Feed

Joe Aultman-Moore | Tolka Issue Five, November 2023

Eerie calm.

A standing wave, a never-ending breaker on a rock cliff, a bass vibration that trembles through every cell like the mountain itself is humming, rain washes the windows like poison—

Someone screaming, Fuck! Fuck!

*

What happens to your Feed after you die? There’s no way to survive that. No way. No, I don’t know know; I didn’t watch it with my own two eyeballs, but I know. Stop, just shut up for one second, I know. And so there’s this thing attached to me, this awful piece of knowledge like a – like a dead dog. A dead-dog piece of the story. What happens to the Feed after you die? When you die it rules out posting something like:

hey I’m dead.

The word sloshes around like a dog dish full of water. You might die, but your Feed lives on in a kind of afterlife. Friends and family gather, talk to you, talk to each other. Your photos continue to pop up. You have a birthday every year. Also – you can rewind the Feed.

The story is the thing. I am the only one who knows, this moment, that the Feed belongs to the friends and family and not to the one whose name is atop the Feed. And I can’t hold onto it – I can’t, I can’t – the Feed when you die:

Scroll down and you’re alive.

Scroll up and you’re dead.

Scroll down and you’re alive.

Scroll up and you’re dead.

*

Somewhere in there is the invisible barrier, the curtain, the cliff, the knife edge. But the Feed never shows it; the story it tells is terrible: down alive up dead. You want to click in between posts. Where’s that one? Where can I find the post that says what happened? Where on the goddamned Internet does it say what happened between down alive up dead? Can you google that? Hey, Siri, hey, Alexa, what happened to my friend?

It gets too bright to look at.

*

So the Feed: scrolling scrolling, going further back in time. Maybe that’s why we’re all addicted to the Feed: trying to push back the march of time with our thumbs.

Believe. Everything happens for a reason.

Live updates: Governor responds, 6 people missing, search and rescue . . .

Hi my friend, I hope everything is good for you.

Reading the news coming out of Haines. Please let me know you’re all right. Concerned. Much love to you from afar.

Shop Local & Save: a collaboration from HEDC and the Chamber of Commerce.

Added 23 new photos.

The story is the thing. I am the only one who knows, this moment, that the Feed belongs to the friends and family. The Feed littered with clickbait: fishing-rod ads, angry political rants, cat pictures. This so-small thing, a few words just to push the story. Some tiny transition between worlds.

The afterlife of the Feed is your life in reverse.

*

Like a big gust of wind, but too much in the bass clef, goes on for far too long without modulation. You know what it sounds like? It sounds like waves on rock. The thump-crash, the deep bedrock bass note that you hear with your bones – but continuous. Heavy surf without break, a wave always hitting.

*

There’s still a half-eaten bagel out there on my desk. Bacon and eggs. For some reason, I can’t get that detail out of my mind. I had a bite of everything bagel, eggs, bacon and cheese when oversaturated ground with heavy snowpack weighted bedrock that had been slowly fracturing and eroding for millennia, eroding the mountain under my feet, under three-hundred-year-old spruce.

Perhaps a tree root breaks. Maybe a bear puts his foot in exactly the wrong spot. Rotten rock collapses and the ancient forest slides like pudding. House/car/person, just a recombination of atoms like forest/mountain/ocean. And me with a mouthful of everything bagel, eggs, bacon and cheese, half-chewed, listening to the sound: a continuous wave on rock.

That detail feels like the key to it all. That was the moment when geological time – god’s time – and human time intersected. That moment – bagel in mouth, confusion – when something that had been building for millennia happened in the space of a minute and a half and blasted an entire forest, several houses, and two of my friends into splinters. If that slide had been slightly wider or slightly more to the south, that moment – bagel in mouth, confusion, continuous sound of wave on rock – that would’ve been my last moment.

*

The Feed blowing up, bing bing bing, more texts. My five-plus-year-old phone can’t keep up. Have to restart it just to clear up some memory:

I got out yes

I don’t know Yes I’m fine

I got out yes

I was next to it. No yes yes I’m downtown now. Café.

I don’t know

I don’t know

On the far side of the slide. They evac-ed us by boat

By boat

By boat

Yes, OK

I don’t know

I haven’t heard from him. Called yeah. No answer. It was right by their house.

Did you get a hold of anyone?

*

I’m alive! Alive alive O! I am alive and they are dead.

