This is the beginning of the end, quite literally. Part 4 is the culmination of everything to happen so far in A Pittsburgh Storm. Coming up we have some shoot-outs, arson, a new major character, and then maybe somewhere along the way, Matthew will finally find what he's looking for. Maybe. And like I haven't said it enough times, if you're impatient to see what comes next, you can just get the ebook for $1.25, with the links on the right. You can even get the paperback if you're ritzy.
This chapter's pretty big so I've broken it in two. Expect the second half on Sunday.
Dave
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Part Four
Downtown
1
The sun is high and I know that the town of Bramble, with all of its abandoned vehicles and potential transport, is only another fifteen minutes walk. The burning house may draw the attention of any other survivors in the area and I'm excited to see if I meet anybody on their way to investigate. I attempt to calculate the probability of someone else from the town being alive.
Pittsburgh had a population of, I guess, three hundred thousand. The metropolitan area had about two million people, I think, but I don’t know where the metropolitan area ends. I compromise and place the population of the city and close surrounding area at six hundred thousand. There were about fifty people in Mecca, and I figure it’s possible to double or triple that figure to guess the total number of survivors in the city. The next part takes a while to figure out as I walk along the bends and curves in the road. Six hundred thousand total population divided by one-hundred and fifty survivors leaves a figure of about one survivor out of every four or five thousand. I need to allow for a huge margin of error. Bramble, Pennsylvania, had a population of six thousand. Maybe there’s one person there now? Maybe five, ten, or none? Does living in an area of lower population density have anything to do with the figure when you consider an infectious disease? Possibly.
Although the snow on the road has drifted deep in places, the walk into Bramble is pleasant enough. Winter birds chirp in the trees and the sun glistens though overhead branches creating a spider web of shadows on the road. The winter must end soon and this spring, unlike any previous spring, will be a season where regrowth of the environment will also be a reclamation; nature reclaiming the earth from man, slowly erasing his impact. It all starts now. Slowly reclaiming more and more, year by year, until only crumbled ruins will remain and then, after millennia, nothing at all. Lawns, crop fields, and houseplants will run amok. I can’t help but wonder at what any civilization in hundreds, thousands, or millions of years time will think of this human race. I imagine a civilization similar to the one I have already known. If they start from scratch, maybe their knowledge will head in a different direction than ours. Maybe, rather than initially focusing on theology or faith and then allowing the sciences to stem from that, their science will start elsewhere, perhaps astrology, biology, or physics, and any theological sense will arrive from there instead. Perhaps they’ll worship Pi and the perfection of trigonometry. Perhaps not. Maybe they’ll evolve as normal and then one day learn how to extract the data from our old computer hard-drives, or decipher the text in our dusty, decaying libraries, making a huge leap in knowledge in only one or two generations. The wild speculations are endless during this easy walk.
I remember one time, when travelling through Europe as an exchange student, visiting a roadside attraction in Wales called King Arthur’s Labyrinth. It involved taking a boat ride down underground rivers, deep into a cold, breezy mountain cave system, to see comical recreations of the King Arthur myths using old shop manikins. At the time, I laughed with my travelling companions to think what future civilization would think of this bizarre set-up. Surely, a collection of plastic men beneath a mountain would be on par with the inexplicable stone heads of Easter Island. Now, I can’t get that image out of my head.
I approach Bramble town center and, like Pittsburgh, the streets are a mess, though fewer inhabitants mean the carnage is tamer in scale. I walk down a long hill onto the town, with the community college on my left, then a medical clinic, library, and a collection of small bookshops. The clinic is ruined. In its last days, it must have been overcrowded and abused. Now it’s quiet and still, no doubt filled with bodies. Beneath the snow, the sidewalk, cracked and spoiled, pounds against my feet. To my right, the bare forest watches my stroll down the shallow incline, until I turn onto one of the town’s main streets and leave the empty hollows behind.
The sun is bright and for the first time since I can remember, I’m uncomfortably hot.
I emerge by the side of a Korean restaurant into the town square. Small businesses and two drugstore chains surround the area, which houses a small garden in the centre. The frontage of Rite-Aid has been smashed up and the building’s contents spilled into the street, covered up by fresh snow. I look back in the direction I came from and spot the smoke from my family’s old home, perhaps a mile away. I wonder how long it will take the fire to stop. Six hours, maybe? I walk across the square and stub my toe on a brick buried in the snow. I pick it up and turn it over in my hand, feeling its weight. I drop my bag to the ground and then, in a moment of whimsy, I throw the brick through a window of the Korean restaurant, so I can watch the destruction and enjoy the sense of power. The sound of the breaking glass carries easily through the otherwise silent air and surrounded by the new noise, I suck in a lungful of the invigorating and refreshing cold.
“Hyahh,” I yell in happy exultation. I both roar and yawn, stretching my arms above my head, satisfied and awake to the sensations around me.
I kick around the square for a while, unwilling to do anything else; there’s no reason to rush myself. I look into what was once the window of a bookstore, checking if there’s anything worth taking, but looters have devastated the interior and I can’t muster the energy to dig through the chaos.
I grab my bag again and slink along side streets, eyeing up any cars I come across, looking for any vehicle suitable for a journey back to Pittsburgh. It’s as I'm doing this that the young boy yells from behind me, “Hey, Sir. Hey, wait!” The voice is full of excitement and relief and, for the first time, the encounter with another human doesn’t scare me; so reassuring is the boy’s tone, and so relaxed is my own psychology. The boy runs towards me, waving his arms, bearing a huge grin of satisfaction. He must be no older than eleven or twelve.
“I can’t believe I found someone,” he yells, as I remain silent. “I thought everyone was, you know. Like, everyone – I thought—”
I maintain my silence. I must appear emotionless and imposing to the boy, but really, the sudden energy of the situation has caught me off guard. In response, the boy slows his erratic gestures and glances and instead looks straight at me. “Hey, are you alright?”
I’m scaring him, so I pull myself together and display my own genuine sense of relief. “Oh yeah, I’m fine,” I laugh. “Sorry, you surprised me there. I’m sorry.” There’s a grateful silence, where the boy smiles. “Have you been here alone all this time?” I ask. “Is there anybody else?”
“I’ve been, yeah— There’s nobody else in town at all, I think. You haven’t been here all this time, right?” I shake my head and he continues. “I’ve been staying at Judy Mullen’s place, just over the square.” He points, but I already know where he means. Judy Mullen was the hostess of the town’s best diner, Judy’s, and therefore she’s a local celebrity. Judy’s made great breakfast eggs and fried potato, and those breakfasts became symbolic of my time at high school.
“Yeah,” I smiled. “I know Judy’s.”
We’re quiet for a moment and the boy’s expression wavers. The next time he speaks, his voice wobbles and cracks. “My parents—,” is all he says. I know that this boy has been though more in these past weeks than any kid his age should ever have to go through.
“Listen,” I say, trying to reassure him. If he starts to talk about his parents, he’ll be lost in depression and he may drag me in with him. “I'm going to head back into Pittsburgh. I know you don’t know who I am, but maybe, if you want, you should come with me. I think it would be for the best if we stuck together.” I feel like we have to do this and I think I would enjoy the company. Furthermore, maybe the role of protector to this kid could at least give me a direction. Only moment’s ago I was wandering an old town square in the snow, throwing bricks. Maybe this kid could provide a reason for this otherwise aimless existence.
“Oh, man, Sir—”
“Sorry, I should have said earlier. I’m Matthew.” We shake hands and the kid smiles further.
“My name’s Martin,” he tells me with pride.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Martin.” I formulate a plan of action. “Maybe you can show me where you’ve been staying? We need food and a car. Specifically, we need a car that can deal with all this snow. Have you any ideas? Have you seen any around?”
He seems like a good kid. Very polite and grateful, and this makes him a pleasure to be around. We go to Judy’s and he shows me the bed he made on one of the longer booth seats. It occurs to me how strange it is that he would choose this diner for a home, amongst all the red and while porcelain and the plastic covered seating, rather than a house, which would be more comfortable by a magnitude. He’s eager to explain his reasoning. “There are too many things going on in those houses,” he says. “Like ghosts.” I know what he means. There are too many memories and traces of other people. Those homes should have been rarely if ever, empty. I feel the photo of Karen Spellman in my back pocket and remember how all of these ghosts can live on in the imagination. These people will never be seen or heard again, yet in a way they live on, if only in our minds. “The diner is like, it’s like it has everybody’s memories, so it’s like it has no ghosts at all, or maybe so many that none of them matter any more.”
He has comics and books strewn across the tables in the rear corner of the building. He also has a large stash of batteries, which he's been using in an old hand-held Nintendo Gameboy. Amongst multitudes of Little Betty Crocker Cookie wrappers and Oreos is the boys screwed up blankets. “I had to leave my home,” he says, “because somebody broke the window. It got too cold with the wind blowing through it. And then we were running out of food too.”
“We?”
“My family— before—”
He looks down at the ground. His body is thin with brown hair hanging limp over his forehead. By all appearances, he would have been classed as a nerdy kid when there were others around to judge him. Perhaps this is why he reminds me of myself.
“So, what have you been doing for all this time?” I ask.
“I was building defenses.” I can see these ‘defenses’ piled up by the front window of Judy's; a jumble of wood and garbage cans. He’s made no effort to give the materials much of an overall structure. They are no more defenses than a cocoa bean is a Hershey bar. I look back at the boy and raise my eyebrows in question and he reads the expression with ease. “Well, I was building defenses, but then there was nobody left to defend against.” I wonder at how he ever coped during a time when he had to barricade himself into a diner to protect himself from what had become of the people he had once known. Then I ask myself how I had ever coped with that, and I recall that the dead body on the Birmingham Bridge stands as testament to how I haven't coped at all.
After I take in the surroundings Martin has constructed, the pair of us go for a walk to see if we can find any suitable vehicles, perhaps to go back to the city in, perhaps to go and see Saul again, or perhaps to do something entirely different. Martin promises me that his old neighbors have a battered, but usable, four-wheel drive in their garage. It should still be there, he says, because he hasn't seen the family in weeks. And he's right. When we break in to the garage, there is indeed a huge, red, rusting hulk of a truck. What’s more, from all outward appearances, it’s in a usable condition. While Martin hunts around the rest of the house, looking for truck’s keys, I attach chains to the wheels, in order to maintain traction when driving in the snow.
