Dharma Days

A short story from a while ago, posted at the request of a dear friend. I have changed a single comma. Photo credits to the Mochowski Gallery.

My feet swung on the Atlantic coast unwillingly. The cliff edge ran in straight lines on both sides of me, gnawed by unseen, gigantic teeth. Birds lived in slippery alcoves ringed with their own shit. I heard surreptitious cracks as the leaden rain struck the cobbled roof of my hut; the open doorway winked, my morning fire clawing for attention. I hugged the leather closer to my thinning shoulders and trudged away from the edge, as the sky turned. The hot stone floor hissed as rainwater peeked through the ventilation holes in the roof. Blackbug carved hierarchies in my cabbages. My bed was a hammock, twisted from the skin of my pack beast, the day it stopped breathing. An old, smooth metal tablet, hinged but dead and dark, was tucked inside it, my scratchings deep in the firelight. I had forgotten what it was. I sat in the lee of a riverstone that formed my doorstep and watched the rain. The birds stayed inside also; the rain brought sickness, but not death; a tiredness that never washed out, a slowing creep that snuck into the bones and slowed the muscles and lymph. Eventually, the body stopped, not unlike stone, but breathed fitfully until starvation or predators came. The rain was dying, and poisoned everything it wet.

Four days before I thought I had seen a caravan of travellers, pulling through the mud on the ancient trade road under the hills. I had run naked from my bed, clutching a stave and grinning, ready to shout. My voice was still good; I practised singing everyday, old tunes that my mother had taught me after classes. Formless shapes slipped through the trees at the road’s edge, but as I approached I saw that it was only a trio of camels, sad and confused, absent-mindedly grazing on the dry-grass that stuck up between the concrete. That night I had eaten a carrot, and dreamt of thousands of camels, scampering like children across the steppes of Mongolia, the sky bright with dead satellites and the forgotten stars. They occasionally glanced fretfully behind them, into the dark shadows of the mountains. All at once the shadows changed, rose and hardened into a Negro-skinned hand, the size of a city, a country, moving towards the herd as if looking for a desired figure on a sales sheet. The camels moaned in terror, scattered before the fingers with wrinkles as wide as streets or shopping centres. The hand curled, horribly slowly, the bones grating with the sound of tectonic movement, and painfully made the sign of the Buddha. I woke to find dogs, thin and stupid, clawing at the ground around my garden. I hollered and struck my stave against the wall of the hut, and they scattered into the woods. They would find no meat here.

This happened every now and then. A clutch of hope, a band of virtuous survivors, the last society; the old radio I had chirped and squeaked to some relay clinging to orbit with rusting receptors, listening to the globe. Nothing ever stirred. There is only static, and the lowing of bulls. Never humans, just confused animals, dragging themselves along riverbanks and mountain passes. And then the dreams. That great hand. An eye the size of Chicago that pulsed with fire. A set of scales at the mouth of the Thames, melting as my brother groaned and shifted.

The rain stopped, slowing as the sky reared overhead, daring me to emerge. I stared at my hands, hairless and drawn, the skin grey with the salt from the sea and the dead earth. I turned back and crouched by my shrine. A picture of my mother rested beside that of a child I did not know, a young boy in shorts by the beach, and a single plasti-candle that flickered convincingly and painted the wall a deep ochre. It would continue to flicker its electronic flame for another four thousand years. The body of the shrine was a packing crate, the label of its contents long since faded, and the Buddha herself perched precariously, like one of the sea-birds, her face long and calm in the bark of a tree, her eyes so heavily lidded she looked as if she was sleeping. I knelt in one of the seventy-five positions that I had learnt before Baxwell had died, and rocked myself back and forth in time with the wind.

“Buddha Sangha, protect me from myself, and all those who climb the ladder.”

It was simple, but it was for everyone lost to me.

