The Second Coming by Garth Risk Hallberg

Author:Garth Risk Hallberg [Hallberg, Garth Risk]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2024-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

9

Which must have been right around the time that Ethan, yawning nervously, scratching through his hoodie, caught the ghost of his own motion in the glass-fronted freezer case of Ducky’s Sinclair. The hoodie was partly to cover his absence of shirt; he’d snuck his tee into the wash next door to get the funk off, since there’d be little chance to buy a new one before the business with the boat. Had he his druthers, of course, he wouldn’t have risked a run-in with Ducky at all. But nor had he wished to add to Moira’s burdens by hanging around her place to mooch breakfast, and at present he was basically subsisting on a pinch of coconut snuck from yesterday’s cakebox, the better part of a Hershey bar dunked in bad ferry cocoa, and this mug of tepid coffee obviously meant for someone else—and he couldn’t see himself making it as far as the IGA without some fortification.

Luckily, he wasn’t choosy. These last months had left him a connoisseur of the grab-n-go, the microwave falafel, the taquitos glazed in brightness through the south-facing windows before his reflection swallowed them again. Without the beard for camouflage, he worried about being recognized here, but of course the last time he’d been in, this clerk would have been about the age of Moira’s kid, so his repeated glances at the video monitors were probably just to track the intentions of a stranger. Maybe with so many junkies floating around these days (or Ducky’s fearsome panopticon having weakened with age), shoplifting had become more of a thing. Certainly, there were more varieties of bottled water now than then. More colorful packaging for the diet pills. The cat on the counter was possibly a different cat. Otherwise, all seemed as before. The smell, for example: pink hand soap, mint-flavored chaw, hot dogs conceivably original to the joint.

With deliberate calm—telling himself he’d been a rounding error in Eddie’s trafficking plot anyway and it had been years since he’d swiped those Whip-Its—he selected a frozen chimichanga from the case, balled the wrapper in the counter’s cute trashcan (new), and popped the rest into an underpowered microwave (old, plus or minus some duct tape). To distract himself from the video poker with its mocking NO PAYOUT sign, he moved to the Street Fighter console demoing mindlessly in a corner. In the course of a generation, just by remaining itself, the game had gone from cutting-edge to passé and was now rounding into a senescence of nostalgic kitsch. A play was still only twenty-five cents, and the hot-drink machine on the ferry had left him with this handful of quarters he began to lay out along the bottom of the screen. Among an array of culturally insensitive avatars (how had he not noticed their offensiveness before?), his favorite had always been the lanky South Asian guy who couldn’t take a punch but who, by means of his extendable limbs, had been able to scoop up a second-former’s mind and carry it far from the little house not thirty yards away.

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