Part 4, Chapter 2

I know this is pretty late, but here's Part 4, Chapter 2. If you enjoy it, please consider buying a copy of the ebook using the links on the right, and supporting a first time writer.

All the best,

Dave

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2

I maneuver the truck up Saul’s driveway later that day. Upon hearing the truck’s engine, the old man appears at his door, again holding his rifle at shoulder height. I know he won’t shoot, he did this the last time I arrived too, but the experience is still harrowing. Martin, in the seat next to me, draws a breath and mutters in fear, but Saul soon recognizes me and lowers the weapon. His softening expression appears behind it.

“It’s ok, Martin,” I say. “This man’s a friend of mine.”

“Some friend!” he responds in disbelief.

I stop the vehicle several yards from the home, climb out, and walk to greet Saul. Martin trails behind me. Saul remains stock-still, resting on his gun as if it’s a walking cane and beams a smile towards us.

“And now there’s two of you!” the old man exclaims. For a self-professed hermit, he seems happy to have company.

“This is Martin,” I respond, gesturing behind me. “He’s the only person left in Bramble.”

Despite this news, Saul smiles further and reaches to shake Martin’s hand. The boy reluctantly accepts the gesture. “It’s good to meet you, Martin,” Saul says in the warm manner that befits old men so well.

Martin, unnerved, blubbers, “You too, sir.”

“Yes, well.” Saul replies. He looks at the boy in a long uncomfortable silence and then turns to me in a gesture of hospitality. “You should both come in, of course. I’ll make coffee.” He turns to Martin, “Maybe I have some lemonade for you; I’ll have to take a look around the kitchen.”

*

Saul is excitable and eager to tell me what’s happened while I’ve been gone.

“There’s been a fire in the city! You could see the smoke billowing up from the Northside or maybe Downtown, and there was a hell of lot of it. It’s windier now – you can’t see it so well – but yesterday afternoon, once you left, I could go up the hill behind us and see the thick clouds rising from the south.”

Such an event seems fitting.

“I guess I'm surprised it didn’t happen before,” I respond.

“The world works in strange ways; only when everyone has gone does the big fire hit. You must admit though, it’s exciting stuff.”

“Oh yeah, definitely.” This is only half-true. My agenda was to go back to the city, and now that plan’s gone up in smoke too.

Saul smiles with a black humor and moves into the kitchen to arrange drinks. Of course he knows he shouldn’t be excited by the fire, but maybe, outside of books, this is the first interesting thing to happen to him in years – aside from the whole apocalypse thing. The guilty excitement reminds me of when, as a young teenager, I visited a family friend in small-town Massachusetts. While I was there, a storm broke out. A dispute within the local authority meant that nobody had cleared the drains for some weeks that autumn, and the town was flooded with several feet of water by the end of the day. Despite our best efforts, the water ruined much of the ground floor of my friend’s home, so we sat in his bedroom, upstairs, with the rest of the family across the hall, and we watched the road outside turn into a river. I had no idea when things would be clear enough for me to go home, and the material losses were nearly incalculable, but I’ll never forget how exciting it was to watch all the junk float down the street.

Saul returns from the kitchen, carrying a kettle, and puts it over the fire to boil. “So how were things in Bramble?” he asks.

“It was deserted. Really strange – but I don’t know what else I was expecting.” Martin nods his head in agreement from the other side of the coffee table. Saul waits for me to elaborate. “You know, I went there because, well, I guess leaving Pittsburgh was about leaving my responsibilities, maybe just symbolically, and going to Bramble was about finding my family, who were responsible for me instead.” Saul nods. “I wanted to find someone else who could do the hard work, I guess. Maybe my family, sure. Yeah, and seeing my family was important, but—”

I pause and Saul raises his eyebrows, waiting for me to finish.

“Well, like I said, there’s nobody left.”

The kettle on the fireplace whistles as the water boils, so Saul climbs out of his chair and makes tea. I turn to look at Martin who still looks uncomfortable. He stares about himself as he digests the strange environment that the bibliophile, Saul, calls home. He turns his gaze to me and I give him a reassuring gesture. This appears to cheer him up.

Meanwhile, Saul has returned to kitchen, from where he yells through to us. “While you were gone, I finished a book I was reading. I meant to have read it years ago after a friend in New York told me how much they enjoyed it, but I’d put it off because this friend was a bit of a tool – he was the curator of some shitty art gallery in Manhattan. Sorry.” He means he’s sorry for cursing in earshot of Martin. “The gallery was some junk about painting mattresses. But anyway, the book was Crime and Punishment. Have you read it?”

“No. Is it good?”

