Jack’s stays in Oxford, Mississippi and Texarkana were much the same. In Abilene, he saw that it was time to stop and reconsider his strategy. The car was fine, the rotation of fuel for it and for him was working well. But it was time to reconsider, anyway, and it was the world outside his windshield that told him so. Over the course of the previous afternoon, as he approached Abilene, the landscape had changed in unmistakable ways. He was at the jumping off place for the great west. Indeed, he was past it. The sky had become so much bigger, just over the course of a couple of hours of driving. Even though winter was coming on, it was quite warm at midday. Dry, crackly scrub stretched out on a frying-pan plain in all directions—and to the west, seemingly to infinity.
It was good to stop and consider that there was no call for help one could make. No emergency crew. No doctors. No hospital. There was medicine aplenty, but medicine is worthless without knowledge behind it. His vehicle had proven reliable, and there was no reason to change it. Jack diligently rotated batteries and practiced reviving engines from stale fuel, just so he could pick up another vehicle at will. But now he might travel a hundred miles or more with no other car in sight. What was he to do if his transportation failed him out there? It was useful to consider that ultimately, he might have only his own two feet to rely on and such food as he could scrounge up from the land. He knew it would also be well to consider that he could be stranded anywhere—without food and without cover. And, he realized, without water! And so water became his new obsession, warranting a few days’ stay in Abilene to develop a backup plan or two, starting with a thoughtful reading of maps. Time to hit the library.
On Cedar Street, he hit the jackpot. What made for a good library was, of course, its book content. Online material was fine, as far as it went, but now there was no online. The Abilene library had plenty of good maps, and books on hydrology and desert survival, but best of all, it had two-story, ground-to-roof windows on multiple sides of the building. Jack camped out there by day, and at night stayed in a house, one that had been unoccupied though it was fully furnished. He slept in a real bed. On his last night in Abilene, he sauntered into the Bellview Saloon wearing a straw cowboy hat and ordered up a beer and steak. There was no one to take his order, of course, so he got the beer himself and took a window seat with the canned ham he had brought with him.
The next day dawned fine and bright. This was the rule rather than the exception in this part of the world, but Jack had only read that in books, he hadn’t experienced it. He did notice that the quality of light had changed to be more crystalline, like he might see only occasionally back east on an exceptionally dry day in early spring. Jack’s renewed caution caused him to target Pecos as his next stop, barely half a day’s drive by interstate, and there he’d gird his loins anew and head north into the harsh brilliance of southeastern New Mexico, but thence, God willing, into the more sheltered and wooded higher elevations of northern and western New Mexico.
The drive to Pecos was uneventful. He ended up sticking to the interstate the whole way because there was just no alternative that made sense. He considered taking a more northerly route, by secondary roads, but he wanted a more cautious first day in the wild west. At least the interstate consisted of two parallel roads. He couldn’t be delayed long by animals or by a road-blocking pile-up of cars. On the drive into the little town, Jack crossed its namesake river. It wasn’t much to look at, by Eastern standards, but there it was, prominently marked out on any map of west Texas. If that’s what counted as a “river” for this region, he knew water might be just as scarce as he feared. Pecos wasn’t so very far from Abilene, but just as he had thought of Abilene as being the first stop inside the heart of the real west, he thought of going “west of the Pecos” as a step wilder yet, into a land of harsh, glaring deserts with no cover that could shrivel you to nothing in the daytime, and unrelenting mountain ranges, difficult to pass at any time, but which could freeze you in unexpected snowdrift in June.
There was little to stop for in Pecos save for the now nearly obsessive changing of water, food rations, and most importantly, gas. The weather was warm, and the sun bright. Quite a difference from the northeast. Jack guarded against complacency, however, and carefully considered his route. He considered going north through Carlsbad and Alamagordo, but he was already desiring to move into more wooded environs, away from the hardscrabble treeless land he’d been through of late. After the usual dithering around in town, he decided to move on, continuing on the interstate for the time being. He crawled along the border at El Paso, taking a long foray into Juarez and finding it as lifeless as its Texas counterpart. He zipped through the border control lanes a few extra times, just because he could.
Jack spent the night in Las Cruces, a town too big to comb through thoroughly, but it would have been pointless, he was sure. The big cities had yielded nothing, starting with the biggest, New York. And then all those smaller burgs—same report. He had held on to a vague notion that perhaps things were different in smaller towns, just because they were smaller. And then perhaps things would be different in more spaced-out towns, or rural areas, just because of the space between. But it was the same everywhere. Death on all sides.
