After the Plague by T. C. Boyle

three hundred bucks. She didn’t need it anymore, she said, and I didn’t want to know what that meant, so I bought it and kept it under my pillow. I’d only fired it once, up a canyon in Tujunga, but it made me feel better just to have it around. I’d forgotten all about it, actually, but when I got my things out of storage and shipped them to Philip’s house, there it was, hidden away in a box of CDs like some poisonous thing crouching under a rock.
    What I was feeling is hard to explain. It had to do with Philip, sure—ex-con, that really hurt—and with Sally and the clinic and the whole Jesus-thumping circus. I didn’t know what I was going to do—nothing, I hoped—but I knew I wasn’t going to take any shit from anybody, and I knew Philip didn’t have it in him to protect himself, let alone Denise and the kids and all the knocked-upgrieving teenage Sallys of the world. That was all. That was it. The extent of my thinking. I walked into the clinic that morning just as I had for the past week and a half, and nobody knew the difference.
    I cleaned the toilets, washed the windows, took out the trash. Some blood work came back from an outside lab—we only did urine—and Fred showed me how to read the results. I discussed the baseball strike with Nurse Tsing and the prospects of an early spring with Nurse Hempfield. At noon I went out to a deli and had a meatball wedge, two beers, and a breath mint. I debated dialling Sally just once more—maybe she was home from school, headachy, nauseous, morning sickness, whatever, and I could get past the brick wall she’d put up between us and talk to her, really talk to her for the first time—but when I got inside the phone booth, I just didn’t feel like it. As I walked back to the clinic I was wondering if she had a boyfriend or if it was just one of those casual encounters, blind date, back seat of the car—or rape, even. Or incest. Her father’s voice could have been the voice of a child abuser, easily—or who even knew if he was her father? Maybe he was the stepfather. Maybe he was a Humbert Humbert type. Maybe anything.
    There were no protesters out front when I got back—they were all in jail—and that lightened my mood a bit. I even joked with Fred and caught myself whistling over my work. I forgot the morning, forgot the gun, forgot Pasadena and the life that was. Coffee kept me awake, coffee and Diet Coke, and I stayed away from the other stuff just to prove something to myself—and to Philip too. For a while there I even began to suffer from the delusion that everything was going to work out.
    Then it was late, getting dark, and the day was almost done. I pictured the evening ahead—Denise’s cooking,
Winnie-the-Pooh,
my brother’s scotch, six windblown blocks to the store for a liter of Black Cat—and suddenly I felt like pulling out the gun and shooting myself right then and there. Uncle Rick, little brother, ex-con: who was I kidding? I would have been better off in jail.
    I needed a cigarette. Badly. The need took me past the waiting room—four scared-looking women, one angry-looking man—through the lab, and into the back corner. The fluorescent lightshissed softly overhead. Fred was already gone. I stood at the window, staring into the nullity of the drawn blinds till the cigarette was a nub. My hands were trembling as I lit another from the butt end of the first, and I didn’t think about the raw-looking leftovers in the stainless-steel trays that were like nothing so much as skinned frogs, and I didn’t think about Sally or the fat-faced bearded son of a bitch shackling himself to the bumper, either. I tried hard to think nothing, to make it all a blank, and I was succeeding, I was, when for some reason—idle curiosity, boredom, fate—I separated two of the slats and peered out into the lot.
    And there she was, just like that: