N. White - The End - Visions of Apocalypse

It happened in stages. Irwin watched television reports about blackouts in areas where power couldn’t be generated. Scientists were baffled as generators proved useless and fresh batteries dropped dead. The blackouts rolled around the globe like a viral epidemic until one by one all the television stations winked out isolating the modern global community back into their respective caves. No one realized how much the world relied on electricity until it disappeared.

In the big pot centered just below the broken window tiny tongues of flame licking up from the cotton ball like a hungry baby bird in a nest. Irwin fed it junk mail, angry with himself for not saving more. Of all the things he saved, junk mail wasn’t one, and they stopped delivering it years ago. The postman’s creed failed to include the threat caused by email staying these couriers rounds.

The fire singed Irwin’s fingers as it eagerly lapped up Father Day Sales Events, and pre-approved credit card offers. He sneered as he sucked on his hand. “You’re not a baby bird — you’re Audrey II.”

Whether Audrey the plant, or Tweety the Bird, the fire in the pot consumed the flyers with a throaty roar. The tide of smoke ebbed as healthy flames grew strong, leaping up above the rim. Irwin was a failure at growing plants, but apparently a wiz with potted bonfires. Already he could feel heat. He held out his palms like a cartoon hobo appreciating the reward of his ingenuity. His previously numb fingers, which had made removing the stubborn cap from the rubbing alcohol a ten minute process, were already stinging with pins-and-needles. A sore clamminess in his face indicated his cheeks were thawing out.

Meep! Meep! My ass .

In the face of the light from the exposed window it was hard to tell how bright the fire was. Abraham Lincoln — the non-vampire hunter version — reportedly read books by candlelight, and Irwin hoped to do something similar. His evenings as of late had been dull affairs, sitting in near absolute darkness, shivering and employing the only other sensory faculty left to him — listening to the wind howl. He was surprised to discover this was no metaphor, it actually howled. Howled and wailed, wailed and howled, speaking a language that took on sinister proportions in the black of night, threats shouted for intimidation’s sake. Irwin was not above being intimidated. Even when the wind wasn’t blowing hard, the gusts whispered conspiratorially to each other as if plotting some terrible crime, a crime Irwin was convinced was planned against him.

But now he had made fire, and a primordial sense of power surged through his being. Is this what ancient man felt when he declared war on nature? When Homo erectus flipped his middle finger at what-went-bump-in-the-night and stepped out of the fear-filled realm of the animal kingdom to take his place on the porcelain throne of the flush toilet, and bask in the glow of the computer screen? Irwin smiled at his creation, tapping the Mickey Mouse handles like a proud father. A shame there were no mastodons to slay, for he felt oddly up to the task.

He settled himself on stacks of sturdy hardbacks positioned where a recliner had once been, and looked down the crevasse that divided science fiction from fantasy, the two foot-wide space of worn carpet he still called his living room. This Mariana trench set between precipices of towering genius comprised a wealth of words, a compilation of ideas that transcended reality, the acme of human expression — a landscape of invented worlds. Of this too he was proud. He had saved it all.

For more than ten years the world had followed the wisdom of the digital word. How many books can you fit on the head of a pin? Infinitely storable, instantly searchable, and for a time believed to be indestructible. Electric numbers never age. Only what happens when the body electric suffers a coronary?

Irwin never trusted the ebook. Such trust was dangerous and all too easy; a gift left before the city gates by an army that had miraculously vanished. He refused to roll that giant horse inside, even though one e-reader possessed the capacity to return his living room, complete with chair. Using cloud technology would have made his storage infinite — but also infinitely precarious, as the Library of Congress had recently found out, when a decade after making the switch to digital, the lights went out and 32 million books disappeared. Besides, a Kindle, or a Nook wouldn’t have been able to solve all Irwin’s problems. A good third of his collection was no longer in print, much less digitized. And while the sleek trekkian device might have doubled his living space, it would have come at an emotional cost. Each book was a personal friend, and Irwin knew what it felt like to be abandoned, to be given away by someone who was supposed to love him forever. He could never do such a thing — not even to a used book, a torn shirt, or an empty pen. He had trouble throwing away used tissues.

Maybe that’s why he had suffered, why his mother gave him up. So that he could save the world’s knowledge-base as a modern dark age monk. It was Joseph Campbell’s classic hero’s journey. For from that pain grew his collection — what his step-brother Jimmy called The Obsession . Jimmy used to threaten to contact that reality television show that helped hoarders “fix their lives.” Old Jimmy said it was for Irwin’s own good, that living in a rat’s nest of rotting paper was a sickness, in addition to a fire hazard.

Jimmy was full of shit.

Jimmy just wanted the house that Irwin inherited. It irked him that Irwin got the house when he wasn’t a real son. But if Jimmy had acted like a real son, he wouldn’t have left home after college. He wouldn’t have abandoned Irwin and their mother, taken the bar, and gotten married. Jimmy had been his best friend — his only friend. Now Jimmy was just another lawyer.

Irwin felt cold.

The fire in the pot dwindled. Feed me Seymour!

Irwin remembered seeing the original B-movie version of Little Shop of Horrors starring Jonathan Haze and a very young Jack Nicholson. That was back before it was popular, before it was a musical, and before Jimmy was a prick.

Irwin who had been feeding the fire an envelope at a time looked for more mail, only the pile was gone. Audrey II had eaten everything the US government delivered.

He searched the narrow tracks, worming through the tunnels and fissures, but found nothing. What he needed was some wood. He thought of breaking down his recliner. He even took a step in that direction before he remember it was gone. His mind also suggested his bed frame. It was old and made of pine, but that too had been sacrificed long before the crisis. He had a small table, only it was just a bit of plastic patio furniture. He could have torn off the cabinet doors, but he’d removed them years ago as well, having no space to swing them open anymore. Besides they were plastic like the cabinets themselves.

Was there nothing burnable in the house?

Everything made over the last few decades came in plastic, or aluminum, and Irwin suspected much of the aluminum was actually plastic. Once they learned you could make it from corn, plastic boomed. There might be wood under the carpet, but he didn’t have anything to cut the carpet away, much less break and pry up the floor boards.

Bookshelves!

The idea rushed him with such excitement that he stood up, only to sit down again. He had bookshelves, old ones made from particle board with contact paper veneers, but they were buried like the foundations of a failed dam and lost just as completely as the walls — walls he hadn’t seen in so long he’d forgotten if they were wallpapered or paneled. All the visible books were stacked on top of each other now forming leaning towers.