And so he found himself thinking about dust and dust mites, wondering which was the host, which the parasite? The predator versus the prey? Was the difference really just a matter of degrees, of who’d inherited what from whom? He’d always imagined he was still in charge, standing in as the human race’s proxy. But it was the animals he was plotting vengeance against who were still making puppies and kittens. It was their DNA that was destined to outlast his—as long as it stayed out of his Crock-Pot.
And so through madness, he came to . . . ambivalence. What was the right move here? Sure, bloody vengeance sounded cathartic, but actually doing it? What did the planet want, based on the evidence? What was he capable of, as a practical matter? He’d killed Diablo out of necessity, and he had no doubt he could pull the trigger again, however many times it took. But each shot would make the next one harder. Not because he’d lose his stomach for it, but because they’d stop trusting him. They’d be on guard; they’d hide whenever he approached. He didn’t even know how many there were, now that they’d begun breeding.
And was all that trouble worth it, just to make a point? All he really needed was for them to be gone from his sight, taking their constant reminders of everything he’d lost with them.
In a lot of ways, it was like before, with his neighbors. Once again, he was seeing how many he could cram into a truck while still being able to drive. And like before, one or two of his passengers would fart along the way. The difference this time was all the slobbering and licking and other outward signs of appreciation his passengers aimed at their former, primary food bringer. “Okay, okay, okay,” he said, most of the way there. “You can stop now.”
But they didn’t, and Dev didn’t really want them to, each warm, wet, sandpapery tongue reminding him of similar tokens of affection he’d received from Diablo. Which, of course, was just another reason for doing what he was about to do.
He had a twelve-gauge shotgun and a gallon of gas—not so much a carrot-and-stick arrangement as stick-and-a-bigger-stick. He’d have brought along some pet food as an enticement, but that was long gone. The partially thawed roast he’d used to get them on to the truck was the extent of the people food he was willing to sacrifice to get the job done. Not thawing it all the way had been a stroke of genius—or perhaps just a sign of his own impatience to get this over with. The point was: they could smell it; they could lust for it, but they couldn’t quite eat it, not when their fangs hit the still-frozen part. And so he could use the same lure for the next batch, and the batch after that.
Arriving at “the gate,” Dev stepped down from one cab and into the other, backing the second truck away, exposing the gap he’d left there, just in case. Once everything was in position, he fingered the key fob for the first truck, opening the doors and popping the hatch covering the truck’s bed. “Everybody out,” he commanded, clapping and whistling and shooing.
The animals got out but just looked at the open gate like the domesticated things they once were, milling, sniffing, cocking a leg, checking out a butt, but none seemed particularly interested in crossing the threshold between the land they knew and whatever lay beyond that gate. Needless to say, Dev could relate—not that it changed his mind. “C’mon,” he said, taking hold of a basset hound he intended to make a lesson of—only to find the animal’s excess flesh slipping through his fingers like some kind of furry ooze. So he switched gears and snatched up a shih tzu instead, wondering how a dog so unlikely to survive had. Holding it over his head so the others could see—and hoping it wouldn’t seize the opportunity to get the drop on him by peeing or worse—he walked the animal bodily through the wall’s opening and then set it down, commanding, “Stay.”
The soulful eyes of the dogs stared back at him, fuzzy with animal emotions, while the electric eyes of the cats looked like they usually did: like they were plotting the perfect murder. Collectively, they all seemed to be saying, “What does this have to do with us?” while the shih tzu, echoing what it sounded like, took a dump on Dev’s shoe.
Perfect, he thought, looking down. Thanks for making this easier. And with that, he took his gallon of gas and poured out a large semicircle, inside which his reluctant escapees milled. The matches were in his pocket, the shotgun wedged under his arm. He dropped the match, and a wall of fire shot up.
The animals seemed conflicted, as Dev thought they might be. The fire was fire, of course, but at sufficient distance, it was warm, too, and though it had stopped snowing for the season, warmth like the fire provided was still a month or so off. And so, minus a few who got the hint, the remainder remained, perhaps remembering more pampered evenings, snug in their homes with their humans.
