The Regardant

Jamison stole through streets quickly as the lights dimmed and the first shouts of the night began to reek in the alleyways. The windows were dark and empty; others were smashed completely, depositing puddles of glass on the concrete. Jamison’s hands were shoved in his pockets and his head drooped downward. He was just a man on his way home, but his steps were increasingly getting longer and his breath continued to obtain a sense of panic. Every once in a while he threw his head behind him, only to see the night flood his vision. He turned the corner, head still bowed, and very nearby, he heard a grunt, followed immediately by a piercing shriek. Jamison stopped for just a moment. He discerned no one, no vague figure outlined in the black. But he knew they were there. Quickly the sudden silence frightened him, and he carried on even faster than before. Around the next corner stood his house, a thin white structure with six tattered windows, all cracked and dirtied with age. There were no keys anymore. He hoped no one had broken in. It wasn’t as if he had anything to offer. He didn’t, except for one small item. A leather book that he was too scared to open. He entered the room warily, as if a monster lay in wait behind the door. There was nothing, save the typical sight of another smashed window, and appropriately, its assassin: a thin black stone with a note attached to it. Someone had obviously thrown it. Jamison went to it and hovered over it, half in anger and half in indifference. He had always been neutral over the vandalism of his home. The house was nothing to be proud of. He wished he didn’t have to stay there; it’s entire structure billowed fear. The fear of being sought out and utterly destroyed. He picked up the stone, gave it a playful toss to lighten the mood, and read the note:

Why not?

He knew exactly what it meant.

Jamison burned the piece of paper with a match and let it flutter outside, watching it turn to ash and sprinkle softly on the grey ground. He shoved the stone under the single chair in the house and sat on the floor. For some reason, putting things under the chair gave him a sensation of “pushing a memory away”, and it acted as his refuse, though in reality it was even more attractive there than it would have been in the stark nakedness of the room.

He didn’t look under the chair. He wanted to light a candle. But he wouldn’t. He was too afraid to see the book. Lying alone on the stripped ground. Once his backside hit the cold floor he recalled its presence, as if the book itself spoke to the floor, told it to send shivers up his spine and into his gullet. Its beaten leather cover wasn’t natural. It didn’t belong to society, Jamison could easily tell. Anything that didn’t belong to society was considered un-human. Jamison glanced out of the smashed window.

There was no government. It was the wishes of the people that spurred society, but it was no democracy. From simple democracy there came liberal permission, with liberal permission there came a hate for each other because their acts were evil. With the hate for each other there came the rebellion against the government. It ended justice. Therefore it ended democracy.

Jamison tried to guess where the leather book sat in the darkness. When he believed he found the spot, he imagined it and saw it quite vividly. The brown pages, disturbed strenuously by the decades, and the faded engraving along its thin spine. Then the image vanished and was replaced by the consequences of having such an old document. Books were burned years ago. No one wanted to learn anymore. Jamison was a fool to leave it on the floor. If seen, the book would instantly be obliterated, as well as his house, and, worst of all, himself. Jamison got the temerity to light the candle. The wick flared and dimly illuminated the leather book’s cover. Jamison knelt low and picked it up, and, after dusting it off, stuck it inside his briefcase. This too he shoved under the chair, along with the stone. Then he stood and listened. At first everything was silent. Slowly, however, his ears picked up the distant shouts of glee as well as the miserable shrieks of terror. Someone was being killed. Someone else was doing the killing. Women were being chased through the streets by gangs of young men, children were being snatched from their mothers, and in every crevice of the wild city there thrived nothing but cruelty, violence, and perversity. Jamison used to be one of them. He used to enjoy seeing people weep. However, as time dragged on, a weight held his heart fast, and he couldn’t bear to wear it any longer. He used to carry a knife with him. The weight caused him to break it in two and flee from it. This was not enough. A child lay broken in the street, abandoned and trampled by stampedes of people. Another desire had sparked within Jamison’s heart. It was the desire to help the child, to heal him. Jamison kept the child with him until he convalesced. Then, without another word, the child disappeared into the streets, all the time with not a single word of the things he had seen. After all these things, Jamison had no idea what he had just done. The desire to help someone was foreign to society. Only a remnant of people remembered such desires, and these people were constantly being sought out. Seemingly all Jamison knew was the murder stored inside people’s souls and its ferocious insanity that drove them all. Drove them to do things that firmly created a new world of emptiness. Jamison realized the candle was burning low. With a whiff of his breath, the flame perished and the consuming darkness returned. Jamison’s eyes bored invisibly into the briefcase. And like soothing but cold fingers, the shivers reentered his spinal cord, wooing him, telling him that surely tomorrow was the day. Tomorrow he would open the book.  

