[Untitled] (Christopher Dolce)

[Apocalyptic Story (Untitled)]

Christopher Dolce

He couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong; there existed this lull state of confusion that only seemed to be getting worse as the “miracle” progressed.  The people who were once awaiting a final liberation from war now seemed to have regressed into a catatonic stupor—unable to perceive the great changes happening to the world around them.  In a great metamorphosis, the last remnants of society were supplanted by a verdant paradise.  A lavish and undisturbed landscape blossomed.  Great deserts reverted to their aqueous beginnings.  The fires of war that had raged for decades had been reduced to ashes—their decaying cinders left as perhaps the only remnants of a past whose people would be no more.  Yet Jim persisted.

The genesis of such an innocent world came suddenly.  Only a few months before, Jim Evans, a middle-aged retired army veteran and single father of a 6 year old girl, Evelyn, had been one of the very few to recognize the initial signs.  Amidst a war-torn world, such subtle forewarnings had been easy to overlook.  Jim’s great realization occurred when he was watching the news surrounding the ongoing fighting in the Holy Lands; as reports came in describing the immense destruction and death toll of the war, Jim—like most other viewers—was horrified by the gruesome imagery he was greeted with.  As the conflict neared its hundredth year, terrible atrocities and war crimes continued to be committed.  Jim, since a few years removed from the fighting, was subsequently haunted by his own unique memories of the war.  However, after being briefly distracted by the carefree play of his daughter, his eyes returned to the scenes of New-Jerusalem and became suddenly affixed upon some strange markings that had been etched into the helmet of a fallen Israeli soldier.  The scene lasted but a brief moment yet what first seemed like the rushed scratchings of a desperate soldier suddenly began to resemble a vestige from Jim’s own past: an insignia of a serpent he had made himself during the war.

            This peculiarity shocked him, but there was no mistaking what he saw.  The coiled figure of a three-headed viper was something that he thought he created himself—an identifying mark with nothing more than a personal connotation.  However, as he continued to watch footage from the ongoing fighting, he saw it appear over in over again in different—yet unmistakable—forms: three mangled corpses laid from a destroyed aircraft, three broken power lines twisted together into a mangled mass, three powers were intertwined in strife for the Holy Lands.  Following this revelation, he quickly put Evelyn to bed and began digging through his old military belongings.  While rummaging through faded photographs and eroded artifacts of his own prior crusade in the Holy Lands, he found it incredibly eerie that the polycephalous serpent never showed one of its several faces.  In fact, such an occurrence made no sense.  For Jim was absolutely certain that he scribbled the insignia in some form on most of his belongings from the war, and yet there existed not a single remnant of such a symbol on any of the things that he pulled down from the rubble of his attic.  Unfortunately, he had no time to muse on such an inexplicable realization, as suddenly the all-too-familiar reverberations of a distant explosion echoed through the walls of his home.   In a crazed haste, Jim rushed Evelyn to the basement of the aging house and repeated to her the same instructions he had drilled into her for years as the ground began to tremor.  Louder, closer explosions were heard again and again.  He knew this day was inevitable, and yet it still came so suddenly—so terribly. 
            It was a nightmare.  Akin to the scorched days he thought he finally escaped from, Jim emerged from his house to see a scene that would fill him with horror.  Fires raged everywhere.  The houses that dotted his small New England neighborhood had been reduced to mere rubble.  The church that had once invigorated the community had been evaporated—become of the smoke that covered the sky.  Jim could do nothing but stand stunned as he watched more bombs eclipse the horizon and set the earth ablaze.  He turned to see if there was anyone in need of help, yet everything around him had already been devastated.  The screams of those around him diffused into a deafening drone, and as he turned back to face his home, his body completely recoiled as he saw a great flame rising from the roof.  He began to run towards his door—towards Evelyn—but suddenly a great gale blasted him off his feet and sent him careening uncontrollably backwards.  The blow nearly knocked him unconscious, but with whatever wisp of strength he had remaining he rose to face what remained of his house.  The flames seemed to completely engulf the structure, and rose nearly fifty feet into the air.  And then the true nightmare began.  Like a lucid imagining, the inferno gradually morphed into a maddening configuration.  Where there was once a great head of smoke emerged three, and the immolation began to twirl around what remained of his inevitable sepulcher.  Before his mind could even register the scene before him, one of the viper’s heads reared back and unleashed upon him.
            There was nothing but immense darkness.  Complete silence enveloped him, leaving him with but the sound of his heartbeat to listen to.  But…a heartbeat? He must’ve been dreaming.  After all, what could have explained the disappearance of the serpentine symbol from all of his old possessions? Or the sudden bombing of a quaint village so far removed from the true religious center of the confederation?  He opened his eyes.  Instant relief came flooding into him as he looked out upon the town, as it seemed to exist just as he remembered it once before—except there was now almost no sound.  In fact, there didn't seem to be much going on in the town at all.  Not a single car drove up or down the road that flanked Jim’s neighborhood, and there seemed to be no activity going further downtown either.  Life seemed to have completely stopped around him.  Before doing anything else, Jim’s first reaction was to go check on Evelyn.  He flew through the front door and up the stairs to see her, but flinging open her bedroom door revealed a desolate room.  No Evelyn—nor any signs of her ever being there.  The nightmare continued.  Jim rushed downstairs to turn on the television and see if the news could offer any sort of explanation to the complete lack of life in his town.  He fumbled the remote twice trying to get the television on, and he almost wished that he hadn’t tried at all when he realized that not a single channel was coming in.  Static everywhere—void of life.  He was running out of options.  He felt despair closing in on him.  It was suffocating.  He retreated back to his own room, hoping to find but a single clue as to what had happened to the life he knew.  Nothing immediately caught his attention, but his eyes were slowly drawn to the locked old chest of his military belongings that he tore apart earlier.  He slowly approached the oddly closed trunk with great suspicion, as an ominous sound emanated louder and louder with every step he took towards it.  Jim readied himself for whatever terror may lay inside, and his sense of dread only deepened when he opened the chest to reveal a sleeping, coiled up serpent.  Except, as if only to make this whole affair even more terrifying, the dormant snake was missing its head—at least, missing one of its heads.  The double-headed snake stirred from its slumber as daylight crept in, and began to open its narrow, amber eyes as Jim fell backwards in fright.  He could not believe that this horror could get any worse, nor could he believe that the snake was already making its way out of its shelter.  Suddenly, the low hisses that were once muffled before began to resemble a more intelligible dialect as the two heads mouthed in syncopated unison.  Indeed, the serpent seemed to be speaking in English! Jim tried his best to resist listening to what must have been some terrible incarnation of the antichrist, but the incanting voice forced him into a helpless trance.  No longer were the words from the serpent even audible; now, the voices existed within Jim’s head—now, he could not resist their temptation. 

