March 11-15: Last (so far)

A compilation of the story as of March 15.

Etching 33

I write to you, though I know you do not exist. I suppose it is boredom that compels me to write. Boredom and meaningless obligation.

Writing has no utility now. Utility no longer exists as a practical reality, except perhaps for cockroaches or something else more resilient than humans, but I haven’t seen any of them either. Perhaps I am not just the last of a species. Perhaps I am the last of the things that can be categorized into species. Utility is now a concept, not a truth.

Writing has no meaning without a reader and I will have none now. Neither reader nor meaning. So, instead I am bored and will write for the empty air, the streets and structures that will disintegrate, the river that will carry the asphalt away with the remnants of my history.

Because it now is my history. Mine alone. It belongs to no one but me. Countless souls emerging over countless years, countless conflicts and loves, countless boring days and exhilarating adventures, all leading to this. My pen and my paper. My history.

My memoir is the last history.

Or not. Maybe it is your history, non-existent Earth-companion. I also write for you, Survivor, Reader. I can conceive of you even if I know you never will be. And that conception at least relieves the boredom. But it offers no utility.

When you—who do not exist—find my notebook, will the walls of this warehouse still stand? I have found a metal desk in a room. The room was once undoubtedly the office of the manager of some business that existed here. I pushed it out to the open floor, where people labored, because I choose to spend what time remains laboring. The desk looks stronger than the walls of the warehouse.

I sit at the desk now, and I will leave the notebook in the drawer when I am not writing. If the walls of this warehouse collapse before you stumble upon my desk, You Who Do Not Exist, I hope this notebook remains protected in the drawer. It might not survive, but believing it will provides me with something to hope for.

I hope for your existence and my notebook’s survival. These are concepts, not truths, but that has always been the nature of hope, even when it was prevalent and common. When people used the words “progress” and “tomorrow” unironically.

I have imagined utility as a solution to boredom. As it always was.

***

The warehouse I’m sitting in was once home to dozens of survivors. Time took some from me. The world took others. Our resources were limited, so we established a process by which small contingents, volunteers at first, ventured into town or into the fields beyond the industrial park to loot or forage, depending on which direction they walked.

At first, we sent only one group at a time, 3 or 4 people. Volunteers were either noble or desperate. It’s a matter of perspective. Some, I suspect, were deluded about their roles in the greater group. Walter Grindholm was one of those people. I disliked him, a perspective I now feel guilty about, as after 5 relatively successful expeditions, his sixth never returned. There were 4 people in his group, total, though to observe them was to conclude he considered the other 3 to be expendable.

That’s my perspective. It’s the only perspective left, so I suppose it must be correct. When other people existed, they might have disagreed with me. But there are no other people, so my opinion stands. Still, I am open to the possibility that I was wrong, that his demeanor was a product of his efficiency, strategy, or some kind of brilliance I didn’t perceive.

It doesn’t matter. He didn’t come back and there is no one to argue with about it. So history shall reflect that Walter Grindholm was an asshole. It doesn’t mean he deserved whatever happened to him on that sixth expedition into the city.

Reader-Who-Doesn’t-Exist, I’m mentioning this just so you know I am aware that I am inadequate. I am sometimes inadequately understanding of people like Walter Grindholm. I am inadequate to the task of history.

But my view is all that matters now, so we need to put that on the table and move on. A planet of 1 is not a democracy.

Walter Grindholm’s sixth expedition was just over a year ago. I should start setting timelines and terms, contexts and conditions.

I know it was over a year ago that I last saw Walter because we started keeping track of sunrises. When our little warehouse community started cohering a bit, Evelyn Forrester began marking each sunrise by scratching a line on an interior wall. It became our imperfect but clarifying version of a calendar. Imperfect because we did not know the date when Evelyn took the broken concrete block and etched her first line in the wall. Clarifying because it allowed us to restart the counting of history.

Evelyn’s first etching simply became “1.” Evelyn died 32 etchings ago. I know because I scratched a new line the day after I buried her, and I’ve scratched a new sunrise every day since.

Even with everything that has happened, I still know how many days are in a year, and Walter’s group has been gone for 387 etchings.

I hate that I hated him. Evelyn I loved.

