by Emily Brewes
If there’s food, make breakfast.
If there’s no food, wait until supper. Don’t go looking for breakfast. Eating right away means waking up at midnight with pangs from an empty belly. Better to have the pangs during the day when you can do things to distract yourself. Like salvage.
Head over to the Heap: a huge pile of wasted, discarded, and forgotten things us poors dig through on the off chance of finding something valuable. Something useful in our brave new world. The path from the humble custodial closet of Union Station that I call home is two lefts, a right, and thirty metres of damp subway tunnel. Nod at the familiar faces who arrive from other passages, collecting into the stream heading for one of the only jobs left. Leastways for those of us who’ve not lucked into a prenticeship or family business that miraculously remained viable once society collapsed. The unskilled, the elderly, and the antisocial must still pay their way.
Spend most of your day at the Heap doing salvage, sifting through the leavings from the rich folk who live in fortified towers. Use the tools you’ve cobbled together — a shovel and a kind of rake-headed glove — to dig and scratch away at one of a dozen hills that rise out of hip-deep detritus, compacted over the years into a mass of what could not be saved. Some of it I can identify, like CD players, computing devices with their shells cracked open, skateboards, various examples of recorded media, dismembered mannequins, and vacuum cleaners. The original uses of other things are unsolvable mysteries. Nearly everyone who could provide answers is dead.
Find yourself constantly mystified at the array of nonsense that clatters down enormous corrugated pipes, landing at the crest of the hill and tumbling down. Develop a sixth sense for knowing when a new batch is on its way, long before it can be heard, so you can get out of the way. More than one salvager has been rendered out of commission by such an impact, in some cases permanently.
Become an expert at sorting junk by type so you spend as little time as possible at the trade desk at the end of the day. It’s bad enough standing in line for hours to get half a handful of tokens, most of which you’re saving to get your shoes repaired; you don’t need to make it worse by being unprepared for your turn at the front. Make a stop at the commissary and pay one token from your hoard for some mushroom jerky and algae supplements. Go home.
By midevening, start feeling the crushing depression of the life you’ve been relegated to. If you’re especially maudlin, sneak another token from your stash and use it to buy a mickey of high-octane hooch from the old woman down the hall who distills it from who-knows-what. Drink yourself into oblivion, halfway hoping you won’t wake up in the morning.
Wake up, anyway, and do it all again.
FOR A WHILE, there were three of us. Mum, Olivia, and I lived all together in a neighbourhood to the southeast of here, under a place called De Grassi Street. Mum was teaching kids at a little school, until someone decided learning to read was maybe a lower priority down here. That notion spread among the parents. The school was shut down in a week. So, we started making our living at salvage. Mum went first, then started bringing my sister and me to show us the ropes.
Olivia took off one midsummer night about five years in (I think it was summer, though it’s hard to know for sure down here). She was twelve, at most. Mum kept going like nothing had happened, only she refused to acknowledge her daughter’s existence. If I made some mention of my sister, it was brushed off or else outright ignored. Without Olivia, Mum made everything at least twice as difficult as it needed to be, antagonizing neighbours, alienating friends, and clawing what small living she was able from the corpse of what had been, until she died in her bed about twenty years ago.
It was two weeks before her fiftieth birthday.
I wish I could say I miss my mother. That sounds awful, but she seemed so put out by most aspects of life that her death was a relief. There are certainly moments when I miss her deeply — I’m not a monster — but there are many more moments when what I actually miss is the distraction from my own thoughts. In those moments, it’s less that I miss her as a person than as an object: a warm body, living and taking up space, making all the little noises that go along with that. The worst part about living alone is being trapped inside your head, ceaselessly thinking, as though one moment’s rest would be like dying.
It’s easier when there’s someone else, to talk to or to care for. Then the thoughts can reach outward instead of turning on themselves. The lonely brain is a special kind of nightmare. It gets to the point when, even with other people around, there’s no attempt at comfort. They may as well not even be there. You don’t start conversations, and you tend to finish those started with you by grunting monosyllables. Or ignoring them completely.
