Desert: is hostile. The cacti are evolving to look like mutated humans. Their backs bend and twist into painful shapes; their fingers sprout like pin cushions. Remain ten feet away at all times.
Ely Thompson, May 6, 2020
I walk through gravel rivers looking for salvation. Empty house after empty house first barricaded, and now dilapidated. The ones that left, took the time to board up cracked windows and fill porcelain tubs with wet cement. It’s been hard for a while now. They didn’t want the folks remaining to use their toilets or wear their underwear. An abandoned house is a black hole; there is no telling how deep the basements go. Sometimes removing floor boards reveals whole rooms that contain only a single mattress. The smell can be incestuous. I have inklings about whether or not a building will be a profitable excavation based solely on external irregularities. Once a Rolling Stones’ poster plastered to a garage door lead me to a Rolex.
At another juncture, I entered, by accident, a library because a large owl was perched on the building’s exposed and brittle rafters. It winked at me. The doors were locked with a large rusted padlock so, made my way to the nearest window and smashed it with my elbow. I pulled away the jagged shards, careful not to cut myself, and climbed through the dark porthole. The inside smelt like cigarettes and moss. The rows of books seemed relatively intact, except for a palm tree, which, had come through the ceiling and taken out M through O. Beyond the tree there was a woman was sitting quietly at the circulation desk. Her face was wrinkled and squashed like a toad’s. She had only a few remaining gray hairs on her head, and she was missing buttons. Minding her own business. Writing a note. Pretending not to see me.
“Hello, are you the librarian?” She hastily finished her note, folded it, and put it in an envelope.
“I have taken that role for myself.”
“Do you have a degree in library science?”
“I have degrees.”
“They must serve you well.” The woman did not respond.
“Would you like a drink?”
“I’m writing a book, when it is finished, I would like it to be placed in your library.”
“Has it been published?”
“No.”
“I could have recommended a friend, but she’s traveling to peninsular Florida by burro train as we speak.”
“I’ll take that drink.” She reached below her desk and pulled out two shot glasses and a bottle of tequila. She told me her name was Francis. “Where did you get the tequila?”
“I’ve been saving it for a special occasion. You’re the first person that’s come to check out a book since all those quitters left. How about a mystery?”
“Let me take a look around.”
“Suit yourself.”
Libraries have always been autistic places. Opening a book, I can’t help but see the half truths, and misinterpreted proclamations, and false exclamations of victory. I used my pen and spent hours annotating history. Francis didn’t mind, she was asleep from too much tequila.
“Where’s your wife?” She had come to and was pointing to my wedding ring. I raised my hand and looked to the crumbling ceiling. She nodded and threw back another shot.
Love: A rich food, for only the richest people. see air.
When I first heard that there was an unoccupied planet far away with wide open spaces, where land was cheap, and resources were inexhaustible, I couldn’t decide whether, it was luck or fate. I remember watching the news—the anchor and his bouffant hair, wondering out loud with his infographics, attempting to calculate, how many people would be able to go and what it was going to come down to: race or sex or class or hair. I was white, male, and middle class. I was still prejudice enough to think it would not be random. During press conferences, the President, styled professionally, in an ivory suite, would give bombastic speeches about the “selection process” and the “perfect equation of people,” but she was going. That wasn’t random. The people who flooded the streets with homemade signs and bad attitudes, moaning about why it should be random; well, they must’ve been born yesterday, so I thought.
The papers called this selection process Democracy in Action. The TV guide called it Your Ticket to Paradise. Your Ticket to Paradise, a global game show, decided who would leave Earth and who would stay. My wife and I, would watch together, in our small apartment, with our tickets in hand, to remind ourselves of our numbers. A plastic experience filled with sequence, B-list celebrities, and useless handouts like Lamborghinis. Numbers, numbers, numbers were all anyone would talk about. When her number was called, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a smile. I put my head on her shoulder. Her mother called to congratulate her; she had been chosen weeks ago. Months later, when they called the last number, I threw up in my living room. She sobbed as she scrubbed the carpeting. I sat, comatose, at the kitchen table. The weeks after the last number was called were wet with tears. Tears on the radio. The bus was wet. I learned to bring a napkin to sit on. People asked if there were extras, and I never hesitated to share.
For months we argued and made lists of pros and cons. But in the end I ripped up the lists and in our small kitchen, under the harsh florescent lights, I told her to go. I said, “Send in your paperwork and make the decision later. You never know, maybe there is a heaven, and if so, I’ll find you. We’ll wear angel wings or become light. Either way our molecules will mix again.” I dried her eyes with a dishtowel. “Maybe someone will pull the wrong lever and you’ll die getting there, and I’ll live for one hundred years, by myself, but with books and gardens. The real things, no pre-programmed Kindles or plastic mums, for me. I can live in California if I want to. Sea wind in my thinning hair; that’s something I’ve always wanted. Who loses then?” She shrugged. She does that when I’m being dramatic.
