[extreme environments]

Adam Peterson

KEITH, or: The Last Man on Earth

I will save only your name, Dorthea, Dorthea, Dorthea.

            The final word of man, a man, this man, who can think of nothing else to protect.

            I repeat it as I walk the decimated land without destination save the one all share.

            The prancing vowels tickle my tongue into senselessness, and I come to the brink of dropping it, that final elated syllable teetering on my lips before I return to myself and swallow the sound whole.

            Dorthea, Dorthea, Dorthea, I will walk your name into the Earth.

            Long after I have gone and the last of humanity with me, your name will remain so that when angels peer down from upstairshappyville, they will recognize you as their own.

*

            It’s when I’m not saying your name that everything turns to buttstuff.

            That’s how it’s been since The Big Drop. Language cannot survive in such silence, and I fear for the vocabulary I will find when I open my teethcave.

            I have dropped so many words, and yet still I bear their weight. I feel them drag behind me in the soot, but when I turn, I find only a single trail of footprints stopping where I stand.

            There’s nothing to lament, not about the words I’ve dropped. Gifting the ghosts a language, that’s how I see things now.

            Once a thing is gone, it’s gone.

            After I drop the name of a fast food restaurant, the next one I walk past, I don’t recognize it.

            Golden knockers.

            Pizza fedora.

            Chicken racist.

            I can imagine smiledumb people eating inside. I can imagine you and me. But what I cannot see is why any of it had to exist at all.

            Civilization crumbles back into the dust out of which we raised it. Was it worth the humiliation of having had to live?

*

            But someone had to stay behind to turn off the lights. Drop the last word. Close the scribblerectangle on humanity, so to speak.

            There’s no reason why it had to be me. I was no one even among everyone.

            And now I’m no one among nothing.

            To be The Last Man on Earth—

            I couldn’t even bigchest about it to The Penultimate Man on Earth. When I stumbled over his masticated corpse, I did not stop.

            Joe didn’t deserve any avenging, but I found the long-necked bastard who killed him and I dropped the beast’s name, that speckled penis-neck.

            Now the animal’s only a WhatsIt, studying me from behind a dumpster and licking his black tongue over his teeth like he’s still got bits of Joe stuck in them.

            I seesee you, you stretched-horse mothersexdoer, I yell.

            But despite it all, I feel bad for him. Nights, the WhatsIt cries. The shrieks raise a shiver in my personsticks, this guilty, naked pain.

            He doesn’t even know what’s gone, Dorthea, Dorthea, Dorthea.

            Only that it isn’t coming back.

*

            I know we had a word for this feeling.

            I would say it to you before you fell asleep. I said it to you before you died.

            But my mind sinks down into my heartbox and finds nothing.  

            Only a hollow into which I softvoice my prayers, but the echoes, they return as screams.

*

            Roger, The Third to Last Man on Earth, thought Joe crazy until Joe showed Roger how crazy he wasn’t by shoving Roger into a rockjacuzzi.

            It spit scalding water into the clouds and smelled like cooked birdmarbles.

            These are good words I have not yet dropped.

            Water.

            Clouds.

            Birdmarbles.

            I’m not sure the last one’s right, but who would correct me? The WhatsIt busies himself kicking his horseboot at a sport utility vroomvroom.

            Rogers last words were, I told you! He’s got a shimmywoo in his thoughthold!

            Don’t we still have the word crazy? Joe said after Roger’s blistered face sunk under the boiling water, never to rise again. Either way, I’m sure as buttstuff not.

*

            Until I met you, Dorthea, Dorthea, Dorthea, I thought the worst thing that could happen was to spend a life alone.

            But I have been wrong about most things most of the time.

*

            The Fourth to Last Man on Earth called himself Moon which made it confusing when we dropped the name for the big whatyoulookingatinthesky.

            It’s a different word, Moon protested. One’s a big whatyoulookingatinthesky and one’s a magician.

            Which one are you? Roger asked.

            I’m Moon, Moon said. The magician.

            He’s crazy, too, Roger said.

            Think I should kill him before he kills us? Joe said.

            The day came when Moon couldn’t remember his own name though he could still make the endless scarf appear out of the tatters of his evening coat.

            That didn’t seem like an endorsement of his sanity to Roger or anyone, and we weren’t surprised when one sunhello we awoke to find him dangling from a tree. He’d knotted the scarf into a circledeedie.

            I told you he was crazy, Roger said.

            Sexdo him, Joe said. Sexdo him right to devilplace.

*

            I will carve a monument to you, Dorthea, Dorthea, Dorthea.

            Like that mountain with the faces on it from the postcards of my littledays.

            But this will be your mountain.

            But this will be your face.

