Sleeping Equinoxes Part 2

:: Sleeping Equinoxes Part 1 :: Sleeping Equinoxes Part 2 :: Sleeping Equinoxes Part 3 :: Sleeping Equinoxes Part 4 ::

I’ve been convincing myself that I am not epileptic for a decade. The intervals between my seizures have been long enough that I could convince myself that I was not going to have another one. That I was not epileptic.

There's a part of me that doesn't want to be epileptic, as much as there is a part of me that would hold on to the disease if I was offered a silver bullet cure-all.

My first seizure was on the way to school one morning, on the school bus. I may have had seizures before that point, but it's hard to tell. Neither my parents nor my brother ever saw me have one.

On the day I got my license I was sure I wasn't ready to drive. I had spent many hours practicing with my learner's permit. My dad began stomping his brake foot on the passenger seat floor before he started screaming at me to hit the goddamn breaks.

We were rolling down Hull Street in his Jeep Grand Cherokee, the one he secretly loved. It was the first vehicle he bought that he actually liked, the first one he bought after I was born a little too early. I was five when he bought it, and eleven years later, I was behind the wheel barreling into a red lighted intersection, talking about ten things at once, without a clue that the light had changed. That's when he pulled the emergency brake. Jeeps can slide sideways for quite some distance.

In a way, a few months later, I was still driving through red-lit intersections.

I fell asleep on the bus one day shortly after I had gotten my license. I shouldn’t have been on the bus, but behind the wheel. Except for the fact that I was a nightmare on the highways. I hated to drive.

Just after I turned sixteen, I was driving back from one of my friends houses. She lived nearly forty minutes from my house. My parents asked me to be at home by eleven. I knew I was going to be late, knew I was pushing the envelope. So I was making up for it by driving a little fast. I was terrified to be driving that late at night in the first place, but the extra minutes, and the fast driving, and the risk all seemed worth five more minutes of real life with a friend.

There's a hair-pin turn on winter pock road. It's a deer trail to begin with. The turn is nearly 180 degrees. A rail road crosses the path of the road there. It is hard to navigate in the daytime.

There was a silver Sony CD player that I bought with money I earned working in a stone aggregate plant with my father. It was new, unscratched, one of the last great portable CD players. It was the first skipless CD player I had ever seen. It had taken me years to own a portable CD player. A tangled wire connected to a fake tape player plugged into the player. The wire had worked itself loose from the tape. If you arranged it just right, and pressed the wire against the tape player precisely correctly, you could get spectacular sound in the Mazda. The CD player had a preamp that required you to adjust it differently when you were in the car, and when you were listening to it with ancient headphones.

I knew the turn was there, even though the sign was covered by a tree.

I was a bit nervous. It was 10:45, and I was still 30 minutes away from the house. Just as I was thinking something about the lyrical brilliance of whomever I was listening to at the time, the tape cut off. I hit the deck. I wiggled the wire, trying to get it just right in the dim light. Something distracted me through the windshield. I looked up, and saw no road, just a wide, dark field.

I slammed the breaks with both feet. I pulled the emergency break, sliding sideways across the gravel shoulder. I saw nothing out of the windshield but bright lights, and the end of my life. I slammed hard into a railroad sign.

An airbag deploys so quickly, it's as if nothing happens at all. I was sitting there in the car, and it was filled with chemicals. I was certain the car was on fire. It seemed like I waited in the car for a long time before it deployed, and it socked me in the throat, burning my skin. But it must have deployed as soon as I hit.

I couldn't see anything out the window, smoke swirling in my eyes. It never occurred to me that I might be in danger due to flames leaping from the engine compartment into the cabin of the car. I was just furiously angry that I had set the car on fire.

There are many things worse than deep self loathing. I couldn't make the cut, I was not enough, and my good intentions meant just north of nothing. It was enough to make me indifferent to the concept of being burned alive in my dad's car, past curfew on a very dark road, far away from anything I knew.

I opened the door, and the smoke evaporated. I still had my seat belt buckled. I could feel that I had utterly ruined the car. I realized, however, that the smoke had disappeared too quickly for the car to be on fire. It had just been the chemicals from the airbag. I looked at it. It lay there limp.

Thus I found myself continuing to wait at the bus stop. I stood there, dodging flying magnolia cones kids were throwing at each other, and I cataloged the things that caused me to total my dad’s Mazda 626. I had not been paying attention. I hadn't responded fast enough. I had been distracted by being late. I had been distracted by all the things that were happening in my head so quickly. Like a thunderstorm in the brain.

It occurred to me that it wasn't going to be the last of my accidents. I wondered if there was something wrong with me. I wondered why I couldn't keep my mind on any single task.

Then I came up with all the reasons that I was not responsible for the accident. It wasn't me. I was born this way. Other people were just luckier. Surely it wasn't some kind of action on the part of safe drivers that I wasn't doing. Surely other people just didn't have the same incline. Surely I was somehow deficient. It crushed my head how every road led to the concept that there was something wrong with me.

I knew one other young man who had the same problem, who crashed cars regularly. But I was an outlier, there was no denying it. Most teenagers of sixteen years old didn't crash their cars the first night their parents allowed them to drive across town. If I acted differently, then I must have something different, deficient going on in my brain. I pounded myself with the concept that there was something wrong, broken with me, over and over again.

I got on the bus and sat in the first window seat. A pretty young girl, named Shabnam Islam sat down beside me. I didn't bother to remove the headphones, or turn off the CD player. I didn’t say hello, put my head on the seat, and drifted into dazed sleep.

It must have scared her, when I began to have my seizure. It was like nothing happened at all to me. For me, it was what scientists describe what the inside of a black hole might be like.

She says it looked like I was staring out of the window, with a grimace.
When she sat down beside me my eyes were open, and I had my head resting against the little square of glass that serves as a bus window. I started to laugh hysterically. It sounded like a bird cough, hollow, mirthless.

Then, without moving, I started slightly panting. Shabnam looked over at me, scared. She thought he's losing his mind, and there's nothing I can do to help him. I began to drool, spittle sliding down my face, over my lips, still frozen in a rictus grin.

It was at this point that I may have been jerking, head slightly banging against the window.

Shabnam didn't know what to do. She didn't know what was happening to me.
She started talking to me. I didn't respond. She motioned to another person on the bus. They both tried talking to me. After about two minutes, with the kids trying to get me to respond, I went limp in the seat. I fell over.

My eyes were dilated and my head was jerking back and forth. Shabnam decided that it would be safer for me if she laid my body in the seat on her lap. She had never seen someone have a seizure before, and she wasn't even sure that was what was happening. All she knew was that I could not speak, and that, despite the terrifying grin, that I was not going insane. She thought I might be dying.

She yelled at one of her friends on the bus to tell the bus driver that I was sick and that she was going to have to stop the bus or do something. Once the bus driver realized that there was a serious emergency, she pulled over on the side of the road.

When the paramedics got to the scene, they asked some of the kids in the back if I could walk, and they said that I was unresponsive, not talking or anything. The paramedics hoisted a gurney on to the bus, brushed past backpacks and shoes, to the seat I was in, laying on my side, legs still on the floor, head in Shabnam's lap. She got up out of the seat. They put me on the gurney, strapped me down, and rolled me off the bus. Kids stared after me, as I passed them, eyes wide open, searching as if I was undersea, looking for a lost treasure.

I don’t know what I remember. I’ve been told the story so many times, what I have in my head might be reconstruction entirely composed by what others have said. There are flashes, nothing from the bus. Everything is dark from the time that I fell asleep on the bus until sometime on the ambulance.

It must have taken quite a while for the ambulance to come, and get me loaded, interview the teenagers, and drive me off to the hospital. It must have been enough time for the school to call my mother, and for her to drive across town to get to me. She rode in the ambulance with me through the hospital.

My mother says I kept telling the paramedics that I was cold. They had to remove my shirt in order to attach electrodes to my body to get a sense of how my heart was beating. When they removed my shirt, they had to hold me down. I punched one of the doctors just below the left eye. It was a surprising punch.

The man I hit was gentle. Some people get instantaneously angry when they are punched in the face, some people lose control. The paramedics told my mother that post-seizure victims are sometimes violent like that, as if they don’t understand what’s going on. Or perhaps as if they had reverted to some deeper, animal understanding of their contexts.

xxx

They wheeled me into the hospital. They have elaborate plans for those who are taken to the hospital because of a seizure.

There is a battery of tests that most hospitals do when admitting a patient who has never had a seizure previously. They performed several tests on my semi-conscious body when I got there.
They did blood tests. They performed several different kinds of EEG testing, and then an MRI and a CT scan.

The EEG, or Electroencephalograph, is a machine that records brain waves picked up by wires glued to the head. Electrical signals produced by brain cells are recorded as wavy lines by the machine. Brain waves during seizures look like earthquake reading. They look much like what the body does during a seizure. They look terrifying.

They pulled back my hair, and glued pads to my scalp in many different places. The glue left raised red bumps on my scalp that I discovered later.

There are several different kinds of EEG tests that can be used to determine whether I was likely to have a seizure in the future. It was clear from the first test that it was the case that my brain waves, the weak electrical charges broadcast by every neuron in the brain were outside the normal range.

Next they had me fall asleep with the electrodes still attached. No one knew that I had been asleep on the bus. The EEG told them that it was likely that I most likely would experience sleep seizures in the future. My brain waves were far more abnormal when I was asleep than when I was awake.

I am not sure whether they did the light testing when I went there the first time, or whether it was at a later date. I remember that they have a wall of light that they lay you down next to. It seems as if you are in a giant room of light. They blast lumens at you.
Then there is an ultraviolet light that they put above you, and blast different rapid patterns of light, not quite like a strobe. It seems so strong. I was not scared. I suspected it would not do anything to me.

I did not have another seizure in the hospital.

The point of some of the procedures they put the patient through it to determine whether the frequency of seizures is going to be high or not. Usually not during the first visit, but shortly after, the hospital's purpose will be to try to make you have another seizure. A great deal of information about the kind, duration, and intensity of any given persons epilepsy can't be determined in any other way.

Then after the hospital had their data, I was released. I went home, and stayed home from school for a few days while we determined that I was not going to continue to have more seizures. We knew nothing.

My mother said that she knew that I was epileptic, that I would continue to have seizures, sure beyond doubt. She said it was because of the way I acted, that I had been acting increasingly erratic up until the day of the seizure. Yet she is unable to pinpoint any single action. I slowly regained memory, and consciousness, and began to function normally again afterward.

