BBQ

BBQ


The end came the way a lake dies choked under algae. First, the water is clear and vibrant with the sky. Then, a few faint clouds of green appear in the shallows, among the reeds. Some rafts of algae detach from edging the shore-line and float toward the center of the open expanse of water. The algae-rafts spread filaments and tentatively touch one another, but still most of the lake is unclouded. Catastrophe occurs exponentially. On the day before the lake perishes, one-half of its surface shimmers in the sunshine, reflecting the blue sky. But the next morning, the entire lake is a festering swamp of algae, a green prairie where fat dragonflies hum like agitated helicopters searching the surface for some speck of clear water.

First, crops failed, but, in some part of the country remote from the capital. Then, there were volcanos and tsunamis and typhoons at sea. The fruit in the grocery stores was afflicted by a faint, whitish cast, a pale odorless mold. Someone opened a can and found that the food was spoiled and had become a kind of blackish tar. Snow fell in places where snow had never fallen before and the orchards couldn’t be saved, despite a hundred thousand smoldering fires set between the groves of doomed trees. The smoke from the fires drifted onto the freeways and caused immense chain collisions and, although rescue crews rushed to clear the wreckage, there was too much debris – at first, the smashed trucks and cars were simply bulldozed into the median of the highway and onto the shoulders of the road, but, at night, mobs of people with acetylene torches swarmed the wrecks, harvesting the metal, and chasseses too heavy to tote away were strewn all over the right-of-way and caused more crashes, more pile-ups until only one lane was open through the debris-field and, then, at last no lane at all. A bridge twisted and tried to collapse but its struts held it upright over the river and, although vehicles could no longer cross, men and women still used the bridge and, as long as they kept their hands free to clutch at the tilted railings, they didn’t fall into the polluted water below. More snow fell and the cities and villages were unprepared since it never had snowed before in this climate and no one knew how to move the snow and ice off the streets. There were riots, rolling black-outs, massacres in the public squares when the government attempted to distribute bread. People ate the animals in the zoo and dead bodies vanished mysteriously from mortuaries. The hospital burned. All of the prostitutes were diseased and they died in the alleyways and a plague of rats devoured them to the bones.

Kozlowski predicted the end of things. He wasn’t a prophet and his prediction wasn’t a year in advance of the catastrophe or even six months before. But he worked as a sanitation engineer and saw things and heard people whispering and about ten weeks before circumstances became untenable, Kozlowski knew in his bones that the end was near. He stockpiled canned goods and rice, lugged jugs of water into his apartment, and made sure that his weapons were loaded. Kozlowski contrived a quarrel with his girlfriend, with whom he had lived for more than ten years, and slapped her face, waving a pistol at her. He threw her out of his apartment and said that she should take a bus into the country to return to the village where her mother still lived. Kozlowski loved his girlfriend and this was hard for him, but he knew that it would be difficult enough for him to survive the crisis, let alone provide for another person. When she left the apartment, dragging her suitcase and crying hysterically, Kozlowski did not look out the window to watch her depart.

His family had come from Gdansk, a year or two before the Communists lost power in Poland, but Kozlowski was born in Dar es Salaam and, except for attending university in Chicago, had lived there all his life. He worked at the college, directing experiments in wastewater treatment. The World Monetary Fund paid his salary and was a reliable employer. Even after the banks failed, funds were still wired to Kozlowski from Geneva. He hired armed bodyguards and went to the wire-transfer office every two weeks to receive his pay, money that he converted into gear that would be useful in the coming period of disturbance and riot. Sometimes, his bodyguards shot at people on rooftops. Many of the narrow streets were too deadly to traverse because of car-bombs and the expedition to the fortified wire-transfer station at the center of the city sometimes took all day.

At the university, where there were also fortifications, Kozlowski talked with his colleagues about leaving the city. The conversations were hush-hush, conducted near the big wastewater stabilization ponds that Kozlowski supervised. He met with Professor Chaudhary and his teaching assistant, Goetzmann. Kozlowski asked if Chaudhary, a medical doctor, knew anyone who could fly a Sikorsky Air-Ambulance. One of those helicopters was abandoned near the campus hospital on a pad of concrete surrounded by big, droopy sunflowers. Kozlowski said that thing were going to deteriorate in Dar es Salaam, probably sooner than later, and that they should flee the city. Chaudhary and Kozlowski had discussed this before, when the first riots occurred at the rice distribution centers, and they knew that there was a university station in the Mbeyan Highlands near the great lakes. Chaudhary had a friend who worked at that research station where the naturalists were studying mountain chimpanzees. “There is a catchment reserve in the hills,” Kozlowski said, “and the water supply is good.” Goetzmann said that he thought that there was also an agricultural test facility close to the reservoir and, therefore, a reasonable source of fresh food. “This isn’t going to last,” Kozlowski said. He gestured to the sea and the plumes of smoke rising from the ships captured by pirates and set aside in the harbor. “The center can’t hold,” Chaudhary said.

One of Kozlowski’s bodyguards, Okinye, was a former air-force officer and he said that he could fly the Sikorsky helicopter. Kozlowski recruited him and the two men went to the university garage to commandeer a vehicle. Something was wrong with the gasoline supply, however, and so the engine wouldn’t start. They hiked across the campus to the hospital compound where the helicopter was sitting on its pad surveyed by sentinels of heavy, drooping sunflowers. The air was bad by the hospital. The patients had all died and been dragged outside, to lie in rows wrapped in white sheets along the sidewalk leading into the building. Okinye started the helicopter and the engine sounded strong. The rotors whirled overhead and dispersed some of the stench hanging in the air from the corpses. The fuel gage showed that the tank was full. Kozlowski asked about the copter’s range. “We can get to Mbeya,” Okinye said, “but we won’t be able to return.” A new sort of acid tainted the sewage that Kozlowski was treating in his experimental ponds. The acid corroded the concrete and made it porous and most of the water had drained down into the earth under the lagoons. Kozlowski didn’t know why there was acid in the wastewater. Smoke from burning garbage layered the air. “We aren’t going to come back,” Kozlowski told Okinye. “What about my family?” Okinye asked. “What about them,” Kozlowski said.

