Civilisation's Last Pretence

"After everything—the portal, the voice, the violence—my brain produced exactly one word: clothes. The second word came later, after a lesson in humility that no dimension should have to teach."

I needed to get away from him.

The thought pulsed through me with the urgency of a heartbeat, driving my feet upstream before my mind had fully committed to the action. Jamie—or as I'd mentally dubbed him, Negative Nancy—radiated a kind of toxic energy that seemed to contaminate every cubic metre of air around him. Even fifty metres felt insufficient, but it was far enough that his silhouette shrank to something manageable, something I could ignore if I angled my body just so.

The riverbank offered a semblance of peace, its gentle murmur a counterpoint to the chaos that had become my internal landscape. I settled onto a patch of dust that seemed slightly less abrasive than the rest, the paper and pen Luke had provided clutched in my hands like talismans. A list of essentials. That was the task. Something concrete, something I could accomplish, something that might actually contribute to our survival in this godforsaken wasteland.

Simple enough, surely.

The blank page stared back at me with the patience of a predator, waiting for me to make the first move. I stared back, willing my brain to produce something—anything—that might justify the paper's existence. Minutes crawled past like wounded creatures, each one heavier than the last. The tranquillity of the river, which I'd hoped would unlock some reservoir of creativity, seemed instead to have frozen every useful thought in my skull.

Finally, the pen touched paper.

Clothes.

The word sat there, solitary and somehow accusatory. Clothes. After everything that had happened—the portal's rejection, the voice declaring my eternal imprisonment, Jamie's violence, the crushing weight of separation from my children—the best my traumatised brain could produce was clothes.

It wasn't wrong. We desperately needed proper attire. The jeans and shirt I'd worn for a quick visit to Luke's were already stiff with dust, the fabric holding the day's accumulated sweat and fear. But surely there was more. Surely a man who'd built a business from nothing, who'd managed inventory and suppliers and the endless logistics, could produce something more comprehensive than a single word.

The page remained stubbornly, mockingly blank except for that one contribution.

A restlessness began to build in my limbs, an itching need to move that had nothing to do with creativity and everything to do with a more pressing biological demand. I'd been ignoring the growing pressure in my bladder for the better part of half an hour, too focused on the chaos of tent assembly and Jamie's hostility and the existential horror of our situation to pay attention to something as mundane as bodily functions.

Now, that mundane demand could no longer be ignored.

I set the paper and pen aside, rising to stretch muscles that had begun to cramp from sitting in one position too long. My eyes scanned the landscape with a new purpose, searching for the privacy that any civilised man would expect when answering nature's call. A bush. A boulder. A depression in the ground deep enough to shield me from view.

The landscape offered nothing.

Rust-coloured dust stretched in every direction, unbroken by vegetation of any kind. Not a shrub, not a tuft of grass. Just the river cutting its path through barren earth, and the endless empty sky pressing down from above. The absence of cover, which I'd noted intellectually since our arrival, now felt like a personal affront—as if Clivilius itself was conspiring to strip away every remaining shred of my dignity.

I glanced back toward the tent. Jamie's figure moved against the canvas, his attention wholly absorbed by the task of securing poles and stakes. He wasn't watching. Probably wouldn't care even if he was—the man had already demonstrated his complete indifference to my comfort or wellbeing.

To my left, the ground rose into a small hill, its crest offering at least the illusion of privacy. Not ideal, but in a world without alternatives, it would have to suffice.

"That'll have to do," I muttered, the words emerging half-whispered, as if even admitting my need aloud was somehow shameful.

The walk to the hilltop took less than a minute, but with each step the landscape unfolded before me in a way I hadn't fully appreciated from the riverbank. Dusty hillocks rolled toward the horizon like frozen waves, the river threading between them, its course disappearing into a distance that seemed to stretch toward infinity. The vastness of it struck me with physical force—so large, so empty, so profoundly silent. Not the comfortable silence of a library or a sleeping house, but the silence of a world where nothing lived, nothing breathed, nothing existed except dust and water and two men who should never have been here.

The view would have been beautiful under different circumstances. Now, it simply underscored my isolation.

I quickened my pace down the far side of the hill, casting a final glance behind me to confirm Jamie's continued absence from my line of sight. Satisfied that I was as alone as this landscape allowed, I undid my zipper with fingers that trembled slightly from exhaustion and nerves.

The relief of emptying my bladder was immediate, almost euphoric. Such a simple thing, the body's need to expel what it no longer required, and yet in this moment it felt like a small victory—proof that some functions, at least, still operated as they should. The stream arced into the dust, darkening a small patch of ground that would dry within minutes under the hot sun.

And then everything changed.

A different urgency seized my lower abdomen, a cramping pressure that announced itself without warning or negotiation. My body, apparently deciding that it had been patient long enough, was making demands that could not be delayed, could not be bargained with, could not be politely rescheduled for a more convenient moment.

