Street Talk/Mark LaFlamme

Deserted city evokes apocalypse

An icy wind blew across the Wal-Mart parking lot, chilling the skin of no one. Traffic signs swayed back and forth at Lowe’s but no one was there to heed their instructions. Bits of trash danced across the front of BJ’s, with no one there to pick it up. Gas pumps crouched like ancient monuments.

At shopping malls and big-box stores, it might have been the day after the apocalypse.

In the police lobby, no foot stomped on the tiled floor. No fist banged against the bulletproof glass and no angry shouts echoed across the room. There were no sobs, no screams, no mothers hushing sobbing children. Just the low hum of electricity deep behind the walls.

It was the scene of a police department in a world gone Utopian.

Lingering alone in a place that is normally abuzz with life is both unsettling and exhilarating. Stand alone in an empty baseball stadium and the roar of history will deafen you. A primitive part of you that has nothing to do with the auditory system will hear the ghost applause of a thousand games. Your spiritual ear will detect the sharp crack of bat on ball though no living soul is there to take a swing.

In places that are absolutely deserted, memories replace the masses.

This is how it was for me on Thanksgiving night when a nest of editors – who never seem to be absent – sent me out into the night in search of holiday action. They wanted to hear Thanksgiving tales of woe from the police lobby. They wanted the exuberant voices of shoppers in pre-spree euphoria screaming across the newspaper page.

But here – and somebody should stop the presses for this one – the editors were wrong. There were no hordes in the places where they thought they should be. In the contentment, intoxication, loneliness or rage of post-holiday festivities, most people celebrated, slept or brooded behind closed doors.

As I have in the dusk of previous holidays, I roamed the streets in search of something to entertain, horrify or emotionally move the reader in the morning. As I have in those earlier dusks, I found nothing much at all. If there was any story to be told, it was in the things that weren’t to be found rather than the things that were.

No families huddled in driveways, hugging, saying last words, prolonging a time they were reluctant to end. No tough guys bumping shoulders, talking trash or exchanging handfuls of cash for things secreted in cellophane. Nobody occupying the spaces that are normally inhabited, as though an entire population took a holiday to another dimension.

Cue “Twilight Zone” theme.

When I was a kid, I often paused with the hypnotic fantasy of being the last person on the planet. Imagine, the young me thought in transcendent awe. The very last person on earth. I could run through a department store, breaking things, taking the things I liked, doing things I could never do in a world of constant scrutiny. I could go the candy shop and indulge in epochal gluttony. I could run around Main Street smashing windows with no fear of consequence.

Those giddy reveries are always tempered by something that borders on abject terror. You’re the last person on the entire planet and night is coming down. You are sad and lonely and afraid and there is nobody – absolutely nobody – to call out to. You could call clear around the globe and nobody will hear a word of your anguish and loneliness. You are about to experience a new brand of loneliness never felt by another living thing.

But of course, even in the sleepy afterglow of Thanksgiving gluttony, Lewiston never falls completely still. Even in those quiet times, there are enough moving shadows to give me pause and inspire wonder.

On Ash Street, an extremely thin woman in a windbreaker was walking faster than most people run. As fast as she walked, she smoked even faster. She pulled the cigarette to her lips over and over as though drawing from the tube some life-sustaining chemical. She did not look left; she did not look right. She moved with frantic speed through the night, like a skinny cartoon character in fast motion.

On Park Street, the antithesis of the thin smoking girl. An older man clad in denim moved with sundial sluggishness along the sidewalk. His arms hung at his sides. His head hung on his neck and he stared at the ground. He looked to me like a man who cared little for the place from which he came. He looked as though he cared even less for his destination, if he had one at all.

I wondered if those people felt like the last people on the planet, only without the giddy thrill of a boy playing games. I wondered if they felt like that more often than not, for surely there are such unfortunates.

But of course, I was only being melancholy and overly dramatic. I was high on editor abuse and low on tryptophan, after all. I went back to the department store and rolled across the parking lot which was as barren as it had been before. I made a few sweeping circles around the deserted lot and then headed back to the crowded clamor of my world.

It’s great to indulge in that last-man-on-Earth fantasy, as long as you know you can come back.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. He routinely taunts editors and little kids, usually in that order.