Ftrain, by Paul Ford

In thinking these things through I keep coming back to little stories that might illustrate the themes that concern me. Lately I've thought about a man with a small farm in Brooklyn, in what used to be Prospect Park. He grows wheat and summer tomatoes. He inherited the farm and the fence around it from his grandfather, along with a large house and a few dogs.

He owns a few million dollars in real estate, but there are no more people in the New World than in 1640. So the neighborhood has gone down a bit. No one knows what happened, just that a few hundred years ago there were many more people, and then there were not. The standard line is that people simply ate the whole world. Sometimes you are out walking and you come across skeletons; their mouths are always open. He's had to kill people, and then bury them to keep them from the dogs. But for the most part people keep to themselves.

Henry James--I think it was--said he wrote his novels about rich people because they were unconstrained and thus more interesting subjects. People write postapocalypse for the same reasons. Post-apocalypse stories are fantasias on human nature--they divorce the human from societal pressures and set him or her free. Of course the very rich are postapocalyptic as-is--far more free to pursue all their robby, rapey, cruel desires than we, the poorer folk for whom laws are intended. We are the ruins through which the rich pick. When we catch on to their bad habits we get together a mob--e.g. Madoff--but it's usually too late to break through the phalanx of vicious lawyers that surround the bastard's helicopter. The postapocalypse is here; it's just not evenly distributed.

Yesterday what I wanted was a slice of pizza. I avoided it. I'm neither proud nor ashamed of this. But now that I have some short distance from the worst of my behaviors, I should ask myself--What exactly did I want? Sure, cheese-and-meat-and-bread, the best to stroke the atavastic receptors in my cavebrain. But there are other delivery mechanisms for those same pleasures. A sausage and a healthful roll with mustard and a bit of string cheese, say. What lullaby was that slice singing that I wanted it so bad?

Now, I have eaten many slices of pizza. Moon-and-backs-worth. My earliest memory is of Sam's Pizza Island (named because it was on a traffic island--formerly a gas station, I think) in West Chester, Pennsylvania. I would cheer when it was time to go. My father might have a few slices with a beer; I'd get a grape soda. Fascinated by the bubbling of the cheese, each brown-orange hemispherical bump, the mysterious physical process that caused it.

Discard the high school and college slices--they were undelicious and there weren't that many of them, and whereas I was an ox I was still young and not yet so far off the rails. But later, as an adult--consider the foul pizzeria on Court St., closest to my apartment--dear God I put away a lot of slices there, and especially gristly chicken parms. I started my cheese-and-meat-and-bread habit there. I knew I should quit those chicken parms, but I couldn't. I would do everything but feed myself well during the day. So that when night came my brain would register a hunger and say: "I have an idea." It always seemed like a good idea at the time, and there I was, slowly trudging to the pizzeria right before it closed, getting the torpedo-shaped package into my hand, the actual transaction carried out mostly in slurred words and grunts.

But I'm not here to talk about parms. I'm here to talk the slice. Two, often three at a time. I wanted not just the food but the whole fluorescent experience: Two slice, one broccoli, one meat, and a Diet Coke, with garlic knots. Perhaps 1,500 calories therein. And what the hell; throw in an ice-cream sandwich at the end. I can see, of course, how that gained me my frame. I could see at the time. But nothing compares to the feeling that sort of stuffing engendered. The fulness of the fullness. Yes, I was enlarging, ballooning; yes, I was presumably cutting myself off from all sorts of emotional and erotic wonderlands (although I always knew many people more miserable than me who were quite, quite thin); but I was full and round, and ready to curl up on my sheets, if they had not fallen off the bed, in my messy apartment, and sleep the sleep of the satiated, blessedly alone. That's what it means to me, the moment of peace. Total quiet, comfortable isolation. A shelter from the heavy rain, albeit a shelter made of soggy pizza-boxes illustrated with a caricatured Italian chef. The apocalypse is about the end of plenty, but human behavior in times of need seems to tend to community, banding together, cooperation. That's how we beat the tigers and killed the mammoths. Yes, there are countless exceptions, but intelligent cooperation is a survival mechanism. So it's possible that it won't go all zombie-nightmare-cum-The Road when the balloon goes up. Far more likely in fact that this, right now, is the apocalypse. It's a time of such lonely plenty. All those years I wandered singly through the glut, eating candy bars and watching movies with a tub of corn--always more corn--propped on my lap, glistening in the reflected light from the screen. I go to a store and buy my broadsail shirts, sewed by some poor person somewhere warm, and I wonder what she thinks, knowing that she could wrap the cloth around her three times.

Weight: 338.5 lbs