It’s time for a new car. I’ve driven the old Pinto for nearly 44 years and at long last I’m rid of it. Gladiola and I made the decision a few days ago and last night, in the gloom and heat, I drove it to the Cliffs of Destruction. As the silvery moon rose between Jupiter and Mars, I released the emergency brake, slid out through the driver’s door and watched it roll over the edge. It disappeared from view, then could be heard to crash on the rocks. Though I’d taken care to empty the fuel tank, it exploded on impact anyway, then quickly was swallowed by an enormous wave. I couldn’t help but think as I called a helicopter taxi service, this can’t be good for the environment. There must be a better way to dispose of old cars.
So now Gladiola and I are on a new car search, and I have to say how proud I am of the world’s automakers. They’ve really risen to the challenge and almost overnight are producing cars that not only don’t cause too much environmental damage, they actually reverse it. Amazing.
I’ve read the brochures, and here’s a partial list of features:
My car will have all the latest technology
My car will do zero to sixty in a respectable 3.4 seconds
My car will be made solely from reclaimed materials
My car will generate zero pollution and one day, after decades of driving, it will biodegrade into a fully functioning tomato patch
My car will filter pollutants from the atmosphere and convert those pollutants into highly nutritious energy bars automatically distributed to those in need
My car will use photosynthesis to convert CO2 to oxygen making it a negative zero carbon emitter
My car will use anti-gravity technology for propulsion with a hover range of slightly above ground level to 40 feet above traffic
My car will have a retractable in-dash record player
My car will repel dirt and water and never require cleaning
My car will transfer the life energy from my passengers to me, the driver, thus slowly reversing the aging process. This is important as I’ve become flabby and potato-faced.
My car will cost about 27,000 dollars, give or take.
On the morning of his 60th birthday, Anvil Atkinson found beneath the newspaper on the doorstep a plain box with his name on it in the ancient language of calligraphy. He picked it up along with the newspaper, glancing at the headline, Eastern Seaboard Evacuation Continues. And then the subhead, Sea Level Rise not Caused by Human Activity, Would have Happened Anyway.
The coffee had finished brewing and he poured his first cup, set the box and newspaper on the kitchen counter, and pulled up a stool. He unfolded the paper and opened it, laying it out so pages two and three were open. In a minute, a toasted bagel would announce itself as ready with a ding from the toaster oven, and he’d put the plate on top of the newspaper. The bagel had already been pre-buttered before toasting, and he’d apply a layer of cream cheese atop that. The newspaper will catch crumbs and absorb the rings from the coffee cup, as well as provide tidbits of news from across the land.
He reached into a bathrobe pocket, removed his carving knife, opened it, and slit the tape running down the middle of the box, then cutting the bit that extended over the sides. He opened it.
“Oooh, a package,” Meryl Atkinson cooed. “Who’s it from?”
“I didn’t hear you come in, Mer,” he said. “You didn’t send it?”
“Nope, not from me,” she said. “Happy birthday,” and she kissed him on the forehead. “Well, open it. I can’t take the suspense.”
The toaster oven, as expected, announced the readiness of the bagel. “I’ll get that for you,” Meryl said.
Anvil pulled aside the tissue paper, revealing an eight inch square envelope with his name on it, again in calligraphy. He examined it and decided it was machine printed and not handwritten. The card inside read in large block type, So you’ve made it to 60. Congratulations. Then in smaller print, it said, Please enjoy these complimentary gifts, courtesy of your government.
He pulled out the first item, a black leather fanny pack. “That’s real leather,” Meryl said, sniffing the material. “Can I borrow it some time?”
“Not ’til you’re sixty,” Anvil said.
Next, he pulled out a pair of red sweatpants. He stood and held them up to his body. They were at least one size too big. “Perfect,” he said, smiling.
“Very nice,” Meryl agreed. “You’ll be very comfortable in them…but, why red? You never wear red.”
“Oh, I’m sure they have their reasons,” Anvil said. “They always do.”
Meryl handed him the plate with the now cream-cheesed bagel and rubbed his back. Something on page three of the newspaper caught her attention. It was one of those fun lifestyle articles and she read the headline out loud, Ten Ways to Make Money Under Authoritarian Rule.
“Sounds interesting,” Anvil said, biting into the bagel. “Delicious. Thanks Mer.”
There were a few more odds and ends in the box: A visor. A pair of compression socks. Tongue depressors. Finally, the one thing he was most looking forward to, the watch.
