3:AM Magazine

By Steve Finbow.

Immediately after the world as he knew it had ended, James Mallory reloaded his space-time machine and looked over the miles of coral-pink sand that lay ahead. Behind him, at the top of the dune, in the burned-out car, Helen Oppenheim – Mallory’s lover and colleague – her face blackened, her lips peeled back in the heat of the plasma fire, smiled once more. Beside her, his bloody nails buried deep in the leather dashboard, his eyelids drifting down like ashen confetti, Conrad Vaughan – Mallory’s colleague and lover – his face twisted, his mouth frozen in an impossible rictus, screamed his last. Mallory whistled and walked into the rippling heat. Above him, the sun hummed, plaintive, its colour a deep and incandescent golden red.

There had been warnings of course. The thunderheads appearing on the horizon, moving like slow obsidian across the sky, darkening, threatening. The gutted cities, crawling with firestorms, crowded with the petrified animals of countless private zoos. Snipers picking off unlikely survivors from the multicoloured turrets of the deserted love hotels. Mallory watched as people flocked into the city to find refuge, safety. He noted that the government, the tycoons, the upper echelons of the military were moving out, were abandoning their homes, their offices. On the fourth day before the world as he knew it ended, Mallory made an early morning visit to his lab. The rats, panicked, scrabbling, scaled the sides of their cage. Killing them was easy, enjoyable. Not so the great apes.

After he finished, he washed from his body the matted red-hair of the orang-utans, the hot gobbets of gorilla blood. He scrubbed as hard as he could; vigorously rubbing his face until it became raw and angry under the scalding water, but still he was unable to remove the trace left by the parting kiss from Gala the female bonobo. Mallory calmly dressed. There was a peculiar change in the atmosphere; strange shifts of oxygen, the light seemed to dart sideways over the earth, furtive, conspiratorial. Along the river, the vegetation was proliferating, dabbing the air with exotic scents, its violent perfumes intruding into the stale, dying air of the city. In the days following the slaughter of the animals, Mallory dreamed of leaving.

Most evenings, before she typed up the results of her experiments, before her first glass of chilled white wine, Helen Oppenheim would step onto the balcony, watch the setting sun drop behind the thorn trees, follow its trajectory as it lost its battle with the glare of the city, then drop, like a suicide over the cold edge of the world into the beckoning sea of shadow. But tonight, restless and agitated, she closed the glass doors, let down the Venetian blinds, turned them to obscure the view, took a waxy packet from the bathroom cabinet, and eased open the corners as if the blade were a narcotic, a reflection of death and pleasure. She ran her tongue along the edge, tasted steel, tasted blood.

Conrad Vaughan spent the next day in front of the flat-screen vidcom. The porn films bored him and he would pause them, frame-forward, back, pause them again, until he found a scene, usually a close up, in which the entwined bodies, the jewelled pudenda, the tribal tattoos, the strained gantries of fingers, the swollen genitals, resembled the edges of the city, the hastily constructed checkpoints, the watch towers, the barbwire, the rain-sodden soldiers in their sentry boxes; the strobing and the static like the clouds of sand and pollen. Was that it? Was it all about ingress and trespass, penetration and withdrawal, tessellation and tesseracts, was it all about releasing the body from a build up of erotic tension, from being alone, from madness?

At dawn, Mallory set fire to the remainder of his lab, he watched the flames lick around the room and left before the chemicals exploded. Helen sat in the passenger seat of the Cadillac reading a copy of Italian Vogue, her pale skin shaded by a large hat, her sunglasses reflecting the emptying city. Mallory approached the car. Helen didn’t look up. Mallory got in and started the engine, as he did so, he reached over and gripped her thigh. Helen shook her head, continued to read an article on the latest paranoid-critical fashions. Mallory turned the car toward the deserted launch pads, the vegetation pushing up through the tarmac, the wind sharp with sand, the Cadillac luminescent in the afternoon’s boiled and rippling heat.

‘Do you realize we are the last to leave the city?’ Vaughan said as he slipped into the back seat, ‘Even the army have left.’ Mallory looked at him in the rear-view mirror. The young man was gaunt, unshaven, his caramel-coloured hair long and uncombed, his denim jacket torn and filthy. Helen blushed, wiped her forehead. Later, as they negotiated the bombed roads circling the airport, they watched the last plane lift into the sky, heavy with cargo, it strained and roared, relieved to be airborne. They watched it disappear. ‘What’s this?’ Vaughan said, lifting a pair of aviator’s goggles from a rucksack. ‘A memento,’ Mallory said and stopped the car, got out, took the rucksack and put the goggles on. ‘You drive,’ he said.

After a long time, after an endless journey, after the blinding flash, the deafening roar of the elements, Mallory stepped back. There was no air. No shade. The heat had burned into the sand the shadows of the razor-wire perimeter fences and the new desert resembled the floor of an abandoned and drained swimming pool. Time was sliding, space eliding. Mallory could see the opened door of the motel room; hear the sound of laughter, of bodies. He turned the space-time machine towards him, looked down the tunnels leading to the future, away from the past, and he thought about the empty hotels, the garbage-strewn lagoons, the obsessive stares of the astronauts as they looked back toward earth, a world he would no longer know.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Finbow’s novel Balzac of the Badlands will be published by Future Fiction London in October 2009. This story was first published in Pequin.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Friday, April 24th, 2009.