Monday, May 6, 2013

People disappear too

This is how the world ended, not with a bang and a flash, wiped clean by the cleansing fire of nuclear war, no plagues ravaged the land, there was no breakdown of society, no riots, no heroics and no one fought against it. The world ended quietly. It was as though everyone was tired and wanted nothing more than to sleep for a long time.


I was a child then and I remember asking my father who was little more than a child himself where everyone was going. He said, "They're going home." He smiled when he said it and for the first time I knew what he was thinking:

"We're all going home."

So it went. Each day the streets were a little emptier. If you watched carefully you could see the people disappear. I saw two teenagers sit down on a bench together. For a moment my view was obscured by a passing car. And then they were gone as though they had never been.

After a while I could tell when people were about to vanish. They looked a certain way, their faces perfectly neutral, their eyelids a little heavy. And then they were gone.

I was seeing the world for the first time then; forming the first memories that would stay with me for life and it seemed natural somehow that this should be how things worked. I didn't really understand that the world was ending until the TV went off air. The TV had always been there, bright and noisy, in the corner of the room and when it finished I realised how quiet the world had become. I watched static fizzing across the screen for a while. Then I turned off the set and went to look through the window.

There was no one in the street. In the distance I saw a dog sniffing at bins that were never to be collected. I looked out at the rows of identical houses set back behind neat squares of lawn. I saw the city spread out below, everything was peaceful and still. And for a moment I had a giddy sense, a preview, of how the world would soon be.

In all the time the world was ending there was only one sign that people cared. That this mattered. Graffiti appeared, daubed on walls and windows it said, "People Disappear Too." It wasn't a sinister thing or a lament. There was no emotional weight attached to it, it was a simple statement of fact.

There are no people left now in this world, only me. I sometimes feel as though I will live forever though my body ages. The last person I saw vanish was my father. I watched the blankness steal over him. I saw all the cares and worries come away from him one by one. The world was entirely deserted then and we took long walks through the empty streets of the city. We didn't talk much, there wasn't anything left to say. The days were long and dusty. There was a dry wind blowing from out west and when it hit the city the tall buildings channeled it and it carried litter high up into the air. It swirled and danced in vacant lots and sighed against the edges of buildings. Then one day my father turned to me and I saw that there were tears in his eyes. "I still love you," he said and there was a measure of wonder in his voice. I stood there and watched him walk off into the distance. Above and around him rose a cloud of debris: old papers, fast food containers, cigarette butts, plastic bags.

And then he was gone.

After a while the city wasn't a safe place to be. The plants that we had kept carefully prisoned away in parks and neat squares of garden escaped. The asphalt roads bubbled and cracked. Young trees forced their way up between paving stones. The buildings started to crack and fall, worn down by vegetable persistence. So I moved into the country. I took a map with me and followed the roads that were so rapidly disappearing. I crossed the desert on highways half covered in sand. In the mountains I saw roads and towns that had been swept away by landslides and avalanches. I floated through the flooded streets of New Orleans in a white row boat. And wherever I went I felt that I belonged. I felt like I had come home.

I have a lot of time to think about what happened as the world ended. And I think that I am not alone. I try to see the end of the world from other people's perspectives and I see the same thing again and again: I see the people leaving one by one, I see the world slowly emptying, till there is only one person left. It helps me when I feel lonely to think that I am not really alone, that somewhere, just out of sight, there is always someone else. Another me alone with the earth and the sea and the stars.

© John James Kennedy

I wrote this a long time ago after seeing "people disappear too" painted on a wall. It struck me as an odd thing to choose to write on a wall. Being anonymous, it didn't seem as threatening as it might have done.

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