The Bomb Shelter (opening chapters)

Prologue

On the rare occasion I pay attention to The Dictator it’s because he posts something to social media so unhinged that I simply must screencap it and share it with Helga. For example: that time The Dictator re-tweeted a conspiracy theory that El-Salvadorean migrants in Grand Rapids, Michigan raping newborn kittens had caused an uptick in feline AIDS. Or the post where – after an acne-faced teenage boy shot three people at a King Soopers – he referred to a New Hampshire congresswoman introducing gun control legislation as a broad-faced gremlin who looks like she should be spurting an arc of water over a fountain . For full transparency, you should probably also know that I once amended my Facebook bio to read “Gadfly”, which is how The Dictator had misspelled “Gaddafi”. (It got me six likes.) 

I do not recall voting.

Chapter One

“In Which Helga Decides To Have the Baby”

I trudge up three flights of stairs to Helga’s apartment with a nine-dollar bottle of white wine. The cheap bottle’s label (“Comely Vineyards”) is starting to peel via condensation due to my shlep from the subway and the ambient humidity. Helga lives in a neighborhood with lots of walk-ups, populated by people who all, like her, displaced the poor migrants who originally built it. I once did, too, until last year – just three blocks away. Nowadays, the distance between my late father’s house and Helga’s neighborhood means that tonight’s ever-so-spontaneous hangout is a journey of Homeric proportions: I travel by car to a park-and-ride, commuter train to the subway, and, finally, I hoof it to Apartment 3B. Helga nor I never mention that there was once a time I could wander here almost by accident, en-route to elsewhere, or even just drop by, without having choreographed my attendance days in advance. To do so, I believe, would be acknowledging an uncomfortable truth -- that eventually, all of this effort will prove too much; that, over time, Helga and I will drift apart. The prospect disquiets me; it crouches somewhere deep inside me, like a parasite, its eyes glowing yellow in the darkness of my insides. 

Helga announces the obvious (You’re here!), opening her flimsy apartment door, draping her arms about me. I can feel the damp small of her back through her summer dress, and the ends of her dry-shampooed hair on my shoulders. 

“Sorry, I smell.” I gesture to my armpits, pulling away from her embrace. “The humidity.” She leads me by the hand to the ratty plaid sofa which faces her television, seating me, then places the wine bottle on her end table. The bottle sweats in the heat. I wait for her to pour us each a glass, patient like an orphan. 

“Have you been watching?” Helga, still standing, asks me. She gestures to the television. I now realise the news has been blaring at an uncomfortable volume. The light from the television casts a flickering glow on her skin. Helga’s skin is her second-best feature. The contrasting lack of light from the windowless kitchenette behind her only serves to highlight her next best features, the shape of her face – her jawline, the well-defined bone structure, about which she often (infuriatingly) dismisses compliments. 

“Watching what?”. I haven’t absorbed a moment of the programme. 

“They’re saying we should be building bomb shelters now.” Helga make a broad, nonspecific gesture around her at her studio apartment. “Where, exactly, would I build my bomb shelter?”. I smile, impatient: the sweating wine bottle is now dangerously approaching room temperature. 

“Well, y’know, you’re always welcome in my bomb shelter. Out in the boonies.” 

“Your father bequeath you one of those as well, huh?” 

I don’t respond quickly enough and our banter deflates. I’m seated, whilst Helga remains standing, and she seems to mistake this disparity and silence for a sort of tension. 

“I was only teasing you, Aimee.” 

“I know, of course, it’s fine, yeah. Should we open that wine?” I lick dry lips. “It’s the finest white the Trinidadian bodega guy had on offer.” 

Helga crosses towards me, smiling with eye contact, seeming like she was about to tenderly cradle my chin or push hair out of my face. But she doesn’t do that. “You’ve lost weight,” she says. 

I’ve gained nine pounds. “I don’t think so.” Helga’s always accusing people of having lost weight; she’s forgotten I know why. “Why are you being weird?” I point at the empty seat next to me on the sofa. 

Helga clasps her temples, gripped by an imagined migraine. “You’re going to think I’m an idiot.” She finally sits beside me, her hand squeezing my thigh. “You’ll judge me.”

“When have I ever judged you?” 

“Bangs. You judged my bangs – after the empanada festival.” 

“That wasn’t judgement.” I shake my head. “I just didn’t have the emotional wherewithal for those bangs. I’ll own that. You know you always look – “ 

“I’m ten weeks pregnant.” Helga’s staring at me now. I desperately want to break eye contact, so instead I focus on the bridge of her nose. It’s perfect, like a child’s drawing of a face, forming a pinched midway between her eyeline and upper lip. 

“Okay. You’re pregnant,” I say, staying matter-of-fact. 

“And I want to keep it.” Helga looks down at her stomach – toned, flat. Filled with foetus. 

“Whose even is it? That guy who said he fucked Caroline Calloway?” 

“No! Thank the lord.” She shakes her head. “That doesn’t even work, mathematically, anyway.”

 “Who, then?” 

“It’s Chet’s.” 

Chet, I knew, was recently tagged in one of Helga’s instagram stories: a looping video of him splayed out on a picnic rug in the park grinning whilst she sat in front of him, department store sunglasses obscuring half of her selfie-face and her well-proportioned features. I had clicked through the tag to Chet’s profile and read his ‘ironic’ captions upon shots of he and his friends at a pop-up microbrewery, scrolled downwards on his grid to where I saw photos of him in 2015 wearing skinny jeans and short-sleeved paisley shirts looking angelic the way some men do in their early twenties. I’d scrolled his “following” list and found the profiles of his older sister, mother, and a nineteen-year-old brother, Reggie. I had clicked through, seen that Reggie is a beautiful intern somewhere in the city who posted IG stories of himself in a hand-me-down suit, a beautiful little business babyface. I had touched myself to sleep and woken with my phone propped on my chest, Reggie’s instagram profile still open. 

“I don’t know much about Chet,” I say. 

“I really want to introduce him to you.” 

“Does he know?” 

She nods. “He’s excited. Talking about moving in together. Rings – et. cetera.” 

“The fuck – engaged?” 

“Why not?” 

I say nothing for a moment. “I just didn’t think this is what you wanted.” 

She shifts uncomfortably. “That’s the kind of thing we used to say in our twenties, like…I’m thirty-one now, babe.” 

“So? I’m thirty-two.” 

“Well, that’s fine if you don’t want this, your plans are cool, too – I’m just saying.”

 Finding something to occupy herself, Helga picks up the remote and turns the television volume all the way down. “If this is ever going to happen for me…why not Chet?” 

Why not Chet? I catch myself thinking of reasons – he plays bass in a Mumford and Sons cover band, wears boat shoes. His mother seems intense. But I’m not supposed to know these things. “I’m really happy for you.” 

She grins, then; grabs both of my hands, kisses me on the cheek. “I’m really fucking excited.”

“Same. Same.”