They still cut the grass. I guess they don’t want people to know they’ve given up, even though everybody’s given up. The park down the street from my old apartment is nice. It’s on a river; that’s where I work. The molded plastic bumpers and steel skeletons of the playground structures still make me feel like I’m sleeping on a magic airship. Sometimes I stay here all day. If the birds miss the screams of children playing, they don’t show it. Kids ain’t played outside in years, so the playground is just what’s left when you don’t account for changes, or what not.
Pulling cars out of the river sucks, but it’s work. Even though you wouldn’t think there’d be plenty of people willing to wade down into that brackish water, there are. Cut the seatbelts, float the bodies and rig the tow lines. I still can’t afford a place to live, since it’s simple work and lots of people will do it. Diver drowns, get another one. But I can eat with what I make. The park is fine, and I take baths at work. Maybe I should build another hair dryer time machine.
My friend works at a bookstore. It’s small and looks independently owned. It’s not. I visit her on my off hours, just to chill, sit on the employees only side of the counter and refuse to help the tourists. They always come in and ask Aimica how long she’s owned the place. They ignore the books she’s ordered, fondle some garbage from China. Is this from Mexico? Are you from Mexico?
She’s American. They see me and ask how long I’ve owned the place, if Aimica and I have children. It’s still kind of new, only about a year since it was discovered, so sometimes people ask if we have children who will take over for us in our old age. Then they put their hand to their mouth as they remember. We play along up to a certain point, but we never pretend it isn't coming.
The friendly owner operator is a mirage, a trick of nostalgia and branding. The real owner is a corporation that gets its mail in Wyoming, cause in Wyoming, no one has to know who owns anything. Just like how in Delaware, corps don’t pay taxes, but paying taxes is the best way to launder money, or so I’ve definitely not heard.
The bookstore manager told Aimica they can’t afford a raise. Not much else to say about that. I told her she should tell them they’d be helping themselves clean their money faster. She told me to shut the fuck up. She basically runs the place and if she quit, the manager wouldn’t know how. She says she’s going to quit someday. Elsewhere ain’t any different though. It’s the same everywhere. The world is an echo in a vacuum. We’ve reached heat death long before the sundragon ever showed up.
If we did have kids in another timeline, we’d name them Hitler and Ghandi and let them pick their own gender. Train them to shoot and give them handguns. They’d be unclassifiable. Their whole lives, people would look at them like, what the fuck are you? It would be exhausting, but I like to think they’d get the last laugh somehow.
A month ago, some dickhead hit me with his car. It was a Kia, so he was probably trying to get to work to make that next car payment before we all get vaporized. Or he stole it. I got knocked down hard. My bicycle is fucked. I’m scraped up, but if that’s the best he’s got, bring it kid.
The cops still come at midnight to the playground. They kick me gently in the head, tell me, “Move on.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere else.”
“Listen to my confessions?” I say. They kick me harder, in the stomach.
Neurosis has taken over the minds of my aging parents. Why worry now about what’s coming? That’s dumb. We all know where this is headed and that should be a relief. Besides, it’s been in the shitter for decades. We get smaller and smaller until, poof. We all disappear into a furnace. My folks have been disappointed in me, seems like my whole life. No need to worry about me getting sucked downriver. I speculate this kind of worrying is just evidence that people aren’t made to understand an eternity of silence.
Nurses in the ER must be the only people on the planet who still care. I went there after that asshole in the Kia knocked me off my bicycle. He bailed like I wasn’t even there. Didn’t flip me off, nothing. What an insult. The triage nurse looked thin inside. His beard was neglect turned into lifestyle. I’d told myself I’d only wait a half hour. Then I started watching Family Guy on the screen and lost two hours like, snap.
I don’t want much, to survive long enough to die with everyone else at the end of the world. Feeling lonely has become the more true death. I’ve been lonely, but don’t want to change. Everyone else has been too. But fuck it. I went on a date. She was talking a lot. I knew it wasn’t going anywhere. It’s not like she was stupid or self-centered. What the fuck even is selfish now? It’s just that I’d rather be alone than listen to someone talk without pausing to breathe. It’s exhausting. It feels like I’m choking on someone else’s thoughts.
