Blank Pages

Isaiah stood at the threshold of an abandoned apartment building. He scanned it with eyes that had remained sharp, despite his advanced age. Tufts of curly hair as gray as the encroaching snow clouds were cropped close to his scalp. He listened and smelled for signs of presence. Apartment buildings were dangerous. Resources were often plentiful, but so were the risks. People tended to hole up in apartment buildings, stockpile their resources and buttress their stronghold. Isaiah would have to be careful. But happening upon this place after traveling for three days with no food or water was a Godsend. Passing by the opportunity wasn’t an option.

A brisk wind nipped at his ears as he surveyed the lobby. The building was dead silent. That didn’t mean there wasn’t anyone there, though. With a firm grip on his walking stick and an eye searching for improvised booby traps, Isaiah made it to the first apartment. The door was hanging at an angle, detached from the top hinge. Isaiah listened for a moment before peeking his head inside. The silence remained, and he determined the apartment was empty.

He pushed past the door, careful not to knock it off the remaining hinge. Further destruction littered the apartment floors: busted furniture, shattered picture frames and knick-knacks, children’s toys left behind in the chaos of mass evacuation. Of all the damage Isaiah had grown accustomed to seeing in these long-abandoned places, the books affected him the most. Tattered, torched, discarded. They made him think of the polished and re-polished manuscript he’d left in his desk drawer to collect its own dust. A far worse fate than these published and forgotten, he thought. Deemed “non-essential” as families snatched up what they could in what little time they had.

Satisfied that no one was there, he took his walking stick in one hand and let his eyes take in the abandoned living space. A blanket of dust muted the once-vibrant colors of the apartment. A couple of cabinet doors stood open in the kitchen. A drawer had been pulled from its space and lay face-down on the tile floor, silverware strewn all the way to the dishwasher. The countertops were surprisingly neat. There were but two coffee cups sitting on the edge of the sink. Isaiah registered it as one of the truly peaceful sights he had seen in this world that had become so horribly silent, one would swear they could hear the earth turn on its rusty axis.

Isaiah turned away from the kitchen and entered a bedroom. The mattress had been slashed open, the foam ripped out. Isaiah couldn’t imagine why. As he stepped farther into the room, his foot contacted something that he hadn’t seen as he observed the damage and decay. His body tensed as he realized he’d let his guard down. He instinctively took a firm grip on his walking stick with both hands, even though he knew it would never protect him from an explosion if he’d tripped a wire. But there at his feet was a baby bottle rolling to a stop in the discolored carpet in front of him.

Isaiah froze as the realization rushed over him. A few more steps into the room revealed a crib next to a small, plain writing desk. A mobile hung from the ceiling, frozen in unnatural stillness. Isaiah’s grip loosened and his shoulders slouched as the weight of everything barreled down upon him. He sank to his knees. Plumes of dust erupted in small, slow-moving clouds from under his walking stick as it fell to the carpet from his trembling hands. He sobbed silently under the load of pity, despair and speculation that percolated into rage. Through gritted teeth, he let out a howl and snatched up his staff. He swung wildly at everything within reach, screaming, giving no more concern to the possibility that someone with less than noble motives could be lurking somewhere in the building. The crib. The desk. The walls and the windows. He released his wrath on it all.

When he’d exhausted his energy, he found himself slumped next to the bed, trying to catch his breath. As he turned his head towards the bed, wiping tears from his cheeks, he noticed the strap of a shoulder bag sticking out from under the bed. He reached for it out of the need for a distraction as much as he did so out of curiosity for what resources it may hold.

He sobbed a chuckle as he registered the contents of the bag. He reached in and removed his fist filled with stacks of twenty-dollar bills bound in rubber bands. The bag was filled with more stacks. There must have been tens of thousands of dollars there. Isaiah closed his eyes and began to heave with silent laughter. How marvelous a windfall this would have been once upon a time. It was so clear to Isaiah sitting in this dust-filled, ransacked apartment how fragile, how absurd the thought of money was now. To think that at one time people lied and cheated and killed for paper. Paper! Somewhere, they probably still did.

Isaiah, feeling more unhinged than he cared to admit to himself, continued to ruffle through the bag, tossing stacks of green paper wrapped in rubber bands onto the floor until his hand hit something solid. He lifted it from the bag. It was a handgun. This could come in handy, he thought. He tossed it onto the mattress and flipped the bag over. He shook it until the rest of the contents lay in a pile on the floor. Lying on top of a box of ammo and a couple more stacks of bills, was a simple black notebook.

