Read The Apocalypse Club Online
Authors: Craig McLay
“But also intriguing. What the hell. I say buy the flowers. Even if she doesn’t show up, they’ll still look nice in your apartment. Not that they’ll get any sun down there. The way you describe your apartment makes me think of Bag End.”
“Bag End was probably nicer. It certainly looked nicer in the movies. My place does really look more like you would expect a hole in the ground to look.”
“Don’t talk to me about the movies. The books are where it’s fucking
at
with that series.” Talia is a huge Lord of the Rings fan. Although she grudgingly admits that the films are not terrible, she did not take kindly to my idly voiced opinion that they were actually better than the source material. Since this is one of the five topics that prevent anyone from entering the inner circle of Talia’s friends and acquaintances, the fact that I was even talking to her about the strangeness of my new dating arrangement was remarkable. “How did you even meet this girl, or are you not allowed to talk about that, either?”
“Actually, I think it was one of the conditions of my plea agreement.”
“Plea agreement?” she screeched. “Are you shitting me?”
I shook my head. “Actually, no.”
“I have to hand it to you, Simms. I took you for a garden-variety sensitive young arts undergrad who wouldn’t know which end of a bong was up. But, sonny boy, consider me intrigued. If this girl ever pops up for long enough for you to take her to dinner or a movie, then let me know. I absolutely must see her with my own eyes.”
So I bought the flowers.
“So you got the message, I see?” Violet said, coming over to take them out of my hands.
“I did. Lucky you that I’m poor enough that I have to actually read my cell phone bill every month to make sure they’re not screwing me. The utilities on the apartment are included with the rent, though, so I don’t recommend inserting any racy come-ons into the gas or hydro bills. My landlord is eighty-two years old and would probably die.”
Just over a month later, I was jogging down the stairs to the subway when I glanced up and noticed that the digital billboard above the entrance had changed slightly. It was displaying an ad for some perfume and featured an image of a woman standing next to a window and wearing only the sheer drapery. As I looked up, the woman’s head was replaced with Violet’s and the ad copy changed from “Open” to “Open Friday”.
I stood there staring at it in disbelief for a moment or two and then started laughing. The other commuters who were bustling past me just took me for a random crazy and ignored me. Maybe I was a random crazy, but I certainly admired the artistry of it. I wondered if Violet was out there somewhere, huddled over a computer monitor and watching me back through some misappropriated security camera, laughing right along. In one sense, she was everywhere, so she was never far away. In another, she was most often everywhere I was not. I wondered if this was what nuns were talking about when they said they were married to god. Probably not. At least I got to see her in the flesh every once in a while.
Things went on that way for about six months or so. I started my third year and went back to work at the library. A few times I suggested that we go out somewhere for dinner, but she became more reclusive and paranoid as time went on and didn’t think it was a good idea for us to meet up in public.
“You remember when I said before that things were starting to come to a head?” she asked one night when we were curled up in my small but comfortable twin bed.
“Mmm hmmm.”
“It might not be safe for us to see each other for a while.”
“I told you,” I said, drowsy. “We’ll just run away to an island somewhere. Go off the grid, as they say.”
“I’ve seen the grid, and there’s no way off it.”
“Then we’ll smash it. Computers don’t last five minutes these days. All you need to do is ensure all their software licences come up for renewal at the same time. Then no one in the office can find the security key. It’ll take them days to get back online. By then, we’ll be safely in Burkina Faso.”
“That’s not an island.”
“Granted, but that doesn’t change the fact that I couldn’t find it on a map.”
She sighed. “What are you going to do when you graduate? It’s not far away.”
“Well, assuming you won’t go along with my Burkina Faso Plan A, then I suppose I’ll have to go with Plan B.”
“Dare I ask?”
“Didn’t have one. Lying about that. It was all Burkina. Now I’m fucked. Shame, too. I think I would have made a good Burkinite. Or Fasoon. Whatever they call themselves.“
“Or you could get a job.”
“Uggh! No one in their right minds ever wants to do that. Don’t you read the news? The general consensus is that jobs are fucking awful. Everybody who has one says so.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to pioneer a new way of thinking. A new way for humanity to live. One free of drudgery and intellectual and economic enslavement. I shall call it…Markism.”
