Approaching Oblivion

by Harlan Ellison

  That is hypocrisy. I write this because I am a thinking creature with an enormous ego, and I cannot bear to consider having been here, being gone, and leaving nothing behind. Since I will never have children to carry on my line, to preserve some tiny bit of my existence…since I will never make a mark in the world, because there is no world left…since I will never write a novel, or paste up a billboard, or have my face carved on Mt. Rushmore…I am writing this. Additionally, it keeps me busy. I have explored all three square blocks of what’s left of the world, and quite frankly, there isn’t much else to do to amuse myself. So I write this.

  I have always had the detestable habit of having to justify myself.

  Let me hear some vague rumor or snippet of gossip about myself, and I spend weeks tracking it down, refuting it, bringing to justice the one who passed the remark. Now that’s just ridiculous. And here I am justifying myself again. This record is here, read it if you please, or don’t. That’s that.

  I was in the hospital. I was terminal. Oxygen tent, tubes plugged into me everywhere, constantly sedated, the pain was the worst thing I’ve ever known, it never stopped. Then…I just started to get well. First I died, I know I died, don’t ask me how I can say such a thing with complete assurance that I’m telling the truth, because if you’ve ever died, you’ll know. Even under the knockout stuff they’d pumped into me, I still had some awareness. But when I died, it was as if I was strapped flat to the front of a subway car, spreadeagled to the wall, facing down the tunnel, into the blackness, and the subway car was hurtling along at a million miles an hour. I was utterly helpless. The air was being sucked out of my lungs and the train just slammed down that tunnel toward a little point of light. And in receding waves of sound I heard a whispering voice calling my name, over and over and over: Eu-gene, Eu-gene, Eu-gene, Eu-gene…

  I went screaming down at that tiny square of light at the end of the tunnel, and I closed my eyes and could see it even with them closed. And then I crashed forward even faster, and went into the spot of light and everything was blinding, and I knew I was dead.

  A long time later—I think it was two hundred years…on the other hand it may only have been a day or two—I opened my eyes and there I was in the hospital bed with a sheet up over my face.

  I lay like that for almost a day. I could see the light of the ceiling fixture through the sheet. No one came to help me, and I felt weak and hungry.

  Finally, I got angry, and I was so hungry I couldn’t stand it any longer, so I whipped the sheet down off my face, and pulled the remaining tube out of my arm—I presumed it to be an intravenous feeding tube and whatever had been left in the bottle was what had sustained me—and got out of bed and slid my feet into my slippers—the heels of my feet were red and dry like the heels of old women in nursing homes—and in that ridiculous hospital gown I went looking for something to eat. I couldn’t find the kitchen of the hospital at first, but I found a candy machine. I didn’t have any dimes for it, but there was a nurse’s station right there, and I was so angry at being ignored, I rummaged through some drawers and a purse under the counter till I found a handful of change.

  I ate four Power House bars, two almond Hershey’s, and a box of those pink Canada mints.

  Then, sucking on tropical fruit Life Savers, I went looking for the hospital staff.

  Did I mention the hospital was empty?

  The hospital was empty.

  Everyone was gone, of course. I told you that at the outset. But it took me a few hours to establish the fact. So I got dressed and went outside. Everything looked the same. The name of this town is Hanover, New Hampshire, if you need to know. I won’t bother with what the names of streets and things were when it was in the world, because I’ve given them all new names. It’s my town now, all mine, so I decided I’d call it what I felt like calling it. But when this town was in the world, Dartmouth College was here, and there was good skiing, and it was desperately cold in the Winter. Now the mountains are gone, and it hasn’t been Winter in a year or so. Dartmouth is also gone. It lay outside the three block area of what was saved when the world vanished. There’s a pizza place here, though. I don’t know how to make pizza, though I’ve tried. I think I miss that most of all. Isn’t that mundane! My God.

  The world is gone, and all I seem to be able to dwell on is pizza. What hapless little creatures we humans were. Are. Am. I am.

