The Scattered and the Dead (Book 0.5) (2 page)

Lately I’ve been thinking that when my lease runs out in a few months, I will go buy a house, but what am I supposed to do? Get a mansion with a fountain or something? What am I supposed to want? I don’t know.

I like being here where I’m anonymous. Nobody who lives here knows about me. Nobody cares. And this place is familiar. And I have the things I need.

So yeah. That’s it. That’s all. Just saying hi.

A few days have passed, and I’ve yet to deliver this letter.

I’m watching the world go to shit on TV, watching endless news footage detailing how thousands of people are bleeding to death out the ass all across the South, reading internet rumors about goddamn face eating zombies in Florida, and I don’t know how to connect to anyone. I don’t know how to say hi to the girl three doors down across the hall. I think I used to know how to do those things, maybe, but I forgot or something.

I don’t know.

I know this can’t quite make sense. I know I can’t sit here and write it down in a way that will feel real to you, feel human to you. Maybe a piece or two will pique your interest, capture your imagination in some way, but I can’t transmit my moment to you. I can’t take the things in my skull and upload them to your skull, can’t share my experiences with you or bear witness to what you’ve seen and felt and dreamed and lived. I am trapped in my head, and you are trapped in yours.

I never really tried to fix that, never really tried to bridge the gap between myself and someone else, and now that I want to, the stupid world is ending. Figures.

16 days before

Over the past eight or ten weeks, I’ve ordered endless supplies from Amazon and stockpiled them here. Food. Drinks. Toilet paper. Giant tanks that I filled with tap water. All of this crap is stacked floor to ceiling in my apartment. Mass quantities of stuff that will keep. Like Tang for a vitamin C source, and beef jerky for protein. A bunch of flashlights. Crank devices I can use to recharge my phone and tablet if the power goes out. I even had a small generator delivered to my storage unit, but I know it won’t do me much good here in the building. Better to have access to one if I ever need it, though.

Have you done anything like that? Prepped for what now looks like the inevitable? I don’t know if other people have been doing this. I assume so, but I started as soon as the first plague rumors bubbled up out of Florida. The stuff on the internet, I mean, before it was on TV or anything.

Anyway, the deliveries finally stopped three days ago. From Amazon, I mean. I thought it was just a delay, but I don’t know. I think they’re done. Something about that makes it seem more real.

OK, so something I’ve failed to mention in this ongoing train wreck of a letter: Outside of those trips to the hospital, I’ve hardly left this building in the past two years.

I might have a slight case of agoraphobia.

All of my groceries are delivered, and I have runners to take care of anything else I need out there. Remember that storage unit I mentioned with the generator? I’ve never even been there. I just have things delivered there. Piles and piles of them. I pay the guy that owns the place extra to keep an eye on my unit, change the locks periodically in case any of my workers get any ideas.

To be clear, I do leave my apartment. Six days a week, I go downstairs to get the mail. I usually do it late at night or really early in the morning to avoid seeing anyone. Or maybe to avoid anyone seeing me? I’m not sure.

Hmm... Can I make this make sense in a letter to a stranger? Probably not, but here’s my half-hearted attempt: I just feel overwhelmed when I’m out in the world, when I’m around people. Even basic stuff like going to the grocery store. My brain short circuits or something, and I forget how to walk and talk and behave and think. I get stuck thinking about myself and thinking about thinking about myself and so on for a seemingly infinite number of layers of self consciousness.

It’s not that fun.

I can’t remember when it all started. Maybe after the websites took off, though I think in some ways it started before that, as long as I’ve been old enough to think, maybe. But the thing is, I’m not one of those misanthropes who wants to spend forever alone. I’m not one of the people that wants to sit above the world and look down on everyone with hatred in their eyes. I like people. Most of the time I like people a lot, more or less. I want to know them and everything. I want to connect with them. It just freaks me out too much, so I stay indoors.

So I bring all of this up because I saw you today. You were leaving your apartment just as I opened the door to go get the mail. I almost said “hi.” I wanted to say “hi.” Instead, I froze there in the doorway like some idiot animal playing dead. You seemed in a hurry. For a second, I think you looked at me out of the corner of your eye. I wonder how I look to you, to a relative stranger. Do I look mean? Do I look sad? Do you forget about me as soon as your eyes flick away?

I’m glad you’re okay, though. I hadn’t seen you for a while.

15 days before

When I went down to get the mail today, I saw an old man vomiting blood out on the sidewalk. He instinctively tried to catch it in his hands, which only made it spray around everywhere, shooting red between his fingers, drizzling it down onto his jacket. I don’t think he saw me, which was for the best.

Jogging up the steps and away was a weird feeling. This person desperately needed help. As bad as any human can need help, I think. I could see the fear in his eyes, the quiver in his lip, the way his shoulders sagged and his chest heaved. He looked wounded. Defeated. But I couldn’t help him now. No one could.

When I close my eyes, I see the chocolate spewing out of my mother, and I see the old man spraying blood all over the sidewalk. I see these things, watch them endlessly on the internet and on TV, and it doesn’t feel real. Is it like that for you? It just can’t be real. It can’t.

14 days before

I really need to deliver this letter before the stupid world ends.

Have you been watching the riots on TV? Pretty scary. Today I watched bodies burn in a fire at a mini-mall. People rushed into the burning wreckage to try to salvage supplies. Some of them couldn’t get out in time. Blackened bodies spread out over the floor and melted into countertops, the news camera zooming in, the charred images on the screen shaking and quivering with the camera’s movements, the flames still flickering everywhere.

I flipped past more footage of sick people. I can’t watch it anymore. All of that human misery. All of that death. Blood coming out of everywhere while journalists wearing surgical masks explain the stages and the symptoms over and over again.

