When the lights go out

The Saturday before Halloween, 2011, Nighttime:

When the world ends, it’s never as much fun as Fallout.

It was around six PM and I was sitting in my room playing Dungeon Defenders for a review. It had been snowing for a few hours, the trees outside my house creaking under the weight. I escaped, though, into colorful cartoon characters and intense, repetitive clicking.

And then boom. Everything is gone forever.

I headed downstairs and huddled around a kerosene lamp with my housemates. I had a bowl of chili. We sat around and played Uwe Rosenberg’s classic card game Bohnanza. We wondered if the power’s going to come back anytime soon, but every cracking tree limb told us no, it won’t. That we’d be stuck like this for days, even weeks.

It felt like the start of the end of the world. One of my housemates joked that it’s the zombie apocalypse. I retorted that, if there was an apocalypse, we wouldn’t be able to guess the form. We could surmise the effect, but never the cause.

Then I heard the loudest noise in my life, and the house shook like a leaf. We held our breath. A tree had just fallen outside our house. Our house is surrounded by large, flat-leafed trees, none of their leaves down yet. The snow was gathering on the leaves, bending the branches. One of them had broken, but it had fallen at us, the tip-top barely missing our porch. Another one could have fall, and it would all be over.

Video games, for all their focus on hiding behind cover and scaring you with jumps and the end of the world, don’t prepare you for the real thing. When you’re in a video game foxhole, explosions all around, it’s spectacle and sound. If you die, no matter how much weight is attached, it’s still just an inconvenience, and you know you’ll still have another chance.

When trees are crashing all around you with the speed of terrorist bullets, you know the next one could be The Real Thing. And you wouldn’t be able to see it coming. That’s the scariest part of the apocalypse, the part video games leave out for good theater: the unpredictable finality of death.

Sunday, the day before Halloween, Morning:

What the fuck are we supposed to do when there’s no power anywhere?

That’s the question, and there’s no easy answer. No laptop. No desktop. No television. No Xbox. No lights, no hot water, no showers. Couldn’t even get my car out of the driveway because one of those massive trees fell across it. We ran out of candles the night before, sitting in the living room, in the safest part of the house, where the only tree that could have killed us would have been the biggest and baddest of them all. We didn’t even have phone service because all the cell towers were knocked out.

As we trudged over to the closest grocery store through a foot of snow, the only thing I could think of was the Moira Brown initiated Wasteland Survival Guide quest in Fallout 3. How sad is my life to be defined by a video game? Snow in every inch of clothing and I was thinking about walking through the wasteland, thinking a bloatfly would appear on the horizon. Instead there was nothing, just hanging white-limbed trees and the scent of snow evaporating.

This is what the apocalypse would feel like, I thought. We’d spent the previous evening talking about what the apocalypse would be if it happened, and I maintained it wouldn’t be a zombie apocalypse because we could imagine that. The apocalypse, I said, would have to be something utterly foreign and alien to us. H.P. Lovecraft was right: we’re more likely to be devoured by unknown horrors from beyond scientific explanation than we are by something we can imagine. We’re more likely to die in a freak October snowstorm than we are by zombies.

But no matter what, it would feel like this. Empty, with a hint of energy and anticipation. And if the world did end, it would happen a lot faster, like a tree falling on your house and crushing your brain before you even knew it was happening.

Inside the grocery store it’s hard not to imagine Fallout. The aisles were filled with spoiling food covered in white plastic tarps, the two friendly clerks illuminating us with flashlights. I was walking around and all I see above the items is “Steal”. “Steal Prepackaged Salami” or “Steal Broom”. They could be useful to us in the future, I reasoned. I didn’t do it though. Society hadn’t fallen apart yet. There was still some normalcy.

Once we looted the powerless grocery store, I undertook a hard march through a corn field to find my girlfriend at her college. Again, a very Fallout moment. We’d heard word from a campus police officer who’d passed us on the road that the school had huddled everyone into the dining commons to feed them lukewarm oatmeal and tepid water, and that if I wanted to find her, I’d have to go there.

“A quest!” I literally exclaimed. So we trudged across the corn field, snow to our knees, hoping that we weren’t too late. “You don’t have to come with me,” I told my companions, “this is my quest.” But they didn’t listen. Of course they didn’t: your companions have to follow you until the end. That’s what they’re scripted to do.

Whenever we passed under a tree on the way, I fretted. What if we died? I’d have failed my quest, crushed by a falling tree skirting a cornfield to go find my girlfriend. Somehow I doubted I’d be able to reload, to try it again. There was a fear to it but also a nobleness of purpose: if we didn’t make it, at least we would have tried.

Sunday, the day before Halloween, night:

What the fuck are we supposed to do with ourselves?

That’s all I could ask myself. We’d completed the quests we were given. I’d found my girlfriend. Her phone worked, so I called my family, told them I was okay. They sounded relieved. We even got home and sawed the tree on our street in half, so we could get our cars out. We’d done absolutely everything we were supposed to do, and the thing kept going on. It was dark, and everything was cold, and, most importantly, there was nothing to do.

We tried playing more board games but everything felt terrible. I just wanted to curl up and fall asleep in the darkness, in the cold. I never felt this way playing Fallout. There were always goals to accomplish, and my bones never got tired from the cold or from exhaustion. I never went hungry. Even in New Vegas, which tried to approximate these concerns with its hardcore mode, I never felt it this much. The cold never seeped into my hands, my feet, making little tasks difficult. No, I could just open up the Pip Boy, drink five Sunset Sarasparillas, and set back out on the road refreshed.

The apocalypse, when you live it, is something you want to be over and done with. Even once you move past the nauseating fear of imminent death, there’s still that emptiness, that hollow center that makes you feel like there’s nothing good in the world. Everything is bleak, and you never see the way out until it smacks you in the face. There’s no heroism, no good and evil laid bare: there’s just a lot of sadness.

Monday, the day of Halloween, afternoon:

This is a happy story, in the end, unlike most apocalypses. This is a story of a return to privilege.

Sunday night we realized Target was open. By Monday afternoon the commercial districts of Western Massachusetts had had power restored, and suddenly the world was open again. I could charge my laptop, my PSP, my 3DS, my old, ill-functioning phone. We could go to the mall and watch movies. We could go to whatever restaurant was open and get something hot and meaty to eat (we went to Appleby’s. “Appleby’s: Because It’s the Only Thing Open!”). I sat in the middle of the Hampshire Mall drinking a glass bottle Coke and playing Gloom with my good friends and I realized how good we had it. The world wasn’t over. It was just hibernating, waiting for the snow to melt so it could go on living.