I have nothing but the clothes I have on and I couldn’t be happier and they are dead. Words bubble out of me; they are dead. Look, I can drink a hot coffee and they are dead. Look at all these not-dead peoples’ faces, warm and ruddy. Look at this big brown dog, soaked from the rain but still with his big doggy grin on. He doesn’t know about the Feed and search and rescue and dead friends. I could just go out into the rain and play fetch for hours with a big joyful brown dog and they still would be dead.

I’m in a hotel, taking a luxurious bath and they are dead. Not-dead people bring food, books, clothes, everyone calls. Roomfuls of kind, not-dead people. Other not-dead people like me with nothing but the clothes they have on and there’s a glow about them too. I hug every one of these not-dead people.

Other serious not-dead people come up to comfort us but we’re alive and feel like dancing. It’s OK to cry, they say; it’s OK to be sad. Cry? I want to sing!

Lovely day, lovely day, lovely day, a lovely day!

lovely day, lovely day, lovely dead, lovely dead, the lovely dead!

There’s an impromptu party at a neighbor’s house – a party of not-dead people who may have lost everything they owned, who knows? Have you ever been to a party full of people who were afraid they were going to die and then didn’t and then were released back into the world like naked infants, with nothing but faces turned to the wild howling world?

It’s quite a party, I can tell you.

I take a friend and kiss her beautiful face and whisper, we’re all going to die.

Well, I almost.

*

The Plan:

if god is in the rain; if god is the mountain:

if god is in the glacier; god is uplifting the Wrangellia terrane; god is the wrinkling of the mountains; god is the scouring of the granite by rivers of ice; god is the evaporation of the jet stream, the Hadley cells, the Coriolis effect and the atmospheric rivers;

if god is the trickle of rainwater into rock; if god is collisions of tectonic plates, shuttering mountains, trembling bedrock; if god is freeze, thaw, freeze, thaw, freeze, thaw, freeze;

god is a five-hundred-year storm; god is a heavy snow; god is a house of cards in the shape of a mountain.

*

The moment that equilibrium was broken – the weight of those infinitesimal events over thousands of years. That hillside. That morning. Those houses. One raindrop too heavy. One single flake of snow too much. One bird lands on a tree.

*

Out of the pile of infinite variables – that one raindrop. One raindrop breaks the mountain.

*

Why not me too?

*

There’s this place called home. There’s this place that your eyes know so well they don’t even see it anymore. There’s this place where you can wake up at four in the morning, no light, swimming through that half-world, but your not-even-conscious brain can step around chairs, piles of clothes, your hand lands exactly on the handrail, fingers reach exactly for the light switch.

Where you can set an open book face down on the couch because you can’t find a bookmark. Where you leave dirty dishes in the sink.

What does it mean when god tears apart the book on the couch, smashes the dirty dishes? Hey, Siri? Hey, Alexa?

*

It’s still raining. Every time a truck passes or, god forbid, a bulldozer, it rumbles a deep bass note like waves hitting rock. I shrink inside my skin, start to sweat, spine vibrates, guts churn.

There’s something murderous in the rain.

The way it shoots down like bullets on a flooded house, on wreckage and broken trees.

I’ve forgotten things. Passwords. Names. To-do lists. Emails. Bank accounts. Things get flushed.

A kind of shattered feeling. Like the story is playing out in reverse.

*

They never say the other words: it was part of God’s Plan to kill my friends. They don’t say the words: ‘God planned to kill _____.’ ‘God planned to kill _____.’

So:

Either God is a murderer in the first degree or God could’ve stopped it but chose not to (negligent homicide); or God didn’t give a shit; or God doesn’t even know about humans and their problems; or God is all-powerful and absolute power corrupts absolutely and He enjoys making people suffer. If this is the story, then everyone deserves what they get. Fuck off. Maybe it’s all just gravity.

Holding you in His Light

Praying that the Lord will save him!

God only gives you as much as you can handle

*

I read a joke once. Golfer goes out to the tee box, picks up his longest driver, lines up and hits the golf ball as far as he can. Ball sails over the fields, lands hundreds of yards away on a blade of grass. The blade of grass screams, ‘Why me, God?’ Ha, ha.

*

So. the Feed:

Scroll up and you’re dead.

Scroll down and you’re alive.

This is how we grieve now: thumbs push against time until they’re alive again. Pictures from last week, pictures from last month. Their hairstyle changes: gets longer, shorter, longer. Beards disappear, reappear. Fashion changes. Makeup comes and goes. Lines disappear from their face. They get thin and svelte.

Depending on how old the person is, maybe it stops there. Older folks might only have a couple years on their Feed. Photos and posts on their kids’ or grandkids’ Feeds. Millennials go back through college, maybe high school. The smartphone generation posting their first selfies practically from the car seat.

