PostApoc (2 page)

- 3 -
MULTIPLE CHOICE

B
efore The End I used to wake up to the following options. Choose the answer that best fits your current state of mind:

a) Reckless

b) Moderately depressed

c) Mildly euphoric

d) Uninhibited

e) All of the above

That was during a time when everyone wanted to join a suicide cult. I can't explain it now, and I don't think I ever could, or cared enough to question it. It just made sense back then.

I swear to you that we all walked around with a similar conversation stuck in our heads, like music:

Friend
1
: Well, I guess I should let you go for now.

Friend
2
: Okay, I'm going to go kill myself later anyway.

Friend
1
: Cool. So I'll see you tonight?

Friend
2
: See you tonight.

We obsessed over self-destruction because that's just what you did in those days. Even if they didn't want to admit it, there were so many people who were ready to die. It was romance for a jaded generation.

Valium gave us the soundtrack, the commandments, the first being that living as close to death as possible was the only way to really live. This showed us all our true priorities.

I especially thought their lyrics were written psychically, with me in mind, as if the band knew I'd been waiting for something else aside from the boredom of my parents' love, the awkward hugs and the lack of danger/destruction/detonation. And feeling safe is no way to feel alive.

Valium taught me to embrace depression as the essence of my personality, my natural way of being. They taught me to cut out anyone who didn't want to know the real me. Through Valium I went feral, seethed where I was formerly subdued.

Valium had a following starting from their very first show, and hooked and hypnotized and hauled in everyone who saw them. The audience knew they were part of something. You could feel a movement, a true underground coming together. The kind of thing someone would write a book about twenty years later.

From the start Valium had a ritual: to communally explore desires for death. Keeping danger on our breaths, the music led us all to discard responsibilities, conventional processes, high expectations.
The projection of a skull behind the stage matched the skulls worn by fans. The projection was meant as a visual power thought. The ones who understood the band knew it was real. They could admit their desires and succumb to psychic process. Older generations—reporters, parents, bar owners—dismissed it all as gimmick. They didn't believe in suicide pacts or mass cults, just thought we were doing it for fashion. The only ones who knew the truth were the ones who mattered. Valium made sure all their fans knew they mattered.

Valium had another ritual: to create images and texts that contained sigils—power thoughts and spells. They'd form a circle, let their beliefs permeate the bonds between them. There were no chants or blood sacrifices or stones, only energy pushed onto images and texts that held the band's words and music and photographs.

They created sigil-born spirits by distributing the images at their shows and on the streets. They glued posters to the sides of buildings and told everyone to keep the images somewhere they could be seen at all times. The more eyes on the images the more their power grew.

Valium's music constantly invoked energies this way. But to hear the band properly you needed to be part of their mass hallucinations. Kids who lived out of town ran away from home to squat in the city so they wouldn't miss a show.

I wasn't one of these kids, but I wanted to be. I used to pretend my parents didn't care where I slept. Convinced myself I was unwanted, an orphan. Told lies about my past, re-imagined my story until it held heaps of criticism, abuse. I thought it sounded better. Aroused sympathy.

My stories sounded a lot like the ones I heard from other kids I met. We liked that about each other.
My stories sounded so true I started to believe them.

It didn't matter if anyone knew I was lying, as it wouldn't take long for my real life to catch up with my fake life anyway; what I've piled on myself, it's been enough. Ask Aimee.

My eighteen-year-old body quivered when I first met Hunter. He was all grey eyeliner and long black hair. A blue light on the club's dancefloor caught the thin silver loop in his nose. Valium wasn't playing that night but they were there, out to support. On the bill were White Eagle and Girl and some other band from out of town none of us had heard of before.

We were at the bar, buying a drink. Hunter caught me staring at him and smiled. Asked if I was old enough to order anything more than a pop.

I had ID that said I was. I'd stolen it from a friend's older sister, who thought she'd lost her license. Hunter didn't wait for me to answer though. He ordered for both of us, clinked his glass to mine before we took our first taste. He said, “I've seen you around before,” and I felt my life colliding into this one moment, everything building up to make me into the person I wanted to be, which was really just a person who was wanted by someone important. Or just a person who was wanted.

His favourite colour was green. His speaking voice was the same as his singing voice. He had a dark scar behind his ear where a homemade tattoo had gone wrong.

He liked to run his hand over my stomach, said that's where my skin was softest. Every time his fingers grazed my navel my ankles quaked, which seemed reason enough for us to move in together two months after we met. Or it was more like me leaving home to live with him in a house he shared with the rest of his band and whoever else needed a place to crash in or pass through.

There was more of a fight from my parents than I wanted. I had to push their voices out of my head the night I picked through my bag of clothing, making small piles of jeans and t-shirts on the floor because Hunter didn't have enough hangers to share with me.

I had to push their voices out of my head again the third or fourth night as I got into bed—a mattress on the floor, black unwashed sheets gritty with something like sand—and felt the room around me take on a different meaning then, something more permanent than I'd ever felt before.

