Commune: Book Two (Commune Series 2) Read online

  One pot translated into depressingly very little water in the tub so we had to boil two pots to get enough water to cover just up to a person’s ankles. Once we had that (and once the water had cooled enough to just be on the safe side of scalding), we’d send someone in to sit in the puddle with a washrag and a bar of soap with the goal of taking up no more than five minutes; at ten I’d start hammering on the door.

  Our original plan was to try and get three people to one fill but the water was so horrifyingly grimy after just two that I vetoed the whole idea. There were some people who were willing to do it but I don’t think I could have slept that night if I’d allowed it. Despite the fact that we had to boil sixteen kettles of water that night and depleted one fifty-five gallon rain barrel down to nearly empty, we got a pretty good rhythm going once we got the hang of it. The trick was to have a kettle on the fire at all times, whether we thought we needed it or not. In that way, we could have one up to a boil right around the time the second person was stepping out of the tub. We also learned that it wasn’t necessary to bring both kettles up to a boil; just the first one. For the second, it was enough to get it lukewarm; once it was poured into the scalding water in the tub, the combined temperatures would normalize down to something a human being could handle and the water would remain comfortable long enough to accommodate two people.

  Each person had a new set of clothes waiting for them after the bath was over. In most cases, these were shirts and baggy sweat pants with the exception of Fred, who would have looked like he was wearing capris. He got a pair of athletic shorts just large enough to be comfortable, though they were still too snug to be decent (the poor guy was walking around hunched over at the hips with his face flushed; I considered calling him “Knuckles” as a gag but decided against it, not wanting to chance getting hammered flat into the ground).

  Sleeping arrangements were handled efficiently. Amanda and Elizabeth took the master bedroom upstairs while Barbara and Rebecca shared the bed in the second room on the other side of the loft. George and Oscar took the king bed downstairs and Monica, her daughter Rose, Maria, Alish, Greg, and Alan all took bunks in the last room, which typically belonged to Elizabeth. Jeff and Wang took couches in the rear entertainment room while Edgar took the easy chair. Fred and Davidson each got an air mattress; we stuck one in the center of the entertainment room between the couches and the other in the dining area; we pulled the table and chairs over tight up against the kitchen.

  That left me with the couch in the front room where we had all conducted our meeting with Jake and Amanda earlier that day. I was surprised to see Jake easing back into his chair across from me at the end of the night when everyone else was settled into their various beds.

  Quietly, so as not to disturb anyone else in the house, I asked, “You’re sleeping there?”

  He smiled. “Not many places left. It’s this or pitch a tent outside.”

  “Huh. I would have thought you’d just take the bed up with Amanda.”

  “Why?”

  I stumbled over the answer for this. I realized I had been making some assumptions about them without any real evidence. “Well, I guess I just thought that you two…you know.”

  Jake nodded slowly and said, “It’s not like that. It’s different.”

  I didn’t know what the hell to make of that so I just grunted. Jake killed the lantern and put his chin down on his chest. The house was already filling up with the soft sound of snoring from all the different corners that had been stuffed full of people.

  I closed my eyes, went under almost instantly, and had an unrestful sleep.

  12 – Interviews, One

  Wang

  I remember that our earliest days on the commune were full of interviews. This is strange, now, for me to recall because it feels like a whole lifetime ago and I’m not sure if any of us knew what was going on while this was happening. We all kind of compared notes sometime after we’d settled in and figured out that both Jake and Amanda had worked through each of us early on, getting a handle on who we are; our strengths and probably our weaknesses too.

  I can’t even tell you who was approached first or what sequence this happened in. All I know for sure is when Jake came to find me.

  I’m pretty sure I woke up before anyone else on the first morning. It was still dark and I was disoriented enough that I reached out into empty space trying to find the back of a bus seat with my hand to orient myself; after several seconds of confusion, I remembered where I was. I heard the sounds of deep breathing and Fred’s snoring soon after; realized everything was probably okay.

  I felt a sharp cramp in my stomach, deep down between my hips, and realized that this is what must have woken me up. The pain felt like a knife digging around inside of me; I immediately understood that I had to go to the bathroom. It had been a few days since any of us had had a decent meal and last night I’d stuffed myself full, so I guess my body was just having a hard time getting used to being fed again. I think that canned fruit might have played a part as well.

  I carefully stood from the couch and walked around Tom and Fred, who were both lined up on the floor on air mattresses. I was having a hard time seeing anything; for one thing I was still fuzzy from sleep but there’s also the fact that not a lot of moonlight makes it into the back part of that house. The rear is pretty much covered with thick tree growth, plus the largest opening in the back had been covered over with a big sheet of wood. The rear of the house is dim even during the middle of the day because of this. Once I turned left around the corner into the main hall, it became easier to see as more light from the moon and stars was able to come in through the front windows.

