A Compartment Found Beneath the Ruin...

Cataclysmia, 1978:

"WHAT IN ALL THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?" Yelled Harper to me from across the dust.

"What?" I replied. "What, WHAT DO YOU EXPECT?"

"WHAT I expect is for YOU to start acting like a man and forget all this stupid-shit nonsense. Look, just stop for one fuckin' minute and look around you.. what'ya see uh? NOTHING! N-O-T-H-I-N-G! Pull your head out of your ass and get out of that pile of shit before somebody comes along and catches us here."

I squatted low in a pile of what was a frame house. I looked at a photo I found. It was in a frame with cracked glass and displayed a man and a woman in their twenties or thirties and each had the unmistakable smile of of companionship on their faces. Each knowing that the other held the same lever of admiration as the opposite. Harper yelled at me for a few minutes more. All talk, never any action. I threw the photo of the couple in the debris and stood and walked back to where Harper was on the roadside, the fallen home and all its contents shifting under my feet.

"You're a prick you know that?"

"Why?"

"'Cause you are... you're a fucking prick and you just don't think about how your stalling and taking doating breaks is killing us and perhaps making us twenty-times more vulnerable than what we shouldn't be."

"I think you're overreacting"

"'Overreacting'? Are you a dumb shit or am I just plain stupid?"

"Well, if you're asking me..."

"Nevermind wiseguy... look, you and I need to keep moving. If we stop at everyone of these homes just to view the fuckin' photos we're gunna be goners! Those asshole gangs of religeios nuts are going to catch up to us and we're going to be burnt at the stake or tar and feathered or some other mideval bullshit! Just listen to me for a chance will ya? Listen and keep moving."

Harper was never a very patience friend. Always quick to react and always slower to listen.

In the dusk of it all I found contentment in each and every item that I uncovered, with or without Harper's approval. I imagined myself as one of the people in the pictures, as one of the people in the times long past, and as one of the happy, unforsaken beasts who crawled the earth with none but LIVING on their minds in place of sheer survival alone.

"Fuck you Harper! You're a negative piece of shit."