2.9 - Arcadia in a Dark Age

“Right here is fine,” I said. My driver slowed but didn’t come to a complete stop. 

“Are you sure?” he said. “Nobody has lived here since…” 

“I know,” I said. “I’m visiting.” I had no need, or rather, no desire to clarify beyond that. He reluctantly shifted the car into park and turned on his emergency flashers, then ended the ride on his phone which wobbled unsteadily in its holster attached to his front window. 

“Have a good one,” he said. I responded in kind and shut the car door behind me. Once he pulled away, I took a moment to stare at the row home in front of me. It looked the same as I remembered it. The stone steps leading from the sidewalk to the house were the same mottled gray I remembered them being, and the third step was still missing a large chunk from the residents who were here before us. The windows on the second floor were still clouded over, and the paint along the gutter was just as chipped as ever. The house was the same, it was the city that had changed. There wasn’t a sound to be heard. Not a dog barking, not an argument escaping a window next door, not the thumping bass of a car nearby. The sounds I remember so vividly were gone. Along with the silence, and even more striking, was the emptiness of the street. Only one parked car was visible for blocks, and it was missing two of its tires. My driver was the only one I had seen for the last fifteen minutes. A few trees along the road rustled in the wind, and the wheel of an upturned bike slowly rotated like the hands of time, waiting to fall in on itself. 

It’s my birthday today. I’m turning twenty. I’ve never considered myself very nostalgic, but maybe I just wasn’t old enough to properly feel it until now. Maybe twenty years is how long one needs to be alive before they start wishing for the past and not for the future. Or maybe its because the future is pallid in comparison to the glow of the past. The political theorists and social scientists who blindly whipped the horses dragging our wagon of idealist progress into the bleak abyss before them have been replaced by philosophers and community-driven socialists, who consider community the global ‘us’ and not just their local constituency, and even still, they estimate our very own Dark Age to last another twenty-three years. The damage was so thoroughly done, it unwound the already loose coil of human togetherness and left behind a society of individuals who only saw what was done to them personally, and how much more they deserve. We are defiantly crawling out of the depths, like an entire world of newborns after the end of days, but I can't shake the feeling that I am still inside of the apocalypse. 

I opened the creaky screen door and tried my key, unsure if it would still work. My dad promised that the locks hadn’t changed. There was no reason to change them after all. After the mass exodus of young people from cities nationwide, houses like ours had lost all value. Even if we tried to sell it, there was no market for it. We defaulted on the mortgage months ago, but nearly two-thirds of the city did alongside us, so there wasn’t much to be done about it. City landlords were hit the hardest by the exodus, but I can’t say I’m sorry for them. Henry George pioneered the Georgism movement during the late 19th century, which asserted that while you should own what you earn, no one person or company should own land or property. Much to the chagrin of landowners, Georgism-reworked and renamed Lizzism after Elizabeth Magie-has made a resurgence during the Dark Age. Elizabeth Magie was an abolitionist, Georgist, and creator of The Landlord Game, designed to illustrate the evils and inherit classist structure of landowning. 

The mechanics of the game itself were lifted from a game called Zohn Ahl, which was played by the Kiowa tribe of Native Americans. The game caught on among Elizabeth’s circles, and eventually, the patent was purchased from her by Parker Brothers for $500 dollars. They printed a small run of the game just to maintain the Copywrite, then began printing a new (and strikingly similar) game called Monopoly. It was an oddly reflective arc of true American thievery.    

The key stuck a few times on the grime inside of the lock, but finally clicked and I was able to pull the door open. The corner of the door scraped against the small raised bump of the hardwood floor in the living room. I remember waiting up in bed for that same noise, as my brother snuck back into the house. Our parents heard it too, I’m sure, but they never scolded him for being out. As long as the cops didn’t get involved and nobody got pregnant, they turned a blind eye. It was a silent agreement between them. They haven’t spoken in eleven months. 

After the exodus, a majority of my generation took to the hills and fields, living in hastily constructed wooden tiny homes. Some can sustain themselves off of the land, but most are too lazy and rely on a coalition of farmers who deliver their goods to your door, in exchange for using some of your lands to farm said goods. No one exactly knows why such a large portion of my generation took to the woods, but the leading theory is the oppressive levels of anxiety that had built up among them. Even from a young age, we were conditioned for it. Toddler toys were made with CBD infusions, schools implemented soundproof single occupancy “void” rooms for students too overwhelmed to function, and anti-anxiety prescriptions quadrupled over a span of fifteen years. The year of the exodus, reports claimed that 90% of Americans between the ages of eight and thirty-nine suffered from nearly constant severe anxiety. It was as if humans crossed an invisible threshold for cohabitation, and had no choice but to isolate. My brother was one of them. Before we moved, his anxiety shifted his entire personality. A darkness brewed heavy and wide inside of him, oozing from the corners of his eyes and coating his tongue. He frequently complained of an oily taste in his mouth, and a feeling of emptiness in his chest, like a chamber sucked clean of its contents. His sense of respect and restraint fell by the wayside. To an outsider, he was a reckless ball of aggression. To me, he was a distillation of the few brief moments from our childhood, when his composure broke. An entire human being, reduced to a slight fraction of his whole. When we left the city, his personality split once more, like a nesting doll, shedding the first two permutations of himself. His aggression was smothered by the quiet of an overburdened man, too bombarded to see anything but the next step he was taking at any given moment. He packed a few things and left without a word to any of us. We tried to track him down, but he showed no interest in being found. Truthfully, I think our parents were relieved to have him gone. They would never admit it, but after watching him unravel for so long, I wouldn’t blame them. 

