Short Story

-)()()ʊ()()(- Only You Can Save The World -)()()ʊ()()(-

By Matt Butrim

On the fourth of December, 1997, whilst she stood underneath rain plummeting in sheets, Luce Magellan was abducted by aliens.

Ten years later, an old man limped out of his beaten white trailer and slowly laid pieces of plywood across his quarter-acre section of the wasteland that stretched to the limits of the horizon. The name of the old man was Noah, and, swept along by the irresistible tides of fate, he was building an Ark. Thirty, forty, years ago, he was a famous politician, but had grown disillusioned with the world of politics, with the entire world, with the world's lack of belief in anything. So he left that world and the world in general and became a desert hermit, because he could no longer stand the ennui of mankind.

Noah was not a great man, and he had not always been an honorable man, but his heart was large. So it was that when he reached the age of seventy, his heart was too full to bursting with the sorrows of others that only his solitude could protect him from what he knew to be the crushing pain of reality. Yet even in his dustland sanctuary he could feel the pain of the earth, feel the pain of every single human who ever felt pain. Up until that point he had been able to endure it, but something within him had changed. He had lived too far away from people for too long, and he only felt their hurting, and he had forgotten the love and the goodness that had given him something to believe in throughout his years of isolation. He resolved to escape. And it was in that resolve that he begun the building of the Ark. It would take him somewhere where mankind's screams could not reach his ears, and where the rot of man’s dreams could not be smelled.

But Noah was not a selfish man. Even if he no longer believed in his fellow humans, he would not blindly flee from them. He hoped that he could find at least one soul who realized that society was destroying humanity. He hoped desperately that he could save one person from mankind's own inevitable self-destruction. So he walked from his dented and sand-scarred trailer, clad in worn white Sketchers and his best black suit from his days as a senator. He walked back towards civilization.

Noah arrived in a city that was as unfamiliar to him as he, in his wind torn rags and his long sun-bleached hair, was to it. He tried to talk to people, but even when somebody stopped to listen, all he saw in their face was pity. Pity for him. He deserved to be pitied, of course. But he didn't deserve it from them, for they had no right to pity him. They should have pitied themselves, for being directionless, for not knowing anything real. Though Noah persisted, he persisted in vain, as after one year in the city, with his hair growing longer, his suit getting darker, and his shoes fading away to nothing, Noah had found not a single person to listen to him. His heart even heavier and even more swollen than when he had left, Noah limped back to his rusted trailer in the middle of the lifeless wastes.

-)()()ʊ()()(-

Noah sat amidst the debris of nails and plywood and sand and sighed, deeply, as if he was trying to expel all of the pain he felt in his heart. It had always hurt, but never this much, never to this extent. The people in the city with their fake smiles and their fake pity had torn his confidence out of him and had torn out much of his hope. So he sat in the dustland plains, drawing pictures in the sand with his finger. A flash of light glinting across the horizonless desert caught his attention, and he looked up, across the land, watching the sun slowly beginning its western descent. He turned around, hoping to see the stars rising on the other side of the horizon, but instead, all he could see was a lone figure approaching from the east. It started out as a silhouette in the farthest distance, but slowly a young girl with twin antennae in her hair was illuminated by the setting sun and the rising stars. She walked steadily and inexorably, approaching Noah's land as a trail of dust blew up behind her. When she reached the developing skeleton of the Ark, she stopped.

“Who...who are you?” asked Noah, his voice raspy from the years of exposure to the gritty air.

“Me?” she replied, looking around for anybody else he could be talking to. When Noah didn't respond, she happily continued. “My name's Luce Magellan. I'm seventeen years old and I'm from space, and I want to come with you on your Ark.”

Noah stuttered, this was the first time anyone had spoken seriously to him in years. “Why is...I mean, why are you asking me? Why are you asking crazy old man Noah?”

One of the girl's antenna swiveled around, pointing directly at Noah. “I followed the stars,” she said, her other antenna pointing to the east. “They led me here, to you. To somebody who could believe in me, to someone who could take me back to the sky.”

Noah stared at the fuzzy antennas that were gawkily protruding from Luce's head, and said, “I...I don't...who are you really?”