I thought that there was something different about me as well. I had been prepared for the idea that there was something wrong with my brain, because I’d been having catastrophic migraines. But I didn’t think it was epilepsy. I thought it was genius. It’s funny how people tangle these things up, make them more palatable for themselves, hang on to sickness.

xxx

The people who are affected by seizures are those who are around the epileptic person, more than the epileptic person.

The stories I heard about the seizure where contradictory.

A friend of mine whom I had known from elementary school, named Newt, told me his story, and I wrote it down in my journal at the time.

Wednesday 5/13/1998

Of most import: I had a seizure today. I was wearing my doc sandals, a blue shirt, and blue jeans. I walked to the bus stop, got on the bus, sat down, and opened my eyes at the Jacob's Glen subdivision. Then I woke up in the ambulance.

Newt Lewis told me that he was trying to speak to me before I had the seizure, but that I was not responding very well. I do not remember that.

He told me that I was sitting beside some black girl, and that the girl freaked out. he told me that some kids told Mrs. Puckett, the bus driver to pull the bus over, and she stopped.

Everyone was freaking out, as you might expect. They called an ambulance, called my parents, and then some time on the way to the hospital, I woke up and tried to pull the oxygen mask off.

Justin said that my eyes were fully dilated, and that a lot of saliva was pouring down my face, and that my lower torso was frozen, but my upper torso was convulsing.

I am pretty sure some of that was filtered through my own interpretation. I suspect that the last part about the lower and upper torso was my own addition. I may have added that after talking to my mom about the situation.

I am not certain when he talked to me. It must have been the day that I had the seizure. I must have called him after I was in the hospital, or he called me. I don't know.

It's odd that I added the stuff about what I was wearing that day. I had bought the Doctor Martin sandals the day before. They were the last thing that my Great Grandmother gave me as a gift, before she lost too of her mental capacity to Alzheimer's to be out in public. I preserved them long after I stopped wearing them, for years.

xxx

The EEG confirmed my mother’s gut feeling, and I was sent to a Neurologist on the basis of the abnormal brainwave reading. I went to the neurologist f or several years. I don’t remember one single thing about him. I am not sure why.

I know that he prescribed the medicine I still currently take. The drugs used to control and lessen epilepsy are sometimes worse than the epilepsy itself, especially for the patient, who has little to no experience of a seizure. The drugs are the scarlet letter of the epileptic. They are the reminder of who you are, as defined by the disease you have.

My dog, Patches, was prescribed Phenobarbital in huge quantities. Phenobarbital is a barbiturate. It replaced Barbital for epileptic patients at the turn of the 20th century, freeing many from the horrible impact of the drug on their lives.

Many people walked through the doors of their mental asylums and institutions, unshackled by Phenobarbital, into jobs, homes, families, real lives.

Phenobarbital has another name, Luminal. Luminal was the brand name for the chemicals used by the Nazi party when they were warming up the holocaust machine, practicing on their own people. They force-fed or injected Luminal to their children who were retarded, sick, insufficiently Aryan, or epileptic.

Luminal worked in children very much the same way that the chemical cocktail used to put family pets to sleep does. In fact Phenobarbital is one of the chemicals that can be used in that cocktail today. Phenobarbital was what veterinarians gave to patches to suppress seizures. They gave him a much larger dose of the same drug to help him drift off into non-being as well.

They stopped using it for people who live in first world countries now. It’s considered essential in third world countries.

Anti-convulsant drugs used to suppress massive seizures have taken a few steps forward since the mid 1950s. My neurologist prescribed carbamazepine, otherwise known as Tegretol. People hate this drug. But it’s far less harmful than the alternatives.

Often, doctors must prescribe combinations of drugs, from not so harsh, upwards to harsher and harsher anti-convulsants. It is very difficult to know if the kind of drug that I am taking is working to suppress the seizures that I have because they were never frequent enough to experiment.

The drug carbamazepine works for people who have tonic/clonic generalized seizures, because it shuts down the sodium “doors” in your neurons. It causes them to be able to fire less. It takes the total electrical output and lowers it, the way you would push down an electrical tide.

One day, shortly after beginning to take this drug, I was sitting in my jeep, taking a left hand turn from the street that my high school was on, towards the pool that I practiced at daily. I saw that there was a car coming, and I stomped on the gas, taking the left. The car nearly slammed into me. It scared me badly, and I shook all the way to the pool. After that, I swore that I would never take the drug again.

I was convinced that the constant shaking and the lack of concentration, the general feeling of being dazed was directly attributable to the medicine. I hated it with every fiber of my body, not just because of the, perhaps imaginary effects.

I skipped when I could, but I had a good network of people around me, such as my mother, who ensured that I took it often. Not often enough. Carbamazepine is a drug that must be taken consistently and precisely as the neurologist describes, or the effectiveness of the drug is lessened.

As I write, I am currently under the slightly stupefying influence of the drug. I don’t notice it. Perhaps you do.

Things got better. I began to shake less. I didn’t appear to have any of the severe side effects, but it did tend to magnify the occasional debilitating migraine. And I couldn’t drink. Not that I didn’t try. I would drink two beers at friend’s houses, and realize that I was very drunk. It didn’t occur to me until later that it was because of the medicine.

But the drug is so much more than its nasty side effects. I am yoking myself. Choosing to have less brain power. Ensuring that I’m a little dumber. I get to take this giant pill twice a day, one that is made of plastic, completely indigestible: a reminder that one night, perhaps in the not too distant future, if it happens to be the spring or fall, that I might swallow my tongue and choke to death.

It was the doorway to a life slightly less healthy all around than what I had been before my seizure. And I take it now. At this instant. I put the pill in my mouth, and dry swallow the rough plastic thing. And I know that no matter how many times I see it being flushed down the toilet, that there is no end. It will always be there.

I know that now. It is very likely, though not impossible, that I will never stop being epileptic. I didn't know that then. It took me so many years to learn it. To learn to accept the situation, to be committed to stopping every potential seizure. I am committed to doing anything to stop any seizure from ever happening again. At some point, it scared me.

Sleeping Equinoxes Part 1

:: Sleeping Equinoxes Part 1 :: Sleeping Equinoxes Part 2 :: Sleeping Equinoxes Part 3 :: Sleeping Equinoxes Part 4 ::

My eyes hurt. All the time. Especially my right eye. When I fall asleep at night, it’s usually very quickly. I suspect that I don’t close my eyes, especially my right eye, when I fall asleep. Other people have confirmed that I sleep with my eyes open. Do I sleep that way because something is wrong with my brain?

I shake my feet all the time. I am hyperactive. I don’t mean that I have ADHD, or had to take Ritalin when I was a child. I mean I move around too much. My wife constantly reminds me to stop moving.

When I was younger, in my teenage years, I may have had some kind of mental problem. I feel like I am the only sane person in a skirling desert of insanity some times now. I wonder if either one of these situations was due to my epilepsy.

I used to cut myself. Epilepsy? Glad to clear the air about that.

I can't give blood. The anticonvulsant medicine I take twice a day could hurt somebody who had not developed some resistance to it. It would cause short term memory loss, irritability, and tremors if my blood made it into another person's body.

Whatever I do, whatever drugs I take, these seizures are going to hurt me in the way change hurts.

xxx

I was sitting on the bleachers watching the girl’s heat in the fourth cross country meet of my eighth grade year, talking to Newt, his curly hair was blowing in the wind that whipped across the metal seats.

He was laughing with me about a game show he had made up. We had a lot of nervous time to burn before we had to run. He was talking like a game show host. It was beginning to annoy me. He had been talking about this game since we changed in the locker room. Our team mates had already stopped throwing him evil glances, and resumed ignoring the two of us.

Suddenly, the reflected light changed. It became sinister, green, too bright, and sickly. I turned to tell him I had been poisoned, but I couldn’t see his head or his left hand, they were missing. It seemed like I could see right through him as he asked me to form my answer into a question. Then, the pain in my temporal lobes gripped me much in the same way that a bald eagle buries talons inside a wriggling fish. I vomited on his shoes.

After a second of outright panic, when he realized I couldn't talk well, Newt got the coach to call my parents, and the hospital.

My dad talked his way out of the hospital scenario, and took me home. I crawled from the front door to my room, and turned off all the lights, vomiting the entire way, unable to speak except in horribly garbled words. They appeared in my mind perfectly fine, the words. Yet my mouth was unable to form anything. The pain tore me to shreds while I lay there. Not even the thought of death was strong enough to pierce through the agony. Nothing was. A pain that left one absolutely no wiser than one was before. That was my first migraine.

When the results of my first MRI came back a year or more later, it became clear that the same areas of the brain that caused me so much horrifying pain also produced the abnormal electrical pattern that originates seizures.

xxx

If epilepsy is the tipping of a bucket full of electrons across the dense spider web of the brain, what do those tidal waves of electricity that I cannot feel, and have no warning of, have anything at all to do with my debilitating migraines?

I am no hypochondriac. I believe that I am largely healthy and sane. I don’t get colds. I don’t get headaches. I like to run 10k races. I swam competitively for many years. I thought I was going to be a marine biologist, before my first recorded seizure prevented me from ever learning SCUBA.

Yet every single strange thing my body does, from intensely dizzy spells, to spinning in my bed after far too many drinks makes me wonder, are all the things that are wrong with me related to my epilepsy?

And the long list of things I don't do well?

Until writing this, I had no clue that this disease, or state, or whatever it is, pervaded my life like a giant octopus, pushing tentacles into a jar.

The only sinister creeping issue to me, the one that matters, is that no one knows why. My neurologist did not tell me why. It wasn’t that he had some compelling reason not to tell me. It wasn’t a power trip, to watch me squirm under the strain of coming face to face with the void of our vast lack of knowledge. It’s that he was squirming, maybe even harder than me, too.

Yet, standing in front of the chasm that is our understanding, I know something. I am certain that the stories are true. I am certain that I have epilepsy, though I have less evidence about being epileptic than I have about the existence of God.

xxx

I can’t remember how many seizures I have had. Which makes sense for two reasons. The first is that I am rendered unconscious by each seizure.

That’s not true for all seizures, just the ones you see in movies. Unfortunately, the ones you see in movies are the ones I have. The idea you might have of a seizure, a person flopping on the floor, foaming at the mouth, biting off their tongues, and rolling their eyes in the back of their heads, is called a tonic-clonic generalized seizure. Used to be known as grand mal. That’s me all over it. Except for the fact that it only happens to me when I sleep.

The second reason is because all the time markers around the seizure are typically obliterated. I am usually semi-conscious for some time afterward. I used to think that it was a couple of days until I returned to normal. The reality is the it only takes a couple of hours for my brain to start functioning. The fact remains that I do not remember when I had any of my seizures. They are unmored, floating along in the sea of memory. I can only tie them down with keystrokes.