“Is one of the central tenets of Markism that everyone give all their money to Mark?”
“Not all of it! Render unto Mark what is Mark’s. From each, according to their ability to pay Mark, to each, according to Mark’s willingness to give some back.”
“That sounds more like a religion than an ethos.”
“You say tomato. The former are more profitable, though, so maybe you’re on to something, there. Although, morally, I would have problems with it. I couldn’t take people’s money without at least giving them something for it in exchange. All this selling the invisible stuff is a big part of why the world is so fucked up.”
“So job it is, then.”
I groaned. “Jobs turn people into little pieces of machinery. They whirl dutifully in place for their whole lives and for what? Enough money to survive and maybe go somewhere every couple of years? Accumulate a bunch of useless stuff you barely use and that your kids or grandkids will just throw out when you die? What’s the meaning in that? There has to be an alternative.”
“Markism.”
“You said it, baby.”
“I’ll join.”
“Thanks.”
“But only after you get your tax-free status. Otherwise, you know, you’re just a cult.” She giggled and poked me in the ribs.
I got up for a drink of water and noticed there was a message on my cell phone. It was from my sister, who, based on her stress level, sounded like she was being kidnapped in the middle of the call. I called her back and got her boyfriend, Dean, instead. Dean is a construction worker who, despite having a titanium knee and a four-pack-a-day habit, openly believes that he can become the world’s next Ultimate Fighting Champion. Dean and I don’t have a lot in common, but my sister seems to like him, so I mostly keep my opinions to myself.
“Yeah, sorry to be the one to tell you this, man,” Dean says in his curlicued, site manager voice.
“Tell me what?”
“Listen, your sister’s at the hospital.”
“What’s wrong with her?” I am suddenly yelling. In the bed, Violet sits up sharply.
“It’s not her, man. Looks like your parents were in a car crash.”
I try to sit down on a chair and miss, landing on the floor with a thump. “What?”
“Yeah. Weirdest fuckin’ thing you can imagine, man. They were just going out to get groceries or something and this huge fuckin’ tornado came shootin’ down out of the sky and picked up the car.”
“A what?”
“I know!” Dean is actually so excited by this detail that he can’t quite contain it. “Like, two hunnerd people saw it! They were just pulling into the plaza when bam! There it was! Huge motherfucker, they said. Anyway, it picked ’em up, spun the car around like a couple a hunnerd thousand times an’ then dropped ’em right through the roof of a
Denny’s
.”
“They did go there a lot,” I said, stupidly.
“‘Parrently, it was closed for renovations. TDL is doin’ some work on their HVAC. I know the guy. Real reasonable, you ever need somebody for that type of work. Anyway, um…looks like they didn’t make it. Listen, I’m real sorry, man.”
I hung up and stared at the phone. Five minutes before, everything had been fine, now everything was different. In the waiting line for infinity, their number had been called. Now I had been forced to step forward and hold up the number clutched in my hand. There was nobody standing between me and the end anymore. I could feel it yawning out in front of me like a cliff edge or door into space.
Holy shit, I thought. I am one selfish bastard. They’re gone and the only thing I can think about is myself.
“What happened?”
I told Violet what Dean had told me. She was already up out of bed and pulling on her clothes before I could get to the part about the HVAC.
“Oh my god, Mark, I’m sorry. Look, I better get out of here.”
What? Of all the times she could run out on me, this was
really
not the best, timing-wise. “Huh?”
“I think this might be my fault,” she said, racing into the bathroom and stuffing things in a bag. “Maybe it was just a warning, I don’t know.”
I stood up. “Your fault? What are you talking about?”
“It sure as hell wasn’t a coincidence.”
“Coincidence?” She raced to the dresser and grabbed her phone. I had to grab her by the shoulders to get her to stand still. “Violet, what are you talking about?”
“I told them I wanted out!” she said.
“You did?”
“Yesterday. I told them I didn’t want to do this anymore.”
My blindfolded brain was struggling to put the simple puzzle pieces together. “And you think…”
“I don’t think it was an accident, let’s put it that way,” she said. “What I know is that I can’t stay here. This is dangerous. I am dangerous. I have to get as far away from you as I possibly can.”
