The Great Man of History

The stars did not return to the City until the week it died. That isn’t to say that they left the world entirely, for the world is an interesting place to watch grow and shift and other things a world is known for doing. Rather, it was the City itself that was dull and lifeless in frankly uninteresting ways. For the majority of the citizens, life could be summed up as a series of “And then” with nary a “Suddenly” or “But then” or even an “Oh no, not again with these” in sight.

There were things of note happening in the City preceding the week it died. A deer was seen wandering the remains of the zoo like a vigil to a long forgotten grave. A group of young adults were murdered for frankly no good reason. A mysterious black creature that had been lurking the City streets like a serial killer had finally escaped from that cage along with a pair of ladies. Then there was a fire that broke out three blocks away from the headquarters of the Fuzon Corporation, which killed five people and maimed twenty. And of course some idiot decided that it would be a good idea to let the Thin White Duke back into the City.

But none of these events were what brought the stars back to the City. What brought them back was much, much smaller. Only one other person witnessed it: inexplicably, it was Billy. Not much is known about Billy. It is assumed that he was born sometime during the bad years three miles away from the City in a minor city whose name was lost to time. But there is a prevailing theory that, if nothing else, has thematic weight that he was born in the City on the exact first second of the bad years. That the sole piece of evidence supporting this theory is that it sounds interesting is most likely complete rubbish as it sounds like a sodding cliché in a way that real life never reflects. (Realistic clichés tend to take the form of egomaniacal jerks who want to take over the world for vaguely explained reasons that probably have more to do with compensating for something they lack than actual ambition, people trying to help others when everything seems lost, or other things that fit within that thematic framework.)

And that’s not even getting into the contradictions of the man. Some sources with extensive amount of research claim that he worked for the Fuzon Corporation for close to a decade before finding himself homeless over a dispute with a foreman. Other equally valid sources who did just as much research claim that he had never worked for the Fuzon Corporation and spent that decade scrounging for food and basic living conditions, but ultimately ended up squatting in various abandoned tenements and street corners. Even asking people who should, in theory, know what Billy was doing in that ten year period of his life, in practice, only knew that he was around. In my own research, I could not confirm either one of these views and have discovered five other contradictory takes on the man. This might very well be because of the lack of paperwork done in the City over the course of its post bad years era.

If I were to hazard a guess as to the nature of Billy’s life at that time, I would say that he was doing what everyone else in the City was doing: surviving and nothing more.

What is known about Billy was this: he was a black man of middle age. Were he to survive the week, he would have been somewhere between 22-25 in a month. He had a scar on his left thigh from a knife wound. The cause of that wound was most likely from a bar fight, though it could have been an accident. What is known about the wound is that it was not self-inflicted. He had a birthmark on his shoulder in the shape of the remains of a hastily erased dot. He was born within 30 miles of the City and only knew the world through the lens of the bad years. He had been, for lack of a better word, incarcerated only once in his life and escaped under circumstances that shall be discussed later. His mother died before his father and his father died before him. Like many who lived in the City, he was starving, only kept alive by the barest of necessities. (There are some horror stories told of those who survived in the City when the food ran out. These are tragedies of people locked in a cage some of them call freedom. As someone once scrawled on the body of another, “It’s better to be outside in the rain.” A pity it was a flood. But then again, there are crocodiles.) And he never told any one his last name.

This might sound like an odd thing to focus on, but his last name is perhaps one of the most controversial talking points in this whole sodding affair. In my time researching the various events, characters, and locations surrounding Billy, I have discovered fifteen different last names. Included in these are “Denton,” “Snapp,” “Mann,” “Fucks” (rhymes with tarboosh), and “Lincoln.” But perhaps the name most of my contemporaries desperately want it to be, like a member of a cult aching for today to be the day they move into the desert to wait out the apocalypse, was “Blake.”

If my simile did not make it clear, I am not one of those people. I understand the temptation, I really do. To have one of the major players in the fall of the City be named “Billy Blake” is one of those things that a historian begs to be true much in the same way one wants to be the second coming of Jesus: in theory, it sounds great. But stop and think about it for a second, and all those pesky implications and cruelties come to light. And then there’s the responsibility of such a status. To look people in the eye and say “You will not be saved.” And that’s not even getting into the theological implications of Billy being a Blake. 

