Rammel Chan, Chicago, USA
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The last man dreams in his burrow.
He is dreaming of birds. Black and white birds. Clumsy like rotund chickens. The birds are his daughters and they stand on an island in the north where the air is so cold it is static on their feathers. It is winter on this arid rock and he is the sun and the birds that are his daughters watch as he rises and falls like an old man waving goodbye over the horizon. And now night is all there is.
The last man startles awake in his burrow and then succumbs again to sleep.
He is now dreaming of his father, though he doesn’t recognize him. His father is a skeleton of tall gigantic and yellowing bones reaching down to him with gaunt rope-like fingers that dig into the ground like tree roots. In the dream, the last man is young, a boy, a teenager, a baby, and he is asking his father a question. Of what? As he speaks he forgets. His father’s papery lids peel back as if waking and reveal the hollow blackness of the inside of his skull and his teeth chatter to speak and it is his father’s voice and the answer is too much, it is too terrible. Out of his father, another larger skeleton grows, a ribcage from a ribcage, a femur from a femur, a skull from a skull, and the new skeleton is hunched over the skeleton of his father and it is his father’s father. And from his father’s father another skeleton grows and it is his father’s father’s father, larger still. And from him another and then another until the sky is a canopy of bones and the skulls of his ancient ancestors looking down on him and he asks each of them the same question and they answer and it is too horrible, too much. The last man feels the shivers of grief in his skin, tears like snakes on his cheeks. And he wakes with a start. And he reaches to his wife in the cold and sweaty tangle of their bed. And hearing her breath calms him but the sting and cold of his tears cling him to wakefulness and so he moves through the tunnels of the burrow into the light of the main room and he makes a tea of nettles and lemongrass. He tries to forget what he learned in his dream: that he is the last man.
The last man and his small family live in the shadow of two mountains, at the bottom of the valley. His wife and the two girls, they do not wake. It is still cool enough to step outside, to breathe the air, to remember. He decides that opening his eyes to his valley will steady his heart.
He exits the burrow into a world that has remained as it was all his life. To his front, he can see the berry bushes on the east side of Sunset Mountain where he once played and where his daughters now play. To his left, to the south, he can see the hill where the shadow of the Sunrise Mountain never reaches, where once his father grew, and now his wife grows, hardy robust plants that could take root in any soil.
To the north, he hears the distant bubbling river stream that separates the valley from the plain and provides them with fish, though like his father and his father’s father and his father’s father’s father before him, the last man only fishes once a week. On Fridays.
About his feet scratch the three hens and the rooster that haunt the outside of their burrow, gaunt strange things that peck the ground at nothing.
Behind him is the outside of the burrow, like a glass igloo. The main room is thatched with ancient hexagonal glass panels. Made by men who knew more than he did, made by men to last thousands of years. They are hard as bricks but clear as stream water, letting in the steel-gray light of the valley morning. Between noon and two when the sun is at its zenith, sunlight washes the shadow of the mountain off their burrow and the glass panels absorb the light and stores the energy so that at night the burrow has enough power to heat their food, purify their water and light their tunnels with pin pricks of electricity.
At the back of the main room, the burrow becomes a cave-like series of tunnels, held up and floored by arches of wood and stone. The tunnels lead into a series of rooms. First, there is the master bedroom, a large mattress where his wife still sleeps, a ferociously intelligent woman with a face like the moon, beautiful and unavoidable. Here in this room his daughters were born. Further down, a bedroom, where now sleeps Aya, his first child, a strong, muscular child of twelve, a steady-minded, fiercely disciplined learner. Further down, another bedroom, Hua’s room, his second child, a child of eight: imaginative, sharp-tongued and born salty. Further down, seven other bedrooms, saved for sons or daughters that the last man and his wife never had. One room is now storage for the weaver. The other is for the clothes. Another is to store tools for building. Another, tools for gardening. Their inanimate family. There is a room of food. Inside, tiny smoked fish hang on lines, a basket of eggs, potatoes, aged, salted animal flesh that the last man had captured in a pit trap twenty days ago, and an endless wall of jars: jars full of berries and jars of cucumbers and melons and roots.
And if you venture further down the tunnel finally you will find the coolest parts of the burrow, where the family sits to talk during the mid-day rest, where they tell stories, where they play games and where they keep their room of books.
His wife has risen. She watches him from the door of their burrow and he turns to meet her gaze. A face like the moon, bright and unavoidable.
The steam from his tea eases the clamoring of his heart. It is a beautiful day and he talks to himself as he walks the half mile to the stream. He finds a spot where he likes to fish and sits with his tea and he thinks for a time about this dream, about his ancestors’ answer to the question he forgot.