There were other girls in the house, tentative cats who threw me suspicious eyes and toughened shoulders. Eventually the band would all have girlfriends, but at first some of them just had girls—different faces on regular rotation unwilling to share their territory. I wouldn't understand that feeling until much, much later.

I was supposed to go back to high school that year. I'd kind of stopped going the year before and only had a few credits to go before I could graduate. Instead, I'd lie on the living room floor in that house, head to head with Hunter, stereo on, acid on our tongues, letting the wrong things into us. Even at the time I think I knew there was a mistake being made, but it felt too good to stop, and it felt too fast to be anything but irreversible. Who needed high school when I was already going beyond the beyond, feeling that the future shimmered in awe, waiting for me to walk right into it on Hunter's arm?

The other girls in the house got used to me because they had to. The stones in their expressions eventually fell away, replaced with something kinder, softer.

We all knew, without ever saying it, that Valium's obsessions had infiltrated each of us in the same way. We had welfare and didn't ever have anywhere to be—no jobs, no homes—but our heads were overwhelmed with the obligation of having to wake up every day.

Together, me and the other girls started to spend our afternoons (we were never up before one o'clock) in copy shops, photocopying pocket-sized flyers for the next Valium shows. We popped pink gum as the machines whirred and then we'd bring our stacks of paper back to the house to cut, pile and admire before handing them out to anyone who looked like they might be one of us. If the band was playing out of town a couple hours away, we'd take a bus and expand the web, build the cult.

The more Valium pushed, the further things went, until we were all the way out in Vancouver.
The move out there was fast. The guys had heard they might be able to make it bigger on the west coast and wanted to try it for at least a few months and see. We left the house with some friends and immediately reminded ourselves of the truths we had, each one sung in Hunter's voice, written on his tongue, the pressure of which kept dipping into self-destruction for inspiration. But our tolerance had gotten so high that Valium had to go to another level if they wanted to write more songs. It was a weight they'd never experienced before, and it got under the hoods of their eyes, soaked into their lids and drew them down, down, down.

And so the pact. A promise. To go together. It wasn't so much that nothing was going as planned (though I am the only one who holds that truth, and it's cut into my hands so deeply I'm barely able to carry it all the time), but that Valium
was
the plan.

Truth: when you set out to design your own demise, you find that your vision is quite easily attained.

Truth: the moment you question it is the moment you know you can't turn anything around.

Truth: I didn't regret it or question it at all at the time. At least not before Hunter's blade sunk into me.

Pact: we agreed that there was no escape. That we had all committed to a lifetime of voices, of off-white anxiety and nameless red fury.

Pact: roses and leather jackets. Dress for the ceremony of pills and deep cuts.

Scene: “You and me.” Those were the words Hunter uttered after we swallowed our doses, which were meant more to keep us calm than to kill us. The death would come with a blade between bone, pushed in long and deep from wrist to elbow. Everyone back then used to talk about how that was the “right way to do it.” So we all paired off, to help each other, to hold each other, to become a Valium song come to life in death.

Hunter and the guys had all discussed it: they would each slit one of their own wrists first so we, the girlfriends, would know they were serious. They didn't want to be questioned, disbelieved.

They would then cut into us girls, and then make the final slices into their own arms. We'd all been warned we might have to help, though, either with ourselves or with them. “There will be a lot of blood,” they'd said. “The knife handle will be slippery in your hand.”

Wet rust on grey carpet. No recollection of whose knife was the first to sink in, or whose blood spilled fastest. Later, in dreams I'd have only after drinking red wine, I'd remember that someone cried out at one point, but that I had my back to the others, my body in Hunter's arms, and I didn't want to turn around.

Before we started, I'd told Hunter I wanted to do the second cut myself. I'd never accomplished anything before and this was my last chance to try to get something right.

But he said no, that he'd cut into me both times because he didn't think I'd have the strength to go deep enough. I've always wondered if he kept the cuts shallow on purpose.

I've always wondered how many times I'll wish that he hadn't. Or how many times I'll wish I could have actually finished what he started.

- 4 -
MY USUAL WAY

T
he End's endless summer was relentless, made us peel from anywhere we sat. It followed us into every corner, every moment.

Nothing stayed white in all that heat. No such feeling as clean anymore as the streets stayed spattered, the chemical contagion and evaporations continued.

Viruses spread through tap water. Norwalk and rota. C Difficile. The lake water was overrun with flushed prescriptions, antibiotic residue passed through urine. Bacterial defense mechanisms strengthened, developed immunities we could not. The treatment system was caught off guard, unprepared for the imbalance of bad medicine. Gastrointestinal outbreaks came in waves, stomach and intestinal linings in constant distress. They said it could take years to develop the right water treatment. It was something they'd never prepared for. We didn't have years to wait, so instead we learned to collect rainwater between rations handed out in jugs outside City Hall. It was the first thing we had to start lining up for. We were told it was from an emergency stockpile, that we had to use it sparingly.

We were told the city wasn't sure how long supplies would last, or whether other cities would be able to help. The problem was everywhere, they said, and some places were worse off already. Niagara Falls was over, decimated; that place hadn't been running on anything but illusion anyway. No one was really surprised to hear the news.

