The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  I look at my photos. There's my work on the giant 'f', happy deluded selfies, like what I was doing was actually worth a shit, like posting on the side of the Empire State was anything like posting on a digital wall.

  No one will see it. If they're anything like Sophia they'll already be dead. I see her loss eating into me, I can feel it crushing my spirit, but there's nothing I can do to stop it. I don't have the resources anymore to buoy myself along. I need outside intervention, but there is none. It's a real boulder crushing me down, and I can't fight it alone.

  I double-click my phone just to hear Io's voice, but she only talks when I ask her questions, and half the time she can't understand what I say anyway. She's just programming, imperfect code made by people who are all dead now.

  Shit bits, Cerulean would say. It's all shit bits, one step away from glitching through a shelf.

  I put the phone away because it's a fantasy. I turn the music off too, because I'm kidding myself. I've been kidding myself since the massacres. That was the reality. There is only kill to live now, kill the ocean every day to live, and I don't know if that's enough.

  I rub my eyes. My head aches from thinking these same things. Sophia has done a real number on me.

  I drive on. Rain comes at me over a hill, a drumming wall of gray passing across the land and I plunge into it. I bull through the wreckage of a bus torn in half. Torn bits of the ocean reach out to me, from the twists of melted slag and rubber.

  I pass through towns that are completely empty. The old guilt surfaces now and then, that maybe I did this. If I'd just kept my dick in my pants the world might still be here. I would see Lara every day in Sir Clowdesley, from afar but at least she'd still be alive. Then I remember the twinges, and how shitty it felt to live like a prisoner beneath them, and for how long it went on.

  I feel the weight of the country pressing down on me. Three thousand miles is such a long, long way. And what's even waiting for me at the end?

  I remember as a kid I'd wake up to hear the night freight train pass by on the tracks a few miles distant, past Meller Creek. There was something so lonely about lying awake in the small hours listening to that long high whistle, calling out its passage.

  Now I'm the last train, roaming a barren world and playing my music like a whistle that nobody will hear. I'm so hungry for contact; I'm just as bad as Sophia. I'm leaving my sad little cairns with such miserable hope it makes me sick.

  They'll find me dead too, and they'll see my pathetic record of events, photos of what I did, my zombie comic, my vainglorious strain for a connection, and it'll only make this feeling worse. I can't win.

  I am too alone. I am going crazy with it. Shit shit shit, I can't take it away. I can't do anything.

  I drive on.

  25. IOWA

  Hazleton, Danville, Lewisburg. I pass through and I don't stop. There are floaters staggering everywhere. There are baby carriages left standing idly on street corners, spatters of dry bone strewn across the gutters, cars lying like strange colorful mushrooms in the road, sprouting around with veiny ivy. The ocean get thinner and grayer, but still they rumble out to greet me.

  More of them are naked now; their clothes have slid or worn right off their skinny frames. They are walking skeletons, rasping at the air.

  I pass from Pennsylvania to Ohio, watching the landscape change. I see a few Boston Markets interspersed amongst the Burger Kings and McDonalds. There are more Krogers, for some reason. I find myself wandering through a J. C. Penny, I don't know why. I shove the floaters that lap near. I pick out a new pair of jeans and put them on. No rips, they feel good. I was starting to look like them.

  There are signs for Pittsburgh, signs for Akron. Somewhere in the distance Cleveland, Toledo, and Chicago pass me by. I'm through Ohio to Indiana, bound for Illinois. I follow the road like a train track, my music off now. I don't leave any of the cairns I'd planned to. It seems pointless. Nobody will see. At times I look at photos of the big 'f' I left in New York, and try to decide if this is good thing or just the same as poor wilted Sophia's 'SORRY'.

  I keep her student ID to torture myself with. She is pinned to the JCB cab. I start to fantasize about her at night, lying in my battle-tank and staring into her eyes, dreaming of her voice and her touch, of teasing her about her kiddie's cereal while she cries out for me, for me.