There was nothing to dream about, nor did Jamison wish to dream about anything. A year before, he had found a beaten mattress lying lopsided in a garbage tin. Along with some other gathered treasures, such as dish rags and singed clothes, he had constructed a somewhat worthy bed. He wrapped himself in the covers, shutting his eyes tight, trying to forget and find some comfort in the empty essence of slumber. It came slowly, with silence that somehow pounded his ears. When he did fall asleep, he didn’t wake again until morning. Just like he had trained his mind to do.

The morning was Jamison’s favorite and least favorite time of the day.

The sun was affectionate. It seemed to be the only thing that was. Its many convoluted rays pooled inside the room and bathed Jamison where he lay. His first thought as he woke was: It’s so warm. But the warmth would be overtaken by another thought: It’s a new day. And I’m hungry.

He intentionally ignored the briefcase as he rose, stretched, and pondered over his hunger. Standing unsteadily upon his strapped feet, he made his way to the window and spotted the cracked pavement, which was clearly devoid of any person. Beyond the crumbling buildings he discerned the tangled apple trees, half overgrown with wild sorghum grass. Outside of the house, the reality of the outdoors encompassed him, as if held tightly in a hand. For one thing, it was always colder out there, perhaps not because of the temperature but because of a profound sense of danger. Though it was daylight, Jamison still held his head down as he stole through the vacant streets. He didn’t want to see the world’s wreckage from the night before.

The first person he saw in front of him was a young woman, clothed in rags and holding a small baby in her arms. She was young, and if not for the sick paleness in her face and the bags underneath her eyes, she would have been quite lovely. She stopped for just a moment when she saw the young Jamison, but then continued twice as fast.

Jamison reached the jungle of tall sorghum grass unharmed, and was pleased to see that no one else was picking the apples. Once he made his way under the first tree, he tore off his shirt and tied it into a sort of bag. Then he ripped dozens of apples from the branches, indifferent of the biting branches that swung into his face. Once his shirt was beginning to tear at the seams, he spun around and slunk back through the grass. He stopped. Above the sound of his own rustling, voices grimily appeared.

“Did you see that fellow, picking our apples?” one fellow said, pretending to be angry. They were so close that Jamison could smell the mixture of liquor and perspiration fume from their bodies. Another one spoke in a voice like a weasel: “I’ve seen him before. ‘E always slinks off like a rat ‘fore I can come after him.”

“He looks like one of the old folk. Just like the ancient ones that think the world has got off track.”

“I don’t know,” replied the weasel. “One time, ‘bout a year ‘go, I spotted him chasing some girl through the streets, waving a knife over his head. I don’t reckon he’s the same fellow as then.”

