy Kremes and calling it “brunch,” when we are facing a generation that will likely live fewer years than their parents due to bad food and a bad lifestyle.

Now, Bourdain is the target of a conservative shit storm. Suddenly, he’s an “elitist,” a “blue-state paternalist,” and, in other words, not one of those “real Americans” we keep hearing about. Conveniently not bringing up the fact that Paula Deen shills for food companies, has her own brand of cookware, and is, in all probability, wealthier than Bourdain will likely ever be (why is it that a billionaire with a folksy accent can ALWAYS pull this off?), Bourdain’s detractors view her as their own food populist, one of their own. She’s the “Real” American, unfairly under fire from a Nanny-State-Lovin’ intellectual elitist with a “Let Them Eat Arugula” attitude.

But the problem with the labels used here isn’t just that people eat crap food… it is that they are proud of it. The commenters in the blogs I’ve cited here seem to think of massive portions, huge amounts of known toxins, saturated fats and refined carbs as a right. And yes, it is certainly a right to kill yourself through food. My problem: you shouldn’t be proud of it. And you shouldn’t make the disease of obesity part of our national identity. Being unhealthy is not what makes you a “Real American.” You are completely at liberty to eat as many “Ladies’ Brunch Burgers” as you like, fine, but don’t call me un-American because I find it reprehensibly self-destructive. Don’t treat your hypertension like a first-amendment right.

It’s written all over their faces when you say it. They think you’re selfish. For wanting to keep your disposable income, your firm stomach, your next 18 years to yourself. They think you will never really be a fully-realized adult, since you’ll never have know the unimaginable joy of changing diapers, or having a door slammed in your face by a red-faced pre-teen, or spending an entire afternoon and far too much hard-earned cash at a Chuck E. Cheese.

And I don’t ever say so, but I think they’re the selfish ones. They brought people into this world. THIS world. This one, right here, the one with Michele Bachmann and MURSA and Katy Perry and polygamist cults and terrorism and “How I Met Your Mother.” They chose to have babies and force them to grow up in this miserable world of corporate tax breaks and ghettos and the widest gap between the rich and the poor we’ve ever seen, and why? So they can stuff fat babies into cute, ironic onesies and name them things like “Grayden” and spend a lot of time looking down on childless people for being hopeless perpetual adolescents with nothing to live for?

The truth is, we’re both selfish. And we’re both not selfish. I don’t think I’ll ever want a baby enough to go through what it would take to make it happen. And when I do look at this world… the one with Justin Bieber and riots in London and the Kardashians and “Real Housewives of Orange County,” I sigh to myself and think, it’s probably for the best. And those people, the ones who make that choice, who decide to have those kids, they probably spend a lot more time awake at night than I do trying to think of how they can keep their children safe from all the horrible things in this world. They probably spend a lot of time thinking about how maybe their kids can help this world become less horrible, how maybe, just maybe the future might be a better place because of little Madison and Slate.

I’ll probably never have babies and you happen to have babies. This doesn’t make me the better person, it doesn’t make you a better person. We both have life experiences that make us better at things, more experienced at other things, more broad-minded than each other in different areas. Different. Not better.

For about the second month since having to pay out-of-pocket for a sizable car repair, I am again living paycheck-to-paycheck. And not even in a “whew, that was close!” kind of way, but in a , “Welp, I just got paid, but I also just paid my insurance and car payments, so I guess I have $30 for two weeks” kind of way. It hasn’t been easy, and even my carefully-budgeted fun money for last weekend’s UMS drinks and such went much more quickly than I’d hoped.

As someone who cares a lot about watching my money, this is more than just nerve-wracking. It’s heartbreaking. I take all the precautions I can to not get into situations like this- from making an Excel Spreadsheet of all my weekly expenses to carefully planning each weekend’s spending allowance and saying “no” firmly but kindly when a night out just doesn’t fit into the plan. And yet, here I am, still reeling from a $600 unexpected expense.

I’m so tired of reeling. Tired of cutting back and trying so hard to be smart while consistently feeling stupid. I realize most people don’t even have the luxury of a paycheck to spend right now, but I feel that it needs to be said… even with my “unsustainable” city-worker benefits covered about 70% by my employer, it is very difficult to make ends meet.

A money-management story on the radio the other day took a different approach. Instead of cutting back on what you spend, try and make more money. Market a skill, provide a service. The part about that story that killed me is that I used to do this. I used to get paid for writing. Not a lot, but enough to keep me (most of the time) from falling into the Money Pit of Despair. Enough to buy drinks and pretty dresses. Enough to put a little away, even.

I realize that I am a work in progress here, and that there is nothing to keep me from circling back to the career I have always skirted but never truly engaged in. I know that this degree is going to help me get there. But right now, looking at 30 with $70 in my bank account, that future feels a long ways away.