The population had started to decrease around eighty years before, the cities being the worst hit. Scientists and analysts had pointed to a downturn in recreational sex after the AIDS epidemic, as well as the increased awareness towards contraception, as the cause. But this did not explain the huge upturn in miscarriages; everyone knew at least one person who had felt their baby die as it came to term. Also, animal populations were starting to swell exponentionally; bears were now regularly seen slumped against bins in the centres of major cities, looking dazed and hungry, and wild horses returned to areas of the world they had long since departed. Everywhere the wilderness was filled with the call of birds in numbers previously unheard of; the paths man had cut through the woods were crisscrossed with pawprints and hoof-marks, as if an unseen party had taken place. The world population halved, and within a further fifteen years it quartered. People were terrified, looting and rioting in the now-empty cities every few years; no one cared if they took things anymore. My mother had told me that there had been a man, a South American, who gained brief international fame in claiming to provide miraculous birth to any who attended his quasi-religious services. He had disappeared as births dried up, and those few who still gave birth to healthy children went into hiding, scared of roving bands of grief-stricken women who had lost their own sons and daughters, or shadowy kidnappers who would ask for several year’s worth of wages for the safe release of their charges. Most people had by this time moved out to smaller communities in the countryside, fending for themselves against the tide of vultures, toads, spiders, cows, and every other beast who hungered in the world.

I remembered my childhood; I was the youngest in the compound. The next youngest was my brother, James, who was nearly twenty, and I had no friends to play with. The perimeter was set with bear-traps, dynamite, laser-tubes, anything we could find to keep wildlife out. Every few days there would be an incident; a racoon shot while hunting for food, the charred corpse of a sheep that had wandered into one of the defence matrices. We were near what remained of Northhampton; we were lucky that Britain didn’t contain many predators. I often thought of those left in Africa, the eyes of millions of lions and hyaenas, waiting in the dark. We grew crops, tried for children, but none came. Our leader, Baxwell, was a Buddhist; it was from him that I received my statue, on my fifteenth birthday. He often held little meetings in his bio-tent; not sermons, as such; nothing as grand as that. His long hair was tied back in grey strands, bald on top; he always wore an open shirt, his haired chest like a wall as he crouched in a camp chair. He was smart, smarter than a lot of us, and serious. He thought he knew what had caused the world to “turn funny”, as he said.

“There’s this balance, people. A balance that the universe tries to keep level. Everything we do, everything any living thing does, tips this balance in crazy directions, and the universe has to make up for it.”

“What do you mean, balance?” Herschel, a German with a bad leg, often had terse questions about Baxwell’s speeches.

“It’s called karma, Herschel. There’s only a certain number of souls in the universe, essences of living things. They move from body to body, thing to thing, possessing them for a lifetime, and then moving on.” He waved his hand, the bracelets festooning them clattering. “This, this is only a shell. My spirit is gonna live on, after I’m dead. Go somewhere else.”

Herschel cut in again, banging his glass down. “You mean resurrection.” He smiled, nastily, feeling a triumph over Baxwell’s expansive knowledge.

“Some people call it that, yeah. The name isn’t important. What is important is what body you go into. It’s all determined by how you act in life.”

I remember the rain hadn’t let up in days, pounding and deathly, and I gazed through the open tent door to see my mother crouched beneath one of the spotlights, fiddling at it with a screwdriver.

“If you act well in your life, try to be good to people, do the right thing, your karma is good, and you’ll become something good in the next life. A princess, or a bank executive, when there were banks, or something like that. But if you act badly, shout at people, hit things, slaughter and eat animals, you’ll get bad karma, and you’ll slip down, and be born as a cat, or a goat, or a fly. And it don’t stop there. If you keep acting like that, keep being bad, you just keep slipping, down and down, until you ain’t nothing more than an amoeba, or a ringworm.”

Some people shifted uncomfortably on the metal panels of the flooring. They had heard this speech before. They knew what was coming.

“You know, people can be so blind. No one saw it coming. We got stupid. All of us. We kept making wars, burning forests, breeding millions of pigs just so we could slaughter them with great big guns and eat bacon, letting people starve. We put men in space but tortured boys in cellars. We made money by killing horses and melting glaciers. We all took part.”

