Afterland (2 page)

I light the candelabra that illuminates my room, sit down on the bed, and pull a paintbrush out of the pillow. During the day, I brood. But now it is dark, and the darkness covers any feelings in its cloak. It is time to paint something. Something more promising. Like today’s sunset. In several minutes it transformed the sky from a bleak gray to a spectacular explosion of colors. If only humans could undo what we had done as easily.

I uncap the orange paint and paint the sky. The multi-dimensional nuances of yellow and red follow next. Then the purple clouds. I have always been a slow painter, and my strokes are long and deliberate. The water I use has long ago turned brown. How strange is it that no matter how bright, beautiful, and unique the colors are, if they are brought together, they will eventually turn into the same unrelenting brown?

I paint the ocean next, reflective of the sky, but still dark blue at the edges. Of course, the sun deserves a place in this painting. And so do the bioluminescent salmon. I paint them in, too.

One painting takes me several hours. Several hours pardon from the harshness of the present. The alcoholics have their beer. I have my colors.

              I know that I’ll practically forget the sunset soon, and all that will be left will be a memory of a memory, no matter how much I don’t want to forget. There are simply too many occasions that need to be remembered, too many memories to be stored, too many things that I need to hold on to before I lose myself in the cascade of a life I never intended to live, and one sunset will soon fade into the background. But I don’t want to forget. So I put my memories to paper. Someday, my paper memories will be all that’s left of me. So I choose carefully what I leave behind. It doesn’t scare me anymore that someday my face will be forgotten, my name no longer relevant, my story never told. As long as somebody will someday look at my painting and think,
The sunset was beautiful that day, and this girl had something to live for then
, I will be satisfied. In this broken world, living a broken life as if it has a meaning is the hardest thing a person can do, so if I can trick the people of the future into thinking that my life was more than just a succession of days, just miniscule numbers on a celestial clock, than the meaningless numbers will string into a handprint on the face of time.

              I look out of the window. One undeniable benefit of the Tragedy are the stars. I don’t remember them much pre-Blast, both because I was only four and because light pollution and smog cancelled them out. Since all the big cities and major factories were destroyed after the Tragedy, the sky gradually regained its past spectacular self. I look outside the window now. It really is breathtaking. Stars cover the entire sky, and I can actually see the milky way. Some people say that all stars are white, but that’s not true. Every star shines with its own color. People also say that white is a mixture of all colors, but I think only angels can stir the rainbow and end up with white clouds. The rest of us end up disappointed and with brown.

              I’ve never mastered the art of drawing starlight. It has a certain magical ambience that’s very hard to portray with paint alone. But it can’t hurt to try. I paint the sky blue, almost black. I take a small brush and paint the milky way in small white dots, adding accents of color later. It doesn’t shine like the sky. I can’t figure out what it’s missing. For more hours, I work, escaping into a magical world beyond our planet, our galaxy, our universe. For those hours of the night, I look at the sky and see it spread out at my fingertips. Right then, I can touch it and hold it, and that’s the most beautiful aspect of art: making the unreachable reachable.

              In the time I was painting, the sky has rotated. Judging by the positions of the stars, it is around one past midnight. I am tired. I should fall asleep.

But I don’t.

I watch the wax stream down the candles, accumulating in small drops at the bottom. My eyes beg to close, but I deny them their request. I’m not sure exactly why I don’t allow myself sleep, but some part of me whispers that it is wrong to sleep in this situation. And besides, nowadays, I feel like I live for the hours when I become too tired to care anymore, too drunk on the night, and too hopeful that it will be different someday, and I can’t be sad at that moment. For those rare moments, I evade into a night half-life that shields me from the day half-life that is much more painful to live.

There’s something wrong with it, of course, that I deny my body’s most basic need to prove to myself that I can. There’s something wrong with the fact that the need to prove to myself that I can survive is stronger than the need to actually do so. Besides, I haven’t been able to sleep properly since the Tragedy. I keep hearing the blast, seeing the flashes… I wake up many times a night to find my hands over my head, protecting myself from the ash that that clogged my lungs thirteen years ago. So I resist the temptation to sleep for as long as I can; I don’t want to relive it again. But eventually, sleep takes me.

I dream of the Tragedy.

The first sign was the earthquake. It was the only quake I had ever experienced and I was sure that it was the apocalypse. I wasn’t exactly wrong. I remember hiding in the bathtub with my parents, too afraid to even cry, keeping my eyes shut, praying that it wasn’t the end. I remember feeling the ground collapsing below my feet as we listened to the sound of the dishes my father left unwashed in the sink shattering and felt the raw power of the waves beating against our walls. The quake continued for what seemed like an eternity. When it was over, I still didn’t open my eyes. At some point, one of my parents turned on the news. The connection was failing, but I could hear a frightened voice announcing “
Evacuate… Eruption… Danger… Immediately…”
Then the power went down.

After that, we were running. All I took was the little stuffed bunny that I had already been holding. My mother held me in her arms, whispering comforting words I didn’t understand as we ran out. Our house was by the bank of the river and the waves had flooded our lawn in water. My parents footsteps squished in the mud and sent up little splashes of water.

All of our neighbors were running out of their houses as well. Suddenly, one of them pointed to the sky and shouted “Look!”

As everyone reacted, the sound of an entire neighborhood gasping in shock filled the air. An enormous cloud of ash was rising, spreading in our direction, and blocking out the entire horizon. It was so vast and expanding so quickly, it took only several minutes for the sun to dim. It was then that we understood for the first time exactly what scale of disaster we were dealing with.

