I Heard "Eden" On The Radio

As the heavy veil of morning lifted from the earth, the dark ears of the Batman Building came into view. What a ridiculous name that was. When the man had first heard it, at the age of five, he had laughed. Now, as he looked at the tall AT&T tower with its distinct spires, a giant even amongst the monoliths of downtown Nashville, he wanted to laugh again. There would not be another Batman movie. The Dark Knight, for all his gadgets and hideaways, was dead, just like everyone else.

There had once been an abundance of firsts, but now he lived in a world of lasts. There was the last green plant, standing sentinel on a field of yellow; the last slice of moldy sandwich ham; the last can of preserved peach. His backpack, a Klondike internal frame patched together with duct tape, bounced against his back as he walked. The last house raid had been three weeks ago, and it had been a failure: he had not found any cans but a rotting person, slumped at the kitchen table, grinning at him from eyeless sockets. It was the smell, he decided, the sweet smell of human decay that had caused him to vomit, to heave up a precious stomachful of food.

The man found a spot of shade underneath an oak tree and sat down to have his breakfast; the tree was barren but some cover was better than none.  His entire body ached: his calves, hamstrings, and heels were all on fire, and massaging them no longer helped. But this was to be his last trek. He had walked from Minneapolis to Chicago, from Chicago to Detroit, from Detroit to Indianapolis, and somewhere along the white, deserted highways he had forgotten where he was from. Now it was coming back, word by word through the long bursts of static. He was walking to Nashville. He was going home.

The man laid a dirty handkerchief on the ground and poured out a handful of trail mix. From another bag he tore a thin strip of tortilla and set out a knife and half a jar of peanut butter. He ate gingerly, savoring each morsel, rolling it around on his dry tongue. If he did not find the tower soon, he would have to try again. Take another roll with the twenty-sided die. What would it be this time? Electrocuted doorknob? Chlorine gas? Hidden crossbow bolts? He had been extremely lucky, the man knew, but this could not go on. And it would not have to go on, because a miracle had happened. The Lord has not forsaken me, after all. That is His hand I see over the horizon, beckoning me to safe haven. That is His voice I hear in the wind, that is His heart still beating in my chest.

He reached into the pack and pulled out the rest of its contents: a stained blanket, two empty Nalgene bottles, a half-filled water skin, a revolver, and an odd-looking white device. The revolver he set unceremoniously beside his handkerchief: the man knew almost nothing about guns, could not determine what model and make from the faded lettering. It was loaded, a full six rounds, and each day he cleaned it the best he could and reloaded it, but for what reason he could not fathom. He had not seen another soul in all the time he had been on the road, not even a stray coyote. He doubted if it would even fire when the time came. But he had to admit that cleaning and reloading the weapon felt good, made him feel in control.

It was almost time. He took the white device in his hands and slowly cranked the handle, taking care not to move the dial from its delicate position. A whirring sound filled the air as he counted to 30. Then he pressed a red button, and a burst of static blasted in his ear. He looked at his watch. 8:59.

And then — suddenly — amazingly — clearer than it had ever been — there was a voice. A human voice.

Good morning, faithful listeners! If this is your first time stumbling on this humble broadcast, then let me say this: you are not alone. I repeat: you are not alone. Humanity is not extinct. Hope is not lost. We are broadcasting from WSM’s Blaw-Knox tower in south Nashville: it is red and white, diamond shaped, one of the highest radio towers in North America. It is a beacon of our hope. Our hope that you exist, somewhere out there, our hope that you can make your way to us, our hope that together we can rebuild humanity. We broadcast at 9 am every day, rain or shine. We have food. Canned food, more than we can count, enough to last ten people for ten years. Come to Nashville. Come share our food with us, our shelter, our company.

Thank you, Dan. I have some good news for our listeners. Fantastic news. This morning, I walked into our backyard and stumbled upon a miracle.

What did you see, Ricky? 

I thought that it must have been a piece of trash, or that I was hallucinating. But I wasn’t. It was the pea plant that I had buried a couple of days ago. The potato didn’t grow, the apple seed didn’t, but the pea did.

Do you think it’s something about the pea, or do you think the soil has decontaminated?

Impossible to tell at this point. But the pea, Dan, the pea! You don’t know how I felt when I saw it for the first time. I felt like Noah glimpsing the first rays of sun from behind the storm clouds. It was magical, I tell you, magical!

Hope is a magical thing, Ricky. Hope can guide a man through the worst of times, but a lack of it can strike him dead where he stands. If you are listening to this broadcast, here is our gift to you: hope. Come to Nashville, come to the diamond-shaped tower in the sky, and we will be here. This is not humankind’s last stand, but its humble beginning.

