Rare Air
Part Sixteen
There was something, in my head. Never mind, carving faces into safety logs and naming doors. No amount of loneliness creates the feeling of something stuck and squirming in your ear. I’ll never know but I’m guessing a moth or fly of some kind. I woke to the beating of wings in my right ear and that beating kept up here and there for hours. I tried lighting a small fire and leaning near it. Coax the stupid thing out maybe. After that came my dirty finger nail diving pointlessly into the opening of my ear. After that came a twig.
Whatever sort of bug it was it took its sweet time dying inside my ear canal and I took my sweet time making it all the worse by sticking this and that in there until the maddening, terrible beating of wings finally stopped.
I kept walking across the mountain, trying not to go up or down it, just along that same line. That thinking only lasted so long before the terrain chose a path for me. Up, always up. I woke up a few days later to a pile of yellow liquid on the backpack I was using for a pillow. The day after that a small chunk of something orange yellow with a leg sticking out of it. Always the pain though, an agonizing itch followed by a tormented and burning sensation. I used up the aspirin and tylenol I found on the dead refugees. I used up what food I had found as well. The snow was nearly all melted until I reached the glaciers. How massive they used to be, all the many paths they had once pushed and pulled across the top of the mountain. Now mostly just so much floods for what amounted to the rivers and tiny creeks below.
I started to get sick, really sick. I started to struggle on my endless day in and day out hikes around and ever up the mountain. There was something wrong, really wrong this time, going on, in, and around my ear. My forehead was hot to the touch, my nose ran constantly until it caked in my beard. Sneezing fits turned into coughing jags.
I hoped it was only a cold until I woke up weeping only to look down at the backpack/pillow. Green and yellow and orange besides and it just flowed out of my head like a leaky facet from there on out.
I was nine, maybe ten days like that when I saw the light. A distant pin point up over the old craigs and bare earth left by the old glaciers. I walked clean through that first night looking at that light, hoping that maybe it was an illusion. Some mountainous version of a distant oasis mirage in the sand. Maybe I would lose my footing along the bare, sharp rocks and wind up just like the frozen refugees I had gleaned my last bit of life from.
Two days like that, trudging and pulling myself up through the rocky terrain to that fucking infernal and aggravating light. Two days of this miserable pain pounding in my head. Two days of coughing and stopping and puking up nothing and coughing some more.
I finally reached the trail that some eagle scouts or park rangers from days gone by had marked out for use on the way to the tower. A fire watch tower, a weather station, an outlook built in the old days to look out over the sound and the peninsula during the war? None of that mattered to me.
I climbed and nearly crawled up the steep path to the steps of that tower with its constant beam of light and I finally reached those stairs. I touched them with my hot hands and smiled. The seed had been planted long ago, days before. The fever and the agony won long before and I wasn’t heading up that path anymore to seek shelter or safety. I wanted to find the owner of that ugly, awful beacon. The mad red light that beckoned me up the side of that awful mountain to my doom. Whoever I found there, whatever I found there, would be destroyed for the sake of having ever existed.
She was in her late thirties or early forties. Her hair was up in a loose bun and she was wearing pajamas and a terry cloth bathrobe. The tower smelled like candles burnt for their scent not their light. The heat in the place was coming up through the floor, through vents, not a wood burning stove or an open fire pit. She smiled at me, at first. She looked at me and cocked her head like a dog trying to hear some distant sound. She had the can of peas in one hand and an opener in the other.
I barely recognized what she was doing as eating. I couldn’t remember the last time I ate something out of a can. I didn’t care what it was. It was about to be mine. Everything up there was about to be mine. I watched that smile die on her face as I growled and lunged at her.
That flaring agony was still hammering in the right side of my head as I murdered that woman. That constant pain was hammering away at me as I swallowed the can of olive grey nothing. That agony kept on as I looted through the remains of that old weather station and found this old, yellowed pad of paper and a working pen to go along with it. I found nothing else of use in that ugly place. She was down to her last can of food and I killed her, not for it, but because she dared to live at all. I killed her because of that awful red beacon still emitting ignorantly from that worthless tower of old. I smashed the console and killed that awful beacon as I looked out and saw the moon shining down over the remains of the once proud Puget sound.
I saw no lights below. No red beacons on distant mountains reaching east or south. No distant camp fires noting the remains of our once proud race. Nothing. No lights at all against the night. I had killed the last one.
I couldn’t stay in that place. Murder was the least of the reasons. I took this pad of paper and this pen. I took a few other mostly useless items and as much water as I could carry and I set that tower on fire.
I get that I’m dying, I know I’m going slow and mean. Maybe I deserve it? Maybe for killing that woman the way I did, maybe for what I did on the road before that? Maybe for being the kind of person who just sits and watches someone give up and die on an urban trail? Some of us died fighting the plague, some of us died from it. Some of us died from accidents or incidents after that. Most of us died from hunger or thirst in the wake of it all. Me, I died from an ear infection at the top of a mountain. Maybe I died the last of my kind, at least as far as they eye can see, and if so, let the last words we wrote be simple and to the point. “We were all a little insane, all the while, and that never should have stopped us from being there for each other. If we had all been there for each other, from day one. We wouldn’t have gone out like this.”