Metafictional Story

Day 14

I started keeping track of the days. Kind of arbitrary, really. Fourteen days ago I decided I’d do it. We’ll see how long I keep it up. It gets dark early now (how cliché is that?). I don’t know why I’m writing this now. They say we write stories to make sense of things. Maybe that’s why I’m doing this. Because it really doesn’t make any sense. It’s not from lack of time to mull it over, either. Time’s been ample. I’ve had a lot of it to think about this, and it makes even less sense the more I do. Maybe that’s why my husband’s given up thinking about it.

He’s sitting in a shredded armchair we pulled from a Macy’s. He’s working on Vanity Fair, going backwards—chronologically. Next it's The New Yorker. And after that, something else. He’s so meticulous about how he turns the page. He starts with his thumb and middle finger at the corner and works his way down. He hates it when I make fun of him for it, but it’s like watching a metronome. It’s how he passes the time.

See, he falls into the camp of people for whom passing the time has grown into a kind of currency. After trading for food and clean water its getting something to read. He was lucky to get The New Yorkers. We had heard they were at the Arcadia library, and we managed to hike down there (a whole ‘nother story), only to find the whole place empty, they hadn’t even left a single back issue of the Journal of Pediatrics (though I guess everything’s a back issue now). It just goes to show how desperate everyone is to find something to do. It was a long walk back.

Anyways the sun’s getting close to the horizon, and I’m skirting around the whole issue. There’s still too much interference for anything electronic to work. Not that I’m some kind of snob or something, don’t get me wrong I watched plenty of TV in my day (Law & Order was my favorite) and I’d watch some more if any of them would work. Or I’d even settle for old DVDs. But I can’t. Big deal. Anyways, it’s not like we’re lacking any entertainment. Even if nothing new’s being written, he has those back issues of The New Yorker ad infinitum, and there’s enough books, magazines, and old newspapers circulating around for anyone to spend a lifetime absorbing. And for people like my husband, that’s enough.

For others … ? Well I don’t really need to explain that’s it the end of the world. I mean after the end, really. And we’ve all seen a movie or read a book or whatever about the whole issue. There’s not anything more to be said about it. You probably have a better idea of what’s going on in the world around me from watching The Day After Tomorrow or Dr Strangelove or seeing Endgame or whatever. What do I have to add to that? I couldn’t even tell you what happened. Let alone make a story out of it. But that’s why I’m here, and that’s what I’m doing (though pretty soon there are going to be children who won’t know what I’m talking about when I say those things? Is that what I’m going to have to do, explain old movies and books to them to try and make sense of what’s happened to the world?).

For others it’s about rebuilding what’s lost. That’s the second camp. They’ve been trying to repopulate the public services and there’s been a massive collection of green backs (they can’t print any new ones) and they’re trying to reinstitute the dollar. Having an economy and a sense of purpose would bring us out of this malaise. At least that’s what they’re telling us. It has been nice having someone take away the garbage. Maybe they could do something about the rats…

And that would be the third camp (if we’re going to do this numerically?). Not the rats themselves—even though at this point they probly outnumber us, they come out in roaming mobs at night, picking through the vacants—but the people who have turned into rats, or maybe always were and finally have had the chance to fully realize themselves. Just yesterday one of them, I’ll call him Whiskers, since that’s the simile anyways, or metaphor, came in waving a tire iron around like some phallic symbol of his impotence and demanded that my husband hand over his copy of The Half Blood Prince. Word must have gotten around that we had it, and this guy had gotten up to Order of the Phoenix and couldn’t let go of Hogwarts. On top of that he demanded every can of creamed corn I had been saving. I gave him one of them. Real good. Right in his real phallic symbol.

He was one of the exceptions, an intellectual. Most of them just go after the food (or me). And there are more camps. More divisions of people. But why go into all of them? This isn’t helping. So it’s shitty and everyone deals with it through some preprogrammed personality trait. How enlightening. Maybe that’s the problem, anyways. We ran out of things to say and think and do and so we annihilated ourselves. A massive conspiracy about boredom. …that created boredom. God, this is just getting stupider. Why am I still writing?

Maybe I should go back to my childhood. A good memory. I remember this time I was in a Safeway with my mom, she was trying to cook for a party and she was on the phone with my dad, and she was mad because he hadn’t told her one of the guests was a vegan (“Vegan, what the hell do they eat?”), aand out of the corner of my eye, I saw a man slip a Milky Way into his pocket. I was three and therefore very short, and I was looking through a gap in one of the shelves. i never saw the man’s face, but when we got to the register I tried to tell her about it, and she was trying to shush me, because I guess I was telling the story wrong, and th;e store manager made us take off our coats and empty out all of our pockets and my mom had t o dump out everything in her purse and she was so embarrassed and I didn’t say a word the whole car ride hom e. It’s fun ny because yea rs later, I i sa w a scene in a movie that wes jst like that . oOr maybe i Was thinking abou t the m ov ie.

Its ‘ get ting toO d aark, I can’ t see what i’M writin g. m Ore tommoro