The expeditions were crucial to our community, which we never named. People who arrived at the warehouse often had some supplies with them, food, weapons, tools, but were often hesitant to share. That resistance was certainly understandable, so we needed communal resources. A few people were capable hunters, some had medical knowledge, a handful had mechanical skills, but our confines were, well, confining. We had to venture forth to gather what we could.

The warehouse seemed protected, though that was probably always a foolish assumption. What it did provide, though, was borders. A defined community. A shared location in which to re-establish something that might approximate a society.

It worked for a while. Societies are temporary, though. I don’t think I ever even considered that while the society into which I was born existed. I thought about it a lot as we constructed a new one.

Our new society had both Walters and Evelyns.

***

Etching 34

There is a big, broken sign outside of the warehouse. It fell from its intended location at some point during the turmoil and now sits broken in front of what was once the main entrance to this building. It is made of wood. It is enormous. It is heavy.

It lies face-down on the shattered asphalt of what was once a parking lot. When the first small group of survivors, myself included, came upon this giant, rectangular shelter and decided it was as good a place to hunker down as any other, we attempted to flip the sign over. It seemed important to know what this place was in its previous iteration. The heft of the thing proved too great. We could not reveal the text of the identity-marker.

Inside, of course, hints of the building’s purpose emerged, followed by confirmation in the form of letterheads and various plaques and paperweights expressing corporate appreciation. But the big sign, the external notification of the warehouse’s identity, remains obscured, broken, no longer signifying anything, just present. I was tempted to propose naming our little community after the building’s previous moniker, but the logos and acronyms, the job titles and anniversary signs on desks, felt too small to adapt to our group. Our collective remained nameless.

Our initial group included Evelyn—a former teacher I met while rummaging through dumpsters in an alley in town—Jeremy and Fred—a father and his 12 year-old son who had constructed a lean-to next the highway out of town, and Haley—a 20-something woman whom I was shocked had survived so long.

Haley wasn’t stupid. She was just disinterested. She hadn’t processed the changed reality, so she always appeared to be in a state of confusion. Shock, I suppose.

I am evaluating Haley, now, just as I did with Walter. I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t do that. I need to record the facts, just the facts. For history.

You don’t exist, though, Reader, so I am struggling to understand my obligations. I will try to do better.

***

Evelyn and I had been traveling together for a few days before we came upon Haley. She was sitting on a park bench staring at nothing in particular. Her gaze pointed limply toward the vacant buildings on the other side of the park, as if her glance had a vague intention of pulling her toward shelter but lacked the requisite ambition. As a result, the young woman sat in a strange stasis, her eyes registering reality but failing to operationalize it. The world was occurring without her participation.

I would have kept walking right past Haley. She was hardly the only broken person I had seen in the previous days, and sentimentality and compassion needed to be rationed. Evelyn and I had elected to go east, scavenging and looting as we made our way through empty streets and broken storefronts. Our objective had been to reach the highway and travel south toward what once was considered the Big City. It would take us days on the highway to reach our destination, where we hoped resources would be more plentiful, but at least we would know where we were. Much had changed, but we could still be confident in the interstate’s location and that it would lead to the city it had always led to.

I would have kept walking, but Evelyn wouldn’t have it. She went straight to the rickety, wood picnic table and sat directly across from Haley.

“Are you okay, dear?” she asked.

Haley did not respond, nor did her gaze change, despite Evelyn’s head now blocking whatever it had been directed toward before.

I remained standing, hoping Evelyn would be quick. I had come to prefer standing near buildings. Their brick solidity felt protective. I wasn’t looking forward to the open highway in my near future, so I definitely didn’t need the precursor of an open park. The trees weren’t as comforting as the broken yet human-built shells of commerce and residence.

Evelyn sat for an uncomfortably long time, just staring into the young woman’s vacant eyes. I distracted myself by listening to the crunchy rustle of the few leaves that remained on the trees. The wind was still blowing.

Eventually, Haley made a sound. “Can you take me home?”

“Yes,” Evelyn lied. “Come with us.”

So Haley did as instructed, joining us on our eastward trek. Her company was welcome, despite my initial hesitancy. She didn’t speak much or, frankly, help much, but more people was better than fewer, I ultimately decided.

