I spotted them first, moon-clutching the air in Fallon & Byrne. The one who might’ve been a woman, alabaster hair, crimped jacket, sucking on black olives. Him, uncannily like a man. I was out on a date with Suzanne. Necessity had us there. There were genuinely few men left. Scientists, government lackeys, the muscle banks working the drone farms up at the Phoenix Park. Don’t look, I said. They’re definitely two. They can’t be, she said. They’ve all been rounded up. No, you don’t get it. They were there, at the table, gathered up their belongings, left, came back as if just newly arrived and began choosing from the menu all over again. Memory-mopped. She ignored me and looked around. Jesus fuck, she said. I’ve only seen the likes in photographs. I couldn’t get over it. Where were the Selectors? I looked around for the waitress. She was oblivious, fixing up bottles of organic wine on the counter. Lining them up like cavaliers. The vineyards in France and Italy were obliterated in the first strike. Everything was imported from Australasia now. We should follow them, I said. No, no time for that, she needed to get back to work. I picked at the salted almonds. I thought of pinching the sea salt from the miniature clay-pot, pressing the grains into her face, licking them off, making her moan. I loved her cushy moans. She was beautiful. She scared me. Her sharp-cut hair with its industrial bread slicer ends. Those Feminello eyes. Go! I said. Go! They’re on the move. She paid with her forefinger on the bannister chip and we ran up into the Nutriment Hall before they made it out of the lift. We fiddled with the vegetables so they wouldn’t notice us. They were black and soft. What do you think this was supposed to be? I asked her. It looked like it had tried its very best to be a relative of the courgette, once. She bent down and put the EVA foot gloves on over my boots and jeans. I did the same for her. You’re so pretty in the daylight, she said. You really are.

We stepped slowly through the purple disinfectant puddles, sticking closely behind, which wasn’t hard as they were just shuffling along. I’d never seen people to schlepp so slow, so awkwardly, bones playing spoons in subterranean insides. It takes a three-toed sloth a month to walk a mile, I said to Suzanne, but she was glaring up at the Zephyrs. Elliptical toilet seats hung there in the thousands, up in the baggy indigo, shat on by tawny irony. I no longer gave them credence, but I understood why she had to. All the clouds were gone. The woman clung to the peaky elbow of the man. His grey trench coat creased from being stuffed under gardening coats and high-rise trousers, perhaps, when gardens were still a thing. Back when we were insulated from any kind of climatic reality. The only gardens now were the communal hothouses in Donnybrook after it was razed, and out beyond the abandoned airport where the last of the indisposed wildlife was being micro-nursed. A dark plastic bubble umbrella covered their heads and shoulders even though the scheduled rains weren’t due for another ten days. Now and then, they’d pause on the pathway to smile at one another before scuffling off again. So tiny and tender a thing I started to bubble up. Don’t, said Suzanne. I hated when she instructed me what to feel. Why are they so familiar to me? I asked. She slapped me hard on the right cheek, the blast knocking me a bit. Grasping my shoulders, pushing me sideways against the window of what used to be a boutique before the planar mirrors and retroflectors went in. Her strength, always so sickening. I kept my head to the left so as not to lose them. The roads were clear and fat and unfurnished since the cars breathed their last. Breezeless air reeked of fried red onions. Those ugly purifiers, pouched out from charred rooftops to sanitise the city of inherited mistakes, had failed to eradicate so many typical things. You remember what I tell you to remember, she said. She bent in all knurly to kiss me. Soft at first. But her long whirring tongue had a habit of making me dizzy. I’m sorry, I said. Try not to sound so like a child, she said. In the crook of my eye I saw the man and woman slip through the door of Aqua Pura.

