Read In the Country of Last Things for Free Online

matters, it would probably take so long that the entire situation would have changed by the time I found out. Where vegetables are grown, for example, and how they are transported to the city. I can’t give you the answers, and I have never met anyone who could. People talk about agricultural zones in the hinterlands to the west, but that doesn’t mean there is any truth to it. People will talk about anything here, especially things they know nothing about. What strikes me as odd is not that everything is falling apart, but that so much continues to be there. It takes a long time for a world to vanish, much longer than youwould think. Lives continue to be lived, and each one of us remains the witness of his own little drama. It’s true that there are no schools anymore; it’s true that the last movie was shown over five years ago; it’s true that wine is so scarce now that only the rich can afford it. But is that what we mean by life? Let everything fall away, and then let’s see what there is. Perhaps that is the most interesting question of all: to see what happens when there is nothing, and whether or not we will survive that too.
    The consequences can be rather curious, and they often go against your expectations. Utter despair can exist side by side with the most dazzling invention; entropy and efflorescence merge. Because there is so little left, almost nothing gets thrown out anymore, and uses have been found for materials that were once scorned as rubbish. It all has to do with a new way of thinking. Scarcity bends your mind toward novel solutions, and you discover yourself willing to entertain ideas that never would have occurred to you before. Take the subject of human waste, literal human waste. Plumbing hardly exists here anymore. Pipes have corroded, toilets have cracked and sprung leaks, the sewer system is largely defunct. Rather than have people fend for themselves and dispose of their slops in some hodgepodge manner—which would quickly lead to chaos and disease—an elaborate system was devised whereby each neighborhood is patrolled by a team of night soil collectors. They rumble through the streets three times a day, lugging and pushing their rusty engines over the split pavement, clanging their bells for the neighborhood people to come outside and empty their buckets into the tank. The odor is of course overpowering, and when this system was first installed the only people willing to do the work were prisoners—whowere given the dubious choice of receiving an extended sentence if they refused and a shorter sentence if they agreed. Things have changed since then, however, and the Fecalists now have the status of civil servants and are provided with housing on a par with that given to the police. It seems only right, I suppose. If there were not some advantage to be gained from this work, why would anyone want to do it? It only goes to show how effective the government can be under certain circumstances. Dead bodies and shit—when it comes to removing health hazards, our administrators are positively Roman in their organization, a model of clear thinking and efficiency.
    It doesn’t end there, however. Once the Fecalists have collected the waste, they do not simply dispose of it. Shit and garbage have become crucial resources here, and with the stocks of coal and oil having dwindled to dangerously low levels, they are the things that supply us with much of the energy we are still able to produce. Each census zone has its own power plant, and these are run entirely on waste. Fuel for running cars, fuel for heating houses—all this comes from the methane gas created in these plants. It might sound funny to you, I realize, but no one jokes about it here. Shit is a serious business, and anyone caught dumping it in the streets is arrested. With your second offense, you are automatically given the death penalty. A system like that tends to dampen your playfulness. You go along with what is demanded of