“It’s pretty self-explanatory if you ask me.”
“Well I did ask you, so let’s have it.”
“It’s all about the struggle of man, good versus evil. The body parts are those of a man, maybe mine, and the wing isn’t a bird, but an angel! Makes sense right? The horn isn’t that of an animal, but the devil.”
It did make sense. But was it too much of a coincidence? Were Kevin and I repressing something we’d actually seen? And now, as people were apt to do, were we attempting to look for reason in the horrors of what we’d witnessed? The whole thing with the angel and Jake’s transformation suddenly left a bitter taste in my mouth. Look at us morons, looking for hope in this wasteland. I reached for the pipe again, but misjudged my aim and tumbled off the chair. Kevin laughed and lapsed into stoned bliss. I never did tell him we’d shared the same dream. I needed to accumulate more information before I could put the whole picture together.
At two-thirty in the morning, I decided to call it a night. Sara followed closely behind. When we were alone, she presented me with her family Bible. I wasn’t exactly in the mood for such heavy reading just then; all I wanted was a solid night’s sleep. “Want me to read to you?”
Not really. “Sure.”
“Alright then, I’ll start with something light.” I think she read a chapter or a Psalm or some damn thing. Whatever it was, it served as my background music, the words melding together as I slipped into a deep, undisturbed slumber. If people needed hope, let them have it. Who knew how long it would last?
Chapter Fourteen
The days that followed that single shot of hope and enlightenment all passed in a gloomy sameness. There were no wandering vagabonds to feed or repel, and we stayed away from town as the acid rain continued its work on anything made of oil and metal. A short run to the neighbouring farmhouses did little for our weakened spirits. If they weren’t abandoned, they were inhabited by the dead. People I’d known my whole young life.
The big book of Sara’s kept me entertained through much of the ‘rainy season’, as we termed it. I read the whole thing, mainly out of curiosity. The most powerful story was, as Sara and Sidney had said that night at the lake, Revelations. Powerful because it was so absolute about the end of the world and a second coming. The Four Horsemen were prevalent. Nasty imagery too, not exactly difficult to conjure up when I was already faced with an ugly reality. But I imagined that at the time the Bible was written, people would have happily seen the end of the world come so they could go to paradise. It almost made me wish this ‘end’ would come. Were we in a limbo or something? It was written that when the end of the world came, man would seek death and not find it. We were not there yet, we were still hanging on to life, but perhaps that too was not far off.
The days just seemed to blend into one another. I’d lost count at day seventeen. I hadn’t even realized that so many had passed until Gil showed me the calendar he’d fashioned from an old school notebook.
“The army isn’t picking us up, are they, Joel?” he asked. I’d been asking myself the same question, but Gil looked so worried that I couldn’t bring myself to distress him further.
“I’m not counting them out yet. Listen, Gil, we can’t give up on ourselves, not ever.” Even if doubts had crept like dark shadows into my head, there was no point in letting on. Some leader that would make.
He didn’t reply, just picked the M-16 up off the floor and walked to the sliding glass door.
“Don’t know how much longer I can keep it together.” His voice was hollow. “I don’t know. The sadness, everyone’s sadness… I hear them, their cries in the night, the walls can’t contain it. I can’t listen to it anymore.” He began to jerk as emotion overwhelmed him and the tears came. “It can’t go on like this, Joel, I know I can’t.”
I joined him at the glass door and watched the darkness distort all that I loved, all that we were. It wasn’t easy to keep it together when somebody else was losing it, but I felt I had a responsibility to be strong. We stood there for God only knows how long. The sky was as the earth, muddied, wretched and dark. You could suffer a case of vertigo from staring for too long.
Standing there, remembering all that this view once offered- the beautiful vistas in the fall, the lush greens of the summer foliage, the crisp whites of winter snow- I realized that memory was all that remained of this place. In my mind’s eye I saw the sun come out and cleanly sweep over the trees and the lawn, the field and the pool; all that I knew were there, but could no longer see through the thick black rain falling hard from a bitter sky, just beyond the glass.