As I finish, Martin returns with the vehicle’s keys and stands by my backpack, which I left by the door. A moment passes and Martin notices the machine-gun, wrapped in an old sweater, and strapped to the bags’ side. Considering the boy’s age, his excitement seems justifiable. He asks to see it, but he means he wants to attempt shooting something. In theory, I find it objectionable to be excited by a firearm, like to do so would be trivializing the items unique quality of violence. Then I recall how it felt to hold and fire the weapon for the first time myself. How I felt as I peppered holes into a car at the roadblock. Then again, he’s only a kid, and kids shouldn’t do those kinds of things. And then a third time, his parents are no longer around, which means he’s his own boss, because I'm not going to claim that position. I consider how much he’s had to deal with in the past weeks, and I consider how fast he’s had to grow in that time. I consider all of these things and deduce that he’s perfectly within his rights to ask to use the weapon. He’s been through a lot, so I should respect that and let him make his own choices. So I agree that he can shoot the gun sometime soon. Maybe he’ll need the practice. Neither of us know who or what waits around the next corner.
I’m a bad driver to begin with, and I’m rusty because I don’t drive in the city, but in an automatic vehicle, going slow, with no other traffic or rules to obey, driving is much simpler than I remember. After Martin and I open the garage doors, I reverse the truck out across the front lawn, across skeletons of rose bushes, and into a mailbox. I suspect that this is the first time Martin has laughed in weeks, and I feel the same way. The boy’s face turns red and he doubles over in hysterics, watching the mailbox buckle and snag, as I pull the truck out into the road. I raise my arms at him as if to say, “Not my problem! They shouldn’t have put it there!” and he laughs again, stood amongst our bags and supplies.
He climbs in the passenger seat and we wind through the town in the old red four by four at an excruciating pace, slowly heading back towards Pittsburgh, with a planned stopover at Saul’s home. Martin makes small talk while I concentrate on driving.
“So, did you see any other kids in the city?” he asks.
“Nobody younger than seventeen or eighteen.”
“Don’t you think that’s weird?”
“Yeah, I guess. I didn’t really think about it.” I don’t ask Martin if he’s noticed the absence of women yet. I imagine he hasn’t and there’s no reason to upset him.
There’s a brief silence and we watch a deer dart along the side of the road.
“So, do you think that I could be the youngest person there is now?” Martin asks.
“I don’t know. How old are you?”
“Eleven.”
“Is that so?” I ask rhetorically. He could well be the youngest survivor for hundreds of miles.
“But I bet any kids younger than me wouldn’t even be able to take care of themselves. I mean, even if they didn’t get sick, like us, I bet they’d have trouble finding food, and a place to sleep, and a place to hide. You know?”
“Yeah, I understand. You know, I think you’re right.”
There’s a brief silence as Martin considers the consequences of being the youngest person alive.
“Man,” the kid says with an odd, excited tone. “That’s going to suck!”
We both laugh. It feels great.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Part 3, Chapter 6 (Second Half)
Here's the end to Part 3. Part 4 will start on Thursday. Enjoy the update, and hey, why not just buy the whole thing right now, for only $1.25, with the links on the right?
Dave
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6 (Continued)
In the morning, the candles have burned down to stubs surrounded by waxen waves.
I ignite a pile of coals in the garden’s barbeque pit, next to the rear porch awning. The morning is clear and sunny, though cold, and I decide it would be pleasant to eat outside. While the coals heat up I go up to my old room to see if I can find any clothes worth taking.
I find clean, dusty boxer shorts in a cupboard, an old, threadbare Metallica t-shirt, a pair of jeans, and a sweater, all left there because, three years ago, I knew I would never wear them again. I go into the bathroom and examine my new outfit in the mirror. “Sex-machine!” I laugh.
My family’s toiletries stand on the bathroom shelf and I'm shocked at how little my family’s possible whereabouts now weighs on my mind. Shouldn’t they have taken toiletries with them when they left? They took all the food, after all. I assume they’ve all died. As horrifying as that is, it seems logical. The problem is that I have so little feeling left, I’ve become so numb, that it’s difficult to show any genuine emotion. I’ve lost track of time, but it wasn’t long ago that Emily died too. My struggle over the loss of her life waned and faded as I received a heavier load to bear. Something important inside of me has gone. It left a week ago as I sat by my apartment window and watched a body cover with freezing snow on the Carnegie Museum’s plaza. All I have left is a growing lump in my throat and a burning behind the eyes. That’s where grief goes when you swallow it down. It hides there and waits to catch you by surprise.
I feel sick at my own sense of unfeeling. This is why I start a fire of newspapers in the living room of my late family’s home. After I eat my barbeque-cooked oatmeal, I gather clothes, and any amenities I can carry. Then I take one of the red-hot coals indoors, and watch the orange flames flicker up the living room’s wall, watching the smoke sweep, thicker than expected, along the ceiling. After a few minutes, the couch catches flame, which surprises me. I figured that all modern couches were fireproof. It looks like an upholstery company somewhere needs to do a recall. As the heat and smoke becomes too uncomfortable, I open the living room windows and climb out, pulling my pack behind me.
From outside, I watch the fire spread through the home for a few minutes. As each item burns, chars, or melts in the inferno that I created, another piece of my past life is exorcized from my mind. The weight of memories and familial responsibility is lifted from my shoulders. When Mecca fell, I had mixed feelings of disappointment, anger, and frustration, but also relief that I was able to escape the commitment it called for. The commitment I felt I owed my family pulled me all the way here, killing another man in the process and almost killing me too. I’m relived to be rid of it.
Though I didn’t found my parents, two brothers, and sister, I feel like I’ve returned my debt. I tried. Maybe they went into the city to find me. Maybe it was only my father who went to the city, as the rest of my family went to stay with an aunt in Ohio. This becomes another mute point as another room catches flame and there’s a crashing noise as an interior wall is weakened and causes my younger brother’s bedroom to fall through into the room below. Or maybe it’s the ground floor living room that falls into the basement. Through the dust, flames, and smoke I can no longer be sure.
There’s no joy in this event. This flight from commitment fills me only with relief. This murderous arsonist standing before you can start a new unencumbered chapter in his life. I’ll visit Saul, the hermit, and tell him what I did, and then perhaps return to Pittsburgh. At least there, I’m familiar with my surroundings and I know I can scavenge plenty of food. When summer arrives, perhaps I’ll go somewhere that I can grow my own food. Maybe I’ll use a patch of Schenley Park.
The smoke in my lungs feels like a fumigation of the body, rather than a choking limitation. This entire time, these past weeks, I feel like I’ve been a sleepwalker, unable to comprehend the horrors around me. I’ve been numb to everything. Now I feel above all of that. My childhood is consumed by flames, as are burdensome perceptions of how I once thought the world worked. I once believed in the old tale: get a job, get a family, stay out of trouble, pay your taxes, and settle for suburban monotony. Now I don’t know what I believe. But now I can decide to believe in whatever I want.
*
My first priority is to find a new form of transportation. There’s a long journey ahead of me, wherever that journey leads.
I stroll away from the burning house in the calmness of that morning. I look back on the continued destruction, despite my desire never to see the home again. Ahead, the snow lies thin on the ground; it feels more delicate than ever. I wonder, if I don’t look back again, will anybody ever see the footprints I make when I leave? I like to think I leave no footprints at all.
Dave
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6 (Continued)
In the morning, the candles have burned down to stubs surrounded by waxen waves.
I ignite a pile of coals in the garden’s barbeque pit, next to the rear porch awning. The morning is clear and sunny, though cold, and I decide it would be pleasant to eat outside. While the coals heat up I go up to my old room to see if I can find any clothes worth taking.
I find clean, dusty boxer shorts in a cupboard, an old, threadbare Metallica t-shirt, a pair of jeans, and a sweater, all left there because, three years ago, I knew I would never wear them again. I go into the bathroom and examine my new outfit in the mirror. “Sex-machine!” I laugh.
My family’s toiletries stand on the bathroom shelf and I'm shocked at how little my family’s possible whereabouts now weighs on my mind. Shouldn’t they have taken toiletries with them when they left? They took all the food, after all. I assume they’ve all died. As horrifying as that is, it seems logical. The problem is that I have so little feeling left, I’ve become so numb, that it’s difficult to show any genuine emotion. I’ve lost track of time, but it wasn’t long ago that Emily died too. My struggle over the loss of her life waned and faded as I received a heavier load to bear. Something important inside of me has gone. It left a week ago as I sat by my apartment window and watched a body cover with freezing snow on the Carnegie Museum’s plaza. All I have left is a growing lump in my throat and a burning behind the eyes. That’s where grief goes when you swallow it down. It hides there and waits to catch you by surprise.
I feel sick at my own sense of unfeeling. This is why I start a fire of newspapers in the living room of my late family’s home. After I eat my barbeque-cooked oatmeal, I gather clothes, and any amenities I can carry. Then I take one of the red-hot coals indoors, and watch the orange flames flicker up the living room’s wall, watching the smoke sweep, thicker than expected, along the ceiling. After a few minutes, the couch catches flame, which surprises me. I figured that all modern couches were fireproof. It looks like an upholstery company somewhere needs to do a recall. As the heat and smoke becomes too uncomfortable, I open the living room windows and climb out, pulling my pack behind me.
From outside, I watch the fire spread through the home for a few minutes. As each item burns, chars, or melts in the inferno that I created, another piece of my past life is exorcized from my mind. The weight of memories and familial responsibility is lifted from my shoulders. When Mecca fell, I had mixed feelings of disappointment, anger, and frustration, but also relief that I was able to escape the commitment it called for. The commitment I felt I owed my family pulled me all the way here, killing another man in the process and almost killing me too. I’m relived to be rid of it.
Though I didn’t found my parents, two brothers, and sister, I feel like I’ve returned my debt. I tried. Maybe they went into the city to find me. Maybe it was only my father who went to the city, as the rest of my family went to stay with an aunt in Ohio. This becomes another mute point as another room catches flame and there’s a crashing noise as an interior wall is weakened and causes my younger brother’s bedroom to fall through into the room below. Or maybe it’s the ground floor living room that falls into the basement. Through the dust, flames, and smoke I can no longer be sure.
There’s no joy in this event. This flight from commitment fills me only with relief. This murderous arsonist standing before you can start a new unencumbered chapter in his life. I’ll visit Saul, the hermit, and tell him what I did, and then perhaps return to Pittsburgh. At least there, I’m familiar with my surroundings and I know I can scavenge plenty of food. When summer arrives, perhaps I’ll go somewhere that I can grow my own food. Maybe I’ll use a patch of Schenley Park.
The smoke in my lungs feels like a fumigation of the body, rather than a choking limitation. This entire time, these past weeks, I feel like I’ve been a sleepwalker, unable to comprehend the horrors around me. I’ve been numb to everything. Now I feel above all of that. My childhood is consumed by flames, as are burdensome perceptions of how I once thought the world worked. I once believed in the old tale: get a job, get a family, stay out of trouble, pay your taxes, and settle for suburban monotony. Now I don’t know what I believe. But now I can decide to believe in whatever I want.
*
My first priority is to find a new form of transportation. There’s a long journey ahead of me, wherever that journey leads.
