Near
On the last day before the bodega closed, Karina bought a pack of tortillas…
– a bag of rice, beans, a carton of eggs, and a 6-pack of mismatched beer. Aaron charged her what he would have for the Budweiser, even though she filled half the pack with those fancy craft brews that they only started stocking after the vegetarian restaurant opened up earlier that year. The shelves hung empty behind the counter. Most of the refrigerators had been left open to air out. Aaron worked the register. Said stood next to him behind the counter. He was giving away packs of cigarettes for free. Faceless people filtered in and out in competition with the smoke they were blowing outside.
Said would have given away everything in the store for free if he could. But everyone just wanted cigarettes. Karina insisted she pay. Aaron smiled at her. He always liked the way her body looked in t-shirts. Karina finally relented and accepted the free ice cream he offered because part of her was still too nervous to decline.
Old habits.
Karina walked the block-and-a-half back to her apartment while eating the shrink-wrapped strawberry shortcake ice-cream bar. Two brightly-dressed men with sunken eyes slunk past her. She knew they were headed for the bodega. She could almost see the nicotine swaddling their fingers and she could certainly catch a whiff of the itch on their breath. Karina thought, not for the first time, about how people should smell like what they want, not like what they are. It only gets squirrely when those two things are the same. Karina knew that equivalency well. It looked like a thing you only want to see over your shoulder.
The men stared at her. She suddenly became conscious of the thick red smear on her lips. She lowered the ice-cream.
The apartment was safe, insofar as it was unpopulated by people with eyes. Karina had always wanted to live with a group of blind women, until she learned about ableism from a quasi-informative article on identity politics and realized she was actually just a privileged bitch. Either way, none of Karina’s roommates were home. They had abandoned her for the greener pastures of North Brooklyn happy-hours.
New pastimes.
Karina left her eventual dinner in the refrigerator beneath the sagging weight of her roommates’ shelves. The beer was stuffed unceremoniously between two slow-leaking bottles of sauvignon blanc turned on their sides. She placed the tortillas ritualistically in a small bread-box above the ensconced cabinets and opened the oven to peer inside. Sighing, she painstakingly removed the haphazard collection of muffin tins and casserole dishes and tossed them callously into the gaping sink. She preheated the oven to who-the-fuck-cares and plopped down on the cat-scratched couch.
Curie jumped up into her lap and started purring. Karina had named the cat Curie because she had a soft-spot for things that died for what must have seemed like a perfectly no-good reason at the time.
Oven whirring behind her, bellowing pedestrians stunting outside, Karina leaned back against the couch and let the day’s scheduled short spell of contentment wash over her. Without thinking, she lifted her hand off Curie’s fur and wiped the ice cream off her lips. They immediately started to itch.
Starting with one of the cheap ones, Karina retrieved a beer from the fridge, plopped four bean-soaked tortillas in the oven, set the timer, and returned to the couch. She turned on the television and powered up the game console beneath and grabbed a controller out of the little basket next to the coffee table. Some asshole had embroidered the basket with the word, “Home.” In her defense, Karina did kind of think it was cute when she bought it.
Karina signed into her account and slipped a disc into the console.
Meanwhile, outside, a car plowed into a cart-pusher. Someone screamed. Maybe someone died, but probably not. People never died anymore around there.
Good neighborhood.
The game took place inside of an derelict steel-mill near a defunct Appalachian mining town. Karina was playing as a former FBI Agent sent to the town to investigate a new bit of evidence from a decades-old cold case. She was already midway through the main story, having successfully charmed the local pub owner into revealing to her the ruffians’ hangout spot back in the early 90s. Karina really dug this game. It was a first-person mystery jaunt in the vein of those old horror games she used to play as a little girl with her older brother’s friends. Occasionally her character had to draw their gun or fight hand-to-hand with some bad-guys. The game mechanics were innovative and challenging — Karina had to turn one thumbstick in the direction of her opponent’s blow to counter, and then follow up by turning the other thumbstick to attack.
She didn’t much care for the shooting bits, but they were alright. Mostly Karina liked to explore. Even after only five minutes in the steel-mill she could tell this was going to be her favorite part of the game.
Karina guided her character through sinuous halls and pitched stairwells. The rusted architecture bled evening sunlight in stuttering patterns. Karina had spent a ton of money on this TV — had even offered it as a gift to all of her roommates, although none of them really used it — and she let herself be taken out of the story for a moment to admire the colors. The cold glow from the screen fooled her with false casts of green vines and red-creeping honeysuckles, all bathed in the sanguine light from the virtual sunset. Her character’s boots made rustling sounds on the dense bed of filth covering the floor. The speakers crackled comfortingly in the close walls of her living room.
A siren outside came to investigate the maybe-deceased cart-pusher. The murmurs of dead-eyed boys and curious dipsomaniacs came fluttering into the apartment. A crowd was starting to form. Karina might have even smelled a faint plume of smoke drifting through the window. She hurriedly rose to shut it.
