weegbree
Just Another Apocalypse
Translated from the Dutch by the author
“Do electricity makes it kinda cozy, don’t you think?” said the woman next to me, and started shovelling her lentilrice with abandon, using a dessert spoon. I nodded, as I too had my mouth full of lentilrice and knew it would take a while to deal with the dry matter before I could answer her properly. You could only produce so much saliva. Sauce was luxury now; after all, we were in the middle of an apocalypse and even if it wasn’t our first, scarcity kept being a thing.
The woman—“You can call me Lia, dear”—had bright orange hair with grey outgrowth and was wearing a colorful sweater with the text THE FUTURE IS MAUW spoken in faded rainbow colors by a black cat with a white chest and a large speech bubble next to his right ear. I did not know her, had never seen her. Not in the DIRK supermarket, not at the ice cream stand on the corner, nor in the waiting room at the only pharmacy in our little Rotterdam-South neighborhood. And yet she lived on my street, it turned out. At number 299, only a few houses away. Strange, because as president of the neighborhood association, I prided myself on knowing just about everyone in the area.
We had entered the community center at the same time, and after each of us had placed a plastic bag with our contribution for the dinner on a table near the entrance, we had sat down next to each other. Above the collection table hung a handwritten A4 sheet with the text: NO MORE THAN 1 (one) FOOD PRODUCT PER MEAL, PLEASE! Behind the word PLEASE someone had drawn an old-fashioned emoji of two hands with folded palms and little blue sleeves. The A4 sheet was half-pinned over some old posters from previous Apos about weapons training and clothing swaps.
In Lia’s bag was dried-out white tiger bread—“Still perfectly fine for making bread pudding!”—and in my bag were five pears I had picked myself from the small city garden I shared with my neighbors. The little tree was less than two meters tall, and I had marveled time and again at the number of pears it could bear. This year, there were four or five hanging from each branch, disproportionately large in relation to the little tree. Or so we thought. But what did we know about the life of pears? I was trained as a graphic designer and my neighbors both worked as architects. We assumed it was because of all the bee hotels that had become so hugely fashionable a few years before. All the neighbors in our single-family row of houses had hung several of them on their fences, and all the neighborhood children now knew the exact difference between a bee and a wasp, even the youngest, not yet four, who had been flitting around the communal outdoor space all summer with transparent wings in hopscotch steps, while the older children compared each other’s waists and debated who had to be wasp and who was allowed to be bee.
While waiting for the food that was cooked in the communal kitchen by Vinnie and Suchi, the two appointed cooks of the day, my neighbor and I talked mostly about cats (I was allergic but told her that the itch would pass after living with a cat for a longer time; she had six in her house, three of which were pregnant). It was the twelfth dinner gathering since the sunstorms hit our part of the city, and the atmosphere was animated. Tino, the postman, sat on the billiards table and strummed a guitar as people slowly trickled in. We didn’t even have to make flyers anymore.
The long string of pushed-together tables that snaked through the main hall was covered in a patchwork of colorful tablecloths that everyone had brought in the first week. I myself had donated a hand-embroidered tablecloth that my mother once made for her trousseau. The linen cloth had strange black, almost spider-like flowers with blood-red pistils on a pink background, and we only ever used it for special occasions like Christmas, but I decided that during an apocalypse, every day should be a special day. I was sure my mother would agree. If you don’t want stains, you shouldn’t eat either, she used to say. I had never really understood what she meant by that, and thankfully I could no longer ask her. There are some things you shouldn’t have to go through at the age of ninety-three. Like three apocalypses in a row.
“How many more days do you think you can contribute?” asked Lia. I watched how she wet her index finger, pressed the tip onto a few lentils lying among the black spider flowers, and stuck it in her mouth.
“Contribute? Uhm . . . ” I pretended to think for a moment, as if I were opening the doors of my kitchen cupboard to see if there was anything inside.
Then, lying flat to her face, I said, “Probably a week or two.”
