Today’s entry is slightly late because, as it turns out, it’s hard to do sustained creative work with an infant in the house! :) However, it’s here, and I’m proud of this story. Looks like I can be both a writer and a father after all! Please enjoy and have a great week.
The Lucky Ones
NOVEMBER 18, 2029 - Took Sarah and Sylvan to their equestrian and soccer practice after school, came home and they wanted to be on their phones the whole time. Sylvan wants the new Opticons, it’s ‘like google glasses but better’, apparently. It’s all beyond me now, which I guess is how it goes. Bill wants to get them for him, but Bill always does. He never seems to worry about them. It’s infuriating, but it’s also like a magic trick. I worry all the time and feel guilty for hovering, but I can’t stop, and there’s some sneaking part of me that thinks that the fact that I won’t stop is all that’s protecting them. Like the things Bill’s gotten me to do—letting Sarah get into horses, say—that’s all fine, but if I hadn’t made it quite so hard, hadn’t fought and been true to my feelings and said no to a hundred other things, then it all would have been a disaster.
Then again, I think I also feel justified because Bill has to many silly conspiracies and scenarios in his head. He’s spent *so* much damn money on preparing for the worst, and none of it will ever happen. It’s his money, so fair enough, but he acts like I’m such a scold and a fantasist when he’s the one who spent ten million finding a foundation contractor with a team who would fly up to the Canadian Wilderness with blindfolds on so they didn’t know exactly where they were working. I’d think “Sarah might fall off her horse and hit her head” would terrify him but instead I honestly think he thinks I’m an idiot.
We’re home now. I sent the kids and their phones to the roof deck to stop the flood of requests, and now I’m writing this while watching “Community” in the background. It’s the paintball episode, the first one, my favorite. I can’t believe I’m still watching this show all these years later, but it’s so comforting.
NOVEMBER 20, 2029 - Strange rumblings today, bubbling up on TikTok out of Russia so hot and smelly that it broke through onto the landing page of the NYT online. People are dying of some new disease. Why can’t people just stop eating bats? Russia is out with a bunch of statements denying anything is happing, and it has big “My ‘We don’t have a plague’ T-Shirt has everyone asking a lot of questions that are already answered by my T-shirt” energy.
Bill is furiously researching things and yelling at the T.V. He’s so worked up. I’ve never seen him this agitated about anything to do with the kids before. I can’t bring myself to care. It’s so far from here, I’ve never even been to Russia, and it’s not like we haven’t had pandemics before. I’d hate to think we’re going to be stuck inside again if it goes global, but it’s not worth screaming at a screen over. I love the man, but his sense of priorities sometimes…
I bought a new blender yesterday, then went to the farmer’s market and bought about ten times as much fruit as we need. Nobody else in the house even drinks smoothies, and if I drink one every day about half of this produce will still spoil on the counter. I’m not sure what I was thinking. Maybe that my family would come to their senses and start drinking smoothies?
NOVEMBER 23, 2029 - My God, it’s happening. This looks like it may be the real thing, the super-pandemic the nut jobs warned us about. Bill seems almost giddy—if it weren’t for the kids I think he’d be openly giddy—and is ostentatiously not saying “I told you so” in a way that definitely makes his point. I never thought I’d see it in my lifetime, but here we are. We were watching the President talk from the Rose Garden, and you could tell from the way he was talking, just the tension in his jaw and in his voice, how serious it is. Russian separatists robbed some sort of illegal bioweapons lab there, and as they were trying to escape with one of the weapons, they were shot and it broke open.
The decision to leave came upon us suddenly. We were both watching the President speak, and then it occurred to me that if we went up to the compound and it turned out to be not as big a deal as it seems like, all we’d lose is the time. As I was thinking that, Bill turned to Sarah and Sylvan and told them to get anything they wanted to take with them. We already have clothes up there. He had a helicopter on the pad before the kids got back from their rooms somehow, and he was pulling us all out the door a moment later.
I’m typing this into my phone while we fly over the city, heading north, towards a private airstrip in the woods. It’s the same heli we’ve taken here so many times, and the memories of those trips keeps coming back to me. We’ve done so much laughing. I wonder if we’ll ever laugh like that again. The kids are both asleep—we gave them the good drugs. They were crying and crying, even Sylvan, crying like I hadn’t seen him in years because his friends couldn’t come and he wasn’t even going to get to say goodbye. It was like a baby cries, so helpless, and quiet a lot of the time because he’s crying so hard he couldn’t get a breath. I wanted to cry with him, to let him know it was okay to cry, but I couldn’t bring myself to it.