The last place they lived, the place before that. Birthdays counting down. A dog they used to have. Expired jokes. News articles from events that used to feel important. Funerals for grandparents and posts from old lovers.

*

Eerie calm.

A single hour of sunshine in the morning, the star barely skirts the spruce trees on the mountain. By afternoon there’s a typical chilly winter drizzle. Then, weirdly, a hot breeze from the south. It’s December in Alaska. And a heavy summer wind is blowing. The grey masses of cloud pour into the valley.

The radio issues storm warnings. Weather experts are calling for a once-in-a-lifetime storm. But this is Southeast Alaska, one of the rainiest places on earth. We walk everywhere in rubber boots, even during clear weather. Big storm just means we drive slower. A little bit slower.

I pick up an extra armload of wood on my way back to the cabin and make sure the car windows are closed. Put drip rags around the corners of the door for the wind spray. Stoke up a nice hot fire and mix an old fashioned. Black as a cave out there, the storm is nothing but sound and gravity. Listen to the wind pick up and moan, the chush of sea rolling over the rocks down below, freezing rain pinging off my windows. Just another winter storm.

*

The wind pushes through the membrane of my dreams – I’m on a ship at night in a storm. Gravity rolls around, I roll in bed, waves smack the ship, wind shrieks like a cat.

Am I awake? Earliest dawn. I crane my neck to look out the porthole/window.

Silhouettes of trees against the flat grey, the surface of the window is swimming. I’m underwater, I think.

The cabin is at the bottom of the ocean. The trees, the massive three-hundred-year-old spruce outside are waving like seaweed.

Like seaweed, I think, underwater.

*

The morning of 2 December. Rain still pelts the windows but we’re through the worst of it. Tom Petty on the radio drowns out the sound of the storm. I sit at the table to work on an essay I’m in the middle of, something about noctilucent clouds and the history of science.

I cut an everything bagel and place it on the woodstove to toast; put a couple strips of bacon in a pan. Bing bing bing.

Young Rd is totally washed out.

My driveway this morning:

Does anyone have a canoe or kayak I can borrow?

I don’t know what to do. I can’t go home. The road is just gone . . .

Slide out Lutak. Fortunately the house was empty when the mudslide . . .

All my chickens drowned except one . . .

Announcement on the radio: the mayor declared a state of emergency, told everyone to stay in their homes.

Fuck. Crazy dude.

I post on a friend’s Feed:

Call if you need a place to stay or a toothbrush or something!

I scramble an egg and fix my bagel sandwich. I put another heap of coffee in the percolator but don’t turn on the burner quite yet. I sit with my sandwich and scroll through the Feed. I take three bites. And stop mid-chew.

A sound like a big gust of wind, but too much in the bass clef; it goes on and on without modulation. A standing wave, a never-ending breaker on a rock cliff, a bass vibration that trembles through every cell like the mountain itself is humming, rain washes the windows like poison—

someone screaming, Fuck! Fuck!

I stand outside on my porch. It smells like wet and earth and mud. There is a hole in the soundscape where the bass note was. I don’t see anything, perhaps somewhere behind the hill—

The sound of another wave, a real wave this time behind me on the beach. I spin around. A single wave ten feet tall, red-brown like dried blood and full of broken trees, is crashing up the beach. A tsunami? Unthinkable. An earthquake? I stand there stupidly.

The bass whoosh again. This time I see trees snapping. Maybe a creek blew out. There are people over there – my friends live right over there, David’s house—

I run inside, put on heavy fishing rain gear and rubber boots and dial 911. It’s 1.23 p.m.

911. What’s your emergency?’

‘Hi. I’m out on Beach Road. I think there’s been a slide or a tsunami or something. There are people over there—’

‘Did you see it?’

‘I saw some trees go down. There was a wave. There are people over there—’

‘You need to evacuate Beach Road immediately.’

‘Oh, there are people—’

‘Get out of the area now.’

The call lasts one minute and sixteen seconds. Run through the woods, out the driveway and onto the road, where several of my neighbors are already in pick-up trucks. Fifty yards down the road there is a wall of broken trees two or three stories high. A couple men are trying to clamber over it. It’s a dead end. Trapped. Phone is wet. I rub it dry on my jacket and find David’s contact. 1.29 p.m. It rings and rings and rings. Voicemail.

‘Hey David, it’s Joe. There’s been a landslide or something – they’re evacuating Beach Road but there are trees across the road. Give me a call when you get this.’

Dial 911 again. The rain is pissing down.

‘911. What’s your emergency?’

