Local Girl Liveblogs the Apocalypse
Chapter 14 - It's Your Funeral
Twenty-four hours a day, the television in my mom's house is on. Prime Minister Kline is always there, always speaking from his podium, his little ant-like experts all lined up, waiting for their turn to deliver a crumb to the harvest, all the while a hurricane is threatening to scatter the food stock to the four corners of the world. His words and theirs are delivered, then chopped up, edited, and given to us again as leftovers, and we eat the same meal over and over, never feeling full.
The experts speak in serious, low, and reassuring tones. No expert leaves the podium without stating some potential positive outcome from the runaway greenhouse effect. The expert that compared us to early Venus had her mic cut and I haven't seen her since. The language they speak feels so thoroughly filtered, it's like there's no substance to them whatsoever. Yes, some crops are having banner years. Yes, you will notice all agriculture harvest will be monitored by the RCMP, yes you have likely observed the drones zipping around the larger lakes and railroad tracks in your community. We are prepared to protect our country’s precious resources. No, there will not be conscription, but if there is, you'll be notified by mail, if the mail comes.
What is happening in other countries, countries that were already embroiled in war, experiencing famine or drought, or who relied on imports to survive, does not get a lot of air time on the Canadian news. Not the main channels, anyway. Later at night or in the very early morning hours you hear about Myanmar, Syria, South Sudan. If you can tolerate the helplessness, you listen to the end. When I can't sleep, that's what I do. I know I cannot help over there. I meditate while picturing a ripple effect and imagine my attempts at creating security and peace here will somehow make change elsewhere. It's not enough and my soul knows it. What I can do is watch, and listen. I can be a witness and I can keep my heart open to the suffering of others because I know dark and light necessitate each other.
Yeah, I know it, but I don't understand it, and I certainly don't like it.
“Jamie's coming over,” Tricia says, entering the living room, breaking my foggy concentration on the news.
For this, my mom mutes the TV.
“How's he getting here?” I ask.
“He got a ride. Says he'll be here a couple days before he has to go back. His friends are doing some kind of... supply run?” Tricia shrugs.
“It'll be so amazing to have all my kids together,” my mom says, huge smile. Then she looks struck as if by a spear. Her hands go to her heart, the site of the wound.
It's Jenna whose absence caused the wound. It's the unknowing that makes it fester.
“It would be so great if Jenna could be here too,” I say, moving to my mom's side and hugging her. There'd been a while after the search parties died down, after the tips stopped coming into the hotline, when holidays came and people didn't ask for updates anymore, when saying Jenna's name had entered a strange realm of unreality. Talking about our childhood, sharing stories that involved Jenna required a certain amount of editing, of creative contouring so it wouldn't shake their mom's foundation. After a while of that, however, their mother began to allow Jenna's light back into the room with them. Back into the stories. And so they went from speaking almost in code or going so far as to pretend certain events had only three siblings involved, deliberately removing Jenna from her own experiences, to gently easing her name back into the dinner table talk. Pictures starting going up around the house. Not the huge shrine-like photos of Jenna at her last graduation, which would have been eighth grade. But family photos, or pictures caught of the just the siblings, a rare photo when all were laughing and no one was left out or offended.
With the climate situation and the sudden knowledge that time is so limited, I can see that my mom is struggling with the idea that she may never see her youngest daughter again. Although the moratorium on her name has been lifted, I think the idea of her death will remain forever verboten.
My mom hugs me back, brief, and pats me on the side to dismiss me. I meet Tricia's eyes and we both wince at the immensity of the hurt that circles the room unchecked unless someone interrupts it.
“Reception on the highway was okay, he said. A few of the dead zones seemed bigger and there was a huge spot near Barrie without any cell service for a few minutes as they were driving through.” Tricia pauses, glances at mom, then continues. “He texted that Barrie looks a little... fucked up. His words. Lots of people trying to leave town, walking and driving. A bunch of stores closed, plywood in windows.”
I sink into the information she's shared. Unless they were fools, the exodus from Barrie will come north, toward us. South is Toronto, and I couldn't imagine wanting to be there any more than wanting to be in Barrie.
Were we to expect an influx of refugees, coming from a city a couple hours away? How long would it take people to walk here?
Major had said the gas station had been all right. A line that took a couple hours, lots of people worried, but the manager kept coming out to reassure that the fuel tank was full and he had heard from the provider that it would continue to be filled. It helped, he'd said, to live along a major highway crossroads. He'd heard smaller towns off the highways had not received such reassurance.
Even so, extra fuel drums and canisters were not to be filled at this time. One jerry can per vehicle, per fill-up.
So Major had filled her tank and just one of the many jerry cans she'd brought with her. And things here sat on the edge of normal.
When Jamie arrives, chaos comes alongside. It's always been that way, though worse when Jenna had been his loyal sidekick to whatever endeavour the two of them concocted. If thinking of Jamie brought up so many memories of Jenna for me, I can't imagine how my mom must be feeling.
She flew up from the couch at the sound of his knock, incredibly loud and abrasive, the type of knock a cop would use on a crackhouse. My brother has never really had an analysis of why anyone would think any differently than him – that is to say, empathy had never been a strong suit. Most of the time, we tolerated it because that's just Jamie. He'd lost his best buddy, his partner in crime – and his two other sisters were nothing more than Level 2 Moms to him.
