Physical Media

Zachary Calhoun

He wanted this, didn’t he? Jason smiled and thought yes, precisely when it became clear that the burning tenements and pandemic rages were more than disconnected passing phases. At a certain point, folks stopped theorizing about the end of the world because they were too busy scrounging for rice and tampons. For almost everyone out there, barely clinging onto life, the realization of a real apocalypse provoked fear. But not for Jason. He really had been hoping this would happen.

Back before the inhabited world phased out of style, Jason collected physical media. He liked it all. Each time he drove to Des Moines for a new record release or a boutique blu-ray, he told himself that the act of purchasing discs, tapes, and hardcovers was meaningful. Even if he suspected this was, in part, a cloaked shopping addiction, he also believed that collecting media was morally crucial. This was his duty, his calling. Jason fancied himself a civilizational archivist whose grassroots Library of Alexandria would outlive the bad times raging outside, making him infinitely valuable in the harsh survivor community that would hopefully rise from the rubble.

He wasn’t prepared for the possibility that the end times might really happen, much less while he was still in his thirties. It all happened so fast. One day he was disparaging Taylor Swift fans on Reddit, bemoaning her role in oversaturating pressed color vinyl in the collector market. That was one day. The next day, his skyline was on fire and half his friends had stopped posting on social media. Were Don and Mia alive? Were there even drops of water in the municipal tank?

For the first few years of the end times, his library of physical media gave little solace. Most days, circumstances forced him to forget his hoard. He hardly noticed dust mounting the curated shelves of his shattered home. His beard grew impressive, at first, and then far too long.

But then the Scavenger Lord began decapitating men who scorned his declared curfew. Suddenly locked indoors through every evening and morning, Jason dusted off his shelves and began to do something he hardly ever did during his collecting mania: he sat down and listened to his records, splitting open the plastic sheaths and collector casings. He cracked the spine of first edition novels, sliding into his comfy couch cushions as Scav Lord reigned over darkness.

By the time our holy gardener militia weakened Scav Lord’s minions by malnutrition and successfully overthrew his dominion, Jason had finally tooled a black market water pump into functional condition and even worked out most of the kinks with his movie projection system. He hosted the afterworld’s first free movie night, lighting a borrowed tarpaulin film screen with jagged images of dinosaurs crashing through cages and electrical wires. The kids couldn’t even believe what they were seeing. In the coming days and nights he rigged a far larger film screen between suspended wires in the maize plot by the rotary mill, launching a film history education series for the kids in the mornings, then a host of classics for the adults and teenagers at night.

That’s him, hoisting the white sheet for tonight’s showing of War and Peace. He swears it’s not as generic as its name makes it sound. The film won’t begin for a few more hours, but we don’t generally worry about the sunlight Jason blocks, or the fact that he eats our corn without contributing material goods. It’s summertime, after all. We could always use a little more shade.

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ZACHARY CALHOUN is an environmental writer from New Mexico and an Assistant Teaching Professor at Iowa State University. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Potomac Review, Moon City Review, Five on the Fifth, Last Leaves Magazine, Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment, After the Pause, and The Review of Metaphysics. He can be found at www.zacharycalhoun.com.