A Different Alchemy (10 page)

The highway into New York had a billboard for
The Phantom of the Opera
that was faded and yellow, the words barely legible. Another billboard advertised the musical production of Steinbecker’s
Mapping the Great De-evolution
, the nonfiction bestseller charting mankind’s gradual decline in population. Steinbecker had meant his analysis of the end of the world to be informative, not entertaining, a fact that was apparently lost on the show’s producers. Audiences were greeted by a full cast of singers belting out songs with lines like:

In the second decade of the decline,

We’re gonna close the schools,

We’re gonna close the schools,

We’re gonna close those schoolbooks one last time.

In the third decade of our expiration,

We’re gonna stop travelling,

We’re gonna stop travelling,

We’re gonna stop using transportation.
 

The show’s producers had to keep audiences from burning the theatre down. It was, understandably, the last new show to hit Broadway before the lights went off and everyone exited stage left one final time.

Wall Street was also boarded up, the last bells having rung ten years earlier when everyone realized there wasn’t a single company that held any intrinsic value. Stacks of paper, noting various stocks of Fortune 500 companies, were either worthless or being traded for pennies on the dollar. What was the point of it? Even the greediest of traders realized each stock would be worth even less the next day and the day after that. Maybe a nickel for two shares of an oil company. Maybe a dime for a hundred shares of a cable company. A week later you could buy the same amount of stock for a penny.

LaGuardia runways looked like they had been bombed by enemy planes. A little crack in the concrete path, usually easy to patch, was two feet wide after just one winter. Two cracks kept spreading until they joined and the ground in between crumbled into a gravel pit.

Central Park, it was rumored, wasn’t safe for humans anymore. People said the wolves and coyotes there were killing everything they saw. A half marathon had been organized right before the city was abandoned for Philadelphia. The race was halted, however, as soon as the first pack of runners entered the tree line, were grabbed by wolves, and eaten alive.

Each joint of the Statue of Liberty was tearing apart. The idea that the statue could have somehow lasted hundreds of years into the future, just to be a symbol of man’s enslavement to a planet of apes, was preposterous—unless the apes spent part of their time keeping the copper body and iron screws maintained, which seemed even more outlandish. Already, one great arm was lying on the ground and the other was getting ready to fall. The torch was completely gone. He had heard a rumor that a crazed politician couldn’t stand the idea of it rotting away after the city was abandoned and had paid for the giant torch to be trucked down to his luxury home in Texas.

A soccer field still had two goals and the feint outline of where games had once been played, but the entire playing surface was now covered in a swamp of weeds.

As much as he tried to remember the city as a place where baseball games had been played, fireworks had exploded over the water, the famous ball had dropped each year, he could only see it for what it was now. He tried to remember being amazed by the lights and the hordes of people the first time he visited the city on a 3
rd
grade field trip. That trip, so long ago, didn’t seem like a part of this life anymore, though.

He had never had a chance to bring Galen to the city. He kept meaning to, year after year, but never did. As he watched the crumbled remains, he wondered what he had done with the time that could have been better spent bringing his son here.

Maybe, he thought, if he had been a better father, Galen would still be around. A better father would have been at his son’s side when that last rally was announced instead of sitting at a meaningless job. If he had been a better husband, Katherine wouldn’t have felt her only resort was taking their son to a stadium of protesters.

He spent the night just north of the city. It was the first night on his trip spent sleeping inside the tank. He did so, not because he was afraid the animals would get him if he camped under the stars, but because sleeping under the constellations kept him thinking of Galen. The nights he had tried sleeping outside, by the road, he became incredibly lonely, shaking with sadness when he should have been slipping off to dreams. After two nights of this, he realized it was because lying on the ground, under the stars, reminded him of the nights he had spent with Galen, camping in their tiny backyard.

The inside of the tank didn’t have any associations that reminded him of time spent with his boy. A sleeping bag, the sounds of crickets, these were things that kept him wishing his son could be there with him. And so he slept inside the metal confines of his cave.

If only he hadn’t let Galen out of his sight. That was what dominated his thoughts. He was the boy’s father. Father’s are supposed to protect their sons, not leave them alone. If only he could have convinced Katherine that everything would be all right.

Asleep inside the tank, it wasn’t daylight that woke him up the next morning. It was the heat; he was cooking inside the tank. He was sweating before he knew where he was. He needed two blankets to stay warm at night, but during the day he was drenched in sweat as the sun beat down on the metal.

In the first abandoned home he came across, he used the food processor to make a handful of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. While there, he realized he hadn’t called his parents to let them know he was OK. Surely they would have seen the news and called his house right away. Maybe Katherine had been there and they had spoken to her. What could she say to them? Knowing her, she would refuse to answer the phone so she didn’t have to say anything at all.

On a computer at the abandoned house, he read a blog that said the Philadelphia caravan left for Washington the day after the stadium fire. A series of pictures showed the flames and smoke followed by pictures of the destruction afterward. It was one thing to look at the remains of Pompeii. That was distant and unknown to his current life. It was quite another thing to see a horror and know someone you loved, someone special to you, someone who you knew every single thing about, was part of what remained in the charred destruction. Seeing the pictures made him want to kill the next Block protester he came across.

The website said that the Philadelphians, after two days of travel, had only made it twenty miles toward Washington. There had been more abandoned cars blocking the highways than previously estimated. There was talk, supposedly, that representatives from the capital would travel out to meet the Philadelphians and tell them to go back home.