An old woman perched near the back called out angrily. “I never killed children or chopped down trees! Neither did any of us here! What did we do wrong?”

Baxwell smiled sadly, and scratched at his balls. “No, pet, of course you didn’t. But it all got too big. We all got caught up in it, one way or another. We all helped these things happen. All the politicians we voted for, the hamburgers we ate, we helped. We are all to blame, as far as the universe is concerned.”

I sensed the atmosphere in the tent turning. People were fidgeting, eager to leave, angry to be blamed. The rain kept them sitting. No one wanted to be outside. Baxwell sensed it was safe to continue.

“So we stopped being born. No one was good enough to be born as a human again. Every time someone died, they came to in a forest, or under a log, or sitting in a nest on a cliff. We became birds, and mice, and sheep. That’s why all the animals have spread and multiplied while the human race had died off. We fucked up.”

He smiled again, his hands wide and placating.

“I’m not judging us, mates. We fucked up, plain and simple. The universe took a long, hard look at us, and found us wanting. All that noise we hear in the night, the braying and the cooing, that’s our mothers and sons, Churchill and the Dalai Lama, all of them, calling to us.”

I thought of the sheep caught in the perimeter fence and shivered. My mother was gone, and the searchlight turned once again on its oiled ratchets.

People were leaving, not wanting to hear any more. They knew where this was heading; what, as always, began as a good-natured story became a religious badgering. Baxwell stood, his eyes staunch, his pose set. He called to them as they shouldered their way into the downpour.

“Don’t you see? That’s what I’m saying! We can stop it! We’ve got enough of us here! We need to live well, be good to one another, stop eating meat, pray for others, pray to the Buddha, spin the wheel. They’ll come back to us! If an old man who leads a virtuous life dies, we shall have children. We don’t all need to die! Climb the ladder!”

Herschel was the last to leave, using the space to heave himself up onto his good leg. He spat onto the tiling and leered at Baxwell, his engineer’s uniform crinkled by his hunched gait.

“You’re fucked in the head, Baxwell. Speaking a load of horseshit. No-one wants to hear it. Save it for the old ones.”

With that he turned, pulling his mac to him, and stepped into the wall of water that drowned the camp, and the woods, the endless woods beyond, full of life. I remember looking back at Baxwell as I left for dinner, his head hung as he kicked dried mud from the grating and shifted his furniture back into place. The spotlight outside the bio-tent illuminated patch after patch of solid thicket; it moved along a wall as long as the camp, barely penetrating the thick undergrowth.

A year or so after that last speech of Baxwell’s, we were forced to travel South, to London, for supplies. All the towns and cities of the Midlands had been picked clean in the previous decades by groups like ours, but eight of us had fitted up an old Ford van salvaged from a car pool and took the old roads southwards. Great phalanx of deer passed us, the hooves pounding the mossed concrete in a migration eased by a motorway. We saw boar sneaking between woods like dark ghosts in the August sun. My mother and brother James were with us, the latter hefting an ancient rifle and silent the entire trip, while my mother sat with her tools in the passenger seat while I drove, cackling at her old jokes and cuffing me on the chin, as she always had. Within a day we had reached Essex, and the dead power plants and suburbs stretched away in front of us, rusting and mute. We had only seen one group of people, ragged men and women who were moving west on an overpass, their horses starved and yellow. The whole of North London was black and unknown in the half-light, as if underwater. As far as we could see, there were no others; no children had been born, and people had rotted in their graves with no one to carve their names in stone. But we couldn’t be too careful; Sally from the camp had been taken by a travelling vagrant not a year back and raped at gunpoint. She had waved us off the day before, still quiet but forcing a smile onto her clean, bright face.

