Ashes and Entropy

by Laird Barron

  So when the Goliath miscreation finally pulled itself completely out of the ground the resulting shockwaves caused an earthquake the likes of which we marvelled at on Saturday nights watching disaster movies, which in turn commenced a tsunami from the converging Indian and Atlantic oceans, a wave seven storeys high that slammed full force into Koeberg before ruthlessly driving itself inland, flattening Melkbosstrand and an assemblage of non-suspecting villages along the coast.

  I only recall flashes: shocked journalists and mobile phone footage of a void-carrying segmented mass, indiscriminately devouring both civilians and cultists, even as they chanted,

  “Xa ithe yazaliseka iminyaka eliwaka, ubudala eyona wokhululwa entolongweni yakhe”.

  When the thousand years are expired, the Old One shall be loosed out of his prison.

  Ja, the Bible is always the first thing people quote when shit like this goes down. But everyone quickly realised that any notions we had of ‘god’ had been wholly misinformed. Eventually, that thing crawled back into its hole, trailing annihilation and human detritus in its wake. Then the government skulked out of its hole where it had been hiding the entire time and began evacuating people out of the greater Cape Town area. And as a bonus, because maybe they thought people didn’t realise it yet, they also blessed us with an official announcement: “Koeberg has gone into meltdown.”

  Fucking no shit.

  You know, the worst thing was that most people had nowhere else to go. Fok, thousands had already been homeless before all of this happened. Meanwhile, the army was at a dearth to deal with the aftermath, logistically and psychologically. They rounded people up in a collective-hive-daze; a few went the other way and got trigger happy. It seemed that when the thing disappeared down its black hole it had left behind a cloud of paranoia that affected some worse than others. I’ll never be able to forget it. It fucking haunts me.

  You want to know how many people lost it when the dust finally settled and they saw Table Mountain split straight in two? That was the coup de grâce to what would quickly be labelled Judgement Day, because of course it would. Half the people left alive in the Mother City went cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs at the sight.

  My parents were among those who stayed. My maternal grandparents were dead and my father's lived in Jozi, but they’d barely spoken to their eldest since he married my mother. Not good enough for him or some shit. Cherry on the cake, not long after Judgement Day my mother discovered she was pregnant. But my father refused to let her (and presumably, himself) live in a crowded army tent under the open Karoo sky (oh yeah – where else were you going to find enough room to temporarily house two million people?). The Koeberg Event – for those less religiously inclined – happened just before the start of spring but the Karoo was sub-zero all year round and I guess my father thought he’d take his chances with the fallout rather than freeze to death. I wish he cared about me as much now as he had then.

  My parents annexed an abandoned mansion in Constantia, the previous owners having left behind a matte gold Mercedez Benz, a boat (I Like Big Boats and I Cannot Lie) and a house filled with luxury furniture that was now worth nothing in the rush to outrun the nuclear fumes. Our family had never been rich, and though the city became more like Thunderdome in the wake of D-day than a haven for tourists, at least inside that repurposed house, for a few years, I’d been a happy kid.

  You might think I sound flippant about all of this. I know a lot of people died and not only from radiation poisoning. Once the sea retreated there were bodies everywhere. It took time to get rid of them all. People got sick. The monster-door in the ground had swallowed thousands. And houses, shacks, cars, bridges, entire freeways – all absorbed into the earth’s innards as if by some chthonic beast.

  Strange thing was, many women besides my mother found themselves pregnant not long after all of this metaphysical ataxia. The scientists put it down to stress, seeing all those people die – quick, we gotto make more! I don’t know. People talked about women in particular experiencing trance-like states for extended periods after, some of them talking shit about carrying god’s babies. Whatever the truth, I grew up alongside a lot of kids who ended up hating their parents, and for good reason.