It’s habit — like pumping water into the tank every morning. The momentum of the treadmill you’re on prevents dismounting. Slowly and steadily, you march your weary way toward your grave until it’s all over and you die.
Or until you rise once more into the land of the living.
I FOUND DOGGO nosing around the Heap on a particularly bad day. Water supply was offline, so the routine was thrown completely out of whack. No pumping. No rhythm. No beat to move to. I was so off my game that I’d already bounced my forehead against the low point of the tunnel — you know, the part I was always warning others about and even got the jerry-rigged local council to paint yellow — then had my heels stepped on in the march through the main tunnel. Twice. If my shoes weren’t already about falling off my feet, they were in dire straits now.
Doggo was the scrawniest mutt I’d ever seen, with wiry hair in nearly every colour a dog comes in. His waist was so thin, it was virtually a spine with skin draped over it, which made his stubby legs seem longer than they were. His coat was patchy with mange, and his wonky, mismatched ears lent him a particularly pathetic air.
Something inside lit up when I saw him, as if moments earlier I’d lacked an essential electricity. I pictured my mind as a rabid rat trapped in a racing wheel before heroically hurling itself toward freedom. I’d discovered an emotional accelerant by nearly tripping over it.
Doggo looked up with guarded caution. I carefully lowered myself to the ground and sat very still. When it became clear that I wasn’t interested in whatever food-stained packaging he was sniffing, he went back to licking it, keeping his eyes fixed on me.
Mid-lick, he had a thought. I know this because I saw it happen: his head raised and tilted to one side, and a tiny spark dawned in his eyes. He stood, looked at me, tail wagging with hope.
“Got a biscuit?”
The fact that he spoke in any human language, let alone in Canadian English, didn’t sink in right then. I must have forgotten it was abnormal for a dog to speak like a person. I couldn’t think clearly through the dizzy happiness I felt upon discovering an animal, a real-life lovely canine. Here was a friend, a companion, someone to save me from my wretched existence! I collected Doggo in my arms and gave him some enthusiastic ear scritches before confessing my biscuit-less state.
“Oh” was his reply, gently easing his way from my embrace. Then he plonked his butt down and began to thoroughly, and thoughtfully, lick his furry little wiener.
If I’d left him to his own devices, I knew he’d surely die. Though he’d survived some time on his own, he was near enough to our small settlement that he’d likely be caught for meat, despite what little was on him. On the other hand, keeping pets wasn’t entirely legal. At best, it meant banishment from this neighbourhood. Wandering the Underground, hoping another neighbourhood would take you in, didn’t exactly appeal. That was if one of the Underground’s many fabled dangers, like man-eating giants, didn’t snatch you first.
At worst, it meant asset forfeiture. The thought sent a chill up my spine.
I spent some time watching Doggo. Once he was done with his nethers, he perched back on his butt and twisted his long, little body in a desperate contortion to put tongue to asshole. When this was complete, he lay down so his body formed a circ
le, nose to tail. And in that moment, I knew I couldn’t leave him.
So I brought him home.
RABBIT, RUN!
AS A SPECIES, we knew it was over years before we finally turned tail for Underground. A generation before I was even born, environmental Cassandras were prophesying the end of days. People like David Suzuki, at once lauded by those in power while his increasingly desperate pleas for action were callously ignored. Or Wangari Maathai. Jane Goodall. Pick a name. Anyone who spoke up got either polite nods or caught heck in the papers as a “fearmonger.”
They told us the end would be brought by the oily hand of fossil fuels, unleashed from beneath the Earth to sweep the unfit from its surface. Foul weather, they cried, plague winds. Droughts, floods, crop decimation, and more. It all came to pass, as did some things we could not predict. Unknown unknowns, knocked into existence by the progressing fall of ecological dominoes.