When was the last time he had seen others? Others that were not his family. Ahh yes, the old woman. He remembers her vividly, her gaunt oxen that pulled her cart through the valley, her sweat soaked cloak hiding her loose skin on her bones. Aya was nine then, yes, and Hua was five. Sharing with her their food and their burrow for a week, in return she gave them an old replacement solar brick that was laid like refuse in her cart and an ancient book written in a Far-Easter language that his wife only somewhat knew. The trader-woman’s news from the east was only ramblings of her own family. With bags of stream water tied tightly and jars of cucumber and berries, she left to the North and did not pass through the valley again.
He tries to remember, when was the last time he had even seen markings of other men? Had he ever seen them? When he ventures south, where his pit traps for the grazers are laid, he always fears being surprised by them, the other men. Years ago, his father had taught him to find their markings, warned him of the dangers of other peoples: slavers, eaters of manflesh, the takers of things. Yet after the lesson, his father admitted it had been years since he had seen footprints or hoof prints, or heard the sound of a transport engine, or seen the smoke of a distant campfire. He considered himself lucky in this. His father admitted too that his own father had only ever seen strange men once, at a distance and they perhaps were as scared of him as he was of them.
The last man tries to remember, when was the last time he had seen another man? And he thinks, as far back as fifteen years. When his father was just starting to become lame in his leg. They ventured for a year past the Sunset Mountain to the arid steppes of the West. As they walked his father would touch him on the shoulder, and at first he did not look back because he thought the old man simply needed support but then as they walked deeper into the steppes, he found his father would touch him on his arm and on his neck and the top of his head and when finally the last man would look back he would find his father smiling, great lines across face. He was a good old man, funny and witty, forgetful but hardworking. The last man thought himself so lucky to even be alive at the same time as a father like him.
At night the old man told the boy stories and by day they marched and saw nothing. No one. Not a soul.
Until one morning his father walked them into the joint of two rivers and there they encountered their first people in three months. Amongst three yurts between the two rivers his old father embraced an even older, more ancient man, hair sparse and silver and his eyes gray with blindness. In a slow, tottering, meek way, like a shy, excited child, the ancient man opened a door to a yurt and revealed a woman, his granddaughter, a girl with a face like the moon, beautiful, shining, and unavoidable.
And there amongst the three yurts between the two rivers, the last man and his wife were married. There were only four of them to witness and sing the song at this last wedding: his father, her mother, her grandfather, her aunt. They did the ritual and ate a modest meal and at dusk the family, eagerly, pushed them into a room to consummate. On their first night together they talked, because that was all he knew how to do. He listened to her and he marveled at the way she spoke, like running water, clear and fast. She talked of black and white birds that lived in the north that disappeared from the world long ago, when the world was cool and people were everywhere. She seemed to know so much and was so willing to offer it to him. All he could do was make her laugh.
He kissed her on the mouth, wanting to take in all her knowledge, wanting to take in everything that was her. He thought himself so lucky to even be alive at the same time with a woman such as her.
And he remembers now how her grandfather looked the day they left, haloed in sunlight, wisps of silver hair in the wind, grieving eyes peeking over a smile, small and crouched as if sinking into himself. He remembers how he smelled as they embraced, like the last crackle of fire-coals, the last heavy drops of water from a rain. How he shrank away as they walked, how he waved and kept on waving until they could no longer see him. He realized now that this was how he always imagined him, waving there still. Even when they returned to their burrow in the valley, where the garden was overgrown and the food was dried up and rotten, but the books smelled the same from when they had left. He forever imagines her grandfather just to the horizon, waving goodbye. Was he the last man he had seen?
No, the last man he saw was his father. He had died just a few weeks after Aya was born. The night before he had held the baby in his hands and kissed her head and made a joke to her and she smiled and he laughed like the last man had never seen his father laugh before. In the morning he found him sitting in his room. His hands open on his lap and his head hung down toward them as if he were studying the lines in his palms. The man did not move from the doorway but watched, hoping that his presence would wake his father with a start and they would laugh at how silly he was to have fallen asleep that way. He stood for a long time until his wife found him.
They buried him in the south hill garden, as he would have wished.
And then today, years later, he came to him in the dream. With his horrid answer. Though his heart has eased, he cannot shake the thought that lingers: “Am I the only man left?”
