Through the Curtains

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room. Each day she tried.

See was perhaps an exaggeration, as the monochromatic aftermath that was left of the world kept most people blind to contrast, depth of field, parallax, or chromatic aberration. The waste-scape promised only the tonal range of gray, the very graph of melancholy plotted on the crossing lines of fear, ambition, jingoism, and miscalculation.

Fear had grown along an X-axis; ambition had risen along a Y-axis, and the depth of the graph lay on a Z-axis of asymptotic jingoism which had begun with merely the insidious sloping patriotism.

There was one more axis--of miscalculation--that lay on one of the upper dimensions which was impossible to chart on paper.

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room. Glimpse was perhaps the wishful thinking of constructing a tailored universe, in her mind, without the missing pieces.

But the window was there and she was there. Day after day. She remained watchful.

She pulled the curtains to face the new grayscale world, devoid of detail, indistinct, hazy, and too blurred for eyes to navigate. But she didn't need her eyes, really. She closed them because they were of no use. Instead, she discerned what lay outside the window with the other gifts of awareness humanity had been bequeathed.

She listened with her ears and heard the machinations of survival. The sounds were devoid of humanity--no grunts, conversations, exasperated exertions, or weeping. She had always felt that while sight was what was used to navigate the physical world, hearing was what made possible navigation through the human world. She listened deeply. Only certain frequencies and tones stood out; they were sterile. The important ones were muted.

She inhaled into her nostrils and smelled the begrudging air of malodorous wafts of smithereens floating in on curies of ionizing radiation. They burned her mouth and lungs. They shined with poison within her cells. There are many ways in which decay happens--anatomically, societally, and morally, with or without the instability of isotopes.

She could taste with her tongue death in the carbonized remnants that hung over the outside world as haunting gossamers, through the window, in the distance. Death tasted gritty, but she knew there was data in that grit, memories and life moments and dispersed binary specks of lives lived, begging defragmentation. Perhaps one day the right technology could scrutinize them to unfold the story of mankind, one ashen person at a time.

The fine hairs on her arms prickled defensively to the thermal fluctuations that drew the curtains in and out, agonal flaps that mirrored the labored breathing of a dying world. Her joints ached coldly with the forecast of the nuclear winter.

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room. Day after day.

Today was different.

She listened with her ears and heard cacophony: chirps, squeals, laughter, and even some strains of melody. She sniffed the breeze that blew invitingly past the gently waving curtains; the world was breathing again, no longer agonal, but huffing and puffing in anticipation. She could smell a different kind of burning, rekindling a love affair with fire to produce the juices of nutrition and the calories of subsistence. From that she knew she soon would be tasting life, not death.

The fine hairs on her arms relaxed, de-escalating the trigger edge of despair into a new détente of hope. Her very joints resumed their proprioception steady state without the abuse of an end-of-times climatology.

The outside world had been unknown to her, but she perceived a different glimpse of it through the window in his room.

They hadn't spoken in months, day after day; he in his basement and she facing his window. But now her senses announced a new day, and both he and she knew it was time. Time to re-join the world; remake the world; reignite the world.

She heard him coming up the steps. She didn't turn to him when he entered the room; she never had. She just listened intently.

"I believe it's time," he said to her. She smiled, still facing the window. He took her by the hand and she arose at the invitation, stiffly, as if to balance using only her inner ear.

"I think it's time, too, my love," she answered softly. "Clearly I can see that it is," and she reached for her red-tipped white cane with her other hand before they walked out through the door, into the open.