How the World Ends (9 page)

Remembering.

…

In the dream, there is always a brief moment before I fall, when I remember: my name is Herb Wiseman, and I wasn’t always like this.

I was once an accountant. I was good and I was sought after. I had job retention – I was needed, and in demand. I worked all the time, taking the train into the city from my house in the suburbs, leaving the little people there to wait for me in their little beds where I might kiss them in passing, late at night or early in the morning, but always too late or too early.

The skies were a real blue in those days, and the water of the lake reflected the sun into a sparkling array of hopefulness that anyone could have felt, if only they had looked. I knew how to see that, once. I would sit on the train or drive in my car and the world was mine – a place to deliver my needs to me, like a servant of my desires. I had control back then, and I revelled in its magnificence, for I felt like a king among a forest of kings and queens.

We were all gliding easily, back then in our cars and trains, over the pavement that protected us from the roughness of the ground beneath. We floated within the haze of our short-sightedness that reminded us of our superiority just by allowing us to glimpse the stars that we could reach out and touch and snatch from the very dome of the sky.

But the time passed by and the days grew into years and the years grew old and into a long, longer day which slowly sloped silently into a longer night, and my dazzling fire grew dim in the face of all that pressure. The young kids fresh out of school, smarter than me, working harder, working faster. The strain building, mounting, pushing me, holding me, sapping my strength of mind, and then… and then… and then…

Forgetting.

I must have forgotten what it was like to see that sky and that sun and be dazzled by the beauty of the day. For I slipped, not all at once, but little by little, inch by sacred inch, inexorably into the dull greyness. I was trapped then, locked in the time before the day begins and the night is over and we wander through it aimlessly hoping for the time to pass onto something else. And then, when that happens, you don’t care anyways, because you don’t even know what cold-and-hungry is, or at least that’s what I was told.

Somebody told me that, once. Or was it just me, talking to myself without speaking?

Something about falling and hitting my head… something about bottles in my coat pocket that held the last of my whisky, for tomorrow morning, when I’d really need it. But there isn’t anything in there; I drank that bottle ages ago, and I don’t know why they’d want it.

“Leave me alone!”

And then the crashing, smashing blasting of rockets as jets streak through the skies and explosions rack the earth and the very matter that makes up the nature of life is changed forever and the noise deafens us and blood runs down our ears and someone somewhere planned this and why can’t I remember what it was like to be whoever I was before I was this?

…

And then I’m awake again, and, oh yes, that’s what being cold feels like, because my jacket’s gone – taken by the scoundrels who walk the streets looking for those more vulnerable than themselves. Damnit damnit damnit! Why did I go to get a drink?

It’s almost light, like it always is from a certain point of view, and I can see faces. Some I know, some I don’t. The eyes of those faces watch me as their hands clench, ever so slightly, and re-open, over and over again. I recognize some of them. Some of the eyes go to the left, and I know that’s the direction my coat went. I’m outside now. I must have been dragged for a bit when they took my coat, because the warehouse looms behind me like a great gaping black maw in the grey light of the dawn.

Dawn – it’s the time of day when you can feel the coldest feeling of loneliness, even knowing that the darkness is behind you. Where is the hope that the dawn is supposed to bring? I turn and walk behind the warehouse to a dumpster where I have an extra coat that I threw away a couple of days ago because it stunk so badly. I greet the day with my usual grimness as I shrug my shoulders into it.

I look out over the city, which isn’t much to look at even on the best of days, but today is it awesome in the peculiar silence that sits over the place like a blanket. I walk, in a shamble of battered shoes and my old smelly coat, back to the doorway of the warehouse, and look in. There’re all still there – the eyes with no faces and hands wringing together with no bodies and no souls to speak of. I’m just like them: that should be what hurts, that should be what tears at my heart like no pang of hunger could ever do, but it doesn’t.

No, I think to myself, as I turn and look at the river and new massive holes that have been blasted in the roads as far as the eye can see. I don’t hurt inside because I know my eyes peer out of the darkness with no soul behind them to see what’s actually there. I hurt because I don’t care, and I want to care, but I don’t have any hope of caring, or care of hoping, and that’s just what it’s like. It’s like being all twisted and wrong inside, with no ending or conclusion, just a wrongness, lacking passion and conviction.

Those blast holes are in me too, and I can’t find my way across, so here I stand. As the day dawns with dull greyness in spite of the sun trying to burn through, I stand forsaken and forgotten, and alone with all of those like me.

Waiting, and watching the edge of that blast hole for a hand to reach over the side.

…

Lucia

The city sleeps a wary, restless sleep. The sun has not yet risen from the black depths of the horizon. People in dark buildings stir and roll over on their balled up coats and wet jackets that have become their only bed-clothes overnight. Some are still awake, trying keep their eyes open in the silent roar of their thoughts.

In stairwells of apartment buildings, in the museum, in the football stadium, in churches: people struggle to find rest in the face of uncertainty. They have never had their lives turned upside down like this. In some places in the world, homelessness and displacement are a desperate fact of life. Most people in this city have never considered the mortality of their existence beyond the chance that they might not have enough money, or they might have to deal with a sick relative, or, eventually, grow old.

Now, growing old seems a luxury that nobody can afford, let alone budget for, in the face of a world turned on its head. Yet these thoughts are reserved for only a few – most can only assume that some isolated disaster has taken place, that the authorities are on their way, that help will be there soon, and normality will be restored.

Lucia Hadly stares into the darkness and knows better. She looks at the space in the blackness and knows that when she sees the cracks of light shine through, that death will quickly follow – at least this is what she fears; she was never privy to the exact schedule of events that the governments had decided upon for the cities that were to be sacrificed. She does not wish to know the true irony: that this city was not on the list at all, that a new list was made up after Geron had offered them another option. She can only imagine that several other mayor’s wives, or possibly mistresses – or anyone else close enough to provide information about those in power – had been approached. She seems to herself a complete fool.

