“The power’s out,” Rivi says, on the other end of the phone line. “My madness is beginning to set in.”
“Your madness set in years ago,” I say. “That ship has sailed, hit an iceberg, sunk, and was swallowed by a sea monster way before today.”
“Don’t make fun of me,” she says. “I’m a delicate flower right now.”
“I apologize. Sincerely. With much sorriness. So much of it. Maybe you should call the electric company while your phone still has a charge, instead of wasting it talking to me.”
“You’re the one who lives in the woods, Sebastian,” Rivi says. “I thought you might have some tips or something to help me survive.”
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you. Out here, we have a generator, and a couple of cans of gas in the shed.”
“I don’t have a shed,” she says. “Or a generator.”
“Of course you don’t. Nobody in an apartment in San Francisco has a generator.”
“I barely have an apartment. It’s all in boxes, Sebastian. Boxes. This is worse than living in a Stalinist gulag.”
“I’m sure it’s not that bad,” I say.
“It’s bad. So bad. So very, very bad.”
“I see you didn’t pack your drama up yet, at least.”
Rivi ptthbts. “I’m dying from lack of electricity and all you can do is pick on me.”
“You need to toughen up a little bit before you get here. You’re going to lose power where you guys are at the new place. There’s no escaping it. How long has your power been out right now?”
“Forever,” she groans. “Fifteen minutes, at least.”
“Fifteen.”
“At least.”
I sigh. “First storm we had after we moved here, it was a week before the power company hooked us back up again.”
“I. Will. Die.”
The house creaks around me, and I look out the window, watching the birch trees bending in the wind of the latest incoming storm. “You won’t die. Boone and Tina will have a generator.”
“Is it too late to change my mind about this whole moving thing?” Rivi asks.
“Well, did you give your landlord your notice on the apartment?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s too late. You’re stuck.”
She groans again. “When I’m dead, cremate me and keep my ashes in a box next to all the ones that have your dead cats in them.”
“I swear, you’re not going to die.”
“An ash party,” she says. “Put my hand in a little plaster mold and set it next to the kitty paw prints.”
“Rivi, hang up your phone and go for a walk. Go to the beach. Do something that doesn’t involve electricity.”
“I could sit here and cry,” she says. “Like a sad girl in the twelfth century.”
“Do you have the plague?” I ask. “Do you have cholera? No, you do not.”
“I might.”
“Rivi, you do not. Hang up the phone. Go look at the ocean. You might not see the Pacific for a while after you move. Might as well get your fill of it while you can.”
“They didn’t have the Pacific in the twelfth century,” she says. “More things to cry about.”
The house creaks again, and a swirl of fresh falling snow blows past the window. “Rivi, I have to go make sure the generator is gassed up. There’s a storm coming in.”
“No antibiotics, no electricity, no Pacific Ocean,” she says. “Just the plague and cholera and the Spanish Inquisition.”
“They didn’t have the Spanish Inquisition in the twelfth century either.”
“I shall go to the ocean and just keep walking out into it until the waves cover my head and I am consigned to the deep.”
“Rivi,” I say.
“Sebastian,” she replies.
“Please don’t forget to pack your drama before you move. It would be a shame for you to leave it behind.”
“Don’t worry,” she says. “You know me. I can always make more.”