The decision to flee didn’t make much sense — as Earthbound beings, where could we go? — but it was an act of desperation. It was something to do once there were no other options. Staring into the face of certain destruction, we hightailed it. Kind of like the way burrowing animals beeline for their warrens instead of for the hills when a wildfire comes sweeping through. Kill or cure. It was far too late, and it was absolutely too little.
While those of us who were able dove for cover, so many more of us had nowhere to go. Sure, most cities had sewers, stormwater systems, but few had the extensive subterranean network of structures boasted by places like Toronto, better known these days as the Underground. What became of Winnipeg or St. John’s or Fredericton is anybody’s guess.
It didn’t take much beyond political will to install a system of sumps to pump away flood waters, to shore up the walls with a kind of spray-on rubber laced with carbon fibre. Budgetary limitations or risk of financial collapse didn’t hold the same sway when it seemed the age of money was coming to a close. It’s just a shame nobody had that mindset until it was too late.
By the time people began moving to the Underground, there hadn’t been broadcast news for about a year, not even CBC. If there had been, it would have been exclusively negative.
Even as humanity ran — to the tunnels, into mountain bunkers, or onto vast floating cities made by welding together a bunch of liberated Carnival cruise ships — we insisted it was our idea. It was our human volition that sparked the move. As though we were saying to the planet that had birthed us, “Well, you’re clearly being unreasonable. We’ll just wait downstairs until you’re ready to talk.”
It was an attempt to gaslight a super organism that isn’t sentient in any way we understand. Who was this deception really for if not ourselves? We accused Mother Earth of betrayal when She stopped loving us, refusing to acknowledge that She’d never loved anyone in the first place. This was the dying breath of deistic thinking. I don’t think I’ve met one God-fearing person down in the Underground, not in thirty-five years. If there are any, they surely keep it to themselves. Perhaps out of shame that their prayers and good living didn’t pay off, or out of fear of reprisal from those who have a bone to pick with the Man Upstairs.
For all intents and purposes, there is nothing quite like us. In all the world, the prevailing theories go, humanity is unique. We have close evolutionary relatives, but they’re more like second cousins once removed — about as related to us as a species as I am to any given stranger. And perhaps, once we’re gone, there will never again be anything like us on Earth.
If I say that’s for the best, it can only come off as cynicism of the highest order. Yet, I would only make that claim based on personal experience. We were monkeys given the top spot on the evolutionary ladder, and all we did was take delight in pooping on all the creatures clinging to the rungs beneath us.
It’s also possible that we aren’t so unique as all that. Perhaps if we’d recognized that everything on our little blue dot was like us, at least inasmuch as possessing a desire to keep living, we’d have acted with more care. With empathy. If only we’d had as much faith in the end of the world as so many placed in the existence of a benevolent, omnipotent, and invisible man.
A god.
So it goes.
MY FAMILY HELD out for some time before we made the move Underground. After all, we lived in the country, where “these things” don’t happen. Never mind the decade of steadily worsening winters that tried to bury us alive in snow, when they weren’t trying to freeze the life from our bodies. And ignore the increasing frequency of summer storms that included tornadoes in their bags of tricks. Month-long power outages that dragged on because one disaster was overlapped by another. Alternating droughts and floods replaced plenty with scarcity.
But “these things” don’t happen outside of the city — that urban den of iniquity. This wasn’t a moral judgment based on any religious belief (though we were ostensibly some stripe of Christian). This was the mistrust, the tribalism, of the small town. The attitude of bib-overalls and straw-chewers who drawl, “Yer not from ’round here, are yas? We do things a mite differently in these parts.”
These things, the extreme weather, the epidemics, did happen to us. We lived in the sticks, not on Mars! Yet during every disaster, there would be some old timer telling the group holed up in the church basement, “I remember a storm like this’un, back in aught-six. We survived it then, we’ll get by now. Sometimes the weather jes’ takes a turn. Those of us with longer memories won’t let a little rain scare us.”