I stroll away from the burning house in the calmness of that morning. I look back on the continued destruction, despite my desire never to see the home again. Ahead, the snow lies thin on the ground; it feels more delicate than ever. I wonder, if I don’t look back again, will anybody ever see the footprints I make when I leave? I like to think I leave no footprints at all.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Part 3, Chapter 6 (First Half)
Sorry I'm a bit late again. I started a new job this week and it's left me a drained shell of my former self! Still, here it is; the penultimate update before the start of Part 4.
Don't forget you can buy the whole thing now (revised and updated) for only $1.25, using the links on the right.
I'll upload the second part on Monday.
Enjoy the update,
Dave
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6
It’s early afternoon and I’m on familiar roads; roads I used to cycle along as a child. I remember this bridge and that old crumbling house. Here, on the left, is where they used to hold the summer fair. Now it’s only a damp empty field. There are few houses out here and, consequently, there were always very few people.
Judging by a recently passed church, I must be around ten miles from home. But then the snowmobile’s engine starts to make a loud grinding noise and the machine slows to a walking pace. I curse through my scarf and rock backwards and forward in the vain hope that the motion of my body will propel the piece of crap forwards. Instead, smoke billows out from the engine and it stops altogether. I climb off and look around with annoyance. I’m at a bend in the road. To the left of me, the bank of the road falls down into a small, slow-paced river. The right side leads up to a hill covered with bare-trunked pine trees.
“Fuck you!” I yell the snowmobile and then again at the emptiness around me.
I have no idea how to fix an engine, so I lift my bag onto my back, grab the dirty crowbar in my hand, and start walking.
I count my remaining blessings. The weather has been clear for hours.
Then it snows.
*
I estimate that after fifteen or twenty minutes of walking I’ll have covered a mile. That estimation means I stand to spend at least another three hours outdoors until I arrive at my parent’s place. “Three hours,” I joke bitterly, “may well kill me.” The snow continues to fall and I keep my steady pace through the gathering drifts.
My hands freeze into claw shapes, but I can’t focus on how cold I’m getting, or else it’ll just get worse. I have to put these facts to the back of my mind, into the dark recesses, where I put those other facts like, I am a murderer. The facts aren’t lost. I just push them aside whenever they crop up in thought and replace them with present circumstance or whatever else can catch my attention. I can only do this by maintaining my matter-of-fact, stoic attitude, concerned with practicalities and what I need to do. This works because yesterday’s murder feels so surreal that it could well have been a lifetime ago. I’m a murderer, but when said with stoicism, it could mean as much as, “I once made sandwiches for a living.” I am also agnostic. I am also pro-choice. I also don’t think that matters. “I am a murderer,” only becomes a fact amongst others when I purposefully ignore the consequences and ramifications. Only my bloodied jacket and smeared crowbar make that fact any more real.
*
Three hours is a long time to walk. Three hours is an even longer time to walk when you’re in the snow. This much is obvious.
I’ve wrapped my body from head to foot in scarves, a hat, a jacket, long underwear, and heavy shoes, yet my face still freezes. I can’t feel my toes, despite two pairs of socks trying to retain the heat. The snow gets thicker and thicker as time passes; it sticks to the front of my body in damp clots, and each step I take kicks more snow from the ground.
After an hour of walking, one third of my estimated journey and without spotting any shelter, I feel lightheaded and break into a cold sweat – just like yesterday’s fainting fit in the strange house on the way to Saul’s place. My head spins and my vision blurs. After a few steps, I stumble into the side of the road and fall into a mound of snow, piled high by the wind against the side of a tree.
*
I’ve no idea how long I lay in the snow for, but when I regain consciousness and shuffle to my feet the sun is still high in the sky. I can’t have been here too long. I haven’t turned blue or anything like that. I could have been here for thirty seconds, or five minutes, or twenty minutes. I’ve no idea.
I shudder at the realization of the danger I’m in. Nobody came to help me while I was unconscious. There was nothing to have stopped me from dying in that cold heap, other than my own body’s ability to revive itself. It dawns on me that the pool I’ve been thrown in, this world, where a strange voice yells, “sink or swim,” is deep, so deep, and I could very well keep on sinking if I don’t do something about it. There’s no safety net and nothing, save myself, to pull me back from the brink, should I reach that far. I’m in a new world where catching the flu, and being unable to feed yourself for a while, could very well be your demise. The dizzy spells I’ve experienced take on a new level of severity when I consider the conditions I face. I remind myself, should these lapses continue happening, I may as well be dead next time.
But at this point, right here, all I can do is pick myself up and continue walking. My limbs feel heavy and protest every movement, but to let lethargy win would be certain suicide. And so I just keep walking, pack on my back, cold wind in my face, and walk, and walk, and walk. I don’t resent my situation any more, because there is no way to escape it. I know this journey must end. I must find shelter, company, or something. If I walk for long enough, I’ll find something.
It feels like when you’re stuck on long haul, multiple part journeys. Those connections and waiting times, in anonymous airports, bus stations, and train stations, when there’s nothing you can do to speed up your progress. I recall the utter exhaustion, when I once waited for the time to tick by in the Greyhound station of Cleveland, Ohio, and in the awful town of Niagara, Ontario, with boarded up windows lining the streets, fog in the air, and a dog barking in the distance. The Niagara station closed in the evening and I had to wait outside late into the night, and the neighborhood didn’t look friendly. A long journey like that is a test, but it’s hard to be miserable when you know you can’t improve your situation in the short term. You’re stuck.
And here I am, walking up Highway 79 and then out and down capillaries pointing the way home. I’m in exactly the same situation. There’s nothing I can do except wait out the duration of the walk.
Hours pass and the roads become more familiar. On my left is the home of my childhood friend, Tom Wyndham, and his sister, Holly Wyndham. Holly Wyndham, who I would spy on in my poorly disguised teenage lust; always trying to catch a glimpse of her body. Only once, I saw her in her panties, as she changed clothes. Tom and I would cycle together every day, until he got a car and a driver’s license and our journeys lost their adventurous veneer. While we still cycled, we roamed through the Pennsylvania country. One time we trespassed through a farmer’s field in the early spring, so the juvenile crops were unrecognizable. Spotting our bikes, the mad old farmer ran after us, yelling abuse, waving a shotgun, theatrical. He didn’t catch us, so were fine, but I guess Tom is dead now anyway. As is that old famer. As is Holly Wyndham. It’s not worth stopping at their home. I’m almost back now.
And here is where I would catch the bus to school. Five boys and six girls, every morning through elementary and middle school, waiting in rain and sun for the often-dreaded flash of yellow to come around the far bend. This bus stop indicates that home is only another hundred meters away. I can already see the low roof and fence of my family’s home. I can already see the dark windows where somebody has closed the curtains and blinds. I can already see the snow gathering on the driveway. My father would have never tolerated such a thing.
I approach the front entrance. The car is gone and the house is, by all appearances, empty. I still possess the keys and my numb fingers fumble through my pockets, searching for them. They slip from my grasp, once, twice, as I try to shove them in the lock, and I have to kick away the snow on the doorstep to find them again. Finally, I gain access and once inside I notice that the air is fresh; there’s an open window somewhere. I stroll into the living room and pull open the curtains to light up the drab interior. The room is immaculate, as it always was when I was growing up. There are a few changes here and there, which my parents implemented when my siblings and I began to move away; my parents finally making the place their own again. The kitchen, like the living room, is also spotless. Even the bathrooms smell fresh. I instinctively press the button on the answering machine before I remember there’s no power.
I’m still somehow surprised that I find none of my family in the building, though I knew the place would be empty. All the rooms are clean, and the beds made, as if my family merely left for a holiday.
I go into my old room. Few traces remain of me in here. I moved out three years ago, taking most of my things, and my parents started to use the room for storage. Cardboard boxes sit between my bed and desk, along with piles of books, photos, and CDs. The blue wallpaper reminds me of a former life and a former me where acne was of the upmost importance and I needed a date for whatever it was I did all the time.
I sit on the couch in the living room and contemplate my situation. I take the photos of my friends, family, Emily Jacobs, and Karen Spellman, from my pocket and stand them on the fireplace.
I sit down again.
Now this entire journey seems pointless and impotent. I killed a man so I could sit on this couch in the dimming afternoon. I struggled through hours of wind and cold to be here. A battery-powered clock ticks away in the kitchen. The ticking travels through the door, providing me with a monotony to focus my reality upon. Other than that sound, I’m numb.
Now that I’ve arrived at the end of my journey, fatigue overtakes my body. These few weeks have made me a new man and left me utterly exhausted. But this is the best place to rest; safe and comfortable. There’s no place like home. I sigh, lie back on the welcoming couch and contemplate what to do next. Return to Saul’s home and hope the old hermit will welcome my presence? I can’t call that progress. Return to Pittsburgh, where fifty or sixty disenfranchised men now roam the streets? Perhaps a new group is forming post-Mecca, but I don’t want to be part of any new group, any more than I wanted to be part of the last.
*
Evening encroaches. I find some candles, which my mother stored beneath the kitchen sink, and set a couple down on the coffee table, waiting for a fuller darkness to set in before I light them. Meanwhile, I take one of the candles down to the basement to look for food. I find nothing useful. My family, when they left, took almost everything of use with them. If they were sick, I have no idea why they would leave, or why they would expend the energy to pack up all their vital belongings. If they were healthy, then why didn’t they attempt to contact me? A note on the fridge would have been some consolation.
But I can’t find any clues. My family seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth.
So I poke around the contents of the basement for while. This is one of my favorite parts of the house, because, although it’s always an uncharacteristic mess, most of the space was given over to me, my brothers, and sister, to use to relax with our friends. A filthy pool table stands down there and old Christmas lights hang from the ceiling. A mini fridge houses drinks, and a small stereo sits atop of it. Huge wooden spools, intended to hold industrial amounts of wire, or pipes, or something, left here by previous tenants, act as tables and chairs. Down here, my friends and I had a chance to escape our middle-class lives, and a chance to act out our cool and rebellious fantasies. Now that I’ve returned home, a changed person after over three years of student life, and several weeks of this surreal after-life. I’m embarrassed by the poster of Che Guevara hanging on the wall and the hip-hop CDs stacked by the stereo system. The basement makes me feel childish and ineffectual again.
I snub the candle and return upstairs. Climbing the same basement steps that would creep me out as a kid, because I always thought a hand would shoot up from between the gaps to grab my feet and pull me down.
I return to the living room and pick a tin of preserved ham out of my bag. I eat it cold, sat on the couch and still wrapped in my winter jacket and hat.
Once the living room is too dark to see comfortably, I light the candles again and stand them back on the coffee table, where their dripping wax ruins the veneer. The new source of light causes the living room’s large windows to act as mirrors on the room’s interior. I walk over to them, pulling my hat and scarf off to inspect myself in the dark and flattering reflection. I admire two weeks of beard growth; the longest my facial hair has ever been.
I close the curtains, partly because I’m unnerved by the thought of somebody staring in at me. Then I sit on the couch, with my tin of luncheon ham, and stare at the ceiling for a while.