Here, the rations weren't enough. Unwilling to let go of old comforts, people wanted to shower, bathe, cook, clean, so they used the tap water despite the risks, smearing their floors and counters and bodies with germs, never understanding how viruses spread. “If we can't see it, then it can't be real,” their collective conscious confirmed. Induce vomiting. Cramps, bloating, diarrhea, nausea, fever. Secondary symptoms: paranoia. The city's corneas had turned the colour of viscera, its winds a deep beige. Grains of contamination stained everything and anything you touched was coated in microscopic illness, flecks of shit and puke.

We forgot what it felt like to be anything but filthy. Clean wasn't even a concept anymore. Eventually we also forgot about television and glossy magazines and newspapers. Forgot about shopping for new clothing or shoes or records. Forgot about apples, oranges, plums, about peaches and fresh red peppers. Forgot about money and the luxury of new things.

But we remembered scarcity. Understood it, finally, through the standard-issue care packages, brown sacks of whatever could be spared, not just water now but thin bars of soap, bandaids, tampons, peanut butter sometimes, or canned beans. We heard food supplies came from emergency reserves that would eventually run out. We heard no answers about what would happen after that.

City grocery stores only had about three days' worth of food at the best of times; shelves here stayed empty, doors locked, lights off.

We heard some cities were better off than others, though; that Montreal still had electricity fifty percent of the time, that some European cities like Paris had set up community kitchens in city squares where they had massive cookouts over bonfires.

But Montreal was too far and Paris was only a rumour, so we stayed with what we knew. I just dealt with it all in my usual way anyway: by staying drunk, scavenging pills. Kept my hand out constantly even though I knew it would make me sick again in a few days.

Everyone was floating around then. No one knew what to do. The roads were always lined up, jammed with people leaving, thinking that if they got out, got somewhere open and northern, it would all be okay.

But smaller towns weren't helping out the big cities much. They weren't even letting newcomers in. People were driving north, hoping to be saved, and being told to turn around. No one had enough to share.
Whole neighbourhood blocks succumbed to spontaneous combustion.

The rest of us just crashed around, too sick and uneasy to stay settled, believing that we'd all be led somewhere else at some point soon. I was okay with this, used to the in-between. The feeling I used to call “figuring things out” became the norm.

Confession: we'd been waiting for the world to end. Believed it would be Our Time. We—meaning us, our friends, our familiar faces—believed ourselves to be ready for this, whatever that meant. Remember, it was a scene. A cult of death teasers. What had started with Valium continued with Shit Kitten, who rose up to fill the gap on the circuit after Valium's decomposition. Shit Kitten showed us how to spend nights lighting fires at the backs of our throats.

There was—still is—a guy named Tooth. Not a nickname; something he always insisted was more serious than that, a name he'd picked for himself when he joined Shit Kitten, the band's philosophy being that we all have two choices: be what the world decides you'll be, or be what you want to be, and he wanted to be Tooth and his singer was Rattail. Self-made, Tooth called it.

We were drinking outside the back door of the Mission when he asked me if I ever thought of myself that way, but I didn't really know how to answer because everything he talked about sounded too much like being alive and I only knew deconstruction. I felt embarrassed then, like Tooth would feel too much of a distance between us to keep talking to me, but he did keep talking, about how Shit Kitten doesn't think of what they do as songwriting, that they instead create inverted rituals, channel confessions that don't come from the band but from the audience.

“We want to rip you all apart, starting from your insides.” I remember that exact phrase because he took out a ballpoint pen and wrote those words on the white toe of my black high tops.

It sounded like a bad thing but Tooth said it wasn't, that it was communal. When people go see a band they're all there for the same reasons. Shows are ritualistic. Remove the sound but keep the movement and you're witnessing something tribal. A new force in the room.

Tooth took my hand in his mouth. The fire in my throat had made me manic so I let him take my tongue, too. His teeth were stunted yellow cubes, lips reluctant around mine even though his hand tugged at the back of my bra.

After he'd told me all about himself it was time to go back in, time for the show to start. I'd given him nothing except a little tongue, but still he wanted me to follow him into the Mission. We stood up and the alley swerved. The fire's flames were licking all the way down my esophagus. “Whatever happens, Shit Kitten's taking all our fans with us. You're in the club now,” he said.

Inside, Aimee stood tall in electric blue heels. Bare legs and a mini in November. Above her ankle was a scratch that could have been dirt. She let me climb on her back so I could see the stage over the heads of mutant boys. She shivered under me every time my hair poked into the back of her neck. I breathed for her through the oval of my mouth as Shit Kitten drew a ritual around us, built a song called “PostApoc” up and up until we believed its presence would blanket us. People leaned back on their heels, daring to faint into the absolute faith in what they were hearing: that The End would be easy, especially if you wanted it to be.

“
It's my body and I'll die if I want to,”
the band sang. And we answered back, because we wanted it, had been feeling it teem in the heat and repression for years. Even though the city was quivering all around us, we felt far away from it, felt like if it touched us we were ready anyway.

It's my body and I'll die if I want to.