I’m not sure what day it is. I did away with calendars, did away with dates, did away with time. I turned off the reminder at the bottom of my computer screen. I must be careful to let my eyes gloss over the timestamps on webpages, since that’s all I look at. I scour webpages all day because it’s my job. The internet had reached its data limit, so old websites had to be deleted to make room for new ones. It might sound easy. Removing the webpage is, but then I have to go and painstakingly delete all mention of it from the internet. I found that part of the job a bit spooky when I signed on, and seemingly unnecessary, but money is money, and it allowed me to work from home.
Sometimes, I poke around a little before deleting the sites. It might be a one-off webpage celebrating a wedding, the bride and groom forcing a smile as they stand awkwardly inside an old-fashioned carriage. Others are deeper and stranger. You might click and click and click through links that never take you anywhere, except to the next link, which leads to another. Maybe some cruel joke on the part of the developer. Hopefully, he got a good laugh out of it because now it’s bye-bye, finito, gone. Oh look, here’s an underground weapons dealing site, the cursor a pixelated graphic of the president with a crosshair dialed on his forehead. Let’s hope that one won’t be missed, but surely another one will spring up in its place.
Despite the apparent frailty of the internet, many people put stock in its permanence. Precious documents of a life fully lived reside only in digital storage that may at any moment disappear or become inaccessible. I suppose that leaves out the odd try-hard who backs everything up to a hard drive.
It started with faces. Facial recognition. They said it was to catch criminals, but their real aim was to remove all traces of human countenances from the internet. It became illegal to look upon the face of another person. Anyone caught doing so, in person or otherwise, were disappeared. There were fleeting rumors on the heavily censored message boards, but where they were disappeared to was never confirmed. All I know is I didn’t want to find out.
It was easier for me. I lived alone. Going out to stores became too risky, so I ordered everything online and had it delivered via drone. Not much changed really, except for the fact that I never left the house. ‘Touching grass’ never had a deeper meaning. It was nice for a while, until loneliness and cabin fever set in. No amount of digital companionship, faceless as it was, could satisfy my desire to feel and be felt by someone, anyone. That’s why I had to ditch dates, any concept of time. I’ve blocked out the windows. I wear a blindfold when I fetch my delivered necessities from the stoop, frozen dinners and toiletries mostly, vitamin D supplements to make up for my lack of sun exposure, so as not to perceive the time of day. It’s all part of my plan to forget the concept of time altogether. Then I can’t know how long it’s been like this, since I’ve been like this, in this compulsory isolation. I never really trusted the idea of time, anyway.
I have a secret stash of photos that I keep in the attic. Using a fine-toothed saw, I cut a short chunk of the windowsill off and hacked away at the brick beneath to create a hiding place for a photo album. I had to part with the others, since I thought multiples would take up too much space and be more conspicuous, but I cherry-picked from all of them to create a single curated lookbook of my family.
Here’s one of me slumped in my stroller at SeaWorld, fast asleep, my father and grandmother waving and smiling, my altruistic mother behind the camera, orcas gallivanting in the background. And look, here’s another, taken on Christmas day. I must have been around nine, since I was cradling a set of plastic Power Rangers armor complete with a little imitation jewel-hilted sword, still pristine in its packaging. I could sit up here and pore over these pictures for hours, and I have. I am now. My last trace of a face.
My little hidden cache escaped detection when the house was raided. All I did was sprinkle a little dust over the slits I’d made in the wood to pass their surprisingly cursory inspection, but they didn’t leave empty-handed. They seized the photo albums I’d left out as a sacrifice, some of my magazines, old catalogs, movies, posters, books (since they had the author’s headshot), anything that showed a human countenance. I never found out what they did with all their seizures. Maybe there are landfills piled high with the last physical traces of all the world’s visages.
My mother and father left this house to me when they passed. That’s the softball way of saying they died. And they did, in slow succession, my mother holding on for much longer. After that, the house was empty, aside from me. I don’t even have a damn houseplant. I’m the only soul here.
Long before my parents died, when I was still a child, a few years older than that little boy slumped over his stroller at Sea World, I stood at my grandmother’s deathbed. She spent her final years in a nursing home, a resident checking on her every few hours, when they weren’t short-staffed. The neat halls and rooms were peopled by slack-jawed elderly, gripping their canes and walkers with their wrinkled, liver-spotted claws, while orderlies in scrubs buzzed around them.
Directly across the hall from my grandmother’s room was a stout old man in suspenders, hunched over his walker, his mouth hanging open so widely I could see the pitch darkness at the back of his throat. His dull, heavy-lidded eyes slowly tracked onto mine, and he began to move toward me at a tortoise-like, movie monster pace. I was afraid of him, afraid that his gaping mouth would swallow me up, and the rest of the world with it. Just as that creeping horror had breached the hallway, the swishing of his slippered feet on the linoleum reaching unbearable, my mother closed the door.
My grandmother was half Cherokee Indian. Her skin was several shades darker than mine, a cousin of copper. Her face was deeply lined, the cheekbones jutting out like horns threatening to break through her leathery flesh. She lay on her hospital-style bed, prevented from falls by metal guard-rails, staring into the middle distance and whispering to herself.
“Hi, Grandma,” I said.
She gasped and clasped my hand. I stared into the deep-set, glinting, beady black of her eyes, as vacuous as the creeping horror’s mouth in the hallway. It seemed to me then that in old age one was consumed by darkness, and that it began to spill out and beckon the living into it.
