by Jerry
The best way to describe it would be to imagine the force of the blast as something tied to a string that was being swung round and round. Everything within the area covered by the string was destroyed, and everything only a few yards beyond it was left—with the exception of such minor damage as some broken windows—intact. The blast at that point appeared to take an upward direction, so that in the area beyond the destroyed center there was no further destruction except that due to fires caused by the falling debris. This destruction was somewhat haphazard; certain buildings escaped all damage while whole areas were completely gutted.
After the original reign of disorder and mayhem, the city started to reorganize itself. Emergency repairs were effected to water supplies, and local authorities were linked by provisional army field telephones. Citizens formed themselves into troops of vigilantes, and though there was some street fighting between different groups which took each other for bandit bands, order was in some degree restored. But there was no sense of security or continuity, for if there is no reason to expect tomorrow to dawn, today loses its validity. Were more bombs going to go off? What was going to happen about food, or work, or money?
People began to evacuate the city in cars, on foot, on bicycles. They left the island of Manhattan, endless black caterpillars of humanity creeping over every bridge, appearing from under the ground in every tunnel. They were migrating like lemmings. Driven by fear, they were going into the unknown where they would inevitably die.
They swarmed over the land like locusts, devastating it, marching till they were halfway to Canada. Some even reached the Canadian border, where they met Canadians marching down from Montreal and Toronto. What had taken place in New York was not an isolated phenomenon. Every big city in North America had suffered the same experience. No city except Washington was completely destroyed, but the population of all had been panicked, and the cumulative effect of these multiple bombings was much more serious than the total destruction of any single city, because all the urban populations fled to the country—which they destroyed; to the small towns and villages where, when once what was happening was understood, the villagers defended themselves with guns and even pitchforks, ex-soldiers fighting from tractors as if they were tanks. It was civil war, mass suicide. North America as a power, as a civilization, ceased to exist.
But as if even this were not enough, disaster was piled upon disaster, and the sickness hit us. First came diseases that were caused, it was said, by radioactivity. Then came the Red Death. The Red Death appears to have been general all over the civilized world.
The news of the period, naturally, was garbled; but there was some news. A few radio hams were able to receive messages. Ships at sea relayed frantic and conflicting reports. Naturally, within hours of the disaster, our air fleets set out for Europe and in a series of retaliatory raids blotted out many centers of military and industrial strength. Every big town in England had been blown up at the same time that ours were: London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, all had ceased to exist. But fortunately the United States, anticipating the possibility of such an attack, had the foresight to be ready for it and had several fleets of immense bombers, complete with atomic bombs and personnel hidden in secret underground hangers. Anticipating the destruction of central authority, the commanding officers of these areas had sealed instructions to be opened if communication broke down.
When the attack came, the wings of retaliation were soon in the air and within hours of the first blast our world was gone. There was never in anyone’s mind, apparently, the idea that any country other than Russia could have been responsible for the attack upon us.
What was forgotten was that Germany was our enemy—the enemy of Russia and America and England—and that nothing would please Germany better than the mutual destruction of the U.S.S.R. and the Western democracies. The Germans hoped this would happen and, in my opinion, engineered it—perhaps even by setting off the explosions in America, knowing that we, in our fear and bewilderment, would attack Russia in a retaliatory reflex. What the Germans did not foresee (or perhaps they did not care) was that such a war would extinguish them with the rest of mechanized mankind. Or again they—the Germans—may have had such confidence in their Spenglerian myth that they assumed they could survive.
And so, perhaps, they could have—until the Red Death came along. Then they died along with all the others.
I had thought till today that it had killed every living human being in the Western Hemisphere with the exception of myself and perhaps some Indians in the forests of the upper Amazon or Orinoco. Some of the last news that we got through was that the same disease had broken out in both Buenos Aires and Rio. This makes me think now, looking back on it, that the bacteriological war the attackers planned for us got completely out of control.
