The Fires of Orc

…I think the world will come to an end

amid the general applause from all the wits

who believe that it is a joke.

Søren Kierkegaard

Fifty years ago fire tore through the cities of the world – first one, then another, until the night sky glowed ghastly and the day came half-dead across a scorched globe. All that Civilization had wrought in the span of eons was consumed in a day and the quarter of us who survived, hidden away from the cities in the wide world where the fire did not come, resumed our lives desperately, man against man, with fiendish urgency, scratching at the parched earth to purchase another day.

Today there are children and parents and grandparents who never knew the world before the fires. Among the people of the world today I am a curiosity, a relic, a mythical being whose mind contains the last real impressions of a world undreamed by the new rank of men.

It’s another morning and I’m awake.

“Coffee’s on,” chirps The Landlord on yet another day. The yellow light of morning fills the musty space of the Friendship Inn. Suspended dust from long-neglected chores blurs outlines of mismatched furnishings and assorted clutter. I take my customary place at the kitchen counter. “Coffee’s on,” he reminds me.

How I loathe The Landlord with his whiskered jowls and sallow skin, the gap-toothed monger, purveyor of hovels to junkies, thieves, mendicants and aged wrecks like me. Of the countless items in the Friendship Inn that are neither friendly nor worth the price of a stay, The Landlord is the most insistently irksome.

“Coffee’s on,” he tweets again, to Helena, the drag queen drug dealer. I believe his actual name is Enrique, but what’s in a name? A nickel bag from any peddler would kill as sickly.

“Coffee’s on,” says The Landlord one-by-one to the wino, the purse snatcher, the ditch digger, the dock worker, bland humanity all in a row, descending like husks of men a twisting, creaking staircase.

How he offends me, this affable twit of a man, his very affability a vanity. The shuffling, snorting, flatulent little beast is quite likely the most repulsive man I have ever known. A loathsome, esurient little troll is The Landlord. May he choke on his bitter coffee.

He sells me bread and board for what scraps I earn teaching simpletons to read. If I weren’t here, I’d be at the New Life Church, on a mat, tended to by well-meaning oafs. That’s coming soon enough. There’s little purpose left for what I, a living artifact, can impart. Day by day there’s less and less worth reading about and fewer sincere optimists to write about it.

But perhaps not at the church. Sometimes, at night, I can almost see it. It comes and right soon. I won’t long survive this place. Surely this is how it ends. In the nadir of my leasehold on misused life lent me by time and twisted fortune, I will dwell amid the palsied and perverted, the manifold miscreants of my kind, until death takes me, wide-eyed and destitute, screaming silently in a twelve-room flophouse. But at least the coffee’s on.

In the littered kitchen a scrawny cat hunches it back, hacking in a corner, a phlegmy imp, one-eyed and wasting.

Outdoors the scene is somewhat worse. A coat of night-born soot coats stoops and gutters and the shuffle of thick-soled boots kicking grey papers, blown in skirls of dry wind, the constant bombardment of a blasted earth. It has been this way since the fires. So few of us are left who knew the world before. Months pass without my seeing in another’s eyes the disgust that dulls mine, the disgust of long life and haunting memory. Virtually no one in the grey of our time knew the green world or the blue. These half-people can’t recall the burst of spring or the reddening of Old October. They can’t know the tragedy of now since they never knew the world before.

Fifty years, half-a-century, two-thirds of my life ago. When it happened we were already nearly fifty years past Orwell’s presaged age of tyranny, but there was no Big Brother. Neither were there shadowy minions, no Ministry of Truth, no Thought Police. We didn’t need them. Who should police our thoughts when there were none of us in those better days still willing to think? We were entertained. Our world gleamed bright and gay.

And then the fires…

“Coffee, Old Timer?” Twenty years and he can’t call me by my name. He was just a youth when I came here. I was his father’s tenant when I still had life in me.

“Why not?” I relent. Coffee is, after all, one of the comforts we can still take for granted in this shattered world. It comes in regularly via the sea trade that connects us to the north and the south. Every few weeks, coffee comes off the small boats and fruit goes on, oranges, limes and avocados, our local bounty.

With a chipped mug of black brew I settle stiffly into a crooked chair in the parlor to watch another morning come and go, another string of guttersnipes pass grimily by and another day’s shadows shorten and lengthen across the grit of an unswept floor. Perhaps I shall read.

Over the long march of years, my books have been my only attachment to the solid world of solid ideas. My little trove of volumes is unique in this burnt-out world, worth more to me than anyone alive. They are my link to a lost era when words expressed thoughts and thoughts moved hearts and hearts believed in the potency of their own pounding. My brittle paper treasures in their crumbling leather bindings are all that I hold dear. I have among my cherished holdings a hundred years of majesty, the finest of the American Century. There are Dreiser, Faulkner, Wolfe, Capote, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. There are also the later greats, Gaiman and McCarthy, Robbins and Pynchon. But just now I think maybe it’s an Upton Sinclair morning.

But wait – no! On this day of days let us weigh anchor and set across the bounding main to find Joyce in his verdant homeland. Before I fade from the world like so many tears in rain, I will understand that bewildering Hibernian.

But before I knock the dust off that weighty tome and try once again to unpack the great riddle of a Dublin sojourn, a bit about my time. It’s right that you should know it. Whether your time is months or years or millennia from mine, you might have influence. You might be one who can alter the course of things. You might bring to bear what forces as yet unknown can keep right the rudder of nations and people in their folly, that they should not steer the ship of history into the shoal. Learn from this grey morning’s tale what fate awaits those who take for granted the wind and time on which they sail.

“What do you hear about Arizona?” he asks.

The Landlord frets about fables. I doubt he believes the stories; no sane person could believe them. Still, he worries.

