After tea, I declare that I need my space for reflection.
I've been lost in a lemon grove by myself, now somehow surrounded by more people than I know what to do with. I have found a family, and they aren't letting me go anywhere. If they are to be believed, there is nowhere to go. I mean, it is highly unlikely that these hundred or so people represent the last of mankind, there are probably pockets like this all over the place, but they aren't doing trade, they aren't having mixers and exchanging DNA. Life has gone tribal in a pre-traditional sense. People aren't ready to come out from hiding so-to-speak. Whatever it was that had killed so many of us fifty years ago had left an impression, such that they don't want to talk about it, and they don't want to move on from it back into a retaking of the Earth. I'm in no position to demand answers. It is my frustration, but it is nobody's fault. Something has happened here, long before I came along, that made this place what it is. I just happened to stumble into it at the exact moment whatever spirit was waking up from however long a slumber. I can't believe it, but I can accept it. It seems that fighting it is exhausting and impossible. I am along for the ride now.
The sun has gone down, and murmuring people are everywhere preparing their meals, caring for each other with such a level of attentiveness I have only seen in documentaries. Even in those films what I saw was the process of care, the function of the whole as a method for improving efficiency. What I observe here I feel differently about. Weaving in between the huts, my hands in the pockets of the overalls I'd gaffled from some workers bench, I feel a distinct lack of pressure. The villagers see me walking, I catch their eyes and even in the fading light of dusk I can see their faces soften and warm as though each of us were a fire that warms the other. I see it and feel it in my own face responding to theirs.
Children by the multitudes swarm around the adults. Their childhood imaginations create a thickness of the atmosphere at three feet elevation above the ground. Their bodies seem capable of flight within this narrow band, and their curiosity so boundless that it expands the compressed space of childhood from within those three feet to the breadth of an entire sky. I watch as the adults in this world seem aware of the creative limitlessness of the minds of their offspring and nurture it.
I wince as I remember making sandcastles with Chet. I was the project manager; he was the foreman. Every time his imagination wanted to place a dragon shaped pillar beneath a corner of a tower, I had explained why such things were impossible with sand. Especially if we wanted to have a good foundation. Look at the pyramids of Egypt, you don't see any dragon statues under those I said. I remembered how crushed he looked in that moment, and how quickly he worked past it and became my little soldier for the rational army.
The path winds itself through the village casually. It never goes anywhere in a hurry. As I walk on, I come to the edge of the development. The backs of the huts are all painted with a camouflage of sorts, covered in stylized lemon flowers. The paint is layers thick. It seems that they repaint it every season to reflect the changes and growth. It has a funny look to it. It isn't exactly paint. Some assortment of pigments derived from what I know not. The white of the flowers is a kind of powder adhered with... I lean in and smell the wall. Honey. The paint is made of honey. The flowers on the wall smell sweet. I imagine in summertime, lemons will also come to be painted here.
Turning back out of the village, I stroll toward the mountains which loom in the distance. I think about my bank account. If I could weigh the relative security of having eighty million dollars in the bank against what I found here in this village, I have to admit that money couldn't buy this peace. I have to admit how useless that money is, even when I had access to it and a world to spend it in. I'd spent my whole life being a sycophant for money. This is the gentle punchline. For all my coaxing of variables, my private Hawthorne experiments, in manipulating the world around me, I had manipulated myself. Oh well, it was spilt milk. I am here now, and despite my greatest attempts, things are alright.
There is something below the horizon. In the moonlight, there are grasses creeping higher toward the foothills. They sway in lunar grayscale against the indigo sky. Something Lucifer black amidst them does not move. It watches me silently. My feet are directed to it by some pedestrian curiosity. As I get closer the shape becomes clearer and I can make out why it isn't moving. It's a cave entrance. A feeling creeps into my skin as I notice how similar it is to one of my fevered dreams atop a lemon tree. The sense that everything has led me here is an ominous reflection. I should go back to the village and get a torch. I should ask someone about this cave.
I stand there, fifty feet from the gaping maw of the underworld, staring into the abyss. I don't know how long. I have not eaten dinner and my stomach rumbles. My weight shifts back and forth on my feet. I feel something under the toe of my right foot. Thinking it is a rock, I scrape at it with the sole of my shoe. It makes a funny noise, a steel ringing sound. Scooping the thing up, I know instantly it is a Zippo lighter. Is this where all the pens and lighters and socks end up? Is that the eighth blessing bestowed upon the earth and this grove by the ancient ones? I flick the cap open and sniff it. It is loaded with some kind of distilled lemon oil rocket fuel. The smell is so potent it almost knocks me over. When I spin the wheel, a gush of sparks shoots out and a flame the size of a crayon flares up.
