The Living

by Isaac Marion

Julie plops down onto the couch-bed and looks at the floor with puffy eyes. Her hair is the usual postmodern sculpture of crazed angles and spikes. She offers me a faint smile as I sit beside her, but it’s clear that her night was not the restful repose that mine was. Wherever she went in her dreams, part of her is still there, chasing her mother down dark alleys while the flood rises at her feet.

  “Coffee,” she croaks at the floor, then looks at Tomsen. “Please tell me you have coffee.”

  “I don’t drink coffee,” Tomsen says, but before Julie can burst into tears, she adds, “but I know a place.”

  She starts the engine.

  • • •

  As day dawns on the highway, we begin to encounter traffic. The first car behind us triggers a panic; M and Nora reach for guns we don’t have and Julie starts rattling off a plan for how to overpower the attackers when they stop us, but then the car passes with a honk and a wave and we all feel foolish. We remember that not everyone in the world is a thief, a rapist, a killer, a cannibal, or an employee of an insane corporate militia. Some people are just people, on their way to wherever, and as more and more of them pass us on this crumbling highway, cars and trucks and bikes and horses, I realize our posture toward life may need some adjustment.

  Somewhere between Baltimore and DC, we pull into a diner.

  It looks the way a diner should look. Old, ugly, clean but well-worn. A blinking neon sign makes an unbelievable claim: OPEN.

  “Is this real?” Nora wonders as we park between a boxy red camper van and a row of horses tied up saloon-style. “It’s some kind of secret base, right? A rebel front? Or are we in some suggestible universe shit?”

  Tomsen’s eyes dart over to Nora. “You’ve read The Suggestible Universe?”

  “Of course I have. Everyone was reading it back when zombies first went public. Fascinating stuff.”

  “Too bad more people don’t believe it,” Tomsen says, hopping down from the driver’s seat. “But no, we didn’t think this into being. Lynda’s Diner, established 2021, best and only breakfast in town.”

  The diner is busy yet eerily subdued. Most of the customers have a look of soggy exhaustion, and I realize these aren’t just customers, they’re refugees. Less than twenty-four hours ago, New York City sank a little deeper under the tide of inevitability, and the labor camp that called itself Manhattan vomited its population into the world. The few busloads that Axiom deemed valuable got free shipping west, to be reinstalled into the machine as soon as possible. Everyone else was left to scatter, and with all that traffic funneling through just a few remaining highways, Lynda’s will be a popular pitstop on the route of the New York diaspora.

  Lucky for us, the rush hasn’t hit yet. We have been racing nearly non-stop since the moment the hurricane passed, driven by desperate quests, and our urgency has put us ahead of the brunch crowds.

  Tomsen leads us to a booth by the window, and Julie and I squeeze in next to her on the red vinyl bench. M and Nora take the other side, but M sits near the edge, projecting none of his usual attempts at charm. Nora notices, and a curious frown hovers on her face.

  A weary, middle-aged waitress approaches the table with a notepad at the ready, just like in the movies, but instead of “What can I get you?” she asks, “What’ve you got?”

  Tomsen reaches into one of her jacket’s many pockets and pulls out two black objects: little bundles of wires encased in tape and plastic. “Signal filters,” she says. “Hook them to your walkie’s antenna, reduce jammer noise by ten percent. Limited stock, act now.”

  The waitress picks up the gadgets, eyes them skeptically, disappears into the kitchen for a minute, then returns with a look of amazement. “I just talked to my husband on the farm. Still squealy, but I can hear him. You could get rich off these things.”

  “They won’t be worth much once we destroy BABL.”

  The waitress smiles patiently. “Right. And how’s that going, ‘H. Tomsen?’ Haven’t seen you in a while.”

  Tomsen glows with the pleasure of being remembered. “I was in jail but these people helped me escape. I killed the jammer in New York, now we’re going to blow up the west coast.”

  The waitress raises an eyebrow.

