THE AGE OF FLOWERS
Ashen wasteland stretched ever on, out beyond the horizon, far past the reach of the eye. The high rises and skyscrapers cut jaggedly off at the third floor, the thirteenth floor, the thirty third floor, the thirteenth floor again, protruding from the rubble laden earth as fractured bone protruding from the wounded flesh. Grey, grey and deeper grey, everything grey and everywhere and always grey. The sun rose and it was grey to shine down on the earth and the earth showed up grey.
Except the flowers.
Somehow the flowers had survived the blast. They came creeping up through the cracks in the hereafter grey of pavement. They snaked through the ashes of their ancestors, creeping through the sticks and the stones that were once bushes and trees to provide the only color left to the desolate earth.
Perhaps it was something from the bomb, a chemical that caused a reaction, or a Darwinian adaptation of the local fauna turned to fast forward, that created the sweetness of the flowers. They melted in the mouth, ran sweet as cola and warm as brandy down the throat. They caused a kind of drunkenness. Not the brutish, slovenly drunkenness mankind had known in the past; rather, a kind of intoxication that filled the head with empty, beautifully empty thoughts. The mind of one who ate the flowers was a cool room with a clean floor, open windows that looked out on a garden and let in a soft breeze that danced about among the curtains and stirred the stillness of the perfect air. Their wakeful dreams dripped with the milk and honey of a promise land that would never be. Not only did the mind drift into a lovely elsewhere, but all wants of the body were satisfied by the flowers. The empty stomach was filled, the parched throat quenched, the straining loins subdued.
I remember the days shortly after the bombing stopped. Both sides had exhausted their supplies of nuclear arms, and there were no generals left to launch them anyway. Only the regular people of day-to-day mediocrity were left to pick at the bits of meat still clinging to the skeleton that was once New York City. New York City be damned, the whole world looked like this. It must have, otherwise someone would have sent help by now. Such a tragedy would not go seven months without aid unless everyone everywhere was equally helpless, equally hopeless, equally homeless.
In the beginning there was a man who had been a monk before the bomb dropped. He was perhaps the only one whose profession did not change with the rest of the world. This monk would climb daily to the highest point left in the city. There was an office building with forty-six stories left standing. The elevator was, of course, non-operational, so the monk would hike the forty-six flights of stairs through the murky darkness that comes just before the sunrise. From this peak and with the rising sun the monk would cup his hands around his mouth and bellow out, though to me it always sounded more of a song than scream, the words of prayer that the world used to kneel and recite every Sunday morning. His voice echoed down the streets and across the waste, searching for heaven’s ear.
“Hail Mary, full of grace
Blessed art thou among women and
Blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus
Holy Mary, mother of God
Pray for us sinners now
At the moment of our death.
Amen.”
To me it was comforting to hear that prayer, to hear it fall down and pelt the ground like rain among the rubble of a demolished world. It reminded me of the time before, maybe. Of a time when I was a child and my grandmother held my hands in hers, showing me how to pray the rosary, her wrinkled hands regaining their strength for as long as they clutched the wooden beads worn smooth by years of atonement for sins I would never know. It was a breath of a living past, that monk’s voice echoing from the tower, though I noticed early that he left out a crucial “and” before “at the moment of our death.” I wonder if he could have just forgotten it.
There were those who heard that prayer every day and, like me, took comfort in it. Then again, there were those who heard nothing but pitiful and loathsome whining to an ancient “virgin” who had birthed none other than the greatest deceiver of all time. To those people the daily prayers came with grinding teeth and sneering lips.
A few of the men below still carried functional guns, though street gun violence had long since vanished. There was nothing to steal, nothing worth killing. Except that prayer. The men in the street with their guns took to shooting at the monk in the tower while he was praying. His voice carried, unwavering, over the crack and ring of rifle fire, coming down to mix with the blunt laughter of his attackers. Nobody shot at him while he was on the ground, but as soon as he took up his place in the tower he was immediately the prime target. Still, there was not a single morning that he could not be seen in that tower, his hands cupped around his mouth, his face angled toward the infinite grey above him, his eyes shut in the final plea of agony and faith.
The morning it happened there was a little more light than usual. I crawled out of the cavern I slept in, a cavern that had once been a corner diner and still had some padded benches I could sleep on, and noticed the grey of the morning was brighter, more cutting. There was the monk on his tower. The first shot rang out before he even started his prayer.
Bang!
“Hail Mary, full of grace.”
Whizz!
“Blessed art thou among”
Crack!