How could he have known? The last man’s only way of knowing the world was through his senses and all he could sense was his valley. He can only see as high as heaven, only smell as low as the dirt on his feet. He can only hear as far as his wife can read and he can only love as long as the length of his daughter’s hair. He could not know all things. He is a man. There are things that men might know. Many men together, many people, could know many things: of the lifelessness of oceans, of the disappearance of ice, of the heaving tyranny of deserts, of the extinction of animals, of the decay of diversity, of the emptiness of soils, of the eccentricity of orbits, of the persistence of feedback loops, of the toxicity of air, of the centuries old gradual depletion of his race, and in knowing these things they might have known sooner what now he discovers in dreams, and perhaps found a new way to live. They together. Many men, many people might do this. But a man, a person, alone, does not know. How could he? He wakes with the sun, feeds his belly and the bellies of his children and labors to ensure their bellies remain full. He lives just as his father lived and his father’s father and his father’s father’s father and occupies his time harvesting berries, pickling squashes and cucumbers, fishing, hunting and teaching the symbols and words and skills to his children.
And Aya and Hua, would they have children? For years, he had taken for granted the thought that someday another man, a trader, or a sojourner might come and embrace him too as his father did to his wife’s grandfather and someday offer up his sons to his daughters. Those sons would be lucky to have them. Aya and Hua are like their mother, strong, witty, quick to learn, precise in their judgment. Unavoidable women, like the moon. In some ways they are like him too: they are steady and sometimes they are also funny. And the way they laugh in the bushes reminds him of his father. And the way they cry when they are hurt, reminds him of his wife’s grandfather. In them is the great combination of those he has loved before. Will their children be like them? Will there be children to be like them?
No. He rejects it. How could this dream be true? In other dreams before he had found answers, yes, but in many dreams he had also found delusions, fictions, feelings that felt true but were really of his own imagining.
He decides the dream must be one of these. There must be others.
But that dream was sent to him for a reason and he decides that the reason was to compel him to action. To see for himself. He decides he should go out into the West, across the steppes and search for them there first. It would be dangerous to leave his family behind but what danger could it mean if he finds no one? What would it mean to him if he would die and not smell and kiss the wispy hairs of his own grandchild? No, he must plan a journey to find them, to find someone.
When he meets them it will start with trade. He could offer pickles, the hexagonal bricks, some dried fish, and then as time moves on the partnership would grow into a friendship, yes, and maybe a contract of marriage for his daughters as his father had done years before he was born with the old man to the west and eventually their children will meet and he and his wife and their relatives will witness and sing the song and his left eye twitches and a bird calls and they can come stay in the valley or at least nearby and he feels a tenseness in his neck and in his arm, a numbness and they will have a child and he scrunches his face but parts of his face feel heavy as if loaded with sand and perhaps the child will be a boy and a blood vessel is bursting and in this way the dream won’t come true and needles of light appear before him and chase after him wherever he looks and his sons-in-law will be good men too and there is a leaking in his thinking and the mug of tea tilts and trickles to his feet and the grandchildren will be strong and many and he opens his mouth and he tries to call his wife’s name and he begins to stand from his favorite fishing spot but his knees buckle and he forgets how to stand and the lights appear more fervently and his breathing is labored and his face is suddenly on the earth now, on the valley he has loved for his whole life and his arms are spread out, his palms down, his numb left hand clings to the grass and if you tilted your head to see just right it would look like the last man were embracing the whole world as though saying goodbye and saying goodbye not just for himself but for all those men who came before, who carried hope like fire on fragile wicks of muscle and skin and bone and his voice comes out and it startles him that it sounds like a laugh, his father’s laugh, his daughters’ laugh and something else happens and something else and something else and he can’t count or conceive of things happening to him anymore but he can feel something stopping and ending and he can feel the idea of him leaving and he clings hard to it, like a man would, like man has, like man never will again, defiant, “No,” and before the clockwork in him cranks down to a halt and the leaking in his mind ruins the engines of his body and the cells that carry his Y chromosome pale and disappear from the world forever, the last man thinks about his daughters.
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Their mother found him. She followed the dusty footprints he had made in the path to the river stream and found him there, beside his favorite fishing spot. She did not scream as she thought she might. She watched him from far away for a long time. She hoped that maybe he was just resting.
After a time, she scooped him up over her shoulders and brought his body the half-mile home. She left the mug.
They wept. Their mother knelt beside them so her face was near theirs and she let their tears soak into her hair. They wept so long and so hard and they screamed his name. And they asked him to wake up. They begged him.
They buried him in the garden as he would have wished.
In the years to come, at the behest of their mother, Aya and Hua would journey into the world armed with their knowledge and their skill and their wit and in years and years and years find no person like their father. Nor would they find many people like them. Just their leavings. An empty cave of scattered tools and hides. Abandoned detritus of tents on a plain. Some old women in huts by a river, waiting to die.