The night I was allocated Suzanne, not late one night, not in the middle of the countryside, but when they burst through our doors instead of landing, she stood in the hallway, biding some contrary clock. Gar had said shut the blinds, shut the day out, love, a microsecond before. We had not noticed the lights. Not that there was much to notice, flicking red and blue dalliances, no more dramatic than a large concert at the horizon-edge of another county or the acoustic zing on the earth’s atmosphere from an electrical storm. Gar’s underling Dermott and his new wife were due over for dinner. I experimented with a citrus dish first. Those newfangled pasta bows from Lidl, cooked off on a very hot pan with red chillies, olive oil and a heap of flat-leaf parsley, finished in the slippy juice of two fat lemons. It tasted oven cleaner rank. I was halfway through my second try: an anchovy recipe that began its élan vital by boiling white wine with chilli and garlic. It smells rough! Gar said. It does, it does! I said, but give it a mo’, when you add the stock and frozen peas, drop in the stinky little fishes and two hundred grammes of spinach, you’ll start to see the sense in it. As the conghaille boils, half the sauce mixture gets blitzed, then you fling in the cooked pasta. Voilà! Except I’d used coloured pasta ears and the squid ink fools turned the entire thing to swamp mulch, the type a JCB would yank up on the first day of a quick-build. I started to properly panic. Relax, Gar said, we can defrost some steaks in the microwave, stick on some baby spuds. The buzzer went at the same time as the banging started. Apartment doors clanged and thumped up and down the entire building, supervened by shrill terrible screams. Go see what the fuck, I said. There’d been some drug raids in recent months, but even this seemed excessive. I was nervous about meeting Dermott’s trade-in wife; the last one was a hatchet from Cabra. Then a disgusting succubus of sorts, my vision pierced with jellied white, the kind of stink-rubber when an egg overboils and farts out a white rug of evil throughout the water. Things, beings, floaters: black and buoyant, all over the sitting room. I am Suzanne, yer one kept saying, in the waft of background. I was shaking my head left and right, real hard, in an effort to focus. Gar on the floor, naked, squiggling. Maybe Dermott as well by that stage. I can’t be sure. Tall bronze pins swaying upwards out of pink pulled flesh, too many for even an abacus to enumerate. Unbelievable howls and writhing about. I could feel fire and brimstone rise from his body, burning my nostril hairs. When I tried to bend to offer some comfort, to let him know I was going to put a stop to all this any way I could, I saw that his eyes were inked in deepest black, phlebotomising unchartered horror. I’m calling the Guards! I roared, though the stratosphere was too clouded to find the phone. I managed, lead-footedly, to get to the window instead. Silver platoons of vans rounding up all the men. Spinning beacons and curdled chemical fog silting over the streetscape. I am Suzanne, she said, again. Shut the fuck up or I’ll knock the steaming shite right out of you, I screamed, with the entire Troy of what was left of my life-force.

I woke a few days later, sitting on a full-spin washing machine cycle on top of the tectonic boundary at the San Andreas Fault that had burst open. I was coming relentlessly; my body crushed in on itself. My fanny bone felt like it’d been pulverised by an articulated lorry. I was lying on the bed, abstrusely shocked. Suzanne had a small white machine attached to me down there, not unlike those Al-Fresco pancreases they dish out to hardcore diabetics. Please get it to stop, I begged. It’s revolting. I wasn’t the type to reach Crotch Nirvana so easily. Gar only managed to make it happen a few times a year. Strangely, around Easter, Christmas and sometimes on the eve of the summer solstice. I found the efforts to get there, embarrassing, quite frankly. It’s important I know every microscopic mechanism of your physicality, she said, if I’m going to halt cancers or provide you lasting pleasure. I didn’t need or want her to know anything about me, and definitely nothing as clandestinely non-public as my body. Where’s my husband? I asked. They were gone, she explained, all of them. It was a new epoch now, a changed world, literally. Projected motions had changed the planet’s map. Major quakes in the Cascadia zone melded some of the continents together. The UK was totally liquidated (and they were worrying about Brexit?). Explosions, not nuclear but Astro-Physical beyond our current technological imaginings. Fiercer and more destructive, but not as damaging to the atmosphere, across Europe, Russia and China. Mountain ranges: surplus to requirements. Some of the oceans sucked dry and previously thought-to-be-complex weather systems were being stringently controlled as easily