Our Love of Attrition – Michael Zunenshine

July 19, 2024

“I haven’t stayed in a hotel this fancy since my folks took me to Orlando.” 
        Making like he’s speaking his thoughts out loud for the benefit of the others, all red-eye stressed out and hungry and beat, standing in line, waiting to be processed. He definitely isn’t going out of his way to direct his comment at her, who, like him, seems more annoyed than worried by the situation. Still, when she glances his way and flashes an oh-brother smirk, his face goes hot.
        “First time? You’ll love it,” he says.
        “Oh no, I come here often,” she says.
        “Should have guessed with that getup you’re a seasoned ice-stormer.” Nodding at her knockoff Timberland boots and oversized parka. 
        “You kidding? I live for this stuff. Evacuations, shelters, soup lines. Thinking about starting a travel blog on the subject.”
        “Name’s Borissey,” he says.
        “Course it is.” Rolling her eyes so wide her head loops around with them.
        The others in the processing line shuffle and turn their backs, put off by the pair’s levity. Who flirts in a crisis? 

It’s 2025: The Montreal winter ice storm is now in its fourth consecutive season. The city’s getting used to it. The only uncertainty, each time, is which neighborhood is going to get it worse. Though odds usually favor lower-income hoods: larger families putting more strain on older wiring and plumbing. May to October is a scramble to repurpose power lines underground. The entire city’s network promises to get there by 2030. Locals scoff at these projections. 
        “By the time the underground lines are complete, our kids won’t know winter anyway,” she says over pea soup and plastic-wrapped crackers.
        “We’re having kids now? In this economy?” Laying on his sarcastic charm, crumbling his crackers into the gray-yellow mush.
        “Figure if the world’s coming to an end, why wait?” She’s spooning out tiny carrot cubes and knocking them on a napkin. He picks it up. “You mind?” He tongues the orange bits into his mouth. “Vitamins, might get scarce.”
        “Gotta keep that beach bod in shape for the coming cosmic heat death.”
        “So glad you noticed.”

Borissey really is his name. Russian-Jewish immigrant folks who dug The Smiths and were smoking a lot of hash when they had him in their twenties. The pair co-owned a small travel agency in their mid-middle-class suburb of Montreal. Borissey coasted toward man-boyhood and got parked into an e-marketing job downtown and a nearby studio apartment. Most days spaced out in front of his computer, work mainly consisting of trying to look busy while not drawing attention to himself. At the end of the week, he’d turn in two or three search-engine-optimized articles on self-help and aspirational lifestyles, which a round of managers would later cut up with comments. Had never tried any of the brands that contracted his company to shill them, never would. 
        He’d spend weekends taking long walks listening to podcasts about neuroscience and AI or listening to audio science-fiction books. But less and less in winter: too cold, dark, icy pavements, and people just forgetting how to share sidewalks like civilized bipeds. And with each ice storm season getting worse, he embraced the season as his ‘dark period.’ Whole weekends hunkered in his apartment drinking and snorting. Had a few on-and-off girlfriends, thanks to his height and good hair and sarcastic charm and steady income. They shared his winter habits, on his bill, and usually split at the dogshit thaw of spring. 
        He decided, fuck it. I’ll take my work remote, spend the winters down south: Medria, Medellin, Bali, Chiang Mai. His company didn’t mind. It worked out fine for a while. Only thing starting to bother him was the increasing age gap between himself and the ‘digital nomad community,’ a label he hated as much as he was coming to hate those it described, and himself for being part of it.  
        Then the world took its first steps toward the edge of boring doom: politics, war, disease, scarce resources, mass migrations, curfews, and lockdowns. International travel went from a luxury to a privilege to a highly curtailed right only afforded to the rich and powerful, but sometimes also extended to the hot and talented: groups he loudly disdained in themselves and quietly for not including him. For the last few years, he quipped the ice storm was his new winter holiday. The hotel-sheltering and all. Most of the people he knew didn’t appreciate the joke.   
        Until he found Hope. 

