Excerpt: Adam, Will You Care?

Ikeuchi is okay, I tell myself. She won’t care if I stop searching for a bit. She can take care of herself. She can take care of Adam, too. She grew up in this kind of environment, anyway, on some godforsaken Sulfur Island where the volcano constantly spewed ash and gas into the air. Where she grew up, everyone wore gas masks far more inconvenient than these for the sake of survival. Though, if the weakness of my lungs is any indication, those gas masks would have been appropriate for the past couple of years.

I lie back onto the ground, eyes closing to mask out the grey sky. Just for a bit, I pretend that I’m wearing a blindfold, that I cannot open my eyes to see the blessing that is an expanse of azure dotted with lazy, white clouds above me. I pretend that instead of hard Earth, it is cement beneath my back—the foundation of the civilization that I used to know, that I used to worship. I stay like this, and I ponder how long I can keep it up for—this artful, beautiful self-deception.

I lift my hands up, broken nails and skin and all, and wave them around lazily as if swatting at some blessed nuisance, some mosquito. My game of Pretend is broken momentarily—that’s one good thing about this. My son will never have to deal with mosquitoes. My sweet blue-eyed son, wherever he is… he’ll be able to live his childhood playing foolish, innocent games without the fear of mosquitoes biting his skin at dusk. He’ll be able to lie on the ground like this, carefree, not worrying about any insects that may crawl up onto his leg and sink their pincers into his baby flesh. Adam can play without the limitations of a world with insects. This is the time for fun and games.

It suddenly occurs to me that I’m delirious. That I’m rambling. That I’m entertaining myself with a private soliloquy in my mind. I should stop, really. Isn’t this the first step to insanity? No. Insanity would be a reprieve. Insanity would allow me to relinquish the responsibility of this disastrous consequence of humanity.

Since the Cro-Magnons wiped out the Neanderthals, since they established something of a society and henceforth began the Neolithic revolution, humankind has been trying to progress to perfection, to create the an Empire so great that not even the British could have imagined it. An Empire with no uprisings or revolutions, an Empire not of conquered nations, mercantilism, and militaristic might, an Empire not sprung from the barrel of a gun, but an Empire built on the greatness of the human mind, an Empire that achieves the impossible and unimaginable as tributes to human conceit rather than spending its time subjugating nations.

And this is the Empire that humanity has collectively built. I call it the Trash Empire. And I sit at the center of this nothingness filled with sulfur and dirt, the glorious Caesar to it all. I am the descendent of Venus.

I open my eyes and am greeted, not surprisingly, with an expanse of grey instead of blue. I sit up and I think to myself: George, you used to be happy. George, what’s happened to your sunny disposition?

I look up again and squint hard, eyeing the charcoal clouds in the sky, wondering if they’re huge plumes of smoke from oil fires that haven’t yet stopped burning or if they're precursors to acid that will gnaw at the bones of the Earth tonight.

Then I think: George, George. What’s happened to the sun?