Last Gardens.(Short Story)

I needed a break so I checked into a monastery in the hills--a charming, declining place, uncertain of its future. After a day spent walking in a public garden nearby, and reading a vampire novel, I decided to have an early night.

How long I'd slept I couldn't say when the noise of a tremendous explosion threw me onto the floor, so that my head rested, rather comfortably, on the pillow of my discarded book. Having long been aware of the imminent possibility of nuclear war, I speculated as to whether this might be it.

"Well, well ..." I thought, wondering if I might be the only person left on the face of the earth and whether the food no doubt partially prepared and waiting for me on the kitchen table would be safe. In the way of debris, I saw little more than a few broken statues--hardly witnesses to the end of time but confirming that something had happened. No one was moving and there was no sound--and, what was even more revealing, no band of light at the foot of any door. Surely they couldn't have slept through it all, being above ground and subject to the full force of the explosion?

To be on the safe side, I decided not to do anything--and I didn't want to wake them up if they were still asleep. It was still early, after all. In any case, I didn't know on which door to knock and couldn't face the prospect of saying, "Look, there was a great noise a few minutes ago. Did you hear anything? Do you think the world's been blown up and we're ... all that's left?"

What should I do? How long might I have to live, having left the safety of my room? Perhaps it was safe now? Perhaps the whole world was safe and I was the only one to benefit from this?

I had to do something, and like others in difficulties before me I drew on literature for guidance. Didn't the vampire book describe a being in a similar situation to mine? Here was a creature capable of living in total isolation; one, indeed, whose only contact with the shadowy world of mortality was with yet another unwilling and intermittent source of his own vitality. Nevertheless, he'd won through and, as if by definition, had found his way. His elegant manners, his consummate style in every aspect of life, spoke of the triumph of art.

If, for most of his life--like sharks which exist chiefly in a state of near-starvation and yet skim ever so sleekly and powerfully through the water--he could walk through his once sumptuous rooms with perfect elegance, brushing away a cobweb as if it were the latest thing in fashion, while bent on the most perverse and cruel meal ever imagined, though not by him, surely I could make the most of my day, even if it and I were on legs as uncertain as his.