“What should I do? Give up my job and follow you?”
“No. No! Don’t follow me. But please, listen . . .”
“Why? Do you have a message from God?”
“I have a message, but not from God: from common sense and reason. A message from the science that gave us our lives of privilege; that defeated disease and put man on the moon. The science that gave us the means to devastate the ecology of this earth – to destroy the environment that we depend on for life!”
“I don’t have time to listen to someone who just wants to get their face on the TV!” he barked as he walked away.
‘No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.’ She didn’t want to be famous. Her years of studying literature gave Annie access to quotes that could eloquently express her despair; but it did not help her when she spoke to people. It did not help her control the hopelessness and sorrow that seized her. I just want to stop the world from dying! keened through her soul.
“Don’t want much, do you?” she muttered savagely to herself. Then she took a deep breath and began looking for the next person to approach.
“Hello. My name’s Annie. What are you doing to save the world?”
When she saw the man looking at her, Annie hesitated. Any sign of interest usually meant she was more likely to be successful in her conversations. “Hello. My name’s Annie. How’s your day been so far?”
“Not bad.” He seemed a little startled by her approach. “You’re the one aren’t you? That person who’s been asking people about saving the world?”
“Quite possibly,” said Annie, still in two minds over her appearance in the media. “What are you doing to save the world?”
The young man in front of her pulled a gun from under his coat and pointed it at her.
“No,” said Annie, reaching towards him, “that won’t help.”
The gun fired.
Chapter Eleven: Limbo
“Do I dare disturb the universe?”
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
As memory completed itself in the words on the screen in front of her, Annie stopped typing. She looked up at the white walls which surrounded her.
“I suppose that means this isn’t an insane asylum. I’m dead, aren’t I?” she asked the glowing figure who stood next to her.
“Not quite. You would probably call this “Limbo”. There is still a choice to be made.”
“A choice?”
“Do you wish to return to the life you had – to “live” – or do you wish to leave this body behind and move on to the next understanding?”
“The next “understanding”? There is life after death? Are you an angel?”
“Yes – to all those questions – but your understanding of an angel is,” he seemed to search for a word that would fit, “not accurate.”
“What are you, then? Where am I? Is there really a God?” In the midst of her confusion, reassurance came to Annie with a sensation of soft fur and a gentle tongue licking her hand. Calmed by this welcome haunting, she was able to attend to what she was being told.
“The human concept of an omniscient being is right in one or two important ways. There is connection between all life and death is not the end. But it is not as you imagined.”
“Where am I?”
“This place is one of transition. It is not as it appears, but has been fashioned for you, to enable this conversation – to allow you a choice.”
“Does every-one get to choose?”
“No. There is judgement. And most human morality has it right. But there is too much tolerance of violence and injustice. Greed has warped human history. You have been given a choice because sometimes one person can make a difference. Most often change occurs because many people act – but they need a catalyst.”
“So you’re saying I can make a difference? You know what will happen?”
“We cannot predict or change the future as you perceive it.” The creature paused. “Every person is special. Every person has the power to make a difference – especially if they act together. You understand this. What you conceive of as God cannot change your world – but you can.”
“So, I could go back, knowing that there is something beyond death.”
“Your memory of this experience will not remain intact. But a decision must be made.” The angel gazed into her soul.
“What will you choose?”
Annie looked around her. The computer and its table were gone. The light, white and pure, that surrounded her, seemed to be pulsing, growing in intensity.
The walls dissolved into light. White light – beckoning.
Chapter Twelve: Epilogue
“There might be a God . . . and there might not. Either way we’re on our own.”
City of Bones – Cassandra Clare
If not for the tomatoes, Annie would not have noticed. She did not often venture into these lower levels of their survival bunker. Now, as she ran through the maze, adrenaline kicked in. Her heart raced in a chest that could not breathe – the air in the tunnels was too close.
She tried to take a deep, calming breath, ignoring the nightmarish, constricting tube around her. Could she be wrong?
Their conversation the other day was clear in her memory.
“How did you learn to swim, Annie?”
Holly knew how much she loved the beach.
“They gave us lessons in public pools. But eventually they had to close the pools. There was still the beach, though. If you were careful.”
Peter ignored her moment of melancholy.
“What did people do if they didn’t know how to swim? Could they still go in the water?” Such a harmless question.
She had talked of fun on lilos and rubber tubes in muddy rivers. And the gastro afterwards. “You could use anything that would float.” Life preservers, chunks of wood.
And then they had dragged out of her the basics – how to float, treading water, survival stroke – the easy bits.
She cursed. Why else would someone have taken the bubble insulation from the hydroponics storage locker? Stupid children!
She heard them as soon as she opened the hatch. Peter was struggling, calling out and splashing. On the inspection deck, Holly was panicking, kneeling and trying to reach him with her hand.