“Long. I’ve heard people say it’s poorly written; I think Hemmingway said so in a book of his, maybe in A Moveable Feast…” his voice fades out in thought and possibly because he’s trying to find clean mugs. “But I enjoyed it regardless.” He drops something on the ground with a clatter. “So near the end of the book, after six hundred pages or so, the protagonist, Raskolnikov, has these delirious dreams while he’s locked up in prison.” He returns to the living room, without the tea, and picks up a copy of the book. “Listen to this,” he says as he flips through the pages and digs out a bookmark. “‘He,’ Raskolnikov, ‘dreamt that the whole world was condemned to a terrible new strange plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia. All were to be destroyed except a very few chosen.’ And the plague, you see, is this plague of ignorance, kind of. I mean, it makes everyone think that they have found the one and only absolute truth and this means that everybody has these unchangeable notions of right and wrong different from everybody else. So communication falls apart in the face of anxiety as everyone thinks all those around them can’t grasp their same truth. And so, for instance, armies will be fighting and it will all fall apart as the soldier’s start fighting within their own ranks. The soldiers all think, as individuals, that they’re right about what they’re doing and that everybody else is wrong and they’re unswerving in this opinion. That’s the idea behind Dostoyevsky’s virus. So, he goes on, here and there, ‘men met in groups, agreed on something, swore to keep together, but at once began on something quite different from what they had proposed. They accused one another, fought and killed each other. There were conflagrations and famine. All men and all things were involved in destruction. The plague spread and moved further and further.’ And this is the bit that really stuck in my mind, listen, ‘only a few men could be saved in the whole world. They were a pure chosen people, destined to found a new race and a new life, to renew and purify the earth,’” he pauses for dramatic effect, “‘but no one had seen these men, no one had heard their words and their voices.’”

Saul puts the book down, with pride. “Isn’t that a great image? A great portrait of humankind’s mentality? I love it. This plague brings the worst in us to the surface. And that’s why we see horrible things like looting. We always wanted to do it and a situation like this provides the rationale. And then at the end of it all, the inability to help yourself out of your desperate situation transpires into you waiting for some great third party, some man in the sky to lift you out, like Dostoevsky’s ‘pure chosen people’…”

It seems that sometimes when Saul talks to you, it seems he is only talking to himself and you happen to be there, willing to listen. Not that your willingness to listen has anything to do with it. He’d tell you anyway.

*

An hour later, we sit drinking tea and telling stories about our lives before the plague. We sound like those old men who sit in the park and drink one-dollar McDonalds’ coffee. The conversation wanes. After a brief silence, Saul tilts his head to the window and announces, “I think spring is on its way.”

As normal, Martin and I wait for him to continue.

“It will soon be that time of year. I can already feel the weather easing up, slowly but surely. Soon enough the snow will begin to thaw and the green will reappear. It can’t be long now, boys. The birds will fly back north and carry on their lives as if nothing ever happened. The earth will renew itself and repair the damage we’ve all done to it. Give it a few hundred years and Pittsburgh, and New York, London, Paris, and all those, will be like the Incan cities we keep finding buried in the rainforests.”

This topic has been on my mind for days. “Yeah,” I contribute, “I can almost see the archaeologists digging all of this up again, in years and years, and finding a, uh, a…”

“A spoon.”

“Ha, yeah, a spoon, or a cell phone, or something, and looking at it like it holds a key to the mystery to our civilization, and sticking it in a museum.”

Saul laughs with words, “Ha ha ha. Imagine them trying to figure us out, when not even I understand all that bullshit.”

We both laugh again, but Martin is uncomfortable. He turns to me and bluntly asks, “So are we going to stay here now?”

I don’t know how to respond. I begin with a denial, because this feels like an accusation, stop myself after a syllable, then I try to utter an affirmation, but stop again. I compromise. “Maybe for a short time.” I turn to Saul. “Is that ok?”

Saul nods and hums a high note of welcome.

Martin’s annoyed by the state of affairs. He stands up and states, without emotion, that he is going to the bathroom.

He leaves the room and Saul looks at me with solemn eyes. “You have a big responsibility with this boy,” he says. “Don’t fuck it up. He may well come to hate you, but don’t fuck it up.”

*

I spend my second night at Saul’s home, but this time, out of respect for Martin, I only get slightly drunk. It’s an enjoyable evening. Saul cooks more root vegetables, which are much better than they sound, and Martin has his first beer.

Later that night, in a room half library and half office, I lie on a couch, tucked under in a thick, warm sheet. The beer making my mind swim, and I stare at the ceiling, illuminated by candle light. The roof is unevenly plastered and the bumps and grooves on the gray surface make me think of how the moon must look once you get close enough. It looks like the moon from a mile out. I daydream like this for a while, studying the valleys and craters in the ceiling and listening to Martin snore in the bed I slept in two nights ago. Saul is in his own room and sleeps silently under the light scream of the wind outside. The room is warm and comforting. I know the wind outside would freeze my bones and I’m eternally grateful for Saul’s hospitality. I find myself regretting my earlier, bizarre evaluations of Saul. I judged him as awkward and emotionless. I’d taken a flight of imagination, coming to a judgment based on his social anxiety, communication problems, and erratic hand gestures. It was unfair.

I look at my fake moon surface, the shadows of the peaks and valleys ebbing and flowing in the ever-changing light. I imagine swooping through the crevices on a most literal flight of fancy. A while passes in daydream before I lean over, blow out the candle, and lie there with my eyes closed. My thoughts take on the rhythm of Martin’s snoring; slow, heaving, lumbering thoughts, on moonlight, on what I’ve lost and on what I’ve found.

Sleep swims up to greet me, but of course, that’s an event I can rarely recall.