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As We Know It |
| Written by JJ Tyler | |
| Saturday, 16 February 2008 | |
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Share it:      Why had I let Nancy take the baby? I could have watched her today. I wasn’t that bad. I didn’t think of the aftershock. When it comes, I’m not ready. I’m trying to put my sweats on to go outside and see what I could see. Then it comes. The house groans and glass shatters. That stupid double window in our room, which has always been a pain to clean, explodes inwards from the aftershock; from the wave of the nuclear blast that comes seconds after the bomb hits. It explodes on me while I am putting on sweats, while my hands are around my knees working the sweats up, so I can’t guard my face. The shock launches me against the dresser. Something cracks. The glass flies around me and in me like tiny bullets. Blood begins to flow above my eye. On the ground, after the shock, I feel to see what is wrong. A larger piece, about the size of a half dollar, sits in my forehead, touching the bone. I pull it out. Baby. Find the baby, and then find Nancy. I hate whatever happens. I hate the sickness, how it is eating my brain, how it has numbered my days. I hate that I let Nancy take the baby to Grandma’s house. I should have watched her. I’m not that bad today. And now this, now a bomb. Now a whistling bomb has landed somewhere, making the house dance and tearing up my face. I grab a towel from the bathroom and look in the mirror. Besides the gash in my forehead, there are five other smaller cuts, not bleeding as badly. I try to clean them up, but they won’t stop bleeding. I use some Sesame Street band aids. Why do we have those? The baby doesn’t care. Karla is only one. Running downstairs, I look at the T.V. Flip it on. There is yelling outside, panicked screaming. The television is flashing images of a newscaster talking. The image bounces in and out of view. He’s panicked as well. There is video of fire in the sky. The fire is far off. Then the channel breaks up. It goes to blue screen. There is never television again. Cell phone. I run to it, hoping for a signal. I call Nancy’s number, but there’s nothing. I call Jon’s number, but there’s nothing. Jon’s place is only a mile and a half away. I’ll go quickly, get Karla, and get Nancy. Outside has changed, as if the first act of the play is over. The first act being everything everyone has ever known. The first thing that hits me is the sound. Car horns rhythmically beeping, alarms going off, some type of emergency broadcast warning, and faint screams peppering it all. My car is a mess. There is as mailbox stuck through the passenger window, lodged between the column and the chair. I try to dislodge it, when somebody touches me, grabs me from behind. Mara. I don’t know Mara, or Steve. We’ve been their neighbors for over 7 years, and I can count the amount of times I have spoken to them on my hand. She’s pale, in shock. Mara, what is it? He’s pinned down real bad. It’s real bad. She repeats this while staring through me, and not at me. Show me. Let’s help him. He’s going to be fine. I say this, because it is what you are supposed to say. Because to say anything else would be cruel, and if you are wrong, the person isn’t going to remember that you are wrong. If you are right, the person remembers you were right, and gave comfort. She turns and scuttles back to her house. I’ve never been to their house. I’ve never asked to borrow anything from Steve and Mara, nor have they us. The inside of the house looks ransacked. There is a book shelf sprawled on the floor, littered with detective novels which surround it in a semi-circle. I look through the living room. At first, it’s just Steve, sitting in a recliner in front of the T.V. But when I look closer, I see the problem. A tree, a beautiful young Live Oak, has crashed through the wall, and one large limb pierces his thigh to the chair. It pins it to the chair. Mara stops. She can’t go closer. I trot over. He’s out but breathing, in his tank top, Bermuda cargo shorts with no socks. The blood is bad. There is more blood than I have ever seen in my life. A fountain of it sprays. I don’t know how long it has been, but he is either dead or dying, unless the tree can be pulled out. The tree rests through the wall, as if taking a break from being a tree. I can’t tell how far the limb has gone through. I have to pull. The tree tries to do what trees normally do, stay put. When I yank up, the tree works against me, pulling and attempting to bounce back in place. I’m surprised I have the strength to be this far from the house, let alone fighting a tree. When the doctors told me what they did, I didn’t believe them. It wasn’t until the seizures started happening, and I started having difficulty with names. I didn’t forget the names, but I couldn’t pronounce them. And these weren’t nouns either, but names. I referred to Nancy as Wife, and Karla as Baby. This was the only way my brain would work. But something changed the day the bombs dropped. I was using their names inside my head. And I was in Steve’s house, fighting a tree. I keep pulling, knowing that if I let go, the tree will bounce back with force, separating the muscle from muscle, from bone, causing more blood flow. I pull the tree free from the wood of the chair, and then lean it to the side, breaking its root. Steve doesn’t move. Mara, get a towel, tie off the blood flow above the leg. O.K. I wish her the best. Steve may make it, who am I to decide? I shouldn’t be out and about, but I am. Before I go, she asks me about my hair. What’s wrong? I look in the mirror, and above the face that has Big Bird band aids on it, the hair is snow flake white. I have never even seen one gray, before this morning. I turn and shrug, then head to Jon’s. Back outside, I see pillars in the distant sky. One is close, behind my house. It’s from downtown, where the nearest bomb hit. The black pillar is the size of a giant’s leg, Godzilla’s leg maybe. I’ve never seen anything that big. It covers the southern sky. Like Moses’ pillar of smoke, it sits in the day, except this one