“I'm a human, just like you, old crazyman Noah,” Luce said, smiling. “Twelve years ago I was abducted by aliens. I was five then. They kept me on their spaceship for two years. When I was seven they sent me back to Earth. They never treated me poorly and never...” Luce stopped, as Noah stood up and turned his back on her, walking towards the door of his buckled-in trailer.

“You don't believe me?” she asked.

Noah turned around, his face taut and his voice sad. “Begone, girl,” he said. “Do not bother trying to humor me. I have had enough of your pity.”

Luce started to open her mouth, to say something more, but seeing Noah's sad and proud stare, she closed her mouth and turned away. The sun was lower now and she turned walked towards it, jerkily stumbling through the sand swept mounds of two by fours and rusted scrap metal sheets, her antennae bouncing furiously. Noah stood unmoving, watching stoically as Luce eventually faded from his sight. He stood like that for another two hours, not flinching even as a sandstorm swept through him, unfeeling even as every single grain of sand stung him in the body and in the heart. But when the sun, nebulously glowing in the haze of the flowing dust, sunk beneath the empty horizon, Noah's shoulders slumped and he turned towards the misshapen door of his misshapen trailer. When he put his hand on the door knob, a huge weight, more than he had ever felt, more than his heart could bear, more than he imagined he could ever carry fell upon him like an asteroid. He sank to his knees, tears streaming from his eyes.

“What...what am I doing?” Noah croaked. “What has happened to me? Is there nothing that I believe in anymore? I have become like those I scorned. I have become what I tried to escape from. Do I have the right to build this ark? Do I have the right to try to save myself from the plague that has spread through humanity when I too carry that very same virus? I...I do not! Not as I am now. I have lost my compassion, I have lost all of my faith. I have been consumed by that same self-absorption and misappropriated anger that has consumed the rest. I thought that I had escaped it, but instead I have been sheltering it, growing it, nurturing it—the only thing that could grow in this God forsaken wilderness!” Noah grabbed a hammer off the sandy ground and threw it at one of the wooden ribs of the Ark.

“And now...” he continued, “...now I don't believe in anything! Without belief, what can I feel besides pain, besides emptiness? There is nothing for me here, nothing but further solitude and further pain. No. Not only here. There is nothing for me anywhere, nothing but the blindness of the sandstorm, and its bitter sting.”

Noah sat beneath the stars in silence for a while. After thinking heavily, he went on. “But, that girl Luce! She was kind, and sweet and pure! She believed in something. Something powerful drove her here, but I sent her back, unaided and unlistened to. And now, she's gone. But she, or someone like her is who needs the Ark. I do not deserve it anymore, I don't know if I ever did.”

Noah's tears had long stopped running, and though he had torn large chunks of his beard in his agony, he was regaining strength in his aging body. He was regaining a sense of purpose. A futile purpose perhaps, but a purpose all the same. Noah was not as selfish as he said he was, nor did he completely lack belief. Indeed, with his growing purpose, he was beginning to have faith again. He was beginning to believe that even if he couldn't escape from humanity's downward spiral, that there were people out there like Luce, who could rise above the pitiless Earth, if only they had the means. And Noah was gaining resolve. He would complete the Ark. He would build it as he had been planning, not for himself to selfishly escape from his own pains, but for those who truly had purpose, who truly believed, who had faith. He would build an Ark that would protect Luce and anybody else like her from the trap of humanity, and he would die, content that he had truly contributed something positive and beneficial. Content that even if he had lost the ability to believe for himself, he had been able to believe in the beliefs of others. If Luce ever returned, Noah would be ready. This was Noah's resolve, as he pulled open the door of his wobbling trailer, and lay down on the sand colored rags on the corner bed.

-)()()ʊ()()(-

Luce Magellan walked west, like she always did. She walked across the flat dunes of the wastelands, watching the movements of the empty blue sky as she walked. It was the fifth day since she had met Noah, and since then all she had done was walk. She walked continuously, staring yearningly at the sky turning yellow, orange, red, starlit black. She stopped when the stars came out and curled up on the cold sand, resting her head on the dusty ground as she gazed up at the stars. She closed her eyes so that she might sleep, and what she saw in her closed eyelids were stars. Eventually she fell asleep, and what she saw in her dreams were stars.