“women. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus.”
Bang!
“Holy Mary”
Crack!
“Mother of God”
Pop!
“Pray for us sinners, now at the moment of our death.”
thump.
“…amen.”
The last shot hit him in the chest, and he bled quickly through the brown fabric of his habit. He teetered for a moment, and the “amen” was accompanied by a spurt of blood and holy water between his teeth. Then he tipped forward and fell, his arms splayed out from his lifeless body. He landed on his back, his ribs pierced by a segment of rebar sticking out of the ground. The man who shot him stepped forward, a hunting rifle slung across his back and one of the vibrant flowers hanging out from his lips. He walked up and knelt beside the body, then rose, took the flower from his lips and tossed the whole thing into his mouth and chewed.
For the most part the people of what was once New York City did nothing. They went out and gathered flowers to heap in piles by their feet while they sat around for the rest of the day. They sat groups, though even in groups they were alone, and took flowers from the piles and chewed them, ground them to pulp and grit, swallowed them petal, bud and stem. I remember the first time I chewed a flower. The peaceful emptiness ebbed at my mind, washing over the everlasting, all consuming, sole existing grey like watercolors over lines of wax. It was peace, alright. It was equality. We were all just as nothing as everyone else; our bodies turning the same ash grey as the city and the streets and the clouds and the sky. I must have been different. They say that the body builds up immunity to certain substances over time. I guess that was me. Eventually the peaceful wash stopped and I felt only more wretched than before I had eaten the flower. Real food was in low supply, though not as low as might be suspected. There were stores of canned food and springs of clear, clean water spouting and splashing out of the broken here and there. The people ate little of the food. The flowers were all they wanted. Food made you want more food, and the canned food made you want real food. The flowers made you want nothing at all, except more flowers after a little while, and flowers were the one thing we had in plenty.
Finally, the people stopped eating anything but flowers. The food was gone and nobody seemed to know or care but myself. Day after day they sat, chewing flower after flower, staring far away into the grey wreckage. Who can say what it was they saw? Who am I to say it wasn’t real? All I know is that I didn’t see it. And that there was no more food. After several days the faces of the people grew gaunt, though their eyes were wet as though seeing the most beautiful things ever imagined. Their bodies shrunk to skeletons, their ribs protruding such that you could count them through the ratty shirts, and still their eyes held the glowing wonder of a man waking up in Eden on the very first day of existence.
I set out on the morning of the sixth day to search for some forgotten store of canned goods. There had to be something somewhere. I walked, picking my way through the piles of people sprawling blissfully across the streets. The rain came in grey, just as everything always came in grey and would always come in grey. The people took no notice. They lifted their faces to the rain and let it run down the sharp edges of their cheekbones, collar bones, ribcage. I walked on.
“Our father, who art in heaven” I whispered, not wanting to incur the malice of any hunters still left awake and of lucid mind, “hallowed be thy name. They kingdom come, they will be done on Earth as it is in heaven.” As it is in heaven? As it was, perhaps. I continued, “Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
I stepped through the doorway of an abandoned grocery store. The shelves were empty, save for a few forgotten fruits. They were a sickly greenish grey with mold, and a variety of flowers sprouted from them.
“Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”
I left to store, back into the ruined street.
“For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, eternal. Amen.”
There was nothing to be seen for a stretch. The structures of this portion of the city had been leveled before the bomb dropped to make way for new high rise apartments. Not even the foundation had been laid. As I walked the loose earth slipped and crumbled beneath my boots.
“Lord” I prayed freely now, still using the formal tongue of those who seemed to know God personally, “Thou hast seen fit to gift me with a heavy mind, a heavy heart. Thou, in thy infinite glory and wisdom, hast seen fit to deprive this wretched sinner’s soul of the relief others are granted by the flowers. Lord, of thy mercy, grant me the backbone to hold up this heavy mind. Lord, of thy goodness, grant me the strength to bear this heart of lead and stone. Lord, of thy wisdom, show me the way to thy bounty, that I might continue to follow in the footsteps of your beloved son Jesus. Lord, give me this day my daily bread. Or, Lord, of thy mercy, give me this day my daily can of peaches. Give me this day my daily package of dog food. This day, heavenly father, my daily anything. Anything, Lord, anything but those wretched flowers, which are food of the enemy. Thou, who giveth and taketh away, pray giveth before thou taketh my breath from my chest.”