‘It’s me again.’ I hear commotion, shouting in the background. ‘We can’t evacuate. There are trees. We’re cut off.’

‘OK.’ More shouting. ‘We’ll call you back.’

Thirty-five seconds. The power lines are stretched down like bowstrings. A truck window rolls down, ‘Do you know what happened?’ Faces are like cardboard cut-outs. I keep looking up the mountain above us like I’m staring at the barrel of a gun.

‘No idea. I think a creek blew out over there. The police just told me they would call me back. Do you know if it hit any houses?’

‘Can’t say for sure.’

I imagine that blood-red wave coming down the mountain at us, full of trees like broken teeth.

I go back down and stand on my porch in the rain, waitingwaitingwaiting.

Phone buzzes in my pocket. 1.54 p.m. David thankgod. No, it’s the police.

‘Can you get to the water?’ says the dispatcher.

‘Yeah, but—’

‘Get a flare and head down to the beach now. We have boats coming out to get you.’

‘OK, but it’s—’ Click. ‘—not really a beach. Just boulders.’

You think that if you’re running out of the proverbial burning building, you take only the few most valuable, irreplaceable items. This is bullshit. What actually happens is that you grab the things closest to your body and run. I fill a small backpack, barely even looking at it, and run down the short, steep trail to the ocean. The trail has turned into a creek. Mud slurps at my boots like quicksand.

The blood-red wave is after me, the giant wall of broken trees surging over the hill. A split second of terror and overwhelming fury then nothing.

The beach is a mess.

I pick my way over blasted trees and branches. It’s a miracle that the gale isn’t raging the way it was earlier this morning, or boat evacuation would be impossible.

A skiff zips around the point. I flash my headlamp, do jumping jacks. The skiff alters course towards me. A moment later, two large fishing boats – gillnetters – also chug around the point. The person in the bow of the skiff points toward a large boulder. I hop over to it. Broken trees float around menacingly like crocodiles, but the skiff slides past them. I leap off the boulder and grab the hand of the same police officer who, not long ago, pulled me over for going thirty in a twenty-five zone.

Hard reverse. More people waving flashlights on shore. It’s an elderly couple, adrenaline making them astonishingly agile as they leap into the skiff. I’m talkingtalkingtalking, don’t even know what about. The three of us offload onto a gillnetter and the skiff zips always searching for more people.

Get away from shore!’ the police officer shouts over the gunwale. ‘If it goes again, we’ll get wiped out!’

Rain blasts down like it’s trying to drown us.

A brown floating island in the middle of the harbour. It’s the forest. Then we see it:

A whole chunk of the mountain is missing. Like a bomb blew it away. Like Mount Saint Helens erupted. Like a shark the size of the fjord came and took a bite out of the mountain. We’re speechless. The wake of the gillnetter pushes through a field of what looks like strange floating rocks. Foam insulation board.

The only question, the only question is: were they home?

*

Toothbrush. Pack of chewing gum. Booklet of tide tables. One tea bag. Deodorant.

Fortunately, my wallet and glasses too. And phone already in my pocket.

I’m sitting at a cafe, the only place I could think to go. The thing is, they don’t even know about it yet, don’t even know people are dead. First thing, I call home, text everyone. But there’s this thing attached to me, this awful piece of knowledge. A dead-dog piece of the story.

Then there’s the Feed.

*

I read a story by David Eagleman that begins:

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

*

The story is the thing. I am the only one who knows, this moment, that the Feed belongs to the friends and family. The Feed littered with clickbait, fishingrodads, angrypoliticalrants and catpictures. This so-small thing, a few words just to push the story. Some tiny transition between worlds. I write:

Friends, David is one of several missing after the landslide hit Beach Rd. Search and rescue mobilizing at first light. I don’t know anything else, so sorry.

*

What happens to your Feed after you die?

Scroll down.

Scroll up.

Scroll down.

Scroll up.

---

David Simmons, my friend and neighbour who was killed in the December 2020 landslide, was a world traveller, Fulbright scholar and raconteur. He finished the first draft of his book, 50 Countries, 50 Stories, just weeks before the storm. All the copies of the manuscript were in the house that the slide destroyed. The manuscript was assumed lost, but then David’s family received his laptop computer in the mail – David had sent it out to get the screen repaired days before the slide. The entire book was on there. Since then, David’s father, Randy, myself and another editor have prepared and brought his book to publication. It can be found online.

---

Joe Aultman-Moore’s work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Earth Island Journal, Daily Science Fiction, Taproot and elsewhere.

‘Feed’ was first published in Issue Five of Tolka (May 2023), which you can purchase here. You can also subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.