Category: Carleigh Baker

FICTION: CARLEIGH BAKER

1/20/2020

LAST WOMAN

I’ve been playing a video game. Post-apocalyptic—post-geomagnetic disaster, in fact—which sounds like something that would melt people. The woman in the video game is the last person on Earth, and has to stay alive. And let me tell you, she didn’t win the goddamn lottery on that front. She’s in the far north—Yukon, I think. Miles and miles of forest, snow, wolves, bears. She has limited supplies, but at least there’s no one to fight over them. Silver lining. Also, there’s a deep, deep silence, which seems nice.

“Things are quiet now. But you won’t believe how quickly the world came apart,” she says. She doesn’t say if anyone melted.

In the mornings, I make a half Bodum of tar-coffee and crawl back into bed. I eat in bed. I’m not proud of this. There’s a tiny table in the corner of the cabin, but I don’t like eating there, and I love bed. Some days I write a little. Or read. Most days I just play. I haven’t played a video game in a long time, but this one seems tailor made for me. I like solitude. Writers like solitude. Modern women without husbands or kids are supposed to be all about solitude. I’m a modern woman, who runs toward adventure with open arms. I moved to Galiano Island three months ago to write, and work weekends at the bookstore. That gives me five days a week alone. And by alone I mean alone. My cabin is on an acreage surrounded by deep forest, and although the owners live on the property too, I never see them. The locals are friendly, but it’s that usual island thing. I’m a foreigner. Worse, a mainlander. People are waiting to see if I’ll make it through the winter; then they’ll invest in me. Since I can’t write all the time, and I have no social life, and I really can’t afford to spend every day drunk, a video game feels like the responsible choice. And a video game about survival is even better. Modern women are all about surviving.

The last woman on Earth ate some bad fish last night, so she’s in bed today, too. She had a better sleep than me, a solid six hours, but I seem to be weathering a little bout of insomnia. I bet if I was burning a zillion calories a day staying alive, I’d sleep better, too. She has to stay in bed and take antibiotics, which, since I have the game on easy mode, are plentiful. But if anything happens while she can’t get out, if she runs out of water or tinder or something, she might still bite it. Then you have to start a brand new game. No second chances.

We while the day away together, she with a snowstorm howling outside, me with the patter of rain on my tin roof. Once she’s healed up and the snow stops, she goes fishing. Walks across a frozen lake and cracks a hole in the ice with a hatchet. I wonder how hard that would be to do in real life.

There’s no cell service at my cabin. Not for five kilometres in any direction—a mid-island dead zone. The internet is reasonably good in the early morning, if I sit close to the wall. On those days I can call my parents using Google (the video chat sucks too much bandwidth) but we still get cut off a lot. Every time the connection breaks I feel like throwing my laptop across the room.

But it’s not the laptop’s fault. It’s the only source of any voice other than my own. Although I know it’s terrible sleep hygiene, I fall asleep most nights with it open in my face. I’ve killed the woman in the game a couple of times that way. She died of exposure while I slept. She’s kind of like a pet. A Tamagotchi.

I’m playing the sandbox alpha, because story mode isn’t ready yet. In story mode she’d have goals, places to go, but in sandbox she just runs around and collects stuff. In easy mode, the wildlife doesn’t attack you, but predators still attack prey animals, so the woman sometimes stumbles across carcasses she can strip. Of course, they freeze if they’ve been out there too long. She can take the hide and gut, too—lays it out to cure on the floor of her cabin. Bet that smells great. Not like she’s expecting company.

Or at least, that’s what I thought. In one of the new game trailers for story mode, the woman expresses her faith that someone is out there. It’s vague, but seems likely that this person is her husband. She believes he’s still alive. She collects wood outside a forest ranger’s lookout, then climbs the stairs to the top. The view would be spectacular if she could see through the fog. She goes inside and lights a fire, boils some water to purify it, cooks a chunk of deer. I wonder if she knew how to light fires without a lighter before the geomagnetic disaster. It’s harder than it looks. In real life I mean, not in the game. My cabin doesn’t have a wood stove but it does have a space heater. Not a great one. Most of the time, I’m in my long johns. Eating in bed. Good thing I’m not expecting company, either.

