Sole Survivor

“They cops?”
        “Not really.”
        “Cause I support the cops. They got a hard job these days, trying to uphold the law when the biggest criminals are some of our own elected officials.”
        Joe shook his head. “These aren't any kind of cops you've ever heard of.”
        Fittich thought for a while, and then he said, “That was an honest answer.”
        “I'm being as truthful with you as I can be. But I'm in a hurry. They probably think I'm in here to call a mechanic or a tow truck or something. If I'm going to get that Suburu, I want it to be now , before they maybe tumble to what I'm really doing.”
        After glancing at the window and the bus stop across the street, Fittich said, “They government?”
        “For all intents and purposes-yeah.”
        “You know why the drug problem just grows?” Fittich said. “It's because half this current group of politicians, they've been paid off to let it happen and, hell, a bunch of the bastards are even users themselves, so they don't care.”
        Joe said nothing, for fear that he would say the wrong thing. He didn't know the cause of Fittich's anger with authority. He could easily misspeak and be viewed suddenly as not a like-thinker but as one of the enemy.
        Frowning, Gem Fittich made a Xerox copy of the driver's license. He returned the laminated card to Joe, who put it away in his wallet.
        At the desk again, Fittich stared at the money. He seemed to be disturbed about cooperating-not because he was worried about getting in trouble but because the moral dimension, in fact, was of concern to him. Finally he sighed, opened a drawer, and slid the two thousand into it.
        From another drawer, he withdrew a set of keys and handed them to Joe.
        Taking them gratefully, Joe said, “Where is it?”
        Fittich pointed at the car through the window. “Half an hour, I probably got to call the cops and report it stolen, just to cover myself.”
        “I understand. With luck, I'll be where I'm going by then.”
        “Hell, don't worry, they won't even look for it anyway. You could use it a week and never get nailed.”
        “I will call you, Mr. Fittich, and tell you exactly where I left it.”
        “I expect you will.” As Joe reached the open door, Fittich said, “Mr. Carpenter, do you believe in the end of all things?”
        Joe paused on the threshold. “Excuse me?”
        The Gem Fittich who had emerged from the chrysalis of the cheerful salesman was not merely harder edged and edgier; he also had peculiar eyes-eyes different from what they had been, full of not anger but an unnerving pensiveness. “The end of time in our time, the end of this mess of a world we've made, all of it just suddenly rolled up and put away like an old moth-eaten rug.”
        “I suppose it's got to end some day,” Joe said.
        “Not someday. Soon. Doesn't it seem to you that wrong and right have all got turned upside down, that we don't even half know the difference any more?”
        “Yes.”
        “Don't you wake up sometimes in the middle of the night and feel it coming? Like a tidal wave a thousand miles high, hanging over us, darker than the night and cold, going to crash over us and sweep us all away?”
        “Yes,” Joe said softly and truthfully. “Yes, I've often felt just that in the middle of the night.”
        The tsunami looming over Joe in dark hours was of an entirely personal nature, however: the loss of his family, towering so high that it blocked the stars and prevented him from seeing the future. He had often longed to be swept away by it.
        He sensed that Fittich, sunk in some deep moral weariness, also longed for a delivering apocalypse. Joe was disquieted and surprised to discover he shared this melancholy with the car salesman.
        The discovery disturbed him, because this expectation that the end of all things loomed was profoundly dysfunctional and antisocial, an illness from which he himself was only beginning to recover with great difficulty, and he feared for a society in which such gloom was widespread.
        “Strange times,” Fittich said, as Joe had said weird times to Barbara a short while ago. “They scare me.” He went to his chair, put his feet on the desk, and stared at the ball game on television. “Better go now.”
        With the flesh on the nape of his neck as crinkled as crepe paper, Joe walked outside to the yellow