by H. G. Bells
I would love, please, for those that were still able to do satellite imaging at the time to see if they caught any of these things happening in Ireland. It would be lovely to see what they looked like from the sky. But if not, I know Karachi was in the spectacular process of burning to the ground right around then: if my fires weren’t visible from space, that one sure as hell was. A time-lapse of the earth while we tore ourselves apart would be an interesting sort of forensic documentation of our last days. At least my fires were good, not destructive. I was trying to help.
It was during one of the final days, when Archie was preaching truth and awakening, seeing if he could make more people abandon the lies of the church, when he got shot. It had to happen eventually. There were enough armed parishioners that it was only a matter of time until one of them tried to put an end to his heresy.
I don’t think I could have got through it without him. He was my salvation, my god that began as real and then existed only as part of me to get me through to the end. I wonder if it had been me at the helm and not him, who would be writing this? Was I him before, or was I me?
I still have the bullet in my chest.
I took the last of my pills to be able to write this. Otherwise it would be a sheet of paper covered in drool.
It’s like—not breathing. Every moment I am awake my mind fixates on the thought of go to sleep. If I held my breath, after a minute the urge to breathe would be less than this awful feeling of deprivation. I try and think of other things, have tried to read a book, but always this thought butts in of go to sleep.
WELL I BLOODY WELL CAN’T!!! Get over it!
Can you just. leave. me. alone.
All the things I once was, who I am, or at least who I was before I became this monstrous thing, this barely-thinking, sloth thing, all those things are falling away from me now. Memories are slipping out of my grasp with each passing hour, each time my mind screams at me to go to sleep.
All my loves, the people, the hobbies, the passions which drove me to live a rich life, I can barely graze them as they fly from my grasp. Sometimes it’s violent and obvious—one minute in the middle of the night I realized I couldn’t remember my middle son’s name. I could see his face plain as day, see how his eyes would crease in laughter at a joke, more often at my expense than not, but no matter. I love him, am so very proud of him, and yet, his name is gone from me.
I have seen a plaque on my wall which bears my name, but I have no recollection of receiving it. And why was I ascribed a strange nickname on it? A middle name inserted in quotation marks, to suggest that it was a joke, and yet there too, a hole. Maddening, to feel and be aware of this slow madness as it descends upon me.
At least I am warm.
And always this strange companion—a man outside my window and sometimes at my door standing, staring, and sometimes whispering at me that I need to go to sleep. He tells me I’m going to die if I don’t sleep soon.
I know already!
And then the whistling! There’s the sound of waves crashing on a shore, but I’m a thousand miles from the coast, and sometimes the sound of heavy rain, though it’s a clear night. This great grey static noise fills up my ears, and then whistling. The man at the door.
There have been bells a few times, pleasant, deep chimes, and I’ve gone out to see where they were coming from. But everywhere I went, they were always that much further away. I can never catch them, so I think they must be like the waves and the rain—a product of my hallucinating brain.
I did ask the man at the door once, through the mail slot, if he could hear the bells. He only laughed and said that I needed to go to sleep.
And then there’re some things in the room that I’m not sure are real. For instance this nice chair I’m sitting in, surely it, in essence, is real, because I am sitting in it. But there are jewels studded all along the arms and legs of it, and I’m not sure that it was like that before. They catch the candlelight sometimes and the glittering of them is quite harsh and bright, enough to make me look away.
I have a candle that wobbles back and forth like a belly dancer. She has a bead of wax for her belly button, and a tapered form which is strangely sultry. For a candle, I mean. Only when she is unlit though; I lit her once to see what would happen, and it stopped its dance. So I haven’t lit her since. I’ve put her on the side table, next to this chair with its pretend jewels, and sometimes I watch her dance. Sometimes the bells strike a rhythm so it looks like they are either keeping time, or she is dancing to match their pace.
And at my feet, the ottoman raises one of its legs up like a dog and appears to urinate on the carpet. I’m pretty sure that’s also not real. It shuddered once, when I put my feet up on it. And I apologized to it.
So my brain is inventing things, inserting new reality into my surroundings.
Before it got this bad, I set myself up rather well; all around me, the room walls are lined with canned food. When I am hungry, I have only to get up from this seat, being careful not to look at the chair if it’s doing its blind-me-with-jewels routine, and take six steps away, so I am at the wall. I have seven can openers, or it might be eight I can’t remember now, but they are all easy to see.
One of them spins all on its own, even when I’m not touching it, it spins. It woke me up once. But I wasn’t sleeping, so that can’t be right. It . . . it maybe broke my concentration, which felt like waking from sleep. It’s not an automatic can opener. I don’t know what’s different about that particular one that made my brain decide that it would be the one to hallucinate moving on its own. It’s just a plain can opener with olive green handles. And it spins on its own.
The man at the door has asked for some of the food.
He knows I have a gun.
He has also asked for a bullet. But I can’t do that. There are a myriad of ways to do away with oneself in this catastrophe, I shall not be charitable and help him take the easy way out when he is still able to do it himself. Lazy ass.
