Cityscape

A Story by Alan B.

A man alone in a city encounters order in chaos.

The city moved. It moved without ceasing. Its noises sounded illogical and grating; senseless. They could only be understood in a certain context and its inhabitants lived constantly in that context. Thomas awoke at midday in August of 2015 compressed in the din of traffic that passed on the street outside his apartment. Summer had just begun and the sweltering heat had the effect of intensifying all the misery the city had to offer. Rising listlessly, Thomas stared out of the window to the right of his bed- another agonizingly bright day shone outside. Even on such clear days with no cloud impeding the rays of the sun, it seemed to Thomas that the yellow orb’s light always shown dingily; as if suffused through an opaque screen.

An apathy had taken over Thomas’ life; or so his few friends believed. For he had lost all desire to be part of their Great Society; shunning all of its technological wonders to the point where, though he lived in the middle of the city, he was considered a hermit. The monolithic irony to Thomas was that the extreme advancement of all things electronic had not served to also advance society’s intellect- either en masse or in its individual components. Thomas put on cool clothing for the heat he would soon feel on his routine trip to the café, some four blocks distant. When he was younger he remembered clearly that the summers had been hot, yes, but not oppressively so. In these recent years however, each summer had become progressively intolerable--not only in the southern states but throughout the whole nation.

Thomas mused that it was as if the earth, feeling itself insulted by our attempt to forget that we lived on it, and that we much preferred the artificial world we built on screens, wanted to push us to the extreme, wild north; to meet extinction or survival in a final test for the validity of our existence. Would that that be the case, thought Thomas. Would that nature obliterate the moronic insolence humanity now felt entitled to. The faces of the people Thomas passed now on the busy street all looked proud and rigid, betraying nothing. But what had they to be proud of in empty vacuous lives? They were lives whose success was predicated upon following the set rules of The System--whatever career they chose. Over all was the propagandized illusion of individuality encapsulated in what had become the cult of Self; a religion that served to fool you into believing you chose your own way. In such a fashion the people continued to think of themselves as free and unique, and thus happy in their roles; most being able to push their true state of misery into the subconscious. Their pride came mainly by virtue of the fact that they were simply part of the gloriously artificial future. Concepts like happiness and contentment- emotions once striven for to validate a life- were antiquated and passé.

Thomas had now arrived at the café and was greeted by the warm aroma of the brewing coffee. He inhaled deeply; it was one of the very few pleasures left to him. After ordering his customary latte' he sat down at the small table in the corner and observed the people around him. The café was made to look like one that might have existed in Paris during the 1920’s, and indeed on the wall hung old photos of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce among others- all in Paris café’s writing, or talking, or drinking alone. Most if not all the people in here, thought Thomas, had no idea who the men in the photos were; though under each there was a small silver nameplate identifying each individual. Reading after all required time, free time. Time- outside of the continued, deliriously psychotic pursuit of increasing power and money in their spheres of influence- was something entirely unknown to these people. One of the saddest facets of modern society to Thomas was that, though people had not grown so stupid as to be illiterate, and though the predictions of some dystopic novels concerning a future where the government banned and burned books had not come true (yet), what was read was merely utilitarian in nature. The great works of authors of the past would perhaps be remembered, but only as artifacts representing the genius of Man before technology elevated us to “true” heights.

Now, as he sat at the small corner table slowly sipping the good coffee, Thomas realized he was watching entropy in effect. The talk he heard around him was all rapid technical jargon stripped totally of human reference, interrupted every few seconds to consult smart phones; drones salivating to speak faster as words became automatic fire, back and forth. A picture came to Thomas’ mind then: these people as large sticks being rubbed together in the hands of a giant- faster and faster till the friction caused them to catch fire and burn rapidly. The image was a good metaphor.

Citizens in this Great Society remained human though they detested their humanity; and they burned quickly upon attempting to live as though their consciousness was inherently connected to the digital. Imbibing enough of the chaotic talk and manic atmosphere, Thomas rose from table and walked silently through the gibbering tables to the outside. He was accosted suddenly by a stinking man in torn, filthy clothes yelling that the apocalypse was here. Thomas looked pityingly at the man, another victim of progress, then gently shook him off and headed home. That night, as every night, Thomas sat in the large, old leather wingback chair his father had given him as a birthday present last year, two weeks before his death. His father had encouraged reading from an early age, and had instilled in Thomas a hunger for knowledge. What was needed for long hours of reading and contemplation, his father told him, was a sublimely comfortable chair. This chair had been his companion through each evening since then, and there was no better friend for a nocturnal existence; for it was the wee hours of the night when the jaggedly edged banshee screams of the city became blunted. But even into the late hours a low hum could still be heard and this Thomas subsumed with music.