We will rebuild humanity, but it won’t be easy. We still have a lot of work to do, a lot of questions to answer. What will we teach our children? What will we change this time?

Well, we would first have to understand what went wrong last time.

And what did go wrong?

Mistrust. Mistrust, fear, paranoia. The desire to think the worst of other people.

Mistrust?

Yes. Because of a man’s own tendencies to cheat, he assumes that others will cheat too. He cannot trust his co-conspirator, even if the man is his best friend, even if they grew up together, because if he is ready to cheat, his friend must be too. It is the same with war. I had better attack him first, so that he can’t attack me. Deploy weapons now, verify intentions later. Isn’t that how we ended up like this?

But how can we change that in the next era to come? Don’t you think the tendency to deceive is innate, a human instinct as primal as hunger or thirst?

We can’t be sure of that. If we start with that assumption, then humankind is doomed to fail, no matter how many do-overs we get. But I like to be optimistic. I think that we can change. I think that, fundamentally, mankind is good. Sometimes we make mistakes, and these mistakes cost us dearly, but in the end I believe that there is a reason we survived.

So that we can start again?

Yes.

The voices faded. The man picked up the white device and saw that the red light had died. He began cranking the handle again, but somehow it had gotten stuck. He strained with all his muscles, feeling it give away, becoming unstuck . . . and then snap. He sat, stunned, the device in one hand and its dismembered limb in another. He let them drop to the ground. Last device, last broadcast. No matter. Soon he would see the tip of the diamond tower over the horizon.

He had first stumbled upon the radio station in Indianapolis. He had been twiddling with the white device yet again, not expecting anything, and suddenly there had been one word, the first human word he had heard spoken in months, and it had been, he was sure of it, “Eden”. He had almost dropped the precious device but had caught it at the last second, cradling it against his chest like a newborn baby. He had never been a particularly religious man, had rarely gone to church, but that word had seemed like the word of God. When he had regained his senses he had turned the dial back but there was nothing but long bursts of static. Had he imagined it? Was he hallucinating already? He walked in a daze through the day but at night managed to catch more snippets: “lonely”, “Nashville”, “tower”. Could it be true? It was possible, he knew: a clear-channel AM station could easily broadcast over several hundred miles, especially with no other signals for it to interfere with. The radio was possible, but that wasn’t the miracle: the miracle was the voice, so much like his and so different, so familiar and yet so strange. A stab of disappointment hit him: so he wasn’t the only one, of course he wasn’t, there wasn’t and never was anything special about him. Then he felt guilt, because he had allowed himself to think that way; then hope, finally, because he had done it. He had found what he was looking for all these months, walking from highway to deserted highway, city after dead city. He had found his kin, or rather his kin had found him, and not in the way that he had expected, but in a way that had seemed ethereal, miraculous. As he had walked south along the I65, the static had gotten more sparse and the voices had gotten clearer, but never as clear as it had been this morning; this morning the man had felt as if Dan and Ricky had sat around him, sharing his food, his company, and he had only had to reach out to touch the bodily flesh of another being.

He was closer, now. The sun hung in the sky like a dusty chandelier. He wished he had a hat, or an umbrella, or anything to shield him from the unforgiving bulb of light, but in a sense he enjoyed it, this slow suffering. It reminded him that he was still alive; it reminded him of the things that he had lost, the things that were, the things that could still be.

He passed by the Nissan Stadium, the Bridgestone Arena, the Conference Center. There was a time, months ago, when he would have forced his way inside, if only to sit in the stands of an empty stadium and marvel at the feats of mankind that had once occurred here and the folly of that mankind to give it all away. There was a time when he had wanted to be awed, had thought that catastrophe brought one closer to the truth, had wanted to feel. But now the pervading feeling was hunger, and he did not dream of the people he knew or the places he lived anymore or even of the food that he had once enjoyed; he dreamt only of his hunger, of lock without a key, of name without a face. But there would be food, food when he reached the station; the thought gave him energy where he thought there was none left.

The tip of the tower came into view as he walked down Broadway. Here was music central, here were the “honky-tonk” bars and “Honky Tonk Central” itself, where the man had celebrated his 21st birthday. He looked in through the window: the chairs had been neatly stacked, the tables wiped clean. The large signs outside still flashed neon red and green, white and blue, as if mocking the patrons that it would no longer boast. Around the corner he found graffiti on the wall, a spray-painted, misquoted poem that he had once known:

I will not go gentle into that good night!

