Late-K Lunacy

by Ted Bernard

  21

  After the storm, the days shambled by me like intoxicated zombies. I was hard-pressed to distinguish one zombie from another, only that during the day, relief workers brought us food and drinking water and volunteers cleared debris along Athenian Way. And at night the passage of time was marked by the tick-tock of the grandfather clock in the living room while I suffered eye-strain reading by candlelight, until the gist of words strayed like lost dogs. The snow had melted. The main roads were open to emergency traffic and selected trucks and buses. A few sisters showed up to collect their belongings, then hopped back aboard the daily BusBolt for points north. Frank had taken my entreaties seriously, yielding me breathing space. Greta baked casseroles, provided me a warm bed and company for several glorious nights, helped me decompress. Although I resorted excessively to long naps all over the house at all times of day and to generalized torpor, I was beginning to think less about omega and more about life returning to normal. It was almost Christmas. I kept telling myself I ought to leave for Ashtabula soon.

  I arrived a few minutes late at The New Jenny which was open in daylight with a limited menu. Kerosene lamps lent a nineteenth century glow to the coffee bar. There was still no power in Argolis and precious little gasoline and diesel for generators. Frank, who told me about the gathering, was there along with others of our conspirators I had neither seen nor realized they had been stranded too. I noticed something: apparently, in the storm’s trauma, many had lapsed into coupledom. Not me, thank God, despite Frank’s cloying attempts. Around the circle were Nick and Em, Zachery with Mikaela, the beautiful Ecuadorian from our class; Sean and Todd; Jeremy, an African American guy I knew slightly, with Maybelle, from Botswana; Julianna, the occupation maven, and Sophie, the prof whose office was next to Stefan’s (Hmm, some age differential for sure); and Astrid and José, the oddest of couples. Katherine seemed to be by herself, as was poor Lara at the far end of the table.

  I made the rounds, hugged everyone, shed tears of confusion and joy.

  When I got to Lara, I simply broke down. “Lara, I am totally heartsick. It was so horrific that Jason was caught in crossfire from those commandos. I cannot get that night out of my mind.”

  “Hannah, dear, dear Hannah, our intrepid mole. Oh yeah. I am still reeling. But I have a PhD to finish as soon as we get electricity, and I’m allowed back in McWhorter. My dad is coming from Minneapolis for Christmas. Jason’s sister from Australia will be here in January for a memorial service.”

  When I hugged Zachary, he said, “Hannah, this is my new best friend, Mikaela. And hey, I haven’t seen you since we liberated you from that lech Tulkinghorn. Are you okay?”

  “Traumatized and bored, Zach, but okay mostly. I’m okay. You cannot imagine how wonderful it is to see all your faces, to know you survived.” I sat next to Katherine while wiping tears across my cheeks.

  We told stories of how we had weathered the past few weeks and speculated about those among the missing. Tulkinghorn? He was taken to the hospital the night of the raid, I said. “Greta, the CNRD administrator, told me he’s on administrative leave pending investigation of his role in the Larnaca mess.”

  “Samantha? She’s in North Dakota”, Katherine said definitively. “What about Melissa?” Nobody had seen her. Abby was in town a few of days ago. Frank saw her. She was on her way home to the Mohawk Reservation in New York. “What about Boss?” Still down in Grieg County. Lara assured us Adrienne was healing slowly in Statia.

  The conversation turned to whether our protest and occupation had been worthwhile. Lara told us that Blackwood Forest had suffered no major destruction. She had spent three days there with Malcolm Barstow. They hiked in the forest and went to the Morse Valley Energy drilling site. There was no activity; the fracking tanks still bore our screes. At this, a round of applause and hoots. Astrid reeled off a handful of the choicest messages. Nick silently shook his head. And what about the university? Katherine shared what she knew: damage to dozens of academic and administrative buildings and residence halls, especially Stiggins, crushed by a state champion sycamore on the east side, would take months to repair. Now they were trying to restore power and connectivity and ramp up the heating system. She said that Professor Zielinski doubted the university would be able to reopen second semester. “And Flintwinch?” Frank asked. “She is still acting president,” Katherine replied.

  “How do you know so much?” Nick asked.

  “I have my ways,” she replied.

  He smirked in a kindly way and nodded. Em squeezed his arm.

  In time, those of us from Stefan’s classes wanted to talk about panarchy and whether we had experienced omega during the ravage of Argolis by ORRF and Domenica.

  “I predicted our conversation would turn to this,” Katherine said. She raised her arm and made a small gesture with her index finger. “So, I invited an expert to help us.”

  Nick said, “Ah ha.”

  She reddened, tilted her head.

  From outside, Stefan ambled toward us. His luminance seemed instantly to lighten our dreary talk of wrack and ruin. My heart skipped some beats. Stefan!

  “Merveilleux! I see his smile! I have missed it so much,” Em exclaimed.

