When the Nines Roll Over (17 page)

Once the scheduled writing has been completed (twenty minutes on a typical day), the best part of the best hour begins, and I read. Early in the planning stages of my bunker, 0I realized that there would not be enough room for my books. My space is severely cramped; every cubic foot is precious. The solution presented itself as technology advanced: an entire library now fits on a single optical disc. Tap a few keys and I am privy to the ruminations of Hamlet, the manipulations of Odysseus, the risen Beatrice. An entire civilization is preserved below ground, the best thoughts of the best minds reified by laser.

Why read these decomposed authors? Because only the dead can save us. Only they can teach us how to rebuild our broken cities. I believe that all our fallen fathers will rise again and hold our dwindling bodies in mighty hands.

A significant problem of permanent reclusion is the lack of sexual outlets. I considered purchasing a pornographic disc for my computer, but decided such activity would distract me from my mission. Thousands of hours of solitude have led me to curse my priggish stance, have left me feverishly conjuring images of nude bodies. Strangely, I find that I am unable to remember faces; my imagined nymphs are crudely drawn. There are few things more likely to demolish a man's morale than failed masturbation.

In desperation I have turned to a disc that came with my 1468, an introduction to human biology that includes some fairly stimulating studies of naked females. Many of these ladies, unfortunately, are attractive on the left side but transparent on the right, revealing the detailed workings of their inner organs, a view certain to repel all but the most perverse suitors.

Then yesterday (O lucky day!) I stumbled upon an appendix to an anatomy primer, a fitness regimen specifying appropriate nutrition and exercises for the middle-aged, detailed diagrams accompanied by wondrous prose, including my current inamorata:

In all my reading I have come across no phrase as arousing as that final demand for tightened buttocks. The instructions form a bildungsroman of sorts, progressing from the flabby novice of the opening to the tight, pelvic-tilting performer of the close.

I was not always this pathetic.

The most malicious aspect of extended confinement is the aural hallucinations, the ghost cries of a dead civilization. Some mornings I could swear I hear the sounds of honking cars, and I have been awakened several times by an insistent rapping on the hatch door, followed by a perfect imitation of children's laughter. My mind, buried below the dead, creates a mirage of noise, human voices replacing palm trees and watering holes. Like an amputated foot that continues to itch, my obliterated town still echoes above me.

I am well aware of the warren of underground chambers secretly constructed by my government for the protection and wartime comfort of our leaders. No doubt the major corporations followed suit, carving boardrooms in the bedrock. Even now gray-suited analysts meet in well-appointed caverns to discuss the ramifications of an incinerated consumer base.

Others will survive this calamity, but only those deemed vital by their respective masters: the necessary bureaucrats, soldiers, scientists, engineers. Who will tell the story of our civilization's end? I should01er that task, though I am a reticent man by nature.

My approach must be microhistorical, for I have no access to the primary documents that papered the path to this fiery place. All I know is my own life, and that is all I can relate. Future scholars must extrapolate an entire society from a single man. I leave this journal as an heirloom for the unborn, that they might learn what went wrong this time, that I might serve and survive as a voice crying out from the ruins. In black ink my name may still shine bright.

The relevance of the following material will have to be sorted out later. Truth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor. The greater part of anyone's lifetime is not worth remembering.

The first horror. Four years old, on my knees by the side of the bed, saying my evening prayers. When I finished I opened my eyes and saw, through the window's glass, a man with a terribly burned face staring back at me. I ran to my parents' room. For a minute I could not work my mouth, but finally I told them what I had seen. My father joked with me, telling me how trees look human in the dark. He switched on the outdoor lights and stepped outside. I wanted him to stay, was certain the burned man would hack him to bits, but my father only laughed. When he came back inside he was grim-faced, slid the dead bolt into place, left the outdoor lights burning. My mother asked him what was wrong and he muttered that there were footsteps in the snow. She called the police while he went upstairs for his shotgun.

Nothing happened. They never found the burned man. No lunatics were missing from asylums, no convicts escaped from death row, nobody was murdered in our town. But that terrible face, two eyes trapped within ruined skin, cannot be forgotten. I wonder how many like him now wander our country's roads, tattered men crying out for water.

Do you recognize her, that woman bald and bawling? She is your mother. For nearly ten months you dwelled within her, and only left because the doctors smoked you out. This becomes family legend, the boy who did not want to be born.

She was a beautiful woman, my mother, and strong, and I don't know why I cannot remember her as beautiful and strong. Every time I picture her face I picture her dying face, the tendons in her neck bulging through the skin, her teeth dug into her upper lip. All your life you know a person, and love her, and then in the space of a year sickness boils her down to her bones. Perhaps I should be grateful that she was not alone in the end. So many die without our caring, decline to silence in rooms beyond hearing. We honor the dead and abhor the dying.

Pain gradually erased my mother's fine complexities, left her curled in a hospital bed, trying to twist away from the clawing inside her. And what can you do? Your mother is slowly murdered and you sit, powerless, and watch. It ends with horror, it ends with the brain starved for oxygen, with the lips gone blue and the feet swelled with fluid. It ends when a mother's eyes become the eyes of fish. Billions of times this ritual repeated, billions of sons watched their mothers die, kissed their cold foreheads, and wept.

If grief was pure, things would be easier, but there is a selfishness in mourning, and a degree of disgust for those still living and cheerful. The diversions of friends seem moronic and irritating, their love lives ridiculous, their complaints petty. Nothing can compete with grief and the griever knows it, and no matter how far into the depths he might fall, he still looks down at the ignorant hordes who cannot see death all around them.

And how did this loss shape my character? Just tap the proper keys and the answer will emerge, correct? Enough of this. No more writing tonight. The issue of my mother is better off filed away.

There is nothing beautiful left in the world, nothing above but skeletons: skeletons strolling down the sidewalk, skeletons washing their cars, skeletons dancing in the late-night dance halls, skeletons drinking their whiskey straight, skeletons bluffing with a single suicide king, skeletons scratching on the eight-ball, skeletons humping in the courtyard, skeletons eating with fork and knife, skeletons singing lullabies to their skeletal babes.

And those who find me, what will they think? They will dig up my bones in three thousand years and wonder, what strange beast was this?