There is a guy, Sean. Not in the game, in real life. Not here, Vancouver. He’s in Copenhagen right now, and he was in Paris before that. He’s a photographer. This makes him sound pretty cosmopolitan, which I guess he is, but we don’t sit around talking about opera or whatever. I met him on Tinder; we went on a couple of dates, and then I think maybe he ghosted me but I was too busy moving to Galiano to notice. Anyway, I didn’t take it personally. Who could possibly take Tinder personally? But for some reason, he’s been messaging again. He’s been sending me beautiful photos of bookshops, first along the Seine River, and now from a strange little enclave in East Copenhagen.

They don’t allow cameras here, but I took two anyway, he writes me.

Badass, I write back. I’m afraid if I appear too impressed with his flirting, he’ll stop.

He uses Instagram to message me, which is appropriate for a photographer. Sometimes he sends me first person perspective photos of himself holding a cup of mulled wine in a park somewhere. Sean likes his wine. We drank a lot when we dated, which to be honest, was only a few times. I look at the photos and infer the “wish you were here” subtext.

There are no streetlights on the island, which makes the darkness of winter nights absolute. If you live on the water, you can see the glow of the city, but I’m in the forest. There are no predators on the island, but there are a lot of deer. There is also a constant feeling of being watched. I’m not nuts. When I finally admit this feeling to some of the locals, they nod knowingly, though most say it’s probably the deer or raccoons or whatever. But the feeling makes it uncomfortable to be out at night. One night the car I borrow on the weekends to get to the bookstore breaks down, and I have to walk home. I can’t find a flashlight at the store but I do find a lantern. Normally the locals pick me up if I’m walking, but lord only knows what they make of this hooded figure in black, stumbling, half blinded by lantern light. Nobody stops. When I’m only steps from my cabin, on the darkest part of the trail, there’s a rustling in the bushes, and terror takes me right the hell out of my body, so I watch a buck emerge from the trees from a third person point of view. Relief. Embarrassment. My adrenaline reek probably scares him away.

The game woman is cold and hungry. She’s grumbling a little, but otherwise she never says much. She could build a fire in one of the abandoned train cars, but there’s a dam not too far ahead, and she’s got stocks there. Energy bars and crackers and some fish she cooked this morning. When I can, I’ve been keeping her well fed.

I realize I’m hungry, too. I forgot to get groceries last time I had the car. Last night I ate half a block of plain tofu, which obviously didn’t satisfy. It’s weird to be somewhere where there are zero places to buy food after 10 PM. There’s a can of tomato paste and a can of chickpeas in the cupboard. The other half block of tofu in the fridge. Two tea bags, salt, and some cinnamon. I roast the chick peas and brew some tea. A friend from the city calls on Skype while I’m cooking, but the connection is crap so we message instead. I put on a podcast so I can hear a voice. Toss the chickpeas in salt and eat them until I feel sick.

That night I wake to what feels like my bed being shoved across the floor. A light shines in my bedroom window, and I hear a man’s voice outside. Everything shudders again, with a deep groan I’m not sure if I’m hearing or feeling, and some books fall off my shelf. For one moment I really, really think the world is ending, and oh fuck me, I’m going to be alone for it. Then I realize that the voice outside is Ken’s, the man who owns the cabin.

“Everything okay in there?” he calls.

“Yep!” I say, in a croaky voice I barely recognize, before even knowing what he’s talking about. Maybe things aren’t okay. I wonder how he knows about the problem with my bed. Poltergeist? What should I do? I see the flashlight beam retreating back toward’s Ken’s place, should I go get him?

Social Media has the answer. Hundreds of “OMG, DID YOU FEEL THAT EARTHQUAKE?” tweets.

My phone buzzes. You feel that? Sean messages.

Don’t tell me you felt it in Copenhagen?

Got back yesterday. Jetlagged, he replies, with a picture of his dog, Henry, sprawled out on the couch. I packed a bag in case we had to get out. Water, dog food, whiskey.

HA. I assume he’s joking, but he sends me a photo of the packed bag. That’s some good whiskey.

