Introduction
Been a bit tardy with this one! It’s long-ish, sorry. As winter drifts away, I sit looking out the window distracted. My backroom is very cold, and getting a little less colder each week. Spring is almost here. Can’t wait. I’m wishing for some change. Certainly the world needs it. And a little more hope these days, too. Admittedly, I’m not sure this continuing story is one of hope quite yet. Strangely, I wrote a lot of this before the present Ukrainian crisis, but I’m already seeing some parallels. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. So take a break if you need to. You’re free to read nothing or everything, but thank you either way for sticking on the journey with me. -L
The Timeline of Doug and Elaine
Part 6 of an ongoing series | Previous Parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Age 47 - 2032 - There’s a line around the corner of the Applebee’s. Former Applebee’s, though everyone still calls it that. The queue is wrapped in coats, scarves, hats, tattered and worn, re-stitched like their faces re-stitched over with a hundred wrinkles. Some kids bob and weave through the line, their parents unscolding and silent, given up. This is an event for some people, a family outing. So let the kids play, let there be laughter and energy, a bright pretending. The cold has set in early this year, will probably peter out by January. No one in line seems to care. They’re thinking about a meal. People look as tired now as they do on the hottest days, but at least they’re not fainting or burning. The hot days are worse. They glisten with sweat and their clothes are soaked through, a smell runs down the line because deodorant is in short supply. (Though at this point is there anyone who needs to impress? And everyone’s adjusted anyways.) On hell days, Elaine has to order the cooks to bring out the big white canopy because the sun has so sharpened in the last few years it stings the skin to be out more than a few minutes. No weather will do away with the line. Maybe an end to the war can. In the back of her mind, she remembers all the articles she read on the global warming crisis. It’s coming, always has. And it has its cold days as much as it hot ones. All of them exhausting. Before the globe hurtles into eternal flames, though, it’s got to have its cataclysms, a few spasms to cough up before it keels over.
Articles. Now that’s a word she hasn’t thought of in awhile. It’s not a word you hear casually anymore. Always used in the titles of promises and agreements made between factions. You might hear it as Articles of Truce or Articles of Independence by the NDA and NALA. But she hasn’t heard it as a passing phrase like one might hear in a cafe years ago. “Have you read that article about thirteen ways to blow dry your hair?” “That article on alt-right groups was interesting.” Cafes sound like a concept, even. They’re still around, but more like an odd luxury for those who live so far away from the front it’s said they wake up daily having to be reminded the war is happening. Around here, a little closer to the action, cafes have been turned into hospitals or supply stores and farmer's markets. They’re bustling but not with the banal chatter of friends getting together. Rather, with the screams of frontline wounded, with the hubbub of market bargaining.
Today’s special is chicken noodle soup. She helps make it now since one of the cooks had to go to the front. Some say he died. No one has contact with the front, no one knows where he is. Cooking isn’t all she does. Logistics, too. General management. She cuts the chicken and then goes outside and counts the people. Another two hours of being open before they shut down for the day. How many people will come through? It used to be hundreds, almost uncountable. With the war stretching on it’s become less. It’s because people are learning to make everything on their own. Every house in the area has a garden in a yard or on a flat row home roof. Chicken coops, even. Whole blocks share. Mrs. Leonard has the peppers. Jones has all the lettuce and kale you could ask for. Down the street, a family thought of buying a cow for milk. Bartering networks everywhere. Specializations have cropped up. A community of weavers, for instance, making baskets and storage supplies. Or, the tech geek community, who maintains a region-wide internet. They have a shop, restoring old computers and handing them out to whoever needs them. Cryptocurrencies are used where they can be, but even that is shaky because the wider internet has been unreliable. Some say a line was cut in the Atlantic. Others just think the enemy is jamming signals.
After counting the line, she’s back inside, making sure the steel pans are aligned on the table, government-issued sternos burning under each, keeping the mashed potatoes and green beans warm. She heads to the kitchen. Ensures the chefs have what they need. If any help is wanted, she’s the first to get on gloves and do whatever they need her to do. No one should have to stop what they’re doing to help someone else, if it can be done by her. For now, it’s a well-ordered line. Professional chefs and short-order cooks working together. Someone who flipped burgers at McDonald’s preps aluminum trays of salad next to the chef from the famous restaurant Dassin who’s stirring a pot and whistling to himself. It takes whoever is willing to make a good meal. And she believes in good tasty meals, even when everyone’s struggling. It lightens people’s hearts. You’re not fighting starvation alone. Depleted morale, spirits gone cold. We’re not in exile yet. This is still the place we live and contribute to the cause. A hot soup goes a long way.
