As I slept in my childhood home for the last time, I had a dream. It started with a memory of conversation with my boss back when I edited books. We were in a mildly crowded coffee shop in New York. For some reason, someone was humming the theme to The Godfather, which permeated the rest of the place. We could see the ninth housing satellite from out the window, even though it was during the day. My boss was sipping her coffee while I was looking at the bank robbers escaping through the computer screen of the guy behind her.
THE IRONIC THING ABOUT HIS RESPONSE, she said in a voice that wasn’t hers, IS THAT HE CLEARLY UNDERSTOOD SOMETHING THAT MUCH OF THE WORLD MISSED. ASIDE FROM THE SUBSEQUENT (AND FUNDAMENTALLY SEPARATE) WAR ON TERROR, THE LARGEST MATERIAL EFFECT OF 9/11 WAS THE PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIC WOUND DEALT TO MANHATTAN—THE PERMANENT AND TRAUMATIC ALTERATION OF ONE OF THE MOST ICONIC SKYLINES IN THE WORLD. HE WAS A CREATURE BIRTHED FROM THAT SAME PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY AND UNDERSTOOD IT INSTINCTIVELY. BUT THIS ALSO EXPLAINS WHY 9/11 FUNDAMENTALLY DERAILED HIS APPARENT TRAJECTORY FROM 2000 TO 2016: IT BEAT HIM AT HIS OWN GAME, MANIFESTING THE ESSENCE OF THE TOWER BETTER THAN HE COULD, AND FORCING HIM TO BECOME SOMETHING MORE MONSTROUS YET BEFORE HE COULD APPEASE HIS AWFUL MASTER.
INDEED, I replied in someone else’s words. BECAUSE WHAT CAN BE MORE TRUE THAN FICTION, WHICH IS THE VERY FRAMEWORK WE CONSTRUCT TO UNDERSTAND OUR LIVES AND THE WORLD AROUND US? ALL RECEIVED KNOWLEDGE COMES TO US THROUGH SOME FORM OF STORY. SINCE ANCIENT TIMES ORAL HISTORY AND ORAL TRADITION USED MYTHOPOEA TO SYMBOLIZE THE ORIGIN AND MACHINATIONS OF THE UNIVERSE. SCIENCE CONSTRUCTS FACTS BASED ON OBSERVATION AND INFERENCE THAT TRANSLATES LOCALIZED KNOWLEDGE INTO THE LANGUAGE OF WESTERN ACADEMIA. AND HISTORY TAKES THE FORM OF A NARRATIVE WOVEN BY INVESTED PARTIES. My boss’ response took the form of turning into a wave of paperwork.
Instead of following my memory to its logical conclusion, the camera that was myself shifted to the outside the coffee shop where the screams of those drowning in paper were drowned out by sounds of the city. There, right outside the coffee shop, were two men. The older of the two men had short white hair, a sloppily kept beard, and camouflage pants. The younger wore a backpack, a ponytail, and a smug disposition that deserves, at most, a punch in the jaw. They weren’t part of the dream of a city I was having, so even though they talked, I couldn’t hear a word they said. At first, it seemed like the two men were complete strangers who had just bumped into one another. But there was a look in the eye of the older man that said otherwise. He called to the younger and, surprisingly, the man came back. There was a fury in the young man’s eyes. Not the fury of a youth squandered by forces brought about by the previous generation or the fury of difference, but rather the fury of familiarity. I could tell from the height of the man’s jaw that he was shouting at the older man. There was a snarl to whatever he was saying.
In response, the old man simply walked up to the young man and bit his neck. Strangers without distinguishable faces came and tried to separate the two, but the old man wouldn’t stop attacking the younger man. It was as if he had the strength of his youth. The young man tried to fight back, but too much repressed blood was seeping from in-between his fingers and onto the ill kept sidewalk. Two people who looked like the young man dragged him away from the old man. I flew above them as they turned into what I thought was smoke. Suddenly, everything that surrounded me seemed to be nothing more than smoke. The rectangular buildings that lacked aesthetic uniformity suddenly became a perfected fog of white. I floated up and up through the smoke until I could see the skyline of New York. I looked around for a source for the fire, but only found clouds.
