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Now she noticed that his hands were fists and his jaw was clenched tight.
“Is something the matter, Albert?”
“No. I’m fine.”
“I can imagine that coming back here—”
“No. All due respect, I don’t think you can imagine.”
By the time they crossed the line, he felt his lungs straining. He was taking air in forced gasps.
He saw the first buildings, very few intact anymore, most of them burned. And he saw, in memory, at least, himself with the life oozing out of him from bullet wounds, months earlier but so fresh in his mind. He remembered knowing that death was very, very close. He remembered the certainty that he would be extinguished.
“Would you like a bottle of water?”
He looked at the bottle. Stared at it. “I’m fine.”
“Are you hungry? It’s been a while since lunch.”
Lunch had been at a McDonald’s in Santa Barbara. It had been so clean. It had smelled like food. It had sounded happy and alive. In the bathroom, the toilet flushed. Water ran in the sink.
He had passed a trash can on the way back to his table and stopped just to look at it. It was full of food. Leftover burgers, the last few fries, smears of ketchup on cardboard. He’d had to hold back tears when he saw it.
“Candy bar?” Vicky asked, and held a Snickers out to him.
At that moment they slowed to turn off the highway and head cautiously, carefully, through recently bulldozed streets, toward the town plaza. That’s where the McDonald’s was. His McDonald’s.
A candy bar. People had killed for less.
“I used to sell rats to starving kids,” Albert said.
Vicky looked alarmed. “I wouldn’t say that to the camera.”
“No,” Albert agreed.
“You did what you had to do. You’re a hero,” Vicky said.
It took a while to set up the equipment
in the plaza. Albert would not get out of the vehicle. He made an excuse about enjoying the air-conditioning. About wanting to listen to the radio.
But as the afternoon wore on, they called for him to come onto the set.
The set.
They had cleaned it up inside. Not all the way, no, they couldn’t do that without weeks of work. But the debris, the filth, the pitiful decorations had been artfully rearranged. The service counter was gleaming incongruously. The menu had been uncovered and one panel replaced. The obscene graffiti had been cleaned off or painted over.
It was the sanitized version of the FAYZ.
He overheard the director talking to one of the cameramen. The cameraman was explaining that he couldn’t get a good long shot on the exterior because someone had set up a fake graveyard right in the plaza.
“Kids just playing around, I guess, but it’s morbid; we’ll have to get rid of it, maybe bring in some sod to—”
“No,” Albert said.
“We’re almost ready for you,” the director assured him.
“That’s not a fake graveyard. Those aren’t fake graves. No one was playing around.”
