Test

No one can say for sure how much time is left because no one can say for sure what it is that will do us in. But hasn’t it always been that way? Sure the list of things that will likely do us in may have changed: radiation poisoning, exotic new autoimmune problems, bacteriumX syndrome from a simple cut, these are new, but the results are the same. Our 10 billionth simultaneously living person was born not too long ago. So maybe it’s time for thinning out… as long as its not me, not too soon….

It’s like that sharp pain that you feel in your thumb, just at the base of the nail. A ghost of the pain you felt at 12 years old when you closed the car door on it, and the door was now locked, and there was Mom scurrying around from other side of the car to unlock it so you could get it out. A pain from long ago, come to visit again, a sharp reminder that you are here now but you were also there then. This is reality.

You have to hurry when you get into the tunnel. It’s hard to know how much time you have. Every so often, several times a day, the water is turned on and it floods the tunnel floor to ceiling. Then the water is turned off and it drains out again.

No one has been able to find any pattern in the intervals between flooding. The best strategy is to meet with a guide and wait outside the entrance for a flood to come and go. As soon as it’s gone, you head on in and hope you get out the other end in time.

It takes about two hours to walk from one end to the other.

Sarah, Mark and John had been camped outside the eastern side for two days. Their guide, Sumbatu, was content to sit by the fire, carving little figures out of wood. The three of them were very nervous. The flood stage had started a couple of hours ago and the noise inside the tunnel was substantial. Now the noise had dropped off a bit as the pumps had stopped bringing water in and the drains had started letting water out.

Sumbatu had put his toys away and was packing up to go. The others also put their gear together.

“Usually there’s at least an hour between floods?” Mark asked for the third time.

“Usually” said Sumbatu.

Now the tunnel was dry enough that they could start walking in.

After about an hour of hiking Sarah heard a noise. She grabbed John’s hand. Behind her the noise escalated as they started to run.

“Today I washed my hair. This is a big accomplishment. Never mind ‘is the water too contaminated’ and ‘is it too wasteful to use water to wash hair’. It has been 3 weeks since I last washed it, so it’s not wasteful, and I always test the water before using. It’s more about finding the time to do it. It’s a little depressing that I’m so pressed for time that even an extra few minutes is so precious. Yet here I sit, waiting, waiting for the train to go again, writing dutifully in my journal as Dr Sanjay Gupta suggests it’s a healthy outlet.  How did everything get so crazy?”

Sondra paused and looked down at the floor where a dull gray dirty spot on the linoleum looked back at her. She idly wondered if the stain was a contaminant, if she should get up right now and test it or just leave for another car on the train. She sighed and wrote again. “These are the kind of idle thoughts we must have today in order to survive. Never mind that it is now normal for a train to stop dead on the tracks for 10 or 15 minutes or more at a time. Never mind that I am alone in this car. It’s the dull gray stain on the floor that worries me.”

Sondra closed her book and put the pen away in her pocket. She got up and carefully stepped over the stain and went to the end of the car. She opened the door and stepped quickly to the door of the next car and slipped inside where she found three other stravellors. One was reading, one was writing furiously in a journal, and one was eating an apple. Sondra sat and opened her book and began to write again.

The place I picked out is in a very sturdy building, not too tall, about 18 stories, with wide stairwells. I took one of the three apartments on the fifth floor. When the electricity goes out it’s not too high to climb and the wide stairwells means it’s easy to set out candles on the landings and light the way.

Tomorrow I will do all sorts of things, but tonight, my first night here, I’m just going from room to room, to sit in each for a while. Feel it all out. Right now I’m sitting on the floor in front of the entryway closet. The closet door is open and I am staring at the only item of clothing to be found in the whole apartment – a man’s khaki trench coat, size 42 long.

I stare at it and try to imagine how it came to be here. Had the owner deliberately left it there, intending to come back for it? Come back to this very splendidly appointed set of rooms, perhaps to live here? And what would he say when he finds me here? Or did he leave it here, intending to pick it up on his way out of the city, on the exodus with the others, to a safer, better place to live.

In other times, this would be an ideal place for anyone to live. Beautifully decorated, with thick lush carpeting in the living room, dining room and bedrooms. Polished tile in the kitchen and bathrooms, gleaming stainless steel appliances. There are linens here – fluffy towels, crisp sheets, soft blankets for the beds. Lovely furniture throughout. But it doesn’t look like anyone has ever lived here.

That’s why I took it for my own. I don’t want any ghosts around me. That trench coat in the closet is bothersome. It, like everything else in the apartment, seems fresh and new. But unlike everything else in the apartment, it is clearly tied to a person. There are no toiletries in the bathroom. Not even toothpaste. This place has never been lived in. So why is that trench coat hanging around waiting for its owner to come back?