as alphabet bricks by black blobs in space ships. It was utterly ludicrous and impossible to take in. Do you know anything about quantum entanglement? she asked. The separation of atoms, hidden variables, that kind of thing? I didn’t, I told her. Come on, it’s not that hard, she said, almost amused. Distant objects that are unable to influence each other in less than a certain amount of time, or reality, to you? I was one of those creative eejits in school, I explained, not venturing anywhere near the outposts of science and failing every maths exam I ever sat. It was all pure imagination with me. I rolled out of the bed, though the pins and needles from toenail to brain hadn’t stopped yet – I had to get away from her – and wobbled towards the sitting room in my lime slippers. It was really upsetting to see the dregs of the dinner party still there, Pompeii’d in time: the shot glasses of amaretto on the china cabinet, the Alice in Wonderland-themed chess set Gar had acquired on some business trip and that he’d hoped Dermott would get a laugh out of. I can’t recall much, I told Suzanne, after she followed me in. You’ve had a full brain purge, she explained. Designed to alleviate as much emotional pain as possible. What the fuck have they done with the men? I asked. Some of the encoded information in my head was retrievable still, clearly. They are being put to good use and they are content, she said. Bollix, I thought. I’d seen a rake of sci-fi flicks where men were stored in sausage-like container-skins, being achingly emptied of nutrients to feed some hellish cosmic mutant with a runny nose. I was amazed at how nonchalant and non-emotional I seemed. I couldn’t really feel at all. Every woman in the world is now designated a female companion, she told me. A poxy cyborg slut, I said. She seemed a bit hurt at my insensitivity. I want you to do something for me, she whispered, as she detached her vagina, placing it carefully on the glass coffee table where it instantly left a smudge. Get yourself acquainted with that, in your own time, and at your own pace. I’d never ever thought of frog-hopping to the other side, not once, and I’d known some stunningly beautiful women in my lifetime, particularly at university. I literally didn’t have it in me. Gar did say I’d make a great lesbian once, in the middle of a rip-roaring argument, after I’d been out on a gaggle of Repeal the Eighth marches. It’s alright for you! I roared back. You can afford a business class seat on Aer Lingus anytime one of your ladies requires The Nilfisk. He genuinely thought feminism was apocryphal, a fake concept. I picked up the vagina and gave it a brief sniff. I half expected it to whiff of sunbathing mackerels, but it was utterly odourless. If you don’t feel ready to stick a finger in, you could try a piece of dried fruit first, she said. Anger just totally welled up from the lower belly registers and I flung the fucking thing full blast across the room. It stuck to the chrome fridge, sluicing down the full length of it, thanks to whatever residual moisture had managed to survive.

Ludicrously, one of the few things to survive were cocktails, even though water itself was now as expensive as saffron. Spirits had a hint of cockroach about them, persevering amidst all the radiation and rottenness. I’ll have a mojito so, I said. Aqua Pura did the best mojitos in town. I loved gawking at her skinny ass when she was up at the bar, tucked so neatly behind large denim pockets. The man and woman were sitting opposite us, sipping some hot concoction that resembled tea. Here ye go, Ladycakes, Suzanne said. Her parochialisms were really marvellous. Their hard drives were complex and extensive, I had learned. Sometimes, during sex, I’d get her to shout at me in Archi, a rare subset of Russian only spoken by 1,200 souls on the edge of the Caspian Sea, in a small village called Archib. We’d been getting on so well for ten months now (or more) – she’d often confide in me about the real reasons why The Greenhorns had come to earth – and in return she agreed not to mention Gar and to purge my memory centres of his shenanigans regularly. It was just too upsetting and I knew he’d be okayish up there. Have you figured out why they seem so recognisable to you? I haven’t, I said, not a bogs, but I still can’t take my eyes off them. Look about you, she said, use that wondrous brain of yours. Apart from women, everywhere, what else do you notice about the demographic? Shit, yeah, there’s no old people, I said. No one over the age of forty-five. Correct, she said. And you do know, don’t you, that you too had grandparents once? I disputed this, rigorously. I’d remember something, a fragment, a splinter. A smell, a plate of hot scones with jam. A haphazard apple tree growing crooked out a suburban back garden. Afternoons watching cricket on the telly. Why would they be out at all then? I asked. Why would they risk it with