25: George – Minimalism Therapy

Holden and Cheppard balanced themselves on the narrow span of wood, silhouetted against the clouds swirling miles underfoot while Holden rose to his. They held onto their handholds until the burst of wind died and the pressure equalized through the space the roof had left. Through the hole in the wall, next door’s attic reflected the view, sans the two men’s faceoff.

“There ain’t a snowman’s chance in hell I’m going back down there.” Eddie said. “You expect us to walk on that tightrope?”

“Eddie,” Holden said, looking up. “You shock me. There will be safely railings, after all.”

“Safety railings? Against a drop like that?”

Cheppard raised his arms. “Actually, I agree with Mr. Crayson. Come down. Stand where I’m standing. It puts our predicament into quite a refreshing perspective.”

“Fuck you, father loco!”

“I’m serious. Above us is chaos. There are bodies rotting in half the rooms, soon to breed disease. This building we’re in is already crumbling and we’ve been here just one day. What’ll the city be like in another ten? Call me crazy if you like, but if that’s the kind of fear and helplessness we have to look forward to, well, the view now looks far more crisp and inviting than it will when you’re bleeding and crying and being battered around inside a giant, plummeting coffin.”

A dozen eyes focused past him, to the wisps of clouds swirling through each other against the blinding sky.

“Cheppard’s right.” George said. “Staying here feels wrong. This structure wasn’t built to dangle.”

Cheppard bowed his head. “Glad to see you’re open to persuasion, my boy.”

“So me and Holden will put in safety rails. We need to get off this block as soon as we can. Anyone not stupid enough to fall, I’d appreciate it if you’d volunteer to knock through the next wall. If not, search the apartments for anything we can use in lieu of a sledgehammer. Those of you who don’t want to brave the apartments, come with me. We’re going across the street for the last of the scaffolding. Let’s get off this berg, people.”

Cheppard scowled and folded his arms. George stood from the huddle around the hole and nodded at the few faces who’d made eye contact. They followed him back to the bridge, and clambered up across the street for poles and clamps. Wendy, in the meantime, plucked the broadest shoulders from those who remained and lined them up against a wall.

“Okay, you guys look like big, strong men,” she said. “Even you, ma’am. So let’s take these doors one at a time and see if we can find something to smash through brick walls with.”

“What if we don’t find anything?” one said.

“Then I’ll be very, very disappointed. Besides, there might be food. We’ll need everything we can get.”

She gave her team of men and woman a mock salute, which they returned, and led them through the nearest door. The door was one unfortunately no longer under Cynthia’s blockade, and without fair warning, they ran back out seconds later.

“Oh, god, his face!” Wendy said, gagging. “He looks like the bloody attic guy from Hellraiser.”

I think that was his skin hanging from the bedpost.” One of the guys said, heaving next to her.

“Half of him must have been cemented to the floor.” Another chimed. “The other half must have been stuck to the bed when it fell. We don’t have to go back in, do we?”

Wendy spat and shook her head. “Let’s let him rest in peace. Try the next one.”

They followed her through the next door with more than a little hesitation, but this time didn’t run straight back out. A collective moan of disgust did echo from one room inside, but nothing else. Cynthia, and those who hadn’t followed, sat in a corner of the corridor and tried not to think about what could elicit that response. They said nothing until Jamie’s cats let out a plaintive meow.

“Are they alright?” Rhea asked him.

Jamie tickled Rover’s chin. “I don’t know. They’ve been fed and had a drink, and I threw their poo away.”

“I think they want out of the box.”

“Yeah, but they might get lost.”

Rhea watched Wendy’s volunteers leave the apartment empty handed.

“Hey,” she called out. “Is there anything in there the kid shouldn’t see?”

Wendy leaned back. “Only in one of the bedrooms.”

Rhea nodded her thanks and took Jamie’s hand. “C’mon, kid. Let’s give these guys some exercise. George’s gonna be coming through here, banging a lot of metal in a minute. Don’t want to scare these guys.”

Jamie followed her into the apartment, where she hurriedly shut the bedroom doors. Unfortunately, the angle she pulled at wasn’t right, and they swung open again as soon as she let go.