To be sure, there’s some pay involved here. There has to be. After the catering company found no use for itself, when a civil war made it irrelevant, it shuttered down. No one needed a catered event. And not simply needed, but had no urge for it. Seeing Miami explode with gun fights on the streets, tanks rolling down Ocean Avenue, bodies on the sand next to destroyed sandcastles, Northern vacationers who got stuck in the first attacks, prisoners of war kept in condos that became like concentration camps. Who wanted to arrange a party with shrimp cocktails and lobster thermidor when they saw on their smartphones thousands of starving people trapped in neon-colored buildings? A surreal experience to see shrinking, thinning people still in the tatters of their vacation wear leaning slung tired over art deco balconies.
All the employees went their separate ways. The work got so dried up over the years, alternative methods were formed, along with a new government to manage it. Elaine was able to band together a few people for a new “business,” which was more of a co-op approved by the New Democratic America. Approved and somewhat funded. What countries around the world gave to the NDA was measly, compared to what it really needed. A reversal of US fortunes. Now she felt like those faceless people overseas, in countries where the US had sanctions or started wars. Reality had come home. Sensationalized news with ad revenue streams making their money off this cast of civilian characters. What’s worse than the brunt of war? The brunt of war, televised and socialized across smartphones and TVs, the unknown eyes of millions watching your pain, and nothing they could do about it. Sometimes she felt those eyes, or thought she felt them. An opaque wetness, a million shapes pressing against her, sliding along her skin. Not seeing her, really. Feeling, rather, with their tearful surfaces. Eyes alone. No bodies. The moving, blinking planetary shapes floating in a dark seeing void. A sense. A floating permanence in the chest and arms, a tightening force.
No real government cash funds the operation. The dollar has become increasingly devalued. Since the war broke out it is no longer the standard in the global market, spinning the country into further destabilization. The government subsidizes as best it can in the form of providing stipends and first dibs for food, clothing, shelter. It is these three basic essentials that the NDA rallied around, and are provided by an arrangement with public and private businesses willing to work in humanitarian aid. The food is grown on vast farms far away from the frontline, though urban vertical farming in large warehouses has been increasing. There are manufacturing jobs for clothing. Warehouses spin out simple wearables to be handed out at the donation banks. Pure utilitarian. The collective malaise holds back color and variety, rather like a collective biblical wearing of sackcloth and ashes to express one’s grief. It’s hard to desire such expression in the midst of the historical moment, the fear of being gunned down, tanks plowing through parked cars, demolishing buildings. As for provided housing, you’re either sanctioned to fix up an old abandoned property or receive one of the pre-built assembly line homes consisting of two steel or wooden containers (depending on supplies) stacked on top of each other. Work provided is dictated by what the State needs and the businesses that agree to its terms. Private businesses prioritize their government contracts, effectively becoming public ones, for the time being.
In exchange for guaranteed subsidies, the food business provides a key service needed in hard times. It’s a labor of love, but also a necessity. Gifts by the daily patrons are welcomed but never necessary or requested. Meaningful enough that people give out of the little they have. Many who come through the line make promises and offerings. Some come with knitted sweaters or homemade art and hand it to Elaine and the other cooks serving food. Little tokens of gratitude. As important as these tokens are, there’s also the contacts she’s collected over the last few years, people she can call in an instance, an entire support network, an alternative black market import economy growing beneath the troubled one that the NDA barely keeps together. The NDA’s intentions remain solidly for the people, she wants to believe, but intentions are met with obstructions. War creates a resource vacuum. All energy is focused on the line. All resources have funneled frontward to provide the army with the best food and shelter and armor. They need all the help they can get. Since a little over fifty percent of the US Army defected to the Southern Freedom Legion, along with a large portion of the equipment and thousands more paramilitary organizations, the ragtag NALA have been bolstered by weapons and armor from European allies. There are some French and English troops helping the NDA cause, but not enough. The expense of war for a European country blows out budgets. In certain sectors, the strain is felt on the European economy almost as much as it is on the NDA. There are talks with other potential allies for assistance in any way they can, but discussions progress as slow and methodical as a stingy person hemming and hawing to donate their money.
