Decomposition
Her heavy boots ground the rubble of several thousand years a little finer with her every shuffling visit to the ancient square. On this day, she bore across the courtyard an obligation of vestigial significance; a prop, to satisfy some old duty of lapsed relevance. Coming to a stop in the center of the gravel expanse, she scanned its perimeter, where a familiar collection of uninspired structures stood exactly as they had just before the end; twentieth century architecture in all its coincidental glory.
Nothing about these low, stucco buildings was accidental: each had been perfectly preserved in a kind of material holographic projection long after the passing of anyone who might have suggested historical eras more worthy of preservation. It was meant to be comforting. And yet, when she walked over the crumbled remains of the last real buildings – and everything else buried below – all she felt was dread.
Reenacting childhood visits to the doctor, she lifted a hand to lay on her chest and took a shallow breath. When she was a girl – nervous on a cold, vinyl-top table, half-shrouded in a hospital gown – a warm stethoscope revealed mysteries and the doctor’s wordless smile said all was well. Then, she felt safe. The grown woman was not so well equipped: her own hand felt cold against her sternum, and beneath its rising and its falling her fingers found no reassurance.
Nor did the nearly-empty spaces around her provide any relief; they were low-rent amusement park rides filled with hollow, mechanistic beings. And these facades in turn refused to give their secrets up – they always faced in her direction.
She understood that she also had been propped up, that she also belonged in the ground, with its vast, cold network of tiny interlocking spaces extending beneath her through strata of broken stone, like the absence of a nervous system that once animated the intercourse of living things. Once again, she surveyed her own being for signs of life.
I should be dead, she thought.
She stood there in that emptiness (silent, agnostic), wanting to shrink from the simple challenge of walking across this space one more time. As often happened in the quiet, in-between places, visions crowded her mind, uninvited, like invaders pouring through an unguarded gate; images of alternate realities, other versions of herself. Priestess. Goddess. A towering plume of ash, smoke, and fire climbing above the horizon; she almost felt the heat of it, as if these ideas had been shut up inside her bones, smoldering, a blush on her cheeks the only sign to rise and break the surface.
On the outside, it was a different story. Her rough canvas coat and coveralls gave the impression she’d been carved out of a tree trunk. To an observer, she would display an indifferent determinism that was mostly empty of thought, mostly free of prejudice – almost inanimate, elemental. Only, not harmless: like the crust of a planet, her clothing was only a thin shell after all, barely binding her volcanic interior.
She herself had chosen to believe she was nothing more than an inconsequential relic, though her dreams were closer to the truth. Next to what remained of this ruined world, she was royalty, clothed with the sun. But dreams and appearances were two sides of the same flipping coin; would she be the head or the tail? Would her destiny be measured along dimensions apocalyptic or geologic? Maybe both. After all, it was Common Knowledge that inside her was a power to change everything, as well as a growing threat of an authentic, end-times disaster if ever she came in contact with anything of real value.
She was, in fact, the planet’s last Act of God, waiting to happen.
She completed her traverse of the square, passed through the doorway of the shimmering image of City Hall, and approached the placid, alert receptionist. Her boots now tread more gently and the hardwood floor creaked in a comforting way.
‘Afternoon, how may I help?’ said the ghost, with the earnest frigidity of a dream remembered by a stranger.
‘I’m here to pay my utility bill,’ she said automatically, playing her part.
‘Certainly!’ said the receptionist, the nobody, the everybody-who-ever-worked-a-desk-job sitting opposite to her. He reached into a metal lock-box for a bound stack of receipts. Lifting the top pages free, he folded the back cover up and under them, recorded the date on the first page, simultaneously imprinting a copy beneath it. ‘Another beautiful day,’ he remarked as they acted out the ritual, passing facsimiles between them.
Normally, some minutes of this pleasant conversation could go by before the pleasure passed; sometimes she gave in to it, gave in to the consolation of these interactions, even if they were only an elaborate recollection. Today, she was in a mood, and didn’t respond. The receptionist was not insensitive.
He softened, just a little, and leaned back with a slight tilt of his head. He spoke with a subtle expression of concern: ‘Anything else I can help you with?’
Her face flushed and she swallowed her response, slumping forward with a turn of her head until her dark hair covered her face. She hated crying, and could feel the threat of a rising flood. It was not safe: to release the waters might mean things coming apart that could not be put back together. Though, lately, she had been flirting with honesty (which felt like asking for trouble), saying a thing or two out loud that would unsettle a prison shrink. Why would she take the risk? She told herself she was only clearing her head, throwing a window open, airing out the sick-room, venting the accumulated poison of her thoughts! She was also willing to admit she wanted to see if it was possible to shock the apparitions. It had been a fine way to stay sane; turn it all into a game. Except, things were starting to get weird.
