The World as We Know It Read online

  I was there to ruin that serene masterpiece. I might as well have been tearing up the canvas. Although I tried, I could not feel any other way about it. I had never killed before, and though I knew it was then my responsibility to provide for my family in the most primal of ways, I was still not at peace with the idea. Was the life of that doe less valuable than my own simply because she lacked the capacity for deeper reasoning? It would certainly have been improper to suggest the same of a human being who suffered the same deficiency, and I would have had no trouble naming more than a few of those. There was no time for justification. Though perhaps not at that very moment, there would come a time when such a decision would mean the difference between life and death, and at that time, my deeper reasoning would be meaningless to predator and prey alike. The conscience will only interfere when there is a choice.

  My stomach felt uneasy as I took up my bow and aimed the arrow just behind her shoulder. I had the perfect shot. She was completely vulnerable and unaware, but I didn’t release right away. I kept on watching her, the bone tip of my arrow never leaving the invisible line that would take her life, her fate resting on no more than three of my fingertips. In my mind, I couldn’t help but personify her. I thought of the old cartoon, Bambi, and how tragic it had seemed to me as a child. I had become the hunter. I was the villain.

  My hesitation cost me the shot. I felt a bead of sweat drip down my face, and as soon as I realized that I was perspiring, she smelled the stink of my humanity. Her head jerked sharply, and just as I released the arrow, she bounded off, leaving it stuck in the ground having not even grazed her. I called the day then and headed back home, where I was welcomed by Maria’s beautiful and ever-forgiving smile when I came in the doorway.

  “Get anything?”

  “No.”

  “Hm,” she replied softly. I sensed a tone of relief.

  The other four arrived after dark, and a bunch of us already had a fire going outside while we waited for them. Paul, Mike, Gabe, and Abraham each dragged a deer behind them, already field dressed and ready to be skinned and hung.

  “Already back, Joe?” Gabe asked. “You must have had better luck than we did. Didn’t see a thing all day, but a whole group came through just a little while ago.”

  “I didn’t get anything,” I said, looking away, more ashamed then of my tarnished masculinity.

  “Well, don’t worry about that,” he replied. “I didn’t kill anything my first time out either.”

  Abraham laughed and said, “Yep, sometime the deer git away. Sometime he win, an’ sometime you lose. Ya hafta lose sometime. People always win git cocky, an’ that’n a worse loss than a deer, but they too cocky to know it.” Then he gently laid out the eight-point buck he had brought back, knelt over the carcass, and bowed his head for a moment.

  There was a time when I had always won. I didn’t explain why I had come back empty-handed.

  It was weeks later when I shot my first deer, and that was a bittersweet moment. It was my hardest kill, both physically and sentimentally. Between Abraham’s farm, the woods, and the stream, hunger was seldom a problem, which was more than I could say for anyone who was still in the city. We used Abraham’s plow and Clydesdales to cultivate more land for crops, and he generously provided all the necessary seed as promised.

  We rose early every morning to our respective trades. I had not adopted one in particular yet, so I was sort of learning them all until I found one that fit. I wasn’t much good at anything. Every occupation, though, gave us time for thought, whether we were hunters, fishermen, farmers, or craftsmen.

  There was a lot of contemplation happening on the farm—more than there ever had been during our former jobs. Not that we didn’t think before, but it was about different things. I used to think about market capitalization, price/earnings ratios, derivatives, dividends, and interest rates. After the collapse, I thought mostly about the consequences of failing to provide for the one person who depended on me and how to ensure that those consequences were never realized. That used to be accomplished with a steady paycheck. Some things had become simpler, and some things were more complex.

  I thought a lot about the rest of the world. I wondered how people in other cultures were adapting to the new condition. Many were certainly better equipped to adapt than we were, which was a strange thought. We had considered ourselves so advanced. The terms “first world” and “third world” no longer had any meaning, and the places that had once been so labeled were no longer separated by invisible lines.

  I also thought about war. Most modern wars were rooted in differences that seemed more and more inconsequential. Anyone who still had the time to look for someone to blame for their problems had fewer of them than the rest of us. There wasn’t much point in placing blame, just like there wasn’t much point in attempting to recover the lifestyle we had left, even if that was sometimes all we wanted.

  The people of the new world did have one advantage, though. We had seen the way the world was before and everything that had been wrong with it. Most of our luxuries had been lost in the collapse, but with them had gone most of the corruption that we had all despised. Based on what we had heard from other refugees and seen with our own eyes, it was reasonable to assume that there was no more government and that there were no more corporations. Never before had we possessed the influence to fix such powerful entities. In the aftermath, we did. From experience, we knew what worked, and we knew what didn’t. It’s far more difficult to change a culture set in its ways than it is to create a new one. We no longer had ways to be set in. Our only way then was the way forward.

