Part 3, Chapter 3 (First Half)

Here's the first half of Part 3, Chapter 3. It's a pretty long one, but sets the scene for the rest of the book and the eventual climax. I'll post the second half on Sunday.

I'm also currently updating the ebook, with some bonus content that you wont find here. There will be more details to follow, but don't let that put you off getting the ebook today. All previous buyers of the ebook are entitled to free copies of updated versions, and for $1.25, you can't go far wrong. Also, anybody who gets the paperback, gets the ebook for free. Check out the links to the right.

And finally, if you're new here, you should probably start on Chapter 1.

Enjoy your week,

Dave

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3

I drive north, along Highway-74, for several more hours.

Around noon, a snowstorm starts. At least I think it’s noon. I can’t be sure, because when I check my watch there’s a crack across the screen and “88:88” flashes on the digital display. The sun is almost overhead.

I maneuver the snowmobile through a valley where a natural wind tunnel has formed. My face soon aches from the cold wind, so I wrap my scarf around my mouth, tighten my jacket, and yank my hat down over my ears.

It’s hard to focus on the big picture as I drive through such torrential conditions. All I do is swear under my breath at each gust and try to avoid any debris on the road. After a while, the anger passes, once I realize how ineffective it is. And fortunately the violence of the wind soon gives way to almost leisurely heaves and pushes. Once the weather slackens, I drive on autopilot, my mind staring into middle-space, thinking vaguely of the past, only a small part of me aware of each abandoned car appearing through the white, and the adjustments necessary to avoid them. I’m so detached and distant from the present I feel like an old man reminiscing on his childhood.

I think back to the games room in the basement of the Uni’s Student Union. I think back to playing pool night after night and getting the highest score on the medieval themed pinball machine. All this when I was a young, single, freshman, living, by chance, in the athlete’s dorm. I made few friends in my housing. Instead, I regularly met with a friend who lived in a dorm down the hill. His dorm was once a psychiatric hospital and the wide hallways, swinging doors, and white walls stood as testament to the building’s past in medicine. As did the tens of mentally disturbed but harmless homeless men living on Forbes Avenue.

I remember being at home with family. A Christmas when I received boxing gloves. A story my father told about pissing on a leprechaun that hid in a bush. Another story about a grizzly bear chasing him up a tree. Another story states we’re related to John F. Kennedy though illicit sexual affairs with an aunt of mine in a famous Dublin hotel.

The snow intensifies once more, buffing and battering. I spot a wooden house by the side of the road and decide to pull in for a while, to shelter from the worst of the elements and regain my senses. I park at the front and shut off the engine. I look down to adjust my coat and when I look up, I see an old man. He steps out from the building’s doorway, calmly raises a long rifle to shoulder height, looks down its sight, and aims it at me.

I freeze.

And he watches me down the gun sight. No expression.

I calculate the odds of me reaching for my gun, taking off the safety, aiming, and firing, before he can do the same. The odds aren’t promising.

I stare at the old man for an eternity. Neither of us move until, by chance, a snowflake hits me in the eye and I recoil in surprise. When I blink away the water, the old man lowers the gun and yells at me, “I guess you’d better come inside. What else do you suppose you’re doing?”

It’s rhetorical, of course, but somehow I yell back, like a child, “I’m going home.”

There’s a long pause while he weights up the situation.

“Well, maybe first, like I said, you should come in from the cold. Get warmed up, huh?”

*

“I’m Saul. It’s good to meet you, Matthew,” the old man says after my own awkward introduction. He shakes my hand and leads me into his home, “This here is my most humble abode.” He raises his arms and turns from side to side, using them to frame the homes interior, as if to establish the space as a piece of cinematic art. Wood and coal are piled high in the fireplace and burn with a pleasant flickering and spark. Several arm chairs and a sofa sit around a coffee table, bathed in the warm glow of the fire. In the next room, through a door, I see a dinner table with a meal of root vegetables for one. But most noticeable of all are the shelves that line every wall, filled with books on every imaginable topic. Books lay all over the coffee table and scattered on the ground. Books prop up the leg of a lop-sided desk, which otherwise houses a now defunct computer. I have never seen this many books outside of a library or bookstore. Books, books, and more books, stuck in every spare nook, piled in dusty stacks everywhere you care to cast your eye.

“I like to read a lot,” Saul informs me with a touch of dry humor. “I’ve been out here, alone, a long time, so I read a lot.”

There’s a long pause. I take stock of the room, basking in its warmth, and the old man continues to speak to me. “I mean, this whole plague business hasn’t touched me much at all. My life has pretty much gone on as it was, except for the electricity getting cut, and the radio, and water, right. I can’t go into the town any more to do my shopping. I was mad when the newspapers stopped being delivered.” Another pause. “Coffee?”