“Hey, kid? Keep you eyes on the floor while we walk past these, okay?”

Jamie obliged her and they went to the living room. Painted white from floor to ceiling, it was a temple to minimalism. It’s furnishings of a single sofa, a coffee table and an entertainment unit lay in piles across from each other in an otherwise bare room. With the lintels of the room providing a wall to the kittens, there was nowhere for them to escape, and a vapor barrier, visible through the melted plaster virtually sealed the room against the pocketed holes other apartments had in their walls.

“Here’s as good a spot as any.” Rhea said.

Jamie placed the box in the center of the room and joined Rhea in righting the sofa, yelping in surprise when it didn’t resist their movement. Jamie hoisted his end with an adult’s ease.

“Nothing is heavy anymore.” He said. “Everything’s really, really light.”

Rhea put her side down. “This must be how Neil Armstrong felt on the moon.”

“I’m kind of glad everything’s light, though. I don’t feel like I’m going to fall all the time.”

As he spoke, Rover fell out of the box. He tumbled to the floor with an indignant squeak as Fido popped his head up to see where he’d gone. Rhea flopped onto the couch and Jamie sat cross legged at the other end. Together they watched the kittens play and explore the room, sniffing and burrowing into the remains of the entertainment unit, a wooden self-build with what remained of a hundred inch TV. The owner might have been minimalist in the quantity of their possessions, but clearly enjoyed maximizing the quality.

“Why does your dad want us to kill ourselves?” Jamie said.

A smile threatening to break across Rhea’s face dropped. As icebreakers went, it wasn’t one she had to deal with before.

“I, ah, really don’t know.” She said. “I think he banged his head pretty hard when he hit the roof.”

“Is that why he’s acting crazy?”

“I really fucking hope so.”

Jamie nodded sagely. “What about your husband? Can he really make a bridge to the station?

“Well, he already built one to the chapel, didn’t he? And we used it to get here.”

“But the station’s two blocks away. We were only across the street. And we’re not heading towards the station, we’re heading uptown.”

“Don’t ask me about the details, kid. George is an idiot a lot of the time, but when he has a plan, I’ve learned to just go with it. They always sound stupid, but they always end up working.”

“Have they ever not?”

“No, but he does have a habit of making situations worse because he never knows when to stop. You have to help me stop him when he reaches that point.”

“Okay!”

Fido bounded over and jumped. He arced through the lesser gravity, as high as Rhea’s face, before landing straight into a nuzzle and a chin stroke on Jamie’s lap.

“This one seems to like being petted more than the other.” Rhea said.

“That’s why I named him Fido.” Jamie said “The one who likes to roam is Rover. They had a bitey brother I called Rex, but he drowned in the stone flood.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I hope he didn’t suffer.”

“My dad dived down to get him. But neither of them came back up, so my mom pulled me out of the house and made me climb onto a truck, but when I looked back, I couldn’t see her. Cynthia says she probably went back to find dad.”

He stared into the middle distance, watching the memory through hardening brows. Rhea pulled him into a hug and held him in her arms, stroking his hair in time with the strokes he gave the cat. Jamie didn’t cry, but she felt the slightest of trembles through her fingers.

“You poor kid.” She said. “If you ever need someone, anyone to talk to, you come find me, okay?”

Jamie nodded. “Will you help me find Rover?”

“I’ll help you find anything you need, sweetheart.”

“Because Rover’s not in the room.”

“Anything.”

Rhea gave him an extra squeeze and the most hopeful smile she could muster. Then frowned. She then panned around the room for the other cat.

“Wait, where is Rover?”

Jamie handed her Fido and went to the entertainment unit. He lifted it with ine hand, but there was no cat beneath it.

“He’s not in the room.”

Rhea placed Fido in the box and ran to the door. “He couldn’t have gotten out, the wall between the ceiling and the top of the door’s too high.”

“But Fido jumped high.” Jamie said. “Everything’s lighter.”

“Shit.” Rhea hissed.

