The sun was dying.
And as it died it would burp, (as stars do when they die). It would expand like a balloon and devour the earth. There was, apparently, nothing to be done about it. The sun would destroy everything in five days the smart people of the planet decided.
And while the smart people could not stop it, they could calculate the exact time that everyone would die and everything that they or anyone that had ever lived; had known, created, loved or built would become a cinder.
The people that decided all of this were very good at math. There was no reason to doubt them.
And so after the usual panic that happens with these sorts of things and after all the denials from conspiracy theorists who thought it was just another plot to take their stuff. After all the preppers had retreated into their underground hiding places with powdered milk and guns. And after all of those that had religion did whatever their particular religion would have them do; the city was empty.
Clifford, a forty-year-old man who lived alone on the second floor of an apartment house on Bleeker Street just went about living what life was left to him. The city where fate had decided he should pass his time while on the planet, had once been home to two hundred thousand, eight hundred and five other people. But as he glanced out the window, it was a ghost town. The wind blew unhindered by people and traffic down silent streets. Even the birds seem to have disappeared. Since the bad news had been delivered by somber men wearing ties on television, everyone had gone to whatever place they felt most appropriate to die.
Some, as you would expect, took it better than others. There was the usual crying and carrying on, churches filled to capacity as did bars, each providing their particular brand of comfort. There was a lot of sex too, since there was no reason to save yourself for anyone now.
Virtue was pointless.
There was the typical rioting and looting at first, people breaking windows and stealing electronics, clothes and food. But it quickly stopped. Stores were left open with no one minding them. You could simply walk in and take whatever you wanted.
People confessed their sins to priests, spouses, family and anyone they’d ever wronged; just in case there really was an afterlife and any of that mattered. People bared their very souls to one another and shared secrets that should have stayed secrets.
The end of the world was in many ways; liberating.
There were a lot of suicides—you would expect that— and interestingly enough a lot of murders.
The settling of old scores.
Why not? Who was going to arrest you now?
Clifford simply locked his door and went about his usual business. He’d had no control over most things his whole life, so this end of the world thing was no different. He’d always been a loner; with no friends, girlfriend or family; so staying home and waiting for his demise with the same anxiety he’d have had waiting for a pizza, was ok with him.
His demise, like everyone’s, had always been inevitable. The only difference now was that everyone knew the date.
And, for Clifford at least, there was a comfort in knowing when it would finally end. He had no place to run to. No unsettled business, no family to say goodbye to. He had always been alone.
But alone or not, everyone was in the same boat. We all, as someone pointed out once, die alone.
From the second floor of his tired old apartment that looked down on Bleeker Street, he looked out upon a quiet city. To the south the center of the city rose in tall buildings and church steeples. A dome sparkled in the sunlight. And to the north the street disappeared beyond a horizon of more buildings and more streets. It was very hot. And so, hoping for a breeze Clifford opened the window. The electricity had stopped three days before.
He was finishing his cold pop tart (no electricity) and wiping the sweat off his face when he noticed a man jogging by.
Surprised to see anyone he called out the window, “what are you doing?”
The man stopped and looked around, the echo from empty streets made it difficult to know where the voice had come from. Then seeing Clifford leaning out the window he replied, “going for my morning jog”.
“What’s the point?” Clifford asked.
“What,” the jogger answered, “was ever the point?”
There was a man that for a few days every month stood on the northwest corner of the courthouse square holding a sign that read “THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END, ARE YOU PREPARED?”
To the locals, he’d become a common sight and no one bothered with him very much. People stood on the courthouse corner all the time to complain about one thing or another. Pro-life, pro-choice, stop the war, support the troops, hands off my guns, feed the poor and so on. But unlike the others he did not force himself on anyone, hand out flyers or otherwise interrupt anyone’s day. He just sat on a bench at far end of the sidewalk holding his sign and reading a book, so that he wouldn’t be in anyone’s way as they hurried to wherever it was they felt they had to be.
