The Troika by Stepan Chapman

Author:Stepan Chapman [Chapman,Stepan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-890464-17-2
Publisher: Ministry of Whimsy Press
Published: 2012-01-24T16:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

SIGNS OF RECOVERY

CHAPTER TEN

SPRAYING FOR BUGS

Their legs were old burnt matches.

Their legs were old burnt matches.

Their legs were old burnt matches.

Their arms were just the same.

—Vachel Lindsay

It was 1997, and I was working for the city of Tucson as an exterminator. My life was fairly simple. I’d given up on being a man, and was trying to function as a public works vehicle.

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I was south of downtown, driving the side streets around Stone, looking for an address. I watched for the numbers stenciled in yellow paint on the lampposts and checked them against my internal street map. My optics scanned the decaying city, translating walls and alleys, and dumpsters into vehicular simulation space. My tires rumbled over the sun-scorched gutter trash. My fender optics tracked the curbs. Traffic was sparse. There weren’t any pedestrians out, nor any drivers either. The city had grown nearly uninhabitable. The storm drains were choked, so the next winter flood would swamp the place and cripple city services for good. Piped water and wired power would recede into the fabled past. The more stubborn among the citizens were refusing to evacuate to the settlement camps. All the worse for them.

I came to Russell Avenue and braked at a stop sign beside a boarded-up library. I was the only vehicle in Tucson that still stopped for signs, but I’m a creature of habit, what can I do? A tow truck limped past me along Russell, dragging a sedan with no wheels. The tow truck had a flat. I turned onto Russell and proceeded south.

A year earlier I’d been the guidance brain in a trash truck. That was pleasant work, if you didn’t have a nose. But they ripped me out of that truck and wired me into this van. Well, ours not to reason why.

My six tires rattled over cracked cement. The pressure vent on my methanol tank was jammed, and my shock absorbers were a joke, but I was on the job, and that was what mattered to the City. I had a good spare tire but no jack. I’d lost a wiper blade, and when it rained, I compulsively dragged bare metal across my windshield. Also I talked to myself too much.

I had my service manual etched on my visual cortex—four volumes of theoretical perfection and zero tolerance schematics—no rust, no wear, no fraying cables. I used to read it in the back of my mind, for a laugh.

My only friend at this time was a municipal garage door opener who opened the door for me when I went out or came back. She told me that my problem was that I’d been a man, and now I expected too much. I wonder how she could tell.

I was driving through a city of people who stayed at home. They stayed indoors and watched television and gradually melted. That was the new virus, the melting. After they melted, ambulances with loud sirens would take their goo to the University Hospital to make sure they were dead.

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