“Did you see it?” Never taking my eyes off the scene, I hoped the vision would return. It was so short lived. Was I shown a possible future? Or did I just fall back into memory to protect myself from the present?
“What? Did you say something, Joel?” Gil’s response was slow and hollow. He was only reacting to the sound of my voice, never relinquishing his stare into the abyss.
“Forget it,” I answered, knowing what I’d seen was nothing more than a memory.
“There’s a hole, you know?” Gil was starting to scare me. I listened as his voice took on a sobering new tone. “A huge hole...and I can’t fill it, not here, certainly not now.” He stared at himself in the blackened glass. “No one can... such a hole, nothing to fill it.” He paused, flexing his jaw muscles. “Only pain to feed it.”
“Gil, listen, man. We’re all going through the same shit here. We just have to stick together. Talk to me when you’re feeling down. Talk to someone. It’s only been seventeen days, Gil, we’ve all got cabin fever. It won’t last forever.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” He turned and headed for the basement stairs. “Thanks, Joel.”
When he disappeared from view, I headed for the family room to check the guard schedule. Anything to keep from thinking as much as Gil was.
*****
Day nineteen, or close to it. I was sitting up in Skylab with Sara, Seth, Gil, Freddy and Sidney, watching Kevin create another dark masterpiece. Sonny, Jake and Connor were on duty. Sonny was so stunned at Jake’s recovery that he would spend endless minutes just looking at him, studying him. Jake took great pride in his sobriety. He had become someone to respect.
“So, what exactly is it you’re painting there, Kev?” Fred asked.
“It seems so twisted.” Sara chewed her lower lip. “Your stuff’s so dark.”
“For me, art thrives on the dark side. The dark pieces are always stronger, don’t you find? Like memories. I bet your first memory is a bad one. Mine is. Don’t you find you remember those feelings best?” He stepped back from his canvas and felt out the perspective. “Even good feelings turned bad are more memorable than purely good feelings. Say you’re at a park and it’s a sunny afternoon. You’re loving life, sipping at your wine, sprawled out on a blanket. But then it starts to storm and your picnic is ruined. You won’t remember the sunny part, only the rain.” He brushed a line of paint on the canvas. “It’s the way we are. We can’t help but be pessimists; we recall the bad over the good. And so art should imitate life and be dark and sad: that way, as an artist I’m appealing to your most powerful memory. You don’t know why you like it, but you do.” He stopped to drink from his juice box. “But hey, maybe that’s just me!”
No. It was all of us.
*****
The anniversary of our first full month alone in the world was anything but a celebration. It wasn’t because we’d developed cabin fever or resigned ourselves to the probability that the military was not coming. No, something terrible happened that day, an event which would prove devastating to the morale of the group.
The fateful morning started the same as every other. We each got up at different hours, depending on our duty time in the addition. Connor and I were pulling an eight to four shift with John. We met at the kitchen sink, where John was pouring water for tea and coffee.
“Gentlemen, ready for your coffee?” he greeted us.
Connor yawned and coughed. We’d all been inflicted with the same nasty cough as a result of our close confinement. He took the steaming mug John held out. “Thanks, buddy. Just what the doctor ordered.”
I also accepted a cup. “Looks like we may have to hit town for some more coffee,” I said, peering into the final tin. It was barely half full.
“Don’t joke about it.” Connor lifted his face from his mug. “All work and no coffee makes Connor …”
“Alright, alright, don’t go all Jack Nicholson on our ass,” John admonished as he stirred sugar into his tea. “I bet we could find plenty of canned goods still untouched at the Super Store.”
“Well, when it becomes necessary to venture back into town we’ll go,” I stated. “But only if we absolutely have to. A tin of coffee ain’t that important.”
“It’s important,” sulked Connor.
John and I laughed, and as usual our laughter was accompanied by deep, chesty coughs. I caught my breath. “It’s not worth going into town if the rain ruins the wheels on the Caddy. Who knows when we’ll need her.”