  So. I was alive again, and I suppose the only reason I didn’t poof away with all the rest of them was that everyone thought I was dead. I suppose that’s the reason. I don’t really know. I’m guessing, of course; but since none of this made any sense at the time, that was my only conclusion.

  If you think I’m terribly calm and rational about something as berserk as this, you can believe that I was frantic when I wandered out into the street in front of the hospital and saw the street was empty. I started walking, sticking my head into one store after another, looking for anybody. And every once in a while I’d stop and cup my hands around my mouth and yell, “Hey! Anybody! Eugene Harrison! Hey! Anybody there?” But there wasn’t a soul.

  When the world was here, I was a postal clerk. I’m not from Hanover. I lived in White Sulphur Springs. I was brought to Hanover, to the hospital, to die.

  When I got to the end of the world, at the foot of the street where the hospital stood, I just stared. I sat down and dangled my feet over, and just stared.

  Then I scrunched around and lay on my stomach and looked over the edge. The ground sloped back, under there, and beneath the sidewalk there was dirt, and I could see roots hanging out, and it was a wedge-shape to the chunk of world floating with me on it, and underneath the chunk there wasn’t anything. I guess it’s not anything. I tried lowering myself on a mountain-climber’s rope once, about a month later, but even when I threw the rope over, it just lay there in the emptiness and wouldn’t fall straight down.

  I think perhaps gravity is gone out there, too.

  So. I got up and decided to circumnavigate the chunk. It was three blocks square, just the buildings and the bit of park and the hospital and some small houses. The U.S. Post Office is also there. I spent one day, a while later, a whole day, sorting the mail that had been left behind when the world vanished, stocking one of the clerks’ windows, oiling the wheels of the carts, sewing up the storage bags with the heavy thread and monster needle every sub-station keeps in its larder. It was one of the dullest days of my life.

  I don’t want to say too much about myself—hypocrisy again—just enough to pass me on down to you so I won’t be forgotten or faceless. I’ve already said my name is Eugene Harrison, from White Sulphur Springs, and I was a postal clerk. I was never married, but I’ve had relationships with at least four women. None of them lasted very long; I think they got tired of me, but I don’t know for sure. I’m moderately educated, I went two years at Dartmouth before I dropped out and went to work in the Post Office. I was majoring in Arts and Letters, which means I thought perhaps I would go into advertising or television or journalism or something. That was certainly a waste of time. I can write things down in order, and even with a little grace, but I’m no writer, that’s for certain. I can’t keep myself at the writing for very long; I get very antsy. And I think I use the word “very” too much.

  I wish I could tell you there was something particularly heroic or remarkable about me, beside the dying, that is, but I am just like all other people I’ve ever known. Or, like they were. They aren’t any more. That’s the truth, and I think it takes a big person to admit that he’s very ordinary. My socks always matched. I forgot to fill the gas tank sometimes and ran out and had to carry a can up the road to the station. I shirked some of my responsibilities. I made gallant gestures occasionally. I hate vegetables.

  My interests were in travel and history. I never did much about either. I went to Yucatan one summer, and I read a lot of history books. Neither of those is very interesting.

  It would be great to be able to say I was special, b
ut I wasn’t. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’m just plain damned average, damn it, I’m average, so stop it, stop your damned badgering! I’m a nothing, a nobody, you never even saw my face through the wicket when I gave you your stamps, you arrogant swine! You never paid me the least attention and you never asked me if I’d had a good day and you never noticed that I trimmed the borders of the stamps I sold you, if they weren’t full sheets, because many people collect full sheets, but you never even noticed that little service!

  That’s how I was special. I cared about the little things. And you never paid any attention…

  I don’t care to tell you any more about myself. Listen, this is about what happened, not about me, and you don’t care about me anyhow, so there’s no need to carry on like that about myself.