            Smiling into the sun as eternity comes to claim you.

*

            There are words I want to drop that I cannot, words terrifying for their bright dread in a world drawn so dim.

            Chlorine.

            Arachnid.

            Lymphoma.

            But what of dandelions, Dorthea, Dorthea, Dorthea? What of phosphorescence?

            These words, too heavy with beauty, I drop, I drop, I drop.

*

            The WhatsIt stalks me like a fangdogly, pacing the periphery of my vision, dallying when I stop. If I turn, he ducks behind lampposts, curving his neck to match the shape of the metal pole but unable to conceal his torso nor the bobbing of his headknobs above the long-extinguished lights.

            The pointless whimsy of the WhatsIt’s headknobs comfort me. I have not dropped the word for them, but like most of what could be known before The Big Drop, I never knew it.

            I am sure mankind managed miraculous things with our knowledge, but it’s the wowdumb that defined us in the end.

            And this is the end.

            The WhatsIt collapses beside me as I sleep. He humps his bulk back against me until I throw a leg and an arm over his long neck.

            We sleep silverwaring like that, but in the sunhello he’s gone, back to trying to hide from something that will always find him.

            I want to tell him, It’s okay. We seesee each other.

*

            An entire lifetime we lived without each other, Dorthea, Dorthea, Dorthea.

            Sometimes I imagine yours.

            A girl excellent at seeking but terrible at hiding. A teen with a dothis caring for wigglepeople, spending her paychecks on scribblerectangles and cigarettes. A woman moving far away with a suitcase full of boots believing she could always return.

            I never reach the part where I say, I aaaaaaaaa you.

            I know what comes next. 

*

            The Fifth to Last Man on Earth decided this was his chance to rule everything, and so he declared himself fancyhatguy of all the Earth.

            Have at it, Trevor, Roger said.

            Please, address me as your highness, Trevor said.

            What does your highness decree? Joe asked. Shall there be a tax upon the ghosts?

            We still had jokes, but not joyquakes so the four of us blinked at each other for a second or two before trying to re-invent agriculture.

            Still, as we tilled up an overgrown golf course, we insisted upon making this joke again and again.

            Shall there be a tax upon the sun? The skysneezes? The nutbandits?

            The joke is probably why Trevor sentenced us all to death. If we could have, we would have joyquaked hardest at this. We’d already been condemned by fate or bad happyoops or the big fancyhatguy in upstairshappyville.

            And how does your highness plan on executing us? Moon asked.

            I’ll boop off your thoughtholds, Trevor said. That’s the standarddoing for fancyhatguys.

            But on the sunhello of the execution, we awoke to find Trevor gone and a note reading, I hereby abdicate the throne. The realm of dudes can no longer be ruled.

             In the next empty city we came upon, we found his body splapped over cracked pavement. His majesty must have jumped from one of the skyticklers.

            How many ways are there to die? Moon asked.

            Infinite, Roger said.

            One, I said.

            We thought this funny and you could tell by how still everything got.

*

            On the tips of his horseboots, the WhatsIt skulks toward my camp like he thinks I won’t notice nature’s tallest mistake.

            When he’s close enough that I could hit him with a scavenged can of sugarfizz, he veers away and gallops across the parking lot of a pillgettery.

            I do not blame him for his lapses in instinct. I have my own. For instance, I cannot say why I decide to chase after him, but chase I do with a stop sign held menacingly above my head.

            What a whoopdeeturn this is, I warcry.

            I seesee you, I warcry.

*

            I’m exhausted.

            By living. By dying.

            Everyone must have felt this way, which is why sometimes I think we welcomed The Big Drop.

            Like I once sat next to a woman and her wiggleperson on an airtube. Into my lap the boy kicked a tiny blue sock, and to be niceguytalk, I asked his age as I passed it back.

            Five months, the woman said.

            With this small decency, I thought I had done the day’s work of keeping society going, but somewhere over an ocean that now rests lifeless, the woman shook me awake.

            I’m so sorry, she pleaded. He turned six months old yesterday.

            And then the mother wept.

            Dorthea, Dorthea, Dorthea, we should have never learned to count.

*

            The Sixth to Last Man on Earth felt ick.

            Doctor Gunther desperately needed a doctor, but he was the only doctor we had. He passed the time moaning about his many cancers and judging where the rest of us went to ivycafeteria and how unhelpful our majors were at the end of the world.

            My leg hurts when I walk on it all day, Doctor Gunther said to Moon. What’s your magic degree say about that?

            That doesn’t seem so unusual, Roger said.

            We’re all going to die anyway, Moon said. Just be motorcyclesunglasses about it.

            Joe killed The Sixth to Last Man on Earth one day while off foraging for bushcandy.