Time for the bigger stick, Dev thought, bracing the shotgun against his shoulder and taking aim at the transitional sun. The boom lit its own, more effective fire under all the furry butts he’d collected there. And so off they fled, in the only direction they had, through the exit he’d opened for them, bounding and leaping and darting for their lives.
As the fire died, and the sounds of animal flight with it, he hoisted himself up into the cab of the gate truck and pulled it back into place. A few more truckloads followed, and Dev didn’t have to kill any of them—not personally. He imagined the shih tzu probably became a fur-ball hors d’oeuvre for something bigger a half hour out on its own. But it wasn’t on him. All he’d done was give them their freedom—whether they wanted it or not.
Returning home after the (hopefully) last batch, Dev staked out a couple of white bedsheets on his front lawn to simulate snow. This would be his confirmation. If the sheets stayed unmarred, great. If not, he had some mopping up to do.
He thought about an earlier fake snow—not bedsheets that time, but tree fluff. It was the change of seasons, and the stuff was everywhere, the outside looking like a snow globe from the inside. He’d let Diablo out to play; there’d been no competition for the front yards back then. As he watched from the living room window, Diablo managed to get a tuft of the seed pod fluff stuck to his shiny wet snout and sneezed it away. And that’s all it took for Dev to be off to the races, connecting the sneeze to illness to death to himself, minus Diablo.
He needed to take pictures, he’d decided. Something to remember the animal by, once he’d started contemplating their relative mortality, their inherently incompatible timelines. The pictures would be his Diablo porn, just like his vacuum cleaner porn, just like the porn of all the things he’d developed a fondness for—something for the pocket when the real thing wasn’t there. And so he grabbed a charged phone, stepped outside, and started taking pictures.
In the first, Diablo was being Diablo in profile, standing point as a squirrel taunted out of reach in some branches with far fewer leaves than just a month before. After that first simulated shutter snap, though, the dog’s concentration broke and refocused on where the sound had come from: his human, Dev. In that next photo, the Lab is looking right at him and the phone, his perma-grin wide, his tongue out in lieu of perspiring but still making him look like a big four-pawed goof. The next picture was more of the same, but with the head bigger, dog closer. Next, a chaotic blur followed by an unplanned selfie. In it, Dev is on his back and Diablo is beside him, the dog’s tongue licking his nearly blank face, but for the slightest Mona Lisa grin.
He stored these to the phone’s card, ejecting it before popping it into a stand-alone printer full of slots and sockets for USB, SD, micro SD, those Sony whatevers. A coffee cup’s worth of gasoline ran the generator long enough to print out these memories he thought he might want someday, back before he knew how Diablo would go—and how hard remembering could hurt.
He’d hidden the pictures afterward, after burying Diablo and then burning the remaining evidence: his dog toys, his collar, the leash. Why he didn’t burn the photos along with the rest, he couldn’t say. Not seeing them seemed enough at the time.
But now, alone-alone, with spring on the doorstep, no chickens clucking in the garage, no dogs or cats chasing or b
eing chased, Dev reached for the book that always made feeling alone feel especially good: My Side of the Mountain. He’d read the book to Diablo a half-dozen times—which was probably why his obvious mind chose its pages to act as the hiding place for those pictures he’d taken to remind himself, before the need to forget became even stronger.
Burning should have been an option, but just like he hadn’t burned up the real animal, he found he couldn’t burn such a detailed likeness either. He could throw them out, though, along with the SD card they’d been saved to. But not in the truck-bed garbage—not somewhere where some future, weaker version of himself could go looking. No, they’d go in the river like the other things he needed out of sight and mind, wrapped in a sheet of newsprint to keep them separate from the garbage that oozed and stank. On second thought, why not give them their own bag? By the looks of it, he could live to a hundred and still not outlast his supply.
