It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel just fine. Got a bottle on the go, and another in my bag, and the whiskey is slipping down like we were made for each other, the happiest of couples. Come to our wedding. Bring flowers.
The sun is setting, and I think it’s for the last time. I really do. There’s blood on the horizon, and it’s cooling, turning brown, crusting over. When the prime minister went on the telly and declared martial law, they thought that was the end. When the army went unilaterally AWOL, deserted in droves, they thought that was it. Then the telly stopped. Just stopped, every channel, and it never came back. And everyone crowded out in the street, whispering, and the whisper turned into a roar, and the roar said THIS IS THE END, past the point of real words. Nothing you could really hear, but everyone understood anyway. I swear that they did.
And then the sun came up again, and it carried on. But late last night there were two moons in the sky, and even though the streets were deserted, you could still hear that roar, like a rising ocean. The second moon was too big, and had a greenish tinge to it, and someone on Twitter said they swore they could see the outline of a face in its shadows. There’s always someone who says this kind of thing, more than one, I guess. This time, people listened. No one could ever agree whose face it was, but people listened, and they responded, and Twitter went down seven times that night, but it kept coming up again, #faceonthemoon and derivatives of that, trending worldwide for hours. And then the internet stopped, and it never came back.
They say that this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang. But with a whimper. I think they’re right. I never heard a sudden noise, just a series of cessations. Things just began to stop. And yeah… there was looting, violence, a little here and there from what I heard. But mainly there was a stunned and growing silence. And then all of the people who’d gather in the street outside every night to whisper together, all of those neighbours who’d barely exchanged a word for years until those words were all they had… well, there were less of them every night.
I was out there. You probably were too. Speaking to strangers become confidants, swapping rumours and stories. The guy from four doors down told me that New York had been hit by a tidal wave. I don’t know where that came from. The phones stopped working the same time the internet stopped, how the hell would he know that? He told me he had a dream, cocked his head to one side with an odd glint in his eyes, and then nodded at me. Turned back into his house, closed the door, and I heard the bolts clicking home and I knew, I just knew, he wasn’t planning on coming out again.
That’s what it’s come to. Thousands of miles away, and we’re so used to just knowing... but suddenly the global community is a few hundred people in a few streets in a nothing suburb in a nowhere town, and the buses and the trains just aren’t running anymore, and no planes fly, and those hundreds of people have turned into a few dozen in the space of ten days, and no one knows where the others went, and I think we’ll be next. And he had a dream.
Funny, really. All of those things we’ve lost - television, the internet, buses, trains and planes - were supposed to have started out with someone having a dream, and making that dream a reality, through work and innovation and some kind of vision for things to come. And now it’s the end, and someone has a dream, and it doesn’t foreshadow any of these things. Nothing new, and all the work is done, and the vision is of nothing to come. Nothing at all.
Yesterday I went out to buy cigarettes and the local shop was shut, and the supermarket up the road had one member of staff in it, the manager, and he was about to close up and told me to help myself. Didn’t ask me for money, just waved at the counter, and then I saw him leaving without even locking up. I took him at his word. Walking back down my street, bag bursting, I saw a rat scurrying down the street a few doors down. I got to my door, looked back. It looked back at me, cocked its head, an odd glint in its eyes, nodded at me and then ran away. Ran for its life. That’s when I knew.
And then just now I woke up, and it’s 4am, and I’d worry about that, but I stopped going to work two days ago when I turned up and no one else was there. I woke up because I dreamed that the world was ending. Just vanishing, bits and pieces and chunks of history, stopping. Here. There. And eventually, everywhere. And while things ended (in my dream), a voice whispered, a voiceover to entropy. Just saying, over and over, this is the way the world ends this is the way the world ends this is the way the world ends this is the way the world ends. I woke up and I was happy.
There’s not much to be happy about, these days. Before the telly stopped, before the internet stopped, we’d all hear about it. You were there, right? About murder and sudden death, about bloody warfare and children fighting in the streets, about economic collapse and the rise of the right. About not enough God in our schools, and too much God in the world. About how their God is bigger than your God, like we’re still at school and only the stakes have changed. You’d have thought… you’d have thought we’d have learned. It’s us that have to change. Maybe this is our time to change.
There’s not much to be happy about, these days. I was happy. I really was, I swear. I thought it was the happiest I’d ever been. And then she left, and I was left to myself, by myself, and being left on your own is the worst, the worst, the worst. The absolute worst thing in the world. I swear that it is.
I was told at school that the world has ended before. They say a six mile wide chunk of rock struck the world and killed the dinosaurs, and I have no idea how many ice ages have risen and fallen, how many glaciers the size of mountains have slowly marched over the face of the planet and slowly melted away. When I was younger, I read about the great flood in the Bible, and when I was older I read that, in the original Hebrew, the words that describe the state of the world after the flood are the exact same that, only a few chapters earlier, describe the world before anything was ever created. Those words don’t appear anywhere else in that book. They translate as “chaos and desolation”, but that won’t do. It really won’t. Because it’s happened since, and it’ll happen again. The world is ending, all over again. It’s traditional. A vicious tradition.
The world is getting smaller, and people aren’t here anymore, people you thought would always be there. There are two moons in the sky, and apparently New York is underwater, and maybe there’s more. And maybe there’s less. And I’m sitting here, in my chair, facing the window, staring out at this smaller, different world, and I’ve started on that second bottle, and I’ve long since stopped bothering with the ashtray, and I know it’s nearly time, and there’s no one here, no one at all, not these days, but I don’t feel like I’m alone anymore. And I’d swear to almighty god if I thought he was still listening, but I do, I swear, I swear, I swear. It’s the happiest I’ve ever been.
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