And now that humanity is dead, so will time cease to exist. And as I thought this I felt a weakened quiver in my jawbone, the kind I usually felt before throwing up. I didn’t throw up, but instead felt the warm sudden streak of a tear trickle down my face. I wiped it and looked at it between my fingers, now in the form of dissipated mud on the dry, dirty, porous maze-like and wavy entrails of my finger; a sight which no sooner reminded me that I hadn’t bathed in weeks, but blurred within the fresh pool of tears in my eyes and fell.
I usually try not to cry, but it just felt so right then. I wanted to scream and take great heaves and cry big tears and fall to my knees, in fetal position, or on my knees as if kicked in the gut would do, and just remain that way until I had the solace to try life again. But I didn’t. I hadn’t even noticed that we had traveled through a nice little clearing over a mountain pass, nestled within a few strong and sparse handsome Douglas Fir, where the red toasted pine needles had evenly covered the ground, and saw Julia’s white neck above her earthen green sleeveless shirt, lined with dirt and pitiful decay, where I decided not to cry out loud. All I had to do was think about her loss, and the look that so easily conquered her once strong and invincible face. She was a strong woman and had suffered loss in the former world, a lover and mother –but nothing like this.
As far as we know we were the very last people on earth. No TV, no radio, no power -long gone in the dismal silence of humanity, a light once flashy, robust, resilient, now seemingly a twinkle, a drop of rainwater, neglected pastime, or afterthought. What happened to it all? All the blood, sweat and tears, poured into this life over a struggling man, his struggle with circumstance to affect an intended outcome, to make better, always better; the baffled mathematician figuring numbers, the hungry painter painting portraits, the image of his eye the beauty of his life, his heart’s desire; better, the tired laborer, laying brick upon brick. And now? Was it really all for nothing? What’s to say of it all?
I didn’t know how long we could keep going like this. We were tired. We were tired of being tired. I don’t know how many grunts, how many complaints, how many pants of breath where taken by our withered mouths. God only knows how it stunk. Our eyes dazed and sunken in the skeletal faces, faces looking only half their formerselves, only slightly similar to the photos of us kept on the abandoned mantels and wallet books of who knows whose possession, the family photos, a little younger, fresh and smiling to the lense in a perfect world. Those places are now silent. Those homes that kept our family photos blanketed in dust and made no noise, not even the scurry of a rat or snake or spider. The family photos down the forgotten halls of silence, starign happily off into a benign world; forgotten. Now there was only the sound of indifferent leaves above stirred by the wind and the shivering convulsions of billions of limbs colliding in the forest above and around us. The days had grown dim above and below and back again; The floors, toasted evergreen, rusted leaves; crunchy and soft, changing like the scales of a Turkish rug carrousel, turning green, red, orange, and brown, to the dusty and rocky ground unevenly and sporadically braided/ by the veins of stuborn roots.
In the protection of an ominous deciduous landscape we stopped to breath, cry, and rest. We were as dirty as Somalian rebels. The idea of Henrietta dying was unbearable. We’d made all the concessions for her condition our journey would allow. Her fever saw no signs of regression and we were now high in the Carpathian hills. The sound of the softdeciduous leaves shifted underfoot. It was soft and moist and smelled like the floor of a ceramics building. Julia tried to hold water to Henrietta’s mouth, but she insisted on not drinking.
‘You must,’ Julia pleaded.
Henrietta only turned her head.
I looked at her as I did when she was my student. Her glasses were now chalky and gray, the fire in her eyes had long burned out and now there was only this dismal fraction of remission. Bernadet and Brigitta hastened to her side.
‘You must drink the water,’ Bernadet said, ‘we’ll make it to Sibiu,’ she said. Brigitta could only repeat these words. Julia took a good look at her, put her hand on her head, and felt her fever.
‘I think it’s worsening,’ she said.
The others only stood nearby and could do nothing but watch.
The sound of Henrietta’s cough had also intisified. What used to be a great unproductive endeavor to restore order to her lungs had now become a dismal semi-conscious reaction to the fluid in them.
The sweat on her forhead beaded like the morning dew found on the hemlock and vibrant hornbeam.
‘She obviously can’t go much further,’ Julia said, looking up through her straining eyes. Zoltan didn’t know what to say, as evidenced in his omission of a timely response. He stood with the empty water bottle in his right hand.
