Another Lifetime

A story set in both the comfortable present and the dystopian future.

Ernst Hamstad shuffled to an optimum position of comfort in his leather recliner chair, placed his laptop onto his knee and prepared to continue his masterpiece. It had been many years since a fictional plot had excited him quite so much.

‘Landfill’ was set to be his greatest novel to date. Of that he was certain. Not because of the writing style or the storyline, or anything like that, but because it was the most likely dystopian scenario to occur in actuality. He wholeheartedly believed that his fans would love his latest offering and the whisperings of movie rights were already murmuring at the back of his mind.

Perhaps the originality of the story might be called into question, he pondered, except it wasn’t simply a story. Not to Ernst Halmstad. To Ernst this manuscript depicted an inevitable future that waited on the lifetimes of the sons and daughters of his young grandchildren.

It was a vision of a world of stark division between rich and poor, haves and have not’s. A world where only a minority enjoyed any comfort and privilege whilst the rest toiled in servitude upon toxic fields of humanities waste. Only the strongest of those made low were spared this collective fate and served the wealth’s interest with force.

The majority of the globe had fallen victim to an ideological holocaust. The poor and needy, the underclass and impoverished were, (by virtue of increasingly diminishing resources), condemned as criminals and, (by virtue of ‘evolutionary adaptation deficit’), relocated to ‘Rehabilitation through Reclamation Estates’ where they were made to work recouping and reconstituting waste materials from the landfill sites of the old world. The construction of these prison estates had gone virtually unnoticed until the larger population were systematically stripped of their given rights and relocated ‘en masse’.

Many resisted and many perished in the carnage of the sporadic class war that ensued. Ernst’s story takes place a generation after the Revolution has been largely subdued by government artillery and propaganda. The scant hope for any individual is the new world article which asserts that ‘those who prove themselves worthy may assimilate into civilised society’, but this worthiness is judged on the merits of physical prowess and the willingness to enforce law on behalf of the minority alone. There is neither education nor leisure time by which one can pursue happiness or betterment; only the chance to escape by helping cajole the lives of your former community.

The one world state is firmly in control as we meet Tutsi Taylor; a young boy who has known nothing other than living in hazardous squalor and rummaging through treacherous wasteland for valuable resources to fuel a world he may never see to know. This short lifetime has been lived beneath the illumination of spotlights and the sights of guns and below the aspiration to participate in the society of folk legend.

Tutsi, (so called because of his tribal connections to continental Africa), lives on a Rehab Estate #732 in the province that is still unofficially referred to as ‘China’, but which has long outlived its need for sovereignty. Like all states and nations ‘China’ had been rendered obsolete when it’s surviving population was relocated to seemingly arbitrary parts of the globe; the fortunate to habitable zones, the undesirable to living purgatory.

Ernst closed his eyes and imagined the nine year old, (the author had already described how the child had no accurate concept of his own age), as he plodded across the dangerous landscape- an absurdly oversized ‘Collector’ strapped to his back by shoulder straps.

Collectors are little more than large hemp sacks that have their openings held wide with a wire hoop. The workers carry these cumbersome objects across the landfill sites and throw their yield into them as they move. On this day Tutsi and his contemporaries are tasked with collecting paper and card; ‘any condition- attached to any other material’. The instructions were simple enough and preferred by a workforce that dreaded orders to collect more specified materials. Under this instruction the dissemination of resources took place at the warehouse, meaning less time spent amongst the often lethal waste.   

Tutsi’s colleagues and community laboured endlessly across the acres wide chasm in nature. From guarded fence to citadel wall, the land was filled with the forlorn forms of a criminal class hell bent on survival. There was no other choice, but to work to prove their worth or die amongst the more valuable waste of the old world. Any and all dissidents were shot and any none-compliant were free to rot in their criminal underworld.

Food was scarce and little grew here except on small patches of land that offered stunted yield. Rain water was polluted, but barely drinkable if collected before it touched the sodden earth. As such all were dependent on the food and water payments from citadel officials. Those that did not work either meekly starved or were killed by their own should they dare to steal.

Tutsi looked curiously at the plastic covered ream of paper that he had happened upon beneath the burnt out husk of a motor vehicle. He could not read and knew that it was a risk to stop working to examine the contents of the zip bag, but something about it piqued his interest.

Tutsi hunkered low beneath the wreckage and shouldered off the collector. He smiled as he observed the paper beneath the covering, although he wasn’t entirely sure why. He had a fleeting thought to self-preservation, but nothing further deterred him from opening the package that would change his world forever.

Ernst tried to think how such a boy on such a place may feel when finding such an unblemished object and decided it would be a kind of ‘reverent detachment’. Surely in such a ‘Neo-Dickensian’ environment the only atmosphere of adventure left to a child was its fertile imagination, he mused.

The boy wiggled his fingers inside the opening, but winced as the dryness of his dirt encrusted fingers scraped irritatingly against the unusually arid texture of the pages within. Tutsi frowned determinedly and pulled the A4 wad free of its confines.

He gazed at the printed words in fascination. He wanted to know what they said; what story might they tell, he wondered. Tutsi’s mother could read a little, but she was too tired and sick to burden with such a matter. At the age of forty she did not have long to live, he knew, and soon he and his elder sister would have to become wholly self-sufficient and self-reliant and there would be no time to read. Perhaps though he would find someone who could read it to him in the future? Perhaps he could afford a teacher to help him learn to read if he impressed enough to join society?

Something about the crisp pages made him yearn to know more.

All he had to do was smuggle it passed the guards who patrolled the walls.

Tutsi flicked through the many pages and was dismayed to find that many of them at the back were unfilled. He looked back at the covering page in mild irritation. Tutsi could not count, but knew enough to understand that less than two handfuls of writing inhabited the first page.

It seemed a waste.

The author must have paused in his thoughts because as Tutsi kept looking the words began to make sense.

At the centre of the almost blank page he read,

“Landfill- a novel by Ernst Hamstad- first draft”

It suddenly occurred to Tutsi that Ernst had stopped writing because his brain had shut down many years before and he realised that he was a young boy living a life that had never been fully told.

Tutsi remembered the future that this discovery portended. The uprising, the upheaval and the toppling of the new world order awaited his participation. They were thoughts as yet unwritten, but Tutsi had found the beginnings of the tale that was rightfully his.

The child that had been Ernst Hamstad got to his knees and placed the manuscript into the string waistband at the back of his ragged trousers. He then strapped on the collector to disguise the bulging object and stepped into his new life with a brand new perspective.

Ernst Hamstad had not lived through writing another novel; he had died while writing another lifetime.

 

Author's Note

This is a sort of mix of a new idea with a novel I was thinking on. Not sure how well it works as it is a bit of an experiment.

Reviews

[Preeti]

I really like it! An intriguing piece of metafiction you have here, where we can't tell which is "fiction" and which is "real" until the end. I love the last line in particular. It sounds quite--there's no other word for it--epic yet it resounds with a note of dark finality.

You have several typos so you may want to go back, read this out loud to yourself and fix them. Also, it's "humanity's", not "humanities", which, if you were to look it up, means something quite different.

Well done!