The Last New Year (9 page)

"Hello? Yeah, mom it's me. What's up? Yes. I know, mom.
Yes, the world is coming to an end, I know. I've been in existence today as
well. No, I'm not at home. I
dunno
, out.
Nothing.
No, I'm not doing anything illegal. I
mean,
maybe I am. I don't think I'm supposed to be out of my
house.
Yeah, a few people.
A lady on
a bench.
A guy who set fire to
Thwacker's
apartment.
Thwacker
, yes.
I don't know if you know him. Wait, actually, he was
at that party for Carol. You were there for like a minute and gave me a hat.
Well I'm sorry you don't remember. I still have the hat, yeah. What? Yeah.
Yeah, that's right. Donald. Yeah he is a nice young man. No, he left before the
guy set his apartment on fire. How should I know why? He probably got off on it
or something. No, he wasn't masturbating as far as I could tell. No, I didn't
call the police. I did jump onto him from a second story window, so I guess he
got what was coming to him. I had to because the building was on fire and the
stairs collapsed. Look, it's a long story. I'll tell you later. No, that's
right, I probably won't. It's not important. I just needed to get something
from the apartment. Yeah, I got it. Yeah. Yeah. I love you too. I'm sorry this
is happening too. How's dad? Yeah I figured. He can sleep through anything.
Well tell him I love him and goodbye or whatever when he wakes up. Yes,
goodbye. Well I'm not going to see you guys again
am
I? Oh, right, I forgot. Sure, I'll accept Him into my heart. Yes! Yes, right
after I get off the phone.
The second I get off.
Okay.
Okay. No, I won't give the message of Good News to
Zahir
.
It's too late anyway. He's dead.
Yeah, got hit by a car.
I know it's a shame. Yeah. No, they were Muslim. No, he was still gay. Yes!
Yes. I hope Hell isn't as bad as they say too. Look, mom. I have to go. There's
somewhere I need to be and I'm running out of time. Take care of yourself, and
give
Boffo
a scratch behind the ears from me. I love
you too. It will be all right."

So that's it then. I'm on the move, a man with a mission,
nothing between me and my goal but a lengthy walk and hopefully no
interruptions. This has already been an interesting day, and I'm not in the
mood for it to get any more interesting. I'm looking forward to boring from
here on out.

So, to reiterate: I have a destination, I have functioning
pelvis and legs and I have approximately five hours to get where I need to go.
This is a workable combination. It's just starting to get dark but the street
lights are all buzzing in their warm-up mode so it's not a problem I foresee
just yet.

As I step around an overturned shopping cart on the
sidewalk, I see a beer bottle on the ground and I think about my friends and
then my family and then suddenly everything overwhelms me and I'm crying. I
keep walking but I can't see clearly, which isn't safe because as I've gotten
closer to the center of the city the detritus has grown worse.

I've actually had to detour once because a car was blocking
the road and some unsavory types were milling around it. I say unsavory types.
They were quite possibly perfectly
savory
, but I have
come to appreciate the level of
unhingedness
this
whole thing has brought about in people, so I decide to err on the side of
caution.

Doing so again, I stop to clear the tears from my eyes, but
then my insides twist up and now I'm sobbing. Sobbing because I'll never see my
shitty parents again, because Zee is dead, Thwack has flown to his own
destiny,
my Chinese pen-pal from the fourth grade is almost
certainly dead. Children and old people and walruses and baobab trees are all
dead or going to be and it's not really fair. We were expecting something to
happen at the turn of the century, some kind of calamity, but I was at least
kind of mentally prepared to wander around a post-apocalyptic wasteland with a
beard and a shotgun and maybe a dog in my motorcycle sidecar. As it is it's
just over.
All gone.
I will miss The Spice Girls.

It passes quickly. The numbness to this part of the ending
process returns. I would call it denial but it's somehow less and more than
that. It's a complete blankness born from a complete lack of anything
resembling hope. It's not the worst thing. It beats blubbering in the street,
anyway.

I start walking again, sniffling, through my increasingly
disappointing end of the world scenario.

Further down the block I see a police officer, looking
forlorn in his uniform. He seems to be just standing around, blinking and
periodically fiddling with his radio, which squawks quietly. I notice that his
gun is not in its holster, which is weird. Did he lose it? Have it stolen? Did
he just not bother with it?

I put my head down and speed up slightly. As I start to pass
the cop, I think of something goofy to say like, "I don't need the hassle,
man," but then I don't. He looks up at me and I can see that he looks very
young, and his face is open and lost, like a little kid who realizes his mom's
forgotten him at the mall again. We make eye contact for a split second and the
cop immediately looks back to the radio. He really seems to be fixated on that
thing. He twiddles one of the knobs in a way that indicates he is at a loss for
what to do next.

