Claire White at the End of the World (Part III)

(photo by Mariano)

(this is part three of a series; I recommend reading parts one and two first)

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Claire’s sleep was disturbed by a beeping sound, but it was far away and it didn’t seem important enough to open her eyes. She patted her nightstand, searching for her phone to turn off the alarm.

When she didn’t feel the nightstand she opened her eyes. She wasn’t in bed at home. She had fallen asleep sitting up, on the floor of the hunting cabin. The beeping was the keypad lock.

Everything rushed back. She was a survivor of the end of the world. It was the middle of the night and someone was unlocking the door. Her door.

Uncle Rick! Claire started to get to her feet, her solitary confinement over. In an instant, she knew the world was saved. Uncle Rick was probably here to tell her the good news and take her home.

The keypad beeped again but she noticed the mechanism did not whir. There was a pause. Then more beeps.

Whoever it was didn’t know the code.

Claire’s stomach turned. Could it be her family? She knew even as she thought it that this was an impossible wish.

Her car was right there. Her family would call out to her, banging on the door. They wouldn’t quietly and blindly try the lock.

She dropped back down to a crouch. Whoever it was had seen her car and decided the risk of someone being inside the cabin was acceptable. They had calculated that they could overtake her, maybe armed. They had decided on surprise.

Claire had always felt alienated by the phrase fight or flight. She had found in times of stress that there were many more preferable options. Freezing in place until someone came to help you, for example. Making yourself as nonthreatening as possible. A fly on the wall. A suburban mom parked in the gas station parking lot.

Alternatively, hiding was a solid option. As quietly as she could, Claire crawled to the bathroom, out of sight of any windows. She held her breath as she closed the door behind her in slow motion. It was pitch black. She fumbled for her phone, which was a different kind of tool these days— flashlight, address book. In the bathroom there was a tall stack of cardboard boxes: Uncle Rick’s stockpile of soap and detergent. She shoved it against the door.

Behind the stockpile she noticed a plastic case on the floor and when she opened it, she found a gun inside. A bathroom gun. Uncle Rick, you lost your mind. But she picked it up gingerly and climbed into the shower, where she backed into the corner with the gun resting on her thigh. Her heart was beating in her fingertips. She was so afraid of accidentally shooting herself that she could barely touch the gun. But she thought maybe she could point it at someone and scare them. She hoped it didn’t have a safety.

She took deep slow breaths to try and hear something outside of her own head. She couldn’t hear the beeping anymore. Either they had given up, or the sound was too faint to reach through the door. After a few minutes, she heard steps in the brush through the cabin’s thin walls, heavy and quick. Was it someone as scared and desperate as she had been? One of the soldiers from the barricades?

The rickety little house would be so easy to break into. Well, it wasn’t easy for Claire, but for someone more determined or more clever, less afraid of breaking things, it would be.

She pictured an axe hacking through the door, a gang of men in boots clearing out the cabinets, leaving her with nothing if she was lucky.

More movie scenes. It had only been a few days, surely people were not that desperate for canned food. Claire locked her phone screen, thinking if someone did come in, she would be a little bit ready.

After an eternity of straining to hear anything outside, she was startled to hear an engine start. She thought it sounded like a motorcycle, not a car. It revved, then receded. She listened for a full minute after the sound disappeared before she let her muscles relax. With the silence came relief and sadness. She was alone and would stay alone.

She crept to the front door, ducking below the windows in case the whole thing was a ruse, and rolled the second deadbolt into place. Then she retreated to her corner of the shower stall, barricaded the door, and struggled to sleep with the gun in her lap, her stomach knotted under its weight.

***

Claire woke up cold. Her neck ached. The phone— add clock to its uses— told her it was morning.

She picked the gun off her lap and realized she didn’t even know if it had bullets inside. She turned it over and over but there was not a single thing about it that she could decipher. She really didn’t know anything.

Still, she felt a little better with it in her hand. She strained to hear any sounds in the cabin. There were none. No light streamed under the bathroom door.

She slid the boxes from the door and paused, still hearing nothing. She cracked the door and nosed the gun through the slit, peeking into the cabin’s main room. No one.

No one except Oscar, who ran to her and started to meow. She set down the gun and picked him up instead. He hated being held, but she could usually get ten seconds before he writhed, clawed or bit her. She squeezed him, needing all the furry seconds she could get. Oscar was far less predictable than a gun, and she wasn’t afraid of him.

There were probably guns somewhere else in the cabin, probably much better ones. She didn’t have experience with it herself, but she assumed a bathroom gun was a backup. She wanted to find the rest, in case the motorcycle rider came back. Maybe she could teach herself how to shoot.

She imagined herself out in the woods, shooting Spaghetti-O cans off a log like a character in a Western. Loudly announcing her presence to anyone in hearing range of a gunshot. Oscar nipped her hand and leapt out of her grip.

She walked around the cabin with the bathroom gun in an unsteady hand, peering out the windows. She looked under the bed. She checked the deadbolt again.

Satisfied that she was alone, she splashed water on her face and helped herself to Uncle Rick’s stash of brand new toothbrushes and toothpaste. Brushing her teeth felt good, but the taste of the toothpaste brought back a sense of normalcy that threatened to break her.

“We did so well,” she said to herself in the mirror, sea foam gathering on her chin. “We even made a special kind of soap for our teeth. We made it taste good, even though we spit it out anyway.” She spit.

