HOW I GOT READY FOR THE END OF THE WORLD
By Eric Del Carlo
New Orleans drowned in our rearview mirror.
I understood very early on that I was in a house full of readers. Books were read to me, ones with kaleidoscopic pictures and infectious rhyming schemes. Later, naturally, I delved into the grown-up books, into pages of pure print, into stories that required some intellectual wherewithal on my part. I relished the reading experiences. I didn't think this odd. Though this was a time before much of our current, taken for granted technology--no Internet, no VCRs, no cable, no cell phones--there was still an abundance of other activities to preoccupy a young person's attention. Reality is a wonder of distraction; and it should be.
But I grew up surrounded by readers. And so I read.
In the house was a veritable trove of genre literature. Science fiction. Horror. Mysteries. Disaster thrillers. Anthologies of every stripe. I read The Shining and was scared spitless. I read Stranger in a Strange Land and thought it just might be the greatest work by man or woman, living or dead. I read musty tales of man versus machine and science-be-damned space operas in their original magazine forms. I liked everything I read. I had not yet absorbed the concept that a book could be "bad." If something had been printed up by a publisher, I reasoned, it had to have passed some absolute test and must, thereby, be worthy, meritorious, "good."
More than anything else that I read, however, I liked end of the world fiction.
It helps to be adolescent when you're developing a true appreciation of this sub-genre. The existential dislocation and lack of emotional surefootedness that come with those years prepares a dedicated reader to enter the post-apocalyptic landscapes. I read I Am Legend and slogged through the strained scientific exposition to savor the very human, very lonely story at its center. My father and future coauthor, Victor--whose books these mostly were--put Niven and Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer into my hands. I was directed toward Alas, Babylon, No Blade of Grass, On the Beach and others. I read explicitly supernatural end of the world novels, like The Stand and Robert McCammon's goof-ball riff on the same scenario, Swan Song. I thought these stories, regardless of how their authors went about ringing down the curtain on human civilization, all owed their gut-punch effects to horror as much as science fiction. Splitting genre hairs is, in my view, persnickety and almost pointless. But it was dread I was experiencing as I basked perversely in these tales of depopulated Earths and decaying ruins. The attraction seems obvious to me now, though I am unsure if I recognized it at the time. I was, of course, imagining myself as that lone survivor or one among a hearty band of other survivors.
I assimilated all of these scenarios. I watched them in movie form. Having been born under the dubious Red Threat of the Cold War--and growing up with the (astonishing, in retrospect) assumption that nuclear holocaust between the US and USSR was inevitable--I found myself curiously prepared for the catastrophe which consumed the city where I'd lived for a number of years. New Orleans was struck by disaster. Call it natural if you like; call Hurricane Katrina a product of human-induced global climate change if you prefer. Call the disaster relief efforts criminally negligent or unavoidably delayed. It makes no difference at all to the dead.
My wife and I fled in the last rentable SUV available in the city. We were gone before the outer bands of the storm scoured onto land. At a distance, parked in a campground, we listened to a live feed from the Superdome. The radio gave out fits and starts of information, including people telephoning in to ask why, after the furious rains had passed, the water was still rising in the streets.
It was the end of the world. A part of it, at least. It just happened to be our part.
I had only one frame of reference. Trivial or not, inappropriate or not, I was able to fit this unprecedented cataclysm into my head through the facility of those speculative scenarios about which I'd read so obsessively. This didn't diminish the blood-draining shock or the marrow-deep sorrow and outrage...but I at least had a vague map of this new horrible territory. Disaster, the collapse of services, social breakdown; these ideas had already been introduced to me. How appalling it was to see them being played out in a modern American city.
We went westward in that SUV, sleeping in a tent next to the vehicle, unwilling to be too far from our possessions which were boxed up inside it. I didn't object to being referred to by the media as a "refugee" rather than an "American." I wasn't in a very American state of mind.
Now here we are, California, my and my wife's mutual home state, an ear out for each time a "record level" of any meteorological phenomenon is reported. I still read end of the world stories; I still write them. I am still waiting for the new tales our planet will tell us in the swiftly approaching future.