wombat football

Oakfield, V

That Wednesday, nearly a full week after we first heard it, the alarm was still sounding. One of the neighbours had called the police at around four that morning; they heard a lot of noise in the street, and looked out to see Ed standing on the Millers’ porch in his robe and a pair of hiking boots, furiously trying to kick the door in. The cops wrote him up with a caution for disturbing the peace. I’d always thought of Ed as a bit of a hothead—in this case, though, I was secretly on his side.

The one good thing that came out of the situation was that it brought us a little closer to the people who live around us, united as we were against a common enemy. Most of those we met during those impromptu lawn gatherings had lived in the area for years, and yet for many of us it was the first time we had spoken to one another.

On my way back from the store that evening, I met Elliott, a guy in his late fifties who lived at the end of the row opposite. His was the house in the corner with no immediate neighbours. He was hosing down his driveway, and as I walked past I stopped to say hi.

Elliott had worked at Omicron a few years back, but took early retirement when they cancelled his project; his managers said they couldn’t fit him in anywhere else because he didn’t have the right skills. Now he was selling up, hoping to move back to Tucson, where his daughter and grandkids lived.

“What is there for me round here now?” he asked, bitterness edging into his voice. “A couple shops, a few restaurants - not enough to make it interesting, especially when you got nothin’ else to do.” He took a sip from his juice box.

“So, have you had anyone come and look around the place?” I asked, not sure what else to say; Elliott shook his head sadly.

“Nope. Lowered the price three times, too. Next time I do that I’ll be losing money. Used to be a prime location in the eighties. But really, I ask you,” he said, looking at me almost imploringly, “who’d want to move here now?”

Life in Oakfield was visibly and inextricably intertwined with Omicron’s stock price. Years back, when the company was flush with cash, new cars and shiny ride-on lawnmowers began popping up all over the place. Conversely, when the dot-com bubble finally burst, and financial departments everywhere began to panic about their balance sheets, you couldn’t walk down the street without seeing a new foreclosure notice tacked to somebody’s door.

And after a few days, when we had gotten to know a bit more about the people who lived around us, I realised something unsettling: the neighbourhood was slowly dying. Four of the twelve houses in our row were unoccupied, their owners forced out by debt or redundancy; it was the same scene throughout much of the suburb. The isolated location and its almost total dependence on the software giant for employment, coupled with the difficulty of getting a home loan, meant that it was nearly impossible to find new buyers once the houses became vacant.

Gradually, people were drifting back to the cities. The mass human experiment that was Suburbia had failed, at least here. This place would eventually become a ghost town; with enough time, it would abandon itself completely to the encroaching desert, leaving no trace that it had ever existed.