The World as We Know It (11 page)

I took some time to gather myself together before reluctantly and carefully limping back through the fence for my clothes and the soap I had thrown. That time, the gun came with me. Prying the pellets out of my leg with the Ka-Bar was excruciating. I cleaned the wound and tore a section from my shirt to tie around my leg and stop the bleeding.

I learned two things from that terrifying experience. One: don’t ever wander a hostile wilderness alone and unarmed. Two: alligator tastes like chicken, but kind of fishy. I smoked the meat before leaving that day, and there was more left than I could bring with me even after I’d had breakfast. It would keep me satisfied until I reached the Atlantic.

The Miami and Fort Lauderdale metropolitan area came into view immediately east of the Everglades, and I wasn’t about to cut through miles of swampland to avoid it, particularly then, with the knowledge of its natural dangers. The city, I hoped, would be safe enough to travel through so long as I didn’t linger and call attention. As time passed and I met new people, I was becoming less concerned about the prospect of a hostile human element. Certainly the rioting had died down.

I headed north along the western edge of the city outskirts. As expected, tenancy was scarce, except for a lonely few who were either too stubborn to leave or too terrified of what it would mean. I found a young child starving in the street and stopped to share my smoked alligator with her.

“Where have the people gone?” I asked her.

“No people around here,” she replied, ravaging the first bit of food she’d had in days.

“Why do you stay?”

“Nowhere else to go.”

“No family?”

“I had family.”

“Where are they?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come with me then. Maybe we can find them together.”

“I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” she said.

“Did your mom teach you that?”

“Yes. Mommy and Daddy.”

“Smart people. I can’t argue with them. You know, I don’t think there are bad people anymore, though.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“What happened to your leg?”

“I had a fight with an alligator,” I said.

“In alligator alley?”

“Is that what you call it?”

“Yeah. What’s your horsey’s name?”

“Nomad.”

“What kind of name is that?” she asked.

“He’s a drifter. A perpetual wanderer. Like me.”

“Can I pet him?”

“Of course you can.”

The little girl began to follow me, as did other lost souls we happened upon. Perhaps all they needed was a final sign of hope—a simple man on a horse emerging through the palms. I put the child up on Nomad’s back while I took to my feet. My companions and I traveled for a couple of days before we came across the new population center of southeast Florida, which spread, as I learned, throughout the vast farmland surrounding Lake Okeechobee and
stretched all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. It was centered on the lake for both its fresh water and fishing.

Even in the eastern parts that had once been saturated with development, it appeared that many of the existing structures had been demolished and the whole area—or at least the part that I saw—had been flattened to start over. It just made more sense than trying to build upon the mistakes of the past, I guess. The old methods had worked in the old world, perhaps, but they would only hinder the creation of a new civilization. If we’re going to rebuild, I thought, we might as well do it right from the ground up. It was beautifully executed. A great number of wells had already been completed, and significant progress had been made toward development of new housing stock.

From our perspective inland, most of the homes appeared to be constructed as domes built of earthbags, which are just what the name implies. Organic woven sacks are filled with soil or whatever ground material is available on site, and then stacked in a brick-like formation to create vertical or curving walls. There, the dome shape was preferred for its stability and simplicity. Once the walls were complete, they were coated inside and out with adobe. Some of the curved roofs flowed directly into small hills surrounding the homes, making them appear as if they had grown from the ground. Most consisted of a single room with a single arched doorway and perhaps a fireplace or a hole in the roof to draw smoke from a central fire pit.

Near the shore, construction was different. Rows of wooden homes were built on stilts to mitigate hurricane damage, and they had hip roofs to reduce drag in strong winds. Networks of trenches spread throughout to direct floodwaters away from neighborhoods. Solid, thoughtful construction is particularly important in geographic areas prone to regular bombardment from the environment. They had to be prepared for the coming hurricane season and many more that would follow annually like clockwork.

We passed through a number of farms, small and large, nestled within the community. An old woman named Esther operated one of them.

“What happened to your leg, boy?” was the first thing she said to me. Before I could answer, she was preparing stitching and insisting that I let her fix me up. She gave me a shirt of her husband’s to replace the shabby rag on my back. Then she went to work on my swollen arm, which was then clearly infected. She scrubbed vigorously with soap and a coarse sponge from the ocean, and I had to bite down on a stick to keep from breaking my teeth as I screamed through them. I took the sponge from her to work at it on my own, but the pain was no less agonizing.

“You’ll need antibiotics,” she said.

“You have any?” I asked, lying on the floor with my arm outstretched when I could no longer take the pain.

“Not here,” she replied, “but there is a place where you can get medicine.”

“Where?”

“It’s a clan that keeps it. I don’t want to send you there, but I don’t think you have a choice.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“They’re pirates,” she said.

“Pirates?”

“You’ve had a long trip. Rest here a few days. Then we’ll talk more.”

Esther took me in for the duration of my stay on the peninsula. The refugees who had come with me were all given room and board at neighboring residences, but the child didn’t want to leave my side. She had to stay with Esther and me. She needed someone to look up to until her parents could be found and, for whatever reason, liked me for the job. Esther reminded me of my grandmother. She was generous and friendly to me and to the child, but outside our company, she was quiet and seldom smiled. When the collapse began, her husband had been on a trip to Asia somewhere, though I was never clear on exactly where or why. He was one of those unfortunate souls who had not managed to make it home in time. So Esther was just waiting. She spoke little of him. I figured his absence caused her deep pain, so I didn’t ask for any more information than she volunteered. I empathized with her. Her heartache was something I felt more deeply than most.

