Eldon
As if I descend into someone else’s existence. Carrying the lantern makes it feel like a tomb. My head is still tangled in the woman. My stomach dreads the anticipated pain of returning to the distant past. How can this be so totally ordinary? That freaks me out.
Expecting Puddy curled up in a corner of the couch. Fallen asleep over a novel, waiting for me to come home. Half the books in the case were hers, I think. She was the book person. Always reading.
I haven’t read anything substantial for so long, I’m not sure I still can.
But the excruciating boredom of the first years subsided. Books would have helped to escape reality. Man’s big brain is mostly used to keep the wider awareness at bay. Lose focus, and the harsh truths come flooding in—wiping out all the precious details.
Knowledge shrivels, becomes worthless and paper-thin.
I became the stranger I was supposed to be. Now I’m the guest, not the owner. I am visiting my home as an alien. I stand at the bottom of the stairs, holding up the lantern, and let the memories wash over me. I have changed.
Why is all this still here? Like a house move stalled. There’s no water damage. If anything, it’s dry here. A dusty, grave-like dry.
The town is clearly deserted. Not a single light in the valley. Its silhouette had an alien beauty—dark spikes reaching up, bigger than I remember. Stalagmites on a cave floor, crowned by a punctured ceiling of unrivaled black.
A bigger sky.
I gave up years ago, but this place has clung to its form. This house lies waiting.
But not for who I am now.
I feel lost.
What I want from the past is not here.
Stubborn hope.
I walk toward my desk. To me, it was an altar, even back then—an exhibition of stuff I deemed important. A parking spot for tools and things I rarely used. I never sat here. June used it. Feet dangling, head tilted, drawing up rooms and places and faces, gluing back things cut. Collecting bits she liked in tin cans and leftover boxes.
We mixed up home and work. We lived in the office. The lab was our living room.
The world was my lab.
I was out when in.
I only felt in when out.
I was never really here.
I wasn’t with them.
And now I am—
and Puddy and Juniper are not.
I hear feet shuffling. The woman is at the top of the stairs, fumbling her way in. I sigh a slow sigh and let myself fall onto the soft couch. From the moment I saw that red monster, it latched onto my desire and pulled me in. Wads of dust wallow up as I land, center-staging me in a mushroom cloud. Not what I had in mind. A trap of discomfort. A sneeze attack triggers a laughing fit as I try to escape the bottomless gravity of these hungry cushions.
“Goddamn sucking sofa!”
A suppressed giggle from above. She can see me in my little lightbulb, my cloudy globe of age-old flakes. Me, brought to my knees by my old corduroy nemesis.
“That divan just doesn’t like me,” I grunt. “I swear it remembers me. One day I’ll burn this couch.”
“Maybe she doesn’t like surprise crash-landings.”
She is definitely the woman on the phone. Her voice in real life. It slips in effortlessly to regions unvisited. I lift my lantern in defense.
“Maybe the couch is the gate to hell. Us men have no defence against that kind of softness.”
A soft, shaky sigh.
“Us women love to slowly render soft what is hard and impatient.”
I can see her now. A vague figure, one foot on the sixth step, her weight still on the landing.
“Auryn,” I say, placing the lantern on the coffee table. I stay on my knees.
“Eldon.”
Two steps down, she sits, leaning against the wall—just within reach of the light.
“I thought you might come here,” she adds.
I sit where I am, on the floor, back against the evil couch. My eyes unsure. My hands plucking. Her gaze is steady. The moonlight makes squares on the floor. Dust hovers. In no hurry to settle. The air thickens with things unsaid. My questions ooze up and refuse to materialize. Her clouds of potential beginnings gather and fill the room.
As if both our contents spill out and start mixing mid-air, before a single spoken word.
The courage needed to make full contact is frightening. I think people shake hands because of this.
It can’t be said.
First contact is massive. The exchange is of a precision inconceivable by the head. The heart must be opened first. Otherwise, communication misfires. Otherwise, words damage crucial structures. I breathe in an unstable breath and force my eyes to meet hers. They lock in—double keys in reciprocating locks.
I am caught.
I am unlocked.
I am opened.
Set free.
I fall.
We both do.
I can see it in her face.
I can see it like I’ve never seen it before.
We communicate without words.
We exchange tears.
We get to know the outskirts of our beings.
I haven’t been with a woman in so long.
The ache hits like fire.
I could devour her.
Eat her.
Tear through her.
Love her.
Disappear into her.
Lose all my shit.
Give up my life to become hers.
I dissolve.
I lower my eyes. My body pulses, hard and stupid. A violent hunger stirs, old and vast and suddenly unbearable. The rug, me and Puddy bought second-hand. The couch. The house. Horny beast you are, Eldon. The first woman down the stairs?
“You might well be the last,” she says.
Releasing the pressure. Clearing the thick atmosphere.
“The last to get out?” I ask.
“That too,” she nods. “But… you didn’t just survive the Pyrrha Project.”
I don’t get what she’s trying to say. The last what?
“They’re all gone, Eldon. Gone or on their way out. Our sons are no longer sons in the strict sense. We have boys, but no men.”
All melody has vanished from her voice.
“You are a rare specimen. You escaped the onslaught. The thinning.”
I’m unable to process it. I haven’t been out that long. Four billion males wiped?
“‘Save the women and children’ sort of backfired on us,” Auryn says.
The words drip bitter. A chill settles in my bones. I laugh.
“What are you saying?”
I want to attack her for bullshitting me. Resist hearing this. Plug my ears. Act as if she didn’t just say what she said. But my skin knows. My spine tightens for the full blow. For the weight to come down.
There is more.