The End Has Come

Because of his lofty status, Chinese merchants spared no expense to smuggle him to the Underground, a hidden part of Seattle, for his safety, with everything given to him.

He was treated as a god.

* * *

A month later, Phineas scraped the last of the canned fish into his mouth with his dirty, unclipped fingernails and drank the briny oil. His only question as he sat in the pitch black, overcome by the smell of the twins’ decaying bodies and his own bodily waste was: Will I starve first or go completely mad?

He tossed the empty can into the darkness of the room and heard it clatter among garbage and the shattered lamps, which had since run out of fuel. He crawled to the battery powered light and switched it on. He only used the simple bulb to operate the I-Ching machine, to ask what day it was as he scratched what he thought was the correct date onto the wall with a jewel-encrusted letter opener. He’d twice forgotten to reset the pulley on his mantle clock (and once let it run down on purpose because of the incessant ticking) so now his chronological bearings were off by a few hours, but in the darkness, the isolation, did it really matter? Now as he slept, his dreams seemed like wakefulness and his waking hours, an endless nightmare.

His only hopeful, productive activity was the three minutes each day that he allowed himself to use the battery powered light to operate the machine. In those fleeting, precious moments, the device became a periscope to the city above, a telegraph of questions and answers, his gear-driven silver-handled radio to the outside world.

Throughout the week he’d asked a litany of questions, none of which seemed helpful. Yes, his followers were doing well. And yes, his survival predictions had come true — living underground in the mines had spared them. The most affluent of the rich had survived as well, with tinctures of colloidal silver, but many more were gone. Yes, the survivors were fighting each other in the streets, the Luddites were smashing the machine-works because few science ministers had survived and those who had lived, unfortunately had left their servants to die. Revolution was happening. But his followers had left the heart of the ruined city. That answer had been crushing, pressing in like the walls around him. Somehow he’d been forgotten, or worse, deemed unnecessary. He prayed to all the gods he could remember that his people were battling above, waging a war and when the fighting stopped he’d be rescued, but as each day passed . . .

Phineas heard himself laugh hysterically as his voice boomed off the walls and he realized how much he sounded like Professor Ling. He started crying as he pulled out fistfuls of hair and rocked back and forth as he asked the machine one final rhetorical question for the day, “What do nightingales taste like?”

He saw the word, Cuowu, and turned out the light.

* * *

Three months later, as near as he could tell, Phineas’ greatest regret was not preserving the bodies of the twins. He’d long since run out of food. And if he had misgivings about subsisting on human flesh, those had passed, lost somewhere in the lucid dreams he now had about sucking the raw meat from the last of his precious mockingbirds.

“I wasted the twins. Who knew that lapse in judgment would be my undoing,” he muttered to himself as he picked at scabs along his scalp.

Phineas guessed that he hadn’t eaten in weeks. His battery powered light had run out, so now he lived in perpetual darkness, trying to remember the days, to count them, feeling the numbers he’d scratched on the wall, occasionally waking up and adding another tic mark. But he still had rice wine in abundance and the alcohol soothed as the sugar sustained him. He regularly drank until he lost consciousness, waking up, imbibing more, vomiting, crawling, finding a dry place in the darkness to collapse, repeating the cycle again and again. It was better than sobriety, which made for unpleasant madness.

Though occasionally he’d be clear-headed enough to remember the I-Ching machine. He’d feel his way through the pitch and the filth and find that device, cradling the cold metal box like a long lost child. Sometimes he’d sit for hours, the machine in his lap, as he asked questions and talked to Professor Ling’s cursed invention like a friend, turning the handle, receiving revelation and outright hallucinations. But in blackness that had become his world, he was never able to read the answers.

It was during one of those manic sessions that he thought he’d died, passed through the veiled, onion-skin of reality and slipped into the ether as he saw a flickering glow that grew into a light as bright as the sun. The heavenly orb blinded him as he called out to his rescuers, tears flowing down his greasy, soiled cheeks.