It had taken me a good part of my life to become a believable liar. Not that I liked lying, but the innocent world I had grown up in—between sugar beets and waving tufts of maize, boring Sunday mornings at church, endless children’s choir rehearsals in the cold side aisle on Mondays, volleyball practice in far- too-short shorts on Tuesdays, BattleStar Galactica on Wednesdays, something I forgot on Thursdays, board games on Fridays, and chips and cola on Satur- days—that world had long since ceased to exist. So I had learned to protect my naivety by lying. Obviously as little as humanly possible.
“That’s nice,” Lia nodded as her eyes wandered over the table in search of more stray lentils. “I only have cat kibble in the house after today. But those are for the cats, so I wonder how long I will be allowed to join the dinners.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” I said reassuringly, “everyone is always welcome, Lia.” I’d learned from a friend that a conversation sounds more sincere if you say someone’s name out loud once in a while. Lia stopped scanning the table and gave me a look that I couldn’t quite place. Did she know? No, she couldn’t, because I had never told anyone.
In truth, I had been stockpiling for years. Even before the first apocalypse took place, me and some friends had set up a disaster group as part of an art project. The Apocalites, we called ourselves. It started out as a rather fun and frolicsome project—I was teaching Social Art at the university and involved a few students who were into guerilla gardening and fermenting stuff. We put together a hand-printed monthly zine, The Wake-up Call, with tips and stories and varying course offerings: wild-picking, basket-making, farming edible insects, that sort of thing. We also developed several analog communication devices, all of which never worked. I could still remember a chaotic meal from the early days where we all had to bring something that was not bought, processed, or machine-produced. Only homegrown or wild-picked food were allowed.
It was a full-blown disaster. People arrived half an hour before the announced time of dinner, carrying bags full of walnuts, sunchokes, and chard, expecting others to prepare it while their hungry children ran about the kitchen, whining and screaming when we were going to eat and if there were any chips. A new Apocalite had brought a purchased bottle of wine, which was immediately taken away by some purists on the grounds that the experiment would otherwise be unsuccessful, to which the wine lover replied that any food experiment without wine would be unsuccessful anyway.
The cooks had it rough. Just the peeling of the sunchokes alone took themthree hours, and there were far more mouths to fill than food was brought in. Everyone invited thought it a wonderfully interesting concept and excitedly shared it on the socials, but nobody actually bothered to bring anything. So much for survival thinking. There was no salt, no sugar, and certainly no spices, just a few sprigs of rosemary and thyme and some chilies, but since the children didn’t like these, they couldn’t be used, because of course the children were the ones who really HAD TO eat, otherwise the parents would have an even harder time for the rest of the evening, and the next day they had to go to work. After all, it wasn’t a real apocalypse.
Fortunately, I still had quite a few saved-up crusts of bread to grind into breadcrumbs. The anarchist baker around the corner had donated them when I told her about our plan a few weeks before. Whether it was within the margins of our concept was open to debate, but adding salted bread was the only way to make the dishes edible, and so everyone on the kitchen team tacitly agreed. I clamped a mincer to the countertop, put a large bucket under it and let the kids turn the wooden handle one by one while I pushed in the rock-hard bread crusts. They loved it and it made chaos manageable for a while. In the meantime we made soup of sunchoke, stir-fried sunchokes with chard, and a sunchoke apple crumble with walnuts and a jar of honey from someone whose brother was the city beekeeper.
That night, everyone suffered from severe stomach aches. After that very unsuccessful evening, I realized we would be completely fucked if a real apocalypse came, basket-making and all. So I bought a food dehydrator and a few books, took a course in preserving, and a year or two later I had a cellar full of candied fruit, pickled vegetables, dried herbs, several old pillow cases full of rice, seeds, and grains, and many glass jars with handmade pasta. I dug that cellar out myself with some construction help from my architect neighbors and converted it into a pantry I called the wine cellar. Finally, I had invested in a water purification tank and also hid that behind the little drywall. I was ready.
“Yes well . . . supplies . . . who has the money and space to stock up these days?” said Lia next to me, and I nodded affirmatively, quickly changing the subject and asking her when she had moved to the area. I couldn’t bear the fact that I didn’t see her before.