That night we wrapped our naked bodies in down, and I kissed her ingrown toes and the thick hips she was always attempting to Ellipticycle away, even though, I asked her not to. I kissed her meaty breasts and course hair. I prayed with her nipples that she was joking, would refuse to go, insist on staying with me and our dog, Trixie. Our final months went by, during sex she would sweat and bawl about the injustices of the world, after she would get into my ears and whisper plans for eternity. Maybe next time I’ll be a boy and you’ll be a girl, she ‘d say. Trixie, will be a baby and everything will be green. I closed my eyes and pretended not to cry. Whenever parents or friends died, we talked about God, but I don’t believe in God. I live in the desert. Meteors have come and gone, it took millions of years, but I made it back. I don’t think I need God to come back again. But I agreed, everything will be green, she smiled and told me, you’ll be the last thing I think about in this body. Light years from now and here.
Governmental Body: An external mouth with no external ears.
The local mayors meet occasionally to discuss new business. The ten of us gather at a rotating location, once a month, hosted by that town’s presiding mayor. We have agendas like rationing and we are solicitous about topics like construction and procreating. My friend Chavez used to wash dishes at a casino and now he’s mayor of Boulder City. Chavez’s life will be important to the history of the world, and I spend time interviewing him and writing his auto-biography every week. He says, “Without the clutter of society I can reach my full potential.” We knock some of the last beers in the world and drink to that. He says, “finally, no money—no problems.” This new system doesn’t beggared Chavez like the old one did, and he doesn’t mind being lonely. He wants to learn as much as possible about the history of North America. He has big plans to become a scholar. I tell him the text books he’s reading are biased, but he insists they were written by a company. He found an astronomy book. He likes to show it to me and tell me about a mathematician from the seventeenth century who predicted that the universe is littered with black holes. Chavez says, “They never made it. Or they made it somewhere, possibly another dimension, but not paradise. The closest thing to paradise is right here.” He leans back to get a better view of the sky.
“No, they made it—everything they took, all the technology, the Pope, the Vice-President, the piece of the true cross, the Mona Lisa, the Eiffel Tower, the Magna Carta; if it was a risk they would have left us something to honor.”
“Maybe you’re right.” Chavez drinks the last swig of his beer and jumps on his bicycle. “I should get back before dark.” Chavez lives alone in Boulder City. He’s afraid that if he is gone for too long someone will take it from him. I live alone too, well except for Francis, but she keeps to herself. Everyone can have their own town now, and people like it that way. The food will last a while and then the Earth will sigh with relief. The roaches can have it.
Gravity: A sticky mass that keeps you from flying—jumping from city to city—being super.
The people and entities who left: The government, the friends, and the families they don’t talk to us. You’d think they would want to know how the orb is doing. Someone—somewhere must think so much of themselves that they believe that they own here and there, and everything else I can see. Communication was so revered, and now I don’t even have a string long enough to play telephone with. Walking out into the desert, I lay on my back, and shield my eyes from the sun. During the day it’s too bright to see where they’ve gone, at night it’s too dark. With everyone gone, the frontier is everywhere: right here, out there, under what’s left of the sea.
History: An uncomfortable feeling in ones stomach, a wish to do again, to do better.
In the 80’s, my parents, my sister, and I lived in a hot rural town in New Mexico. The ground was firm and dry, which made farming difficult. My father had the idea to raise and sell Turkeys; my sister and I called the big one Tom. My father, spent weeks creating a makeshift fence out of hay bails and barbed wire. On Sundays, he would sacrifice one for us to eat. Every week he would wear the same bloody outfit, and with the same dark crowbar in hand, he would pant as he chased the turkeys around their pen. My sister and I would squeeze palms when he grabbed one by the neck. In one motion, he ensnared the bird’s feet under the crowbar then stepped onto it with his large boots. I covered my sisters eyes with my hands as I solemnly watched from behind the hay and through the wire. With the turkeys feet trapped under the crowbar, and his feet on top of the bar driving the bird’s feet into the ground, he pulled with all his strength on the neck. Cluck. After the breakage, the bird fervently flapped its wings in an attempt to fly until the heaviness of death stilled them. Feathers found ways of escaping, and after he was gone, I would gather them and put them somewhere safe. Later, with blood and flesh caked under his finger nails, he would lead us in prayer. We would bow our heads and thank God for turkey.