On the other hand, what are the chances that I would have a catalogue of memories for any given two days in my whole life? Slim. Frankly ruined by the drug.

Oddly though, it seems to have erased certain, albeit minor portions of my memory. Those holes in my memory speak to me the way the Marianas Trench speaks to marine biologists. I spent time fiddling with the absence of memory the way your tongue is magnetized to a loose tooth.

I can’t remember anything at all about certain people it seems. I loved my great grandmother. When I went to her grave the first time, it had a different name on it that what I remembered. I saw a picture of her about a year ago. I had never seen the woman in the photograph in my life. It hurt to know that memory has a blank burn where she should be.

xxx

I have no warning symptoms in the slightest. Some people say that they have a feeling like they are going to have a seizure. Like an apocalyptic curtain hung over everything. Like the feeling you might have if the sky suddenly turned an angry purple at noon. For me, I often deny to my wife that I have had a seizure, when I regain consciousness afterwards. I feel like I should know if something like that happened to me.

I am surprised at how powerfully I don’t want to know what’s wrong with me. I have been denying that I was epileptic for a decade. I wanted it to go away. I wanted it to be larger than it is as well, something grand. What an irrational thing to think.

xxx

And it plays into my worst fears, the concept that I may not be capable of overcoming the circumstances that render me essentially silent in the universe. These swirling circumstances, or the solid circumstances that are the definition of my capabilities. The fact that I may not be able to tell a good story, or create the kind of art that I love to experience. It may be the case that I am incapable of participating in the sere beauty of stories, just capable of perception. As if I had my tongue cut out, and my ears sharpened.

xxx

It steals from me. It steals the experience of epilepsy itself. It steals other memories too. It steals memories of my youth, steals the memory of my dying great grandmother. And with those memories goes something integral, something that was mine.

Of course, I’ve got books published by the doctors, forums published by the afflicted, and websites compiled by the earnest to replace what is stolen. They tell me how the complex balance of the electrical system in the brain may be tipped in several ways. Head trauma or lack of oxygen during birth, or brain tumors, genetic conditions… and so on.

Any of those things, plus many more, could be the reason that I am epileptic. Yet they don't tell me why I'm epileptic. They don't describe the vacancy, the way that fear works, how subtle it is. They don't relate what it's like. All the books in the world can't replace one jot of what epilepsy takes from me, what it takes from my family.

Epilepsy has stopped me from doing some things in my life that I wanted to do. I find it difficult to believe that my life, my will, my freedom are so obviously framed by something so ephemeral.

Ephemeral because the disease is a story that others have told me about myself. Because other people experience my epilepsy more than I do. It shakes some people profoundly. My mother, my father, my wife, and my children, when they begin to realize what it means. And they tell me.

So I don't even have my own story. Just the story that others, doctors, bystanders, and family tell me. If enough people tell you a consistent enough story enough times, you believe them, even if you have no way to observe the thing that they are telling you about.

And if you are somewhat of a rational person, you make up half-memories and coincidences to mortar the faith that you have in their story. You snap to a particular take on the truth, and magnify it. You are persuaded by the fragments of ideas on a tide of circumstance, and you build on that story as if it was a foundation. All this is to simply say that the reason that I have epilepsy is because they tell me a story about myself that I believe utterly without question.

It’s always easier to believe in something if you have seen it in other people first. And that’s how it happened with me.

xxx

One afternoon, my dad walked in from the back yard, with a pinched look. He walked over to mom, and whispered something urgently to her. Immediately, my brother and I picked up on the panic.

He had taken the dog, Patches, an English springer spaniel, out in the back yard, and the dog had begun to behave oddly, he said. He wondered whether the dog had been bitten by a spider, or poisoned. He walked back outside, and dragged the dog into the back room of the house.

My brother asked if they thought Patches was going to be all right. My mother said she didn't know. Then asked my brother and I go to our room, while they dealt with the dog.

I couldn’t help but pester my mom to get her to tell me what had happened after the chaos had died down. She didn’t understand what had happened to the dog herself, which made it easier for her to withhold information.

What had happened was that the dog went out to urinate, lay down on the ground, and then stiffened so violently that he smashed into a tree several yards away. Then he laid at the base of the tree, foaming at the mouth, making demonic noises in his throat and lungs, with his eyes rolled backwards, shuddering into the epileptic gaze.

Patches was a bad case of epilepsy. The veterinarian told us he had the worst kind of epilepsy, and to prepare for the worst. In this case, the worst would be several years of epilepsy followed by putting the dog to sleep. The veterinarian suggested that it was a structural issue in the brain that might get progressively worse.

Epilepsy is not common in dogs or humans. It's slightly more common in certain pure breeds, such as Springer Spaniels. Overbreeding over the past 200 years has caused genetic weaknesses, and structural deficiencies.

The veterinarians prescribed Phenobarbital for Patches. It had a soporific effect. Patches was hardly there. He found it nearly impossible to do much. The Phenobarbital was difficult to administer to the dog as well, partly because the human party was as reluctant as the canine.

My parents must have thought they had a handle on the situation. There must have been a time when they thought the drug would stop Patches from having horrible seizures. It wasn't long.

As Patches began having more seizures, and the veterinarian began raising the dose, I began to ask more questions. They told me a little about it. My mother is a nurse, and she had read quite a bit about epilepsy. She must have known when Dad first walked in that it was no spider bite.

Mom sat me down on my cherrywood bed, the one my father had slept in when he was my age. She sat down beside me, and told me a little bit about what happened to Patches.

She told me that when a person as a seizure, it's like a thunder storm in the brain. She said that sometimes people do different things, and lose control of themselves. She said that Patches' seizures meant that he was epileptic, and that meant that he would continue to have seizures in the future. She told me that it was terrible to watch a seizure because they made the person who was having them look very ugly, and sometimes make a mess.

One evening, Patches began having a seizure while I was lying on the couch, with him right beside me. I asked if I could remain downstairs. They said that he would be very disturbing to watch. He hit the far wall so hard that it shook a picture off. We turned off the television, my brother ran upstairs, and I sat there, fascinated, and observed. Then I helped them clean up the mess.

I walked up stairs, dazed with what I had seen. My brother was sitting on his bed, arms wrapped around his knees, crying. I walked over to his bed and told him it was okay, that Patches was still alive.

On the evenings when the dog had more than one seizure, my dad would drag Patches into the garage, for sanitary reasons. He would sometimes spend some time with the dog, riding out the worst of it. Sometimes, he would simply let the dog go it alone.

Dad walked in from the garage one night, with a pinched look. He walked over to mom, and whispered something urgently to her. Her eyes widened. I saw him walk out of the house with an old .22 rifle. He was crying. He had spent too much time in the garage that night.

I woke up the next morning and dad wasn't there. I spent the whole day imagining what the dog must have looked like after he shot it. I determined I wouldn't cry.

The next morning, he put the dog to sleep. He told me, after I came home from school, that the dog had to be put to sleep because he had had 24 seizures that evening. The family sat around the table, and everyone cried, including him. I sat there, fascinated, and observed.

It's sheer coincidence that my dog had epilepsy and that later on, I developed epilepsy too. Epilepsy, as far as science is aware is definitely not a transmittable disease.

How is my brain like Patches’ brain?

I can steal something back, though. I can take something from epilepsy. I can pin down all the stories. I can talk to every person I know who has seen me have a seizure. I can keep a video recorder by my bed. I can look my epilepsy in the face. I can know what it means. I can know what it does to me, and what it doesn’t do. I can learn what my odds of living a full life are. I can know what the chances are that epilepsy will kill me.

I can write down different variations of other people’s stories. I can demystify everything about epilepsy. I can know my own biases about it, and be aware of others. I can teach myself. I can become the most knowledgeable person in the world about it.

I can fill the internet full of solid information for the hundred other people in this country who have the same problem. I can put letters in bottles for the thousands of people throughout history who have died who weren’t able to pen a word about what their epilepsy did to them.

I can write it all down. You can read it. I can read it. That’s the only thing I can do. I can take my anti-convulsant drugs and write short stories that are as true as possible about what it’s like to be profoundly out of control of your own body.

I can tell you what it’s like to be neither asleep, nor awake, nor dead.

Status Epilepticus is the state of the body after more than five solid minutes of tonic/clonic seizing. The body cannot survive more than that without permanent damage. It might be a dramatic name to choose for a collection of short stories about the topic. But it’s the name I chose to see every day because it’s the thing that I fear the most.

I fear that my epilepsy has utterly crippled me, and curdled my genius.

I fear that I will not be able to be a good father.

I fear that I will always forget where my car is parked.

I fear that deep down somewhere I will never be able to convince myself that I am an acceptable, functional person, even thought I know that those things, those deficiencies probably aren’t real.

There’s a good chance that I’m pretty normal.

And if they are real, they’re not the fault of epilepsy.

Status Epilepticus

It steals from me. It steals the experience of epilepsy itself. It steals other memories too.It steals memories of my youth, steals the memory of my dying great grandmother. And with those memories goes something integral, something that was mine.

Of course, I've got books published by the doctors, forums published by the afflicted, and websites compiled by the earnest to replace what is stolen.

The complex balance of the electrical system in the brain may be tipped in several ways. Head trauma or lack of oxygen during birth, or brain tumors, genetic conditions... and so on. Any of those things, plus many more, could be the reason that I am epileptic.

Epilepsy has stopped me from doing some things in my life that I wanted to do. I find it difficult to believe that my life, my will, my freedom are so obviously framed by something so ephemeral.

You might wonder how something so slavering, painful, convulsive, repulsive, and physical as a seizure could be ephemeral. I can’t remember anything about any of the seizures I’ve had. In that sense, the disease is a story that others have told me about myself. Enough people tell you a consistent enough story enough times, and you believe them, even if you have no way to observe the thing that they are telling you about.

And if you are somewhat of a rational person, you make up observable datum to assuage the faith that you have in that story that they keep telling you. All this is to simply say that the reason that I have epilepsy is because they tell me a story about myself that I believe utterly without question.

But it took me years to believe it.

There is no good metaphor for what a seizure is. Yet I will provide one anyway. Imagine a giant computer central processing unit, the size of the ocean. Now imagine the energy of the sun converted with 100% efficiency (or as close as the laws of thermodynamics would allow) into electricity. Now dump the electricity through the CPU. It would be an apocalyptic wave of burning electrons. That's what a seizure is, when you bring it back to human scale.