  4

  THE JOURNEY

  I immediately regretted volunteering for the journey. It had seemed sensible at first, as I had not yet found my niche on the farm, for me to be the one to leave it in order to find out what was happening outside of our community. I was not particularly good at anything useful. It was a glaring fact I had to face and the reason it was always I who volunteered for scavenging missions and searches for nearby settlements. We had found two other villages with which we shared food and supplies, and the barter system between us brought a literal meaning to the term “horse-trading.” I never knew where they were getting all of the livestock that we procured from them, but we were in no position to judge anyone for stealing. After all, they never stole from us. It seemed that the commodities we produced were too valuable to jeopardize the relationship.

  People there would ask me if I had heard anything of the outside world. My reply was always the same: “I know of you. How far outside is the outside world?” Among those of us who did leave the farm, we all agreed on one thing: it was quiet out there. Some of those who went back to the city in the later months didn’t want to talk about what they had seen, but I felt there was more happening than we knew.

  Over a year had passed since the Great Collapse, and the springtime sowing had begun again. The forest and fields were greening for the second time since we had moved to the farm, and still, I was a broken man without direction. Perhaps accepting a new and unclaimed responsibility was my way of compensating for my shortcomings, giving myself some degree of importance. Maria loved me no matter what, she said, but there was this primal need to prove my worth.

  “You’re so brave, honey,” she used to say patronizingly when I would kill a spider in the kitchen or toss a garter snake from the yard with a rake. Then she’d follow her words with a kiss on my cheek. Bravery had been defined differently then.

  Our curiosities had been discussed over campfires for a while. I wonder how my cousins in Colorado are holding up—yeah, I have friends in Florida. I hope they’re doing OK—this winter must have been rough on Chicago. I don’t remember whose idea it was originally, but eventually, it was suggested that we send someone to find out.

  “I’ll do it,” I said. It had been a particularly emasculating day of hunting, and I’d had a few drinks. Everyone just looked at me. I took another sip.

  “Joe, come o
n,” Maria stopped me.

  “What, no faith?”

  “Of course I have faith in you, but have you forgotten I’m your wife, Joe? You need to stay with me,” she mumbled. “You promised you’d never leave me again.”

  “Maria, sometimes a guy has to take responsibility.”

  “Fine, then I’m going with you.”

  “No way.” I laughed. “That’s too dangerous. We don’t have any idea what’s going on out there.”

  Everyone was quietly watching us.

  “Exactly,” Paul interjected, “you don’t know, Joe. It wouldn’t be a good idea to send one guy out alone.” He looked around at the group. “Anyone else willing? Daniel? John? Noah?” Nobody spoke up. “Gabe?”

  Silence.

  “Then I’ll go,” he said.

  “No way, Paul,” Sarah jumped in.

  “You’re way too important here,” Noah followed quickly. “Nobody knows this land like you do.”

  “You’ve got Abraham,” replied Paul.

  “We can’t just rely on him. He’s an old man, Paul. What if, God forbid, something happens to him while you’re away?”

  Paul smiled. “Somehow I don’t see that happening.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Sarah. “We need you.”

  “They’re right, Paul,” I slurred. “I, on the other hand, am expendable, and it’s about damn time I did something productive. What’s the problem? You’ll trust me with your IRA, but now that that’s all gone—”

  “Joe, relax, that’s not what I’m saying.”

  “Well, let me tell you something. All of you. I didn’t put us here, but I can put things back the way they were.”

  “Well, look at you, big man,” Mike laughed, pushing me over.

  “I’m not so sure everyone wants things back the way they were,” Gabe said, “but it would be nice not to feel so isolated. We’ve got to find out what’s happening out there.”

  “Let it go, Joe,” Maria whispered to me. “You and I can talk about this later.”

  I shut my mouth and took another drink, and the conversation awkwardly evolved to a lighter one.

  The next morning, I realized what I had done. I’m never drinking again, I thought, a sentiment I had awoken to so many mornings in college. After the previous night, the journey was on everybody’s mind, and I had committed myself. We all knew that we needed some connection to the outside world, and thanks to my big mouth, everyone was looking to me. Nobody talked about it, but I knew they were waiting for me to bring it up again—to reaffirm my commitment.

  My true emotions, those that I was always straining to disguise, had been publically exposed that night at the fire as I had wallowed in my own sense of failure and drank myself into buffoonery. I had been important in the world before the collapse. I had worn a suit to work. People used to come to me for advice on all sorts of things, not just on where to put their money. I had been a success, somebody that people looked up to. My marriage had been happy. My life had been good. As soon as the system came crashing down, nobody was interested in anything I had to say anymore. It was as if I couldn’t be trusted, but perhaps that feeling was simply my own conscience interpreting the guilt I felt over having been part of that system. I had enjoyed the rural lifestyle, but only as an occasional weekend escape from the fast-paced routine that we had fallen into. Although I may have dreamed of a simpler life, I had never actually planned to live that way. But I was completely immersed in it. I was angry, and though on a clear day, I knew that things could and should never go back to the way they were, I often wished that it were all just a dream I would wake up from.

