One Day in August, On the Corner of Time

For the larger part of our history, the statement that “the shortest distance between two points is a straight line” had been held to be indisputable. Nobody warned us that, for those who survived the End, this would not be the case.1

One day – it was a day in August of 2013, but hardly anybody remembers which – the bombs fell, and “as the crow flies” became about as relevant as “mad dogs and Englishmen”. The dogs were all mad. Nobody knew what had happened to England.2

There were two reasons for this.3

The first was that the surface of our planet had approximately the same texture – and, in some places, the same consistency – as a good cheese. No road was reliable. Nobody was quite sure if the mountains, the rivers, the lakes and plains were exactly where we left them. 4

The second reason was that time had moved. It had changed. The bombs came down: Vulcan’s hand shot up from the Earth in plumes of sweet fire. The rain was blown in unnatural directions. Earth melted to water, shadows bonded to walls. Heat came in gusts and color was leached from the world, as the wind sputtered, ailing. Newspapers went blank in the dispensaries. Every vehicle on the sprawling roads turned first white, then black, then the grey of unretouched steel. Entire verdant forests turned as bright as a sea of copper, then went to ash.5

And, as all of this happened, time rearranged itself. A gifted few, survivors, not annihilated but hopelessly irradiated, killed themselves and found themselves alive, alive, alive. Time had attached itself to them, rode their feelings and their unsettling thoughts and, if they tried to extinguish themselves, at a loss for a future or for hope, time – now a conscious entity, directive and present – preserved them. They were borne back through the past, to the moment where they expired. 6

In time, they just lost it. How can you survive, knowing that those nearby suffer every ailment of spirit you do, without going off the deep end just a little? They started interpreting themselves as divine, going by the names of forgotten gods and demigods. And - partly because they carried themselves like this, partly because we knew that time wasn’t a certainty without them – we all gathered in communities to venerate them. 7

My personal Village prayed to Artemis, and one day – namely in August, although months were by now a metaphor – she disappeared.8

I had gone away. It was a small village, but devoted to her, and one day – also in ‘August’, but earlier, although how long nobody knows – she called me into her Tent.9

Let me interject here that the word “Tent” was a formality of our religion. In the first years after the End of Days, when the Wastelands were real wastelands – the kind of which now remain in only a few blotches of scar tissue on a now-bounteous planet - bands of anxious nomads circled around their gods and were led from rad-free oasis to rad-free oasis. Most of these tribes had only a tent to their name – a canvas job, probably found in somebody’s bombed-out attic. The Tent was where the God slept, and lived, when every species stopped looking after its own ass and started subjugating, killing, and otherwise fucking with other species, and all of the tribes had to settle down to survive. Now, you could hardly call them “tents”, as you might have used the word before the war. Most resembled houses – many were clapboard, the ones in larger cities were brick-and-mortar, God’s-honest-truth mansions. I’ve heard the one in Kabru Kowee has Doric columns.10

In our village, I was one of the few allowed in the Tent, except under provision of the Goddess. When the bombs came down, my ancestors had fled to a shelter that was stacked to the rafters with books of every size and description. I had grown up there, and since the day I learned to read, I spent so long in there I often woke up between the shelves. Subtracting the age I began to read, at five, from my current physical age, which by anyone’s reckoning is my mid-thirties, I’ve been reading for thirty-some years. I have, by reading the tomes of Chaucer, Cato, and Sedaris, acquired a modest classical education, and have become spiritually conscious from the ruined pages of Lao-Tzu, Camus, and other such religious luminaries. I was her priest, after a fashion, and she held me in special counsel. 11

I arrived, on the same night in the cycle of moons at which we always met. First, we went through our ritual. I took a drink from her well, and felt the familiar excitement burgeoning up from my toes. I waited for her touch on my naked shoulder, telling me she had disrobed. I carried her into the room in the Tent where her sleeping pad lay, never once disturbing the mask that covered her face. The rest came naturally. It’s a ritual most priests and priestesses I’ve met are bound to. Afterwards, I turned my back and walked out, picking out a seat in the parlour.12

She came in behind a sheet of muslin, thin enough that I could see her silhouette but not her features. She pinned it to a line that went from one end of the room to the other, and dragged it to separate the den neatly in two halves.13

There was a rustle as she sat, then she talked.14

“My voice is getting worse.” 15

She was right. It was nearly a croak. It had been deteriorating for days on end now.16