  I had a shock when I came through the front room and saw Jake sitting in his chair. At first I thought he was just sitting there quietly next to Gibs, who was still asleep, and waiting for the rest of us to wake up, which would have been intensely disturbing. I froze in place for a few seconds waiting for him to acknowledge me before I realized that his chin was down and he was asleep. My stomach cramped again, reminding me that I had problems to take care of, so I continued down the main hall towards the front door, rounded the corner back down the smaller side hall, and found the bathroom.

  I’m not going to get all gross about what happened in there but what I’ll offer here is that I had forgotten how nice it was to use a clean toilet that still flushed. We’d all been sharing dead commodes on the road for so long that using “prefilled” facilities was something we were all familiar with. Being able to sit down and…take some time on an unspoiled toilet had become a luxury. When I found the full roll of toilet paper, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

  I knew it was time to leave when I started feeling pins and needles in my legs. I finished up, put myself back together, and flushed; the sound of the toilet doing what toilets do was surreal. It was so…normal! I’d gone so long without hearing it that I experienced something like a wave of nostalgia or déjà vu…or something. This is harder to describe than I thought it would be; I was confused by that sound, as though there was a part of me that knew there was supposed to be a world in which light switches made light, toilets flushed, and ordinary people didn’t try to shoot each other, and still another part of me that understood that all of this was now gone, perhaps forever.

  There were two large jugs of water on the sink, both of which I poured into the toilet tank for the next person that would inevitably be in there. I collected the jugs to refill outside of the house at the rain barrel.

  I exited through the front door of the house and probably would have crapped myself if I hadn’t just taken care of business a moment ago. Jake was sitting out on the front porch, now awake, apparently. I never heard him move through the house or open the door; I suffered a childish urge to look back into the house and see if he was still sleeping in the front room. Ultimately I didn’t…but I can’t say that I wasn’t at least a little nervous about what I would have seen if I did.

  It was a shock to
see him sitting there, like I said, and I blurted out something like, “What the hell?”

  Jake raised a hand and whispered, “Easy. You’ll wake the others.”

  “Sorry,” I whispered back. “I wasn’t expecting you there.”

  He nodded and gestured to a chair to his right on the other side of a small wooden table that still had some of the tree bark on it. “Join me?”

  “I should refill these,” I said stupidly, holding up the jugs.

  “You’ve refilled the tank already, right? You have time. We’ll hear the next time the toilet flushes. You can refill them and take them back then.”

  I shrugged and moved around him to have a seat, placing the jugs on the table between us.

  “I’ll make coffee in a little while when the others start to wake up,” he said. I was a tea drinker, personally, but I knew a lot of the others would appreciate this.

  He fell silent for a while after that. I glanced over at him out of the corner of my eye while trying not to be obvious about it. He seemed to have forgotten that I was out there with him; his eyes were cast up to the sky with an expression hard to describe. His eyebrows were raised a little and beetled together at the center; the eyes themselves squinted and shined. His lips were cracked open just enough so that he could breathe; it was clear to anyone that whatever was left of his nose didn’t do much more than take up area on his face. He sounded like an old boxer when he spoke; like a mouth breather. It gave you incorrect impressions about who he was. Thinking back on it, I’d have to use the word “wonder” to describe what I saw in his eyes.

  “I don’t know if I’m ever going to get used to this view,” he said quietly, eyes still locked forward.

  I looked out in the same direction and saw what he meant. The sun was just starting to peak up over the horizon but was still hidden behind the mountain wall, so the only hint of it we could see was the outline of the mountain ridge itself, a pure black contrast, lined by a deep red sky which immediately gave way to indigo before reverting to black. There wasn’t a cloud up there; the entire sky was packed end to end with stars, just big, sweeping, bright waves of stars everywhere. The world all around us was impenetrable, solid black with that yawning sky stretched out above us. I felt as though I was looking down into a reflection on the surface of some great lake; like I might begin to fall up into the sky if I didn’t look away.

  I said the first thing that came to mind. “Holy shit. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  “I feel sometimes as though I have no business seeing this.”

  “What?” I asked. “Why?”

  Finally, he turned to look at me. I was certain he was going to answer; the shadow of his lips flexed like he was about to form words. He turned his head back to look out ahead of us again and sighed just loud enough for me to hear.

  “It’ll get better shortly as the sun moves higher,” he said.

  He was right. During the normal day time, you don’t notice the sun so much. It’s the last thing you want to look at, because it will hurt you, so you’re really only aware of it as something bright and hot above you somewhere. Mostly, what you see is the blue sky above. You don’t realize how deceptively fast the sun moves across the sky unless you watch a sunrise or a sunset. As we sat there, not talking, the heavens above us shifted from black to red-pink to blue and the valley out in front of us morphed from formless void to open, green fields ringed on all sides by tree covered mountains.

  “You know,” I said, “I think this is the first time I’ve ever sat out and watched a sunrise.”

  “Not an outdoor type?”

  “Not really. Most of my life has been spent with my head in a book, like my parents. They spent their whole lives in books. My mom was a copy editor, see? My dad, well, he was something else.”