It’s always easier to believe in something if you have seen it in other people first. And that’s how it happened to me. When someone has a seizure, everyone has a seizure. They have a way of convulsing the patterns of everything around them. As if the seizure in one tiny part of the brain triggers a larger seizure, which triggers a larger seizure, which triggers a brain wide seizure, which triggers a social seizure.

One afternoon, my dad walked in from the back yard, with a pinched look. He walked over to mom, and whispered something urgently to her. Immediately, my brother and I picked up on the panic.

He had taken the dog, Patches, an English Springer Spaniel, out in the back yard, and the dog had begun to behave oddly. They discussed, openly whether the dog had been bitten by a spider, or poisoned.


Then they made my brother and I go to our rooms, while they dealt with the dog. As an inquisitive child, I couldn't help but pester my mom to get her to tell me what had happened. She didn't understand what had happened to the dog herself, which made it easier for her to withhold information.

What had happened was that the dog went out to urinate, laid down on the ground, and then stiffened so violently that he smashed into a tree several yards away. His legs pushed straight with such force, that from a supine position, he hit a tree. Then he laid at the base of the tree, foaming at the mouth, making demonic noises in his throat and lungs, with his eyes rolled backwards, shuddering into the epileptic gaze.

A year or so later, with the dog turned into a rug with Phenobarbital, they had a thought they had a handle on the situation. Yet Patches began having a seizure while I was laying on the couch, him right beside me. I asked if I could remain downstairs. They told me a little about it. They said that he would be very disturbing to watch. He hit the far wall so hard that it shook a picture off. We turned off the television, my brother ran upstairs, and I sat there, fascinated, and observed.

On the evenings when the dog had more than one seizure, my dad would drag Patches into the garage, for sanitary reasons. He would sometimes spend some time with the dog, riding out the worst of it, and sometimes, he would simply let the dog go it alone.

Dad walked in from the garage one night, with a pinched look. He walked over to mom, and whispered something urgently to her. Her eyes widened. I saw him walk out of the house with a .22 rifle. He was crying. He had spent too much time in the garage that night.

The next morning, he put the dog to sleep. He told me, after I came home from school, that the dog had to be put to sleep because he had had 24 seizures that evening. The family sat around the table, and everyone cried, including him. I sat there, fascinated, and observed.

Why is my brain like Patches's brain?

2.

I've been convincing myself that I am not epileptic for a decade. The intervals between my seizures have been long enough that I could convince myself that I was not going to have another one. That I was not epileptic.

It is somewhat likely that I've been having seizures in my sleep since I hit puberty. That's part of how seizures work. There are three ways that seizures can develop, and one of them is during puberty. Yet my parents can’t recount me ever having one until the one I had in public. So my first was on a school bus.

I fell asleep on the bus one day shortly after I had gotten my license. I shouldn't have been on the bus, but behind the wheel, except for the fact that I was a nightmare on the highways. My concentration on the road could be compared to cats chasing marbles.

I was listening to The Cure, Disintegration, and I remember a fat black girl sitting down beside me. She had a white shirt on. I didn't say hello when she sat down.

It must have scared the shit out of her, when I began to... have my seizure. I would like to talk to that girl, since she was probably one of the few people who could tell me what the beginning of one of my seizures looks like.

I only have seizures when I am asleep. Two kids, Shabnam Islam, and James whose last name I don't remember, pulled me off the bus when the bus driver finally realized she had an emergency on her hands.

I imagine the black girl beside me must have been terrified when I began to spasm and foam at the mouth. She screamed, and pushed herself out of the seat, and into the aisle of the moving bus. The driver shouted at her to sit down. The girl stood in the middle of the aisle, and stared with fascination, as I collapsed into the floor, my backpack falling on my face, obscuring the twisted mouth, the open eyes, rolling back white, into the epileptic gaze.

Someone shouted at the driver to stop the bus. Kids pushed themselves out of their seats, as they jostled one another trying to scope the horror. The situation shifted into spectacle, into emergency. It took the driver a minute or two to find a suitable place to pull over. By the time the bus was no longer in motion, neither was my body. My face was dumb, not twisted, but lifeless.

The two teenagers pulled me off the bus like a young Adam and Eve, watching the effects of the broken world on humans.

I don't know what I remember. I've been told the story so many times, what I have in my head might be reconstruction entirely composed by what others have said.

It must have taken quite a while for the ambulance to come, and get me loaded, interview the teenagers, and drive me off to the hospital. It must have been enough time for the school to call my mother, and for her to drive across town to get to me. She road in the ambulance with me through the hospital. It only makes sense that what flashes of memories I have are a recount of the situation through her eyes, not mine.

He kept telling the paramedics that he was cold. They had to remove his shirt in order to attach electrodes to his body to get a sense of how his heart was beating, so that they'd be able to give data to the doctors once they got him to the hospital. When they removed his shirt, they had to hold him down. He punched one of the doctors just below the left eye. It was a surprising punch.

The man he hit was gentle. Some people get instantaneously angry. The paramedics said that post-seizure victims are sometimes violent like that, as if they don't understand what's going on. Or perhaps as if they had reverted to some deeper, animal understanding of their contexts.

Then they got me into the hospital. I had some of the procedures that they did to me the first time done to me later, in a second round, when they were determining the extent of my epilepsy, so I have some idea what the tests were like. Essentially, they do everything they can to make you have a seizure while you are attached to a machine, just to see what your brain waves look like.

The EEG, or Electroencephalograph, is a machine that records brain waves picked up by wires taped to the head. Electrical signals produced by brain cells are recorded as wavy lines by the machine. Brain waves during seizures look like earthquake reading. They look much like what the body does during a seizure. They look terrifying.

On the other hand, an abnormal EEG is not that dramatic. On a normal day, say while I'm at work, if I had those electrodes attached to my head, the reading would come back abnormal.

Then after the hospital had their data, I was released. I went home, and stayed home from school for a few days while we determined that I was not going to continue to have more seizures. We knew nothing.

My mother said that she knew that I was epileptic, that I would continue to have seizures, sure beyond doubt. She said it was because of the way I acted, that I had been acting increasingly erratic up until the day of the seizure. Yet she is unable to pinpoint any single action. I slowly regained memory, and consciousness, and began to function normally again afterward.

I thought that there was something different about me as well. I had been prepared for the idea that there was something wrong with my brain, because I’d been having catastrophic migraines. But I didn't think it was epilepsy. I thought it was genius. It's funny how people tangle these things up, make them more palatable for themselves, hang on to sickness.


3.

To me, the abnormal EEG reading, with it's minor waves, is more terrifying than the seizure waves. It means that the epilepsy is really a symptom of something else. That seizures are not a symptom of a disease called epilepsy, rather epilepsy is a symptom of something wrong with the way your brain is built.

Something is wrong with the way that my brain is built.

I am sane. I am generally happy, with hard streaks of moroseness. I am normal. Yet I am not sure that the moments of my incompetence are due to the human condition.

I can't remember how many seizures I have had. Which makes sense for two reasons. The first is that I am rendered unconscious by the seizure.

That's not true for all seizures, just the ones you see in movies. Unfortunately, the ones you see in movies are the ones I have. The idea you might have of a seizure, a person flopping on the floor, foaming at the mouth, biting off their tongues, and rolling their eyes in the back of their heads, is called a tonic-clonic generalized grand mal seizure. That's me all over it. Except for the fact that it only happens to me when I sleep.

The second reason is because all the time markers around the time of the seizure are typically obliterated. I am usually semi-conscious for some time afterward. I used to think that it was a couple of days until I returned to normal. Now I don't think that that was, or is the case. Perhaps my first seizure was more profound somehow than the others that followed it, and it did require a few days. Perhaps it is perfectly normal, on the other hand that I don’t sharply remember the days following my first seizure. What are the chances that I would have a catalogue of memories for any given two days in my whole life?

I believe that I am typical. I think that I don't remember anything at all for twenty minutes, to an hour after the seizure, which is what happens to most victims of a seizure of the kind that I have.

Oddly though, It seems to have erased certain, albeit minor portions of my memory. Those holes in my memory speak to me the way the Marianas Trench speaks to marine biologists. I spent time fiddling with the absence of memory the way your tongue is magnetized to a loose tooth.

No one slept with me, until my fiancé got pregnant, so after that is the only real record I have of my epilepsy. My wife has had to witness every one of the seizures that I have had since we got pregnant. What she must go through during every seizure is a metaphor for how we got pregnant.

She is laying in bed, having the dreams of youth, and beauty, freedom, and fearlessness, when she is wrenched from her sleep with the inexorable strength of death’s hands. They are my hands, flopping in the bed, my throat constricting, my tongue disappeared, my eyes white on white on white, no pupil. Every time, she is convinced that I am dying. It is a much more terrible burden for her than it ever will be for me, no matter what angst I feel about my inabilities to guarantee my ability to provide in the future.

I have no warning symptoms in the slightest. Some people say that they have a feeling like they are going to have a seizure. Like an apocalyptic curtain hung over everything. Like the feeling you might have if the sky suddenly turned an angry purple at noon. For me, I often deny to my wife that I have had a seizure, when I regain consciousness afterwards. I feel like I should know if something like that happened to me.


4.

I am surprised at how powerfully I don't want to know what's wrong with me. I have been denying that I was epileptic for a decade. I wanted it to go away. I wanted it to be larger than it is as well, something grand. What an irrational thing to think.

I didn't have my second seizure until much later.

I hated the kid I was rooming with for the first semester at Bridgewater College. During the second semester, I moved into a friend's dorm room, on the other side of the campus.

He had already taken the bottom bunk, and I liked top bunks anyway. I hadn't had a seizure in two years, and there wasn't any way for me to know that I usually had seizures in the spring and fall.

I had a dream one night that I had fallen off the bunk, in the dark, and hit the table near the bed with my hip. I didn't know that it wasn't a dream, because I was waking up from a seizure. I woke up in the morning, still on the floor where I had fallen from the top bunk.

I had bruised my hip pretty badly on the table. If I had broken it, I am sure my roommate, who was there, sleeping in his bunk below me when I fell off, wouldn't have done anything any differently.

I asked him some time later why he didn't help me, or what he'd heard. He'd said he thought I was masturbating in the top bunk, because I was shaking the bed and breathing heavily. He said he didn't hear me fall and hit the table. He said he had no idea I was having a seizure, just that he was very embarrassed.

I had told him ahead of time that I was possibly epileptic. That they had told me that I definitely was because of the abnormal EEG.

The neurologist I was going to at the time said that it was extremely probable that I had a seizure that night. It doesn’t tally up with the rest of the seizures that I had in subtle ways. The second seizure gave me plenty of room to both milk the concept of epilepsy for the uniqueness it introduced into my life, and to deny any need for me to take the medicine that my neurologist was prescribing.