What little daylight made it through the clouds and the moldy windows reflected off the plastic wrap encasing the notebook. It’s still in the plastic, Isaiah thought. Dear, God. It’s still in the plastic. How long had it been? Between the planet reclaiming itself and miscreants setting fire or otherwise destroying everything that was clean and pure in this world, Isaiah couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a clean sheet of white paper, not to mention a perfectly preserved notebook.

He dropped the bag at his side and picked up the notebook. He brushed his hand over it. He placed his thumbnail against the plastic along the open edge of the book, but hesitated at the sight of grease and grime that had built up underneath the nail. He scraped as much of the grime out with the nail of a finger on the other hand until it was as clean as most things got in this world. He smiled at the whisper as he moved his thumbnail towards the bottom, splitting the plastic. He flipped through the pages and closed his eyes as the wind from the fluttering pages whispered to him. He opened it to the middle and stared at the page, pure and white. No lines. No dots. Just space.

With the book in his hand, he spun toward the overturned desk. There in the corner: a pencil. It was broken in half, but the tip was still intact. He snatched it up and turned to the first blank sheet. A great desire swelled up in him, like something wanted to burst forth from his chest onto the page.

It occurred to him that this could very well be the only pristine sheets of paper left in the world. What could possibly be worth defacing them?

The desire was replaced by nausea. In a previous life, he would tell himself to just start writing and see where it goes but, in those days, paper was readily available. He didn’t have to consider how best to use it. How to preserve it. How quickly and easily it could be taken away.

How foolish of him.

How foolish of them all.

Isaiah sat back against the bed, the book open in his lap. The blank pages staring at him. Beckoning. Taunting. He could document what happened here. He could start a journal. He could sketch what he could remember of his children’s faces. In his mind, he could see the pages filled with small script, tiny so as to get as much use of the space as possible. He imagined a story—his story—interspersed with small drawings and poems. Quotes he could remember and Bible verses.

But his thoughts were overpowered by the potential mistakes.

Dark lines and frantic scribbles. The impressions on the page that an eraser couldn't erase. The lines of text on unruled paper that inevitably fell on a downward slant. So many imperfections that could deface a perfect page. How could he possibly—

Shuffling feet.

He wasn’t alone.

Isaiah gasped, slapped the book shut, and shoved it into his jacket. When he looked up, he was staring at the black hole in the business end of the handgun. His eyes refocused on the unkempt face of a dirty, desperate man. The gun wobbled in his hands, no doubt weak from starvation and fear. But the man wasn’t looking at Isaiah. He was looking at the stacks of bills tossed about the carpeted floor. Isaiah saw something in the man’s eyes he hadn’t seen in so long. Something he knew still existed but thought existed in such a different manner now.

Greed.

“Wait,” was the only sound Isaiah could muster. His voice cracked from disuse. The man grunted and nodded at the bag at Isaiah’s side. Isaiah tossed it to the man with his free hand. The man began stuffing the stacks of bills into the bag.

Why, Isaiah thought. Why these worthless pieces of paper? Isaiah imagined the man dying of starvation on a bed of twenty-dollar bills.

When all the stacks had been collected, the man stood up and seemingly for the first time noticed Isaiah’s hand in his jacket. The man grunted again and motioned with the gun. At first, Isaiah didn’t understand. The man dropped the bag and motioned with his free hand, demanding what was in Isaiah’s jacket.

“No, no,” he pleaded, waving his hand. “Just go.”

The man’s face twisted. He charged toward Isaiah. Isaiah tried to kick the man away, but as weak and starved as the man was, he was driven by something deeper now. Isaiah briefly wondered if the man had lost all sense of reality. But he was certain enough that it was real when the gun went off.

There was a burning sensation in Isaiah’s abdomen. His body tensed and he became only faintly aware of the man’s hands searching him. He could barely feel the man tear the book from his grasp. But, somehow, he could see the contempt in the man’s face as he realized what it was.

Just a worthless book full of blank pages.

The man tossed the book onto Isaiah’s chest, snatched up the bag, and walked out of the room without so much as looking back.

Isaiah’s breathing grew shallow. He wanted to reach up and place his hand on the book, but his arms were like lead. His whole body felt heavy. He was tired. The book lay open, face down on his chest. Warmth spread across his belly. The fibers of his shirt grew dark as a crimson tide crept across his skin underneath. Isaiah could see the fibers in the paper begin to absorb the blood. He felt the corners of his mouth tug slightly upward. One of the final movements his body would make, he figured. He recalled one of his favorite quotes—or maybe it was an amalgamation of quotes he’d learned along the way: Writing is easy, he remembered amid the haze. All you have to do is sit down…and bleed.