Who could blame the people in Washington for wanting the Pennsylvanians to turn back? Rumors and whispers travelled faster than cars. By the time the first trucks arrived from the north, the newcomers would be seen as Genghis and his cavalry, ready to rape and plunder. If they were capable of torching their own loved ones, the invaders were definitely capable of repeating the crimes against their new neighbors. Who would want to live surrounded by people they didn’t trust, people they know were capable of barbarity?

Having read enough, he opened his email and started typing.

Mom and Dad,

I’m sure by now you’ve heard what happened. I wanted to let you know I’m not among the people traveling south to Washington. I wasn’t at the stadium, but Katherine was. And she took Galen there. I couldn’t stand to see her again so I left. Right now I’m north of New York City, but I’m not settling down here.

I know you’ll probably worry about me when you read this, but I’d rather be by myself than with those people. I wish you both the best. No one could have asked for better, more loving parents. I hope the Florida sun is treating you well. I love you both. I’ll write again.

Jeffrey

There were a lot of other things he thought about saying. They could be said in future letters, however. When he finished typing he powered off the computer. There had been no email from Katherine asking where he was or if he would be returning. It was doubtful there ever would be.

He passed a string of little towns where trees had fallen into homes. Even the houses that missed being hit had collapsed roofs because of the winters and the storms. Everywhere he went, the roads were battered. Only eighty miles north of home, abandoned by the masses for only three years, the roads looked like a series of massive earthquakes must have ripped the land apart. Philadelphia would look the same way in two or three years. Another few years after that and Washington would be the same. Everything would be, eventually.

Ahead of him, a mile up the road, he saw something on the side of the highway that didn’t resemble the abandoned cars and flat tires he was used to seeing. It wasn’t until he was within twenty feet of it that he realized it was a body. Not once had he seen a dead animal on the road in the short span of his trip—there simply weren’t enough vehicles traveling the roads anymore, and the ones that did were moving too slowly to hit anything. Now, instead of a deer or raccoon, lay the body of an actual person.

“Lord, help me,” Jeffrey muttered to himself.

The tank stopped five feet from the body.
Whoever it was would be dead
, he thought,
there’s no point to rushing out to provide medical assistance
.

Part of him didn’t want to stop at all, but he did. The thing that kept Jeffrey there, in the middle of the highway, was the placement of the body. It wasn’t splayed out like a run-down animal; the body’s arms were by its side as though someone had simply dragged it out of a car and left it there. One of the people from the monster truck caravan must have ditched it.

He kept staring at it, wondering if the body was on the side of the road because whoever it was had already died, and transporting them any further would have been wasted space. Or was it a Block who had been abandoned when it became too much of a burden? The body—a young man—looked to be the same age as Galen.

This last thought compelled him to climb out and inspect it. Tiny lines of ants were making their way up and down the man’s skin. There was nothing to differentiate the body to know for sure if it had been a regular person or a Block. It was the Block’s life that separated it from normal people, not its death.

As Jeffrey looked at the body, the only thing he could think about was Galen. Galen lying there on the ground. Galen being abandoned. Galen needing love. Galen on fire. Galen as a singed skeleton.

If only he hadn’t convinced Katherine to have a baby in the first place. The years afterwards would have been quiet and lonely without his son there, but the twenty years of not being a father would have been worth it if he didn’t have to know his boy was burned to death.

Flies came and went from the man’s body. Given time, maggots would work away at anything the birds and foxes didn’t nibble on first. The skin would begin to smell awful.

Thinking back to the cars passing by him in that caravan, he thought about all of the drivers who hadn’t looked his way, didn’t smile or wave, only continued south in the direction they felt they needed to go. One of them had just recently pulled their son, this boy, out of their vehicle just long enough to ditch the body at the roadside before speeding ahead to rejoin the rest of the caravan.

Just then, with Jeffrey only two feet away, the man blinked.

“Fuck,” Jeffrey screamed, falling backwards.

And yet there was no flicker of recognition from the body on the ground, no relief at being saved, not even uncomprehending blinking of trying to figure out if he was alive or if he was already in the afterlife. The eyes closed again. That was the man’s only movement. And Jeffrey knew that this was the only movement the body ever had and ever would make.

Physically, it would have been easy to wave the monster trucks ahead and let the rest of the cars go by. But how could you actually do that to another person, just leave them there? Maybe the driver had acted as though they were changing another flat tire until the caravan disappeared over a hill. Then they would take the Block under his armpits and drag him onto the road. The car would smell better as soon as the unchanged diapers were no longer there. But to simply abandon your flesh and blood on the side of the highway, to let this man starve to death, if the elements didn’t get him first, how could you drive away from that, rejoining the caravan as though nothing had happened?

If only I hadn’t let my boy out of my sight
, Jeffrey thought.

Unsure of what to do, he simply stood over the body. There was no way he could keep driving as if he had never found this young man. If nothing else, he had to at least give the man a blanket and some water. That wasn’t enough either, though. The Block would never know if it was suffering from dehydration, would never shiver from the cold, but that didn’t mean it was acceptable to leave it to the frigid nights. He went back to the tank and when he approached the body again he had blankets and a bottle of water. He unrolled the blanket, pulling it up around the Block’s shoulders. Then he unscrewed the water bottle and poured a sip’s worth into the man’s mouth. The water dribbled out the sides of his lips. Jeffrey hadn’t manually fed a Block since Galen was a little boy. The thought made him groan.