journal of no memory

I do not know if it is my doing but I suspect it is, I suspect it is me: I have nightmares about — the other week was about the end of the world, again, and I saw [name] sitting on a box outside a garage across the street and I was reading the paper about the market crash and how it might be the big one and I waved and walked over and said this is it, isn’t it? it’s happening today. and [name] said yep, this is it — selling the car right now for some flight money. heading to the airport next, taking the family and getting the fuck out of here — it’s going to get bad and he was smiling and I was smiling and already there was trash on the street and he was sitting on a bucket and I thought my god this is the day when everything changes (I can remember this dream so clearly, the quality of the air and the the light; it was probably just eleven in the morning) and the next I knew my job was over, of course, and so was everyone else’s in the neighborhood and people were screaming after a couple days because we all knew this was it, that there was no coming back from this one any time soon, that the kids who grew up in this would know a different America (finally!) from the one we knew. [name] had gotten his five grand and gotten out. I was living in a house, a bigger house further into the city with about fifteen other people and we had a pretty good community; kept cooking, kept clean, kept the lights out at night and generally stayed unnoticed, which at this (relatively) early stage was a good thing. A few months in and people were taking drastic measures; the law had been gone for months, but the illusion had vanished completely only in the last few weeks. We didn’t pretend anymore. We stayed honest, but we knew the people outside were beyond trust because they had fallen into survivalism, were without food, were still trying to support families. You couldn’t do this anymore, really, not without joining a bigger group. Anyway we had to stay low at night because men were on the hunt and would invade your home for food — getting robbed on the street was a threat, sure, but being out was no plan because you’d just lead someone right back to your house, and even if (like us) you had about fifteen strong guys to put up a fight the noise would let everyone else know you had something worth stealing, worth fighting to protect — the name of survival was anonymity and we had to keep it, keep it nondescript. At the time I woke up we were interviewing a potential roommate. We all liked him, but it didn’t seem likely he could bring in much food. As I woke up I remembered that the person in question was me.