He met her in a bar in New York City the night before the Lockdown hit.

Outside the bar, the downtown streets brayed with energy. Those who walked out there did so as a self-selecting crowd, willing to break curfew, risk arrest, fall down drunk, get laid, catch the God-damned Tehachapi Flu and die, all in one fell apocalyptic swoop.

It was the night before the pandemic closed down an unflinching pit bull of a city, with shelter-in-place orders two weeks old, and much stricter orders set to go into effect at 6 a.m. The bars closed at 4 a.m. in Manhattan. It felt like a sign to him, to her, to everyone who took their life in their hands to venture out into the dark and a reckless final night of freedom.

Close down the bars at four, plenty of time to be home by six.

It seemed like fireworks filled the sky, though the only thing that shone over them was the glare of streetlights, and the feeble glow of the moon.

Josh staked out a slot at the bar early, sucked down a beer and a couple shots immediately, then hit the brakes a little and coasted on fumes. He noticed Zoe dancing right away, her blissful, sunny face popping in and out of view behind the otherwise faceless crowd of people between them.

He stared in her direction, rewarded every few seconds by the sight of her smile. He didn’t mind the short waits between sights.

She came and sat down next to him when she finished dancing.

“You’ve been watching me.”

“Well, yeah,” he replied.

“Why?”

“You’re pretty,” he said, and he saw her face crumple a little, as if disappointed by such a boiler-plate answer. He answered a little more honestly. “I like your eyes. I like you smile too. What I really like is that your smile shows up in your eyes.”

Sure enough, right on schedule, the smile appeared, flashing in her eyes like sunlight on water.

“Look out there,” he said. “Where people are dancing.”

She looked.

He said, “Look at their faces. People are smiling and laughing and flirting. But only on a precious few do you see their smile inside their eyes.”

“And I’m part of the precious few?” she said.

“No. Not just you. There are two kinds of people, those whose eyes show their smiles and those who don’t. Their faces are dead.”

The statement left her momentarily speechless. He figured he might not ever get another chance. He kissed her. 

She returned the kiss with pre-apocalyptic enthusiasm. She took him by the hand, stood, and wordlessly led him from his stool to the back door of the bar and into the alley.

She pressed him against a Dumpster and said, “Let’s try that again,” but he was already fumbling with the buttons of her blouse as his lips found hers. He peeled her shirt off her shoulders and kissed his way across her jawline and down onto her neck. When he took her breasts in his hands and rolled her nipples against his thumb and forefinger she collapsed against him. He pinched and pulled, she moaned and mewed. When he roughly flipped her around and pushed her against the Dumpster, she arched her back, presenting her ass. He lifted her skirt and entered her slowly, savoring the giddy insanity of the moment.

As they consumed each other, revelers prowled the streets. Mostly young, mostly drunk, mostly in pursuit of a sexual tangle similar to the one happening against the Dumpster. Josh had been wrong: their faces were not dead. If anything, their eyes and mouths seemed afire with color and energy, painted with life, desperate for connection, wild with need.

He came inside of her, and they both fell against the cold metal of the Dumpster. The noxious smell of the trash inside of it was only now beginning to reveal itself.

She pulled back from him. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “Take me home and fuck me like it’s the end of the world.”

He did.

It was.

#

The apartment smelled like small dead animals.

They’d been inside her tiny apartment on the Lower East Side for three months, since that first night of the Lockdown.

A neat stack of used pizza boxes and empty Chinese food cartons towered in the corner of the room.

The windows were closed, as they nearly always were, so a lingering scent of decay, along with many other smells, had gathered and prospered during the last several weeks.

It was their literal window to the outside world. The occasional car whooshing by, nearly always too speedily, windows invariably closed, doors certainly locked. The people in the windows of the apartment buildings across the street watching them with dull intensity.

Every great once in a while, a pedestrian walked down the sidewalk four floors directly below them. It was illegal to be out on the street without a pass. Whenever they saw someone, Josh and Zoe spent hours discussing why these people were out on the streets, examining their clothes, their gait, their body for possible clues.

They shouted down questions down to the figures walking below them. They never got an answer. Usually people just started walking faster. 

They were bored often.

They fucked all the time.

All. The. Time.

When they weren’t fucking they played dumb games to pass the day.

“Your turn,” he said. “Fuck, marry, kill. Ryan Gosling. Idris Elba. Margot Robbie.”