There is no Army of the Sun. There is no new life in the desert. No blue sky, no Southwest Republic. But if there were, what would become of a leech like him? If just over the mountains there were a Shangri La with jobs and homes and golf courses for all, who would long remain on this dingy, ashen coast to rent his lousy beds and stuff his cash box?

“Same old same old,” I tell him. “They say there’s clean water and blue skies. I’ve heard the Army of the Sun controls everything from Old Yuma to the Rio Grande.”

Look at him shift and fidget. Idiot. An odious blend of avarice and anxiety stuffed in a pudgy package.

“So what do you think, then? Think they intend to expand? I mean, do you think they want to come out this way?”

“Can’t say for sure,” I tell him, belaboring the pointless deception. “I’ve heard talk of raids in the camps to the east. They say some loggers in the mountains disappeared and left a complete lumber facility with all the equipment in place, untouched.”

“What could that mean?” he persists.

“I couldn’t say, but if they got conscripted, well I don’t suppose there’s much timber to cut in Phoenix so why would the army take the equipment?”

“But if it’s desert, how can they support an army and a whole republic?”

A sensible question. Look at him, pushing that tattered rag around the filthy counter, faintly streaking the grease and ash.

“Could be the river. Maybe they’re irrigating. It’s a long way but the Colorado used to support cities all over the desert, some of them with millions of people.”

“Now you’re pulling my leg,” he protests. “Millions of people living in the desert?”

“It’s true. The river used to support forty million people, half of them in the desert.”

“Oh come on. How could that be?”

How could he understand? This world, after the fires, these people, they just can’t imagine.

“The river is life,” I tell him. “Give it enough water and the desert is farmland. Build dams and the river’s a power plant. Forty million people lived off the river, most of them hundreds of miles from its banks.”

He scratches. “But why wouldn’t the river dry up?”

“Well it nearly did, eventually. In fact, people used up the river at least twice. Before my time, long before, the Ancient Ones built an empire in the desert. They drained water from the river into the surrounding dry ground and the land was so fertile that forests grew up around their canals. But they cut down the trees and the soil washed away with the water and in time the canals cut the earth into badlands. The empire crumbled and the Ancient Ones drifted away, leaving their chambers behind.”

“And the people in your time didn’t learn from the Ancient Ones?”

Another sensible question.

“The more things change,” I tell him, “the more they stay the same.”

I remember learning about the Ancient Ones as a boy. I once visited their ruins. I saw their cities in the cliffs, their kivas, the Cathedrals of the West, where Red multitudes came together thousands of years before Whites in their westward frenzy.

There are towers in the desert, ancient towers that still stand. I learned about them as a boy and I remember hearing that for a hundred years explorers argued over their purpose. Perhaps they were built as look-out posts. Perhaps they had some ceremonial purpose. Perhaps they were just vain monuments to the power of those who built them.

But in my time a young archaeologist had a hunch. He and a cohort of fellow researchers fanned out across the desert one night. They ascended a dozen of the ancient towers and lit fires atop them. Then they spread themselves across the desert floor in all directions and found that wherever one happened to be in the desert one was always within sight of a fire. As one traveled away from a fire, leaving it behind, another appeared in front such that even for the wanderer in the desert, in the time of the Ancient Ones one could never be truly lost. Wherever one found oneself there was always a fire to light one’s way home.

I found comfort in that, as the Ancient Ones must have – the idea that you are not alone, that even in the desert on the darkest night you can find a place where someone waits, where someone will welcome you in from your travels, where water and the sounds of life await the parched and lonely vagabond. A light in the darkness is a simple thing and for the lonely and afraid that simple thing can be enough. “You are not alone,” says the light, and that makes all the difference.

Here though, now, in this woeful place with its sordid and motley herd, one is truly alone even in the crush of men. We were no better in my time but our beastliness was better hidden, at least on our surface. The beasts within us were no different from those within these gargoyle men with whom I pass my waning days. But our outward selves still feigned refinement, civilization, culture, marks that stand us apart in our minds from the animals we are in our souls.

“I’m not going to worry,” says The Landlord. “Even if there is a Desert Republic and an Army of the Sun, what would they want with us? We have nothing worth taking. We’re simple people. Why would powerful people want to conquer simple people?”

Why indeed?

He wouldn’t understand, but before I get to Joyce, if you like, I’ll tell you about my time, that is, the time before the fires. Today, fifty years after, the crusted earth is just beginning to shake off its charred shell. In spots, the black earth blooms green. But the coming life still struggles. In this time, after the fires, no wanderer would follow a flame. We would all rather flee the flickering light. Our common notions are too freshly wounded and the fires too recently past. The burnt earth is not ready for fires in the night.

And so we wander, many of us outside the company of our own kind, some within an easy walk of settlements like New Pacifica where I make my home. But those outsiders will not come among the enfolding reach of our bustling new enclaves. They would rather wander the empty wilds, suffering the ills they know, than forsake their isolation and succumb to ills they know not of. There is a long way to go. I won’t live to see us get there. The possibility of a new world remains just a possibility, while stories of the old world are little more than fables.

But I lived in the old world. I can tell you the truth.

I am now a man in his eighties, truly alone. I lived the best of my life in my twenties. All that happened to me I remember as if from a story. I might never have been that young man at all but I believe I was. The loneliness that attends my unending days is not something I bargained for. I feel I’ve done nothing of any account, nothing to stand the test of time. So what is there to do? I can keep living each dismal day until day does not come, but is that all there is?

Now, if I could tell a story, once truly and well, if I could fit my mind to its narration and bend my will to its revealing, perhaps then I’d have done what should be done. It’s not that anything I’ve seen, said or done is in itself so remarkable, so worthy or so important that it must be shared. It could all go untold, but to tell it is in me, I suppose, like the song is in the blackbird.