Way too much sugar. Sometimes the bagel shop gave Isaac a day-old freebie if he’d take his coffee to go. None today but he took his order outside anyway. Always too much of this or not enough of that, a buzz in his head or a rumble in his gut. He didn’t starve or pig out but he had no routine, either. Non-refrigerateds, pull-top cans, cereal out of the box, denteds and expireds. Peanut butter, canned meats and beans for protein. Salted snacks, energy bars, pepperoni, Little Debbie cakes can’t go bad. Pickles had vitamins but no calories. He wasn’t a fan of fruit; if it was free, it was already too ripe. Cabbage was okay, just peel off the bad leaves. Brick cheese, scrape off the mold. Priced-for-Quick-Sale baskets, BOGO, Manager’s Special, Tuesday Tacos. Five-Dollar-Friday whole roasted chicken, too much to eat by himself so share it with somebody who shared back. Soup kitchen closed on weekends, so today it’s church-basement Wonder Bread sandwiches served with blessings at Whitman Park. Filling, but who puts margarine on a cheese sandwich? Some guys speed-bus the tables at the food court, but he had strict standards. Nobody’s leftovers for him. Creamer, sugar and ketchup packs only—but no more sugar today! No shoplifting and stay out of dumpsters, too. Isaac left that to the ones who couldn’t do any better. A pride thing. It saved money to live rentless but it cost you years, sniffles, soggy clothes, lost belongings, shrinkage of yourself. Living small made you seem smaller, less significant. Not many fat people living on the river. No master bedrooms or two-car garages. They had nothing but that wasn’t what put people like Isaac in a tent. It was having too much of something. Thoughts, panics, blues, smoke, drink, drugs, attitude. Like the sugar shakes he had right now. Maybe if he biked hard back to camp he could burn it off before he crashed.
Isaac Samson’s camp was almost perfect. Miles from the river and even further from the aimless flutter around the Bermuda Triangle of the shelter, Walmart and the mental health clinic. It was concealed in a thicket of ditchwater trees next to a leased hay field back from a stub road that ran between an office park and the Goodwill, where they didn’t care if he used the restroom. The Express Suites had a free breakfast where half the guests looked like they came from a shelter with their flannel pants and blank eyes. It was good to grab a banana, honey and some hard-boiled eggs, but he didn’t overdo it. The nearby mall was depressing in a bus-station-the-day-after-Christmas way and Security stink-eyed anyone with a backpack, but he could keep cool in the summer if he dressed clean, carried a book and stayed out of the stores.
Across the road were a few dozen vinyl-clad townhouses built right before the crash. The owners not foreclosed were too stunned from being underwater to do much of anything but work and watch TV with the blinds closed. Next door, a scatter of outbuildings behind a small house farmer-built with no particular style, now occupied by renters who either turned over quickly or whose appearance changed drastically according to the meth supply. On the face of it, maybe not a premier set-up but Isaac had a notarized letter from the landowner informing To Whom It May Concern that Isaac Samson had Barry Lester’s permission to camp there.
Barry collected rent off the books from the rough clan next door while waiting for the housing market to resume its northward march across his property. Isaac camped at the edge of the field in exchange for a couple hours a day at Freedom City, where Barry signed the paychecks. Well, not paychecks; Barry paid only in cash and only for special jobs like rigging a flagpole or setting up a bounce castle for a party.
Barry started out as Flag City, selling specialty flags via what they used to call mail order, mostly to customers who bought Made in America. His best products were U.S. military standards and POW-MIA flags, the fringed guidons used by color guards and in government buildings, school and custom rodeo banners sewed by relatives Barry’s Internet bride Mai brought over from Vietnam. The walk-in store stocked flags of all nations and denominations for patriots and party animals alike. The Confederate battle flag, Jolly Rogers, lapel pin flags and bunting, Broncos car pennants, boat flags with martini glasses and Playboy Bunnies, peace symbols, rainbows, Yin-Yang and Tibetan prayer flags, Catholic flags, Episcopalian flags. Just about anything except a Muslim flag or hammer and sickle. Swastikas were available but strictly behind the counter for collectors only.
