Rekia reached across the table to take my hand. “I told you, Matt. No more apologies. We love you both, and that didn’t change when you left.”
When the bill came, none of us could believe how expensive our meals were. Awkwardly, we asked the waiter if he’d made a mistake. “No, sorry,” he said gently. “Our suppliers are the ones jacking up the prices.”
As we all hugged goodbye, Rekia and Tom stepped into a driverless. He pulled a can of tobacco from his pocket, flicking it with a fast and loose wrist, and Rekia gave him a Really?
This left me and Coral on the street together. We stood for a moment, gazing all the way to the Hudson, where I could see the cranes and barges manned by construction crews. I knew from my years at FBF that these were part of the operation to build the living breakwaters, piling rubble, concrete, and stone to slow storm surges and grow ecosystems of oyster beds to form protective reefs. That was the idea at least. This was A Fierce Blue Fire’s new focus: working with cities and communities to gird them for what was coming (or already here). Everyone had given up trying to actually stop the problem itself. Now it was about armaments.
“Hey,” said Coral, scratching at the deep pits of old acne scars that perforated their cheeks. “Seriously—want to play the new Avenging Angel? It’s got a level where you have a shoot-out right in the middle of the Oscars. All these tuxes and dresses exploding in gore.”
“Wow, that’s gruesome and inappropriate.”
“I know.”
At Coral’s apartment, we donned VR sets and played Avenging Angel for four hours that went by in a blink. It brought a lot of delightful nostalgia. All those times when Kate was out of town and Coral would text to ask if I wanted to come over and throw on old movies and play hyperviolent VR multiplayers.
After a while, I was sweating and my ears ached from the headset, so Coral ordered a pizza, cracked open a couple beers, and we threw on the original Alien.
“Ellen Ripley, your idol,” they said.
About midway through the movie, right after the Xenomorph bursts from John Hurt’s chest, I asked, “So do you miss D.C.?”
Coral shook their head. “Not really. Not everyone was happy when Rekia announced the transition, but it makes sense. Plus, you don’t have to sell all that many kidneys to afford a one-bedroom.” I laughed at their geeky delivery. “So what’s next? You and Kate will be back in D.C. soon, right?”
“The plan is to drive out there in January and start preparing for the concert.”
“That’s a lot of lead time.”
I let my silence indicate I did not particularly care for any more probing. “It’s a big task.”
Coral swigged from their beer and was quiet a moment, watching the movie. Finally, they said, “Stop me, Matt, if you’ve heard this already, but did I ever tell you the story of how my dad died?”
I turned to them. “No. You definitely didn’t.”
Coral nodded, bobbing their head a few times. “It’s not a big deal. You know I grew up in the Imperial Valley, right by the Salton Sea. We were broke but not unhappy. My dad was this brawny guy with a teddy bear disposition. A really sweet, wonderful dad. But he was also from the kind of family where everyone just did stupid shit. Both his brothers went to prison for aggravated assault. For a barfight, if that paints a picture. Dad always stayed clear of it, though. He didn’t drink, didn’t fight, didn’t step out of line ever. He was like the one straight arrow in his family. Then one day, the police show up at our door, this state trooper, and he tells us my dad is dead. Killed in a motorcycle accident.” Coral cleared their throat, about as much emotion from them as I’d ever seen. “But my mom isn’t even worried because Dad didn’t own a motorcycle. And she’s telling the cop this. She tells him when they got married, she made him swear he wouldn’t drink, drug, fight, or ride a motorcycle because that was all his family was known for. And my mom kept insisting, ‘No, you have the wrong person, it couldn’t be him, my husband doesn’t own a motorcycle.’ And he didn’t. I sure as hell had never seen my dad on a bike. I knew my mom was right, and they’d made a mistake.”
Down on the street, the siren and strobing lights of an ambulance washed the neighborhood for a minute, and they waited for it to pass.
“Of course, it turns out it was my dad. He took a corner a little fast, plowed into a truck head-on. It killed him and the guy in the truck. They ended up having to show my mom pictures of my dad’s body to convince her, which I’m sure couldn’t have been too pretty. I was sixteen at the time. And then we found out my dad did have a motorcycle. He’d been keeping it at his buddy’s place, in the garage, for fifteen years.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah.” They raised an eyebrow at their beer bottle. “I have no doubt that’s what broke my mom’s heart the most. He’d kept this secret he probably thought was harmless, and it ended up dragging two families into a lifetime of tragedy.”
“Damn, Coral. I didn’t know that. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s ancient history now. I didn’t bring it up for sympathy, though, Matt.” On-screen, Tom Skerritt hunted the Xenomorph through the air ducts with a makeshift flamethrower. “My mom and I didn’t believe the state trooper because we don’t see the people we love with clarity. I’m not being subtle here.”
We sat in silence for a while finishing our beers until Dallas encountered the alien in the dark, and Coral brought up the popular fan theory that Dallas and Ripley had been having an affair aboard the Nostromo.
My flight back to Oregon was delayed due to storms across the Midwest, and I spent three hours in the airport, mostly sitting at a bar and staring at the email I’d gotten from UNC Greensboro. There was an image on one of the televisions of The Pastor with, of all things, a flamethrower not unlike the one I’d watched Tom Skerritt wield in Alien the night before. The chyron said something about a controversy, but the sound was off. I asked the guy sitting next to me, a hipster using his carry-on as a footrest, what the deal was.
“This fucking nutjob just lit up a pile of Qur’ans.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, man. Just walks out with that thing, gives a spiel about how it’s the book of Satan and burned like two hundred copies. Not in VR either.” He tugged at a barbershop mustache waxed to its points. “This and the riots in Texas and no one answering from the Mars mission, I just—”
“What do you mean no one’s answering?”
“It’s supposed to land in two months, but NASA, SpaceX, no one knows where the fuck it is. No one’s home. They’ve lost it.”
“God, I hadn’t heard that.”
He kept on tugging his mustache and shaking his head. “I just want one year where it doesn’t feel like the world has gone bug-fuck insane.”
From Portland, I took a driverless down to Bend. Kate’s mom had been staying with her while I was away. We’d moved to Oregon partly so Kate could be close to Sonja, but of course they rarely spent an evening together without bickering.
Sonja called while I was in the car because she would just miss me, our rides passing each other somewhere on the McKenzie Highway. She told me that Dizzy had gotten her cone off but would need to take antibiotics for another two days after getting her leg snagged in some old fencing near the property line. She also said Kate was getting a little “hardwired,” which was Sonja’s malapropism for when her daughter was on edge.
“This concert, she gets to meet Beyoncé and Haydukai and all these other famous people, and you’d think someone was marching her off the plank.”