There was a guy in my undergrad philosophy classes who couldn’t shut up. It was better than Family Guy. He took up the entire class time asking questions and challenging the professor. I had him in every class for three years, until I dropped out. Don’t know what happened to him. Might be in the river with the rest of the true believers. My date and I sat facing each other in an empty McDonald’s. She was twirling her hair. The manager in his company polo ran the T-broom around. It could have felt like being at the ballet, if she’d shut up for a minute. She asked if she could see my apartment. I told her I lived in the park. She didn’t mind, said, “no judgement.”, invited me to her parents’ place.
The eviction was a new level of what the fuck. I stared at the building so long, the rep of the company called the police. Eviction so close to the end was a shit thing to do. Even more than when it was just a regular shit thing to do. A monster shit thing. A million living suns can’t sway the literal heartless. Or some shit anyways. That’s how I ended up in the park. Aimica visits me and the birds there sometimes.
I pretend I know better, but meme-war has exhumed my mind and violated my mind’s corpse. I should know. My job is basically graverobbing. The last thousand years of myths fetishized killing for a cause. A vague excuse that always strips our hands of any real power. People don’t really kiss in movies anymore. Oh well. Why am I living in a park? Because with less than a month left, some corporation can’t understand that their bottom line is about to be snorted by a cosmic horror. It’s not even a decision for them.
For stars to act like an animal, science is more incomplete than we thought. If not straight up broken.
We’re all dead now or will be. Maybe Aimica and I could escape via time machine. If it didn’t work, it’d probably kill us, but we won’t be alone.
Opinions change. Beliefs change. Streamers are making a big ironic deal about it. They are saying how science told us humanity would destroy the planet. Religion told us we’d be saved by God. Now that we’re looking at an impossible monster headed our way, the scientists are getting religion, and the religious are split between begging for a solution and going completely psychotic. The rest of us are just shoplifting our way to hell.
It’s medieval how they execute criminals in the streets. I guess it’s good for the street cleaners. Does it matter? Has anything ever mattered? A lot more people call themselves nihilists these days. But they still argue about who is more of a nihilist, Nietzsche or Sartre. That’s got to be the least nihilist thing ever.
Aimica asked me, “Have you read Camus?”
“I prefer Sartre.”
“Sartre was a hack.”
Time travel is funny. I did it once by accident when I dropped my hair dryer in a bathtub. This was a long time ago. The thing had a GFI on the plug, it took a few seconds to cut the power. I heard that’s not right. While I was being electrocuted, thoughts about my body and the electric blue world shook my dead ass. Not the world of people, but like, the world of spirits. Like how everything is electricity. Heard that on stream, how I was electricity. How the AC current in a building cycles 60 times per second, like the speed of the heartbeat of the universe.
I felt these cycles on a muscular level. I felt myself traveling great distances through the universe instantly on the friction between planets, or something.
Traffic sucks, but I love cars. If people stopped driving their cars into rivers, I’d starve and so would a few coroners. The cars I admire most were built by madmen. Some rich guy would get infected with an idea. Everyone would feel bad for him, because they’d know where it would take him, but not too bad because it’s always good to have someone tragic to laugh at.
He sells off a few hundred million in assets to sink into a company that’ll be dead before it makes a penny. He spends years in design meetings, building factories from the ground up, training crews to build his baby. He borrows from the mafia. They build half a dozen prototypes. Crippled by hatred and alcoholism, the world hates him back. His family disappears into a future he can’t follow them into. It’s squeezing, crushing him like an empty can or an old junk car.
In the end, he won’t be a total failure. He’ll make money, just not for himself. Those prototypes are sold off in the bankruptcy. The rich guy dies broke and alone, whacked by the mob. Like seeds on the wind, those cars will be worth millions once they mature. How many artists fit that mold?
Maybe that’s the failure of nihilism. Meaning comes out of meaninglessness. Art is problem solving, just not the problem you thought you were solving. It doesn’t make a better world. It makes a stranger one, or something.