“Oh honey, I’ve lived here all my life, but I never much leave the house because I don’t want to be a nuisance to anyone. I’ve had enough of that in the past.“Nuisance?” I asked, “how’s that?” I couldn’t imagine how this friendly woman could be a bother to anyone. Lia was silent for a moment and observed how Tino made his way towards the kitchen with a far-too-big and shaky pile of dirty plates. Then she started telling how, some 20 years ago—long before I moved here—people from the neighborhood had started calling her cat lady because she fed all the street cats and often took them in when needed.
“It really became untenable when even people from outside started to bring in sick animals while I really didn’t have the money or the space for that.” I imagined what her house must have looked like: scratched-off chairs and sofas and backrests with staring eyes and slowly swishing tails everywhere, the endless mewing of kittens, and the stench of full litter trays. I shuddered.
“So at one point,” Lia continued, “I asked my neighbors, ‘Can’t you contribute something from time to time? I can’t manage on my own.’ And miraculously, they then decided to open a bank account from which I could draw.” I nodded enthusiastically.
“What a great idea!”
“Yes, that was very sweet. Quite a few people deposited small amounts every month, so I could buy all the food and medicine I needed. And yes, I also bought some rolling tobacco with that money sometimes, but I didn’t feel guilty about that at all, because I thought: I’m doing a lot for the neighborhood cats and for the neighbors as well, and so I could treat myself once in a while, right?” She squeezed her eyes a little shut and looked at me, but it didn’t really feel like she expected me to answer.
“But at some point someone found out about the tobacco buying. And then they took all the money out of the account and organized a neighborhood barbe- cue without inviting me and threw their rubbish over my fence afterwards. Since then I have been keeping a low profile.”
Appalled, I shook my head in disgust and sympathy.
“Such a thing would never happen within our neighborhood association,” I said firmly. Lia said nothing but concentrated on the dessert the cooks had just distributed.
“Heej Aaf! Howissit?’’ Jan slapped his plate of bread pudding on the table, squeezed his huge body and an equally huge odor between me and Lia, and started stuffing his face.
“Yeah, all right,” I said, “a bit meh.” And that was not a lie. Somehow I didn’t really know how to fill the days; I was bored even. It sounded bizarre in the middle of this disaster, and you would expect there to be all sorts of things to do, but there weren’t. My cellar had no space left for any new projects and by now, the Apocalites group had become a fairly well-oiled machine and really no one seemed very impressed by this whole sunstorm situation. Three Apos in a row had done wonders for the community spirit, and the resilience of the local residents had grown with each new challenge. Secretly, I was beginning to feel redundant.
“Aw . . . dolly-doll, those stupid sunstorms will surely pass soon!” Jan hooted in my ear. He put an arm around my shoulder and pressed me tightly against him while still scooping pudding with his other hand. “We won’t let ourselves get crushed, will we?”
I tried not to breathe and managed a smile.
The first real Apo still came as a complete surprise. Our country had always been known for its highly sophisticated water management, but long-term cuts in maintenance of the flood defenses had left the dykes in poor condition. So when one Wednesday morning the city flooded completely and left behind an algae unknown to science that reduced everything it encountered to pulp, panic struck nationwide. The green slime turned out to be a type of saltwater fungus and could only be stopped by suckermouths, a genetically engineered algae-eating catfish, which our government had to import from Hungary at a bizarrely high cost. The investigation by the Parliamentary Enquiry Committee on the Suckermouths Deal was still ongoing.
For weeks, we had to coexist with the algae, which soon turned out to be edible for humans, but hardly anyone dared to venture into that, myself included. A missed opportunity in retrospect. Local distribution points for the Suckermouths were set up quickly, and we all got instruction manuals on how to deploy them. They were harnessed sucker catfish that had been genetically engineered into a hybrid of fish and land amphibian. They could be exposed to the outside air for quite a long time, but still had to be placed in fresh water every two hours to avoid dehydration. When at work, drawing streaks in the green goo, like little hoovers, their smacking went through marrow and bone, while, when resting in the bucket, their bulging fish eyes followed everything you did. Terrifying.