It was quite funny, actually, having another conscious exist besides his own.  It was also completely terrifying.  Nonetheless, Jim could do nothing but listen to the hissing words that lived within his mind.  Initially, the hisses told of how cramped the little trunk was, and how tiring it was waiting there to be released.  Then another voice chimed in—one head cutting off the other—and finally began to explain what it called “the final requiem for humanity.”  In the renewed war over the Holy Lands, the voice explained, mankind had shown itself unfit to peacefully inhabit the world anymore.  The fighting had shown much of humanity’s true colors, as all three Abrahamic religions contributed to the mass destruction and loss of billions of human lives.  Man’s petty quarrels over what was once a shared place of worship escalated into a complete holocaust of the Middle East.  Of course, Jim already knew much of this information.  Having once been a part of the fighting that cleaved the people of the world apart, he himself had witnessed—and tried to forget—the horrors of war that the serpent repeated to him.  However, the serpent still neglected to acknowledge just why humanity had since seemingly disappeared.  Was it some sort of punishment? Or could Jim still have been stuck in some sort of elegiac nightmare?  Finally, after what seemed like hours of maddening hissing within his head, a voice that sounded like it came from the other head—which had been completely silent since its first silenced comment—began speaking once more.  First speaking over his counterpart, his voice eventually prevailed in Jim’s head as syllables became slowly clearer and clearer.  This head, speaking in a much calmer dialect than the one before it, did not dwell on the fiery past that had brought humanity to this point; rather, the voice offered Jim—the one who had turned his back from the fighting—three distinct futures for the world.  Like the three-headed serpent that had manifested itself in flames, these three futures offered varying prospects for humanity.  The first option was for the world to stay as it currently was: no people left to wage war and destroy the earth’s natural serenity.  The second option would return the world to the state it was in before the bombings: war still raging, people finally returned.  The last option, what the serpent described as a “miracle,” would transform the world into an idyllic paradise: returning a changed humanity in the process.  Almost without thinking—and without even considering the possible deceit of the serpent—Jim imagined the utopia that could be waiting humanity.  He thought about seeing Evelyn again and finally escaping this recurring nightmare he was stuck in.  He thought about a true end to the fighting that brought upon this apocalypse.  He thought it might finally be over. 

