deeplyshallow // the last omelette

the last omelette

A.: Did you just put salsa on your potatoes?

B.: Yeah.

A.: God, you’re so emo.

B.: Shut up.

I won’t pretend to understand this snippet of conversation I overheard this morning as I ate breakfast and read my book. It came from a booth in the corner that was full of giggling college girls who I had mistaken for twelve-year-olds. (Is it just me, or didn’t once upon a time, when you were a kid yourself, college kids seemed growed-up? I seem to remember it that way. Working in and living near a college town, you see lots of college kids, and let me tell you: they are all too young to drive, drink, swear or anything else. They are all sixth-graders. I swear.)

Yesterday I finished reading a book about Bill Clinton’s presidency, and before I move on to the next serious book in my To Read stack, I figured I needed something to clear my palate. The last six or seven books I’ve read have all been heavily political, scientific, theological, et cetera; a guy needs a chuckle now and then, you know. So last night Felicia and I bumped around the bookstore, looking for something sufficiently lightweight. I settled on The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. I started it over breakfast. It is decidedly not lightweight. It is bold and dark and menacing. In other words, perfect breakfast reading.

The book, which I have only just begun, seems to be about a father and son making their way through an apocalyptic, burned country, with scorched old gas stations, blackened countryside, rain and ice gone gray with ash. They have not yet encountered anybody, but I suspect they will; novels like this, you have to run into someone who wants something you’ve got, or wants to give you something worse.

Books like this — Alas, Babylon or On the Beach or Earth Abides or whatever — all end up reminding me of The Stand (it should be the other way around; Stephen King owes tremendous debts to those earlier novels), which gets me thinking about King’s habit of throwing loners and stragglers together to create a small unit of people struggling against something — monsters or disease or insanity or what-not — which got me looking around the little restaurant this morning, studying the people there who would, if suddenly the outside world became poisonous, make up my own little band of survivors. I took inventory while I read my book:

The waitress. No-nonsense jogger-type. You’d expect her to be the brave heroine, but I suspect she’d crumble when the first flaming pterodactyl came crashing through the plate-glass windows. Can’t handle a by-the-numbers eco-nutjob rastafarian customer at the bar, ain’t no way you’re going to be able to stand your ground when a scaly spider with dragon wings and the blood of babies on its fangs is smacking its lips and lumbering towards you. I’m just saying.

The old man and his wife. Old woman will be the first to go. Old man will lose it and become a powerful second-in-command, getting shit done when the hero chokes under pressure. He’ll end up sacrificing himself for the hero, or probably die because he trips on a chair leg and falls down and breaks his hip. All grunting, “Leave… me…” and then you leave him and behind you are his screams as he’s gobbled up by some thing. All those years at the paper mill, and for what?

The three giggling college girls. One of them, improbably, will end up being the last person standing, shell-shocked and grimy, and will walk off into the nuclear sunset, stepping over the torn bodies of her fallen sleepover girlfriends. Fast-forward fifteen years and she’ll be Ripley, leading a rag-tag bunch of civilians in a battle against the alien menace, flamethrower in hand, but for now she’s just a little girl on the prairie whose entire family just got scalped. Maybe she can have a dog for a sidekick, or an imaginary My Pretty Pony to help her navigate her destroyed psyche.

The rail-thin Bible boys. One’s the shepherd, one’s the lamb. They are sitting at the table over their toast and eggs. The shepherd says, “So how are things between you and the Lord lately?” and the lamb says, “Oh, you know. I feel like I am saved but then I will accidentally cuss and I think, if I died right now, I would go to hell!” Then the lamb drops his toast, jam-side down, on his lap and says, “Aw, shit.” And right then something explodes through the glass and off goes his head and the shepherd guy cries at the irony of it all.

The cook. Lives long enough to make you think he’s going to be the hero, then panics and hides in his oven but forgets to turn it off. Screams, can’t get out, comic relief, et cetera. At least the survivors will have something to eat if it comes to that.

The real question now is how I, the hero, will meet my demise. It’s got to happen. It’ll happen in a way that saves as many other lives as possible, but that seems unlikely, since everybody but the twelve-year-old and her puppy are dead. Maybe — oh, the wonderful irony — I could save everyone before they die, and then I die, and as soon as the light has left my eyes, everyone else dies, wham-bam-boom, thus canceling out all that was ever good and pure in this universe and replacing it with yummy, delicious evil.

Instead, I read my book at the breakfast counter, and when I was done, I paid my bill and drove to work and saved the world in ways with much less to do with pterodactyls and well-baked diner cooks and far more to do with making sure that button looks clickable and that nobody designs anything, anywhere, with tabs in it.