I fall asleep with a blanket pulled over me and the can still in my hand.
Don't forget you can buy the whole thing now (revised and updated) for only $1.25, using the links on the right.
I'll upload the second part on Monday.
Enjoy the update,
Dave
---------
6
It’s early afternoon and I’m on familiar roads; roads I used to cycle along as a child. I remember this bridge and that old crumbling house. Here, on the left, is where they used to hold the summer fair. Now it’s only a damp empty field. There are few houses out here and, consequently, there were always very few people.
Judging by a recently passed church, I must be around ten miles from home. But then the snowmobile’s engine starts to make a loud grinding noise and the machine slows to a walking pace. I curse through my scarf and rock backwards and forward in the vain hope that the motion of my body will propel the piece of crap forwards. Instead, smoke billows out from the engine and it stops altogether. I climb off and look around with annoyance. I’m at a bend in the road. To the left of me, the bank of the road falls down into a small, slow-paced river. The right side leads up to a hill covered with bare-trunked pine trees.
“Fuck you!” I yell the snowmobile and then again at the emptiness around me.
I have no idea how to fix an engine, so I lift my bag onto my back, grab the dirty crowbar in my hand, and start walking.
I count my remaining blessings. The weather has been clear for hours.
Then it snows.
*
I estimate that after fifteen or twenty minutes of walking I’ll have covered a mile. That estimation means I stand to spend at least another three hours outdoors until I arrive at my parent’s place. “Three hours,” I joke bitterly, “may well kill me.” The snow continues to fall and I keep my steady pace through the gathering drifts.
My hands freeze into claw shapes, but I can’t focus on how cold I’m getting, or else it’ll just get worse. I have to put these facts to the back of my mind, into the dark recesses, where I put those other facts like, I am a murderer. The facts aren’t lost. I just push them aside whenever they crop up in thought and replace them with present circumstance or whatever else can catch my attention. I can only do this by maintaining my matter-of-fact, stoic attitude, concerned with practicalities and what I need to do. This works because yesterday’s murder feels so surreal that it could well have been a lifetime ago. I’m a murderer, but when said with stoicism, it could mean as much as, “I once made sandwiches for a living.” I am also agnostic. I am also pro-choice. I also don’t think that matters. “I am a murderer,” only becomes a fact amongst others when I purposefully ignore the consequences and ramifications. Only my bloodied jacket and smeared crowbar make that fact any more real.
*
Three hours is a long time to walk. Three hours is an even longer time to walk when you’re in the snow. This much is obvious.
I’ve wrapped my body from head to foot in scarves, a hat, a jacket, long underwear, and heavy shoes, yet my face still freezes. I can’t feel my toes, despite two pairs of socks trying to retain the heat. The snow gets thicker and thicker as time passes; it sticks to the front of my body in damp clots, and each step I take kicks more snow from the ground.
After an hour of walking, one third of my estimated journey and without spotting any shelter, I feel lightheaded and break into a cold sweat – just like yesterday’s fainting fit in the strange house on the way to Saul’s place. My head spins and my vision blurs. After a few steps, I stumble into the side of the road and fall into a mound of snow, piled high by the wind against the side of a tree.
*
I’ve no idea how long I lay in the snow for, but when I regain consciousness and shuffle to my feet the sun is still high in the sky. I can’t have been here too long. I haven’t turned blue or anything like that. I could have been here for thirty seconds, or five minutes, or twenty minutes. I’ve no idea.
I shudder at the realization of the danger I’m in. Nobody came to help me while I was unconscious. There was nothing to have stopped me from dying in that cold heap, other than my own body’s ability to revive itself. It dawns on me that the pool I’ve been thrown in, this world, where a strange voice yells, “sink or swim,” is deep, so deep, and I could very well keep on sinking if I don’t do something about it. There’s no safety net and nothing, save myself, to pull me back from the brink, should I reach that far. I’m in a new world where catching the flu, and being unable to feed yourself for a while, could very well be your demise. The dizzy spells I’ve experienced take on a new level of severity when I consider the conditions I face. I remind myself, should these lapses continue happening, I may as well be dead next time.
But at this point, right here, all I can do is pick myself up and continue walking. My limbs feel heavy and protest every movement, but to let lethargy win would be certain suicide. And so I just keep walking, pack on my back, cold wind in my face, and walk, and walk, and walk. I don’t resent my situation any more, because there is no way to escape it. I know this journey must end. I must find shelter, company, or something. If I walk for long enough, I’ll find something.
It feels like when you’re stuck on long haul, multiple part journeys. Those connections and waiting times, in anonymous airports, bus stations, and train stations, when there’s nothing you can do to speed up your progress. I recall the utter exhaustion, when I once waited for the time to tick by in the Greyhound station of Cleveland, Ohio, and in the awful town of Niagara, Ontario, with boarded up windows lining the streets, fog in the air, and a dog barking in the distance. The Niagara station closed in the evening and I had to wait outside late into the night, and the neighborhood didn’t look friendly. A long journey like that is a test, but it’s hard to be miserable when you know you can’t improve your situation in the short term. You’re stuck.
And here I am, walking up Highway 79 and then out and down capillaries pointing the way home. I’m in exactly the same situation. There’s nothing I can do except wait out the duration of the walk.
Hours pass and the roads become more familiar. On my left is the home of my childhood friend, Tom Wyndham, and his sister, Holly Wyndham. Holly Wyndham, who I would spy on in my poorly disguised teenage lust; always trying to catch a glimpse of her body. Only once, I saw her in her panties, as she changed clothes. Tom and I would cycle together every day, until he got a car and a driver’s license and our journeys lost their adventurous veneer. While we still cycled, we roamed through the Pennsylvania country. One time we trespassed through a farmer’s field in the early spring, so the juvenile crops were unrecognizable. Spotting our bikes, the mad old farmer ran after us, yelling abuse, waving a shotgun, theatrical. He didn’t catch us, so were fine, but I guess Tom is dead now anyway. As is that old famer. As is Holly Wyndham. It’s not worth stopping at their home. I’m almost back now.
And here is where I would catch the bus to school. Five boys and six girls, every morning through elementary and middle school, waiting in rain and sun for the often-dreaded flash of yellow to come around the far bend. This bus stop indicates that home is only another hundred meters away. I can already see the low roof and fence of my family’s home. I can already see the dark windows where somebody has closed the curtains and blinds. I can already see the snow gathering on the driveway. My father would have never tolerated such a thing.
I approach the front entrance. The car is gone and the house is, by all appearances, empty. I still possess the keys and my numb fingers fumble through my pockets, searching for them. They slip from my grasp, once, twice, as I try to shove them in the lock, and I have to kick away the snow on the doorstep to find them again. Finally, I gain access and once inside I notice that the air is fresh; there’s an open window somewhere. I stroll into the living room and pull open the curtains to light up the drab interior. The room is immaculate, as it always was when I was growing up. There are a few changes here and there, which my parents implemented when my siblings and I began to move away; my parents finally making the place their own again. The kitchen, like the living room, is also spotless. Even the bathrooms smell fresh. I instinctively press the button on the answering machine before I remember there’s no power.
I’m still somehow surprised that I find none of my family in the building, though I knew the place would be empty. All the rooms are clean, and the beds made, as if my family merely left for a holiday.
I go into my old room. Few traces remain of me in here. I moved out three years ago, taking most of my things, and my parents started to use the room for storage. Cardboard boxes sit between my bed and desk, along with piles of books, photos, and CDs. The blue wallpaper reminds me of a former life and a former me where acne was of the upmost importance and I needed a date for whatever it was I did all the time.
I sit on the couch in the living room and contemplate my situation. I take the photos of my friends, family, Emily Jacobs, and Karen Spellman, from my pocket and stand them on the fireplace.
I sit down again.
Now this entire journey seems pointless and impotent. I killed a man so I could sit on this couch in the dimming afternoon. I struggled through hours of wind and cold to be here. A battery-powered clock ticks away in the kitchen. The ticking travels through the door, providing me with a monotony to focus my reality upon. Other than that sound, I’m numb.
Now that I’ve arrived at the end of my journey, fatigue overtakes my body. These few weeks have made me a new man and left me utterly exhausted. But this is the best place to rest; safe and comfortable. There’s no place like home. I sigh, lie back on the welcoming couch and contemplate what to do next. Return to Saul’s home and hope the old hermit will welcome my presence? I can’t call that progress. Return to Pittsburgh, where fifty or sixty disenfranchised men now roam the streets? Perhaps a new group is forming post-Mecca, but I don’t want to be part of any new group, any more than I wanted to be part of the last.
*
Evening encroaches. I find some candles, which my mother stored beneath the kitchen sink, and set a couple down on the coffee table, waiting for a fuller darkness to set in before I light them. Meanwhile, I take one of the candles down to the basement to look for food. I find nothing useful. My family, when they left, took almost everything of use with them. If they were sick, I have no idea why they would leave, or why they would expend the energy to pack up all their vital belongings. If they were healthy, then why didn’t they attempt to contact me? A note on the fridge would have been some consolation.
But I can’t find any clues. My family seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth.
So I poke around the contents of the basement for while. This is one of my favorite parts of the house, because, although it’s always an uncharacteristic mess, most of the space was given over to me, my brothers, and sister, to use to relax with our friends. A filthy pool table stands down there and old Christmas lights hang from the ceiling. A mini fridge houses drinks, and a small stereo sits atop of it. Huge wooden spools, intended to hold industrial amounts of wire, or pipes, or something, left here by previous tenants, act as tables and chairs. Down here, my friends and I had a chance to escape our middle-class lives, and a chance to act out our cool and rebellious fantasies. Now that I’ve returned home, a changed person after over three years of student life, and several weeks of this surreal after-life. I’m embarrassed by the poster of Che Guevara hanging on the wall and the hip-hop CDs stacked by the stereo system. The basement makes me feel childish and ineffectual again.
I snub the candle and return upstairs. Climbing the same basement steps that would creep me out as a kid, because I always thought a hand would shoot up from between the gaps to grab my feet and pull me down.
I return to the living room and pick a tin of preserved ham out of my bag. I eat it cold, sat on the couch and still wrapped in my winter jacket and hat.
Once the living room is too dark to see comfortably, I light the candles again and stand them back on the coffee table, where their dripping wax ruins the veneer. The new source of light causes the living room’s large windows to act as mirrors on the room’s interior. I walk over to them, pulling my hat and scarf off to inspect myself in the dark and flattering reflection. I admire two weeks of beard growth; the longest my facial hair has ever been.
I close the curtains, partly because I’m unnerved by the thought of somebody staring in at me. Then I sit on the couch, with my tin of luncheon ham, and stare at the ceiling for a while.
I fall asleep with a blanket pulled over me and the can still in my hand.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Part 3, Chapter 5
A short chapter, an interlude really, before the end of Part 3. Sorry it's a bit late in the day -- I've been doing some travelling this weekend.
