Part 1, Chapter 4

Here's Chapter 4, where I start to introduce some new elements into the mix. The subsequent two chapters are pretty short (expect Chapter 5 on April 15th and Chapter 6 on April 19th) and spin the narrative off on a whole new direction before the beginning of Part 2. Stay tuned for that.

Use the menu on the right to navigate to wherever you are. As always, the whole thing starts at Chapter 1, here.

I've had some great plugs this week, and I love it when people promote my work, so please do that more! Tell all your friends and stick this on Digg and Reddit and all that mumbo-jumbo. Comments and constructive criticism also makes me feel fuzzy inside.

(so would an publisher who wants to give me cash)

Much love,

Dave

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4


This morning’s intrusion into the Spellman house has simultaneously renewed my feelings of sickening loss and given me a strange hunger for voyeuristic intrusion. Although looking through the remnants of the old lives is saddening, I want more. I lose myself the masochistic pleasure of searching through the homes, reconstructing in my mind the lives of those who once inhabited the buildings. The ramifications of the G9 plague and the deaths of billions are so enormous that anything other than an escape through fantasy is too much for the mind to cope with. So I do that. I escape through fantasy. I recreate the lives of those who once lived in these homes. I watch my fabrications move around the empty spaces and I pretend nothing has happened. I’m aware that I’m creating fictions — this understanding never leaves my mind — and I’m aware that I need to do this. I’m still sane — I’m just trying to cope.

A forty-minute walk from James’ place is a large house, better described as a manor, which I recall from riding the bus between Oakland and Squirrel Hill. The house was always in a poor condition, with vines creeping up its walls and over its dusty windows, and there’s no guarantee of valuable contents, but the home has fostered a place in my imagination. It’s as good a reason as any other, so with time to kill, I decide to make the trip there.

As I stroll into the driveway, having not seen a soul on the journey, I immediately notice that looters have targeted the home. They’ve smashed all of the bay windows at the front of the building. The building’s main entrance is ajar and I approach it along the gravel driveway, which crunches underfoot, softly muted by a thick layer of snow. In the lobby, old smashed vinyl records and broken photo frames cover the ground. I climb over an upturned couch blocking the door into the kitchen.

In the kitchen, the cupboards are open and their contents spilled on the floor: pots, pans, plates, cutlery, and food. I pick up a box of cheese-flavored biscuits, find it empty, and throw it back to the ground where it clatters onto some silverware. The rear door is open and the wind has blown several feet of snow into the kitchen. There are no footprints in it, so I must be the first person to visit this place in a while.

While I gaze at the destruction around the home, the cold turns my breath into a specter that floats ahead of me. The ghostly image of the otherwise invisible breath leads me to imagine the family who perhaps lived here: mom, dad, and three children in this enormous expanse of a home. Mom pours orange juice and coffee and serves cereal to dad who fastens his tie, ready for a day at the office. The kids scutter about, collecting their lunches, preparing for school. Sometimes mom and dad have parties here, and where I’m standing crowds of life would have milled around, telling stories, drinking their cocktails, serving up another martini, another rum and coke, another Campari and orange. Then a week, maybe ten days ago, mom, dad, and three children caught G9. They suffered for up to three days in a serious condition as the breathing difficulties and heart problems kicked in. The family died soon after and their home, built with years of hard work and care in equal measures, struggling under its old age, is reduced to this present shambles in a matter of days, left in the hands of those few strangers who remain clinging to the threads of life.

It shocks me how suddenly this home became another ambiguous place. I’m unnerved, so I can’t bring myself to look upstairs — the voyeuristic pleasure has left me. Instead of pushing into the interior, I leave through the kitchen door, into the back garden, and down the side of the house, climbing over a snow-buried toy truck.

The air is clear from snowfall, so I take my time walking back to James’ house, kicking up the powder on the sidewalk in weak swishes.

*

Do you know that feeling of being watched? It only manifests itself when the actual chances of being watched are very low. Perhaps the feeling of being watched is only a reaction to how uncomfortable it is for humans, as social animals, to be alone. If there were a genuine potential for people to be looking out of each window on this quiet residential street, I would have no such paranoia. It’s a bizarre feeling, this feeling of a total absence. It’s the feeling of every hair on the back of your neck standing to attention because this is the uncanny in its most distilled of forms.

The city has forgotten I exist. It will always be here, regardless of my presence — it will always stand over me, but it will always be oblivious. A few years ago, in my own creative writing, I was obsessed with the concept how the city functioned as if it were alive — constructed by man, but then given the push and left to roll upon its own steam. In my first year of university, to the neglect of class work, I used to churn out short stories — maybe five a month. They were fine in terms of quality and a few were published in small press journals, but when I found myself with a Grade Point Average of 2.3 by the end of the year and faced the prospect of resitting examinations, I left the stories on my mind’s backburner, and buckled down to work. I never returned to the stories, but they still stick in my mind. I wrote one of the stories after visiting a student photography show that depicted a city, buzzing with vibrancy and life, and lighting up the otherwise cold night. The photographer intended these images to be a celebration of the awesome power of the city, but when I looked at them, rather than seeing vibrancy and fun, I saw people who looked small, ineffectual, and trodden on. To the photographer, the city was a spectacular neon show, but in my eyes, the city was a machine, and I was more interested in the fuel that kept it alive: the people who toiled there every day. Yes, the machine was magnificent, but only at the price of the individual.