Rage, rage against the dying of the light!

A sign notified him that he had left Downtown Nashville behind and was now entering the district of Brentwood. The red and white lattices of the tower rose in the sky like the top of a crucifix. Ricky. Dan. Ricky and Dan. They were the names of the man’s closest friends; they would replace the man’s previous friends, lovers, family. He imagined himself on the radio, broadcasting for hundreds of miles on the clear-channel AM: Come to Nashville! Come join us at the diamond tower! Together we will no longer be alone, together we will start again . . .

Up across a traffic bridge. Past an empty Kroger’s. Almost stepping on some dead bodies; these were the ones that did not make it inside in time. A giant billboard: Nashville Lottery. Win $15 million today and change your life. Please play responsibly. It used to be so green here: he had biked here, it had been one of his favorite trails. A church. A dusty field. A large mansion straight from the picture book. And yet not a single sign of life, no trace of Ricky and Dan. He had only heard their voices. Would they look familiar to him? Would he see in them the faces of his brother, his father, his mother? Did he even remember what they looked like?

Early afternoon. The peak of heat. His last skin of water, drained empty. But now he could see that there was a house at the base of the tower, a white house, solid, nondescript. And something else: movement. Movement! Another human being! He waved his arms and cried out, but his parched voice was muted by the humid air. The figure was about five hundred paces in front of him; he saw that it was a girl, her black hair tied in a ponytail, a grey backpack dangling behind her. She was moving slowly toward the white house. He tried to move faster to intersect his path with hers, but his feet were blocked by dried foliage. What he saw in the girl was a mirror of himself: hungry, thirsty, tired, dragging each limb by the sheer force of will itself.

One hundred paces away from the house, the backpack dropped onto the ground. The girl seemed not to notice. Fifty paces, she broke into a staggering run. The man had stopped still, his eyes fixed on the girl’s movements. At twenty paces, she fell, picked herself up again, and kept moving in a combination of crawl and run, her four limbs pulling and dragging like a large, grotesque puppet. She collapsed at the door. She raised a scrawny, sunburnt arm. The man held his breath. She knocked.

The door did not open. She knocked again. This time, something moved. Two men emerged from behind the house, one on either side. Each carried a long, gleaming object. They moved slowly toward the girl, like a crab closing its pincer, the things in their hands pointed at the girl. The man on the right shouted something, and the girl lifted her hands up. He walked behind her and hit her on the head with his weapon. The girl collapsed in a heap. The other man raised her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and the first man unlocked the door. The two men walked inside with the girl, and after a moment emerged without her. They began walking toward the man.

The man jerked his body behind the tree trunk on his left. They had seen him! He fumbled through his backpack for his revolver but couldn’t find it. It was gone! Relax, relax, don’t panic. He peeked around the side: the men were nearer now, but they weren’t walking towards him. The object of their excursion was the pack that the girl had dropped. The bush had hidden him, after all. The men stopped, not twenty paces from where he hid, and picked up the pack. The objects that they had held in their hands, the man saw, were rifles, now strapped across their backs. Both wore yellow t-shirts, dirty, grey-colored shorts, and sandals. Their bodies weren’t robust but they looked healthy; there was color in their cheeks and they moved with the gracefulness of those well fed. One wore a baseball cap, turned backwards so the man could not tell what team it supported. This was the one that spoke first:

She had nothing. A couple of crushed granola bars. Some rope. No cans.

It was Dan! The man could recognize the voice anywhere. Dan!

The other man: Real scrawny too. Not our best catch.

This second man was Ricky.

She’s the only one we’ve had all week, the first man said. Do you think they’re dying out? How soon until there’s no more left?

God knows. Tell Him to keep them coming.

How many do we have now?

Five, including the girl, but the twins won’t last another day.

Let’s have them tonight then.

Lord, it was your word on the radio. It was you who told me ‘Eden’. You promised. You promised!

The man with Ricky’s voice looked up.

Did you hear that?

What?

Some leaves crackling, over there.

You think somebody’s there?

Let’s go see.

They walked toward the place where the man was hiding, their rifles raised now, pointed carefully in front of them. The man could hear their footsteps, sharp and cracking on the bed of dry leaves, coming closer and closer. He tried to mouth a prayer but couldn’t think of the words. Instead, his hand found the reassuring coldness of the revolver on the bottom of the pack.

If they come around the tree, I will fire.

I will not go gentle into that good night.

A leaf broke off from the tree and fluttered down in front of him. With surprise he saw that it was green, green as the color of a newly sprouted pea.