Also, this week has been the best week yet for book sales, so thanks to everybody who decided to support independent publishing and bought a copy. It's hugely appreciated. If you haven't got your copy yet, they're only $1.25, and available with the links on the right.
Anyway, enjoy the update,
Dave.
--------
5
That morning’s journey is long and uneventful. The sun is out and shining bright, for the most part, but its rays never seem to warm the earth enough. I wonder if the snow will ever leave and if this winter will ever give way to summer. With no sense of time any more, the winter seems to have lasted forever. The previous summer of heaving Oakland traffic and outdoor movies seems like a lifetime away. The crisp Pittsburgh autumn feels like it was of some bygone era. Back with baseball and letterman jackets and corndogs at the drive-in.
I remember last autumn, when Emily and I went on a date to the Phipps botanical gardens, in the heart of Schenley Park. I’d never visited the gardens before so we went on a late evening trip through the amazing panoramas of tropical plants. Fruit kept dropping from the trees and smashing on the ground around us. That evening with Emily was from a time that is now so alien that it may as well never have happened at all. The person I was then may as well be a character from a TV show; they have so little bearing on my life in the present.
I drive the snowmobile down miles and miles of abandoned roads. All I have is time to think.
Also, this week has been the best week yet for book sales, so thanks to everybody who decided to support independent publishing and bought a copy. It's hugely appreciated. If you haven't got your copy yet, they're only $1.25, and available with the links on the right.
Anyway, enjoy the update,
Dave.
--------
5
That morning’s journey is long and uneventful. The sun is out and shining bright, for the most part, but its rays never seem to warm the earth enough. I wonder if the snow will ever leave and if this winter will ever give way to summer. With no sense of time any more, the winter seems to have lasted forever. The previous summer of heaving Oakland traffic and outdoor movies seems like a lifetime away. The crisp Pittsburgh autumn feels like it was of some bygone era. Back with baseball and letterman jackets and corndogs at the drive-in.
I remember last autumn, when Emily and I went on a date to the Phipps botanical gardens, in the heart of Schenley Park. I’d never visited the gardens before so we went on a late evening trip through the amazing panoramas of tropical plants. Fruit kept dropping from the trees and smashing on the ground around us. That evening with Emily was from a time that is now so alien that it may as well never have happened at all. The person I was then may as well be a character from a TV show; they have so little bearing on my life in the present.
I drive the snowmobile down miles and miles of abandoned roads. All I have is time to think.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Part 3, Chapter 4
Here's Part 3, Chapter 4. It's a short one. I'll post the next chapter on Sunday.
A few people bought copies of the ebook this week, which was awesome, and I'd like to extend my thanks to them -- this week has been the best week for sales so far. So thanks for supporting small publishing! If you haven't picked up a copy yet, they're only $1.25, and have recently been updated with a stack of grammatical fixes, some of the junk cut, and some nice new bits put in. Just check out the links on the right.
I hope you enjoy Part 3, Chapter 4. Sorry it's a bit late in the day -- I've been busy at a family reunion. Enjoy the rest of your week,
Dave
---------
4
At Saul’s, I dream that I’m standing outside the Students’ Union. But, in this dream, the Union building isn’t burnt and gutted. It’s the same as it’s been for years. Busy, with teenagers pouring in and out of its eateries. Behind me, a plaque states that Gene Kelly is a university alumnus. Students stroll by, enjoying the sunshine. Here, one is eating an ice cream. Here, a couple walks hand in hand. Many of them wear pastel clothes, as if I am in a teen movie on an old and faded video cassette.
Someone walks by and I recognize his face. Weeks prior, he had sat on a table across from me in a coffee shop. He called a girl on his cell phone and told her ridiculous stories about his life. He claimed that NASA had offered him a job, and that they would send him a helicopter every morning to bring him into the field to study the latest geological discoveries. The girl hung up on him.
In the dream he only glances at me, grimaces, and walks on.
I look at the Gene Kelly plaque again, glinting in the warm sun, and then turn to use the ATM machine by the Union’s exterior. I put my card in the machine, enter my security number, and listen to the whirr of the mechanism while it thinks and processes. I press more buttons and wait for money and the ATM whirrs some more. The machine dispenses money, but once I pluck it from the slot, I see that I hold pound sterling, rather than dollars. I look around at the students walking by and a queue is forming behind me. I grunt disapproval and put my card into the ATM again. This time the machine whirrs and dispenses fifty Euros in notes illustrated with the Arc de Triumph on one side and Marmeduke comics on the other. I get angry.
This isn’t a nightmare, this is just frustrating. Why doesn’t anything fucking work?...
*
I wake up in a bed, though I fell asleep in an armchair. Saul must have moved me in the night or perhaps I had woken up drunk, climbed into bed.
The copy on Don Quixote sits on the bedside table. Closed.
Light filters down through the window illuminating dust motes in the air.
As I lift my arms out from under the sheets, I realize how cold it is.
I lie under the thick blanket for a while, unwilling to expose myself to the elements, even for the length of time it will take to get dressed. I’m only wearing my boxer shorts and I try to remember if I undressed myself last night. My filthy clothes are folded on a chair in the far corner of the room. I can see blood stains on my jeans even at this distance, though Saul never mentioned it, nor even seemed to notice. Being so blotted with grease and grime, being so dirty, and not showering in so long a time, does in a way, feel more liberating than disgusting. I stink, but nobodies offended. I’d jump in the next lake I see, but the cold would probably kill me.
From the bed, I can see through the window, up into the sky. The clouds are a white and wispy, which makes a change from the oppressive snow clouds that have been overhead for months now. A bird twitters outside.
Eventually, I hear Saul moving in the kitchen, making coffee on an old steel espresso maker, which he places above the coals of the living room’s fireplace, on a small iron frame. “Did you sleep well?” he asks as I walk into the living room, and pull on a sweater.
“Like a rock,” I say. He’s made boiled eggs in a pot over the fire. The smell as he shells them wafts across the room and I feel ravenous.
“I heard you waking, so I put the breakfast on. You’re hungry, right?”
“Absolutely. You read my mind.”
As we eat, Saul asks me what I thought to the opening of Don Quixote. I can’t remember much of the short part I flicked through. Rather than say this, I give vague generalities, and he reads the difficult praises. “It’s a classic,” he laughs. “Give it time. You’ll love it.”
We pass the time, shooting the shit; talking about the weather. Eventually, he asks about my plans. I’m silent for a little while, unwilling to offend his generosity, but I want to leave within the next hour or two.
“Well, I have to go home eventually – I mean go to my parent’s home. I have to see what’s going on and how thing’s stand.”
“There’s no time like the present,” he shrugs.
“That’s true,” I say with relief.
“After breakfast, I’ll get some water. That way, you can get yourself cleaned up. I guess after that there’ll be no reason for you to stick around, right?” It seems that Saul’s hermit instincts have begun to surface again. “I’m interested in what you plan to do, though, after you’ve been back to your old home. Have you figured out your plans? I mean, where are you going in life now?”
I don’t have a clue, but I can’t say that.
“Well, maybe go back to the city. There’s food there, after all.”
“You should go to Florida.” Saul beams with a smile. “I might do it too. All those condos up for grabs now, so you may as well soak up the sun!”
And that sounds like a fantastic idea.
“Maybe I will – why bother staying in this cold?”
Saul’s face crinkles as he looks through the window in quiet thought. Saul’s home is one of those places where what you see beyond it can often take precedent over its interior. “But then, this little place does hold a certain charm,” he says as sparse snowflakes fall against the backdrop of brown and green.
*
Soon afterwards, I pull the tarpaulin from the snowmobile and fire it into life. Saul stands aside, in his doorway, watching with a vague smiling interest. Before I leave, I wave to him and yell “Thanks!” over the sound of the engine. He puts some enthusiasm into his smile and raises his thumb in farewell. I drive away without looking back.
A few people bought copies of the ebook this week, which was awesome, and I'd like to extend my thanks to them -- this week has been the best week for sales so far. So thanks for supporting small publishing! If you haven't picked up a copy yet, they're only $1.25, and have recently been updated with a stack of grammatical fixes, some of the junk cut, and some nice new bits put in. Just check out the links on the right.
I hope you enjoy Part 3, Chapter 4. Sorry it's a bit late in the day -- I've been busy at a family reunion. Enjoy the rest of your week,
Dave
---------
4
At Saul’s, I dream that I’m standing outside the Students’ Union. But, in this dream, the Union building isn’t burnt and gutted. It’s the same as it’s been for years. Busy, with teenagers pouring in and out of its eateries. Behind me, a plaque states that Gene Kelly is a university alumnus. Students stroll by, enjoying the sunshine. Here, one is eating an ice cream. Here, a couple walks hand in hand. Many of them wear pastel clothes, as if I am in a teen movie on an old and faded video cassette.
Someone walks by and I recognize his face. Weeks prior, he had sat on a table across from me in a coffee shop. He called a girl on his cell phone and told her ridiculous stories about his life. He claimed that NASA had offered him a job, and that they would send him a helicopter every morning to bring him into the field to study the latest geological discoveries. The girl hung up on him.
In the dream he only glances at me, grimaces, and walks on.
I look at the Gene Kelly plaque again, glinting in the warm sun, and then turn to use the ATM machine by the Union’s exterior. I put my card in the machine, enter my security number, and listen to the whirr of the mechanism while it thinks and processes. I press more buttons and wait for money and the ATM whirrs some more. The machine dispenses money, but once I pluck it from the slot, I see that I hold pound sterling, rather than dollars. I look around at the students walking by and a queue is forming behind me. I grunt disapproval and put my card into the ATM again. This time the machine whirrs and dispenses fifty Euros in notes illustrated with the Arc de Triumph on one side and Marmeduke comics on the other. I get angry.
This isn’t a nightmare, this is just frustrating. Why doesn’t anything fucking work?...
*
I wake up in a bed, though I fell asleep in an armchair. Saul must have moved me in the night or perhaps I had woken up drunk, climbed into bed.
The copy on Don Quixote sits on the bedside table. Closed.
Light filters down through the window illuminating dust motes in the air.
As I lift my arms out from under the sheets, I realize how cold it is.
I lie under the thick blanket for a while, unwilling to expose myself to the elements, even for the length of time it will take to get dressed. I’m only wearing my boxer shorts and I try to remember if I undressed myself last night. My filthy clothes are folded on a chair in the far corner of the room. I can see blood stains on my jeans even at this distance, though Saul never mentioned it, nor even seemed to notice. Being so blotted with grease and grime, being so dirty, and not showering in so long a time, does in a way, feel more liberating than disgusting. I stink, but nobodies offended. I’d jump in the next lake I see, but the cold would probably kill me.