He held it in his hand staring at it. It was blank. He felt the three tiny metal nubs on the back of the device, the part that would touch him. They were smooth and cold. He hesitated a moment. “Mer, which hand should I put it on?”
This was an important decision as, once on, the watch was never coming off. It would bond with you. The prongs served two purposes. First, they formed a data connection with the wearer, and second, the wearer’s electrical impulses powered the unit, a kind of bio-mechanical symbiosis.
“Just put it on your left wrist. If you wear it on the right, it will feel weird.”
Anvil removed the Hamilton watch he’d worn every day for nearly forty years, except when swimming or while in the boxing ring. He put the new watch on and felt a faint static electric zap when he did. Where the prongs touched him, his wrist tingled. A plain white light blinked slowly on the face, then sped up. He knew from what his older friends told him that the watch was calibrating, setting itself, syncing with his vital functions and data, and most importantly, to the communication center in his brain. This way, if he wanted the time, he would merely think time and glance at the watch. Same thing for weather, messages, quarantines, curfews and other civil safety alerts. A world of information.
In just a few seconds, the watch had completed calibrating, and he thought, time. The current time displayed.
Meryl said, “it looks good on you.”
“Not bad,” he said. And again he hesitated because the one thing he wanted to see was his number, the watch’s greatest feature. It calculated the number based on the wearer’s current health, activity level, DNA, family history, environmental conditions, and so on, and displayed the number in years, months, and days.
He thought it and it displayed 23:9:7. Twenty three years, nine months, and seven days. That was how long the watch calculated Anvil Atkinson had left to live. Not bad. Not a huge number, but not bad. He took another bite from the bagel and it dropped to 23:6:4. A gulp of coffee, and it rose to 23:7:18.
The device had an official name, but everyone called it “The Deathwatch.”
Over the next few days, Anvil thought constantly about the number, watching it rise and fall depending on what he was doing. Slight increases to the number were caused by exercise, sleep, and working in the garden. Decreases: driving a car, eating meat, watching the news.
As the months progressed, the headlines continued to worsen and his number dropped beneath twenty years. Anvil wondered if this was because of the state of the world, or if it was because of his reaction to those conditions.
The Twenty-Years War had started to spread and one day there was a biological incident far away, but still on native soil, dropping his number to 15:3:11. Food shortages had begun and he and Meryl were thankful for the vegetable garden. However, though the plants grew lush and green, they stopped bearing fruit. The number dropped to 7:6:5. Meryl contracted a strange fungal disease causing her skin to bruise and bones to snap. She died, and his number dropped to 3:6:2.
After the funeral, Anvil and a few friends sat in his back yard in their visors and red sweatpants, talking as the sun went down through the murk. Anvil brought out his last bottle of whiskey and poured drinks. Each had a Deathwatch, and they compared their numbers. They talking about how bad things were, how the authorities had really screwed things up, how maybe those in charge didn’t know what they were doing, and how maybe folks had misplaced their trust. How maybe someone should do something.
As they spoke, the numbers on their watches raced backwards until each one flashed zeros. They each felt a tingle where the prongs of their watches met their skin, and then their watches, all at the same time, unlatched themselves and dropped to the ground. A vehicle pulled up and men wearing that ubiquitous armband of the state carrying scatter-guns poured out, trampling the vegetable garden as they approached the group. “On my signal,” the one in charge said.
I know we were going to list Seventeen Things you can do to Save the Environment today. Our researchers have been hard at work on that and had made a good deal of progress until at our round table meeting this morning, Stupid Tad pointed out that each simple solution was based on time travel, and that the average person doesn’t have access to a time travel machine. The team has gone back to the drawing board. In place of saving the environment, we have an update for you from Artisanal Onion.
There have been a few unforeseen problems at the Artisanal Onionry. As many home onion product makers have discovered, growing, harvesting, and distilling onions to make delicious and wholesome products is expensive and difficult, and requires hours upon hours of training. Worst of all, attention to detail must be paid by someone. But by whom (who?)?
Because of the recent walkout by workers*, management has been handling all phases of the operation, clocking in more than a dozen hours a week making products, doing marketing and order fulfillment, and checking the water levels in the quadraphonic onion vats. Also, we have to sweep up discarded onion skins. It’s exhausting .
Purchasers of recent small-batch products can apply for a full refund by sending back products that may have fouled due to the onion fungus or stinkbug infestation. Our suppliers have apologized and we pass that apology on to you.
