Warm Bodies Page 0,63

Are there still people out there engaging in frivolity despite the times? But then, ten minutes into the third quarter, the images warp like VHS tape and switch to a different game, the teams and scores changing in the middle of a tackle. Five minutes later they switch again, with just a quick stutter to mark the splice. None of the sports fans seem to notice. They watch these abbreviated, eternally looping contests with blank eyes and sip their drinks like players in an historical reenactment.

A few of the patrons notice me staring at them and I look away. But then I look back. Something about this scene is burrowing into my mind. A thought is developing like a ghost on a Polaroid.

'Three grapefruits,' Julie tells the bartender, who looks vaguely embarrassed as he prepares the drinks. We settle in on bar stools and the two girls start talking. The music of their voices replaces the jangling classic rock on the jukebox, but then even this fades to a muffled drone. I'm staring at the TVs. I'm staring at the people. I can see the outline of their bones under their muscles. The edges of joints poking up under tight skin. I see their skeletons, and the idea taking shape in my head is something I hadn't expected: a blueprint of the Boneys. A glimpse into the their twisted, dried-up minds.

The universe is compressing. All memory and all possibility squeezing down to the smallest of points as the last of their flesh falls away. To exist in that singularity, trapped in one static state for eternity - this is the Boneys' world. They are dead-eyed ID photos, frozen at the precise moment they gave up their humanity. That hopeless instant when they snipped the last thread and dropped into the abyss. Now there's nothing left. No thought, no feeling, no past, no future. Nothing exists but the desperate need to keep things as they are, as they always have been. They must stay on the rails of their loop or be overwhelmed, set ablaze and consumed by the colours, the sounds, the wide-open sky.

And so the thought hums in my head, whispering through my nerves like voices through phone lines: what if we could derail them? We've already disrupted their structure enough to incite a blind rage. What if we could create a change so deep, so new and astonishing, they would simply break? Surrender? Crumble into dust and ride out of town on the wind?

'R,' Julie says, poking me in the arm. 'Where are you? Daydreaming again?'

I smile and shrug. Once again my vocabulary fails me. I'm going to need to find a way to let her into my head soon. Whatever this thing is I'm trying to do, I know it can't be done alone.

The bartender returns with our drinks. Julie grins at me and Nora as we appraise the three tumblers of pale yellow nectar. 'Remember how when we were kids, pure grapefruit juice was the tough-guy drink? Like the whiskey of kiddie beverages?'

'Right,' Nora laughs. 'Apple juice, Capri Sun, that stuff was for bitches.'

Julie raises her glass. 'To our new friend Archie.'

I lift my glass an inch off the bar and the girls clang theirs down against it. We drink. I don't exactly taste it, but the juice stings my mouth, finding its way into old cuts in my cheeks, bites I don't remember biting.

Julie orders another round, and when it arrives she hefts her messenger bag onto her shoulder and picks up all three glasses. She leans in close and gives me and Nora a wink. 'Be right back.' With the drinks in hand, she disappears into the bathroom.

'What's . . . she doing?' I ask Nora.

'Dunno. Stealing our drinks?'

We sit there in awkward silence, third-party friends lacking the connective tissue of Julie's presence. After a few minutes, Nora leans in and lowers her voice. 'You know why she said you were my boyfriend, right?'

I shrug one shoulder. 'Sure.'

'It didn't mean anything, she was just trying to deflect attention away from you. If she said you were her boyfriend, or her friend, or anything to do with her, Grigio would've grilled the fuck out of you. And obviously if he really looks at you . . . the make-up's not perfect.'

'I under . . . stand.'

'And by the way, just so you know? That was a pretty big deal that she took you to see her mom today.'

I raise my eyebrows.

'She doesn't tell