From the bed, I can see through the window, up into the sky. The clouds are a white and wispy, which makes a change from the oppressive snow clouds that have been overhead for months now. A bird twitters outside.
Eventually, I hear Saul moving in the kitchen, making coffee on an old steel espresso maker, which he places above the coals of the living room’s fireplace, on a small iron frame. “Did you sleep well?” he asks as I walk into the living room, and pull on a sweater.
“Like a rock,” I say. He’s made boiled eggs in a pot over the fire. The smell as he shells them wafts across the room and I feel ravenous.
“I heard you waking, so I put the breakfast on. You’re hungry, right?”
“Absolutely. You read my mind.”
As we eat, Saul asks me what I thought to the opening of Don Quixote. I can’t remember much of the short part I flicked through. Rather than say this, I give vague generalities, and he reads the difficult praises. “It’s a classic,” he laughs. “Give it time. You’ll love it.”
We pass the time, shooting the shit; talking about the weather. Eventually, he asks about my plans. I’m silent for a little while, unwilling to offend his generosity, but I want to leave within the next hour or two.
“Well, I have to go home eventually – I mean go to my parent’s home. I have to see what’s going on and how thing’s stand.”
“There’s no time like the present,” he shrugs.
“That’s true,” I say with relief.
“After breakfast, I’ll get some water. That way, you can get yourself cleaned up. I guess after that there’ll be no reason for you to stick around, right?” It seems that Saul’s hermit instincts have begun to surface again. “I’m interested in what you plan to do, though, after you’ve been back to your old home. Have you figured out your plans? I mean, where are you going in life now?”
I don’t have a clue, but I can’t say that.
“Well, maybe go back to the city. There’s food there, after all.”
“You should go to Florida.” Saul beams with a smile. “I might do it too. All those condos up for grabs now, so you may as well soak up the sun!”
And that sounds like a fantastic idea.
“Maybe I will – why bother staying in this cold?”
Saul’s face crinkles as he looks through the window in quiet thought. Saul’s home is one of those places where what you see beyond it can often take precedent over its interior. “But then, this little place does hold a certain charm,” he says as sparse snowflakes fall against the backdrop of brown and green.
*
Soon afterwards, I pull the tarpaulin from the snowmobile and fire it into life. Saul stands aside, in his doorway, watching with a vague smiling interest. Before I leave, I wave to him and yell “Thanks!” over the sound of the engine. He puts some enthusiasm into his smile and raises his thumb in farewell. I drive away without looking back.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Part 3, Chapter 3 (Second Half)
Here's the second half of Part 3, Chapter 3.
I hope you're enjoying your weekend. I'm having a super-lazy day, watching TV, and reading a 1970's sci-fi anthology.
I've just uploaded a new edition of A Pittsburgh Storm, with all new grammatical fixes, some junk chopped out, and some good stuff thrown in. It has a new cover too, with a really nice review from Stacey Cochran on there (from howtopublishabook.org).
Pick it up for only $1.25 from the links on the right, and support independent publishing.
Enjoy the post.
Dave
------
3 (Continued)
We drink beer together for several hours. After eating his own dinner, Saul makes up some canned stir-fry vegetables for me and it is, without a doubt, the best meal I’ve eaten in weeks.
Through most of the afternoon, Saul fills me in on his views about literature, and I chip in bits learnt from college. Then Saul recounts his experiences riding on the Trans-Siberian railway in the late nineties, when he was already an old man, rolling across the endless fields of snow. He tells me about growing up in Manhattan in the thirties and forties; what it was like to be a young black man in a big city, who was promised so much but given so little.
We talk, and talk, and the sun sets. It’s too dark outside to continue on the snowmobile and I can hear the wind pick up again. So Saul offers to let me sleep in his spare room. We both knew there was no question about this. There are new rules of hospitality, and they apply as much now as when I met James, and then Hank, and we banded together back then for mutual survival.
Some time later, between beers, he hands me a thick book, its spine wrecked with many readings, and certainly on its third or fourth owner.
“You should read this. Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Take it. It’s a travel story, like yours, about a man on an impossible quest. Again, maybe that’s like yours. It’s full of disaster, which I guess we’ll both face, but through all that, the narrator finds incredible humor. That’s good advice, Matthew. So don’t forget it.”
“Thanks,” is all I say because Saul gets up and leaves the room. I read a few pages while he busies himself in the kitchen.
Eventually, Saul returns to the living room and we drink more.
And soon enough, I fall asleep on the couch.
*
The morning after the Oakland riots, Emily woke up earlier than I did and put the television on to watch the news reports. In the night, she had developed a cough and it unnerved us both, though neither of us mentioned it. From bed, I could hear the TV, as I buried my head into the pillows, relishing the warmth they offered and aware that the rest of the apartment was nowhere near as cozy as that cocoon of blankets and comforters.
Local news had a short segment the Oakland riots and then returned to national and international problems. Of prominence was the U.S.-Mexico border conflict. At that time, Mexico had a much lower infection rate than the U.S. and subsequently many U.S. citizens were attempting to flee there. In an effort to control the situation, the U.S. military sealed the borders, escalating tensions as individuals found themselves in increasingly desperate situations. Violence brewed and breaks in the fence appeared with alarming regularity. The U.S. was losing tens of thousands of citizens over the Mexican border. Both countries regarded this as dangerous.
The broadcast moved to a press conference the President gave the previous evening. “There will soon be a cure,” he said while I curled up beneath the comforter. “It is our number one priority to find this cure,” “researchers are making fantastic progress,” and so on and so on. He mentioned Singapore and Japan. They had the highest infection rates in the world, because of the high density of people and strong trade routes. The news show cut to scenes of chaos around the globe and I pulled the blankets aside to watch the images. It looked like a movie. All of those events and pictures were so removed from my reality. I couldn’t help but distance myself from them, even though they were happening on my own doorstep.
That’s why, as I lay in bed that morning, even though I had evicted an injured woman from my couch the previous night, and Emily was coughing, which spelled nothing but bad news, I felt like I could cope. Even though I had thrown that woman onto the streets as she could barely stand, so destroyed by her illness, and I felt terrible for hours, I awoke with an ease of mind. I should have been shivering in those sheets, rapt in self-loathing, but instead I was too busy listening to the news as a distant observer. All this was too big for me. There was nothing I could do anyway.
Two days earlier, I’d found myself unemployed when the manager of the coffee shop I worked in succumbed to the illness and was forced to close the store. The day before that, I’d watched the Students’ Union belch smoke out of its upper windows as burning paper floated up into the air and glass shattered from the heat of the flames. The fire gutted the entire top four floors and destroyed everything else around. This is how unreal my life had become.
Emily’s cough worsened as the day progressed into the afternoon. She said her stomach hurt and her limbs felt weak, so she went to lie down in bed while I stood leaning on the kitchen counter feeling useless; feeling impotent. How could you defend your home against such a thing? How could you defend against an enemy that could creep up in the night, creep into your cells, and render you utterly defeated without any chance of retaliation? Everyone kept asking that same question. And there were no answers.
I concluded that if Emily was infected then I was too, but this didn’t shock or worry me as much as it should have done. As I said, I far away from the reality of these events. I sat on the couch and stared at the wall, trying to comprehend the ramifications of the situation, but nothing would seem real for a few days yet. By then I would ask why I was the only person not developing any symptoms.
I hope you're enjoying your weekend. I'm having a super-lazy day, watching TV, and reading a 1970's sci-fi anthology.
I've just uploaded a new edition of A Pittsburgh Storm, with all new grammatical fixes, some junk chopped out, and some good stuff thrown in. It has a new cover too, with a really nice review from Stacey Cochran on there (from howtopublishabook.org).
Pick it up for only $1.25 from the links on the right, and support independent publishing.
Enjoy the post.
Dave
------
3 (Continued)
We drink beer together for several hours. After eating his own dinner, Saul makes up some canned stir-fry vegetables for me and it is, without a doubt, the best meal I’ve eaten in weeks.
Through most of the afternoon, Saul fills me in on his views about literature, and I chip in bits learnt from college. Then Saul recounts his experiences riding on the Trans-Siberian railway in the late nineties, when he was already an old man, rolling across the endless fields of snow. He tells me about growing up in Manhattan in the thirties and forties; what it was like to be a young black man in a big city, who was promised so much but given so little.
We talk, and talk, and the sun sets. It’s too dark outside to continue on the snowmobile and I can hear the wind pick up again. So Saul offers to let me sleep in his spare room. We both knew there was no question about this. There are new rules of hospitality, and they apply as much now as when I met James, and then Hank, and we banded together back then for mutual survival.
Some time later, between beers, he hands me a thick book, its spine wrecked with many readings, and certainly on its third or fourth owner.
“You should read this. Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Take it. It’s a travel story, like yours, about a man on an impossible quest. Again, maybe that’s like yours. It’s full of disaster, which I guess we’ll both face, but through all that, the narrator finds incredible humor. That’s good advice, Matthew. So don’t forget it.”
“Thanks,” is all I say because Saul gets up and leaves the room. I read a few pages while he busies himself in the kitchen.
Eventually, Saul returns to the living room and we drink more.
And soon enough, I fall asleep on the couch.
*
The morning after the Oakland riots, Emily woke up earlier than I did and put the television on to watch the news reports. In the night, she had developed a cough and it unnerved us both, though neither of us mentioned it. From bed, I could hear the TV, as I buried my head into the pillows, relishing the warmth they offered and aware that the rest of the apartment was nowhere near as cozy as that cocoon of blankets and comforters.
Local news had a short segment the Oakland riots and then returned to national and international problems. Of prominence was the U.S.-Mexico border conflict. At that time, Mexico had a much lower infection rate than the U.S. and subsequently many U.S. citizens were attempting to flee there. In an effort to control the situation, the U.S. military sealed the borders, escalating tensions as individuals found themselves in increasingly desperate situations. Violence brewed and breaks in the fence appeared with alarming regularity. The U.S. was losing tens of thousands of citizens over the Mexican border. Both countries regarded this as dangerous.
The broadcast moved to a press conference the President gave the previous evening. “There will soon be a cure,” he said while I curled up beneath the comforter. “It is our number one priority to find this cure,” “researchers are making fantastic progress,” and so on and so on. He mentioned Singapore and Japan. They had the highest infection rates in the world, because of the high density of people and strong trade routes. The news show cut to scenes of chaos around the globe and I pulled the blankets aside to watch the images. It looked like a movie. All of those events and pictures were so removed from my reality. I couldn’t help but distance myself from them, even though they were happening on my own doorstep.
That’s why, as I lay in bed that morning, even though I had evicted an injured woman from my couch the previous night, and Emily was coughing, which spelled nothing but bad news, I felt like I could cope. Even though I had thrown that woman onto the streets as she could barely stand, so destroyed by her illness, and I felt terrible for hours, I awoke with an ease of mind. I should have been shivering in those sheets, rapt in self-loathing, but instead I was too busy listening to the news as a distant observer. All this was too big for me. There was nothing I could do anyway.
