Twenty years is a long time to play dead. Especially for an eighty-year-old. 

            I do not feel eighty. I hydrate and stretch and walk three miles every day around the pond at the back of the farm I call home. There are a few animals that the ranch hand cares for on a good salary. I adore the pigs. People believe they are filthy. They are the most misunderstood creature on this planet. They do not excrete in their living or eating space. I have trained all of them to follow me like a pack of sheep. That’s more to say than Sadie, my great Pyrenees, the white-haired shaggy monster who slobbers on me but has never learned how to sit on command.

            I love her so.

            She is not Helen, who passed this day last year. It’s why I am finally writing after all of these years. She and I were together for fifty-two years. I always loved her, but it was not until I let the memory of Lorelai rest during those awful war years that I finally released my full heart and soul into Helen’s heart.

            And then I fled.

            I had help. I still do not say who or what or how, just that I lived for five years on my own, on the run, staying and establishing underground shelters where I received daily updates on the happenings around my science. Klaus Braun’s science that I perfected.

            The ant network will be necessary when the time comes for the next global conflict. Oppenheimer’s bomb was only the beginning. A scratch that you itch until it becomes a gouge. Scientists with their itchy minds. Politicians with their itchy trigger fingers. 

            After five years of coordinating the network and ensuring implementation, I brought Helen with me. We moved to a farm with acreage and animals and skies the cerulean blue of tropical waters. We worked the farm until our bodies didn’t allow us to do so. Then we brewed coffee and sat together on the porch reading books or listening to world updates. 

            There was a war with Korea. Our soldiers were used to great effect, according to my sources. Then they were retrieved from active duty and held in storage facilities on standby until the next conflict. 

            That came with the ongoing skirmish with Vietnam. Superior troops and weapons will not win this battle. To be arrogant is to open yourself, and your friends, to vulnerability. It’s to walk through a doorway of invisible razor wires and only realize you were falling into pieces when your lips fell off.

            Dominic and Bianca passed within a week of each other. I did not attend the funeral. I was given permission, but I did not consider it necessary. They were both good to me. They tolerated my quirks until they realized I was not the psychopath many first think upon meeting me. I do believe if you were to meet me for the first time today, my quirks have smoothed into the fashions of an old man with more pleasantries and questions to ask than anything else. 

            In happier news, I am told Dino and Marjorie’s son Robert excels in mathematics and will study accounting at the University of Central Michigan. Johanna lives with a woman named Tammi. They run the bakery together. Ernst’s run as a director for Hollywood pictures ended, of his own choosing, with his last picture, Elliot’s Guild, a story about a man on the run from the government. It was released two years ago, to much acclaim. It was not nominated for best film or picture or whatever those nonsensical awards shows call it. I watched all of them. The peculiar Strangelove that made me feel as if I walked onto the set of a real war room. Mary Poppins. My Fair Lady. Beckett. Zorba the Greek. I have much time on my hands when I’m not traveling to quality control laboratories. Ernst’s picture dwarves them all. 

            He did not change to producing films because he did not win, according to my sources. He wanted more oversight. He wanted to work on multiple pictures at once. He wanted to dig his own ant network. Like father like son. 

            Helen and I lived a good second life together. Her sight worsened the last few years. She could no longer write. I transcribed words for her. We would sit on the porch after breakfast, two over easy eggs and two strips of bacon for her, three scrambled eggs on toast for me. Sadie chewed on a bone. Helen and I drank hot coffee in the cool morning, blankets draped over our laps, the glare of the sunrise shaded by the apple trees that lined the gravel driveway. Helen narrated a story about a young girl who was abandoned by society when none of the countries could get along anymore.

            The countries could have gotten along, Helen explained in her soft, slow voice that morning, my hand loosely holding the pen that turned her prophetic prose into swirls of ink on the parchment. They just chose not to, she said. They were poorly raised humans who were never taught simple manners such as sharing or how to say please and thank you. When they were not given treats, they simply took what they wanted. When the treats filled them with energy and power, they did not know how to behave. 

            It is not uncommon to see people who have power thrust on them at an early age misbehave. It is unfortunate that the blueprint to prepare for the effects of power, and how to wield it, was laid out for these countries, these humans. They simply chose to ignore it, their egos already swollen from, as one wise moderator between the countries so delicately put it, smelling their own farts. 

            The moderator’s job was to first know where each person had stockpiled the loads of stones they planned on throwing at their enemy’s house. That was a painstaking job that required many assistant moderator’s working an around the clock schedule of accountants in April. The moderator’s second job was deciphering the implied codes and meanings every time each person spoke. For instance, if one of the ego-drenched powers said, “I don’t want to hurt a hair on the body of any person in this great land,” the moderator knew a blank space existed at the end of the sentence, and could fill it with what the other ego-drenched power heard, which was the unspoken, “But I will if you move your finger closer to that big red button.” 

            And so, the conversations between powers went, the moderator realizing she was unfortunately only delaying the inevitable. All the while, a young girl of African American and Asian descent, fifteen years old, a citizen of the world with self-declared alliances to not countries, but the good people who lived within their borders, ate a chocolate doughnut, and pondered how she would survive in a world without power. She read survival books. She learned how to make fires and how to build lean-tos from sticks and brush. She cooked fish caught from a stream behind her school, which she still attended but only did so to keep access to the library. 

            By the time the young girl could spear fish with a spear crafted from a maple tree, the countries had agreed upon a fight. They would meet like two boxers and attempt to settle their dispute. Whoever won the match was the stronger of the two. They were more powerful, tactical, elusive. The countries trained by stockpiling their loads of stones. The young girl trained by researching which plants and berries were edible. 