As we walked and scavenged, Haley slowly revealed bits and pieces of her story. By this time, I knew Evelyn’s story fairly well, and I suppose Evelyn knew enough of mine. It was a relief to have a new story to accompany us.

***

Haley remained fairly quiet until we approached the highway. The park where Evelyn and I found her was up the hill from the modest commercial district of our town. In past years, the neighborhood where we found Haley would have been considered affluent. It was old, old enough that brick walkup apartment buildings co-mingled with homes that would accurately be described as mansions by anyone except the wealthy but progressive-minded or -perceived people who owned them. Those people are mostly gone now, but their ownership remains. There’s no one left to buy those houses, even if the owners were alive to sign the paperwork.

That architectural co-mingling was a vestige of an even earlier period, when streetcars and politeness enabled department store owners to live near, and commute with, department store workers. Perhaps Haley’s dazed demeanor was a symptom of her location. The neighborhood displayed the physical remnants of a social reality that was out-of-time, the living ruins of an ancient civilization ripped from existence by epic cultural and political forces around the middle of the 20th century. We were walking toward another physical manifestation of those forces, the highway, a marker of the new civilization that made co-mingling defunct, along with the neighborhood. After a time of economic decay, the inevitable consequence of the collapse of civilizations, the neighborhood on the hill had been revitalized by money and well-meaning, destructive displacement.

The Epic of the neighborhood concluded, just as all Epics have now concluded, leaving behind configurations of bricks and concrete that once served a purpose. Now that all stories have ended, staring into the distance in a place like that park seems as good a response as any. Perhaps Haley’s consciousness had been sucked into the vacuum of the empty history surrounding her picnic table.

Perhaps Evelyn’s attention helped put Haley’s consciousness back where it belonged. It took some time, though, for the consciousness to feel secure. It took a while for Haley to speak, release her hold just enough to let some of herself back out to the world. It took seeing the highway.

“I used to play in that park every day as a kid,” she said. Evelyn and I had been vaguely chatting about our strategy for when we finally got to the Big City.

“What’s that, sweetie?” Evelyn asked.

“That park. There was a swing set when I was little. They took it down a few years ago. Dangerous, I guess.”

“Did you live near there?” Evelyn followed up. Good ol’ Evelyn. I’m glad she was there to carry the conversation.

“Yes. On Livingston. About two blocks down.”

Evelyn looked at me, just for a second. A few days scavenging with her, and she was already reading my mind.

“Sweetie, you asked me to take you home. You were right by home.”

“I don’t know why I asked that,” Haley said. I was worried for a moment that she was going back inside her mind, returning to whatever mental world she had constructed before we saw her at that picnic table. Only for a moment, though, as I remembered that Evelyn was better at this than I was.

“It’s alright. You’re with us. We’ll find a place in the City and build a new home. Some place where we can be stable. We’re going to make something new.”

We were getting close to the highway entrance ramp, which split off of 4th Street right past the bank I used to drive through every other Friday. The idea of walking up the ramp, traversing a path I had travelled countless times in a vehicle, putting my feet on a road meant for tires, was strangely disconcerting.

“My Grandmother supposedly grew up in a house right there,” Haley said, pointing at a spot about halfway up the entrance ramp.

“Really? How do you know?” I asked, somewhat surprising myself. I hoped I didn’t sound aggressive. I hadn’t really spoken to Haley before that moment.

“They knocked the house down when the highway came through. They knocked down the whole neighborhood. My Grandma had a picture of the house. I don’t know where it is now. My mom probably has it in the attic, so I guess it’s still there.”

“Do you want to go back and take anything from the house? We can go back,” Evelyn offered. I rolled my eyes a little but managed to stop myself before it was noticeable.

Haley stayed quiet for a few seconds, though we kept walking forward. Finally, she said, “No. Let’s keep going.”

Evelyn looked relieved, though I would never mention it. “How long has your family had a house up the hill? I’ve always loved that area,” Evelyn inquired. Apparently we were going to keep talking about this.