The tone of Saul’s voice is striking erratic, like he’s out of practice with conversation. One line will be mournful, the next, cheerful, like these are only token emotions that fit any particular sentence rather than genuine feelings in themselves

“Yes, please. Coffee would be great,” I respond. As I say this, I break into a sweat, conscious of how many layers of clothes I’m wearing and how comfortable this man’s home is. I peel off some layers while Saul walks into the kitchen and pulls pas from cupboards.

I hang my excess clothes on an armchair to dry, and sit down on a couch in my jeans and t-shirt. This is the warmest that I’ve been in weeks. I untie my shoelaces and pull the shoes from my feet. I scrunch my toes up and it feels fantastic.

“You’re the first person I’ve met in two weeks,” Saul tells me, through the open kitchen door.

“Well, you’re pretty isolated out here, right?”

“Relatively.” He returns to the living room and places a kettle of water over the fire. “A lot of people came out to these parts once the city got too bad, I guess. A lot of them were on the road out there, but most passed by. Only a few came up here to my house.”

Saul’s house sits above the highway and set back about fifteen meters, still very visible, but secluded from the casual passer-by.

“They wanted to come in, of course, and stay the duration of the troubles. ‘Homeless,’ one man said. His house had burnt down. Everybody who left the city was looking for a place to stay, and a few thought this place looked ideal. I’m no charity though. What makes people think they could come and do that? So I soon scared them off.” He nods his head toward the rifle that stands by the door.

“So why did you let me in?”

Saul pauses to think and I regret having asked in case he changes his mind. Instead, he says, as if I should already know, “Because you’re the first person I’ve seen in almost two weeks.”

“It’s already been that long?” I sigh. “I lose track of the days.”

“Yeah, I think so. I think it’s been two weeks. I have a calendar, but I might have missed a few days, so two weeks at the least, unless I crossed too many days off.” The water boils and Saul remains silent as he takes the pot from above the fire, back into the kitchen, to make the coffee. I leaf through a few of the books on the table. They’re all classics. J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Cervantes' Don Quixote.

“You want milk?” Saul yells.

“You have milk?”

“Well, it’s creamer. It’s just as good.”

“Of course. That would be great.”

“Creamer it is.” Saul returns to the living room with two steaming mugs and I shuffle books to make space on the table for them.

I accept my drink with a sincere smile and Saul leans back in an armchair opposite me. He relaxes, closes his eyes for a moment, and sighs. “You gave me a scare back then, when I heard your engine. It’s been so quiet for so long. Even before all this, I would still hear engines passing all through the day. But now, nothing.” He waits, but I don’t know what to say. “So you came from Pittsburgh?”

“Yeah, Oakland.”

“That’s good. I haven’t been there in a long time. Some would call me a recluse, you know. But that’s fair, I guess. I don’t have much of an interest in the world. I mean, I watch the news and all, of course. I keep up to date. I’m not ignorant, but I have no desire to delve in for real. I tried once, but,” he sighs, “well, it didn’t work out.”

I stay silent. I feel uncomfortable around this odd character, so any reply that comes to mind feels forced or irrelevant. I’d be happy talking about his home décor, but instead he gets deep.

“The biggest change for me since this—” he pauses his slow speech to search for an appropriate term “—apocalypse, is that there is no more electricity, I don’t pay rent any more, in fact, my bank doesn’t work any more, and the water keeps freezing in the pipes outside. I’ve not had any news since the TVs and radios stopped. No news, other than those hoards of northbound city folks. They provided me with ample clues concerning the state of the world. I know you’re running away, so things have got pretty bad, right?”

“I’m not running, no,” I insist. I know he wasn’t trying to insult me, but only making an observation. “There’s not much left to run away from. The whole place is wrecked. There’s barely anyone left and, well, no women whatsoever.”

“Sorry?”

“There are no women.”

“No women?”

I elaborate, providing a synopsis of our discovery, the events in Mecca, the unveiling of the transvestite Mistress Sylvia, and my journey north out of Pittsburgh. Saul’s face falls deeper and deeper into itself as the synopsis continues. He tucks his chin into his chest and his brow creases as I retell parts of my story between sips of coffee. I exaggerate certain points and minimize others. I altogether exclude the killing of Hank, of course. I’m in the position of being able to rewrite my entire history, as I wish, and without the danger of any outside contradictions. In this new history, I never saw Hank again after leaving Mecca. There was no gathering pool of deep red blood atop the same crisp white snow that had clouded my vision so completely. There was no crunch and the watermelon thud, watching the crowbar falling through the air to lodge into the rear of a skull, bloodied and oozing…

All of those details are missing from my account, which I otherwise finish with surprising speed. After this, both Saul and I look to the ground, awkward. I’m in a better mood than I expected, having taken a lot off my chest, but Saul’s silence makes me feel uncomfortable. I wish I could read this man.