“Violet…”
“Sorry, Mark. I love you but I have to go.”
And with that, she kissed me once, checked to make sure her keys were in her pocket, and ran out the door.
From
The Guardian
, 14 September 1992:
GRISLY DISCOVERY DEEPENS GHENZHAI MYSTERY
(GREENLAND) – The five bodies discovered near the edge of the massive Förssagen ice sheet in a remote area of northeastern Greenland last week may belong to renowned Arctic explorer Hideki Ghenzhai and his exploration team, who vanished in the region 60 years ago.
The bodies were discovered by a small team of Norwegian climate researchers led by Dr. Lars Juningsprogen, who has been conducting research for the University of Oslo.
“It appears that the bodies were frozen in the ice sheet,” said Dr. Juningsprogen. “But as the rate of ice melt has accelerated, they have broken free, if you will, and been washed down into the giant Handleer Crevasse, which is approximately twice the depth of the Grand Canyon.”
Dr. Juningsprogen said it would be extremely difficult to estimate the original location of the bodies, which are believed to include Ghenzhai, Swedish geologist Dr. Hans Stromm, renowned Italian mountaineer Sergio “Seven Summits” Cabosta, and two unidentified research assistants. The other eight members of the expedition are still missing.
The condition of the bodies, however, has raised more questions than their sudden reappearance has answered.
“They appear to have suffered little to no decomposition at all,” said Dr. Willem Strosek, the pathologist who examined the remains at the Bethesda Medical Center in Maryland. “This is not at all what we would expect to see in cases where victims died as a result of exposure.”
Some reports, however, seem to indicate that exposure was not the cause of death.
“It looked like some of them had been, well, partially eaten,” said Dr. Juningsprogen. “Ghenzhai and Cabosta especially. Cabosta’s chest cavity was open and it appeared that his heart had been taken out. Ghenzhai’s lower jaw was missing and his tongue appeared to have been removed. One of the interns was missing eyes while the other had no ears.”
Dr. Strosek refused to comment on the apparent mutilations or whether or not they appeared to be the result of human or animal activity. “It is far too early to speculate on that,” he said. He also refused to say whether the injuries were post mortem or may have contributed to the deaths of those individuals.
The Handleer Crevasse is approximately 750 miles northeast of the last known position of the famously doomed expedition, which disappeared in August 1932.
Ghenzhai had publicly announced his intent to follow in the footsteps of previous failed expeditions, such as Luis Dornier, Smythe-Hudson and Enrico Trappicanti, to locate what many in the scientific community derisively refer to as “Eden island” below the massive Greenland ice sheet.
Following on what he claimed was “lost” research recovered from an earlier expedition mounted by Lord Tristan Smythe and George Randall Hudson, Ghenzhai claimed to have translated three ancient scrolls discovered near Yedra (the site of a former Muslim fortification during the Crusades in Syria) that pointed to Greenland as the origin of all life on earth.
Born in San Francisco to a Chinese father and Australian mother, Ghenzhai first rose to prominence with his discovery of the famous “Lost Maltese Treasure” on the tiny island of Mandrago in the eastern Mediterranean in 1926.
Rumoured to be worth as much as £3.2 billion in adjusted currency, the discovery caused an international sensation. Various territorial claims on the treasure by the governments of Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain and seven other countries forced Ghenzhai to flee to Tasmania, where some claim he hid much of the gold in a secret vault under his house.
Called a “fearless adventurer” by some and a “mercenary grave-robber” by others, Ghenzhai remained in Tasmania while he organized his next expedition. The few interviews he gave at the time indicated that he had become obsessed with the Eden island theory and was determined to be the first to prove that it was true.
With plenty of funds at his disposal, Ghenzhai hired experts who were, if not in full agreement with his theories, at least not opposed to his contract terms. Stromm in particular gave an interview to the Australian press in which he called the idea “madness – but highly profitable madness.”
The expedition was assembled and launched from Rotterdam in May 1932. It was supposed to last for two months.
The surviving three minutes of film footage and documents of the expedition reveal that it was a disaster almost from the beginning.