  We welcomed him with clapping, laughter, hoots, and hugs. He circulated around slowly, person by person. He drank-in our faces, chatting and laughing with each of us. At length, he sat down. And we basked in his presence: the serene uncool professor who had instilled in us a critical turn of mind, a love of non-conformity, a curiosity about the future, and whose inner joy and sense of freedom had linked us with our own. As if each person in the room had been so starved of discourse beyond disaster, what then ensued was an intellectual feeding frenzy that only added to the ambivalence we all felt about the semester of our lifetime and the dusky future. Three hours later, as the early winter sun cast a buttered marmalade glow on the charred and battered uptown district — its trees uprooted, shops and restaurants shuttered behind plywood and chain-link fences, buildings leveled by fires — my friends departed into the gathering darkness.

  I hung back with Katherine and Stefan. Drawn, as ever, to his bluefire eyes, I said, “Holy crap, Stefan, that conversation was anything but bright: all that speculation about omega. Hey, aren’t we ever getting to talk about the back loop and renewal and hope?”

  “We didn’t quite get there, did we? Next time, I promise.”

  Katherine grabbed her coat and Stefan’s arm. I bundled up. And we three aimed toward that promise of next time.

  ~

  There would be no next time.

  Just when electric power returned tentatively, then reliably, and there were lights and devices after dark and furnaces to warm apartments; just when people’s phones began to chime with emails and Facebook posts, and tweets and calls and texts; just when the Argolis Farmers Market resumed; just when Boss dropped by Katherine and Stefan’s with the charmer, Macy, and Stefan’s face lit up with pure benevolence as though he was in the presence of a holy child; just when President Flintwinch fired Truman Tulkinghorn, appointed Burt Zielinski as CNRD director, and called the faculty together; just when local social and economic indicators seemed resurgent, and Katherine and Stefan glowed as brightly as Christmas candles — just then, industrial civilization tore across unthinkable thresholds.

  22

  The Great Collapse unfurled with such speed and vengeance that even the most ardent of fundamentalist Christian story tellers were taken aback, unable to fathom the legions of elders and pastors left behind. Civilization, arguably at its brittlemost, had gone over the cliff. Seen from the vantage point of a college town in southern Ohio, the confluence of events that sent systems tumbling caused many residents to overreact. They fled Argolis toward Columbus, Dayton, and Cleveland where services were rumored to persist. Those of us in Stefan’s circle knew what to expect, though it surpassed our darkest nightmares. Collapse descended upon us like a satanic raptor, its talons ripping to shreds the lives we had known.
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br />   As often foreseen (and recently by Sean), in the two years following the storm, a pandemic of epic proportions swept across the planet. Supervirus H7N9, a bird flu, was contracted by a single human in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. From there it was transmitted through the air, human-to-human, to every corner of the globe. Within months, it had overwhelmed even the most sophisticated emergency response and public health systems, and it far outpaced efforts to develop and disseminate a vaccine. By the second winter, one billion people had perished directly from Guangdong Flu. Collateral deaths, at least as great, were never precisely known. When the flu subsided, so few were those not impacted that the basic features of civilized life faltered — education at all levels, energy production, communication and information systems, drinking water and sewage treatment, as well as the social and political institutions that once insured security and enabled human services.

  In Argolis, on a given day we would have electric power and Internet connectivity. The next day, nothing. Boil orders would constantly be issued as contaminants seeped into public drinking water. Schools and the university closed. A trip to the County Court House would become futile: nobody there to staff the deeds office; the Court of Common Pleas shuttered, the Treasurer and Auditor and their staff missing. When Sean and Todd went for a marriage license, they found an undated note on the door of the clerk’s office:

  County Clerk Hazel Hathaway died this morning of complications following the flu. May her soul rest in eternal peace. To inquire about the reopening of this office, please contact one of the County Commissioners.

  When Sean dialed the numbers listed, there were no responses. He later discovered that all three commissioners had also succumbed. The same was true at the community hospital as nurses and doctors fell ill and medical supply chains faltered. Finally, Todd and the other remaining healthy student doctors were told to go home.

  A few weeks later, during three days when broadcast television and radio were inexplicably accessible, we survivors learned of other forces battering the world. Information was passed in rumor-tainted fragments: wars in Europe involving Russia and NATO countries following Russia’s invasion of Latvia, and between Iran and Israel. Reputedly, Israel launched a nuclear attack on Iran. Iran retaliated and terrorists deployed dirty bombs in Tel Aviv and a dozen other cities, including Washington and New York. The final arteries of a gasping industrial civilization were deliberately slashed by various jihadists and separatists: coaxial cables cut, the big five cloud providers hacked, power grids dismantled, server farms and cell towers bombed. No one could say whether functioning national governments prevailed in North America or elsewhere.

  Not since the Great Recession of 2009 had the delusion of unfettered growth and corrupt and unwise speculation so shattered the global economy. Commerce and manufacturing, industrial agriculture, financial markets, equities and hedge funds seized like hearts in arrest. Argolis survivors, like those in Kate Nickleby’s Brights Grove, panicked as goods in shops and stores dwindled, gasoline deliveries dried up, vehicular travel became difficult then impossible, banks closed, and the electric grid and telecommunications sputtered. In less than five years, we found ourselves struggling to survive with few survival skills.

