There was no great trauma that attended (what some later called) Mary’s descent, unless this counted as one: her husband, taking her for a ride on a camel on their honeymoon in Egypt, twenty years ago, and the ornery, swaggering animal shrugging him off and spitting on him as he struggled to find his footing on the sand. The image imprinted on her. Not the image of her husband: grinning and attempting to brush the indignity off even as he brushed the sand and animal’s saliva from his clothing. No, it was the dromedary itself: teeth like bad fencing, lips wrinkling around them, taking unbothered steps to turn itself away from them both, tail swatting them like flies, or bad air. It had the conviction to say ‘no’ and to strike out on its own path.
In a ramshackle gift stall—after their guide had led them back from the desert for another 500 Egyptian pounds—Mary had purchased her first icon of a camel. It was green-gold and surprisingly heavy, and pretty. She felt its aura in her hand luggage at 36,000 feet on the flight back, while her husband slept. It was almost illicit, like she was an accomplice to infidelity in broad daylight. Looking around the plane Mary thought none of these people know what I have.
Two decades later and their house was full of camels. Mary defended it by saying that many Americans collected Santa Claus figurines, or nutcrackers, plastic pop figures, blow molds, garden ornaments, on it went, and so her dromedary collection was not unusual. And it was delimited; she avoided stuffed animals of any kind in favor of sculptural representations of the creature. She learned about the different kinds of dromedaries, the one- and two-humped varieties. Their remarkable prehensile lips were textured to grasp foliage of all kinds, and looking at them up close was like looking at the craggy surface of another world. This had been her first clue. World-eaters. They were self-sufficient, taking of the world around them and storing it in their bodies for an assumedly calamitous future. Nature’s very own doomsday preppers. Even the word ‘dromedary’ sounded like ‘doomsday’ to Mary’s ears, and when her husband had left for work and her son for school and she had done her morning chores the 24-hour news channels unfurled an endless tapestry of horrors: bombing, terrorists, pedophiles, and worse. Mary would stand in the middle of the living room—the camel figurines comforting in their exotic glamor, the spark and spangles of metallic paint and porcelain sheen, robed in the garments of their faraway homes—and buttress herself against the news, making-fortress of herself. Arms stuck to her torso. Bent over double. Bending more until her glasses nearly fell off. Imagining her back swelling, imagining a bulwark on her back in which she would have everything she needed, and would never need to face the horrors of the outside world again.
She thought of their honeymoon, and that first patrician specimen of a dromedary who had shucked her husband from his mount and shown her what real authority looked like.
It was a tragedy that she would never be able to visit its environ again.
The television confirmed that in the years since their honeymoon the world had truly turned to shit. Economic crises, bombings, invasions, immigrants, the destruction of the categories of male and female, an entire world turned upside down.
It got worse, and when her sons left for college she had by then mastered the art of squirrelling away dollars from the monthly food budget, pushing it like a stretching sackskin. With the diverted money she would buy a little more. One more six-pack of tinned tuna, mercury-filtered. Ten pots of instant noodles. Corned beef. The attic, in which she hid these supplies, became her joyous secret; she imagined the house creaking with weight as she lay on her back while her husband spent himself in her at night, looking up at the ceiling swollen, in her mind, with the sustenance and prodigality of a camel’s hump.
After a few months of renewed sexual vigor on her husband’s part, what with the now-empty-except-for-them house, she maxed one of his credit cards on an antique bronze dromedary statue that came up to her chin. I deserve it, she told him, but what she really meant was I earned it, and I need it to inspire me in this God-forgotten world.
Mary called her two sons at college in liberal, urban universities, and pleaded with them to stay safe. Every daily news report of some shooting or murder set her into an unshakeable panic, and she would text, and call, and inevitably be laughed at for hysteria. A tale as old as time! Women were never listened to. Her husband now seemed to want nothing more than to be out in his garage busying himself with inscrutable projects, and did nothing to ease her mind. He did take her cards away though, cutting them up in front of her like a naughty child. It’s for your own good, Mary. She said nothing. Clasped her hands in front of her while a maelstrom slurried behind her unlovely and unremarkable features. Somehow, she had managed to hoist the antique camel up to the attic using ropes and pillows and she thought of it now, standing up there in the dark, surviving, safeguarding all of her supplies.
Waiting.
So Mary spent her days cleaning and listening to her internet shows and one day her favorite political expert provided a definitive date for the collapse of society: a month away, at the confluence of several planets, the dates corresponding with numbers in the Bible that this expert had had the brilliance to both identify and sound a clarion for.
Mary told her husband, breathless with panic, and that she was going to buy extra supplies for it, and he grudgingly acquiesced, giving her one hundred dollars in cash. She called their sons, who told her she was fucking crazy and were so rude and so cruel to her as she cried and begged them to come home. As she hustled around the supermarket, panic leaving her entirely directionless in what she might by, she looked around at the other people like zombies meandering around her. Don’t you know? She wanted to howl at them. Aren’t you scared? Clamping her hands to the trolley handle to prevent her from throttling sense into her fellow shopper who had no idea that, even now, titanic forces were sliding nearer in the void of space and that nothing, nothing could be done but to hide and to pray.
