By April, I had to find ways to bring in income because even though things were sliding through the putrid intestinal tract of the universe, eating was still necessary and my finances started going in the ditch as my money began to run out. I couldn’t depend on anything from the sale of my book; sales ceased almost immediately after the Event. No sales, no royalties. Besides, by January the little company that published it became a casualty of the rapidly downturning economy and the book quickly went out of print. So, with reluctance, I gave up the gratis tutoring and returned to digging graves.
I did that until the end of June – around the first anniversary of the Event – then, when I couldn’t abide doing it any longer, I took a job that consisted of helping clear the rubble of abandoned building that were being demolished. Sometimes we found previously missed human remains. These we took to a crematorium. Fortunately, as time went on, this happened less often.
When there was no demolition rubble to be cleared, I swept streets and removed fallen branches from roadways and sidewalks after storms. I figured I could stand it until the schools finally reopened even though the work was uneven and the pay wasn’t good. It was a job.
I took up writing again which I did in my down time. My laptop still worked and even though I couldn’t afford a landline or the DSL internet connection, I didn’t need those to write.
Yes, I knew my being able to publish again carried only a miniscule probability, especially since my publishing company no longer existed. Still, I finished the sequel to my adventure novel even though I didn’t expect it to go anywhere, because I found it was something that helped me maintain a little equilibrium and kept me from going completely insane.
I finished the novel and continued to write. Usually I wrote little vignettes that involved the characters from my novels. Perhaps I would use them to begin another sequel. It was a thought. I also kept a journal in which I recorded my experiences since the Event. Writing about some things was painful, but it helped me cope.
I worked at the clean-up/street-sweeping job for months, picking up other odd jobs, such as washing dishes in a greasy spoon, to supplement the low wages. I ran up on a couple of ex-coworkers from school who’d survived the Event and were in the same predicament. We’d sometimes get together for a drink after work, to commiserate. Like me, they were working at what they could and waiting for the schools to reopen.
By then, smart people from several different countries had held a conference and released the estimate that approximately five billion worldwide – about half the world population – died. That was shocking but it explained why whole neighborhoods were empty. According to several accounts, the populations of some cities and towns were gone in their entirety. I suppose we were fortunate that enough people survived to more or less carry on.
I don’t know how accurate that was, but that was only on the day it happened. More people died in other ways that first year. Tens of thousands succumbed in one way or another before the National Guard controlled the riots and rampages, and the sickos who decided that the best way to handle the situation was to kill as many as they could. Like the ones who opened fire in Miami, killing my cousin along with a lot of others. And, the suicide rate was high. I could understand the suicides.
Once the governments of the world began to reorganize, for a while, a lot of finger pointing and blame went on until everyone gave it up for lack of evidence and because of the fact that no country was in great shape – or in any position to rule the world. Until that happened, I suppose those of us left were lucky there was one particular technology that no longer worked: ballistic missiles. Like airplanes, those were defunct. No one said it but everyone knew that if it hadn’t been for that there would have been a lot of those flying around after the Event. Or maybe not. Maybe I’d watched too many doomsday movies. Of course, the Event was a doomsday all by itself.
It got to be October, and the schools remained closed. The government kept promising but by January, with it having been a year and a half since the world went to shit, it became obvious that there would no longer be a need for middle-school English teachers at all because as time wore on, we realized the schools were never going to reopen. This was an indication that for the foreseeable future, public schooling was a thing of the past.
Some of my colleagues left for other regions, hoping to get work at a private school somewhere. For most, it didn’t happen, and for the majority of us, our careers as teachers were over.
Part Two: Tracking
Chapter Eleven
I OSCILLATED BETWEEN APATHY AND RAGE.
Most days I plodded home from one or the other of the jobs I worked, where I would sit dry-eyed and alone in my flat drinking too much and staring at the little brown elf magnet I’d kept, or at the paintings of Missy’s and Jon’s I hung on my walls. I went through the images on my laptop that I transferred from my cellphone of family and friends. People that no longer existed. I read that last note from Zoni countless times. I tried to write but the day I found myself repeatedly typing nothing but “Zoni” for an entire page, I put my laptop aside and didn’t try again.
In my quest to forget, or at least to not think, sometimes I’d go out and find a woman. I never brought one to my flat. We’d go to her place or I’d rent a room in a cheap motel. Sometimes they wanted pay. I didn’t mind. Everybody had to make a living. They were always surprised that I wasn’t as old as I looked.
There were times when I’d get drunk and take my gun and lurch through an abandoned section of the city taking potshots at lampposts, signs, vacant buildings, and old cars, or throw rocks and smash windows. This went on until one night, after one of those excursions, I awakened with a nearly empty bottle of cheap rum in one hand, spraddled out on the stairs that went up to the apartments. Lowell was standing over me shaking his head.
The only thing he said as he got me to my feet, was, “Come on boy. Let’s get you to your room.”
He helped me up the stairs and I staggered my way to the john. My bladder was so full it was a wonder I hadn’t pissed myself. My stomach churned and I became so queasy that when I leaned over the toilet it was a race between the urine and the vomit as to which would hit first. I have to say they hit the floor and the back of the wall at about the same time as I missed the commode on both counts.
When I stumbled my way back out, Lowell was in my bedroom sitting at my fold-up desk. He said something, which I didn’t catch because the room was spinning like an out of control drone. I flopped down on the bed, fell back, and whirled off into blackness.
And then I was waking up. Light streamed in through the tiny curtainless back window, and a little imp with a big hammer was inside my head in the process of demolishing my brain.
I rolled from the bed. I was in my underwear and I wondered when I’d taken off my shoes and gotten undressed but my head wasn’t allowing me to remember much, so I stumbled into the bathroom. Immediately, the odors of piss and puke whacked me in the nose. My stomach protested and I tasted bile but I managed to keep it down. I vaguely recalled having made the mess. I used the toilet and dragged myself back out where I spotted a small white bottle sitting on my desk. A note accompanied it: “Take a couple of these. It’s something for your head and stomach. Come down when you feel better.”
It floated into my rum-fried brain that I hadn’t been the one to undress myself, that it was Lowell who removed my shoes and clothing. I sloshed water into the chipped mug sitting on the side of the small sink in the corner of the front room – the space I called my kitchen – and downed three of the pills, then I slumped down in one of the two chairs at the tiny table near the sink. I stared at the wall for a while, until the ache in my head and the nausea in my belly began to ease up then I got the bucket I kept under the sink, and went to clean the bathroom.