            He welcomed it, Joe said. That was my distinct impression during the murder.

            None of us felt up to punishing Joe, but we made him promise not to kill anyone else.

            And except for Roger, he pretty much never did.

*

            I will draw a picture of you in flowers across the continent, Dorthea, Dorthea, Dorthea.

            And when aliens traverse time and space to find our ossuary, they will take the memory of you onward, seeds to plant through time and space.

*

            The animals deserve their shot, that’s how I see things now. Even if the WhatsIt doesn’t know his ass from his limbhinge, it’s now his planet more than mine.

            We dicked it up real good though. Even the birds know it. They fly straight up into the sky then dive against the ground.

            The robins and the Americaheads and the—I don’t know, blue ones.

            It’s not auspicious. No, it sure as sexdo isn’t.

            But then I remember how they’re basically dinosaurs who had a spaceclod blow up their spot.

            Yet they found a way to go on.

            It’s more than anyone will say for us.

*

            Even after the world has ended, innumerable opportunities for decadence remain. Thinking about dinosaurs is mine.

            I imagine if I travelled back to peak dinosaur, say when the thoughtbright ones began imagining having a language and cities and pants, and I explained that every last one of them would become oil or parakeets—

            But our great project! the dinosaurs would roar. All the unspeakable wonder we can’t hold in our tiny arms and yet we try and yet we try and yet we try.

            And I would have to say, Nope, you’re carjuice. Maybe if you’re happyoopsy, a handy dad will build you an apartment complex in the backyard.

            Well sexdo us, the dinosaurs would say.

            It doesn’t end any better for us if that helps, I’d say.

            It doesn’t, the dinosaurs would say. That really doesn’t help us at all.

*

            Once, I knew someone who refused liquid foods.

            This was her decadence.

            To render chewing irrelevant, she said, is an affront to humanity.

            I think she only didn’t like how the neighborhood had become mostly smoothie shops.

            When I think of her starving, I see her joyquaking all the way to an upstairshappyville drawn with her own lovely lightness, swearing she wouldn’t drink a smoothie even if you held one to her quivering lips.

            And Dorthea, Dorthea, I should have died beside you, Dorthea.

*

            Though one remains to praise, I still possess a single compliment and it’s this—

            You would get along with the dinosaurs in my thoughthold.

            And you would have, but it’s like the dinosaurs in my thoughthold are always saying—

            Well sexdo us.

*

            Before The Big Drop, The Seventh to Last Man on Earth was eyeknown.

            Hugely, grotesquely eyeknown.

            The surreality of doing workaday things with him like digging for dirtsquigglers overwhelmed me. He’d be right there slurping them down beside everyone else.

            His name was Ethan.

            No, not that one.

            When the rest of us told stories of our lost lives, Ethan would recite the plots of his punchlovelies like they actually happened to him.

            Someone said, I fell in aaaaaaaaa with a woman 98 days before The Big Drop, and I can’t decide if I’m The Happyoopsiest or Unhappyoopsiest Man on Earth.

            And Ethan replied, Yeah, well, I once worked in a boozery. Of course, that was only my overstory because one day a warbigum showed up and told me they needed me for one final dothis. How best was I? The. So I jumpsilked into enemy territory. It all went to devilplace when I uncovered the plot twist: I worked for some bad spanishwordfordudes. Duh duh duuuu. I returned to my placeofmomfeeling to murderhug my own country’s bigtiewaver. A guy named Tom Foster was the bestboy and, let’s see, the key grip was—

            I’m going to kill him, Joe said.

            No killing, Roger said.

            I’m going to kill someone, Joe said. Just you watch.

            But before Joe could kill Ethan, the screenface stepped on a nail that left him with a teenieick in his personsauce.

            To avoid being a burden, most would have faced their end alone, but Ethan asked us to carry him onward and also for some hairytreeball water if it wasn’t too much trouble.

            Death being his last great role, he soliloquized the entire elevenplustwo days it took him to die.

            There is no grace, he said.

            Except in refusal, he said.

            You think about that, he said. Especially you, Roger.

            Wait, what did I do? Roger said.

            After we kicked Ethan’s body into an earthcrack, we all felt deepnot. Not because he was eyeknown or we knew what he’d been talking about, but because afterword the silence felt too silent.

*

            I told the story about the woman.

            98 days.

            I know because I count them, I count them, I count them.

*

            I will write your name in clouds, Dorthea, Dorthea, Dorthea.

            What happens next—

            It could be anything.

            It won’t be.

            But it could.

*

            The Eighth to Last Man on Earth gave me the idea for the clouds.