The sheer aloneness was weighing on him. Isolation can be good for the soul, but not this. At some point, he would have to give up this nonsense and stop looking for a sign—some suggestion of more recent life, some hint that things were different. Jack had toyed with the idea of heading south through one of the border towns and continuing on. But from what he did know of the epidemic as it had swept through, it was no respecter of international boundaries anywhere. There was no reason to suppose that things would be different in the Yucatan, or across the canal, or in South America. In the American West, the utter predictability of lifeless manmade structures was wearing on him. On top of that, the food supplies were becoming less reliable. There was plenty of game, of course, but Jack hadn’t crossed that line yet, just because he had no experience at hunting his own food, and to this point, no need. He resolved to try killing one of the deer who jumped into his world from time to time to scare the daylights out of him.
But later. For now, Jack drove and wrestled with who, and what, he now was. His entire self-awareness had been qualitatively changed over the last several days. For the entire drive out west, in particular, but even before that, too. Was he more animal-like because of his preoccupation with survival and his lack of connection to the rest of his species? He hung on to his connection with others, in a way, by continuing the fruitless search, but his hope was fading, and with it his remaining sense of connectedness. He was different, aloof even from himself. This was something more than mere loneliness or despondency. Jack was losing the ability to see himself in his own mind. All of his thoughts were outward-directed, not centered on himself except in the sense of seeing to his basic animal needs. His self-awareness was diminished. It was as though he were walking in a twilight world, though he physically moved through the brilliant light of the southwest. Perhaps this was just self-preservation, to shift from self-consciousness as derived from his reaction to others. He would dry up entirely in his humanness, perhaps, if he continued to depend on his connection to other people for his sense of self, even the tenuous connection he derived from continuing the search. If the day was going to come when he would give up the search entirely, perhaps on that day he needed a new sense of self that relied on no one else to tell him who he was. And perhaps then, even this awareness of his state of self-awareness would come to an end.
At Deming, New Mexico, Jack cruised up and down some of the humble, straight streets in a desultory way. It was still fairly early in the day. For the first time since Texarkana, there were clouds in the sky, but it wasn’t a leaden overcast like he’d often experienced back east. There were long trails of cumulus interspersed with blue sky peering through the light cloud cover. At one moment, it looked as though it would become overcast entirely, though the clouds were high. At the next, he
stood in sunshine, but with the muted colors of shade in the middle distance on all sides. There was an appearance of what would have been, in another time, a romantic, alive feeling in the combination of weather and wild terrain.
Jack headed north, not appreciating the significance of the elevation change to weather in the American west. He knew he was climbing, but he did not grasp the fact that this would move him more toward the cold he had set out to escape. In short order, the San Francisco Mountains came into view, and Jack stopped several times, transfixed. From the highway, the slopes of the lonely mountains seemed to lure him in, to a place of mystery and beauty and repose. What was he becoming, he wondered. What was it about these mountains that made him feel as if he were invited to abide there, so long as he came alone?
The drive seemed to him surreal. The mountains around him under the shifting indecisive weather were at once cold and compelling, drawing him on, siren-like. The end of the day seemed to be coming too soon in the shadow of the mountains and the clouds, following days on end of piercing brightness. Despite the allure of his surroundings, Jack was feeling a fatigue not born of exertion or lack of sustenance or lack of sleep, but of world-weariness. His motivation for carrying on was being leached away from him, and his last little pockets of resistance to surrender were being emptied. He looked about for a place to pull over and just stop, perhaps to just push back the seat of his vehicle and lie down and just breathe—until he tired of doing that, too. He considered just stopping right in the middle of the road. Why not? And then he saw a sign for Luna, 2 miles. Why not drive to the moon? He pulled over into the hamlet of Luna as the last light of day purpled the hills to the east and formed an orange penumbra around those to the west.
The first house he tried was empty. Jack built a fire in the fireplace and pulled a mattress from the bedroom to the open space in front of the fire, piling blankets he scrounged from all over the house, but keeping his sleeping bag in reserve nearby. Then he located sufficient wood for the night and stacked it up right there, a few feet from the fireplace. The locks on the doors were flimsy—just enough to keep an honest man out. Jack dragged a piece of furniture in front of each of them. Against what, he had no idea. Bears, maybe. Or elk. Or just a psychological illusion of security. Jack gathered all of his weapons from the car but didn’t bother with the food. He intended to lie on the mattress and sleep for as long as he possibly could. What he took for lack of self-awareness was perhaps just a new kind of self-consciousness, all the more intense because it was based on his own perspective only. A consciousness looking outward, with no reflection in others at all. Perhaps what was left was not a lack of self-consciousness, but its opposite—pure, unadulterated consciousness of self. An unbearable heaviness of being.
He lay down to sleep for the night. And remained in bed all the following day. He slept in long stretches and in his snatches of wakefulness was heedless of anything but stoking the fire back to life and gazing into it until sleep overcame him again. And after twenty-four hours of that, he was tired, so he slept, fitfully, until noon the day following. Retrieving some food from his car, he looked around incuriously. The air was damp, and there was a gray cast to the light. It began to snow. Jack returned to his lair.
