Like Dust

Marco walked in the shadow of twisted shapes of steel. He paid no attention to them or the ruins right at his side. Instead, he only counted his footsteps. He grew lean after the end. He was once a fat financial tycoon who counted in thousands and millions. Now he counted one step at a time. And then events to which he payed no attention became a global catastrophe. In what seemed like a matter of hours he was cast from a life of luxury into one of impoverished solitude. Now he struggled to live.

Somehow he survived the end, though it seemed to him nobody else did. In these long months since he started walking, he met not one other living creature. The loneliness was at first unbearable but over time it became little more than an ambiance. Solitude became as noticeable as breathing to him. He only noticed it when he thought to take notice. He devoted most of his waking hours to counting his steps.

He continued marching forward. His stomach roared for food and he took little notice. He had learned not to feel the pangs of hunger, the dryness of thirst, and the sting on his feet from walking for long distances without stopping. The year and a half since he accepted his life of solitude had taught him how to ignore undesirable sensations.

He continued on his march, counting every footstep. Where he was heading was a mystery to him. His motivations remained an enigma. The only thing he did was march for what he had measured as five eighths of every day. He estimated this by counting the seconds, using the word ‘Mississippi’ in his head, to measure a minute. He used the number of steps he took in that measure of a minute to measure an hour. And from there, he concluded that he could cover fifteen hours of steps every day before he would need to rest.

The time for rest was coming soon. He had exactly thirty-two steps before he would stop. He passed the remnants of a bank’s doors. Now twenty steps remained. He crossed an intersection. Five steps remained.

He stopped at the crumbling corner of what had once been a now unidentifiable store. He only knew it had once been a retail business because he could see the toppled shelves inside over the remains of its crumbled walls. The four walls of this building were mostly gone. So was the roof, which seemed to have disappeared without a trace. There was no sign of a collapse and the contents of inside were not pulverized by a falling roof. Rather, he surmised that in those first few days of chaos, people had taken away material one or two handfuls at a time. He had no doubt those people were now dead.

Marco lay down on the cement, which was covered with tiny shards of shattered glass and sharp bits of stone, and he took off the blanket wrapped diagonally from his shoulder to his waist and set it to the side. He opened the saddle bag and fished around in it. It had once been so heavy with supplies he feared the fabric would tear. Now, it was almost empty. All that was inside was a small black notebook, about five inches by seven, two pens running out ink, and a rusty multitool. The once white pages of his black notebook were now yellowing. Marco frowned when he realized this little black book, a couple of pens, and a degraded multitool were the only contents in this bag. He had no food and his canteen was almost empty. If he could not change these facts soon, he would join the rest of his species.

To take his mind away from this reality, Marco decided to read the contents of his little black book. It was his journal, and he had it since his first days in the cubicles of an investment bank. He intended to write in it daily when he purchased it. However, soon the demands of work and the temptations of leisure took him away from his notebook. Instead, the entries filling the pages were often dated weeks and sometimes even months apart.

The pages brought back cherished memories from before. He remembered company holiday parties, the finer details of the first car he bought, and the thrill of buying a major stake in a lucrative company. His life had been a shooting a star. Its bright trajectory snuffed out by the immutable laws of the universe over which he could exert no control. The warmth of these happy memories became a bittersweet afterglow. He thought he might cry but his eyes remained totally dry.

He had been walking all day. His muscles ached as his eyelids grew heavy. He put the little black book away and pulled the blanket over him. He drifted into yet another restless sleep.

The wind howled throughout the night as it tore through the misshapen steel which now looked like petrified flames instead of impressive towers. The sound of the howling woke Marco throughout the night. He often mistook it for a dog’s howl. When he realized it was nothing but wind, he could not help but think of the dog he had in his childhood. He thought how he first met the dog as a puppy on his eighth birthday. The puppy grew and watched the boy become a man. Then he recalled painful memory of the day when the dog was put down for reasons he still refused to accept. A few tears fell from Marco’s eyes, little droplets flowing from wells he thought had run dry long ago.

His sleep was restless. His dreams were not nightmares, but instead happy memories which brought the distressing despair. His dog, his job, his life before, all danced in his head as he slept. These specters of his past joys and triumphs mocked him. They were like the beautiful women he would sometimes see at bars who would tease him but rebuff his advances; or more appropriate to his existence, the sight of a stocked shelf in an abandoned store, only to find it isn’t food but some item he would have once considered dear.

The sun rose too soon and day was again upon him. The duty to walk relieved him of the misery of solitude in the same way a punishment delivered removes the fear of it. Instead of thinking of those things which could not possibly be again, he could distract himself by counting his footsteps.

Sixty-nine steps a minute meant four thousand and one hundred forty steps an hour. This was his measurement. He had exacted it many times over. So he calculated he had been walking on his empty stomach for exactly two hours, three minutes, and twenty seconds when he saw the grocery store.

It was not crumbling like everything around it. The glass windows of this oasis were cracked from a lack of care, but not shattered by intention. He approached it and for the first time in months took no notice of how many steps he took. His mouth began to water as he fancied he might have found a source of sustenance which somehow had not been looted. He rubbed his eyes again and again, fearing it was a hallucination.

His hopes grew fainter the closer he got. It was neither a mirage nor an oasis. The front door to this store was missing entirely. No sign of there having been one, even hinges, could be found. He walked in and noticed that the roof of the sales floor had five skylights bereft of glass. The shattered glass from those skylights littered the floor, indicating that at one time or another desperate people had come through the roof to pilfer this place. He screamed into the empty world as he saw the shelves were empty. Some were toppled onto each other as if they had been pushed. Others were battered and smashed. Clearly, other people, months ago, had come here with the same hopes Marco did. Destroying the shelves was their scream.

He did find an answer to this thirst in the few unopened bottles of water lying on the ground. They were scattered, indicating that they had all been dropped, likely at the same time by some desperate looter, and rolled in different directions. He collected and counted them. Five medium size water bottles.

What little food had not been taken from the sales floor had rotted long ago, leaving only traces of the mold which had consumed them. Hoping there was something edible in the back rooms, Marco pushed his way through the double doors. The doors swung closed behind him as he stared at the walls of the backroom from which insulation, wiring and everything else not important to structural integrity else had been removed. The rotting remains of cardboard, paper, and wood pallets littered the floor. It appeared as though there had never been food here.

What Marco did find made him laugh with madness. On the cement floor, spilled out from a safe in the wall but discarded and left to rot, were various denominations of dollar bills. He could not help himself. Counting these had once been his life. He reveled in the irony. He gathered these bits of paper currency, organized them by value, and stacked them accordingly. He counted them over and over, again and again. The number was amazingly exactly twenty-thousand dollars. He looked at these six stacks of cash. Eighteen months and two days ago, this would have been a find for most people. This had been the exact amount of the first bonus he ever received. The specter of a past life of luxury now manifested itself before him. It did not dance, but stood still in six piles of filthy pieces of green paper. Now they were utterly worthless.

He opened a bottle of water and drank from it as though he were a drunk with a bottle of vodka. The water tasted like the plastic which contained it. Even water had gone bad in this life. Like the empty sales floor, the crumbling buildings of this city, his empty saddlebag, and these twenty-thousand dollars, everything was rotted and meaningless. It was all like dust.