She reads about this in the news. When her phone works, that is. Often, she loses signal. Large pockets of the city are blackholes for good reception. Some think this is because the SFL have coordinated attacks on radio antennas and data centers, anything that remotely appears as a place contributing to communications. Of course her phone isn’t the one she had before, so long ago. That lasted until an explosion erupted on a nearby street and sent her falling down the stairs, crushing the phone under her hip. Now she pockets an old recycled smartphone with a broken screen scraping up her thumb when she pans through the makeshift NDA News app. All her old data was lost. There is no more cloud, not in the NDA. It’s only what the tech community can come up with locally, working together with government officials. Musk’s Starlink satellites went off line a few years ago after the whole company was bombed, so the wider internet access is lost.
No matter. The phone isn’t important to her memories. She savors an old Mexico trip she had. Ethereal dust of a square settles in her mind. She thinks of a child she met, how they must be a teenager, maybe with a job at a restaurant or working on a family farm. How she pines for the lonely days of a pandemic. Or before then, weekends that felt light as clouds and sunshine, when she could feel in her body an eruption of colors and shapes, world at her fingertips. Future plans and travels. A growing, leaping excitement. Where dance club lights flash across faces, like the briefest of shining stars and fiery meteors. Late nights with friends, yelling down from rooftops to confused passers-by. A little wobbly, someone pulling her back from the edge, still yelling out to pedestrians below, tipsy like an ancient world ruler celebrating the night of a great victory.
She remembers gossip, hushed tones over lovers and affairs and breakups. She remembers mixed drinks at Lloyd’s, the bartender who always gave her one on the house, not knowing if that meant he wanted bigger tips or if he genuinely liked her. That was in the immediate days of separating from Doug. Doug. That’s a name of a past beyond her comprehension, a world cut off. Even when she tries to access those memories, they’re like a movie you once loved as a kid but can’t quite remember the actors who played in it, their faces or gestures all stretched-out blobs. And no repeating the famous lines you once knew, but knowing you used to know them. It’s all shards without feeling. It floats in her mind’s eye like the gelatinous gunk in her grandmother’s lava lamp.
Of course, what of the old days really lives? Sometimes she sits at her salvaged desk staring out her room’s window. The rumbling cheery blabber of housemates two floors below her, laughing at the board games or books they’re reading, sharing funny stories despite the potential that a rocket could hit at any moment, gunfire could break out in the streets. Trying to live life like it was, little remnants of it seeping through the days, like half-memories blossoming, brief flashes, one foot still planted in the previous life, small glowing hope that it might return.
On her sill grow several plants retrieved from various neighbors and the partial ruins of an apartment complex. Surrounding her are freshly painted walls that glow when the sun bursts above the rooftops across the street, a twice daily occurrence. Her roommates found an old boarded-up hardware store somehow bypassed by looters in the early days. It’s an off-white paint they’ve found. Not her default color, but better than the scraped-up and black-marked walls of the previous tenant who was a bike messenger with five bicycles hung from every corner, ones he salvaged out of a rubbled bike shop whose owner had disappeared or died. No one knew for sure. Now the former tenant, Charlie, was working across the city, living in another part of town, still delivering food for a humanitarian co-op transporting goods to people who were sick or elderly.
She’d dated Charlie for two years. Or whatever “dating” meant in these times. Two of war’s children come together, more for survival than love, as lost mourners, as funeral wailers, playactors of something called romance. She called him the “previous tenant,” but it’s not like she didn’t live there most of the time anyway. It had been her longest relationship since Doug. They’d met at the Applebee’s, joked about having never stepped foot in an Applebee’s before the war, funny that it was now a place of refuge. He delivered the meals her team packed when they weren’t serving lunches and dinners. That was all she kept of him now. Small encapsulated memories. The slightest skid out of his bike when he stopped outside the kitchen door and waited for the meals to be placed on his back or in his panniers. The hulking mass of his bike bag that smelled of rolled cigarettes and gasoline. His hair’s ruffled sweaty nest when he took off his cap in winter.
She did not keep anything else. No bedroom scenes or candle lit nights. None of the quiet moments, no conversations. The long walks along the wall of sandbags near the river, or the soldier friends of his who let them get a view from near the top of a decommissioned building whose highest floors were skeletal remains. She knew better than to keep much. She didn’t have space to remember the living, too many memories of people she wanted returned, crowding out the present’s ethereal sensation of a life that had derailed somewhere far back, living now in this alternate timeline that couldn’t possibly be the real one. Time in some other forked road had gone and found a happier place for her. She could be happy for the self she might never find again.
