When the time comes I write as quickly as possible, saving the day’s pages with a push of the button. One unforeseen advantage of the war is that my computer, Model 1468, top of the line when I bought it, will remain top of the line. No new technology will supplant it (I resist the traditional her reserved for favored machines; the sleek curves of a roadster or sailboat might suggest femininity, but nothing about the 1468 does). My computer will never be obsolete, will never be humbled by an endless succession of snickering progeny, memories doubling every generation.
Once the scheduled writing has been completed (twenty minutes on a typical day), the best part of the best hour begins, and I read. Early in the planning stages of my bunker, 0I realized that there would not be enough room for my books. My space is severely cramped; every cubic foot is precious. The solution presented itself as technology advanced: an entire library now fits on a single optical disc. Tap a few keys and I am privy to the ruminations of Hamlet, the manipulations of Odysseus, the risen Beatrice. An entire civilization is preserved below ground, the best thoughts of the best minds reified by laser.
Why read these decomposed authors? Because only the dead can save us. Only they can teach us how to rebuild our broken cities. I believe that all our fallen fathers will rise again and hold our dwindling bodies in mighty hands.
A significant problem of permanent reclusion is the lack of sexual outlets. I considered purchasing a pornographic disc for my computer, but decided such activity would distract me from my mission. Thousands of hours of solitude have led me to curse my priggish stance, have left me feverishly conjuring images of nude bodies. Strangely, I find that I am unable to remember faces; my imagined nymphs are crudely drawn. There are few things more likely to demolish a man’s morale than failed masturbation.
In desperation I have turned to a disc that came with my 1468, an introduction to human biology that includes some fairly stimulating studies of naked females. Many of these ladies, unfortunately, are attractive on the left side but transparent on the right, revealing the detailed workings of their inner organs, a view certain to repel all but the most perverse suitors.
Then yesterday (O lucky day!) I stumbled upon an appendix to an anatomy primer, a fitness regimen specifying appropriate nutrition and exercises for the middle-aged, detailed diagrams accompanied by wondrous prose, including my current inamorata:This gentle rhythmic action helps to lift and firm flabby buttocks. The effective movement tones and tightens muscles in the buttocks and hips as well as strengthening the stomach muscles by resistance tension.
INSTRUCTIONS—BEGINNER • Lie on back with buttocks on moving pads.
• Extend legs with knees slightly bent.
• Press flexed feet against side pads.
• Perform a pelvic tilt.
• Keep stomach and buttocks tight.
In all my reading I have come across no phrase as arousing as that final demand for tightened buttocks. The instructions form a bildungsroman of sorts, progressing from the flabby novice of the opening to the tight, pelvic-tilting performer of the close.
I was not always this pathetic.
The most malicious aspect of extended confinement is the aural hallucinations, the ghost cries of a dead civilization. Some mornings I could swear I hear the sounds of honking cars, and I have been awakened several times by an insistent rapping on the hatch door, followed by a perfect imitation of children’s laughter. My mind, buried below the dead, creates a mirage of noise, human voices replacing palm trees and watering holes. Like an amputated foot that continues to itch, my obliterated town still echoes above me.
I am well aware of the warren of underground chambers secretly constructed by my government for the protection and wartime comfort of our leaders. No doubt the major corporations followed suit, carving boardrooms in the bedrock. Even now gray-suited analysts meet in well-appointed caverns to discuss the ramifications of an incinerated consumer base.
Others will survive this calamity, but only those deemed vital by their respective masters: the necessary bureaucrats, soldiers, scientists, engineers. Who will tell the story of our civilization’s end? I should01er that task, though I am a reticent man by nature.
My approach must be microhistorical, for I have no access to the primary documents that papered the path to this fiery place. All I know is my own life, and that is all I can relate. Future scholars must extrapolate an entire society from a single man. I leave this journal as an heirloom for the unborn, that they might learn what went wrong this time, that I might serve and survive as a voice crying out from the ruins. In black ink my name may still shine bright.
The relevance of the following material will have to be sorted out later. Truth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor. The greater part of anyone’s lifetime is not worth remembering.
