Teleology.
The man woke with barred light on his face. He rolled over on his side, trying to escape back into the warm darkness of his dreams, but it was no use. The long months of walking had ingrained in him the habit of waking at dawn and, besides, his bed was far from comfortable. It had been the best he could find last night, and it was better than many of the places he had slept since he set out. Choosing to spend the night in the prison had been, perhaps, an unnecessary precaution. There probably weren’t any hunters this far west, only a few scavengers living off the broken earth. But, just as he was unable to go back to sleep after he woke up, so was he unable to stop taking precautions. He reached involuntarily and touched the scar that ran diagonally from his neck to his abdomen. It was better this way.
Down in the yard, he made up a fire on the basketball court and then went foraging. He found a water butt beside one of the outhouses that was still connected to the gutters, and the water inside didn’t smell too bad, so he filled his bottle then washed in it, taking care to avoid his reflection. He also found some of the yellow flowers growing nearby whose stalks were good energy, though bitter. He carefully picked each one and wrapped them in a cloth before putting them in his satchel.
Back at the fire, he poured some of the water into the old bean can he used for a pan and set it to boil. Then he took out from his satchel a small bag like the one a child would use to carry marbles. Inside were some hickory nuts that the man had been astonished to find growing by the side of the road some days previous. His hunger would have liked him to swallow them all in one go, but he knew he couldn’t rely on having such luck again. Therefore, he took out only a few and placed them carefully on a brick. By rotating another brick on top, he ground the nuts down to meal. He then waited till the water was boiling and skimmed some off, mixing it with the meal until he had a paste.
He placed the brick with the paste on it in onto the fire then added the stalks of the yellow flower to the remaining water in the bean can. While he waited for his breakfast to cook, he took from his satchel the second of his three treasures. It was a piece of paper, ripped and greasy in the folds with writing slanting across it. The man unfolded the paper and read it again, as he did every morning.
As always, he thought back to how he had come by it. The man in the cave had been old and his lungs were gone. In between coughs, he had explained that he was too old to make the journey himself, but he knew the way. Hundreds of miles south, it was. You had to follow the coast down to the port and then head inland along the freeway for a hundred and fifty kilometres, through the city and into the mountains. That’s where they were, he said, and his voice became tender with remembering.
The man had understood his longing. Indeed, he shared it. The two men had been like disciples sitting together in the cave, the last true believers in a world that had lost faith. When the man in the cave had written out the directions in the thin wavering light of his brushwood fire, it had been an act of devotion, the transmission of a sacred duty.
Now he was almost there. The port was miles back, its acres of metal rusting in the sun and the long blackened pipelines stretching up into the hills. The city was more recent, and the man could still see it on the horizon if he looked back. He’d passed through in a hurry less than a week ago. Three days it had taken him, of fast walking and little sleep. He had not liked being among the high rises. They seemed to echo still with voices. The play-sets in the gardens, the dried-up swimming pools and vast avenues, the long queues of cars that never got out.
Now the mountains were in sight, no more than a day’s walk away. He might even reach his destination before nightfall. The thought made the man excited and scared at the same time. He mustn’t hope, though. Hope was the precursor to despair. He had to carry on doing everything just the way he had been. That was how you survived.
The man folded up the paper again, letting it fall back into its folds with the ease of long usage. Then, using a stick to pull the can off the fire and move the brick, the man assembled his breakfast. He ate the stalks first, sucking them down as he had once eaten spaghetti. After that he ate the pancake. He wished he had some sugar to put on it, but that was impossible.
He didn’t see anyone on the road all day. Only the wrecks of more cars, rusting with plants growing through their open windows. At midday he sat down on the crash barrier in the central reservation and drank some of his boiled water. Looking over the road he noticed a rotten stump poking out from the trees. He wandered over and pulled up some of the bark. There were several fat cockroaches inside, sluggishly evading the light. The man picked them out and crushed them on the roadside then pried them apart to access the flesh. This was good protein and the man was grateful.
