The Last New Year (6 page)

 
the
day before.
5:55 pm, December 30, 1999

I stare for a long moment at the words written along the
bottom of the cup, not quite knowing what I'm seeing or what I should do. I
move it closer to my face, then farther away. I squint. I blink furiously.

It still says: GET BENT, LOSER.

I note that there is something almost unbearably attractive
about her handwriting.
A certain unsteadiness of line, the
slight obliqueness, the kerning.
It somehow makes it all that much worse
to have to fall for her handwriting as well.

It doesn't seem fair. After all that, after the sitting and
talking and walking and talking and then (for me at least) floating and
talking, it all boils down to three words that completely dismiss me, from her
company, from her life, from everything.

I mean, who does that? What kind of person walks up to you
and gets all wonderful in your face and then smacks you in the brain with
intelligence and wit, and then tells you to GET BENT? Not just get bent, but
GET BENT, LOSER! So I'm the loser? Me? I'm the loser? I'm not the one standing
here on the sidewalk holding an insulting coffee cup and wondering if life is
worth living any more. Except, wait: yes I am.

I glare angrily at the word LOSER, daring it to take a shot
at me. I will take you out so hard, you five letter
son
of a bitch.

I notice a dotted line next to LOSER snaking away across the
bottom of the cup. I turn it in my hand with my fingertips. More words:

JUST KIDDING! SORRY COULDN'T RESIST!
a
smiley face and her address.

Oh.

Well. That's all right then.

The universe unkinks itself. I continue on my way. I look at
the cup again and again, not taking the chance that it had just been wishful
thinking filling out the other side with relevant information. It doesn't
appear to be. The address stays where it is, written in that same slightly
tilted print. I notice she doesn't dot her "
i"s
with little hearts. That makes me glad.

When I get to
Thwacker's
place, I
push through the front door, up the stairs to the second floor, past a couple
of other apartments. Everything's still quiet, which is a good sign. Generally
if
Thwacker
starts drinking before 7 or 8 it's going
to be a very long night.

The door's partway open, so I let myself in. The apartment
is small but cozy, and for a wonder it's actually approaching tidy.
More or less.
I can see the corner of a pizza box poking out
from under the couch, and a pile of magazines in the kitchen sink, but that's
pretty good for here. And it doesn't smell quite so much of sour beer and bong
water as it usually does. Apparently
Thwacker
actually is making an effort, though as far as I can see his decorations
haven't gotten past the "nail a paper plate to the wall" stage.

But the plate is there, as promised. And it does say
"happy". Next to the word is a smiley face, no extra charge. The
smiley face reminds me of the cup and I feel what the plate wants me to.

Thwacker
, I discover, is asleep on
the floor next to his bed.
Uh oh.
I am amazed all over
again at how small he is. He is exceptionally short, just a hair over 5 feet
("five feet and a QUARTER!"), but what he lacks in stature he
generally makes up for in personality and heart. But
him
being asleep means that he's been drinking already, and that means, as I
mentioned, a long night.

In for a penny, I think, and nudge him with my foot. He
snorts and opens one eye.

"How long was I out?" He asks.

"I don't know," I say. "I just got off the
phone with you ten or 15 minutes ago."

"So ten or 15 minutes.
Okay." He gets up and scratches his head, then his crotch, grimacing
thoughtfully. "You
gonna
help me get ready? I
have beer."

He does have beer.
An alarming amount and
variety of beer.
The refrigerator is full of every kind of ale, bock,
hefeweizen
, lager,
lambic
,
pilsner, porter, and stout I've ever seen. And quite a bit I haven't. It
doesn't look like you can really have more than two of any one kind either. I
ask
Thwacker
how he managed to do this and he shrugs.
That's all I get from him and I don't really care enough to press it, so I
decide to be satisfied with the shrug.

We spend the next couple of hours casually drinking and
putting things together.
Thwacker
finds an old Wham-O
Slip n Slide still in the box that he claims he found in a dumpster. We roll it
out into the hallway and it seems to be pretty workable as long as
Thwacker
doesn't mind
drunk
naked
people careening into his bedroom. Actually, that sounds like most of
Thwacker's
parties, so the addition of a lubricated
delivery system should be pretty much just a natural evolution.

I'm starting to really enjoy myself, letting my excellent
day and everything just flow through me now that it looks like I've got great
things to look forward to. The beer is helping quite a bit. I stick my head in
the fridge.

"Hey Thwack," I say, "I think I drank all the
Spaten
."

He's behind the couch for some reason. A head pokes up.
"What is that?
Spaten
.
What is
Spaten
?"

"I
dunno
. I think it's
German."

He makes a
pfffft
!
sound
and ducks back down behind the couch. "Don't
worry about it. I drank all of Belgium like an hour ago."

I don't worry about it and get something Japanese or Chinese
or Korean. I can't tell from the ideograms anything specific about country of
origin but it's not bad so I add this to the list of things I'm not going to
worry about.

Wait, but there is one thing I do need to worry about: I
pick up the cup with
Em's
address on it and put it in
the kitchen cupboard.
Highest up and all the way in the back.
I set my face and wag a stern mental finger at myself.

Go ahead. Have a good time. But do not—I repeat, DO NOT—forget
this cup. You are absolutely going to need it so DO. NOT. FORGET.