Be prepared, he writes. I try to imagine him as a boy scout.

We message until the light filters through the curtains. I guess he didn’t want to be alone, either.

Sean has blonde hair and pale blue eyes that point in different directions sometimes. In an embarrassing moment of vulnerability I told him they were beautiful, and I meant it, but I could tell he didn’t believe me. Hard to explain to someone that their imperfections are their best assets. His attractiveness, like anyone I’ve been attracted to, lies in his emotional detachment—he was always happy to see me, but only so happy. Also, he talks about weird stuff. The first thing he brought up on our first date, in a hip Gastown bar with a Yeah Yeah Yeahs soundtrack, was the super-deluxe robo-toilets they have in the Tokyo airport. I don’t even remember if he had a segue between “nice to meet you,” and that. After I recovered from the initial concern about what other people might think of the conversation, I realized I loved it. One of his eyes drifted toward the roof, while the other looked at me intently. Then he showed me his photos of a group of Japanese guys who dress up like rockabilly dudes and challenge each other to dance-offs in a park outside Tokyo. Sean loves Japan. I think he was disappointed to learn I haven’t travelled much.

Once, when I was reading him one of my stories on his rooftop deck, overlooking downtown, he snapped a picture of me. That seemed to me like high intimacy. He didn’t show me the photo and I didn’t ask. The sun was setting and we’d had so much gin.

No food again. Not in the game, in real life. It’s an hour long walk to the store. A modern woman would walk to the store. I check Google Maps three times, to see if there’s a faster way to get there, some secret trails through the forest. It’s only about a kilometre away as the crow flies. But I’m not a crow. In the video game, crows circle the bodies of fresh killed deer. Ravens, I guess, since it’s the Yukon. I wonder how the animals made it through the geomagnetic disaster, but then I realize I have no idea what a geomagnetic disaster actually is. Google it.

Turns out it wouldn’t melt anyone, which is a shame. But it would knock out all the electricity, which would totally kill most people these days. A very un-sciencey website called Business Insider claims that in 2012, a huge solar storm sent out an energy wave that almost hit Earth. If we'd been in the storm’s path, we would have been hit by a solar flare, (amazing!) and then a coronal mass ejection, (who can we thank for this catastrophe nomenclature!) Billions of tons of hot, electrically charged atoms of hydrogen and helium would have been our conquerors. It sounds terrifying, but I guess besides a really bright light, people on Earth wouldn’t actually see it happening. That might make it even scarier.

I wonder how the woman in the game survived. Maybe she was one of those people who don’t have a smart phone. Those people still exist, though there are fewer and fewer of them. What if she is the only person left because she didn’t have a smart phone?

I decide to walk to the store. It takes a lot of preparation. There’s clothing considerations—it’s cold, but I’ll heat up quickly. So, layers. And then of course there’s me. I’m a disaster. Pale, sickly, dirty hair—I can’t remember the last time I washed it. My cabin only has a bathtub, and washing long hair in the tub is the shits. Something’s wrong with the water, it’s kind of yellow and smells like sulphur. “Not poisonous,” Ken says. Great. But still, I’m never really clean. Fortunately, Galiano is an aesthetically forgiving community. I put on my glasses over bleary, unlined eyes, spend another half hour stressing about which shoes to wear (practical, not aesthetic concerns) and finally, finally, leave.

Outside, everything is winter white frosty. I go back in and get my sunglasses, check Google Maps again, check Facebook again, leave again. Sunbeams everywhere, it’s nuts. After a few steps, the adrenaline-heavy “leaving the house” feeling is replaced with a drunk-ish happiness, some kind of endorphin rush for having granted myself fresh air and blood circulation. I take pictures of the light filtering through crystalline tree branches. I don’t see anyone. The island is long and skinny, and most houses are set away from the road, down long driveways. As a result, the roads seem empty. There’s still the deer, of course. Sometimes, if I look at a deer for too long, I get weepy.

