Part 2, Chapter 4

Here's chapter 4. Sorry it's a little late in the day -- I know some of you read this at work! I remember I particularly enjoyed writing this chapter. I really liked doing James' monologue near the end. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed reading it. Expect the next chapter on Sunday.

An another note, I learned yesterday that the expansion pack to the XBox's post-apocalyptic video game, Fallout 3, is to be set in Pittsburgh -- which is brilliant because I loved the old Fallout games. But Pittsburgh's no stranger to Zombies and Apocalypses -- George Romero was from the city, and many of his films were made in the area. In fact, Dawn of the Dead was filmed in the Monroeville mall (I've a great photo of myself pretending to be a zombie there), and Left 4 Dead (the video-game) is set in Allegheny county. And here I am perpetuating this great injustice! It seems so unfair, when Pittsburgh was recently voted No.1 place to live in the U.S. by The Economist.

Fallout 3: The Pitt (image from fallout.bethsoft.com)

And finally -- good luck to the Penguins tomorrow.

Dave

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4

In the courtyard that night, five of us gather for poker: myself; Hank; Timothy; a young man named Ivor, with a peach-fuzz moustache; and a bearded man named Don, who waved to me across the courtyard earlier that day. Don wears thick black-framed glasses with tape wrapped around both the nose and arm.

It’s a calm night and, although it’s cold, it’s no warmer indoors, so several other clusters of men lounge around elsewhere in the courtyard. Everybody helps themselves to the various boxes of liquor and beer that have been stacked to one side. There’s a continual patter of laughter in the yard as various groups joke around. We play our games on a table underneath one of newly constructed plastic shelters. The ceilings are transparent and corrugated so that, when I look up, the clouds ripple across the sky. There are no stars visible tonight and the clouds imply we’ll experience more snow or rain before sunrise.

We’re on our fourth hand of Texas Hold ‘Em, which is the only form of poker that we all know, and I’m winning by one-hundred dollars worth of chips, though there’s no money to bet or win. We each have a pseudo fifteen-hundred and the winner will get bragging rights. We pass around joints made from the eighth of weed that I found earlier, when Hank and I searched through old apartment buildings. The etiquette in Mecca means we have to share the weed with the other groups down in the courtyard, so it doesn’t stretch far at all.

I have a Jack of spades and a ten of hearts so I call fifty dollars.

Hank calls my bet and, aware that I’m sitting amongst Mecca skeptics, I mention my earlier discussion with James, who’s currently reading in our room. I’m not sure if telling these men what he said about Sylvia is betraying his confidence or not, but then, since arriving here a day ago, I’m no longer too concerned about James’ trust. We’ve grown apart too much already. I was surprised that he opened up to me today. Our friendship was forced and sudden and it seemed to be crashing at a similar pace. When he told me about his worries, he seemed so far away. I was unable to sympathize or even formulate an adequate response. Instead, I was concerned about my own fragile place under Sylvia’s matriarchy. Right then I felt James was a stranger, and I guess in many ways he was, and still is. When James and I last spoke I was worried about the ramification of treasonous talk, but here, amongst these other strangers, I feel utterly comfortable. I guess that says a lot about the friendship between James and I.

As I recite James’ words to these men, I speak softly so that they all lean closer to listen. We can’t afford to have other people know our opinions. “He says she’s insane,” I finish.

The men look at each other, musing on James’ story. Timothy juts out his jaw, perplexed. In an attempt to look natural to the rest of the courtyard, to look like our conversation isn’t treasonous, he casually throws fifty dollars of chips onto the table.

Igor, with the peach-fuzz moustache, twitches and tries to take the controversy down a notch, though I wish he wouldn’t — I need to talk about these things. “But I think this whole situation’s insane. Don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Hank concurs as the topic slips further and further away from the topic of Sylvia’s fragile mind. “There’s no normality anywhere anymore. Sylvia fits the situation. She’s normal for the situation and that’s how you survive. She has to be nuts to rule over a world gone nuts. Maybe.” He pauses and takes a breath. “There’s no such thing as normality any more.”

“I guess this can feel like normality, in a way,” I say as I fiddle with my Jack and ten, aware that the Sylvia topic is lost – Hank just played it away. Sitting here and playing a game of poker feels perfectly normal.

Tim laughs at me, but it’s not funny, and Igor calls Tim’s fifty dollars.

“You’re just drunk and stoned. You think this is anything like normality?” Tim says in the deep tones of his thick accent. “No way. We’re sat here, six strangers, near enough, playing under a plastic roof in a dead city and a dead country. This ain’t normality, man. There’s a guard with a shotgun at the entrance where we live. This ain’t normality. This attempt at normality is just your security blanket.”

We all remain quiet for a while. We agree with each other, but admitting that would be too difficult. We’re half-happy with the fiction of a security blanket.

Don raises one-hundred dollars.

I call.

Don passes me the stub of a joint, from which I take a deep drag. My head feels light as the cannabis floods my nervous system. I feel like I can’t control my arms the way I’d like to; that they always move a bit too far and a bit too fast and flail about a bit too much. I know that soon I’ll be slouching in my chair and slurring my words ever so slightly and it will feel great to relax, though eventually I’ll take a one drag too much and become sick to my stomach. I take a swig from a beer bottle to erase the burning at the back of my throat.

“I’m not surprised that James said what he did,” Hank says as he calls the one-hundred. “In all honesty, I’m more surprised that more people here aren’t saying the same things. And on top of that I’m surprised to see that so few of us have cracked up at all.” He pauses to think. “But, I mean, barring that event—” he stops. Clearly, people are cracking.