  All children born in the five years preceding the Koeberg Event and for one year thereafter began having visions once they turned twenty-five. They called it the six-year-string. Some of the newborns – it’s not something I like talking about. I sometimes volunteered at Tygerberg after they relocated it closer to the city centre. Some of those babies had terrible deformities. Occasionally they survived, but for the most part, their parents – or others – made sure they didn’t. I eventually stopped going to the hospital. I couldn’t reconcile believing that everyone had a right to life and thinking what kind of life such an existence would entail.

  I also learned to avoid the beaches. You can only see crab-scuttling humanoids – some as young as four or five – skittering and chittering disproportionately toward the shoreline before you stop sleeping altogether.

  My own visions started almost five years ago to the day. They’re violent and may slowly be killing me. I have no idea what they mean; they make very little sense. Shapes and shadows coalescing but never showing me anything I understand. Every night I wake up screaming, convinced I’m dying. And my parents became afraid of me. They, who had made deals with some cack-dimension-entity, and then began to look at me like I was sussing them for tomorrow morning’s breakfast. They left one night while I was sleeping. The other provinces in the country want nothing to do with us. They call us the forgotten children and believe me, they work hard at doing their best to forget.

  ~

  It’s peak summer now, the beginning of February. Mooching alongside the stone wall of the Castle of Good Hope, I hear the gleeful shrieks of children. They’re playing soccer in the old prison yard, passing a raggedy ball skilfully from one bare foot to another. Someone had glued hand-drawn posters on the castle wall: “Yi! SAVE US FROM OBLIVION.”

  I’m heading to the central library. The government does its best to straddle the line between caring for the Cape Town communities and forgetting we exist. They still regularly send books (everywhere else has upgraded to digital libraries) but electricity and Internet are sketchy at best. Maybe, if the fucking cultists had shown some respect for the written word, none of this would have happened.

  The library is comparatively safe. The real vandals don’t give a shit about literature and there is enough radioactive garbage out on the streets to make bonfires with. Junkies scared no-one anymore because that’s another thing the government sends lots of: drugs. A lot of those who had visions bombarded their brain-soup with some serious chemicals to suppress them, or if that didn’t work, to forget them as quickly as possible. Give them access to blitzing themselves into a stupor and they had no impetus to complain. Sometimes they tripped out in the library because for the most part, it remained a place of solace.

  I’m not much for drugs but surrounded by books, I feel safe. I have bad anxiety, awful panic attacks; the distraction that words provide diverts my attention. Also, Cape Town Central was the only one among 102 libraries in the area that stocked books in all of the country’s 11 official languages. My Xhosa needed work. I’ve always wanted to learn Swedish.

  It was Saturday and the warm morning already had the feel of a protracted yawn. My mood had been vile lately, an indication of (a) an impending anxiety attack or (b) worse, the goddamned visions. Buttressed between two rows of books, I was thumbing a Don Quixote when a clamour disturbed my peace. It came from the opposite end of the room where once a coterie of librarians had conversed in secret languages behind a heavy oak counter. Nowadays it was strictly self-checkout.

  I wasn’t scared but knew how to be careful. Quietly I made my way along the shelves, head down. Thump and another thump-smash. It was coming from behind the next row of books. Carefully, I peered round the corner of the shelf.

  She was dressed in tatty jeans and
a short-sleeved shirt, dark hair almost on her shoulders, which were broader than most and accentuated how tall she was. She stared intently at the books in front of her. Lying face down on the floor were several books, their pages awkwardly splayed, spines jutting. She yanked another one off the shelf and pitched it behind her into the air, not caring to look as it came back down in a mess.

  "Oi!"

  Well, what the fuck, I thought soon as the word left my mouth. For all I knew she was high on tik or whatever they sold down on the wharf these days. Some people quickly built up a tolerance to the government drugs and got hungry for the hard stuff.

  She looked at me, evidently like I’d disturbed something important.

  "What those books ever do to you?”