A Galiano raven has cultivated exactly the right acoustics to achieve the Ultimate Haunting Call. Those who have been fortunate enough to experience the UHC in person know that it's not necessarily a mournful cry. If anything, a smug satisfaction at having engineered maximum amplification and reverb through a combination of positioning, air clarity, temperature, and vocal chops, is detectable in the cry. These are the things you start to notice when you spend a lot of time in silence. Outside feels good, less like loneliness, and more like solitude. Buzzfeed says that’s different. I decide to force myself out for a few hours every day.

The woman in the game has found a gun. I don’t know anything about guns besides what I’ve learned from other games, but it’s clearly a shotgun. She finds some ammo, too, in the trunk of a car outside a fishing shack. This means she doesn’t have to wait for the wolves to make her kills for her any more—now she’s got the power. She runs out into a field and the first thing we see is a rabbit, so we shoot it. It screams. She just gets to work on the carcass, like, no big deal—this will make some great mitts. But over here, in real life, my eyes are watering.

Hey, maybe you can come to the island sometime, I message Sean, holding my breath.

Sounds good, he messages back. But that’s it.

The next day, on a misty road that’s presenting me with a seriously pastoral farm landscape, I see a snake. Just a garter snake, no big deal. I used to catch garters when I was a kid and impress the boys with my totally masculine bravery. I loved the feel as they hugged my wrist, coiling themselves around it like they were claiming me. The snakes, not the boys.

As I get closer, I see it’s half squashed. There’s more carnage further along—a couple of flat lizards. The road is a reptile deathtrap. I look away, at the horses in the fields, frosty green beans hanging from a lattice, sun diffusing onto Scotch Broom. It’s chilly, but these genuinely cold spells only last a few days, usually. Still, you’d think the lizards would hibernate in the winter.

And then, an eagle flies overhead and drops a lizard on the ground right in front of me. Alive, but stunned. Both of us. I approach slowly, like it might be a lizard bomb, undetonated. Run a finger across its mottled brown skin and it doesn't move. Pick it up by the tail, crouching low to the ground in case it wiggles out of my grasp, but it doesn't. I walk a long way into the woods, into a half frozen grassy marsh. I can't explain how I know I’ve found the right spot; at a certain point I just stop walking and put the lizard down. Again, that Galiano feeling that someone or something is watching me, like I’m being Punk’d by nature. But maybe that instinct is wrong, not an instinct at all, really. Maybe the opposite of an instinct. A long-time misconception that I’m not a part of all this, Of nature, I mean.

This realization doesn’t come with fireworks or nausea, or anything that might mark a life-changing epiphany. Maybe it’s just cabin fever. I want to sing, which sounds douchey, but I’m so tired of silence. All that comes to mind is a John Trudell poem, so I sing that. Culturally borrowing—hardcore—but hopefully Trudell would forgive me. “Days people don’t care for people. These days are the hardest.”

When the all-season songbirds start to sing along with me, I admit, it feels like a prayer.

The last woman on Earth (maybe) would never indulge herself like this. She doesn’t know it’s almost Christmas day, or if she does, she doesn’t acknowledge it. It’s a day like any other: do some fishing, purify some water, stay alive—none of that other shit matters when you’re the last woman on Earth.

She’s been skinning her kills. She’s been stockpiling the stinking hides and the gut, because she knows the bullets for the gun won’t last forever. Birch saplings will be straight enough for arrows. Maple for a bow. But they have to be dried and hardened, and these things take time.

"Last Woman" originally appeared in the 2017 Hingston & Olsen Short Story Advent Calendar.

Carleigh Baker is an nêhiyaw âpihtawikosisân /Icelandic writer who lives as a guest on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and səl̓ilwəta peoples. Her work has appeared in Best Canadian Essays, The Short Story Advent Calendar, and The Journey Prize Stories. She also writes reviews for the Globe and Mail and the Literary Review of Canada. Her debut story collection, Bad Endings (Anvil, 2017) won the City of Vancouver Book Award, and was also a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Emerging Indigenous Voices Award for fiction, and the BC Book Prize Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award. She is the 2019/20 writer in residence and a 2020 Shadbolt fellow in the humanities at Simon Fraser University.

THE CITY IMAGINES: WRITERS & THE CLIMATE CRISIS

FICTION: CARLEIGH BAKER

About

Archives

Categories