The Future of Peppers

Who would have thought that what I would miss the most wouldn't be my family, my friends, Krispy Kreme, or pedicures, but the Internet. Of course I miss my kids, but an intentional numbness has long taken over that grief. I had become accustomed to finding answers to my questions and answers to my boredom in one easy click. That is, up until about a decade ago. I miss the Internet, but don't grieve it. This allows the feelings to come through.

I wondered if anyone had ever studied the impact of post-traumatic stress on the ability to love. I couldn’t expect to have an intelligent conversation about this with the few people around me. Lolly had been a dental hygienist in 2022, which, at the risk of sounding critical, was the very top of her abilities. Jackson is one of the generation Alpha kids born prior to Covid-19 a couple decades ago. He hasn’t experienced normal society ever. He spent his early years with the Internet as his teacher, friend and entertainment. Leslie is the smartest. He’s in his 60’s, a bit older than I am, so he remembers a time when you had to remember stuff. Still, he wouldn’t know about studies in social sciences. He’s more of a tinker-with-tools kind of guy. Fine by me, because I loved him for other reasons.

When I entered the kitchen for breakfast, Leslie greeted me with the smile I’ve come to love. Lolly and Jackson had arrived before me.

Leslie and I had pseudo-adopted Lolly and Jax after the Decline. Lolly was an adult, but I recognized at the time of the Decline when she lost her family, that she was somewhat disabled, probably on the autistism spectrum. I’m not certain, but I think she got her pre-Decline job because of a friend of the family. I sort of feel bad now that I made such little effort to learn about my neighbours before the Decline. I pride myself on helping others and I neglected to see the people right before my nose until they were thrust in front of my face.

Lolly’s family wasn’t affected by Covid-19. Like many people, they really didn’t get the potential outcome of a zoological/ man made virus leaking into humanity and mutating. Probably because it didn’t affect people other than the elderly and sick at first. With the help of her parents Lolly completed the dental hygienist program after being laid off from her clerk job at a small local shop. I didn’t know her then. She was just my neighbour in the condo complex.

By the time I met Lolly crying in the courtyard, she had lost her family to Cov-X and was harshly experiencing the effects of the Decline. Very few of us were left, and there were even fewer who cared to get our teeth professionally cleaned. I assume there are some dentists who survived somewhere, but most survivors don't think of dental services unless they’re in great pain.

We’re back at the level of the 1800’s. As a “scholar’, my curiosities get the best of me at times. I wonder about things that I have no way of easily learning about. Without the Internet, I’m at the mercy of information that exists in hard copy. I can access a library if I want, but without the ability to easily search a digital database, I’m relegated to reading journal after journal to find information that may help me in my quest for intellectual stimulation.

My lamenting about the old times of the information highway was interrupted by Leslie. Even though he’s not the most empathetic of people, he sometimes “gets” me to a level that scares me. He reminded me that I had intended to hike over to the UBC library and suggested I run there today. I know this may sound like torture to some people, but it’s my ideal day! Running and reading psychological journals. I'm a nerd. It also meant that Leslie was volunteering to tend to the garden and animals today. I hope Jax helps. He seems to prefer doing nothing at all to expending any physical energy.

We adopted Jackson about the same time as Lolly. I found him in the condo right next to mine. I don’t think he was aware that he was only days away from running out of food. He was about six years old and he held a heart-shaped locket, staring at the photos. As a psychologist, I thought it was interesting that the photos in the locket were of Jax himself. Maybe a phenomenon to be studied by long-future generations: “The impact of severe lack of socialization on the grief response ”. A very worthy, boring article that ironically may have been interesting to someone before most people fell off the planet, metaphorically and physically. Or maybe it's as simple as that the locket was his mom's and he needed it to feel close to her.

I knew the only way to make it out of this life in one piece was to create as normal of a family as I could. Leslie and I moved into one of the abandoned houses with a barn down the road with Lolly and Jax. We planted a large garden and found some chickens and goats to put in the yard. We kept routines, even though we didn't have to.

I took Leslie up on his offer and packed myself with water, snacks, pen and paper. I set off from what used to be Langley, BC to get to the old UBC campus to do a little research and pilfering before heading home. In some respect, I understand that others could think I’m being selfish and that what I do is irrelevant. Why would anyone waste their time learning things that won’t have any effect? So many changes have happened in so little time and there are very few people left. In about sixty years or less, humans will cease to exist. I remain inspired by Viktor Frankl's “Man’s Search for Meaning”. If I could use my understanding of human psychology to help the remainder of humankind, or just my few friends and adopted family, then my life could be meaningful.