            Baptiste spent a lot of time trying to be anywhere but the Earth’s surface. Before The Big Drop, he’d worked the hamburgerflatness at Golden Knockers, but he believed if he found an airtube he could fly away from everything.

            Where he would go, Baptiste never said. The destination irrelevant, it was only one more inventive suicide in world that never valued the creativity over the violence.

            Baptiste never got an airtube aloft, but he managed to drive one once. We took it down the road until it ran out of airtubecarjuice in a scorched field.

            There, things only got worse. He built himself a flingyrig, and as he climbed up it, he extemporized a poem about a great war between ground and sky.

            I think technically it’s a trebuchet, Roger said.

            If it rhymes, it’s a poem, Baptiste said.

            Like the birds he went up—

            And down.

            Out of respect for his beliefs, we didn’t bury him.

*

            You were not The Last Woman on Earth.

            Not in any count save mine.

*

            The Ninth to Last Man on Earth I never knew.

            We heard the echoes of a bulletpow and ran to find him leaking all over the tinspinny at a playground.

            Who he’d been or where he called placeofmomfeeling we never knew and we didn’t ask.

            The dead can only teach us one thing, and it’s something we’ve always known.

*

            The WhatsIt follows behind me trying to walk on his two hind horseboots.

            He wants to show me that we’re in this together, share the same fate, that I’m not becoming less human, he’s only becoming more.

            Maybe that’s why he ate Joe. What better way to show humanity than to destroy a precious thing for a vulgar reason?

            That’s probably how Joe saw it.

            Until he didn’t.

*

            I don’t know the digitfiddling that can tell me how many days count as a lifetime, but if you think we had enough, Dorthea, I think so, too.

            We met at a party when still we had buddyups. We danced when still we could spindid.

            We were in aaaaaaaaa for the time we had to aaaaaaaaa.

            These words, they drop like a bridge collapsing beneath my feet as I try to escape into our past.

            I will fall, Dorthea.

            Again, Dorthea.

*

            The Tenth to Last Man on Earth wanted everyone to be positivegogo about any ohnos.

            When the rest of us got deepnot, Martin would prick his finger so we could thoughtholdstorm some solutions. He’d write these in his own personsauce in the scribblerectangle he kept in the back pocket of his dungarees.

            Everyone hated him.

            It wasn’t his fault these lists of solutions always looked like a suicide note.

            Himself, he never got deepnot, not even at the end. He died in his sleep with a smile stretched over his face.

            What a selfish asscrater, Doctor Gunther said. And here I’m going to die of excruciating leg cancer.

*

            Nope.

*

            I will brand the Earth with your name, Dorthea, Dorthea, Dorthea, the last thing I do, Dorthea, Dorthea, Dorthea.

            And I will be the scorched period at the end of the final word I could not save.

            I bend beside soot-covered vroomvrooms huffing the fumes as I suck and spit. A swirlywhirl overtakes my thoughthold and I drop so many words, but I hold tight to your name.

            The WhatsIt watches as I write it in carjuice, his lookycircles peeking above a billboard for adult teethfences, headknobs tilting in curiosity, black tongue slicking his faceflaps.

            I yell, I cry, I beg for him to abandon me to my goodbyeall. I wish him the best in whatever future he can rend from this ruinous world.

            But before I can turn the last of the carjuice over my head and strike a spark, the WhatsIt charges.

            Rising on his hindlegs, he kicks the carjuice out of my hands with his horseboots. We manbusiness over your name, and I can no longer make out the wet letters in the dirt when the WhatsIt kafomps me good.

            Nightdots fill my vision. My arganow is balped. The carjuice mixedemup with the earthstuff and will never hotprickle now.

            I will be okay, I think until I drop the word.

            I will be autumntuesday, I think.

            And I want to be, be anything, be alive for another second and then another. Only moments ago I wanted goodbyeall over desolation, but that’s not how I see things now.

            I scramble upright and beat back the WhatsIt’s teethsnipping maw.

            I seesee you, I warcry.

            I strike and teethsnip back, getting close enough the WhatsIt can’t bend his neck to ouch me. I climb onto his back and wrap my handsticks around his neck, murderhugging him with all my remaining strength.

            He could throw me off but doesn’t.

            He could live but won’t.

            His heart quits.

            Mine rages ever on.

            He has his way out. I have mine.

*

            Dorthea, I wish I believed in forever. I wish we had more than 98 days.

            But the beautiful die, the birds fall, the clocks stop.

            When I go, I won’t go to you, Dorthea, but you will go with me.

            Memory is the best accounting of any life, and so I alwaysknot you, I will save yours as long as I can, bury your name in my heartbox, alive only for you, Dorthea, Dorthea, Dorthea, Dorthea.

[EXTRACTION]