Jamison recalled the animal he had been. He grimaced. That animal that strived to purge all hellish desires. Suddenly sweat began to pulse down Jamison’s cheeks, and a feverish heat scalded his forehead. He was scared out of his wits. And then, at the peak of his terror, he felt a sneeze throb inside his nostrils. In his mind he cursed and shut his mouth tight as if that would retain the outburst. The sneeze gathered, and unable to contain it any longer, Jamison gulped in a loud breath and let loose the explosion, leaped to his feet, and fled toward the ruined city. The other men gave a shout. “There ‘e goes!” cried the weasel. Jamison felt a knife glance off his shoulder; a second later, apples were pouring forth as if in a schoolyard dodge ball fight. Most of them thudded into the ground vainly, while others caught the back of his head and slightly jarred his vision. When Jamison hurled his head behind him for one brief second, he spotted the two men (he had mistaken them for more) still sprinting after him, screaming, “We’ll get ya! We’ll follow you wherever you go.” Jamison was determined that they could not find out where his house was. Once in the street, he straggled onto a crumbling ledge of a building and swung into the room before his pursuers escaped the jungle of sorghum grass. Within the dark room, he realized with horror that the crumbling mortar made a little waterfall of dust and broken clots. Tingling downward it fell softly on the sidewalk. The weasel said, “He’s climbed into that window, the blighter.” Jamison bolted for the room’s door, but was suddenly stopped when his eyes caught a dark figure pressed fearfully against the back wall. His hand drifted from the doorknob to his side. It was a woman, dressed in nothing but a long shawl, which was wound around her like tomb linen. Jamison was struck by her, for so stunning it was to see another person in the same room, especially a woman, but also it was due to the fact that she was incredibly beautiful. Her black hair was thick and tangled, but only added to the fierce green eyes underneath it. Her nose was dirty, and her hands, which clutched the shawl at her throat, were cracked dry, but still contained their pale perfection. Behind him, Jamison heard the two men grunting as they attempted the climb. The weasel’s head appeared along with a pair of terrible eyes. Jamison thrust his hand downward for the girl to take. At first she shook her head, almost vehemently, and cuddled even further against the wall. “They’ll kill both of us, and hurt you before they kill you,” he said desperately. The woman’s green eyes darted to the window. The weasel had thrown his leg over the crumbling outcrop. After a moment of hesitation, she slowly extended her hand. The moment she was on her feet she was out the room’s door in a blur. Jamison struggled to maintain her pace as she flitted up the stairs as efficiently as a mountain goat.  Somewhere within the flurry of motion she said, “Just follow me.”

Jamison glanced over his shoulder to see the weasel helping his comrade onto the ledge. Without another thought he ran after the girl, flight after flight until they arrived at the building’s roof. “Where are we going?” asked Jamison as the tall winds apprehended him where he stood. She didn’t answer. Instead, she grabbed his arm and led him to the building’s edge, where a board bridge connected that building with another. The two men’s heads protruded above the roof. Jamison tugged away from the girl’s hand; he was replete with doubt of such a spindly board—besides that, the thought of falling to a concrete floor daunted him. The thought of dying in such a simple, meaningless way daunted him.

“Trust me,” she said. “I’m not like them.” The weasel regained his feet, and like a human skeleton, charged toward Jamison with a knife thrust above his head. Jamison chose the board. Before he knew it, the girl was on the other side, while Jamison was still hovering in the center of it, trying his best not to look down. The weasel arrived at bridge’s edge.  

“Hurry,” screamed the girl. “He’ll jar the board!” For some reason, this option for the weasel had never occurred to Jamison. Instantly he forgot his fear and wobbled uncontrollably forward. The weasel strained to lift the board. As soon as Jamison’s weight was deposited to the bridge’s opposite end, the adversary succeeded in simply lifting his side up, doing Jamison the only damage of tripping into the girl’s open arms. The weasel snarled and let the board clatter to the ground below.

“I seen your face!” he screeched. His comrade staggered beside him. “I’ll kill you if I get the chance!” Jamison had been threatened similarly in earlier times. He thought nothing of it except that it was another detail adding to the fact that humans were becoming animals. The weasel scratched his stubbly face with a filthy, blood encrusted paw, and for a brief moment Jamison spotted a sort of remorse flame within the cruel eyes. A memory.

The girl did not ask him how he was feeling after such a dramatic experience. She stood still for a moment, hands by her sides, and then backed away from Jamison until she got quite close to the edge of the building.

“What’s your name?” Jamison did his best to sound sympathetic. Nevertheless, the sound of his voice appeared to inject even more fear into those terrified eyes. Suddenly Jamison was angry.

