The End of the World Feels Like Nothing

The End of the World Feels Like Nothing

Billy Chew

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A Brief, Inevitable Exchange by Billy Chew

Zack listens to his playlist Apocalypse Daze. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” comes up on shuffle as he arrives to Mason and Sandro’s cookout. Whether the song is a good omen or a bad omen, or an omen at all, Zack is unsure. He points for the driver—“Right there, thanks.”—pockets his earbuds, and glances at his phone for the time. “Have a great night, man.”

The Uber hums off. Zack takes in Mason and Sandro’s house. Christopher Cross blasts all the way around to the sidewalk out front. God forbid Mason enjoy something without the plausible deniability of it all being a joke. The partygoers are also at such a decibel level, commingling with the yacht rock, that Zack surmises Marta’s gotta be there by now. He’s satisfied with his well-timed arrival. Thinks of his app and takes a series of deep breaths.

In for four heartbeats.

Hold.

Out for four.

Hold.

The sun will start setting soon. Zack watches it through LA’s brownly orange haze and breathes there alone in the hot driveway.

“Don’t.”

“Dude,” Zack rolls his eyes.

“I’m asking you not to,” Mason takes Zack gently by the elbow. “Go meet the pig on the grill and chill, erwhatever.” Mason squeezes warmly once and releases. “The pig is tentatively named Gertrude until someone comes up with something that’s actually funny. Prize is first dibs on the carcass.”

“I’m just asking if she’s here.”

“And where.”

“Maybe I’m trying to avoid her.”

“This is a nice cookout, with a pig.”

“Yeah, you mentioned the pig, man.”

“Sandro and Berkeley are downstairs jamming. Get the nerves out, bro. Food’ll be up in like an hour.”

Zack can’t help but nervously shift his weight, glancing around the party behind Mason.

“And of course Marta’s here,” Mason says. “Were you expecting me to disinvite her or something for breaking up with you?”

A breakbeat is the only pattern Zack really knows how to play on the drums. He wishes he could churn out a relentless motorik, but his legs always cramp up. So he finds jamming both frustrating and monotonous when he’s stuck on drums. He stops. “Let’s trade up.”

Sandro nods. “I pack a fresh bowl, you guys . . . ?”

“Fuck yeah bro,” Zack replies.

Sandro hangs his guitar on a wallmount. Berkeley plops onto an IKEA loveseat draped with a cyberskull throw-blanket.

“My man, how you holding up?” Sandro fishes some weed out of his bespoke leather pouch and begins to fastidiously pack his resin-dulled skull pipe. Warped, radioactive skulls being his latest aesthetic makeover apparently. “You at, like, the suicide-note Stage of Grieving?”

“I’m at the perpetually-listening-to-The-Bends stage.”

“Oh, you been crying.” Berkeley hands Sandro a small, bright red skull. Sandro flicks it open and lights up with it. Skull on skull.

“Honestly, I’m not crying as much as I thought I’d be since I moved out. I’m more, like, still a little angry, y’know?”

Sandro exhales and hands Zack the bowl. “Well then good thing this is a super strong sativa.”

“Blue Dream?”

“Green Crack.”

Zack takes a deep hit. He wonders if it’s possible to develop a callous in the back of your throat from weed-smoking-frequency. Exhales. “She’s totally erased me from the band. Did you guys see the Pitchfork thing at FYF?”

“I was asking about the break-up, not the band, but OK.” Sandro takes the pipe back.

Berkeley drapes himself across the be-skulled loveseat, his head hanging upside down toward Zack. “I always preferred your solo shit. No shade to Marta and Kumiko.”

“Same,” Sandro adds and hands off the bowl to Berkeley, but Berkeley just passes it back to Zack.

Zack’s heart rises warmly as he accepts the weed. Of course they love his solo shit. He takes a hit. “Thanks, guys. That means a lot.” Exhales.

“You been writing some sad-ass Thom Yorke psych, erwhatever? Like, you gettin’ the feels out?”