On-screen, her character stumbled across a room full of emaciated junkies. It was a good ole video-game drug nest. It looked just like how the white-collared Swedish designers who made these games must have thought American drug-nests looked. The junkies hopped up with cartoonish fever-grins and sinewy arms. They lurched over to Karina’s character and bared their sallow teeth.
Her character drew their gun. Karina pushed a button on the controller to holster it again. She was a trained FBI Agent, after all, and these people were innocent. They were troubled and sick and they didn’t deserve to die. They had been cordoned off here in this crumbling place because the government took their homes. Her character must have reminded them of those same faceless men who knocked on their doors all those years ago — months or even just weeks after the mill tumbled into a pit of recession along with their jobs. Probably. At least, she thought so. This game was pretty light on flavor text. She lowered her character’s pistol and settled on handling this with their fists.
After scarcely a moment, the junkies swarmed her character. She flung her thumbs about on the controller wildly, desperately trying to block strikes from all directions while still returning some of her own. One junkie fell, knocked unconscious by a powerful roundhouse. But even as they went down, three more landed vicious snarling blows across the screen. Her character grunted in pain as stylized red blood-streaks flashed athwart their point of view. Karina desperately tried to run for the door, but the junkies had surrounded her. She knocked down two more, but her character had been wounded so many times that half the screen was covered with splattered blood. Karina could hardly see where she was swinging. Another blow landed on her character. And another. The screen bloomed bright red as the FBI Agent died a slow, gruesome death.
Karina cursed at the screen. She re-loaded from the last checkpoint and stepped into the room again.
Another siren approached outside. This one had a distinctly higher pitch — probably an ambulance, Karina thought for no particular reason. She turned her attention back to the junkies and once again readied her fists.
Again and again, Karina tried to take on the room full of junkies unarmed. Again and again, her character suffered the same grisly fate. Three times. Four times. Five reloaded checkpoints. Sixth violent deaths. Seven failed attempts. Again. And again.
Karina screamed. She shoved the controller down violently into the couch cushion. Curie leapt up in fear and ran for the bedroom.
Resolved to it, Karina reloaded the game one last time. She marched toward the room, filled with inscrutable purpose. She didn’t even wait until entering before drawing her gun. She pressed a button to violently kick down the door and dashed inside. Before the junkies could even rise from their palette mats, Karina unloaded two full clips into them. She watched with deep satisfaction as their blood spurted out and stained the black-molded walls. They fell back to their palettes, all dead. Karina reloaded and kept putting bullets in their corpses, enraptured by the sight of her victory. Her hands were slick with the sweat of her frustration, her eyes alight with success, her nose awash in the scent of a strange cocktail of copper and something that couldn’t have been smoke. The room was hers.
A klaxon from the kitchen broke her rage. At first Karina thought it was just the oven-timer. But after a moment, Karina could clearly make out the distinct chirping of the oven-timer — piercing and insistent in its repetition. It had been beeping for awhile — lost in the cacophony of the sirens without and the shrieking druggies from the mill. But it was not what jolted her from her stupor.
Unimaginably loud above the oven-timer, ceaseless and ineffable, was the hateful fortissimo of her smoke alarm.
Karina stumbled over the couch in a mad-dash for the kitchen. She hurled open the oven doors to reveal four hard-burned tacos scarcely visible in an overwhelming shroud of black smoke. She flung open the window and let it blossom out into the thick summer air. Karina stuck her head outside to draw the clean(er) taste of the city back into her chest. She coughed up lungfuls of burnt tortilla and charred black bean.
Tears pushed forcefully against the breadth of her eyes. She opened them wide as she could to let out the soot. Her pupils clouded and cleared and lent pity to her struggling vision. She shook the street back into focus and looked down at the sidewalk.
She was very surprised to see Aaron from the bodega staring back.
He was spread-eagled on the pavement in a pool of blackening blood. It drizzled down the rough asphalt and into a sewer drain at the curb. His skull was cracked open down the middle and his right leg was bent upward at an unnatural angle. His left leg was altogether missing. His sneakers were on the opposite side of the street. Karina stared down at him, into eyes uncomprehending and wide. The crumpled bumper of a Honda shitbox was wrapped around a telephone pole at the corner.
Karina turned her head slowly, eyes still locked with the dead man. The smoke swirled around her peripherals and bandaged the neighborhood in gray. The sirens’ vibrance suffused high into the burnt sky and blanketed a glow over the collected crowd.
Karina kept her head tilted down and continued to turn, until all she could see was the low street ruddering out toward the distant throes of midtown, streetlights just on for the evening, the vegetarian cafe preparing for the post-happy hour rush, and the shuttered windows of her avenue’s last bodega.