While I was floating upwards, I could hear a chant without a source. It sounded like the guttural howl of a starving bear trapped in a long abandoned zoo, praying to an uncaring unknowable God. I don’t remember all of the words, or even if that was because of the fading nature of dream memories or because the howl was largely incomprehensible. I do however remember a few fragments: “EMERGENCE OF A TUMOR JUST A GOD WHO TRIES TO BREAK INTO OUR WORLD BY THE SHORTEST PATH,” “THING ESCAPES AND DEATH IS JUST,” “ONE I KNOW RETAINS A NAME.” Their meaning is lost on me.
When I stopped rising, I saw two figures. One was a skeletal figure in a black cloak wearing a pair of skis while holding a scythe. The other… it’s hard to describe the other figure. At once, the being was male and female, young and old, thin and fat, black and white and all the other colors one could be. And yet, the being wasn’t an amalgamation of all these things. Rather, the being shifted its form constantly, never once repeating the same face. It spoke with the tenor of a lion in its prime, capable of scaring off the most ardent of scavenger with a single roar. And with its voice, the shapeful being said, GO INTO THAT CITY AND SLAY HALF OF THE DWELLERS THEREIN, YET SPARE A HALF OF THEM THAT THEY MAY KNOW THAT I AM GOD. The skeletal being obeyed what I presumed was its master and flew past me with an air of resigned melancholy.
I followed the figure as it descended down and down and down towards the city. Despite it’s skeletal form, its wings were feathered brown and soft. It gracefully descended upon the city with the ease a child has going to sleep. It tilted its eternally grinning head towards me. There was a void where its eyes should be. The words weren’t so much spoken as implanted into my brain with the voice of my own thoughts. (But then, what other voices appear in our dreams than our own?) They said BUT WE MUST CARE. FOR IF WE DO NOT CARE, WE DO NOT EXIST. IF WE DO NOT EXIST, THEN THERE IS NOTHING BUT BLIND OBLIVION. AND EVEN OBLIVION MUST END SOME DAY. I could see the city in all its grandeur and monstrosity. All the people were tiny from my height. They were buzzing about like flies in the ointment of the city’s architecture. It was then that I realized that I didn’t much care for this perspective of the world. I liked being around my fellow man in the muck of the world. Sure, there was some beauty in this perspective, but there was something missing from it to make it just right. Before I could put my finger on what that was, my companion pointed upwards towards the descending station. It then said something else to me, but I awoke in a sweat before the words could be interpreted and retained.
Before I left my childhood home forever, I shook the hands of the families who let me sleep in their home. There were three in total, and they seemed to be good people… or, at least, the kind who wouldn’t steal all my stuff while I slept. When I asked if I could mention who they were in this… what do you call it? It’s too short to be a journal yet too long to be a note. Snippet? Entry? Fragment? Regardless, they said no. But they did allow me to explain the structure of their living. They had split the house up with one family on each floor. The basement went to a lesbian couple and their three children. The children got my brother Patrick’s second bedroom while the couple slept on the couches where I’d watch some of my brother’s old VHS tapes. Some of them were still on the shelf. The rest probably got traded for food or were stolen before the families moved in. The laundry room was communal and I was surprised to see the plastic laundry baskets I had known since my childhood were still being put to good use. The mark on the wall between floors where my brother punched a hole through it was still there. We told him to fix it, but he always kept pushing it off until we all just got used to it. I guess no one has the tools to make it invisible.