“Peter!” Annie called. “Lie on your back and stop struggling! Take a breath of air. You’ll be safe! I’ll get you out!”
She grabbed the nearby cleaning pole and eased herself into the water as Peter fought for control of himself. He tried to lie back, but would not let any of his head remain in the water. He was too afraid and the sheets of plastic bubbles tangled his limbs as he thrashed again in fear.
Gripping the metal grid that supported the deck, Annie held out the long pole and was able to just reach Peter. He clutched at the pole, almost dragging it from her. Then, with something to hold, he calmed a little.
“Now please lay back and float, Peter. It’s all right to put the back of your head into the water. You have to. You will be safe. Just hold the pole in front of you.”
Gently Annie drew him towards the scaffolding that supported her. He did not need to be told to grip the pipes. He stayed there, breathing properly again, while Annie untangled the insulation sheets from around him.
“I am too old for this. Seventy-year-olds should not be rescuing teenagers who want to drown themselves.”
She sat on the decking with Holly and Peter until the shaking began to subside.
“Well,” she finally said. “I guess we’d better go tell every-one you’ve been swimming in the back-up water supply.”
“What a bloody stupid thing to do!”
“Thanks for stating the obvious, Bruce.”
Annie faced him, Holly behind her, comforting Peter, shivering in a blanket. “The kids should go home. We’ll find Zeke and decide on the proper consequences.”
“Consequences!” Rage and frustration moulded his face. “We all suffer for their actions. What if the water is contaminated?”
“Bruce! We’ll talk about this when the kids have gone. We’re the council executive. Once we find Zeke . . . “
“Ah! What’s the bloody difference! Consequences don’t matter any more.” He rose from his chair, pleading. “They should be told!”
“No, Bruce. Not now. We need a calm decision. Just wait until we can talk.”
The teenagers’ parents arrived, stalling the conversation. Bruce turned to face the wall while Jacinta fussed over Holly, and Peter was whisked away by Tran and Shara.
“Thanks Annie.” Holly stepped forward to hug Annie. “I don’t think I could have rescued Peter. Thank-you.”
“I’m glad I got there soon enough. You rest. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“You have to get this in perspective,” Annie began to explain to Bruce, as she shut the hatch and turned to face him. Head in hands, he had slumped over the desk.
“It’s too much. I just don’t think I can keep doing this.”
“This isn’t so bad, Bruce. Peter is safe. We can filter the water. We have to decide on some sort of consequences. Maybe put him in charge of water purity . . . permanently . . .”
“It’s not that . . . it’s the lie. Every day . . . lying. They should be told.”
“We’ve had this conversation before, Bruce. You agreed with Zeke and I. The few others who know, or have realized, all agree.
“Bruce,” her voice pleaded gently, “there has to be hope.”
“But there isn’t.”
There was no answer to him. Annie knew he was right. Should they live to her age, Peter or Holly might die with no-one to mourn them. Adam and Eve in reverse.
“Maybe,” she replied, “but that’s not the point. Do you want those children to suffer the knowledge of their own doomed futures the way you do – the way we all do.” Annie sat in the padded chair by the filing cabinet. Exhaustion overtook her as the adrenaline wore off.
“It’s been a long day, Bruce. Maybe we should talk about this in the morning.”
There was a sharp rap at the hatch, which opened, allowing Zeke to join them. “Well,” he said. “I’ve brought potato peel vodka and the last of my real coffee beans. Which is it to be?”
When she returned to her quarters, Annie wrapped a blanket about herself and began writing in her journal.
I want to wake up in the morning, when light is seeping into the world. Birds are piping and chattering their morning gossip, welcoming a new day.
Maybe it is still possible. There always has to be hope.
If it hadn’t been for those tomatoes giving me such trouble, Peter might have drowned. I don’t even like these tomatoes. I remember tomatoes, tiny ones, picked sweet and juicy under open skies. I remember the smell of earth in the air. I remember the ocean, beaches . . . such beautiful places.
I want to wake in the morning, light oozing into the world, and hear birds piping and chattering their morning gossip. It’s the birds I miss the most.
The children don’t remember birds.
I never expected to be a grandmother, but I’ve worked with other people’s children, laughed with them, taught them, cherished them. I thought there would always be children.
But they cannot survive in our survival pod. They die. And are no longer conceived.
Sometimes I feel guilt for my own emotions. In the midst of global disaster I have the temerity to feel sorry for myself. “I want to go for a walk in a forest,” I whine. “I miss the birds.” My grief for what I have lost seems self-indulgent.
I can’t protect myself from despair. I go through the motions . . . believing it to be futile. All the while afraid that if I allow my students to see my pain I will have betrayed them.
Every-one deserves to have hope.
Annie knew there was some desperate hope. A vague background whisper. The cataclysmic pollution that had destroyed all life in the ocean and disrupted the planet’s oxygen cycle had been neutralized. And now a team may have managed to establish a viable colony of phytoplankton and algae (cultured from specimens that survived in a laboratory) in the Atlantic waters. If they continued to survive . . .