She was starting to attract a new kind of attention: the nobodies were comforting her and she was letting them do it. Just days before, she’d broken down in front of one of the creeps and spoke of her despair, loneliness; some pretty dark thoughts. She wept. And, when she felt the hand on hers she failed entirely in that moment to remember that it wasn’t alive. It was warm, heavy, and it pulsed at the edge of perception with a liquid rhythm that matched her own. It was ... it had the impossible feel of life in it. But what did she know? The mere thought of it made her sick with a sudden, nauseating conflict between desire and understanding. She could swear that it was human. But she knew that it was not. She knew that it was instead somehow the sum of human comforts curated from a million moments like this one in order that moments like this would offer something of the comfort of things past. It wasn’t real. And she had to remind herself of this fact often. Today, she saw the illusion for what it was.
And yet: did she have to discount the feeling of grace that came by such beguiling consolations? Why should she not be consoled? That was the cruelest question. The endless consolation in this place threatened to wear her down to nothing. Except, she thought, it couldn’t be said to wear exactly; because, like everything now, the feeling had no abrasive qualities at all. That was the real horror of it: she felt nothing now, except the chafe of fabric on her skin. Nothing hurt anymore. It was unbearable. She wanted to scream.
Only now, standing across from the receptionist and his treacherously ingratiating attitude of accommodation, her body had gone rigid, though her mouth still moved and a small voice could be heard. Out of her came the disquieting sound you might expect to hear coming from a forgotten solitary cell in a forgotten prison, far from any other life. Her speech was disconnected, self-fulfilling: ‘... You don’t have what I need. Even if you did it just might kill me, ‘cause I’m so soft at the edges I think the tiniest scratch would make me spill apart, and I’d slip, with nothing to stop me, in between the smallest pieces of this place and disappear ...’ and hearing her own words she wondered if there would be enough of her left to find its way through the cracks to the soft earth, now hidden so far beneath the ruin that nothing green could grow from it.
She let her eyes shut, and her mind wandered, searching, over the surface of the world. She thought that there were mountains nearby, and she could picture an ocean somewhere to the west (she’d seen it once, when she first came to this place). She imagined that happy coast, sculpted by ocean waves from the beginning of time, and wondered if that had somehow come to an end as well. She thought the sea might have worn its way inland and come to the edge of the town by now, so much time had passed. But she hadn’t seen real water in ages, except in pictures at the library.
Her world was shrunk, the boundaries of her town marking the limits of her existence. The library dominated the square in front of City Hall, and was her window to the wider world. She used to love it there, loved looking through the oversized picture books, though it had become too painful to look at things she could never really see. Lately she had been working her way through old stories full of adventure and long-dead heroes, books suggested by the old librarian. At first she allowed the fantasies to work on her, but she could no longer accept these fictions or their posturing champions – what did these histories have to do with her? She had no need to fight a great battle, to discover new territory, or cure some deadly disease. What use did she have for greatness?
She had a simpler dream; carried it with her like a dried flower in an envelope, close to her heart. Her dream was to one day do something offensive enough to get punched in the face ... just once. And maybe get one good hit in before blacking out. Then she would know that there was something worth fighting for. That she was worth fighting for.
Now, she thought, there was nothing left ... except windmills turning slowly above the town by some hidden power, in the dead air. Nothing would ever hurt her. There was nothing left to fight for, nothing to beat, nothing to break, nobody left to offend, but herself. There was no pain left to feel. Even the heavy clothes she wore had no purpose, meant to protect her from ... what? Only the ground beneath her feet remained, could be considered a worthy adversary, a danger. She wondered ... if she could just get high enough to leap to her death? No, the buildings would not permit it.
Walking away from the receptionist without another word, she pushed the door open – would have thrown it open if she’d thought she could get away with it – and walked once more to the center of the square, and once more came to a halt, uncertain.
Down the block, a bar and grill broadcast its welcome with fake neon signs in the windows and tin-can pop music droning over empty outdoor tables. At a time when each experience existed only as the average of every other same or similar experience, this ancient dive had benefited somewhat from the reboot after the end of the world. Yet, for all the happy hours she’d spent there, none of them had been very happy, mostly because the alcohol was not really alcoholic, in the old sense. Her stomach was growling now – only partly from hunger.
After a long time staring hazily into the distance and hating the bland satisfaction of all that was to follow, she heard the crunch of rubble under her feet and realized that she had begun to move across the square in the direction of food.
