The Story of Antoine Paradise (the adopted Indian child)

With Sam the dog at my side, I took a gas tanker from town-to-town across what used to be America.  Used an old hose to connect the truck’s double tanks to the cargo tank on the back so that I could feed off that.  This self-sufficiency reminded me of a snail.  One less reason to pull over.

Of course having a few thousand gallons of gas on your rig makes you drive it like a spastic Old Italian man, but with the right soundtrack, going out with a bang sounds triumphant and exciting, and part of you wishes it’d happen to you.
…But driving at nearly 200 MPH I look at my dog, and only for his sake, I slow it down.

I pulled in to the void streets of Statesville, with all the appropriate signals and lane-changes, checking my blind spots on either side.  In a rig like this, safety is my duty to all the other drivers on the road.

Newspapers blew, flies buzzed around, leafs on the trees but no birds, just a wind passing and whistling in the ears, crossing over the openings of two empty bottles.

“WUS GOIN’ ON, STATESVILLIANS?” I shouted at the graveyard of coffee-shop, banking, restaurant, hair-salon tombstones lining the main street.  Then I gulped.

My words fell faster than spit straight back into this bottomless silence.
Like a scab, this was a silence that got worse the more you broke it in.
…It was just so hard not to pick at it.

Maybe I liked that certain regretful twang I got each time I heaved up a word or two.
Talking to yourself, even when you’re almost surely the last man on planet earth, is still done with guilt.  
You feel alienated.  Not that it would be insane if you did get this way after a while...

The newspapers were free.  The world was finally letting me catch up.
The latest and last music before the twelfth encore.
The latest and last movies before Fade to Black.
The latest and last of politics, baseball and comic strips that made me cough, which is all I can do instead of laughing since I started on smoking Marlboros.
Yep--if there were anyone else, I would be the one impressing them, for a change.

With much sarcasm I sat and read: ‘Who’s Wearing Who?’
…And jerked off to pictures of a few dead celebrities, fully exposed and liberated and pants-down in the empty, dead streets of Statesville.
Now I know it’s rude to piss on graves, but ejaculating?  Giving seed?  Attempting to fertilize and resurrect the dead?

…I looked around at the corpses, mostly fat old women, bloated sacks in the hot sun.
If necrophilia were only my thing!  
I’d be in paradise.

I couldn’t help but imagine…And then, thankfully, feel like vomiting.
…Nope—Antoine Paradise is a man of standards, I tell you.


Last stop was the beer store to get directions (and beer).
…And there it was.
Always easy to find a beer store in a small town in need of escapism.

I put on my gas mask and stepped in through the out door.
Inside was carpeted with dead people and their various fabrics.
No bugs or insects to eat them, so they just bloated up like fat caricatures of themselves.  A good infestation of bugs serves a purpose in a morgue.  You need something to pop an ever-growing balloon of flesh and infection.

So I walk up to the register and ring the bell hard, but for some reason I doubt anyone’s coming.  The silver echo lasts forever.

Plugging in the security system into my noisy gas generator, I get the last images taken by the in-store security cameras before the power went down.

Rewinding the tape, I see the dead in time-lapse, doing nothing.  Rotting and waiting for their beer.  I see the sun rise, which means the sun setting in reverse.
Then I see the sun set, and then rise, once again…

And then at 6 PM, all the corpses stand up like marionettes and wait there in line for their beer.  I take my finger off of rewind and go for pause.

This was three weeks ago.  March the 16th, 2007.
Calculating the difference in longitude, I take out my notebook and compare the time code of that exact moment when everyone stood up in reverse to the time code at the last beer store--which was somewhere in Georgia.
…That moment where everyone hit the cold floor with their grocery bags.  Fell down and stayed down.

Between the one in Georgia and the on in Statesville, there was a few seconds of unaccountable difference in time.
Between the one in Georgia and the one just further south on the I-95, there was an even greater difference.