He’s pretending to read a ragged paperback picked up off a cart some city crisis-worker wheeled through the rows of cots. Luck didn’t favor him this time with a private room when the computer dished out lots. The book is science fiction, but the bad kind: Hybrid crystal-eyed man-gods doing galactic battle against fecund bestial space-gals in shiny spandex wielding mind-control over stone-faced eyeless masses. But the pages have a nice worn texture and smell pleasant. The cover art’s cartoonish-breasted women might make good wank material with nothing else around.
        He gets a kick in the foot, a bit too hard to be playful. “Owch.” Borissey hamming it up.
        “Oopsie,” she says. “Nice digs, design it yourself?”
        “Fancy firm uptown, actually. CEO owes me a favor.”
        “Scooch.” Plops down hard beside him, thigh to thigh. He gets that unwashed hair whiff and then a twitch in his pants. “Take it you didn’t luck out with a room either,” he says. “Pity.” 
        “Oh I did indeed. Came here to make you jealous. Working?”
        “Nope. Man of the people this one.”
        “Pshh.”
        “And your name is…”
        “Hope.”
        “Course it is.”
        “Check it,” Hope says, patting her chest, then opens her parka to flash him a magnum of Seagram’s in the inside pocket. “Care?”
        “Damn I left my Cohibas in my other Canada Goose.” He extends his hand to take the bottle. She swats, not gently. “Not here.”
        “Right, you have a room.” 
        “Yeah, that’s it.” Eye roll. “Come on.”
        Except she leads him on, down a corridor your typical hotel guest never sees, and starts trying doors at random. He’s hesitant, so she keeps whistling at him like a Myna bird to keep up.
        Inside a supply closet. “Perfectly cliche, right?” she says. They share swigs of whiskey and have impatient sex against the wall. And then again more slowly on top of sacks of powder detergent he’d thrown down for better leverage. Jackets off but tops still on, pants-and-all around the ankles bunched above their boots. Once done, their sarcastic thrust and parry not missing a beat as they go back to swigging.
        “You were saying something about Disney World?” she says.
        “Was I? Right. Yeah. Isn’t this place nicer?”
        “It’ll do.”
        “I should send my parents a postcard. They’re in Florida.”
        “Course they are.”
        “Course.”
        “Wholesome upbringing, I presume?”
        “Yup. Made me the rascal I am today.”
        “Ain’t negative correlation a bitch.”
        “Raging one.”
        “You a mama’s boy or got daddy issues or both?” she asks.
        “Oedipal two-for-one. That obvious?”
        “I’m a hedger. Like an even spread. Could smell it on you a mile away.”
        “Thanks,” he says, a bit self conscious for not having showered since his neighborhood got the evacuation order. “And you, Hope?” He tries her name out in his mouth, “let me guess. You’re the spitting image of your mother and a daddy’s girl all the way.”
        “Hmph.”
        “And your folks are jet-setting around the globe as we speak. Somewhere in the Adriatic, I bet, or Bay of Bengal.”
        “Nope. Dead.”
        “Shit.”
        “Yeah.”
        “Sorry.”
        “You don’t have to say that.”
        “Sorry. I mean, for saying that. For saying sorry. I bet everyone—”
        “Shut up.” 
        “Yeah.” 
        Silence. He takes another swig. Expecting her to get up and walk away without a word. Figuring she’s a stress-sex person and is now done with him. But her body sighs, yawns, and she presses closer to him. “I don’t actually have a room. But we can stay in this one until they find us and kick us out, right? Can we?”
        “As long as we like.” He faces her for a kiss but she slaps his face away. “What’s that?” she asks and starts pinching a dried zit on the back of his neck. “Gross,” he says. So she digs her nails in hard and gets the outer scab off. Flicks it at him, “tell me about it.”

Hope, or Omid. From Los Angeles. Parents worked in the movie business: her Iranian dad an assistant cameraman who never made it to DP, her Lebanese-Christian mom a script doctor who couldn’t sell her own pitch. Not that they ever stopped trying, so the choice of name for their only child. Omid on her documents. Introducing herself by the English translation since Junior High to fit in among the white girls with their California tanned and peach-fuzz skin.  
        Shy of twenty, her parents got smothered by a freak mudslide while hiking on holiday in the Philippines. Hope got enough of an inheritance to leave tinseltown and the States for good. Chose Montreal for the arbitrary reason that it at best sounded European and at least looked diagonally opposite to LA on a North American map. That, and winter photos of the snow-blanketed city gave her a sense of peace, as if there, even the undeservedly dead had little choice but to hibernate until some banal second coming. 
        Aside from the sentimentality of her choice to move, the death of her parents hardened her just enough to weather her new city’s cold bureaucracy and the increasingly hostile winters. That was back in the early 2020s, before the city-wide ice storm shutdown became an annual certainty that got worse each year.

They shun talk of the big freeze but could still read the news on the dry exhausted faces of the other evacuees. ‘Not looking good,’ and ‘no end in sight.’ Trees cracking under the weight of iced branches and crashing through power lines causing local explosions. Emergency work crews understaffed and overtaxed, here and there mumbling of a strike.
        Hope and Borissey are carrying on. Exploring the hotel and finding new spots to fuck or lay around: in the laundry room he heaved her ass onto a dryer but couldn’t turn it rumbling on, the boiler room made them sweat to no end and he buried his face in her armpits then crotch until she nearly tore out his thinning hair, they even found what might have been a concierge’s apartment and slept there for hours until security kicked them out, threatening to expel them from the hotel. “Can they even do that?” he asked, later.
        “Banishment, excommunication. It’s coming, be sure.”

 

No telling how many days passed. Then in a flash, time hits her in the face as she watches him swig the last of the magnum. “Well that was good,” he says, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. They were in the main hall, huddled under blankets, as even the hotels had to turn the power off intermittently to spare the city’s grid. “Can I charge you with the mission of sourcing another bottle?” she asks with little feeling and less expectation.
        “Sure, what would the mademoiselle be in the mood for? We have a lovely selection of Amarones, or perhaps one of our reserve Chateau Lafites? On the house of course, the Baron is a personal friend of the estate.” He sees she isn’t amused. “Sorry, I’ll see what I can do.” And he moves to get up but she pulls him back. “No, it’s fine. Let’s just…”
        “Yeah OK.”
        They sit there. They don’t speak. The sarcastic thrust and parry feeling moronic now. He’s got his arm around her but his hand isn’t exactly squeezing her soft flesh, just padding. “You’re upset,” he says.
        “Just bored.”
        “Of me.”
        “Stop.”
        “It’s OK. I’m just as surprised as you are.”
        “What do you mean?”
        “Thought maybe you were just looking for a quick ff—, for some quick comfort, like, because of the stress of all this shit.”
        “That what you wanted?”
        “What?”
        “Is that what you wanted?”
        “No. I…”
        “You?”
        “Whatever.”
        “Yeah, whatever.” Silence. Then he gets up and says, “no idea where to find booze here, but if there is, I got it.” He knows he doesn’t sound convincing and walks away before it shows too much on his face.
        She folds the blanket over her body and makes herself invisible. Waiting for her own body heat to be enough. Thinks about the last relationship she had: Guillaume, when she first arrived in the city. Tall, thin, man bun, wireframe specs and aftershave. A local to show her around and translate French to English. He helped her with apartment hunting and other bureaucratic headaches. At the time, she was worried she’d lose interest once she was settled in, as if this worry was proof that she wasn’t just using the guy. Didn’t want to admit that about herself. But that sense of needing a man then cutting him loose when the need was gone was present again now. Maybe, she thinks, she should stop this thing with Borissey right away. Weather the rest of the disaster season independently. And alone.
        In the end, Guillaume ended it first, said he was fed up with the sarcasm, wanted someone “authentic.” Fucking bore.
        She’s getting warmer now and her mind is made up. So Hope can close her eyes and let sleep crawl up inside her.