What happened in the Far East, in Australia and Asia, I have no idea. We never heard anything from there, and perhaps they, too, survived. Perhaps a new empire of Orientals arose. I doubt it, though, because I feel that they would surely have established some kind of communication with the East coast of the United States. I think it is safe to assume that sickness and death overtook everyone in the Far East as well, except for isolated tribesmen and perhaps the inhabitants of such a remote place as Lhasa, the sacred city of Tibet.
The two girls I saw were standing on a small hill on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 23d Street. I saw them clearly silhouetted against the skyline. They had long spears in their hands and were leading horses. One horse was a bay and the other a chestnut. The girls were staring north, shading their eyes with their hands, while the horses cropped the grass beside them. Both girls were blond. Their hair was knotted on their necks and they wore what looked like buckskin shirts and trousers. I had trouble with the dogs, Vixen and Bodo; the girls were upwind and the dogs had never smelled a woman before—or any other human being but me, for that matter—and they probably thought of me as one of themselves, since I had bred them and their parents before them and they were never separated from me, even sleeping on the same heap of skins in the cave I had built in the ruined Chelsea Hotel.
Having described the girls, I suppose I had better describe myself.
I was born in Paris, just in time to serve in the first World War. I was severely wounded and went to live in South Africa, where I farmed cattle for ten years. I then took to writing, returned to England and came from there to the United States, where I remained, apart from a few trips to England, France and the Bahamas, till the second World War, when I married a charming American girl, an artist, and continued writing while I waited for the war to end. My age and disabilities prevented my doing anything more active. Among others, I wrote and talked of the dangers of our Anglo-American retention of the bomb secret, maintaining that manufacture should cease and control be given to the United Nations. I also said that our civilization, as we knew it, was finished; and that as others were saying and writing at the same time the future presented only two alternatives: the liberation of man through atomic power or the destruction of our civilization, either by great nations in an undeclared war, which was what we feared, or by atomic bandits or nihilists.
My wife and I lived in a small studio penthouse on the eleventh floor of the Whitby Apartments on West 45th Street, opposite the Martin Beck Theater. I was over there yesterday and it is still almost intact, having been extremely well constructed sometime in the twenties. As a matter of fact, I shot a mountain lion that my dogs had driven into a basement apartment which had, when we lived there, been occupied by a drummer. Hunting big game in old apartment houses is the most dangerous form of shooting there is and makes any African safari look like child’s play, because the animals are likely to attack from the immediate flank—that is, from any apartment—as you move down a passage. Hunting under such conditions would be quite impossible without dogs that first investigate the building and bay up the den of any animal that is lurking there. The losses in dogs are heavy; but I am continually breeding new ones�
�huge animals of mixed Saint Bernard, Newfoundland, great Dane, Irish wolfhound, bloodhound, mastiff, police dog and Husky blood—which generation by generation become larger, fiercer, and better hunters. The feral dogs—the wild stock that has survived and bred itself by mongrelization—are not much bigger than jackals or coyotes.
When I am out for a stroll, as I was today, I usually take only a couple of well-trained dogs as guards to inform me of any danger that I do not see myself, which was lucky for the girls and their horses. For had I been hunting with my pack, as I do every second day or so, the girls would undoubtedly have been torn to pieces, since this is my way of feeding my dogs. They are trained to pull down any living thing and, having done so, to break it up as English hounds did a fox. Of course, when hunting the mutations such as the giant wolf and mink and a kind of wild ox that resembles the extinct European aurochs, I use a rifle—a 450 express that I selected at Abercrombie and Fitch—which has immense striking power. The dogs, instead of attacking game that is too big for them, merely bring it to bay and hold it till I come.
From my point of view, there is a certain interest in the change in my own character because, when I first went to Africa as a young man, I was an ardent hunter. Then, at the age of thirty-five, I gave up shooting altogether. Now I, like my dogs, have reverted atavistically, and hunting is my only pleasure. My mind is less disciplined than it was when I used to write for the magazines. It drifts along strange paths, as I dig among my memories seeking for incidents and examples that will elucidate or explain what has happened. This is not a story. It has no plot. It is a testament, a form of history, a literary curiosity written for myself as a form of justification, as a debt that I, the last man of the past, must owe to an unborn future.