The tin of pears I just ate was black, and tasted of motor oil. But I was sure that, when I put all the food against the walls, I was still able to read, and I could tell that it was all food I was putting there.
And yet now this taste of gross motor oil, of ash, of dirt, is in my mouth. I just looked at the empty tin, and there was only some clear pear juice left in it, just a few drops, but it wasn’t black, as it looked before.
The man at the door is yelling now, screaming at me. He can hear the bells too.
The rain falls heavy outside, but this time I can’t hear it—only see. And I went outside to put my hand in it, to see if it was real, and it stung my hand.
My skin is bubbling.
I cannot tell if it’s real. The pain is quite real, but after these weeks of fighting go to sleep, it is not so hard to ignore pain. Nor to invent pain where there is none.
I’m fairly sure it’s real now—my skin is sloughing off, and the blood is flowing from a few places.
So something in the air is killing me.
The man at the door tells me to go to sleep.
I ask him if he still wants me to shoot him. He says no. I might do it anyway; if I can muster the strength to open the door and see what he looks like—if he looks as terrible as I suspect I do, with these sores and skin peeling, and now my fingernails feel loose—then I shall help him.
I opened the door, but outside was only a mirror. The man there did look like me, and had terrible wounds, and a tooth missing, gums bleeding.
I will shoot him now.
PART 4
DEATH
Turn off your lights or I will shoot you in the fucking head!
—Fliers pasted up in Syracuse, New York, United States
Hopefully I can give you a bit of an info dump without it coming out like a pile of shit.
But really, it’s about damn time you learned a thing or two about the power grid, isn’t it? I mean, we probably saved more lives by keeping it on than . . . Ah well, whatever man. Ju
st, I’ll keep the civil engineering lesson short, okay?
There’s three major power grids in North America, Texas not included. Texas has their own, because Texas. I was at the helm of the Northeast Power Coordinating Council, part of the Eastern Interconnection, which sucked power out of Canadian damns and pumped water into the Hudson Bay. We were responsible for getting hydroelectricity to seven states, New York being the most populous, and five provinces, Ontario and Québec included.
All told, I was in charge of keeping the lights on for over sixty million people.
Right off the bat we had it lucky. Anyone that relied on coal for their power grid got the big ol’ F.U. of the dark ages within a few days. Coal took a lot of intervention. Coal had to be constantly dumped into those plants, a steady stream of people working, all the way from pulling it out of the ground to getting it into the damn burners. You just can’t keep a system like that going when the world starts to end. Most of the United States relied on coal.
Can we use emoticons? Will you edit them out? Frowny face frowny face frowny face.
Despite a lot of industries putting on airs to switching over to renewable fuel sources, it was nowhere near where it should have been. I mean it’s a laugh really; the last year that BP existed, it spent more money advertising that it was going green, than it did actually going green.
So most of the people in charge of keeping the lights on were doomed from the start. They tried, I know they tried. There were lots of people who didn’t just fuck off, people who didn’t need the government to mandate that they stay the fuck at work. They knew that keeping the power on was the most important thing. Some might argue with me, but they’re wrong. What good are any of the other services they’d put before power, without power?
Electricity was the name of the game, and like I said, right off the bat, we were lucky.
Someday, the world is going to come for Canada’s water. I don’t blame them. We have more than our fair share of it, I think. But when it came down to it, we were able to keep the power running for an impressive percentage of our country, and seven states, because we used hydro power.
The places around the globe that used solar and wind fared even better than us, I imagine. They need even less intervention to keep things going. There are a lot of tidal power units, even more than before, and they couldn’t care less about people doing whatever.
The only hitch in the system, every system, not just those of us putting a harness on whatever river we wanted, was that we weren’t talking about normal power use. Before, we’d have our peaks and valleys, highs and lows of power consumption throughout the day. . . . But these were created from the constant cycle of waking and sleeping. Once people were awake all the time, once the night pressed in around them, and especially once the curfew started getting serious, the demand for electricity went through the roof.
It was not even a week into it, just five days of not sleeping, five days of people slowly dropping out of their jobs, abandoning their posts, when I calculated how long we’d be able to keep the power on for two-thirds of the country’s population. Sorry to the rest of them—we had to focus on helping the most people we could, so that was my grid. I know the west managed something similar, but god help us we failed the vast expanse of central Canada. All our farmers, all our small town people—well, I’m truly sorry. Some of them kept the lights on, for sure, but mostly they just didn’t have enough people with the expertise to keep the grid working. What small town can boast an excess of power grid technicians, when even before they’d had to import them in on a for-lend basis? If they were lucky, they had enough to get the system set up to last them as long as . . . well. We didn’t know.
But like I said, I ran the grid which fed off of the dams that led into the mighty Hudson Bay. We worked against nature—capturing runoff water during the melt and storing it in the summer and letting it flow back out into the bay to power the turbines in the winter, effectively reversing the freeze-melt cycle of the largest freshwater system on earth. We were wreaking havoc on the North Atlantic and the whole of the Arctic Current, and thus, the whole earth’s ocean currents.