In my mind, I make terrible generalizations about Saul. Last year, I read an article about sociopaths for a class. The article claimed that as many as one in every twenty people may be a sociopath. That is, they lack any genuine sense of compassion, but mask it so well that they may even convince themselves otherwise. As if there’s a short circuit there, which nobody knows about, and which can make those people uncaring and selfish and unreadable. It struck me as dangerous that so many of these people could inhabit the world around me – that maybe I could even be one. I reminded myself that the only difference between sociopath and psychopath is bloodlust. And I found the safe fear enjoyable, like a good horror movie. My best guesses for sociopaths were company C.E.O.s – the kind of men who have to trample on everybody beneath them for pure material gain – confidence tricksters and, I speculated, war-mongering political leaders, those who managed to climb the slippery pole of politics. Who was it who said that whoever managed to attain the position of president shouldn’t be trusted to do the job? Kurt Vonnegut? If they’re mostly sociopaths, maybe he’s right.

Saul’s strange body language and speech patterns paint him not only as someone who doesn’t know how to react to the emotions of others, but also someone who hasn’t learnt to mask this gap in his knowledge. I already know he’s a hermit, so he doesn’t need to convince other’s of his emotional connection, nor convince himself. Of course, this is a terrible way to think of those around you. Such narrow systems of classification only indicate a narrow-mindedness on ones own part. I tell myself this and try to push these thoughts to the back of my mind.

“No women,” he sighs in disbelief. “Hell.”

I straighten up in the chair and place my mug on the table.

“I’ve been living in this place for thirty-three years now,” he continues. “Can you imagine that? The only times I’ve left have been to get groceries, clothes, books, things like that. There’s been the occasional trip to the bar if I feel too cooped up, and once a year I go to New York to see my brother. Well, and to see his children and now grandchildren. But I grew up in New York – right there in Brooklyn. I’m sure some would wonder how I went from living in the busiest city in the world to being a hermit like this, but I don’t find the transition any stretch of the imagination. That city… I went back there for a visit only three months ago. ‘Like a pot of honey left on the stove,’ I told my brother. ‘The longer it boils the sticker it gets.’ All those people, all those strangers, and every person there seems so afraid. I just don’t know how anybody can deal with all that. I couldn’t, not personally.

“But, like I said, I always wanted kids. That’s why I even went there at all, to see my brother’s grandchildren. Beautiful little things: Molly, Ayden, Michael. My brother’s wife comes from an Irish family. Whenever I visited, I would take them to the park, you know, like old men are supposed to do.” He chuckles to himself.

“But I always wanted kids, I don’t know, to leave a legacy or something. Do you know what I mean? The only reason I didn’t have any is because I couldn’t find the right woman. There were a few women, but they were never the correct fit. Never the right woman for me.”

Saul falls silent for a moment. I wonder why he tells me all this and then I realize, he has nobody left to tell and he may never have this opportunity again. He needs to get a burden off his chest, just as I’d done. He looks down at his large hands with his fingers spread apart. He examines them, as if doing so will help understand this messed up situation.

“And now, I guess, that will never happen,” he says, but without any sadness or regret. Only a statement of fact.

“Yeah,” I say after a pause. Anything else I could say would be pointless, so I remain silent.

“What woman would want to live with an old hermit like me anyway? An old crank?” he says with too much volume and pace. “I don’t think I want a woman around here, or kids knocking into everything and screaming, you know?” He pauses, looks about himself, and resumes in a more comfortable voice. “It’s like, I wanted kids, but in the end, not that bullshit and responsibility that comes with them. That’s a bit misogynist, isn’t it? I want a wife to have the kids and rear them for me and keep out of my face when I want them to and leave me to myself.”

“All the rewards without the responsibility – that sounds like something Kerouac would say.” Surrounded by books, I know we’re both comfortable with literary references.

“Yeah, that’s true. Absolutely the truth.” Saul seems delighted that I’ve brought up literature, perhaps so he can escape from his real dilemma, and a smile spreads across his old, wrinkled face. “You see, Kerouac and co., the Beats in the fifties and sixties, lived a life which offered freedom from work, relationships, and any kind of commitment. It sounds fun, but it was all one sided, because the women were barely allowed any part. Hear me out, I have a point. You see, the Beats were famous for their sexual promiscuity – or at least the willingness to write about it, if not to actually engage in it – and the Beat women, like the men, were expected to be sexually available all the time. But because the men skirted all responsibility – because responsibility would only keep them from their ‘truth’ – the women were left with the aftermath, like bills to pay and children to raise. The women could be ‘beat’, up until they inevitably got pregnant, and then they had to be responsible for both the children and for their respective men. And to top it off, the women who entirely supported these men were relegated to just a few pages or few verses in some token gesture or afterthought. You know, Kerouac reduced a two-year relationship of his into about three pages of Desolation Angels. Imagine that.

