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Bad as it is, as a general rule, it could always be worse.
Figuring out exactly how is a fun little game to play in the bleakest moments of the longest nights, when fires are burning in the streets, the sky is rumbling, and you’re praying the echoes of gunfire won’t wake the baby.
At least we have water and power, albeit in limited supply and at offensively high rates. Store shelves are still reasonably well stocked with essential items. Deliveries from outside the perimeter mercifully keep coming. The police force is woefully understaffed, but it exists and it somehow manages to keep the city from descending into complete lawlessness.
Nine months after Philadelphia was laid to waste by a dragon, things are arguably going better than you’d expect. Though, to be fair, that’s not saying much.
How it began was sudden seismic activity under downtown. Cracks in the road spreading in seconds. Cars and pedestrians that didn’t have time to get clear tumbling into the crevasse. Then silence, just long enough that people thought it might all be over, just a strange, random earthquake rattling easterners who don’t plan for this sort of thing.
It wasn’t.
Even now, there are a lot of questions no one has answers to. Chief among them: where did the creature come from? Deep, deep underground? A dimensional rift somewhere down below? A government lab? China?
Day to day, pushing my son’s stroller through the wreckage, I can only say there are few things I can imagine that matter less than the where and the why.
What we do know is it crawled out from a sinkhole in Franklin Square, 70 feet tall, with slick and scaly skin, clawed fingers, a slimy tongue, leathery wings that spanned half a city block. Tens of thousands of deaths and billions of dollars of property damage later, Philadelphia is a festering scar that might never fully heal.
Anyway, Robbie wakes up a few times a night these days, crying like 6-month-olds do. My wife Dina and I alternate rocking him until he falls back asleep. It somehow always takes longer for me. She doesn’t make a big deal about it, but it’s a bit of a blow to my already faltering self-esteem how easy it is for her.
We have kept the crib next to the bed for longer than I imagine either of us expected. How far do you really want to be from the baby when there’s a non-zero chance a dragon is going to burst through your wall like a fire-breathing Kool-Aid Man?
So there comes this moment every night where I wake from a fitful sleep certain I heard him gurgle or coo. I stare across the bed over Dina’s legs at the bars of the crib, motionless, silent, waiting, hoping I won’t have to spend the next hour settling him down.
It’s worse than usual tonight because the pain was already keeping me up. Something in my right shoulder is off since the fight earlier, and I’ve got bruises down the left side of my chest. I can’t get comfortable and I worry shifting around too much might wake him.
However much sleep you think you need a night, having a baby teaches you pretty fast that you can get by on significantly less. Not that sleeping is that easy these days to begin with. An entire city grappling with PTSD, the air heavy with fear and anxiety, everyone everywhere on edge. It’s infectious.
When I close my eyes sometimes, I see this hulking mass, ten stories high, tearing through buildings and vehicles, leaving debris and death in its wake. I barely caught a glimpse of it from a distance when it happened, and I’ve resisted watching the countless videos of it online. But I heard the screams loud and clear and my mind filled in the rest.
It lasted three dark, cold and seemingly endless days. Twenty blocks away from the epicenter, in a high school basement that once doubled as a bomb shelter, you could hear the roars echo and feel the walls quiver. With the power out and cell networks overloaded, nobody knew anything for certain.
Listening to a handful of old crackpots trade rumors and theories over CB radio felt almost quaint, like an analog version of Twitter. Not that I could appreciate the charm at the time, thinking of nothing but where my pregnant wife might be and whether she and our unborn child would survive the insanity around us.
Somehow they did. For once, the dreadful lack of punctuality of her ob/gyn’s office came in handy. I stopped going to some of the appointments because they tended to start about an hour late and run twenty minutes longer than planned. Due to that chronic lateness, though, she was still at the hospital when it all went south, surrounded by doctors and emergency supplies.
There’s no moment in a pregnancy that isn’t stressful. Being a half a city apart with phone lines down, roads blocked, and a dragon rampaging through downtown Philly between us pushed me beyond my limits, though.
Down in that basement, I prayed a lot.
The guy manning the radio looked exactly like you’d expect: tattered coat, long beard, glasses held together by masking tape, ancient enough to have fought in Korea or Vietnam and not come back entirely in one piece. Friendly, but more than a little crazy.