And so Dev took the little stack of photos and folded, then double folded the Freep’s last front page around them, taping the edges like a gift before placing them inside a plastic grocery bag. He knotted the handles tight, blew into a hole in the bottom seam before knotting that, too, trapping both the photos and his own breath inside.
As he carried his latest beach ball to the railing at the end of the block, Dev noted how the contents flip-flopped inside, making it drum as he walked. It’s like the beating of a heart, he thought—hoping that what he was doing now would cure him of such non-Vulcanic thoughts once and for all.
39
It seemed like a good idea: visit the Midwest Mecca, a.k.a. Dearborn, Michigan—outside the Middle East, the city with the highest number of Arabic families anywhere on earth. Not as a religious pilgrimage—the secular apocalypse had pretty much cured both of provincial religiosity—but more as a kind of ethnic validation, the sort Marcus had not found among the scarlet-necked Okies of Oklahoma. Lucy was on board with the decision, because Dearborn was also home to Greenfield Village, Henry Ford’s homage to steampunk minus the punk.
“It’s like a DIY kit for Western civilization,” she promised.
“You know what Gandhi said about Western civilization, don’t you?” Lucy shook her head, inviting Marcus to elucidate. “He said he thought it would be a good idea,” he said, quoting not Gandhi so much as his handlers quoting Gandhi—ironically enough.
Lucy didn’t say that dissing Western civilization was rich coming from a representative of a culture—Marcus’s, not Gandhi’s—some of whom wanted to bring back the Stone Age. Or the stoning age, at least. But she didn’t. She simply nodded at the deepness of the observation while they drove on in silence through the leftovers of that aforementioned civilization.
Once they finally reached post-whatever Dearborn, Marcus’s idea of finding his roots suffered the fate of a lot of good ideas hitting the wall of reality: it revealed itself as a bad idea. The disappointment was heightened by the fact that, at first, all the signs were as hopeful as the sun glinting off the golden onion domes and minarets of the largest mosque in the United States.
“Holy shite,” Lucy said as they rounded a corner and the Islamic Center of America came into view. It was something she’d started doing lately: swearing in homage to her father’s favorite euphemisms.
“Watch it,” Marcus warned; with her accent on top, shite could easily have been Shiite.
“I thought this wasn’t about religion,” she said. “‘What did you used to be?’ Remember?”
“That doesn’t mean you have to go out of your way to be disrespectful.”
“I wasn’t trying to be,” she insisted. “I was just like, wow!”
And indeed, it was an impressive building. But Marcus, stung by her connecting it all back to religion, turned away from the mosque, dazzling though it was, and headed toward downtown Dearborn, the epicenter of the ethnic validation he purportedly sought.
There he found in person—well, in concrete and glass—what he’d seen on Google Street View: storefronts bearing signs in Arabic, many without English translations, leaving him to puzzle over what it was they might be selling behind those hunchbacked Ts, backward threes, bowls, hooks, squiggles, and dots. He thought he recognized a dry cleaner, a bookstore, and a store where craftsmen made things by hand, with awls and leather, chisels and wood. There were restaurants, their menus taped to the windows, the ones with English translations not having to mention that everything they served was halal because any other scenario was unthinkable in any language. Facade after facade after facade—in the highest resolution of all: real life.
What he hadn’t considered were all the dead Muslims. It was like he’d wandered into a 3-D version of his handlers’ PowerPoint war porn. Knitted skullcaps lying next to actual skulls, their hair and flesh, muscles and humanity spirited off by insects, animals, and the elements. The heavy black fabric of burka-wrapped skeletons turned paisley with colorful molds and mildews. The full spectrum of Islamic women’s apparel was on display, from fully Westernized moderns to medieval, dropped where they shopped, prayed, where they hurried to get from point A to B when the whatever struck. From head scarves little different from eastern European babushkas, to something that looked like a nun’s habit, to full-body shrouds with eye slots some jerks back at school had once called “beekeeper outfits.” Marcus had begun stepping over one such outfit when he noticed the humming and realized it had become a literal hive, buzzing with wasps that hadn’t had a living human being to sting in quite some time . . .
