April 10

As soon as you heard, you knew for the rest of your life you’d be telling people where you were when you got the news. I was at my workplace. Groans and murmurs. Everyone lingered watching the event on TV and news sites until we were given the day off. I whisked my children out of school, feeling guilty that I’d never built a secret shelter with canned foods and a chemical toilet.

After the family meeting, we drew the blinds and built a practice shelter out of cushions. We passed the flash light around, shining it up in our faces. I made a speech about how we were survivors now and had to be strong. I sought the fine line between gravity and hope. Certainly my daughter nuzzled my triceps until she shook hardly at all. My son asked a question about what to do in case of cannibals, which upset Vennika and her mother. I shouted at him, he cried, but “deep down” I thought it was a very cute little question. Cannibals, yes, well…. We all slept in the practice shelter, dreaming of the world we’d taken for granted, now lost forever.

April 11

The president has accepted full responsibility. He tells us to obey the disaster response teams. I didn’t vote for the president but I will assist his teams, the circumstances being what they are. People stay in their houses, awaiting help.

Word got around the neighborhood that Old Man Huntingdon had barricaded himself and his wife inside their shabby little bungalow. They fear looters, rapists, the indignities of anarchy. I called to reassure him that of all the householders on our block, a pensioner with a houseful of junk and a shriveled wife had the least to worry about, even from cannibals. My wife tittered at that one.

To protect my family, I sit bolt upright out on the porch, jut-jawed, leaning sideways whenever strangers pass, as if towards the grip of a modified shotgun. I repeat to myself, Now a man can keep only what he has strength enough to protect. I like that: “a man.” It’s from one of those post-apocalyptic movies, nomads in gas-masks, the scraping wind of bastard particles, the crisp crackle of the home-made Geiger counter. Expending a bullet on a man for a quart of motor oil, or for looking at your daughter. The shot echoes to the horizon.

April 13

When the crisis began, we all waited for the president to impose curfew and martial law. I exercised my right not to vote in the last election, none of the candidates representing my views, but I would have gone along with such orders. No time for civil disobedience, the case being what it is. I may differ with the president, but he presents the masses with the right image of calm and unity at this trying time.

Instead of curfew and bread lines, life goes on—but not as before. I see it in the faces of drivers at rush hour: haggard, resigned, their nostalgia gone bitter. Of course the price of oil and other basic commodities has gone up, just as stocks and investments have sunk. Most of us have had our portfolios hit hard. No general agreement just how we got here, who to blame, how the delicate shock-absorbing mechanisms failed, but the net effect is a self-reinforcing crisis of confidence. Confidence is low because confidence is low. Universities are granting degrees in economic psychology.

That commentator on TV said that we are like crabs trying to climb out of a plastic pail, pulling each other back in. Or like astronauts with enough supplies to stay but without enough fuel to break the inertia and blast off of the asteroid and zoom back to Earth. Or something about a prisoner’s dilemma that I didn’t quite grasp. You think you know the prisoner’s dilemma and then someone will go and say something like that. If there were more books of useful knowledge out there, not just potboilers and vanity projects, I would start reading again. It’s possible that the commentator understands the crisis better than I do, that if I keep thinking about his prisoner’s dilemma, my understanding will come closer to his, without ever quite reaching it. This is the price you pay for believing that someone else is right. But I would like to be ready with the right analogy—crab, astronaut or prisoner—when my kids are older and ask me what happened. About the prelapsarian times. It’s also possible that the commentator is a pompous fucking charlatan.

April 18

Back at work now. Spared in the round of layoffs. We who remained stopped complaining about our jobs, having kept them. The manager made a joke about how PowerPoint sucks. Chuckles. He gave a flip chart presentation about the tough times and our new core values:

Innovating from inside the box

Communication with value added

Chinese common sense (the barrel floats on the river)

VTP: Visualize The Pilgrimage

This speech was useful for those with low morale. I would have managed things differently, but then the important thing here was to throw a bone, a safety line, a personal flotation device, to those without inner resources.

April 25

Day 15 of the crisis and I can’t see how any of this will end. Everyone tense, desperate. The president has manifested on all frequencies to tell us what is being done. He is a young, dynamic president, a president to pin our hopes on, but he looks older now. The ears, the nose—you can see what he will look like as an old man. Since economic stimulus is no longer reliable, the president tells us, I am declaring The War on Taxes. Income and sales taxes will be phased out, the IRS wound up, branches of government shut down. A freer federalism. The United States: fifty plans, not just one plan. Identify the successful plans, recalibrate, emulate. A new era of self-reliance. The founding fathers. Alexis de Tocqueville. A hardworking family I spoke with in Saint Cloud, Minnesota. The savings and the drive to reinvest in the alternative energy sources of a new century up for grabs. For America to lead again, must reinvent American leadership. Last best hope. G’bless.

Since I find representative democracy childish and inevitably dishonest, I have never voted for this president or any other candidate. Nevertheless! The president did a very good job reaching out to the people with his message. His stop-gap policies are understandable, under these less-than-ideal conditions.

I have kept my beliefs secret, refining them and waiting for the day when the nation will be ready. And when that omega point comes, I will seize the new flag and march in the streets. In my unoccupied hours, I have sketched the new flag: Bars sable on a field potent. In the center, ruins crushed by an ultramundane fist, for example.

May 2

Was about to quickie my wife when our son burst in without even a knock. He was obviously upset. We asked him what it was—bullies, a nasty teacher, a harassing anonymous text, was he picked last, did we not buy him the right video games, what? Everything, he sobbed, it’s just everything since…since..... We drew him onto the bed and embraced through the sheets, amoebalike. My wife and I had forgotten how hard it is for kids to understand and adapt to the crisis. The world gets turned upside down and adults know they just have to make the best of it. But children need a reason for everything. They haven’t learned not to question why things change.

I hand-held him back to his large, well-furnished room and read him a story from my mobile device. The story was about a magic bottle and the genie inside who grants wishes. But the genie is an evil genie who hurts the wishers by following wishes to the letter. You wish for money, he buries you in silver. You wish for true love, your hopeless crush becomes your stalker. In the end, the hero, who has lost everything, is too careful to wish out loud. He consults lawyers noted for their pro bono work and has his final wish drawn up in the form of a contract. The hero is just a hero, so he can’t understand the language of the contract. But the lawyers assure him that it says the genie will have to stay in the bottle and never come out for anyone ever again. The genie reads the contract, signs it, and pours himself back into the bottle. The hero plugs the bottle and places it carefully at the back of a high shelf. However, in the next few years most of his wishes come true anyway. One insomniac night in his villa, next to the woman of his dreams, he can’t stand it anymore. He leaps out of bed, snatches the bottle off the shelf and smashes it into a thousand—

My son was sleeping soundly. I touched his cheek and checked my texts and bets and tiptoed out of his room. Arm around a smiling giraffe, my daughter was sleeping. So was my wife. I lay down and waited to doze off. It had been a hard day for us all, but not without certain moments.

Life can never go back to the way it was, I know, but we still have each other. At least the crisis has made us clear up our priorities. Every day I hear about someone I know getting divorced, laid off, disillusioned, beat up, run over, medicated, date-raped, analyzed, surrogated, stricken with cancer, reproportioned—all because of the crisis. To that nauseating popular movement which says there is no crisis, that it was all cabal-constructed to make us docile, obedient and easy to pluck, I say tell that to the victims. I say, you’re a gang of naïve students and job-dodgers. You haven’t worked a day in your lives and you will never contribute. I say, when the new flag comes, first against the wall. Besides, things could hardly have gone on in the old way.

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