We found a deserted hotel, a blast from James’ riot gun pulverising the lock, and settled down for the night. The rooms were clean, and spacious, but they smelt of damp and rot; within a few years this building, and others like it, would collapse along the lines of bright river water that wormed their way into the walls, poisoning the foundations, and killing it, slumping into the street. We had seen older buildings where this had happened; the mortars and cement rested, skeletal and waiting, in cellars buried by the buildings they would have fixed.

The next day we searched the surrounding streets, but found nothing of use; all the canned foods were gone, and only the shadows remained of the fruits and meat, their disintegration so complete that they had disappeared on the air. Any medicine worth taking was gone. We pushed further, weighed down by defeat and the muggy air that found itself hung between the narrow streets of Camden. Holograffiti glowed fitfully from dark alleys, like phosphorus, the enzymes in the null-paint slowly dying like everything else.

We reached Trafalgar Square, great ferrocrete struts from some forgotten art installation laying over it like rigid tissue. Everywhere we looked we saw thousands of pigeons, perhaps tens of thousands; they roosted in the shells of buildings, on roofs, and under the steps that led up to the National Gallery, though they ignored us entirely – their coos and frenzied mating convinced us that we weren’t about to be descended upon. A lone swan drifted lazily in one of the pools. The great lions that guarded the Column had grown a green fuzz, some compound from the air that mated with the bronze, and they seemed made of felt, like a child’s toy. Edgar, one of the older members of the team, said something, and he whistled in appreciation. It was beautiful. The skyscrapers were falling or close to it, and vegetation grew everywhere, never really gone, just ready to poke back through when the men with rakes and shears had disappeared. My mother’s voice cracked in my ears.

“Come on, guys, move! Start searching the buildings! We know what we’re here for!”

We headed off in random directions, my brother still quiet, scanning the tapering streets with his muzzle pointed. I headed towards a ruined portico, a fallen doorway to what may have been a church, or the atrium of some theatre. The space within was oppressively small, choking with marble dust, and I could see nothing of use in the dry hollow of the place. I was about to investigate a faded set of steps marked “Crypt” when I heard my mother scream. It was long and bitter, and I had never heard it before, but I knew it was her. I turned backed into the diminishing brilliance of the sun.

It was a tiger, or perhaps a lion, though the distinction was not easy as a layer of dust patterned its hide a dull beige. It was definitely a big cat, but bigger than any I had ever seen in old videos; it looked more like a horse, with huge serrated teeth. The team was nowhere to be seen, and the pigeons had retreated up into the air-conditioning units of severed tenements, watching the beast eat below.

My brother was trapped under one paw the size of a pillow, the claws pinioning him like a caught dove. His face was gone, gnawed off, and the beast sheared strips of meat from him with one tooth, almost lazily. It was in no hurry. My mother was being held back by Edgar, crouched behind a bench a few yards off. My brother’s riot gun lay not two feet from him, his hand gripping and ungripping in spasms. He was still alive. I coughed and vomit dribbled onto my trouser leg. Edgar turned at the sound and saw me, his eyes huge and wet. His grip must have loosened, as my mother tore from him and half sprinted, half-fell into the animal’s feast. It raised its head, dripping with my brother’s features, and snapped at her. She had one hand on the riot gun before her arm was hewn off at the shoulder. She made no noise except a short, rude grunt and tumbled to the side, still and broken. Edgar had run, where I did not see. The square was empty and the cat, in its irritation at my mother, noticed me and roared deep in its throat, booming like a torpedo strike. There was no other sound, the pigeons keeping silent lest the cat should turn its attention to them.

I ran, as you would. As any creature presented with his own death would do his best to avoid it. But it was never going to chase me. It had two fresh kills laid out before it; there was no sense in chasing a third. I bowled down sunken roads and nests of rats before I stopped, crying and voiding my bowels, in an old kebab shop. I spent the whole night wrapped in a curtain, the faintest chink of moonlit street allowed access, and it never came. I never heard it, just the bark of urban owls, and the shriek of rabbits, lost and pinned by the neck.