  Each time I finish I feel pathetic. I am pathetic. I push her picture far away, like I've sinned against her and myself. I go to sleep mired in guilt, and when I wake I have to climb through it just to breathe. I see my failure everywhere.

  I get out my M320 and start to blow things up; billboards at first, then chain restaurants. They crunch and explode, sending bin doors, deep fat fryers and bright plastic chairs flying out in beautiful sprays. These can be my cairns. Let them read like Braille across the country, a story of loneliness and loss. I can only be honest.

  I make slow progress, so much it feels like a crawl. I am constantly nudging other vehicles out of the way, stopping to herd floaters. I can only drive at the speed of the convoy. Once I come upon a herd of the ocean near South Bend, tramping across the landscape from east to west like a river, and I wonder where they're going. Then I rev the earthmover and nudge through them.

  I don't think I kill any. They are like a bad storm raging around me, hammering at every inch of my convoy, beating for a way in. I turn the music up to make them go crazy. I consider getting to the top of the battle-tank and letting rip into their ranks with my M240s, but I'm beyond that now. I'm not in this to get revenge or cause pain.

  I just need to get through. I won't give up like Sophia, not yet, but I can't promise what I'll do when I reach the West Coast. Maybe I'll swing there too, last mayor of America taking in the view.

  I rumble over bridges and down a hundred Main Streets, through little towns cored by the move to Yangtze same-day delivery drones. As I swing through Indiana, I remember why my country is so religious. The vast empty expanses of flat overgrown cornfields spread to either side like endless yellow skies, and the loneliness here is palpable. Maybe I too can sense God, in these fields.

  I enter Iowa on a Thursday, at 9:56 in the morning. I keep my phone charged with batteries and solar rechargers. Without it I would have no idea of the date, but Io remembers. This is my land, my home state. The mega-church thirty miles past the border is still there, sprawling like a holiday resort; the mass capitalization of faith and loneliness. I consider going in and alternately praying or shooting up the place.

  I do neither. I'm like flat soda left out in the sun. I eat sugary cereal and don't taste it. I drive. After Des Moines I pull off I-80, bound for the little town I come from, where my parents may be even now; Creston. I pull in a day later, wondering if this experience will defeat me, like it did Sophia.

  The neighborhood is unchanged, bar nature growing out of control. I pull up to the house, all typical Americana; a swing on the sheltered porch, mosquito nets on the doors and windows, woodwork painted pale lime and white. My folks don't actually have a white picket fence, but the neighbor Mr. Connors does.

  The grass is wild on the front lawn. Dad loved his John Deere and would never have abided that. Just seeing this makes me start to cry. Of course I know they're both dead already, but seeing this damn grass makes it real. Maybe coming here was a mistake.

  I start up the music and get out, drawing a few floaters to the truck. I trail the shotgun barrel noisily behind me, scraping a line up the concrete path, then stop at the door. I actually have a key. It feels so strange in my hand, like a piece of magic to access this world, so far away.

  It slides into the lock, I turn it, and the door opens.

  Inside it smells of slowly baking mahogany and cedar. It's a timber-framed house and they've got dark wood furniture throughout.

  "Mom," I call, into the musty corridor. Plenty of light radiates in through the windows. "Dad."

  To either side are chests of drawers, one adorned with a few petite Chinese-style
vases. Mom loved these, and would often boast of them to friends and neighbors, though they were plainly reproductions probably cast a few miles down the road at the hippy commune near Shenandoah.

  I go down the hall, past the neat kitchen, to the den. Nothing is touched or has been changed. Wooden ducks fly across the wall above the TV, still a thick old CRT model. I'd been meaning to buy them a new one before the coma hit. I run my fingers through the dust on the kitchen table. We used to play games of Rook here when I was little, me on my Mom's side, Aaron on Dad's, and it doesn't hurt to remember that, though it feels like ancient history.

  I wander through the living room, where the coffee table is still piled neatly with mom's women's magazines. In the back room the piano rests silently. I play a few notes.

  "Mom," I call again, but no answer comes.