She stepped over the lintel and listened for anything cat-like. George passed the open front door with several steel bars dragging behind him. When he saw her, her blew her a kiss. She shushed him.

“Okay.” He said, walking on. “Not the answer I was looking for.”

From across the corridor, Eddie gave her a smirk. “What’s up? Newlyweds already arguing?”

“Do you see one of the kid’s cats out there?” she said.

“Nope. Cat’s usually run away from all this banging and people, at least in my experience. Can I help?”

“Yeah, help me find the cat.”

She pushed open a side door and stuck her head into a perfectly preserved bathroom. It was pristine, unaffected by gravity, save for two fallen shower gel and shampoo bottles. It was tribute to cleanliness, but contained no kittens.

Eddie tried the door opposite and whistled. Rover sat on the upside of a bed Wendy’s crew had leant against a wall. He meowed sharply as Rhea clambered past Eddie to fetch him, and let her pick him up without a fuss. He purred with contentment, and then screeched when she dropped him.

Jamie followed the noise and found Rhea and Eddie staring at something around the corner. He stepped over the lintel to find two bodies intertwined, coated in a shell of now hardened plaster, and wrapped in each others arms.

“That’s Mrs. Fowle.” Rhea said quietly.

Eddie slapped a hand over Jamie’s face. “At least her and Mr. Fowle went out with a bang.”

Rhea shook her head. “That’s not Mr. Fowle. He works on an oil rig. This is Mr. Toro. I didn’t even know they knew each other. Not any more than as neighbors.”

“If Mr. Fowle was on an oil rig, why is she with Mr. Toro?” Jamie asked, pulling Eddie’s hand away.

“I think that’s between them.”

“But if she’s with another man, doesn’t that mean she’s a slut?”

Rhea whirled. “What? Who told you that?”

“My mom. She said a lady always waits for her man.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that, li’l buckaroo.” Eddie said. “If Mrs. Fowle’s husband is never there for her, she would have spent every day waiting for him. If another man gave her the time of day, then that’d be pretty damn attractive.”

“Don’t tell him that.” Rhea said.

“I’m not saying she jumped into bed with another man as soon as she could. That’s not how it works. Two people meet, they talk, they become friends and hang out and have fun. But one argument with the missing husband or wife, they pour their heart out to their new best friend who stuck by them for such a long time, that one person who actually listens to them and is always there with a shoulder to cry on. Appreciation turns to something more, maybe a little hesitantly, but sooner or later, they’ll make a decision.”

“What decision?” Jamie said.

“To either stop hanging out or progress into a more intimate relationship. She’d get the blame, of course. Get called a slut. Nobody ever thinks about the emotional turmoil she must have gone through to become one.”

“You sound like you’re speaking from experience.” Rhea said.

Eddie headed to the door. “And plenty of it.”

He left the room and Rhea ushered Jamie out after him, scooping Rover up on the way. Back in the lounge, Fido mewled beside the box, waiting for their return. He leapt into Jamie’s arms as soon as they reappeared in the doorway.

“I’m going to check on my dad and George.” Rhea told him. “Make sure they haven’t killed each other. Keep these two in this room and do not go back into the bedroom.”

She let Cynthia know which room Jamie was in on the way past, noting the lower number of refugees sitting in the corridor, and stuck her head through the attic hatch. Holden and George had been busy.

The sky still loomed underfoot, but as promised, Holden had built a safety barrier. Along the central beam were now rails leading through the hole in the wall. Her dad stood beneath her, glaring after the progress where Holden led construction of his latest monstrosity.

“Beep, beep! Coming through!” George called behind her.

She looked up and stood aside as George and another volunteer carried steel poles to the hatch. Eddie followed behind with a pillowcase full of clamps.

“Hey, babe.” George said, then shouted “Scaffold!” down the hatch.

“To me!” Holden called back, returning from next door. He held his hands up.

“To you.” George said, and handed them down one at a time.

“Hey,” Rhea said. “Let me help.”

She climbed down the stacked boxes and joined Holden and her father, both doing their best to ignore each other.

“Oh, darling, not you, too.” Her dad said. “Surely you can see this is madness?”