The dust was heavy, but not as heavy as I expected, and the smell of cinnamon and dryer sheets that permeated my childhood was somehow still persisting. I pulled open the stained gray curtains in the front window, bathing the room in sunlight. Most of our furniture was gone, but my parents had left a few pieces. An old tattered armchair in the corner, where my aunt would sit during visits. An end table missing a rubber foot, the folded piece of cardboard I had placed under the uneven leg still intact. A touch lamp, sitting alone on the floor in the far corner, missing its bulb. My twin sisters used to hide behind the couch and tap the lamp right after our dad would sit down and turn it on. The prank never lasted long, seeing as how they would start giggling before they even put their plan into motion. Like my brother, they both left shortly after the exodus. Not to hide away, but to fight. As cities were being abandoned one by one, some folks couldn’t stand to move on, desperate for retribution upon someone, something, anything. Activist groups became militias, online forums became war rooms, and before any of us were prepared for it, blood was spilled in the streets. It was closer to ancient medieval battles than modern-day warfare, where confrontations were planned and agreed upon, two warring sides meeting on an equal plane and bashing each other to bits. Regardless of who was doing the fighting, or where, it seemed that no one was interested in guerrilla tactics or subterfuge. The emotions boiled over too much for that. My twin sisters, a year younger than I am, immediately threw their lot in with our local chapter. I remember the day we left without them. My mom, brother and me, sitting in the packed car, staring out the front window at my twin sisters. They were sitting on the curb with their backpacks, waiting for a car to take them to militia headquarters. Dad was standing before them, crying more than I’ve ever seen, begging for them to come with us. His arm was in a sling from a car accident the week before. Some kid had careened through an intersection with a blindfold on, slamming into a half a dozen cars before skidding to a halt on the median. He jumped out of the car and started shouting about how he didn’t ask to be born in the first place, and that what he did didn’t matter, and wouldn’t be remembered by anyone anyway. I found out later that it was a kid I went to school with. My sisters just sat on the curb, watching my dad, shaking their heads in unison. They resented him, all of us, for our decision to leave. The last time I talked to them, they shouted at me for abandoning humanity. Called me a traitor to my own kind. Told me that I didn’t deserve to take up space in the world they would build. They refused to even acknowledge my brother. Maybe they’re right. Maybe generations from now, people like me will be a black smudge, held up as relics of a weaker time. A time when retreating to the woods to rebuild some semblance of sanity was acceptable. I feel like I have lost all concept of what I should be doing, or what matters to me individually. I think that’s why, when my dad came home from his car accident and told me what my classmate had said, I was chilled to the bone. I couldn’t see myself doing something like that, but I could feel what he felt. I could see where our paths had diverged, but more importantly, I could see where they were matched. 

I left the living room and walked up the blue carpeted stairs. I used to sit on the bottom step and build Legos. The steps were in the corner of the house, and I could build there and feel completely alone. Afterward, I would take the ships I built up to the bathroom and float them in the sink, imagining myself at sea. I could feel the quivering deck beneath my feet, the splash of seawater stinging my eyes. I’ve never been on a boat, but the concept is invigorating to me. On the second floor, my brother and I shared a room, while our sisters had the second and our parents the third. I stood in the middle of the hallway for a moment, listening. I could hear my mom in the kitchen, clinking pots and pans. I could hear my sisters laughing in their room. I could hear my dad talking to my brother in our room about something that happened at school. 

Then, suddenly, it was all gone. I was surrounded by deafening silence. But here I am. Outside of everything. Reliving the time before it all broke down. I don’t know what I hoped to accomplish, coming here. I don’t think I hoped to accomplish much of anything. Before I came, there was a chill air around me seeping through my skin and blistering my throat with each breath. As I look forward to the years ahead of me, I see not a shred of what I knew life to be growing up. It is as if I am suffering through a second birth, emerging into a world that belongs to none of us, but we must make due. The people I knew from this house are still here, and it’s where they will stay forever. The person I was in this house is still here, captured in the walls and the floors and ambulating through the halls. None of us can leave. When I look at my parents, in our cabin, buried deep in the wilderness, I see the gaps. Each of them has pieces missing. Parts of them that they can never recover. As we trudge forward through this Dark Age, it eats away at us. I am afraid. I don’t know what will be left when I step out into the sunlight at long last but I have no choice. I am not as defiant as my sisters who have blossomed in this infantile world. I am not dismantled and disconnected like my brother. I don’t know what I am. I don’t know where I fit, or if I fit, but I know that I have no choice but to move forward. The version of me that is here will stay. He has his place and I envy him for it. After today, I won’t return to this house, or this city ever again. It is all part of a different, ancient world. The one we have now is strange and radical, and only now learning to speak, but it is learning. Out in the wilderness, I will try to become the me that belongs to it, whatever that may mean.