“It was my grandparents’ house, my dad’s parents. He grew up in that house, too, so it’s been in the family for a long time. My dad’s family is rich. My mom’s family is a little trashy, to be honest. My dad’s parents never liked them. I always thought they were kind of fun, though.”

Haley stopped talking, as if she had let out too much of the precious consciousness she had regained in the park.

I looked at her, trying to figure out what was going on. Her brow seemed a little tight, not pained, but slightly tense, her eyebrows scrunching toward each other, almost imperceptibly. Her mouth was also tight, expressionless, almost frozen.

“I never lived anywhere else,” she said, releasing her mouth muscles just enough to get the words into the world.

“Where would you have wanted to live?” Evelyn asked. It felt like dangerous territory to me, but this was clearly the Evelyn Show.

“I don’t know. Somewhere. I’m an adult. I should have lived some place I chose, at least once. Doesn’t it seem kind of pathetic? I just never did. I could have. It just made sense to stay in that house.”

“Well, now you’re going to,” Evelyn said. How did she do that? How did she make things seem better? Things were not going to get better. Was she just that good of a liar, or did she know something I didn’t know?

It doesn’t really matter. At this point, I’m alive and Evelyn is buried outside the warehouse. I’m not sure if that means she’s a liar or I am.

Well, there are Evelyns and there are Walters. And there are Haleys. I wish more Haleys had Evelyns to talk to than they had Walters to talk to. Maybe some of this could have been avoided.

It’s a moot point. Haley wasn’t quiet anymore. We were adding again, after so much had been subtracted.

***

The afternoon we reached the highway, the sun or something else had heated the pavement sufficiently to feel tacky under our feet. The entrance ramp had been repaired a few years earlier, so the road still felt cleaner and newer than the city streets it emerged from. Those repairs were completed prior to all the turmoil, fixed up just in time to lose its function.

The soles of our shoes made smacking sounds as we walked on the hot surface of the entrance ramp, up the incline to the raised highway. It wasn’t too steep, but the stickiness of the surface, coupled with gravity, seemed to add resistance, as if the materiality of the town itself wanted to hold onto us, prevent escape. I was panting more than I wanted to admit, but I didn’t try to hide it. Shame, like a lot of things, had become frivolous.

“It’d be nice if it rained a little,” Evelyn said.

“I’m not sure I want anything falling down on us right now,” I panted.

“To cool us off. This humidity needs to break,” she said, as if it were two years ago.

“You confident it won’t be fire and brimstone?”

"You need to grow up, kiddo,” she said.

Haley chimed in: “There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound.”

“What?” I asked. Evelyn looked amused.

“It’s poem. My mom had a book of poetry I used to read when I was little. I don’t know why I remember that one.”

“What is it?” Evelyn asked.

“I think it’s from World War I. It’s about how shitty people are, I guess. I think I just liked the sound of it.”

“A lot of poetry is about how shitty people are, if you think about it,” Evelyn said.

“Really?” I asked. “I think of nature when I think about poetry.”

“Sure, I guess, but why do you think people need to write about nature. They can just look at it.”

“To make a record, maybe. To remember how a flower or whatever made you feel,” I said, ready to drop the rain conversation already.

“I think that’s right,” Evelyn said.

Haley piped up, apparently not letting the rain conversation drop: “Poetry makes me think of music.”

“Me too,” Evelyn replied, while I walked a little quicker.

***

Etching 35

You-Who-Don’t-Exist, I’m out of sorts today. I woke this morning to a shuttering, banging sound against the big metal walls of the warehouse. It rattled me awake as its sound reverberated mostly unencumbered through the vast room.

As I’m the only one left, I pulled my bed to the middle of the warehouse. I don’t need privacy. I sleep on a makeshift bed mattress, piles of towels stuffed in several big canvas mailbags lashed together with rope. You’ve probably already seen it. It’s that mess snuggled up against this desk.

Just after we arrived and chose our new home, Jeremy located a stack of cots in a back room, but they are just short enough to annoy me into sleeplessness. So, I prefer my jerry-rigged bed. I’ve gotten used to it. I usually sleep pretty well now.

I was sleeping pretty well last night, just not long enough. The banging woke me up before dawn, judging from the lack of light entering through the skylights high above my head. Or maybe the sun went out during the night.

