01: The New Normal

Written to Subterranean Homesick Alien by Radiohead

It all began with an unexpected drop in temperature and snowflakes floating down to the ground in mid-summer Texas. People thought it was a local one-time phenomenon – a weird glitch in the atmospheric system some experts would say – but it changed when planes of ice stretched over the undulating badlands near Zabriskie Point while the mangrove forests at the shores of Biscayne National Park morphed into boreal biomes. Up north, showers of rain turned into harsh blizzards, and it didn't take long until the first wave of existential fear came crashing down on millions of American citizens because gone were the days of backyard barbeques and overcrowded swimming pools. Gone were the days when GM foods weren't a necessity, and gone were the days when mankind took pride in calling itself the very pinnacle of evolution.

They started to pop up at random places. Playgrounds, road junctions, parking lots, and public restrooms. It was confusing at first, creepy as fuck because one minute you were busy scraping the ice off your car window or taking out the trash, and next thing you knew, a naked stranger was lying at your feet, curled up into a foetal position, howling like a wounded animal, teeth clattering, limbs quivering, and eyelids fluttering with disorientation.

The first newcomer – a lanky female one with a bowl cut, who was later named Jadis by the operating coroner – died right at the spot when it landed in garbage compactor in upstate Michigan. The whole incident kicked off a huge debate about workplace safety that came to nothing once the autopsy report showed that the intruder might've looked like a human being, but, in fact, had more in common with whales and dolphins in terms of DNA and brain structure. As a result, the Department of Extraterrestrial Affairs and Prosecution was founded while more stories about unseasonal freeze-ups and humanlike-looking non-humans falling from the sky in London, Mombasa, Sydney, and Beijing hit the headlines.

Subsequently, the internet became a swap meet for conspiracy theorists: Some believed that the newcomers had arrived with invisible spaceships, some believed they were actors, some others believed they'd been bred in a secret laboratory deep down in the underground lairs of the Pentagon or the Lubyanka. Some believed that irregardless was an actual word, and some others believed that bananas, gravy, and sugar sprinkles made up for a delicious food combination.

None of that seems to matter these days because the newcomers have been around for a while now and people like Rick Grimes get paid to keep an eye on them.

His job involves doing paperwork. Lots of paperwork that keeps him trapped in his stuffy office for eight hours a day. As Alexandria's Chief Supervisor, Rick has to write weekly reports for the local government, his superiors at the DEAP as well as the DHS and the FBI – knowing full well that said reports usually end up in the file shredder without ever being read. He also has to reach out to the authorities and make an application whenever one of his newcomers – say, Carol Peletier – wants to renovate their bedroom because buying a power drill is now a matter of national security – at least when your ID card says that you're an Extraterrestrial Asylee.

It's a bad joke, it's fucking ludicrous: 60 per cent of Earth's total land mass is held hostage by a glacial period that has zoologists, climatologists, and agricultural advisors collectively pissing their pants, and here's the government continuously hitting the panic button due to a couple of unexpected immigrants.

Granted, there've been some incidents in the past. There've been some violent newcomers. Gareth Goya from Terminus for example, who'd deemed it necessary to kill and eat 18 innocent people, or Negan Scott, who's going to spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement because he'd thought it'd be fun to steal some kid's baseball bat and use it to bash his supervisor's head in.

Most of them are harmless, though. Most of them don't even know what's going on when they're moved to a joint community. They just go with it. They get a house, a job, an identity. They don't ask any questions and they don't fight back. They seem to be a-okay with living under the illusion that the restrictions and preventive measures – the curfews, the weekly medical examinations and psychological evaluations, the implanted tracking transmitters – are a benefit to their own safety… which is a huge fucking lie of course.

"Good Morning, Chief!"

Cut off from his grim reverie, Rick squints at the burnt-out end of the cigarette that's dangling between his index and middle finger. It's a bad habit he developed when he moved here, initiated by a subtle urge to socialise with his co-workers and then intensified by the treacherous appeal of habitualness. Often enough, he's catching himself thinking I can quit anytime when, in truth, he knows that it's not a matter of ability, but a matter of willpower. And maybe that's the problem.

He sighs, tosses the stub into the overstuffed floor ashtray that's set up next to the town hall's entry, and steers his attention towards the lean figure that's approaching him from the other side of the frost-glazed frontcourt. The squelch of muddy slush has long turned into a familiar tune, insetted into the shambolic tapestry of monotonous traffic noise. It's background music, trivial and ubiquitous enough to give him a headache every now and then.

"Morning", he replies by the time Councilman Michael "Mike" Anthony and his guide dog Dre – a chocolate brown Labrador Retriever with a perpetually curious expression – have reached the smoking zone, "You're pretty early today."

Mike pulls a squashed pack of Morley Lights out of his coat pocket and exhales a cloud-shaped chuckle that sidles through the air, rising and soaring until it's pierced and shredded by a broad phalanx of hyemal sunrays.