Esther got up at an ungodly hour every morning, earlier even than the predawn hour at which I had become accustomed to rising. I couldn’t feel right about sleeping in while the old woman worked, so naturally, my own
schedule had to suffer. She said the animals needed her, but I think she just couldn’t sleep. She would make breakfast, and the three of us would eat together by candlelight. I would help her on the farm for a few hours each day until the rest of civilization began its morning. The child stayed with us always, feeding the goats or chasing the chickens in the field.

Then I was off, meeting the citizens of the place and teaching as much as learning. I helped to build homes for the people in the community, filling earthbags, stacking them, mixing adobe from sand, clay, straw, and water, and coating the earthbag walls with adobe. I understood how so much progress had already been made. Their construction was quick, simple, and beautiful. Surely demolition of the old structures had been the hard part. Rebuilding came naturally.

Several postal centers had already been erected across the expansive commune, from which one was selected to serve as the primary stop for long-range mail and the couriers who were sure to follow me. A more complex communication system was already taking shape. Large provincial centers would be spread hundreds of miles apart, where mail would be received by and dispersed to less widespread regional centers. Daily transfers would be made between the regional centers and the local ones within their districts, which would serve as the drop-off and pickup points for individuals within a particular radius. I figured the burgeoning population of mail centers would simply adopt those
roles as new civilizations grew. A piece of mail would be addressed this way:

Provincial Center Designation
Regional Center Designation
Local Center Designation
Name of Recipient

The new provincial center there was where I posted and dispatched notice about the child in search of her parents. I was always thinking of her, which helped to take my mind off Maria. I couldn’t imagine an innocent child surviving so long alone without food or access to clean water. What had happened to her parents? Were they alive? Could they have left town and abandoned her? And if they had, did they even deserve her? In a city that massive, the best hope for finding them and answers to those questions would be to spread the word via post. Surely someone there missed the child.

I met many new friends with whom I shared recipes for both food and hygienic products. Flora was far different there than back home. The flavor of toothpaste and the aroma of soap changed. Residents cleaned their hair with a blend of cucumber and lemon; the lemon cleansed, and the cucumber conditioned. They used coconut oil for lotion and in soap as well as cooking. Toothpaste was made from dried bay leaves and citrus peels. I was running low on hygienic products, and I had to make more as I traveled. We ate oranges, grapefruits, and bananas among
other produce that could not easily be grown outdoors in the Midwest.

I could also add salt to my meals, a treat that I suddenly realized how much I had missed since we had moved to the farm. They say salt doesn’t actually have a flavor of its own; rather, it simply enhances the flavor of whatever is seasoned with it. Even more importantly, it was used to cure meat stores. Salt was something we had taken for granted before, and I understood why it had served as currency for hundreds of years in many places across the earth. Unless you lived near the sea or a salt lake, it was not easy to come by. Even extracting from a salt mine was difficult and dangerous without industrial equipment, which, of course, we no longer had use of. Thanks in part to my sacrifice, I thought, the day would soon come when we could ship such commodities around the continent.

I mentioned that in conversation with some of my new friends while peeling a fresh grapefruit at lunchtime; only I used the word “country.”

“The lines separating this country from the next don’t exist anymore,” suggested Andrés, one of those who had joined me as I had passed through what had once been Miami.

“Well, I guess you’re right about that,” I replied.

“Geographically, ‘continent’ has always meant far more anyway, and not just in terms of size,” he said in his thin Latin accent. “Nature never recognized the invisible lines that humans drew between states and nations among the same land. I forget them too, now that even my own
native country has grown as foreign to me as this one. Really, what is the difference between you and me and the Canadian down the road? For that matter, between me and a Peruvian or a Nigerian or a Pakistani or a Korean? If every person on the planet chose a husband or wife from another country and made children, within a few generations, there would be no distinguishing between cultures based on appearance.

“‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’ Those words are from a plaque at the Statue of Liberty. It’s a sonnet written by Emma Lazarus. Do you know it?”

“I’ve seen it in pictures,” I replied.

“That sonnet is why I came over here,” Andrés continued. “It filled me with hope. It was a statement that Americans could proudly adopt and stand behind in recognition that this truly was a nation of immigrants, as we always heard the politicians say. But instead, we were referred to as ‘illegal aliens,’ as if our search for a better life was in some way criminal. What were we supposed to do? It seemed like everywhere we looked, the cartels were killing people, leaving body parts in the streets. We didn’t have the time or money to do things the way the government wanted us to—the legal way. We just had to get out. The value of a person shouldn’t be determined by the location of his or her birthplace in relation to some imaginary line. None of us makes that decision.”

What Andrés said made me wonder how Esther’s husband was faring in Asia, and I imagine the same thought
had been troubling her all the time he had been gone. In many parts of the world, white Americans were not always welcomed with open arms. Perhaps wherever he was, the transition had passed more smoothly.

Although scrubbing my arm regularly seemed to slow the infection, after a few days I knew it would not be healed unless I had the antibiotics to treat it. If it got much worse, I might lose my arm. I would have to go see the nefarious pirates. Their stores were kept on a boat at anchor in the Atlantic, where approaching customers or adversaries were visible a long way off. Their position ensured they always had the upper hand, and only desperate souls with no other choice dared to meet them in their waters. Even fishermen avoided the area for fear of a confrontation. The clan had pillaged all remaining medicine from the coastal hospitals shortly after the collapse and kept it all under close guard ever since.

I was told not to bring anything of value that I didn’t intend to trade for medication. The pirates were likely to take everything I had. Bringing a weapon would almost certainly get me killed. I hadn’t taken anything with me on the journey that I didn’t need for my own survival, but Esther was endlessly generous. She gave me a hen and a rooster to barter with.

It was about a six-hour walk to the coast, where I borrowed a rowboat from a local resident. He was reluctant to loan it at first, but when he saw my arm and heard where I was headed, he took pity on me.