He returns empty handed. What did he expect? Mostly just wanted to wander alone, let his little wormy brain tire itself out. 
        He sees she’s sleeping and wonders if she’s faking it to avoid him. Nudges her with the tip of his boot. “Hey.”
        Keeping her eyes closed. “Hey.” She licks her lips. He just stands there, over her.
        All around the massive space, a den of mumbling starts to rise. People are getting up and moving about with impatient swiftness. Excitement and shouts. Hope and Borissey both think, oh shit, that bad? But soon it’s clear that it isn’t distress or fear, but frenetic giddiness. 
        Then a massive hum ramps up like a mechanical Leviathan awakening from slumber. Lights popping on, heaters spewing out dusty hot breath. People are glued to their phones for the news. “It’s a Miracle!” somebody nearby squeals, causing Hope and Borissey to roll their eyes in unison.
        Inexplicably, the weather’s reversed itself, the storm sucked out of existence by a triumphant Sun God no forecast anticipated. And to confound the experts even more, the city’s restored more than fifty percent of the power grid within moments of the sky clearing. Some technical oversight or experimental protocol that would be studied and reviewed for months to come. And like a third domino of good fortune falling in a row, the municipality and its workers are back in agreement. 

Hope and Borissey hug like old acquaintances. More arms than chests pressing, her breasts too small to feel through the thick clothing. He gets her unwashed hair again in his nostrils but it merely ranks. Also a note of sulfur in her breath. She winces at his earful of oily gunk and scabby flakes. Glimpses a pattern of dried red zits on the back of his neck, knows they’re on his shoulders and back too. They promise to keep in touch. Neither is sure they mean it. The rest of the winter is chilly and snowy and ordinary and sad, but for now, this year’s crisis is over.   

///

Spring shows up early and gets to work right away. Just enough rain at first to clear the snow, then the timid sun relearning its powers.
        The City of Montreal elects a new mayor by a landslide. She gets to work reversing a series of austerity measures that were hampering the exact public services that made the recent ice storm responses so inefficient. It’ll free up funds for better public transit and more bike lanes and improved health services and cooler festivals and increased rights and services for lower and medium-income-earning single childless apartment-renters. People like Hope and Borissey. It had been a while since the city was so enthusiastic about a municipal government.

It’s Saturday and Borissey is out of the house early without a trace of a hangover. He stops at a new cafe near his apartment and nabs a small outdoor table. The Americano is just to his liking: more old school bitter than that third-wave sour stuff. Pulls out his phone to scan the news over social media headlines. #LeipzigAccords is trending: renewed diplomacy between Russia and Germany, full restoration of energy contracts, win-win for most of Europe and Asia with only the States grumbling on the sidelines. Fuck them, Borissey thinks, and chomps down on a perfect white ham and butter croissant. What else? A coalition of developing countries wins a suit at the Permanent Court of Arbitration, forcing several medical patents to pass into the public domain, with the WHO pledging billions to build manufacturing centers across Latin America, Africa and Central Asia. A move applauded by most, only to the chagrin of the West and its corporate sponsors.
        He puts his phone down and smiles at the world. The cute, pale-skinned waitress with a bob cut and bangs comes out and he opts for a second cup. Considers flirting with her because, why not, everything else today is going roses. She comes back with the coffee just as a text hits his phone, derailing his moment. 
        It’s Hope: “Don’t bother. You’re not her type old man,” and a winking emoji.
        The fuck? He thinks, she stalking me? But what he mainly catches in his own reaction to that possibility is that he’s flattered. And wants to see her. To fuck her and lay around all day with her. Now more than ever. Hope. He starts typing a message back, hesitates, no idea how to advance. 
        Then hears the whistle. Like a Myna bird. 