  Jake looked at me (and I mean really looked at me for probably the first time) and said, “Tell me.” He rested his chin on his right fist.

  I chewed a lip while mentally composing the most efficient way to explain. “My dad was an architect. Mostly, that means he spent all of his time buried in paperwork. He was either reviewing proposals, going over plans, meeting with clients, reviewing cost estimates, or off in a meeting somewhere. And, because he was an architect, it means I was studying to be one as well. Like I said: lots of books.”

  “Oh, really?” he said, perking up. “How far along in your studies were you?”

  “I was about a year out from graduating. I was far enough along that I was interning at a firm.”

  “Did you enjoy it?”

  His question pulled me up short. Before, when all was still normal, people always sounded impressed if I told them what I was studying in college. There was this initial reaction of “Oh, wow! That must be really cool!” and then they’d spend the next several minutes asking me what an architect actually does. No one had ever asked me if I enjoyed it before. I had to think about it.

  “Well,” I finally said, “my dad would have told you ‘yes’. Then again, he also would have confidently listed my four favorite foods and gotten all of them wrong. He was a lot better at drinking and demanding silence than he was at knowing things about me.”

  “I see.”

  “Maybe you see but I’m not sure.” I sighed. “I don’t know, man. It was okay, I guess. I seemed to be good at it, what little of it I actually got to do before being an architect became obsolete.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say it’s obsolete,” Jake said, shifting in his seat. “I’m sure there’re all kinds of ways to put a specialized skill like that to use these days.”

  “Doing what?” I laughed. “Designing a new shopping mall? Organizing client meetings and submitting plans to the city? Hey, I know!” I pointed out in front of us at a spot on the ground some thirty feet away. “We’ll put a giant exterior water feature right over there; it’ll really class the place up.”

  I leaned back in my chair and sighed. “I’ll get on the phone after lunch and start lining up subcontractors. Can I use your landline or is that, like, a thing?”

  Jake took everything I said passively, which I suppose I was happy for. If he’d been annoyed at my outburst it wouldn’t have been the first time my mouth got me in trouble.

  Finally, he said, “Everyone has to adapt, Wang. Even architects. There are new requirements, now, certainly, but there are things we can all do to be useful. You’ll learn to handle a weapon soon, if you haven’t already, and you’ll contribute at the least with scavenging and protecting your people. But don’t completely throw away your skills from the old world. One day, we’ll need to build something bigger than a wooden box and you’ll be there to help us figure out how. More importantly, you’ll be there to pass on what you know and what you learn to the children so that the knowledge we took for granted doesn’t become a lost secret.”

  He stood up from his seat, stretched his arms out to either side, triceps bunching up and twitching as he did, and growled. “And now, speaking of adaptation,” he said, “I have my own to see to.”

  He nodded to me and trotted off the front porch.

  “Where you going?” I called after him.

  “Garage. I have some heavy things to move around.”

  I stood up and moved to follow. “Do you need a hand?”

  He stopped, turned back to me, looked me up and down, and smiled. “Sure,” he said. “Come on. I’ll teach you how to squat.”

  “What?”

  13 – Interviews, Two

  Fred

  I don’t rightly know how the rest of the folks I was travelling with felt about staying at Jake’s place on that first night, but for me? I was sold on the whole thing. I had just woke up from the first good night’s sleep that I could remember in I don’t know how long and, for once, my knees and my hips weren’t hurting me. Remember, now, that I had gone from sleeping on a hard, linoleum super market floor that I had tried (and failed) to soften up with scraps of clothing and other shit, to sleeping on the nasty ass floor of that scho
ol bus. I’d tried at first to stretch across the rows of seats but it just didn’t work out. I was too wide to lie on the seat properly and the bench rows on those buses are staggered, so I couldn’t get my legs across the aisle right. I always ended up on the floor.

  I was on the floor again in Jake’s house as well, only this time, they put me on a large air mattress. And even if my feet did hang off and my ass was starting to rest on the floor by the time I woke up, it was still a night of sleep with no pressure on my spine or any of my joints. I woke up happy.

  I noticed everyone else was awake already when I sat up and started moving around. Tom and Jeff were talking quietly and Gibs was over on my right poking around in the kitchen. Wang was gone already, I noticed, along with Edgar.

  “Mornin’,” I said. “How long’s everyone been up?”

  “Forever, Sunshine,” Gibs said from the kitchen. “We couldn’t sleep through all your snoring.”

  “Yeah, least I wasn’t fartin’ all night, asshole,” I said. “What the hell, Tom? We need to get you to see a doctor, or what?”

  “That wasn’t me, man! That was Wang!”

  “Wang?” I laughed. “Wang ain’t big enough to bust ass as nasty as what I smelled.”

  “Whatever, man,” Tom said. “Wasn’t me.”

  I tried to sit up out of my bed but it was so low on air that the damned thing just spooned me back into the ground every time I tried. I struggled around on my back like some kind of drunk turtle when Gibs approached from the side, laughing, the bastard.