“What’s madness?” Holden said. “This be a simple enough concept. One simply walks along this central beam, ignores the infinite drop either side, and kicks at a wall on the opposite end until they’re tired or breaks through. Then swap out.”

Cheppard scowled. “Madness.”

“Actually, dad, I wanted to ask you a favor.” Rhea said. “That kid, Jamie? I think he could use your guidance right about now. He’s on the first door on the left.”

The Cheppard didn’t buy her ruse, but left anyway, weaving through George and his crew’s dismantling of the bridge that had got them there. They secured the shortening length with wires hooked into Rhea’s apartment, deconstructed its end bit by bit. When all the pieces were down in the attic, they found themselves with nothing left to do, and Rhea took George to one side.

“I just had to explain to a child why two married people were having sex.” She said.

George cocked his head. “Well, I know we’re not exactly following the traditional pattern with our own marriage, but generally when two people get hitched, they fuck.”

“They were hitched to other people.”

“Oh, and I take it their spouses weren’t present? I can see how that’d be a little difficult to explain.”

“It would have been a lot harder to explain if all four were there.”

“What’s hard about explaining adults have different kinds of parties?”

“That’s not the point! When he asked, I didn’t have any answers. I had to let that guy in the Hawaiian shirt explain it.”

“And did he do a good job?”

“Actually, yes.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

Rhea beat her fists on George’s chest. “I didn’t have the answers, George. Me, the one who’s got a baby growing in me right now. And that was after the kitten went walkabout! How are we going to handle a baby if the cat can get one up on me?”

“Is this a metaphorical cat?”

“George, what if the world is stuck like this forever? How are we going to raise a child here? What if I have to give birth without a midwife? These walls aren’t even solid anymore. They’re full of holes. We’re exposed. There isn’t even a nurse among us! Are any of us a doctor, George? Where do we get towels and boiling water?”

George backed away. “Maybe you should ask your dad all this. He’s trained to deal with, y’know, questions? Actually, the way he’s been behaving all day, maybe that’s not a good idea.”

“I left him babysitting in the minimalist apartment. I want answers from you.”

“George looked around. “What can I say? It’ll work out? We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it? What does your training tell you?”

George, you’re not helping!”

George tossed his head back and growled at the floor. “Look, right now, all I can worry about is getting us to somewhere, hopefully more stable that a building dangling over infinite space, so do me a favor. Help me get you there first. Then we’ll talk.”

Rhea gritted her teeth and swallowed an internal scream, but she followed George back to the attic. The wooden beams of each building’s roof hung suspended from the walls above by the petrified wood, reinforced by it’s own new chemical composition, and additional scaffolding props. Holden’s crew had taken the rest and reconstructed the bridge at the other end of the block, their final efforts visible through the tunnel of holes running the street’s length.

Rhea stepped off the steps of stacked crates, onto the makeshift skyway. As promised, Holden had added railings, and she gripped them hard as she followed George along it. Now she was on the beam, it didn’t seem so thin, but the sky below each side of her feet kept the illusion of safety safely in the realms of illusion.

“George, your services are demanded.” Holden said. “You need to work your cable magic from above us.”

He tossed George a roll of wires and positioned himself into the bridge.

“Got it.” George said, and climbed a ladder someone had conveniently left. Rhea followed him to the top floor of the last house on the block, where two volunteers waved in the midst of throwing furniture out the window.

On the floor above, George whistled out the window of a room even more minimalist than Mr. Toro’s. He dropped three lengths of cable to Holden, who grabbed the first and secured it to the end of the bridge, then shuffled lower, away from their eyes with the other two. George stood ready for his signal.

While they waited, another volunteer hopped into the room and excused herself past Rhea to throw a chair out the window next to her. They watched it sail away with the winds as it shrank into the clouds.

“I’ll never get tired of watching that.” The woman said, and threw out a vase.

“What are you doing?” Rhea said.

“Helping.”

She left the room, giving Rhea no real answer and reappeared a moment later, dragging a fridge. With a heave and a grunt, she hoisted it over her head and took it to the window. With an impressive effort, she tossed it out after the chair and vase, and Rhea and George joined her watching it plummet away.