Yet I began to wonder if there was something profoundly wrong with me.

My eyes hurt. All the time. Especially my right eye. When I fall asleep at night, it's usually very quickly. I suspect that I don't close my eyes, especially my right eye, when I fall asleep. Other people have confirmed that I sleep with my eyes open. Do I sleep that way because something is wrong with my brain?

I shake my feet all the time. I am hyperactive. I don't mean that I have ADHD, or had to take Ritalin when I was a child. I mean I move around too much. My wife constantly reminds me to stop moving. It worked great when my children were small, because children like to be subtly moved, all the time, it keeps them quiet.

When I was younger, in my teenage years, I may have had some kind of mental problem. I feel like I am the only sane person in a desert of insanity some times now. I wonder if either one of these situations was due to my epilepsy.

I used to cut myself. Epilepsy?

I was sitting on the bleachers, watching the girl's heat in the fourth cross country meet of my eighth grade year, talking to a friend of mine. He was laughing with me about a game show he had made up. Suddenly, the light changed. It became sinister, green, too bright, sickly. I turned to tell him I had been poisoned, but I couldn't see his head, or his left hand, they were missing, and it seemed like I could see right through him. Then, the pain in my temporal lobes gripped me much in the same way that a bald eagle swoops and buries his talons inside a wriggling fish. I vomited on his shoes. He got the coach to call my parents, and the hospital.

My dad talked his way out of the hospital scenario, and took me home. I crawled from the front door to my room, and turned off all the lights, vomiting the entire way, unable to speak except in horribly garbled words. They appeared in my mind perfectly fine, the words. Yet my mouth was tragically, terrifyingly unable to form anything. The pain tore me to shreds while I lay there. The thought of death was not strong enough to pierce through the agony. Nothing was. A pain that left one absolutely no wiser than one was before. That was my first migraine.

If epilepsy is the tipping of a bucket full of electrons across the dense spider web of the brain, what do those tidal waves of electricity that I cannot feel, and have no warning of, have anything at all to do with my debilitating migraines?

I am no hypochondriac. I believe that I am largely healthy and sane. I don't get colds. I don't get headaches. I like to run 10k races. I swam competitively for many years. I thought I was going to be a marine biologist, before my first recorded seizure prevented me from ever learning SCUBA.

Yet every single strange thing my body does, from intensely dizzy spells, to spinning in my bed after a drunken party makes me wonder, is all the shit that's wrong with me related to my epilepsy?

Until writing this, I had no clue that this disease, or state, or whatever it is, pervaded my life like a giant octopus, pushing tentacles into a jar.


The only sinister creeping issue to me, the one that matters, is that no one knows why. My neurologist did not tell me why. It wasn't that he had some compelling reason not to tell me. It wasn't a power trip, to watch me squirm under the strain of coming face to face with the void of our vast lack of knowledge. It's that he was squirming, maybe even harder than me, too.

Yet, standing in front of a chasm of no understanding, I know something. I am certain that the stories are true. I am certain that I have epilepsy, though I have less evidence about being epileptic than I have about the existence of God.

The evidence that I have ever had a seizure amounts to a picture of my brain taken during an MRI, a EEG readout with spiky graphs drawn in red, and a feeling of being dumbed. That something has been taken from me. Something that was mine, some part of my brain that has been wrested from me by the hands of an electric disaster.

Metashorts: goals

It's not clear why anyone tells stories. So any kind of answer sounds like bullshit. But i keep running myself aground on the problem of why I want to do this.

His Halo

By Josh Thomas

His hair is haloed in the sun slanting through the woods. We’ve been quite lost for the last fifteen minutes. He doesn’t quite know how bad lost can be, but he scented that we were going the wrong way. There has to be a word that I said, a shoulder movement that gave my slight fear away.

“Dad,” his high voice was sharp and tight, “Are we gonna find the way back to the car?”

“Of course, son, there’s no way we can be truly lost in a park in the daytime. See the sun through the trees? You know your cardinal points right? Which was is west, Jonah?”

“Well, is it that way?”

“No, it’s the direction towards the sun when it sets.”

“Oh, no, dad, the sun is setting? We’re gonna be out here in the dark?! Oh, no! Dad, dad! We’re gonna be out here in the dark?”

“Whoa, whoa,” I flipped him forward off my shoulders. His legs had gotten so long that he had to bend his knees so he didn’t kick me in the face. Still the flip went smooth. We were well practiced at the little flip off the shoulder move.

I looked him in the eye, while he descended instantaneously into full panic mode. He brought his hands up to his chest like a nervous rodent. He began sobbing uncontrollably.

“Hey, now, stop. Stop it. Dammit son. Stop.” It took me a second to fight down the equally instantaneous wave of anger that wrenched my jaw-muscles taut. And there we were in an ancient cycle. His insanity was fueling my equally insane anger.

And that’s what crushes me until I can be crushed no more. How could I be so angry at someone so close to me, is this what I am finally made of? The smallest parts of me that can be broken down contain this mote of pure fanatical animal mindless hatred. And so it is with you. This is the heart of everything, every bad thing.

How important is metaphysical thinking?

How important is it for you to decide what you believe? Everybody has an answer to this question to varying degrees, and I suspect the majority of folks would answer that it's pretty important to dredge through the options and come up with an explicit metaphysical viewpoint.

As for me, I've been reading some opponents to the concept of developing some kind of metaphysical world view, specifically, that such a world view is universally damaging. See Christopher Hitchen's God is not Great.

Now I haven't read the story in quite some time, and this is not a scholarly piece, but the concept that spending time thinking about "God" whatever that might mean will eventually render something heinous might very well be true (and also a straw man argument). But I'm just not sure that not thinking about the situation is very healthy from a social perspective either.

I mean, consider the situation from a bastardized game theory perspective. In fact this would be an excellent time to draw up a game theory matrix for this. too bad i'm so lazy. nevermind. back to work.

Idea for a story

When I was a christian, I had metaphysical conversations frequently, and I cherished them greatly. Now that I am not, I cherish the absence of those same conversations greatly. Yet, I still have conversations of the same fervent tone, they are just about the physical.
There is numinous wonder to be had in the physical world around us. As long as you don't go into the world searching for that. The nature of the divine has something to do with the chemical makeup of the human brain, and that can be a hugely negative thing, as proven by the world's religions.
Yet there can be a shred of positive there too, a coloration of the interactions you have with the people all around you.

Working on a webcomic

The likelihood that anyone outside the project will see this post is of course, nearly miniscule, since I have not applied SEO prowess to this site until I deem myself readier.
However, in the spirit of open source, I would like to extend an open invitation for anyone who reads my stories to come edit and make commentary on what I'm currently working on. Here's a link.
My Wiki
Thanks,

The Simple Trap

1.

As the ziptie began cutting into Karl’s wrist, he twisted in the backseat. He attempted to break the plastic band quietly. He was grinding his teeth and his skin. The zip tie was the hinges, the teeth, the steel jaws closing down on him.
A wave of sickness crashed over him.

“Darryl, stop the car, I’m going to throw up again,” he moaned. He had been violently ill into a plastic baggy on the floor. He had motion sickness whenever he didn’t drive.
Darryl kept his fists white against the wheel. Darryl had thick leathery hands, with calluses. He had been a gardener before the ice age started, before the bombs, before the crops failed, before the little wars.

“Darryl,” he half moaned, “Stop the car, I’m gonna be sick, Da-.” Karl didn’t make it to the end of his quasi-captor’s name. But it hadn’t been the first time he had begged to vomit on solid ground. He had been begging from the backseat for about an hour.

“Okay, flashlights, batteries, three gallons of gasoline, matches, four lighters, a .22 pistol, five bullets,” Darryl said, running down the inventory of what they had in the car again. Darryl was trying to organize the things they could trade, the things that in his mind would save their lives.

“Darryl, stop doing that, please. You’re going to kill me with that shit. What are you obsessed about what we’ve got with us? Where are we going, Darryl?” Karl’s voice was hoarse. He was having a hard time not thrashing around hysterically in the backseat.

“Karl, it sounds terrible. I’m sorry. It sounds like it hurts, and I very much hope that is not the case. I am trying to figure out what we’re going to do. I have a good idea, but I can’t tell you yet. You know we can not stop though. They are going to catch us before the Virginia border if we do.”

Karl sat up in the seat in the back after some length of silence. He was still trying to find some weak millimeter in the plastic. Trying to think of a way out. Anything.

“Darryl, I am going to piss in your backseat. You can drive the rest of the way to wherever you’re going with the smell of piss clouding your mind. That’s choice A,” Karl said. He was furiously angry; he hadn’t considered saying it beforehand. “Choice B is to cut me loose so I can piss in your water bottle. Choice C is to stop the car. Choice C is clearly the best answer,” Karl said, enunciating every word. He bit his lip, and arched his back against his hands behind him. “I’m just trying to roll with the punches here, okay? But man, I’m losing it back here. I just don’t know. You can’t keep me caged here like this.”

“We’re going to die, Karl. Choice C is death,” said Darryl.

“Is it certain death, man?”

“Well, no, but it lowers our chances of long term survival, don’t you think?” Darryl’s voice sounded like wood.

“There’s something wrong with you, and I’ve got to pee really badly. The ball’s in your court, Darryl. You’re going to have to either cut me loose, or unzip my pants, man,” said Karl, voice tightening with his bladder.

“So, an ultimatum, Karl? All right, we’re gonna stop the car. But we got a little ways to go before we can stop. I know there aren’t going to be that many people on the roads, but it would make sense to pull off on one of the exits. You’ve got to plan ahead,” Darryl glanced back at Karl in the seat, and grey light bounced off his thinning grey hair. He reached up and tapped the side of his head.

“But before we stop, I found this,” he leaned back, reached around the seat, and laid a wallet sized picture of Karl’s dad, Luke, in his lap.
It struck Karl like a blow. Karl recoiled, but he couldn’t pick it up, and it just stared at up at him, smiling a tight, toothy grin. It looked like the picture of a bad man. Maybe it was just Luke’s mustache that made him look like a murderer, like Stalin. He was standing there with Karl’s mom.

“Everyone who wears a mustache like that must be a murderer,” said Karl.

“Not today, Karl. We better just hope he’s dead.”

Karl watched Darryl’s eyes in the rearview. Darryl couldn’t hold his eyes from looking back, checking the rearview, over and over. Karl squirmed in the backseat. .

“I’m pissing now! I’m now pissing in your backseat.” Karl shook the picture off his lap. It fell face down into the plastic baggie.