“You sound-“ I said, and paused for the word.
“You sound unwell.”17

Disease was something I had only read about.18

“I’m not in the best shape,” she admitted.19

“I’m sorry.”20

“I’ll live, priest.”21

Every so often, she would pause, and sniff moistly.22

“Can I do anything for you?”
In a small voice, she said: “No, you can’t.”
“Alright,” I said. Stymied, I stood to leave.
“Shit,” she said. I stopped.
“Sit down. Yes. Yes, this time, you can do something for me.”
“What is that?” 23

Obligingly. 24

“Anything.”
“Anyth-“ I began to ask, but she interrupted.
“Anything. Just, something.”
“What do y-“
“I sit in here," she groaned, "Without end, reading, or praying, or waiting, or fucking. I don’t leave. I’m restless. Everything I do, I do through you. And you haven’t done anything – anything worthwhile – in what must be, Jesus, months? Seasons?”25

“I wouldn’t know what to do.” I protested, louder and more contrary than I intended. “You haven’t needed anything. The crops have come in fine, even faster than normal. There hasn’t been a drought. There’s no food you wanted we couldn’t provide, no service you’ve asked for we couldn’t render. What could I do? If I did anything, it would be pointless, arbitrary.”26

“Fuck arbitrary”, she yelled, putting a surplus of stress on the vulgarity, and stomping one foot so loudly I heard cries of inquiry from the town square outside.27

I sat, speechless, uncertain of what to say. It continued like this, interminably, until after an uncertain, but extended amount of time she sighed, and spoke.28

“Have you ever read Hamlet, priest?”29

“No,” I answered, stonewalled, “Never.”30

“I have. Twenty-three times.”31

After a night’s rest, I gathered up a satchel of food – dried fruit and oats, jerky and cashews, things that were light. There wasn’t any bacteria after the war and the End, but it was the type of thing that was always mentioned in my readings as “travel fare”, so I took it if I went on a long errand. In addition to this, I took a Tent: most villages have the tent that was the temple of the first settlement, and most kept it as mobile shelter for the priest, to be used on divine errands. They were in the condition you might expect a tent that age to be in – there was less tent than open air – but the interruption of the water cycle meant that it hardly rained and it did provide some cover from scavenging animals, so I took that as well. I took a knife. 32

Lastly, I took a pocketwatch. It was in fine shape, for a pre-war artifact, well-polished and (when it was in our village) ticking away dutifully, although you might notice an uncannily biological pause before each movement of the hand. It was not for keeping track of the length of my journey, or the time of day. 33

After the End of Days, time had become dangerous, unpredictable, a powerful living landscape where some areas would push you recklessly into the future. You could lose your life in seconds if you didn’t walk with caution. So I took the pocketwatch, and by referring to it consistently I kept away from chronological hotspots that would earn me an early grave.34

I left. I walked through regions where time was an inconstant visitor, where – if you had watched me traveling from afar – I would have appeared to move at a snail’s pace. I walked through regions where time was a compelling current, other places where time ticked by lifelessly, and pulled at your ankles like gravity, or weight, and I walked on paths where time combusted in brief, explosive incidents. I arrived in Yaude after forty miles of erratic time, and when I came back, with a new robe in my hand for Artemis, my village was empty.35

The shanties had no traffic between them. There wasn’t a footfall to be heard anywhere. The people, the crops in the field, the periodic scavengers – wolves and insects and field mice – every living thing had disappeared. I walked to the Tent and peered into the windows: no candles sputtered, no mist clouded the windows, and the steady smoke of Her fire had disappeared from the chimneys. She had gone, and in her absence, the time I felt had continued traveling – but the Village’s had not.36

What had happened had been their effective death, or perhaps mine. My life had, and heaven only knows why, continued, but in the absence of Artemis the Village’s had been put in a moribund stasis. There was a scorched and devastated rift between us, their lives a painting and mine a film, and as my body and theirs became separated farther and farther by passing time, the spirits they had left began to disappear. 37

None of us can look at death – or, indeed, any distance from life as it ought to be - and feel genuine peace. He has a hateful countenance, pitted and unsightly, that inspires each of our million grievances to sputter into petulant flame, and we protest each of them, loudly. We all go out mad, flagrant, obstreperous, complaining in our caustic voices, mad with glee and contrariness. The ghosts that hung over that place derived their potency from this.38

Somewhere in a time that had not passed, and would not pass, these people were standing, not dead but far from living, maybe sentient and aware of their removal. Or maybe not. For that, there was left a lingering infection of soundless voices, the furious whispering of ghosts on the wind, a disease. But their muttering was still fecund, and it rattled me unspeakably, froze me into muteness and fixity. I stood there, horrified, while their clamor faded to the sound of blowing dust, and died.39

That evening, I started back - on the road to Yaude.