"You know me", the Councilman says, adjusting his oval-shaped sunglasses and mumbling his thanks when Rick assists him in lighting his cigarette, "I have three talents: phrasemongering, being a hopeless overachiever, and knowing your smoking break schedule by heart."

"Right."

Rick smiles to himself as he bends down to scratch the top of Dre's head, prompting the dog to waggle its tail with wild enthusiasm. Despite all the tragedies that have shaped his life – growing up in the system after his parents died in a car crash when he was just 4 ½ years old, and losing about 80 per cent of his vision due to diabetic retinopathy, to name a few – Mike is one of the most optimistic, most open-minded, and most caring people Rick has ever met.

Along with Mayor Deanna Monroe, he was one of the main campaigners for converting Alexandria, a small town with a total population of approximately 12,000, into a joint community, and now, nearly two and a half years later, his grudgers are still eager to undermine his position at any given opportunity - either by making snide remarks about his skin colour, or by branding him as a starry-eyed liberal, a communist, and a traitor of his own species.

It's what Rick hates about this place from time to time: the fact that people are still pretty good at being scared and hidebound, the fact that he still has to act like he's paying attention when yet another deeply concerned citizen feels called to barge into his office and proclaim some wisdom about those goddamned strangers, who are a threat to the neighbourhood because they're clearly about to instigate a rebellion or something.

Yeah. Needless to say that the public meetings, held twice a month, have become a real test of Rick's patience because what everyone seems to conveniently forget is that there are currently three registered newcomers living in Alexandria. Three. Three relatively well-adjusted individuals in a now gated community that gets heavily subsidised by the state for participating in the National Newcomer Integration Program.

"You're doing interviews today, right?" Mike asks, a stream of thick smoke flowing over his lips, "How's Glenn doing?"

"Well, I don't know what's so exciting about delivering pizzas, but he still loves his job – probably because he's obsessed with Italian food", Rick affirms whilst snickering at the memory of his third or fourth interview with Glenn Rhee and how the kid wouldn't stop waxing poetic about calzones for half an hour.

"Man, if he only knew the real deal", Mike sighs and brushes a hand over his jet-black buzz cut, "We should do more, you know? Take them to D.C. or to a restaurant where they don't use all that GM crap. Spend some time with them, get to know them. We're so busy expecting them to learn from us and adapt to our way of living. Don't you ever wonder where they came from and what we could learn from them?"

An odd sense of wistfulness takes hold of his voice and Rick can feel it, too. He can feel it irritate his skin like a nasty rash. He can feel it ridge his cells and leave behind trails of hot blisters as it runs and spreads across his chest.

"I do."

It's not illegal to interact with them in a civilised way. It's not illegal to make them feel at home. It's not illegal to befriend them. It's just frowned upon by some people he couldn't care less about. People who consider every newcomer a potential loose cannon. People who celebrated when the DEAP bribed the House and the Senate into voting for a law that prohibits newcomers from going beyond the walls.

"I'll be gone before lunch break, though", Mike continues, "Gotta spend some time pep-talking myself for tonight."

Raising his brows, he pulls his lips into a wide smile that reveals two rows of dazzling white teeth as if to pass on some unvoiced secret to Rick, who needs a second to get the message since he's a) embarrassingly slow on the uptake when it comes to things that aren't related to his job, and b) not really interested in other people's dating life. It was bad enough when Maggie ruined his image of Spencer Monroe and told him that the young Sergeant likes to iron his underwear, or when he was out of staples and caught Councilman Bob Stookey and his secretary making out like teenagers in the stockroom on the second floor.

"Oh", he says.

"Yeah. Been a while since I met someone who might be worth all the trouble."

For a second, Rick isn't sure what to make of this statement, but before he has the chance to come up with an answer, the well-known compulsion to cop out kicks in and takes control over the muscles in his mouth, propelling him to palm his friend off with some feeble excuse and quickly draw back into the antechamber of his office where Morgan Jones, fellow supervisor and occasional drinking buddy, is already waiting for him.

"Everything alright?" he asks, tilting his head at the nervous-looking woman, who's seated next to his colleague and wrings her hands with her shoulders hunched and her head held down.

"We had a rough morning", Morgan explains, rubbing his protectee's back whilst taking great pains not to roll his eyes, "Some people just can't keep their fucking mouths shut."

Albeit being Alexandria's very first newcomer, Carol Peletier still seems to struggle with her environment every now and then. Sometimes it's her job at Dixon's Autoshop, sometimes it's the nightmares, and sometimes it's hypersensitivity. Either way, Rick feels for her and thus tries to keep the weekly interviews as short and stress-free as possible. He doesn't want to overwhelm her, doesn't want to overwhelm any of them period, and thankfully, his subordinates seem to share his point of view.