This is what Luce dreamed of: She saw herself, sleeping in the sand, a small dot in the huge desert that was a small dot on the world—a small black dot in the infinite darkness of space. She saw Noah, asleep in his trailer as his wastelands burned away to reveal a thick metal sheen underneath the sands. She saw Noah sitting outside, eyes bright as stars, wearing his pitch black business suit, crying as everything that he had ever known was burned in front of him. She saw herself as a five year old, playing with all of the neighborhood kids. She saw the rain begin to fall, washing away the chalk foursquare court, washing away the smiles, washing away all of her friends. As the rain fell, she saw her present self again, chained to the earth as the rising floods suffocated her. With the waters rising around her neck, she could only look up and see the distant stars.

In the morning, Luce woke up, her antennae damp with the desert dew.

“I,” she stated as she yawned herself awake, “will return to Noah. I believe in him, and I believe that he means well. I believe that eventually he'll believe in me.”

Luce stood up, stretching her arms. She snapped them down with a firm resolve. “But not yet. He's not ready to move forward, and I'm not ready to leave. So I'll continue west, and when the time comes, I'll be back here, and me and Noah shall go off to the stars.”

Luce yawned again, scratching herself on the head, feeling the bumps where the antennae emerged from her scalp. She yawned one more time, just for the sake of it, and following the westerly breeze she walked off through the desert.

Luce walked around the world before she deemed herself ready. She encountered every people, found madmen and saints, heroes and devils. But what she saw in all of them was a reflection of flames. Behind the madness, behind the goodness, behind the boldness, behind the evil, all she could see was emptiness. There was no room for compassion, there was no room for her in that emptiness. So every night, she slept outside, underneath the stars.

-)()()ʊ()()(-

It was four years since Noah had seen Luce, and four years since Noah had rediscovered his belief and reaffirmed his purpose. Noah did not notice as Luce, still wearing her antennae and her overalls, walked into his quarter-acre, for Noah was hard at work upon his Ark. Luce on the other hand had been watching Noah since she had seen the tip of the Ark upon the horizon. She could tell that he was ready.

“Noah!” She shouted across the debris strewn badlands.

He appeared not to hear her, his battered and scarred body somehow lifting a twenty-five foot sheet of brown rusted iron onto a wooden framework.

“Noah!” She yelled, louder.

He still did not hear, as he drilled impossibly large rivets through the sheet-metal and into the frame of the massive ship that was his Ark.

“Noah!” She yelled a third time, a feeling of contentment and happiness flooding in to her as she watched the old man, seemingly possessed by something much larger, wrestle his corroded metal plate towards another and weld them together.

This time, Noah heard her. Slowly he turned away from the Ark, staring at Luce. His eyes moved towards the antennae that adorned her sand-swept hair, and he began to weep softly, the four years of unceasing work completely and comprehensively validated.

“Luce.” He hoarsely choked out. “I...I'm sorry. I'm ready to believe now.”

Luce smiled and took Noah's wrinkled hand. “I'm ready to believe in you as well.” She said, as she sat down on the steps of Noah's brown striped trailer. “Last time we met, I never got the chance to finish my story. I'll do that now, if you want.”

Noah's tears continued to flow out of his eyes, and he found himself unable to speak, so he nodded his head in consent.

Luce began her story where she left off. “When with the rain I floated back down to the Earth, I found myself in a place I no longer understood and no longer knew. They left me with my parents, but I didn't know them, and they didn't know me. So I left on a clear night, and walked as I watched the stars, following them west as they rose and fell across the sky, chased by the flaming sun. I searched for somebody who would believe my tale, but nobody I encountered ever really understood who I, who had seen something so much greater than their small lives, really was. They didn't believe me and refused to hear me out. After I had walked around the world once, I realized that as a human being I could never find a home. So I drilled these antennae into my head, and I decided to return to the stars to find something that I could truly call home. I continued to follow the stars west, and eventually they led me to you. I looked into your eyes and saw not emptiness but stars, and above all your overflowing heart. I listened to your words and heard belief and compassion. I knew then that even though the faith and love in your heart was being swamped by the flood of humanity's pain and sorrow, your heart was big enough that you would be the one who had room to believe in me, and room to take me to the stars.”