My narrative must drift back and forth to catch memories that are like butterflies as they flick through my mind, for I am an old man. How can I write about the death of my wife? I can’t. But the description of her death will be there, threaded like every twentieth bead on the string of my life. I cannot coldly discuss killing and eating Annie, my pet dog. Nevertheless, I did kill and eat her.
We also ate Edward, the kinkajou we had had for four years, in a stew. There was no food for pet animals, and it was necessary to dispose of them all. I have never had a nicer pet than a kinkajou, a South American animal resembling, though not connected with, a lemur. It has a long prehensile tail, a soft fur, and charming snuggly habits. It is about the size of a cat and is more or less nocturnal. We never took to cannibalism, though both cannibalism and infanticide were widely practiced and probably, under such conditions, to be condoned. Morality can exist only in a social framework. A man alone cannot be good or bad. He cannot steal, fight, lie, or murder.
Now I return to animals because it is among animals that the last twenty years of my life have been lived. In addition to the giant mutations, there was an immense increase in the wild animals indigenous to New York State, such as the timber wolf, beaver, black bear, lynx, mountain lion, deer, moose and bobcat. There were even some bison and caribou. There were also many game birds: pheasant, ptarmigan, grouse, and a new kind of American jungle fowl which evolved from ordinary poultry. The inmates of the Central Park zoo now roamed wild, too. Some lunatic, very shortly after the explosion, had thrown open every cage in the zoo, and since no one had time to deal with the liberated animals, a number of them survived and became acclimated. Now there are tigers in New York, which, in their long winter coats, resemble the great tigers of Manchuria. There are also leopards, Jaguars and a wide variety of buck and antelope which, despite the severity of the winters, have managed to survive. As happened elsewhere where their ranges overlapped, the lions were soon exterminated by the tigers. There is at least one herd of zebra and another of donkeys. Occasionally they hybridize. There are no horses, and the two that I saw today are the first I have seen for twenty years. Grizzly bears have spread from the West and are very large-even bigger, I should say, than the Kodiak bears. I have seen marks where they sharpened their claws against a tree in Central Park more than twenty feet from the ground. There are several families of polar bears living along both the Hudson and East rivers. There is a great colony of seals at Ellis Island.
The great bald eagle now nests in the abandoned cliffs of every skyscraper. There are pigeons by the millions; and ducks, wild geese and swans in all the ponds and rivers. Buzzards and kites circle everywhere.
Many of the larger carnivora live in the drains, which is probably how those from more tropical countries survived their first winter. It is of course for the same reason that I live in a cave, where the temperature is more or less stable, rather than in an apartment, of which there is certainly no shortage. It occurred to me when I moved in here that, after all, a cave was man’s natural habitat, and that a house was only an artificial cave.
At least one more thing is necessary to supply a picture of this area as it is now. New York was always famous for its skyline. This skyline is now vastly changed. There are a number of large buildings—blocks of flats, hospitals and hotels—more or less intact. Rockefeller Center stands; so does the pinnacle of the Empire State Building, an eagles’ aerie now. The Chrysler Building stands, but its pinnacle hangs from it at any angle. The bomb blast area is completely bare and almost as flat as a polo field. A curious thing, however, has occurred. The debris that landed on the housetops, combined with the guano from the countless birds that took to roosting on them, has formed a soil so fertile that trees and shrubs cover the flat tops of higher buildings. This fertility accounts for the amount of game found here.
The Washington Bridge is intact and so is the Brooklyn Bridge, these two being the main migration routes for those animals which leave or come to the island of Manhattan. The polar bears, moose and caribou seem to prefer swimming, as do the tigers in the summer months.