On arriving in Skylab we met Seth, Sonny and Freddy. Their eyes looked red and tired, the result of staring blankly into the darkness for hours.
“Get me up when the rain stops,” Seth said as they passed us on the way out.
“Alright, let’s get settled, fellas. Should be an exciting morning!” My sarcasm was duly noted. I couldn’t have known or been more embarrassed on realizing just how prophetic those words would turn out to be.
Suddenly Freddy thundered upstairs and burst into our midst, eyes the size of saucers and face a ghastly shade of green. “They’re cutting him down right now,” he gasped. “It’s Gil. He did it, man. He hung himself... he’s dead. He’s dead...”
Too shocked to speak, we followed him downstairs to the basement. Seth was on his knees, bent over the motionless vessel that once housed our friend. Gil’s tongue protruded through his purple lips: he hadn’t broken his neck as planned, so he had strangled to death. The noose, which he had fashioned from a belt and attached to a rafter in the ceiling, cut deeply into his flesh. The chair that he launched himself from lay several feet away. Seth had cut him down with the fishing knife he kept on his person at all times. Gil, he didn’t want to live. He’d told me that in not so many words. But I told him to talk to me!
Damn it, Gil.
Sidney, emerging from the bathroom on the ground floor and coming downstairs to the bed he had set up in a corner of the basement was caught off guard by the gruesome sight. Freddy grabbed him and held him back. Connor and I too kept our distance.
Seth cried, blaming himself over and over again. I knelt beside him. “He did this, Seth... not you. This isn’t your fault...”
“He said stuff, you know?” Seth struggled to speak. “He said things, I should have known, I could’ve...”
He put Gil’s head down softly and raised his to the sky. “FUCK YOU!” he screamed. Then, broken, he slumped over the body. I squeezed his shoulder and stood. We left him with Gil to make his peace. Upstairs, we gave the others the grim news, preparing everyone for a funeral.
The girls wept openly. The guys shifted in their seats uncomfortably, cursing under their breath.
“Why did he hang himself, man?” Sidney asked no one in particular. “Why not use his gun? Why did he hang himself?”
“What now?” Sonny asked the question that was on everyone’s mind. “What do we do now?”
“Now we wait. We wait for Seth.” I turned to leave the kitchen. Guard duty still had to be done. Turning back, I added. “He’ll let us know what he wants done and when.”
Seth finally came up from the basement later that afternoon and asked us to help him bury Gil in the back woods, by the small creek where they’d first fished together.
“He’d have wanted to be by the water, where the fish are...”
Seth had prepared his friend’s body with almost loving care, wrapping it in cloth from head to toe and placing a fishing rod in its embrace He gave a eulogy, something stirring, powerful and yet I can’t recall a single line. I just tried to keep it together, if for no one else then for Gil.
Four of us carried Gil out the basement doors, beyond the pool that was now filthy beyond repair. We almost lost our footing on the slick muck that had once been a beautiful lawn. Our journey to the river was a short one, and once we were sheltered by the trees, the rain didn’t seem so bad. Sonny, Freddy, John and I picked up shovels and dug the grave by the river. Then Seth and Kevin lowered the body into the hot earth. A brief moment of silence fell over us until Seth gave the signal to fill in the hole. After Sara led the group in a prayer, we left.
That evening was spent in quiet contemplation as each of us mourned in our own way. Rest in peace, Gil. You will be missed.
Chapter Fifteen
The days that followed Gil’s demise were quiet and unsettling for everyone. Nobody talked much. Much as this should already have dawned on us, we suddenly started to realize our own mortality, and that was hard. We were teenagers for Christ’s sake; we shouldn’t have been worried about mortality. Even when my dad died I didn’t think about dying. With Gil it was different. He was our age. He had been young and healthy. And we had been there to witness it. Death of one of our own had finally stared us in the face.