I like living alone. I like being the only resident in the entire building. I like that there’s probably less than seven thousand people still living in Manhattan. It took me a long time to get used to it, and now I like it. I found the perfect place to live and now this trench coat shows up. Why didn’t I notice it before? I want to take that coat and throw it out the window, let it land in an alley somewhere and be a home for the rats.

But I won’t do that. I’ll leave it right where it is, and let it stay all alone in the closet.

In case someone comes looking for it.

There was a meeting the other day, a sort of seminar titled “Current Wisdom.” An elderly woman got up to make her presentation:

 “I would imagine that fifty years ago, people wondered what it would be like today. And fifty years from now, people will wonder what it must have been like.  I’ll tell you what it is like. It’s like this:

 “Every day, every single day I used to wake up and the first thing I would think is: ‘Today is the day I will look out my window just in time to see a flash of white, the white flash that comes before the impact of the explosion, and then it all comes to an end.’ I look out my window. There is no flash of white. Instead I go to the kitchen and make my coffee and start my day.”

 One of the younger men scoffs and that, and gets up as if to leave. “This is supposed to be your wisdom? What a pile of crap. How is something like that supposed to enlighten us?”

 “My dear, allow me to explain further. At the point when I looked out my window, the day was won. I was alive and I was free to live another day. This is the part that is difficult to convey – how to describe an experience to someone who has never had anything like it to relate to? –

 ”By contrast allow me to tell how I passed the night last night:

 ”Having gone to bed and almost fast asleep, I was snapped wide awake by the drone of a mosquito. I spent the next three hours hunting that thing down. How sad that we now must fear death in the form of common everyday things like mosquitoes, or apple juice, or plastic cups.

 ”The threats today are so close to us, and there are so many of them! Vigelence is a constant and the stress of it is unending and inescapable.

 ”How much simpler it was to worry about a bomb because I could at times forget the bomb and live freely. But now the bombs are among us. They dwell in our household items and in the air we breathe, they explode all around us with stealth and chip away at our lives until they hit their mark.

“I want to spend my time pursuing what life has to offer, not dodging bullets. “

For a brief while cell phones were working the other day. But the wires were crossed. I could hear other people’s phone conversations but could not make phone calls myself. I actually heard a conversation going on at one of the outposts outside the city:

 “Bella, we have to form a party to go out and get some.”

 “You mean, go outside the wall? Take a big risk just for sugar?”

 “We’ve done it before.”

 “Yes, but that was when we lost power and no one could make fire. We’ve gone to great lengths to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

 “Look, it was inevitable that we would run out of something and would have to go out again.”

 “If we go out for sugar then we’ll have to answer for other things people have been clamoring for: Vanilla beans, saffron, other spices. Toilet paper. We’ve been substituting other things for years. Don’t think there won’t be an outcry if we go out and don’t come back with toilet paper. Liquor.

 “Now wait a minute. What makes you think anybody out there is making liquor better than we are?”

 “You haven’t had any lately.”

 “OK. Let’s collect a list of what people want – and get their priorities on it. Then we’ll form a party and sortie out and see what we can find.”

After that the connection was broken. I don’t know who they are or where they are. I hope they got what they needed.

Power outages prevented me from posting new entries. I couldn’t even write, because light was so limited at night – and just not enough time during the day to sit and do something as idle as writing.

I had a dream the other other night. I think it was a dream. I hope it was a dream. I had a gun in my hands, and a soldier’s head was in my lap.

He had been shot while trying to protect me and some kids. I put the kids in a closet, told them to lie down and not make a sound. I couldn’t leave him. I couldn’t carry him.

I moved some of the metal crates around us as a sort of shield and sat there with him. His radio was broken. All we could do was keep quiet, listen, and help other solders would come looking for him.

He showed me how to bandage his leg. He showed me how to shoot the gun, how to prop it up facing the door and lean into it for the little kick it would give when fired. He had me fire one round to try it. It didn’t make a lot of noise. He told me if any of his boys were coming in, they would call out first. Otherwise, if the door started moving I should squeeze the trigger and not let go. I didn’t think I could do it.

Then the light shining in my eyes and the sound of the fan whirring again woke me up. I turned out the light and went back to sleep.

Was this a dream or a memory?

While searching for a clean place to live I heard that medical researchers have established a ‘clean room’ in New York where they can be sure to work in a space free of the virus.
 
Can you imagine?
 
It’s clean now, this room, this air, this floor. And if proper precautions are taken, it will stay clean, pure. Free from any microbes that kill. Safe. They say that it took six months before a technician was found who had the knowledge to do it and two years to assemble all the machinery and parts and chemicals.
 
Chemicals. To make something clean again we need chemicals. It was chemicals that helped bring on this devastation in the first place.
 
But that was then.
 
Now there is a starting point. A ground zero of another kind. The hope of the world could be resting on this one patch of floor. This could be where history starts again. If the plague can be defeated here, it can be defeated anywhere. It all starts with a clean room, a freshly scrubbed floor.