From across the street, she sees him look up and around like a nervous-excited idiot manchild and her heart does the tiniest of pirouettes. “Over here idiot,” she calls out to him. He spots her, his beaming too much to bear.
        Contrary to Hope’s expectations, spotting him didn’t immediately turn into a whirlwind day of strolling and catching-up and afternoon drinks and late night burgers and sex that, despite being over too fast, would still release a month’s worth of libidinal waste. They only chatted for a few moments. She kept her hand on the back of the empty chair at his table and watched him watching her hand. 
        She didn’t strategize the run-in outright. But she couldn’t admit it was wholly by accident. The cafe was near his apartment, and she knew this, and since the spring awakening, she’d let herself jog around the vicinity. Knowing she looks good a bit sweaty. 
        At least he seemed more flustered, the idiot, she later thinks, then checks her phone for texts.
        The next day there’s one from him and it’s short and sweet. She mirrors back short and spicy-sweet and for some days their thrust and parry goes from sarcastic to flirtatious. It’s only a matter of time before one suggests they meet. He casually texts to “inquire” if she’s “heard about this new Birria joint” punctuated with the taco emoji. She accepts the bait and texts back: “Tomorrow. 8.” 

For six days and nights, they don’t spend a moment apart. Always his apartment. “Should we go to yours tonight?” he asks, coming up behind her while she’s chopping onions for scrambled eggs, “like a vacation?” 
        She mock-bawls, “Nooooo… Waaaaa…”
        Over on the table, a news-voice bleats from his laptop about some ‘breaking emergency.’ He slams the laptop shut and silences the outside world. “No seriously, I’ve never been there. Is something wrong with your place?” She spins around, paring knife aimed up at his throat. “What are you snooping around for, eh mister? Think I’m hiding something? Bodies in the closet, heads in the fridge? A cluster of cats?”
        “Mean a nuisance.”
        “A nuisance of feral cats?”
        “Butter’s burning,” he says.
        “You bet it is, baby.”
        And over breakfast explains to him the ever-growing list of reasons she’s getting fed up with her place: a newish spring-musty smell, some recently plopped-out baby whose incessant screaming tells her it hates this side of life, the news a neighbor was assaulted in her home and the lingering fear the scumbag’s marked her place for next, and paying rent in full is also getting tough. 
        So this is where Hope and Borissey decide to give it a real go. As summer heat waves tread near record breaking, and negotiations between the EU and OPEC countries begin to go foul, and something about a dearth in bees in the Midwest and Prairies, Hope gets out of her lease and moves her stuff in with her new boyfriend.    

He’s never cohabited in a relationship before. Almost did once. Lana. Worked in HR and looked just right for the part: pulled back blonde hair, prominent upper gums and big skin-toned teeth. At the time he was ready to try it just for the sake of advancing to a higher level of relationship maturity. A normal part of growing up. 
        “If the phrase, ‘dodged a bullet’ was ever more justified…” he tells Hope after easy morning sex.
        Hope had done the move-in-together thing back in L.A. More out of financial convenience than commitment. It ended as amicably as it started when she could afford her own pad again. “In my mind it never really counted,” she says.
        “Not like this?”
        “Not like this.”
        The summer heatwave intensifies but they refuse to get AC. Tell people they hate the noise or care too much about the environmental impact or that their windows just don’t have the right fit. Truth is they adore their stuffy sweat box, the two of them. Glistening bodies, a disparate tangle of slippery limbs. Besides, energy costs are hyper-inflated. An impending war abroad, with Canada drawing — or letting itself get drawn — ever nearer, maybe not-so reluctantly. Alliances and pacts and all, and probably some bad vibes too.
        They cook together and clean. On takeout nights they take turns surprising one another with their choice of restaurant and never disappoint. They rotate control over movie night and seem to both pick hit after hit. Anecdotes, stories, past-life experiences, personal revelations and guilty-pleasure confessions: they pile them up on each other, never boring nor off-putting. And beyond the quotidian tasks of sharing a space and the unfolding of personal tastes and quirks, something akin to love grows. All that obnoxious talk when other couples bang on: best friend, partner-in-crime, deep confidant, my desert island baby. Gross, and they gobble it up.

There’s talk of birth control: some new hormonal concoction that works as both a prophylactic and morning-after pill. Patented by Big Pharma with generous subsidies from a government projecting ever-scarcer resources. “You just want my tits bigger,” she says, making a mock-horndog face. 
        They’re finishing a second big bottle of red wine. Her foot is in his crotch, but both know there’s not enough stirring. Recent attempts at condom use have flopped, and pulling out is too risky. “Are you kidding? Those adorable little nubs are the main reason I fell for you,” he says. She rolls her eyes and her head loops around with them. Seeing that familiar expression, he jumps her with a fresh surge of manhood. 
        Once they’re done, she says, “I guess now we really should look into it, you know, to be responsible.”
        “Pshh,” he says. 
        They read online the next morning that it takes weeks to get on the list for the new contraceptive. “Fuck!”
        “Should we, you know, do something?” he asks, wondering about the cost of seeing a doctor amidst sudden austerity cuts to public health insurance. Keep mail-order meds cheap while making in-person medical services prohibitive as hell. Damn backstabbing politicians.  
        “Should we? I don’t know.”
        “Let’s just be careful from now on then?”
        “But if…”
        “There are options,” he says. One of them to become parents. It’s far from what either of them want, let alone planned. But neither approach the topic with outright rejection. This is something new growing inside both of them. Even if there’s no kernel of material life this time, the idea has been born. 
        He kisses her on the belly. “Stay,” he says, “I got the coffee.” Gets up, pads to the kitchen and opens the laptop on the table. The live news-stream starts up automatically as he begins the brew. Something about a pipeline explosion, false flag operations, tanks massing near borders, artillery counts, reserves being called up. “Welly welly well, this can’t be good.” 
        “What?” she says, calling from the bedroom. 
        “Oh nothing.” He changes the station to music, something baroque and cheerful. “Just the world fucking with us again.”
        “Course it is.”
        “Course.”
        “Let it,” she says, appearing in the kitchen half-draped in their yellowing-white bedsheet. He tries out the Myna bird call. Just manages to splutter.