As there have been animal mutations, so there have also been mutations among the plants. There are some great ferns as big as trees, and there is a new elm which creeps along the ground, one tree covering as much as an acre. Everything grows with great rapidity.
The scene from a hilltop or a ruin is of strange and almost incredible beauty. The game is so thick that it is reminiscent of the Sabi game reserve in the Transvaal. Standing out above the rolling greensward that covers the fallen buildings, great towers of masonry rise like ancient forts.
Everywhere there are small woods, clumps of trees, and little streams and rivers. There are large numbers of flowers, many of them completely new, at least new as wild flowers. Varieties of roses which usually had to be budded now grow wild, as do gladioli, dahlias, tulips and every other kind of bulb. Hyacinths, daffodils and crocuses cover large patches in solid mats of color; they lie like scatter rugs on the green floor of the city; and nothing more beautiful could be imagined than coming across a great striped Bengal tiger asleep on a carpet of purple crocuses in the first warm afternoon of early spring, or seeing a red and white wild ox standing belly-deep in orange gladioli. There are ferns and mosses to be found wherever water drips or runs among the rocky gullies. And in no place are they more beautiful than in the natural grotto in front of the Chelsea Hotel, where a clear spring bubbles up and falls with a delightful splash into the small lake made by the subsidence of the ground in 23d Street. It is in this lake that I keep the black bass, rainbow trout and carp that I catch when I need a change of diet. They have become adapted to this way of life and are very little different from their ancestors.
I must say that after the hardships we underwent in the beginning while we were learning to adjust ourselves, I now live very well. I have fresh meat and fish, wine and whisky when I want it, and plenty of canned food of all kinds. I only miss bread and potatoes.
I have often thought about the question of luck—of my good luck in being left alive, for instance. But are we really sure about what is good luck and what is bad? Why was I chosen to be spared out of so many millions?
Or, on the other hand, why was I so damned as to b
e made to survive, to live alone in a world of death and putrescence—made to revert atavistically to a subhuman existence? What had I done to deserve a lonely hell like this, when all other men—as I had supposed until today—were killed quickly and mercifully, or at least relatively quickly and mercifully? Now that it is all over; and my adjustments are made—now that I have gotten over my loneliness and overcompensated to the point where, having seen two fellow human beings, I hide like an animal—I go over it all again in my mind.
It was naturally a great shock for a modern man to be thrust back into prehistory, and to see how, having misused our means, we had lost our ends, which should have been, not the search for a life of more and more comfort and the possession of more and more things, but the integration of the personality—man becoming man at last. I had visualized in the last years of our era a new type of co-operative, non-predatory man living at peace with his fellows in a world of plenty made possible by modern technology. But man instead had weighted himself down with this very technology in a system that corresponded to the armor of the prehistoric reptiles and, like them, unable to change, had been forced by the very extent of its development into self-destruction.
Looking back, I realize I have not thought seriously about anything for ten years. Obviously, in the first rush of events and difficulties of adjustment there was little time for thought; it was hard enough just to stay alive. But about five years after the disaster, for a period of several years, I thought and read a great deal. I still have a very fine library that I collected at that time, and sometimes on a sunny day I sit and read in the grotto with my gun and dogs beside me. But I read mainly poetry now, stuff with a ringing meter, that I learned as a child: Tennyson, Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, Kipling, Swinburne, and Hood. It is what critics used to call the best bad poetry. I think that unconsciously I have gone back to it so as to keep the song of words and the power of simile functioning in a mind that was becoming atrophied from disuse. For I had stopped thinking in words and was only feeling things, like an animal. I had even stopped speaking to my dogs, and controlled them by gestures and sounds: sah to attack, ah to check them, hi-lorst to hunt, er to warn, hup to jump. So, to regain the use of my tongue and vocal chords, I went back to the poems of my school days, taking an almost childish pleasure in watching the development of my own defense mechanisms, laughing wryly at the devices of a so-called cultured mind as it strove to fight madness alone in lovely wilderness.