The light dimmed. He grew more and more concerned about conserving what was left of the rendered fat. The vernal equinox was a month behind him now, so it would become less necessary to light his rooms, his desk, as early.
There was a time when he could send his little video drone over the city to see where the encampments still stood and which ones had been taken out by the AI drones. For a time, his presence and the small drone was barely noticeable, and he imagined a kind of zone of safety around his house. It was far enough from the center of the seemingly static lines of engagement. But eventually his drone was lost. He had no way to explain its disappearance, but he decided he would have lost it eventually anyway. Things wear out. Things fall apart.
Yeats. “The center cannot hold” True. One true thing. How could he know? How did Yeats know? These kinds of details were increasingly hidden. Of course, doomsayers clung to that poem during every era of upheaval since it was penned, he supposed. As if there were any eras that were not defined by upheaval. By inutterable and devastating chaos somewhere. Perhaps that’s what Yeats was getting at. It hardly mattered now, though he wished it did.
Oddly enough his dreams remained steadfastly and even increasingly hopeful. More than ever. When in the past they tended toward the apocalyptic, now they resolved into harmony and union. There was no way to explain it. And now he was nearly out of lamp oil. He’d invented a blend once he ran out of vegetable oil, or rather, once it was no longer available to him, the last came from an old factory half caved in.
All this dystopic imagery. He remembered using his drone before the collapse to fly above the city to get broad overhead shots of its dramatic setting. A dramatic setting unavailable to anyone without access to any wide-angle overhead drone cameras. And his drone was tiny, a little larger than a dragonfly. A wonderful gadget, he once thought. Great sunsets over a shining river curving around the courthouse and the County Building which was an old mini sky-scraper; art deco, modeled somewhat after the Empire State Building. The lake in the distance, the wide delta of the river that spread out and entered it from the north. Before development, before European settlement, the largest freshwater varied wetlands ecosystem in the country. They became a mere remnant of themselves as housing developments and strip malls, all that disposable architecture, trudged north away from Detroit. It had been a rich estuary and riverine habitat for eons and then, once drained and sectioned off, amazingly fertile farmlands… until people abandoned the city and stretched concrete, asphalt and the curving lines and cul-de-sacs of housing developments over the black earth, over the mucky clay bottomlands and filled wetlands. It’s an old story, told in almost every spreading urban area in the country in the 20th century.
But then, even all that came to a halt.
His own stories of all this had once brought him some renown for a time. Even money. But he should have seen what was happening before the entire superstructure of society collapsed in a kind of slow-motion mayhem. He should have paid more attention. It was easily enough foreseen. Repeated throughout history in one way or another. Factions. Misinformation. Alarm and a nascent sense of perverse ill-defined destiny. Leaders emerged who lead poorly and primarily for their own benefit. As if their vision somehow did not depend on the very social and political architecture that they demanded be discarded. They were good at that at least, he thought… at discarding. But they were obtusely insufficient at even the most basic plan to unite their motley bands of loud and often half-cogent followers once they managed to, sometimes violently and not without blood, demolish the pre-existing order… even if what was called order very often did not have a very orderly outward appearance. They seemed only able to devolve into even more absurd and time-consuming exercises in internecine argument and, at times, increasingly explosive factional division.
He was impatient with this tendency of his to resort to incomplete… he thought: ineffectual, ineffective… philosophizing about the entire anti-historical spasm of a perfect storm of disorder in almost every plausible combination that destructively impacted each and every aspect of any even minimally required and enforced social order.
Climate upheaval. Increased and devastating waves of disease, some newly emerging out of the unknowns of a climate gone awry as well as the spread of tropical and water borne diseases far north from where they were once contained into the most heavily populated areas on the planet, areas where seasonal patterns of extreme cold kept many viral, bacterial, and emerging previously unknown infectious disorders at bay or even nonexistent.
The synchronicity of the emergence of all these devastating events could almost be considered magnificent if they weren’t so utterly cruel. The first wave of a new flesh-eating disease ran rampant through the Chicago area, and it was a kind of a wake up call. The fact that it was born in the water supply, in the increasingly toxic algae blooms of a warming, ice-less, Lake Michigan, and was highly resistant to any existing water purifying system arrived as a kind of shock and awe. But it was also completely denied by the disordered forces of various Nationalist groups that were semi-consciously bent on dissembling the structures holding society together, even minimally. They habitually misconstrued every serious environmental challenge to the basic status quo as a purposeful conspiratorial attempt by one or another other activist, religious, or race group to undermine their perceived progress in destroying the liberal order, even though what was left of the liberal order had shrunk to a barely discernable mutter in the popular discourse. What had been called “The Left” was largely reduced to a memory and the habit of occasional nonviolent protest, though its language of resistance and liberation had been completely coopted by a nervous and threatened elite that seemed unable to relinquish its tunnel vision on a kind of unrealistic economic growth paradigm that was absurd and had been self-immolating for decades . In greater Chicago tens of thousands of people succumbed to the horrific disease in weeks. Things did not get better.
