Entry #15: A Screaming Woman
It wasn’t North Korea or Iran or even America or Russia or China that went psycho and destroyed the world, it was us. It was the paranoid world that we had created for themselves…
The tale of Two Pigeons continues. If you’re new to this start with Entry #1: The Job. To read all installments…please become a paying subscriber.
Day four of lockdown now. Was woken up at 3 am…someone was out there yelling at the top of their lungs. My windows are sealed shut — metal shutters outside, lead lined curtains inside — so I couldn’t open them to get a god look. The door camera showed a woman in the street…naked except for socks. She had clearly lost it and was mumbling, tossing her possessions around, screaming at nothing. She was probably a neighbor, although I didn’t recognize her.
The screaming outside my window reminded me of what my neighborhood was like before the war. I live on Belvedere Street. I think it means “beautiful view” in Italian. What kind of view did I have? People shooting up, smoking meth, constantly having mental breakdowns, camping and shitting right under my window. There was a woman who on good days would walk around barefoot and sing pop songs. On bad ones she'd show up screaming, naked, smeared in her own feces. She was probably in her early thirties but she looked destroyed — like someone who spent her whole life working in a coal mine. I’d buy her energy drinks or give her money from time to time. She offered to share her meth with me a few times as a sign of gratitude — it was the only things she had to share. I don’t remember her name. But she’s gone now…dead no doubt. Most of the people who lived on the street back when the war happened were dead within a few months. A lot of people like her refused to go into the rad shelters when the fallout first came. And they were right to, I guess. The normies quickly forced out the crazy and the unstable ones…pushing them right out of the airlock into the street. So the radiation took them. I was in those shelters. Saw it happen. And I have to say…I didn’t protest it. I felt bad about it but the reality is that we all had to live in a giant open tents, a hundred or more people to each one, for months. There wasn’t really a way to fit in the unstable ones, the ones who wouldn’t wash, who’d shit in the corners. So they were banished. Later I saw some of these types around my neighborhood with open sores and giant tumors growing out of their necks…rotting alive on the sidewalk. This rotting process…I guess it was happening to them anyway, even before the war. The radiation just sped it up. It also solved the homeless problem once and for all. Funny how after all those decades that San Francisco was trying and failing to do something about it…Israel fixed it with one push of the button.
The screaming woman outside my window moved on after about twenty minutes. I could hear her from around the corner for a while…and then nothing. Being stuck inside like this — windows shuttered, no natural light, the fear of the radiation seeping in — isn’t easy. People drink, take whatever drugs they can get their hands on. Some just lose it.
I couldn’t fall back asleep after that. I didn’t want to read or look at the feed. So I turned on an electronic candle and took out the little portable watercolor set my daughter gave me for my birthday. I sometimes use it to do landscape paintings. The ocean, the sand dunes… it’s all very crude…I’m not very good. Now, stuck inside, I painted the thing that’s on my mind and on everyone’s mind: the radioactive cloud…a deep red and purple cloud on the rad app hanging over us.
Later in the day I got the idea of finding my bar mitzvah speech. Having gone down the rabbit hole on all this Jewish ritual sacrifice business I found it a little strange that the torah portion I had to read when I turned thirteen had dealt with this very specific thing: the tabernacle, the mobile temple where ancient Jews carried out their animal sacrifices and which housed the Ark of the Covenant, a big gold box adorned with ancient cherubs, that the Hebrew god instructed Moses to build. Apparently this box functioned as god’s earthly docking platform…he’s levitate on top of it and talk to Moses. I found a miniature model of this ark in Misha’s office. A very weird coincidence, I thought.
I live in one of four units in a Victorian building that was built before the automobile and so my garage was added later, probably in the 1950s, and dug at a steep slope into the basement and foundation. There’s no lead lining in the garage door so the space isn’t well shielded from radiation. I put on a full suit and helmet…