“No, wait!” yelled Darryl, half over his shoulder, swerving at 95 mph. The car threatened to fish tail. “I’m pulling over now, I’m - now, don’t!”
They scraped along the fence, crunching through the gravel, halfway up Afton Mountain. Karl had not peed himself much, by the time Darryl got around to opening his door. The chilly air hitting his face as he pushed himself out of the door helped him stop the stream.

“Oh Jesus, unzip me, Oh Christ, pull it out, man, you got to.” Karl heard the snick of a knife.

“You die if you run, right? Not by my knife, but hunger,” said Darryl. There was no conviction in his voice. Karl’s hands were free.

The feeling rushed up inside his chest, sparkling in his guts, shivering up his spine. It was glorious. It was like pushing steely jaws back off his neck: the rabbit rises from the snapping metal.

The other side of the road dropped into the Shenandoah Valley.

Karl’s eyes slowly came to focus; he raised his head, while he zipped his pants. He was staring into the gaping maul of death. Where the fog was being burned off by the dim sun, he could make out tiny, distant buildings, collapsing, falling into themselves.
There were many short trees, and a few tall pines, invading like twisted armies, tearing up the perfect lines of farms that used to be. Everything human would be erased within a year. His eyes opened wider. It made him choke, made his eyes burn. He stood there, fog rolling across his feet, and rubbed his bloody wrists, getting it on his hands.

There was no escape from what he was looking at, no way out. All traps, every direction.

“A decade, that’s what science says. We have to survive, just one decade, then, we can set those lines aright,” said Darryl, pointing into the fog.
Karl’s shadow was faint on the ground. He asked the question that was most on his mind,

“Where the fuck are we going man?”

“Somewhere defensible and we’ll start all over again. Just you have to come with me, now. We have to get going. Okay?” said Darryl. “If it’s all right, would you sit in the back?”

“I see,” said Karl, and he pulled the door handle.


2.

Karl watched the signs pass, many still legible, slumped in the back seat. It felt wonderful, after being forced upright, when his wrists were bound. He took off his glasses, and tried to clean them. It failed, he could still see the smudges, blurring things a little, so he pulled his hair back in a curly, short pony tail, and settled. They had driven past Charleston, down in its long valley, to a sign that said Amma and Clio. They drove around a huge pot hole right in the middle of the exit ramp.

“It hasn’t gotten worse than the last time I was here. That was four years ago, before the war,” Darryl said, shaking his head.

“Not surprising. This is West Virginia,” said Karl.

“The last time I drove down these back roads, my wife and children were alive. It was just after Scott and his wife Lena had their third daughter.”

“Scott?” said Karl.

“Scott is my former brother in law. He’s got guns,” Darryl said, glancing in the rearview at Karl. “I have a plan, Karl. I’ve got a couple plans. And now we’re here. So, can you help me? I understand that you might have some reasons not to help me. I know what happened at the Greenhouse was tougher for you than perhaps anyone. I didn’t know what else to do. Everything was out of control. But I’m gonna need you. We’re gonna have to cooperate. God, I’m sorry, Karl.”

Karl took a deep breath, his mouth open for a long moment, but then he closed his mouth, crushing molars together. Chemicals. They were following the tiny winding gravel along a creek. Karl saw a trailer in the distance.

“Where’d you get that picture?” Karl asked suddenly.
Darryl flipped down the visor, and pointed. This had been one of Luke’s cars. Suddenly the car was crushing Karl.

Darryl pulled the car into a gravel patch next to the trailer, and got out of the car. Karl wished he was back in college, sitting in a lecture hall, sipping a bottle of water. He would have graduated in the fall semester. That was a year ago. More. This was now August. He opened his door. It was cold under the trees.

Standing in the short driveway, Darryl expected Scott, his dead wife’s brother, to sort of jump out of the trailer. Their car had crunched into the driveway, surely enough noise to alert these backwoods boys that somebody had arrived unannounced. But there was no welcome wagon. Karl saw the worry written all over Darryl’s face.

Karl watched Darryl ring the doorbell. A woman opened the door. She was wearing an old tee-shirt that said “SCREW THE YANKEES”, and sweatpants, but she was the most beautiful thing Karl could remember ever seeing. She was big, tall, and Scandinavian. She had freckles, and blond curly hair, like a halo, cropped short along her jaw line.

“Oh, fuckin’ Christ,” she said, then leaned back inside the house, and shouted for Scott.

“Lena,” said Darryl. He stuck his hand out. She looked at it.

“Look, I’m not sure it would be real good for y’all to stay here. I mean, I’m not sure why you’d want to,” he said. His wry smile rose, then faded.

They were sitting around a little table in the single-wide trailer. Scott was pushing his chair back, raising up the front of the seat, flexing his legs, his shaved scalp pressing against the wall.

Karl rubbed the red welts on his wrists. The movement drew Scott’s eyes.

“And what the fuck happened to him,” said Scott, nodding his head towards Karl.
Karl looked at Darryl. Darryl looked at Karl. A long silence filled the room.

“Well, he bound my wrists with a ziptie,” said Karl.

More silence.

“Ya’ll can’t stay here. I don’t know what’s been going down, why you’re here, nothing. I can’t see why you think I’d let you. Damn, it’s just arrogant for you to come here bringing your bad shit riding up behind you,” said Scott.

“Look, Scott, we can provide protection and food. We got something you need. We got nothing following us. And I got something better even than that if you would let us stay a night here. I’m going to buy a night here with you with something you want,” said Darryl, wringing his hands under the table.

“What could you have that I want?” asked Scott.

“I’ve got a dime-bag for you if you let us sleep here. Let us talk to you. Let us in. A whole dime-bag,” said Darryl.

“Let me see it,” Scott said, narrowing his eyes.

“No. Let us stay. I give it to you in the morning,” said Darryl.

“I can’t believe you smoke,” said Scott, shaking his head.

“Scott, I never touch the stuff. But it trades for a lot these days, and… Let us stay. That’s all I’m asking,” Darryl said. At the end, his voice wavered just a hair.
Karl glanced at Scott, and thought he saw the dawn of a smirk.

“You must think I’m a real son of a bitch. Man, I’m not really gonna turn you out to the bears. I never really liked you, but you’re family, more or less, yeah?” said Scott, leaning forward, smiling like a dog. “But let me tell you what. You bring down any kind of trouble, something bad coming after you, whatever you’re traveling this far for, and I’ll field dress you, then turn you over to whoever is interested. You got me?” Scott laughed.

“You got nothing to worry about, just gain. I got a little plan I want to let you in on. That’s why I came here. I knew this would be the only place where my little plan might have a chance of working,” said Darryl. He was a little giddy with relief.

Karl was wondering what Darryl had up his sleeves. He was beginning to wonder if Darryl intended to set up another grow house like the one they had on the outskirts of Richmond. The thought made Karl’s mouth clench even harder. An annotated list of why it wasn’t going to work quickly compiled in his mind. But he didn’t say any of that. He just said, “I’m Karl, by the way,” and Scott crushed his hand, nodding his Mr. Clean skull.

“Scott, we’ve been up for about 24 hours. I am in need of some sleep, badly. Would you let us sleep here?”

“Course man. But the kids have the only spare room in the house. You guys won’t mind sleeping on the floor in here would you?”

“No, no, that sounds wonderful.”

“Hey, Lena, would you get out the old sleeping bags?” said Scott.

A few minutes later, Lena laid two ancient sleeping bags on the floor in the middle of the living room. Heinous smell expanded in the room. Darryl looked up at Karl, shrugged his shoulders, and grabbed one.


3.

They slept through the next morning. There was no breakfast waiting for him when Karl rolled himself off the couch, and pulled his hoodie back on. He felt horrible.
Scott clanged through the front door, having heard Karl get up and yawn.

"Morning sunshine," he said.

Karl looked up at him through his internal morning fog with squinty eyes.

“Look,” said Darryl, still lying on his sleeping bag, “There was one thing especially I was wondering about. You still got any guns? Because you don’t got enough trigger fingers here. The last time I was up, you had six semi automatic weapons or more. You didn’t sell them all did you?”

"Christ, man, where you just asleep?" said Scott.

"No, I've been awake for some time now. I figured I would take the time to think things through. And the gun question came to mind. I meant to ask you last night."

“I got them guns still, man. In fact, if Lena will get off her ass for a second, I’d show you where they were. You might need ‘em sooner than you think, and you’re right, I got more guns than bodies,” Scott said, moving towards the couch.

Lena shifted off the couch, and Scott laid his hand on one end of the back of the couch. “Mind giving me a hand,” he said.

Karl was standing, wondering whether they had any coffee. Vain hope. Scott was motioning him to help, so he moved to the other side, and said, “What exactly you want me to do? Sliding it forward?”

Scott demonstrated that he was going to tilt the couch forward. When they lifted it off the ground, Karl realized the front legs where hinged to the floor, and the pea green carpet had been torn out from underneath the couch. Scott knelt stiffly, and stuck a stubby finger in hole, and opened a door in the plywood. Scott pulled out guns, stacking them against the underside of his couch. Karl stood there, staring at the fluffy little bags of spider eggs attached to the corners of the underside of the couch, watching the armory pile grow.

“So which one you want, man?” asked Scott. He was looking over his shoulder at Karl.

“Which one is easy to use?” asked Karl, keeping the hesitation out of his voice.

“Well, none of ‘em really. It doesn’t really matter, just pick what looks nice.”

“I don’t know. I’m choosing the gun that’s gonna kill me. I don’t know.” Karl said.

“Pistol then? May I cordially recommend the Sig Sauer 9 millimeter, compact edition?” Scott’s scorn rang off the plywood.

As Scott handed Karl the gun from the pile, he had a hard time moving his hand to accept it. He felt like it was going to lunge and bite him. He composed himself, and wrapped his hand smoothly around the grip.

“Sure, man, sure. Got an extra clip?” said Karl.

“In case of extra bad guys?” said Scott.

“All right, never mind. It’s cool.”

“Just ribbing ya. They’re over in my bedroom, with all the ammunition, if I can find the goddamn lock.”

“You got a lot of experience shootin’ folks?” Scott was looking at Darryl.

“No, not really,” said Darryl.

“Well, that’s a shame, could use some old vet or something.”

“Nope, I was a gardener, not a fighter,” Darryl said.

“But you have seen some fighting, sure, right?”

“Well, yeah, I guess,” said Darryl. Bright florescent light washed over his face. His skin looked translucent, pockmarked.

“I saw him shoot a man once,” said Karl. He watched Darryl out of the corner of his eye. Darryl’s constantly anxious look didn’t change a bit.

“Awesome. Did he kill him?”