‘I say we keep going to Sibiu,’ Csaba said, ‘it’s the only way she’ll make it.’
None of us wanted to hear this. We all knew what it meant. There was a good chance that Henrietta wouldn’t survive this, and none of us knew whether or not we could survive her death. We’d seen enough death within the last few months to last an eternity and could stomach no more of it. If we were the last people on earth, wouldn’t we want to save every life we could spare?
Julia rose and pulled Csaba to the side. I heard their words through the breaches of space through their position.
‘Csaba,’ Julia said in a stern voice, ‘I’ll have no more of you selfishly imposing your ideas onto the rest of us.’
There was a pause and the rest of their words became a sinonomous unintelligible circus.
Csaba’s response was just as severe, though it obviously made no impact as she left their autonomous discussion as quickly as she had instigated it.
The burn in my stomach reminded me of my own pitiful condition, but somehow managed not to succumb, if by sheer will, I managed not to succumb. I removed the hot bookback from my back, my back now damp with sweat and chilled by the sudden connection with the *** forest air. I took out my water bottle and sat nursing the distilled Carpathian spring water within it we’d managed to get the day before by the blind luck of chance. We’d traversed many a’ long mountain paths and meandering channels through the forests when we’d discovered an old abandoned cabin what looked like had been a retreat of some kind and covered with the most delectable little green grass that frazzled when the wind struck it, and much like our own hearts when we’d first taken sight of it tucked away in the lost forest. Waiting several moments for signs of life to appear, or, more realistically, not to appear, we’d searched the grounds for food or drink, or any supplies useful for our purposes and, when finding nothing, found there instead, beyond a shy meandering path, crossing an old handmade bridge three feet long and two wide, a piece of pvc plumbing or conduit protruding from the side of mountainous outcrop, gushing plentiful sparkling springwater from the mountains above. We’d filled every ounce of container we had and drank until there was nothing left to drink and even bathed in the spring water, our clothes of course never coming off or undone, just hinging to our soaken and salty bodies like wet slacks of new skin.
I sat in the shade and looked at Henrietta’s worsening condition. I tried to remember if she smiled at that time, but then I don’t think any of us did and, in fact, couldn’t remember whose idea it was for us to bathe in the mountain spring water in the first place.
Julia returned to Henrietta’s side.
‘Drink.’ there was a detectable tone of fear in her voice and though it was a statement, sounded more like a pitiful request.
enrietta coughed and surprised us all when she lifted her head, took the bottle, and drank a sip. A stream of spring water rolled down both sides of her face. She was dirty and had a perfect brown smut on her nose.
‘You look like Rudolph,’ Zoltan said.
Henrietta giggled, succeeded by a repetition of three coughs. She took the water and sipped it again.
‘Just keep drinking,’ Julia instructed her. The children were more than helpful in holding her languid shoulders up off the dirty forest floor. Her old sneakers were the ones I’d remember seeing her wear on the first day of school that year, blue denim with white shoulder pad like caps. She managed another sip of water, and though this was encouraging, our disparaging grew as shown by the helpless and wordless glances shared among the colleagues. It was obvious to even the little ones Henrietta’s condition had gotten much more serious.
We’d left the protection of the lovely decidous overpass and cushiony leafy hills of the dying autumn leaves (they’d felt like felt) which opened up and let us out into a sunny meadow flourishing with rich wheat and buckeye and mulberry bushes, Henrietta walking between the arms of the other two girls, and occassionaly Julia, and occassionaly me, and occasionally one of the other men.
‘You’re going to survive,’ I said. ‘You’re a strong girl.’
I could remember exactly the laughs and smiles of our classes together, always full of youthful noise, and the live-for-the-moment mentality of children, those times, when the body is strong and life lasts forever. I remembered the soft under side of her arm as we locked arms in the classroom playing ‘adj kiraly katonat,’ or -red rosey in English. A then blissful and ever so lively girl, happy, and living for the moment. Emil, Istvan, Zoltan, and Csaba looked like grains of pepper over the moving landscape before us. Julia took my spot helping Henrietta to walk, while I untwisted the bottle of spring water and took a good gulp to surmise the admission of sweat from the effort of having shoulder the young girl.
‘Ouh, Sibiu, Sibiu! Lovely Sibiu!’ One of the men cried from the front. This was an exaggeration of desire of course, a sentiment reflected in the hearts of all of us. We knew not what awaited us there, but counted on the lure of adjor to get us there, and the prospect of sustenance, or morsel of life.