July’s vibrancy becomes a scorched August. They can see it in the yellow grass, feel it crunch underfoot during walks with ever-lengthening silences. He’s thinking, this should be the quiet pleasant phase. Mutual understanding. Who needs to bang all the time? Our secret language of hand-holding and long sighs. 
        To stop overthinking it, he remarks on how many more wasps there are this season than ever before. Or they’re murder hornets, extra vicious fuckers. “Must be a nest nearby,” he says.
        “Mean a swarm,” she says.  
        Meanwhile she starts to worry something’s beginning to bother him. He’s lost in thought. Is it the war, now in full swing? “Is something wrong?” she catches herself asking without any idea of what she wants to hear back.
        “What? No. What do you mean?”
        “Nothing.”
        But it’s too late. Now he thinks something’s bothering her. The silences are no longer pleasant. Full of questions and accusations that form at the back of their throats like little cancerous lumps, but remiss somewhere in the mouth, leaving a bad taste, lingering, making it hard to face one another, to make out with their old breathless abandon. 
        He drops her hand and starts spazzing about when a wasp goes right for his face, or is it a murder hornet? She puts a few steps between them.

If there is any sex, it’s morning sex. He wakes up hard and presses against her and she rolls over on her side to allow it. Not a bad way to start a day, he thinks, grateful they’re now on the pill. And she too realizes that she prefers this to foreplay and having to go down on him. But one night she dreams of giving head to some strange dark and dirty man, possibly a residual image from a clip she caught on the news: people across the world screaming in the aftermath of some bombing carnage, covered in blood and stone dust, tears running clean lines down their sandy hollow cheeks.

It’s his turn to order dinner. His appetite is shot, so he thinks hard of what she might like best. A romantic sacrifice. He plans to make love to her later, foreplay and all, and finds himself needing to be psyched up for the moment. He starts drinking early.
        When the food arrives, she gets that waft of curry and almost gags. How selfish of him, she thinks, assuming Indian food is his favorite. Sure, she tried to tell him last time that she was getting over the stuff. She meant fed up, sick. Later, she picks a movie she knows he won’t like out of revenge. Some grainy German thing from the 70s, ugly knob-nosed men and sad droopy women. Nihilistic conversations with unbearably long pauses in dreary bars and small dirty kitchens. His instinct tells him she did this on purpose, but he’s not sure, so he makes the effort to seem really into it. This pisses her off even more, especially when he falls asleep near the end, but wakes up during the credits. “That was great,” he says.
        “You missed the third act.”
        “No. Are you sure? I don’t think so. Fritz shoots himself.”
        “Course he does.” She gets up, faking a stretch and a yawn, and walks to the bedroom.
        “I’ll be in soon, just want to check the news,” he says, abandoning his plans for dutiful intimacy. He pours himself another drink and puts the news on but mutes it. Chyrons drifting by, something about a ceasefire, belligerents ‘coming to the table’ at the invitation of some supposedly neutral state.

They’re drinking more. As if to outdo one another. Hangovers don’t help start the day on the right note. And it’s downhill from there. 
        He still has to put in a few hours of work-from-home. Silently blames her for how hard it is to get anything done. She often catches sight of his browser window: social media, the news, random videos, anything but the tons of work he complains so much about. And her inheritance is running down. He has to assume this but doesn’t dare ask. Somewhere in the neighborhood of three in the afternoon he cracks a beer. She starts with wine soon after. Cheap whiskey waits for them over the grumbling dinner table. By the end of the night they clamor for whatever is left. Old cooking wine isn’t out of the question.

A foul and airless Saturday morning. He wakes up on the couch. She’s shaving her arms in the bathroom, he just knows, getting that scent of her lathering up, hearing the plastic razor clack on the sink’s edge and the plopping dunk in the water. Once, during the first week living together, as he was stroking the thick dark hairs on the small of her back, she became self-conscious about this part of her ethnic legacy. “I’d worship every single follicle on your body,” he told her, french kissing the top of her ass crack. Now he’s picturing it, and her lower belly, her knuckles, toe knuckles, and thinking about the sink clogging up again. A faint aroma of sulfur then manifests inside his nostrils beneath that cheap perfumed shaving cream.
        The sink is indeed clogging up. She runs her finger down around the filthy drain. Some gurgling and the water swirls down. And when she pulls her finger out, it’s covered in a mix of lather, tiny black hairs, and, what’s this? A crusty yellow crescent. A fingernail, his. Flings it off and bangs her hand on the sink’s porcelain ledge. “Fuck,” that hurt, his fault too. She’s told him, use the toilet or the trash bin, not the sink. He’d probably want credit for doing it at all. Says he has to grow them out before cutting or it’s too difficult. More so for his toenails. Thick masses of gray-beige matter surrounded by tufts of white calloused skin. When she first saw his feet, all she could do was melt in affection for how embarrassed he was, realizing that for as long as possible he’d been trying hard to conceal this part of his body. Kept socks on to fuck. Held her too close when they showered together so she couldn’t even look down. “Idiot,” she joked, “here, let me,” and actually spent an hour giving him her best amateur pedicure. In the end, he let her paint them. They went with pastels: pink and blue. Laughed their asses off the whole time. Just like when she forced him to let her pop some dried pimples from the back of his neck and shoulders and he squealed like a teenage piggy. 
        “You OK in there?” he calls out. He waited long enough to ask, she thinks, since I almost broke my fucking finger. God she’d love to break his hand. Pop his face off and make him squeal, reduce him to blubbering puss to match his personality. Except she’d be the one to have to clean it all up, probably.     