“Pfft. I’m at like a . . . ” Zack takes another deep hit. Holds it for a beat before announcing: “Total. Creative. Block.” He exhales a massive cloud and hacks. They all laugh. Zack checks his phone to see how soon dinner is but it’s dead.

Mason’s cooking makes Zack feel like less of a man, but the epicurean excellence makes up for the blow to his ego. He doesn’t mind being one of the however-many people gathered shoulder to shoulder to appreciate and enjoy this culinary labor of love. Gertrude is a little too Faces-of-Death, Zack thinks, but the persimmons down the table practically glow. Zack notices Marta standing beside them. Browsing for what to put on her paper plate. Amidst a throng of friends.

Zack watches her discreetly. She won’t acknowledge him whatsoever. Surely she’s heard that he’s here by now. Maybe she’s even seen him. But she’s openly conversing with everyone around her without, conveniently, ever glancing over in Zack’s direction.

For fucksake.

“You grabbing brussels or no?” Someone Zack doesn’t know but always interacts with at these cookouts leans in.

Zack realizes he’s just been standing there. “Sorry, I’m super baked.” He serves himself some brussel sprouts and continues down the spread, grabbing some of the persimmons. When he looks up to see if Marta has any of them on her own plate, she’s gone.

Berkeley will probably eat with her somewhere. Zack will find them. Usually on the balcony. Marta was always jealous of Mason’s view.

Is it weird to bring your dinner plate with you to the bathroom? The fact that Zack even has to ask himself that question is its own answer. Nevertheless, he needs a moment to himself. Even in the bathroom off the living room, the gathering’s din is impressive.

He looks himself over in the mirror. Mason’s bathroom lighting situation is disturbing. Zack intends to center himself again, though. Remembers his app. Breathes. Holds. Breathes. Holds.

“I’m not trying to corner you,” he practices into the mirror. Eyes shut. “I just need to talk.”

He breathes.

Holds.

Breathes.

Holds.

Suddenly, phone alerts start going off on the other side of the bathroom door, rippling through the party. More and more of partygoers’ phones wailing with some sort of vital announcement. Zack looks to his own phone, forgetting for a moment that it’s a black brick. Amber Alert, he figures. Certainly not an earthquake or he’d hear people bolting for cover.

Disturbed, Zack takes in the sustained wall of sounding phones. An uncountable number of them blaring outside. The formerly boisterous volume of the cookout fades. Dies to zero. Then there’s a silence that holds. No klaxons anymore. No voices, either. No sound or sign of life remains.

The hairs on the back of Zack’s neck bristle. The entire party has vanished into a vacuum. He feels slightly embarrassed for feeling afraid. He steps toward the bathroom door. He can hear a few folks flopping onto furniture or pulling out kitchen chairs. So far, no words are spoken. He opens the door slowly, carefully, quiet pride rising for overcoming his fear. Everyone is still there at the cookout, of course. They all sit in silence. Or stand. Or lean. The same, or roughly the same, expression on everyone’s face. Staring down at the phones in all of their hands.

Sandro stands spellbound by his own phone beside the silent record player a few feet away. A bloody Osees record he was apparently about to put on dropped and forgotten, splayed open on the red rug beside him. A roaring, axe-wielding orc illustration on the album’s gatefold.

Zack walks quietly as he approaches Sandro. No one looks up. He leans in towards Sandro’s shoulder, speech feeling like a secret or some forbidden act for reasons Zack doesn’t understand beyond his reptile-brain’s present coaching.

“Yo,” he manages to get out. His voice quivering somehow on the single syllable.

Sandro hands Zack his phone. No eye contact. Nothing. Sandro just stares down into the orc at his feet. Zack hesitates to check the phone in his friend’s hand. Afraid of what he’s about to find. Less embarrassed about it this time. So he looks.

A bright red push-alert fills the entire foldable Android’s display. The thing’s haptics surge almost painfully in Zack’s palm.