Up and down, to and fro, over mountains, plains, rivers and snakes. Trotting over cold earth and salty rock. The various greenery and Shrubs of the Carpathians pass through my vision like a kaleidoscope and continue running endlessly with the talk of my Hungarian colleagues.
I’ve walked until the sores on my feet hurt and my feet blistered and burned, because I wore my socks off several days ago. I cut the legs of my pants off, because I was hot. That proved to be a big mistake, because now I have to stop and itch frequently from some kind of agitant plant, and briars and the stickers and the thorn bushes, and surprisingly, the ferns with sharp edges, cut up my bruised and thinning legs.
Without warning, there was a sudden boom overhead, and before there was time to ascertain its origin, we’d fell to the ground, the voices of my colleagues shattering like an open bag of marbles dropping and scattering over a hardwood floor. One of the girls screamed. I could hear the fear in her voice. When I opened my eyes I was looking face down at my hands and watched the sand rise up through my fingers. A brown coffee stained sand. I looked into one of the tiniest grains I could see and can still remember to this day its exact detail, and I thought, could I ever find you again? And I thought how safe and nice it must be to be you. You who no one could ever find and you who would never have to endure this. In its crystalline glass I could see myself, my life, all within a timeless instant; the grumbling warm hunger in my stomach. I thought about life. The billions of chemical reactions near and far, the ones unseen and distant, those forgotten and those travelling to other planets on rock which had shattered into space beyond the ionosphere and into the galaxy, making interplanetary voyages to other planets and whether or not they prospered there and, if so, what would be the outcome in several billion years if that planet did not leave the energy provision of the sun? Would life appear again as we know it, and, if so, would it become even remotely similar to the life we now know? Would it become as advanced is it is now? And if ever intelligence should arise, would it ponder the same thoughts I have now, reflect on them with sentiment, or awe, or be thankful to us for its roots? Probably not, I thought, and closed my hand harder around the green schist. I saw within the layers of soot and sand transparent pieces of glass and crystal, dark pepper like kernels of granite, and the dust that hollowed away from my breath, which I was careful not to take back in. How I wanted to go into that ground and be among them. The forgotten pieces of sand, silica, and quartz, some vitrified, forming tiny hollow, branching fulgurite root structures, where it had been struck by lightning when the earth was formless and void, where the lava rivers cut its crests, and large precipices overlooked endless seas of red and the skies sweltered with hot gases; drunken, upset, and subverted, in endless convection; broken and churned away through the eons of saltation, deflation, erosion, continental collision, and subduction, as earth’s fledgling plates collided with destiny among the mathematical miracles to condition/define life as it is. The grass iches me all over and I slowly recovered to my feet. Julia was just ahead of me, her gray sleeveless shirt sweat soaked and filthy. Her face stained and sordid. It must have been, because after forty years of smoking, she has not had a cigarette in at least two weeks. ‘What was that?’ I said.
The heads of everyone in our group was turned and straining upward to see what had happened in the sky. Suddenly, as if covered by a dark blanket, the skies fluxed from a red to neon gray and black. Two more bangs and three smoky contrails across the sky. They disappeared beyond the trees. Then it was all quiet and the weeds shuffled in the clearing where we were standing. I could hear the voice of the men up font talking and Julia turned her head and told me in English what she’d just learned. It was an airplane, she said, several of them. Her face looked exhausted and she was squinting the light out of her eyes. Her arm, though exposed to the sun, was still white as it lay outstretched and clutching the bag at that rested momentarily at her feet.
The students looked tired and impossible. If I were a doctor I would say bowelly irritable. When was the last time they had had a good nights sleep? A good meal? A good bowel movement? We were all in similar predicament. Each with his own individual concerns and doing what they could best for the rest. None of us knew what to do, where to turn. In those days my mind thought back constantly to my mother. We had had a big fight several years before and I couldn‘t raise myself to get over it. The stake of my family and everything that would make me who I am and was was at risk. That’s just the way it is. Life goes on. I had tried somehow to work it out in my heart what do do about it. I kept my faith in God, but that was all. Nobody is born into this world with all the answers. Sometimes I feign to think that all life’s more major battles all just have to do with growing up. Could that be? Certainly could. I digress. The point is, I had left my mother one night sitting in the widow and all I had considered at the time was myself. It hurts me to remember her in the yellow light of the kitchen incadescent bulb, sewing her garment or reading the paper or whatever it was she was doing so concentratedly, for tears had distorted my vision and trouble had panged my heart. I walked off with that last look and never looked back. I never allowed myself to consider what she would do for the rest of her life, nor did I let such power bits of emotion interfer with my current acuity. In the end, if this was the right way in ‘growing’ up, I’ve yet to decide. We can say, at least, that this was just the way it happened, and leave it at that. I’m sure there are many people in this world as they get older they look back and say, ‘gee, I wish I could change that, or this. Gee, I would do that differently,’ and yes, ‘gee. I never knew it would be this way. I thought life would be different.’