Late at night, struggling to sleep, my body sprawled across three tottering cafeteria chairs, I’d hear him rambling on and on to no one in particular.
“You ever stop and think of how vulnerable we are every minute of every day?” the old man said often. “Buses, trains, malls, parks, anywhere you go, you’re a sitting duck. You know why? Why we only really secure airports and government buildings? Because security makes us feel unsafe. If you don’t see armed guards and metal detectors, you have to wonder, how dangerous could it really be, right? We put ourselves in danger every time we leave the house because protecting ourselves would make us feel like we’re in danger, and no one wants that.”
Whenever I did manage to fall asleep for a bit, I’d wake to him shouting things like, “The dragon is a metaphor for modern capitalism.”
He was a nice guy, though. A grandfather, it turned out. On day two, we bonded over a room-temperature can of Coke I found under a bench. He showed me pictures of his grandkids, I showed him ultrasound images. We wallowed in our well-earned pessimism about the world.
“We worried so much about terrorism. Climate change. Gun violence. Debt,” he said as he savored the last sip of flat, warm soda. “And in the end, it’s gonna be dragons that get us.”
“In retrospect, it feels inevitable,” I shrugged.
He nodded approvingly.
Robbie’s tears yank me out of the memory. Dina rolls over and mumbles that it’s my turn. After the night I had, I’m in no mood to argue over it. I exhale, fumble for my slippers, stumble across the room on stiff, swollen legs, and lurch toward the kitchen to grab a bottle.
Picking him up takes all the strength I’ve got. We settle into the rocking chair in the living room. I stare out the window at the quarter moon peeking through a late-night fog as he guzzles his formula.
Having a baby really ruins post-apocalyptic fiction for you. There’s always the young couple or the sullen widow trying to bring up a newborn in the aftermath of a great disaster, the symbol of hope and promise and rebirth and yada, yada. But, like, where are you getting diapers? You’re scrounging across a wasteland with little more than a backpack and you expect me to believe you’ve got a few dozen diapers in there to get through the week, and you’re going to keep lucking upon more as you go? You’ve got a steady supply of wipes and diaper cream?
Sure, if the mother survives, breast milk might get you through the early months. But a dad raising a kid alone in a barren hellscape? I just don’t see it. Where are you getting the formula and the water to mix with it?
That’s to say nothing of actually keeping a baby occupied and happy through the endless days without daycare or internet access, ensuring the kid gets its midday naps as you trek through the ruins of some forsaken city, praying that its inevitable crying and screaming doesn’t attract animals, mutants, zombies, or whatever.
I don’t buy it. My family is living in a merely moderately decimated community, and every single day is a struggle to ensure our baby is fully clothed and fed and that he’s still breathing come morning. I can’t imagine what we’d do if every last vestige of modern society had been immolated.
These are the things I think about when he’s fading out in my arms in the rocking chair but I’m not sure if he’s quite asleep enough to move him back to the crib without waking him. Every move is a gamble.
There’s something about these moments when it’s just me and him alone in the depths of the night. An intimacy I often tell myself I would never trade for a couple extra hours of sleep. I hold him close, pat his back, and sing my favorite songs in a soft, gravelly voice I’m too embarrassed to let others hear.
I don’t mean to romanticize it. It’s also frustrating as hell.
Anyway, I whisper the first verse and a half or so of Billy Joel’s “The Longest Time,” but I can’t quite pull together the rest of the lyrics so I move on to “Sometimes a Fantasy.”
I can’t help wondering if he’ll someday find himself in therapy recounting how his father used to sing him lullabies about phone sex, but I expect that’s going to be relatively low on his list of childhood traumas.
My eyes drift to the clock. It’s pushing up on that point in the early morning where it makes more sense to stay up than to go back to sleep. I have to be out the door in four hours to get downtown before the morning rush.
You might not think people would want to buy souvenirs from the deaths of tens of thousands of their fellow Americans, but you’d be wrong. T-shirts, snow globes, shot glasses. The campier and kitschier, the better, it turns out.
“I saw a dragon and all I got was this lousy t-shirt” is a top seller. As is the shirt with Samuel L. Jackson shouting, “Get this motherfucking dragon away from my motherfucking cheesesteak.”
