An Eclipse at the End of the World

Ryan Hume

March 2006

"No," Johanna started. "No way. Liar."

Sebastian looked sincere enough, no tell, not a sign of bullshit amongst his features – confident eyes, steady chapped lips, sallow inert cheekbones.

"I’m serious," he began. "It’s all over the news. You guys, of course, are at the one place in town that’s not overrun by television screens. I can’t believe you haven’t heard," he belittled us.

Johanna’s expression drew heavy, as if she had put on extra weight.

"What’s all over the news?" she inquired carefully, not wanting to be the butt of Sebastian’s cruel joke.

"The end of the world, goddamnit." He grew impatient, his hands clenched the plastic armrests of the chair. "I’m not fucking kidding. They announced the end of the world. That’s it, okay? Everyone’s gonna die. It’s really the end of the fucking world.

"Supposedly, astrophysicists in Newark, New Jersey were trying to recreate the Big Bang on a subatomic level and inadvertently created a black hole one-sixteenth the size of a pinpoint. It is slowly sucking in the entire universe, starting with Earth."

"Scientists," I replied. "They finally killed us all."

"You believe him?" Johanna looked at me skeptically.

"Sure," I shrugged. "Why not? It makes perfect sense that the end of the world would start in New Jersey. Either there or Florida."

"I’m not kidding," Sebastian said, frustrated.

"No," I said. "I don’t think you are."

"Bullshit," Johanna retorted, looking at both of us with watchful eyes, as if we were in on this together, as if we’d be in on anything together.

"It happened five days ago," Sebastian continued. "In a lab in Newark that covers two city blocks. The machinery involved in recreating the Big Bang on a subatomic scale is huge, filled up this entire building, and – "

" – And doesn’t work," I added. "Doesn’t work at all. It doesn’t recreate the Big Bang on any scale. It instead destroys the entire universe."

"Right," Sebastian snickered. "And it’s eating through the fabric of time and space, devouring matter, and it’s getting bigger. As it swallows, it grows, getting faster and faster by the second. Five days ago! They didn’t tell us for five days! They tried to fix it! Fix it and cover it up! They thought they could fix a black hole!"

"It’s official, then," I said. "New Jersey sucks."

"It’s not funny!" Sebastian screamed.

"It’s kind of funny," I replied.

"Oh my god," Johanna looked blankly towards the ocean, the waves crashed against the rocks, slowly beating away the earth. "The world’s ending?"

"So what’s your prognosis, Dr. Doom?" I said to Sebastian.

"What?"

"How long do we have."

"I don’t know," he said. "They said it will take a few weeks on the news, but I don’t think they really know. Most of the New Jersey Turnpike is already gone."

"Good riddance," Johanna said. We both looked at her surprised, that was my line.

"A few weeks," Sebastian repeated.

I smiled, I really smiled. It didn’t feel forced, or wrong, or peculiar, just natural. It had come about of its own accord.

"What are you smiling about?" Johanna asked venomously. Her stare didn’t penetrate me this time, couldn’t wipe away the freedom and abandon I felt pulsing within me, the utter nihilism that eclipsed my breathing.

"I was just thinking about all of the times that I slept until three in the afternoon or all of the times I watched television for hours upon hours or did absolutely nothing," I said to Johanna, looking right into her comfortable eyes, her formerly comfortable eyes. "And of all of the times that you told me I was wasting my life, and how I began to think that you were right – and that you really had something there, and I began to believe that I was wasting my life – and how, now, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all. I did exactly what I wanted to do, which sometimes was nothing, and how I will never, not even for a second, ever regret doing nothing ever again. You were wrong, and it’s wonderful."

She started to cry, and I felt horrible, sort of. That hadn’t been my intention. I didn’t want to hurt her, I just wanted liberation.

"Jesus," Sebastian scolded me. "Asshole."

But I didn’t stop smiling. The sun was right over us now. The heat was dry. The lingering puddles had given up, the moisture dissipating. I thought about all of the babies that would never become children and all of the fetuses that would never become babies and all of the adolescents that would never realize that things weren’t so bad and all of the adults who would never get to take their vacation time, or retire and get a boat, or lose ten pounds and how, right now and for the rest of the world, the only lives that are complete are those of the dead and how we will be the last people this aborted earth ever sees before it is swallowed and then I thought about myself and the black hole, and how I could empathize with it. How it was small and inconsequential, yet it pulled everything towards itself.

"The only thing I want back," I began. Sebastian looked up at me, his hand on Johanna’s shoulder. "Is all of the time I thought about the war, or the deficit, or multinational corporations, or international trade agreements: that’s it, that’s all I want back. All I regret, because more than anything else, that was the biggest waste of time. Those are things I had no business thinking about, the things that I could and now will never change." I looked directly at Johanna, who had stopped crying. Her eyes left dew-swollen, her checks rouged. "I could have been fucking or eating or sleeping and now I will never get that time back."

"What should we do?" Johanna asked.

"I don’t know," Sebastian said. "I don’t think there’s anything we can do."

"Should we go to the woods or something? – I mean..." She looked down at her hands.

"I don’t think it’s that kind of apocalypse," I said. "It’s not gonna matter if we go to the woods. Or if we get out of the city. It’s just the end of the world."

"He’s right," Sebastian agreed. "It’s just the end of the world."

"We could head west though." Johanna played with her fingers, pulling on the tips as if to elongate them. "That would be something. Buy airline tickets with everything we’ve got and head west. It would prolong it anyway. Keep heading west until we run out of money or until..."

"Really?" I said, after she trailed off. "Do you really want to prolong it?"

Sebastian and Johanna looked at their hands, furtively, studying the creases that would soon vanish, the scars that meant nothing, their evaporating age.

After we realized NASA had abandoned his post, the mission aborted, I retrieved bottles from the empty bar inside. I made a sort of Sangria or puke punch, and brought it back to the table in a glass pitcher, all smiles. We filled our glasses.

"A toast," I said, raising my glass. The sun disappeared behind a cloud, and the bruised sky fell over us. Johanna and Sebastian joined my salute. "To the end of this world. And to never getting any older."

"That’s a horrible toast," Johanna said.

I closed my eyes. The sun burnt my vision orange, all purple halos and ghost-blue auras out somewhere beyond my eyelids.

"How did you think it would happen?" Sebastian finally asked.

"I don’t believe in God," Johanna started, "but I’ve always been afraid of the Four Horsemen."

"I always thought it would be nuclear war," Sebastian said. "And that humans would live underground, surviving off vermin – but survive, you know? Someway. Something would survive. Maybe cockroaches."

"I always truly believed scientists would create a black hole the size of a pinpoint somewhere in New Jersey," I stated flatly.

"Liar," Johanna smirked.

We emptied our glasses, the patio seemed so still, a faux calm. The apex of our solitude so far away from that apex of approaching doom, of nothingness. We refilled our glasses and thought about ourselves.

We watched the clouds in the murky blue sky as they were pulled east.

Ryan Hume is a writer and editor living in Portland, Oregon. His short fiction has appeared in Old Growth and the now-defunct Sick for Crayola. His journalism has appeared in the Willamette Week. He is usually writing a novel.

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