Sunshine

So, where was I? Right. What you do when you know you have two days to live. Not a lot different than if you didn’t know. Six months you could do something with. Two days? Hmph. Eat an entire Bitter Chocolate Death all by yourself. (Actually I bombed on this. Mel had to eat the last slab. A pan of Bitter Chocolate Death isn’t very large, but it is intense.) Reread your favorite novel, the one you only let yourself read any more when you’re sick in bed. I might have enjoyed this more, since I’m never sick, if death didn’t seem like a very bad trade-off. Buy eight dozen roses from the best florist in town—the super expensive ones, the ones that smell like roses rather than merely looking like them—and put them all over your apartment. I bought five dozen red and three dozen white. I have one vase and one iced tea pitcher, which has regularly spent more of its time holding cut flowers than iced tea. After I used these, and the two twinkly-gold-flecked tumblers and two cheap champagne flutes plus the best of my limited and motley collection of water and wine glasses, I emptied out my shampoo bottle—which was tall and rather a nice shape, even if it was plastic—into a jam jar, and put a few in it. I cut most of the rest of them off at the base of the flower and floated them in whatever else I had that would hold water, including the bathtub. I decided this had been one of my better ideas. The last three—two red, one white—I tied together and hung upside down from the rear-view mirror of the Wreck. Better than fuzzy dice.

Take a good long look at everyone you love—everyone local; you’ve only got two days. And don’t tell anybody. You don’t need to be surrounded by a lot of depressed people; you’re already depressed enough for everybody.

Of course in my case I couldn’t tell anybody because either they wouldn’t believe me or they’d try to stop me.

I thought about being rude to Mr. Cagney. It was something I had been longing to do for years, and I somehow managed to be behind the counter on the second morning when he needed someone to complain to. But I looked at his scrunched-up, petulant face and decided, rather regretfully, that I had better things to do with my last morning on earth. So I said “mm-hmm” a few times, refilled his coffee cup (which he changed tack to tell me was cold: okay, I’m not Mary, but it was not cold) and left him to Charlie, who didn’t know it was my last morning on earth, and was hastening over from cranking down the awning to stop me from being rude.

Other things I didn’t do included waste any time trying to find out who’d planted that fetch on me. Yolande did a sweep on the Wreck for me and didn’t find anything but two new wards tucked under the front bumper and a ticker behind the rear license plate. She was quite taken with the wards, saying she was falling behind on research faster than she knew, that they were a whole new design of traveling ward and by far the most effective she’d seen. They had to be SOF too. An example of a large corrupt organization getting it right. She left all of them alone.

I had been hoping to see Pat. I could promise anything he liked for tomorrow or the day after that. But he didn’t show up, as he mostly hadn’t been showing up since the night we blew out HQ. He must be getting his cinnamon roll fix by white bakery bag. In a world where I was less and less sure of anything, I was sure that that jones was real. I was sorry not to have a chance to say good-bye, except of course I wouldn’t have said good-bye. When Mary came into the bakery to ask if there was anything hot out of the oven she didn’t know about to tell Jesse and Theo I said, carelessly, “Oh, I’ll bring it: I’ll try my new whatever-these-are on them.” I liked the idea of inventing a new recipe on my last day on earth, and I’ve always liked to see my guinea pigs’ faces when they first bite down. I said, “So, say hi to Pat for me,” and they both looked at me as if there was a hidden message, which there was, although I doubted they were going to guess it. They were distracted quickly enough by the whatever-these-were: I’d have to do the unthinkable and write out the recipe, so Paulie could have it. And maybe Aimil would come up with a good name. Sunshine’s Eschatology. Hey, my eschatology would have butter, heavy cream, pecans, and three kinds of chocolate in it.

I’d miss feeding my SOFs: they were good eaters.

I’d miss being alive.