…This meant: whatever killed everyone and every animal on March 16th was a blast, like a selective A-bomb, wrapping around the world from a certain one location, starting fast but then gradually slowing and gradually dying out, somewhere…

I took a tall can of Budweiser and twisted the tab down, up, down, up…Like the tab’s doing sit-ups, going through the alphabet one letter at a time, and then it snaps at the waist at letter ‘L’…L…Who do I know that’s still living whose name starts with L?
No one…

Now my direction was verified.  I was on some kind of path in my gas tanker.  As long as this difference in time code was becoming less and lesser, I was going to come across some answers and finally be entirely caught up with all of world history.  I could imagine some kind of bunker, some sort of military base in Russia or Iraq where I would find biochemical weapons.  Or perhaps I would find an asteroid that touched down and carried with it something that curdled with oxygen and instantly wrapped the globe, killing everything…

…But it’s nice to imagine that a kid named Leonard that I used to know from Woodworking and who used to work at the CD store was still out there, thinking of me, and thinking of me thinking of him, sometimes, too…Who else do I know starting with the letter L?

I made a bet with myself that wherever this deadly blast came from, it probably ended at my feet, where I was aboard a houseboat with my parents, a long way off the west coast of Canada.
For a long time it was just them and me and Sam the dog…

After one day with no radio and no TV and no cell phone signals, my father took us into the harbor.
I remember the first dead man we saw was flopped down on the back of a jet ski, floating by.   It made me laugh—that someone could just sleep like that.

“Wakey wakey!” shouted Harold, blowing the boat horn.

We pulled in through morning fog to the black outlines of the harbor.
Everyone was just lying about in the sun.

“Barb?” said Harold with a shaky voice.  “Tell Anthony to go make a sandwich, put on a CD…Tell him that you want to give him a hand for a while…Until you hear from me.”

“Sure!” said Barb.
I swallowed hard enough to swallow my curiosity.
When you’ve lived with your parents twenty-one years, you get used to your role.
I would find out sooner or later…

So what did I do?
I got out the mayonnaise, some twelve-grain and some black-forest ham.

Half an hour passed.  Harold came back with a red face, sweating and babbling.
“GUYS!” he said, bursting through the door.  “Things are a little crazy at the harbor…They are giving me shit!  I don’t seem to be able to speak with anyone…And there’s a bunch of low-life’s that are hanging around—God Damn vagrants…Barb—come for a walk?”
He ran his hand over the squeaky top of his bald head and stood, crouched in the doorway.
“Sure!” said Barb with an exaggerative reluctance that bad liars think can only be heard by the people that are in on the lie.   

I sat down there in the living room of the houseboat, stared out the circular portal at nothing but waves and a sailboat, drifting by, unmanned…And I threw up mayonnaise, black forest ham and twelve-grain bread.

My parents were out somewhere making the decision that I would never be able to handle the apparent truth.
…So they did the selfless thing and decided to create an elaborate lie to avoid any hard, embarrassing, honest confrontations.
This plan was as wanton, insane and see-through as the birds and the bees, as Santa Clause and God…

My Father declared that the Paradise family would be continuing on vacation as planned.
After all, they worked nine-to-five all year for this one, special week…

“We’ve got hotel reservations at the Diplomat for four PM!” said Barb.  “Get your stuff together, Antoine….And make sure you bring your swimming things!  They’ve got a POOL!”

Whenever my parents lied, they lied to me like I was a child, in hopes that the tone of their voices would send me lapsing into an instant, mental regression.  In hopes that I, too, would fall into the act—which was generally the easiest way to go.
A regression back to when things were easy and you didn’t NEED to know about how babies were made and why things live and why things die and why it seems that every living creature and every human being has dropped dead…

The next two weeks were beautiful.  I sat in the back of the RV and wasn’t allowed to open the orange curtains.
Gas price dropped to free.  
We sailed across the continent in a rectangular toaster-oven--the chrome, heat-conductive Recreational Vehicle they marketed as ‘The Gargantuan’.

…And behind The Gargantuan we toed a Ford Explorer.  Behind the Ford Explorer, we toed the House Boat.