Noah wiped the last of his tears out of his wrinkled eyes and turned around, gesturing at the huge ship that he had spent the energy of his life on. “This is your Ark, Luce,” he said. “I built it for you, who unfalteringly believes in the stars. I built it for you, who still believes in an old man who can't see clearly anymore.”

Luce took in the enormity of the ship made of rusty metal and dried up splinters of wood. “No, this is your Ark, Noah.” She said. “In your belief in the ultimate good of humanity, in your effort to give this world something besides anger and narcissism and emptiness, you built something that could bring me hope, and that could save anybody who wanted to be saved.”

Luce and Noah gazed at the unfinished Ark that stood in the rough desert of the dead lands, and as the stars rose again in the east, Luce followed Noah into his aging trailer and slept on the floor, a roof over her head for the first time since she was five.

-)()()ʊ()()(-

Luce was twenty-five and Noah was seventy-nine when the Ark was finished. Noah’s quarter-acre plot of wilderness was completely clean now, dust settling upon the remnants of older dust. The only thing visible across the entire panorama of the desert was the Ark, banged up as the trailer, but pristinely beautiful.

“Shall we go?” Asked Noah, standing by Luce, gazing at their construction. “Or should we wait for any others?”

“I can wait, for a while. Can you?” responded Luce, who was staring into the clean sky.

“I too can wait. But when should we leave?”

“Only when cities surround us, and the people have not responded to us. Only when our pain become too unbearable. We shall go only then, when humanity is lost and we are nearly lost as well. Then we will go.” Luce spoke with a vision of the future, almost certain that nobody would respond to them, but hoping that somebody would.

Noah asked in reply, “But what about us? Will we be able to wait for the skyscrapers to appear, and wait for people who can hear our belief? Will we not lose our beliefs as we age, instead turning to pride and anger to inspire us?”

And Luce, who had become wise beyond her years answered, “Our beliefs are in each other. So long as I don’t lose my purpose, you won’t either. So long as you do not falter in your resolution, neither will I. Together our beliefs, our dedications, and our dreams will keep us on our feet, even if you are three-hundred and I two-hundred and fifty by the time we are ready to leave. But if we were to leave now, we would also be leaving behind our hearts and our souls, and there would be no meaning to that.”

Noah nodded, unable to feel anything but hope as he listened to Luce, who had wholly embraced her dreams and his hopes.

So they waited. It was not long before a city of chrome began to rise skyward from the dust of the wastelands, and people soon began to follow. None of these men and women answered the call of Noah and Luce; they were too cold, too shaped by their society to believe in something so honest and pure. Noah and Luce continued to wait though, and the chrome moved closer, enveloping the desert sand, until the only remnant of the wasteland was Noah’s quarter-acre, with the Ark sitting in it. But the chrome skyscrapers only rose higher, and the people faded more and more into their chrome lives. At the time that the dustland was completely overrun, Noah was one hundred and twenty one and Luce sixty two, and they watched sadly as the sky was gradually closed up by the encroaching spires of the city. They were both much older now, and had felt worlds of sadness and pain as they had waited. They could sense that even the chrome people in the chrome city could feel the sadness of their kind, but they could see that none of them were willing to dare to hope, or to pray, or to seek something better.

“I think, that finally, it is time to leave,” said Noah to Luce.

“Yes. There is not a single person in this city who wants us here, and this chrome is soon to become our prison.” Luce said, her voice a small bit sadder now, but still confident with her dreams and beliefs.

“Then we shall leave tonight.” Said Noah.

So it was that fifty-seven years after Luce was abducted by aliens as a five year old child, and twenty-eight years after Noah had come to realize his true destiny and purpose, Luce and Noah walked together into the Ark, alone from humanity, but not alone in their beliefs or in their faith or in their path. It was December, 2053, and though pillars of chrome grasped towards the sky, they could not reach as Luce Magellan and Noah flew their Ark towards the star-spotted black of night in the west, a silver light behind them seeming to engulf all of the cities of the world.