Dec. 21, 2012

I’d like to say that I felt a psychic tug – a whisper in the darkness of the back of my mind – when Carrie was vaporized into immortality. But I can’t.

Perhaps the world was shaking too violently for me to be able to ‘hear’ her say she loved me right before she was whisked away to begin fulfilling a destiny I still do not understand nor, quite frankly, accept.

Carrie was my ‘finally got it right’ moment. It is hoaky to say, and as cliched as any poorly written romance story, but she was the love of my life. She was the light along which I would conclude my days on this world – in this body. There was a great calm joy that she inserted into my life, a thing once battered and abused from my own simple, hedonistic navigation. As the borth of daughter provided for me, she gave me reason and an appreciation for all that life and the world and the universe offered.

The entire time that we were separated, I knew that we would one day be reunited. Despite having witnessed Andy’s inhuman prowesses and despite the fact I had lived through the beginning of the end of the world, unspared for my sins, I still doubted Kenneth.

How could I believe someone who looked me in the eye, and with a dark, piercing, prickly glare, tell me I was evil and I had to get lost? Someone who was going to remove the joy from my life, albeit one that was coming to terms with living in a world denuded of good and average and left for the evil and subhuman, brushed me away like a spider dangling in a doorway.

In our separation I searched deep within and came to love Carrie all the more; I refused to accept Kenneth’s decree and, just as my love always preached, I remained positive. Sure enough – we were reunited in time for the end game.

I see her eyes; I feel her breath on my cheek; I can smell her and taste her and I expect her to leap out from behind a door in hopes of making me scream like a girl. Sometimes I think I can hear her laughing. Othertimes I see shadows in the darkness that fail to frighten me; they give me peace.

My dreams are now my friends. Carrie and I have great adventures together, sometimes in alien landscapes and other times in ‘our world.’ We always wanted to go to Italy together and I have had the most unbelievable and lush dreams where we are walking along a Tuscan lane, on our way to dinner – holding hands.

Her hands… I hold them constantly in my solitude.

I’ve been experiencing these things since March 16.

I awoke on the floor in the cabin outside Mammoth Lake. A thin blanket of dust fell away from me as I sat up with a groan – my throat bleeding and chest aching from the sulphurous, acrid, thick, crunchy air. The world had stopped shaking.

It took me a moment to get my bearings before I looked around for Andy. I checked every room in the luxurious cabin, calling his name.

Outside, the world was hanging in the sky and the sun was blocked away.

The murk within the cabin became unsettling as minutes turned to hours and Andy did not return.

You may not realize it but a person can sit perfectly still for an entire day – listening to nothing, silent, reading nothing – doing nothing at all.

I thought of Papillon – alone on his island – sufferings untold beyond despair; resigned and accepting.

At the time I did not know that the world had split wide open – it’s inner workings breaking down from the stresses created by a miniture black hole that originated near Geneva, Switzerland.

I know this now because I seem to know everything; at least I have developed an incredibly powerful imagination.

I write ceaselessly. Words are my finest companions, along with a few cats and the occasional starving crow that tries to set upon the cats.

Andy never did come back. He just abandoned me in that shaking cabin in Mammoth Lake and I also now know that he put something in my Scotch broth that knocked me out.

I believe he left me to venture to a place I could not go – without being killed instantly.

I’ve written a 30,000 word treatise on how I wish he would have killed me, or taken me with him in order to be relieved of this sentence. And I have written a 40,000 word treatise on why I am glad he spared me; with the conclusion being I still have my dreams. I’ve written a 10,000 word treatise on how to write treatises, too, as a matter of fact. Not much else to do but write, really.

It’s unclear to me how long I lingered in the cabin – probably a week or more. I was relatively safe in the well-built, air tight luxury cabin that was well-stocked with firewood and jammed full of food and clean bottled water.

I became accustomed to the sour air, though my chest felt like it was being squeezed in a bear hug by Andre the Giant and my throat continued to ooze blood… salt and spit and grit.

When I finally dared venture outside, my face wrapped by a soaking towel, ski goggles protecting my eyes, it was like walking into a winter wonderland. There must have been four feet of ash on the ground, covering everything. The sky had stopped falling for a full day before I dared go outside and the almost constant tremors now arrived every other hour.

Looking back, I never worried about being fizzed into the hereafter by a volcanic eruption or buried by a collapsing mountain. A dull inner peace followed me around. It followed me as I wandered around Mammoth, searching through homes and businesses, stocking up on supplies.