Two days earlier, I’d found myself unemployed when the manager of the coffee shop I worked in succumbed to the illness and was forced to close the store. The day before that, I’d watched the Students’ Union belch smoke out of its upper windows as burning paper floated up into the air and glass shattered from the heat of the flames. The fire gutted the entire top four floors and destroyed everything else around. This is how unreal my life had become.
Emily’s cough worsened as the day progressed into the afternoon. She said her stomach hurt and her limbs felt weak, so she went to lie down in bed while I stood leaning on the kitchen counter feeling useless; feeling impotent. How could you defend your home against such a thing? How could you defend against an enemy that could creep up in the night, creep into your cells, and render you utterly defeated without any chance of retaliation? Everyone kept asking that same question. And there were no answers.
I concluded that if Emily was infected then I was too, but this didn’t shock or worry me as much as it should have done. As I said, I far away from the reality of these events. I sat on the couch and stared at the wall, trying to comprehend the ramifications of the situation, but nothing would seem real for a few days yet. By then I would ask why I was the only person not developing any symptoms.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
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
---------
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.”
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.”
Monday, July 6, 2009
Part 3, Chapter 2 (Second Half)
Whoa, late post. Sorry about that!
I'll put the next chapter up on Thursday. Enjoy!
Dave
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2 (Continued)
But an hour later, I stop again as I approach an old military roadblock. It’s made up of short concrete barricades, backed by several military vehicles, and spread across the width of the road. A couple of weeks ago, the barricades were big news because they meant that the entire city was now under quarantine. It made the city feel like a lost cause, and was emblematic of how out of control the plague had become. Here were these blockades of concrete and steel and guns, trying to fight a plague of microbes and plasma and bits of DNA – no more effective than Emily holding her damp t-shirt to her mouth.
The most notorious roadblocks in the US, or at least those with the highest media appeal, bordered the built up areas of New York and Chicago. Millions of people were trying to escape the hotbeds of disease, which embodied city life, and get out into the country and whatever cities they presumed to be clean. Missoula, Montana, State College in Pennsylvania, and Boulder, Colorado, being prime examples. Of course, all the cities fell. Everywhere fell. After a few weeks, infection rates were so high across the board that nowhere was “clean”.
And anyway, there was no way the authorities could hold back the millions of men, women, and children trying to flee the cities. Before the crowds overran almost all vestiges of authority, people would simply run through the fields to evade the checkpoints. People got crazy and when they hit a roadblock, nothing was going to stand in the way of their own survival. Furthermore, the men holding those roadblocks together were as scared as everybody else. As the hierarchy of authority began to crumble, as even the president got sick and died, it became increasingly difficult to find a way to keep the masses in order.
I remember an image from the front page of one of the last issues of The Pittsburgh Post Gazette. The February 14 edition. In a half-page photograph, an old woman holds her hands up in plea to a masked military officer who tries his best to ignore her. She implores to him, on her knees. He stares over her head, into the distance, impersonal and inhuman; his expressing cracking just enough to convince us otherwise. But the woman’s face utterly crumples in despair. All is lost, the photo says. I’ll never forget that image.
Similar emblematic stories and images emerged from around the world, documenting harsh methods of disease control. In the U.K., authorities opened fire on a crowd of eighteen thousand protestors outside the Houses of Parliament, and then again, on the same day, in Hyde Park. The protest was against the closing of the borders and the subsequent crackdown on all British emigration.
Authorities also closed the U.S.-Mexico and the U.S.-Canada borders. Like in Britain, this wasn’t about controlling the movement of people; this was about halting all movement completely. No immigration. No emigration. No imports. No exports. Nothing. Across the world, almost all countries tightened their borders, to various degrees, and then within the countries themselves, cities too were often sealed. This, of course, was a disaster. No country was self-sufficient. The world was paralyzed.
In the U.S., military personal were stretched between calming public discontent and keeping that very same public quarantined. Soon enough, as the plague’s death toll rose to epic proportions, those checkpoints and barricades became little more than ghosts of authority. Now the old concrete barriers are monoliths to a previous controller; monuments for those gods to whom we almost sacrificed our freedom.
And here I am, poking around this symbolic ground of oppression, as a scavenger, looking for anything of use.
I’m surprised to find a well-stocked weapon’s cabinet in an unlocked, temporary office. I’m even more surprised to find that all I need to unlock the cabinet is a key, which is on the desk in the office next door.
I’ve never held a gun before and now I’m holding a semi-automatic machinegun; big, gray, heavy, cold steel. My experience in videogames provides me with the terminology of weapons. So I know this is a semi-automatic, an MP5 maybe, which is the most prevalent of videogame guns.
I walk to the edge of the road, towards a verge of snow-covered grass, which faces onto scrubland and, beyond that, a rock-face. I aim the gun, pull the trigger, and there’s a click, but nothing more. It appears that digital violence hasn’t taught me well enough. I turn the weapon over in my hands and fiddle with its mechanism for a while, searching for a safety catch. I want to see if there’s ammo inside the clip, but I don’t know how. I feel impotent holding the gun. I’m supposed to feel its power in my hands and equate it to my cock. The archetypal cock: thick, hard, my entire being and source of power. The cock. The gun. “Click.” But nothing happens.
“Click.”
“Click.”
I search around some more and find a switch. I twist it around its axis and settle the weapon again. Then I take aim and pull the trigger.
The force of the shot is so unexpected, it scares the shit out of me. The pellet of metal breaks the sound barrier and the shock travels up through my arm, into my body, so I can feel how tight my feet grip the ground. The power of the gun makes me feel big and in control. I feel powerful, as promised. I shoot more, at a wall, then at a car. I worry that the car might explode if I hit its petrol tank. Then I stop worrying. I’m in charge now, after all, so I shoot the car some more, aiming for the tank now.
The car doesn’t explode, but my whole body feels invigorated.
I pull the trigger again and again. The bang, the flash, the clang of metal against metal. It feels great.
After a while, I stop, control my breathing, and lower the gun. The car is now pocketed with holes and sitting on deflated tires. Paint has chipped off across the length of its body. Windows are smashed and the side mirror hangs by a few wires. What could be oil or gasoline is pooling on the ground beneath the car in a fast spreading dark patch.
I put the safety back on and pull the trigger to check if the gun’s disabled. It clicks its dead sound again so I strap the weapon to my pack along with my other collected miscellany and drive away on the snowmobile, heading north.
I'll put the next chapter up on Thursday. Enjoy!
Dave
-------
2 (Continued)
But an hour later, I stop again as I approach an old military roadblock. It’s made up of short concrete barricades, backed by several military vehicles, and spread across the width of the road. A couple of weeks ago, the barricades were big news because they meant that the entire city was now under quarantine. It made the city feel like a lost cause, and was emblematic of how out of control the plague had become. Here were these blockades of concrete and steel and guns, trying to fight a plague of microbes and plasma and bits of DNA – no more effective than Emily holding her damp t-shirt to her mouth.
The most notorious roadblocks in the US, or at least those with the highest media appeal, bordered the built up areas of New York and Chicago. Millions of people were trying to escape the hotbeds of disease, which embodied city life, and get out into the country and whatever cities they presumed to be clean. Missoula, Montana, State College in Pennsylvania, and Boulder, Colorado, being prime examples. Of course, all the cities fell. Everywhere fell. After a few weeks, infection rates were so high across the board that nowhere was “clean”.
And anyway, there was no way the authorities could hold back the millions of men, women, and children trying to flee the cities. Before the crowds overran almost all vestiges of authority, people would simply run through the fields to evade the checkpoints. People got crazy and when they hit a roadblock, nothing was going to stand in the way of their own survival. Furthermore, the men holding those roadblocks together were as scared as everybody else. As the hierarchy of authority began to crumble, as even the president got sick and died, it became increasingly difficult to find a way to keep the masses in order.
I remember an image from the front page of one of the last issues of The Pittsburgh Post Gazette. The February 14 edition. In a half-page photograph, an old woman holds her hands up in plea to a masked military officer who tries his best to ignore her. She implores to him, on her knees. He stares over her head, into the distance, impersonal and inhuman; his expressing cracking just enough to convince us otherwise. But the woman’s face utterly crumples in despair. All is lost, the photo says. I’ll never forget that image.
Similar emblematic stories and images emerged from around the world, documenting harsh methods of disease control. In the U.K., authorities opened fire on a crowd of eighteen thousand protestors outside the Houses of Parliament, and then again, on the same day, in Hyde Park. The protest was against the closing of the borders and the subsequent crackdown on all British emigration.
Authorities also closed the U.S.-Mexico and the U.S.-Canada borders. Like in Britain, this wasn’t about controlling the movement of people; this was about halting all movement completely. No immigration. No emigration. No imports. No exports. Nothing. Across the world, almost all countries tightened their borders, to various degrees, and then within the countries themselves, cities too were often sealed. This, of course, was a disaster. No country was self-sufficient. The world was paralyzed.
In the U.S., military personal were stretched between calming public discontent and keeping that very same public quarantined. Soon enough, as the plague’s death toll rose to epic proportions, those checkpoints and barricades became little more than ghosts of authority. Now the old concrete barriers are monoliths to a previous controller; monuments for those gods to whom we almost sacrificed our freedom.
And here I am, poking around this symbolic ground of oppression, as a scavenger, looking for anything of use.
I’m surprised to find a well-stocked weapon’s cabinet in an unlocked, temporary office. I’m even more surprised to find that all I need to unlock the cabinet is a key, which is on the desk in the office next door.
I’ve never held a gun before and now I’m holding a semi-automatic machinegun; big, gray, heavy, cold steel. My experience in videogames provides me with the terminology of weapons. So I know this is a semi-automatic, an MP5 maybe, which is the most prevalent of videogame guns.
I walk to the edge of the road, towards a verge of snow-covered grass, which faces onto scrubland and, beyond that, a rock-face. I aim the gun, pull the trigger, and there’s a click, but nothing more. It appears that digital violence hasn’t taught me well enough. I turn the weapon over in my hands and fiddle with its mechanism for a while, searching for a safety catch. I want to see if there’s ammo inside the clip, but I don’t know how. I feel impotent holding the gun. I’m supposed to feel its power in my hands and equate it to my cock. The archetypal cock: thick, hard, my entire being and source of power. The cock. The gun. “Click.” But nothing happens.
“Click.”
“Click.”
I search around some more and find a switch. I twist it around its axis and settle the weapon again. Then I take aim and pull the trigger.
The force of the shot is so unexpected, it scares the shit out of me. The pellet of metal breaks the sound barrier and the shock travels up through my arm, into my body, so I can feel how tight my feet grip the ground. The power of the gun makes me feel big and in control. I feel powerful, as promised. I shoot more, at a wall, then at a car. I worry that the car might explode if I hit its petrol tank. Then I stop worrying. I’m in charge now, after all, so I shoot the car some more, aiming for the tank now.