And they reached an ocean, and watched a flimsy layer of debris float and dance atop the waves. And they reached a land of hard rubble, words written and faded in the stones, now covered in ivy, moss and grass. And they found themselves in deserts of endless sun and over mountains of tinny air and in breathless forests of oily, strange trees. They hunted megafauna, the likes of which have not been seen for hundreds of thousands of years. And they fought and bested gargantuan beasts that they had never read of in any books. They healed themselves and rested in familiar solar burrows along hillsides built and forsaken by people like them. They picked berries from bushes in their wanderings, laughing at stories of their youth in the valley and remembered their mother and of course, remembered their father.
And eventually they found their way back to the valley, hair silver, skin brown, muscles taut. The garden was overgrown and the food was dried up and rotten, but the ancient books gathering dust in the burrow smelled the same from when they were young. They found the bones of their mother in the bedroom where they were born and they buried her in the south hill garden as she would have wanted.
In these later years, the dream of the last man seeped into the minds of his daughters, though it came not as one night terror of bones and answers, but as drips of water torturing from the kitchen, as the ticking of a clock counting on the wall, as the clattering harsh breath of old age in a sister’s throat. It came in the passing of the hours, days, decades without family arising around them, without friend or even stranger waving from the horizon, without the magical appearance of the wispy hairs and sweet smells of children.
They had witnessed the lonely earth and they were married to Finality and knew him well.
And the summers grew too hot, and the legs grew lame and the sisters grew too old and to rest was all they could do.
Hua, who was a better storyteller than her sister, would talk in the coolness of the back room. Stories she made up. Stories from books. Stories of the things she could not have known on her own but a great many people had once known together.
She had read an article many years ago, or was it a story her mother told her before she died. No, Aya remembers, it was part of a book by one Elizabeth Kolbert, a fairy story of flightless, black and white birds that once lived in the northern islands. Ahh, yes, Great Auks, they were called. Aya nods, interested, listening, toying with the remnants of her meal, craning her neck to the ceiling of the burrow, listening deeply. These birds, Hua says, were docile, fat and clumsy, more like chickens in penguin dress. They first encountered man in the greedy sailors, pirates in search of fortune and gold and land to tame. The birds’ bodies were sacrificed to these men. Great young men, a different kind of man than our father, she says, but men still the same. They plucked the birds from the ground as easily as if they were ripe turnips, they butchered them for their feasting, these stupid, flightless animals. And then when the men failed in finding their gold, they decided to make their fortune off their backs. They peeled off their skin, tore off the feathers from their bodies and shipped them into bags to be stuffed into ladies pillows on the continent.
In a short time, swaths of the land that were once the birds’ nesting ground, once covered in busy black and white bodies, were now empty. Eggs cracked open on the limestone, the bones of their mothers and fathers picked clean. The story ends, Hua says, very sadly. The last remaining birds, the very last birds, were found on a treacherous, icy island in the north. It seems they had chosen to nest there because it was the furthest away they could get from humans. Just two of them, male and female, tending one lone egg. The birds had become such a rarity, that to the men their flesh was a delicacy, their feathers a rare commodity. The men who went looking for them, had seen their black and white bodies from their ship and knew they could make money out of them. In their greed, the men clambered onto the island, almost dying themselves. At the sight of the men, the birds tried to run, but were easily bested, just as they had been bested a hundred years before. Short legs, stubby flightless wings against the men who came, fiercely and unrelentingly, with their height and their strength and their brutality. Without remorse, the men strangled the last of the Great Auks. As they dragged the bodies to the ship, the men noticed that in the scuffle the last egg had cracked and was useless to them. So they abandoned it, on a cold island in the north, to freeze, or worse yet, to be born into the world, the last of its kind, and to die quickly, no parents, no grandparents, no others, not a living relative in the world to grieve for it.
Hua stops. A silence falls on the back room of their burrow. The burrow of the last man, now the burrow of the last two women, waiting to die. They sit silent so long that the light of the sun from the main room fades and the electricity kicks on with a hum. And now night is all there is.
Aya, finally, mercifully, rubs her eyes and says, “How lucky I am.”
“What do you mean?” Hua asks quietly.
“I have you.”
And they thought themselves so lucky to be alive.
Rammel Chan is an actor and writer based in Chicago. He is a Kundiman Fiction Fellow and his short plays have premiered at the Gift Theater as part of TEN and his fiction has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction and Riksha. He has performed with the Timeline Theater, Lookingglass Theater Company, the Goodman Theater, Victory Gardens Theater and with the Steppenwolf Theater Company, among others.
Please say hi at rammelchan.com