Whatever he has to say, it is worth waiting for, because it is Charlie who is saying it.
Charlie was in the desert for a long time. He doesn’t know how long. He does not know how close he came to dying, but he knows it was damn close.
And then at last he made it here. It took him a lot longer than it took me, because there was no Ms. Wells then, no outrider from Vegas making sorties into the State, finding exiles and pointing them in the right direction.
“What is this place? Why is everything indoors?”
Charlie writes.
“Under my ass.”
“What?”
He points to the paper again. “Under my ass.”
I crouch before him to perform the peculiar intimate act of reaching under the fragile structure of his body, leveraging him up slightly with one hand while I feel around with the other under his bony rear end until I find the wiry spirals of a notebook. More paper. Paper everywhere.
The cover of the notebook is blank.
The notebook is only a few pages long. Still squatting, I flip it open and read it.
It is the provisional understanding of the people of Las Vegas that at some (currently) indeterminate time in the past, an enemy (???) of what was then known as “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” (with “enemy” to be [provisionally] defined as EITHER an external adversary OR an internal adversary OR some combination of the two) did inflict (EITHER over time OR “at a strike”) irrevocable damage upon “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA”.
The text in the notebook is hard to read. There are many strikeouts and erasures, with some passages in pen and others in in pencil, and with much of it written in, over, and around earlier text. There are arrows at the ends of lines, directing the reader to skip a paragraph or turn the page over to find the continued thought on the back. Each notebook page is a patchwork of smaller pages, smaller pieces of paper, taped and stapled on.
This (postulated) irrevocable damage done to “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” was realized by taking advantage of the nation’s highly interconnected energy infrastructure, coupled with the (near-??) total reliance of that “grid” (term?) on computerized control mechanisms which were highly vulnerable to interference (“sabotage”). The postulated “enemy” (internal OR external OR combined, as noted above) was thus able to take advantage of
A) “systemic flaws” in this “grid” AND/OR
B) “systemic flaws” in the general population’s ATTITUDE TOWARD authority, i.e. DISTRUST for any statement issued by the “government” (including, FOR EXAMPLE, an announcement relating to an attack on the “grid”) AND/OR
C) “systemic flaws” in the population’s ATTITUDE TOWARD the “media” (term?), such that—
I close the notebook for a second and take a look at Charlie. It’s hard to tell but he might be sleeping. His mighty presence has momentarily departed the room. I try to find my place in the book but it’s hard, among the wandering lines of texts, the arrows and cross-outs and redirects. So I just pick a page, a few pages on from where I was.
—a BLAST RADIUS measuring dozens (hundreds? +++?) of miles in diameter. The effects of this accident (term?) were COMPOUNDED by the inability/ unwillingness of survivors to communicate [i.e., severe distrust toward fellow survivors, refusal to accept or solicit assistance, presumption of “enemy intent”]. Lacking the tools to measure, we can feel uncertain—
Someone had written “we can feel certain,” and someone else, or maybe the some person having second thoughts, had gone back and made the certain into uncertain.
—that despite the intervening passage of [???] years, the environmental hazard that was the result of the explosion(s) still pervades the atmosphere in (some but not all) of “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.”
That’s the last word on that page, “America,” and then it skips down a few lines and someone else in different handwriting has written, in parentheses and in very small letters, (“term?”).
It goes on. I can’t read anymore. I laugh at myself, shaking my head. I sit with the book in my lap, looking out the window of Charlie’s little room. The sky isn’t poisoned with lies, you idiot. It’s poisoned with poison.
“Hey,” says Charlie, working hard to get the word out. “Hey.”
He is holding out his working hand for the notebook, and I hand it to him. He flips back to the first page, takes his pencil and presses down hard, underlining a single word, the fourth word in the paragraph: “provisional.”
The roof of the Mirage is all farmland.
I followed Charlie up here in the elevator, and now I lope behind him through yet another alternate universe, a landscape of self-sufficiency rolled out high above the street.
The rooftop has been covered in soil, built over with greenhouses and silos. I follow in Charlie’s wake as he maneuvers past patches of unsown field, cornstalks growing in bent rows. He ably navigates the bulk of his chair between piles of mulch and a clatter of unused shovels and rakes. Dark soil is laid out right to the lip of the roof, with roots twisting into it deep, with the bulging, uneven bulbs of pumpkins twisting up out of the dirt.
Charlie writes.
“Mine all mine,” his note says.
He owns the pumpkin patch. He has papers for it. Other pieces of this common garden are owned by other people, all of it pipelined to the bazaar down below. The people of Las Vegas determined, one way or another, to create a civilization, dragging themselves along as they go.
Charlie angles his chair very close to the edge of the building to show me what he wants me to see: a wooden machine that he built, or maybe had built, right up at the lip of the roof. It’s a very simple structure, just a plank of wood balanced on a triangle, like a teeter-totter, suspended in place with a thick elastic band. And there’s a pumpkin placed, delicately, at the near end of the plank. It’s a catapult, and it’s loaded. Waiting to fire.
We regard this primitive invention for a moment in silence. I feel the heat of the day finally starting to dissipate as it gets closer to nighttime.
Charlie writes one of his notes, and I bend over him to read it:
“What happens?”
“What do you mean?”
But he doesn’t write anymore. He holds up the same paper again. “What happens?”
Meaning, I gather at last, dense Laszlo, what happens when you fire it? When you let loose the pumpkin? What happens?
“It’ll—it’ll go down. Fly over the side.” He waits. I look at his rickety machine, and then back at Charlie, still holding his paper, the scrap of interlocution, patient, insistent. “It’ll fly down and then smash on the ground below.”
I peek over the edge of the hotel, shade my eyes. I think I can see, just barely, the parking lot, littered with the smashed carcasses of pumpkins.
I step up to the machine. I haven’t seen him do it before, and I would have said it was impossible, but Charlie arches his eyebrows: mischievous. Daring.
So I fire the pumpkin. Release the band, step back, and watch the pumpkin fly off the board and disappear over the edge. Together we watch it go: hurtling down and down, arcing outward, tracing a long wobbling parabola until it makes its satisfying smack, loud on the pavement, and bursts into its gore atop and around the existing pile.
I look at Charlie. I’m grinning, weirdly exuberant. He’s already writing.