So I decide to help him out. "Officer," I say. He
looks up, sharply, eyes wide. One hand dips to his missing gun.

"Whoa," I say, putting up my hands in front of me,
"Didn't mean to startle you."

"Sir, you need to get back in your home," He says.
"We have everything under—"

"Control.
Right, sure, I got
it," I say, "I'll go straight home. I'm on my way there now. Don't
worry about it."

He relaxes. "Okay," and goes back to his radio.

"Only there's a guy about four blocks back that
way," I jerk a thumb over my shoulder, "he's hurt pretty bad, I
think. Something fell on him."

He looks stricken. "I, uh," he shakes his head,
"I can't leave. I'm supposed to wait here for instructions." He holds
up the radio and waggles it at me gently. I begin to understand what the
problem is.

"Well the radio will still work four blocks from here,
right? I'm worried about that guy." I am, actually. Since I've calmed down
a bit I feel kind of bad about what happened, especially since I got what I
needed out of the situation.

Honestly, it was probably the greatest and most liberating
day of this guy's entire life.
I kind of shit all over that.
I had good reason, but the least I could do is send someone to check on him.

"I don't know," the cop says. The radio beeps and
he puts it to his ear, eyes wild with hope and fear. The thought that someone
will tell him what to do is at odds with the terrifying prospect of actually
doing something.

"Come on," I say. Now I'm getting a little
impatient with this whole thing. This was just an offhand gesture after all. I
figured the guy might need some help and this cop might need something to take
his mind off things. I don't need to waste my time on this, especially now. But
I give it one last try: "Aren't you supposed to protect and serve?"

The cop laughs bitterly. He gestures out at the empty city
and presumably the doom that is approaching our horizon. "Protect and
serve what?"

"I don't
know,
the state.
Citizens.
Humanity, for fuck's sake."

He shakes his head, looks back at his radio. "Return to
your home."

Well that's that: I give up. Sorry, Mr. Ginger Arsonist. Looks
like you're on your own. I tried. I hope nothing too important was crushed.

I am very disappointed in the cop. I wish there was some
point in reporting him to somebody.
The mayor, maybe, or the
police commissioner.
But there isn't any point in doing that, or
anything. And maybe that actually is the point. Maybe just standing around
waiting to hear something from somebody telling us what to do next is the only
logical course of action.

I've got a quest, but if it wasn't for that, I'd probably be
sitting on the couch with Zee right now drinking and playing Mad Libs or
something.
Except he's dead.
But maybe he wouldn't
have been if I wasn't in such a hurry to get going, or if we'd crossed the
street before we noticed Ape-head, or if that old guy had
zigged
instead of
zagged
.

But no.
I can't think like that.
There's just not a lot of point in that line of thinking.

I realize I have to take a leak, so I go behind a tree. The
bark steams when I'm done, reminding me that it's only going to get colder as
evening lengthens.

The cop doesn't seem to notice my public whizzing. He just
stares downward, the radio buzzes slightly in his trembling hand.

 
interlude
2.
(
monologue
with cigarettes)

I don't know how he managed to get me to sit and smoke a
cigarette with him. One minute I was walking at a brisk pace, looking forward
to the end of my journey, then all of a sudden this 30-something guy just sort
of slopes out of nowhere and tells me I look like a man who could use a break.
He pulls two cigarettes from a coat pocket and leads me by the shoulders to a
bench, guides me into it, hands me one of the smokes and holds out a lighter
with a big friendly grin.

I'm sitting and lit up before I even realize what's
happening. I don't even smoke.

He tells me his name is unimportant but that he has some
things he needs to tell somebody before the end of everything. He'd been
waiting, so he says, all day for the right person to talk to, but now it's
getting late and I'll have to do. He laughs and I laugh too, though I still
don't exactly know why I'm going along with this.

What is it he needs to tell, I ask. He puffs dramatically,
leans forward until he is well into my personal space, and says:

"So, I grew up in this little town in Pennsylvania,
right near this other town that was also little, but not
so
little as my town. There really wasn't much there: a gas station, a convenience
store, a little strip mall with a consignment shop and a high-end jewelry store
for some reason. Nobody ever bought anything from it. Now I guess maybe it was
a front for something. The Mafia or like the Amish or whatever.

"But so listen: the point is that there wasn't a lot to
do in my town.
Which was fine when I was a little kid; when
you're five you can just fuck off to the backyard and be a pirate for an
afternoon and be as happy as you like.
What else is a five year old
gonna
do?"

(He drags thoughtfully on his cigarette.)