But how else occupy his thought time? There seemed so much of it. He lived quietly. There was a quiet now. At least. He was fortunate… and grateful… for that. His little house, with all its leaks and erosions and cracked and boarded windows, was far enough out of the center of town where the worst atrocities had taken place. It was not far from the river and one of the few structures that survived the combination of pseudo military sweeps, violent storms, and sheer and evidently unsuccessful exoduses by groups of people determined to get anywhere safer and more livable. He never heard if anyone ever survived these migrations. And he didn’t think much about it. There was too much to attend to, especially in the first years. There was that period of time, maybe a year, maybe more, when he sequestered himself in his basement. He would go out at night and rifle through what was left of other homes in the neighborhood. That could be productive though he used to break into bouts of crazy laughter when he found himself jolt at an unexplained noise almost expecting to run into a bunch of zombies… the entire environment was so reminiscent of that old TV show, “The Walking Dead”. Oddly enough, he rarely if ever even happened upon any people at all. Not even dead ones. But it was night. He felt safer alone.
For a time, while he stayed in his basement during the day, he would hear footsteps, sometimes many footsteps and even loud voices, and sometimes some vehicles, cars and trucks, and he was glad not to be seen by any others passing through. Mostly because he preferred not to have to share his rather sizable stash of canned goods and oil, vegetable oil mostly. It was selfish. He knew it. From a brain function angle (he knew a quite a bit about parts of the brain and how they worked together from his research for a number of his writing projects) he recognized he had become a little divorced, separated, from his frontal lobe and was operating primarily from his amygdala. When that thought rose up out of an opaque, ethereal stream of consciousness that often took over his primary thought process, he would bust out laughing and then start hopping around like a chimp or a gorilla. It was fun. A diversion. It fit into the absurdity of his situation. At times he thought it might be the best way to behave if he was forced to interact with any other humans who might come along. Perhaps to scare them off. Or perhaps they would just kill him out of fear.
But, in the end, he was just tired of all this, what he came to call, apocalyptic jive. It was too much like the apocalyptic futures portrayed in numerous movies in the years prior to the collapse. He tried hard to make his perspective different from any perspective someone might be preconditioned to hold due to being indoctrinated by the pervasive presence of so many of these kinds of movies. True, he’d found those films entertaining, but only because he was convinced it would be different. After a similar apocalypse, a collapse. People would be kinder. They would find ways to work together and rebuild a working society… maybe one even better than what had come before. One that respected environmental boundaries.
He once wrote an essay and research paper that was published in a prestigious journal about what his research determined was the most reasonable and likely outcome for humans after catastrophic global change… whether it be from climate change or socio-political collapse. They would build a more just and environmentally wise societies that interacted with one another and with the surviving flora and fauna in more sustainable and respectful ways. They would learn from their antecedent culture’s errors. He’d researched various archeological and socio-biological studies and texts that brought him to this conclusion: that the race could and often did choose to proceed in wiser and more inherently sustainable and cooperative ways once past the turning point of a collapse, whatever its cause. He’d been most proud of this piece and it was a welcome divergence from the predominant post-apocalyptic scenarios being circulated in academia and throughout the general public in popular literature and media. It made him a bundle in speaking fees too. Why not?
Now, when he considered the premise of that paper, he found he spontaneously experienced a wide range of feelings, from utter derision to how he might reapproach and reasonably revise the thesis to make it more in sync with what he was experiencing now. He held on to hope at times, as if it were some possibly delusional life raft for his sense of sanity. He wrote obsessively about this. Though he was beginning to see a point when his store of pads of paper and notebooks would soon run out.
He’d started experimenting with ways he might make his own paper and his own writing implements. He’d read plenty about paper making through history. But so few books survived. Of course there was no internet. The books succumbed to an odd fungus that suddenly appeared, rapaciously destroying entire libraries, his own included. Some of his notebooks dedicated to social processes, his thoughts and observational analyses regarding the early days of the collapse, were lost during this terrifying fungal outbreak that disappeared as quickly as it spread, though a large collection of his early pre-collapse notes were destroyed as well. Still, he felt he could learn the basics of paper making through experiment. The difficulty was finding the right combination of plant and other organic materials and making the right choices for processing and drying it into sheets. He'd had some success with scroll-type rolls, but he remained unsure of the lifespan of these scrolls and he continued to write out ideas, thoughts, instructions, and a record of his activities and musings on his rapidly depleting supply of paper.