  Year after year, we worked our asses off to grow enough food during sweltering unpredictable summers that in one month drowned fields and in subsequent months desiccated crops on cracking clay. In the initial years, we could track the severity of climate collapse by the number of people shuffling along the weed-choked, potholed Interstate, pushing their meager possessions in grocery carts and wheelbarrows. Refugees from despoiled landscapes, flooded cities, impoverished Central American countries, and disappearing island states arrived hungry and sick. (Speaking of island states, regrettably, we never had further word from St. Eustatius.) Having barely sufficient food and little but crumbling shelter, we reluctantly advised the raggedy migrants to keep moving. The sickest died by the roadside. Grave-digging became a gruesome daily task.

  Just as Nickleby had predicted, the interlocking, cascading, multiplying, and terrifying outcomes of Late-K lunacy eventually creeped into every town and hamlet, no matter their pretentions of sustainability. Argolis, once a paragon of so-called community sustainability, deprived of its supply chains, financial ties, power and communications systems — its population diminished by outmigration, disease and starvation, its university shuttered — became a victim of communal bulimia, a skeleton writhing toward death. Seeing all this and aiming to rebuild toward alpha, a handful of sturdy and foresighted people formed a new settlement.

  EIGHT

  The Genius that Invents the Future

  If, like a god, we could see every photon’s arc and each neutrino’s wobble, we would see past and future laid out in a single mathematical design: infinite, determined, perfect.

  We will never achieve such knowledge. We only ever see the pattern dimly and in flashes. Yet we can practice and cultivate understanding the intimate necessary connection of all things to each other. Light comes to us from millions of miles away, through the emptiness of space, and we can see it. Its heat warms our skin. Pleasure arises in feeling ourselves attuned and connected to such sublime power. The only practical question remaining is whether we, existing as we are, will be that light.

  — Roy Scrantonxviii

  1

  FEELING REFRESHED from his nap in the copse of trees overlooking the valley, Stefan strolled northward along the river toward our village. Ever louder, claps of late afternoon thunder signaled the storm was nigh. Rain would be welcome. He quickened his pace. Instead of compiling a mental list of chores before nightfall, his mind drifted back to Kate Nickleby: the sweetness and sting of their friendship, the gift of her life, her prophesy. He had long ago memorized her final message to him, an email he had recited hundreds of times.

  Did she understand she was about to die? How could unrequited love possibly redeem the life taken from her and the one I’ve been granted, in which there have been two loves. You, Kate, yes, of course. And Katherine. Grant me Katherine, I beg of you. To lie down in that grass.

  And then, as he neared the village, he recalled the way Kate had concluded her book: that hope, however faint its prospect, could not be stifled. Oh. That she might meet him in Rumi’s field! Or here, these many decades later, in this emerald valley, where we cautiously embrace that future genius.

  OVER THE CLIFF

  Katja Nickleby

  Chapter Six

  The Loop of Hope

  IF THERE SHALL BE RECOVERY from an omega event that puts the future of humanity at risk, it will proceed along the back loop of the adaptive cycle from omega to alpha to reorganization and rapid growth (Ω to α to r). This is the path of catagenesis, which after breakdown invites the birth “of something new, unexpected, and potentially good … the reinvention of our future.”32 I choose to frame this progression as “the loop of hope,” realizing fully and without apology, the implied human arrogance. I am, after all, possessed of a human heart imbued with a perhaps delusionary belief in humanity’s goodness and potential. Hope is a healthy frame of mind so long as it is not purely wishful thinking. That is why hope is the essence of this final chapter.

  The German-American poet, Lisel Mueller, thought about hope this way:

  Hope is the singular gift we cannot destroy in ourselves

  the argument that refutes death

  the genius that invents the future.33

  Where will we find such genius? As explained in previous chapters, significant, even calamitous, breakdown is a natural progression in complex adaptive systems. And breakdown often induces novel and positive change. The physical and biological foundations of planet Earth and the way they function “as a single operational unit”,34 despite their present diminishment, lead me to believe that whether we are a piece of the story or not, the seeds of renewal and reorganization do await. If humans prove incapable of surviving the worst misfortune in their history, so be it.
I am certain of this: in the next five or so billion years, our earthly home will get along very well without us. Without fail, the adaptive cycle will repeat itself many times over.

  On the other hand, we are a tenacious species. If I were a betting woman, I would wager that the odds are high that our own genius may well be a factor in the speed and success of “natural” recovery. As for scale, I would expect that the back loop will launch locally at a landscape scale and will be embodied by humans in small kinship-based communities over a span of many generations. Will the evolution of complex technologically-based societies follow? Who can say? The answer may be wrapped up in whether humanity will have learned the lessons of collapse, will have become humbler in reimagining their place in the evolving ecological order. Thomas Berry sees this as the most difficult transition humanity will ever have to make — the transition from anthropocentric arrogance to biocentric humility. If this doesn’t happen it will be the outcome, he says, of tragic defects in our human hearts.