Crucial supplies, like food and heavy weather gear, were left behind while the wrong items were loaded by mistake. A famous but possibly apocryphal story had their ship coming within sight of the east coast of Greenland and opening a crate of what they believed to be skis and snow shoes only to find uninflated footballs inside.
The expedition’s cartographer and navigator, a man they had known as Hiram Thrist, was revealed to be a convicted fraudster whose real name was Joseph “Memphis” Beleu, a former brothel owner from Sydney. Beleu was fired from the expedition and disembarked during an unplanned stop in Reykjavik, which meant he was the only survivor.
Beleu spent the last five years of his life claiming that he knew where Ghenzhai had hidden his billions, but no trace of the treasure was ever found. Beleu was killed during an attempted bank robbery in Mexico City in 1941.
The only surviving record of the expedition after Beleu’s departure belonged to the medic, John Dobble. In his bestselling book about the expedition, author Peter Chernowyth pointed out that “although he was the medic, Dobble had no known or verifiable medical training – the closest he had ever come was working as a stretcher-carrier during the Battle of Ypres.”
Dobble’s account of the expedition is his diary, where day-to-day events are interspersed with declarations of affection for a woman named alternately “Willy” and “Mina.” Chernowyth echoes the popular speculation that this refers to the French dowager Wilhelmina du Blaise, whose brother Herbert commanded Dobble’s regiment, but this is unknown.
The first few chapters of the account detail the almost comical problems that beset the expedition as they made their way across the north Atlantic, which included storms, sea sickness, and a head-on collision with an iceberg that resulted in Cabosta breaking his index toe. Once they arrived in Greenland, however, things took a distinct turn for the strange.
Dobble describes descending into a large crack in the ice sheet (possibly the Guurlaan Crevasse, which is longer but not as deep as its northern cousin) to find a large field of fruit trees and bright red and purple flowers. At another point, he describes a river “jumping with fish” and “a warm, sunny valley” full of what looked like “elk, lizards and all manner of birds.”
Many of these entries have caused some to speculate that Dobble was embroidering the truth to boost Ghenzhai’s claims. Others, like Chernowyth, have openly speculated that Dobble was suffering hallucinations brought on by drug and alcohol withdrawal. Dobble was demoted from sergeant to corporal for being drunk on duty, according to army records.
His last diary entry, the one dated 23 July 1932 is the one that has kept curiosity and speculation alive ever since:
Cabosta has been taken. All standing guard again tonight.
I pray the beasts do not find us again. We are making for
Piotrsgete with all possible speed. G believes we are only
a few hours away, now. The blue stones have given us
purpose, but G has advised not to handle them too much.
The screams still fill my ears, but we dare not turn back.
Immortality lies ahead. Death is all around us, but we are
lighter on our feet. I believe we will succeed. We will be
first to open the door.
No one knows what he means when he states that Cabosta was “taken,” or by his reference to standing guard against beasts in the night. The polar bear, which is the largest land-based predator, is the only species native to Greenland large enough to risk attacking humans, but such encounters, even considering that region’s tiny population, are rare.
Although the injuries attributed to Cabosta could have conceivably been inflicted by a bear, the possibility is “extremely small” according to Sheila Copperfield, director of the non-profit Arctic Bear Preservation Foundation.
“As unlikely as it is that a polar bear would attack a human, let alone a group of humans, there’s never been a documented case of one chewing through a rib cage to get at the heart and leaving the rest of the body alone,” she said. “Much like the other injuries…it just doesn’t sound like something that a polar bear would do. Not even a young one.”
Similarly, “Piotrsgete” is not a name associated with any location in Greenland – matching no settlement or topographic feature. Some have speculated that the “blue stones” were rare diamonds or sapphires, but Greenland carries no known deposits of either.
Chernowyth speculates that when Dobble refers to immortality lying just ahead and death being all around that he’s speaking metaphorically about fame and the precarious reality of their situation on a cold and hostile land mass. The problem with this is that Dobble indulges in metaphor only one other time in the diary, and that’s to describe his beloved Willy (or Mina). This was not a man who avoided speaking literally.
Whether or not the new evidence supports or debunks some of the wilder claims about the expedition remains to be seen. The only ones who know anything have been dead for a long time.
And despite Dobble’s claims about immortality, they are likely to stay that way.