“If you’re scared out of your wits by me, maybe you shouldn’t have led me to the top of this forsaken roof with not much opportunity of escape.”

He was quite shocked to hear her speak, and even more so when he noticed that her voice contained high doses of both anger and deep sadness.

“I’m not about to see someone get killed in my room.” Her face scrunched up like a little girl’s, and she continued, “I hate seeing blood.” She clenched her teeth as well as her fists; with her bare, dirt encrusted foot, she began to stomp mercilessly on the roof. Jamison was amused by her and was delighted when she added, “All those heartless animals who don’t want anything but see blood and to rip my clothes off and to cackle like jackals—” In this deluge of speech she hesitated to regain her breath. “—so how can I know that you’re no different, that you don’t want to see blood and to rip my clothes off and to cackle like a jackal?” He didn’t know. No explanation for any type of behavior seemed to exist. Jamison tried to form words but had no evidence for their truth.

“I can’t know,” he confessed, half as a stunning realization. “I can never know what it is inside of me.” Silence stung the air; the wind had calmed into a sifting breeze. The girl’s face was also calm. Her eyes were now perfectly trained on his, and slowly she approached him: one step cleanly after the other, hands still grasping the shawl at her throat. Presently she was directly in front of him. Jamison discerned the creases in her lips and the translucent paleness in her skin. “No one knows,” he whispered.

“What’s good and what’s bad,” she completed. She kissed him, not vice versa, but Jamison did nothing to reject it. She held his shoulder now and didn’t let go. Jamison whispered, “What’s your name?”

“It’s funny,” she replied with a laugh. “You still don’t know my name, and yet it feels like I know you better than anyone else. My name is Constance.”

“Constance.” He repeated it softly and smiled. “My name’s Jamison—I don’t remember how I got it. I never met any of my family. If you can even say that word anymore.”

“I had a mother. She taught me how to talk. She loved me.”

“When did she die?” There was no longer a question of why someone was absent. Hypothetically, Constance’s mother could have abandoned her, gone to live with another man; now, if someone was stated in the past tense, it was taken literally. Constance’s mother no longer existed. Therefore, the past was crucial to Constance’s life and understanding. The past was her hope.

“Years ago. I was ten.”

“She had your eyes.”

“My father had my eyes. She had my brain.”

::::::::::::::

Jamison had never known how to love a person in his life. Early on, cruelty was all—the pleasure of indulging in the animal—but when he helped the broken child in the streets, something unknown snapped his heart. He didn’t love then, he only realized his emptiness and the emptiness of everyone around him. But he loved Constance. At first glance at her ingenuity of escape, her caution towards his character, he felt his snapped heart reform. Love was no longer foreign. They descended the building by using the outside staircase, and once on the ground, Constance surprised Jamison when she opened the lid to the sewage corridors. She appeared to be confused when Jamison stepped away, frowning.

“Haven’t you ever thought of this before?” she asked.

“That’s just it,” replied Jamison. “Who else has thought of it?” Constance explained that she used it every day to reach different parts of the city, and that all that remained in them was stone cold tunnels. When Jamison still looked skeptical, she stuck her head into the darkness and shouted, “Hullo!” so it echoed for several seconds. Jamison cringed.

“All right. Just go down before anyone comes.”

The darkness falsely magnified the sewer’s depth. Jamison watched Constance vanish within it as if being consumed by a black mouth. He wavered over it, and at one moment, almost ran toward his house to forget all that happened, to exterminate any negative possibilities that such a “leap of faith” entailed. But he heard her chipper voice reverberate off of the stone walls, heard her voice shimmer with hope. And such a thought suddenly turned sour. He didn’t even look behind his shoulder again. Instead, he permitted the darkness to consume him like dim fire.