Selectors on every street corner? It could be that they were in hiding, she said. Sometimes they give them a few hours to ramble about after they’ve been discovered, before reporting to one of the Euthanasia Stations. I had never been aware of this, I felt totally stupid that I had never considered the age thing. I also felt sick, increasingly sick by the millisecond. But worse than that, Suzanne was a prize cunt, she knew my grandmother had died recently and this scenario should never have come into it. She was sitting there smirking, always the upper hand. You’ve done this on purpose, I said. Is it because I asked you to take a precious day off work? You really are a bucket of shit, Suzanne. Ha! she said, ha! You were the one who chose them. I wanted to wait it out, pick people a bit more … interesting. And yeah, I did take yet another day off work, but you don’t get that, you with zero job or real responsibilities and a prick of a husband with a heavier bank account than brains. I was completely bored with her games. What a fucked-up twat. To be perfectly honest, without that vibrating glow-in-the-dark strap-on around her waist, she wasn’t all that. Though she relished the notion that she was automatically superior in the sack to me because she’d been with women before. You chose an alien enactment, which was grand at first for me, but you know I can’t stand science, can’t abide all that crusty environmental hippy end-days bollix. You could’ve picked something more genial, like Victorian Dublin or something. She started pissing herself laughing. Victorian Dublin! Oh, what, so you turn up in a horse-drawn carriage wearing a pair of cotton pantaloons under some puffed meringue of a dress! Her chair was completely rocking now with the moronic guffawing. She looked like the Laughing Policeman wobbling in its glass case at The Pleasure Beach in Blackpool. What did I ever see in her? I wanted to knock her snot in. And by the way, I said, you’re calling my husband thick but your ginger fuckhead is his gimp, and apparently, not much good at it. She paused for a moment; it was completely amazing to see that smarmy facial expression collapse like a basket of wet washing. Well at least Dermott still gives me the ride regularly, she said. I was up then, before I was even aware, a full mojito, including mint leaves all over her conceited mush and jacket. The old lady jumped up with a ‘good God’, some of it had reached that far. ‘Stupid bitches!’ her husband shouted.

Out on South William Street I saw her beetling like a mad thing, zigzagging through a throng of legs, banging her tatty second-hand Orla Kiely bag into anyone who tried to pass. It’s over, I thought. At least now it’s properly over. Gar would give it the you’re-late-again-pissed-again invective. I was no more in the mood for the fool. But I did feel an extrinsic sense of relief, overall. I wouldn’t be going there again, such risky shit, and I had a lot to lose. Plus, being brutally honest, women were definitely not my thing. The night they arrived at the apartment, the Gay Marriage referendum celebrations were just starting to kick off. A skyload of fireworks and thousands pouring out like warm treacle onto the streets. They were banging the doors throughout the building in celebration. There’s a couple of gay guys who live upstairs, I said, this is such a momentous moment for them, what a bloody coup! I’m Suzanne, she said. Dermott looked really proud, like wanky wanky proud. And yeah, she was steamingly gorgeous. Tall and blonde and gym-sculptured and brainy and loud. I’m Chrissie, I replied, shaking her hand. Gar had lined up amaretto shots to start us off and was busy making his trademark Kermit’s Piss cocktail to down next. Cripes, you have the best view of the city from this penthouse, Suzanne said. It was Gar’s turn to look proud. He valued material copiousness more than anything. I’m going to play devil’s advocate here for a moment, Gar said. Like, I understand how the men get it on, you know, the gay horn in the massage parlours down the river there, I can almost understand it. But what the fuck is lesbian sex all about, really? Dermott spat his drink out. Suzanne calmly replied, ‘Basically, boys, it’s when both people come.’ I leapt up off my chair to high-five her. We are definitely going out on the tear, I told her. And those two prats are not weighing us down. Gar looked like someone had stuck an acupuncture needle straight into one of his sweaty balls. Wow, you’ve got yourself a bit of a feisty filly there Dermott, Gar said. It was unusual to see Dermott so strategically silenced. Yeah, she scares the crap out of the men in Met Éireann, he said. It was a poor riposte and everyone knew it. Suzanne reached across to gently tap my glass, winked ever so slightly and smiled. Well, here’s to the gays, Gar said, standing up tall to deliver a dramatic formal toast. And whatever the fuck it is those lesbians get up to.