“Where ARE we getting all this money?” I yelled down the hallway-thin living space of The Gargantuan.
My Dad was driving, Barb was reading the map with the red nail-extension on her pinky finger, trying to find a way around major roads and freeways—where all the dead cars would be stalled.
Harold was about to answer me…

“Hey--we have friends in this area!” said Barb.  “Do you remember the Livingstons, Antoine?”
“May they rest in peace!” I shouted, raising my clenched fist into the air and then letting it flop to my side.
“Well anyway I’m going to see if they’re home,” she said.  “Harold you don’t mind if we stop by, do you?”
“I don’t mind—but it’s a ways from here and I’d rather find somewhere to--”
The Gargantuan passed over a dead body.  It slid over it.  You could feel the texture of the decayed flesh in the way the tires swiveled out.

“…Bump ahead!” shouted Harold.
And the RV crunched into a stalled car, sending the small Volvo spinning off the highway into a swamp with glorious shrapnel of moss and gunk, spraying all over our windshield.

We crossed the boarder without problems, didn’t stop at toll booths, headed down through Georgia and passed the Appalachian Mountains all in one nervous, 30-hour day of my Dad driving, looking for survivors but never acknowledging it.

My Mom got him to pull over and we took pictures, faked nervous smiles in front of the polluted sunset.
The illusion was going fine until we noticed that Sam the dog was eating a dead person’s crotch.

“Get back in the RV!” shouted Harold.
By this time I was dealing with things by laughing hard and heart-felt at everything.
Barb’s hands shot up and covered her mouth as she burst.

And I heard Sam yelp.
“Don’t hurt my fuckin’ dog!” I shouted from inside.

Inside the RV was all orange and fake wood paneling.
It was, like my Mother, stuck in the 1950’s and very well made-up.
All the appliances were unnecessarily large, colored like butter and decorated with egg-timers, making an unnecessary amount of noise when they were running.

We took shots of all the hot spots on our way across the dead continent of America.  By the end, Barb had composed quite an album.

The American emblem of the Eagle was the jinx that began it all, considering the prophecy of the 12 Eagles foretold the fall of Rome at the end of 12 centuries in rule.

And on the side of The Gargantuan was a giant, spray-brushed landscape painting.  It showed the mountains somewhere in Utah, with an eagle soaring, with a wolf, with a caribou, lightning and sunshine.
I used my toe to part the curtains and look out over the mountains of Utah when they came around on the Marquee of landscapes.
It was polluted.  Look close enough and you could see village ghost-towns and factories that contributed to the yellow/green, faded skies.
And of course there was also the occasional corpse or tour bus on its side, wafting the smell of death like a whale’s corpse across a desolated beach.

Barb was on the phone with no one.  She was leaving messages after a voice recording that must’ve been working on batteries.

“Look I don’t know what kind of business it is that you run, but you are very bad at getting back to people, you know.  This is the second time I’ve called today!” she said.  “My husband and I are outraged…Please give me a call back.  This is Barb calling again.  I left my number before, but here it is once again…Three-O five, two-seven nine, one-one-six-one…You can call anytime.  We’ll be waiting…Please?  You won’t be bothering us, you know…Please?”

Swinging back up to Washington D.C., we stopped by at my Mother’s Cousin’s house, only to find them all dead.
This was something of a revelation to my Mother, and about the first time that she admitted the circumstance.

Then the act started up again as we went to take photos of the White House.
Just to take photos…Not to find answers.

We wound up staying there for three days.  I smoked cigars on the balcony overlooking the Pentagon.  I sat with the rotten President.  Punched him in the face.
Sam ran around, shitting on the rug, and we fed him steak from George Bush’s kitchen.

Sam was king of the place, and probably the most fit Presidential Candidate of the Paradise family.  He had a certain spring in his walk and a flop in his ears.  He ran around and grinned and sized things up, operating in binary, either barking or not barking, running or sitting…As decisive as that he’d be able to call out ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

I cracked a bottle of wine.  The price was irrelevant, but it was well-aged.
Sam came onto the balcony and started barking at me.
I strolled behind him, in from the balcony and down to my parent’s room.  That’s when I found them, sleeping pills beside the bed.
I stood above them and nausea grew inside me like a thermometer.  I took a drink of wine and irrationally spit it all over them.
Fire as red as the burgundy sheets they lay on top of was growing inside me.
This New World was hardly brave and curdled with my idea of comfort.

I stood there, and by the time the bottle in my hand had finished, I had accepted myself as the last man on earth.

To be continued…