The family that lived on the main floor was a polyamorous quartet with six children. The only part of the floor that wasn’t slept in was the dining room, which was missing its table. And yet, the painting of the Last Supper I got from my grandparents was still there. Indeed, a lot of the stuff attached to the walls was still there, even the needlepoint picture of a unicorn in the bathroom. It wasn’t as if this stuff was permanently fused to the walls. People back during the bad days tended to steal artwork for fires and what not. At the very least the plates could be used as, well, plates. But nothing was stolen. Hell, my great grandfather’s sword was still on the mantle place, and the case for that was broken.
The only room that was regularly used by the families staying at the top floor of my childhood home was my parent’s bedroom. The occupants consisted of a single father and his daughter. The giant bed that once lay there had long since disappeared. All that remained were the faint scratches it made on the walls. I slept in my brother’s childhood bedroom, as the bedroom that was once mine had a giant hole where the window used to be. Most of my books were gone. So many years spent collecting them, all for naught in the grand scheme of things. I couldn’t carry the remainder of my library, but I did take a few favorites. Though I left my most favorite book for the children of this new, post-capitalist age to discover.
My departure from my childhood home was, all things considered, quite banal. The families had seen many a traveler come and go, though never one who lived in the house before them. They never did go into details about those people. I suppose there’s room in this world for some mysteries, like what made the sounds in the attic or who was sleeping in the extension of our house we built once my grandmother got too old to stay alone in her house in the Expanding Woods. (Though, I was curious. Am curious [I’m rubbish with tenses at times, I’m sorry.] Then again, there are many a thing I’ll see on my journey that you will never know. Who knows what I’ll find or who I’ll see. Maybe I’ll find out on my travels. Or maybe it’ll gnaw at me for the rest of my life because I just can’t live without complete and utter closure.) The families found me generally polite, though my minor insomnia and penchant for monologues did get on some people’s nerves. I helped out for the entire month I stayed with them, to the best of my abilities, and generally got on with them. There were some growing pains. But then, I am a writer, whereas they were a farming family. (The entire backyard was full of fruits and vegetables. The front was full of rabbits.) Differences were bound to come up. But we worked through it, and I think we were happier knowing one another… I hope.
As I walked away, I turned to give my home one last look. I’m old enough to know I will never see it again, so I might as well say goodbye. The dark blue paint had faded long ago and no one seemed to care to paint it again, though the red door still had its pop. Save for my childhood bedroom, the house looked to be completely intact. The vines that seemed to consume many of the homes in the area only ate the chimney side of the house, which is to say the side that wasn’t where my old bed was. The tree that I always thought was going to fall and crush me while I slept in my old bed had yet to fall. In fact, it seemed sturdier than ever. All things considered, it was a good house. I’m going to miss it.
I suppose now I should mention where it is that I was heading to. When the world ended and became what it is now, I was living in London. I had been married for some time, though my love was lost last year. We lived a good life, helping wherever we could and other such things. One day, I looked into a mirror and saw that I was getting older. I was still healthy, but it looked like my time was going to come soon. And if I was to die, then I wanted to die where I was born: Santa Monica, California. I could have taken a boat directly to the state, but I wanted to visit my childhood town one last time before the end. I spent a month simply living in the town as if I was a tourist, virgin to the place. Now I was to meet up with a troupe of Spiders heading to a “city” on the west coast, which they claimed was a short distance away from my birthplace.
When I reached Sheephill Road, I decided to turn away from my grandmother’s house and towards the Post Road. I was on a bit of a time crunch and were I to head towards her home, a tribe of deer might confront me. Besides, the Expanding Woods had long since consumed that area, as I learned the hard way. I played it safe. On my way to the Post Road, I saw a small house. The house was more rectangular than my childhood home, probably because it only had one floor. It had been consumed completely by vines and other natural things. The only thing that was visible through the vines was a compass. It had a star of eight points at the center of it that seemed to be made of copper. It was the first time I had ever noticed this house in all the years I had lived here (or at least the first time I recall). I never knew the people who lived in that house. Indeed, I barely knew the people who lived in the neighborhood. But then, my childhood was a time of paranoia and privacy. The world’s changed since then.