“The perfect beat woman, in the eyes of someone like Kerouac, was called the fellaheen. It mean’s ‘peasant woman’ and the idea is that they’re all a bit stupid and vulnerable and angelic in their innocence, so they have to be protected and guided by the men. Doing that that lets a beat man prove his masculinity, which is important in a generation that arrived too late for warfare – beforehand, you see, anybody could prove how much of a man they were by doing a bit of military service. So these women, at the same time as being angels of innocence and vulnerability, were also still supposed to be sexually promiscuous. They call it the angel-prostitute paradox, and it’s impossible, and eventually it drove plenty of beat women crazy. They couldn’t achieve the perfect beat woman. They couldn’t possibly be stupid, submissive, innocent, responsible, kind hearted, and then, above all, sexual, all at once.

“Now the Beats appeared in the fifties, about the same time that Hugh Heffner launched Playboy. That magazine, you could say, was supposed to represent more mainstream views of nineteen-fifty's American youth, and the Beat views are supposed to be the alternative ones, the counterculture. Thing is, when it comes to women the views of Playboy and the views of the Beats are almost identical. Both groups objectify women, use them for sex, and then try to deny any responsibility for them. All that means that maybe Kerouac isn’t such a rebel after all. He was pretty damn mainstream in many ways. It’s no wonder that the next decade brought us modern feminism, with shit like that preceding it.”

“Yeah, I see.”

Through all of this, Saul had found a copy of On the Road and has been flicking through the pages without any specific aim. “So if you say my misogyny sounds like Kerouac, I’d say it’s pretty close to the views of most men. At least at that time and probably to this day. Most men want a legacy, but I’m not sure how many want to stick around and watch it grow. It’s a terrible thing to say.” It is, but I’m not sure I agree with him in the first place.

“What I’m trying to say is that men are fuckers. This beat thing is only one example of how much a bunch of fuckers men are. Men have been fuckers right through history. That’s why so many rulers are men. That’s why history’s only the history of men. Men are fuckers, and I know I’ve certainly been a bit of a fucker. And you probably have, even if you want to deny it. Maybe all this, this whole situation, is just men getting what we deserve. We’re going to live the rest of our lives knowing that this is it; we’re the end; we were fuckers. Maybe it serves us right.”

“Wait, you just said the whole human race will die because we’re possibly misogynists.”

“Well, no, of course I don’t mean that. I meant that this is one facet of a much greater problem. The problem I’m talking about incorporates all that sexual and racial inequality, greed, war mongering, and the whole goddamned environmental nightmare the earth has been facing for years now – just for starters. All those cases of mankind fucking it up. Mankind being real fuckers.”

“So you think this is divine punishment for our sins?”

“No, you don’t understand. Maybe I’m not being clear enough. Maybe I’m clouding the air when I talk about books. The thing is, I don’t think it matters if we’re being punished or not. I’m saying we deserve it.” I nod in uneasy assent. “Besides, I’m not sure something man brought upon himself can be classed as a punishment.”

“G9 was man-made?”

“Well why not? A greedy man somewhere; some hateful scientist. That’s all it would take, right? A scientist in the M.O.D. or F.B.I., or whatever these organizations are called, paid to come up with this new biological weapon and it all gets out of control. Mankind can be vicious, Matthew. And I said about the environmental problem already, didn’t I? Doesn’t that sometimes stand as proof that man doesn’t care about anything else around him, but only cares about himself? He skirted all that responsibility.”

“I think that’s a long-shot.”

“Well, maybe it doesn’t matter any more now anyway. I’m only saying we deserve this, whether we brought it on directly, though the manufacture of such a thing, or whether it’s divine justice, or just coincidence. I remember all the news reports acting mixed up about all that – about where all this came from. I think all that matters now is that at least mankind can’t fuck up any more.”

We sit without speaking for a time. Saul breathes heavily, in, out, in, as if doing so requires a lot of effort.

I break the silence. “Don’t you think that maybe you’re too much of a pessimist when it comes to mankind? Do you honestly think humans are all that bad?” Though I barely know this man, he welcomes the tough questions so readily. “So bad that you cut yourself off like this and have no sympathy for the problem at all?”

“I think…” Saul looks around the room, searching for the words he wants to use. Perhaps he thinks he can pluck them from the thousands of books with which he shares his home. “I only think the possibility that this could be unjust would be too much to bear. I’m not sure I could stand a universe where this was all a cruel chance event.”

I stare at Saul and digest his final argument. I’ll accept the concept that this has been annihilation by design, for a purpose, because the alternative, that this has been a pointless apocalypse, is too cruel to comprehend. But these days, I don’t think I even believe in a God. What god would have left me here?

“Do you want a beer?” Saul asks. “I have some cans chilling in the ice outside.

“You know, that would be great.”