In my story, the city literally consumed its inhabitants in its insatiable hunger for growth. The individuals residing in the city’s mechanism were shadows, drowned out by streetlights, headlamps, and neon. Did you ever see those photos of Hiroshima after the A-Bombs were dropped? Not the photos of the mushroom cloud, but the photos of human-shaped outlines on walls, floors, and staircases. I know you have — everyone’s seen them. Those outlines where created by bodies shielding the concrete from the A-Bomb’s fire, allowing spots of the city structure to escape the burn. In the city of my story, the only way to spot the people who live there is by their shadows — like the shadows in Hiroshima which existed without a source. In my city, shadows sit on busses and in cabs, flowing like blood along the urban veins. In the real city, where I stood when I wrote, when people rode the trains and busses they stared out of the windows to avoid contact with others. The individuals wanted to avoid the difficult judgments and awkward looks from the faceless crowd, so they crawled into themselves. Try compounding this awkwardness with the fear of others and see how that effects alienation. The fear was widespread. The fear of the potential muggers, rapists, thieves, murderers, and terrorists. The fear of street gangs, and the homeless, and beggars, and the cynical businessman. That’s why I feel like a shadow in the city — because to the city I am only that forgettable, ineffectual number amongst the fearful and alienated. Like the protagonist in Ellison’s Invisible Man, who filled his basement hideaway with light bulbs to drown out the shadows, so he can always see the truth and always know he exists.

Now I know the city has forgotten about me. Right now, I am a nostril hair poking its upper lip or a pimple on its ass. The sun continues to rise and set over the city, rise and set, rise and set, regardless of whoever’s there to see it. Now, walking these cold city streets, it feels as if the whole universe has forgotten about me.

*

Later that night, once Hank and I return to James’ home, the three of us play Scrabble by candlelight. We all drink Pennsylvania lagers, Iron City, Yeungling, and Rolling Rock, which we left in the snow to chill. There’s another eighteen bottles of them, taken from Hank’s old place, cooling on the porch. It feels bizarre to entertain ourselves without electricity, being so used to computers, televisions, hi-fi systems, and Nintendo. In contrast to this, Scrabble feels quaint and satisfying, like a return to the old ways. I used to play it during the summer, while I sat in a coffee shop off Forbes, killing time with other liberal arts students. A friend who took chemistry routinely beat me until we enforced a new rule banning the use of supposed chemical elements and enzymes.

Right now though, in James’ home, I make “Quota” for fourteen points and Hank kicks off a new topic of conversation.

“So over the past few days, how many people have we seen?”

We decide on a figure high enough to count with both hands. James gets “Joke” on a double word score for thirty points. He leads by a margin of sixty-two.

“Yeah, maybe ten between us in the past week,” James concurs, “but in the past few days I’ve not seen anyone but you and Matt.”

“That’s a fair point,” Hank says, “I’ve seen a few, but I’ve been moving around more than you guys. So, in the whole of the city, what would you estimate? One-hundred people left, maybe?”

I contribute my own doubts. “But, you see, it’s hard to hide when there are no other sounds. And there’s always fresh snow on the ground to leave footprints in. Any movement sticks out.”

“True. But there are going to be people holed up pretty tight — people who would prefer to die in their bunkers than risk an infection — so I’m going to place one-hundred people as a liberal estimate. Is that fair?”

“Yeah,” James and I nod in agreement.

“And we’ve seen ten. That’s ten percent, but probably more like fifteen or twenty percent. Right?”

Again, we agree with the line of logic.

“It’s just that, well—” he takes a deep breath, “where are all the women?”

*

He’s right. I’ve barely seen a soul in days, but Hank has seen people while he toured downtown and the surrounding districts. You’d expect to see one woman, if there were any women to see. This is a horrible concept because, of course, without women, well, there can never be any more anything. Ever. At all.

The lack of evidence is our proof, and I mention to Hank and James the problems this presents while Hank spells “Ass” for two points. They both nod gravely, because this time, maybe, just maybe, the lack of evidence might be proof enough. How else can you prove there are no women, other than by not seeing any?

The photo of the bikini clad Karen Spellman feels like it’s burning through my back pocket. Karen Spellman: sexy and tanned in blue, in the sun, on the sand, and smiles all around. Emily Jacobs, now ex-girlfriend, forever ex-girlfriend, sits in my back pocket and is never coming back.

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Chapter 5 is here.