  Please excuse what I wrote just now. It was an outburst. I’m sorry. And I’m sorry I cursed. I didn’t mean to do that. I am a Lutheran. I attended Our Redeemer Lutheran Church in White Sulphur Springs. I was raised not to curse.

  I’m going on now to what happened.

  I walked all around the edge of the chunk of the world. It wasn’t chopped off neatly. Whatever had done it, made the world vanish, had done it sloppily. The streets came to ragged ends, telephone lines trailed off where they’d dropped and some of them hung off into the emptiness, just floating like fishlines in water.

  I should tell you what it looked like out there beyond the edge. It looked like a Winter snowfall, murky and with falling motes of light like snowflakes, but it was dark, too. I could see through the dark. That was what made it frightening: one shouldn’t be able to see through the darkness. There was a wind out there, but it didn’t blow. I can’t describe that any better. You’ll have to imagine it. And it wasn’t cold or hot. It was just pleasant.

  So I spent my days in what had been Hanover; I spent them all alone. And there was nothing heroic about me. Except that during the first week I saved my town from invasion about fifty times.

  That will sound remarkable, but I assure you it wasn’t. The first time it happened I was coming out of the Dartmouth Co-Op on the main street, carrying several paperbacks I had taken to read, when this Viking came screaming down the street. He was enormous, well over six feet tall, with a double-bitted axe in his hand, and a helmet with two horns, and a fierce orange beard, wearing furs and thongs and a bearskin cape, and he came right at me, shrieking in some barbarian language, with blood in his eyes and certain as God determined to hack me to bits.

  I was terrified. I threw the paperbacks at him and would have run if I had been able to run, but I knew he’d catch me.

  Except, what he did was: he threw up his free hand to ward off the paperbacks, and swerved around me and started running away from me down a side street. I couldn’t understand what was happening, but I picked up the paperbacks and took off after him. I ran as fast as I could, which was pretty fast, and I started to catch up to him. When he looked over his shoulder and saw me coming, he screamed and ran like a madman.

  I chased him right off the edge of the world.

  He kept on running, right out into that darkness with the snowstorm in it, and he disappeared after a while, but I saw him still running at top speed till he was out of sight. I was afraid to go after him.

  Later that day I turned back an attack by a German Stuka that strafed the main street, an attack by a Samurai warrior, an attack by a Moro with a huge batangas knife, an attack by a knight on a black horse—he carried a couched lance—and attacks by a Hun, a Visigoth, a Vandal, a Vietcong with a machine gun, an Amazon with a mace, a Puerto Rican street mugger, a Teddy Boy with a cosh, a deranged and drugged disciple of Kali with a knotted silk rope, a Venetian swordsman with a left-hand dagger, and I forget which all that first day.

  It went on that way all that week. It was all I could do to get any reading done.

  Then they stopped, and I went about my business. But none of that was heroic. It was just part of the new order of things. At first I thought I was being tested, then I decided that was wrong. Actually, it got annoying, and I stood on the steps of the hospital and yelled at whoever it was responsible, “Look, I don’t want to know about any more of this. It’s just nonsense, so knock it off!”

  And it stopped just like that. I was relieved.

  I had no television or movies (the movie house was gone) or radio, but the electricity worked fine and I had music and some talking records. I listened to Dylan Thomas reading Under Milk Wood and Errol Flynn telling the story of Robin Hood and Basil Rathbone telling the story of The Three Musketeers. That was very entertaining.

  The water worked, and the gas, and the telephones didn’t work. I was comfortable. There was no sun in the sky, or moon at night, but I could always see as if it were daylight in the daytime, and clear enough to get around by night.

  I saw her sitting on the front steps of the Post Office, I guess it was about a year after I’d died, and I hadn’t seen anyone else after the invaders stopped doing their crazy screaming thing in the streets. She was just sitting there with her elbow propped on her knee and her chin resting in her palm.

  I walked down the street to her, and stopped right in front of the Post Office. I was waiting for her to leap up and scream, “Amok! Amok!” or something, but she didn’t. She just stared at me for a while.