Turkey became his obsession, the extra money allowed him to stay out late at night and keep secrets. After a while, blackbirds began to encroach on his new freedoms. They were stealing the turkey eggs and became the enemy. After dinner, he would crack a beer, light a cigarette, and sit on the back porch with a rifle under his arms until way after it was too dark to see. The shots were loud and sudden. I never knew where he was pointing so, I took my sister and crawled under her crib. For protection I pulled the crib-bars down. Eventually, piles of sleek black feathers and rotting bones littered the yard sending a message to the obstinate birds. When the piles grew high enough; the blackbirds found other eggs to eat. The piles attracted rats and after they finished with the blackbirds’ corpses, they ate our turkeys. Considering my present situation, a diet consisting of canned food and the occasional cactus, I would eat a turkey, a buffalo, a blackbird, or a rat.
Apotheosis: A proud and disappointing moment.
The morning she left we tried to recreate an average morning. I told her that was what I would miss the most. Drinking coffee in our bathrobes and having sex in our shower. I remember my breakfast cereal had chocolate in it and I didn’t bother to conserve. I ate my fill. We laid in bed, her head on my lap, until the doorbell rang twice. Right before she left I made a mistake. Standing in our doorway I said, “Don’t go.” Her mom was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. She began to cry and shake her head.
“Are you serious?” she said. I lied.
“No, I’m not serious.” I grabbed onto her yellow sweater and clenched my fists. I bit her shoulder and I put my hands around her fragile neck. I said, “No, I’m not serious.”
After the door closed I ran to the window and watched her enter the parade of people walking away.
During the day, I charged my batteries and prepared a grand meal for, Trixie, with the last of our perishable food. As the sun went down, I climbed out our bedroom window and onto the fire escape. I made my way to the roof of our building. Large, cruise ships filled the sky from horizon to horizon. For months previous, they had scraped the remaining iron ore out of the mountains to make the metal giants. They bulldozed and hoarded skyscrapers, railways, and airplanes melting and mixing them into molds. In the last days, hundreds of tank trucks went from gas station to gas station suckling and swallowing the final drops of dark power. The ships glistened white, some ten and some twenty stories tall. Each ships main deck, was connected to the ground by eight translucent covered stairways. Through the diaphanous tubes I could see the shadows of the lucky ones climbing to paradise. An exodus, so brilliant, I couldn’t help but applaud our ingenuity.
Government officials erected cement walls to keep the people whose numbers were not called out of the way. Snipers poked guns out of deep crenels, and shot anyone making a ruckus, or anyone standing by someone making a ruckus. Smoke began to block my view, as the ships began to break away from the connecting stairs. A diaspora as big as humanity got smaller and smaller as it got further and further away. From above I could see the people left becoming anxious, guns were fired, glass was broken, and the city was suddenly ablaze. The only structure strong enough to resist the heat were the stairs to nowhere that now stand, in every town and country, as monuments to our last day together.
When the ships were gone and safe from any harm we, on the ground, could cause them, the lights were turned off. In meetings held in high school gymnasiums all across the country the officials were blunt, “You are free to use the electrical grid, the water mains, and the nuclear reactor just as soon as you know how to turn them back on.” For a few days I studied the instructional manuals they passed out at the meeting. I bought a shovel for coal mining, but it all appeared to be more trouble than it was worth. The small amount of people left didn’t bother valuing our limited resources, and from what I saw wouldn’t have appreciated it even it I did learn how to manufacture coal. They burnt the streets, stole all those stereos, killed my dog Trixie, killed the president (who actually didn’t get to go after all), and poisoned the water with the some of the last bottles of Drano and boxes of Tide. Then they took off for more temperate climates. For the first couple of weeks I scrubbed day and night. I had an economy sized bottle of Pledge, but it was never enough. I kept going back to the store, which was not in the same shape as it used to be. The doors were torn from their hinges and all the ice cream was gone gone gone.
I thought I’d get a deal on a mansion in Beverly Hills, but the Japanese got there first. I thought I’d go to Japan, but from what I hear, from word of mouth, the Chinese have moved in. Most days I think, maybe right here is fine for now.The desert gets a little hot sometimes, but its all mine. I never could grow anything here, but maybe I won’t have to. There could be a cataclysmic event around the corner. The wind picks up, and I lose hold on the plastic bag I carry for emergencies. I watch it sail to the ground. I don’t sweat it—I can’t imagine ever running out of plastic bags.
Livestock: Beings that would rather be taken advantage of than extinct. See elderly, dogs, hamsters.