Take, for example, the bridge at the intersection between Sheephill and the Post Road. I rarely crossed it as a kid. In fact, I think the only time I went across it was when I was 18 and went for a half hour walk around the train station that took an hour to complete on account of getting lost. Even back then, the woods seemed to consume it. Now, that took on a more literal meaning as the ruins of the bridge (destroyed during the bad days) was healed by a series of vines, roots, and plants that inexplicably grew to connect the path. To heighten the supernatural nature of the new bridge, I could see a fucking Bigfoot conversing with one of his deer friends on the other side. Neither one seemed to notice me.
I ran before they could, until I reached, for lack of a better term, the farmer’s market that used to be a strip mall. The inaccuracy of that term refers to the fact that capitalism as an economic system has long since become incompatible with the modern world. What use are credit cards in a world with minimal electricity? What use is cash aside from kindling? There were no longer any landlords to pay back, nothing to spend the money on, and no one could account for it all. Everyone was, for all intensive purposes, equal. There were rumors that there was a “city” on the west cost that still used money in a capitalistic sense. Then again, there were also rumors of tribes in the desert that worship money as a God, so anything’s possible. Regardless, the area I decided to rest at was a place where one could get some fruits or vegetables to eat. People left them in baskets or, in the case of apples, the trees they grew from. I took a granny smith from a tree growing out of a shattered window of an abandoned CVS and continued on my way.
It was then that I reached a pair of obelisks. When I was a kid, they were simply advertisements for the various shops at the nearby shopping center, but again, the world has changed. I had heard a rumor that magicians were using them as a means of traveling to the lands of fairies. I think it was either called Barsoom or Ookbar, though I could never a straight word on what they were called. (Magicians are highly finicky when it comes to fictional terminology, especially when you call it “fictional.”) There were many places like that in America. In some ways, the country was a land of pathways much like England is a land of margins. When I saw an active sigil on the sidewalk besides one of the obelisks (in the shape of a pair of TIE fighters laid out like a broken ladder with one of them connected to a stylized sharp “S”), I decided to not step on them. I was lucky, as I saw a fellow step on one on the opposite side of the street and disappear in a puff of smoke. He must not have seen the cum stains.
I eventually arrived at the aforementioned shopping center to find a trio of Wolves heading towards the old Stop and Shop. (I think I went there a few times as a kid, at least back when they sold comics. It had a Playstation 2 to demonstrate whatever game they were trying to sell. More often than not, we shopped at the Shop Rite across the street. It was either because it was cheaper or nicer.) What the Wolves were doing there, I did not know. I could tell they were Wolves on account of them wearing the felt of said animal around their necks like a scarf. (An… odd look for summertime.) They appeared to be in their mid-teens, which was about average for Wolves. There were rumors about what those girls in particular would do if they caught you. I decided not to test those rumors (especially since they looked like they were sneaking into the Stop and Shop) and ran as fast as I could. I was so distracted by the screams from behind that I tripped over an abandoned lawn chair on the side of the road.
When I picked myself up, I noticed that I was by one of those indoor theme parks that seemed to be everywhere when I was young. It had closed down long before the bad days and I think I only went there once or twice for some other kid’s birthday, I honestly don’t remember. And yet, despite my unfamiliarity, there was an air of melancholy in seeing it abandoned like this. The dragon’s head mounted upon the brick exterior, now decayed to the point where it was missing its green paint and left eye. The child in the airplane that held the banner that advertised the park was missing. The windows shattered, though someone who cared swept up the glass long ago. Inside the building, I could see a small fire. Surrounding it was a tribe of children. They were conversing with an elder, though they didn’t seem to trust the man like a father. Their trust seemed to be more akin to one a child has towards Spiderman or Doctor Who. I couldn’t get a good look at him, but he had the grin of a stuffed dog.