I'd handed in that hairshirt a long time ago, though. I can tell I'm feeling cold toward him, and I do try to pull it back. There's no need to layer more drama onto an an already eggshelly situation.
“You're here, you're here,” Mom chants, her arms around his neck and he eventually has to just drop his luggage to the ground and succumb to the hug.
Tricia's coming down the stairs, and the cat dances between her feet all the way to the bottom.
'The way to handle that,' Tricia had told me not long after the cat had arrived and promptly tried to kill me on those stairs, 'Is to just pretend she isn't there. Walk as you normally would and if you step on her, she'll learn her lesson. If she steps in front of your foot as you're walking and gets punted, she'll learn.' This sage wisdom did not bear out in reality, partially because I suspect that Penelope the cat likes getting launched down the stairs. She'll zip back up for another round, and now you're playing an incredibly stupid game with an incredibly stupid cat.
“I'm not staying in the house,” Jamie says, peeling himself away from our mom. “I've got a couple friends who I need to see and they'll probably set me up. This house is such a fucking bummer.”
“Jamie,” Tricia says, glaring at him. “Already?”
I glance at our mom just long enough to see her smooth the stricken look off her features and rearrange her expression into something motherly and tolerating.
“That's fine, Jamie, but you'll keep in touch? When will you be back next?”
“Fuck, I just got here and already it's when am I coming back?” Jamie says with a laugh. Tricia snorts and my mom gives a small smile but only Jamie could be oblivious enough to miss the hurt she's exuding.
“Want a drink?” I ask, knowing that will at least get him settled into one place for a bit.
“When do you think the LCBO is going to run out of booze?” Tricia asks as we all march to the kitchen and take our lifelong seats around the kitchen table.
I say, “I'm pretty sure our premier has made it his sacred duty to keep it stocked even after the end times end.”
“You all haven't had much looting, then?” Jamie asks, accepting the beer I hand him. I make offers and Tricia takes one as well, Mom passes, and I start a pot of coffee.
We sit around the kitchen table, Jenna's absence all the more conspicuous in our familiar configuration, her spot next to Jamie like a black hole.
“No looting, as far as we know,” Mom says. “But the comment threads are just... off the rails. I've never seen so much rudeness. It's like everyone is taking their fear out on each other, which just makes people feel less safe, and on it goes.”
Jamie shakes his head. “Yeah, but that's online. It's when people start rejecting the social contract in the real world that we should be concerned with.”
“Katherine's starting a, a kind of project. To get people together so we can be safe,” Tricia says, her chin tipped up as she looks around the table. Part pride, part challenge.
“A project for women,” Mom says. I can hear the subtlest of disapproval in her voice, the kind of layered meaning that only an eldest daughter can pick up on. And saying it like that allowed my brother to rip into it, which set the table up in one of its oldest traditions: Mom and Jamie against Tricia and me.
“Oh, a prime target for the raping and pillaging to come,” he sneers. “Better hope the word doesn't get out.”
“Almost sounds like you're cheering for the rapist team,” I say. The coffee's ready but I decide not to pour myself any so I'm not stuck in this situation any longer than I have to be.
“I'm just saying, you have to think like men when it comes to this stuff. It's the end of the fucking world. There's going to be extinction burst behaviours on a global scale. You want women to be safe? They need to buddy up with men.”
“Oh, because that's kept women safe for millennia,” I snap. “Our options: get raped by many men, or get married and get raped by one. It's been like fifty years since women even had a say in who they married. You think men were protecting women? They were treating them like a resource.”
“Jamie,” Tricia says, “I don't think you get how dangerous and isolating a so-called buddy system would be. We are trying to get women out of those situations, not into them.”
But Jamie had landed on another flaw, one I saw coming from a mile away.
“And what about men who want to be safe? What about the good guys who want to keep women safe?”
“I hope they can find a meaningful way to do that,” I say. “If they actually want that, they'll understand why it's come to this.”
Jamie laughs, runs his hands through his hair. He levels his gaze at me, target locked as if we were still kids. “Aren't you, like, dying?”
“Jamie!” Mom cries. “Enough.” She leaves the table to pour herself a coffee.
“Can't think of a better time to try to be helpful,” I say. I yearn to be harsher, to say that he'll regret his callousness long after I'm gone, but I can't. It's the first time he's brought up the subject himself, and that tells me his words are acting as a bodyguard for his feelings. So I swallow my desire to lash out, despite how it churns my stomach. Being the bigger person shouldn't feel so bitter.
“Honestly, whatever makes you feel better. Even if this disaster takes our lifetimes to devolve into hell on Earth, some psycho is just going to blow the planet up before we get a chance to rebuild something better. It's fucking over.”
“No,” Tricia says. “Right now, it isn't over. We're all still here, alive, making coffee with clean water and drinking beer sold by a government outlet. We're only on the path to 'over'. We haven't arrived.”
“And you'll never convince me it's stupid or pointless to try to ease suffering while we still can,” I say.
“Well,” Jamie says, keeping us in suspense as he finishes his beer. “It's your funeral. But you already knew that.”