Simon Treadwell sat cross-legged on the floor of the empty apartment, hunched over the glowing screen of an electronic book reader. His eyes scanned the lines feverishly, then closed, his lips moving silently, repeating the words. He rocked back and forth as he recited, as if this rhythm would aid memorization. Then back to the reader for more.
The abandoned apartment was bare, except for a few bits of broken furniture he had piled against the door. The windows were mostly broken, the glass littering the sill and the floor beneath, jagged shards dangling from the casings. A cold wind moaned through the broken panes. The floors were of hardwood, a feature Simon could once have appreciated. Now, wall-to-wall shag carpeting would have been a comfort.
The city streets were quiet now – some wee hour of the morning, Simon had no way of telling – the incessant yelling, screaming, running, fighting, looting and breaking, crying, moaning and wailing having come to a pause. Even the roving gangs needed to rest sometime, as did their victims. But someone was still moving around in a distant corner of this building, ripping walls apart from the sound of it, or maybe the wood floors – one particularly loud bang caused him to look up from the reader. He had chosen this apartment because there seemed nothing left to salvage from it. But if the looters did come back, his only hope was that the barricade would delay them while he went out the window.
He went back to the book reader, an Amazon Kindle LSX 4. The device contained all of what used to be called the “Canon of Western Literature,” plus much besides, selections from around the world and his own eclectic tastes, everything from Aeschylus to a biography of Miles to lyrics by ZZ Top. (He wished he had a sleeping bag to slip into right now.) There was Eliot and Eliot. Keats and Yeats. Woolf and Wolfe and Wolfe. Williams, Williams, and Williams. Marquez, Borges and Rushdie. Wright and Baldwin and Walker. Joyce and Carroll and Oates. Ballard and Gibson and Dick. Chaucer, Byron, Pound, Cesaire, Plath, Ginsberg, Baraka and Oliver. Just about every play – comedy, drama, tragedy, history or musical – that was still in print, along with scores for the most recent ones. Plus histories of art, science, and theater. And music, which took up even more space than the print. But he wasn’t wasting battery life on music.
Right now, a page from Hamlet was open on the device. Why had he chosen Hamlet to memorize, of all the plays in the Kindle? Seemed a bit cliched, really. He could hear his friends from the MFA program chiding him for his old-schoolishness, his fascination with dead white guys. (Where were those friends now, anyway? Had their fortunes been better than his own?) Early in his career, he had played Rosencrantz in a regional theater production. He had envied the man in the lead role, and wondered how many years he had before directors would say he was too old for the part. He had landed other lead roles in theaters across the country, but that part had always eluded him. Now, the prospects of playing a part on any stage ever again seemed remote.
He watched the battery indicator on the Kindle drop from two bars to one. Maybe 15 minutes left? And when would he have another chance to re-charge? The power had been on for a couple of hours a week ago, and he had been fortunate to find a live outlet in an abandoned Starbucks. When would it come on again? No way of knowing. There was no news. Even the National Guard’s armored vehicles, with their megaphoned announcements of where to go for water and when the power would be on, had stopped now.
Back when it looked like things could get bad – though no one could see it would get this bad – when it was fashionable to be “off the grid” in whatever small ways possible, he had bought a solar charger that would power the Kindle and his other electronic devices. Then came wave after wave of energy price spikes and plunges, the first big energy shortages, the beginnings of civil unrest, at first somewhat organized, then increasingly anarchic. Then the solar charger failed, and there was no one to fix it, no way to replace it. And so he was stuck looking for a few odd moments of power.
At some point, he’d have to ditch the Kindle. It was small, true, and weighed less than a pound, a bit more with the power cord and high quality headphones. But his backpack, the container of all his worldly possessions, was already bulging. He could barely walk under its weight even now. He had a few days of food, a couple of changes of clothes. A thin blanket, a holey tarp, and some bits of string for shelter. He knew he would have to carry increasing amounts of water when he headed north out of the city. Cold as it was, there was still the desert north of Los Angeles to think about. Just getting through or around LA would be another problem. The stories from up there were not good.
He had kept some real books, of course. Nothing – or almost nothing – from his old collection. He had sold that off when he realized how much he could store on the Kindle. The act had felt freeing – just the thought of packing up those heavy boxes of books every time he moved had weighed him down. Now, he felt a pang of regret every time he remembered the day he took the boxes to a used bookshop, receiving a paltry sum of cash in return. But what did it matter now? There was no way he could have carried a fraction of them, even if they had survived the day when the ocean invaded his seaside cottage. Packing his Kindle and a few other irreplaceable items as the tide rose on that day, he had felt positively prescient. That was two years ago now, and it seemed the beginning of this long descent, for himself, the country, the world. Now he really was free of every encumbrance, save what a backpack would hold.
What books he did have were mostly ones he’d come across since then, popular novels, a few Harry Potters – still plenty of those around in the trash heaps and abandoned houses, at least until last year’s cold snap. A Bible, Gideon’s of course, he didn’t know why. It was a book. The Book, to some. He did have two books saved from his own collection. One was his old, battered copy of King Lear, an early 20th century edition with tiny print. It had stood for years on his parents’ bookshelf, one of a large collection that had pulled him into reading, and then into acting. It was the last thing he had left from his childhood. The other was a battered copy of Gravity’s Rainbow. Maybe he’d find some comfort in reading of Tyrone Slothrop’s peregrinations around war-torn Europe, as he tried to leave this deconstructing West Coast of America.
Finally, the battery indicator began flashing and the screen went dark. He stared at the blank page. The battery isn’t holding a charge the way it used to, he thought. I’ll have to go online tomorrow and order a new one.
LOL, as they used to say.
ROFL.
LMFAO.
He was tempted to throw the device across the room – but not yet. He rolled over and curled into a ball, using his pack for a pillow, to sleep, perchance that tomorrow would never come.
* * * * * *
It had been an unseasonably cold winter in San Diego – but then, what did “seasonable” mean anymore? It had snowed, and the snow stuck around for two weeks. It was so absurdly cold that not even the global warming deniers, had any of them remained, could find in the cold weather a contradiction of climate change. Now it had gone from freezing to a damp, bone-chilling, seaside cold. In the mornings, rime ice coated the abandoned, over-turned, stripped and burned-out cars, the toppled lamp posts and traffic signals, the broken, empty bus shelters.
Downtown, mobs were breaking into the central library and hauling out books, avid for their thermal content.
