Tulsa by Christopher Harris

Author:Christopher Harris [Harris, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: apocalypse, electricity, survival, midwest, gasoline
ISBN: 9780692170137
Publisher: Asphalt House
Published: 2018-09-03T04:00:00+00:00

13

Long around seven months after darkness, people began talking more openly about the past.

I overheard how couples met. I heard about distant undergraduate hijinks and romantic trips to the Mediterranean. Several women discovered they’d independently flown to the same march in Washington, D.C. Several men reminisced over an improbable Royals baseball championship. I heard about car crashes, ski adventures, terrible bosses, house remodels, favorite restaurants and TV shows, romantic entanglements, lucky breaks, tragic coincidences, lifelong regrets and professional triumphs. Nostalgia was a pathogen. They didn’t realize they were doing it until everyone was doing it. I heard the same stories over and over, as they were repeated to different farm residents.

And who wouldn’t understand the impulse? There was an accelerating sense that the record of these things now began and ended with our own minds. I was tempted to recount stories, too. I had “Painting Garth Brooks’s House” (he gave me a beer and talked about French fries) and “Insane Freshman Year Roommate” (he serially threatened his department chair and the police found seven firearms in his closet), to say nothing of being forced from my apartment and my home city, meeting Clooney, looking for the boy while robbing houses, stealing chemotherapy drugs, taking chemotherapy drugs, invading Shreveport…but for the time being I kept my powder dry. I’d nod off in Maribel’s cubicle or by the fireplace or the back woodstove narrating the details to myself. Winter was coming but who knew when?

It came. I woke one mid-December morning and padded around the house, nodding at other predawn risers who quietly ballyhooed about two fresh feet of snow. Ben was in his kitchen putting on boots.

“I’m shoveling out the generator and cars,” he said.

I said, “Let me do it. You cook.”

“Not a one-person job,” he said.

“Cook.”

It was still snowing. I shoveled until my pulse rattled my teeth.

It was bad. If any more accumulated, we might not be able to drive. Whatever we had now might be all we’d have until spring.

I only went to one of their community forums. A week after Xochitl and I swung down out of the north bearing news of our capture, Elizabeth insisted I attend. But the forum was too chaotic. What day-to-day seemed like smooth operation on the farm was exposed as raucous underneath: people waited their turn then shouted about unfairness and poor planning and perceived slights, and Elizabeth and Sonya explained their decisions while Charles reprimanded everyone without saying a word. People were angry about the lack of meat in their meals, the lack of privacy, what they perceived as loafing by some of the farmhands now that there was little harvesting left to do, the lack of respect for the veiled, the bending-over-backward required by the unveiled…and other things, stupid things, the color and quality of the farm’s remaining toilet paper, women who still wore lipstick and left marks on glassware, people leaving farm implements with handles crisscrossed which was supposedly bad luck. Basically: the weather was changing and they felt

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