Book of the Dead (22 page)

Then God, in his infinite mercy and wisdom, pulls the big switch on us. Throws us a curveball—no, a knuckler—when we were all geared up for the heat, and no doubt busts a gut laughing as we tie ourselves in knots trying to hit it.

Oh, yes! He left us lucky survivors with a veritable plethora of choices. And, lo! they do not all lead unto death! No, not by a long road. In fact, the great majority of them lead to something considerably worse —though only after a long and painful march, of course. I assume that it’s all very purgative.

So his sacred prerogative of free will remains intact, as ever, propelled by fear and buoyed by false hope.

Dawson paused to wipe sweat from his forehead, but his mind never left the stream of his composition. He was wholly unaware that he had achieved the level of escape and absorption that he had once dared to hope for. He was writing with the intense concentration that he had known in his midteens, when he had wanted to be the new Thoreau. With the lack of self-consciousness he had achieved somewhat later, when he was keen on being the second coming of Kerouac. With the lack of constraint he knew only in his late twenties and early thirties, when he had long since given up any thoughts of literary fame and kept a journal simply for the therapy and joy that it provided.

Escape, immersion, involvement achieved, he became very much awake.

For the hope that he has offered us is not “the thing with feathers” that Emily Dickinson once knew.

No!

His hope is the thing with teeth. It is the hope of survival. The hope that one might prolong one’s personal experience of horror and deprivation. The foolish but stubborn hope that somehow, after day upon day of terror and pain, he might smile down upon whoever remains and lift his awful curse.

      We are all drowning. A drowning man cannot easily discern the difference between a timber and a straw. A desperate man cannot distinguish between a hope that is never likely to pan out, and one that
cannot
under any circumstances.

Yet these are the choices we must make.

These are the hopes he has left us.

I have a goal.

Straw or timber?

A desperate man grasps at what he can.

Dawson paused, breathing deeply. He cast his head back to look up through the tangle of branches and noticed that the sky was beginning to dismiss its darkness.

He listened. There were no disturbing sounds. Only birds, making virtually the same noises that birds have made through all the ages of mankind.

[4]

A godsend.

I hope.

Godsend or self-activated trap, it hardly matters. I cannot survive forever without sleep. Real sleep. I will stay the night. I have chosen the likely death of staying in one place and submitting to unconsciousness, over the certain death of attempting to continue on through my exhaustion.

I am hoping that I am not too grossly underestimating their abilities to sense and to seek. Never before have I felt so claustrophobic. Never before have I had so excellent a reason to.

The small, boxlike house was neither wide nor long, though it stood two stories. It had given Dawson the impression of a retreat, a hunting or fishing camp where an urbanite might escape his lot for a couple of weeks and a half-dozen weekends each year. It was almost out of sight from the road, and Dawson felt that if he hadn’t been moving slowly, and on foot, he would have missed it altogether. He found that thought to be a friendly one.

It hadn’t been the thought of sanctuary that had given him the necessary courage to investigate, it had been the hope of finding food. Any food to supplement his godweary and diminishing rations of dried fruit and nuts.

Once he had assured himself that the place was truly deserted, he lost no time in reaching his decision. He quickly set about constructing makeshift barricades for the door and windows on the first floor. He knew that the simple restraints that he was building would not keep them out for long, if indeed they should discover him, but he hoped that they would prove substantial enough to give the ghouls some difficulty. If they were enough to delay the beasts, and to increase the amount of noise that any entry would create, they would have served the purpose they were built for.

Only later did he search for food.

The pantry turned out to be a pleasanter surprise than he’d have dared to hope: canned ham, tuna, stew and a variety of canned vegetables, all in great quantity. There were two full five-gallon plastic water bottles and, prize of prizes, an unopened bottle of whiskey and one of rum. These final items presented him with a dilemma that he knew he’d have to work out later, but he could not deny the pleasure that their presence had inspired in him.

He filled his arms and made his way upstairs, to the larger of the two small bedrooms.

I know that drinking in this situation is foolish. I must remain alert. But to take advantage of the positive aspects of my circumstance, it is imperative that I sleep. To sleep I must curb my anxieties, my sense of being trapped. No other method seems to be forthcoming, so I will drink. Only in moderation, of course. Just enough to help me sleep.

Later, in a sloppier hand, he wrote:

I cannot stop wondering how long I have. How keen, how far-reaching are their senses? How near are they now? Will I waken in the middle of the night to find them hammering on the door? Worse? Will I waken with their godawful hands and teeth

STOP!

I know I may be drinking my death in this godforsaken trap

ENOUGH!

Does it matter? Does any of it matter? Why pretend? Ultimately there is no escape, just stays of execution. I die tonight, tomorrow, some other day or night.

I die.

That is what it all boils down to. Why pretend otherwise? The world is theirs now. We are all doomed. No escapes remain, only choices.

I have chosen to die drunk in this bed, trapped inside this house. If I wake tomorrow, I may choose another way to die.

These are the only choices that remain to me. This is how I am permitted to utilize God’s sacred prerogative.

[5]

Long rays of late-morning sunshine suffused everything in the room into a single golden haze. Dawson closed his eyes against the gentle glow and stretched.

“Bear of a hangover,” he muttered.

He glanced over toward the nightstand to check the time.

No nightstand.

No time.

It all came back very suddenly.

    
They have not found me.

Yet.

But I do not feel capable of traveling now. The drink was a stupid mistake. Letting it get so out of hand. Like on a fucking holiday.