Of course no one speaks. Who wants to be the first person to say it’s the end of the world out loud?

Kyiv is gone. Other places too. The names are long and Russian-sounding. But Zack recognizes Kyiv.

He thinks of Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Thinks back on all those times he heard about modern nukes being “X times more powerful” than the bombs dropped on Japan. But he can’t remember the value of X. He remembers being what feels now to be perversely impressed by X, though. Was it in the double digits? Was it a factor of hundreds? Thousands? He doesn’t know. What he knows is that Kyiv is leveled. He pictures a city-sized, flaming, radioactive flatland of rubble and dead bodies. But then he realizes that it’s probably considerably worse.

What’s he missed in the news recently? John Oliver and Colbert and the blips of KCRW on the way to Blue Bottle in the mornings keep him pretty in the loop—or at least knowledgeable enough about global goings-on to be marginally aware of the loops that he’s not in on. Was he, and/or everyone else on the planet, the proverbial frog in the pot coming to a boil, ignorant of some rising international tensions or the ascension of a trigger-happy madman? Or was Zack just not paying attention?

Who’s behind all of everything right now? Zack feels like he needs to know, needs to attach his rational mind to someone in order for a logical sense of cause and effect to still exist in the universe. Blame is Zack’s only lifeline. Was it Russia? Moscow isn’t in the reporting yet, so could be. 

Zack’s sphincter tightens at the word “yet.” Where else is in a Yet Situation? Is he himself in a Yet Situation? What about other places in the US? LA must be a valuable strategic target, right? What about the US as a whole? What about everywhere?

But specifically what about LA?

Zack looks around, away from Sandro’s phone. Sandro has abandoned him and migrated across the room to his girlfriend on another be-skulled, deep couch. The news of what’s happening is beginning to sink in for everyone. There are some brief expressions of shock. Wordless vocalizations from folks, attempts at something said but abandoned halfway through into the eery quiet again. Dazed hugs are exchanged. Language is taking its time to return.

His stranger/friend from the brussel sprouts breaks down. Others follow. Zack is glad he doesn’t know the stranger/friend well enough to have to blink himself out of his own shock to comfort the guy. Berkeley, though, leads him from the living room floor to the deck outside. Always the Boy Scout. The stranger/friend is still audibly crying out there. Zack doesn’t turn to look through the sliding doors. He doesn’t wanna see that right now.

The colors of the living room have lost their saturation. A deep night descending. No one currently with the presence of mind to flip on the lights, and no one noticing that no one has.

“ICBM’s still in the exosphere according to NORAD,” a familiar voice announces. Zack remembers NORAD as the Santa Trackers when he was a kid. How similar now is his belief that they can track these things, he wonders.

Someone breathlessly states the obvious: “More nukes.”

“More of them over the Indian Ocean,” another voice adds. “Origins unknown.”

“Pacific Ocean, too,” Sandro chimes in, a wavering shakiness to his voice completely unfamiliar to Zack and probably everyone else in the room. The notion of seeking shelter is broached briefly, but the conversation fizzles. What’s shelter?

“Maybe we should turn on the news,” suggests Sandro’s girlfriend. Zack remembers that her name is Emily. Maybe Emma. He doesn’t care.

“Where’s the PS5 controller?” Sandro asks to no one in particular and begins frantically going through his TV’s remote-routine. Zack half tip-toes over to a seat on the arm of an occupied La-Z-Boy. The TV visible now. He turns on the first lamp.

The room ripples into incandescence as everyone realizes they need it and switch things on. Sandro tells the Playstation to pull up CNN Live but it just hangs on buffering. A pin could drop and everyone would lose their mind.

From Zack’s new perspective on the fluffy chair, he spots Marta seated at the base of the steps to the upstairs. Her leg up against the wall beside her friend Anni. Zack always mostly liked Anni. She’s posed mirror to Marta. Leg up. They both stare at the same point in space somewhere between them, a few steps below. Lost in private distress, stumbling mentally through somewhere alien just like everyone else.

