The Silencing of Life

Content warning: references to suicide, government-directed violence towards migrants.

We didn’t save the world today. But nobody really talks about that anymore.

The island lies dormant this evening. Everybody goes straight home after work now. We used to get together, usually for a drink, perhaps for a board game, and sometimes, when the weather was forgiving and the tide was low, we’d set up the badminton net down on the beach.

I miss those days. We all do, but we’re all too tired to do anything about it.

I come up here daily. It’s the only place I feel unshackled from my existence here. I light a depleted candle, its cinnamon tones radiating some false warmth into the room. The turret room sits atop my house, its windows exposing a haunting vista all around me. To my right I observe the great wind turbine beating defiantly against the turbulent coastal winds, its tireless labors the heartbeat of our small community. In the near distance it is eclipsed by El Diablo: the towering volcano that first laid claim to this island. Were we the spiritual types, we’d be humbly praying daily for it to prolong our suffering. As the evening sun begins to disappear it casts a gloomy shadow over the colourless landscape, enveloping the cluster of research buildings at its base in a cloak of darkness.

Lights begin to click on now in some of the houses scattered across the scrubland. Each one plays a repetitive showreel of life - a table being set for dinner, fresh linens rippling through the air before being applied to quilts, sometimes even a child barreling through a corridor, chasing some long forgotten joy.

I turn around to observe the ocean, tusks of foam stabbing up at the horizon in mesmerising undulations. For all its grandeur and ferocity, it is lifeless as far as the eye can see. Perhaps below that blue-grey blanket of teeth there is a pod of dolphins playing, ignorant in the blissfulness and simplicity of their existence.

Perhaps I should stop trying to excuse the ocean for the devastation it brought forth, for the lives it took. Even now it seems to claw its way up toward me through the crags of black rocks below, its salty fingers reaching out to steal me away for good.

That was where the beach used to be, waves gently lapping at our feet as we frolicked and played. But when the Earth came to collect its debts we had no choice but to pay up. And now I feel the silence - not just of this room, nor of the island, but of the planet.

I look at the television sitting pathetically in the corner, cowering under a coat of dust. The aging wooden floorboards creak as I make my way over to it. It glows miserably into life, exposing a sheet of black and white static which buzzes across the screen like a colony of insects. I don’t know why I expect some sort of sound from it, something akin to the crackle of those old CRT televisions from way back when, but it doesn’t come. I stare at it, hoping to see some far-off land, some breaking news story, some sign that something somewhere is happening right now..

I don’t remember the last thing that screen showed me; it all went quiet so fast. I imagine something like the final news broadcasts from horror films, the anchor delivering their last report on humanity’s failure before signing off with some half-hearted phrase of hope. But it didn’t happen like the movies. At some point, it all just stopped.

At first the signs of our finality were subtle, starting with mass migrations from countries where ecosystems had collapsed. I remember watching those awful scenes with hundreds of thousands of tired, starving, desperate refugees at borders across the globe, cascading from dinghies and clawing at chain link fences. Yet the citizens behind those fences consistently voted to keep them out at all costs, defending their loose nationalist arguments to the very end. There were even reports of countries opening fire on refugees at their borders. The news channels didn’t report on that, you only got whispers of that from social media, but they were swiftly censored. Most of it was branded fake news, but you couldn’t fake those images. Those harrowing, forsaken images.

Even the countries that did open their borders seemed to be faring well at first - if you looked past the reports of concentration camps and forced labour. Immigrants were happy, economies were growing, and nobody had to lift a finger.

That was thanks to us. A group of top climate scientists from across the globe sent out to a remote high-tech research centre to combat the forces of nature that were oppressing us. We were heroes back then, even royalty didn’t get the treatment that we got. We could ask for whatever we wanted, the salaries and bonuses were astronomical, and we even got a team of chefs, cleaners, teachers and a host of other supporting staff to see us through. Best of all? We’d save the world and take all the credit.

And at first it was great. We made fantastic progress. Our small team here fast-forwarded research at lightning speed. I remember the parties, every other Friday, with bottomless drinks and the most exquisite cuisines, all shipped across by our respective governments. It was like being back at university, except without the financial struggles and adolescent drama. Every other day a journalist from some international news agency would arrive at the docks, wide-eyed and awe-struck, excitedly lapping up our successes and predictions for a bright future. Even we believed it was achievable back then.

I remember the day one of the scientists, Johan, came to my office, uncharacteristically flustered and twitching with anxiety. He hadn’t heard anything from his family back home for days. They had stayed behind, unwilling to uproot to some remote “party island” a million miles from civilization. We’d seen reports of rioting in countries worldwide - violent riots over food shortages, power cuts and refugee crises. We knew it was getting bad. I consoled him and suggested they were probably in a prolonged power cut and were unable to get in touch, and that they’d be fine.

He returned a week later after he’d found out that they’d been shot during a crowd surge at a military-run food handout. I didn’t make him work after that, but neither could I send him back home to his country. The turning point for all of us was the day he didn’t answer the door. The parties stopped after that. People started making more mistakes in the lab, everybody felt the pressure of what we needed to achieve, and all the while the embers of the apocalypse grew into wildfires.