At any rate, I wasn’t well rested, so the sound not only woke me but set my heart into a wild rhythm and my brain into frenetic overdrive. It must have been a storm, but a violent one. It lasted a while, and my elevated heartrate lasted even longer.

So, I want to keep writing my history, but you should know I’m unsettled as I do it. I was writing about Haley when I stopped last. I’ll get back on track.

I wanted to make good time down the highway, both because I knew the Big City would be a better place to establish a home in our new reality and because I was finding it difficult to hold a conversation with Haley and Evelyn. They were both very nice people, and I’m grateful to have had them in my new, convoluted reality. But until we were secure and had a longer-term plan, I didn’t want to chat.

I didn’t get my wish for silence though, as after what I assume was a mile or so, we saw Jeremy and Fred’s little lean-to shelter, just a few 2X4s and a dirty tarp. I saw their truck first, though. Along the highway, we had seen a few cars that had run off the road or had simply been abandoned, but even in the sun and heat I could see that the Jeremy’s red Ford was strangely clean. Most vehicles we had seen were dented and beaten, by what force I don’t know. But Jeremy’s truck was in pristine condition, parked on the shoulder. In a different time, I would have just thought it was having mechanical problems and the driver had pulled over. In this time, however, the driver was living next to it, just on the other side, down the road, in a rickety structure he shared with his little boy.

Jeremy spotted us while I was still looking at his truck. The first I was aware of him was with his yelling voice:

“Hey! Hey! So glad to see you!”

This seemed foolish to me, even though I was glad to see him, as well. Given the circumstances, it struck me as a bad idea to just shout out to a group of complete strangers who outnumbered him. Haley ran forward, “Oh thank fucking God, Hi!” she called to him, but then she saw the child. “Oh, hi there. I’m Haley.”

I thought the boy looked elementary-school age, but he later confirmed to me that he was a middle schooler. That wasn’t better.

I wasn’t happy to see the child. I admit it. I didn’t want more complications. His able-bodied father was a welcome addition, but the kid was going to require attention. The adults had enough to deal with, what with the world ending and all.

But Haley found him amusing, so we added another source of interest for her. A font of new, more irritating conversation. I thought Jeremy would be useful, and we weren’t going to just leave them to rot, so they gathered their things, leaving their terrible shelter in hopes of a more solid one.

The truck was dead, despite its pristine appearance. It had seemed so promising, but it wouldn’t start.

“We were trying to get out of town, and it just stopped. It’s got gas. It just won’t go,” Jeremy explained.

“Why is it so clean? Every abandoned vehicle I’ve seen on the road looks like a shitshow,” I asked him.

“Beats me. I noticed that too. We holed up in the house when everything went down. We were prepared with food and stuff. When it seemed like we should go, we hopped in the truck and went.” He paused for a moment, thinking. “There wasn’t any traffic.”

“Just cars on the side of the road,” I finished his thought.

“Yeah. Weird.”

***

Upon our first meeting, I found Jeremy to be a decent guy, and Fred was nice enough for a kid on the cusp of puberty. One of them would be useful, and the other one would be a burden. At the end of the world, I suppose you have to take both and hope one outweighs the other.

Jeremy was a teacher, or at least he had been before recent events. He taught high school social studies at the school I hadn’t attended. I was a proud Titan, an alum of the other high school in town. He was an Eagle. I was willing to overlook that, at least mostly.

Had Fred been old enough, he probably would have been an Eagle, too. That made me a little envious of the kid, not for being a potential Eagle but because he wouldn’t be a Titan either. He’d be something else.

That was upon our first meeting, though. Now, he’ll be nothing more than Fred.

Fred really liked Haley, probably because Haley really liked Fred. There could be any number of reasons, I suppose. Haley was closer in age to Fred, child though he was, than she was to Evelyn. She didn’t seem particularly fond of me, and I hadn’t given her much reason to be. Maybe there really is some kind of maternal instinct. Haley’s chances of being a mother had been obliterated by our circumstances, so maybe she was drawn to the boy.

Maybe Fred’s puberty had kicked in after all.

Whatever the reason, the moment Haley and Fred locked eyes, they were a pair. I assume that was a relief to Jeremy, but what do I know? I don’t have kids, and like Haley, now I never will.