“I love how light everything is!” she said with a cackle. “I feel like Supergirl!”

“Is there any particular reason you’re throwing everything out the window?” George said.

“We’re calling it minimalism therapy. It was your friend’s idea. Windy. She said if we get rid of everything inside the houses, then there’d be less weight for the buildings to hold up, so we won’t fall like that creepy priest said.”

“That creepy priest is my father.” Rhea said.

“Oh. Well you might want to find one who’s a little less doom and gloom. My parents’ had a father who ran a small church on the mainland. He was lot more optimistic.”

“Not that kind of father.”

A sharp whistle and a wave of a rag called George. He handed a cable to each woman and called a countdown without explanation. When he hit one, he heaved the cables back, and Holden’s team below pushed their handiwork out. Rhea and the other woman copied George before the cables went slack.

The bridge slid out from the last house with a screech of metal and rammed into the middle floors of lower dangling building across the street. George took all three cables and pulled as hard as he could, while below, Holden called for more or less lift while his team positioned the end of the bridge into a former window. The plaster and weakened brickwork around the edges crumbled on impact, but the bridge settled into its new home.

“Okay!” Holden called. “Head back along the walkway and take a single building each, call everybody inside and tell them we are leaving ASAP. Try not to leave anybody behind, since we may require more hands in the next phase, or for any reasons of conscience or morality that would otherwise plague you and affect your usefulness to the group.”

“This house already knows!” the woman called down. She danced out of the room to inspect for more survivors.

George caught his breath from the sudden exertion and clamped the cables to the window frame.

Rhea scratched her chin. “You know what? We need to take a register.”

“And I need to get my crew ready to dismantle the bridge again in a minute.”

“Good, collect their names for me. I want to get everyone organized.”

They descended back to the attic. George went down the ladder first, steadying it for her Rhea. She took her time, unable to take her eyes off the nonexistent floor through its rungs. When she was down, George offered her first place to cross the bridge, and they clambered down to survey their next location on their journey and plan out the next route.

“Why did we come this way?” Rhea said, looking up through the bridge struts at the road. “I know you can get to the station this way, but why couldn’t we just head back to the apartment Holden was in and head out the back?”

George pointed back at the way they’d come. “Your midrise is on the coast. It only goes five storeys up. The one we’re in now reaches up to eight. We can maneuver easier and that makes it safer. And gives us more room to construct a stronger bridge. And we wanted any other survivors along the street to see us heading here. Not much more effort to collect them from the block between yours and the station.”

“Look at you playing hero.”

“Actually it was Holden playing troll. Rescuing more people just to spite your dad. What’s with him, anyway?”

They reached the end of the bridge and crawled out onto a wooden floor.

“When I find out,” Rhea said. “I’ll let you know. This building doesn’t seem very solid.”

 “That’s why we chose it.” George said. “It’s prefabricated. The concrete walls mostly melted off, but that just reinforced the wood in the floors, and the steel girders they’re set into are better at holding us up than—”

A crash from the previous block boomed through the street, followed by innumerable screams. Crumbs of rock and dust broke off, cascading away into the breeze in a beige plume. The clambering of refugees across the bridge followed. They bent and filed down the triangle tube, spilling into the new building. Rhea and George helped them out one at a time, taking Jamie’s box to help him, helping Cynthia to her feet. Eddie and Wendy pulled and pushed Zeke respectively until he begrudgingly let George throw him into the corner of the room. The flow of people didn’t stop until all the houses were empty.

“What happened?” Rhea said.

Eddie, half bent and breathing slowly to calm his heart, pointed back at the first block. “That furthest apartment, the top one, the floor collapsed. Shook the whole block. We panicked.”

Rhea pushed two people aside to get a better view. “That’s my apartment!”

Her apartment crackled again, then with a snap, collapsed onto the one below. Like a stack of dominoes, they fell atop one another, finally resting at the bottom on Mr. Toro’s.

“I left your fichus in there.” George said.