Billionaires are the artists now. They’ve been building rockets for twenty years. There is nowhere left for a rocket to go. The entire galaxy will be consumed. On streams, scientists are saying how it shouldn’t be possible, yada yada. I guess they need to revise the definition of possible. Maybe we all do. They say its mass should be way more than enough to collapse the center into a black hole and behave like a normal galaxy. Instead, it moves faster than light and chomps down other galaxies. It moves 100,000 light years for every Earth year. Surely, we are all equal as God’s children now, maybe.
There are still videos of Bill Hicks on stream. He always ended his shows with the same bit. It was deep. He was talking about how life is a roller coaster, and some people come to Earth to tell us that, and… well, we kill those people. It’s funnier to hear him say it. But then he says that there’s really only one choice any of us has, whether to see the world through the eyes of fear or love.
That’s got to be up there among the whitest things ever said. At least he was joking.
My childhood was chucking bricks at trains from an overpass. That’s the only game we ever played. The headlight was the bullseye. The windshield was where you aimed if you had a bad life or whatever. The cow catcher was pretty easy to hit. That’s why it was a pussy target. Our lives were empty, infinite.
They stayed empty. Infinite became eternal and for a very long time after that I only aimed at the windshield. Forty-ounce in hand, a dimly lit infinity crackled in the corners of my closed eyes. But I couldn’t look directly at it. I became Tantalus, reaching for my own despair.
In the face of annihilation, shareholder returns are prioritized. It’s like that time; the only time anybody asked me to drive. I was sober for the weekend, and my four drunkest friends asked me to DD. Cars are too tempting. They have so much potential. I jumped the median into the oncoming lanes and ripped the wheels off a brand-new Lexus to demand mustard from some idiot in a BMW.
No one ever asked me to drive again. Even as my friends started dying off from overdoses they couldn’t avoid, they passed down knowledge of my potential destructive power, like genetic information. So why do we keep putting the same psychopaths in charge of where money comes from? Anyone in the car that day could see I was ready to kill us all for laughs. Why can’t people see the same bloodlust in private equity? I fumed and banged my fist on the counter.
“Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“Bang your fist on my counter.”
“We both know who owns this counter.”
“No actually, we don’t.”
“Right.”
At least a restaurant gives you one free meal every shift. All Aimica gets is smarter. People are desperate. Everything is burning. Myths are the strongest shit we have, but we have entered the era of mythic desperation. If someone told me I’d win life for just sitting through a little presentation, no obligations, snacks included, free to leave at any time, I would be culturally obligated to hear them out.
People call it The Sundragon. That fits. I hated it at first. The name, not the thing. Mostly because of the media and the people whose fifteen seconds of fame was coming out to the world as secret anthropologists who’ve known for years, thanks to their original survey of ancient Amazonian civilizations. “You see this glyph here? What’s it look like to you? A donut? It’s not a donut. It’s a sundragon.”
All these self-important academics doing interviews about their studies confirming the hopelessness of humanity. Everyone calmly sitting in leather furniture discussing the end times like it’s a recently discovered stream of lost media: cosmic horror themed Antiques Roadshow. “Tell him how much that apocalypse urn is worth, Gerald. Two million dollars! Oh, he definitely shat himself out loud.”
At this, Aimica smiled, but did not laugh.
We’ve been able to see it with big telescopes for about a month. Hard to imagine the little goldilocked nudibranch smaller than the moon is going to atomize the planet next week. None of us living will even get to be corpses. It’s going to be that fast. The dying won't know how quick they died. I think about throwing my hair dryer in the bathtub again and seeing where it brings me this time. But I no longer have a bathtub or a hairdryer.
I could get lucky, shunted into a timeline where the only cars are built by mad engineers and are so dangerous and impractical that nobody drives, and they don’t need wars, because peoples’ sacrificial urge is satisfied by worldwide demolition derbies. There would be no sundragon there and Aimica would own the bookstore and kick people out who were too stupid to deserve a book.
“That sounds nice,” she says.