            When the day came for the countries to fight, the young girl watched with her classmates at the auditorium at her school. They were instructed to enjoy the match, but to quickly follow the evacuation procedure at the conclusion of the match. That procedure meant hurrying in an organized fashion to their assigned classroom – the young girl was in Mr. Jones’ science lab – where they would crouch under a desk, cover their ears, and wait to see how the loser of the fight handled defeat. 

            The match was sloppily fought in the early rounds. Each boxer came out with too much energy, firing jabs and hooks that missed their opponent’s face or body entirely. When they did connect, it was with the opponent’s gloves that barricaded its rugged face. The truth about each fighter was that they didn’t see themselves as pretty anymore. For brawlers, they suffered from insecurity issues. A puzzling irony persisted, of them playing a sport that risked destroying what was left of their beauty – which was a lot, the young girl thought; the rivers and streams and mountains and fields in both countries was more than enough. 

            At the start of the fourth round, the powerhouse country from across the world connected on a jab, jab, right hook to the face, right hook to the body, combo. The underdog staggered against the ropes. The powerhouse rushed in. It threw three more uppercuts into the gloved defense of the underdog. The underdog retaliated with a quick right jab that stunned the powerhouse. The underdog didn’t hesitate. It threw a flurry of stones at the powerhouse, shattering windows and doors until an entire wing of the glass house crumbled in a crescendoing cascade of broken glass. 

            The rest of the fight was one flurry of attacks after another, each fighter going back and forth, inflicting a cut here, a cut there, until both were bruised and battered, standing across the ring with swollen eyes and heaving blood-spattered chests. The underdog had one eye entirely shut. The trainer pressed an Enswell, the eye iron kept on ice between rounds, to the swollen eye. It didn’t matter. It was too late. The eye was useless. Unless the trainer could do something to relieve the pressure. The powerhouse watched from across the ring as the trainer opened a pen knife and drew it across the bulge above the underdog’s eye. The young girl gasped when the blood poured from the intentional gash. She had learned much in her journey to prepare for the dark times, but she had not learned that. 

            The trainer cleaned the blood and clotted it with Vaseline. The swelling faded enough for the underdog to see out of that eye. There was enough sight to get it through the final round. The powerhouse also had two swollen eyes, but it could see out of each. It could not, however, breath regularly or without a sharp pain like someone was stabbing a hot poker into their side. That was due to the three broken ribs inflicted by the largest stone thrown by the underdog, a series of fierce uppercuts to the midsection that lifted the powerhouse clean off the mat. Vital organs were protected by those ribs, and they were now shattered like the veranda and entryway to its once glorious glass mansion. 

            The students in the auditorium held their breath. The fight was being projected on a screen on the stage where children performed song and dance routines at talent shows, where the show choir performed choreographed routines, where the drama club as recently as a year ago put on a production of “Fiddler on the Roof.” The young girl had inched her way to the front of the auditorium throughout the fight. She wanted a closer view during the closing moments. She also wanted quick access to the emergency exit at the front of the auditorium. Where her classmates were planning on hiding under their desks, she had a path mapped to ride her bike quickly to the bunker at her parents’ house. They should both be there waiting for her. 

            The final round began. Each fighter threw a slow right, left, combo that grazed off the bloody shoulders of its opponent. They circled each other for what felt like the rest of the round, the seconds ticking down at the matched pace of the young girl’s heartbeat. She had trained on remaining calm. It would be required in the days, months, and eventually, years to come.

            Near the end of the round, the exhausted underdog finally connected on its second to last punch of the match. It struck the powerhouse just under the jaw. The sound of rattling teeth echoed through the auditorium. The powerhouse didn’t have the energy to stagger. It simply stood pat, feet in cement, leaning forward with its long arms. One of them hit the underdog in the ear. Another burrowed into the now swollen shut again eye. The Vaseline and blood mixture congealed into a red gel that oozed down the underdog’s cheek. They stood toe to toe during the final seconds, the powerhouse landing blow after blow, each sounding like fists slammed into raw beef, the underdog missing on all punches but one, the final one, an uppercut under the jaw, this one causing two teeth to crack and fly like spittle out of the powerhouse’s mouth. The powerhouse soared backwards against the ropes. The momentum of the uppercut carried the underdog in that direction. The underdog landed on the powerhouse, who was holding on desperately to the ropes. The momentum was too much. It caused the two fighters to flip over the ropes and out of the ring. 

            The young girl gasped. She checked her increased heart rate with two deep breaths. Rather than wait for the second battle to begin, she fled the auditorium as the trainers for each fighter were cutting the tape off their wrists and removing the boxing gloves. They stood outside the ring, bare knuckles flexed, with sirens going off inside the arena and auditorium and around town as the young girl pedaled furiously to get to the bunker on time.

            She made it, thankfully, for all of us, Helen told me, and then she closed her eyes.

            The sun warmed her pale face. She was sick then. We had decided to let it play out. She took a sip of her coffee and opened her eyes. They were light blue and energized by her storytelling. For years she had presented just the facts, letting her son have fun with fiction. It was her turn now. 

            Even though, as I told her, her fiction felt far too real. 

            The young girl, Helen began again, would survive the big bangs. Others would too. Not many, and far away from her. Her parents would not. They did not make it to the bunker in time. She wept for them, but not for herself. She was prepared. And, as she found out, pleasantly surprised the bombs were not radioactive. Her space suits, as she called them, would not be necessary, at least in this round of destruction. 

            She left on her journey to survive in a new world. 

            And I wrote about every adventure she encountered while watching my beautiful best friend of fifty-two years smile while she told each tale.

            Rest in Peace, Helen. I love you.