Immediately she snatched his hand. “I’m here. Don’t worry.” Jamison squinted vainly. All around him the cool air chafed his skin. He scraped his foot against the hard floor, and, realizing this told him nothing of its texture, he bent low and dragged his fingers over it. He discerned tendrils of water trickling over a simple and presumably grey floor. “How did you find this place?” It was an obvious question, and Jamison felt stupid the moment he said it. The answer popped in his brain even before she spoke. She has to survive. She has to find something to save her. She returned the question using nearly these exact words, and then added, “You’re not a woman. It’s not the same. People want to murder you, but with us, they want to indulge themselves in us in every possible way before seeing us die. That’s how I found it. Not by chance. By necessity.” Jamison felt her form gingerly step forward. Automatically he followed, still squinting, used to the thought of eventually seeing, but nevertheless turning up with nothing save folds of more darkness.

“It doesn’t stink,” he commented.

“Oh no. It’s been so long since they’ve used it.” Jamison wondered how long. How long had things been this way, and how long would they continue to be this way? When he was a child, he remembered his grandparents stealing to his house, when there was still a bit of civility in the streets, and talking in low voices to his parents about the “goodness of the old days.” Two years later, both his grandparents and parents vanished, several houses perished in flames, and not one book remained after the bonfires rose like plagues. Faintly, Jamison remembered a man burning the books, waving a flag that said THE NEW IS COME. He remembered blaming him for the loss of his parents, simultaneously hating him in the process. Constance obtained a sixth sense and said, “What are you thinking?”

“About the times before now.” He saw no sense in hiding his thoughts, whether they were good or bad. According to society, everything was good, and everything was bad. “How can we know our future when we don’t know our past?” Constance didn’t answer, but her silence ignited Jamison’s own sixth sense. He knew she was thinking. They continued onward, and with each step Jamison grew in this strange sensation of safety. He couldn’t be seen in the darkness. Being invisible was a newfound blessing, one that even his attic could not obtain. Yet the safety and silence would have been vain if Jamison had no hand to hold his. Being alone in safety was worse than being alone in danger. Unconsciously he gripped Constance’s hand. She gripped it back, not because she was afraid, but because she too was savoring this rare delicacy. They had found someone who shared the same muddled feelings of hope. They were blind to be sure, but they were curiously blind.

Constance was compelled to feel the wall after they had walked for several hundred yards. Jamison could tell that the corridor curved sharply. Around the corner, he was ecstatic to see a ray of golden light pierce the darkness. He lunged after it hungrily; Constance gave a yelp and caught his arm, chiding, “Not there! It’s a trap. And be quiet.” They skirted the ray of light, and as they passed it, Jamison could see more city buildings looming within the limited frame. “What do you mean a trap?”

“It’s a polar bear and a seal tactic.”

“I thought you said this was safe.” He regretted drifting back into this realm of doubt, but it seemed inevitable. He wanted to trust Constance wholeheartedly, and yet even then trust was a gamble. Constance hadn’t won his full mind. Not quite. 

“Those skunks don’t come down here,” she said. “They can’t find anyone, but they know we come down here.”

After a moment of reasoning, Jamison asked, “So aren’t all of the holes blocked up?”

She chuckled. “Not if you’ve made your own.” The pitch black returned in full. After training his eyes on such a heavenly ray of light, Jamison was heavily dissatisfied with his blindness, now cursing the safety because it piqued his very neurons of their longing for light. He stopped himself, felt Constance’s hand in his, and brutally reminded himself that darkness was protection. The slight battle did not even tint Constance’s attention. She was humming to herself: some song that Jamison thought bizarre; after a while, however, and to his own surprise, he found himself also chiming the tune. The more he indulged in its strange, prolonged notes, the more he sensed the song’s familiarity. His brain discerned the unknown memories and vainly tried to process them so they would become recognizable. It irritated him, made him thirsty for its title.

“Who taught you this song?” he said finally, with the tone of voice suggesting he’d been holding his breath for a long time.

“My mother,” she said carelessly between notes, and continued, as unscathed and perfectly as before. Presently she added words. Whether they were original or not remained a mystery.