Not so long before, a Hungarian friend had told me about these labs in her city where technological experiments were being performed on animals. One day they had created this craze with little colorful songbirds that sang so bizarrely beautiful that when you were exposed to the twittering for too long, you fell under hypnosis and lost any sense of morality. The numbers of reports of people accusing their relatives, friends, and neighbors of suspicious subversive behavior were skyrocketing. This fact made me so paranoid that for weeks I covered my ears at every bird warble. And I also always threw a cloth over the bucket with the suckermouth when it was not working.
In the meantime I was stuck with Jan, who was happily digging into his dessert.
“Jan, do you know Lia here?” I said in an attempt to shift Jan’s attention to my new neighbor-friend.
“Yes of course we know each other!” cried Jan with his mouth full, spraying pieces of bread pudding with pear all around. “We’ve known each other since I picked up Witje.” I assumed Witje was a cat, and so I asked no further, hoping Jan would pounce on Lia. But Lia saw it coming and got up quickly.
“I need to pee,” she said.
I resigned myself to the fact that I would have to spend the next fifteen minutes or more listening to Witje’s story before I could come up with a reasonable excuse to escape Jan, too. Surprisingly, Lia returned to the table a few moments later. She really needed to pee. Jan had just been telling me that Witje was suffering from severe seizures of epilepsy and that he only had medication left for a few days and was very stressed about it, and I nodded as much as I could with- out really asking more because I was afraid I would never be able to get away, although I really did feel seriously sorry for him. But Lia simply said, “Which medicine does Witje need? I still have quite a stash.” She winked at me while Jan started hugging her. I felt caught out. But I also started to really like Lia, and I thought, this woman is a good one to have around—she would be an asset for our secret core group.
Immediately after the first sunstorm, we had come together with a select group of Apocalites to discuss what could be done to keep our families safe. We suspected that there were forces at work that were trying to create more and more chaos, more and more disasters, and that things were going to get rough very soon. That was what neighbor Lale warned us for anyway.
Lale worked for the municipality and had a direct line to the mayor. Not that the latter understood anything about what was going on in his own city; as a newly elected puppet of the NihiLib government, he barely knew how to tie his leather designer shoes, let alone had any shred of understanding how the power cuts had occurred. But his cleaning lady Sanaa knew, both how to tie shoes and about the facts behind the disaster that had powered out big parts of the city. Indeed, the mayor had all his emails printed out in large font by Lale, his secretary, so that he could read them without reading glasses, but since he usually fell asleep before he was halfway through the emails, many of the unread A4s ended up in the wastebasket. The same basket that cleaner Sanaa had to empty twice a week. The mayor was told by Lale that Sanaa could not speak Dutch, let alone read or write, but that was a gross deception. Saana was very able to read. And write. As it happens, she was the partner of Lale and had just completed a Master’s in Creative Writing and needed a job to pay her rent while writing her first science fiction novel about solar storms. So when she was emptying the mayor’s trash and came across some emails with the subject line “SECRET test project solar storms in Rotterdam-Zuid,” she did not hesitate for a moment. Fishing the printouts quickly out of the bin, she softly mumbled, “Confirming existing prejudices can go a long way.”
And so Sanaa told Lale about how the government had been engaged in induced solar storms. After the Suckermouth debacle, our NihiLib government had a huge debt with the Hungarian company, a debt so high that it would take about three hundred years for it to shrink to a normal debt of a few billion. The pressure was high, and it turned out that the same Hungarian company was looking for test sites to conduct experiments with superlocal generated solar storms: simulated coronal mass ejections in the form of controlled thermonuclear mergers with the goal to create chaos in certain demarcated areas. Our government had been persuaded—with, as usual, a counter-motion by the Party for Animals, which was, as usual, rejected—and it was decided that Rotterdam-South was the best location for this. Why Rotterdam-South exactly, Sanaa had not been able to find anywhere in the emails.