  Up the beige-carpeted stairs, I look in on each of our bedrooms one by one. Theirs is plain and unadorned; large cupboards, a dresser, a full-length mirror, veils on the windows.

  The guest room, which used to be Aaron's room, is barren, with nothing of him left here now. My room is empty too, though it still bears many of my teenaged decorations, like a time capsule. I stand in the middle and look at this hollow space in the air, thinking there must be millions of rooms just like it across America, emptied out.

  I open my drawers, looking at my collection of old Transformers toys. I run my fingers over their plastic shells, their holographic stickers, so colorful and bright. Perhaps if I cared about these things now, I'd be like Sophia. They would be my flimsy roots, too easily plucked up and exposed to the air, wriggling weakly. Loss of them might break me, seeing them like this could hurt me, like she brought her movies and her kid's cereal along for the ride.

  I don't need them. They don't mean anything to who I am now. I've died so many times between then and now I can hardly remember. This room is a shell I've grown out of.

  The basement is the same. It was my prison for a time. I sit on my old bed and look up at the door, imagining Cerulean in a place like this while his mother hammered her way in. She brought him into the world and she took him out of it.

  I go out into the yard and wander through the long grass. A few thick hotdog reeds have sprung up at the edges, where the rainwater always collects and tries to make a pond. Bulrushes? I can't remember. Io can't tell me.

  My folks aren't here. I could roam around and study shriveled peanut faces looking for them, though there seems to be a flow these days in the ocean, heading to the west. My folks are probably a thousand miles distant by now, and even if I found them, they still wouldn't be here.

  I put Sophia's ID card reverently on the kitchen table, alongside one of my favorite transformers, Megatron himself. That's enough of that, now. All of this is a farewell, and I've felt guilty abusing her poor, lost image for so long. I am a seed of a long-dead plant, caught on a wind and untethered by any trailing, unmet desires, and that's fine.

  I get in my cab and drive off, to the west, on a pilgrimage with the dead headed God knows where.

  26. ENDLESS

  In an endless landscape of corn, I run out of gasoline.

  The battle-tank is empty of supplies. It's not that I planned it wrong, or I forgot to fill them up. There were countless opportunities to resupply; I could have siphoned any of the tankers I've passed, I could even have rigged a pump to bring it up from the depths beneath a gas station. I have those kinds of skills now.

  But I didn't do any of that. It is a clear-headed but entirely passive choice. I rumble the convoy on until it stops, the engine gutters, and goes silent.

  Hot sun bakes down. I leave my phone behind on the seat. I contemplate taking all my clothes off and going out naked, but there's no need for that. It will happen itself, when time has thinned me down like the rest of them, and the sun has baked and worn them so much they slough off.

  I want to wander free like the herds that fill out this land. I'll finally belong again. I want to face it, the same fate that I gave to them all. I'm just so tired of being alone.

  I climb out of the cab. I don't need guns or music now. It's all right. I start walking. The sun is hot and the corn is indescribably beautiful. I've never seen it grow so out of control before. The stalks get thick and tangled, interweaving like unkempt threads in a greater organism.

  We are all like this, I think. I take step after step and feel lighter with every one. I am walking into my freedom. If Sophia had been brave enough she would have done this too. Yes there will be pain, but then it will be over. Like my parents there'll be nothing left to find because I'll be gone.

  I leave no message, no 'SORRY' scrawled hastily over the battle-tank's side, because I am not sorry. This is reality and I'm not ashamed. I am not willing to kill a single floater more to survive, for this. My life is not worth it. I'd rather run with the herd, hunting down buffalo in the wild, feeling the hot blood gush down my neck and chest, swallowing, swaying together like kelp on the tides.

  I get misty-eyed thinking of it. It seems like a beautiful life, and I am proud that I finally see that. Life is nothing lived alone. I don't want to be in my basement anymore, I don't want to hide away in my cab afraid and clinging to the past. My eyes are open.

