Everman

Every day, the same thing. Wake up. Eat. Excrete. Maybe cry in self-pity for a little while just to mix up the schedule a little bit, but mostly only on special occasions. Like today. Today was his birthday—although not a happy birthday. No day was happy for James Everman.

James lived in the Oasis community of Los Angeles, a gated community with a desert theme that really messed with James’ head on certain days. Today, like every day, he walked to the front gate, to the control panel hidden in a fake palm tree, and reached for the switch that would turn on the little water fountain in front of the place.

He didn’t even bother to dress anymore. He could feel the heat of the sun on his naked body, but he was past caring. Skin cancer was the least of his concerns.

His hand stopped right over the switch. What was the point? Honestly? (This hesitation was part of the ritual, and then he’d always flip the switch and go on about his day, because not to flip the switch would be to admit that no one else was ever going to see the fountain again.)

Six months.

He closed the tree without flipping the switch.

He opened the gate and went down to the supermarket to go about the pointless task of cleaning the place up. The perishables were more or less slime in the bins, and the nonperishables had kept him alive these past six months.

Before he got there he passed a park, where he had sat often, with girlfriends. There were no children in the sandbox, no old men feeding the pigeons.

No pigeons. The park, just like everything else, was completely silent. He moved along.

He sighed often as he went about his work. Tears flowed loosely from his eyes. He didn’t even realize he was crying. There was no real purpose to what he was doing—if anything, it would have been to clear the place of the stench of decay, and he’d gotten used to the smell long ago—but if he didn’t do something, he knew he’d go mad. Again.

After a few hours, he became weary—not physically weary, for he had been for the past few months in the best shape of his life—and stopped. He went home, running past the graveyard of his mind that used to be a park.

***

The routine lasted for several hours each day, and the hope had gone out of his voice, the words dead and uninviting. As a daily ritual for the past six months he used his phone—which shouldn’t still be working, but it was—to call phone numbers around the planet. He knew he’d never get a phone bill for it, and he had the international codes memorized after so long. Today he called thirty numbers in Canada, China, or Australia, as well as thirty or so more domestic numbers.

He always left the same message, if a message machine picked up: “If you can hear this, I survived too. I know you don’t want to be alone; neither do I. Call me.” He left his number, with the international code if necessary. It had occurred to him that God’s sense of humor would probably see fit to have the only other survivor be non-English speaking, but there was nothing much he could do about that.

He’d considered getting one of those automatic dialers, the kind the telemarketers used that always seemed to hit your number at three in the morning; but on the off chance that someone actually picked up, he wanted to talk to them that very second.

After a few hours he looked out the window, at the sun making its way down the west end of the sky, and then at his watch. It wasn’t Sunday, but he was going to church.

***

He’d long ago cleared out the few bodies that had been in the church. It hadn’t been crowded at all—if people who know doom is approaching don’t die alone, they usually die in church together; obviously they didn’t know it was coming—and had taken almost no time. There had been a bum sleeping in the back (whose smell in death had likely borne little difference to that in life), a woman in the confessional who had died with her hands over her face, crying, and the priest in the other side of the confessional, who to James’ morbid amusement had a crossword puzzle in his hand, pen poised to write in another word.

James had never been a very religious man—maybe that was his problem—but since he had all the time in the world he had sat down and read through the entire Bible, several times. The Revelations were especially well worn in the copy he would read when he came to church. James had come to the conclusion that the end of the world had come, and he had been left alone on Earth, forgotten and forsaken in a distant corner of space.

Why? He didn’t know. He’d never been a religious man, but he’d never been a bad man. He’d always given to the Salvation Army Santas that rang little bells and reeked of cheap alcohol. He’d bought Girl Scout cookies and otherwise supported the next generation. True, he avoided eye contact with bums as much as possible, hung up curtly on telemarketers, and never gave the Jehovah’s Witnesses the time of day—but Christ! was that so different from anyone else?

All he knew was that he had been chosen as the only specimen of the human race to be called Scum of the Earth, and so he was alone.

As he walked home after reading the prophecy of his fate once more, the sun dipped under the horizon. Lampposts all across the city of Los Angeles flickered on. The city looked alive, and some part of James’ mind wondered idly (as it did every day around this time) why electricity was still flowing through the city.

***

It was to be an historical achievement for all mankind. A new source of energy, hundreds of times more powerful than atomic energy. Secretly, the United States government, in response to energy crises resulting from oil shortages, had been working to create a massive remote system that could send energy in radio-like waves to all electrical systems on the planet, charging them permanently. It was highly secretive to avoid sabotage, and was not going to be announced until after it happened, a post facto explanation.

When the system was implemented, the invisible waves of energy that—as expected—spread across the globe and permanently charged all electrical equipment also sent power surges of nuclear magnitude through the brains of all the living creatures on the planet. Because such organs were based on electrical impulses, all synapses fired simultaneously; massive hemorrhages instantly killed every living thing on the planet. Birds fell from the sky mid-flight and even most deep sea fish floated lifelessly to the surface.

