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I wonder how I would fare in a nuclear fallout. An earthquake or riot. My dad tells me about all these awful things that happen. Water goes bad and the children die first. They’re small and it goes through their bodies quicker. It’s winter now and the cold would be tremendous. We’d burn more calories and starve; we’d burn wood to melt the ice in our pipes, we’d burn our house down around ourselves and the poison would be in the air, in our lungs. We’d burn our house down and we’d breathe the nuclear poison. We’d swallow the carcinogens from the wood and the poison would burn our lungs down.

And I wonder how the Aleutians did it a thousand years ago. Before radiation. Before cigarettes. Before water mains and ground water. What did they die of? Crystallized hydrogen and oxygen, plucked from the sky by frosty fingers, like heaven’s fruit laid on a glacier. Water in the sky and water on the earth. Nothing in between the eye and the horizon.
They didn’t die of the cold. If they had, they would have moved south, toward the sun. They didn’t die of hunger; they wouldn’t be so fat. They pulled whales from the sea, gathered them like juicy tubers that occasionally broke from the earth to take air from the sky. To draw air from the sky through a fleshy straw and then dive back down, deep into indigo where their chorus shakes the icy walls. Great bellows to seize the nerves and offer the fear of God. Any god. Whale sighs so wide, so deep, a sound wave so big that a hunter’s canoe could fit between its peaks. And they do.
A flash of his arm and a spear of bone shoots out. Bone from the prey. The tube of air fills with blood and a great eye rolls to the sky. In this instance is his life span measured, a boat length, a wavelength from God. Add it to the earth.

The power is out. I’m standing in my kitchen, but I don’t dare open the refrigerator because you never know how long the power will be out. Cold air must not escape: the milk will go bad first, then the cottage cheese. The fruit. The vegetables. If I open the fridge I must be prepared to eat everything.
The power is out, so I measure the life span of all the energy in my room. The battery on my laptop is half dead. My mp3 player is almost fully charged. I count the bars left on my phone. One.
I count bars and estimate the life left in all of the capacitors and acids, the lithium and crystals glowing in the dark.

Icy fingers pluck water from the sky, add it to the earth. He plucks the whale from the ocean and adds it to the earth. Rips flesh and fat from God’s skeleton and adds them to his own. He will eat this animal and add it to his body’s blood vessels. The remainder he will nail to a wall and smoke. He will make a vessel of the animal’s body, stretch the skin over the bones and harden it and skim out onto the water.
Float over those dark clouds on a taut piece of flesh. In the ripples on the surface he can measure his life, measure it in the calories beneath his skin and in his arm. He has nothing to protect from another man. Nothing outside of his own body that merits concern. Nothing to be taken but his life.

I wonder how I’d fare. After all the bars disappear. After the refrigerator becomes warm and the fruit brown. After the water freezes. How would I measure my life? For so long I knew how to measure life: by prolonging it. By distancing death. By putting layers of plastic between myself and it. With antibiotics, antibacterial, with soaps and conditioners and rules and regulations. Maybe I didn’t know what my life was, but I knew it was safe and sound.
I’ll eat all of the food in the refrigerator first. Then the pantry. I’ll burn wood to melt the ice in the pipes because it’s still safe to drink. I’ll burn the house down around myself, burn down my lungs until I’ve nothing left to protect. I’ll have nothing save the fat under my skin and the oxygen in my blood vessels, self-contained.
Like a great shaking god of muscle and fat rolling over and over under the dark blue sky. Feeling every molecule of air expire inside two burning lungs, waiting to pierce the sky with a fleshy straw. Like a quivering hunter skimming over dark clouds on an ark of bone and flesh, waiting to pierce the lungs with a sharpened bone. To feel the heartbeat slow and the blood fill the sky. I’ve nothing to be taken but my life.