The Third Horseman

Mr. and Mrs. Smith, each thirty years old, desired nothing else in life so much as a white picket fence. If you asked, either one of them would have identified such suburban iconography as their one goal in life, despite their years of expensive progressive higher education and learned affectation of post-modern ironic detachment from the nuclear familial idyll.

As it turned out, although the years of inundation with conservative cultural norms and lifestyle marketing had somehow been ineffective at transforming the Smiths’ generation into neo-baby boomers in the Before Time, their collective near-miss with the prospect of annihilation simply could not be beat for its capacity to inspire in the survivors a yearning for the passé banality of what came before—a new normalcy, if you will.

Adam Smith pondered this paradox often in the shower, standing alone but for his thoughts in an off-white prefab unit, rubbing chemicals into his skin and scalp under a stream of calcified and, unbeknownst to him, slightly leaded water. He supposed his and his wife’s craving for the mid-century dream epitomized by white-painted sticks of dead tree (or, these days, vinyl) and a verdant, well kempt stretch of an invasive ornamental plant species must be, at the chemical level, some kind of survival reflex deep in his reptile brain. Adam supposed that a person faced with the very real possibility of perishing inevitably loses the privilege of rejecting the body’s instinctual need for saccharine comfort. Try stranding a health food junkie in the woods for a week without food and see if he turns down a decidedly not-organic candy bar or inquires as to the antibiotic status of a hearty, caged, cruelty-added chicken dinner. Adam reckoned the same principle applied to his generation’s newfound coveting for the middle-class ideal after they survived the not-quite-end-of-the-world.

The end of the world had begun not with a bang, or even a whimper, but rather a vaguely foreboding headline about a potential plague far away in a foreign country which was, to Adam at least, the other side of the world.

Adam first read about the apocalypse while sitting on the toilet, scrolling with one hand and wiping with the other. Adam remembered sitting on the ceramic throne not knowing how much credence to give this particular article about a virus decimating Asia. This headline had been one among at a least dozen others that day predicting some cataclysm of some sort, most popularly climate catastrophe or economic collapse.

And even now, nearly a decade on, Adam didn’t know whether this first seal of the apocalypse had been opened by bushmeat consumption, laboratory experiment gone wrong, or, hell, an angelic trumpet of divine judgment. If scientists or politicians had ever resolved how the apocalypse began, Adam and his fellow citizens were none the wiser.

What Adam did know was that, no sooner had the apocalypse began than had the world’s sharpest minds—nearly all of whom had, at this point, abandoned public interest posts for cushy but high-octane careers at corporate think tanks—figured out how it could make them a mint.

The first horseman of the apocalypse had appeared on a white stallion, galloping across the Mercator projection, ravaging one population after another with pestilence and death—the latter courtesy of the fourth horseman and his sickly yellow donkey.

The second horseman, on a red mare, seized the opportunity created by the virus—which cared naught for the imaginary lines the tribes of humanity had scrawled on technicolor maps to distinguish their land from their neighbors—and turned petty squabbles over these scribbles into violent border crises.

And amidst this chaos, the third horseman, on a black steed, flourished.

Pre-apocalyptic prophets had, at their own peril, perennially envisioned the third horseman as famine. And he was that, of course—but much more. The third horseman was greed, and he reared his ugly head in every apocalypse. But modernity had not shunned greed as it had—at least publicly—spurned pestilence, war, and death. Instead, greed had found its apotheosis in the corporate fiction, the third horseman.

Confronted with the viral apocalypse, the third horseman set out not to outright deny access to food, water, and shelter as foretold, but rather to monopolize, market, and monetize this bottom rung of Maslow’s hierarchy in the name of maximizing shareholder profit, luxury, and prestige. The pandemic permitted mega-corporations of all taxonomic persuasions—parents, subsidiaries, shells, holdings, dummies, one interconnected nesting doll of capitalist self-indulgence—to grab up every single parcel of land they could get their greasy grubby (invisible) hands on.

From the California redwoods to the Gulf stream, this land was their land now—albeit perhaps with the ignominious exceptions of Wyoming, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Alaska, because, even after an apocalypse, the huddled masses of suburbia’s wretched refuse were not quite desperate enough to move out there yet.

And so the land-grabbing had begun before it was even certain that what we were dealing with here actually was an apocalypse. The apocalypse could hurt some corporations’ bottom line, and so some Top Minds™ initially united in an effort to fight the viral plague. A vaccine was developed within a year, a beautiful feat of human ingenuity. It looked as though the world might fend off the apocalypse after all, notwithstanding the abounding conspiracy theories and the innate, uniquely American instinct to rebel against common sense, particularly as it relates to matters of health.

But the corporations did not share the vaccine with the entire world. They sold it to make a buck, as is their wont. The virus mutated in the unvaccinated. Variants evolved, alpha through omega or zeta or who-knows-what. The vaccines couldn’t keep up. The world was plunged into darkness and death and upheaval the likes of which it had not seen since the bubonic plague.