Grossman, Dr. Grossman to him, was at the library when I arrived. I was excited to tell him of my most recent curiosity about PTSD and love. Leslie and I had met less than a year after the beginning of the Decline. At that point, the Internet still existed because the companies were still fighting to maintain their base service levels in the hope they’d be the winner in the end. Like any animals doing the last fight in the face of imminent death, I have to somewhat admire anyone who gave it a go at that time. No company would be able to sustain itself with only two percent of its workforce and two percent of its client base. I admit I Googled Leslie while I could. He had a LinkedIn account that showed he had run a business for many years. Strangely, he didn’t have a FaceBook account. I wondered if I should trust him because he was so inaccessible in the digital world. What was he hiding?

When the Internet slowly shut down as server after server went dead, Leslie proved to me he can be trusted. I didn’t need digital verification; I saw it with my own eyes. Brady, the neighbour on the other side of me from Jackson, had died. As we had been told early on in the extended pandemic of Cov-X, if you didn’t see someone for a few days and there were signs of “expiration” (i.e. the smell of decomposition), it was recommended that we call the CDC while it still existed. Once they removed the contaminated (body) and had completed the sanitization fogging, the next of kin would be informed to come in and clean out the area of belongings. Leslie, being more social than I was, knew that Brady’s family had died before him. Instead of raiding Brady’s condo for himself, I found Leslie in the hallway moving Brady’s queen-sized mattress down the hall to another tenant, Janine. Leslie explained that Janine had been sleeping in the same single bed as her toddler. Even though her little one had died, Janine still slept in the old tiny bed, which was not only uncomfortable, but emotionally distressing. I fell in love with Leslie at that moment.

It’s not the first time I fell in love, but it’s maybe the most interesting. I have often wondered if I would have fallen in love with Leslie if I had met him before the Decline. Would I have thought a person who ran a cleaning company was worthy of my time when all options for partners were available? After I divorced my husband, I had been dating online. I had set my preferred partner to have a minimum of an undergraduate degree. I wondered if my love for Leslie was just a result of our situation. This was more of an academic question because, in my heart, I knew I loved him. I think I was looking for research that proved my love was “real” and not just a product of scarce mate resources. There were very few people in my age range left, let alone men who have attributes I considered valuable.

On my run to the library, I wondered what I would change if I learned that people are more susceptible to falling in love after experiencing a post-traumatic stress situation. Would I question my love of Leslie? My pursuit of knowledge seemed ridiculous when framed this way. Am I really looking for validation that the feelings I have now are just as valid as the feelings I had before the Decline?

I hate being a women who cries, but when I think of how I should have protected Miles and Xavier, I can’t help it. I had their 23andMe genetic profiles done a few years before the virus mutated. The company sent me the update, informing me that my kids didn’t have the protective mutation. If they got Cov-X, they’d die. But, I didn’t want them to live a life in virtual prison. I wish we knew the stats as well as we know now. If I knew there was a 98% death rate from this fast-speading mutant virus, I would have stayed home and made them stay home forever just to be with them. Even as I think this, I realize I couldn't have been in control of two teenagers.

Grossman noticed my tears. “Oh God, woman! You’re one of the survivors. Don’t go weak on me.”

“You’re my rock, Grossman,” I said, partly sarcastically. “I know we’ve talked about this so much it’s become a broken record, but sometimes I wonder why I’m one of the two percent who survived. It’s like we’ve been thrown back to the 1800’s, but tragically with the knowledge of how it could be better. It’s kind of torture.”

“Melodramatic.”

“I think the best thing that came out of this is the knowledge that global disaster didn’t lead to boundless mayhem. When there’s more stuff than people, we don’t need to fight over it. Because all us survivors have become sterile, we don’t fight over sex. The two biggest motivators of behaviour - survival and procreation - have been almost eliminated.”

“Goddamn! I wished you wouldn’t talk so much about psychology,” Grossman deflected. “I’m a geneticist. I really don’t care about your fluffy shit. I still haven’t come close to figuring out why this virus almost self-destructed by making its host dead or sterile. If it didn’t jump back into the animal world, it wouldn’t exist anymore. Fascinating!”

“You’d think that being witness to the biggest thing to ever happen to humanity would make you more interested in people.”

“I am interested in people, but only at a microscopic level, literally.”

“Fine, Grossman. I’ll look at journals sitting next to you, but I won’t inject my humanity into your clean world of science.”

Grossman had an almost imperceptible smile cross his lips.

“Do you want to come over for some peppers and eggs after this?” I asked.

Grossman’s response was only a slight nod, but I saw the mixed emotions behind it, or at least what I interpreted as pain, relief and gratitude.

I can’t describe how thankful I was to have Grossman by my side when I returned home that evening to find Leslie in the recliner, non-responsive and going cold. Lolly had been out for most of the day hanging out at the park. Jax had been home when Leslie started having chest pain, but he didn’t know what to do. Both of them seemed stunned and Jax was in the same position as I found him when he was six and somehow he had found that locket and was staring at it.

"This world sucks,” was all I could say to Grossman for many minutes. He sat with me in silence until I spoke again.

“Do you know how to grow peppers?” I asked Grossman.

His nod was slight, but I knew what it meant.