Over time he’d explored a wide area, especially once what he called “The Quiet” descended on the area and he felt safe venturing out in the light of day. He even went into town. He remained unable to think much about what he encountered that first visit. It was so disturbing. He wore a mask over his entire face. He wasn’t sure it mattered but he adopted a better safe than sorry approach to almost everything he attempted. The old county building, the one modeled after the Empire State Building, had ragged gaping holes in it and the top third of half the building was crumbled, the detritus in piles around the building’s base. One of the group of carved art deco gargoyles that decorated the top balustrade of the building still stared out over the river. The face of an Indian. The river nearby was full of debris. He thought he might climb up as far into the building as he could, to see the view. He was able to get to the ninth floor. He stood in the wind looking out toward the lake. The profile of the Indian gargoyle propped up above him, as if it were staring out at the same scene. The only thing he could compare it to was a view across a landfill or a huge dump.
Down the street from the county building the high school’s planetarium was open like a cracked egg and the natatorium’s roof was peeled back. One side of the Olympic sized pool was collapsed and held some filthy water. He stayed a while in the remains of the huge old ornate auditorium.
He didn’t see a single person. He did find a storage closet in the school that had stacks of pads of paper. Some were ragged from the paper eating fungus but many, deep in the piles, seemed unaffected. That was quite a find. He nearly wept when he found it. In another room there was a mass of the remains of old yearbooks. Most of the pages in the remnants of these books were eaten away by the telltale indications of the paper eating fungus… reddish-green slime with blackened webs that spread out across what was left of the slick paper and the obliterated print and photographs.
He went back to the County Building. While he explored the building he was startled by noises. He hadn’t heard any noises other than wind and rain for weeks… months. Something alive was moving around. He was alarmed but curious.
When he approached a fetid, half-darkened room a little swarm of a half dozen raccoons appeared. They turned on him and snarled and hissed and began to approach. Then several ran at him. Was that foam around their mouths? They were fast. Their hissing seemed deranged. Initially he was stunned into immobility by their presence. He had to kick them away. He took a brick and smashed one that nearly grabbed him by the pant leg, and he smacked another with a length of two-by-four he grabbed. He was able to escape the remainder of the animals who seemed to be diverted by the now motionless animals he had struck. He could hear them snarling and fighting among themselves as he withdrew.
Later he recalled that his paper on post-apocalyptic possibilities had surmised that the survivors of such an event would most likely be more adept at peaceable coexistence with other life forms. This depressed him so much he did not eat or get up from his makeshift bed for several days, but then out of nowhere a thought spontaneously occurred to him that he might go back and see if he could trap the animals, kill them and eat them. That he remembered the foaming mouths of one of the beasts was perhaps the only reason he did not return to find and kill the animals. The thought of butchering a raccoon stayed with him on and off for weeks. Sometimes it made him weep.
He dreamt regularly of people. They were people he’d never seen before, though they often acted like close friends or family. He’d never been able to manage a relationship, a love relationship, an intimate partnership, with anyone for longer than a year or two. He’d normalized this. He’d theorized it to be a normal and healthy way to exist in a world full of other people. The house he was in now was one he’d shared with two of his lovers, though he’d separated from both before the collapse spun to its apex.
Clara, his last lover, left to see about her parents just as the events of the collapse began to gather momentum. He never saw or heard from her again. He never dreamt about her. Eventually he stopped remembering what she looked like. No pictures of her or photos of any of his other intimates or family members survived. The great files of internet stored photos were gone. Lost. He waited for her. He considered going after her, but early into the collapse he knew his only chance of success would be to travel in darkness (and everything had become so dark after sunset). He thought it best to stay put in case she found her way back.