He was not there to convince you of anything. He was simply giving you information; what you chose to do with it was your business.
His name was Hugh and he was a thin, whiskered man in his mid-thirties dressed neatly and unremarkably. He could have been a blade of grass for as much as anyone noticed him. Occasionally someone would glance. The sign he held was about the size of a stop sign. The words were written in neat block letters…all caps.
Busy people on their way to something or on their way back from it, were burdened with their own problems and hardly had time to look at a man holding a sign or give his message any real thought. But whatever it was that they were worried about. Or whatever thing that they thought they couldn’t live without, get enough of or hide in their pockets; their time would have been better spent stopping, reading the sign and maybe asking a few questions.
Because as it turns out the quiet, whiskered, unremarkable man was right and the answer to the question on his sign was no.
Adam who lived three floors up from Clifford, died on the day Hugh became a prophet and began to see the future. When Hugh decided to make a sign, Adam was playing basketball.
They were brothers. Whether that is co-incidence, master plan or fate we cannot say and didn’t matter to either of them.
Adam was 29 and according to his obituary, he died suddenly.
If you are young, relatively careful and live in a rich country, you are statistically less likely to die than someone ninety years old who climbs mountains and lives in a Third World country where they have a civil war every couple of weeks.
In Third World countries dying young is not unusual. No one would say that you died suddenly if you die in a third world country, no matter what it is you die of. But if you die at 29 in America they will say probably say that you died suddenly.
Although no one really dies suddenly. Everyone dies exactly when they’re supposed to die. It might have been better to say that Adam died unexpectedly. Like seeing Elvis and a super model making out in a garbage truck would be unexpected.
It would be statistically unlikely.
The doctors, when speaking to his grieving family, also said that he’d died instantly. That was supposed to make them better, believing that Adam had not suffered any pain.
But the truth is that everyone dies instantly. Everyone is alive one instant and then dead the next. Instantly. And only Adam could tell you if he’d felt any pain. But of course he couldn’t do that since he was dead. And dead people as a rule are not very talkative.
Adam’s death happened at the local YMCA during a rousing game of basketball. Adam was running to the corner waving his arms when he dropped dead. He fell like a puppet whose strings had suddenly been cut. And since Adam had always been rather dramatic (always complaining about being fouled when things didn’t go his way), at first no one paid much attention when he dropped to the floor.
As it happened he died just beyond the three-point line which was, he would tell anyone that would listen, his spot.
Adam was a very good shot, that was true; and he was wide open, that was also true. And it really was his spot. His team was losing by two. Had he taken and made the shot, his team would have won. Instead they lost and Adam dropped dead.
Adam and Clifford did not know each other, even though they’d lived in the same apartment house for ten years. They’d passed each other three hundred and sixty-eight times coming and going out of the building without ever acknowledging each other.
It was nothing personal.
And while Clifford had no family, Adam had two brothers and a wife. One brother lived in Los Angeles where he was trying to become famous. The other lived across town and began to tell the future.
Being a prophet was not something Hugh had aspired to as a young child.
He had never been religious although he’d been raised Baptist. Since generally we think that to be a prophet you have to be religious, then Hugh would not have been most likely to become one. But that may or may not be true. On forms that asked for his religious affiliation he always put “does not apply” or “none.”. He was not overly bright, extroverted, brave or athletic. He was as normal and close to average as a human being can be.
If you were making a movie about anything and required people (extras) in the backround; Hugh would have been perfect. Nothing about him would have distracted you from whatever it was you were trying to get people to watch.
He was, like his brother, unremarkable.
And so of all the people on the planet, why the universe had chosen him to be a prophet is anyone’s guess. But one day, out of the blue, it came to him that the world was going to end in exactly three years. His brother was dropping dead at the YMCA that very same moment.