These evenings had kept his fragile mind from breaking altogether. Tonight he was reading Paris in the Twentieth Century by Jules Verne; a novel which, like all of Verne’s work, uncannily predicted what was to come and resonated strongly for Thomas. A cello suite by Bach played softly on the radio, the old chair’s comfort adding to the pleasure of his intellect in the music and book. As he read, a dreamy lethargy stole over his entire body. Thomas thought it simple tiredness at first till it became so pronounced that the book became heavy in his hands, and his body felt like it was filled with concrete. There was a mild panic he felt as the book fell to the floor and he tried to rise from the chair, but it was distant and unimportant. His head reclined back and he stopped fighting the strange but wonderful soporific that had entered seemingly from nowhere. Blackness clouded his vision and his eyelids closed. His last thought before falling into the abyss was that if this was death, he welcomed it.

Thomas' eyes opened again at around ten the following morning. Though he had slept in the chair he felt extremely well rested; a better night's sleep than any he could remember in fact. The sunlight was coming in from the window opposite, caressing, more than striking his face. At first, the silence did not register in his mind because of Its totality; he was only perplexed by his calm mood this morning. It hit him when he got up and was able to hear the old wooden floorboards creaking under his weight. He froze after taking three steps on his way to the bathroom; it’s not possible, was his first thought after the shock wore off. The hellish orchestra of the atonal city should just be getting started at this hour. This was a dream; or he had finally been driven mad and this was an illusion. He walked to the window stiffly, terrified yet awed when he could bring himself to open his eyes and look out at the scene. The city was dead; at least it looked that way. There was no noise because there were no people; absolutely no hint or whisper of human life anywhere it seemed. But Thomas did not grow faint, nor weak in the knees. A deep suspicion he was unaware of had been brewing deep in his mind; a suspicion that this exact occurrence would happen; a suspicion which was now thrust into his thoughts and confirmed as fact. This registered in Thomas as only surprise that his reaction was so measured.

The logical side of Thomas' mind told him to go out and and search for others, that this was not a good thing and something terrible must have happened. But now as he stood looking at the motionless streets, a terrible knowledge filled his heart and mind: there was no one to search for, not in his city and not in the rest of the world. He knew with a simple surety that he was unequivocally the only human on earth. How that knowledge had come to him, and how he knew it to be true was impossible to explain. This left him perplexed but again, there was no sense of shock- only a sort of indifference. Numbly, he moved to the door, opened it slowly and took a tentative step outside. At first he expected to breathe in some acrid chemical odor and drop dead; that this was the result of a chemical attack. The city seemed deserted because most people were dead in their houses, but if that were the case he'd be dead too, he thought. Thomas was suddenly willing to accept any wild theory now, just to have something his mind could grasp by way of explanation.

There was no odd smell in the air. There was nothing that he could see that gave any clue as to what might have happened. The strangeness came from the stillness of everything around him. For the first time, he heard the chirping and singing of birds in the city. He had heard birds before as a boy when his family went on a camping trip to the country one summer. Thomas recalled that the sound of their chirping was sweet to his ears in that pastoral setting, but here it was an alien sound and added to the initial weirdness of it all. He began toward the cafe' out of habit then realized what direction he took no longer mattered. Shuffling was all he could muster, and he passed through empty streets for hours, the memory of which he could not recollect later. When his mind finally cleared he found that he stood in front of his cafe'. Dusk was coming on, covering him in the long shadows of the skyscrapers as the sun set lazily. Thomas pressed himself against the large front window and peered in, seeing only bare tables and chairs. The cafe', like every other place, was another sepulcher.

He tried the door and found it unlocked. A ghost of that rich smell of brewing coffee was still in the air as he went to his corner table. It was the quiet in the cafe that made the overwhelming sense of his being alone visceral. How, or even why, this thing happened defied all explanation and would drive him mad if he tried. Thomas thought whatever forces had removed humanity had not done so maliciously; he alone was not left on the planet arbitrarily. Perhaps because he had rebelled against the self-destruction that was society; that he was able to see that human advancement was not driven by altruism or for the beneficence of all; that any set system, whether capitalist or communist in nature, served only to perfect the worst in our nature's- chiefly our illimitable capacity for greed. The panic and need for explanation as to the "event"-for lack of a better term- had now passed.

Thomas was, for the first time since he began to come here, able to savor silence in the cafe'. He felt like an animal that had been placed back into its natural habitat after years caged. Elation dominated his emotions; the knowledge of his solitude only making him feel true freedom. This was the best of all possible worlds. God's experiment had failed and Thomas felt no sympathy; not because of some evil but, again, because he seemed to know innately that humanity would have never reformed itself, and no power on earth could make it. The revelation was not troubling, though Thomas had always hoped that some type of Renaissance would occur as it had before. His mind wandered further, thinking extraordinarily clearly. Life would now be a grand thought experiment. Thomas smiled sincerely and continued smiling all night in the cafe' and still at dawn when he arrived home and sat in his chair.