On the corner of Fairfield and West Main a block or so away from the decaying dragon’s head, there was a broken electrical box. (I was surprised by the presence of those signs, though I suppose it’s easier to use maps if you have signs. I was shocked when I discovered, against all odds and sensible explanations, maps survived into the modern world. But then, we are a race of detectives. All of us are in need of clues…) It was painted over, as all the boxes of its kind were in my hometown. I was always fascinated by what was in them as a kid (especially the one that was painted to look like a box of crayons), but even more so by the designs used to obfuscate the banality of their contents for the benefit of dumb kids. There was another that had the designs of Charles Atlas on them and another that had superheroes on them. The broken one seemed to have once had an alien invasion by a race of little green men. There was a cow or two in the tractor beam and the city seemed to be burning from a heat ray. Evidentially, the alien cults of the bad days didn’t take kindly to people “mocking” their beliefs.
On the other side of the road, I could see a small forest growing within the remains of a Taco Bell and a few nearby small apartments. The ruins were minor in the grand scheme of things, simply decommissioned buildings from before the bad days that had been ignored when those days had begun. The Taco Bell had its roof and one of the walls torn asunder shortly before the trees began to grow within them. The maple tree growing out of the next-door apartment was but a sapling compared to other trees I’ve seen since the bad days. And yet, it was still able to shatter out of the roof of the building like a hand rising out of the sea. There were still people living in there, eating off of and sitting on the tree as if it was another piece of furniture. The other trees around it grew in a similar manner.
Above the electronic box and past the trees, I could see one of the last remaining high rises. The rest were either burnt down during the bad days or overgrown by various bits of vegetation to make living there untenable. But there it was, still standing. It was a tube in shape with each floor stacked together like a pile of Oreos—and not the good kind either, the kind that had yellow cookies and yellow filling (Birthday Surprise, I think it was called). Even when it was new, the high rise looked old. I never knew anyone who lived in that specific building (though I remember picking up my cousin at one of them to see a movie, though I forget what we saw). But it was nonetheless a sign I was nearing Stamford and, subsequently, my destination.
My path was blocked by a long abandoned car, which had long since been stripped of parts. It was silver in color and looked as if it just left the lot, save for its missing wheels and broken windows. There was a body in there, a skeleton decayed and left behind from the bad days. The skull was cracked, barely recognizable as human. There’s a small hole at the back of it. I do not know why the body remained there rather than getting buried or removed. Some of my childhood friends (who returned home when the bad days started to care for their parents) said that it’s because the man was a pedophile. Others claimed attempts at removing the body cause people to get sick. One guy said that this is how the man wanted to be preserved. To be honest, I don’t care much for the actual reason behind the corpse still being there. I found it to be a highly evocative image, but one with a probably banal explanation.
Whatever the reason, there was a sadness to the skeleton. The things this man had done in his life seemed meaningless in the face of the sadness. There was no sickness when I grabbed the body from out of the car, no universal breakage as I moved to the river. At most, a flock of Canadian Geese walked past. And while I had a justified nervousness towards those birds, they did not move to attack. Only one looked in my direction, but that was just for a brief moment as it turned its head away from a crumb on the ground. Maybe the body would be destroyed in the rapids. Maybe it would reach the ocean (or some lake or wherever the river ended) intact. Or maybe someone would take the body back to where it was as punishment for the crimes the man committed. I do not know.
I sat on a wooden bench a few feet away from the river. I could see a man and a woman walking their dog. The man was wearing a black sweater (again, odd for summer) and a tan fedora. The woman wore long blue camouflage pants, a buttoned up denim jacket, and sunglasses. Both had more style than I (I was just wearing a pair of black gym shorts, a collapsing satchel bag I’ve had for a few years, and a faded t-shirt of a once popular Spider themed superhero). The pair seemed to love each other, but one could never know I suppose. And or first time in my entire life, the dog didn’t bark at me like I was plotting on eating them alive.
