It felt like an eternity since that Christmas, even though it had only been twelve months. It had indeed been the twelve longest months of my life. The loneliness and struggle. The boredom. The lack of contact, save the Labrador. It was starting to wear on me. I thought about everything I wasn’t going to go through this Christmas and I spiraled into a deep depression.
I think some of the depression had to do with the lack of daylight. The days were short and the nights were long, dreadfully long. The sun was behind the horizon before I knew it every day. I spent more and more time in my bed. It felt like my body was adjusting to a solar schedule instead of being a slave for a clock. About an hour after the sun went down, my body would decide it was time for bed. I would collapse into the covers and wrap myself in them like a mummy. Rowdy continued his vigils on the floor by hearth, draped in the warmth of the fire. Occasionally, he would wake me at some point in the middle of the night and need to be let out into the snow for a few moments to answer nature’s call, but he and I both spent the majority of the nights asleep. There was nothing else to do.
I would wake with the dawn. The morning light became too bright for me to sleep through. Me, who used to be able to sleep until noon with a sunbeam in my face, was now being roused the second there was enough light in the sky to show the landscape beyond the windows. If it was sunny, I might force myself to go out and do something, but if it was gray and threatening snow I would cocoon myself in front of the fire and try to read. Most of the time I couldn’t hold thoughts in my head long enough to process a page. I would get frustrated of starting and restarting the same page countless times. Even going back to my favorite books like Pratchett, Christopher Moore, Laura Ingalls Wilder, or Dragonlance novels, didn’t help.
I began to be plagued by thoughts of everything I’d never have: a college education, a family, children, a house in the suburbs and a job that I tolerated, or maybe even enjoyed. I would never get to take my kids to Six Flags in Illinois and ride the wooden roller coaster with them like my dad did with me. I would never be a Little League coach or sit on the sidelines for youth soccer games. I would never watch football again on Sundays. I would never kiss Emily again. There was a better than average chance that I would never kiss anyone again. I would never have sex. (Em and I had done a fair amount in our messing around, but hadn’t crossed that bridge.) My list of I Would Nevers… became miles long in my head. That was enough to send me into another grief spiral.
I ate very little for a while around that time. I’d already lost a bit of weight due to eating small meals only once or twice a day combined with my activity to prepare for winter, but when I was in that grief cloud, I stopped eating all together. I didn’t feed Rowdy unless he reminded me he needed to be fed. I just sat or slept and became useless. It was like when my parents died and I waited for the Flu to claim me. I wasn’t living, I just was. I was existing. I was a mistake that nature couldn’t cleanse.
I would be lying if I said that suicide didn’t come back into my head. I had the guns. I could have done it and it would have been really easy to do, too. One squeeze, and pop! It would all be over. No more crying. No more feeling numb. No more thinking about everything I would never do. Just sweet, sweet darkness.
I can’t honestly tell you why I didn’t just do it, by the way--kill myself, I mean. Part of it might have been Hamlet’s quandary; I feared what might come next. Part of it was stubbornness; if the disease couldn’t take me, then maybe I was meant to be here. Part of it might have been respect for those who passed; maybe I was meant to live because those who died no longer could. I don’t know for certain, though. One dark night, I was sitting on the edge of my bed, my comforter draped over my shoulders and head like cloak, and I was just staring at that semi-auto on the chair next to the bed. It would have been so easy. But, I just didn’t. Eventually, I fell asleep and woke up the next day. The sun was a rosy pink in the sky and even though the world beyond the windows looked frigid and pale, it was still the world beyond the windows and it was waiting.
I suffered many mental torments that winter. I started to think that maybe I had already died. Maybe I’d died during the Flu and this was my version of the Afterlife. It wasn’t Heaven, and it wasn’t Hell. Maybe it was a weird sort of Limbo or Purgatory. I thought about the smell of the dead that Fall, though. And I thought about cutting open my hand. The scar was still there. If it was the Afterlife, wouldn’t I be free of blood and scars? Or maybe that was just part of my Afterlife. I couldn’t tell anymore. Reality became a tenuous concept, at best.
