Dysthymia

Marty gripped the cold steel heart with final conviction.

Today, one way or another, I’ll know.

He could already feel his body locking up. Inside the cabin, alone and braving an unkind heat, he held a small locket in his hand. The shape of a heart; the thing might as well have contained his soul.

Marty turned the locket over in his hand, running his small fingers against its intricate yet long-marred designs. Locked, forever unopened, by him. Chainless, the little rusty heart was his lifeline.

Seated against the wall, a shiver tapping his thinning back against fraying wood, a glance out the window told the young man that more acid rain was on its way. Grey shimmering clouds, rife with radiation and pregnant with the condensed smog from a previous age, fingered down a half-dozen twisters in the distance. They wafted in his direction. The latest superstorm hovered through town toward his shack.

Marty held up his heart to see it in the overcast light. His shivering stopped. The emptied one-story living room he sat in, long ago abandoned, without a functioning appliance left or any solid insulation, fell away from his perception. The stench from outside was gone. His dwindling foodstuffs here were clouded from his mind. The presence of the pair of skeletons lying on the bed, hand in hand and undisturbed, in the adjacent room, was no longer remembered. The constant, restless feeling that everything was off… that went away too. For a spell.

For the moment, Marty fingered the locket, trying at last to open it. His features scrunched but he exhaled easily.

“I have to… It is someone… I’m holding someone and I have to know...” the young man mumbled to himself, focusing on his quarry with bulging eyes.

As he did so, the dull burning started up his body, stealing sensations. It spawned from his toes and headed for his dome.

Marty ignored it, absorbed. The latest cycle in a chronic, singular tragedy.

The lone man struggled against his locket with twitching eyes and fingers, while the numbness took over his body for a final time.

~

From the ruins of today, no one left can mark the exact moment when it all began. For some, there was no notice at all, one way or another. Many of those who were already living alone bit the dust quick. A quarter of the world population perished faster than a response could be commanded from governments, let alone realized by the loners themselves, remote in space or spirit. In only a month, one-third of humanity died.

For most who lived together, one or more bodies in states of “uninterrupted closeness”, the symptoms were continuously quelled or eradicated entirely. Enough that no harm ever came. No slow burn, no ‘locking up’ of limbs. No pain and no final, miserable death. Most, but not all. As long as people stayed together, close in ‘space and spirit,’ they were safe, for a while.

Such proximities were the key to fighting the disease. Or “phenom” as the United Nations’ authorities ended up calling it, for no biological evidence of a transferable microbe or virus or anything else of material scientific understanding could be gathered from the samples of those afflicted. They never determined how it spread throughout the world in the first place, before anyone had noticed or felt their first foot go numb.

No matter to its underlying cause or physical instrumentality, the global phenom rose to an extinctive threat. The diagnosis was simple:

Those apart from others were soon to experience sensations of soft burning in their bodies, beginning in their lower half and rising all the way to the head. The brain. Not brain-‘dead’, said the doctors, just away. Numb to life. Forever. With the brain away, the bodies wasted in short order. Every case, in the end, was fatal.

Durations of cases ranged. Sometimes it struck in cycles, weeks or months. Pangs of rising and falling symptoms of numbing bodily pain. Sometimes the whole deal was done in one go. Sometimes chronic paralysis came first, death soon to follow.

In effect, those apart from other people are soon to die.

What did “apart” mean? This was just the official language, the greatest perceiving minds of humanity’s attempt at a description of the affliction’s choice of victim.

Apart meant away from people. Not near them. But also less known to others. Living alone. Or living not alone, but in pain. To catch this phenom, this curse, apart meant alone metaphysically as well as physically.

By the time the military was making proclamations under martial law about “apartness” and “needing to band together” to end this mad sprawl of death, it was too late.

It did not take long for the world to fall apart.

Survivor communities’ hypotheses for this neo-plague, and its sheer effectiveness at decimating humanity to the brink of extinction, vary wildly.

A contributing, perhaps dominating, factor to the survival rate of humanity under the pressure of this novel, accursed, singularizing affliction was likely the recent facts of everyday existence at the dawn of the twenty-second century being constantly intervened upon by inhospitable heat and life-destroying floods and daily storms and clouds of grey rain that burned and killed on their own, fast or slow. Tsunamis crushing cities while millions of others starved from a lack of water locked away many of the global population’s vision of a possible future continuity for their children, or themselves.

A pervading hopelessness had captured the world’s mass.

The vast amount of freshly cognizant adolescent children with loving parents taking their first Crisis Classes in mid-school and never waking up again at some point during Month One seemed to attest to this kind of hypothesis’ dire conclusion.

~

Marty grit his teeth as he put all the weak strength of his fingers on the locket’s metal flap. It did not budge. His fingernails bent and cracked against the tiny lid’s edge. The scratchy un-feeling of his feet rose up his legs.