“There’s the rub,” thought Annie vaguely, flexing her hand, strained by heroics. Eventually it might work. Normal oxygen levels would gradually build up. But it would take time. Thirty years or more.
There were survival shelters like theirs, arks where plants and animals were treasured and guarded, in the hope that one day they would return to live unaided on the surface of their world.
But there were problems with breeding for some of the species . . .
It wasn’t just that she was too old to hope to see the saving of the world. It was the children. The few remaining teenagers, those who’d survived the “danger phase”, were possibly the last generation of mankind.
“This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends,” Annie muttered to herself. “Not with a bang but a whimper.”
The shelter she lived in was a good one. It had been set up to observe conditions on the south-east coast of Australia in an area where people had no longer survived in great numbers. Drought and bushfires had driven them away, if it hadn’t killed them.
And when the air turned bad, the isolation of the observation post had protected them from the horror. Annie could remember the tales of shelters surrounded by mobs, trying to break in. Sometimes succeeding.
Or shelters that took in too many people, and perished.
“But can we survive?” Annie looked at the walls around her. Precious scraps, photos, feathers, seashells, a dog with wise brown eyes; treasured objects littered about.
It was still a prison underneath the trimmings. She could not leave – she could not survive outside the shelter. None of them could.
And other shelters, mourning in their words, sent messages describing the sterility of their population.
“How could they let this happen?” Annie cried, focussing her anger on people she could never reach. The people of the early twenty-first century, forty years ago, when they could have saved the world.
Why didn’t they . . . we . . . just stop. But we didn’t. We kept living like there was no tomorrow, blaming our democratic system for the bad decisions.
We had Al Gore come and tell us to get our act together. We had the technology, for Christ’s sake!
And there's another thing. God.
How could an all-powerful being allow this to happen – allow us to do this?
I don’t want to believe there is a God. Unfortunately I can't believe there isn't one either. I'm left in a frenzy of doubt, a witness to apocalypse, wanting to shout into the storm, my arms raised to the heavens.
"Just what the f*** do you think you're doing!" I plead, facing the desolate landscape, devoid of deity.
The Judeao-Christian God made us as gods, in control of our own destiny. If there is such a Being, their shoulders are bowed with grief for what we have done to this Paradise that was created for us with such savage tenderness.
Annie was always telling her students, “One good thing about life is that you get fresh mornings to start again.” After a sleepless night, Annie looked at the photo of a wide blue beach that was above her desk. She knew she would never walk there again and pushed her tears back into her soul – maybe there would be time for tears later.
This morning, after breakfast, they would explain to the whole community that, for any-one who lived here, there could be no fresh start. Their home would be their tomb.
There was no hope.
* * * * * * *
Annie gasped. The nightmare had gripped her like a vice. She struggled to breathe as though she still ran through metal corridors. The dream was over but the terror persisted now that she was awake, overwhelming her with a sense of despair. It w
as the dream of a doomed future that she had often had when she was younger and fighting to save the world.
In last night’s version she was older, but it was just a dream, wasn’t it? The environment was improving now. The world was (mostly) a better place, where few had to fear for their future. Why did she experience this feeling of panic, as if she had barely survived being drowned?
She tried to calm herself. The gentle snoring of her companions in the cabin was reassuring, but she knew that sleep would now elude her. She rose carefully and splashed cold water on her face, trying to wash away the lingering fear. In the mirror she saw her face, lined by age and framed with white hair.
Annie quietly left the cabin and walked to the beach, where she breathed deeply and immersed herself in a moving meditation, giving thanks for the beauty that surrounded her.
“And just what do you think you’re doing there, Miss?”
Annie was standing at the edge of the ocean, the dying waves washing between her toes. She had been staring out towards the horizon.
“What are you doing here, Bluey?” She turned slightly to face him, realizing that the reason the wind didn’t blow him away was that he was too thin to offer any resistance. “I’d have thought this was too early in the day for you.”
“Well, I had to take a slash and thought I’d look at the beach before I went back to bed. For f.f…. Sorry, Miss.” He grinned and spoke deliberately. “For goodness’ sake, Miss. I watched you for a full minute before I came down here. You’ve been staring out to sea and kind of waving your arms around. Are you gonna swim out to sea and never come back, or have you just gone mad?”
Annie laughed. “Both attractive options,” she said. “Isn’t the sunrise beautiful?” She turned her gaze back to the ocean, tracking a seagull that hovered above the swell.
“Bit breezy, though.” He hesitated, shoulders hunched and hands in his pockets. “Seriously, Miss, what are you doing?”
“Can you handle the truth?”
“I think so.”
Annie turned to face the youth as he balanced on the beach, trying to avoid tumbling into adulthood.