The Crash

Lying in the foreign bed of a darkened room, I feel my body finally begin to relax. My eyes scan the interior landscape of unfamiliar silhouettes against pockets of void, tracing around the vague recessions of what I estimate to be one of four corners in the room, and further still to the spidery lattice of dim light that bears the meager luminant offering of some far-off streetlight from down the way. I settle in on the brightest point in the geometry and stare. Sometimes I stay like this for hours. There was hardly much else to do at night anymore, and this neat little game of house-crashing the recently deceased has, in a matter of days, gone from something admittedly fun and novel to something resolutely desperate, and carnal. There is a relative safety during the night- a small comfort that takes convincing. I let my eyes unfocus as I withdraw into the night's speculations, hardly bothered by the muted sobs and whimperings that work their way through the small fabric openings of a towel shoved less-than-expertly under-door, quietly reminding me that I am not alone in this house. Not surprising.

There's this sort of spellbinding effect that comes after resigning yourself to stare at the wall- I mean, to truly give in to that moment as a reality. It comes packaged with this weird sense of peace, almost like you're completely handing yourself over to something, and it feels insulating, and pleasant. It's what I imagine a religious experience might feel like. Maybe those folks weren't as spiritually pastiche as my friends and I used to laugh about. I lie and I stare and I go on like this for hours, conjuring up little mind nuggets to neurologically chew on, that despite their, and I promise you this, completely mind blowing and revelatory nature, remain overly modest against the backdrop of a dying world- a world that in its mortally wounded state reflexively sought to reduce the social topography into nothing more complex than than a two-piston engine. There is only Black and White. Hunger and Thirst. Enemy or Ally. Fight or Flight. With the daylight comes the reluctant poking and prodding amidst stagnant rows of suburbia, heart heavy with conscious acknowledgement of the slow and constant depletion of scattered resources. No birds chirp here. My eyes are fatigued from the unrelenting wariness involved with tracking each sun-dried passerby, never not clutching the kitchen knife in my jacket, never not sizing up and internally preparing to answer with extreme aggression if contested. I am not a violent person, and the notion fills me with all the more dread when I realize how little it takes to push someone into this state of mind. And yet underneath this newly crowned lizard brain there still lives something warm in blood, something that is cautiously willing to extend a hand to someone with an earnest need, to offer some small form of human kindness in this bleak new world, if not for anything but to prove to myself that despite all I've seen in these timeless weeks, there is still something good in me. Something that believes in a world outside of this all-too-primal dash for the prize of seeing the next day. Oh, and at night? At night comes the thing anyone still living is all too keen on, the reason why we drop any remaining shreds of societal niceties and rush for shelter at the first suggestion of a setting sun. At night comes the only remaining thing befitting the description of a God- at night, inevitably, comes the gas.

The first occurrence was widely circulated on the majority of cable networks, and most people found themselves caring very much about how this mess got started and who exactly was to blame for it. That lasted for about two hours. It turns out that being continuously plugged into an apparatus of doom does comically little to prepare you for Doom proper, and even when the broadcasts, suddenly and in unison, resolved into frame the silent hanging depiction of a heart shaped locket, people could hardly be bothered with parsing out the meaning. When the "what" of something becomes too pertinent, the "why" of it becomes irrelevant, and if anyone else shared in the faintest sense of relief from the idea of that, I wouldn't know it. If there was to be one point of mercy from the gas it would be that it wasn't all that permeable, at least so far as gasses go. "Gas" is just the knee-jerk term for it. It's almost more like a dense fog; it crawls in low and hugs the streets, never really rising, never really dissipating, yet always there, always progressing creepily at the same Michael Myers-esque speed, measured and orderly, stopping only to gently lap and break at the foundations of buildings and windows, but never what seems like a sincere attempt to seep inside, almost as though it were tucking you in for the night in a polite way. It feels almost motherly. It nearly makes you appreciate the gas, because for all you know, the gas is the only thing left in the world that will allow you this small island of respite. I'm sure there's some reason for the feeling, probably something to do with the sort-of predictable nature of the gas, juxtaposed by the wholly unpredictable nature of human beings who have been stripped from their normal, non-apocalyptic, interpersonal proclivities. Some small part of me would like to know, but my mind is too preoccupied with more personally relevant worries, like how every axiom I structured my life by has gone inert, like how for the past two weeks my debilitatingly clinical depression has been questionably absent, how the power grid remains suspiciously intact, and how my head only gives the faintest, near imperceptible start when the deafness of night is lanced by a pressurized scream and subsequent gunshot. Another early retirement to the fate that patiently waits for us all. If I had to wager I'd say it came from the east. I guess I know where I'll be staying tomorrow.