  Her brow creased and I expected her to yell at me. But she only made some kind of snake noise and stalked off, disappearing into the dimness of a stairwell. Yeah, sod off. I collected the books from the floor and shelved them. One of the titles was Ancient Religion in Modern Times. Everybody was angry at something.

  The sudden jolt of adrenalin in my body had nowhere to go, making me feel tired. I lay down on the well-worn carpet and tracked a steady ray of dust motes. In the street outside, someone or something howled.

  When I opened my eyes there was no carpet, no books, and no library. I’m unsure there was a floor. There was definitely no roof, only a compellingly disturbing vacuum spitting forth churning stars harbouring seemingly treacherous intentions.

  The image transmuted. I was standing on a beach. Cape Agulhas, maybe. There was a lighthouse, red and white against a blue sky, its oversized light oscillating a repetitive warning.

  Something moved beyond, in the water, behind a swell of oversized waves. Whales? I looked down and saw my naked legs dangling in shadowy green water that fathomed into infinity. A vast shadow undulated below me, came into focus and it was not a whale at all. Grotesquely bloated, it began surfacing, blooming in size. Now I was in the water entirely, frantically treading. I turned to look behind me, hoping to see the lighthouse, to be back on Cabo das Agulhas, the Cape of Needles – anywhere but in that unbearably deep water and that whatever-thing rising below my useless legs. The burning stars spat into the sky again and –

  nightime –

  the heavens whispered and the ground shook. The water tilted and the ocean rose.

  The leviathan dweller

  – the fear of being swallowed intact, heart hammering as the seawater itself begins writhing, a living liquescent mass —

  thflthkh’ngha! –

  ''Stop! You're ok. It's not real."

  Instinctively I thrashed, smashed the back of my hand hard against a bookshelf and screech-swallowed obscenely. But at least I recognised her, from earlier. I shirked to avoid her touching me and in doing so amplified a rough onset of dizziness. "Shit, I think I’m gonna puke.”

  ~

  The joke went that the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront had changed for the better after the Koeberg Event. The once la-di-da retail stores had been ambushed by forgotten children who were now forgotten adults, the old shops converted into trading posts. Sometimes they stocked luxuries (Ricoffy and Nederburgh Pinotage) but mostly the essentials – bread, eggs, milk and tobacco. Nobody ever sold fish anymore and not because of radiation but because of the bizarre vulgarities that frequently washed out on beaches. Don’t eat the surf, stick to the turf.

  Most greens were grown hydroponically to avoid radiation but harvesting success could be sporadic. The government had once shipped containers full of clean soil into the harbour but this had tapered off eventually and now almost never happened. As for R&R, most people home-brewed their own beer and a small conglomerate out in Greenpoint grew ganja which, to their credit, they sold at an affordable price.

  Outside the library I laughed out loud when I saw Astrid had a car, and not only that, one that could actually be driven somewhere. A Toyota, beige like day-old dog shit.

  She drove. I asked her about petrol.

  "Know a guy who makes his own biofuel. I trade him for ganja. He lives outside Stellenbosch, on a farm close to the old Spier wine estate. He doesn’t have visions but he’s paranoid as hell about driving to the city. I go out there once a month."

  "I don’t think I’ve left the city since—"

  "I have to. It gets to me. Remember how white the cloth of cloud on Table Mountain used to be? Now it's just a patchy rag of smog and nuclear pollution. They’re back to running the coal factories twenty-four-seven.”

  "How long have you sold trinkets at the waterfront?"

  Astrid scowled. "They're not trinkets, and I don’t sell them.”

  "Trade, okay? Sorry. I’ve seen one too many sangommas throw bones trying to figure out what the hell happened and why."

  The scowl turned into a smirk. “They’re not gonna get anywhere if they keep talking to the wrong ancestors.”

  I had no idea what she meant. Astrid bounded the eleventy-billionth circle in so many seconds navigating to the waterfront parking lot. The abandoned IMAX loomed on the left side of the road next to an Audi showroom. The shattered display windows revealed once brand new cars static under layers of dust and rainbow graffiti. I closed my eyes but the scorched, spitting stars burned there. I would be trying to stave off sleep tonight. "I’ve heard it’s difficult to get a spot out here to trade."