He thought about God. Had God been invented by someone like him, tortured by this consciousness of self and perhaps creating an imaginary friend? A friend who could receive the projection of lonely self-consciousness, and reflect it back? Now how would that work, he wondered. Perhaps man invented God to be the point of projecting man’s self-awareness. If I am entirely alone, Jack thought, but I want to continue to be self-aware, or self-conscious, then I would need to imagine myself from another’s vantage point. And while I’m at it, I might as well be known intimately by one who cares for me, like maybe a doting father. But God had not spoken to Jack when Jack lived among throngs of people, many of whom avidly pursued God, and some of whom said they’d found Him. If God was God, couldn’t His voice have been heard above that din? Why would Jack suppose that the voice of God would only be heard by him now when all other voices were completely silenced? He looked up at the tired waferboard ceiling and imagined the low cloud-ceiling above this pinpoint of space on the earth, and the infinite blue beyond that. God’s home. If he were to start hearing God only now, how would he distinguish God’s voice from his own delusion?
After all the brightness on the road, the dull gray of a wintry sky was a welcome change. How many hours had he lain here like this? Was the snow accumulating? Was this his fourth day in the little house? Fifth? Did it matter? A little note of alarm sounded in the back of his mind, the noise a weak alarm clock might make if it were muffled by blankets and sounding from a far room. Time for a little reality check-down. First, water-gas-food supplies? Adequate. Illness? The big illness would be almost welcome, but little ordinary ones, like the flu, were terrifying. Why survive all he’d survived, with access to all the medicine he could want, only to die of something that would have only slowed him down a little in earlier days? Too ironic. Besides, he felt all right if a little lethargic. Despondency? Depression? He turned on his side and hefted a few sticks onto the low fire. He laid back in the blankets and covered his cold nose with one hand as he considered his state of mind. Maybe depression. Hard to say when you’re in the middle of it, but Jack didn’t really feel as though he were completely debilitated by it. There didn’t seem to be a danger of just curling up in the blanket until he was no more. Or so he believed. The facts, he told himself, were just that he was taking a break. He was vacationing, in a manner of speaking, holed up like this. What of it? Perhaps it wasn’t so much depression, as just a new sense of time. There was no urgency because there was nowhere to go. It was not yet obvious to Jack that his survival depended on movement for the sake of movement. He would rise from this little season of dormancy, he thought, and move on, but he was finding that an hour was a day was a week.
The wood supply was not what it ought to be, though, if he were to stay dug in for much longer. Jack had no idea what time of day it was, other than noting that it had been light for some time. He could just see at an angle from one of the windows that snow continued to fall. This much light in this kind of weather suggested mid-afternoon, perhaps?
As appealing as it might be to just hunker down in the blankets and continue to sleep the days and nights away, Jack decided to go ahead and stock up on wood, so that he could settle down to his vacation without interruption for a while longer. He got up and quickly donned his biggest jacket, grateful he’d had the foresight to stuff thick gloves into the zippered pockets. He filled up a trash bag with detritus from his fireside meals. He pushed aside a clunky bureau and pulled the front door open with a loud creak. A rush of cold reviving air greeted him. He welcomed the snow on his face, swept in instantly upon opening the door. He went back in for the trash bag and lugged it outside, resisting the temptation to just throw it into the yard. It was a matter of personal discipline, he decided, and besides, there was no point attracting vermin when he might yet be there a few more days. Jack circled behind the house to where the rear curtilage ended, not at the back of another house, but at an uninterrupted expanse of white that indicated another dirt street parallel to his, and perpendicular to the highway. No obvious receptacle for trash appeared on his route. Finally, he just tossed the trash bag into the back of a pickup truck that had four deflated tires, parked in the driveway of a neighboring house. He heaved the bag up and out to clear his sidearm, and in doing so, realized he wasn’t wearing it. Stupid, he thought. He sometimes forgot to pick up a rifle, but here he was without even the ever-present .45. He hustled back to retrieve both, then wandered out again in search of firewood.
Thirty minutes later, there was a sizeable firewood stack both inside by the fireplace, and outside by the door. One more task—retrieving a box of food from his vehicle and taking a quick inventory. He might as well calculate how much time he had with the food on hand before he’d have to push on of
necessity. Luna had no food stores. He’d have to forage in private houses if he stayed too long. It was something he hated to do unless there was no other option. Maybe when the weather abated, he thought, he’d finally take up hunting.
Jack made his way out to his vehicle, still parked at the edge of the front yard to the house, partly in the road. He carried a rifle, in addition to his .45, as self-punishment for his earlier lapse. The snow had stopped falling, but two to three inches had accumulated. The box he was looking for was right next to the rear door on the side of the car facing the road. He’d taken a few things out earlier. Maybe he could just take an armful of cans and not the whole box. He considered this and looked dully around him at all the footprints around the car. How many times had he come out to re-provision? He didn’t remember having come out since the snow started, but obviously he had.
Another Like Me Page 3