How to Find Peace at the End of the World (18 page)

I kept going.

My cockatiel was sort of yellow. It was enough and would warn me when I had stayed too long, delved too deep.
I stayed for a night at the house I grew up in. It had long before been sold to another well-meaning family. Even though I knew nothing about them, the walls seemed to resonate with them, with memories that while different from my own seemed familiar in their own right. The pictures indicated two children. A cat. A dog. A pet turtle. I walked the various rooms and their ghosts walked with me. When I had enough of walking with ghosts, I let them go, like a kid with a balloon. Like that kid, I was immediately remorseful, when a moment before I had been curious, daring.

This was no place for me. I kept heading north for as long as my companions would allow and then I turned and headed back south.
Wherever I encountered cars scrunched together like a closed fist, I moved as many out of the way by putting them in drive as I could. Then I would grab a big truck, a tractor trailer, that was always invariably nearby and gas it up with the diesel tin in the back I always kept full. With enough road to get up to speed, I would clear the road in spectacular fashion.
Actually, this wasn’t the best way to do it. I just hadn’t learned yet. I didn’t learn until one day a big piece of shrapnel flew from a crumpled VW through the windshield and nicked my face. Close. From that point on I would simply nose the eighteen wheeler down the street and nudge the wrecks out of the way. I had an instinct for it, too. I’d pass a few semi’s and have that feeling come over me that up ahead would be a clog and I’d get in one of them and drive down the road a few miles and clear the clog and drive back to the Beast II. I was loyal to the Beast II just like the original. It was almost like some trusted companion. I cried over the first Beast because it had served me through those hard days after everyone had disappeared (and I didn’t really believe it yet). It had borne me through confirming my worst fears until it was taken from me as well.

Melodramatic, I guess. Many other beasts in the world. I used the second beast all the way up to OKC and a bit farther and back down again, encountering things just as eventful but it had come out running like new at the end. I patted the dash often and thought of better times, of my parents, of Amy, of civilization, even of my job. I thought of how we would snicker whenever the boss referred to the Beast, Tim Johnson leaning in and saying “When he says the Beast, he’s really referring to his wife,” in his best Alan Alda. That was so long ago.

Often I reached for Charley huddled beside me, or for the bird on my shoulder, my finger searching for that approving peck. I thought it would do me in, what I felt for Amy. Instead it was like a little bird that sat on my shoulder and pecked at me from time to time, and tried to deworm my ear.
In each of the cities along the way, I found mostly the same.
The rounded hills of Texas flattened out, as if stamped by a machine. The lines of trees around 35 disappeared and things opened up as I headed into Mexico. There were these great long stretches of clear flat and that’s when I would gun it. Just like the first, the Beast II was surprisingly spry for such a big machine, an even more spry machine once I got the trailer detached.

Mexico was a blur. I realize now I was still healing. In South America, I got philosophical. I sat there for a long time waiting for Christo de Rio De Janiero, or whatever it was called, to crumble down the mountain into the city. I sat there waiting until it seemed that each minute was a century and that the statue might actually fall.

I ranged all over. I saw things mostly not happening. Except for nature. Nature always happens. I watched cities overtaken by trees and vine, progressively – each time I passed by.

Along my travels I’ve rarely gone hungry. And I’ve broken surprisingly few bones, knock on wood. Only out on the periphery of my body: once I slammed my thumb in the door of the truck.

I was trapped in rainstorms during the summer. That was about the worst of it. Wild animals kept me and my domesticated friends up at night on a few occasions. In the fall, in the mountains there were snowstorms.

Soon I began looking for a more permanent place to roost. To sit and think. To remember.

I wanted, before the opportunity disappeared, to think back on all of the people I’d ever known. It seemed to be slipping through me each new place I ended up in, each new place I studied the ghosts of humanity. It seems to be getting harder every day.

Amy. Mom. Dad. Carrie. Brian. Mike. Steve. Josh. David. David. David.Terry. That cute girl who worked in the Starbucks. The old couple who would come in with their dog. The celebrities on TV. The millions, billions of nameless faces in the wings. Who else?

Even that stop I made back in my boyhood home made me question the authenticity of what I thought I knew. What I remembered. What I took away.

Sometimes I stop in a house and I go from top to bottom and learn everything. I go through every photo album and read every letter I can find. I learn their names and memorize them. I tell myself it’s corny, like out of the movies. Like, I have to keep living and experiencing because I’m the last one around to do it. But I guess I’m just curious. I’ve taught myself Español and Portuguesa, sort of, because that’s where I spend most of my time now, south of the Rio Grande. Yes, I realize how ridiculous this sounds. About as ridiculous as this recounting. But it’s as important now as it has ever been, this repeating of lives under my breath.