He opened his eyes once again.  Indeed, the world around him had changed, and it was like nothing that he could have ever imagined.  Great trees rose hundreds of feet into the air.  Lush meadows covered the earth while brilliant flowers bloomed.  A calm mist loomed over a meandering spring, and there was not a single cloud in the bright, blue sky.  This was paradise—a miracle made real.  A great tree rose from where Jim’s house once stood, and Evelyn sat, sleeping, at its foundation.  Jim ran over to embrace her, and as he lifted her up into the pristine air she remained still in her deep slumber.  First trying to calmly awake her, Jim whispered into the delicate ears of the daughter he thought he would never see again.  However, this effort—as well as several others that would rapidly follow it—just would not get Evelyn out of her unconscious state.  And while this certainly troubled Jim, he was at least content knowing there should now be other people around him to help him.  He returned Evelyn to the base of the tree and turned back to go look for help.  Surrounded by a purified terrain, the landmarks that once defined his neighborhood were nowhere to be found.  Jim wandered past a grove of tangled fruit trees and was visually stunned by the beauty of nature around him.  It almost kept him from proceeding further through the immense trees that were before him, as the whole area emitted a bewitching aura that seemed to be pulling him back into the forest.  However, a clearing in the foliage just up ahead motivated Jim to keep going; any chance of Evelyn waking up seemed to rely on his getting her help, so he finally pushed forwards through the break in the tree-line.  A broad expanse opened up before him, and the trees that he left behind him were replaced by thousands of tiny, lifeless dots all along the horizon.  He tried looking out to see what form these odd specters took on, but most of them were still too far out in the distance to be able to tell what they were.  From where he stood atop the valley, it looked like a colony of ants lay dormant below him.  The entire scene intimidated him—the near countless amount of these figures astounded him.  However, he needed to find someone that could help Evelyn.  The ground below him gave wave to a shallow hillside just steep enough to smoothly descend down, and so knowing that it might take him hours to get back to Evelyn, he remained fully committed to finding the other humans that must be wandering this serene paradise.  He began to slide down the gentle slope, and as it continued for what seemed like half of a mile, he slowly became able to make out static figures that he approached—they were people.

And he couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong; there existed this lull state of confusion that only seemed to be getting worse as the “miracle” progressed.  The people who were once awaiting a final liberation from war now seemed to have regressed into a catatonic stupor—unable to perceive the great changes happening to the world around them.  Jim approached the first person he encountered and tried to wake him from the deep sleep he was in.  Similar to Evelyn, the man did not budge.  In fact, the man resisted any sort of movement at all.  He seemed rooted in place in a sort of vegetative state, and behind him existed countless rows of similar, lifeless people.  There seemed to be no end to the comatose beings, as walking past the emotionless faces seemed to reveal even more people than what seemed to appear from the hillside.  Every so often, Jim would pass the shell of someone he knew in life before—a few neighbors, a woman he knew from the town over, even the local priest.  Interspersed with these familiar faces, there seemed to be thousands upon thousands of people present from all over the world that similarly got affected by the miracle.  Jim realized that this must have been what the two-headed-serpent meant by a “changed humanity:” this was a humanity that could hurt the earth no longer.  The rash, destructive nature that defined mankind once before did not exist in the people that now inhabited the world, and so the new, blissful world could finally go undisturbed—the rebirth of Earth after a great flood.  Jim, realizing that all was now hopeless, sat down amongst the rows of husks—finally succumbing to this terrible fate that he had met with.  Never before had he felt so alone.  Even when he had before been seemingly the last person on the planet, the feeling of isolation he had sitting with thousands of people besides him was unlike any terror he had ever witnessed before.  There he was, a man who had braved the horrors of more than a decade of brutal warfare, cowering behind the shadows of a new paradise. 