I flick it shut again and walk toward the cave. At the entrance I stop and listen with my ear leaned into the black hole. It has the shape of a mouth with the corners turned down. Six feet tall at the center. I flick on the lighter. The illumination reveals a torchiere held to the wall like a primitive sconce. I hold the lighter to it, and it bursts into a fiery bloom. Blue flames lick up to the top of the oil-soaked fabric and warm into a bright orange ball. I pick it from its bracket, a convenient notch in the rock of the cave, and I walk inside.
The path inside leads down sharply. I think I might slip and tumble, so I go slow and gentle, taking each step with immaculate care. I am probably a hundred feet deep when the tunnel opens up into a large room. I am in a great antechamber. The walls are lined with movie posters in darkened frames. The ceiling appears to be a skyward reaching dome, with a glass chandelier hanging too low, stretched to the limits of the wiring supporting its full weight, as it had been dislodged from a mounting hook by some catastrophe or another. I imagine what that looked like.
This room was a well-lit carnival of citizens distracted by their own narratives, here on a first date, or to reconcile a failing marriage, going on a date night as suggested by their therapist, every one of them thinking about their own shit. None of them foreseeing a cataclysm that would rock their concepts of a free life to the core.
Then I see it happen. In movies people scream during an earthquake. In my fantasy, everyone is too shocked to scream, they just drop to their knees and start crawling. Their faces turn to a depth of fear surpassing anguish. Many of them begin to cry. Some of them are looking up as this massive chandelier starts to plummet. There is a young couple huddled beneath it. They are holding each other by the shoulders, and their cheeks are touching as they mumble their end of the world prayers into each other's ears. They don't know it, but their love is the most pure on the planet in that moment. The fact that they are not going to die alone prompts the fates to hold off and try to get them at a later date, when they will be separated by another circumstance. The wiring of the big lamp is snapped taut like a whip. It makes a cracking noise as the weight of the thing is transferred up the line to the ceiling box, where some handfuls of dust and debris are shaken loose by the massive seismic activity of the ground and the pull of the weight of a five-hundred-pound light fixture stopped just a mere six feet from the floor.
The couple hear the noise. The woman wets her pants. But they are alive. They crawl out from under that dangling Sword of Damocles and run for better cover, arm in arm. Nobody is screaming.
I walk to a concession counter. Collapsed glass and steel cases long ago emptied of treats either by hungry survivors or rats. Tracing along the counter with my torch, a breeze pulls the flame. I shudder to wonder if I am alone down here now. The flame has pointed up the line, toward the ticket check. The carpet beneath my feet covered in dust. There are no other footprints, which is comforting.
Into the back of the house, I go. The trail is littered with five-decade old theater garbage. The silence is deep. I open the double doors to one theater and am greeted by a wall of debris packed solid. There are probably a hundred mummified corpses in there. I shut the doors and walk on until a breeze pulls me into a set of doors. The theater inside is undamaged. The curtains still hang on the walls, twenty-five feet up in the dark, the red velvet crenelations against the wall are still. My eyes play tricks though and I think I see movement. With the light from the torch being one big flicker, it must be an artifact of the lighting. There is no sound. Nothing is moving down here.
The aisle is littered with rat shit and an inch of dust. The screen is smooth and silent. The slope of the house pulls me toward the screen and to the exit doors at the bottom. The exit signs are in retirement. Their back up batteries might have lasted a year at the most once the power was cut off, presumably by a hundred feet of earth being dumped over everything.
Standing at the base of the screen, I once again see movement in the corner of my eye, high up in the catwalk, but the light won't stay still long enough for me to get a good look. I put my hand on the crash bar of the door. A noise like a door slamming hard from somewhere else in the theater strikes at my core. I feel my insides turn to jelly. With as much stealth as I can manage with my balls in my throat I push on the crash bar. The door is blocked on the other side. I look across the foot of the stage at the other door and move towards it, again sensing movement above me, which now feels sinister. The hairs on the back of my neck point straight at the sky and my adrenaline spikes. I hit the other crash bar with considerably less stealth than before and burst through it. There is no obstruction, but there is plenty of debris. I look back into the theater, and by the light of the torch I swear I see something fall from the ceiling and hit the ground silently. The door slams shut on this unseen horror, and I find a brace on the ground and shove it in place against the door.
Within seconds something from the other side hits the crash bar and drives my brace six inches into the asphalt. I slam it shut again and place more debris in the path. It hits again and scatters much of the garbage out of the alley and into the street beyond. I decide to make a run for it, my torch is now streaming flames back behind me, pointing in horror at whatever is leaning heavily into that door. I'm so panicked that I run for some number of blocks before I realize I'm running through a living city. There are electric lights on in some of the windows. The streets are lined with dead cars, all pieced and parted out until just the assembly line looking carriages are left, almost feather-light-looking, nowhere left to go, picked clean like the desert bones of prairie cattle.