Hugh didn’t know that his brother Adam was dropping dead. He wouldn’t find out for a couple of hours when a policeman called to tell him. But before any of that happened, out loud while standing in the kitchen he said “the world will end in three years”. He was alone, so there was no-one there to hear him.
But like a tree that falls in the forest when no one is around, it doesn’t really matter to the tree if anyone hears it. It falls just the same.
Hugh was not very good at math, so unlike the smart people who had done the calculations, he had no formula to prove anything.
But everyday after that, no matter where he was, he’d say it again; subtracting a day.
When the world is about to end, God is always part of the conversation. When they found the bodies of the people at Pompei thousands of years after a volcano had buried them, many of them were gathered around statues of their gods. There was Jupiter, Apollo and Minerva among others. All of the people decided when it was obvious that they were going to die, that the best place to be was near a statue of their god. Because they were pretty sure that their god would perform some sort of magic and save them. They lit candles and sacrificed things. Things that seem odd.
People have done all sorts of odd things for their gods throughout history.
Except for the names of the god, this was no different. And so now that the sun was about to burp, a lot of people looked to God.
People generally look for God when the shit hits the fan.
And so a lot of people, religious and otherwise decided that church was the best place to wait for the end of the world. If there was an angel or a savior who would return and lead them into paradise just before the world burned up; being in a church, they reasoned, would make them less likely to be missed.
While at the church they prayed in front of alters, lit candles and waited for the savior to come and snatch them up just before everything became a cinder. The smart people who’d figured out when the sun would burp were pretty sure that none of that was going to happen.
But people waited anyway. What did they have to lose? And if they didn’t get snatched up alive, there was always heaven to look forward to when they died.
Religion’s biggest attraction, no matter what that religion is, has always been an afterlife. People didn’t like to think that their existence would suddenly end and that would be that. They didn’t like to think that they’d never see their loved ones again. There had to be a reason, they’d say, for their lives. And of course a reward for all the good things they’d done. An afterlife with heaven, full of virgins (if that’s what you believed) and old relatives seemed logical.
One of the scientists who had figured out the timing of the end of the world was asked about an afterlife in one of the hundreds of interviews on tv while there was still tv to watch. She was surprised by the question. She was prepared with statistics, charts and math. So she paused, wanting to say the right thing and then said, in the way that scientists say things; that there was no proof that there was an afterlife.
But that didn’t stop the churches from filling up anyway. It got so full that people couldn’t get in and had to stand outside. Close enough they thought. God would find them. He was God after all.
If you had a bucket list, there wasn’t much time to fill it. If you’d always wanted to visit Europe and lived in Seattle, that wasn’t going to happen. No planes were flying, no boats were sailing and there wasn’t time.
Perhaps the luckiest people were the ones that lived so far away from civilization that they were unaware that the end of the world was coming. They chopped wood and gathered berries like they’d done everyday, saving for next week not knowing that there would be no next week.
Of all the clichés perhaps the one that really was true was that ignorance is bliss. Live everyday like it’s your last was also a good one. Because it is always the last day for someone. Now it was going to be the last day for everyone.
Clifford never left his apartment. He rose and sat in the chair by the window, waited and watched the jogger pass everyday. The jogger kept running. After the jogger had run out of sight, Clifford would leave the window and sit in his recliner with his pop tart and read.
He’d always loved books. His walls were lined with books that he’d read; classics, history, poetry. There were books he hadn’t gotten around to reading and others that he’d read so long ago he could not remember what they were about.
Meanwhile across town Hugh the prophet sipped a glass of wine and looked at old pictures. There were pictures of friends and family, some that he hadn’t spoken to for many years. There were old newspaper clippings between the pages of photo albums. One clipping was of his brother Adam scoring forty points to lead his high school team to a county championship. There was another article with a picture of Adam who, the writer said, was a sure thing to make the pros someday.
“The world will end today,” Hugh said out loud between sips of wine.
As usual, there was no one there to hear him.