John Adams - Wastelands 2

Start talking to your shadow. It sits on the wall of your cave each night like an angry imp. Arms folded. Chin tucked into its chest like a sulking child. Tell it to cheer up. Tell it to stop whining. Tell your shadow it needs to buck the hell up or get lost. You don’t have time for stragglers in this screwed-up world. You can’t wait around while it sorts out its feelings. Ask it, “Are you a man or are you a shadow?” When it remains silent, say, “I thought so.”

Stare at the sky over the hillside for a number of days and notice how the ribbon of smoke that occasionally found its way over the farm behind that hill has stopped appearing. Don’t do anything right away. Just count the days. One. Two. Three. Four. Like that, until you get to ten full days with no smoke dawning on the horizon. Walk over the hill to the farm. Creep around its perimeter. Wait for an hour or two, just watching, to make sure there are no signs of life. Peer into the kitchen window. Dirty dishes are stacked and scattered everywhere. The body of an old woman lies at an odd angle beside a table overflowing with old newspapers, plastic grocery bags and rubber bands. Enter the house quietly, and make your rounds until you’re sure no one living remains. Then raid the kitchen, take the food stored in the basement, the guns in the living room, the newspapers and boxes of matches for starting fires more easily, then—

Stop. Why are you taking everything when you can move what you have to the house instead?

Bury the old woman. Lie in her bed each night staring up at a foreign ceiling, but remember how familiar it is to do this, unable to sleep, a ceiling above you. Not the cold walls of a cave. You are still a bit human, then. You can remember creature comforts, luxuries. You didn’t completely devolve.

And here you have a house! And a river nearby, and a garden, and a barn where six chickens and a rooster all sit on their nests like the little members of royal families, clucking their way through the dead days of the apocalypse. They lay eggs, and you fry them in a pan on an antique stove. The old woman was a collector. Everything in this house is old, old, old.

Sit down in the old woman’s old rocking chair. Push yourself back and forth on the balls of your feet like you are her. Grip your fingertips over the arms of the chair. Smile as you turn your face to look out the nearest window, where the sun falls through in a long golden shaft, and dust motes spin like stars inside it. Beyond it, though, take notice of the smoke curling up and into the sky above the hillside. Someone has taken your old cave.

Be cautious, but not illogical. Whoever it is up there, they’re just another person trying to eke out an existence under ridiculous circumstances, just like you. Watch the perimeter of your property, though. Pay attention to all of the places you yourself used to hide when you were spying on the old woman. Take notice that you think of the old woman’s land as your property now. No one owns the world any longer. It is all yours.

On a cool evening, drift through the purple gloaming that hovers beneath the trees around your property and climb the hillside from a secret angle. When you see the person living in your cave, wince in confusion. They are so familiar. Those eyes, that hair, the curl of the lips, the set of the shoulders. It’s you, actually, after all. To be precise, it’s your shadow. It never left the cave when you moved into the old woman’s house. It stayed behind in the surroundings to which it had grown accustomed. It can never forget what it went through. It can never move with you into the old woman’s house. If it did, it would forget everything that happened to it, and in the moment of its total forgetting, it would cease to exist.

Leave your shadow be. Let it continue on as it wishes. Go back to the old woman’s house and make yourself dinner. A nice salad. Some eggs, hard-boiled. Sigh when you’re all finished. It’s hard to get the image of your shadow out of your memory. The food doesn’t distract you. The warm water of the bath you boil up with plenty of kettles an hour later can’t either. So you sit in the dented copper basin in the pantry like some kind of pioneer days person, knobbly knees sticking out of the sudsy water, and weep. Weep for everyone you used to know. Many names can be included on this list that you conjure, including your own.

There is such a thing as survivor’s guilt, even at the end of the world, even after the end of the world is over. But don’t worry. Like everything else, this too shall pass.

“We should make a map,” she says. “Just to keep track of things.”

I keep my mouth shut, try not to look at her.

We live in a sooty half-dawn that never wakes. Nights are so dark it’s better not to think about it. (The nights had only just begun to get dark at all; for a while it was just as bright as the day, from all the fires eating through the dry forest, and we walked until we dropped just to keep ahead of the smoke.)

Sleeping is the worst. You don’t know if you’ve been asleep for ten hours or ten minutes. I’m never rested—the darkness and the smoke have swallowed everything—and there’s nothing to go on, and whenever I open my eyes everything’s still pointless, and she’s already awake.

“It’s morning,” she says, or, “It’s afternoon,” like she knows any better than I do what time it is, and she’s looking away from me and out at the wreckage.

Maybe that’s why she wanted to make a map; just to pretend that there was something better coming, that we’d meet someone who would need it.

The real map of the new world is tacked to a wall in the Darkroad Project wing of the Ames Research Center. It’s already yellowing; NASA’s acid-free paper can’t hold up against the atmosphere.

The map is stuck with little green pins where explosions are most likely to affect the tectonic plates. There are circles drawn in black and red, in orange and purple and green. The map key names them: twenty years, ten years, five years, one. The black circles are widest, and marked Xibalba.

The papers posted around it are from algorithms that have been run on the Pleiades supercomputer. They’re printed thickly with core temperatures, trade winds, a Refractive Index to gauge the best chances to preserve the ice caps. There’s a list of temperate vegetation six pages long, Latin names and English names side by side.

There are smaller maps, anonymous close-ups of deserts and forests and plains and islands. Beneath each map there are pages of notes on maximum water levels, likely periods of drought, natural shelters; each one has a tacked-up list of flora and fauna marked with Xs, or E for Edible.

It’s a drastic future, carefully planned, waiting patiently for its day.

She looked like she had been ready for something. She had hiking boots that laced up her calves, and a backpack big enough to live from. My canvas sneakers lasted less than a week; I had to wrap them with drawstrings from my jacket until we found a corpse with my shoe size.

She never said what she had been doing in the forest. She hardly ever talked. I talked; when we met I talked about what had happened, about where my girlfriend was. (“Dead,” she said.) I talked about where we should go to look for others.

There were none. Just corpses with my shoe size.

After we’d walked where I wanted for ten days, she said, “I think we should try another way.” It was the longest speech she’d made, and the way she said it sounded like the whole thing was my fault.

“Like you know where to go,” I said, but we headed another way.