Read How to Find Peace at the End of the World for Free Online

Actually, that’s an exaggeration. Well, they’re splintered, but not with the fire axe. Too much work and possibility for self-harm. No, I only broke down the Foster’s door. Then, I took Scott Foster’s motorcycle, a big beastly Harley, and ran all the other doors down. Dinged the front fender pretty badly, of course, and by the last door on my street, the fender was so smashed in that the front tire went flat. Oh well. I went through all the other houses and found basically nada. Zip. Well, really just the same old crap I had in my own house: the 60 inch plasma televisions, the PS3s, the Xboxes, computers, games, movies, brushed aluminum appliances, jewelry, shoes, vibrators, crap. I reveled in my childishness, of course. I threw tables out of bay windows. Not just tables, but chairs and couches and dildos. I rifled through panty drawers. I found cameras and took all the memory chips (I’ll look at them later). I removed hard drives. This got to be a thing. The ultimate act of voyeurism. But there was something else too. I was hungry for them. Every time I found something like that, one of these electronic caches, I laughed gleefully, a kid on Christmas. It made me feel less lonely. Less pathetic. By the end of my rounds I’d collected thirty six hard drives, fifteen memory chips. A handful of photographs that I deemed good enough to take with me. Don’t judge, non-existent observer, but I took a photograph of the Grosser’s seventeen year old daughter. So beautiful. I’ll throw it away, I’ll burn it before I get to Amy’s. I took also the pictures of the other kids on the block, the ones I would chase dogs with, the ones I would buy ice cream from the truck for. I wonder if their parents ever thought me strange, weird, this single older man running around like a kid himself. I took all of this for non-perverse reasons of course. I wanted, standing there in somebody else’s living room, to surround myself with life. What if I struck out tomorrow and found nothing all the way to Dallas and in Dallas found nothing and nobody and farther north nothing and the nothing continued for as far as I went, always ahead of me by so many steps? It is such a desolating feeling, this racing with nothing. So I grabbed at something. Surely this is something. Surely these preserves and this handful of pictures, surely these ones and zeroes are something? They are, they must be, because even these things make me feel less lonely, less alone, bolstered. I have these things. I take them with me. Tomorrow I can strike out, then. So tired now. Tomorrow.

8 AM. The static of the radio alarm wakes me. I wonder why the radio station doesn’t have one of those loop back programs to play their old stuff if they don’t happen to be there. And what about all that pre-taped content they have? The shit you think of hungover. I bolt upright, remembering my errant dream: that everything of the day before had only been some sick joke, and people had begun popping up from behind bushes and trees, from storm drains and manhole covers. Surprise! Surprise! It was all a sick sick sick joke. There wasn’t any plane crash, silly. The alcohol from the day before enlarges my brain pan. I bring a hand up to my forehead and accidentally press too hard on the bump from the car going over into the ditch. A deeper throb swallows my whole head.
    God. It was all real.
    After retching into the wastebasket by the bed I dial her again. " You’ve reached the voicemail of Amy Seager, junior partner specializing in-” I listen to the whole message. I call again and don’t hang up until her voice fades and the beep interrupts me.

I get up and go to the window. The street is as I had left it. The garbage truck is askew across the Gregory’s lawn where I had left it after trying unsuccessfully to operate it. All of the doors on the street are still busted in with the front fender of Roque’s Harley Davidson. The Harley is still tipped over against the