The first horror. Four years old, on my knees by the side of the bed, saying my evening prayers. When I finished I opened my eyes and saw, through the window’s glass, a man with a terribly burned face staring back at me. I ran to my parents’ room. For a minute I could not work my mouth, but finally I told them what I had seen. My father joked with me, telling me how trees look human in the dark. He switched on the outdoor lights and stepped outside. I wanted him to stay, was certain the burned man would hack him to bits, but my father only laughed. When he came back inside he was grim-faced, slid the dead bolt into place, left the outdoor lights burning. My mother asked him what was wrong and he muttered that there were footsteps in the snow. She called the police while he went upstairs for his shotgun.
Nothing happened. They never found the burned man. No lunatics were missing from asylums, no convicts escaped from death row, nobody was murdered in our town. But that terrible face, two eyes trapped within ruined skin, cannot be forgotten. I wonder how many like him now wander our country’s roads, tattered men crying out for water.
Do you recognize her, that woman bald and bawling? She is your mother. For nearly ten months you dwelled within her, and only left because the doctors smoked you out. This becomes family legend, the boy who did not want to be born.
She was a beautiful woman, my mother, and strong, and I don’t know why I cannot remember her as beautiful and strong. Every time I picture her face I picture her dying face, the tendons in her neck bulging through the skin, her teeth dug into her upper lip. All your life you know a person, and love her, and then in the space of a year sickness boils her down to her bones. Perhaps I should be grateful that she was not alone in the end. So many die without our caring, decline to silence in rooms beyond hearing. We honor the dead and abhor the dying.
Pain gradually erased my mother’s fine complexities, left her curled in a hospital bed, trying to twist away from the clawing inside her. And what can you do? Your mother is slowly murdered and you sit, powerless, and watch. It ends with horror, it ends with the brain starved for oxygen, with the lips gone blue and the feet swelled with fluid. It ends when a mother’s eyes become the eyes of fish. Billions of times this ritual repeated, billions of sons watched their mothers die, kissed their cold foreheads, and wept.
If grief was pure, things would be easier, but there is a selfishness in mourning, and a degree of disgust for those still living and cheerful. The diversions of friends seem moronic and irritating, their love lives ridiculous, their complaints petty. Nothing can compete with grief and the griever knows it, and no matter how far into the depths he might fall, he still looks down at the ignorant hordes who cannot see death all around them.
And how did this loss shape my character? Just tap the proper keys and the answer will emerge, correct? Enough of this. No more writing tonight. The issue of my mother is better off filed away.
There is nothing beautiful left in the world, nothing above but skeletons: skeletons strolling down the sidewalk, skeletons washing their cars, skeletons dancing in the late-night dance halls, skeletons drinking their whiskey straight, skeletons bluffing with a single suicide king, skeletons scratching on the e
ight-ball, skeletons humping in the courtyard, skeletons eating with fork and knife, skeletons singing lullabies to their skeletal babes.
And those who find me, what will they think? They will dig up my bones in three thousand years and wonder, what strange beast was this?
We begin with Prometheus. The Titan chained to a great rock, punishment for bringing fire to the humans. Every day a vulture swoops down and devours his liver. The pain, we are meant to understand, is unbearable. The moral is spelled clearly for the dullards among us: stay within thy boundaries.
But can sensation maintain its clarity for eternity? Eventually Prometheus stops screaming. He retreats inward from the pain, after years, or decades, or centuries. The suffering is suppressed, locked in a trunk in the attic of consciousness. But Prometheus is still chained to a rock. And so he begins to imagine, to dream of freedom. Let it be so. He creates fictional cities and roams through them, drinks in fictional taverns, consorts with fictional lovers. And in one of these strange cities, walking at dusk down a desolate avenue along the abandoned docks, the transformation occurs: Prometheus is no longer aware of his fiction—the fiction has swallowed him whole. Let it be so. The street signs are stamped in the machinery of his mind, but he is not conscious of their creation. And the beings created now populate an entire world, a universe, convinced of their own reality—even their creator is convinced of their reality. We’re all waking in the Titan’s dream.
Substitute the word God for Prometheus and loneliness for the vulture. Genesis begins with torture, whether a vulture’s beak or infinite loneliness, the face of the One moving over dark waters. To those who ask, “Where is God now?” I respond, “He has forgotten that He exists.”