I go through and find all their most intimate things. I think things about them. Come up with stories and assumptions. But then, they’re all just in my mind aren’t they? I can’t really know these people.

As I look through them, the family albums, I think how each one of them smiling was deluded and deceived, comforted in the ghosts of other people that surrounded them. After all you will only have the memories in the end. So I borrow and steal. What difference there than having lived here in Caracas or Montivideo or Buenos Aires.

No matter how many other people’s homes I visit. How many family photo albums I leaf through. It always feels like coming upon a joke being told too late and laughing anyway.

As for places to roost, I finally found one real high up. I had started to settle down a bit, gravitating towards the troves I’ve discovered here and there. In the summers you could have often found me in Patagonia.

I tried to avoid the Andes unless everything was clear, and then I’d go up with a loaded rig and camp in style. I tried to avoid crossing north of the canal as it’d gotten treacherous.

One day, after all this solitary adventuring, I looked at my dog on one side, my cockatiel on the other, and a great tiredness came over me. That first summer I had gone all the way south, to the tip of South America and tried to make out the seventh continent across the water. I had gone as far north again as far as the Panama Canal. I had summited Aconcagua (after 4 wheeling it most of the way there).

My wanderlust had gone. I had explored even the remotest, coldest corner of my cage.

I found a nice little place in the rough center, in what once was Sao Paulo.

I noticed it, the roost I wanted to fly to, while standing on the thirtieth floor of the first solid building I had broken into and summited. I was surprised at how quickly the surrounding forests had begun to encroach upon this ruined fortress of skyscrapers. I looked towards the once sterile center of the city, the one that seemed to be the most solid, the deepest boot print of humanity.

I remember thinking as my eyes scanned the horizon that surely there must be more than the cold encumbered nights I had spent in my 4x4, my latest Beast, for as long as I could recall, for many months at least since I last left some other ex-urban cave. Then my eyes chanced upon it, two miles further into the forest of skyscrapers, right at eye level.

The place is nice enough. Sao Paulo, where pre-event the electricity wasn’t that great anyway, I guess. I remember looking up at the building, seeing the flower like blooms of delicate panels on top and going up to investigate

The A/C lasts all evening and night if I’m careful with the electricity use. Then the battery banks recharge during the day when I’m out and about: I turn the thermostat up. Food, in can form, is plentiful, and I’ve cultivated my own crops in the numerous flower boxes and concrete planters. I can even begin hunting the streets south of Avenida Paulista: the trees of Trianon park having long overgrown the park’s bounds. After a day of harvesting or foraging for fresh foods and for nostalgic foods (as nostalgic as you can get down here) I will get back to my roost and start a fire on the broad deck. I’ll turn off all the lights inside and I’ll sit there and prepare my dinner. After eating, I’ll smother the fire and huddle under a thick blanket and wait for the sun to shake the stars out of its mane. In the dusk I’ll look south and west at the river and lakes as the sun, still barely peeking over the mountains makes them gold.

The only thing I abstained from was crossing the ocean, or getting in a plane. Fuck, like I’d know how to sail or fly. Probably drown or blow myself up in a crash.

Sometimes, looking out at that gold ribbon, I am gripped by a desire to go seeking.

The muscles in my legs clinch. I stand up, my body primed for another quest.

Some vague hope that I am simply the last person on this one continent. Somewhere out there, on some other giant landmass, there is another searching for me. We hack through the hectares of dark jungle looking for one another.

I take in a breath and try to tell myself that there are no boundaries, Dan. The boundaries have been blown open. And I feel naked standing out on my deck. In this openness, fear coats like scar tissue. It traps you again. There is little you can do to protect yourself from that bereftness. Sometime I suspect if I had started as a more somber person, it would drive me mad. Sometimes I wonder if I’m not mad already.

So if I am to be a madman, at least let me be a happy madman. I mumble a lot, a wall of unintelligible words. And I Iaugh a spell of laughs to protect me as if I have to make my own borders and walls, to keep things in: faces and voices, memories, all the best and worst, all my own, all joys and sorrows, so that they may live with me in the cage of my own making and be mine, those memories if not souls, and keep me company.

I sit myself back down again. Half clutching my belly as if what I hold inside of myself is singularly precious, half under the crazy making crush of not solitude but aloneness. I sit there on my chair, on my balcony overlooking the river, muttering to myself to convince myself of the world’s passing and not my own.

Every once in a while, however, a piece of debris mounts the river like the hull of a small vessel and floats lazily past my perch. I chuckle and Charley raises his head to look in the direction I’m cackling like a madman and Amy cocks her head to the side.

I could learn to sail first on that river, on those placid lakes. I’d take it easy. I’d learn to sail and think about all the people that have come and gone in my life, and then everyone else would come and go like the ripples on the water’s surface.

Someday, I’ll sail.

THE END