Made in China Chapter 28

            I poured the serum in Zula Zane’s pretty mouth slowly and it gurgled down her throat. Before long her eyes opened and she was awake, though she couldn’t remember what had happened or how she got there. She smiled when I told her about Tattoo. She always liked him, she said though they had never met. She was stuck in 2013 well before the ordure hit the fan, when she was five and as peaceful and innocent as a baby bunny rabbit. I buried Chloe on the beach. Zula attended the funeral as did a few gulls. She wore a white dress and was beautiful beyond imagination. I asked her if she ever loved anyone and she said yes and told me all about her. All this way for a lesbian, I pouted to myself. “But she’s dead now,” she added rather plainly.

            Zula and I sat on the beach in the warm California sand. The water was choppy and the sky was still blood red and hopeless. Burying Chloe did not make for good conversation. It was clear that the beautiful Zula Zane was not in love with me and I was not in love with her either. I saw Francesca up the beach a ways walk directly into the ocean and she did not come back. I thought of Jana Olavstrauss for a moment. I thought of everything for a moment. I wrote on Chloe’s driftwood marker the only thing I could think to say: “Here lies truth.”

            “What will you do now?” Zula asked. Her face was thin and her lips plump. It seemed like an open invitation, a door to walk through. When love dies, can it be planted or is it as natural as the sun and the moon, and as old as the universe? I took the love gun out of my waistband and showed it to Zula. She was impressed and oohed the way a child would. She was easily impressed, it was clear.

            “If I zap you with this gun you will go out like a light for a moment but when you wake up you will have fallen madly in love with me. Do you believe that?”

            She smiled brightly. “Yes. I believe it!” She waited on me for a moment as I pointed it right at her heart as though it mattered where I shot her. She was also easily persuaded. “Well, do it! Please?!”

            I held the gun and had her in my sight. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, perhaps the most beautiful woman the world has ever known. She was all real, not fake, inside and out. There were no wires inside of her, no computer program, just blood and guts and real life emotions fired by a soul and a brain so complex that no scientist will ever duplicate. Her mother was Chinese and she was impervious to the Kitty, though she said, she had never been with a man because she was sure she was lesbian when she was six. I asked her what convinced her and she smiled and said, “God.” She said she only had sex with three women like it was some miraculous accomplishment on the lines of swimming the English Channel, or making the blind see with spit and dirt.

            I lowered the gun and tossed it as far as I could toss it into the horny Pacific Ocean. She looked at me bizarrely. “What did you do that for?”

            “Love is not science.” We walked away down the beach. The tide swept in touching Chloe’s grave behind us. The red sky turned colors and from a quiet spot further down the beach we watched the first sunset in a decade, gazed at the beautiful stars of a billion possibilities as though we had never seen them, and still were up for the sunrise. And then the world was good again.