Peace talks are dragging on over on the other side of the planet. Timid advances forward, reluctant steps back. But the worst of the devastation seems behind them for the time being. Canada is playing a hand in the diplomacy now. “At least we didn’t ship over our boys,” he says.
        “Whatever, they know what they signed up for,” she says.
        “Harsh, girl.”
        “Well, it’s not like we have a draft.”
        “It was just a joke.”
        “Fucking hilarious.”
        The news keeps repeating the phrase ‘dragging on.’ He can’t get these words out of his head. A dull evil mantra.

Hardly an exchange goes on between them that isn’t a pretense to blow off frustration or spew muted rage. Still, they never really have it out. 
        She lies awake at night on the far edge of the bed tallying up points. If she gets him to raise his voice, that’s a point. If he stops himself, lifts his finger in the “one moment” gesture and counts his breathing, that’s two points. If he curses or clenches his fist, three. But if at any point in the day she goes to the bathroom and cries a little, he gets five points. She can never get the math to add up in any way that makes sense. Maybe because she knows he’s fake-sleeping, lying on his side and away from her. Let him. At least it’ll keep him from unconsciously farting in bed. 

They’re at a house party. His coworker friends. Once, she’d have called them her friends too, after he first introduced her around. Now she was done with the idea of shared friends. Shared anything. 
        The party sucks. Too much politics and too much booze and really half-assed food and snacks: rubbery orange cheese and crackers, pre-cut veggies with sugary ranch dip out of a plastic container. White people food. A group of blond girls have taken over the music and they’re jumping and screeching along to girl-band pop hits. 
        Even as diplomatic efforts proceed, there’s enough rebel activity to doubt that the end of hostilities is near. Terrorist acts, but probably covertly funded by the main state actors anyway. Or staged by the other side. He thinks everyone at the party has no concept of history or material conditions of power dynamics. They all just repeat catch phrases from the news. “War of attrition,” seems to be the trending slogan. When he sees Hope nod along to some greasy-haired asshole in a fucking black dinner vest defining the phrase, he knows she’s trying to signal to him that… what? Something. Is she flirting? He bobs over to the blond-girl gang. “I love this song.” He mocks them. They’re too dumb to get it.
        She steps up behind him. Touches his shoulder, a fair display of normal couple contact. “How much longer you want to stay?” she asks.
        “What? I don’t know. You want to go?”
        “No. Yeah, maybe. You can stay.” She’d love that. He wouldn’t mind it either. A humanitarian pause. 
        “No, if you want to go, we can go.”
        “You sure?”
        “We’ll catch the last metro,” he says. She thinks, cheap ass, but it does make sense. Money’s tight, and Uber prices are jacked at this hour. “Give me a few moments,” he says. She waits longer than she’d have liked. He’s leaving before he believes the party might finally get good. Before some fun, any fun. 
        They almost miss the metro. She sort of wishes they have. Give her a chance to blame him for making them waste more money. Could have used it as leverage to buy something nice for herself. Just for herself.
        Descending beneath the city’s surface to the metro’s platform. They can feel the subterranean heat rising up at them. Some sporting event or concert in the area has just ended, and the platform’s packed with a rowdy drunken crowd. A nervous energy. As the first ride pulls up, they see the cars are already sardine-packed, red and greasy faces pressed up against the glass saying, don’t you dare try to get in this one.
        They were continuing their passive-aggressive thrust and parry on the walk over, but now, waiting on the platform, there’s this silent truce. Neither wants to make a scene. Both are angling for the best position to get on one of the next rides, barely checking if the other is close by. Maybe they’ll mount different cars? So what. But they know, they’re there, always there, even if they did try to ditch one another. 
        Finally they shove on after another ride pulls up. Inside the airless car the heat is twice as nauseating with all the dog-breathing and perspiring bodies. Her bare arm grazes the skin of a stranger and gets that wet sticky feeling which cools and unleashes a wormy shiver beneath her skin. He sees the look of disgust on her face but interprets it as a continuation of their argument. So he goes on, in as best a hushed volume as he can considering the crowd and the metro’s rumbling, “you know my instinct is to apologize to you over and over, but I don’t even know what I’m sorry for.”
        “Course you don’t,” she says.
        “Seriously, I’m just placating you at this point.”
        “Meaning?”
        “You weaponize your bad moods. I think you people get off on being miserable.”
        Speechless. This is too much for her and she makes the oh-no-fucking-way face. He seizes her mute defenselessness, “I’m wrong?”
        She feels herself summoning something, and that’s when the metro stops. Dead in its tracks. Everyone shifts in the jolt, more bodies heaving. Lights go out too. The crowd half grumbles but half cheers. Everything’s a joke to somebody. Now she’s ready, “you’re not wrong, you’re never fucking wrong,” a bit sarcastic, maybe, “you’re just…” she wants to say, “an asshole,” but she thinks she’s heard that in a movie. Besides, some strangers close to them in the crowd are listening. Or pretending not to.
        “An asshole?” he says, filling in her hesitation, and now she’s livid. The fucking cliche.
        “You’re just so predictably selfish, like, even in your nicest, most generous… whatever.”
        “Oh that makes sense.” But it shakes him that she’s dropped every nuance of sarcasm.
        “You’re kind to feel good about yourself. You do things for other people so you’re owed something back.”
        “What other people?”
        “Fine. Me. You lord over me.”
        “Why?”
        “I don’t know. Because I’m unemployed. Or brown. Or because I give a shit about, like, other people, the world. And all you do is act smart, like you want the world to go to hell just so you can lecture people about ‘context’ and the ‘material causes’ and your other smarmy bullshit.”
        He’s stumped. The metro’s lights flicker and the car jerks a bit forward, but nothing more. “If you feel this way, why are we…?”
        “Good, Put it all on me. As if you didn’t just say I was a total fucking moody bitch all the time.” Now some people are trying really hard not to notice, but ears are pricked. It’s possible someone is filming them.
        “You know what?”
        “Yeah?” 
        The metro jerks back to life, lights and all, resuming the smooth ride home. There’s a general roar of idiotic clapping as the crowd around them lose interest in the couple’s spat. That’s right, applaud the city for just doing their goddamn job without screwing up too much.
        Hope and Borissey arrive at their stop. Their trip is over.   