Flag City’s glory time came post-9/11, but even an enthusiastic repeat flag customer only shows up about once a decade. Meanwhile Barry’s Chinese suppliers had figured out patriotism had certain price points and started selling below him, direct over the Internet. Compete, grow or die, that was capitalism, and Barry couldn’t afford to die. Some of his best Stars and Stripes and Don’t Tread On Me customers were into survivalism. One day Barry watched a prepper webinar that convinced him he wasn’t in the flag business, he was in the Preserving Our Way of Life business, which would kick into high gear once the central government and its fiat currency went bankrupt. He renamed the store Freedom City and stocked up on prepper specialty items. Unfortunately, the sales of home generators, water purifiers, hand-cranked radios and macaroni in ten-gallon tubs peaked without black helicopters and global collapse. So why not celebrate in the meantime with patriotic and holiday yard decorations? Get someone to go for Frosty the Snowman one winter, he might think about an Easter Bunny or a Jack-o-Lantern for next time the grandkids came over. Inflatables were an impulse buy. Nobody went shopping for a Hansel and Gretel popping from an oven. Barry’s customers had to see them full-size and in action so to speak, to be aware they could choose from Santas in all kinds of situations, even one coming out of an outhouse—add the laughing elf for twenty bucks more. The next Christmas they could add a Lamb of God Jesus or a blow-up nativity scene, although in Isaac’s opinion, the Mary and Joseph in that one looked too much like Cabbage Patch Kids.
Placed outdoors, the displays attracted attention from the heavy mall-bound traffic but also from kids who liked to shoot Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer with a pellet gun or relocate Frankenstein to a neighbor’s swimming pool. Since Barry was a desk potato and Mai weighed about as much as two of the sandbags used to anchor the displays, neither was keen about the daily set-up and tear-down required. They needed someone who’d work an hour in the morning and another at night, for next to nothing and no chance of advancement. Who better than the guy they caught mining cardboard in the Freedom City dumpster? A satisfactory arrangement all around.
Isaac’s time was constrained by his open-and-close, seven-day-a-week bargain with Barry. He had to fill the empty hours without his head overflowing. Moving, waiting, thinking, always thinking. Thoughts ballooned, threatening to carry him away. Or they snagged high in the trees. The voices he sometimes heard came from his own mind, he knew, at least now when they were silent. But somewhere real words were being formed by real lips and they gathered in unwaveable clouds of gnats and bats and wasps whose sting he could not reason away. He always carried a book as if it were a device to arrest his mind’s fibrillation. He’d find a story, trace a line at a time, turn the pages and lose himself in the flow. A book was coverpaperinkletterwordphrasesentenceparagraphpagechaptertheend. So few things were so finely connected like that.
He unrolled his yoga mat and settled against a bale filched from the hay field. He was half into a good story about a cowboy being squeezed off his land by a greater power. The same old story, really. The horse was going to die, but Isaac looked forward to that part, knowing his heart would be broken. He cried for whatever could turn out no other way than it always did. He cried for the good horses more than the good men because they were faithful, without any notion of their fate.
A line struck him. He unwrapped the crucifix of thick rubber bands around his notebook. He’d bought the entire stock of red and black cloth-bound volumes from a Barnes and Noble bargain table. In the reds he recorded passages from his reading, random observations, overheard conversations and rants. On visits to his storage unit, he copied the chronological entries into black books organized by categories: Coincidence, Wrong, Puzzle, Structure and Systems, Findings, Edison/Reagan and Elements of Control.
Isaac read until the evening passed into a grey that turned the letters runic. He watched the fading words form lines, then blocks, then merge into a black page. The transition reminded him of drifting into sleep, but also of Barry slowly going out of business, of the decline of empires, of death descending. Every fading of the light is our preview of the end, he thought, and when the end doesn’t come, we start to believe the movie is never-ending.