There is some good news to report. We’ve finally received FDA approval for several new and exciting products: onion enemas, onion skin condoms, strawberry infused onion shampoo. We hope to have these ready for delivery in time for one the many holiday seasons sprinkled throughout the calendar.
*Workers demanded that payment be valid and fungible, and that management provide them with onion goggles. Artisanal Onion is a strong believer in the free market and that our contractor partners, as business owners themselves, are responsible for their own equipment and income. We must end senseless government overreach and regulation plaguing the home onion industry. So called “Big Onion” enjoys a great deal of freedom and squelches small business competition from entrepreneurs like myself. Write your congressperson (who is probably in the pocket of Big Onion, so what’s the point…).
Can we talk about the end of the world for just one post? The UN global report has been released and it’s pretty grim. Grimmer than zombies (but arguably beneficial for zombies). Ultra grim.
Here’s an excerpt from the Washington Post’s story. “The U.N. report ‘means that nature is collapsing around us, and it’s a real wake-up call to humanity,’ said Andrew Wetzler, managing director of the nature program for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a conservation group.”
I disagree. We’ve been ignoring wake-up calls for a long time and we’ll ignore this one. Wake-up calls are bad for business, and let’s discredit anyone involved in this UN report. In 1962, Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring, documenting the damage from pesticides. So what happens? By 1972, the US bans DDT in the US, but its use continued throughout the world, and is still used. You can use your personal internet web searching prowess to read all about DDT and the environment. No place on earth is untouched by DDT.
If you’re old enough, you remember nights raucous with the sounds of insects, frogs, and other critters. You remember how a short drive on a suburban road would leave your windshield smattered with bug splats, and porch lights surrounded by a cloud of moths and mosquitos and other insects. Last year, articles like this one appeared.
My children don’t know these sounds and have never had to squeegee a few hours accumulation of bug carcasses off their windshields. They haven’t seen a sky criss-crossed with massive flocks of migrating birds, so they don’t look up and wonder what’s wrong. They do have phones that can show them pictures of what the world looked like and can see Imax films documenting the once stunning diversity of the natural world.
It’s not up to us, the consumers of the world. We’re kind of sheepish. Take common lawn and garden chemicals. Tell us that spraying a little something will kill dandelions and we’ll buy it because we’ve been convinced that a uniform grass lawn is very important. We don’t think about the fresh water that lawns consume, nor the half-life of the chemicals we apply. We don’t know to ask about active ingredients and inert ingredients. You (and you know who you are) don’t want us to think about that, so we don’t. Good job by your marketing and PR departments, and kudos to your lobbying, I might add! So it’s up to you. This wake-up call’s for you. Because we’ll keep buying the stuff you tell us to and we’ll believe whatever you want us to believe.
I want to say something about soft drinks, which I admit I know little about. But, when I stopped using them, the quality of my life did not decline. I talked about this with a friend and we agreed, these products might have no real benefit. Anyhoo, here’s a question for the asking, “what percentage of the world’s fresh water is used to produce and consume bottled beverages? How much plastic gets into the enviroment because of all these drinks? Who wants to think about that every time you twist off a cap to enjoy a cold one! That would be grim.
To sum up, everything’s fine. Earnings are up. Keep doing what you’re doing. At least you don’t have to clean the windshield very often.
Next time: 17 simple things you can do for the environment
In the future, it’s safest for cats to roam in broad daylight.
Yeah, the zombies are coming and Norm is going on a business trip. He doesn’t travel well. He doesn’t know it yet, but everything seems ominous to him.
Love in the Time Before Zombies Chapter 2.1
I’m impatient and intolerant and feel confined in airports and on airplanes. Travel exhausts me, which is why I take prescription amphetamines and constantly drink espresso.
A few minutes ago, Jill slept while I put on my consultant’s uniform: gray slacks, white shirt, and blue sport coat. I paused to stare at my wife’s sleeping body. She wore a tank top and boxer shorts. I kissed her on the cheek. “Mmmm,” she said. “Come here!” She grabbed my collar and pulled me onto the bed. “This will only take a minute,” she said.
“I have a minute.”
Jill makes sure we get a quickie in before I travel so she can draw upon recent raunchy memories in case my plane crashes or Peruvians kidnap me. Afterward, I kissed her on the cheek again. “See you in a few days.”
“I might not really love you,” she said, her eyes closed, already returning to sleep.
On the way to the airport, there’s little traffic, but an ominous – see what I mean about ubiquitous ominousness – van sideswipes us on the 125th street ramp to the Triboro Bridge. It’s one of those beat up windowless vans you see a lot of in the city. The words “Ken’s Contracting” are stenciled unevenly on the side in black, a corona of fine black a couple of inches from the letters, where the excess spray from the can collected.