Catastrophe. My computer’s security scan has detected a virus. I have no 1connection to the outside world—there is no outside world—so I must presume that the rogue code was transmitted by my optical discs, or else was programmed into my 1468 at birth. The closed-cycle plumbing unit. Great entertainment for the neighbors. I was the local lunatic, scanning function recognized the virus and even has a name for it: “Air Dred.” What possesses people to sabotage the unseen work of strangers? The hacker who created Air Dred must have stalked the museums of the world, slashing the canvases caloric demands of such rigorous exertion, and the consequent depletion of my larder, posed a caloric demands of such rigorous exertion, and the consequent depletion of my larder, posed a of Old Masters. Dark days for me: My life preserver has sprung a leak.
Still trying to determine the extent of the damage. The 1468’s security system identifies intruders and attempts to neutralize them but refuses to provide any useful information concerning the saboteur’s methods. Air Dred is a “memory-site infection”: that is the extent of my knowledge. My computer has a tumor, the tumor is malig01nant, should all countermeasures fail the tumor will metastasize, my computer will die. This reeks of melodrama, granted, but I am lost without 1468. The computer is my companion, my library, the record of my days. Without it I am faced with uninterrupted solitude. And what could I contemplate to lift and firm flabby buttocks in those silent hours but personal extinction? It will be as if I never was. Drowned, all my plans to serve as a bottled message, to provide the blueprints of our Atlantis to future divers.
Still, no need for panic yet. I have confidence in my 1468’s autosurgery. Humanity’s greatest talent is you know a person, and love them, and then in the space of a year sickness boils them down to their bones. Perhaps I should be grateful that she was not alone in the end. So many die without our caring, decline to silence in rooms beyond hearing. We surviving. We will rule this planet until something better comes along.
I don’t know what I1010was thinking, refusing to die with my tribe. Sheer conceit that it could matter at all, this dismal little man stabbing at keys in near darkness, twelve feet below01 the ground. The sentence I wish could end this journal—Spring, and the grass is rising—will never truthfully be written. I could live one hundred years and never survive this winter.
Words fail me, it goes without saying. Yes, it does. Gone and unsaid.
Mostly I miss the nighttime, walking through grass fields lit by stars alive and dying and dead. And lying down in the woods beyond the town limits, lulled by the deceitful I perform my infrequent bowel movements in darkness. When I work I perform my infrequent bowel movements in darkness. When I work I perform my infrequent bowel movements in darkness. When I work I perform my infrequent bowel movements in darkness. When I work I perform my infrequent bowel movements in darkness. When I work harmony surrounding me. Every tree battle101d toward the sun, leaving its neighbor to wither in the shade; the hooting owl is waiting with hooked claws for a shrew to break cover; the cricket heard fiddling is the lone survivor of a three-thousand brood, her brothers and sisters murdered by frost and frogs.
T001010his world was at war long before us.
I am losing everything. Air Dred advances on every front,1a0digital blitzkrieg swarming past all defenses. 1468 no longer retrieves previously saved documents. There is no way of knowing whether the computer’s memory preserves anything I type. No way of knowing whether my memories are remembered by 01101468. I came down here to tell my stories but my stories are swallowed whole by a sick machine.
And my library, all my beautiful books, deathless, I thought, deathless, but I’ve lost them, Homer and Dante and Shakespea01001re01and00Cervantes and Goethe and what strange beast was this? Shelley and Baudelaire and Tolstoy, gone, all of them, buried below a snow of zeros and ones. Leaving me alone at last, all my truest friends, the heroes and villains of a thousand novels, plays and poems, all the creations of all the wonderful minds slaughtered by a mindless virus, the imagined city emptied by plague.
Will anyone read this? Who could I be writing for, what possible au11010010dience still there were footsteps in the snow. She called there were footsteps in the snow. She called there were footsteps in the snow. She called there were footsteps in the snow. She called there were footsteps in the snow. She called there were footsteps in the snow. She called there were footsteps in the snow. She called there were footsteps in the snow. She called there were footsteps in the snow. She called there were footsteps in the snow. She called there were footsteps in the snow. She called there were footsteps in the snow. She called there were footsteps in the snow. She called exists?