Bill was predicting disaster, was part of it. He kept saying it was the end of the world, until I finally snapped at him and he gave it a rest for a while. I told them it would probably all blow over, that it might be a month or even a year but there are isolated labs studying this stuff already and developing vaccines. They just kept crying. I hugged them close as we crossed the freeway, and it was jammed with abandoned cars. I’m not sure what that means exactly. I made Bill turn off the news, and the last I heard they still weren’t sure, but abandoned cars on the freeway can’t be good.
I haven’t been to the compound since it was finished a few years ago. It was just Bill’s ridiculous project, and I was the only one he told about it so it never came up at parties, it never felt real, it was just this… thing that was going on up there, and it was sort of fine because it didn’t hurt anybody, it just made some construction crews rich and I didn’t see anything wrong with that.
Now though, thank God. We have somewhere to go and wait this thing out. We’re the lucky ones.
NOVEMBER 24, 2029 - We’ve arrived at the compound. It’s incredible. I had no idea some of the things he’s done up here. The weather is terrible and we’re going to get only a few hours of light a day all winter, but he’s got UV rooms set up with huge screens and speakers and even a variety of scent modules available so you can feel like you’re somewhere warm. There’s a greenhouse you could build an airplane in with all kinds of plants growing in it, and it’s all automated. There’s a nuclear plant that Bill says will run forever if it has to.
Things are getting bad out there. “S-T” is what they’re calling the virus, and now they’re saying it has some kind of delayed effects. Lots of people are dying in Russia, and people are so scared of what the rest of the world might be like they’re starting to riot and loot. It’s strange to look out at the endless white snow waving on the trees all around us and imagine that’s really going on all over the same planet.
Sarah has been hanging out with me a lot. We’re doing a rewatch of “Brooklyn 99” now. The Michael Schur shows are our favorites, and we have thousands of shows and movies here on hard disks, not streaming, so we won’t lose them no matter what happens. Sylvan stays in the study with Bill, though, watching news and reading Twitter, watching videos of the looting. I’m sitting here writing this to help me resist the temptation to tell them to stop. It really is newsworthy, I just want to cry every time they shout some horrible statistic out of the darkness. It’s too much. Thank God my parents are dead, but my sister is out there somewhere. It’s been years since we saw each other, for coffee at that halfway house in Cleveland. Bill just shouted that Ohio has declared a state of emergency and called in the national guard, and it jolted me. I hope she’s all right.
NOVEMBER 26, 2029 - I can’t believe what’s unfolding on the other end of our internet connection. Even Bill seems shocked at how right he was, and I can’t ever remember seeing him shocked. The kids are both in their rooms sleeping—we gave them the good drugs again. It’s just too much.
Russian State TV has stopped broadcasting. They think there may be only small pockets of population left alive in the entire country. The President is urging calm but he’s broadcasting from a bunker in an undisclosed location, which doesn’t exactly inspire calm. Large portions of the internet are going down. 911 calls aren’t getting answered. They expect the secondary symptoms—what they’re calling the “Death Wave”—to start hitting other countries this week. My heart cannot accept what that will be like. It just seems impossible.
At the same time, I feel such a profound gratitude for my husband, and what he has prepared for us here. He’s saved the lives of our children, and my life too, by the way. We’re going to be okay here. I keep trying to call my friends but can’t get through, and my heart breaks for them but I’m just so damn glad it isn’t us. We have enough to last us the rest of our lives, and yeah there are all kinds of problems with that, but they’re problems we’re incredibly lucky to face.
Bill isn’t even being smug about it, either. He was right on in his predictions but I don’t think he really grasped it. I think he thought he’d feel more vindicated, and instead he just feels sick to his stomach like the rest of us do. He was right about the situation but the emotional reality is something nobody can plan for.
NOVEMBER 30, 2029 - I’ve spent the last four days avoiding everything, just sitting in my bedroom, eating fruit and watching Jake Peralta and Amy Santiago catch crooks and fall in adorable love. I know it’s pathetic, or wrong, or something, but I literally can’t lift my arms or legs besides that.
The kids are laying here with me. Bill is on the couch in the other room, staring at the ceiling. The internet is almost totally gone now. He thinks it’s likely that one government or another took out a bunch of satellites or did an “E-M-P” in space and it shut everything down. Suddenly the hundreds of miles of forest between us the the neighbors feels very, very real.