The thing that I have learned about life is that it is ironic. Ironic enough to make you think you know too little about what you think you know. The truth is, outside of God, we all know nothing. The human mind is small and confounded. I digress.
We were tired, but struggling our way through the Carpathians wasn’t always a struggle. Sometimes, when the wind wouldn’t blow, when it didn’t rain, and when the temperature wasn’t so low it was unbearable, there were actually some beautiful moments. In fact, the moment I saw those channels of sand that rose through the webbing of my fingers rise up, when I spoke to it, the wind was at my back. It was in September or so, at least in the human calendar, that one I had always known and knew of anything different (I never thought it would disappear. But as I think of it now, time always was a human invention. It was never like a scientific discovery were you would need to adjust some aspect of your life to accommodate for it and learn from it or adapt to it. Life, indeed we must accommodate, but time, never. We see the plants that live and grown and bloom and die. We see the cycle, and are aware of something happening, but never time itself. It is not calcualable nor tangible, but a mere tool by we moderated our existence. And now that we are dead, there is no use for moderation. There is no use for anything, indeed, there is no use.
The autumn winds that blew through the Carpathians was light and caused the leafs of the cherwood and Lilith to whisper. It brought back old memories of my childhood when we had not a care in the world. I had not visions of my childhood for many years and, indeed, had forgotten that I once was a child. That, indeed, there was once a time in my life when my mind new of other things beside pain, and there were times in my life where I even knew the pain of others, or other things. I saw my feet step one by one go before me laying down the strings or rick wheat and season grass and remembered the time my cousin and I played at my grandmother’s with his bb gun. The time he’d shot blindly into the air for no apparent reason other than to be shooting when there was a thud, and looking down was a lifeless bluebird that’s been shot through perfectly through the heart. I remember the remorse I’d felt for the bluebird and wondered if it’d had a soul and, if so, if there were someplace beautiful it could attend in compensation for its loss. I had hoped so, for, it’s body, soft and tender and beautifully designed, laid heartless at my feet. And why? Where was the justification for its death, or better, the justification for its life? It was said and I have heard, that, before one dies, they tend to think back on childhood memories. I’d seen a lot of death lately, more than my fare share. And each time it happened, I would recount the words of a Chinese man by the name of Harry Wu. He had survived in a Chinese Lao Gai labor camp for sixteen years. He was arrested during China’s cultural revolution for being among the ‘educated elite,’ which translated somehow into’intellecual counterrevolutionary.’ In actuality, Mr. Wu was only imprisoned because certain sectors of the state had to all meet a quota of counterrevolutionaries that needed to be apprehended in order to satisfy their constituents in the central government, and because Mr.Wu had some philosophical differences with the powers that were, he would do as well as any other ‘counter-revolutionary’ to help reach the quota and sent to die in prison. He survived sixteen years by trapping rats and frogs and snakes and other insects. But during his many years in the labor camps, he’d have to witness countless of his friends die. He studied their behaviors before death and concluded many interesting facts that remained ingrained in my mind until this day. How before death one seemingly forgets himself, falls into a lull of optimism, recounts the treasured stories of their youth, or springs forth with s burst of energy to start cleaning and putting their house in order. Mr Wu couldn’t have been more right. And I thought that death must have been looming over my head (quite literally now), because I was having relapses of childhood memories and regurgitating them one by one much more frequently now. Only I had no one to tell them to. I just walked endlessly recounting and sometime re-recounting with the sights and sounds of our journey like the slow and inaudible screening of my life. The precious blades of grass and weeds bending at my feet, completely unappreciated for being for all I knew the very last things I would experience in this life. Had I thought that I was to die during those days maybe I would have admired those pieces of grass, or leaves, or strewn clouds so high up in the air, at an untouchable place, a place I highly admired. And yet, perhaps that was exactly what I was doing, only there wasn’t even of me to go around over the relapses of childhood memories and innumberable images updating my vision in an indifferent and insequential pattern, to complex to remember all, too much to take in, not like the pebble I’d brought up to my face in the sand that ran through my fingers, whose every vein I recall perfectly to this day. Though no longer there, recall with perfect recollection in perfect detail so far far away in that nostalgic and ethereal distance over those rolling mountains and hills and treacherous terrain; over that journey of pilgrams lined up like kernals of peppers through a golden and gray field of wheat barley.
