The Last Man on Earth

This story is 100% true.

Once upon a time back when I was gainfully employed, I attended a conference in the city of Rock Island, which is part of the mighty Mississippi-bestriding Quad Cities Metropolitan Area (Davenport, Bettendorf, Rock Island, Moline, and East Moline). And as that conference dragged on into eternity, it came to me that it had been one long-assed time since I'd visited my Iowa home-town.

Now the term "home-town" (as well as its corollary question, "Where are you from?") has always been problematic for me. Where I was born is 900 miles and two states away from where I spent my preschool years. Where I spent my preschool years is 7,000 miles and few countries and languages away from where I started school. Where I started school is 18,000 miles and several countries (we took the long way 'round, back to the United States) away from where I finished my primary education, learned about baseball and bullying, and discovered science fiction, beer and girls.

And so forth.

But the place I was thinking of in Iowa is definitely one of my home-towns.

In my memory, it has always been something built out of lint from Ray Bradbury's pockets. A microscopic Iowa town of streets tossed here and there like yarrow sticks, a gaunt, elongated clapboard church that floats in my recollections like something from the deep background of an El Greco painting, a scattershot of houses and slowly collapsing barns, a general store, a Chinese restaurant, a dowdy little beauty parlor/tavern (I could never quite suss out whether these were two, distinct establishments or if the regulars there just drank in the middle of the day), some dark and mysterious basements (cool as crypts and stocked with dark, stumbly things) and one, squat monster of an elementary school where my mom taught:  located conveniently right across the street from our house, it was a 1930s beaut made out of granite and built to last until the sun went nova, with mile-long banisters apparently carved from solid oak and a playground that used to call us at all hours like a Siren.

(All of which was down the road a long way from where my father worked -- a school famous for being America's first All!Electric! High School until it burned to the ground some years after we moved away.)

So, after MapQuest told me that I could make it there and back to Chicago without too much trouble, off I went across the Mississippi.

The town is not hidden, but if you don't know which frontage roads to get on and double back down, and which forlorn war memorial you have to pass before you start looking for the turn, you will never find it.  Then a longish drive through another, newer town, and there you are: each piece of the tiny skyline dropping into place right where you left it.

There is that other house we lived in for a time: the one where I had so many impressive nightmares.  There is the church.  There is post office.  There is the school.

But...where are all of the people?

Where are any of the people?

I had arrived as dusk lightly gilded every surface, and the whole place was empty. I don't mean ghost- town-empty: I mean it looked as if the town had had a mass fire drill and everyone had up and left a few hours before. 


I parked in the school lot and walked around the town.


No one stood in any doorway.  No television played.  No radio.  No music or voices came from anywhere.

The general store was closed, but the restaurant was open...and empty.  Tables were set.  A few jackets hung from the coat rack.  Steam was visible from the kitchen.  But no people.  No one to reply to my "Halloooo!"

No one at the post office.

No one answered the door of my old house.

The school itself stood open and empty.  The ancient gym was rigged up for indoor horse-shoes.  The locker rooms -- pitch dark and locked tightly off -- gently exhaled damp, old memories.  A large, sugar-cube model of the United States Capitol building sat half-melted near a trophy case stuffed with statues and loving cups dating back to the Truman administration.  I followed wide, stone staircases up and down three floors of silent classrooms full of desks, chairs, books, lab equipment, library carrels and every other stand issue item to be found in a pre-internet school, all standing mutely under acres of clear plastic tarp, frozen in the moment of their last productive use at the hands of Iowa school children.    

In one of these rooms, under one of these tarps, was the spot where a small going-away party had been held for my mother.  (Neighbors had moved away before, of course, but usually to Des Moines, or Burlington or maybe as far away as Iowa City -- the thought of someone moving from here to the Philippines was, well, Mom might as well have been moving to the Moon.)   In another room, family legend has it that my sister had gotten into an argument with her teacher over the correct pronunciation "Sacagawea".   


The entire time I spent within the borders of my old home-town, I spotted one other human being -- a man who looked as if his face had been slapped together out of clay and parts of other people and teeth like spall hammered from the bones of ogres -- trotting behind what looked like a beat-up baby stroller being pulled by a three-legged dog.  He hustled very quickly on down the road, not saying a word, trailing dust and disappearing around a corner.  If this had been mythology, it might have been Typhon taking Cerberus out for a tinkle.  If this had been science fiction, it would have been the town's guardian, hurriedly assembled by aliens using third-rate human-approximating replication code and dispatched to assess the threat-level posed by the intruder who had stumbled onto their enterprise.


I played detective a while longer, but frankly I was starting to get a little freaked out.  My Blackberry was getting persistently zero reception, and my imagination started telling me that every noise I made -- from the scuff of parking lot gravel to the squeak of the swing-set to my shouted "Helloooo"s -- sounded ominously tamped down and muted, as if this was all happening under the dome of a blizzard instead of beneath the quickly setting sun of an Iowa summer evening.


And so off I went, back out the way I came, past the lonely war memorial, down the frontage road, headlights on as I merged back onto I-80, and thence back to my home in big, bright, loud and well-peopled Chicago.


A couple of years later, my family and I took a little hajj through the Iowa locales of my childhood, and when we swung through this little town we found evidence of human habitation again.  People lived in the houses.  Dogs barked.  A long lost friend of the family had bought the school and had made themselves a little condo out of one of its corners (the rest remained cavernous and  untouched.) 


However to this day, I have no good explanation for what I saw and did not see on the evening I decided on a whim to take a walk through the smallest of my old home-towns.