"Hey", he says carefully, feeling like he's talking to a frightened child as he squats down in front of Carol, "You wanna tell me what happened?"

She gives a slow nod and he stands up and gestures towards his office door with an encouraging smile. She's a sweetheart, shy and soft-spoken, but there are moments when he fears that she might snap someday. And while he wouldn't be opposed to the idea of Carol defending herself against her co-workers, he has to take the legal consequences into account.

"Go ahead then. I'll be with you in a minute."

"Thank you, Sir."

He waits until she has disappeared behind the door and then turns to Morgan, who passes him an ocher-coloured folder from Dr Anderson and a lime green one from Dr Cloyd.

"Let me guess", Rick mutters, choosing not to skim through the new reports for now, "Merle told her to go back to her planet again."

"More like Why don't you do us all a favour and head back to the kitchen, hun."

"So, he's on a sexist roll lately?"

"Yeah", Morgan shakes his head with a dispirited laugh, "Grinned at me and told me he was just trying to toughen her up, no ill intent or whatsoever, just boys being boys or some shit. I gave him a verbal warning, but we've done that a thousand times before and it's not gonna change anything, right? Once a dickhead, always a dickhead."

Unfortunately, that sounds about right. If there's one thing Merle Dixon – senior car mechanic, proud member of the neighbourhood watch, and white supremacist par excellence – is really good at, it's decontextualising and minimalizing his racial slurs and misogynistic outbursts without denying or retracting them, leaving most people to take his antics with a lethargic shrug and a healthy dose of equanimity because that's just how Merle Dixon is, we all know him, he's a basket case, no need to make a fuss about it.

"We should do more", unintentionally, he finds himself repeating Mike's words, and he fights the urge to cringe because it's such a glib thing to say, such an unfinished, condescending phrase to fling about, such an empty promise to choke out in the face of epidemical suspicion and shiftless localism.

Silence falls between them and he feels like an idiot, an amateur, a liar. He feels like a hypocrite, too, because they're not doing anything to begin with. Not for them. Not for Glenn, not for Carol, not for –

"I'm gonna talk to Deanna", Morgan says, "Heard she's looking for a new personal assistant."

"You know they're not allowed to work in the public sector."

As if to physically abscond from Rick and his tendency to fend off aspiration with numbers and regulations, Morgan rises to his feet and makes his way to the hallway, his jaw flexing furiously as he breathes out an answer that exudes painful dubitation.

"Maybe they'll make an exception."

The door clicks shut and Rick is left blinking down at his dark blue uniform, thinking about how nervous he was on his first day of work, how agog and full of zest for action. How he spoke to Carl, Shane, and Lori on the phone the night before and told them about all the things he was hoping to do here, the change and the difference he was hoping to make.

A scowl pricks his skin at the memory of how quickly his enthusiasm raged itself out once he learned that making a change in Alexandria actually means biting his tongue, scraping his knuckles, and bursting his skull whilst mediating between a horde of paranoid fault-finders and a small group of clueless fugitives.

She left a dent in his brain when Aaron led her into his office for the first time, an antagonal mish-mash of subtle diffidence, unblanked defiance, and childlike curiosity criss-crossing her features. Back then, she was wearing a dark cotton dress and a goldenrod cardigan, but today she's wrapped in denim and cream-coloured wool, and her neat dreadlocks are pulled into a loose side braid that's nestled against the crook of her neck while her thick, fir green duffle coat is draped over her left forearm.

With all his attention zeroed in on the display of the camera next to his laptop, he allows himself a small grin as she confabulates about how excited she was when Sasha Williams – a teacher at Hilltop High School, who also volunteers as an educator for newly arrived newcomers – confirmed to her that she had passed her final World History exam with flying colours.

Her whole body is moulded into the leathern cushions of her seat, and every once in a while, she's looking directly into the lens. And he can't help himself, he can't help but think that even the cold, unfavourable light of the neon lamps provides her skin with a special kind of glow. Tugging at the collar of his shirt, he recalls how, about half an hour ago, the sound of her knuckles rapping against his office door yanked him into a halt and turned his spine into a ramrod pole, and how his fingers – kept busy fidgeting with the end of his unpressed tie – flew up to fix his bedraggled curls and beard, and then down into his lap.

She greeted him with an apology on her supervisor's behalf because apparently, Aaron got caught in traffic and thus had promised to hand in the reports later. And despite his aggressive affinity for adherence to deadlines, Rick just waved it off and told her not to worry.

He knows all the basics about her: 32 years old, female, found by a scout group on the waterfront of Potomac River earlier this year, moved to Alexandria six months ago, resident at 192 Kepler Street, apprentice pastry chef at Mrs Anderson's bakery. Her reports are flawless – no medical or psychological peculiarities, no signs of combative behaviour – and her eyes are a twinkling conflux of several dark brown hues that remind him of fertile plains, drenched dunes, and polished walnut slabs.