“Hell no,” spit Karl. He could see the muscles in Darryl’s jaw clench. Success.


4.

“Lunch is ready, if you like canned pork and beans,” said Scott. He sat down at the table, and it shifted under his weight.

“That’s good. Karl, you like pork and beans?” asked Darryl.

“I’ve gotten to know them,” said Karl. He tried control his little frown.
Karl and Darryl followed Scott over to the little table. Karl shoved his 9mm gingerly into his pants. It fell out of his jeans as soon as he sat down at the table. It clattered across the floor, spinning a little before coming to a silent stop. Every fiber of interest in the room was suddenly fused to the black plastic and metal, still as a painting on the floor.

In the silence, Karl heard Scott’s children playing in a back room. One of them screaming at another, fighting over a toy. Fuck, they had kids.

Suddenly Lena got up. She uttered a quick laugh.
Karl watched her reach into the cupboard, while studying the wood lines in the table top. While her shirt pulled up over her belly, he removed the gun from the floor and placed in on the table.

Scott looked at it, shaking his head, smiling at Karl. Lena pulled two cans out of the cupboard.

“Scott, I’ve got a little deal for you,” Darryl said, when Lena put a plate in front of him, and then one in front of Scott, “What if I said we can set you up with crops man, real crops. And I mean edible stuff, not just weed.”

“Ain’t no crops gonna grow in West Virginia man, its way too cold. First frost, and most plants die, man.”

“That’s why we are going to grow all kinds of varieties underground, in a series of cellars. We’ve done it before. We know what we’re doing. We just have to get it started somewhere. What do you think about that?”

“Man, you are just full of ideas aren’t you. Thanks for that too. That’s what we needed, around here, exactly what will help us survive. Some more fuckin’ ideas. Well, what’s the risk, man? I mean besides you,” said Scott.

Darryl shifted in his seat. “There’s no real risk. Much less risk than if we were planting outside. We can control the climate easily underground.”

“I’m listening. There gotta be some downside. There’s always a downside,” Scott said, leaning forward intently.

“Well, if you, if you feed us up front. The deal would be that you feed us while we tend the crops, then you get a full third of the share, until we leave. After that, you get to keep what’s there. I’ll teach you how to keep this whole thing moving right along before we go, if you still want us to vacate after we get the ball rolling,” said Darryl.

“For what it’s worth, I think that sounds like a pretty good idea, I mean, somethin’ like that might actually have a chance of workin’.” Lena said.

“Well, I’ll take that into account, but I still gotta think this all through. We gotta do whatever’s the best for the family and all,” Scott said.

“Yeah, but this could mean you wouldn’t have to spend most of the fall sitting beside deer trail. You could even get to know the kids or something,” said Lena.

“I said I’d think about it.”

“You give us three months, the tools to excavate some cellars, and we get you sustainable crops.” Darryl paused to think for a split second. “Most plants take a long time to grow. Except tomatoes. In the right heating conditions, they are relatively fast. Do you like fresh tomatoes?”

“Hell yeah I do,” said Scott. The words came out clear despite a mouthful of the gooey hotdog.

Karl pondered Darryl’s rhetorical sleight of hand. They might be staying with Scott for a while after all. There was no better place Karl could think to go on the fallow planet. He noticed that his hand was resting on the gun on the table. And it was shaking a little. He withdrew it under the table, at a moment when everyone was paying attention to food.

“Okay then, imagine that. You feed us for two months, and then everyone feasts,” said Darryl.

“Two months?”

“We’ll help feed ourselves, but we gotta dig somewhere around here. You got a springhouse or something by the creek.”

“In fact, we do,” said Scott, with a small smile, “In fact, we do.”

5.

After lunch was over, the plastic plates scraped off and cleaned, and returned to their plastic bag, Scott led Darryl and Karl down to the springhouse. They walked down across the browning yard, towards the creek. They crossed the road, and then down the bank by the creek that ran down the length of the road.

Karl saw that the clasp on the door was twisted and dented. Darryl put his hand on the door, and pushed, but found that it swung outward. He opened the door, and Karl saw three steps down, into deep black.

The doorjamb seemed to bend a little to Karl. Must be the dim sun, the steel clouds, he thought. He looked up at the sky, at the shiny clouds. No sun for more than a year.

“Just walk down in there. With the door open, you can see well enough,” said Scott.
But Karl didn’t follow Darryl down into the spring house; he stood in front of it, clenching his jaws. He swallowed a rubber ball in his throat. There was enough room for the two of them, among the shelf – lined walls. Shit.

“Can we pull the shelves out of the back wall?” Darryl shouted out at Scott.

“Yeah, sure man. Sure ain’t anything down here worth preserving at this point.”

“I can’t believe nobody’s tried to raid this yet,” Karl said, looking right at the twisted latch.

Scott said, “What? Well, they did. I should have slept out here every night. You’d have seen the broken glass on the floor, if you were in there.” He gestured towards the door with his forefinger, and contempt.

Karl picked it up like a magnet, and took a step towards the door. Then he stopped again. Darryl rustled beyond the door like a fox in leaves.

“You need me down there?”

“Yes, Karl. Come down here for a second, help me get this shelf,” said Darryl.

“All right, well, I’m going to go see if there’s anything in the trap line. Would’ve gone out a lot earlier, but then again, y’all came along,” said Scott. He turned to walk back across the road to the trailer.

Karl put his hand up against the doorjamb, and looked down into the mouth of the cellar.

6.

“So how much did you get done today?” said Scott, “I got three rabbits, don’t know how those bastards survive out there. Guess the fuckin’ animals are all doing a little better without us.” He shook his head.

They were all sitting in the living room, a few steps away from the kitchen. An old TV sat on a lazy-susan in the corner, blank, a mirror. Karl could see himself in there. He looked terrible. Suddenly pictures of Australian rabbits with myxomatosis slid through his mind.

“Not enough. We’re figuring we can probably grow enough food for a year with about 6 to 10 acres underground,” said Darryl. He was staring at his hand, doing some last minute calculation.

“Jesus Christ, man. How you planning on doing that? That’s like the whole underside of our yard,” said Scott.

“We’re going to be careful. I mean we can do this a little at a time. All we need right now is about quadruple what you got in the little cellar,” said Darryl. He caught Lena staring at the dirt caked on the bottom of his boots. “Oh, I’m very sorry, Lena.” He took them off, and put them out side. Then he opened it again, and put them inside. Scott chuckled.

“We were talking about doing it in chambers. And we’re going to need timbers to shore the thing up as we go along. We’ve got the shelf material,” Karl said. A sense of dread had built in him over the last five hours of digging. He didn’t know if they were going to be able to do this after all. The logistics, this tightening in his throat, the thread of raw skin around his wrist that was like a live strong bracelet, it was all wrong.

“What we need to do by tonight is set up some test plants, set up a bunch of different varieties, and let them settle. Of course that won’t be a real big temptation to anybody, but we were thinking we should set up some kind of watch,” said Darryl.

“We?” said Karl, snapping his head up, “I mean, shit I have no idea what’s going on here. Why don’t you let me in on these things before you just tell us all what we’re going to do.” He saw himself standing in front of the dark door. The thought was repellant. He shivered, finally, hard.

“Look, I’m just telling you, we’ve got to set up these plants,” Darryl looked at him funny. “If we do that, someone is going to have to guard them tonight. There are thieves who already know where this godforsaken place is –“
Karl interjected, “It’s not like whoever took the first preserves plan on coming back for seconds, it’s not like preserves grow.”

“So you’re willing to take the risk of losing most of our seeds?” Darryl’s voice was rising, “Did you think about that, Karl? Karl, what’s going on with you? Do you even know where the seeds are? No you don’t, do you, you ungrateful –“

“Whoa there boys!” Scott said way too loudly. It startled Darryl to silence. “We ain’t gonna do that shit. That shit don’t help nobody. I mean, I’ll throw my weight around. This is my house, and I ain’t having none of that. We’re gonna have some semblance of order, or ya’ll gonna get the hell out.”

“Don’t you think you’re overreacting a little bit, hon?” said Lena, she was sitting in a la-z-boy, facing the blank TV.

“No, no, it’s cool,” said Karl, “It’s cool man, we weren’t really arguing.”

“All right, I’m just warning you, we gonna nip that shit in the bud. I don’t know where you came from, or what kind of history you brought with you, but you can leave that history at the door, or at least don’t show me none,” explained Scott. He had his hands on his thighs, gripping them as if he was about to spring up.

“All right, look, Darryl, you gonna take the first watch? Are we gonna do it by night, or shift?” said Karl, pretending to relax. He shifted his shoulders around.

“I think we should do it by shift, Karl,” said Darryl, he was rubbing the back of his neck, looking any way but Karl’s, “And I’m gonna need to be planting the samples. You know I have more experience Karl, and this is just too important. And I don’t think we should ask Scott into the rotation, at least not yet.”
Karl looked up at Darryl, an intense little smile chiseled on his face. He nodded his head a little.

“Well, what about me?” asked Lena.

“You really think you can get across the yard with a bunch of gun toting hungry folk shooting at you?” said Darryl.

“You must not know my wife,” mumbled Scott, smiling.

“Well, I think I can probably do it as well as you or Karl,” said Lena, smiling, “Scott on the other hand? Well, he’s a bad motherfucker.” Karl laughed loudly. Everyone turned to look at him.

“So okay… Okay, you’ll relieve Karl. You’ll get in there, change with him around 11:00 tonight. I think Karl should take the first samples we can get planted with him, as soon as possible. What do you think, Scott?”

“I think we should give him a rifle to go with that nine,” said Scott, “That is, if we think he can handle it.”

“Oh, and one last thing. I saw the potbellied stove in your neighbor’s yard. That would, um, be perfect for getting that climate right for tomatoes,” said Darryl.

“I guess that’s what you were widening the door for earlier. Great,” said Karl, “just great.”

7.


The only light falling on Karl’s face was the skull glow from the stove. They had managed to haul it all the way from the neighbors shed to the spring house. They slid it across the whole yard, opening two long scars in the grass, like a giant arrow to the cellar. Karl imagined it showing up on satellite imagery, a television show. God he missed theatres, like a missing tooth. He noticed he was wringing his hands. He put them down beside him.

There were a few of the samples sitting in the dirt beside him that Darryl had managed to toss in the car, back at the greenhouse, that were already germinated. It seemed to Karl as if the little tendrils were crawling towards him in the wavering orange light. It was already too warm. He peeled off his coat.