I’m sure there are still other people alive in the world. We can’t be the only pocket. But maybe we can be. I’ve spent so many years listening to Bill rant and rave about the scenarios, and just looking around this place it’s obvious how hard it is to sustain without a community around you.
I prayed yesterday for the first time since I was a teenager. I mostly prayed for the kids. I keep having conversations in my head where I support them and talk about what they’re feeling, but they start crying every time we make eye contact, and I start crying every time they start crying, so we’re just watching TV. We have so many shows and movies, but nobody can really face the idea of picking something, so we’re just continuing to watch Brooklyn 99. I don’t know what we’ll do when the series ends. On Netflix it would prompt you with a similar series, usually “Community” or “The Good Place”, but this machine has a hard drive and I don’t know that it works the same way.
I’m not sure how much I’ll have the energy to keep updating my journal, but I’d like to try. I always harbored some fantasy that I’d be an important enough person that one day someone would read my journal and be glad I kept it so they’d have insight into who I really was, and I used to wonder if that was the only reason I was doing it. Now I know that wasn’t true, that at least in part I did it for me, and I’m glad of that.
DECEMBER 5, 2029 - Today is Sylvan’s thirteenth birthday. Sarah will be ten in two weeks. I made him a cake, but none of us wanted to eat it. We’re all losing weight. The internet is gone.
The TV here suggests more shows just like Netflix does, so now we’re watching “The Salon”.
DECEMBER 8, 2029 - A strange thing happened today. Bill has been obsessed with his daily rounds, checking all the systems and weeding the gardens and things like that. But today he came into where we were sitting, and asked if we could watch “The Office”, because he missed going into his. The kids smiled for the first time since we got here when he sat down and we all just watched this show as a family. It didn’t feel normal, but it felt good.
The kids are what keeps me going more than anything. They try so hard. They’re doing all they can to pick up their spirits, and I want to protect them. From what I’m not sure. Hopelessness, I guess? That’s the only threat I can help with at all. Bill’s taken care of all their basic needs, and nothing I can do will bring the world back.
I want to try to talk to him about when we might leave here and try to see if there are other people we can make contact with. He has vehicles here that can take us back to the nearest cities, but I worry he’ll get angry with me if I ask about it. He’s been so happy to be right about society, I think it would be hard for him to admit it might not be completely gone.
Or maybe it’s hard for me to admit it is gone—we have radio receivers and satellite hookups and everything else I’ve ever heard of, and we’re getting nothing. It’s just so hard still to think about that, for the kids’ sake. That would mean they’d never get married, or have kids of their own. The whole rest of their lives would be this compound, and eventually burying us. I try to remember how much better that is than what they would have had. We really are the lucky ones. But I want more for them.
DECEBMER 16, 2029 - We’ve started trying to put together a new dynamic as a family. Bill sat us down and asked if we could try. He sounded so emotional—I’ve almost never heard him like that. Being vindicated for all his conspiracy theories really does seem to have meant a lot to him. He said that he cared for us, and he said he wanted to teach the kids all the maintenance and routines in case something happened to him, so they’d be okay.
So we started making rounds, and he showed us every nook and cranny of the compound. The level of planning and detail he’s put into this is truly mind-blowing. Besides friends, there’s not one thing I’ve asked about that he didn’t make provision for.
As we move around the house, we are keeping our sitcoms on. We’re deep into our “The Office” rewatch now. A lot of the time we’re not even watching, or talking over it if we are watching, but it helps to have it in the background. It’s like having friends here. Even the silence between episodes can feel a little oppressive. But when I walk into a room and it’s playing there’s just this familiarity that picks me up and helps ground me at the same time.
DECEMBER 19, 2029 - The last three days have been maybe the best three of my entire marriage. Bill has come alive. As the shock has worn off, he’s started treating the whole thing like a grand adventure. He’s relating to the kids in the way I’ve always wished he would, and they seem to love it even if they’re a little surprised.
There’s always been a part of me that wondered if I married Bill for his money. I definitely liked the fact that he had it. We were never starving when I was a kid but I worked starting early and gave most of the money to my parents to help out. I never thought I’d do much more than live paycheck-to-paycheck. Then I met Bill, and he thought nothing of spending thousands of dollars just to make me smile. He knew where I came from and he promised I’d never have to work again.
But now we’re working again. I wake up every day with chores to do, and I love it, because it’s something we do together. I had to come out here to realize that I actually love my husband. I guess he had to come out here to realize he liked being a husband. He’s devoted, he’s engaged, he’s attentive.