She kicked at him playfully from her side of the bed. “Thanks for throwing me a girl this time.”

“Anytime. Quit stalling.”

“Okay. Kill Ryan Gosling. Always kill Ryan Gosling. That one’s easy. Then, let’s see, Idris Elba, I gotta marry him. So I guess I gotta fuck Margot Robbie.”

“I’d fuck her,” he laughed.

She kicked at him again, less playfully this time. “Too late. You’re fucking me. I’ll tell you what, though: if she shows up at the door, you can have her.”

“Cool. Your turn.”

She took a deep breath. “Okay. Fuck, marry, kill. Zendaya. Ariana Grande. And...um...let’s go with Sidney Sweeney.”

“Ariana Grande?”

“Yes.”

“Who am I, a twelve-year-old girl?”

She laughed. “You think she’s hot. You said so.”

“I saw her on TV once; she looked hot, I dunno. I don’t know enough to kill her or marry her.”

“Better fuck her then,” said Zoe.

“Fuck her I will. Marry Zendaya, of course, because you’re like required to marry Zendaya. And I guess I’ll kill whoever’s left.”

“So you’re gonna kill Sidney Sweeney because she’s all that’s left?”

“Hey, she probably deserves it. I don’t have strong feelings either way. Gotta kill someone.”

“Jesus. That’s kinda harsh, huh?”

“Yes,” he agreed. “It’s a little harsh.”

It was more than a little harsh, he knew.

“Maybe not so much with the word games about killing people,” she said.

A silence fell.

The sound of someone coughing on the street below them broke the stillness of the night.

They both looked instinctively to their masks on a table by the front door.

The pleasant vibe they’d created leaked out of the room like helium leaving a birthday balloon. They both looked out the window instinctively: the empty streets, the people trapped in their own apartments.

She uncurled from her side of the bed and wrapped herself against his side. He dropped his arms around her and held her tightly, her face to his chest. After a time, she lifted her head and looked up into his eyes.

He kissed her. The kiss lasted deep into the night.

When the kiss finally ended, the window had filled with darkness. The city didn’t light up the streetlights anymore, so the only light that made its way back into the room from the outside was from tiny points of individual lights: the table lamps in the apartments across the street, the headlights from passing cars. 

Josh heard the ambulance from a long way away. He listened as the siren came and went, blown toward him, then away, with the vagaries of the breeze. It trended more toward than away.

When the ambulance was blocks away, he raised up on one elbow, careful not to wake Zoe sleeping beside him. He saw others on the far side of the street watching out the window along with him. Some made eye contact; most did not.

The lights of the ambulance showed up before the rig itself, blues and reds ricocheting off the plate glass windows like bullets. As the light intensified, the sound did too, until the ambulance came roaring down the street. The watchers from the windows drew back as if frightened, unwilling to expose themselves to further calamity.

Their faces looked dead, blank with worry.

Josh wondered what was considered an emergency in these benighted times.   

The ambulance blew down the block and left his sight, alarms Dopplering abruptly lower as it passed. He listened to the sound drift away on the breeze until it was gone.

He looked down to see Zoe awake, watching his face, alert.

“Everything okay?” she asked.

“Marry me,” he said, suddenly earnest.

“What?”

“Please? Please. Will you marry me?”

Her eyes searched his. With limitless calm, she said, “Yes. Of course.”

He said, “So much is out of our hands. So much of our lives have been confined to this room. Four walls and us. You give me the gift of a larger world. I look at you, and I see all of it. I look at you and remember it and am given the faith that it’s all still there, somewhere.”

He jumped from the bed, suddenly energized. Scouring the room for something appropriate, he found the tie to an old bread bag and fashioned it into a ring and knelt before her. And of course by now she knew his question, and of course by now he knew her answer, and so after he asked and after she answered they collapsed on the bed together, sticky skin pressed together, limbs intertwined, hearts bruised and weary and relentlessly alive.

#

“You won’t taste it,” he told her.

“How do you know?” she asked. “It’s not like you can taste-test it.”

“No.” He regarded her. “It’s what I heard. The person who told me how.”

After a moment passed, he said, “Cork, I think. She said something about it tasting like cork.” 

They studied the two wine glasses on the coffee table in front of them. The sun shone through the front picture window and onto the coffee table, lighting the wine glasses, highlighting the slightly altered color of the wine inside.

Beyond the glass of the picture window ran the East River, and beyond that, the ruins of Manhattan.