Zack wants to want to go to Marta when CNN Live flashes into deafening, blinding brilliance. Sandro leaps for the remote and rapidly turns down the soundbar. “Sorry sorry sorry.” The matrix of glowing CNN elements resolves onto the screen. White and blue and red and gold. The camera swoops in toward the anchors standing amidst moving walls and screens.

The anchor with a white beard leans, head down between his shoulders, dizzy, wobbling against the news desk. No one helps him. No one even seems to notice. Another anchor silently stares off-camera, nodding slowly, finger on her earpiece, listening to something that makes her mouth hang open.

A man beside a wall-sized touchscreen of a topographical map of somewhere with no information on it weeps. He pleads up to the display, “Don’t update it! Please. Leave it all blank for just another second,” he says. “Don’t make me look at it yet.”

“It’s like binging the first season of the Apocalypse in there,” Mason says to Zack and stubs out a cigarette on the bottom of his Adidas. At some point, Zack has to step outside to bum an American Spirit off Mason. They plant themselves on the curb beneath a sulphur-colored streetlight. Smoking in morose silence.

It’s deeply unsettling to Zack that overlooking Los Angeles, there seems to be nothing really happening of note. No sirens. No helicopters. Not even any car alarms. An invisible Apocalypse so far. Off a ways on the distant mountainside, he guesses there are probably less headlights on the 134. But maybe it’s just the smog.

Mason takes a drag on a new cigarette and breaks the quiet, “I’m afraid to ask for an update.”

“More in the air,” Zack says, looking upward for splotches of stars in the hazy urban clouds. “Everyone seems to have lost track of how many there are.”

“Damn . . .” Mason trails off. Hesitates. “. . . US yet?”

“Still unscathed.”

Mason nods. “I guess we’d kinda be the first to find out.”

They’re quiet together for a moment. Emotional CPU’s frying. “I need one more before I go back in.” Zack turns to reach but Mason’s already got his pack out, arm outstretched, cigarette extended.

“I’ll be out here,” Mason replies.

“Ten figures.” That’s how the TV starts referring to the body count once it gets too high too fast to keep track of, which is a matter of about twenty minutes after the news really starts coming in. Zack recalls that the human population of the entire planet is somewhere around nine billion. So, “ten figures” could be most humans. Could even be all of them. All of them except for the folks in Zack’s direct line of sight and those presently on television.

The devastation is in the quintillions of dollars, a maybe made-up number. Pretty much everyone at what used to be referred to as a cookout agrees that handwringing prognostication regarding the economic toll of Armageddon is ill-timed at best. 

“I’d like to know the real death toll so far, though” Emma/Emily appeals to the remaining guests at Sandro and Mason’s. “I think we’re all entitled to know.” Sure, Zack thinks. What good would that do, though? The news feels as useless as it always does.

“I’d like to know pretty much everything about what the fuck is going on overall,” replies Sandro from beside Emma/Emily on the couch, both of them nestled atop one another beneath the neon skull blanket.

“I think everyone still alive on the planet would like to know that,” Berkeley answers. He’d come in from the deck after Zack’s stranger/friend called himself an Uber. No one expected one to come, but it only took about 10 minutes for a Ford Fiesta to pull up out front. So the guy’s gone now, as are most of Mason and Sandro’s guests. Drove home regardless of inebriation level. Wandered home through the dark on foot whether they live nearby or not. Sometimes on the phone trying and occasionally succeeding to get through to a loved one. Sometimes hand in hand with someone. Sometimes alone. Some were taken home by friends or acquaintances, perhaps to ensure that no one leaped off a bridge or threw themselves into traffic failing to fathom the End of Civilization As We Know It.

