John Adams - Wastelands - Stories of the Apocalipse

Rome burned, too. It is said that Nero fiddled.

Back at the house, Wyndham washed up and made himself a drink from the liquor cabinet he found in the kitchen. He’d never been much of a drinker before the world ended, but he didn’t see any reason not to give it a try now. His experiment proved such a success that he began sitting out on the porch nights, drinking gin and watching the sky. One night he thought he saw a plane, lights blinking as it arced high overhead. Later, sober, he concluded that it must have been a satellite, still whipping around the planet, beaming down telemetry to empty listening stations and abandoned command posts.

A day or two later the power went out. And a few days after that, Wyndham ran out of liquor. Using the Volvo, he set off in search of a town. Characters in end-of-the-world stories commonly drive vehicles of two types: The jaded sophisticates tend to drive souped up sports cars, often racing them along the Australian coast line because what else do they have to live for; everyone else drives rugged SUVs. Since the 1991 Persian Gulf War—in which some 23,000 people died, most of them Iraqi conscripts killed by American smart bombs-military-style Humvees have been especially coveted. Wyndham, however, found the Volvo entirely adequate to his needs.

No one shot at him.

He was not assaulted by a roving pack of feral dogs.

He found a town after only fifteen minutes on the road. He didn’t see any evidence of looting. Everybody was too dead to loot; that’s the way it is at the end of the world.

On the way, Wyndham passed a sporting goods store where he did not stop to stock up on weapons or survival equipment. He passed numerous abandoned vehicles, but he did not stop to siphon off some gas. He did stop at the liquor store, where he smashed a window with a rock and helped himself to several cases of gin, whiskey, and vodka. He also stopped at the grocery store, where he found the reeking bodies of the night crew sprawled out beside carts of supplies that would never make it onto the shelves. Holding a handkerchief over his nose, Wyndham loaded up on tonic water and a variety of other mixers. He also got some canned goods, though he didn’t feel any imperative to stock up beyond his immediate needs. He ignored the bottled water.

In the book section, he did pick up a bartender’s guide.

Some end-of-the-world stories present us with two post-apocalypse survivors, one male and one female. These two survivors take it upon themselves to Re-Populate the Earth, part of their larger effort to Re-Establish Western Civilization without the Bad Old Ways. Their names are always artfully withheld until the end of the story, at which point they are invariably revealed to be Adam and Eve.

The truth is, almost all end-of-the-world stories are at some level Adam-and-Eve stories. That may be why they enjoy such popularity. In the interests of total disclosure, I will admit that in fallow periods of my own sexual life-and, alas, these periods have been more frequent than I’d care to admit-I’ve often found Adam-and-Eve post-holocaust fantasies strangely comforting. Being the only man alive significantly reduces the potential for rejection in my view. And it cuts performance anxiety practically to nothing.

There’s a woman in this story, too. Don’t get your hopes up.

By this time, Wyndham has been living in the brick house for almost two weeks. He sleeps in the old couple’s bedroom, and he sleeps pretty well, but maybe that’s the gin. Some mornings he wakes up disoriented, wondering where his wife is and how he came to be in a strange place. Other mornings he wakes up feeling like he dreamed everything else and this has always been his bedroom.

One day, though, he wakes up early, to gray pre-dawn light. Someone is moving around downstairs. Wyndham’s curious, but he’s not afraid. He doesn’t wish he’d stopped at the sporting goods store and gotten a gun. Wyndham has never shot a gun in his life. If he did shoot someone-even a post-apocalyptic punk with cannibalism on his mind-he’d probably have a breakdown.

Wyndham doesn’t try to disguise his presence as he goes downstairs. There’s a woman in the living room. She’s not bad looking, this woman blonde in a washed-out kind of way, trim, and young, twenty-five, thirty at the most. She doesn’t look extremely clean, and she doesn’t smell much better, but hygiene hasn’t been uppermost on Wyndham’s mind lately, either. Who is he to judge?

"I was looking for a place to sleep," the woman says.

"There’s a spare bedroom upstairs," Wyndham tells her.

The next morning-it’s really almost noon, but Wyndham has gotten into the habit of sleeping late-they eat breakfast together: a Pop Tart for the woman, a bowl of dry Cheerios for Wyndham.

They compare notes, but we don’t need to get into that. It’s the end of the world and the woman doesn’t know how it happened any more than Wyndham does or you do or anybody ever does. She does most of the talking, though. Wyndham’s never been much of a talker, even at the best of times.

He doesn’t ask her to stay. He doesn’t ask her to leave.

He doesn’t ask her much of anything.

That’s how it goes all day.

Sometimes the whole sex thing causes the end of the world.

In fact, if you’ll permit me to reference Adam and Eve just one more time, sex and death have been connected to the end of the world ever since-well, the beginning of the world. Eve, despite warnings to the contrary, eats of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and realizes she’s naked-that is, a sexual being. Then she introduces Adam to the idea by giving him a bite of the fruit.

God punishes Adam and Eve for their transgression by kicking them out of Paradise and introducing death into the world. And there you have it: the first apocalypse, Eros and Thanatos all tied up in one neat little bundle, and it’s all Eve’s fault.

No wonder feminists don’t like that story. It’s a pretty corrosive view of female sexuality when you think about it.

Coincidentally, perhaps, one of my favourite end-of-the-world stories involves some astronauts who fall into a time warp; when they get out they learn that all the men are dead. The women have done pretty well for themselves in the meantime. They no longer need men to reproduce and they’ve set up a society that seems to work okay without men-better in fact than our messy two-sex societies ever have.

But do the men stay out of it?

They do not. They’re men, after all, and they’re driven by their need for sexual dominance. It’s genetically encoded so to speak, and it’s not long before they’re trying to turn this Eden into another fallen world. It’s sex that does it, violent male sex-rape, actually. In other words, sex that’s more about the violence than the sex.

And certainly nothing to do with love.

Which, when you think about it, is a pretty corrosive view of male sexuality. The more things change the more they stay the same, I guess.

Wyndham, though.

Wyndham heads out on the porch around three. He’s got some tonic. He’s got some gin. It’s what he does now. He doesn’t know where the woman is, doesn’t have strong feelings on the issue either way.

He’s been sitting there for hours when she joins him. Wyndham doesn’t know what time it is, but the air has that hazy underwater quality that comes around twilight. Darkness is starting to pool under the trees, the crickets are tuning up, and it’s so peaceful that for a moment Wyndham can almost forget that it’s the end of the world.

Then the screen door claps shut behind the woman. Wyndham can tell right away that she’s done something to herself, though he couldn’t tell you for sure what it is: that magic women do, he guesses. His wife used to do it, too. She always looked good to him, but sometimes she looked just flat-out amazing. Some powder, a little blush. Lipstick. You know.