Stepping back suddenly, he bumped into the still-living, still-very-pregnant Lucy, his hand not meaning to, but touching her bulging belly while the angry burka buzzed. And that’s when it happened; his whole world flipped. His brain cross-wired itself, and suddenly he could feel the buzzing in his fingertips, as if it were coming from the child inside. He jerked his hand away, as if stung.
“This was a bad idea,” he said.
He kept seeing his family—that was the problem. Every dead Muslim man was his father; every dead woman in hijab was his mother. In the younger dead Muslims, he saw himself. And among all that death, one new life, buzzing away inside Lucy’s womb, threatening him in some vague way.
He thought he had talked himself into being happy about being a father, but he didn’t recognize that person now. What had he been thinking? Some edited-for-TV version of parenthood, no doubt, full of bouncing knees and giggles, the tableau mysteriously preapocalyptic, as if the miracle of birth would reverse everything. But it hadn’t. Wouldn’t. And once the baby was born, there’d be scrounged diapers full of poop and crying jags and an insidious wedge being driven deeper and deeper into the two halves of himself: the one that was a son and the other that was a father—the two poised nakedly between cradle and grave.
He hadn’t seen his own father die. Instead, he’d seen a lot of other boys and men, none related to him, dying their inconsequential deaths, collected into the catch-all “them,” the vague pronoun for foreigners who’d insisted he was the foreigner. The empathy he’d prided himself on was a sham; he saw that now. He’d been like an anthropologist, studying a strange tribe, pleasantly surprised to find they weren’t, indeed, Martians, but humans who actually had thoughts and feelings he recognized. But there’d always been that us versus them in the back of his head, a longing for all the changes that would come when he and his kind were in the majority.
Had he imagined that Dearborn would be spared the global judgment of karma just because of all its Muslimy goodness? Despite his loss of faith in the aftermath of whatever, had he harbored a secret wish that his faith would be restored, rushing back when he discovered that Allah was indeed great and had spared this little island of Middle Eastern culture in the middle of the Midwest? Though it seemed ridiculous in retrospect, the way he felt now suggested that he must have been thinking something along those very lines.
But now it was all clear. He was going to die, and being a father just hastened that reality; he’d colluded in producing—reproducing
—his own replacement, Allah willing, a pallbearer at his funeral, no sooner than a hundred years from now, but inevitable nonetheless. The fuse was lit, the clock ticking, and there were no special dispensations for appending the adjective Muslim. That’s what he’d felt, touching Lucy’s belly: his own impending mortality, creeping ever closer, one full diaper, one sleepless night at a time.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said, not sure if he was just talking to Lucy or what he meant by “here.”
Moving on to Greenfield Village was also a disappointment. Lucy had imagined finding the equipment and tools necessary to reboot the Industrial Revolution. What she found were stick-for-stick reconstructions of the Wright brothers’ bicycle shop, Thomas Edison’s lab, the storage shed where Henry Ford built his first car. There was a working farm, too, but that had stopped working when the people did, and the weeds had taken over. There seemed to be lots of mills—for cider, silk, lumber, grain. They’d even reconstructed an old-timey Main Street of shops (with signs in English, thank you) and offices: a doctor’s office, a general store, a post office, a courthouse, a chapel, and a schoolhouse. All showed wear and tear, probably from a rough winter minus the tender loving care of human custodians.
Unlike Marcus, Lucy hadn’t been able to dismiss the dead white Christians all around her as members of some other tribe. The dead she’d been experiencing since this whole thing happened were as personal as they could get, starting with the one inside her at the time. Her ability to see past all the dead tourists littering this museum to what used to be was hard-won: she’d simply been saturated numb. And so she focused on what other generations of the dead had left behind, while stepping over the bodies of the latest and perhaps last one.
Happy Doomsday: A Novel Page 28