A final crack answered them, and the mid-rise, along with the chapel, peeled away from the world. Like the fridge and chair and vase before them, they spiralled with the winds, whole buildings rendered weightless in freefall, and disappeared into the rolling clouds.

From the rest of the block, more popping and cracking snapped through the air. Then, standing alone at the opposite end of the bridge, the Cheppard’s voice echoed over.

“Do you still think this is coincidence, Mr. Crayson?”

Holden answered by facing George. “If we don’t secure those cables to this side, pronto, we’re going to lose our bridge.”

“I’ll get them, you secure them.” George said.

Rhea stood in his way. “Are you crazy? You’re not going back out there. What if it falls?” She ran to the bridge. “Dad? Dad, climb over! What are you doing? You’re going to get yourself killed!”

“I’m leading by example, dear.” he shouted.

George leaned out next to Rhea. “Damnit, Cheppard, make yourself useful for once! Just go and untie the lines and we’ll drag you over with the bridge.”

“Oh, as I walk through the valley of the shadow of death—”

“Dad, you’re not in a valley, you’re in an attic!”

“—an upside-down attic, dear. Same shape as valley. I fear no evil. My rod and staff, they comfort me. Wait, I’ve never actually owned a rod or staff.”

“For fuck’s sake.” George grumbled.

He ducked into the bridge tunnel and climbed back to the crumbling block. Cheppard simply stood, ignoring all pleas for sanity, holding his hands together in prayer while his neighborhood collapsed around him.

George reached the other side and shook him. Cheppard’s eyes opened but he didn’t stop chanting. George growled and ran for the ladder. He unclamped the cables and threw them out the window, then slid back down and out onto the bridge, this time on its outside. He gathered the cables and tossed them up to Holden.

“Cheppard, we are leaving!” he shouted.

Cheppard didn’t respond.

“Dad!” Rhea screamed. “Please!”

Cheppard bowed his head and spread his arms and lifted one foot over the edge. A collective gasp and cries of “Don’t!” and “He’s mad!” burst from the group, but the Pastor didn’t stop. Without hurry or hesitation, he let himself fall.

Straight into George’s fist.

“Sorry, padre.” He said, yanking Cheppard’s collar. He dragged the bewildered pastor onto the bridge and yelled at everyone watching to pull. They stood is stunned silence, absorbing what they’d seen until Rhea grabbed their end.

“He said pull, damn you!”

The spell shattered and the survivors snapped into focus. They grabbed the edges of the bridge and yanked it backwards, back through the spaces once occupied by walls, hauling in the pastor and the builder until Rhea could wrap her arms around them both and sob and hit and yell at them.

Holden and his two volunteers ran back to find the scene in silence. His best friend lay in the arms of the woman he loved, hero to her and all those around him, the son in-law the Cheppard didn’t deserve. The Cheppard, for all his talk, pushed everyone away, including his daughter, who sobbed into George’s arms. Cheppard glared at Holden, then at George.

“You don’t deserve my blessings, boy.” He said.

“Fuck you,” Holden said. “After what you just pulled George deserves a medal. You ought to be applauding him.”

Clap, came a clap.

It was followed by another.

Then another. A slow applause from three pairs of hands in the shadows.

Holden and the survivors looked back, and then stepped away as the clappers stepped into the light. Holden’s face paled.

“Now that,” a familiar face said, “Was some grade-A action shit, straight outta the flicks.”

“Could’ve done without the soppy stuff at the end, though.” said another

“Alex?” Holden said. “Otis? You’re alive.”

“Why, bless me,” Alex said. “Is that cousin Holden? What could be the chances of meeting the final member of our dear little family here of all places?”

Holden stood slowly. “Final member?”

Otis picked at his cuticles with a stiletto knife. “How grand. A family reunion, just when our whole world had turned upside-down. Warms the heart, doesn’t it, dad?”

From behind his kids, Lenny Crayson, wife on his arm, walked up to Holden.

“It’s been a while, boy.” Lenny said.

Lenny and Yvonne Crayson held out their hands. Everybody in the room took their cue from George, doing their best to fade into the background as Holden looked at the outstretched hands and didn’t take them.

Their hands were already full with guns.