Sorry ‘bout that.
No one said it was perfect.
But hey, we could keep it running even on minimal staff. I made a plan to keep it going as long as possible, but we’d need the public on board. I chaired the meeting to lay out my timeline and my projections, and I think it was the meeting that saved the grid.
And because we controlled the water, we controlled the power. There was fear that the military would roll in and throw a wrench in our works, but we hoped to keep the juice going to Uncle Sam as well as us Canucks.
We could have cut them off, could have made it real easy on ourselves . . . Whatever we did, we tried to do the best for as many people as we could, border be damned.
God, I bet there’s a ton of that to hear about, from those times. Sacrificing the needs of the few so the needs of the many could be met? Well I think we made the right choice. You can decide for yourself I guess . . .
There were a few empty seats in our shiny board room, white walls with recessed lighting along the ceiling. The window wall looked out from the second story over the lobby of the hydro building, increasingly sparse staff scuttling to and fro as best they could. This was the building where all the bureaucracy happened, quite removed from the operations of the dams and river turbines that fed it the juice.
“Where’s Bill?” I asked.
“Had to help with his kids,” said one of the guys from PR. I nodded. You can’t make people work. Some people came in to serve the grid even when they had other things that maybe they needed to be taking care of, like family. A lot of sacrifices were made. But they had to be the one to make that call. Mandates don’t mean shit in the wake of the personal tragedies people were beginning to go through.
“We need a slogan, something that pops and that people can remember and repeat. Loose lips sink ships, you know,” I told them. My brain was starting to get that fog all over it. Like looking through one of those old telescopes a ship’s captain might use to scan the horizon—grit around the edges, the glass perhaps a little warped along one side, and held with the shaky hands of someone whose teeth are loosening and whose men are thinking mutinous thoughts.
“What we want to get across is that the longer we can conserve power, the longer we’ll have it,” said one of my engineers. My first mate. My navigator. Her fingers shook as she ran them through her hair, which was caught in a collar button; she fumbled with it to untangle her hair, and ended up tossing away a piece of knotted locks, ends squiggly from where she’d pulled them from the offending knot.
“Loose lips sink ships,” I repeated, as though it would clarify everything.
“How do we tell people to live in the dark?” answered one of the public liaisons. “Watching television is the only thing keeping them from rioting,” she added, disregarding the massive riots that had already happened despite the power holding steady.
“Look,” said the PR guy, “we cut the power. We keep it off for a day. We let them see what it will be like when it goes out. Then we tell them, Hey, we figured out a way to keep it on, but you have to follow our instructions to the letter, or it won’t work.”
“What instructions?” said another engineer. “There’s no way we can keep up with this demand. Lights on in every city, all night! Televisions going, heaters going, goddamn video games going, twenty-four hours a goddamn day!” Mutiny stalking around, barely below the surface, a fin breaching here and there.
“I’ve got a plan,” I said, my hands shushing at him in what I hoped was a gentle way. “I’ve worked out a sensible schedule that I think most people would think is fair. Each household basically gets one light on for twelve hours a day, one television on for eight, and the regular usage for appliances and hot water.”
“They’ll never do it voluntarily,” said the engineer with a frown.
“That’s why we cut the power,�
� said the PR guy. “We need the message to hit home. We need them to see what it will be like if they don’t do what we say.” PR guy, an unlikely hired gun. But he knew, maybe more than most—he’d been in the control room with me, been there when we saw how fast it’d be going dark. He had kids at home.
“It’s cruel.”
“It’s effective,” he countered.
“The lights go out. And when the power comes back on, we still need a message. We need a concrete plan and we need to follow through with it. And we might need to set an example of someone that doesn’t follow the plan.”
“We could encourage people to report those in noncompliance,” said another engineer.
“And turn neighbor against neighbor? Everyone scrutinizing each other’s power use? The Johnson’s light is on again dear, won’t you go and say something?”
“And why shouldn’t they say something!” shouted the increasingly irate engineer. “People are going to start dying when the power goes out! It’s going to get bloody cold. We’re going to go out in the dark, huddled around a candle as the only thing to see us through the death in the night!”
“There’s even another question: can we tell people to use candles? There have been an awful lot of fires already; people just aren’t paying attention like they should be, and a knocked over flame could be a disaster.”
“Less homes to power. If everyone didn’t live in their own home, if we could get them to double up, triple up, maybe have one house on the block with power or something—”
“Jesus, man, that would never fly.” PR guy was going too far. The fins were breaching the surface further and further, the water beginning to roil with discontent.
“Look,” I said loudly to regain the decorum of the meeting, “we go with my timeline. It lets people have the most power for the most time, in their own homes. As long as our automation works as we’ve told it to. First, we cut the power,” I said with a nod of deference to the PR guy, “and when it comes back, the TV has every channel on a message from the government, both governments, telling them how it’s going to be. We need a slogan, and then we need people to follow the plan.”