Perhaps that’s what I needed, though. Release. Oblivion. If the delay it has caused doesn’t kill me, I think I will consider the episode less harshly.

I will try to spend another night here. I prefer to travel by daylight and have already missed much of today’s. I will not drink tonight.

I am hoping that their absence now indicates that they are all too far away to sense me. Straw or timber?

I will spend the time I have here writing. It is the only safe peace upon which I can draw.

Three weeks earlier Dawson had been fooling around in the kitchen of his suburban bachelor flat, drinking beer and putting the finishing touches on a mammoth pizza, preparatory to sliding it in the oven. Mike, who had been his closest friend for better than fifteen years, was in the kitchen with him, keeping him company and offering expert advice on pepperoni placement. Scott, a new acquaintance more Mike’s friend than Dawson’s, was in the living room watching the Dodgers and Mets play the Saturday afternoon Game of the Week.

That evening the three of them intended to catch the local heroes in person. “A real game,” both Mike and Dawson had chided Scott, “an American League game.”

It had been a beautiful day. Their moods were excellent.

“Mike, Daws—get in here! Quick!!”

Scott’s voice accosted them with such ridiculous urgency that Dawson had rolled his eyes while Mike scrinched up his face and answered, in a lilting falsetto, “Coming, dear.”

“Hurry dammit!”

Dawson picked up the pizza.

“Go ahead Mike, no need for both of us to miss the earth-shattering replay. I’ll be right in, you can tell me all about it.”

As Mike left the room, Dawson carried the pizza over to the oven and wondered how Scott could get so worked up over nothing. Not only were the two teams in the wrong league, but they were the easiest two teams in that wrong league to root against.

“Well, what can you expect of a Los Angelino?” he muttered, and left the kitchen to join his friends.

The strange looks on their faces told him that something was drastically wrong. The voice from the tv set was not the bubbly effulgence of an inane sportscaster filling dead air. Instead it was the deadly serious, but somehow comically urgent, drone of a tv newsman. A bulletin of some sort.

“Either the missiles are in the air, or the president has another migraine,” he thought.

Then he began to listen in earnest.

“You changed the channel, this is part of a movie, right?”

“No.”

“A spoof then, like the War of the Worlds broadcast… ‘We interrupt this meaningless mundane broadcast to bring you…’”

“No, man. This is serious.”

“What sort of judge are
you
? You thought the Mets and Dodgers were serious.”

“Shut the fuck up!”

They listened.

They watched.

The talking head in the box apprised them of the most incredible things. Then it was gone, and they watched some grown men playing with a ball on a green field.

Then the head came back, speaking even more urgently. This time he had film clips to show them too. Eventually the network stopped trying to go back to the game.

That’s when Dawson knew that things were really out of hand.

The three of them sat in Dawson’s living room for an unknowable period of time, mesmerized by phosphor dots, incomprehension and fear. They were subjected to a veritable parade of talking heads: reporters, so-called experts, and the seemingly inescapable man on the street.

The advice of the experts was, at best, difficult to fathom:

—Stay where you are. Secure it. It is unsafe to venture out.

—Seek a federally sanctioned shelter. Emergency personnel will be on hand to aid you. Stay tuned for a complete listing of government-run emergency shelters in your area.

—Stay clear of all federal and state-run shelters. Communications to many are down. Many have been overrun.

—Call this HOTLINE for expert advice and up-to-the-minute details of the situation in your area.

So they watched the horror unfold, increase in complexity, and develop new facets and twists of terror, in the proverbial comfort of Dawson’s own home. It was being vigorously covered on television, thereby abridging any need for them to be anything other than spectators. The tv gave the experience a distinct air of unreality.

Dawson had the strange feeling that he had seen it all before in bits and pieces. The language of the television was the same as it had always been. Even the experts with their dry faces, excitable voices, and competing “facts” seemed only like so many salesmen delivering their eternal pitches:

“Act now…” ‘

“Don’t delay…”

“Operators are standing by…”

“Over fifty locations to serve you…”

So the three of them continued staring, as each had done for uncountable hours in the course of their lives, at the strange blue phosphorescent glow of the tube.

It didn’t occur to them to do anything else.

It didn’t occur to them that there was anything else to do.

Eventually Mike roused himself sufficiently to go to the phone and dial the HOTLINE.

He listened to the phone ring.

Twenty times.

Then fifty.

Seventy-five.

Then he returned to the sofa, to sit and listen to the experts a little longer.

The next decisive action that any of them took was when the screen went blank. It was Scott who rose then and fiddled with the set until he found a station that was still broadcasting.

Mesmerized.

Phosphor dots and fear.

Maybe it was simply the fact that someone was knocking on the door. Surely that was a startling enough development itself. Not that the knocking frightened us, we were too far gone for that. Our fear had become abstract, incapable of approaching us in such a fashion. That, in fact, was our real problem at the time.

Besides, in the world we were used to—and had refused, to that point, to divorce ourselves of— knocks on the door were, at worst, annoyances, never threats. So even though we had all been informed that the world outside my apartment had changed drastically, I think we shared an instinctive rationale that death would never be polite enough to knock.

Perhaps it was the effect of seeing real people, made of actual flesh and actual blood, after so many hours of serious, soulless electronic faces.

But I think it was something more than either, or both, of these things.

As soon as he opened the door, Dawson recognized the people on his doorstep, not as individuals, but as a class. He recognized their paraphernalia—their books and magazines and tracts—but most of all their hand was tipped by the patented, vacuous, God’s-gracious-grins they wore.