Dave’s Lincoln had scraped against the side of the van as we merged into a single lane, hitting the van’s dangling side view mirror and ripping it from its duct taped mooring. Glass shatters, maybe the headlamp, and that, combined with the caffeine and other drugs kicking in, really gets my heart going.
“Criminy,” Dave says. He slows down and looks in his rear view mirror, considering whether to stop.
He pulls over. The van drives up behind us and instead of stopping, it accelerates into us, sending my face lurching forward into the back of the headrest.
“JFC!” Dave yells. He gets out of the car.
“What is wrong with you? Are you out of your mind?” He doesn’t curse. He speaks clearly and enunciates very well. He controls the tone of his voice the way a TV preacher does.
I click open the door, but as I move to open it, Dave slams it shut with his hip. Just as well. I’m woozy. I touch my face with my fingers and wince when I feel the area beneath my left eye. No blood yet, but it hurts and already is puffing up. There are loud voices coming from outside the window, but I can’t make out what they’re saying. Then the front door opens and Dave reaches in, and just as quickly, is outside again. Something has been smashed. I turn my head around and through the tinted rear window see that Dave is holding a big black pipe. He swings it and shatters a headlight. The three men slowly back away from Dave. One of the men runs back into the van through the sliding door, it behind him. Dave holds the pipe above his head and wiggles it. One gets in the driver’s door. The other is standing his ground, yelling at Dave in another language. Dave takes a step towards the man, who finally yields and retreats to the passenger door. The driver guns it straight at Dave who sidesteps, spins, and swings the black pipe into a taillight, shattering it. Dave gets into the car.
He puts the pipe down. It’s actually a big, metal flashlight, dinged and scraped in a couple of places and wrapped in duct tape at the handle. He flicks the switch. “Perfectly good flashlight, ruined.” He drops it onto the seat. He looks at me through the mirror. “That’s one nasty looking bruise. You OK?”
I nod. My face hurts and so does my head. I might have a concussion. “Christ, Dave, you scared the daylights out of those guys.”
He smiles. “I could have taken all three of them if it came to it.” Despite that unscheduled interaction, we arrive early. The limo has a long scrape mark on the passenger side, and the rear end is dented. It will be a long day for Dave. I hand him a fifty.
“No need to do that,” he says.
“No,” I say. “I owe you. Get yourself a nice breakfast somewhere.”
At the airport club, I have a drink – I know, I know, it’s not even seven in the morning. My father used to joke, “Does your face hurt?” And like the punchline, I whisper, “No, but it’s killing me.” The aspirin has helped to bring down the swelling, but everything throbs in time with the beating of my heart.
“Norman?” It’s Colleen, a business analyst on the project, in charge of infrastructure.
“Colleen?” I say. “What are you doing in New York?”
“I spent the weekend with my boyfriend – he lives in the Village. Remember, we had this same conversation Friday at the airport in North Carolina?”
I don’t remember. I rub the back of my head feeling for the bump, but it’s my forehead that’s bruised, I remember now. “There’s blood on my shirt,” I say.
“Yes,” she confirms.
“I was in an accident this morning,” I tell her. “Nosebleed. Nothing serious.”
“Let me see that,” she says, and pokes the bruise on my forehead with a finger. “Are you all right?”
I ignore the question. “What’s on your calendar this morning,” I say. She’s the infrastructure team lead. “Where are your people on the cabling on nine?”
“Finished two weeks ago. We’re on eleven now.”
“On schedule? What’s the date?”
She tells me, but I’m not listening. I open my tablet. “I have a few emails to catch up on.” I sit down at a chair looking out over the jetways and runways. One jet takes off. Another lands.
Understandably, he didn’t notice the dog as he walked into the airport.
So:
Everyday violent encounter or harbinger of doom? You decide. But don’t worry about Colleen. She doesn’t have much more to do here. She’s young and smart and will soon make partner, and shortly thereafter spin off her own tech company. She’ll get to enjoy a marvelous lifestyle before putting all of her time, brilliance, and resources into preserving the natural world, before the zombies come and claw it all to pieces.
Outside the bedroom window, storm clouds turn the sky a steely blue.
Norm and Jill are afraid that the world is unraveling and that soon, civilization will collapse.