  A member of the ocean peels out of the corn. Just one, and I wonder at his long and winding journey to reach this place, a bit of jetsam tossed upon the golden waves, like me.

  His leg is twisted and he can't run. So much the better. We can dance together one last time. I walk and he walks behind me. We walk together, and I slow my pace to let him keep up. It can even be beautiful, a harmony of kinds. I turn once at a rise and see my convoy so far behind, so small.

  We are all so small. Like Aaron always taught me, the key lies in seeing that smallness and knowing it. You have to see the reality or you are lying to yourself, and I can't be Sophia. I want to go forward as boldly as I can.

  We walk together, the floater and me. Its body is so shrunken I can't tell the gender anymore; any hint of genitalia has shriveled up into the body. I start to cry, and now it is a release. Tears flood down my face. I'll walk until I run out of strength, then I'll turn this body over to the flood. That at least is honest. It's facing death down and accepting it with open arms, hiding no more.

  I reach out and stroke the ears of corn, fat and yellow. I pluck one and eat it as I walk. The natural sugars are ripe and rich, sweeter down my throat than any of the processed, canned shit I've been on for months. The air is so clean. I look back to make sure my friend is still coming.

  It's been joined by another. They both hobble along, neither of them running. I don't know why this is, they don't look injured, but I'm grateful. They will run me down, but with respect. I will give myself up in the same way. I duck them a low bow and we go on.

  I toss the corn back into the field. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. It was a grand dream, really. I no longer feel bad about my New York cairn. Perhaps others will come, in time, and it might help them. They'll take strength in what I've left for them, and they may even make it to the West Coast alive. It won't matter that I'm not there when they arrive, if they've already made it that far. They can build their own destination. I just made a starting point.

  I'm smiling as I walk. Happiness rises in me like a flood, withheld for so long. Now I feel proud again, and it doesn't matter that no one will witness my death, because I'm here. I don't need the others for this moment, I don't need to apologize or to be witnessed, because which one of us goes into death with others by our side?

  We all go alone. Cerulean went alone, Aaron went alone, my parents went alone, but we all go the same way. This is a path so well trodden it is worn into stone, and finally, I feel the company of all these ghosts in the air around me.

  I'll run with Cerulean and my parents, with Aaron and Lara and them all.

  I walk through the day, until there is a crowd of dozens behind me. Not a one of them runs, and with each one added to the slow trudge my heart fills a little more. This
is my audience. They will leap upon me and tear me apart, and we're going to do it together. I am giving them my body for their sustenance, and in turn they are making me one with them.

  Who ever said birth was pain-free? Life is hard and it hurts. The first thing a baby feels is a slap to make it breathe, and the indignities keep on coming. Lost love, lost friends, broken bones, all of it part of the tapestry of life. I am part of it too. I started this thing and finally it's caught up to me.

  The cornfields don't end. At some point nearing dusk, when my feet are growing weary and my vision blurs with the heat and exhaustion, so tired I can barely take another step, I stop and I turn. There are hundreds of them now, all my brothers and sisters, and now I am sorry.

  I'm sorry for the family I locked within their home in Mott Haven, and for the mall cops I killed with monitors above Sir Clowdesley. I am sorry for the thousands I burned and the thousands I mowed down with bullets and the tens of thousands I locked into the stadium. I would take all of it back if I could. Why should I have any more right to the world than them? Why should I be the one to go on, clinging to a past that is no longer real?

  I spread my arms, and the gray tide draws in, folds around me, and I am encompassed. Their limbs and their skins find mine, tenderness reigns, and we are all rolled into one in the blackness together.

  27. COMA

  I remember my coma.

  It was terrifying; I was a child again surrounded by colors I couldn't recognize and shapes I couldn't distinguish, shifting constantly like warping reflections on a soap bubble.

  Have you ever seen a coma victim blanche so completely? I mean, they always lose their color in a week or two, it drains out of them, but this?

  It was overnight.

  I've never seen the like.

  I 'hear' the words coming to me through gusts of color, like digital brush-strokes, 130-point font and meaningless.