Waking in the night to the sounds of car alarms and barking dogs, Joseph got out of bed to close his window and stem the breeze that was goosepimpling his skin under his thin blanket. The faint noisome smell of something rotting came to him, but he was sleep-drunk and dismissed this as a part of the dream he was surely having. He shut the window and shivered. On his way back to bed, he stubbed his toe. He swore into the darkness and felt his way under the covers.
He dreamed of railroads and dead rats. Strange, uncomfortable dreams that brought him to the brink of waking more than once. Somewhere in a dream he longed for a cigarette, and this is what woke him. He stumbled into his coffeetable and tore the empty pack apart like a rabid animal. Sniffling in the midnight air, he dragged his coat around him and slipped his feet—injured toe pulsating into his watering eyeballs—into his shoes. He checked his coat pockets for his wallet and groped out the door.
The streets were slick from a rainstorm, the air still thick with summernight humidity. A breeze stuck his thin pajamas to the sweat on the backs of his knees. The outside world woke him and he reeled in neon signs and the procession of taxicabs three blocks down to the allnight convenience store to buy a pack of cigarettes. An electronic bell ding-donged as he shoved open the door to the fluorescent paradise, a nighttime smoker’s Garden of Eden. The clerk barely looked up from his college textbook full of diagrams and equations to slide the blessed tobacco over the counter. Joseph pulled at the door out onto the street, the prerecorded bell ringing into the night after him.
He slumped on a bench up the street, looking like a hobo trying to keep warm, and fumbled three matches from the disintegrating book into a brief flare that he caught with the head of his cigarette. He felt a part of the city here, falling asleep on a bench with smoke trailing from his nostrils; one of the halfdead denizens of dissolving cardboard boxes and jangling coffee cups he tried to put out of his mind when he lied about not having any change.
A subway train went by below him. A hiss of steam erupted like vulcanized ash from the grate on the corner. A man stepped through the cloud seeming to appear in a cheap magician’s trick and sat on the bench next to Joseph. He was dressed in a shabby tuxedo, like He’d come bleary out of some classy party uptown that He didn’t belong at in the first place and walked fifty blocks down here to where the steam scared away the rats.
“Could I bum a smoke?”
Joseph had never given a cigarette to anyone in his life. Not on principle, exactly, but on the principle that if they looked like they could afford their own cigarettes then he’d give them one. Nobody had ever seemed worth it, but this guy looked like He was in a jam. Joseph shuffled his fresh-minus-one pack out of his coat and flicked the bottom expertly to make one smokestack pop, held in His direction.
“Thanks.”
A sound like thunder rattled the pavement and gave way to a crackling like bubblewrap. Joseph looked up to see the clouds on fire, and a ball of tumbling flame cannon out of the fog leaving a trail of sparkling dust behind it on its way down to the city, burst in a firework bouquet. He thought of a line from a novel he’d read: “A screaming comes across the sky.” He hadn’t finished that one. Probably should some day, he thought. It seemed good.
“You know what that was?”
Fire from the heavens. Wrath of the gods. Joseph gaped at the prehensile dust clamoring down the streets a mile away like water rushing through a tunnel. A shockwave rippled his thin pajamas and rocked his ears across his head. The tinnitus shriek of car alarms followed, sending all the dogs in town into a frenzy of barking drunks arguing on the sidewalk. He felt the impact through his feet send a jolt into his incandescent toe. He tried to form the words to answer Him—a meteorite hit somewhere uptown and its debris is rolling toward us at an incredible pace and we should probably find shelter quickly before we’re overcome by a thick jelly of smoke that will tear our lungs from our chests—but all he could think about were his balls receding slowly and unstoppably into his stomach.
“We should probably get indoors.”
He was calm: either He’d resigned to fate or He’d seen all this before. He knew what to do. It was meaningless to Joseph; everything is meaningless without a frame of reference. It’s difficult to find significance in chaos unless you’re looking for it.
They spilled into the convenience store. The clerk was gone and had left his book of equations open on the glass counter. He had the right idea; there’s no point in sticking around, holding a fort you have no stake in. Maybe this will change things. Change is the only constant. Maybe this will clean everything up, force the halfdead zombies of civilization to take stock of their lives, to realize that their pathetic little petty jobs make them look like ants scurrying around blindly on the orders of the queen. No, ants are better than that. At least ants don’t have bureaucracy.
They took a bottle of whiskey from behind the counter and took turns in swigging from it until half of it was gone. The only thing to do at a time like this is to get so drunk you’re half dead already when the thing comes to kill you and you can laugh in its face and throw up on its shoes. Halfdead, halfdead, halfdead; we are all halfdead. The city and the world are half dead. Everything is dead from the day it is born.
Joseph’s nose filled up with death, that sicklysweet stench of a corpse that he knew from his childhood when his old dog had crawled under the porch of his parents’ house to die and his father couldn’t get the damn thing out so they just had to leave it there to rot away and try to ignore the rising shit-and-honey vapor that came up to his hairline and made him faint every time he went in the front door. Bacteria eating away at his dead dog releasing putrescine, slowed by the cool, damp soil under the porch, the dog saponifying, drawing out the process, covered in waxy adipocere and adipose and lye reacting slowly into soap, smelling like hell itself and making Joseph use the back door for a month. He couldn’t imagine tiny single cells making such a stench. It seemed to rise from the pavement, as if the whole city had died under the porch and was being consumed by maggots and microbes.
The sum of human existence is death. Death, led by pain, penury and strife. Hope is an illusion. Happiness is nothing more than a statistical anomaly. It’s that one point way off up the y-axis that throws out the pattern of all the others and momentarily disrupts the line of the graph that curves inexorably down to zero; human life careening from the skies on a parabolic trajectory and crashing to Earth in a fiery cataclysm when all things end.
Maybe we should have a party. Get everyone to dance in the streets like they do in New Orleans. Women dancing in ten foot high champagne goblets and aberrant oyster-clams that think they’re organ pipes. Throw the airburst a parade across the sky and follow it down to the point of impact.
“Maybe we should have a party.”
“I think it’s time to go home.”
They stood at the door for a moment.
“You’re sure you can get home?”
“I know the way.”
“Good.”
They finished the bottle of whiskey and shook hands briefly; Joseph felt his pajamas stick to his knees again. He pushed the door out onto the street covered in grey haze and stinking death, the electronic bell lost in the great rush of wind and destruction. Joseph watched Him walk further downtown. The dogs had stopped barking and the wind’s tiger roar seemed more like silence than silence does when you're inside of it.
He had to find his way home through the deluge of debris and dust; extrapolating his route back to his apartment, loping drunk against gravity, taking the way he’d taken so many times, tracing the lines on the grid like those on the back of his proverbial hand. You can’t see where things really are until you’re jacked up on whiskey and nearly dead in the streets trying to find your way home. Home is where you want to fall down when you’re too drunk to stand. You know you have a place in the world when you have a place to black out.
“Oh, and Joseph,” He called, turning back, barely visible through the veiled halfblock he’d already walked. “All my hopes.”
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