I heard voices occasionally, too. I started to think that maybe I was developing schizophrenia. I remembered from a psychology class I took that schizophrenia could develop in young men around 18 to 22 years of age. I started worrying that I might be one of them. That would be all I needed: to face the apocalypse with voices in my head.
The voices weren’t random though, and they were all voices I recognized. I’d hear my mother calling to me as she used to do when dinner was ready. I’d hear my dad asking a question, never a specific question, and never with words I recognized, just the muffled Charlie Brown teacher-esque quality of his voice. Waa-whaa-waa-waaa…
I heard Em, too. And some of my classmates like Hunter and James. And some of my neighbors. They were all voices of people I missed, people I knew had died. It was like my brain was trying to make me remember them and in the stillness of the library, it could somehow tap into the nerves in my ears and make me hear them again.
I thought about trying to do something that might exorcise those voices. I thought about maybe putting up a Christmas tree for myself, but it felt like too much work. I thought about going back to my old neighborhood and digging up some old home DVDs and playing them on a TV here, hooked to the generator for power, but I didn’t. I eventually broke down and watched a couple of the DVDs in the library, exhausting some generator juice to do so. It was comforting. I hadn’t watched TV since before the grids went dark. It was fun to see The Princess Bride again, although the sheer emotion of it, both real and imagined in my mind, made me weep like a little girl. When Inigo goes after Count Rugen--tears. When Fezzik shows up with the horses at the end--more tears. When Fred Savage asks Peter Falk to come back and read the book again the next day, and Peter--in the best line in the whole movie--says, 'As you wish'--I was bawling. I had to watch Airplane! just to get the emotions out of my mind. I felt guilty wasting the gas just to watch some movies, but it was fun and it distracted me from the sadness for a bit.
I started reading books about mental health during the days. I tried everything from medical books to pop-psychology self-help books. I started to do push-ups and sit-ups every morning because most of them said that a lot of exercise helped improve a person’s outlook. I forced myself to gear up and take Rowdy outside for long walks every day, except when it was brutally cold. I always took one of the shotguns with me, though. I know that the dog packs were around town, and while I didn’t think I was in too much danger, it was still comforting to have the weight of a Remington slung across my back.
I tried to read uplifting books. I read some of those Chicken Soup for the Soul books. I read some books I’d loved as a child. I read comics where the superheroes always defeat the bad guy at the end. I read biographies of people who had amazing lives, and people who overcame tremendous adversity. I tried to find solace wherever I could get it.
I’d like to say it helped, but it only kept me from completely losing my mind. It didn’t help; it just kept me plateaued.
CHAPTER TEN
The Dead of Winter
January’s brutality was typical. I went to bed one night and it was cold, and I awoke the next morning and it was freezing. Really freezing. The thermometer that I put outside the window was somewhere around negative thirty. The fire I’d had going the night before had burned to cinders and the low, red glow was no competition for the powerful creep of the cold. Even Rowdy had found more comfort by jumping into bed with me and tunnel
ing under the covers. The big Lab’s body helped to heat my bed, so I wasn’t complaining. When I exhaled, I could see my breath. There was frost on the glass around the library. The very thought of throwing back my covers to get out of bed terrified me.
I hate being cold.
I steeled myself to the fact that getting out of bed was going to hurt, and I tossed back the covers. The cold bit into every warm part of me like piranhas. It burned my body and my face. I contemplated just pulling the covers back and never leaving that bed, but I knew I had to heat the annex or the water would be in danger of freezing.
I rushed to the fire and stirred the embers to get them red. I fed the few logs I had stacked next to the fire from the night before into the embers and blew gently to get them to get the coals to light them. It took a minor eternity, but the well-fed fire eventually roared into a crackling hearth full of flames and the warmth radiated out from it in glorious, life-saving waves.