It was with me when I discovered the 1965 Rambler Classic parked in the back of a body shop. The boxy old beast had just been lovingly restored before the disappearance and it started without a hiccup or fart.

It was in that old car that I made my through the dead world – first south into Death Valley and then east into Nevada.

I kept clear of Las Vegas for the obvious reason. Once the quakes, tsunamis and eruptions stopped, the entire west coast of North America was in ruins. The desert was covered three to five feet deep in ash. The old Rambler kept choking out on me as I plowed onward. I was well supplied and completely unafraid. I would stop for days at a time if I came upon a comfortable place to stay.

In Warm Springs, east of Tonopah on Highway 6, I found a home fully-lit. After cautiously checking it out and finding it empty, I discovered a gnarly power system using the sun and wind. Some clever hermit, apparently, as the comfortable hippie pad screamed ’60-something Democrat’, left me a place to spend the next six months.

I expected trouble every day and every day trouble did not come. Trouble had lost its collective mind and emptied its collective stomach, when the Earth tore open.

Those who survived the ‘apocalypse’ seemed to do as I had – hunker down and expect the worst.

The Earth had been thrust into a volcanic winter and the days grew darker, instead of lighter, as summer approached. Only the constant winds howling out of the mangled mountains to the west assured me small doses of energy, enough to run a small heater, a couple of lights, a beer fridge and a few other appliances.

Those steady winds pushed most of the ash into catchment basins and the roads became slightly passable again.

One cold August night, my too-casual nerves were jangled into a fraying abyss when an old truck grumbled past on the highway, about 300 yards from ‘my house.’ For some reason, the low twinkle of light from my writing lamp and the candles in the kitchen, along with the beautiful scent of woodsmoke drifting over the waning sulphur stink, did not catch the driver’s attention.

I briefly fantasized that it was Andy. He went searching for a vehicle and became lost and when he finally made it back, I had left.

Instead of feeling fear that the truck and its occupants – likely all spectacular bastards – would turn around, I longed for it to do so. Sick and evil be damned; I wanted company.

That longing eventually led me back into the Rambler and I started a long, slow journey north on Sept. 3. My daughter would have turned 19 and she was with me as I crawled north up Highway 93.

I stopped outside Jackpot and surveyed the island of sin perched on the Idaho border – expecting to see it barricaded by zombies or cutthroats, or both. Like Ely and Wells, it too was completely void of evil.

For old time’s sake, I stopped at one of the casinos, its front doors clogged with ash, sand and grey soil, and walked into a dark hole.

Silence welcomed me and I made my way to the bar. Amazingly, I hadn’t touched a drop of booze since I left Mammoth, and the first warm beer, a touch on the sour side, was a sobering experience. I spat it out and reached for a bottle of Scotch. Perfect.

Half an hour later I pulled my Glock out and after saying a silent cheers to Carrie, I unloaded a clip into a dark Sex in the City game.

I was fully piss stinking drunk when I lumbered out of the casino and flumped behind the wheel of the Rambler, which I called “Piggy.” A box filled with Scotch, tequila and rum jingled on the front seat next to me. Piggy’s cassette deck played Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ Cruisin’.

It was 11:11 a.m. when I crossed the stateline into Idaho and a sign, erected during a battle between two warlords of the apocalypse, informed me that I was entering “hell.”

I continued to roll north up 93. At Twin Falls, I once again expected trouble but the only problem I encountered was enormous difficulty in finding gasoline for Piggy. The bridge across the Snake River Canyon was almost impassable. Only Piggy’s stout flat face allowed me to push my way across the bridge. Skeletal remains, covered in ash, were all over the bridge deck. The Snake River carved its way through a 40 or 50 foot deep bank of ash and debris that had been swept into the canyon below.

Foolishly, perhaps unconsciouslessly suicidally, I turned west on Interstate 84, trying to get away from the omnipresent, thick ash.

I entered Boise and took note of how clean it was. The Idaho militia had done a thorough job of cleaning up the chaos of the disappearance but the city was still. I passed through a check point on the Interstate, near the airport, but it was abandoned. I turned into the city and made my way up Highway 55. Boise had been home to more than 300 crazed souls before Yellowstone went kerboom but it was now all mine, if I wanted it.

The Hyatt Place appeared to have been the headquarters of the Idaho militia, or of a certain high ranking warlord.

I parked the Rambler, sputtering from a constantly clogging air filter, in front and walked past a sandbagged guard post into the lobby of the dusty hotel. Satisfied that no ghouls were going to leap out of the shadows at me, I made my way upstairs and found a room for the night.