I changed the channel one last time to see a guy’s skull bashed in by police outside of a hardware store. Their night sticks caved in the top of his head, the shards of bone held together by flapping bits of curly hair that shook as he continued to get pummeled, his arms and legs twitching. I had no context for why they did this, if there was a reason. In my memory, the newscasters didn’t say anything, like they’ve given up on trying to explain any of this to us, the worst parts, anyway. They just turn their cameras on now.

I know I should be out of my mind. Watching everyone die, watching the whole world burned to the ground, I should be inconsolable. It’s somehow impossible, though, to avoid becoming a little numb to it all. I am scared, for sure, but I should be more upset. I think it’s too big to feel it all the way.

Still, I can’t believe they just show that kind of violence on network TV, but I guess what’s the use in pretending now? All of this time it’s like we kept trying to present this sanitized version of humanity to ourselves, this censored edition, this idealized image that looks a lot more decent and wholesome and clean than we really are. TV could talk about the bad things, but it couldn’t show them.

But we have always been all of those awful things. Stabbings and stranglings and bludgeonings with blunt objects. They’re always around. Always waiting on the edge of things.

I feel like I’ve always known that. Always been unable to see it any other way.

When I was a kid, I saw this video of a guy shooting himself at a press conference on local access TV or something. I didn’t watch it live or anything like that. It was a widely circulated “shocking video” at the time. I guess he was a state representative in trouble for embezzling money. He might have been innocent, even. I’m not sure.

He was a fat, bald guy in a suit, standing behind a podium. He rambled about his innocence a while, and then he pulled a .357 out of a manila envelope. Everyone in the room gasped. He stumbled back a few steps, poked the barrel of it into his mouth, pointed it straight up toward the top of his head, and squeezed the trigger. His body slumped back against the wall, sliding into a seated position, and a stream of blood spurted out of the wound. From the look in his eyes, you could see that he was gone right away, his body still.

And then, after a beat, blood gushed out of his nose and out of the wound, draining down in a spraying spiral exactly like water tumbling out of a bathtub faucet on full blast. So much so, in fact, that it was hard to believe it was real blood, though it surely was. It flowed for a long time. Too long. What seemed like gallons and gallons spilling out. In my memory, it feels like forever.

I don’t know why I’m rehashing it here in such detail. I guess I’ve been thinking about it a lot as I watch these new horrors on the news. Things like that are happening everywhere now, you know?

I always wonder about that beat, that pause, that moment of total stillness before the faucet turned on and the blood rushed forth.

13 days before

You’re probably already aware of this, but: The apartment building across the street burned down, and nobody ever came to put it out. No firemen. No police. No one.

It burned all evening and most of the night. I stayed up to watch it. The heat had knocked out the streetlights over there, so I was eventually just looking at red embers glowing in the black of night, unable to discern anything beyond that. The red swelled and ebbed when the air moved, when the wind changed directions. It made it look like the coals were breathing.

The roof collapsed in the night sometime, too. Loud as hell. I couldn’t see much, though, just glowing pieces shifting and falling and kicking up bursts of sparks everywhere.

The weirdest thing about all of this, from my perspective, at least, is that I sat 50 or 100 feet from the flames and the smoke and the crumbling walls and bricks and beams, but I was too busy watching the riots on TV and on my computer to notice them on my doorstep, at least for a long while.

By the time I got a look, the building was beyond the point of any hope for salvation. A bunch of the windows were blown out and bricks crumbled away where the heat cracked the facade. Something about watching chunk after chunk of brick separate itself from the wall and fall away made me think of those dreams where your teeth get loose and fall out. In this case, the tumbling pieces shattered on the concrete below.

It was shouting that eventually got my attention. Crowds swarmed on the sidewalks below, necks all craned to watch the fire, hands cupped over brows to shade their eyes. Two lumberjack looking guys in flannel shirts got in a fight, and the yells surrounding that finally got me looking away from the computer and TV screens long enough to notice the inferno out there.

I cracked the window to listen to them all as I watched, the half-disturbed, half-aroused mob two floors down. It was hard to pick out individual voices for very long, but I heard someone say it was probably arson because for the fire to burn hot enough to blow out the windows it almost had to be. I have no way of verifying that hypothesis, though. I also heard it said that no one got hurt. I tried to verify that on the internet, but none of the local news websites have anything about it. They’ve been slow to update lately, I guess. Too much shit to keep up with.

Looking at the building now, it looks like a damn skeleton. Gazing through the busted windows, you can see right through, see that there’s no roof above, no floors and ceilings left on the top floors.

I can’t believe no one came to help.

12 days before

The power keeps cutting out. For now, it’s only gone down for a few minutes at a time, maybe twenty at the most. Sometimes it’s only half there, like a brownout, I guess. The lights dim down to the shade of a rotten tooth – somehow brown and yellow at the same time -- and the red numbers on my alarm clock pulse and throb in chaotic sequences. But so far, at least, it has always come back. I know a time will come when that won’t be the case, that it will go down for a long, long time. Weeks? Months? Longer? I can’t say.

I try to brace myself for it, though, for no more TV or internet or refrigeration, but I don’t think I can. Even when it’s out now, I flip the light switches out of habit. I try to turn on the TV or think about how I should look something up on the internet before I remember that I can’t.

I suppose it’s all the same across the hall, though. That’s the weird thing, right? That all I can do in a letter is relay my experiences and my thoughts to you, transmit my moments to you. Some of these will be things you’ve experienced, thoughts you’ve already had, or worse still, thoughts and experiences you can’t relate to, ideas that mean nothing to you. And I, as the author of the letter, have little way of knowing what will get through and what won’t.