I need to escape. This gray box I am trapped in shrinks every day, the blocks of concrete edging closer, squeezing out the air. Need to flee, need to run as fast as I can for as long as I want.
I am nothing but an eschatologist of the underground, not even bright enough to realize that the conclusion has already been written and I am101000marching in lockstep from left to right, trapped in a text that offers no exit but the end.
Again today the knocking on my hatch door, insistent this time, lasting fifteen minutes. My mind is beginning to defo1011011rm.010Or has something survived? And if so, do I dare to open the hatch? Anything that dwells in the fiction has swallowed him whole. The street signs are stamped in the machinery of his mind, but he is not conscious of the fiction has swallowed him whole. The street signs are stamped in the machinery of his mind, but he is not conscious of the waste-land above must be desperate, scavenging for f110ood and drinkable water. A horde of interlopers could easily overpower m01e, seize me by the neck and drag me from safety. Maybe the survivo110110101rs01have110reverted to cannibalism; they will tie me to a tree and carve open my belly with linoleum knives looted from the hardware store, fry my intestines on an open fire while 0I still live.
Hours have passed since the knocking stopped. I very nearly unlatched the hatch a few minutes ago, but decided against it. For one thing, I dete0110101100101 00100110110rmined from the beginning to remain underground at least six months, as a precaution against radioactive fallout. Beyond that is the fear of what I will see, the ruins of my hometown, all my landmarks rubbl0100e.
But there is a deeper dread, scurrying about on tiny clawed feet belo
w the floorboards of my mind, that 0I will emerge from this bunker and find everything untouched, the same houses clad in the same fiberglass siding, th011e same lawns still littered with inflatable pools and children’s toys, the same neighbors gathered for their Sunday barbecue, drinking cans of beer and shooing away the horseflies.
This morning I rediscovered hope—I believe I have fou0110nd a01way to de1101feat Air Dred. I01f0011 my101pl0110101010an110101101001011010110110110s10 1101001110101011u00101110100110100111010010c10110 0011100100101101011010111000101101010101001100110 11000100110011001c0101101001011001010101010101100 1100110010011101001111000101101011010010100111001 10110100110010100101001010101010011101001001110ee 0101011001010110110101001111010111011001110111001 1011010110111010101110110101001101110010110101110 1011101101100110110110011110010110101101010110110 101110101001010101001111011011010110101l0101010110 1001011100110010110101100011101001011001011101001 1010011101001010110001110010010110101010111001001 1101010100110l011011000001100110101010010010110010 1010010101100110011001001110100111100010110101101 0010001110011011000110101001010001111001110100100 11100101011l00001101101010011110101110110011101110 0110101101101110101011101110001101110011101011101 0111011011001101101100111100101101011010101101101 0111010100101010100110101101010001101010011101010 0101100101101010001101010011101010010110010110101 0001101010011101010010110010110101000110101001110 1010010110010110101000110101001110101001011001011 0101000110101001110101001011001011010100011010100 1110101001011001011010100011010100111010100101100 1011010100011010100111010100101101101101101011010 1101010110001111010110010110101100011101001011001 01110100110100111010010101100I0111001001011000101 1100001110101010011001101100000110011001010010010 1101010101000101100110011001001110100111100010110 1011010010001110011011000110101001010001111001110 1001001110010101100001101101010011110101110110011 1010110011011010110111010101110111000111110011101 0101010101110110110011011011001101100101101011010 1011011010111010100101010100111101101101011010110 1010110001101101011001011010110001110100101100101 1101001101001110100101011000111001001011000101110 0001110101010011001101100000110011101100011010100 1010001111001110100100111001010110000110010011100 1010110000110010011100101011000011001001110010101 1000011001001110010101100001100100111001010110000 1100100111001010110000110010011100101011000011001 0011100101011000011001001110010101100001100100111 0010101100001100100111001010110000110010011100101 0110000110010011100101011000011001001110010101100 0011001001110010101100001100100111001010110000110 0100111001010110000110010011100101011000011001001 0011001001110010101100001100100111001010110000110 0100111001010110000110010011100101011000011001001 1100101011000011001001110010101100001100100111000
When the Nines Roll Over Page 12
