Another Country by James Fowler
When the beer started tasting skunky, we knew the jig was up. A people that can no longer manage such a staple is beyond hope. The time has come to pack the kettles and seek fairer parts. Beer, after all, has as strong a claim to being civilization’s first product as bread does.
Of course, the bread lines, riots, and frequent brownouts also clued us in. But we were willing to write all that off as a temporary systemic hiccup. Our leaders said as much. “Don’t worry. Everything will sort itself out before long. We’re already seeing recovery in the footwear sector.”
Curiously, the stock market remained bullish even as people on the street were being mauled by bears. Bitter zookeepers, who didn’t want to see their charges starve or be put down, had simply opened their cages. Officials responded by declaring open season and sharing recipes for grilled ostrich. It all felt vaguely Roman.
That empire took centuries to decline. Our slide? Five years. Now the debt and dysfunction behind it had piled up for decades. But that was just politics as usual. We all deplored the irresponsibility, voted down tax increases, and assumed that strategic borrowing would see us through. Words like leveraging and stimulus rolled smoothly off our tongues. Turns out we’d levered the economy right off a cliff.
Then there were the infrastructure hints: leaky dams, sagging bridges, sewers indifferent which way they flowed. Clever as we’d been with patches, reckonings we couldn’t face were coming due. Even the greenery was losing moral fiber. Kids one block over toppled a tree with rocks.
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Public meltdowns were growing common. We watched the national security director froth at reporters for fear-mongering. Street traffic became a free-for-all, with drivers leaping out to throw punches. You could tell how stressed everyone was by the stray hair all around. Balls of it tumbled down sidewalks on breezy days.
At first we pulled back into our homes, our heads. Some turned to frenzied baking, until even their children pleaded they couldn’t eat that many cakes and cookies. Others lost themselves in doorstopper novels or online games. That gave rise to elaborate fantasies about alternate realms accessed through brainwave-activated headsets or Victorian attic toys. All the while outer reality was closing in. Flour and butter grew scarce. Mental travelers convinced they had crossed over were found stripped to their underwear in a neighbor’s tree house. The tree’s swaying they took for high seas.
Finally we’ve decided there’s nothing for it but to leave this place and start over somewhere else. Apparently there’s a good-sized island for sale, shares of which can be had at top dollar. Buy-in for all but the most wealthy could require complete liquidation of assets, including pension. But what if we got there only to find ramshackle huts and friendly mosquitos? Better to forge our own path.
It’s hard to avoid magical thinking in these cases. After modest struggle, we picture ourselves in a nation that’s a model of prudence, with charming folkways. They’re only too glad to welcome the chastened refugees of a once-great country. We bring our know-how to the table. We are skilled workers, easily retooled. Many of them already speak our global lingo, so it’s just a matter of sprinkling our talk with their favorite phrases. “Yes, I too am happy enough to whistle the sun to my side.”
If only. Here’s the more likely scenario: after being shuttled from host to host, we wind up in a sad sack of a country that charges us a steep settlement fee, restricts our movement, and drills us on their history of never-ending grudges. The only work we can get is washing milk jugs. Our children pick up peasant habits and curse us in the local dialect for bringing them there. We adults gain a rude grasp of the language by matching subtitles to the dialogue of ancient sitcoms imported from our home country. Pathetic, our hankering to live on those black-and-white sets, with their cozily fraudulent exterior shots, secure as our situations resolve themselves in thirty-minute installments.
Then again, why go so far? The lighthouses and ocean grottoes may already be taken, but ours is a big country, with plenty of outback. Just think how many secluded mountain meadows there must be. All that virgin territory can’t be owned. Even if it is, our encampment could be well on its way to a homestead by the time we’re caught. We’ll have to study squatter laws. And learn the most hi-tech methods of roughing it. That’s the spirit of our country after all, even in its dying breath.
James Fowler has published a poetry collection, The Pain Trader (Golden Antelope Press, 2020), and a volume of short stories, Field Trip (Cornerpost Press, 2022).