Hey, I don’t design the shirts. I just sell them. Jangling down the street with a shopping cart full of cheaply made trinkets and shirts that will inevitably fade after the second or third wash, carrying about $30 in change as I circle the 5-block radius around a massive crater that the government still has blocked off.
Some would find it crass or uncouth to sell memorabilia marking such a tragedy. I don’t disagree, but my counter argument would be that I’ve got a 6-month-old who has grown accustomed to food and clothing.
I used to be a mid-level manager at a local bank. Small regional banks are great until the owner and half the executives are wiped out when the tail of a giant lizard tears through their offices. Turns out my skill set isn’t all that marketable in the aftermath of a dragon attack. So when my neighbor offered me this gig selling bootleg souvenirs he’s getting from I-don’t-ask-where, I wasn’t exactly in a position to say no.
I’m not, by nature, an outgoing person. But the sheepish guy standing quietly on the sidewalk doesn’t sell very many t-shirts. So I’ve learned to do the sales pitch, like I’m selling hot dogs and beer at a Phillies game. “Get ya’ souvenirs here!” and so on. You learn fast to tune out the dirty looks from locals and zero in on the rubes, the out-of-towners clicking selfies who treat all this like a visit to the set of “Pacific Rim.”
Then there are the truthers, the crowd convinced this was all a false flag attack hyped up to justify some sweeping expansion of government power. People so certain of something so utterly insane, you don’t even know where to begin trying to reason with them.
Last week, this guy came up to me ranting, raging, accusing me of helping the deep state sell “the big lie.”
“Dragon’s breath can’t melt steel beams,” he said.
“How do you know how hot a dragon’s breath is?” I asked.
“It’s all over Facebook,” he told me.
My first couple of months on the job, I might have argued with him. Pointed to the massive hole in the ground a few blocks away. Listed off names of friends and acquaintances I’d lost. At this point, I just offered him a snow globe at 25% off.
He kicked over my cart and ran away, screaming that the truth would soon be revealed.
I imagine someday I’ll tell Robbie stories about stuff like that and we’ll laugh together. That feels very far off in the future sometimes.
Of course, right now, I can make him laugh uncontrollably by blinking really fast or waving his arms around like a bird. Apparently, six-month-olds think I’m hilarious.
I’m sure that will change.
It’s getting close to 4 a.m. when I place him back in the crib. I watch the rain sweep against the windows and splash off the bars of the fire escape. He rolls over and begins to cry again. I pat his back rhythmically and try to whisper soothing sounds. It doesn’t work. I slap his back more firmly and gently shush him, lose myself in the rhythm of it. In the crib, he winces and rolls away toward the window. Away from me.
I can feel Dina staring through me from the bed.
Of course, this isn’t sustainable. But getting out costs money, and making money takes time. Especially when you’re also spending an awful lot of it caring for a baby and your condo is suddenly worth half what you paid for it a few years ago.
Dina knows this. We’ve discussed it ad nauseum for months. But I limped through the door with a black eye, torn jeans, and blood spattered across my shirt last night, and reason kind of flew out the window. I tried to explain what happened in a hurried whisper, but she wasn’t interested. She saw a 40-year-old father who got drunk and got himself into some stupid bar brawl with morons half his age. I honestly couldn’t dispute that characterization.
“I’m not raising my child here,” she declared, cutting off my third half-hearted attempt to defend myself. “This is insane.”
What happened is this: I met this guy, Dylan, for a drink after my shift. We weren’t close friends before all this, but between the dead and the departed, social circles have tightened up a bit. As usual, he tried to offer me a job.
So, pre-dragon, Dylan ran a fairly successful subscription toothpaste service. Post-dragon, he quickly learned one of the first things cut out of people’s budgets when a kaiju-driven recession hits is $16 mail-order green tea toothpaste that cleans their teeth exactly the same as the $3 tube you get at CVS. Now, he sells monster insurance. You know, so your home and vehicle are protected the next time a dragon, yeti, alien cyborg, or giant sloth attacks. It’s a grift, sure, but you kind of have to admire the hustle with which they got it up and running and got Tom Selleck to shoot the commercials for it.
Anyway, we’re arguing about the exact definition of a pyramid scheme, and the neighborhood “protection squad” barges in, harassing the kindly old Korean man behind the bar. Godzilla jokes abound. I know, I know, Godzilla was Japanese, not Korean, but that’s really not an argument worth having with these guys.