The car doesn’t explode, but my whole body feels invigorated.
I pull the trigger again and again. The bang, the flash, the clang of metal against metal. It feels great.
After a while, I stop, control my breathing, and lower the gun. The car is now pocketed with holes and sitting on deflated tires. Paint has chipped off across the length of its body. Windows are smashed and the side mirror hangs by a few wires. What could be oil or gasoline is pooling on the ground beneath the car in a fast spreading dark patch.
I put the safety back on and pull the trigger to check if the gun’s disabled. It clicks its dead sound again so I strap the weapon to my pack along with my other collected miscellany and drive away on the snowmobile, heading north.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Part 3, Chapter 2 (First Half)
Here's the first half of Chapter 2. I'll post the rest on Sunday. Enjoy the rest of your week,
Dave
----------
2
The dawn sun shines through the window of this strange living room and eases me from my sleep. First thing: my stomach aches from hunger, so I search the kitchen for food. A Tupperware box sits on the counter. I lift the lid, hopeful, but find moulding mung beans that smell like rotten milk. I open the kitchen window and throw the box, with its disgusting contents, into the garden, for the rats to eat.
In the cupboards, I find canned ravioli and a packet of dried macaroni and cheese. I eat the cold ravioli and watch the light snow fall against the large glass doors by the rear of the building. Pine tree’s stand at the back of the garden, snow covered, with spots of brown poking through. Bird footprints trail through the expansive white.
I palm some more water from the toilet’s cistern tank.
With my morning routine complete, I decide to get moving again. There’s no reason to waste the daylight. I shove the macaroni into my backpack and tie my blanket up.
The whole time I’ve been here, I’ve avoided looking in mirrors. I haven’t seen my face in three days, since Hank and I were in the Southside, and I’m half-scared of what I might find there. I rinse it with water, and tell myself I’ll look later.
As I prepare to leave the home, about to hoist the bag onto my back, I see an acoustic guitar propped by the side of a computer desk. I drop my bag again and sit on the couch with the guitar on my knee. I can only play one part of one song. I think it’s called Cavatina, and it’s the closing music to the movie, The Deer Hunter, which was made a little south of the city. I know the song because my father was a guitarist and used the song as a warm-up exercise. He began learning the instument in his late thirties and he played it every day since with a devotion my mother had never seen him muster before. I remember, while I was in high school, each year through most of the fall and winter I would stay late at school to attend theatre rehearsals. I was Stanley from A Streetcar Named Desire one year and then Iago from Othello the next. When I returned home in the evenings, my father would be back from work and upstairs in his and my mother’s room, carrying out his daily, hour-long practice. I can remember dropping my bag by the stairs and standing in the hall for a minute or so each day to listen. Most of the time, he was playing Cavatina. Slow-fast high notes, the pauses, the refrain, ultimately mournful, but also a celebration of whatever was lost.
Here, in this strange house, I try a few bars of the song, like my father taught me. I last a moment but then I fret the wrong note, and then again a second time, so I give up. I put the guitar, with a certain respect, against the desk where I found it. Cavatina reminds me of returning home, and that’s what I’m supposed to do today.
*
The snowmobile takes a while to start, and the I have to slowly maneuver out of the barricaded street, but after that I’m cruising at a pleasant pace through the city’s outskirts, a clear sky overhead, and a good mood prevailing.
A few miles further out of the city, I pull over at a gas station to salvage a small gas-tank, which I half-fill with fuel siphoned from an old, rusting Chevrolet.
While I’m at the gas station, I decide to look inside the shop. The shelves are bare and the cash register is broken open and emptied of its contents. Through an open door, I see into the storeroom, which looters have ransacked, like everything else. As I move around the shelves, I kick some trash at my feet, and a squirrel appears by the coffee dispenser. It scrambles out through the front of the building, its claws clattering against the tile floor and its tail bouncing through the air.
Whenever I go into these derelict places, be they homes, grocery stores, or gas stations, I feel almost like a detective trying to piece together the last moments of the building’s life, and the lives of its inhabitants. I look for clues, like footprints, broken objects, and points of entry. I look for clues because these buildings feel so unnatural that there must be a mystery somewhere.
Kicking through junk, I walk behind the counter, through the storeroom, and into the manager’s office. I kick a coffee cup aside and it leaks a mould-topped black sludge across scattered printed papers detailing accounts, orders, stock, and so on.
I wish there was somebody I could talk to around here.
Instead, there’s a man’s body sat in an office chair, slouched backwards, head tilted towards me, and eyes open. Maybe a week ago this would have scared me, but I’ve seen enough bodies now. An ashtray with a half-smoked cigarette is on the desk in front of the corpse, next to an empty bottle of expensive looking wine.
Whoever this man is, whoever he was, he didn’t die from the plague. The G9 plague is relatively slow and wilting, and gives an individual the time to get to a bed. Maybe this was a heart attack, a huge seizure, or something else of that severity. Whatever, the final stroke must have been sudden and unexpected. When this happened, there would have been no ambulances to come to this man’s aid. It was quick. He was one of the lucky ones.
A distinct smell of piss hangs in the air, and it’s this, more than anything else, which offends me. Couldn’t this man have been awarded just a little bit of dignity?
Maybe I should bury him. Maybe such an act of respect would save an ounce of my own wicked soul.
But I don’t have a shovel, and I don’t know where to get one out here, so I just leave.
I walk out of the store and strap the old, half-full gasoline tank to the back of the snowmobile. Then I set off again for another few hours of driving on the cold, monotonous, and often crowded, static Highway-74, heading north out of Pittsburgh for what seems like an eternity.
*
But an hour later, I’m forced to stop again as I approach an old military roadblock…
------
If you enjoyed this, why not support independent publishing and get the whole book without the wait. Available in paperback and ebook ($1.25!) on Lulu and Smashwords. See the links to the right.
Dave
----------
2
The dawn sun shines through the window of this strange living room and eases me from my sleep. First thing: my stomach aches from hunger, so I search the kitchen for food. A Tupperware box sits on the counter. I lift the lid, hopeful, but find moulding mung beans that smell like rotten milk. I open the kitchen window and throw the box, with its disgusting contents, into the garden, for the rats to eat.
In the cupboards, I find canned ravioli and a packet of dried macaroni and cheese. I eat the cold ravioli and watch the light snow fall against the large glass doors by the rear of the building. Pine tree’s stand at the back of the garden, snow covered, with spots of brown poking through. Bird footprints trail through the expansive white.
I palm some more water from the toilet’s cistern tank.
With my morning routine complete, I decide to get moving again. There’s no reason to waste the daylight. I shove the macaroni into my backpack and tie my blanket up.
The whole time I’ve been here, I’ve avoided looking in mirrors. I haven’t seen my face in three days, since Hank and I were in the Southside, and I’m half-scared of what I might find there. I rinse it with water, and tell myself I’ll look later.
As I prepare to leave the home, about to hoist the bag onto my back, I see an acoustic guitar propped by the side of a computer desk. I drop my bag again and sit on the couch with the guitar on my knee. I can only play one part of one song. I think it’s called Cavatina, and it’s the closing music to the movie, The Deer Hunter, which was made a little south of the city. I know the song because my father was a guitarist and used the song as a warm-up exercise. He began learning the instument in his late thirties and he played it every day since with a devotion my mother had never seen him muster before. I remember, while I was in high school, each year through most of the fall and winter I would stay late at school to attend theatre rehearsals. I was Stanley from A Streetcar Named Desire one year and then Iago from Othello the next. When I returned home in the evenings, my father would be back from work and upstairs in his and my mother’s room, carrying out his daily, hour-long practice. I can remember dropping my bag by the stairs and standing in the hall for a minute or so each day to listen. Most of the time, he was playing Cavatina. Slow-fast high notes, the pauses, the refrain, ultimately mournful, but also a celebration of whatever was lost.
Here, in this strange house, I try a few bars of the song, like my father taught me. I last a moment but then I fret the wrong note, and then again a second time, so I give up. I put the guitar, with a certain respect, against the desk where I found it. Cavatina reminds me of returning home, and that’s what I’m supposed to do today.
*
The snowmobile takes a while to start, and the I have to slowly maneuver out of the barricaded street, but after that I’m cruising at a pleasant pace through the city’s outskirts, a clear sky overhead, and a good mood prevailing.
A few miles further out of the city, I pull over at a gas station to salvage a small gas-tank, which I half-fill with fuel siphoned from an old, rusting Chevrolet.
While I’m at the gas station, I decide to look inside the shop. The shelves are bare and the cash register is broken open and emptied of its contents. Through an open door, I see into the storeroom, which looters have ransacked, like everything else. As I move around the shelves, I kick some trash at my feet, and a squirrel appears by the coffee dispenser. It scrambles out through the front of the building, its claws clattering against the tile floor and its tail bouncing through the air.
Whenever I go into these derelict places, be they homes, grocery stores, or gas stations, I feel almost like a detective trying to piece together the last moments of the building’s life, and the lives of its inhabitants. I look for clues, like footprints, broken objects, and points of entry. I look for clues because these buildings feel so unnatural that there must be a mystery somewhere.
Kicking through junk, I walk behind the counter, through the storeroom, and into the manager’s office. I kick a coffee cup aside and it leaks a mould-topped black sludge across scattered printed papers detailing accounts, orders, stock, and so on.
I wish there was somebody I could talk to around here.
Instead, there’s a man’s body sat in an office chair, slouched backwards, head tilted towards me, and eyes open. Maybe a week ago this would have scared me, but I’ve seen enough bodies now. An ashtray with a half-smoked cigarette is on the desk in front of the corpse, next to an empty bottle of expensive looking wine.
Whoever this man is, whoever he was, he didn’t die from the plague. The G9 plague is relatively slow and wilting, and gives an individual the time to get to a bed. Maybe this was a heart attack, a huge seizure, or something else of that severity. Whatever, the final stroke must have been sudden and unexpected. When this happened, there would have been no ambulances to come to this man’s aid. It was quick. He was one of the lucky ones.
A distinct smell of piss hangs in the air, and it’s this, more than anything else, which offends me. Couldn’t this man have been awarded just a little bit of dignity?
Maybe I should bury him. Maybe such an act of respect would save an ounce of my own wicked soul.
But I don’t have a shovel, and I don’t know where to get one out here, so I just leave.
I walk out of the store and strap the old, half-full gasoline tank to the back of the snowmobile. Then I set off again for another few hours of driving on the cold, monotonous, and often crowded, static Highway-74, heading north out of Pittsburgh for what seems like an eternity.
*
But an hour later, I’m forced to stop again as I approach an old military roadblock…
------
If you enjoyed this, why not support independent publishing and get the whole book without the wait. Available in paperback and ebook ($1.25!) on Lulu and Smashwords. See the links to the right.
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