The coming months were boring. It was the only way to describe them. I seldom thought of my mother, or brother, or even my peaceful, dead father, crushed by a falling pylon. I walked. Through towns, woods, along motorways. The further I got from London the worse the roads became; whole sections of the A3 had disappeared under thin, languid sand, like a tourist attraction in Egypt, the way lost, scorpions and ferrets burrowing into the sewers. I found food where I could, ignoring the sheep and pheasants that wandered past, occassionally, aimless. I dug up wild potatoes, lumpy and small. An old vineyard had taken root and the vines sprouted over several hectares, the trunks four meters tall. I spent several days walking in the dappled, rich soil, eating grapes and sleeping in a wheelbarrow that was starting to brown with rust. I reached Birmingham, thought about turning north, and decided against it. I could see no point. The little Buddha Baxwell gave me was still in my pack, along with a picture of my mother. The picture of the little boy I found in a house in Bromsgrove. I liked the colours, and pocketed it, along with three mildewing sets of male boxers. The cities of England gave way to the mountains and castles of Wales, the rain constant, the roads steep, and the way curved.

The clouds were starting to disperse, limping venomously out into the sea to pester Canada or Greenland. I hoped for sun. It was best to be hopeful, as the heat of the sun meant that I would burn less wood. It was hard to find dead branches and twigs; the trees seemed to bud with life, and I found little on the ground. I never hacked anything from a living tree, it wouldn’t be worth it. A little cold is worth suffering for a noble end.

I creaked to my feet, my old legs thin and padded with tough skin from years spent kneeling or cross-legged. The birds were starting to take to the air again, screeching with joy as the ocean started to boil with fish. You couldn’t wade out five meters without nearly stepping on herring as big as your arm, some blue and nervous, others slow and green, grumpy like parrots. The birds blotted out the new sun, momentarily, and were out over the water, following the clouds.

I sat myself in front of my hut, on a grassy hillock I had built up especially, and started to sway. I was chanting what I knew of the Dharma, the Way and the Light, as revealed to me by Baxwell. Since that day in London I had not killed an animal, or chopped down a tree, or shot a bird, or speared a fish. I had prayed to the Gautama twice a day, and spent most of my waking hours in meditation. I had a first-aid box, salvaged from a wrecked lifeboat, packed full of penicillin and gauze, ready to assist any weary traveller that came through these parts. But I never saw any. Only more and more animals, everyday, watching me curiously. I was the last one, in a great big zoo. Of course, out here there were unlikely to be any people; maybe some had survived, maybe there were children. I doubted it.

I suddenly saw that lion, that great cat, again, peering at me as it ate my brother. I had wanted it, for so long, to be an evil soul, one who had killed others as a human, had infected men with malaria as a mosquito, that had trapped mice as a spider in its jungle home. But I knew it would not be. It had been a grandfather, cooking stew for his kids. It had been a bison, birthing young under a lightning sky. It had been a son.

The one thing I had noticed was that everyday, there were more and more bugs. Huge black beetles, bloated, obese flies, and crawling millipedes, they seemed to burst from the earth, less soil than living bodies. They ate my crops, picking holes with finger-like teeth, but I never stepped on them, or flicked them from my knee. At times I fed them, bringing them old lettuce and beetroot. They ate it gladly, and then turned back to my garden, picking it to mulch.

My chant went on. Dharma, praise all life. All life is yours. I am part of life. I am part of the ladder. The ladder is me and my father and my mother and your mother. May we find peace in new forms. May we not be found wanting.
I felt a cough rack me like a bolt of electricity and I doubled in pain. There was blood in my beard, I could smell it. I wouldn’t last much longer, on this knuckle of land, eating leaves and rubbing my sores with rocks.

I smiled for the first time in months. The way it made my face crease and contour was still familiar. I could reassure myself. Somewhere, there was someone like Sally, with a clean face and a nervous smile, who one night would hurt and scream for hours, not too long, and would push out a child, just as the evening fire died, here, on the cliff. I prayed, still, rocking and rocking as the sea misted against my face, that I had done enough.