beckons you to run, not follow. Fallout. I begin to run down the street. People are gathered outside their homes. I run past them. I don’t talk. My legs carry my shell of a body. My body is 3/5th of what it was, before the doctors told me what they did, before the fatty tissue in my brain was separated by a foreign mass. I am lighter, but I have not walked this far in a year, let alone run. My feet carry me on, in house slippers. My shirt is wet with blood, mine and my neighbors. A block away from Jon’s house, I see a small fire. It has taken over two houses, covering the grass between them like a fiery blanket. It’s not far from Jon’s home, and the wind is right to bring it there. At the front door, Jon opens before I knock. Nancy at work? Yes. Stupid bank. Yes, stupid bank with their Saturday banking hours. She should be home. Yes, she should. How’s Grandma? Scared but O.K. She’s got Karla in the back. Karla looks how she always looks, happy about the current state of everything and anything. I’ve got to go get Nancy. Of course you do. I need the Jeep. Its ready—I’ve got half of my Y2K supplies in there. There’s 3 months worth of water, canned food, and batteries in the back seat. Four 20 gallon bottles sit in a sea of cans and packages. Don’t ya’ll need thi--. No. Take it, get Nancy, and then tell her to take you to Big Daddy’s old place. It’s a shack, but there’s a— I know, but is there running water? Yes. Only use it sparingly. If the city sewer gets cut off, there will be too much backup, and you will have to leave. Get her, get these two safe from this horrible thing. I knew it would come, but I didn’t think it would be in my lifetime. Is it just in Texas? No, it’s world wide. Britain is burned to the ground. London? Britain. I was on the ham radio a few minutes ago. Armies are gathering, shipping towards somewhere in the Middle East at the same time. The U.S. is no more. Get safe, and protect the girls. Do you feel ok? I shrug. I’ve never felt better. He looks at my white hair and my red shirt, as does Karla, when I pick her up. Then she smiles. I kiss Grandma, hug Jon. I tell Jon about the fire, but he knows. He’s ready to leave. I drive along the side of the road, staying off the main highway, where it is all surely a parking lot. Some cars are tipped over. Some people are trapped in them. If I can get Nancy and Karla safe, I can help, but not until then. The drive is slow to the neighboring town. I give a bottle to Karla while she sits in her car seat. At the bank, there’s a crowd of people--not bank going type people, but people who go to banks when society has broken down. When there are no consequences for anything. I park far away. Do I take Karla, or do I leave her in the car? The mob is screaming, throwing rocks at the windows. I leave Karla there. I love you. She smiles. I go to the back of the mob, screaming and yelling with them. I pick up a rock and throw it at the building. I work my way to the front of the crowd where there’s a man demanding to get inside. The manager, a grizzly old man who is Nancy’s infamous boss, isn’t budging. He’s willing to let the mob get more riled up, more dangerous, so when they do come in they just don’t take money, but lives. I put a finger up to mob leader number 1, who tries to say something to me, but I ignore him, letting him know I am the alpha male, all 143 pounds of me, with snow white hair and a face that looks like a road map. Let us in, and everyone lives, understand? I turn to my mob. The mob nods in this impromptu negotiation plot. Wait till the law comes, and you won’t have a choice in the matter. The voice from inside is scared but defiant. That voice is willing to waste the time that I can’t waste. Let these people in. Give them what you want, and you can blame me and fire Nancy. But if you wait any longer, people are going to get killed. There’s no sign of movement through the steel door. A stone lands in front of me, bursting into several pieces. One gets in my eye. I turn and cuss. Is that you? I hear Nancy. She doesn’t say another word. Standing there, at the bank door, with its steel security blinders shut, I pray. The mob continues to push me against it, threatening to squash me while leaving my daughter in a car alone in the brush, and my wife awaiting a rabid mob. The door clicks. It opens and I rush inside. I take Nancy and lean against the wall, hiding her face into my bony and sunken chest. The mob rushes in, heading towards the bank’s vault, which is open and ripe for the taking. A fight breaks out inside the vault. Things are starting to get thrown. I see the manager duck out behind the violence, as well as another teller. I grab Nancy and go. The bank is left as an unguarded corpse for the buzzards to fight and squawk after. How did you get here? Your dad’s jeep. No, I mean how are you this far from home? How are you feeling? Show me the way to Big Daddy’s land. She takes Karla out of the car seat and begins to cry. Karla hasn’t missed a beat. She still smiles and is all sunshine, while the pillars of smoke stand around us in panorama. I tell Nancy what Jon said. I tell her that Britain has burned to the ground, and we’re burning. I tell her how I think this thing is going to go down, despite what they say and want us to believe. We drive to the land. We hide the Jeep with tree branches and logs. We get into the cellar. The fallout, the nuclear poison is coming, if not all ready here. After carrying the loads of supplies down below, we shut and lock the steel door from inside. It’s hidden in the abandoned house, under fake flooring. Karla crawls on the concrete ground, on her blanket with the happy yellow sun. Nancy looks unattached to the situation. She looks up, and asks me the question that I don’t have an answer to. We wait. She runs her hands through my white hair. I feel good. I haven’t puked or seized all day. Maybe that was left behind in the life before the bomb, before the nuclear holocaust. Maybe the tumor is sitting there somewhere on my bedroom floor, looking for my brain. I hope for that. I hope for this to pass. Copyright 2008 JJ Tyler |
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