During a meager meal of carrot mash (about which we had debated whether it should be called that, given the minimum amount of carrots in the mash, namely two), we had speculated with the Apocalites on possible reasons. We came to the conclusion that an astonishing number of very organized neighborhood associations had been set up in Rotterdam-South recently, and that these were gaining more and more influence in the bigger districts, managing against all odds to set up mutual aid networks in a much more efficient and faster way than the city government was able to do. An ever-increasing eagerness to become self-sufficient had emerged among the citizens, especially in the historically more deprived areas. Perhaps our otherwise pouvoir neutre king’s repeated call for a participatory society had proved a little too successful, and those in power felt threatened by all these proactive citizens. Time to bring in some chaos again, they must have thought.
But we were not going to be deterred that easily.
“Always be careful what you ask for!” Lale had said with an evil grin at our most recent general meeting.
“Chaos it is!” Hassan cheerfully added.
“New rounds, new opportunists!” Jan had shouted enthusiastically. Jan was always enthusiastic, but he didn’t always get it.
Back at the community center, after everyone had finished their meal—the wait was always for Simon, who had dentures—there was a hearty applause. Vinnie and Suchi took a bow and assigned three people to do the dishes. The dishwashers were ceremoniously handed the rubber gloves, a ritual Lenie from the senior apartment had devised. This time Louis got the pink ones and was the dishwasher, Malika got the green ones and was going to dry, and finally Tino got the yellow pair pressed into his hands with a quasi-official gesture and was thus responsible for putting away the clean things. There was another round of applause. Most of us didn’t even think of the dishwashers anymore.
Still, the situation was gradually becoming more dire. Children had long since stopped whining for crisps, one of the unexpected positive side effects, but parents were starting to get worried that they might not be getting enough nutrients. There was some haggling here and there with illegal bartering on the side. A couple of neighborhood boys had set up a trade in the basement of the car garage, and just last week I had exchanged a full pillowcase of brown rice for two bars of chocolate. Not organic and not fair trade. Scarcity does mean things to your principles.
With the Apocalites core group we had started talking about leaving the neighborhood and living somewhere in a forest, somewhere where we could start growing real food. Wild-picking in a city is a fun hobby, we told each other, but not a long-term survival strategy. Opinions were still somewhat divided about where best to go, and at times there was some sputtering about things like solidarity and so on, but soon there would be an Apo where it really would be every man for himself; that was one thing for certain.
So when Jan left for a moment to take his plate to the dishwashers—he had managed to drag out a second serving of bread pudding—I invited Lia to join the core group and shared our plans. Lia was outraged.
“Whaaaat are you saying? Leaving the neighborhood just like that?” she said. “It’s a disgraaaace!” All her a’s were filled with disappointed indignation and exploded one by one in my face. The enthusiasm I had felt while making our plans vanished like snow for the sun. How had I ever dared to want this? I was a bad, bad person. Suddenly, I felt a deep urge to tell Lia about my dry-wall and so-called wine cellar. I wanted to say that I would donate everything to the community center. I desperately wanted to convince her that I was, in fact, a good neighbor and that I would never let our neighborhood down. But my tongue lay paralyzed in my mouth, and all I could do was stare at a huge stain in between two black embroidered spiders while Lia took her bag and left. That’s the thing about lies: the longer you wait to come clean, the further the ship drifts towards the horizon, and the harder it is to bring it back into port. So I decided that from tomorrow, I would secretly put an extra bag of food on the table.
The next day, after the rubber glove ritual, in which I was elected along with Jan and Khalid, I did my best to feign interest in Jan’s stories and be a good neighbor. He enthusiastically talked about his hobby of making garden gnomes.
“Did you know that the clay in our backyards is magic?” he said. For a moment I thought of our pear tree, full of enormous pears.
“The clay from Lia’s garden, for example, is simply amazing—you wouldn’t believe how much potential it has! Just fabulous!”
I had to do my best not to laugh at his ever-so-lyrical choice of words.