“This world will end,” she said, looking right at me. “And you will be the last person alive. You will walk out your door and there will be no one.” My mother escorted me out of the room with a worried look on her face, coming perilously close to the yawning void of the old man’s mouth. We waited for my father in the lobby.
“Don’t mind her,” my mother said. “It’s just dementia. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.” The word sounded so exotic to me at the time, so fantastical. ‘Dementia’. Like something from another dimension. I had a vague notion of what it meant to be demented, picturing a lunatic laughing in a straitjacket, but my grandmother seemed calm and lucid when she spoke her grave prophecy.
Believe what you want about what she said, but I think it’s true. Why else would things have gone the way they did? I think maybe she was channeling the ancestors. She was as close to the other side as she ever would be before finally passing over, which she did a few days later, my father delivering the news to me while my mother wiped away tears.
“Grandma’s gone, buddy,” my father said.
Her whispers before she grabbed me must have been her deliberating with the spirits, maybe beseeching them to spare me of my terrible fate. I think often of her face, creased and angular, her smooth straight hair a shock of white beneath a purple bandana. It’s a shame I don’t have a picture of her for my album, but she was superstitious about having her photograph taken.
When they took away our faces, they took away our identity. We were reduced to usernames and handles, some final attempt at self-identification. I loathe the notion as much as the next, but I had to take part, if only to keep my sanity. I needed some semblance of connection. No one can be summed up by a word or two and a few numbers, but that’s what we all became. Mine was maxhargrove95. First name, last name, year of birth. Typical, I know, but I wanted something direct, a clear statement of self. The internet became more of a wasteland than it already was, but I was entrenched in it just like the rest.
I did a bad thing. I made a website on the deep web and posted my family photo album. It’s gotten seven hits so far. Someone just commented a heart emoji, but it could have just been a bot or a trap, an undercover trying to lure me out. Are there others out there like me, slaving away at their computers?
To hell with it, I’m going outside. I stare at myself in the bathroom mirror, taking in my overgrown beard and hair, sunken eyes, and a new depth of pale, a sort of semi-translucent sheen of mega-white. I shut off the light and bid my ghastly reflection goodbye. Is it day, night? I turn the knob of the front door but snatch my hand away. I can’t. It’s too risky, too forbidden. No, I have to know. I burst through the door, squinting and shielding my eyes from the mid-morning sun. It must be autumn, since all the leaves have turned, so I run inside and throw on a pullover. The street is empty and silent. There are no cars lining the sidewalks, where before they crowded the curb, all the houses in my neighborhood being within ten or so feet of each other. Good old urban squalor. But now, there’s no one.
I walk and walk, all the way to the local zoo, passing through my eerily still neighborhood and into the dwarfing heights of downtown. I’m not sure why I choose that as my destination. Maybe it’s a nostalgia trip, a way to relive that SeaWorld photo, at least in spirit. I hoof it through the barren parking lot. The entrance is wide open, the massive sign reading: Hapsburg Zoo & Aquarium. The sign has banners with neon-colored animal print on either side. I let myself in, crossing through the black metal gate. I pay for my ticket at the self-serve kiosk, slipping in a twenty. My change clangs out of the machine, into a little metal bowl, the leftover bills and the ticket jutting out with a little vrrh sound. The zoo is running smoothly, despite there being no people to staff it. I buy a souvenir at the gift shop, a little snow globe with a seal inside, perched proudly on a rock amid a tiny sea, grab a map for good measure, and carry them around in a plastic bag.
I always start in the aquarium. I prefer its hushed, contemplative atmosphere to the bustling foot traffic of the outdoor exhibits. The penguins are jolly and portly from their feasts of mackerel, brought in by self-driving trucks and funneled to their faux den. The manatees stare knowingly at me from their glass enclosure. Even if they aren’t human, it’s nice to see another face.
As I leave the aquarium, I notice an office door hanging open. I peek inside to see a great ring of keys hanging on the wall, a strip of duct tape stuck to the wall above it with the word “master” scrawled in sharpie. I stash it in my plastic bag. I know what I have to do. One by one, I open each of their mini habitats. I let out the herbivores and non-predators first. Buffalo mingled with kangaroos, mingled with elephants and tropical birds. What a sight to behold. They look more natural, stomping and bounding and skittering and flapping their way out of that place than they ever did in their man-made prison. I let the apes go free, careful to give them a wide berth. They flee the zoo quickly, climbing their way out, moving more or less as the crow flies. I make sure I have an escape route before I release the big cats. There’s nothing stopping them from stalking me and snatching an easy dinner, but they make their way out of the confines of the zoo, sleek and stealthy, seeking broader pastures, a semblance of what they knew as wild animals. They are wild once again, spreading out on the unpeopled landscape. Unpeopled except for me, of course.
I look out over the empty zoo from a watchtower in the safari area. I promise myself I’ll find a way to liberate the aquatic animals as well, carting them one by one to the ocean if I have to. I could make a pilgrimage to nearby zoos and do the same. Are all the zoos running as that one was? Who are they running for? Is it all for me? I’m the last human on earth.
I, maxhargrove95, preside over the countryside, a man with no legacy, master of my domain.
About the Author
The author is a native of Ohio, with a B.A. in literature. His stories have appeared in The Yard: Crime Blog, Pulp Lit Mag, and The Fear of Monkeys, and are forthcoming in Timada’s Diary, Mystic Mind, Mobius Blvd, and Schlock! webzine.