With nothing better to do but await his own liberation from this nightmare, Jim began to think about his ill-fated negligence towards the other options the snake had offered him.  There was the first option that he ignored, but that option seemed just as grim as the reality he ended up choosing.  In that option, Earth would have remained in a similar condition to what it was before the bombings—there just would have been no people remaining to continue the fighting.  Jim would have been the only man left in a completely desolate world, but such would be no different than the state he was in under the option he ultimately chose.  He would be isolated no matter which of these two similar options he elected to bring about.  But he had also ignored the second option—the option that would bring back the war he tried so hard to escape from.  He imagined what that reality would be like.  He remembered the lingering fear he always lived under during the time of war, as he knew it would always be possible for a retaliatory strike to destroy all that he held dear to him.  But he also remembered consoling Evelyn at night, and how much she meant to him.  She had been the one to heal his scars of war, the one to make life worth something once again for him.

Jim had to see her one last time.  As he took off for her up the hill, he thought he saw the eyes of those around him follow him, but he was too concerned with getting to Evelyn to pay any attention to the occurrence.  And what felt like half of a mile coming down seemed like a marathon going back up as Jim struggled up the ever steeper slope towards where Evelyn remained.  When he finally reached the top of what now looked like a great summit, he stumbled, completely exhausted, back through the forest.  And where there was once a decent path for him to follow through the wood there was now a mess of trees all knotted before him to keep him from Evelyn.  Thorns and tree branches lashed against him, and one tree limb fell from such a height onto one of his arms that he heard his bones shatter.  It was as if this paradise now recognized the true threat that Jim could pose—for he was the last real human left.  Nevertheless, he pressed on, brutally injured, through the grove that before enchanted him and finally reached the clearing where the great tree stood.  Debilitated, bleeding, and near death from the trauma he suffered through, he collapsed a few feet from the base of the tree—his last sight being of a calm and sleeping Evelyn. 

This was his apocalypse; he was the one that had brought this isolation—this paradise—to himself.  The world had changed, but now there seemed to be no one left to inhabit this Garden of Eden.  But around the unconscious figure of Jim slithered a long, amber-eyed serpent with its narrow head hissing towards some odd, ethereal fruit that suspended itself from the tree.  And from under that tree awoke Eve.

Commentary

            When I first started imagining what I wanted to do with my apocalypse, I knew I wanted to do something similar to W.E.B. DuBois’ The Comet or Ronald McDougall’s The World, the Flesh, and the Devil.  When analyzing those two pieces, I just really liked the personal apocalypses that they introduced, and I was drawn especially to the isolation they presented in the apocalypses.  In both stories, there was not much of a real threat posed to the protagonists in the apocalypses.  Rather, they both dealt with being alone in the world, and how a desolate environment can cause potential emotional trauma worse than any other stereotypical, destructive apocalypse.  It was from these two stories that I probably drew the most inspiration from, and I also used some general motifs from the Bible in creating my apocalypse.  However, although I knew that I wanted to make the protagonist feel alone, I wasn’t sure of how to “get rid” of the other people from the world.  I eventually came up with the whole decision that Jim makes, and how he basically chooses to turn the world into a paradise with a “changed” humanity.  I like how this added an element of guilt to the apocalypse, because Jim truly could have made the decision to just make things like they were before and return the world he once knew.  Instead, the “change” humanity he encounters is similar to what the protagonists of Annihilation encounter in the shimmer.  Jim encounters a vegetative, unresponsive people in his apocalypse, while in Annihilation the protagonists see humans turn into actual plant-beings in the shimmer (one character even allows it to happen to her). 
            In terms of what motifs I avoided—or found too difficult to integrate into my apocalypse—there were two specific things that weren’t really included in my story.  First, I ultimately did not include a traditional climate-change apocalypse into my story.  I think such an apocalypse may be a common theme among other final projects, and so I liked the idea of looking into a more supernatural apocalypse.  Nonetheless, the paradise that came with Jim’s apocalypse can certainly be seen as reflecting certain tropes associated with a climate change apocalypse.  Overall, I did try to avoid making this a strictly climate change apocalypse.  However, one idea that I tried to toy with was making a cyclic-time element to the story similar to what is seen in John Kessel’s A Clean Escape.  Specifically, I wanted Jim to relive all the moments that lead up to the apocalypse or possibly see how his life would be different if he hadn’t made the decision he did.  Having Jim relieve such things could have added to the guilt that he already felt, and would have compounded the feelings of isolation in his personal apocalypse.  I didn’t really find a way to incorporate such elements effectively into my story, but regardless I am pretty happy with how it turned out overall.