“I’d be a famous driver.”
“I’d watch that.”
In this timeline, cars are economic devices for dismantling our spirits.
There’s a place downriver where three bridges count as one. Traffic started to swell about a hundred years ago. It thickened like a roux. Managers and engineers were given entire lifetimes, and then some, to get it flowing again. Great-grandchildren of the first crew are still on the project. The bridges multiplied, got bigger. They were torn down one at a time and replaced with absolute monsters. There’s a traffic jam there today. Probably those same idiots still driving to work to pay rent, until they can’t do it anymore.
Then they drive into the river, and someone has to patch the guardrail, someone’s got to fish them out.
Maybe Bill Hicks was right. All this shit just goes on and on, a loop. Up and down. No lives matter. Some of us are spending our last days stuck in traffic on a bridge, not even looking at the water, even when they are taking the plunge. I’ll grin stupidly greeting God.
A million suns headed to Earth, beautiful. What a shame we can’t see its full scale. I looked up into the dead sky. The sundragon twisted and flexed like a stentor under a microscope slide. A sentient galaxy unaware of us in its path. The most beautiful thing since the nurse who put burn gel on my leg when they finally saw me at the ER. I’d watched six episodes of Family guy by then. She was a little older than me. She joked that I was putting a strain on hospital resources. Maybe it wasn’t a joke. I was kind of out of it.
I said, “We all know our own brand, the brand of every rock in the solar system and most of the galaxy.” I banged my fist on the gurney.
“Shut the fuck up and don’t bang on my gurney. It’s not yours.” She put a cold compress on my forehead and pushed me back on the hollow pillow. “Don’t make me strap you down.”
That was a month ago. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her, all of them really. There they are, patching people up, when they know, a month later, we’ll all be gone.
Aimica quit her job. The bookstore didn’t hire anyone to replace her. They just closed. Probably satisfied with return on investment. Maybe going to try and burn the place down a couple days early and collect the insurance to boot. I say, “Why didn’t you quit sooner?”
“I wanted to die on vacation.”
“That’s smart,” I say.
“Books,” she says.
“Right.”
I thought the train tracks were calling me. It should have been comforting to spend the last moments of planet Earth on the overpass above the tracks. I thought I’d feel elevated, like all those idiots who follow the tracks were beneath me. Instead, I was full of self-pity and righteousness, which I determined are really the same thing. Not even a speck, not spit in the ocean, I held a fresh brick in my hand from a construction site nearby. But there was no train. Everyone finally took the day off. So, yep, no trains. I dropped the brick. It clattered and echoed under the overpass. Then, all was quiet.
Back at the park, Aimica was talking to the birds. “Should have just stayed here,” I admitted.
“Duh,” she said.
“Huh. What are the birds saying?”
“They say we should stand barefoot in the edge of the river. There’s no place exactly like it in the universe.”
“Birds understand that there’s a universe?”
“Birds understand a lot.”
“Right.”
So we stood in the river, barefoot. Mud squelched between our toes. Minnows and fry encircled our ankles, pressing closer. “Do fish smell?”
“You’ve never smelled a fish?” she said.
“No, I mean like, can they smell?”
“They sense electricity. It’s kind of like smelling radio waves.”
The sky was acting funny. The sun reminded me of those airsock dummies used at used car dealerships. A new wind blew big whipping arms of solar fire. Aurora covered the noon sky with green and purple smoke. I felt an electric shock and looked down at the water. Aimica looked too. There was a tingle-tickling, like AC 110 spreading up my heels. She held her hand out and I took it. I felt the world slow down. Then I wasn’t sure if the heat was from the melting sun, or what.
David John Baer McNicholas has four names. Two of them are extremely common, while the other two are strangely hard to pronounce in New Mexico. He won second place in the limbo, while drinking on a booze cruise, in 2003, and second place in a dance contest, while sober in Thailand, in 2015. He has done nothing noteworthy since then. David loves cats, and is allergic to them, and so keeps them at a distance which both parties find frustrating. He writes roughly 1,000 words an hour, but has to compost most of them, repeatedly.