  Under the stress of the last year, my marriage had been struggling. Maria and I had been fighting more than we ever had. Every little thing set me off. I didn’t hold her when she slept anymore. Given the current state of things, I didn’t understand why she had asked to come along. The more I thought about the journey, the more I realized that it was something I needed to do and that I couldn’t bring my wife with me, even if I wanted to. Based on what I had seen and heard, I suspected that there was no law anymore in our country or in any other. The only thing keeping a man honest was his own set of morals, and in the world we had known before, that simply hadn’t been enough for most. The human factor was just one of many dangers. The environment was another. If I were to embark on such a journey, it would be a slow one, and there would be no Hiltons along the way. My fear grew by the day, as did the knowledge that I would inevitably have to face the challenge for the sake of everyone there. James Neil Hollingworth, under the pseudonym Ambrose Redmoon, wrote that, “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than one’s fear.” That definition could not be more accurate.

  While working in the fields one day, I confronted Paul with my thoughts.

  “What do you think?” I asked him.

  “I think somebody’s got to do it. There are billions of people out there right now going through the same things were are. We can learn from them, and perhaps they can learn from us. We can’t stay isolated the way we have been.”

  “And I volunteered.”

  “And you volunteered.”

  “I was thinking. If I’m going out there, we could use a long-distance system of communication. I could help set it up.”

  “The Pony Express.” He laughed.

  “Well, yeah, something like that.”

  “Postmaster Joe. You’ll be like Kevin Costner in that movie.”

  “The Postman?”

  “Yeah, The Postman.”

  “I hope the world hasn’t come to that.”

  Then I took the conversation to Maria, which is probably where it should have started. I had grown less concerned with considering her in my decisions. She sat stroking the cat to calm her nerves, not speaking, just listening as I explained why I had resolved to leave. The job could only be entrusted to a person of great ambition and persistence and integrity, and I was the one person willing and able to take it on. I didn’t say it, but it gave me that sense of success and purpose that I’d had before the collapse.

  When I was finished speaking, I turned to leave, and that was when she stopped me to ask the question that I would find myself agonizing over for some time to come.

  “What happened to you, Joe? Where is the man I married?”

  “Right here, Maria!” I yelled at her. “Success or failure? Your choice.”

  “You never gave me a choice, and I think you and I have different ideas about what those things mean. Look, we’re OK here. God’s given us everything we need.”

  “Your superstitions are useless, Maria. Where was God when the market tanked and people lost their jobs and destroyed everything?”

  “He was right there. But they were looking the other way.”

  She began to cry.

  “Nonsense,” I said. “We lost everything. Don’t you understand that?”

  “We don’t need all that stuff, Joe.”

  “Oh, really? So all those hours I worked to give you everything you could ever want meant nothing to you?”

  “Of course they did,” she answered, “but you’re more important to me than any of that.”

  “So you’d rather I stay here in this aimless existence, living off of the generosity of successful people?”

  “You’re obsessed with success, Joe! Stop thinking that way. You have me here.”

  “Do I?”

  “Joe, what do you mean?”

  “I mean I don’t know what’s going to happen with us. I need a change.”

  “Joe, please don’t abandon me.”

  “It’s done, so deal with it.”

  She sat down on the bed, and I left her there alone in our cabin, still crying.

  We spoke less and less after that, and when we did, she couldn’t look at me. It was as if she were speaking to the floor. There was no backing out after that argument, and my resentment festered. It was easier not to ask myself why. Perha
ps it was that I envied her faith, or that she remained so content after losing all of the things that I had worked so hard to provide.

  I asked around, trying to recruit a companion with some kind of useful skill. I knew that Paul was too important to the livelihood of everyone at the farm. He knew the land better than anyone, and he had learned so much from Abraham through the years that our community would have been doomed without his expertise. All of our knowledge about how to survive, everything we manufactured, and everything we grew came from the two of them. I had no doubt that without them, most of us would have died long before, and the rest would still have been struggling to survive. Mike and Gabe were the best hunters behind Paul, and the growing population needed all three of them and many more to keep everyone fed. We had expanded to the size of a small village by then, and our population was well into the hundreds, much larger than when we had started with just Paul’s and Abraham’s farms. Daniel and John had the fields and livestock, and none of the newer arrivals possessed the same combination of physical endurance and farming knowledge that the two of them had gained from the old man. The number of their apprentices grew as our population did. Noah tended all of our horses, and he had become an invaluable groom and trainer to our growing herd of mustangs. Beyond them, I could think of no other person who wouldn’t be more of a burden than an asset. I would be traveling alone.

  Word of my impending journey began to spread throughout the community. Talking to Abraham, I started to realize just how trying that journey would be. We no longer had cars, so I would be traveling by horse, and I couldn’t expect to cover much more than thirty miles each day. The route we had planned, however, was close to nine thousand miles. Taking into account time spent at other settlements, assuming I could find them, it would be nearly a year before I would see home again. It was a shocking realization. A knot began to grow in my stomach.

  We drew the journey out on an old map that we had taken from one of the cars the year before, figuring that the major population centers of the past would be the best places to look for new settlements nearby.