I want to speak in a language unknown

To listen to the seeds that are plentifully sown

To watch them burst into luminous splendor

To see the rain, it’s personal and gracious lender

It was hauntingly beautiful, administering shivers along Jamison’s spine like fingers putting on ice. She sang the verse repeatedly, probably for the sake of Jamison; at last he memorized the words and harmonized as best as he could. By the time the united verse ended, Constance pressed an invisible finger to Jamison’s lips and whispered, “My tunnel is somewhere around here.”

She departed from his hand and was heard shuffling along the wall, in what Jamison assumed was her tactic to discover the tunnel. Periodically he would whisper, “Find it yet?” only to receive the negative reply. Jamison hated the darkness. Impatience magnified its depth. He yearned for just a speck of light to glimmer; though it would appear like a golden snowflake, hardly tainting the sea of black, it would be enough to purge his eyes for a short while. Then he rebuked himself again after the cold realization returned: darkness was protection. He repeated these words incessantly in his mind until his yearning for light was drowned. Until even the illusion, the hallucination of light vanished.

“Found it,” she said. Jamison caught her voice and followed it, at last bumping against her, reaching down so their fingers interlaced. She pulled him into another atmosphere. Jamison sensed a compressed structure overhead. Cold and earthy air came in handfuls down Jamison’s throat. And there it was. A grey light shattered his vision. He didn’t have to call darkness safety any longer. They emerged into daylight, and the prolonged expectation of rows of abandoned streets never came. Instead, the city was tucked away by unfurled columns of aspen trees. Each of them coded for a specific autumn bloom, bursting with yellow, red, and speckled green. Constance gave a laugh. “Isn’t it wonderful?” Jamison glanced underfoot and spotted his feet standing firmly on a carpet of grass. The sun wasn’t contaminated by the dullness of the buildings, but danced fervently within the trees’ melodious veil. Beauty clashed with beauty and therefore jived with it.

“It is wonderful,” he said.

“I bet you thought the apple orchard was good.” At these words, Jamison’s face grimaced, almost unconsciously, and he replied, “It’s too close to the buildings. Too human.” Right when the word “buildings” escaped his mouth, he was self-conscious, like being stared at naked.

“We have to go back,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Are you kidding? The only reason I don’t live out here is because it gets too cold during the night.”

All at once Jamison realized the sewage “hypothesis” of safe conduct was utterly stupid. Going to the woods and back was worthless when it could be possible to go underneath his own house or the apple orchard. Being in the sewer was being safe, but Constance wasn’t using it as a way to survive, but as a way to remember. No one, not even Jamison, paused to look at the trees, though when a reluctant spirit did it was mesmerized. Jamison’s ruthlessness poured forth, and he said blatantly, “How can this help us? There are no animals here. Look.” He pressed his foot into the ground to show her it was much too soft for any deer to walk on. Constance was surprised, and let go of his hand with a rude jerk.

“I thought you would like it,” she said. “I was wrong.” She said this with certainty, making Jamison cringe. She was sure of his indifference towards the sun and the trees. Only out of stupor had he admired them. The biting reality, however, only thought of survival.  

But he had forgotten the true reason he wanted to go back. The book was waiting for him, and even then was applying its constant shiver. His craving for survival had replaced his unnatural craving for the book. He said, “We have to go back because of a book. A book that I found.”

She paused in her anger, mouth dropping and her lips quivering in disbelief. “A book?”

“You’ve never seen one in your life,” assumed Jamison.

She shook her head. “Of course not. Where did you find it?” Jamison recalled the occasion.

“I was walking near the apple orchard.” He hesitated, not to strain for remembrance, but to grasp the correct words in order to form its true happening. Too little explained and he would leave a gap in its strength. “It was cold, and raining, and snowing. I was on the verge of freezing. My house offered no comfort so I began to walk around, just to get my blood moving.” He checked to see if she was watching him, and to his pleasure, she was. It wasn’t with those polite eyes, bearing reluctantly through the story, but with eyes that bored through his and tried to make his brain secrete all of its thoughts. “I spotted it in the grass, almost totally buried in snow, and when I shoveled it out, I realized what it truly was.