  She was awfully pretty. I’m not good at describing what people look like, but you can take it from me, she was very pretty. She was wearing a thin white gown that I could see through, and she was pretty all over. Her hair was long and gray, but not old gray; it was gray as if she liked it that way, the fashionable young-person kind of gray. If you know what I’m getting at.

  “How do you feel?” she asked, finally.

  “I’m all right, thank you.”

  “Have you healed up nicely?”

  “I knitted real well. Who are you? Where did you come from?”

  She waved toward the end of the world, and around the street, and shrugged. “I don’t know. I just sort of woke up here. Everybody else’s gone, is that right?”

  “That’s right. They’ve been gone for about a year. Well, uh, where did you wake up?”

  “Right here. I’ve been sitting here for about an hour. I was just starting to get my bearings. I thought I might be all alone here.”

  “Do you remember your name?”

  She seemed annoyed at that. “Yes, of course, I remember my name. It’s Opal Sellers. I’m from Boston.”

  “This was Hanover, New Hampshire.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Eugene Harrison. From White Sulphur Springs.”

  She looked very pale. I didn’t say it, but that was the first thing about her I noticed. It wasn’t the dress I could see through, really; it was the paleness. Just very white, as if she had been left out too long in the snow. I thought I could see the blood rushing along under the skin, but that was probably my imagination.

  Now I know someone is going to think she was a ghost, or a vampire, or some alien creature dressed up to look like a human being, but as Nero Wolfe says in the mysteries, that is just flummery. She was a person, nothing more than that, and you can forget that sort of stuff, even with what comes next. She was as real as I was.

  “How did you know I’d been sick?” I asked.

  She shrugged again. “I don’t know, I suppose I just knew, that’s all. But I saw you coming out of the hospital up the street.”

  “I live there. But how could you know I was sick? Actually, I almost died. Well, that’s not accurate: I did die, but I’m all right now.”

  “What do we do here?”

  “Nothing much, just take it easy. The rest of the world is gone, and I don’t know where, so we just sort of take it easy, I guess. There used to be a lot of crazy invasions, about a year ago, but they stopped pretty suddenly.”

  “I’ll need a place to live,” she said. “How about the hospital?”

  “Well, that’s fine with me,” I said, “but actually, I was going to take o
ver one of those little houses over there. If you like, you can move into the one next door.”

  So she did, and I did, and it was nice for a few weeks. I always went very slowly with women. Or maybe it’s that they went slow with me. I’m a big believer that women give off radiation or something, that keeps a man from moving in on them if they don’t want him to. I don’t know much about it, if you want the truth.

  We had a cordial relationship, Opal and I. She kept up her yard and I kept up mine. We ate dinner together a lot, and we saw each other frequently through the day. Once—when she realized I was spending time at the Post Office—she came in with a letter and came up to my window and asked me for an air mail stamp. She had money. I sold it to her. She took it and said, “Thank you for removing those little white borders; I always have trouble with them and usually rip the stamp or leave some on the edge. That was very nice of you, sir.” And she left.

  I was stunned and pleased even to consider where she was mailing the letter to.

  Or to whom she was writing.

  One night we had dinner together and she made fried chicken. The grocery store had a large supply of food, more than enough for us for a long time. It did bother me, of course, why the milk was always fresh, and the meat was always freshly cut, but I assumed it was part of the scheme of things that kept the lights and water working, that took away the garbage and kept the streets clean. I never saw anyone who did it, but it got done, so I didn’t worry about it.

  Look: before I died, when the world was here, I drove a mail truck and I rode a Honda. I didn’t know how either of those things worked, I mean aside from cleaning the spark plugs once in a while or filling the gas tanks, or superficial repairs like that. I never worried about it, because it got done, and that was the long and short of it. No one was any different. It was the same after everything vanished. As long as it worked, I didn’t have to think about the logic of it, and if it had started going sour I would have; but it didn’t, and that’s all I want to say about that. You’d have done the same.