Clara was a nurse practitioner he’d met during one of the encampments initiated by what remained of the organized Left to demand that world leaders act with all possible urgency to stop the ever increasing levels of chaos and violence instigated by nationalists the world over. Clara and he were a natural match, it seemed. She was kept busy giving medical care when the demonstrations became violent, after government forces, the police, and the nationalists attacked and infiltrated the encampments. When she moved in with him it was something of a last resort. The violence in the streets between various factions, not only against the Left by police forces and nationalists, but between various opposing factions of the nationalists who had deep and bizarre disagreements related to the conspiracy theories they held as sacrosanct and central to their movements. Soon the violence between the nationalist factions was the most prevalent, though it was misconstrued by the mainstream media as having been instigated by the Left. The Left by then had either been arrested and detained indefinitely or disappeared… or gone home… and left the streets to the nationalist factions. Clara and he sequestered themselves in his house until anything human became defined by a level of chaos that seemed to demand action of some kind and Clara felt she must seek out her parents who lived in a suburb a few miles away, though under the circumstances that seemed like a world away. The blackouts and shutdowns came a few days after she left. He built a safe room in the basement, for himself and for Clara when she returned. It kept his mind busy. He made sure no light could be seen from the street, no obvious sign of life, though the question of light became moot once it was clear the electrical systems were down permanently. That’s when he began to experiment with various kinds of oil lamps. He had some gasoline but felt that was too dangerous and might be of the most practical use sometime in the future.
At first his dreams were a comfort, though he grew to resent them. Sometimes they scared him, even if they were so unexplainably pleasant… small intimate and smiling groups of people sharing food and spending time in blowy warmth under trees or in a café. None of it was familiar, regardless of how pleasant. It was unnerving. Sometimes he thought it was a sign of his impending death, but no… somehow, he remained quite healthy. His forays into the city at night and then further away, once the quiet predominated, supplied him with more than enough to eat. He even cultivated a successful garden after the quiet began. He found seeds in a storeroom of an old hardware store. He remembered how to save seeds too. He had his first tomato. Carrots and green beans.
His life smoothed out into a kind of routine. He considered his writing essential, a kind of record keeping. In case someone found his little space after he died and if no other paper-eating fungus destroyed his folders and the scrolls he hoped to invent. A measure of maintaining sanity too. Oddly enough, during his explorations of the surrounding area, he rarely if ever came across human remains. He wondered about that. He did find the body of an adolescent boy in a house a few blocks from his own place. No name. No pictures. He buried the boy, who was quite decomposed by then. This disturbed him.
He had a vision of a story he wanted to write. The first idea for fiction he’d had since the collapse. It came to him not long after he found and buried the boy. He named the boy Curtis. After his younger brother who died during one of the earliest viral outbreaks back in the 2020s. He had a story about Curtis, he thought.
Actually, the story was more about the house Curtis lived in. There was another house too, another house that would be part of the story. Curtis’s house was a small single-story bungalow, like the ones built en masse in the 1950s. He imagined Curtis living in the house with his mother and father. His father was a janitor in a local school and his mother a secretary for a local accountant. Curtis had a brother and a sister. He was the middle child. His parents were very well educated and well read, but like many people, the community, the society itself, was not equipped to offer them employment, occupation, commensurate with their level of intelligence and potential… nor was it able to offer meaningful work according to those same measurements of human need and potential. The work, the jobs, in society all were calibrated upon how much value they offered to the profit profile of fewer and fewer major multifaceted interconnected corporate entities. A kind of neo-feudalism, he thought. That was it.
In the story Curtis’s parents would not be resentful. They would make the best of the situation and their primary focus and meaning in life more concerned with their children’s well-being. It was a struggle, but they did well enough. That is, until the collapse began to unravel the spool of their lives. He thought hard about how the story would evolve for Curtis’s family once the collapse took hold. Would they participate in the Leftist encampments? Would they be enticed to join one of the conspiracist nationalist groups? And how did Curtis end up dead in his house… alone?
The other house was a much larger one. This house would be one based on a house that was relatively intact he’d happened upon during one of his forays looking for supplies and food. He took a good deal from that place and made several visits over a period of a few months. There was no sign of life and the place had clearly been looted prior to his arrival, though many of the things he was interested in were not the kinds of things most looters would primarily be looking for. It was curious how little he could tell about the people who once lived there by what was left.
He imagined the family was comfortable enough not to take the evolving collapse seriously. They cultivated a perspective that disallowed any serious threat to their way of life. Because they were physically surrounded by all the indications of wealth and privilege, they had no real reason to think that there was any real threat, even as the signs of collapse crept closer and closer to their home and into the specifics of their lives. Perhaps they had a place, a place safe from the fallout and disease of the collapse. A second home they imagined was far from the spreading chaos. When did they finally understand that they would not be immune from the impact of the collapse? When did it finally occur to them? Is that when they decided to leave this large and opulent home? Did disease find its way into their home? Were they threatened by one of the factions as the internecine violence spread and respread neighborhood to neighborhood? Where would they go to escape? What would they do when all their money, their investment portfolio and stock options became worthless? Perhaps they were a part of one of the nationalist factions… did they fund it? Did they think their status or wealth would purchase immunity or escape? Where, in this viral pandemic, did they believe they would be safe?