The survival rate should have been absolute zero. James Everman was an anomaly whose survival would never be known by others, or understood by himself. All he knew upon waking the next morning was that everyone and everything else was dead.

***

James sat at home. One might have expected him to be drinking, but drinking had driven him faster to insanity than the situation alone would probably have done, and while his desperate situation had led him to an interesting two weeks without his mind, the company of his own faculties was the only company he had, and he had learned after the initial madness to cope, which had been doing for four months since.

When he had been twelve years old, his mother had caught him masturbating in his room. That had been quite a debacle; he’d cried for hours afterward, ashamed at himself both for what he had been doing, and the fact that he didn’t regret it and didn’t plan to stop.

His mom wasn’t going to catch him this time.

He cried anyway.

***

If a man screams in primal loneliness, and no one is alive to hear it, does he make a sound?

***

Six months. And now it was his birthday.

He could have gone to any store, any mall, and gotten anything he could possibly have desired, but who needed a wok big enough to cook for four when that was three too many? or an alarm clock to mark the passage of time in a dead world? He knew what gift he wanted, and he wasn’t going to find it at the nearby Ikea outlet.

He remembered hearing somewhere—or maybe he’d read it somewhere; either way—that if you submersed yourself in warm water before you slashed your wrists, you wouldn’t even feel it, and you’d fade away quietly.

James ran a warm bath.

He sat down at his desk and took out a pen and paper. He wrote “Goodbye Cruel World” and then laughed, a screechy sound more feral than human. To think, that anyone was going to read his suicide note. Especially one as clichéd as that.

Good Christ, James, if you’re going to be dramatic at least be original. He screeched again, crumpled it up and urinated on it as it sat on his desk, just because he could.

He almost turned off the pouring faucet, but decided not to. Why bother? Wasting water was no longer a concern. He got in the bath, realized he didn’t have a razor, got out of the bath again. The water had already begun to overflow onto the floor, and as he stepped out of the bath, his foot slipped. Instinctively he shot his hand out and grabbed the edge of the sink, narrowly stopping himself from cracking his head open and killing himself on the linoleum.

He screeched laughter again. He shouldn’t have caught himself.

He got out the razor and went back into the bath. He poised the infinitely sharp blade over his wrist. He could see the blue veins underneath waiting to be severed. Could almost feel them pulsing in the paper-like membrane of his inner wrist. He ran the flat side of the blade lightly up and down his wrist and forearm, tickling the sensitive skin.

He considered the situation one more time. Suicide, he knew from his careful appraisal of the Good Book, would get him sent straight to Hell. Did he want that?

Thinking. Long and hard.

He was already in Hell, and he had no other choice. Sooner or later the food would run out and he would die anyway. No reason to stave off the inevitable. He slid the razor through his skin.

His hand snapped back as he slashed the muscles on the underside of his wrist, leaving the ones on top to fully contract unopposed. Blood spurted out of the open wound.

The sight of blood had always made James squeamish, and his vision swam for a moment (and it would hardly do to pass out and drown in the middle of a suicide attempt, wouldn't it?), but it was too late to stop now. He turned the razor around in his good hand, stuck it in his mouth, and slashed the other wrist, a little shallower this time. He found himself still in control of his right hand, as the blood began to flow from the gaping arteries.

He spat the razor aside onto the floor, and shoved his severed wrists under the warm water. However he’d come across the idea of the bath, it was a good one. He couldn’t feel it. He started to relax as his body drained.

At that very moment, an alien sound pierced the descending mental fog. He hadn’t heard it in six months, and it had to repeat a few times before he realized what it was.

The phone was ringing.

James tried to leap from the tub, but he was already weak with blood loss. He succeeded only in flopping himself limply over the lip of the tub, to land on the discarded razor, which cut into his stomach, knocking the wind from him. He inhaled deeply, his face against the floor, and got a half-lung at least of the water that had begun to puddle deeply there. Coughing as violently as his body could handle, he dragged himself along with his good hand, pushing the razor even deeper into his abdomen. The sliced muscles of his stomach shrieked with every breath he took, and tears streamed from his eyes as his life streamed from his body.

“I’m coming!” he tried to yell, but it came out a croaky whisper.

“Please, don’t hang up! I’m coming!” He got out the door to his bathroom as the answering machine picked up.

He crawled along, leaving a thin dark trail on the carpet as he heard, but didn’t listen to, the recorded message he had made long ago.

“Hey, this is James Everman. Thanks for calling, I feel loved. Let me know who you are and how to get back to you, and I will! Have a good one!”

So cheery. So naïve. So long ago…

The voice that followed was not his own. It was a young woman’s.

“Hello? I…uh, I survived, too. My name’s Linda. I got your message just now. I—it’s funny, I actually was ready to kill myself, but then I came home and got your message. I…I want to meet you. Call me back as soon as you get this. I’m here in the U.S. [phone]. Um…bye.”

Click. She was gone.

She had sounded pretty.

James died.