But the virus, like the plague, eventually ran its course. Adam and his wife survived. Not all of his friends and family had been so lucky. Adam kept his mother’s heart-shaped locket on his bedside as a reminder of the heartache; a cheap, mass-produced trinket, not a family heirloom, but he had little else to remember her by.

While family died, corporations thrived, particularly shipping and e-commerce magnates. The prices of commodities, necessities, real estate, everything skyrocketed beyond the range of the common person’s means. Corporations became the only owners of anything. Money talks. Hell, money sings—even in the face of Armageddon. This is the song of civilization.

The third horseman became the new lord of a feudal fiefdom over the third estate. “A quart of milk for a denarius,” it whinnied. “Three rolls of toilet paper for a denarius. A three-bedroom-two-bath for a million dēnāriī. But do not damage the crude oil and the Cristal.”

So it came to pass that the Smiths, scraping together their lifes' savings, sought to buy a house with a picket fence. Unfortunately for the Smiths, it seemed that virtually all of their fellow survivors in working-class America—regardless of race, sex, creed, age, or political inclination—shared the same longing. And the invisible iron fist of supply and demand first described by another, more well-to-do Adam Smith (no relation, that bastard) dictated that, if everyone wants it, well, they can have it—if they pay out the ass.

After all, this, just like the picket fence itself, was the American way. The Smiths couldn’t afford to buy a house with apocalypse pricing, so they became permanent renters.

And this apocalypse had just been one long disappointment.

In the Before Time, Adam pictured an apocalyptic survivor as a one-eyed and bearded hero, clad in a tight-fitting black leather jacket and makeshift armor, protecting his family and Australian shepherd dog from irradiated raiders, mutant beasts, and diseased zombies with nothing but a sawed-off shotgun, nail-spiked baseball bat, and his wits.

But, as he stood in front of the bathroom mirror, nude and dripping wet, trying to conjure self-confidence in his impending middle age, Adam was hardly the picture of a masculine pulp protagonist. He matched the apocalypse he had survived, which—no matter how immensely horrible and depressing—had not been worthy of a blockbuster thriller.

Adam wasn’t a musclebound scavenger in a deserted world burned by nuclear fire; he was a balding data entry clerk working from home on the couch.

He wasn’t leading revolutions against evil masked warlords; he was barely getting by with a master’s degree in a niche field and $200,000 in unforgiven student debt.

He wasn’t starving or dying from radiation; he was pudgy and balding. He was dying—I mean, of course—but slowly, from ordinary heart disease and microplastics in the food chain like everybody else.

He wasn’t a refugee in a wartorn city where moss grows in the cracks of crumbled buildings. He was the proud renter of a two-bed/one-and-a-half-bath habitat he couldn’t afford to own outright.

This was perhaps the most gut-wrenching truth of it all: the apocalypse had been nothing but mundane. The ever-increasing death tolls had grown monotonous within months of the first outbreak. Dire headlines became routine.

The apocalypse came and went before anyone even realized that they had lost the world that came before. The present was some distorted dystopian reality, unthinkable ten years ago, that had crept upon the world so slowly no one noticed until it was too late.

Adam went outside to check on his mailbox subscription. (The postal service had been privatized around six years before, another victim to the third horseman.)

Adam saw no horizon, no treeline, just claustrophobic walls of “craftsman” housing façades conforming to the same identical HOA-compliant mandates predetermined by shareholder vote. Blue plastic siding traced in a polite white trim. Sensible raised panel shutters in aqua. An isosceles roof gable supported by a charming white pediment. A dormer window to nowhere. A white vinyl garage door just big enough to plant the false notion that it might fit two cars. A concrete porch just too thin to accommodate a rocking chair. A small plot of AstroTurf in the front of every yard. No trees, just a canopy of buzzing powerlines, webbed like spider silk.

But hey, each home had a white picket fence.

“Storybook living 10 minutes from downtown,” the brochure had read. Adam didn’t know who wrote the story, but he knew that they would rent it to you for half your monthly take-home or more.

Adam wondered how all of this would look to the early hominids who had painted aurochs and stags on cave walls so many eons ago. Their lives had been simpler, no doubt. Maybe twenty hours of hunting and gathering a week, like nature intended. Not forty to sixty hours in front of a screen. They had more freedom. One could sure argue that. But, Adam thought, even this suburban hellscape must surely look palatial in comparison. Did Adam really know that they would look on mankind’s mighty modern works and despair?

Adam returned inside and set next to his wife, Beth, on their polyester couch. It didn’t matter what some paleolithic caveman thought. This was the future. Software-as-a-service, entertainment-as-a-service, nutrition-as-a-service, shelter-as-a-service, life-as-a-service. As Beth scrolled through the various streaming options, Adam sat transfixed. Not on the television, nor on the picket fence beyond the window. Adam stared silent at the paint on the living room wall, a trademarked and patented shade of gray with an undertone of beige.