///

Autumn takes its first timid footsteps across the city. Montreal is having a parade. Wooly scarves and rosy cheeks and runny noses and spongy lawns and steaming paper cups of simulation pumpkin pie-flavored Tim Hortons sugar-coffee. Good amount of coughing too. 
        All of Canada is parading and celebrating. Welcoming the Canadian Armed Forces home. Elated not a single one was killed nor even shot at. Not a single one ever had cause to raise their arms and take aim to end some foreign life. And not just Canada, similar celebrations take place all over the world. Phrases like ‘stepped back from the brink’ and ‘catastrophe avoided’ plaster newspaper covers and are echoed in the idiot-robot maws of media talking heads.   

Borissey is pushing through the crowd. It might be afternoon but to him it’s morning. Stayed up most of the night getting high with the dregs of a dive bar crowd he’d befriended due to his bad habit of drunken generosity. “Who wants shots?” and “who knows a number we can call?” and “where’s a cash machine?” He was at least ten years older than the rest of the gang. They went back to one of their apartments, a small but expensively modern place some daddy paid for. Borissey passed out somewhere around seven on a minimalist armchair with short leg extensions. Got nudged awake by the kid who lived there around noon and took his leave with what little dignity he could manage to fake. 
        Now it seems like he’s walking against the crowd. As if wanting to turn around the events of war and peace and bring on the bombs and carnage. He finally approaches his regular cafe but can’t face that pale, bob-cut banged girl who works there. And he fucking hates Tim Hortons too.

Hope wakes up in Guillaume’s bed. He’s been sleeping in the living room, on the sofa. A real gent. She’s been crashing there. For some reason, she felt more than confident he wouldn’t take it as anything more than a friend in need. And she was right. Still, unsure if he’d been playing some long game. 
        The other night, he cooked a bland veggie stir fry and she drank more than twice as much red wine as he. Sometime after dinner she began wondering if this was his night to make a move, and she wasn’t sure how she’d take it, except she knew she was not one hundred percent against it. He didn’t. She was let down, but later in bed, head spinning, relieved, only to wake up feeling embarrassed. By the time she faced him over coffee — he already aftershave-splashed and dressed for work — a sense of personal insult finally took over. Guillaume hardly seemed to notice.
        She checks her phone. Hates this habit of doing so first thing in the morning. Especially as she’s kidding herself that it’s about the news, which is nothing but sickening elation and pablum about a new and happy peaceful world order. No, she’s looking at dating apps: fresh matches, new messages, anything. But there’s nothing, meaning nothing that remotely interests her, though there’s plenty of activity from sad divorcees or horny fuckboys or dull profiles from the dating dead, desperate to settle down and breed. Only one match in the last few weeks remotely interested her. Shadowy face, university prof, speaks four languages — which is probably a lie — has a cat. Some back and forth texting with gaps too long to count as conversation. Came close to flirting but not quite enough. He was pretty curious about ‘where she was from.’ After waiting long enough, she leapt across the void to suggest meeting up. The guy went silent. She unmatched shortly after, a too-little-too-late scramble-for-dignity.

Autumn makes way for an early winter. The city enthusiastically pushes its influenza vaccine campaign. Some people go for it, many don’t bother. It’s just the flu, after all. What’s more, the meteorological consensus is calling for mildness, and Montreal will get spared a serious ice storm this year. The first snowfall is Instagram perfect: no filter needed, languid floating precious flakes glistening in the evening yellow street lamps. Genial temperatures just below zero. And hardly a gust of wind.

Borissey is two and a half days deep into a bender. He’s sitting on his can with his limp dick in one hand and his phone in the other. Moisturizer standing patiently on the floor before him. Porn doesn’t work, though. He needs the faintest possibility of something materializing in real life, even if that is in itself just the fantasy. So he’s using dating apps as wank material. He can’t explain it. Just knows it’s a new level of desperate.
        But there’s Hope. 
        He was drunk-thumbing right so fast he Yes’d her in the microsecond before he registered it was her. Fuck. A flash panic and he drops his phone between his thighs into the bowl. Fuck fuck oh fuck.
        Before his heart begins to calm down again, he goes into an automatic mode and starts jerking off. Thinking of Hope. Finishes within seconds. Cums downward into the toilet water, on the phone, flushing away any residual chance of a legacy, yet again. 
        In the morning he texts her using his web browser, his phone still powered off in a bag of rice. Figuring to himself, get out in front of this thing, make some lame excuse, ‘haha’ it off like an idiot accident. 
        It’s a lie. He wants her now. More than ever.

