BY DR. AGONSON
I couldn’t tell you when the change took place. It wasn’t the transformation of a night but the slow work of days and nights, days following nights and nights following days, of waking up sore and sleeping hungry, of losing friends and forgetting—what was it I forgot?—of living like one of them, soulless, more animal than man; it was all this, the persistent wearing away. I don’t know when it started, how it happened, but yesterday there was a moment, a sudden clarity. Long before this nightmare, I had written something, a journal it was called. I found it again, somehow. I guess who I was thought he’d keep writing. I must have thrown it in the back of my car with everything I thought was worth keeping.
The paper had grown soft and smelled of mold. I didn’t even know what I had found as moved boxes around in my car. I opened it. There was the faint penciling of another’s hand, of my hand. I didn’t recognize it, these words, this writer. I kept thinking, Who, who on earth would have left this in my car? What idiot would write such inane blather?
I didn’t even know me anymore. It was an hour before I realized who I was. I had to stop the car. Who am I? I asked. I flipped the little book to the final entry. It was dated, I think a week or so before this life began. I read the senseless words I had written but forgotten, not understanding them anymore. Who was I?
I had a pen. More useful in the apocalypse than some might think; more a marker than anything. Turning to the next blank page, I wrote the date in the upper corner, at least I wrote the year, the season; I wasn’t sure of months or days anymore. It looked wrong. The dark Sharpie bled through the thinning pages, and the black strokes looked foreign beside those thin, gray lines of pencil across the binding.
Do you think it strange then, that I buried it? I even mourned. I left a little stone above it, and on that stone, I etched my name in deep grooves. Whoever I was, I have forgotten, but I am sorry he’s gone. I’m sorry I couldn’t understand him anymore. So I stood there, in an empty field, my head bare. I stood in silence.
“Goodbye,” I think I finally said, and I got back into my car.
The world ended long ago, and why should I be surprised that I died with it? Men have become savages or animals, but whatever I had written, I have not written. I am like one of those possessed madmen which are no longer human: We who remembered had to learn to forget who they were, but they no longer knew, and I no longer know.
So I am undead.
Tale Told 