Perhaps that’s what I was doing. But its not as if I didn’t hear the prairie wolves, tree squirrels, the insects, the hawks of the sky and fowls of the foreign lands and the crickets at night, it was just the sound of my own inner voice had grown so strong as to actually speak louder than those things around me. That’s what happens when one is turned out into nature so long. The absence of the lack of city and bustling of man’s latest devices keep his mind roaring along with them, but the quiet and soothing nurture of nature, removes the madness and reclaims once more man’s forgotten connection from whence he came. I digress.
Tired and exhausted, we made our way from the clearing and head on through the trees ahead. We walked in the clearing for as long as we could because the sun could reach us there and warm our backs. After walking long hours in the forest, one gets cold and petrifies. Walking in the sunlight from time to time thaw. I stayed in the back as usual. You could say I was the rear guard. I didn’t mind, but I watched behind me frequently. Julia always stayed just ahead of me. I’d become very fond of her. When we worked to together, I was always a bit afraid of her. I think it must have been her genuine eastern European nature that frightened me. Then again, maybe frightened is a strong word with subversive semantic properties. Maybe ‘intimidated’ is the word I’m actually searching for. She intimated me because she was so gosh darn intelligent. She was a biologist. She’d had warmed to me, too. I had always felt a keen sense of sorrow for her, especially since she knew not what lied for her in Sibiu where her ex-husband had lived and her son, Erik, had visited before everything happened. It’d at least been two months before they’d spoken.
These were the things that went through my mind over and over again. Some made sense and some didn’t, but the caboose of my mind churned on like the savage boiler on the steam of burned carbohydrates, flooding my brain with hemoglobin and firing neurons through the solar like constellations of my mind, pursuing over and replaying long stored away and forgotten memories through the heap of mucus and braided muscle of my body.
At night, when the crickets churned and feared the unknown and the shadows among the trees and quietly revered a life past, each to his own like the diverse morsels of a box of chocolates, my heart summoned to mind the warm and vivid recollections of the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. A woman. A woman whose name I’m not allowed to say.
I had also heard it was said other than the words of the memories that accompany death, but the nature of love, and the power of love. I remember stories of love that brought death, like Bronte’s *, which brought life, like the resurrection of Jesus, or love that, or any of the myriad of situation’s surrounding the most played out theme in all of human intellectual tradition: love.
I had never considered it as a force in this life, positive or negative. Maybe I never believed in love, maybe I never knew love, but there was a change in me after meeting her. Something that made me believe in it for the first time, and, after meeting her, I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, couldn’t walk the streets of my life without thinking of her. At every moment, every turn, every fold of thought, could not help but return to her. There were times when this was fond, times when it was not, but fond or not, was always on my mind. Her smile, lips, laughter.
Maybe I believed because I wanted her. Maybe I believed because for the first time in my life my life made sense. There was something I wanted and because of that, life had meaning, because if I had that, my life would be happy. So, then, is happiness the meaning of life? If it was, she was my ticket there.
Either way, it was true that she was the reason I had not fallen ill nor died nor managed to disappear like the others. At least, I thought so, it certainly seemed that way. I know for sure I would have have allowed myself to be ravaged, or ill compelled in evading my own moribund and sunder demise had it not been for her. It seemed now my only reason for pushing on was for her, for, although there was no hope in humanity now, no hope in the future, I held out hope for smelling her hair, holding her close and keeping her warm and keeping myself warm in her body temperature, wiping her tears and, as I so often daydreamed, protecting her danger and sitting next to her as she languidly awoke from a feverish nightmare or some breaking fever, to see me, smiling in the light of the fire, and selflessly doing all that was in my power, or spending the rest of my life, if necessary, trying to make her smile back at me.