She feels most keenly the loss of Phillip – whose love she had captured since they were children, and she had stayed for the summer in the cottage on the lake beside the Hadlys’ – those times were the only innocence she could still remember. She had been Lucia Seer then, not yet torn between the seduction of powerful men and the love of her own family. Choices were made, and the regrets accumulated. In this world, where death lingers stubbornly in her heart, there is no innocence left. The guilt rises in her chest and wraps about her mind as those in the dark stairwell arise with the dawning of morning and the cracks of light that begin to show through the bottom of the emergency exit door.

…

Jonah

I walk through the night. I walk until I am cold, until numbness fills my fingers and toes and the stumps of my feet feel like wooden blocks that I am kicking at with my knees. Eventually, I fall down on the stiff gravel, stumbling on the railway ties that I have been concentrating on stepping over in the waning starlight. The moon has set in the west, the sun not yet risen, and my chin bounces off a squared, creosote-laden timber.

I lay there, trying to remember what my hands were supposed to do in order to lift me off the ground. Fumbling with my arms that feel trapped at my sides, it seems as though I am under a great weight, struggling to keep me down, while another force is calling me, telling me that I
can
rise, that I
can
lift any weight and throw it off my shoulders. If only I believe.

Only if I believe.

Do I? Do I really believe?

The questions hold me there. I roll onto my back and try to see the patterns of the stars in the sky, but my beacons have faded.

“You’ve got to believe that you believe, man!” says a familiar voice. “I can see it in your eyes that you believe in one thing, but the other thing that you don’t know about, that you keep questioning, is just you. Being you is a thing that never stops changing anyway.”

It takes me a second to place the voice. “Gabe?” I ask, startled. “Where did you come from?”

There is no answer.

What is this?
I wonder in my head.

Nothing.

Without thinking about it, I stand up, and bow my head, struggling through the only prayer I know – the Lord’s Prayer, which I learned in school, and is nearly forgotten, but for the repetition, year after year.

I don’t know why I choose to pray now, except for the fact that I am hearing voices in my head at fairly opportune moments. Or are they – opportune moments, that is? Are they voices in my head – or just me, imagining them? Who gave me the rock?

I quickly rummage around in my pocket and pull out the small, innocuous looking stone.

Looking up, I see Gabe, ahead on the tracks. He waves and turns away, walking over a slight rise and disappearing. I start putting one foot in front of the other, and before I know it, I am walking again.

Like a sword through the darkness of night and its hidden terrors, the sun rises behind me. I catch sight of the skyline of the smoky city, except this morning the smoke is from a series of spent fires and explosions around the perimeter. For as far as I can see the roads around the city are blasted and smashed into great fuming holes.

I see the vision of it all in front of me and wonder if it can truly be real. How can this be allowed to happen in a world where we have institutions and establishments that are dedicated to looking after our wellbeing? Or are they, I ask myself, merely looking out for themselves, for their own, for their small circles of influence that their power can affect?

The power. It staggers me and I stop at the top of low rise where the train tracks turn slightly to accommodate some older houses beside the lake that existed before the tracks did. The power to destroy and the power to create. The power to choose and the power to revoke choices made by others. The power to rend and the power to care for. The seeds that are sown within me take root and sprout into a resolve to change the world. The power of God seems to light my path and I no longer feel torn between duty and purpose – I am merely called to action.

I am no longer tired, my legs no longer weary. I see the light of the sun dart ahead of me, into the shadows, chasing the gloom before it. I pick up my pace to reach the city and try to make a difference.

Before I get within a half-mile of the river, I can see that the tracks before me are lost into a gaping hole that is rapidly filling in with river-water. I start to walk around it, but I quickly get bogged down by a sucking swamp that has formed around the blast-hole. I stagger back up to the tracks and try to think about how to get over that hole. The late spring warmth of the sun feels nice, but I know that the water in that hole will be damned cold.

I spin around slowly, searching the landscape in all directions for something that can get me quickly across, or around this hole. The houses at the lake edge are only a few hundred yards back along the tracks and on the other side of a low hill. I can only see the rooftops, but there might be something, or someone, there. The weariness of the night completely gone, replaced with a biting hunger, I step off the tracks and walk through last year’s tall grass to the old-looking stone cottages paired up on the lakeside.

They appear to be deserted. The lawn grass is long, dead and undisturbed; these must be summer dwellings, or else abandoned. The door on one house is locked, but the small shed behind it is not. In it, as I can see through the glass window on the old-fashioned garage door, rests an old, yet functional-looking Land Rover truck.

As I open the door, I hear a roar overhead of planes flying low. I look up to see several fighter planes making passes over the city. I wonder if they are the ones who blast-holed the road, or whether the guards did that as the pulled out of the city – if indeed they are not still within the city itself. It amazes me how quickly I can detach myself from the incredulity of the situation to analyze the details that are necessary for survival. It’s just human nature, I suppose.

The Rover is very, very old. I’m not sure how to start it – as the dashboard has been obviously modified. The seat is little more than a metal bench on top of which an old blanket has been placed – comfy. The dash is comprised of four black toggle switches and a red push button. I push the red button. Nothing. I flip all the toggle twitches back and forth. Nothing. The battery must be dead. Thinking back to my days on the farm when our old Massey Ferguson spent its days parked at the top of hill so that it could be easily jump-started, I smile inwardly, glancing at the downward sloping driveway that curves down to the railway crossing and the dirt lane that must run over to the main road.