  “It’s going to be beautiful.” Tomsen is bouncing in her seat like a child, and I wonder if someone should try to stop her before she gushes our plans to the whole world, but it’s coming out so fast… “You’ll be able to walkie your farm man whenever you want, tell him you love him and have radio sex, lost kids will find their families, weird people will find friends, we’re going to untie the gag so the world can talk again.”

  I glance around, but no one is listening to us. The waitress scans our faces, dirty and bruised and tired, hair matted and wild, and I realize we probably look more like delusional drug addicts than villains, heroes, or any other threat to the norm.

  “Good for you,” the waitress says with a faint smile. “So what can I get for you?”

  “Five days of food and all your fryer oil.”

  “Deal.”

  “And coffee,” Julie mumbles, staring into empty space. “All your coffee.”

  • • •

  The coffee comes first and Julie nearly dunks her face in the mug. Tomsen slides hers over to Julie, who grabs it with her free hand and holds it at the ready.

  I look down into the black well of my mug. Aromatic steam drifts up to my nose. Iridescent oils swirl on the surface. I take a sip of the inky brew, bitter and bracing, and I feel the caffeine meeting my neurons. A cautious greeting, then recognition, old friends reunited. My brain lights up like a city.

  Ten minutes later, the food comes: a classic breakfast of pancakes, eggs, bacon, and fruit, and not the thin, pale, reconstituted versions I remember from diners of the old world. Not frozen food ingots dumped out of a bucket off a ship from China. Real food, fresh from a nearby farm, thick and brimming with life.

  For the first time in weeks, I feel hungry.

  I take a bite of pancake and my eyes snap wide when the flavor hits my brain. I can taste it. It doesn’t taste like carbohydrates and proteins and the knowledge that I won’t starve; it tastes like butter and maple and rich, doughy warmth. I pop a bulging strawberry into my mouth and my tongue ignites with tangy sweetness so overwhelming my eyes roll into my head.

  “R,” Julie says with a wondering smile. “Are you…enjoying your breakfast?”

  My cheeks are too stuffed to answer, so I just nod and keep chewing. The only thing I don’t inhale with rapture is the bacon. Staring at that thick rasher of smoky meat, my mouth tingles with desire, but my mind backs away. I am not ready for that. Maybe I never will be. It’s harder to decontextualize meat when you’ve chewed it off a living, screaming body. Perhaps some parts of my humanity should be left unremembered.

  M notices my conflict and resolves it for me. Three strips of moral ambiguity disappear into his mouth.

  • • •

  There is no further conversation at our table. Food is a delightful novelty for me, but for these three women and their fully Living appetites, it’s serious. They’ve subsisted on little but Carbtein since we left the stadium—much longer, in Tomsen’s case—and despite providing all the nutrition of a proper meal, there is some aspect of human hunger which that miraculous chalk never satisfies. I can see a few patches of sunken skin on Tomsen’s neck, translucent brown like apple bruises, revealing the phantom malnutrition of a Carbtein diet, the body insisting “I’m fine!” until the very moment of death. All three of them are literally starving, and the meal proceeds accordingly. The minutes tick by in wordless chewing.

  So I settle in to wait, feeling full in a way I never have in this life, and as I gaze idly around the diner, studying faces and skimming conversations, my ears perk to the sound of an escalating debate in the booth behind me.

  “It won’t work,” says a man says
with a faint East African accent. “Maybe with a dozen people in a house, maybe a hundred in a remote compound, but once it tries to be a society, it will always implode or be crushed.”

  “And you’re so sure of this why exactly?” says another man with an Irish lilt.

  “Because history! People have been trying this kind of thing for centuries. It does not work.”

  “With all due respect to your field, love, history is overrated.”

  “Oh is it?”

  “History isn’t long enough to be an accurate predictor. It’s a statistically insignificant sample size. An idea fails a few times in a single century and that means it will always fail, no matter how much things change around it? Bollocks!”

  “Okay, but—”

  “You can’t take a handful of examples and call it universal law. Our entire recorded history amounts to a few thousand years—a nanosecond on our evolutionary timeline. We have no bloody idea what’s possible.”