As we made our way down the highway, Jeremy, Evelyn, and I led, trying to make whatever small talk entails when every topic is big. Smallness had ceased to be interesting. Or maybe it had become so interesting we couldn’t see the bigness surrounding us. I’m not sure.

But we talked about high school. Evelyn had moved to town with her husband, so she didn’t know the subtleties of local teen sports rivalries. She didn’t know why it was important that Titans went to the McDonald’s on Spring Street, while Eagles went to the one on Darcy. She didn’t know where the bussing demarcation lines had been drawn decades ago, or why those lines meant knowing if someone’s dad worked at the Northside Bottling Company or the Riverview Plastics Plant could tell you everything you needed to know about their home life.

Evelyn was born on the coast, far far away from here, where her friends’ parents didn’t work in manufacturing. Her father had run a supermarket, and her mother was a journalist at a well-known and, according to her, well-respected newspaper. She met her husband in college and they moved to the middle of the country so he could pursue his career. He was a business guy. Our city allowed him to be a big fish in a small pond, rather than drowning in the ocean he was born into.

He died many years ago, long before he had to witness what his wife witnessed. What I witnessed, and Jeremy and Haley and Fred, too. By Evelyn’s account, her husband had a good life in management. I wonder if he’d be able to manage anything these days. He’d be an old man, and the world has either extended or shrunk beyond managing.

Haley and Fred seemed to do just fine behind us, chatting and goofing, occasionally laughing at some inside joke about something they saw along the road. I could hear them, but I didn’t pay much attention. Haley could take care of the kid.

I like to think Haley and Fred were together when the end came for them. I don’t know, Reader Who Does Not Exist. I don’t know what happened to them. But I can like to think whatever I want to think. That’s my prerogative, as the remaining historian.

***

Etching 36

The 5 of us—me, Evelyn, Haley, Jeremy, and Fred—made our way along the highway, fleeing our Small City not due to immediate danger, but to avoid more long term danger. The resources in town felt limited. The resources in the Big City seemed plentiful.

That was our motivation. It might have been possible to rebuild in the place we were when the world ended. I admit it might have been.

But catastrophe so often spurs migration. Famines, fire, despair, war. These things prompt movement, change, disruption of the norm. We weren’t so different from other refugees. The precipitating tragedy was novel, but maybe there are some things that don’t change.

The certain had become uncertain, so we opted for the unknown. We didn’t truly know what we would find when we got to the Big City. We just hoped and, I suppose, assumed there would be more. Of everything.

That might be another side effect of catastrophe: hoarding. The lumber in the back of Jeremy’s truck haunted me the entire walk. He said the wood was meant for a deck-repair project he just hadn’t managed to start. That was weeks ago, but the wood stayed in the truck. Now, the deck project was pointless, so the lumber would keep on sitting there unless we came up with a way to transport it. Wasted.

We saw more trucks and cars along the road as we walked. They were like the others we had seen, dented and dirty. Windows shattered, bumpers on the ground. Jeremy’s truck was an anomaly.

“You think the battery’s dead?” I asked him as we walked.

“Maybe, but I tried my portable jumper. I guess I should have tried taking a battery from one of those other cars.” He was blaming himself.

“Nah,” I said, though I had thought the same thing. “Let’s just get situated. We can come back and try to fix it later.”

As the blazing sun became a purplish sunset, we walked down an exit ramp Evelyn had pegged. She had spotted the road sign indicating truck stops on the side of the highway and wisely suggested we stop. My skin had been crawling for hours, agitated by the long walk out in the open, far from buildings and protection. My discomfort masked fatigue, and I wasn’t sure what happened at night in this new reality, so I concurred with Evelyn.

Jeremy hadn’t mentioned anything strange at night, and he and Fred had slept in their flimsy roadside shelter for days. Depite seeming more comfortable with the open air, they would welcome real walls and a real ceiling. Haley had spent her time since the disaster in her childhood home, only leaving to scavenge. She wasn’t keen on sleeping outside, either.

The exit ramp intersected a county road, where a sign indicated gas stations in either direction. “Are we Richardson’s or Global Petrol people?” I asked.