***

Later, as she boiled water for instant coffee, she lingered over her drawing of the pickup driver. Even though it was a simple pen drawing on lined paper, she had captured his face. It was a distinct face, a face he might have shared with his father or his son. Small, stubbly chin, thin lips covering an underbite. He wore a hat with a team logo, jeans with stains on them. In her drawing, the soldier’s mirrored helmet stared him down, the flash barely emerging from his gun. Her drawing was the record of this man’s death. A piece of the story of the end of the world, right here in her hands.

She grabbed the pen and illustrated the next scene. It was painful, but she felt she needed to record what happened to him. The heap on the ground that was his body, the way they zipped it into a black bag and tossed it into his truck bed. She realized there was no one else who knew this story. No witness, no investigative journalist would come forward and avenge him. She had to tell it.

She had to tell it all.

She didn’t know if her survival adventure would last hours or days, but she knew she needed better paper. She ransacked the cabin, coming up with a few interesting finds: manila envelopes, cardboard boxes (harvested by dumping out supplies in huge heaps on the floor), a bag of charcoal. She found some more pens and a sharpie.

Through the windows, she saw the peeling bark of white birch trees in the sunlight. An ancient source of paper, dignified and austere. She put her shoes on and went out, pausing just outside the door. The morning light and the dew in the trees made the forest seem safe, even tranquil. She went to the birch stand and quickly rolled off sheets of the bark, just as she had instructed her fifth graders to do the year before. The morning was cool and bright, and the smell of soil and toothpaste invigorated her. She took a deep breath, feeling confident in her path.

But when she turned to face the front door, her arms loaded with sheets of bark, Claire’s legs turned liquid. Across the entire door, bleeding onto the frame, someone had sloppily spray painted a red X in a circle. Lurid red drips streamed down from the shape.

She looked around, terrified, feeling so stupid for going outside. Her body started to shake. The red X made her feel like she was already dead. It shouted at her. You are no one. You don’t exist.

She ran inside, fumbling at the keypad for a heart-stopping second, and dropped the bark on the floor. She doubled over in a sob. The X was a code she didn’t understand. Marking her for someone to return? Was it the soldiers? Doubt, terror, and bewilderment threatened to topple everything. There were so many more things she didn’t know than she did.

What started as sobbing grew into a growl, then a primal, animal scream. She screamed until her throat felt like it would bleed. Oscar darted away and hid under the bed, but she couldn’t nurture him now. She beat her fists on the floor and rage poured out of her until she choked. She had survived. She wouldn’t be marked out with an X. She needed the world to know she was here.

Picking up the gun in both hands, like a character in a cop show, she stormed outside and pulled the trigger. Tree bark exploded in the distance. The sound of the gun was loud and clean. Baptism by fire.

Claire was done with things she didn’t understand. Soldiers and barricades, motorcycle bandits and all the wars and decisions and failures that had caused the end of the world. Let them hear her.

She couldn’t think anymore— what was next, who would come— She had to do something, and she was really good at one thing.

She started to gather her materials, pausing for only a minute to hold Oscar’s mouth shut, finally forcing him to swallow his pill. Tough love, Oscar. No spitting it out today. He looked at her, compliant and a little fearful, the whites of his eyes showing. It reminded her of how her sons looked when she lost her patience. Mom’s mad.

She took a steadying breath, surrounded by a circle of supplies.

She finally knew what she was doing. As a graduate student, Claire had been captivated by cave paintings. The brawny, stampeding bulls of Lascaux, the dancing figures of Tassili, the ghostly hands of Cueva de las Manos, reaching through the eons. Without mass communications, without the internet, without canvas or even oil paint, ancient humans had recorded the story of themselves. Their paintings were profound depictions of life on earth— humans and animals, ceremonies and fire and weather— that we could still recognize, tens of thousands of years later.

Claire had somehow found herself at the end of the world. She could not undo it. She could not fight it. She couldn’t save her family, or even herself. But she could tell the story, isolated and confused and trying to make sense of the world, like the cave painters she loved.

She filled the birch bark, she covered the cardboard, and over hours and days she drew on the walls, the floors, the bed sheets. She barely slept, drawing everything she had seen, in a race against the red X and whatever it symbolized. A race against her own body. She drew faithfully every dot and detail she could drag out of her traumatized brain.

Tapping into all her art history knowledge, she discovered new ways to make paint: instant coffee and powdered eggs to make tempera, burnt charcoal for shading. She mixed ash and soot with oil to make her own inks. Uncle Rick had built a survivor’s cabin, but Claire had turned it into a time capsule, a museum of the end of the world.

The days flipped by in a blur, fueled by Spaghetti-os, instant coffee, and long nights of sleep next to the gun— a gun she could use— felt a sense of purpose overtake her. She was here for a reason.

The end of the world was not the whole story, of course. Heart aching, she drew her babies before they had phones in their hands. She drew Oscar, his extravagant fur and long whiskers. She dipped his paws in ink and let him walk around the cabin. She drew her husband sleeping, stubble on his jaw. She drew a sunset. Probably whoever found this place would still know about sunsets, but she drew one anyway.

As she neared the midpoint of her 30-day countdown, she loaded up her car with supplies— toothpaste and canned food and bottles of water, the bathroom gun and her new art supplies. She was determined to find a pharmacy, even if it was burned out. She wanted to at least try to live another few weeks, another month. Maybe she could draw on walls wherever she went, a traveling artist at the end of the world. A documentarian.

Before she left, she used a kitchen knife to carve her name, the date, and her phone number into the floor, just in case.

Finally, Claire covered both hands in ink and pressed them on the walls, hoping beyond hope that one would last. Undeniable proof that she had existed.

Proof that Claire White had been there, at the end of the world.

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