Marty, rejected at every wall and gate and commune he could get into shouting distance of, was past sanity. He was a sufferer but no ‘carrier.’ Nevertheless, fears of his aloneness, of his feeble frame seen at distance hobbling over the cracked, weed-sprouting concrete, marked him for rejection. Loners, so rare already, were at best, bad luck. At worst, ‘infected.’ He tried to explain his time among others; they always asked where they were now. Lying, he tried to tell the local gatekeepers and scouts and wallwatchers of the only metro area he’d ever lived in Before Time, about how he had proof that the thing wasn’t contagious. Every time, they turned him away cold and hard, with weapons raised.

Deserted as a pariah in a fallen world, for a long time, Marty could not understand how he was still alive. Lucky for him in the northern elevation of his birth, stored and as-of-yet unscavenged non-perishable food wasn’t too hard to find. He kept his body alive with food and drink even as the cycles of the phenom’s symptoms flowed through him month after month.

He’d lived for two years now - for all intents and purposes - alone. Certainly ‘apart’ for vast stretches. The blinks of time he’d spent traveling with others seemed like distant memories. They’d gone, or gone, so long ago. What kept him going had been a mystery until quite recently, the revelation falling upon him in another fitful night of silent ego death...

Marty huddled over the locket as he bashed his broken shoe against it, yelping with every strike. He’d never tried so ardently to open it until now. The difficulty was maddening.

A face. Just a face. That’s all I need.

He’d broken every mirror in the house. The sight of his own body or face sent him into especially heinous cycles of pain and immobilization. Each of those paralyses neared consummation, to the point that young Marty had fully, spiritually, embraced his death ten times over by now during such episodes.

Always he came back. Always the locket was the thing in his hand.

The heart. His heart. A small steel sigil that wouldn’t open. He had no memory of where he’d found it. In one house or another. Maybe it was given to him by a previous companion. He could not remember their faces. Every day passed into abyss for him. Another symptom of the condition he’d never heard wind of. Memory going. Marty wondered if he was one of the eldest sufferers there’d been in the world. He wondered about that a lot and what it might mean.

Marty screamed into the heart, unopened with new bloody scratches across its outer face. His midsection fell numb. The draping quiet outside, apart from his animalistic yells and a wicked bird’s song, spurred him into further animosity.

A beautiful lady. A portrait of a grandfather. A mother and her child embracing with twin smiles. Something… Anything...

This was his lifeline. His heart. Or had been. The locket, its contents unknown as of yet, had been the thing keeping him alive. A connection, an abstract hope. A physical device, something he could touch, that carried complex meaning to him alone. Maybe not a future, but a constant crux for him to struggle through the wastes alongside, always warming up in the palm of his hand.

To Marty’s anxious bleeding heart for long needing only such possibilities, it now neared a shaking and burning breaking point of one kind or another, and he had to know.

He was compelled to open the locket and see what the heart contained.

That sight, or else the phenom, the curse, the wretched collective failing of Man’s spirit would finish its awful work upon him and he would die. Finally, the cycles would end and he’d be done with it. Another ghost among so many.

A part of Marty wanted that.

A bigger part of him desperately wanted the locket open. Even if he perished in the process.

Whatever was inside would give him reason to live or die.

Marty was weeping now. The locket wouldn’t open. Thoughts of tools somewhere in the house, or a last-ditch scavenge for a hammer or vise or some other thing he wouldn’t know where to look for or how to use, did not arrive. Marty was dying and neared collapse.

Violently slamming himself to the center of the dusty floor, “FINE!” was the word Marty screamed as he cast the last of his energy into a throw.

Out of his freezing right hand, the locket flew against the brick of the fireplace across the room. It fell to the ground and clicked open.

Marty crawled to it, gasping but eager, only one arm working to lurch his failing body across the rippling wood. The earth tremored from a far microquake that Marty couldn’t notice.

The metal cover of the heart, a fresh gash across its center, lay open. Inside was a photo. The glass pane was cracked but the image was clear enough.

Marty nearly choked on his next breath. What followed it was a nerve-shattering hysteria, a convulsing cackle that resounded through the house and out of its broken windows. Some crows flew from their perch at the gutter. He sprawled onto his back, laughing madly, sincerely, harder than he could ever remember doing in his whole life. Sensation returned to his body, to life and limb together in dizzying shudders. A rejuvenating dance flowed through his form, one that Marty could hardly take stock of there in that moment. Continuously, seemingly without end, vigorous tears flowed down his cheeks as he flailed all four limbs through the humid air like a child in a fit.

To the tune of joy and comedy and derealization, Marty howled.

Inside the locket was a photograph of a roaring kitten, pitch-black fur bristling around wide blue eyes, the sight of which had warmed the boy’s heart to no end. ~