  I notice the rest of our table has tuned in. Julie sits upright and cranes her neck, trying to catch a glimpse of the speakers.

  “Okay,” the other man says. “Valid point, if you want to zoom out that far. But right now? You really believe this could work right now?”

  “It’s the post-apocalypse, Geb! All the old systems are gone, the rubbish is swept out. There’s never been a better time to try something different.”

  The other man pauses. “Let’s take a poll.”

  He turns around, smiling at us over the top of the booth, and suddenly we are participants. “Excuse me. My name is Gebre and this is my husband Gael and we are having one of those windy debates about how to rebuild society. Can we get your opinion?”

  “Sure,” Nora says with an odd note of unease, perhaps fearing a repeat of the Julie-Abram conflicts.

  Julie, Tomsen, and I twist around on the bench to face our neighbors. Gebre is slim and dark-skinned with short, tufted hair and a neat goatee, dressed for the wrong decade in crisp khakis and an improbably clean blue button-up. Gael is nearly his opposite, with fair skin and shaggy blond hair, his ratty mustard t-shirt revealing tattooed strings of numbers spiraling up his forearms. He gives us an apologetic smile as Gebre launches into his “poll.”

  “So in the Old Gov days, society was a machine, yes? Each law was connected to another law leaving no empty space between them. There had to be a law for every situation, no loose parts, no gaps, because if there was a gap, someone would exploit it. You agree so far?”

  No one confirms this, but he continues.

  “We know that many people are good, but we designed the machine to assume everyone is bad. Most people wouldn’t choose to hurt others even if they were allowed to, but some would, so we had to design the machine around those ones. We couldn’t leave anything to choice. We couldn’t use soft human ethics for any of the machine’s gears. They had to be hard, made out of law and force.”

  “Which severely limited the possibilities of the design,” Gael interjects.

  “Yes,” Gebre agrees, nodding. “There aren’t many designs to choose from when they have to be this rigid. But what are you going to do?” He shrugs. “If you live underwater, all your vehicles must be submarines.”

  “See, this is where Geb and I part ways,” Gael says to our table. “He thinks people are a mindless erosive element like water, that we’re always working to break down society, so the only kinds of societies that can survive are watertight ones.”

  “No, no, no,” Gebre says. “This is not what I think, it’s what they think.” He waves a hand around the diner, taking in everyone. “What most people think. And whatever most people think becomes reality.”

  “Our idea of what ‘most people’ think hasn’t been updated in a long time.”

  “Well, this is my question for these people, isn’t it? So. You people.” He swings his hand back to our table and looks us over, taking in our haggard appearance, our bandages and scars. “You look…well traveled. You look like you’ve had your share of experience with humanity. What do you think?”

  Julie leans forward against the bench, cocking her head. “About…what, exactly?”

  “Would you want to live in a society that uses altruism and cooperation for some of its gears? A system that contains opportunities for exploitation but expects people not to choose them? A society based—at least partially—on goodness?”

  Julie thinks for a moment, but not a long one. “Hell yes.”

  Gebre hesitates. “Hell yes?”

  “Fuck yes!” Her eyes glitter. “Sure, it sounds crazy, but we’ve been using sane systems for a long time and look how that turned out. If we’re not willing take a big leap, we’re going to end up right back where the apocalypse started.”

  Tomsen raises her hand. “I say aye, concur and agree. Break stuff open and show what’s in it and make new stuff from the pieces.”

  Gebre has lost some momentum but he continues. “It would be very difficult. People would have to rely on each other—not just their own groups but everyone together. We’d have to give up some security and independence. We wouldn’t have what we had before.”

  “Fuck what we had before!”

  I smile at the half-crazed passion in Julie’s eyes. Nothing gets her revved like a windy debate, no matter where, when, or with whom. Combine it with untold quantities of caffeine and…

  “What we had before is what burned the world down. I’m ready for a whole new everything.”