The riots turned into bloodbaths. Governments closed borders and severed diplomatic ties. The broadcasts became ever-more disturbing: first famines, mass graves, government-organised genocides. One country even started nuking its cities. As the lights of the planet went out one by one, we became even more isolated. The television channels shut down, then the internet, and finally the radio, our most simple, last-resort communication device, fell completely silent.

I feel numb to it all now as I let the television fade into permanent blackness.

I survey the landscape again, the orange hue of the low sun setting the coarse grassland ablaze. I see my colleagues and their families shuttering out the oppressive evening chill. If you listen closely you can occasionally hear a wailing violin or cello as they try fruitlessly to drown out the miserable silence of night.

I hear a subdued creak from behind me. My husband stands expectantly in the doorway, looking his usual tired forlorn self. I turn in his direction, force a coy smile, and shake my head. He nods, defeated, then retreats back into the depths of the house below, closing the door gently.

We were happy once, before we came here. We had our modest townhouse, just outside the city centre: three story, dark brown bricks, period features. I can barely recall the smell of must and oak in the narrow hallway. I summon memories of the living room, where we would discuss the nuances and emotions of the day with a glass of wine and, in the winter, the smouldering, crackling logs burning away in the fireplace.

I can just about recollect the first time I saw his face, the luminescence of my phone’s screen straining my eyes as I index another batch of half-hearted messages from prospective lovers. There he was: an easy smile, subdued yet confident, hair like the night sky, unkempt, secretive. Most importantly, a message that wasn’t a variant of “hey babe how are you?”

I miss those early dates, our late night discussions about philosophy, and what ifs, and which way round to put cream and jam on scones. I miss the cuddling. I miss the walks on the moors and the mud on our boots and roast chicken on Sundays.

I wish we could find comfort in those memories now. When we married, we thought it would only get better. A year later he sacrificed his life - no, our life - to support me in what we thought was the most important thing we’d ever accomplish. He showed no bitterness, not even when things started to get tough. Every day I’d come back  to the same smile and the same warm house we had ten years ago. He brought our home with him.

I walk over to the desk, the chair with its back turned in defiance to the island. All around me water is churning and convulsing, and in the setting sun it seems awash in the blood of our forsaken species..

It doesn’t care, the ocean. We tried to vilify the forces of our planet as cruel, merciless serial killers, punishing us for our greed, our desire to grow and expand and consume. We fought back - how arrogant that we saw this as a fight, and one we could win! I allow myself to smile at that, a bitter, disdainful grimace at our fate.

Balance. All the planet does - not need, nor want - is balance itself out. That’s what we were trying to do here, to catalyze the reconciliation process so we might continue as a species for thousands more millenia. Not for the love of the planet, our home? No, we’d have abandoned Mother Earth as soon as we found somewhere less capricious. Somewhere we could be comfortable and placated, getting fat and drunk until something even we couldn’t control came along to snuff us out for good.

I feel tears welling in my eyes. Why did I come here? Maybe I wasn’t always this bitter. Maybe we weren’t all that bad. We could love, we could be charitable, we could laugh and frolic in the company of others. We domesticated animals and brought them into our homes and spent our weekends tossing balls for them to chase until they were tired. We sang songs and hugged complete strangers at the turn of the year.

We lived. Until we didn’t.

I pull open a drawer. Four pea-sized, colourless capsules wobble lazily on a stack of long-forgotten notes and drawings. I take two of them in my hand, fiddling at them with my thumb, feeling their smooth shells against my flesh. For years I’ve tried to protect life, to prolong and secure it, and yet here in these two tiny pellets I wield death. I bring them to my lips and close my eyes, the silky exterior eliciting a morbid pleasure as I ripple them across my lips. The end is so close now, and the closure relaxes me for the first time in years.

I throw the pills in back into the drawer, close it, and lean back in the chair, allowing myself to stretch a little.The worries and stresses of my work seem to seep away into the quiet of the stale air around me, the whiffs of cinnamon fading away as the candle burns itself out.

Just before the sun goes down, I always scan the horizon, tragically hoping for some ship to appear, careening towards the island with a boatload of survivors. Sometimes I imagine this all to be some sort of messed up psychological experiment, our lives projected across walls of monitors as minions in lab coats observe our descent into an inevitable depression. In my optimistic paranoia I’ve scoured this house for microphones and cameras, only to be disappointed and, once upon one time, to care enough to break down in tears.

It’s too dark to see much outside the windows now. The homes of those with a few shreds of sanity left give out faint sobs of orange light in a sparse constellation across the hillside. The distant thud of doors from below suggest that Matthew is taking an early night. I could join him, but I won’t. I’ll sleep alone as I always do now. Yesterday’s memories make for better company.

As I make my way towards the door, I glance one last time toward the horizon, barely separable from the speckled night sky. Nothing, as is always the case. Nothing yesterday, nothing tonight, and nothing tomorrow. Maybe somewhere in the world someone else is looking out too.

We’ll have one last party tomorrow, one final blow-out before we call time on humanity.