"But then I got older, and the world started getting
smaller and then the smallness got bigger, and I became less and less satisfied
in it. I ranged out further by degrees, climbing my back fence and going into
the woods to find new places to explore. I built forts out of sticks, threw
rocks at squirrels, did all the normal kid stuff. One time I got hold of some
matches and nearly burned up the whole forest trying to melt army men. But I
managed to smack the fire enough so that it died down, and I ended up having to
hide my burned hand for about a week. I'm not sure why I didn't stomp on it
instead.

"I didn't have any friends, really. Not because I
didn't—or don't—like people, but mostly because I didn't feel like dealing with
anyone's bullshit when I had my own stuff going on. This world was small but it
belonged to me, and I didn't want to share it with anybody. Especially not some
dumb kid. So I kept it to myself.

"The year when I was 10 there was a big mess in the
town because a kid had drowned in the quarry nearby. The thing was filled with
water and was probably about 50 feet deep, and this giant cold monster had just
swallowed a kid up. They never found his body, which was weird because you'd
think he'd float, but they didn't. He was just gone, probably at the bottom of
this hole.

"Or, you know, maybe he ran away from home, snuck off
from the quarry and started a new life somewhere, maybe as a circus acrobat or
a pastry chef. I don't think so though. This kid wasn't the running away type.
He was, however, definitely the drowning in a quarry type, so I'm pretty sure
that's what happened.

This wasn't the first time either. 15 years earlier another
kid got a cramp and went under as his friends watched. And I don't know even if
that was the first time. It was a risky undertaking, swimming there."

(He glances at
me,
can see I'm
getting impatient. My cigarette has gone out. He offers his lighter, I shake my
head and he
continues:
)

"I got to be obsessed with this place, with this quarry
that murdered boys. I was scared of it, like, unreasonably so, but at the same
time I couldn't stay away. I used to sneak out there sometimes and just sit on
the edge, my feet in the water, wondering what it must have been like to be out
there, swimming and having a great time, and then suddenly losing the ability
to stay above the surface, to slowly and pathetically give up on the world of
air and warmth and sunlight and give in to a cold hell of lungs bursting and
water and sinking into blackness.

"I thought about it a lot, sitting there, I thought
about the thin boundary between living and dying, about making that choice to
stay in the world of air and light. I don't know what I was looking for, what
answer I thought I would get from this open water-filled maw."

(This is it, I think, he's got one more minute and then I'm
leaving.)

"So then one bright summer day I made the decision. I rode
my bike to the quarry, took off my shoes and, instead of just rolling up my
pants to put my feet in the water, I took them off, and my shirt, so I was
standing by the edge of the quarry in my
Underoos
. I
don't remember what kind, so don't ask.
Spiderman maybe.

"After I stood there for a few minutes, I kind of half-
assedly
jumped in. You couldn't wade in, because it wasn't
like a lake where it gently slopes, it was just a sheer drop-off into deep
water.

"It was cold.
Really, seriously cold.
Freaked me right out it was so cold. The day was a normal mid-summer brand of
muggy, so I want to say that it was bracing, the water. Only it wasn't. It was
cold, and not just physical temperature either, it was cold like it feels just
before you have a car accident, when you know the brakes aren't going to stop
you and everything drops out of your midsection. Cold like realizing you've
made a terrible mistake but it's too late to change it.

"I didn't care, not then. Now I think I was being
stupid, but it doesn't matter. I swam as best I could out to the middle of the
quarry and waited a few minutes. Looking down I could just make out my feet and
the yawning blackness beneath. I dared that blackness to come and take me, to
add me to the list of boys it had eaten. It didn't.

"Obviously.

"So I put my head back, let my legs float up, and lay
on the surface of the water on my back. It was an odd feeling. My face and
chest and knees were being warmed by the sun above me, and my back was still in
the freezing water, all that death and darkness below and behind me. And I felt
content, really content for the first time in my life.
Like I
was where I was supposed to be.
Where we're all
supposed to be."

He stops, stubbing out his cigarette. As he lights
another,
and I realize he's not continuing, I say,
"Wait. That's it?"

"Yeah," He puffs.

"That's the important thing you needed to say?"

"Yeah."

"Well what's it mean?"

He smiles.
"Nothing.
Not a
goddamn thing."

I stand up. "Jesus Christ."

I hear an abrupt sound, a horrible, grating crunch, from a
little way away.

"Did you hear that?" I say.

Another crunch.
Then
a woman shouting.
I can't make out the words but they are suddenly cut
off by another crunch. The guy doesn't respond.

"I've got to go," I say. "Thanks for the
cigarettes and the, uh, story."

He holds out his pack of smokes, "I have another
carton."

I decline. "Thanks, but those
things'll
give you cancer." I realize immediately what a stupid thing this is to
say.

"One can only hope," he says, and inhales deeply.