She gazes at me steadily with intent licking her lips as he closes her eyes.
“Why are those two kids with you?” Her head signals towards them.
“You’d call it serendipity I think,” I say honestly.
She sits there just smoking, I shift in my seat looking around and the two tour guides just stand there.
“Why don’t they talk?” I ask.
“Shut the fuck up!” she stands slamming her arms on the desk. “I told you, no questions, is that so fucking hard to remember?”
I apologize ready to fight, adrenaline pumping as a dead weight drops in my chest.
“Ok, forget it, I need you to go in that room and talk to the man inside it. For one hour then you can stay here.” She points to a door in the next chamber.
“Ok, like I said before the kids come with me.” They don’t deny the request and we walk to the door.
I look back at the woman and she says to knock, I knock, and the door slowly opens. I immediately notice an exquisite chandelier hanging among general disrepair. A man walks back to his seat and we walk in cautiously. A television is mounted above his head, it’s playing a video of what looks like a Youtube channel-someone’s vlog about eating food. I stand there taking it in; he’s eating something and talking about its taste, the camera zooms in multiple times on the food and another video starts again about foodies and food culture. I look at the man, sun-tanned with a salt and pepper beard, grey-blue eyes set back in a European skull. I look around—on his desk are a few books: One-Dimensional Man, Sane Society, Existential Psychotherapy and Everyone Poops. In the corner stands a women dressed in steam-punk attire, she has a nose ring that extends to her ear, I have a slight inclination to yank it out—she’s also sporting a wicked green waster cut. I look down and Jesse and Mary are sitting cross-legged on the ground as if ready to take in some dropped knowledge. I look back and the man is sitting there calmly as tears stream down his wrinkly face.
“You must have come far to get here stranger.”
“Sort of, far physically but in other ways too,” I respond in what I think is nonchalance. “What’s with the commercials and the books and the weird chick?”
“Why not? The books help me make sense of what happened, the commercials remind me of the past sub-conscious desires, and the chick is just weird man,” he says with a smile.
“So I’m just supposed to stand here and talk to you for an hour?”
“That’s the deal kid.”
“Well what do you want to know?”
“A better question is, what’s the point?”
“The point of what?” I ask as my eyes squint in minor confusion.
The steam-punk weirdo comes over and sits with Mary and Jesse. A commercial for Arby’s sandwiches comes on followed by some kind of clothing company that ships clothes to yuppies in cities they are about to visit.
“The point of anything anymore? Everything’s gone, everyone’s gone mad, and nothing really matters anymore,” he says but without indicating any emotional connection to the words.
“Did it matter before though? I mean, people are still people, we just happen to live in a new era, a crazier era but here we are,” I haven’t exactly given it much thought, I just like not answering emails and paying taxes really.
“It mattered before because we had a system of justice and humanity. We also had a vision to create a better world, and yet here we are. A people succumbed to their own sickness.”
“Sickness, like the plague or disease you mean?”
“No, I mean like consumerism, mindless people working 40 hours a week, driving to a place they hate, to do things they don’t want to do, to buy shit they don’t want, made by poor exploited people, burning fossil fuels to bring it to us, while the whole damn world burned. The disease was just one symptom that got out of control. If not the virus it would have been something else. It was a sick world, we were, are, all sick. So maybe you’re right, maybe there never was a purpose. So why go on at all?”
“Why not?” at which point shouts are heard outside, expletives and gun-fire too.
Once all hell had broken loose in the world the usual cults sprang up preaching salvation in a damned world. Others rose up to monetize or at least profit, on humanity’s renewed sense of faith and community. And of course another clever group intent on self-preservation would attach themselves to the savvy profiteers, too smart to join up with whack-jobs while hating humanity too much to lead them. Not all cults were made equal however and some were way cooler than others. Our story with Beeblebrox, Mary, and Jesse happened to veer into just such a wonderfully interesting group of post-apocalyptic humans.
The People in Black had given up health and happiness, speaking even in favor of cigarettes, community, and suffering. They felt—not without reason—that all that happened was just desserts for humanity’s misdeeds, the reckoning we all deserved. They viewed themselves as truly unworthy of continued breath, so they diligently but slowly snuffed it out with chain smoking. Those who had risen in rank would eventually work their way up to other drugs. Their spiritual pursuit eventually ending in desiccation and death.
The People in Black had formed their group, cult, within the city limits of Denver. Those souls who somehow managed to stay alive after the initial collapse formed small bands which coalesced around the European Skulled-Man. He was tall, with cheek-bones that seemed to give rise to his crystal blue eyes. A man with a keen eye for profit and a .357 Magnum finds himself with the bona-fide job characteristics to meet the requirements of post-apocalyptic cult leader. To his surprise, instead of demapping everyone he met, his face seemed to inspire faith in others. But whence cometh his loyal followers you may wonder? Who would devote themselves to a cause and why?
Before we get to that it’s important to first note Logan’s (European Skulled-Man) brief tango with suicidal ideation. He had taken shelter in an abandoned apartment complex in Five Points, it was there that the ex-banker was forced to finally consider what the point of his life was. 9-5 was gone, status disappeared, Huggies butt wipes extinct, easy sex access via Tinder evaporated, parents dead, friends unknown, and most importantly he didn’t know what the fuck to do. Before he was inside of a groove, rolling forward with the constant feedback of his bank account, promotions, and the attention of attractive women. Now he was surrounded by chaos; finally in these moments of existential ennui, he was confronted whole-heartedly by that which he had spent a lifetime avoiding. The bulwark of fear, once it plows into your soul doesn’t simply walk away. He cried long and hard and he knew not why or for whom—maybe for the world, maybe for his fear, but ultimately he went and decided that he would kill himself. In his newfound mental prison amidst limitless freedom, he couldn’t understand who he was anymore. Without external monitors of his progress, virtue, and purpose he himself was unmoored. He put the gun inside his mouth, his European-Skull was about to be eviscerated and in the moment of truth he heard a commotion outside.
“Fuck you, you mother cunt!” shouted a tall dark-skinned, Mo-hawked woman as he was stepping on a raider’s groin, pointing a katana at his face. She was surrounded by four others pointing rifles, nail-bats, and chains at her. He squirmed and shouted, “Kill the bitch!”
The other raiders—in their rags, old-sports equipment, and missing teeth started to move in. Logan liked her chutzpah, and wondered what to do. Moments from his own demapping he thought, well if I’m gonna die I may as well go out in style. In this flicker of meaning something new ignited, a sense of purpose not externally granted but pushing him on from within.