“Come see my garden later. I just made a few new ones, and I think these gnomes could really make a difference.” Not really understanding what he meant and desperately thinking no thanks, I said, “Of course, Jan, lovely. Garden gnomes.” Jan spontaneously gave me a hug, his wet pink gloves still full of suds, and I thought how wonderfully easy it was to please him. On a whim, I said, “Shall I ask some more people? That might be cozy.” Jan looked at me in surprise and then began to smile broadly.
“Good idea,” he said.
An hour later I stood with Jan and a few Apocalites around a small wishing well shaped like a giant ceramic frog. Above its wide-open mouth was a ram- shackle structure hammered from thin slats from which hung a rope with a small bucket.
“Does anyone perhaps have a coin to make a wish?” asked Jan, beaming as he was carefully creaking the little lever to coil up the rope. “It really works. Just a few weeks ago I wished the world would become a better place.”
But all of us just stood staring at the garden, speechless. Around the wishing well, there were over a hundred garden gnomes in different tableaus. I recognized Lia first. She was wearing her cat sweater and a red pointed hat and was sitting on a bench with a rollie in her hand. On the back of the bench lay three cats, a Siamese, a tiger and a calico, the latter pregnant by the looks of it. Right next to the frog well stood miniature versions of Vinnie and Suchi, both holding tiny cooking pots. They wore blue hats and aprons. A little further on stood a set of three gnomes with pink, green, and yellow household gloves on their tiny hands. They were Louis, Malika, and Tino. We all stood rooted to the ground.
“So, do you guys like it?” asked Jan. “This one is new,” he added, referring to a gnome who, with a pointed hat pulled far over their ears, was putting two shopping bags on a small table. I felt the skin of my skull shrink.
“I haven’t turned on the lights lately,” Jan said, pointing towards a tiny party garland above a long, snaking dining table with many-colored tablecloths. His voice sounded a bit guilty. “The energy bill became so high that I could no longer pay it.” He stepped carefully between a few gnome children playing football, their little pointed hats as goalposts in the fake grass.
“But now that you’re here, I’ll put them on anyway; that’ll be fun!” he said excitedly. No one in the group had said a stupid word yet. We were all obsessively looking at all the gnomes to see who else we recognized. It was almost everyone. In a corner I even saw our old neighbor Hemmo in overalls, smoking a cigar. He had taught all the neighborhood kids how to put new tires on their bikes despite his advanced Parkinson’s. “You have to keep willing your hands,” he used to say, while lovingly sliding an inner tube through his hands to find the hole, or deftly pushing the last piece of stiff outer tire onto the rim. In between, he secretly smoked cigars when the kids were busy. Unfortunately, Hemmo had passed away a few months ago, and the children made a work of art in his honor from bicycle wheels rimmed with brightly colored strips of plastic that rattled when you turned them. The sculpture stood in the middle of our little square, next to the pharmacy, the plinth being a sawn oak that had died around the same time as Hemmo.
I quickly wiped away a tear.
In the meantime, Jan had entered the shed at the back of the garden, and through the open door, we saw him unrolling an extension cable. We looked at each other pityingly. Did Jan still not realize that we had been without power for weeks? That the mayor threw more unread emails into the trash than Sanaa could steal without her being uncovered as literate? That children were fighting over the last overcooked Brussels sprout?
It was already dusk, and no one wanted to walk the streets in the dark, so Michael started to say, “Well, thanks Jan, what an extraordinary . . . ” when suddenly the entire garden was bathed in light. Festive garlands of lights, made up of hundreds of tiny LEDs in different colors transformed the garden into a magical landscape. Somewhere a small fountain began to gurgle, and I heard the tiny bicycle wheel honoring Hemmo start to rattle. The street lights flickered on one by one, making us all blink, and a radio started blaring from a window. There were cheers and jeers all down the street.
“Cool right?” said Jan.
Then Lia stepped out from the shed and winked at me.
Sometimes, later, yesterday, when we are sitting in front of the television again, a microwave meal on our lap, unsatisfied from a day of working too hard and too tired to even look for a new series to binge-watch, we send a message to Jan: Can you please turn off the lights for a while?
And then Jan pulls the plug, and we play Apocalypse for an evening.
Or a day.
Or two.
weegbree lives, loves and works in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.