Charlie wasn’t dead. Not yet. She respected him, his work and everything he did. She said hello when she saw him, fewer times since he was assigned a different location. But if you weren’t dead then you were a ghost as all of them were. It was death that made you the realest thing. For most of them, grayed expressions fissured their faces, lightning bolt wrinkles grew in a slow storm of aging. Was it the government rationed food, what they were given from the farms that made them age so rapidly? Or the plain anxiety absorbed a thousand times over like the folded blade of a sword? She didn’t flinch at gunfire or bombs anymore, despite deep-down inside her inner core was a twisting, corkscrewing seizure, a retracting bundle of nerves that quaked at the slightest rattle, the staccato popping of a machine gun. You could subdue the fear of death and still always be afraid.
She can’t think about this anymore. She stands from her small desk and turns, eyeing her shadow on the white walls at her periphery, and goes to the limp dresser drawers protected by a blanket that covers the corner leaning up against the wall. She shuffles through a pile of socks and finds the clear plastic box with the tape secure inside. She plops herself down on the bed and loads the tape into her cassette player next to her alarm clock and lamp, its speakers staring at her like two big eyes. She listens through the static. The sharp bright sounds of rain tapping against metal, the puffy pitter-patter on soil and leaves. Later, a horn blares as a car passes. Birds chirp, echo calls, going through their scales. Brief chatter from the young girl. She can never quite make out what she’s saying. There’s a whole section of puddle sloshes. Then what feels like a bright sunny day, can almost hear the sun on skin, slowly burning the girl’s arms and face. Always that section with a cat purring and meowing. A stream gurgles as the child’s voice hums a song attempting to mimic its bubbly flow. Scraps and bits of sound, the recorder whooshed around fabric, stuck in the folds of a pocket, transitions to another section. Still, all these years later, she can’t remember any of this. Vague thought scratches at the tip of her mind, about a cousin maybe. She has images she can’t quite place of someone coming to visit when she was very young and staying with her family.
She opens her eyes. The tape has stopped, speaker hiss outweighed by a coffee cup that chatters on its plate. Small vibration from somewhere. Maybe a tank rolling through the streets. Dark out now. How long did she nap for? She should get dressed, get something to eat. There’s a food shipment coming that night and she has to be there to take inventory—orange in the window, bright heaven light, body thrown, weightless, for a moment she’s in space lost in a cold dark, but then it’s not dark, not cold, but heat on her face, this is not floating warm baby in the womb but falling into vastness from vertigo heights through flame blossoms, body thuds against the wall and slides down, like a hand has been grabbing her this whole time and throws her in disgust, dark now, screaming rises up from the broken window, or is it the broken window that screams, she gathers enough energy to check herself, no blood, limbs moving and felt, she’s okay, but the window screams, someone somewhere stuck beneath rubble, all her plants on the windowsill cast across the room, plants everywhere, a growing jungle consuming the decay, nature pushing itself back up into its rightful place, mending the destruction. ▨
Housepainter (2007-2009)
the long hours that stretched
before I knew what darkness meant
my body falling star
sleep my escape
climbing ladders in golden sun
red-necked, red-armed
sweating an ocean
sweat beads hitting concrete make
the sound of hard rain
patching holes in wounded houses
doctors of beautification
staining decks like color to lips
sanding ten hours a day
buzz in your ears
gnawing sound skull-drilled
out the mouth and eyes
pouring the red language
this is my punishment
for the sins of leisure
for reading books
the hell of those
who’ve learned nothing
so feather weighted
silver spoon turned rust
conscious of pain
I did not see anyone at night
for many nights at a time
I slept in a tomb
my body aging into oblivion
cavern dreams of images
falling away like trap doors
sprung open through which
the sensation of falling
betrays its terror
for there is victory
in weightlessness
falling as if
space needed our presence
in order to negate itself
to say what it is
from what it isn’t
but even then to speak of it
creates its thereness
I shake awake
into a gray morning
all over again
I paint a room with primer
the sour sweet smell
invading the space inside
between my eyes
a headache forms like
a mushroom in my head
the wall color is pink
gnarled by time
of boots and shoes
and furniture scrapes
and the sun through
a window forms
a faded square
but this is all gone
times marking erased in white
reset for a new color
a new canvas for time to play on
I bend up, down
I cut in the corners and
roll out the room
I am shaping the room
I am erasing everything that
has happened here
memory’s murderer
history is a dark place
where futile matches
are lit and flustered
later, I return home
in the back of the rattling van
perched on a five-gallon bucket
keeping my balance
smear of city lights
in the driver window, speechless
I think of what color
I would paint my room
if only I could see it
Coming Up…
Next Release: End of March (hopefully)
As always: If you missed anything or can’t find an email, just visit the website to read through the archives.