That year, our small herd of a half-dozen goats was washed away by a deluge that dumped a metre of water in an hour.
Year on year, it grew worse and worse. True terror set in. The kind that settles as a cold puddle in the very bottom of your stomach and doesn’t go away; that no amount of homemade stew and a mother’s love can warm.
And then in singles and couples, folk started moving away. They used every excuse in the book to retain their small-towner cred. An ailing relative who can’t travel needs them to come help with the kids. It was getting too hard for old bones to till the field, so they were taking retirement. The Good Lord told them to take mission to the urban heathens.
It all amounted to the same thing: we’re getting the heck out of Dodge.
My father, typically pragmatic, was unusually stiff-necked about the whole thing. The merest mention of the city or Underground was grounds for being sent to bed without supper. Then again, it was a bit of a toss-up whether there was any supper to be denied on a given night.
Mum had been putting up any and all surplus, canning, drying, pickling, and preserving. When there was no surplus to be had from our small patch, she sent us into the woods with foraging baskets and the imperative to only come home with them full. Berries, nuts, greens, roots, even the occasional mushroom. Whatever might have come up in the neighbour’s patch, abandoned since they lit out, if the harvest in the woods fell short. She worked some kind of miracle, and we ate nearly as well as always for longer than seemed feasible.
It wasn’t till the stores were running frighteningly dry that she started to broach the subject of moving away.
“We don’t have to go to the city, but we do need to find food.”
Dad grunted into his bowl. “What’s this? Food, isn’t it?”
“Christ, you are so stubborn!”
His response was to slurp up his dregs and mop out the rest with two fingers, the bread having run out more than a year past.
“I’ll be in the shop,” he announced, letting his bowl rattle on the table as he stood up from his chair.
Mum hit the table hard enough to clatter the silverware against the dishes.
“Get back here, Gord. We need to talk about this!”
There was a rattle of keys being taken off the hook, followed by the back door slamming closed and the creaking of floorboards from the closed-in porch.
At the time, his attitude pissed me off. To a kid, his avoidance looked a hell of a lot like not giving a damn. He didn’t care
about us, and he made Mum so upset I found her crying more often than not. Olivia wasn’t any help, either, as sullen and silent as Dad. She sat at the table pushing lima beans around her plate and frowning.
Looking back, I think I understand. He was afraid, like all of us were, but not of the weather. At least not directly. This was a thing too big to fathom — a thing he had no way to fix — and he feared how afraid it made him. It became a kind of paralytic, so the only way he could carry on was to behave as though nothing was wrong. He was like a windup toy set on a track, ticking along in the most familiar ways. To do otherwise was literally impossible.
Then came the night we left. Hushed and moonless, the chill of late spring just warming so that the wet air felt like stepping into freshly drawn bath. The air was dense with the smell of lilac and pollinating birch trees, and it was utterly, eerily silent.
It was past midnight. Mum roused us, told us to be quiet. She’d packed bags for us and helped us get them on, but only after we were out of the house. We went on foot. Even if we’d had more than a whisper of fuel for the biodiesel pickup, Mum didn’t like to drive.
“Besides,” she said, “we’re leaving it for Dad. He’s staying behind to close up the farm, then coming along later.”
And we were coming back, too, just as soon as the bad weather stopped. Then we’d all be a family again. I think it was the most lying she’d done in her whole life, and she’d gone and dropped a couple of whoppers. If the guilt of it hadn’t killed her, I’d almost be proud.
GETTING DOWN
WE TRAVELLED AT NIGHT. Summer was arriving with a vengeance, so the daytime temperatures were rapidly becoming intolerable. We’d walk until the first rays of sun peeked over the horizon, then find a shady place to hole up for the day. There were basements aplenty to either side of the highway, so we never wanted for shelter. With a tarp stretched across one corner, we were set in minutes.