  "Should tell you something about the kind of trinkets I trade."

  "Why were you angry, back in the library?"

  “I was looking for answers. Fok, but it’s hot in this car.”

  I got the hint, kept quiet. Astrid segued into the sprawling parking lot, the cracked asphalt deserted save for a hodgepodge of long-abandoned cars, their metal skeletons corroded by sea air.

  Inside the vast shopping complex I saw no-one – “people tend to sleep during the day and trade at night” – up stairs and past a Spur steakhouse that looked empty but blasted INXS's "New Sensation" behind closed doors.

  "This place is a lot less creepy when it's not packed out with hungry sales reps."

  Astrid unlocked what used to be an American Swiss, the front windows blocked out

  by refuse bags. Once inside and the door locked she flicked a light switch; fluorescents sputtered and the walls came alive with objects and static entities pitching shadows that instinctively made me recoil. Masks gaped hollowly, eyes staring like flailing fish. Amulets of bone warned dangerously beneath the stark light and tentacled idols seemed intent on reaching out. Other things too that bore a disjointed, eerie resemblance to that thing the cultists coaxed from within the earth.

  "Where’d you get this stuff?"

  "Contacts on cargo ships. From Pacific islands, mostly, some from Hawaii.”

  Entirely possible, since 99% of what happened in the harbour was illegal. Astrid took an unlabelled bottle from what might once have been a bedside table, its content impressively clear. Could have been turps for all I knew. She unscrewed the bottle top, poured and offered me a plastic cup.

  "It’s clean."

  The booze or the cup? "I don't care."

  The sun was almost below the horizon. For the past hour I’d been aware that I’d allowed myself into a situation where I was entirely at the mercy of someone I didn’t know from the proverbial soap. Stupid. Okay, she was nice to look at and all but again – stupid. Was that all it took these days for me to shrug and say “yeah whatever” when she asked how long it’s been since I’d seen the view from Quay 4?

  Because you’re stupid or because she’s attractive?

  "Bend your legs. I don't bite."

  “That’s all good but I’m not so sure about all these other things on your walls.” I pulled a Black Label beer crate from against the wall. Above it hung a woodcarving resembling an anorexic Slenderman. The clear liquid in the cup was gin, I assumed, because that’s what it tasted like.

  "You don't talk much."

  "I’m scared you’ll hiss at me again."

  "I have a temper. Sorry.
It’s a character flaw.”

  “Do you have visions?"

  “I don’t. But I used to be police force so maybe, the anger, you know?” She raised her orange Tupperware cup: “Fuck the government.”

  “Why’d you really bring me here? I mean, Quay 4 is great and all but these days it

  mostly smells like seagull shit and brine.”

  "Your eyes rolling back in your head like that, in the library. You looked ready to start foaming at the mouth.”

  “Concern for someone else’s well-being? That’s novel." I gulped the rest of the gin and stood up too fast, wobbly. Then I remembered: you have nowhere to go.

  "You're wound tighter than a minister's wife."

  "Wow, okay. I hope you’ve had fun, because I'm off."

  "Don't be stupid. It’ll be pitch black soon."

  "Probably better than sticking around."

  “Come on—”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “It’s a good six or seven k’s back to the city in the dark. You really want to risk that?”

  “It’s been great.”

  And despite the bitch-quip parting shot Astrid still came after me, which turned out to be a good thing because halfway to the door reality buckled like your sense of self on a bad acid trip and I was sure those heaving, scorching stars had conquered my eye sockets for good and were letting in the grotesqueries on Astrid’s shop walls. As if obliged by some resolute but entirely obscure force I felt myself tilting, losing all sense of measure and being… and when I fell I did so without ever feeling the ground beneath me.