I checked the water. Some of the bottles had ice in them, but luckily none of them cracked. It had been dangerously cold. During cold snaps like this, I was going to have to sleep in shorter bursts so that I could remember to feed the fire. I needed to maintain a decent temperature in the annex for my own comfort and to keep the water from freezing.
During the cold snaps, there wasn’t much to be done. I dressed in my thermal undies, jeans, wool hunting socks, and sweatshirt and sat near the fire with the dog. I had the thermal gear handy if I needed to go outside, but the very thought of leaving that heated room to venture into the Hoth that awaited me beyond the library made me shudder. Why bother? The fire was warm. The dog was happy. Other than those horrible moments where he or I needed to heed the call of nature, we were comfortable. Let me tell you--leaving the warm annex to run through the freezing library to slap my butt on a frozen toilet seat was about the least amount of fun a person could have. I don’t know who invented central heat, but if he or she doesn’t have a Nobel Prize, I am going to posthumously award him or her one.
I continued to read a lot of books. Mysteries, literary fiction, contemporary self-help, graphic novels. I was making my way through the library’s stacks. I had barely scratched the surface of everything the library held, though. There were miles of books, I realized. More books than I might be able to read in a lifetime.
In my darker moments, I wondered why I was even bothering to read these books. It wasn’t like they were helping me to be a better person. Usually when you judge people to be the better man, you have to compare them to someone else. At that moment, as far as I knew, I was the smartest man alive. I was also the handsomest man, the most ripped, and the funniest person on the planet. All of these things helped me not iota. I was still alone and the books were just time killers to alleviate the boredom of waiting for Spring so I could go back out and continue to desperately seek out other survivors. I was gaining knowledge of cultures and situations that were no longer relevant. I read a book about sex. Why? It wasn’t like I had some redhead with perky boobs desperate to jump me. I read a book about the Civil War. Why? I doubted if there was enough people still alive in the US to continue to give two flying figs about skin color. I read a mystery novel. Why? If something happened in the library, it was either me or the dog. I didn’t have to stretch my brain too far to solve the Mystery of the Horribly Stinky Air. (Here’s a hint: It was almost always Rowdy.) Sometimes, those frustrations would bubble to the surface and I’d throw the book across the room and sit sullenly in my chair, staring into the flames. Inevitably, I would rouse myself from that childishness, and I would crack open a new book.
I awoke during that first cold snap to a strange noise one night. The thermometer was well below zero. I couldn’t place the noise that was coming from somewhere in the library. It was a strained gurgling, a groaning. I got out of bed, fed a couple more logs to the fire, and slipped my feet into my boots. Rowdy was inspired to join me, as the sound had intrigued him. I slipped into my parka and put the revolver in the pocket for security, even though I knew it likely wasn’t something I would need to fight. It just felt better to have it as an option if I needed it. I used a flashlight to light my way through the darkened library and listened for more of the noise. It was intermittent, but enough to be worrisome.
Approaching the bathroom, it was clear that the noise was coming from there. I checked the men’s room first and heard nothing. The ladies’ room however, was the source. It only took me a moment to realize that the cold was doing something to the pipes. It might be frozen water in the lines. It might be the ground swelling and constricting pipes. Either way, it wasn’t good.
I went into panic mode, mainly because if the pipes failed, I was going to have to start doing my business outside, or in chamber pots. I had no desire to cart my own waste outside a few times a day after I dropped it in a five-gallon bucket. I’d cursed the cold bathroom often. It was freezing in there whenever I went in to take care of business, but at least I could flush it away by adding water to the bowl. I wasn’t completely living in the Laura Ingalls Wilder ages. The men’s room was quiet because it was getting some use a couple of times a day. The women’s room had only been my shower. I hadn’t flushed any of the toilets in there for months. I didn’t know how much difference that was making in the pipes, but apparently it was.
