The End - Visions of Apocalypse

Irwin never trusted the ebook. Such trust was dangerous and all too easy; a gift left before the city gates by an army that had miraculously vanished. He refused to roll that giant horse inside, even though one e-reader possessed the capacity to return his living room, complete with chair. Using cloud technology would have made his storage infinite—but also infinitely precarious, as the Library of Congress had recently found out, when a decade after making the switch to digital, the lights went out and 32 million books disappeared. Besides, a Kindle, or a Nook wouldn’t have been able to solve all Irwin’s problems. A good third of his collection was no longer in print, much less digitized. And while the sleek trekkian device might have doubled his living space, it would have come at an emotional cost. Each book was a personal friend, and Irwin knew what it felt like to be abandoned, to be given away by someone who was supposed to love him forever. He could never do such a thing—not even to a used book, a torn shirt, or an empty pen. He had trouble throwing away used tissues.

Maybe that’s why he had suffered, why his mother gave him up. So that he could save the world’s knowledge-base as a modern dark age monk. It was Joseph Campbell’s classic hero’s journey. For from that pain grew his collection—what his step-brother Jimmy called The Obsession. Jimmy used to threaten to contact that reality television show that helped hoarders “fix their lives.” Old Jimmy said it was for Irwin’s own good, that living in a rat’s nest of rotting paper was a sickness, in addition to a fire hazard.

Jimmy was full of shit.

Jimmy just wanted the house that Irwin inherited. It irked him that Irwin got the house when he wasn’t a real son. But if Jimmy had acted like a real son, he wouldn’t have left home after college. He wouldn’t have abandoned Irwin and their mother, taken the bar, and gotten married. Jimmy had been his best friend—his only friend. Now Jimmy was just another lawyer.

Irwin felt cold.

The fire in the pot dwindled. Feed me Seymour!

Irwin remembered seeing the original B-movie version of Little Shop of Horrors starring Jonathan Haze and a very young Jack Nicholson. That was back before it was popular, before it was a musical, and before Jimmy was a prick.

Irwin who had been feeding the fire an envelope at a time looked for more mail, only the pile was gone. Audrey II had eaten everything the US government delivered.

He searched the narrow tracks, worming through the tunnels and fissures, but found nothing. What he needed was some wood. He thought of breaking down his recliner. He even took a step in that direction before he remember it was gone. His mind also suggested his bed frame. It was old and made of pine, but that too had been sacrificed long before the crisis. He had a small table, only it was just a bit of plastic patio furniture. He could have torn off the cabinet doors, but he’d removed them years ago as well, having no space to swing them open anymore. Besides they were plastic like the cabinets themselves.

Was there nothing burnable in the house?

Everything made over the last few decades came in plastic, or aluminum, and Irwin suspected much of the aluminum was actually plastic. Once they learned you could make it from corn, plastic boomed. There might be wood under the carpet, but he didn’t have anything to cut the carpet away, much less break and pry up the floor boards.

Bookshelves!

The idea rushed him with such excitement that he stood up, only to sit down again. He had bookshelves, old ones made from particle board with contact paper veneers, but they were buried like the foundations of a failed dam and lost just as completely as the walls—walls he hadn’t seen in so long he’d forgotten if they were wallpapered or paneled. All the visible books were stacked on top of each other now forming leaning towers.

Did he really have nothing to burn?