The sheer enormity of the thing kept everyone riveted in place for a moment. At this point, I couldn’t hold the tears back any longer and they began to flow freely, accompanied by the terrified sound of my gasps. My mother recovered quickly and pressed me to her chest so that I wouldn’t see the chaos. I listened to the frightened beating of her heart and felt the salt of my tears in my mouth.

Everybody in our neighborhood had a motorboat at the time. It was clear that we wouldn’t be able to escape by car since the roads were collapsing, so we took our chances with the river. We begin to run towards the boat. We’ll survive if we only make it...But the air is so thick and the ground so fluid...

In the dream, we never make it to the boat. The mud of the yard begins to swallow us. The ash piles up faster than we can escape it. I can barely breathe. I can’t see. I can’t feel my parents. They’ve probably already been absorbed into the ground. And now, the mud and ash almost swallow me…

I wake up shuddering and covered in a cold sweat. My hands are over my head and my mouth opened in a scream that never came out.  Every day I sink deeper and deeper. Someday, I know I won’t wake up before it consumes us. I can’t stop my shaking. I know that it is only a dream. But it feels so real. I hoped that I would eventually learn to be aware in my dreams and that somehow, that it would make it better. But that didn’t happen. For the entirety of the dream, the Eruption is reality again. And the fear is real. The fear is realer than anything else.

In actuality, it was different. We did make it to the boat. My mother and I got below deck. All I remember after that was not knowing which way was up and hearing my mother whispering more words. We rode away for hours. When we finally got up on deck, the scene outside was devastating: everything was covered in a thick layer of ash. The sun was blocked out. The highway nearby was at a standstill; what looked like a mountain of cars had collided at an intersection. A corpse floated by. I pressed my face into my mother’s leg as she surveyed the carnage around us. I didn’t want to believe, couldn’t believe that this, whatever it was, had happened, that my world has been reduced to an ashen wasteland, that this could spell the end for me.

Later, it was found out that some extremely rich and powerful organization had managed to drop a nuclear bomb on every super-volcano on Earth and forced the eruption of most of them. They also hired planes to spread metallic dust throughout the atmosphere. All of it was radioactive. It was all so cold, so calculated, so powerful. I can’t imagine ever having that much control.

For many months, even breathing was dangerous. We weren’t prepared for the toxic air. And we weren’t prepared for the cold.

We didn’t think that all the ash and dust could out many of the sun’s rays, ending Summer. We didn’t realize that the agriculture worldwide would be devastated. We watched helplessly as economies collapsed worldwide and metropolises around the world lay in ruins. We did nothing except run as millions were left homeless. Even after thirteen years, the Earth hasn’t shown signs of getting better.

They called it a volcanic winter.

But it wasn’t.

It was a human winter. And we simply weren’t prepared for that kind of power.

I wrap my blankets tighter around myself and shiver. Most of the year is unpleasant. Winter is brutal. Merciless. A quarter of Hopetown’s population is wiped out. Every Spring, I wonder how the human race hasn’t gone extinct. After the roads are plowed enough for a sled to get through, short straws are drawn for who from the snow cleaning crew will take all the dead bodies out. They don’t even bury them properly, just throw them into a large ditch in the woods. Hundreds of lives are just thrown away. I hate it. I’ve seen the sled ride through Centre Street and I still can’t comprehend how much is lost every winter. I dread the day the sled rides through Hopetown. Even more, I dread the day I’ll be the one riding it.

The first snow used to be a beautiful experience, that much I remember from before the Eruption. My mother called the snowflakes dancing fairies and we would watch together as the entire neighborhood transformed into a snowy dreamland.

The snow that falls now isn’t a dance of fairies. It is a march of executioners. The first snow is the unspoken question that everybody is afraid to ask: who’s next? I hate living like that - in a state of constant uncertainty. I don’t want to go to bed each night not knowing for sure that I’ll wake up in the morning. It fills me with a subconscious fear that invades every other part of my being. How can anybody live like that?

A long time ago, someone said,
Live every day as if it was your last
. He meant to live each day to the fullest, but when each day could actually be your last… The only way you live is in fear. I want to live each day to the fullest, I really do. I want each day of my life to have a meaning. But in this bleak hellhole of a town, which is just a tiny corner in a bleak hellhole of a world, living life to the fullest is pretending that you’re not here.

The worst thing about the Tragedy, I think, is that to this day, nobody knows exactly why it happened. We need an explanation, a justification, rather, for all the futures that were obliterated in the Blast.

But we still know nothing.

Even the group that did it has remained nameless. It was beyond the power scale of any known terrorist group, but many people theorize that it was an unknown group of terrorists that lay low and formed under the nose of international governments, waiting for the right moment to devastate the world.

That isn’t the only version, of course. The identity of the Blasters is speculated constantly. Some say it was a government experiment gone wrong. Some say it was a government experiment gone right. Some blame foreign governments. Every possible group on the planet has been stuck with the blame, but since any research organization that could have told us for sure got wiped out, there remains no definitive answer. Each year the trail gets colder, and we’ll probably never know.

But I want to know. Knowing whose name to curse would take the blame off of me, somehow, for not doing anything to change it. I know I’m not doing anything because I
can’t
, but still: is there
really
nothing I can do? It is my life after all, isn’t it? Still my decision what to do with it.

Isn’t it?

Perhaps not. We live under a set of rules, both natural and imposed, that make it impossible for us to leave and difficult to change. I used to spit at the door of the Hopetown senate every time I passed it, but I soon realized that it did nothing for me and only amused the senators. Besides, the fools sitting inside the white walls of the senate were just taking orders from the Continental Governing Body, the tyrannical group of warlords who took over after the old government collapsed. Many have blamed them for the Eruption. Very few have been able to stand up to them, as all uprising that was found was crushed. And besides, nobody really wanted to rebel after the executions. I shiver at the thought.