“I threw it back on the ground in disgust. I wanted to run away from it, because even then I knew that I would always be tempted to open it. And I hate being tempted to do something strange. I hate doing things against society. It scares me.”

“Do you belong to society?” she asked him.

“Yes and no. I obey it, whatever it is, by living for myself. But I don’t love it.”

“Continue,” she said, smiling.

“After some time of pacing around, I knew it must have been time for folks to make their dash for the woods and the orchard. For some reason, I didn’t want anyone else to find what I had. I was jealous for the book. I think if anyone else picked it up in front of me, I would have fought them for it. So I took it and went back to my house, I suppose waiting for it to open by itself while I tried and get the courage to read it.”

“It could be blank,” Constance suggested.

“It’s been picked up before. Nearly burned too. There are singe marks along the spine and the cloth bookmark is frayed black.”

“Why don’t you open it?”

“I will. But I want you to come with me.” Where else would she go? It would be impossible to ignore her if she simply went on as if they had never met. His eyes would always linger to her window, and every day he would saunter under it, foolish in his intoxication of her, and beg her to show her face, just for a moment. Just so he could have a good image in his mind.

“I can’t live without you.” She said this with no emotion, but rather with a shrug of her shoulders and a jounce of her eyebrows. Jamison asked her why.

“Because I love you. You saved my life by coming into it.”

“I could have let those dogs chase me for miles, and you’d be tucked away in your room, safe as ever. I may be the cause of your death one day.”

“Better to die with someone real, someone who actually sees, than to live alone.” She glanced at him, and added as ominously as possible, “To live in fear. You know what it’s like, Jamison. To live in fear.” He did, and bore a strong faith that every man, murderer and weak old woman, also did.

“I don’t know what love can do to fear,” he said. “But I know I’m tired of it. I hate my house. I hate the shattered windows. But I’d love it if I could just feel safe inside of it.” He didn’t know what fearlessness was, yet was easily persuaded that its absence was freedom.

They sifted through the trees as the sun weakened and the first tendrils of darkness flitted overhead. In the sky’s paleness, silver dots began only the first dosage of the night’s stars. Jamison realized he had never looked at them since he was a child. After all, once night set in, he generally tucked his head into his jacket collar and tried not to look at anything. It was a near discomforting feeling, possessing the freedom to look around him and not have to spot the world’s wreckage.

They walked for a long time before reaching the outskirts of the city. Jamison automatically crouched a little lower and considered every passerby a suspect when the first building was within a stone’s throw. The stars and the trees were gone. The ground under his feet again turned to concrete. He felt its coldness and accepted its truth. The truth that survival was again key. Constance walked still with a careless air; her hands however, which had been freely dangling by her sides, now jumped to hold her shawl close to her face. Her gait could not be maintained for long. Presently she too cowered a little lower, like Jamison, and incessantly threw glances every which way. And they only grew in fear. Entering reality from the dream was something neither of them was prepared for. Had she, too, the one who made the tunnel to reach the forest, forgotten the intention of such a lovely place? No. She had forgotten Jamison, and Jamison had forgotten her. They looked like animals, jerking their heads left and right, eyes darting, never finding rest. The thought of holding hands did not recur, and even if it had, both Jamison and Constance would have thought it futile. Their minds were molded.

The nightly shrieks plunged them even further into their dementia.  Jamison began to run; Constance followed suit, and they reached the streets with the view of five men crowding over three women, cursing and laughing, kicking and tearing, all it one hideous amalgam. Jamison stopped. Constance kept running and vanished suddenly around the corner, but he paid her no mind. One of the women was screaming. The other two were shielding their faces vainly and were aware of nothing except the continuous onslaught of pain. The screaming girl spotted Jamison. Her eyes beseeched him to help her, to do something, to die valiantly for something right. The trees and the stars are gone. There’s concrete under my feet. Jamison bowed his head and walked away—he was confused—why he was, he didn’t know. There was nothing of worth in the ruined city, just a vision of survival. It was brutal. As Jamison’s legs quickened, his heart twisted.