“Yeah, we know man,” adds Tim as he folds from the game. “We should all be fucked up by now. I was seeing guys on those streets totally fucking cracking. Totally insane. Being ripped from normality like this is enough to make anybody crack. We’re all doin’ alright, but how does anyone make sense of that?”

Nobody answers Tim’s question and he creases his eyebrows while he considers the answer himself. There is a call, a check, and the river is dealt. There’s a short silence as we figure out our hands. My cards haven’t worked out, so I bluff and raise one-hundred.

“How long do you guys think you’ll be able to stay here?” Don asks. I’m sure we’ve all been thinking the same question for some time now. We all have our own answers. Hank, Timothy, Ivor, and I, look at each other, judging one another’s reaction to the question.

Rain spatters on the plastic roof and dark, damp spots appear on the asphalt. I watch another group of men stroll towards a second shelter, laughing at a joke. One of their group carries a guitar and settles down with it on his knee to tune it in.

“What else do we have?” Hank asks in a miserable tone. “If this falls apart—”

Silence.

“I think the shit we’re left with when all this falls apart is well understood by all,” says Tim.

Ivor and I nod together.

The rain gets heavier, rattles on the roof and runs down the corrugations to trickle off the sides.

Tim folds when faced with my raise. Ivor laughs and shows his cards, a five and a nine. “This isn’t going anywhere for me,” he smiles.

Don chuckles too. “The money’s yours,” he says to me. “Well done, you bastard.” He throws his cards in.

The guitarist under the next shelter strums a few chords as Ivor shuffles and deals the cards. Then the guitarist picks strings for a while, hums along, and attempts to remember the progression of a song.

*

After two more reckless games, I’m down to three hundred and twenty five dollars. I never claimed to be good at poker. Through the last two games, the rain has intensified. Now, huge sheets of water thunder against the plastic above our heads.

Under the rain, four poker companions and I voice our doubts concerning Mecca. James’ has tired of his reading and has come to the courtyard to sit with us, though he doesn’t play. I feel bad for neglecting to ask him to join the game, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He sits on a crate of canned food and chips in on the conversation every now and then. He’s the most vehement and outspoken detractor of Mistress Sylvia, and he relates to us the day’s events, including his meeting with her, with a particular venom. Unlike the rest of our group, he doesn’t temper the volume of his voice, much to our gathered concern.

“I was down at the rear of the courtyard, there,” he points to a stack of scrap metal and engines, “helping some of the other guys fix a generator, like I said. It’s a piece of junk, but we replaced the broken parts, tightened the gears and fired the thing up. It appeared to work fine, so we hooked it into the mains, and the lights in the building flickered on.” Ivor nods because he remembers the lights. “Cheers were coming from all the windows while the generator is making a huge fucking amount of noise. Then a fan belt snaps, a gear breaks, and that’s it. A day’s work for forty seconds of lighting. Ha! But Mistress Sylvia comes out to congratulate us personally, like she’s the queen or something, visiting her, her, her fucking subjects. It’s supposed to be a morale boost, I guess, because we were all pissed that it didn’t work better. We failed, but she says, ‘it was a big step forward and a step closer to a new civilization.’ Then she tells us that we are the guys who are going to bind Mecca together. That makes sense, sure. Us and the guys who are plumbing, because, she says, we can provide all the modern conveniences. Yeah, that’s all fair enough.

“But then she goes on. She says something like, ‘Mecca will be the promised land. With electricity we’ll contact other groups and there’ll be exponential growth,’ and it all gets a bit weird. She says something like ‘as sovereign mother’ or some shit ‘I will be the glue that holds us all together. Our group will be remembered as the founders of this new and glorious civilization,’ and then she refers to herself as the Earth Mother too and starts going on and on. It’s fucking crazy though. Her head tilted back and her eyes glazed. She says that her men, all of us, will stand by the pleats of her skirt as the pillars of civilization, and all I can think is, ‘What!’ This is all supposed to be a compliment for our hard work, I guess, but it becomes this wild fantasy of hers about her kingdom and her rulership. Only we’re all too weirded out and a bit too scared to say anything.”

We all laugh, nervous and high pitched.

“Ok, the Mecca plan is all a good idea on the practical side. How can you refute it? Without it we have nothing and no hope, but, but she, our ‘mother,’ she’s completely insane. She’s losing it.”

James looks at us, eyes wild, looking for acknowledgement that he’s made a sufficient impact. The rain continues to pour.

I’ve had very few encounters with Mistress Sylvia. In reality, all I know about her Mecca program is that the sharp separation that exists between her followers and her skeptics might be precisely what tears things apart. Unlike any other almost cultish group that may have existed prior to the outbreak of G9, here we have no choice but to play a part. So, some of the men here haven’t been correctly brainwashed yet. Even if we’re free thinkers, we have no choice, for practical reasons, other than to live here and follow her program. And now I realize that any group of men will come to resent the absolute leadership of a woman. We’ll call her insane and mutter rumors; we’ll do anything in an attempt to undermine her leadership, or at least prop up our own masculinity. I’m sure some of these men think Mistress Sylvia should be plain old Sylvia (I certainly do), but some of these men must think she should be nothing more that a breeding slave, reproducing for the sake of humanity. I know some of the men think that.

Resentment is building and a storm will come, regardless of what we may want. Yesterdays’ shooting was precursor to whatever is coming; that much is sure. Something is brewing from deep within this group, something hateful and resentful, and I’m sure that when it erupts nobody will be safe from its wrath.

A storm is most certainly on its way.

The raindrops pound down overhead.