A couple days passed. Kozlowski supervised the placement of provisions and medical supplies on the Sikorsky. A cold wind tormented the ocean and huge, icy waves battered the beaches. It seemed as if it were going to snow. “I don’t know if we can fly with frost and ice on the rotor,” Okinye told the three men. “Then, we need to leave now,” Kozlowski said, “before it snows.” Chaudhary and Goetzmann climbed into the helicopter and strapped themselves into their seats. Kozlowski sat next to Okinye. When the helicopter took off, it tilted to the side, and the big canisters of bottled water rolled across the freight-deck and boomed against the metal walls of the aircraft. “What happened?’ Kozlowski shouted. “It takes me a moment to adjust,” Okinye said. The rotor of the helicopter beheaded the sunflowers and the big orbs of black seeds were flung high in the sky. Then, the Sikorsky rose up through the smoke drifting over the campus and Kozlowski saw the rows of corpses like white cocoons lying by the sidewalk, rust-brown stains coloring the sheets and the beds of flowers wild with weeds in the flower garden and, then, the tapestry of the city laced with innumerable red veins and arteries of flame and the seacoast twisting away under them like a snake.

They flew over the veldt and saw the small villages on the brown plain, many of them with thatched roofs set afire, black roads littered with abandoned cars, and green cultivated fields speckled with brown rot. The air was cold and there was frost on the highlands and, then, wet snow that whirled through the air and lay in clots on the ground. For several hours, the helicopter made its way westward, sometimes, jerking and bucking in pockets of warm air interspersed in the icy fog. Near Mbeya and the great lakes, the ground was entirely covered with snow, or, perhaps, it was the dense interwoven canopy of the rain forest that was laden with ice and sleet, in places collapsed inward to make wet craters in the jungle.

The engine choked a couple times and, then, stuttered and the floor rattled so that all of the men were trembling uncontrollably with the vibrations. The rotors lost power. “There is something wrong with the fuel,” Okinye said. He wrestled with the throttle and the controls and the helicopter rolled to the side. “We are all going to die,” Chaudhary said. Then, the Sikorsky dropped out of the sky and there was a great splash of sodden tree limbs and mud and a gout of fire that belched outward and was gone before it could be imagined, and, then, Kozlowski was flung forward and hit his head so that he lost consciousness.

Snow was falling in Kozlowski’s open eyes. The climate had changed significantly only 18 months before and Kozlowski had been 37 when he first touched snow. The snow was falling through the darkness and it seemed to descend from very far away and long ago. The cold made his face tingle and he tasted the snow on his lips and tongue and it was sweet. He didn’t feel any pain, although it was not certain whether he could move. At the periphery of his vision, he saw a yellow-orange flame guttering in some wreckage. Some children, it seemed, had come toward the crashed aircraft and Kozlowski saw their hunched shadows. For a moment, an unearthly hooting filled the air. Kozlowski didn’t recognize any words in the sounds that he heard, but he knew that there were many tribes in his country and, so, many different languages. One of the small, crouching figures raised a gobbet of fire in his dark hands, scooping up the flames on a sort of broom-shaped torch, and, again, the air was wild with the children crying out in triumph against the darkness. The small, crouching figures slid sideways, following the bobbing pupil of fire and vanished into the black forest.

Kozlowski didn’t know how much time passed. When he opened his eyes again, he had grown a pale beard of snow. The fire burning in the wreckage had gone out. He tried to call out and, to his surprise, heard his voice echoing against the dark woods that were slowly filling with snow. He felt drowsy and, even, warm, but something urged him to try to stand. Slowly, he lifted himself from the ground and discovered that he could hold himself upright and, even, hop a little forward. The calf of his right leg was macerated and the tendons seemed to be torn so that he couldn’t reliable raise his foot, but half staggering and crawling, he was able to move away from the crashed helicopter. Kozlowski saw no sign of the other men.

He stumbled into a portal in the wall of trees, a kind of narrow, steep path where the snow lay almost knee-deep. The cold seemed to put his wounds to sleep and he felt no pain. After creeping forward for a some time, Kozlowski saw a small bonfire burning in the distance, at the bottom of a ravine where some big boulders bulged out of the creek bed. The children that Kozlowski had glimpsed at the crashed helicopter seemed to be gathered around the small fire. He saw their hunched shoulders, dark within some kind of fur cloth.

The slope was steep and intricate with vines frozen rigid as barbed wire. Kozlowski’s leg wouldn’t support him any more and he clawed his way through the icy underbrush toward the red blossom of the fire. When he crept to within a dozen feet of the flames, Kozlowski saw Chaudhary’s face, serene and bloodless like the countenance of a Bodhisattva near the fire. A couple of figures huddled around the flames turned to look at Kozlowski. They were chimpanzees, shivering in the cold and their yellow fangs flashed when the apes grinned at Kozlowski. The chimpanzees were roasting gobbets of meat on skewers that they clutched in their black hands. The meat sizzled and fat dripped into the flames, igniting as it fell. Chaudhary’s face lay at the edge of the fire still attached to a raw tangle of bloody neckbones. Kozlowski stared at the chimpanzees cooking their supper. The chimpanzees hooted and, then, looked at him curiously with their wise and ancient eyes.