Mary returned from the store with a fifty-dollar small leather camel figurine, a multipack of soda, and several large bags of chips. She hid it all up in the attic before her husband could see.
That night she prayed that a solution would present itself, because she did not have time to build a bunker in a month, even if they could afford to dig up their yard like that. In her dreaming that night a great, saurian silhouette lumbered towards her against a starfield brilliant like those Egyptian nights, its body forming a mountainous peak. It spat epiphanies at her. It lowed, humble and almighty at once, like the true Redeemer.
Her eyes snapped open.
Of course! The solution was not to go underground. The solution was to go up: to make a hump of her house, keeping everything they needed—food, water, medial supplies—in the upper stories. With the bronze behemoth dromedary: the sovereign and the absolute. It had the same aspect as that first camel in Egypt; a magician-created simulacrum, perhaps, fashioned from ether and flashed onto her computer screen by some electronic djinn .She spent the new few days furiously moving everything up to the attic, and by the time all the camel figurines had been moved up there from the living room all the supplies had to be stacked vertically. After another week the attic had transformed into a glittering shrine lit by the sole exposed lightbulb in the roof. Camels made a perimeter of the room. Behind them, in the space between the models and the wall: cans, toilet rolls, books, flashlights, medical supply kits, bags of chips, cookies, everything reared up in rustling towers. Mary worked with her headphones in, listening to a YouTuber for more tips as the apocalypse approached. Inspired by his rapid-fire speech she ordered backpacks, a camping knife, a fire making kit, a sleeping bag. Mary had never been camping in her life. Her doughty body had hardened somewhat in all her exertions—and she was too anxious to eat much these days—so she took solace in that. A weird form of pride, too, in her hunching shoulders, the whales’ hump of her back. But she grew unsatisfied, feeling like she was missing some deeper truth; like something more was being withheld.
She researched the Ancient Egyptians, clicking through websites online as she took breaks from going up and down the ladder (her husband was no help, resolving to stay downstairs while she worked, and then after a while leaving the house completely). To her surprise she found out that camels were not native to Egypt, but had been brought over by an Assyrian king, Sacou, who in his old age had sealed himself in a tomb with a pack of the beasts—and who was found, hundreds of years later, still alive, the creatures too, when the stone was rolled away. The parallels with the Savior were too obvious. Mary felt revelation settle on her like a suit of armor and luxuriated in that feeling of security, up in the attic, with her own pack, watching her with carved eyes.
Those with skin-close-to-God!
Those who made a home of their own bodies, stacking their salvation like a gift beneath their own skin!
Mary had been posting online throughout all this, of course, and while most of her friends and family had first laughed at her, calling her ‘Dromedary Mary,’ and then, increasingly concerned, had cut her off—some believed her.
In that last day Mary opened the front door to their house and left a trail of straw up through their filthy hallway and staircase up, up to the attic ladder, as a final invitation for those who wanted to join her.
Some came.
A neighbor and her son from two houses down.
A homosexual from a local neighborhood who had found God, claimed to have denounced his sin, and had convinced his tearful, pale former lover to join them.
An ex-military man and his wife and sons, who later had to be physically bound to keep them up there, and whose snuffles and pleas Mary quashed by placing small metal dromedary figures in their mouths and sealing them shut with packing tape.
Mary sat on the lip of the attic like Sacou himself, surrounded by her subjects, and held out her hand, just like a patriarch.
“The dromedaries need offerings,” she said. “You must bring things to keep you alive. No one will share. We each of us are sovereigns of the land of our bodies.”
So they brought things, and they climbed up, and when the room was full Mary pulled up the ladder and sent up a silent prayer that they would be released two hundred years from now and they would, as a pack, step down in the glory of their sovereignty into a new world.
Mary was found six weeks later, fat with sustenance and delirious, by the police officers who were sent over on her husband’s call. Gnawed-on and decomposing human remains surrounded her, the figures so corrupted that they resembled obscene geological formations than once living beings. Hunks of flesh had been torn off and arranged like antipasti at the feet of the countless camel statues standing around Mary—and Mary herself had mounted a huge bronze effigy in the center back of the attic, roaring like a king. Blood seeped down her legs and onto more camel figures piled around her feet. Their heads and necks were crimsoned with blood. The woman curled over the neck of the statue, arcing her back, pushing her spine up into the world.
A policeman’s flashlight fell on her like the light of God.
“I am ready,” she cawed, looking upon her dominion, grander than Sacou had ever been. “I survived the end of the world. Take me to be born anew.”
With the grace of a prophet she uncurled fingers to the policemen, waiting for a lift down.