It’s not like it’s “worth it” or something. I’m not stupid. But it happened, and now here we are, and maybe life will still be worth something. We go outside every evening and watch the sun set over the trees. There’s a lake within walking distance. I don’t even know the name, but it’s freezing cold and beautiful.
DECEMBER 24, 2029 - Merry Christmas. We didn’t have presents because it doesn’t really make any sense out here, but we killed a chicken from our flock, cooked it like a turkey, and sat around an actual dinner table. It was a good day.
JANUARY 18, 2030 - We’ve watched all the old sitcoms I love at this point. I counted it up and it’s a total of one hundred twenty one seasons from twenty-four different shows, total watch time of just under a thousand hours. We started back over with “Community”, and we had a little ceremony where we put a mark on the wall next to the TV screen, so we’ll know exactly how many times we’ve seen each show.
After the Community pilot, Bill took the kids out to check on the fish stocks in their tank. I went into the kitchen to make a smoothie. As I was taking fruit out of the freezer, suddenly I started crying and couldn’t stop. It took me thirty minutes and some of the good drugs to calm down. They don’t work on me like they do on the kids, but they do work. I’m glad the others seem to be adjusting to our new life, but I’m struggling more than I care to admit.
In six days it’ll have been two months since we got here. I think about two years, or twenty, and it still churns my stomach. Bill seems to relish it, and the kids are just glad to finally have a whole father, but I look at the calendar and I’m not sure there’s enough sitcoms in the world.
I couldn’t drink the smoothie I made. It’s my favorite food and I couldn’t touch it. There has to be something more for us than these walls and the forest you can see from them. I have to talk to Bill.
FEBRUARY 3, 2030 - I talked to Bill and it was worse than I could have imagined. I went with him to the back of the compound to weed the herb garden, and I asked him what he thought was going to become of the kids once we were gone. He looked at me like he’d never thought about it. I tried to explain about all the things they’d never have, and he just insisted that they were better off than all their dead friends or our dead friends. When I told him that better off than dead people isn’t much of a life, and he started screaming at me and called me ungrateful.
I got really mad and I asked him how sure he was that we were all that was left. I asked if he even planned to ever try to find out or if he just wanted to stay here forever, and he slapped me across the face and told me he never wanted to talk about it again. He’s never hit me in our lives together—hell he wouldn’t even spank me during sex when I invited him to do it.
He stalked off, and when I went back inside, he smiled and asked about dinner like it had never happened. The kids were there, and they were smiling, and I just couldn’t ruin it. They’ve been through so much. Maybe I’m stupid for asking. That’s not a justification, there’s really no reason to think there’s anybody else. If there was they’d be broadcasting somehow. I don’t know why I can’t let it go. It’s not even like he’s made us stay here so long, it’s been less than three months. I just worry that the longer we stay here, the harder it will be to contemplate leaving. The kids will lose sight of what they’re missing.
We’re the lucky ones just to be here, I know that. I know he’s right, I’m being ungrateful. I have my children and I have my health and that should be enough. But another part of me thinks that if this is all there is, we’re all better off dead.
FEBRUARY 10, 2030 - Bill shut off the sitcoms today. We were on the fourth season of “30 Rock”, the episode where Jenna meets Paul. He walked in and said he wanted to watch a movie instead, and the kids agreed that it was time so I didn’t dare protest, but the way he looked right at me when he said it make it clear that he was taking something from me. He’s never cared about a movie in his life. He just knew that this was something I found comforting and he wanted to take it away.
We sat there and watched “Donnie Darko”, and Bill kept looking back at me, and he’d do this half-smile thing that chilled me. Sarah was sitting beside me and she could see him, and I’m sure to her it looked like he was reassuring me, but I could see he was trying to bring me back into the fold after our fight. He doesn’t trust me now that I said that.
Or, and I have to admit this is a possibility, I’m starting to lose it. What if Bill is right and it’s absolutely clear that there are no other people out there, and my thinking about leaving represents some kind of delusion.
I’ve been thinking lately, what if Bill faked all this somehow? What if he couldn’t stand the idea that all his preparation was for nothing, and he felt like a fool that I knew, and so he set it up so that we “had” to come out here? What if he faked the news reports, and then when we got here he faked the broadcasts and faked the internet getting shut off? How would I know? There could be seven billion people alive in the world and we still wouldn’t see any around here.
I know this is crazy. We took a flight and saw cars crowding an abandoned freeway. I watched regular TV channels, CNN and NBC and all of them, they aren’t all fake. But then I look around at this place, at all Bill did to get this compound built, and I wonder what’s impossible and what’s not.