Jagged chills ran down his spine, over and over again, at ever flicker, every scraping rustle through the forest around him. He had never felt so outside of the orbit of humanity in his life. It was as if he was going to die of loneliness, of the feeling of being so ultimately unfamiliar. He thought of cosmonauts, set adrift; he thought of angry animals, seeking his prey-smell, just outside the door. He thought of chicken, and of sex.
And then, he thought of his father, and the pool of blood he had been laying in, when he saw him last.

He’d done well so far, keeping that image suppressed. He had closed the door in his mind every time it threatened to surface in the car. Keeping it back was damming a lake. The whole scene flooded his mind, in surprising detail, vibrant, as if to make up for the dark in this hole he was buried in.

Karl let the whole scenario wash over him, like a tepid bath.

They had a good thing going; the only good thing among the waste after the world began to cool precipitously. Luke had noticed some of Darryl’s produce on the barter market that had sprung up after the wars.

It was that simple. Luke had connections with everybody, as a bartender. He was a market facilitator after the wars, getting the right thing for the right person, for a price.
The food Darryl had been growing in the old greenhouse was perfect. Plus Darryl hated leaving the place. He had real trouble with any people. The apocalypse was part of it, but Karl suspected epic disaster wasn’t the sole cause. Lucky Luke; otherwise, Darryl might have traded it through other means.

And then somebody had the bright idea to get Karl involved. Luke wanted to make sure his cash cow, Darryl, was properly under his power. What better way than to send the son. As soon as he got involved, essentially as Darryl’s gopher, he saw what the real opportunity was.

Karl had almost left his experiments die in the biology lab at the Richmond college, and the ones at his house had long since become something less than scientific. But there were a few samples of the best strain of cannabis sativa that he had ever grown left over, still alive in a fish tank, a few stalks and a five year old gecko that should have been dead. Years ago, he started growing strains, and originally, he had strongly disliked the taste. It had grown on him. He still liked to think of himself as the Pot-leaf Mendel.

They started to grow on Karl’s insistence. It made sense to him. The country had been addicted to psychological drugs at the dawn of Armageddon. What better way to supply that need than with a little ganj, right? Little galang goes a long way when you’re getting paid with gasoline, eh? He remember saying those words to his dad, dismissing the arguments about what the rival militias might do to get a hold on that kind of production.
And his father, he had been right and wrong. Darryl called him down to the greenhouse, to deliver 12 pounds. The biggest haul they’d ever had. But there was no 12 pounds. Darryl shot Luke in the belly with an ancient .22 pistol. Then he leaned over and apologized. Karl saw it play over and over, Darryl leaning over, pained look, the thread of saliva.

Then the guys walked in, all wearing the stinking catholic rosaries. It sort of sunk in. Darryl had betrayed Luke to the Rosaries. And of course, the Rosaries took the opportunity to kill both Luke and Darryl off.

That’s what all the shooting was for. By a fluke, Darryl was in the only corner that was distant from a door. Darryl was shouting something, and then Karl was tackled to the floor, and his hands bound behind his back with a ziptie. Darryl held him to the floor with his knee.

It had been a simple double cross. Why hadn’t Darryl missed that in all his overwrought planning? Why couldn’t he have seen it coming?
Karl wondered what time it was.

He lifted his head up before he had registered any sound. Then he heard the cars roll up like all Armageddon. It wasn’t that they were driving fast. It was that they hadn’t seen cars the whole way up to West Virginia. They were still miles away, when he heard the first crunching of gravel beneath tires. A list of names flew through his mind, a list of the possibilities, some options, a bit of psychology. He realized that at some point, he’d picked up the thirty-ought-six, and he was gripping it as if to keep the crunching tires away by dint of hand pressure alone.

It struck him as a true indication of his own will. Suddenly, he knew that he did not want the cars to come, no matter what. He knew he was going to burst out the doors, and attempt to shoot at the tires, and the engines, but not the windshields. Could his father be alive?

Karl stood up, and pressed his shoulder to the door. He had to pee, suddenly. The cars were so far away. He wondered if he could make it to the house without them seeing him. Was that the right course of action? What time was it? Would Lena be walking across the yard, coming to relieve him? He cracked the door a hair, and attempted to look down the road. He was looking into flat black, like a new blackboard.

Then he saw headlight reflecting, bouncing along from a great distance away. But he had gravely misjudged just how far they were. He wondered if the rest of the people could hear the cars too. It was very possible that they could not, he thought. That was why they needed him.

Karl was caught in the headlights of the Jeep and the CRV when they came crashing into the Scott’s clearing, his little hilltop. He couldn’t see any of the people in the car, but he dove out of the way, to the left, rolling down a few feet towards the creek.
He tried not to breathe as the jeep in front pulled an e-brake. The car ground to a halt in the gravel, not a dozen feet away. He picked up a handful of rocks and threw it into the trees behind him, as three men leapt out of the jeep, and another two with a young woman in the Subaru. He saw them turned their heads. He realized it had been a terrible idea.

One of the rocks hit a tree, but the others landed in leaves, nearly noiselessly. He imagined the sound as a glowing arrow pointing back to his location on the sod. They had certainly seen him regardless. The men turned on their flashlights, beams like railroad ties of light, bludgeoning the darkness.

A few moments later, a bent silhouette clambered out of the jeep into the grass.
Hs face was pressed against the wet, cold grass. He had left his coat inside the cellar, and the cold had already begun feeling up his bone marrow. He stayed rigid, knowing they’d shoot him. They’d shoot him over and over. In the day light, he’d be able to see them, they were so close. He wrestled with the urge to find out whether the man struggling to stand up was his dad. Suddenly, a flash light beam spotlighted him. Problem solved.

“Hey, hey! Who the fuck are you? Are you okay?” asked his dad, Luke. A wave of relief washed over him. He was surprised. His voice sounded exhausted.

“It’s me dad. It’s Karl.” He rose to his feet.
Someone turned on the trailer floodlight. Karl was blinded for a few seconds. He shielded his useless eyes with his wet sleeve.

“Stop right there, freeze…you bastard,” said his dad.

“You know, that’s a funny thing for you to say,” said Karl. There was a hint of laughter in his voice. He lowered his hand. He notice his father was clutching his stomach. He looked terribly old haloed in the bright light.

“You had me killed. I mean bastard when I say it. I got something for you. Don’t fucking move, son.” Luke spit a bullet into his hand. He held it up. The small piece of brass and lead glimmered in the light. “This is yours, son, take it back.” He snapped the bullet at his son. The bullet hit Karl in the hand. He grabbed his right hand with his left, cursing and spitting. Two or three of his Dad’s men were yelling for him to freeze.

He felt like the damn thing had burst a blood vessel, one of the big ones in the back of his hand. It occurred to him, that relatively speaking that must have been a lucky shot. He wondered for a brief second just how much slower the bullet was when it hit his hand, than when it lodged wherever his father had retrieved it from.

“You might as well have pulled the trigger yourself,” said Luke. It sounded like he was wincing from the effort. “Hit me in the stomach. Sure Darryl thought he got me back there at the greenhouse. Sure he thought the Rosaries would have let him stay there. But they didn’t. They been indebted to me since two weeks after the apocalypse,” Luke had both hands over his belly, as if holding his organs in place. His voice was getting weaker, but he continued. Karl noticed that Luke’s entourage were all wearing rosaries except for the woman.

“Did you know that? No, you didn’t. He thought he was betraying me for whatever fucking honorable reasons, and you fucking helped him every step of the way.” Luke walked over to his son, and slapped him across the face. Karl fell on the ground, a trickle of blood where his dad had opened up his eyebrow a little. It shocked Karl, with the finality: it seemed like it might be the last that the big man might have in him.
One of Luke’s men had to wrap his arm around Luke’s ribcage to keep the old man from falling. The rain was already mixing with the blood, getting it all over Karl’s face. “I’m not going to fucking kill you, but I’m putting a bullet in Darryl’s face. Where is he?”
Karl didn’t respond.

“Look, Karl. We’ve had our problems, but” said Luke. He swallowed. He pushed the man holding him up away. “I didn’t want it to be like this though. You’re my son. I love you. I just can’t let this go down. You betrayed me. Now you gotta earn the right to be my son again.”

Karl laid there on the ground for a second. Darryl had bound him up, in the back seat of the car, didn’t stop to let him be carsick, and that’s not even considering the thousand indignities he’d put Karl through when they were establishing the greenhouse. His eyebrow throbbed.

“Fuck you old man,” said Karl, who was crying, “You don’t know, but I had nothing to do with any of this. I can’t seem to escape this shit though. You might as well just fucking shoot me.”

Luke’s old face cracked into a grin, slowly. It grew like plants in a dark cellar. “You know I’m gonna shoot you, all familial sentiment aside? Why did you have to,” he shot Karl in the arm, “say something like that.”

Karl screamed into the grass and mud, and rivulets of rain moving towards the creek. He screamed like a rabbit in a steel trap, high, animal, ululating. It echoed like it was bouncing down every declivity within fifty miles, repeating, perfectly harmonizing with the continuing original. It didn’t sound like it was coming from where Karl was lying on the ground, Luke standing over him, haloed in flashlights.

He could feel his mind shutter into shock. He heard his father turn, and mumble something to one of the other men. Someone tried to pick him up. He felt bones shift. He screamed in such a way that the man let him lie there.

As soon as they got him off the ground, the shattered arm hanging there, Darryl kicked open the front door. But nobody was standing in the light from inside. Suddenly a twelve gauge belched from the bottom right corner of the door.

Three of the men had guns in their hands, and they ducked behind the jeep. Karl could see where they were shooting because of the holes that opened up near the door. There was no chance that Darryl had survived the first volley. It looked like at least five bullets would have passed through where he must have been lying on the floor to shoot through the door like that.

Silence descended into the little valley. One of the men opened up hatch of the jeep. Karl fell onto the ground, writing in a pool of agony. Two of the men picked him up and roughly tossed him onto the floor. He could smell the stink of their rosaries.

Automatic Kalashnikov fire perforated the noise of the rain. Both men were blown off their feet. Karl tried to lift his head. An odd clearness descended on him. Philosophy and chemicals. He couldn’t move. He tried hard to breath calmly. He wanted to see who was dead, where Scott was shooting from.

Everything was silent. Burned gunpowder bent up his nostrils. And then it stopped.

8.

It was pretty clear to him that he had lost a lot of blood. He knew for certain he was dying, and kept saying so over and over again. Lena kept telling him otherwise. He was lying in Scott’s bed. The bed smelled like ancient old spice. He was alive nonetheless. Nobody else in the whole world, he had seen the bodies. Just Lena, Lena’s children and him.

“I’m out,” he thought, and though he couldn’t smile, the thought crossed his mind.