And when Hope gets his text she can read through his idiot nonchalance. Sees right through to his terrified little heart. And she thinks she loves it.

They’re in his bed. She’s on her back, her arm around his neck, and his face is in her pit. All the windows are hermetically sealed shut and the dusty heater is blowing hard. A Persian oldies mix streams from a laptop. Salty aroma of seafood and garlic from the pasta he cooked her the night before. Her other hand is tickling herself, grazing her crusted pubic hairs, sending prickly shivers through to her belly. He feels each soft spasm from her body and uses her rhythm to set his breathing. There’s no reason to get out of bed today. No reason to change a thing.

A few days later they both get the text message at the same time. The whole city gets it. Vaccine announcement. They’re prompted to follow a link to book an appointment for a jab. Mandatory now. The city will know who you are if you don’t.
        “Do you believe this?”
        “Course I don’t.”
        “Me neither.”
        “Course.”
        “What do we do?”
        “Run away.”
        “I’ll pack the bags.”
        “I’ll clean the gun.”
        “Pyew pyew.”

It’s become unseasonably freezing, even for Montreal. A rogue cold wave, they say, totally unexpected, meteorologists stumped. Flu cases spiking. Then they say it’s not just the flu. Something novel. Nothing to worry about, not like Corona 2019, they say. Shots and masks and social distancing and maybe a tiny little lockdown. ‘We’ll nip this one in the bud’ and ‘we’re all in this together.’ ‘Ça va bien aller’ graffiti all over town. But news out of Asia, Africa and Russia tells a different story. If and when they get that news. 
        Then one day, a media blackout.
        “There’s going to be a protest.”
        “You mean a parade?”
        “The mayor’s going to ride a giant float shaped like a needle. Squirting at the crowd.”
        “The premiere’s going to ride a tank, a real one. Shoot everyone who’s not cheering.”
        “The prime minister’s going to…”
        “What?”
        “Baby?”
        “Yeah?”
        “Are you worried?”

RSV-Variant-26. Or Respiva as the people dub it. Though some people call it The Cull, and by no means believe it’s accidental, let alone natural. Others don’t think it’s real at all. The mass incinerating of infected bodies in every city’s outskirts is hard to doubt, mainly because of the initial attempts to hide it from the public. But cause and effect, onset and symptom, original source and desired outcome, and the ever-shifting public messaging: these tidal back-and-forths make it hard to know who or what to believe. 
        Weekly protests have turned to daily protests, and though the governments of the world attempt to play them down, most of them are indeed riots. Martial law and frozen bank accounts and forced quarantine zones with armed guards. #EmergencyActs trends. On top of that, a fabulous leak to every non-state media outlet goes viral: windfall profits for the pharmaceutical companies and the private equity-NGO-foundation nexus that owns them. The leak itself suspected to be the product of a runaway AI hacking module, one possibly with algos twisting financial markets solely to stop the presses for maximum virality and who knows what else. Meanwhile food gets scarcer and rations tighter, rolling blackouts and “heat-pauses” more frequent and longer lasting. If one can trust the news, more than one country is undergoing a violent populist takeover, and not where one would expect it. Western Europe is over, some are saying.

Hope and Borissey are lucky enough in these times. They’re back in the hotel where they first met. And they have a corner cot. Built a fort out of blankets and junk. Rationing a magnum bottle of discount brandy. They bought it in advance of the worsening situation, anticipating just this moment. A bit of nostalgia to see them through minus-forty-degree-celsius hell.
        “Did we do this?”
        “I think we did.”
        “I know we did.”
        “Negative correlation, that bitch.”
        “Course.”
        “Kiss me.”
        They tongue-swirl warm brandy round inside each other’s mouths. Pulling away to catch their breath, she whistles for anyone watching them with envy.

A 9.7 magnitude earthquake hits the Persian Gulf. Fault line over 1.8 thousand kilometers long. The globe’s fuel situation becomes apocalyptic. Tidal waves hit almost every coast of the Indian Ocean. Respiva — whatever its true cause, whatever it is — thrives. People’s armies around the world are slaughtering or being slaughtered en masse and no one knows who’s on what side. The hotel where Hope and Borissey are holding up is on the verge of siege. Nobody’s sure who’s really out there.
        “Is it us?”
        “It’ll always be us.”
        “What if we end it?”
        “Me and you?”
        “Me and you and all of it?”
        “Should we end it?”
        “Do we want to?”
        “If we don’t?”
        “Is that an option?”
        “It’s an option.”
        “Then let it end.”
        “Us?”
        “Everything else.”
        “We’ll end with it.”
        “Course we will.”
        “Should we consider options?”
        “We have two.”
        “A pair of options.”
        “Mean a couple.”
        “A twosome.”
        “Me and you.”
        “As long as we like.”
        “Until the end.”
        “Until they kick us out.”
        “Course.”
        “Any moment now.”
        “Unless…”
        “Unless…”
        “Yeah?” 

///