Some people are waiting for the time of the zombies to come, both fearing it and desperately craving it. They want apocalypse, burning cities, every man for himself. They stock up on weapons and canned food and reading glasses. They build bunkers and become survivalists. They learn which insects and weeds to eat and how to shoot a crossbow. They watch zombie TV and wait for the time of the zombies to come.
Some people don’t want to be lumped in with the zombies, don’t want to go down in a hail of bullets, or the shrapnel of a fertilizer bomb. Norm and Jill are like that, but they’re afraid it’s coming and there’s no stopping it. They came into being about six years ago. They and two little children living in an apartment in New York, exactly like the one I lived in, growing more fearful as 25,000 words accumulated until one day they just stopped mid-paragraph. It was titled, Love in the Time Before Zombies. A lot people don’t like that title because they think it’s derivative. *
Norm is kind of like me, only better at his job. But dumber, too. Jill is loosely based on my wife. I say loosely because it’s safer for me that way, you understand.
They have two barely sketched out kids, Brian and Dot. Little is known of them other than that they both like cute, cuddly things. We don’t know their ages, what color hair they have, whether they’re plump or skinny or ordinary or exceptional. Their names will change a half dozen or more times.
The story starts with a line that violates the first of Walt the Dog’s Rules of Writing: “Unless you’re Pat Conroy, don’t use weather to start a story. Even in the prologue.”
Love in the Time Before Zombies Chapter 1, Verse 1
Lightning flashes on the gray sky across the river over New Jersey, and then it strikes startlingly nearby. Thunder follows an instant later and she flinches in the bed beside me, but doesn’t wake. She can sleep through anything. Most nights, I can’t even fall asleep.
In a moment, Brian’s tousled head appears in the door. He rubs his eyes. “What was that?”
“Just thunder,” I say. “It’s just a storm.”
“Can I get in bed with you?”
I pull the covers aside for him and he runs to the bed, clambers up and over me and lands between Jill and me. She murmurs something, licks her lips and rolls onto her side, draping an arm over Brian as another blast of thunder shakes the room. I hear a scream, pounding footsteps and Dot bounds into our bedroom, her hands covering her mouth, tears on her little cheeks and she too dives onto the bed.
“Mommy, mommy, mommy!” she shrieks.
Jill wraps her arms around Dot, cradling her, kissing her hair. “Shhhh, my little punctuation mark. It’s OK. Mommy’s right here.”
So, the story continues and eventually the storm subsides, and frankly, some of the sentences I make up are overblown and self-important and embarrassing. The kids fall asleep and Jill is quiet and Norm starts to drift off when she says, “Norm, how are we doing? I mean, how much do we have in the bank?”
That line about money is supposed to be important to our understanding of this couple. Jill the money manager, the financial wiz is suddenly worried about money. Norm says he’ll check their account balances in the morning and she insists he do it right then and there. He does and when he comes back to bed, she’s asleep.
Love in the Time Before Zombies, is a pre-apocalyptic tale. I mean, once you have zombies, you have the apocalypse, and these events are all the things that happen leading right up to that. These may be pre-zombie times, but make no mistake about it, the zombies are coming.
* As Bob Dylan sang, “if there’s an original thought out there, I could sure use it right now.”
If you’ve received this invitation, you’re famous and therefore a fabulous individual. Each year, my wife Blech and I host a Summer Solstice Dinner Dance for Famous Persons. This coming June 21 is the inaugural event, and, since you’re famous, we’d love to have you and your famous plus one. We find that famous people are simply more interesting than rest of us, and that’s why you’re invited. You’re famous! And again, congratulations on your well-deserved fame.
Now, full disclosure, we are pre-famous, which gives you a ground-floor opportunity to get to know us before everyone else does. However, due to our famous anonymity, we never know just who is going to show up. Therefore, dinner is potluck. Bring whatever you’d like (Blech will be whipping up her indelible artisanal onions), and lots of it. Whatever doesn’t get eaten will be left for the local wildlife. There’s a fox who passes through the garden once or twice a day, and deer. Lots of deer, but I think they’re mostly vegetarian. The wolves keep them under control, fortunately, so you don’t have to worry about bringing food for them.
There will be dancing under the stars, and lots of it. However, please remember to bring at least one musician. We’re never sure who’s going to show up, or how many, so it’d be absurd for us to supply musicians when you, our famous (and rich) guest can just bring one of your struggling but talented musician friends. Check with us first. One year, we had seven alto trombonists and a triangle player. What a strange trio that was, but we made the best of it and had a great time anyway. That triangle-ist could really jam!
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