See, there's a kind of asshole who was always just waiting for an excuse. You know, teetering on the line, consumed by festering grudges against the popular kids who picked them last for dodgeball and the pretty girls who never even knew their names. A complete societal collapse in the wake of a 70-foot lizard attack left a vacuum that these goons couldn’t wait to fill with a baseball bat and an obviously homemade badge.
Dylan stepped up to intervene. I tried to stop him, but he asked me, “Do you really want to tell your son someday about how you stood by and did nothing?”
So there I was, an hour later, bruised and bloodied but feeling somewhat morally superior, as if that counted for something.
“We can’t live like this,” Dina said.
“Come on,” I told her. “The chances of another dragon attack are extremely low.”
“I really don’t understand how you can say those words and find that comforting,” she said, gazing out the window.
“It’s not comforting, but we can’t live in fear.”
“Of course we can,” she gulped down a rather intimidating swig of red wine straight from the bottle. “Who isn’t afraid of fucking dragons? Is living in denial really better?”
“Nobody’s in denial here,” I insisted. “I am down there every day. It’s a tourist attraction. I watch families snap photos in front of the wreckage. I know it sounds insane, but things are getting back to normal around here.”
“Back to normal? You’re covered in blood.”
I glanced down at my clothes. “Most of it’s not mine.”
She put the bottle down on the dining room table and headed toward the bedroom. Over my shoulder, I heard her ask from the hallway, “Have you considered getting off the streets and getting a real job again?”
“I’m sorry,” I looked back to see her leaning against the linen closet door with her arms crossed and her brow decidedly furrowed. “Were you under the impression selling t-shirts out of a shopping cart was plan A? This is the best I can do, babe.”
She responded with a vacant glare that shouted, That’s the problem.
Hours later, I’m still on edge. Maybe more than I know. That’s not an excuse. But if you don’t learn to live with your mistakes, parenting will drive you nuts by the time you check out of the maternity ward. Robbie snuggles close to my chest in the rocking chair.
Could I wake up Dina and ask her to sit with him? Sure, but there’s a point in trying to do a thing where getting the thing done becomes more about proving a point than anything else.
A rumbling echoes in the distance but he barely notices. I stop rocking and wait.
Thunder strikes differently now. You hear a booming roar in the sky, you don’t know what may follow, whether some winged beast is up there somewhere, poised to rain fire down upon you. You hold your breath till the lightning comes.
The sky flashes. He blinks and I can see him struggling to lift his eyelids back up, like a weightlifter stretching to bench a little more than he can handle. I resume rocking.
This is the point in the night when exhaustion and frustration give way to festering anxiety, when my mind unspools increasingly dire scenarios for my son’s future that seem both outlandish and inevitable. I held out hope for a while that there would be a return to normal on the other side of all this, but nights like tonight remind me normal left town nine months ago and is never coming back.
Robbie is going to grow up post...whatever the hell we’re living through. “The D Generation,” the media calls them, which is admittedly cooler than Generation X or Generation Z. But how do you prepare a child for a world where dragons are more than fairy tales and CGI? You can’t wave away their fears anymore by telling them, “Monsters aren’t real,” because apparently some are.
This is not the life we envisioned for our child, but what real life ever is? They say no plan survives first contact with the enemy, and for a parent who dreams up the best for their kid, the enemy is often reality. So instead of working my way toward a corner office at Liberty Savings and Trust, I’m selling t-shirts and snow globes next to a giant hole in the world. Instead of running a successful online stationery business from our apartment, Dina is holding our home together with grit and duct tape. Instead of swim classes or gymnastics, we’re scrounging up cash to send our baby to toddler survival training.
Here we are, a city over an abyss that opened up one morning and burped out a dragon. People on the outside had sympathy at first, but that faded in weeks. A hurricane, a mass shooting, wildfires. There’s always a crisis somewhere in America. Nobody’s coming to solve this, to wave a magic wand, to medivac us to safety. We’re on our own.
In the darkness, something howls at the moon. I hold Robbie tighter.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” I whisper softly as he nuzzles into my shoulder.
Sometimes, I wonder why I lie to a child too young to understand a word I’m saying.