The differences between the people who once lived in these two homes, so separated from each other, so separated and insulated from the needs and meaning in their lives, despite being separated by a mere mile or two, preoccupied him.
He wrote his questions and theories out daily in his remaining notebooks. How did the split between the lives and livelihoods of these two families contribute to the collapse? To the violence that preceded it and the fetid silences that came after it… and to the quiet that eventually settled over the ruins of what had once been an imperfect but livable community.
For a time, the quiet soothed him. His forays into the surrounding streets and neighborhoods sustained him and educated him about the nature and impact of the collapse. His little garden was even a bit of a joy. He managed to attract some bees and one day a crow came to the yard and stayed for many weeks.
His writing occupied his mind and kept it sharp. He was able to make shelves and cupboards where he could keep his writings. He returned to the thought that they might be useful to anyone who might come upon them once he had died. But his death also became a preoccupying puzzle. How would it happen? Could he prepare? Would he want to be found in the basement… or maybe in his garden? And there were times when he had accidents during his travels into the city.
Once he attempted to climb up into the ruins of the County Building again. Maybe he thought he might catch one of the racoons. Mostly he was interested in what the view might say to him. Later he admitted he had a secret longing for some kind of meat, and he had a friend, long ago, who roasted a muskrat for him and another good friend Jacob and it was quite good. Could a raccoon be much different? He thought he remembered that same friend talking about cooking raccoon. But there were no indications of any raccoons that day in the County Building and on the way down the stairs, at about the fifth floor, part of the stairway gave way and he nearly fell the entire way to the jumble of wreckage at the bottom of the stairwell. Luckily, he was able to catch himself and only suffered a sprain. He thought how much the accident felt like something out of Alice in Wonderland… falling down the rabbit hole.
How did he want to die and how would he be found… if he was ever found? He certainly hoped his writing was found. If only as a record of his experience during these times. It might be valuable to whatever or whoever arises in the future.
Would there be a future?
Not long after his fall in the ruins of the County Building, he began to notice that the river was widening and frequently spilling over its banks. Soon, in a matter of weeks, the entire area across the river appeared to be flooded more often than not. The water was rising. He wondered how long it would take for the water to inundate his own neighborhood. If it did not stop. It did not look like it would stop. Was this an indication of the ongoing consequences of climate change? Of course.
Of course.
It wasn’t long before it became clear that the water was rising and would not stop any time soon. He wasn’t sure what to do. Should he wait it out? Would he build a structure that would rise above the water? On stilts? Would he find another place to stay beyond the high-water mark? What if the tornado swarms came again? How would a house on stilts fare?
He found waterproof materials and even a safe that he was able to move to his house and he began to store all his writings away in these containers. He thought for days about where he would go… which direction. Would he have a plan? Even in those few days it was clear that the water had risen by several feet. It was clear it wouldn’t stop. It was happening more quickly by the week. He thought maybe this was the motivation he needed to move on. Perhaps he could see if Clara had survived. He would go west. Yes. There was higher land west. In Oakland County. It would take him a few days to get there. He wasn’t sure if any familiar landmarks would be there to guide him, but he could follow the sun. He had a good sense of direction. Maybe he could find a compass. He knew nothing about compasses.
There was no way he could tote all his writing. This distressed him, but he thought it might survive if he continued to devise a way to keep it all dry. He tested his safe and the shelves he made and waterproofed. They seemed to work. They seemed watertight. He was still worried but also satisfied and a little proud. He would take some of his writings with him. A few. He had a good backpack. He packed as much of his food as he could carry. He packed his seeds and a few of his smaller tools and some of the blank paper as well as some of the experimental scrolls that seemed to be the most resilient and impervious to dampness. Yes. This might work.
It was hard to leave but he thought he should. He thought he must. And besides, he was tired of being alone. Maybe he would find other people. Maybe. He wept as he locked up and secured his cabinets and safe. Maybe he would be able to return. Someday.
It was a fine day. As he walked down the street, away from his house and the rising waters, it was a good day. Not too hot. Sunny and breezy. He thought he heard a crow in the distance. Was it that same crow that had visited him every day for weeks last year? And then he hummed a little tune he made up. He had taken to making up little songs when he was working in the garden or on a project in and around the house. It was a good song, really.
The night before he had a dream. He was with people he had never seen again. They had a big table full of good food. Bread. He hadn’t seen bread like that in years. He thought he could smell it. He’d never smelled anything in a dream before. Even pies. He could almost taste the pies. And people laughed. In the dream there was the laughter of people he knew but didn’t know. How was that possible?