I had to hurry back to the annex to dress, and then I spent the next several hours hauling in snow in as many containers as I could. I started heating snow in all the large pots I had. I even put snow in empty 20-gallon Rubbermaid containers and pushed them close enough to the fireplace to melt the snow, but not the plastic. As soon as I had some water heated to seventy or eighty degrees, I would pour it into a five-gallon bucket and cart that into the ladies’ room, pouring it into different bowls and flushing. The groaning noises intensified at first, but after a few hours of doing this in both bathrooms, it relented and fell silent.
After that night, I spent at least an hour every day heating snow and flushing it to keep the pipes right. It was a stop-gap measure; I just needed them to last until spring. Once spring came, I could figure out another method. I could develop another plan.
The cold snap ended one day, as they usually do. I watched the thermometer dial climb to twenty above zero over the course of a morning. It seems silly to think that twenty above zero (which is still twelve degrees below freezing, mind you) could be considered a heat wave, but when you’ve lived in Wisconsin long enough, you start to realize that twenty above zero ain’t so bad. I needed to get out of the library for my own mental health, and I knew that Rowdy could use the exercise, too. We geared up and set out to get some walking done.
I carried the shotgun across my back, just in case. I had never seen one of the dog packs that I knew were lurking around, and I had no idea of knowing how they would act when they saw me, but I knew that three-quarters of a year spent hunting for their survival might have changed them. I had seen evidence of more mutilated deer and even a few sheep that had been taken down and turned into a meal by a pack. I know that the cold might have settled the dogs, or it might have gotten them hungry. Either way, I wasn’t taking chances. Rowdy was my early-warning system, regardless. His ears and nose would tell me if I had cause for alarm. He wasn’t shy about whining and being cowardly, either. If something bugged him, he let me know in his own way. He would give a high-pitched whine and dance away from me, or he would start to run back toward the library, toward safety, and then stop, waiting for me to join him.
It was strangely warm that day, even for twelve below freezing. I always found becoming the gradual acceptance of winter by the body to be strange. When Fall arrives and that temperature starts dropping below sixty, the body--which is used to temperatures in excess of seventy or better--finds those temps chilly and sends us all running for jackets and pullovers. In mid-March, kids would shed jackets and sweatshirts at forty-five degrees proclaiming the weather to be boiling out, and much too warm for jackets. The first month and change of really cold temperatures
acclimatized me well, for twenty degrees felt downright balmy. It still stung my face a bit, but it was an acceptable burn. My patchy beard held most of the cold at bay so I didn’t even need a facemask.
Rowdy and I walked to Walmart, only a few blocks west of the library. I didn’t need anything in particular, but I wanted to see how the building was holding up in the cold. When I walked through the doors, which were still smashed from the looting before everything went quiet, Rowdy went on alert. I could see it from the change in his demeanor. His ears perked, his body went tight. He began sniffing the ground. Given he wasn’t whining and asking to go home, I felt safe in thinking that his alert was probably small animals like raccoons or possums.
I had to use a flashlight to illuminate the cavernous warehouse interior. As the beam passed over some shelves, critters scattered. Rowdy barked and gave chase, but the raccoons, who had been living off the ample stores of chips and boxed food on the shelves, simply crawled underneath racks or up to high shelves and scolded us with hisses.
I could see that anything still on the shelves that had water in them had either swelled and distorted the cans, or simply broken their jars. Even the salted goods, which could stand some cold, had frozen during the last blast. More food for the critters, I guess.
Snow had drifted in from the doors and pooled in crescents near the entry. These were marked with animal tracks, including some dog tracks from some larger-than-average dogs, probably Pits. I don’t know what it is about Pit Bulls, but they were prevalent in Sun Prairie. I have nothing against the breed, mind you. I’m not one of those people who was out to ban a dog simply because of some situations that went down when some moron who probably shouldn’t have owned a dog in the first place failed to train his dog. I know that it’s the handler, not the dog. However, there were a lot of morons in this town, and a lot of those morons liked Pit Bulls.
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