There, more beautiful than gold and strings of pearls pouring from a wood chest, in the back of small room that had once been a convenience store, was a pile of canned goods. I summoned my remaining strength and ran to the cans. They were wet to the touch, but I ignored this, blind in my desperation for nourishment. I pulled the knife from my pocket and opened the first can. It was cold pasta. I ate ravenously, tossing the can away over my shoulder. Sitting on my haunches, I must have looked something like a vulture over a fresh kill, my shoulders riding up to my ears as I dug through the pile. I took the bag that had been slung over one shoulder and yanked at the zipper. There wasn’t more than a dozen cans in the pile and they fit into the bag easily enough.
“I don’t have to tell anyone.” I whispered to myself as I walked back, “I could keep them all. Those stupid flower eaters wouldn’t ask any questions. No, that wouldn’t be right. Father, forgive my sinful thought. Heavenly father, I am tired. I thought sinfully in my exhaustion. Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed art thou among women. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, Pray for this sinner, now and at the moment of my death.”
I continued, my sin atoned, back through the gatherings of senseless people. I approached a large group and unzipped my bag, holding out a can for them see. I felt the perspiration of the can running down my palm to collect in a large drop at my wrist. It was a can of pears.
“Look, all of you!” I called out. They stirred a little, blinking at me as though I were far away and long ago. “There is food here!” I said, “Not much, but some. Come on, all of you, take and eat! We will live to see another day.”
One man among them seemed to be the most alert. He got to his feet, shaking as with a great effort, and took the can from my hand. Then he threw it away, surprisingly far for one as weak as he, so that it bounced and clattered down into a bomb crater.
“The food is wretched.” He said, his voice barely above a hoarse whisper, “Look around you. See the people? That is what comes of you and your food.”
I stared at him, bewildered. His tone suggested that he blamed me for the bodies in the street, for the waste made by the bombs, for the grey of the air and the grey of the world and they still deeper grey of his own skin and soul.
“Are you stupid?” I yelled, suddenly angry, “These people are like this from the flowers! You are all dying of starvation because you eat nothing but those damned flowers.”
“Only half of these people have already died. They now grow flowers from their bodies to feed the rest of us. That vile filth” he gestured towards the crater where the pears had landed, “was the food of the old world. The world that created this hell on earth. We eat of it no longer. We eat only of the flowers, and they bring the only peace, the only joy, the only love, and the only happiness still to be found on that barren rock called the Earth. The flowers are the food of the now. That which you carry in your bag, those are cans of death. It is the squalid slop of demise and destruction wrapped in ugly grey tin. Those grey cans contain grey foods that do nothing but perpetuate a grey life that leads to a greyer death. The flowers are the way of now.” He reached down and, to my horror, picked two flowers sprouting from the eye socket of a woman lying dead next to him. He ate one and offered the other to me. I tried to speak, tried to rebuke him, but found I couldn’t. There was only to run.
Back in my dilapidated diner I opened another can. It was slices of apples in syrup. This can too was wet around the rim of the bottom.
“Tomorrow” I said to the dusty grey of the empty room, “I will go retrieve those pears. Then I will stay in here. I don’t want to see those animals ever again. Them and their wretched flowers.”
I began to feel ill after the can of apples. The feeling grew until the whole room swam, fluid and wavering with the nausea that was working its way up my throat. I ran to a corner and vomited. Leaning against the wall and panting, I told myself that it was the disgust with the people outside, the people that ate flowers out of the bodies of their friends, that I was sick. I vomited again, not feeling any better for it. Weakly, I made my way over to my back and looked at the empty apple can.
There were tiny holes in the side of the can, in the sides of all the cans. They were infected with the radiation and disease of the bomb. Unlike the flowers, the canned food did not gain any psychedelic qualities from exposure. Only a deadly toxicity. I had already consumed two full cans. I dug through until I found the can of cherries. I had been going to save it for last. I love cherries. I opened it and took a sip of the syrup and ate a cherry. It was just as wonderful now as the day I first had one, when my grandmother had taken me out for ice cream at the corner parlor. I thought of her now, how she had given me the cherry off her own cone because she had seen how much I liked them. I thought of all she had given me, all she had taught me. I tossed another cherry into my mouth, noticing how bright and beautiful the color was against the drab grey of the everything. I prayed again, my mouth full of cherries, full of memory and full of death.
“Hail Mary, full of grace
Blessed art thou among women and
Blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus
Holy Mary, mother of God
Pray for us sinners now
At the moment of our death.
Amen.”
I vomited again. I thought that the monk in the tower had not forgotten about that last “and”, and neither had I.