When I have brought this up to my contemporaries, the best I’ve gotten was a self-congratulatory bemusement at my silly assumptions with the patronizing tone of a babysitter being asked to put on something the kid actually wants to watch rather than what they think the kid wants to watch. Sadly, these were a minority of situations. More often, I would be violently beaten for daring to go against the grain on this subject. The last time I considered bringing up my concerns prior to this telling ended with me losing an eye and him an arm. I haven’t slept well since that night.

I’m currently writing this chapter next to him. The doctors say he should be fine. They’re good at their job, as my brother has told me time and time again. The man’s arm can be replaced, the Doctor with blonde hair died blue tells me. She says it should take about a month to build, but it can be done. They did what they could for my eye, but I will never see through it again. Still, I’m grateful to her and the staff that kept him alive. He’s good people, despite this one bad incident. Shortly after I finished this chapter, I asked him if it would be fine if I named him in this moment and went more in-depth about the matter than I am. He politely declined for several sympathetic reasons. One he said I could use was that this is a bit tangential and I should return to the story.

It was a dark sky that the City had gotten used to in its boring years. The clouds were parting, though you couldn’t notice in the featureless sky. Billy was lying on the concrete surface of the City streets. He was cold and dressed in clothing he wore for the past year. The air was percolated with the stench of the unwashed masses. His fellow homeless were making the noise all humans make when they haven’t had any dreams since they were five, which sounds almost like a moan of defeat, but with the hint of a sigh of sadness. In short, Billy could not get any sleep. Inexplicably, he was the only one who couldn’t.

Which made it all the more fitting that he was the first one who saw her. What follows is purely speculation on my part. I did not know Billy nor do I know what his thought process was at the time. This is based on the experiences of those who survived the City’s final days. As such, I feel this reality of my honest story needs mentioning only once. Sometimes honesty isn’t about the facts as it is about the feelings of the world around you. I do not think he thought she was real at first. Illuminated in the flickering electronic glow of the City streets, she would have looked like an angel to the malnourished Billy.

He approached her moments after first seeing her, forgetting the need to sleep as many do within the City. It didn’t take him long to see that she was merely a work of art made out of the remains of a long dead person. Not too long dead to begin decay but long enough to know that they aren’t actually sleeping. And yet, Billy still approached her. He looked upon her form in all its strangeness. He probably couldn’t see the words etched on the ground beneath her remains, them having been long since discarded by the wind. Nor could he know what sad life she led prior to being remixed into a statue.

But he did know the feeling of her, the sadness that her malnourished body evoked. The cruelties the barcode on her left arm signified. The urges her right arm expressed. The lonely smile on her face that not even the winds of history could remove. Her fingernails consumed like her left eye. Her feet, mere stumps. He would never know her voice, but he could tell that it was beautiful. No recordings of who this woman was exist. Her past was consumed by the loss of the old future. Deleted by those who didn’t want to see her as a person. All we have left of her is an employee number: 7877.

I visited the ruins of the factory she spent the last years of her life once. Even when it wasn’t a ruin, it was a desolate place. A monument of brutality and brutalism fitting within the barest definition of “livable.” Room 7.8.77 was barren. No sign of life or even what remains when someone moves out of a childhood home. Not even dust percolated the air. The banalities of the room are well reported. A chill went down my spine as I inspected her bed for any sign of someone sleeping in it. There wasn’t even an absence.

I wonder sometimes about what they did to make the rooms like that. All the rooms were the same: the same brutalism, the same barrenness, the same lack of absence. Who could have done such a thing to those rooms? How could they have removed all evidence that anyone was ever there? There are cameras, but we don’t know where the footage is or how to retrieve it. All we have of any evidence that she did work here is a barcode and a number. Everything else is absence lost to the either like clouds on a windy day. My unconscious companion awoke as I wrote that line. He dreamed of popping clouds in a hot air balloon and finding people inside them like candy in an Easter egg. I wonder if there’s any significance to that.

As Billy stroked the body’s face, wondering about someone he cared for no doubt, the sun began to rise.

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