The clear blue sky and the cool air had a soothing affect on me. I would have fallen asleep then and there, were the bench lacking in its metal arm rests. Instead, I sat there thinking to myself about the life that I had led. It was a good one, all things considered. I tried to be a good man and succeeded. There was a bit of doubt, as there always would be. No one can ever be sure if they’re good or not. That’s for other people to judge. But still I sat there, stroking my short white beard and adjusting my glasses, thinking of what I had done. I loved, I lost, and I didn’t know that much. And yet, I felt as if I led a pretty good life.
Eventually, I got up and continued my journey. Fortunately, the artificial path by the river that I found myself on would lead directly to the street where I was to meet with the Spiders. I could tell because the path by the river ended right at UCONN Stamford, which was only a block or two away from the where I was heading. The campus was relatively intact; especially considering the T UMP TO E was across the street. There was many a building that had letters stolen from it. I heard rumors that someone made the obvious joke out of North Mianus School, but that was along the path of my Grandmother’s house, so I didn’t check. (Growing up, I would typically take those roads to get to my destination as opposed to the one I took.) And yet, T UMP TO E seemed to be even more destroyed than all the rest. I could understand why, and indeed felt the same disgust simply looking at it as I assumed the people who attacked it did. The only thing that surprised me was the fact that it was still standing. Bar a few broken windows and its historical implications, people could theoretically live there. But then, I guess the proper tools for its destruction no longer exist. All that’s left is for nature to consume it as it has so many buildings. There were a few vines growing around it, certainly, but I wouldn’t call it consumed quite yet. Rather, it was held in the way I was holding an apple at that moment: about to chomp down on its green skin.
More interestingly was what was happening at the building a block from where I was to meet the Spiders. Shaped like a wave, I could see within its turquoise windows a small group of people having a gunfight. Naturally, I went inside to investigate. From what I could gather, there were two men fighting against twenty others. It seemed to be a sort of buddy cop scenario wherein one was the grizzled veteran broken by the system and its inability to stop the real criminals while the other was the hotshot rookie who didn’t play by the rules. Said rule breaking appeared to have gotten the rookie shot in the arm. The twenty were descending in on the pair, armed to the teeth and prepared to kill the duo. With no other choice, the older officer was forced to open fire without proper warning.
“BANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANG,” went the officer as he rapidly tapped his thumbs to his index fingers. Each shot caused some amount of damage to the attackers. Some were even killed. One such body landed right in front of me.
“Oh, hey Sean,” the corpse said to me, more tired than anything else. “We’re just finishing up here, would you mind waiting at the theatre? Breaks emersion, you know.” Not one to disagree with a dead person I exited the building stage left and sauntered towards the meeting place.
When I was a kid, this used to be a movie theater. The Avalon, I think it was called. Some of the letters that would light up its yellow sign had been stolen such that only the “A,” “V,” and “N” were left. I started going to the theater when I was in middle school. I remember inexplicably seeing Day of the Dead in 35mm as part of a surprise double feature with my dad. The Master immensely bored my parents and I, despite my brother’s claims of the film’s greatness. I saw so many things on those two screens that impacted who I was and how I think, that I consider it my favorite movie theater. I sat in the slightly carpeted, slightly grassy, mostly used lobby and waited for the Spiders to conclude their play. There were other people there, some I recognized and some I didn’t. One such person was a lean man. There was a gauntness to him even though he wasn’t all that thin. He was balding, though he tried to distract from this by growing a long beard. He was about a year older than me and he looked almost as tired as I felt. The man had recently lost one of his arms and someone I hoped was a Doctor was patching him up. His clothing was ripped and the holes had twigs and vines sticking out of it.
I approached the man and said with a slightly smug, but mostly melancholic, smile, “Hey Patrick. How are things?” He looked at me with tears on his cheeks. With the Doctor’s permission, I hugged him. We left at around twilight, never again to see that theater again.
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