Remember the exact moment you realized it was an apocalypse? I don’t, because not that much had changed for me.
Usually, for those epic, history-altering events in life, people can tell you exactly what they were doing when they noticed. They tell you what made that moment different, how it stood apart, how it seared into their memory. I wish I could pinpoint the exact day I realized the world ended, that my cell would not be opened, that my next meal would never be delivered.
It took me the better part of a week before I realized the outside world had ripped itself apart and died.
***
Time stretches and compresses in odd ways in solitary confinement. Without the sunrise or night for clues your body’s internal rhythm fractures.
In 1961 Stefania Follini volunteered to climb down into a cavern and live in the dark. Voluntary solitary confinement. She fell into a twenty-eight day rhythm of sleeping, and then that slipped into a forty-eight hour rhythm by the end of the 130 day experiment.
At the end of the experiment she had lost seventeen pounds, was pale as hell, and she guessed that she’d only spent two months.
No surprise then, that I realized the end of the world had come because only because I hadn’t eaten in what felt like days.
But maybe it was a week.
Either way, I couldn’t tell you when the world ended.
***
_Two strides wide. Four deep. Four down the middle, stop, turn, four back down to the door._
The sweat-stained mattress pad smelled of ash and ass when I first arrived, now it’s mellowed out to match me. I know every dimple and tear on it and the scratchy sheet over it. I’m careful to flip it over every other day so it can wear evenly.
It’s the small rituals that stop you from losing control.
***
My grandmother took fifteen days to die. They’d promised us that it would be quick once they’d pulled the feeding tube. No food, no water, her body riddled with cancer and on enough pain meds to take down a water buffalo to ease her way.
Usually a few days without water gets you. But the human body has enough fat and muscle for your energy system to break it down for energy. That’s *why* we get fat, isn’t it? Humans ate whatever they could in the good times so that they could starve and lose it in the hard times.
I’m suddenly glad I didn’t lean out in the exercise yard, but spent my time reading or watching TV in the commons.
Never thought I’d miss the press of bodies, angry shouts, nervous laughter, shitty food…
I had a wet dream about the boiled green beans last night. Watery and limp. But right now, I’d weep for a single green bean.
I haven’t eaten in what feels like a week. But maybe it’s two.
Maybe I’m on day fourteen.
Right grandma, you stubborn bitch?
***
If I hadn’t beat the shit out of Tony for taking a pudding cup off my tray I wouldn’t be in here. That one small decision took away my sunlight, my yard, my books, the TV, the good food, conversation, friendships and more.
But as I kick the concrete that looms around me, presses in, stares at me with judgmental disapproval, I realize that I’m wrong to hate myself for my choices. It’s the end of the fucking world. No one has come for me. And that means everyone is dead.
Everyone is dead.
***
I think a lot about apocalypses that aren’t.
It can’t be zombies, I haven’t heard any screams.
It’s not a nuclear scenario, or I would have heard the bombs, been irradiated, coughing blood by now.
Plague? Maybe, but wouldn’t someone, even as they were dying, thought, “fuck it, let’s release these poor fuckers, and hit the big red button to open all the doors?”
Super plague. Super fast.
I never heard anyone coughing, or any news about anything.
Sometimes I think the rapture came for everyone but me, but I know far, far worse sinners than me are out there, outside the jail. Wouldn’t they have come by now?
Maybe they don’t give a shit.
Has a death sentence been given to me that I didn’t hear about and I’m just left alone to starve?
No. Clearly I’m the last one around. Maybe even the last person alive, ever.
That should panic me, freak me out, do something. At first, I had a panic attack in the dark of the cell. I realized I would slowly waste away in here. It was my tomb, and in the end, if some strange alien species came, they would just find my fingernail scratches in the concrete from where I tried to claw my way out.
Futile. All that does is leave broken fingernails and blood smeared on the concrete.
***
It does not matter how it ended. I have no control over it. No control over even finding out what happened.
I am here to make peace with my own death, as I am the last person alive. So how will the last person alive die?
Will I rail against the dying of the light? Rage futile against the deaf concrete walls?
There is no history that will remember my graceful death, I have only myself as an audience.
Three strips of the sheet, ripped apart and tied off against the bars, and I could choke myself to death.
It would take a lot of willpower.
***
There are these monks in Japan that drink things to preserve their body, and then starve themselves to become mummies. In control of their death just as their life.
I made a decision that for myself, I will create a graceful end to the human species. Because that is all I can control, all that there is left to do in the dark. I will sit on the bed and meditate, I will die with that same cryptic blankness on my face that grandma had.
But it isn’t easy. I understand how Gollum went mad in Lord of the Rings. It’s only been weeks, not years, and I have no ring to keep me company.
Even an evil ring of power would be a good friend right now.
If it’s hard to live with yourself, it’s ten times as hard to die with yourself.
***
The small door on the bottom of the door creaks open, and a ghostly hand pushes a metal tray across the concrete floor.
Green beans. Rolls. Potatoes. Gray meat.
“What’s happening outside?” I scream at the bottom of the door. “Tell me what happened?”
Am I going mad?
I’m crying so hard snot drips down my stiff shirt.
“Zombies,” the voice on the other side of the door says after a minor eternity.
Damn it. I’d ruled them out.
***
“I can’t let you go,” the voice says.
I have begged. I have pleaded. With every meal that comes I try to reason. But they are unmoved.
“We are trying to rebuild civilization,” it says. They cleared the commons, they cleared the cells.
“I can help you do that!” I call out. I would do anything, honestly anything, to help them.
“First you have to do your time and pay your debt.”
“That makes no sense. The world that judged me doesn’t even exist.” Though the thought of that asshole, Judge Emery, walking around as a zombie, that is a nice image.
I bang my head against the door.
“A social contract is a contract,” the voice says. “You can help us when you get out.”
I guess I should be grateful I’m being fed. Every day this person says they have to carefully cross a street teeming with zombies to bring me food.
Gratefulness is a virtue to be cultivated and fed, or it starves and withers away, and one day you find yourself looking at a new BMW i3 and thinking “I’ve worked hard, never gotten ahead, that *should* be mine.”
***
When my time is ends, it’s a fourteen year old kid with a shotgun that leads me away from my cell and out into the light.
So that’s where I was when the world ended.
Where were you?