We had to get out, or convince ourselves we could, before the gloom and fear made someone else do something stupid. With Kevin’s help, I graphed a map of the surrounding area within a ten kilometre radius. The map was then mounted on the east wall of Skylab. The point was not merely to raise our spirits by suggesting a future exodus: it was a necessary step to mark the boundaries of what we’d laid claim to and see what was out there, what was left. With the group gathered in the addition, I laid out a future plan.
“We all want out of this house, right? I know I do. I am proposing that we do it.” I pointed at the map. “Earl has had this idea from the very start and I feel that now is the time. We should begin surveying; we need to see what is out there.”
Earl took it from there. “I’ve been measuring the rainfall in a steel bucket for the last seven days and have noticed a considerable difference in the amount that fell the first day in comparison to today. In fact each day since I began the experiment, the water level has been decreasing. I think that soon it’ll stop altogether. Then we can get out and scout the terrain.”
“This is good news,” I announced. “This is what we’ve been waiting for, real proof.” I felt the group’s excitement. The morale in the room hit a new high.
“Connor’s going to pair up those that want to be in the surveying crews,” Earl continued. “We’ll likely have to arrange for additional shifts up here. You don’t have to be on an outside crew if you don’t want to.”
Everyone’s hand shot up. Connor jotted each person’s name down in his notebook, and then organized them into groups of two and three. Meeting adjourned, we each poured a drink from the bar. A guitar came out of retirement, serving as background to our excited chatter.
Seth approached me later that evening with a disturbing piece of literature salvaged from Gil’s belongings. “Don’t want to bring you down, Joel,” he began as he handed me a binder. “I only wanted you to see this, as I guess Gil had intended us all to.”
Seeing my puzzled expression, he explained. “It’s his suicide letter, you know? It’s self righteous garbage, justification, a conversation with himself.” He twisted the top off his piss-warm beer, slammed the bottle to his lips and swallowed as much as he could before he was forced to take a breath. “Talking himself into the position I found him in: hanging from the ceiling!”
“Seth, I don’t know what it was that Gil could have been thinking in order to have done what he did, and if it says why in here, I’m not going to read it. You have to believe that there wasn’t shit we could have done to prevent it, not in these conditions.” I closed the journal. “We need to remember how Gil lived, not the way he died.” With t
hat said, I returned the book to him and walked away.
*****
The following day witnessed the first of the outdoor expeditions. We’d been fighting the mental strain of the day-to-day lockdown, fading under a black sky that concealed a forgotten sun. This was our chance to get outside and beat back the malaise. That’s what killed Gil after all, and I didn’t need to read his goddamn suicide note to put it together. Stuff he thought and the things he’d seen were shared experiences amongst the group. What he did about it though, was another story.
The first crew consisted of Earl, Connor, and Sidney. We decided to send them east, to the farm where Sonny and I had found the massive drug warehouse. Their mission: to survey the surrounding area, bring back what remained of the drug stash, and report on the farm’s condition. We’d realized that the hydroponics would be perfect for growing food. The idea came to me when I was rearranging the cold room and found seed packets that never made it to the hardware store: carrots, lettuce, celery, a veritable vegetable garden!
Sonny was the navigator, naturally, Connor was at the wheel and Earl sat in the back of the five-wheeler, gun poised, always prepared, a real Boy Scout. It felt as though we were sending them to the moon or further. They were dressed in layers, each holding an umbrella to protect them from the driving rain. I wished I could go with them, but there was too much to be done here. John had the flu so I was taking over his guard shift in Skylab.
The hours that followed proved as uneventful as the many hundred hours we’d clocked in the addition. But when John announced their return, we sprang to life, rushing to meet them at the door.
Success! It took them all of two hours to return with garbage bags of the choice weed and more good news. The barn was holding its own. The interior hadn’t yet been breached, keeping the operation useable for a new kind of plant.
“The hydroponics looked good.” Sonny set his garbage bag on the hall floor. “We’ll need some fuel though. Their generator is dry.”
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