“Global Petrol,” Haley responded immediately.

“Huh. You seem convinced. GP it is then,” Jeremy volunteered. I didn’t bother to ask for a vote.

It was a good choice, regardless. The front door was smashed, so we had an easy entry. I pushed an ice cooler against the door when we were all inside. Fred immediately began ransacking the food aisle while Evelyn peered at the diner attached to the convenience store.

“Think we can get a stove to work?” She asked.

“We can try,” Jeremy said, and they disappeared into the kitchen.

Haley walked toward Fred. Her expression looked like it did when Evelyn and I had first seen her in the park, as if all the muscles in her face has suddenly relaxed. Her eyes seemed blank.

“Hey, Haley, are you good? I’m going to see about the plumbing,” I said.

She was silent for a moment, but then replied, “Yeah, I’m fine,” a tiny speck of energy seeming to animate her, just for an instant, before her face went slack again.

“Ok. Grab some water from the cooler. I’m going to see if the showers work.”

The GP had regular, gendered restrooms, and attached to each was a shower facility. In other times, truck drivers and road trippers could sign up for shower time and wait for a voice on the PA system to tell them it’s their turn to get clean.

I went to the men’s room. I’m not sure why. Social convention was no longer salient, and I still went to the men’s room automatically. The comfort of normalcy, I suppose.

I suddenlly had to shit and found myself speed-walking to reach a stall. I hadn’t felt the need to shit moments before. Seeing the appropriate place, my intestines came to life, convulsing, dropping their pretense.

Outside, on the side of the highway, would have been an equally appropriate place now, but my body hadn’t adjusted to new social expectations.

The toilet flushed. I was relieved. I wasn’t sure it would. It indicated functionality in plumbing.

I washed my hands, noting the brownish sheen of the water, but disregarding it. There was soap.

I badly needed to clean my body, so I turned toward the shower area. It resembled, in arrangement if not aesthetics, the shower at the gym I went to in the pre-catastrophe world. Five tiled shower stalls with ragged curtains shared a drain in the center of the room. The floor was caked in dried soap and human dermatological matter, clearly not having been cleaned when the calamity struck. A white/gray sheen covered the tiles and the drainage grate.

I went to the nearest stall to test the water, mindful of the dirty water from the sink. I turned the knob to the left, and the shower head sputtered for a moment before bursting forth, like my intestines minutes before.

I was instantly covered in a fetid black mess of thick, viscous fluid. Not the brownish tint of the sink. A tacky, sticky tar-like substance, indefinable in the moment, but resembling what I imagined crude oil might look like. Feel like. Sticky, slick, warm.

I bolted back, out of the stall, leaving the shower running. The gunk hadn’t gotten into my eyes, but it had drenched my torso and legs. I reached for the towel cabinet and grabbed a pristine white terry-cloth towel. I wiped myself down vigorously, violently, getting as much substance off of me as I could, but truthfully just rubbing it into my t-shirt, jeans, and skin.

I dropped the towel, now black and slimy, and ran back to the sink, splashing the brown water on my face, my arms, my legs, leaving me a drenched, dirty disaster.

***

My commotion must have snapped Haley out of her weird trance. She and Fred came running into the men’s room, social convention be damned.

“What the hell? What happened?”

“Fucking shower,” I growled, presence of a child be damned.

Haley ran to the men’s shower room, while Fred looked at me slack-jawed. I stripped and pulled a new shirt from my backpack. I threw the old one in the garbage can and tried wiping my jeans with paper towels, which proved equally ineffective.

I heard the shower turn off and Haley emerged from the shower room. I spotted dark wet spots on the sleeves of her shirt, but otherwise it appeared she had avoided too much contact with the sludge. She had been more careful than I had.

“Ugh. What the hell is that?” She said as she washed her hands.

“No idea. But I think showers are out,” I answered.

“I’ll check the ladies’.”

The women’s restroom was no better. A strange black gunk came through the shower heads. The sinks produced grimy water, but it was still identifiably water.

It was a mystery, but I didn’t want to think about it too hard. We’d wash with bottled water. The plumbing was somebody else’s problem. Which I guess means it was nobody’s problem.