(courtesy hughhowey.com)
There are a great many horrible things about being caught in an apocalypse – any kind; take your pick – zombie, aline, viral, political – but what really strikes you as you watch or read stories about the end of the world is how lonely it must be.
Everything that once connected you to people is gone – sheer numbers of them for one thing, vastly reducing the chance of encountering someone, and if you do happen to luck upon another Homo Sapiens, the odds are good that they do you harm not give you a hug.
Given that you are more likely to be attacked than embraced, people retreat into themselves and their hideaways, unable to get any information because media and the internet are down, their lives consumed not by the idyll of socialisation but the endless quest for food, water, security.
Not a lot of companionship to be had in that kind of hardscrabble, survivalist lifestyle and even if you do get brave enough to send out feelers to see who’s out there, there’s a good chance it will end in your death rather than warm and happy chat over beer and pretzels (which, let’s face it, aren’t around anymore, anyway).
All of that grinding, desperate loneliness is on remarkably resonant display The Balloon Hunter: A Found Novel by Hugh Howey (Silo) and Elinor Taylor, which tells the story of two people trying to connect in a world that is inimically opposed to it in a host of terrifyingly final ways.
Initially we meet Rita, a mid-thirties woman holed in what might be a supermarket or Costco – the beguiling thing about the novel is how details are drip-fed to us in just the right away, illuminating something said earlier in ways that really hit home, such as when it emerges that Rita wasn’t always this alone – who is writing on postcards and attaching them to helium balloons which she then sends out into the world.
It’s a random way of seeing who’s out there but in a world bereft of post offices and emails and social media (which might not be such a bad thing), it’s pretty all she’s got left but it’s a strategy with a finite life span owing to her diminishing supplies of postcards, cylinders and string, none of which are likely to ever be made again.
Rita believes herself to be wholly alone in the world, and on her first postcard, defiantly writes to the Apocalypse itself, declaring that “I’m writing in my capacity as a sole survivor to inform you that, despite your best efforts, I’m still here”.
She’s worked out she can survive until her 127th year which gives her a good 90 years or so to settle into her palace of onetime capitalist shopping excess; but it emerges, slowly and with a break-in here and a strangely disquieting noise there, that she might not be so alone after all.
It’s then that Rita begins to wonder if being lonely might not be better than being dead, but she keeps sending out the cards because what choice does she have when the human soul all but impels us to seek out others, risks be damned?
One thing she won’t do is leave the building and so even when she sees balloons lodging in trees across the carpark of the store, she won’t head out to retrieve them, consoling herself with the fact that someone out there, Darwinian savagery not withstanding, prefers to send postcards to say “Hi” than come toting a gun in the middle of the night.
That person is Clayton, a man whose military skills – he’s an army vet who saw action overseas on more than one occasion – have set him up to survive nicely in a world where brute force counts more than sociability or generous humanity.
He knows that the fog brings death – either in and of itself since the cause of the apocalypse, best left to the reading and about which Rita has some forcefully angry opinions, has does strange things to the weather or because it hides Big Bads out to look after themselves and themselves only – and he knows that sending out balloons is all but painting a target on yourself.
But, needing companionship like anyone else, he begins writing back to Rita, with their postcards first bearing no real relationship to each other until he discovers more and more of her airborne missives and begins a correspondence of sorts, even if many of his postcards are never sent out and kept in a box that he might or might show Rita when/if he finds her.
What makes The Balloon Hunter so arrestingly affecting in myriad ways is that there are so many things against Rita and Clayton meeting up.
He has no easy way to find her and even if he does, will she still be alive? After all, there’s no way of even knowing if Rita penned these at one time and is now dead, her postcards living on, tangled in trees and caught in gutters, meaning that Clayton, who softens and opens up purely because there’s another decent person somewhere out there, might be chasing a ghost.
The build-up of the story, told in small snatches on postcards, is magnificently well-judged and nuanced, doling out details and ever more vulnerable humanity with every entry, and building a picture of two people trying to ameliorate, or in Rita’s gloriously, movingly defiant case, smash into smithereens the loneliness that has captured them both.
It’s hard not to read the open, honest outpourings from Rita and Clayton and not feel deeply moved and close to them; you wish they could find each other and find some measure of love and companionship together because in a world that’s been shorn of just about everything else, surely that’s the very least they need and deserve?
To say much more, will be to rob future readers of the way these small snippets of humanity out to paper really do begin to materially impact you, but suffice to say that The Balloon Hunter is a beautifully heartrending meditation on what it is to survive the end of the world only to find that what threatens you the most might just be the catastrophic insularity of your own soul.