  “Chairs on the ceiling,” Tomsen adds. “An otter for president.”

  Gebre looks at us for a moment, then tosses up his hands and turns back to his husband. “Well. Okay.”

  Gael erupts with laughter. “You’re out of touch with the youth, old man.”

  “I might even agree with them,” Gebre says with a shrug, “but they’re hardly representative of the general population.”

  “We might be someday,” Julie says. “Maybe sooner than you think.”

  Gebre grunts and resumes eating while Gael holds back a flood of gloating.

  “But is this a real place you’re talking about?” Julie asks the couple, all but climbing over the booth. “Is there a enclave like this out there somewhere?”

  “No, no,” Gebre says, waving dismissively. “Not a real place. Utopia means ‘no place.’”

  “It’s just an idea that’s been floating around,” Gael says. “Although I’ve heard they’re getting close in Portland.”

  “Even if it could work in theory,” Gebre sighs, “a seed this delicate could never take root while that is steamrolling the landscape.” He jabs a palm toward the TV hanging over the counter.

  I stare at the screen and my stomach sinks. The onslaught of flashing images stings my eyes, but I can’t look away. A reminder of why we’re here. Where our road leads. What we’ll face when we get there.

  There was once a nation that hated itself. It was founded on the idea that no one should need it, that each individual was his own nation and needed no alliance with neighbors, that each of the millions was separate, alone, and in competition with every other. This contradiction drove the nation insane. For the second time in its short history, the nation declared war on itself.

  So to defend this nation against the people who comprised it, its government built a machine called BABL, and every communication channel but its own disappeared into static. This slowed the government’s fall. It bought a little time. And then, after years of fire and death and unimaginable mutations of reality, the government disappeared, too.

  But like the impossible walking corpses that were rapidly replacing humanity, Old Gov’s channel shambled on after its death. It showered the ruins of the nation with a looping collage of stock images, fragmented clips, and foggy filler content, and people kept their TVs and radios tuned to this cultural compost because if they squinted hard enough, they could imagi
ne the world was still turning. Even meaningless noise was preferable to silence.

  This was the LOTUS Feed I grew up with: the jabbering ghost of a dead world, annoying but harmless.

  Times have changed.

  The ghost has become a demon, growling and spitting and fighting for possession. In between coded messages to Axiom operatives, the Feed spews dire warnings and aggressive recruitment ads, calling every able body to donate itself at the nearest branch. Zombie hordes and burning houses fade to smiling families safe behind concrete walls. Demure women clutching babies. Square-jawed men clutching guns. A surprising number of the diner’s patrons are watching this grim infomercial, but whether with interest or horror, it’s hard to tell.

  I am relieved, at least, to see no recurrences of our wanted poster in the Feed. It seems Axiom has decided we’re no longer worth the airtime, no longer a threat worth worrying about.

  Good.

  “Lies Over Truth United States,” Gebre mutters. “How is anyone going to listen to an experimental civics lecture over all that noise?”

  “They did,” Gael says, gesturing to us.

  “That’s not the acronym,” Tomsen interjects.

  “A joke,” Gebre says. “Who knows what it really means?”

  “They listened, Gebre.”

  “Old Gov never made it public,” Tomsen says, “but popular rumor is Lullaby Opiate Trauma and Urge Satisfaction.”

  “Lady Ogle,” M mumbles, “Tits and Underwear…Show.”

  “We listened, Gebre,” Julie says, cutting forcefully through all the cross-talk. “And there have to be more like us out there. And by the way”—she thrusts a hand out to our neighbors—“I’m Julie.”

  “Hello, Julie,” Gebre says, shaking it.

  “This is R, that’s Tomsen, and that’s Nora and Marcus.”

  I smile. Tomsen waves. M nods. Nora stares.

  “Pleasure to meet you,” Gael says. “Been a long time since we’ve heard any new names, hasn’t it, love?”

  Gebre nods with a whimsical smile. “These days mostly just ‘hey you.’”