I lay down on the bed and picked up the remote lying on the bedside table. Old habits. The 42 inch flatscreen stared back at me, black and cold as the world.

It was 12:34 p.m. when I finally found some gasoline and rolled out of Boise on Highway 55, the Rambler a coughing and creaking comet, with grey and white ash swirling behind as its tail. The sun strained for nowt in the almost purple-black sky. By the time I reached New Meadows and began to enter the Little Salmon River canyon, the ash began to thin. When I swooped down in Grangeville, at 4:44 p.m., the road was clear of ash. The occasional drift lay against the edge of a ditch or a building here or there, but the prevailing winds and the mountains had created a buffer in this area.

There was no sign of ash at all, at least from what was visible in the dark of night, when I crept through Lewiston. Gasoline was easy to scrounge and, feeling an inexorable tug, I opted against stopping and rolled up with winding switchbacks along Highway 95 – northbound.

It was 9:33 p.m. when I entered Coeur d’Alene and once again scrounged gasoline. I thought of crazy old Vincent as the Rambler, happier due to the absence of Volcano shit, chugged past the Coeur d’Alene Resort. You might think I would think of Carrie, too, but I never stopped thinking about her. She was sitting next to me, near the jingling box of booze. I spoke with her constantly; and to assure you I am not mad, despite being, apparently, one of the few people left alive in the world, that she never replied.

Coeur d’Alene, for being a beautiful area and city, had been spared the steady presence of  legions of evil. As a result it was still a pain in the ass to drive through, but I wound and double-backed my way through the carnage and mess of an abandoned world and continued north to Lake Cocolalla. It was 11:11 p.m. when I stomped into our cabin.

It smelled vaguely of the last meal we cooked before we embarked on our journey – on the trip that wrenched Carrie from me.

For the first time since I came to my senses on the floor in Mammoth, I wept. There was Carrie’s cabin shoes, her cabin campfire jacket, her cabin iPod and cabin reading glasses on the kitchen table. There was a black and white painting of the Eiffel Tower that she had set on the back edge of the couch to dry. Grief, remorse and vast loneliness poured out of me as I wailed and blubbered “why” to a God that had left the world with the love of my life.

I spent the night in our cabin doing as I had so often done before, getting ridiculously plastered.

It was 8:11 a.m. when I groaned awake, curled in a tight ball on the couch. I was freezing. Volcanic winter ensured temperatures would be at least 20 degrees lower than normal and it had to be just above freezing, despite being Sept. 5.

I prepared a quick and easy meal of cold canned ravioli and as I spooned it down, I walked around the cabin. Without realizing I was doing it, I began piling objects on the kitchen table – photos, mementoes, gifts Carrie had given me, gifts I had given her, letters and cards from our kids.

It was 11:10 a.m. when I carried a heavy box of items out to the Rambler. Once it was packed, I walked back inside and lit a dry joint, squirreled from a stash I had in our bedroom. Smoke scratched down my raw throat and filled my heavy lungs. I held it in for as long as I could and exhaled with a chest-heaving series of snorting coughs. I took another painful hoot and flicked my lighter. A small orange flame sputtered forth and licked at the bottom edge of the curtain covering the window I used to look out of in the morning while Carrie made potato pancakes and the cabin filled with the delicious scent of love and peace.

A flicker of flame wriggled up the curtain as I puffed another lung-scratcher and turned for the door. As I closed the door, the entire curtain was ablaze.

As I pulled away from the cabin, I felt a tap on the back of my neck and flinched. My heart racing, I turned to look in the back seat but no one was there. The Rambler crunched out of the driveway onto Cocolalla Loop Road and I rolled east toward the highway.

By the time I covered the four miles to the highway, our cabin was filling with smoke and by the time I crept onto the disordered causeway leading to Sandpoint, the cabin was fully engulfed.

I don’t really know why I torched our cabin. Perhaps because it wasn’t our cabin any longer.

But that doesn’t explain why I drove home to Cranbrook.

It was 2:21 p.m. when I turned the Rambler off, in our driveway. Cranbrook was as we left it – empty and eerie.

That was more than three months ago.

Today is Dec. 21, 2012. I had a laugh with the cats this morning; today was supposed to be the end of the world, according to the paranoid and exploitative.

It dawned as it always does nowadays, dark and cold and silent, save for the odd meow and caw.

The end

Ian Cobb/e-KNOW

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