The Bomb Shelter (opening of chapter 1)

On the rare occasion I pay attention to The Dictator it’s because he posts something to Twitter so absurd that I feel obligated to screencap it and share it with my best friend Helga. For example: that time The Dictator re-tweeted a conspiracy theory that El Salvadoran migrants in Grand Rapids 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 RoNetco’s – he referred to a New Hampshire congresswoman introducing gun control legislation as a broad-faced gargoyle who looks like she should be spurting an arc of water over a fountain. The Dictator, to me,  is simply a currency that Helga and I pass between ourselves, back and forth, forever. 

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I trudge up three flights of stairs to Helga’s apartment with a seven-dollar bottle of white wine. The cheap bottle’s label (“Comely Vineyards”) is starting to peel via condensation thanks to my shlep from the subway and from a lingering humidity. 

Helga lives in a neighborhood of walk-ups, populated by people who, like her, displaced the poor migrants who originally built it. I once did too—just three blocks away—until last year. Nowadays, the distance between my late father’s house and Helga’s neighborhood makes tonight’s ‘spontaneous’ hangout feel Homeric: car to park-and-ride lot, commuter train to subway, then a final hoof to Apartment 3B. Neither Helga nor I mention that there was once a time I could wander here almost by accident, en route to elsewhere, or just drop by without planning days in advance. To do so, I believe, would be to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth: that eventually, all 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!), swinging open 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 at my armpits, pulling away from her embrace. “Swampy out there.” She leads me by the hand to the ratty plaid sofa facing her television, seats me, then sets the wine on the end table. The bottle sweats in the heat. I wait for her to pour us each a glass, like a patient little orphan. 

“Have you been watching?” Helga, still standing, asks me. She gestures to her television. I only now realize the news has been playing at low volume. The light from the screen, which shows the POV of an unmanned bomber-drone in Eastern Europe, flickers on her skin. Helga’s skin is her second-best feature. The contrasting lack of light from the windowless kitchenette behind her only accentuates the shape of her face—her jawline, her bone structure, which she (infuriatingly) dismisses when complimented. 

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

“They’re saying we should all be building bomb shelters now.” Helga makes 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. 

“Only teasing you, Aimee.” 

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

Helga crosses toward me, smiling with eye contact, as if she’s about to cradle my chin or tuck hair behind my ear. But she doesn’t. “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, to the point of absurdity. “Why are you being weird?” I point at the empty seat next to me on the sofa. 

Helga clasps her temples, as if gripped by a 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?” I feel her eyes on me. “I’m hardly in a position to be judgemental.”

“Bangs. You judged my new bangs after work sent me to New Mexico.” 

“That wasn’t, like, 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 makes eye contact. I stare at the bridge of her nose, trying not to meet her gaze. It’s a perfect little sketch of a nose. A child would draw it exactly that way.

“Okay. You’re pregnant,” I say, deliberate and 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 Helga 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 buddies 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 many guys 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 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, even.” 

“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, like, our twenties. I’m thirty-one now, babe.” 

“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 mutes the television. “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 so fucking glad I told you.” A pause that lasts a little too long. “You’re gonna be Aunt Aimee!”

I smile widely, like a threatened chimpanzee.