FEBRUARY 18, 2030 - Bill is dead. My hands are shaking as I type this, and there’s blood under my fingernails. He took me out to check the fences, and when we were there, he told me he knew what I was planning. I told him I wasn’t planning anything, and he punched me and told me to stop lying. He said he knew that I was conspiring with the kids to take him away from here. He said he knew I couldn’t stand that he’d been right and I’d been wrong.
He put his hands around my neck and I knew he was going to kill me. He was making this growl deep in his throat like I’d never heard before. I can still feel that pressure now. There was this buzzing in my ears. I was trying to hit him but it didn’t make any difference. I was about to pass out, and I slipped, and when I slipped he lost footing and fell backwards onto a log and hit his head.
He wasn’t quite dead from that, though, and I… I— I did what I had to do. I did it for the kids, and I did it for me. Even if he didn’t fake all of this, he was delusional. I have to believe he was, and not me. He wanted to come out here and stay, and whatever else that meant, it meant my babies weren’t going to have real lives, or families, or anything else. I can’t imagine them living here, just the two of them, for so many years, and then what if one of them gets sick or dies and the other is completely alone?
The four walls of this compound cannot contain enough hope to sustain us. Bill thought of everything but that. There wasn’t one thing we would have wanted for, and yet we had nothing. Giving your children everything without giving them hope of something more isn’t parenting, it’s handcuffing. What’s the point of staying here if there’s no tank that grows hope?
The sitcoms are off now. The screens are dark. I want to go turn them on, but I can’t make myself do it. Comfort doesn’t feel comforting.
When I finish this entry, I’m going to go tell the kids that Bill had an accident and died. I’m going to tell them that it was a malfunction in the compound’s machinery that caused the accident, and that means we can’t stay here anymore because it’s not safe.
Then tomorrow, we’re going to take the vehicles that Bill stationed here, we’re going to load them up with spare batteries and food, and we’re going to head out towards the nearest civilization. Maybe there’s nothing there and we’ll just drive until the charge runs out, but it’s better than what we have here, for all the creature comforts.
FEBRUARY 19, 2030 - The cars are fake. The cars are fake! Fuck you, Bill. I’m not much of a curser but FUCK. YOU. I went out to the garage and tried to start one and it wouldn’t even budge. I popped the hood and it was empty. Literally nothing in it, just a shell. Whether or not Bill was lying about needing to come here, he was never planning to leave.
I tried to see if there was anything weird about the computers, if he had rigged them to turn off the internet or anything. I’m not a computer illiterate or anything. I was able to do a full reformat and reset, and I reinstalled the operating systems from backup disks that Bill had laying around. I guess it’s possible that he completely reprogrammed the operating system to phase out the internet and even seeded it into the backup disks, but they’re factory-stamped and it seems impossible, even for him.
So now we’re here, and I just don’t know what to believe. But I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to pack up the kids with whatever food we can carry, and I’m going to start walking. It’s seventy miles to the nearest town, and I think we can carry enough food to get there if we get lucky and find some clean water on the way.
In the end, it doesn’t matter whether the town has people or not, doesn’t matter whether the world has people or not. Staying here was Bill’s hope, his retreat from a world he didn’t understand except how to make money in it. But leaving is our hope. It’s hope for the kids, for a future, and the hope for me of providing that for them. There was everything here for us and there was nothing here for us, not of what matters there wasn’t. Bill might have snapped first, but none of us could have stayed sane for long.
Tomorrow, we leave these four walls and set out into that uncertain, hopeful endlessness. I’m leaving all the good drugs here. It’s time we all grew up and learned to do without them. We will probably die of the cold, or dehydration, or some parasite in the water, or one of a million other things. The chances of us making it back to something real and recognizable approach zero. And with all that, I cannot wait to get started.
END
This story is chilling, mainly because the protagonist is an unreliable narrator. Was Bill punishing her for for wanting to leave, or did he just want to watch a movie? Did Bill snap first and try to kill her, or is that a story she’ll telling herself because she feels too guilty for murdering her husband? Are the cars actually fake, did she get rid of the engines in some sort of psychotic episode and forgot about it, or is she lying again to further vilify her murdered husband? Very good story!
Slightly off topic, but has reiterated- at least for me- the importance of escapist fiction. You don’t want to be listening to a story about a pandemic that wipes out the majority of the population while living in that exact scenario.
I want to know what happens to them!!