"Got you something", he says rather casually after he turns off the camera and pulls at the top drawer of his desk to hand her a slightly damaged copy of Photographs from the Edge, "Thought you might like it."

She blinds him with a heart-stopping smile and he almost backs away in his chair because this is getting ridiculous. Because today was the 25th time he skipped his lunch break, went to Horvath's Book Discount, and left the store with another second-hand coffee table book tucked under his arm and a warm flutter sprouting from the pit of his stomach.

"Thank you, Chief."

The gentle hum of her voice fails to alleviate the sour taste in his mouth. Suddenly, his skin is on fire and he throws an accusing glare at the grumbling radiator that's lurking between two excessively overstuffed file cabinets and spitting out waves of crushing heat. He really fucking hates it when she calls him by his rank – it feels like a blow to his face, harsh and unexpected yet not sobering enough for him stop fantasising about what his name would sound like if it plunged from the tip of her tongue just once, and what the notion of her vocal chords caressing and giving birth to this one, simple syllable – just once, just once – would do to him.

"It's nothing", he says.

Her smile becomes impossibly brighter. And it's more than ridiculous. It's fucking pathetic. He can't be angry at her for referring to him as Chief when the sheer thought of uttering out her name fills him with the kind of irrational panic that infiltrates and undermines him from within, and turns him into a spluttering heap of cold sweat and strained nerves.

And yet her name – whether it was given to her by the DEAP or not – is so beautiful, so different, so perfect for a woman like her, and maybe he can't say it when she's sitting on the other side of his desk, but at least he finds the courage to whisper it in his dreams.

"I don't expect you to do that every time, you know?", she says after a while, "You shouldn't waste your money on –"

"I wouldn't do it if I didn't want to."

For a moment, she quirks a brow as if she's trying to figure out whether he's telling the truth or not. He watches as she tightens her grip on the book, and he fears that he might've presented her with another torture device. That he might've stirred her desire to blow up her golden cage and leave, only to find out that all those magical places – the calm sea of lavender at the foot of Mount Ventoux, the dry beds of radio telescopes in the Atacama Desert, and the blazing serpents of liquid fire that worm their way through the narrow rifts of Holuhraun – have been run over by a flood wave of ice and snow.

"Well", she lifts her head to meet his gaze and he's so fucking screwed because all he wants to do is reach out and follow the curve of her jawline with his index finger, "I still owe you."

"No, you don't."

"I do."

"You don't."

"You're awfully stubborn today, aren't you?", her laugh is clear and euphonious, causing his lips to twitch and his innards to flip and quake all at once, "Anyhow, you already know that I spent hours decorating a Battenberg birthday cake for my boss' son and that I threw a tantrum when I read the final chapter of Atonement, so I think it's high time for you to tell me about your week."

There's a beryllonite tarpaulin pinned to the inside of his skull. It's blotted with chatoyant close-ups, and he's dipping his thumb into her jugular notch while her pulse – firm and steady like the continual click of a metronome – strikes against his mouth. He has to tear it down before he feels safe enough to contribute to their ritual and expatiate on his last phone call with Carl, which gains him a sympathetic smile of hers.

Her expression turns a bit sheepish when he brings up Mike's impending date and he doesn't tell her about Carol and Merle because sometimes, he wants her to believe that she came to a place where common decency goes without saying.

And he can only hope that she doesn't know that he's enjoying their conversations a lot more than he's supposed to. He can only hope that she doesn't know how often he ends up replaying their little post-interview talks in his head on his way back home. He can only hope that she doesn't know that she's still with him when scattered snowflakes brush against the front window of his decrepit midnight blue pickup with the orange glimmer of ice-crusted streetlamps whirling past him at regular intervals and a stream of stupid love songs oozing out of the car radio.

Quotes/References

1) Zabriskie Point is located in Death Valley National Park (CA), whereas Biscayne National Park is located in Florida.

2) The Lubyanka is the current HQ of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation.

3) Gareth's surname is a reference to the Spanish painter Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes. One of his most famous paintings is called Saturn Devouring His Son and depicts cannibalism.

4) Morley is a fictional brand of cigarettes that has been mentioned on the show several times by now.

5) Diabetic retinopathy is an eye disease that causes blindness. In Mike's case there's no complete vision loss. He's still able to make out shadows, silhouettes, and sharp colour contrasts.

6) Kepler Street is a reference to the German astronomer Johannes Kepler.

7) Photographs From the Edge is a volume of photographs by Art Wolfe and Rob Sheppard.

8) Mount Ventoux is a mountain in the Provence region of France, the Atacama Desert is a plateau in Chile, and the Holuhraun is a lava field in the Icelandic Highlands.

9) Atonement is a novel by Ian McEwan.