At the very beginning, I made a mistake at the zoo. Chavez and I had an argument about what to do with the animals. He said, “Feed the small ones dog food.” The fresh produce was gone, and the canned food was a necessity. Chavez pulled out a pistol and walked through the main entrance. I followed close behind. The squawking and screaming din of hungry impatient animals was so loud I almost didn’t hear him fire the first shot. A brown bear, surrounded by cheap plaster rocks, reared up on his hind legs, exposed his teeth, and then collapsed like a marionette. Chavez blew into the barrel of his gun. “We can’t have bears running around.” Chavez explained that we had to eat every part of the bear. It was the sensible thing to do. We climbed over the low fence and jumped into the pit. With one cut, the bears viscera were on the ground, and its ribs gleamed light. I knelt down and kissed the bear on its forehead. After that, I told Chavez, I would take care of my own zoo. He spit on my shoes and told me I wasn’t prepared for the responsibility.
Animals should be free to experience all the same emotional highs and lows available to me. I found a bolt cutter in the back of a Home Depot. My method for release could have been more…methodical. It took the cougar five minutes to eat six penguins. I should have given those penguins a proper head start. Much to my chagrin, the carnivores never seemed to fill. They roamed the streets searching for prey, and in only a few days they began to hunt each other. By the weekend it was just me and Lucy, the lion. Chavez, shook his head at all the missed opportunities for Thanksgivings and meat. He told me he was hungry and to shoot it. Francis, told me to shoot it too, but I couldn’t.
Now, at the same time everyday I break open an economy size can of corn beef and hash, from Costco, for Lucy. Recent events have worn her down. Her hair is mangled, her fur is matted, and her hips protrude sharply; she’s out of shape and slow. I know where she sleeps, and every morning, before the sun is up, I ride by her on my bike. I throw the hash and peddle like mad. She always wants more, and I know she wants me. I’ll never kill that lion. Every day that I share food with Lucy is one less day I’ll live, but now I have something to honor, and that keeps me alive.
Nonsense: Formalities.
The day after they turned off the lights there was a ceremony. A man shook my hand. It was someone important even though I don’t remember what his name tag said. He wore a monocle and a silk black top hat, and his wife wore an elegant sash. I thought it suited her. I wear a sash all the time now. Not many people see me and the ones that do—don’t think I’m putting on airs, or trying to be something I’m not. It’s a gold sash encrusted with silver gemstones. I found it while I was rifling through an apartment. It used to say, Miss America, but I scribbled it out. The Dean of my undergraduate university once said, “Ely, one day you’ll be an important man, a sash you should wear.” The word important still echoes from my external auditory canal to the temporal bone of my pale ears.
Friend: Bugs that bring their dead home, so that they can be buried in their own beds.
The desert surrounds my town. I spend my days on the top of the tallest building with a pair of binoculars I’ve had since I was a child. I’m vigilant about Lucy. Also, if anyone happens to stumble upon my town, I want to make sure they are taken care of. For instance, a man came by the other day. He must have been fifty or sixty years old. He had a backpack and a sleeping bag strapped to his back. On his shirt, he wore an official badge, shaped in the form of a star. On his head, he wore a cowboy hat. His beard was ratty, and his face was grizzled. I filled my pack with hash in case I ran into Lucy, and went to meet him.
“Good morning, Sheriff?” I said, as he made his way over the dune that bled into the city.
“You don’t have to call me that if you don’t want to. I just wear it to impress the ladies.”
“I sort of do want to.” The man tilted his head and read my sash.
“You mayor of this town?”
“Yes, almost two years now. I’d be glad to show you around.”
“You’re the only one living here?”
“Well, there is a lion and a librarian in the mix, but they don’t eat much.”
“Seems crowded,” he said with a frown. I shook my head. I motioned to the man to follow me. I gave him a bicycle tour of the twenty or so grocery stores in town, including a Costco. The food supply was limited, but had barely been touched. We opened an econo size jar of pickles for lunch, and barely finished it. He followed diligently as I showed him some of the primo houses available.
“And this one is a three bed room with a nice size patio and a swimming hole. There is an outhouse out back that I dug myself.”
“What would I do with a swimming hole?”
“Anything.”
“Sir, I think I’ve been wasting your time. I’m a private man.”
“How about you take half the town? The lion, the librarian, and I, we’ll take the other. In fact, we don’t mind, we’ll move, and you can have the good half. The one with three Whole Foods and the Costco. Just come by every once in a while. We’ll play cards.” He took his time letting his eyes roll over everything I had showed him.
“Nah,” he said. “I’ll just keep on walking. Got to find me my own town, don’t you know, there’re unclaimed states out up there.” He points north. “I’m thinking about making Alaska mine all mine.” Walking away, he muttered something about a design he has for a burner that is powered by perpetual motion. I yell to him,
“What happens if it breaks?”
“Don’t know.” I shook my head. He left then, jogging.
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