Panic fluttered in my chest as I grasped the implications. I was standing in an open landscape with my trousers around my thighs, about to experience something I hadn't anticipated and certainly hadn't prepared for.

A heavy sigh escaped my lips—resignation, embarrassment, the acknowledgment of a situation I was powerless to prevent. I squatted over the dust, thighs already protesting the unnatural position, some distant part of my brain lamenting my failure to even scrape out a shallow hole. The thought seemed almost comically inadequate given the circumstances, like worrying about table manners while the house burned down around you.

What followed was neither dignified nor quiet. The burst of wind that accompanied the evacuation seemed to echo across the empty landscape, a sound that would have been mortifying in a public toilet back home and was somehow worse here, in the vast silence of Clivilius. I squeezed my eyes shut, as if not seeing would somehow make the situation less real.

It didn't.

And then, with the worst of the biological necessity behind me, a new horror presented itself.

What on earth am I meant to wipe with?

My eyes flew open, scanning the barren ground with something approaching desperation. No leaves—there were no plants. No paper—I'd left that by the river, a fifty-metre walk that might as well have been fifty kilometres in my current state. No fabric I was willing to sacrifice, given that we had precisely nothing in the way of spare clothing.

My thighs screamed their objection to the prolonged squat, muscles burning with the effort of maintaining a position the human body was never designed to hold for extended periods. Time was running out. The discomfort was becoming unbearable.

For one desperate, irrational moment, I considered calling out to Jamie. The thought was absurd—what would he do? Rush over with a roll of toilet paper he'd somehow conjured from the Clivilian dust? Offer words of comfort and practical solutions? The image was so far removed from reality that I might have laughed if I weren't on the verge of tears.

What good would that do?

The answer was obvious: none. I was alone in this, as I was alone in so many things. No wife to commiserate with, no children to distract me from my misery, no brother to offer help that didn't come with strings attached. Just me and the dust and the evidence of my own humanity staring up at me from the ground.

"Fuck it."

The words barely registered as sound, swallowed by the vast emptiness that surrounded me. After a moment of hesitation that felt like hours, I stood. My hands shook—not just from the physical awkwardness of the situation, but from something deeper, something that felt like the final collapse of pretence. I was not a businessman here. Not a father, not a husband, not a member of any community or church or family. I was an animal, doing what animals do, stripped of every convenience and comfort that civilisation had taught me to take for granted.

Pulling up my trousers, I felt a sharp sting behind my eyes. Tears, threatening to fall. The humiliation of the moment pressed down on me with physical weight, and I found myself fighting for breath, fighting for composure, fighting for some scrap of dignity that I could carry forward.

There it was, behind me. A mess that seemed violently out of place against the rust-coloured dust, yet somehow appropriate—a stinking reminder of the primal, basic nature of existence that no amount of education or success or social standing could transcend. I stared at it for longer than was necessary, unable to look away, unable to reconcile the sight with my image of myself.

From every angle, it seemed to mock me. This is what you are, it whispered. This is what you've always been. Everything else was just decoration.

And yet, standing there in the aftermath of my own undoing, something shifted. The humiliation remained, hot and uncomfortable, but beneath it stirred a different sensation—something that might have been acceptance, or perhaps simply exhaustion too complete to sustain shame. This moment, as undignified as it was, as far removed from anything I'd imagined for my life, was real. It was honest. It was stripped of every pretence I'd maintained for years.

Perhaps there was something to be said for that.

I crouched down, scooping handfuls of the soft, powdery earth, covering the evidence of my discomfort with the same dust that covered everything else in this world. It was a crude burial, a pathetic attempt to mask what had happened, but it was the best I could manage. When I finished, the ground looked almost undisturbed—just another patch of rust among countless others, holding its secret with the patience of stone.

I walked away.

Each step carried me further from the physical location of my humiliation, but the emotional residue clung like the dust that had worked its way into every crease of my clothing. I would need to wash, somehow. I would need to find a way to clean myself properly, to restore some semblance of hygiene and dignity. But those were problems for later, for when I'd gathered the fragments of myself back into something resembling composure.

For now, I simply walked, letting the rhythm of my footsteps replace the chaos in my mind.

The river came back into view, its constant flow unchanged by my absence, unchanged by my crisis, unchanged by anything that might happen to the small, struggling creatures who'd stumbled into its path. It didn't care about my dignity or my survival or my desperate longing for my children. It simply was, flowing through its barren channel, offering water to anyone patient enough to drink.

I returned to my spot on the bank, the paper and pen still waiting where I'd left them. The single word—Clothes—stared up at me, inadequate and accusatory.

After a long moment, I picked up the pen.

Toilet paper, I wrote, the letters shaky but legible.