Critical-Fiction - Cave Dweller (part 1)

"I'm removing myself from the system," he said. "I'm taking the numbers off myself--no more social security UPC code for me. I will live, alone, as a man, above man. Primitive, exultant." A two-headed lizard crawled over his shoe. He felt his knees go weak.

The sun was going down, burning the rocks an even deeper red, the shadows of the Los Alamos laboratory stretching toward him. He strung lights he had purchased from the KMart is Los Gatos, just off Route 3. They'd been on sale and had been purchased with cash, rather than credit. "The government won't follow my spending habits anymore." No credit lists. No tracking markers in twenty dollar bills. Counter-forgery-devices my ass! "I know when I'm being watched," he shouted out the mouth of the cave. From the back of the cave something growled and scrapped a heavy belly over rocks. He lowered his fist slowly and finished unpacking the electrical cord, one eye keenly peeled on the back wall.

When UPS delivered the coal burning stove and solar-panels he refused to sign for them. "I won't help you help the eye-in-the-sky track me. I'm disappearing. I'm no longer 'in' the 'system.'" He made air quotes, flick flick, in the around the words "in" and "system."

The UPS driver nodded. "That's cool and all, but you know, I can't let you have this stuff if you don't sign."

"Authority monkey!" He cackled and ran to the edge of the cliff. Beneath him was his cave, in his arms the smallest of the boxes. The cave was too far down. The box was heavy. His palms began to sweat.

"I've got somerope in the truck." UPS driver jerked his thumb toward his truck. "I could help you get that down there."

"Really? That would be awfully nice of--" he stopped as the electronic pad was raised before him. The plastic, inkless pen sitting neatly like a cigarette on an ashtray waiting for him to sign but not leave a real mark. "You know why they call you brown, don't you?"

"You're going to make a 'poop' joke aren't you?"

"No," he lied. "Poop," he thought.

The dry winter winds rustled the spruce trees outside his cave. The rope ladder was tied neatly in a spiral at the front, next to the screen door. He sat, watched a two-headed lizard get into a territorial fight with itself as he smoked what he had grown himself. "Los Alamos Yellow Cake" he called it.

"I'm out of the world," he wrote on a piece of paper, his last, and then threw it in the fire. It burned quickly, but the words hung in teh smoke coming from his pipe. A twig snapped.