That afternoon, he passed through another small town at the foot of the mountains. There was a large stone gateway at the entrance with a booth in the middle between the two lanes of traffic where attendants had once sat and handed out glossy brochures. On the other side, in the town, the man got hopelessly lost. He kept trying to move west keeping the mountains ahead of him, but the roads tricked him, curving round on themselves then stopping or leaving him facing the wrong way. At one point, he found himself in a poor part of town where the houses were low and poorly made. Rounding a corner, he found himself staring into the face of a princess. Beside her stood a bloodthirsty blackamoor, a dragon and a costumed superhero that the man remembered as being popular before the end. They were all giants, more than twenty feet tall, and they peered at him over a barbed wire fence in various stages of collapse, bloated and stained or their faces sagging away to reveal the wire frames beneath. This must have been where they stored the floats from their Mardi Gras parade, the man realised, thinking to recycle them next year. But the mannequins were still waiting.
The man carried on until he came to another junction. Losing patience with the town’s road system, he chose neither left nor right but continued straight on, vaulting over a fence and crossing several back gardens and alleyways. At one stage, he heard a low, dangerous hissing from under a porch and rushed on, not wanting to see what it was. Finally, he came within sight of a large road. He had to cross a channel of stagnant water where fat mosquitoes and black fly buzzed greedily around him. After that, the going was better. The new road led directly into the hills.
Soon it got colder. There were little shacks by the side of the road now, but not many of them. The jungle had closed over the fields that used to grow here, lianas trailing over the terraces men had cut from the earth when it was rich and black.
Towards late afternoon, the man stopped. There it was, just like the old man had said. The statue of the Indian stood in the middle of the road, its face a mask of benign stupidity, the final condescending gift of the colonial powers that drove them from the land and eradicated them from the earth.
He checked the directions. From the feet of the Indian, head north-east for three hundred metres, turn left when you reach the stream and follow it for five hundred metres till you come to the farm. Behind the farm you’ll find the field, and that’s where they are.
The man was afraid on that last part of his journey – afraid that they wouldn’t be there anymore. But he needn’t have worried. Since the man in the cave had left, they’d multiplied. Now the whole field was full of them. The earth was recovering, perhaps, regaining the lost fertility that they needed to survive.
Cautiously, tenderly, the man walked among the plants, trailing his fingers over their fruit. Then he picked a handful of them and went to the edge of the field. He made a fire and, as per the instructions the other man had given him, he put the fruit into his billy can to roast, stirring them occasionally to stop them burning.
An hour later, he took the beans off the fire to cool. The smell was already bringing back memories of coffee shops and Saturday mornings with the newspaper and an espresso. He hurried over to the stream and filled his bottle with fresh water. Back at the fire, he added more wood and filled the can with water before setting it down to boil.
Finally, he got out the third and last of his treasures. It was a small piece of muslin with, inside it, a single chipped and crumbling sugar cube. The man had found the sugar over a year ago, at the back of a cupboard in a restaurant he’d been scavenging. The muslin was the second gift the man in the cave had made to him. The man had not needed to ask what it was for.
Now he placed the muslin over the mouth of his bottle and ever so carefully tipped the roasted beans into the funnel. He took the water off the boil and poured it over the muslin, a peck at a time, until the bottle was about half-full. Finally, he took the priceless lump of sugar and, after a moment of agony in which he couldn’t bear to part with it, he dropped that, too, into the bottle. He spun and jiggled the bottle until the sugar had dissolved, then he poured the liquid back into the empty bean can.
And there it was. After all this time and all those miles, as the sun went down behind the edge of this remote and silent mountain in the middle of nowhere, he had himself a cup of coffee.
As the man took another sip, it did not seem strange to him that he had travelled so far or risked so much to reach this point. He had been missing coffee ever since the world ended, and finding a decent cup had seemed as good a motive as any other in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. And he wasn’t alone in this – the man in the cave had understood his compulsion, too.
Now he only wished he had some more damn sugar.