I take a pull on my beer, grab the olive oil and go to
prepare the Slip 'n' Slide.

I forgot the cup.

I search frantically and fruitlessly for ten minutes, but
after the first few seconds it's clear to me that I'm not going to find it and
I left it at
Thwacker's
place. The whole night is a
pleasant blur, but somewhere in there the cup with the address and myself were
separated and now I don't know where she lives because I can't remember because
I didn't think I needed to because I had the cup because it's vital I have the
cup because
because
because

I am breathing in ragged, heart-thumping bursts and none of
this is helping. I try to calm down and be realistic about the situation. Ok.
Question one: Do I remember the address that was written on the cup? I know I
looked at it a bunch of times, but did I actually absorb what the words on the
cup actually said. I reach back into my memory, trying really hard to bring the
address on the cup into focus. But all that comes to me is that she doesn't dot
her "
i"s
with little hearts. So there's at
least one lowercase "i" in the address.
Which helps
me not at all.

Question two: Do I remember where I put the cup at
Thwacker's
place? No. Nothing
so
specific as "where" but I definitely have a very strong feeling that
it is there. Probably it's there.

I start to hyperventilate again. No, no, knock it off. I
need to take this step by step. Gather information, move forward based on that
information, assess,
repeat
.

"What time is it?" I call out.

A pause.
"Almost
three."

Ok. Three o'clock. That's plenty of time. I just have to go
over to Thwack's, find the cup wherever I hid it, get the address and move on
from there. It's not part of my original plan (which now that I think of it I
never actually made a plan, but that's even better because now this is the REAL
original plan), but that's what I will do. And everything will be fine.

So bolstered, I dress and brush my teeth again and put on
shoes and drink a glass of water and make sure I have everything I could
possibly need for the last nine or so hours of existence. The thought of this
doesn't bother me overmuch, for some reason. I've never really thought much
past the next nine hours anyway. This time will just be the final run. I've
just got to make this one count.

I glance out the window. It's still relatively quiet, or
seems to be from what I can see. Ape-Head is still MIA, and the TV in his
apartment now just shows static. His window is open, one of the curtains moving
softly in the breeze. This makes me uneasy somehow. I go into the living room
and head for the front door.

"Hang on, mate, I'm coming with," Zee says. He's
pulling on his battered work boots.

"Uh, Ok. But I'm
gonna
be
moving pretty quick."

"Yeah, yeah," He grunts as he crams his foot into
the boot. "I need to pick up some more beer.
Wanna
toast home when it goes."

"Oh. Ok."

"Should be around seven."
He stands up, "If you were wondering."

"Ready?"

"Lay on,
MacDuff
."

Out the door into the hallway.
Someone has smashed a large jar of pennies onto the floor. Silvery shards of
glass and pennies are strewn down the hall. The air smells faintly of copper
for obvious reasons. As we are not unaccustomed to this sort of thing happening
on a semi-regular basis, Zee and I step carefully around the glass and coinage
to the elevator. I press the down button. It opens immediately.

Someone has helpfully taken a large, semi-solid shit on the
floor of the elevator. The smell is powerfully and unpleasantly like human
feces, which is exactly what it is, but is there really anything else to
compare it to? A hint of vanilla, but that somehow makes it worse. I glance at
Zee, who shrugs.

Stairs, then.

 
interlude
1.
(
four
conversations in a stairwell)

Me:
What do you think it will be like outside when we get there?

Zee:
I
dunno
. Haven't looked outside, have I? You've got a
window. What did you see?

Me:
I
saw a guy get killed, I think. Shot when he just walking
down
the street.

Zee:
You think?

Me:
I've decided not to take my word for it. I'm pretty unreliable.

Zee:
Well that's off-putting, as far as wanting to go for a stroll.

Me:
I
couldn't see much, though, honestly. This street is pretty quiet usually. But,
you know, it could be anything out there. It is the end of the world after all.

Zee:
I
doubt there'll be any weightlifters in gimp masks or muscle cars with razor-wire
welded to the fenders.

Me:
Probably not at this point, no.

Zee:
Not enough time to go really do-
lally
, I think.
People will just be watching it on television.

Me:
Yeah.

Zee:
I
was thinking.

Me:
Yeah? That's surprising.

Zee:
I
know, not my usual thing. But it occurred to me earlier that if you were in a
plane headed from, say, Hawaii to New Zealand this morning, and you crossed the
date-line, would you be behind the thing? Land in New Zealand and be ok?

Me:
I imagine
it's pretty devastated. We've seen what the fire wall—

Zee:
Phenomenon, mate.
Decorum.

Me:
What the Phenomenon does to stuff. Buildings get vaporized just like people.

Zee:
But there's still a chance. What about underground?

Me:
I don't
know. And anyway, this is all assuming it will stop when it gets back to the
start, but it could just go around and around. Plane or no, you can't outrun it
forever.

Zee:
I
wonder how much gas Air Force One has.

Me:
Not
enough,
is my point.

Zee:
I
guess it doesn't really make any difference to us stiffs on the ground, huh?

Me:
Maybe somebody will find a way to beat it.

Zee:
Just not us.

Me:
Not us.