Constance waited for him. She ambled away a few yards, just to retake those yards with uncertain feet. She never stopped moving, and the darkness that crowded her digested the lurkers within it. She began to hear nonexistent things: howling monsters, hissing centipedes, and writhing snakes, thinking these creatures constructed the night, made everything black. When she saw no sign of Jamison, her lips began chanting his name, first in a whisper, then in a panicked monotone, until her voice sprouted into blatant shrieking, “Jamison! Jamison! Jamison…….” She pounded her fists against the nearest building. Tears poured down her cheeks, one after the other, dropping on her shawl and dampening her bangs. At one point, she noticed she was indifferent toward even death; her longing for Jamison overcame the wanton desire of survival, and she couldn’t have cared less if she felt her shawl being torn away, and her bare flesh being mangled. In fact, if Jamison would not return, she very much preferred death as a substitute. At last she allowed her hands to fall to her sides. She fell to her knees and closed her mouth, but the tears continued, even when her sorrow had turned numb. For a split second she hadn’t cared. Neither of them had. They had merely cared about remaining untouched. They weren’t animals. They weren’t supposed to be afraid. Constance was certain of this. She wasn't designed to be afraid.

Constance felt Jamison’s hand fall on her shoulder nearly an hour later. She was half-asleep, with her back against the wall and her head lolled back, unconsciously forming Jamison’s name with her lips. Of course she believed that someone was raping her; her consciousness returned vividly, and she leapt up with an instinctive strike of her first, which planted itself firmly in Jamison’s stomach. He was undaunted. Holding her waist, he repeated, “It’s me. It’s me.” She clawed his hands before she realized it was Jamison who held her, who had come back for her. In the pale moonlight, which they had both discarded since leaving the woods, Constance saw Jamison’s soft eyes, and discerned small tears pooling at their bases. Before speaking he let out a choking sob, “It’s Jamison!” She was paralyzed—did nothing but stare at him as her own tears restarted. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.” He shook with sobs and let his head fall on her shoulder. Slowly, slowly, she wrapped her arms around him and said, “I love you.”

“I love you.” Crying over another person struck them both as un-human. As something foreign to society. They realized with a passionate shiver that being un-human was being good.

Jamison remembered the book. The same shiver.

They reached the house by midnight, and once inside, instantly went upstairs with the briefcase. Jamison lit the candle once they were in the closet and, fingers trembling, opened the case. Constance was crowding over Jamison’s shoulder, breath stopped and locks of hair tumbling down past her shawl. When she saw the book, she gave a sharp gasp, not out of surprise, but out of curiosity.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said.

“You probably never will again.” This time there was no stunning pause before opening the book. There was no haunting silence before attempting it. He had raced his conscious on the way to the house, and had beaten it by a long mark. He opened it quickly, with only a slight pang of excitement.

He had not landed on the first page. Two columns of tiny words lined themselves on the paper, and at the top, it read, in large bold letters: GENESIS

Something warm appeared in Jamison’s heart, and he presumed in Constance’s as well. He read about the Tree of Life. How humans once were good. He read how a snake, perhaps one like those he spotted vaguely in the darkness, took away that goodness. Or rather how the humans took it away themselves. And he read about another creature, who he and Constance had never thought of or ever considered. A being that made the sunlight. That made the stars. This God.

“We are evil,” whispered Jamison.

“Man is not alone.” Another rock burst through the last unscathed window beneath them. Jamison hardly  flinched. Putting down the book, he and Constance crept down the stairs and into the main room, where the stone still spun slightly within a pool of glass. The note did not read its expected message of Why not? Jamison peered through the window, and saw perhaps just a shade of the weasel, the very one who had pursued him earlier that day. He looked at the note again, just to ascertain the single word written on the dirty parchment:

WHY?