Zoe began to speak, but was interrupted by a bout of violent coughing from Josh.

When the coughing had subsided, she said, “Do you want some tea?”

“No. It’s okay. I think it’s passed.”

“Are we in a hurry?”

“No. Of course not.”

She cleared her throat and said, “Because I like it. Here on the couch. Me and you. Sun shining through the window.”

“We can wait,” he offered.

“How long? How long can we wait?” Josh did not respond, and in the vacuum, Zoe said, “Do you remember our first night?”

“That last night in Manhattan? Before the Lockdown dropped?”

“Our first night together was the last night of the world.”

He took her hand. “Don’t say that. It wasn’t the last night of the world. We lived together for nearly thirty years after that. The world found a way to carry on for all that time.”

She nodded to the picture window and the world outside it framed, the leaning buildings, the downed bridges. “The world’s carrying on? Look outside.”

“Look inside. Look at us.”

“There are no birds out there. No cats. No dogs. No squirrels. Do you even remember squirrels?”

Slowly, and with some consideration, he said, “I remember.”

The lines of her mouth turned wistful, then curled up at the edges into a grin. “Do you remember Netflix?”

He laughed. “Yes! I remember Netflix. Wow. Netflix was fun. All you had to do was push a button, and you’d see a movie. Do you remember that thing where if you weren’t with someone but wanted to watch something together, you’d call them up and pick out a movie on Netflix and hit ‘play’ at exactly the same time?”

“I did that! You’d always have to count down. Remember the countdown?”

Together they shouted, “Three, two, one, play!”

They laughed. She leaned her head against his shoulder.

“It’s stupid I miss something so goofy,” he said. “But I do.”

“Me too. I miss stupid stuff. Meaningless stuff. I wonder why that is?”

“I dunno,” he said, “but you’re right. You know what I miss? Interstates. Driving. Back before all the roadblocks went up. And the states all shut down their borders. You could drive all night. Remember?”

“I remember.”

“All night long. We never got to do that together, did we? A road trip? Fill up the tank for forty dollars….”

“...Forty dollars for a tank of gas….”

“...and get in the car and drive the tank dry. Pull into a gas station, fill her up again, get a Red Bull and a microwave burrito and get in the car and keep on driving. It doesn’t even seem real. I miss it. I miss it so much.”

“Me too, love.” She sighed. “I miss all of it.”

Her sigh caught in her throat and turned into a cough. She hacked away for several minutes as he held her, and gently patted her back.

When she recovered, she said, “Our first night. That last night. I imagined that the sky was full of fireworks. Even now, looking back, I remember the sky being filled with fireworks.”

“We made our own fireworks.” He smiled.

“Don’t be corny,” she said, but she shared the smile. “Do you remember your line to me that night?” 

“I do,” he said. She nodded to him to repeat it. “I told you I could see your smile in your eyes.”

“You did.”

“I could.”

“And you pointed out all the other people at the bar. You said there were two kinds of people. The kind of people who show you the smile in their eyes.

“And the kind of people who don’t,” he finished.

“Do you still think that?” It was a genuine question.

“I think...I think it’s the kind of simple thing a twenty-year-old boy says. I don’t think there are two kinds of people. I think there are lots of different kinds of people. Some people show you their smile in their eyes. Some people show you their fears. I look in your eyes and I see everything. Your smile. Your fears. Your...everything.”

“Kiss me,” she said, and they removed their masks and he pressed his lips against hers. The kiss stretched across the afternoon.

When it ended they left their masks off. They watched the last of the light leak in through the picture window, coloring the wine glasses that had been sitting in front of them for hours now.

“You give me the gift of a larger world. I said that to you. When I proposed. Do you remember that?”

“Of course. Of course I do.”

“It’s true,” he told her. “I see a larger world with you. Even when the world is no longer there. It was true then. It’s true now.”

The sun disappeared over the rim of the Earth. The world beyond the glass went dark. No streetlights anymore. No porch lamps.

He stood and lit a single candle on the coffee table. Light and shadow played on the walls like ghosts. The flicker of the flame danced in the complex optics of the wine glasses.

“Cork, huh?” she said. “It tastes like cork?”

“That’s what I was told.”

“How long?” she asked again. “How long can we wait?”

He said, “We can wait as long as we want. It’s our life. It’s our time.” 

“Let’s hold off a little longer, then,” she told him.

“Alright,” he said.

They waited together, patiently, hand in hand.