Marta seems to be taking everything well, it seems. All Zack saw in her was that daze on the stairs before she went elsewhere when he didn’t notice. Her dusty shoeprints still linger on the eggshell wall like shadows. Zack can’t tell if the fact that Marta taking things relatively well is a good thing or a bad thing. Or if it’s even a Thing at all. He just knows that she’s still avoiding him, still hasn’t made any eye contact or acknowledgement. Her avoidance is inarguable now. Zack hasn’t seen her for a minute, though. He wonders if she trickled out with some of the others. She’s notorious for her Irish Exits. Now here Zack is, he thinks. Butt-hurt and likely doomed.

Although, when it comes to doom, the US remains unscathed after nearly three hours. Three hours of missiles and bombs and entire cities being ethered. Three hours of statistics so sublimely incomprehensible as to essentially bounce right off Zack’s cerebellum.

The pixelated firsthand footage comes in and out. Bodies clogging rivers. The deep mutilation of what a person can survive, but barely and not for long. What remains of human beings wander a fiery wasteland. Picture-in-picture on the TV broadcast. Maybe looped. Maybe not.

Are we being spared? Zack wonders if there’s simply an apocalypse-lag when you’re the sole remaining superpower. Perhaps soon to be the sole remaining liveable place on the planet. But what about Nuclear Winter? Or Radioactive Clouds? The Yet Situation hovers over him like so many impatient ICBM’s.

It seems somehow logical that Moscow eventually makes the list. Zack doesn’t know yet who’s to blame for kicking over the first nuclear domino, but everyone has their suspicions. A few offered them up to the group gathered at the TV earlier. North Korea. China came up twice. Iran for a reason Zack couldn’t quite follow. Sandro offered up a contrarian hypothesis about a preemptive launch by the US and the unspoken rage was so palpable that Zack could have sworn the room warmed several degrees. Now everyone’s hypothesis is their own. They’ll all find out eventually, Zack figures, or they won’t. Kinda doesn’t matter if it’s Russia anymore. Maybe they’d been a part of it for an hour or so. Now they’re gone. Like Kyiv.

Like Mumbai.

Like Islamabad, apparently the capitol of Pakistan.

Like Sydney.

Like Tehran.

Tokyo.

Berlin.

Beijing.

London.

Rome and the Vatican.

All of Israel and Palestine.

The entire Korean Peninsula.

Like countless other places that never lived in the forefront of Zack’s brain and certainly can’t stay there now.

“Ten figures,” a TV anchor says again. Zack worries that he’s not really feeling enough about everything thus far. It settles over him that he’s starving, but doesn’t want anyone to see him eating at a time like this. He remembers his paper plate left in the bathroom; he decides to discreetly retrieve it and eat in the garage. Or out on the curb with Mason who’s on his third pack of cigarettes, resorting now to menthols someone gifted him on their drunken stumble back home up the hill.

Zack looks around for Marta as he makes his way to the restroom, and, yeah, maybe she’s really gone. Damn. Anni is still here, though, speaking softly in the kitchen to someone Zack doesn’t catch sight of as he passes. If Marta’s gone home, she’ll be going home to a boyfriend-less apartment. One that Zack assumes is still half-empty from when he moved out a few weeks ago. Her ADHD is likely working against her getting it all put back together, and Zack gets a certain satisfaction from that.

When Zack opens the door to the bathroom, he finds three people in there together apparently hurling. A round of mutual heaving seems to have just come to a close, and the trio of pukers all turn to Zack. Each one of them sweaty. Eyes bloodshot. Hair matted. Vomit on the corners of all their mouths and on their chins. None of them he knows. One of them he thinks he might, but if so, they’re unrecognizable. The smell of the room is overwhelmingly putrid. “Oh,” Zack blinks. “Excuse me.”

The three figures stare wordlessly up at Zack, startled out of their respective trances, eyes wide, expectant. Two share the toilet bowl. The third person is at the sink, faucet running but not particularly helping to fully cleanse the sink of the man’s partially-digested roast pig and persimmons.

Zack stutters, glances over at his dinner still beside the sink. From the doorway, visually untouched by the sink-bound puker’s splashback, but never mind.

He realizes that the six eyes are still on him. All vomiting suspended. The bathroom’s bleak lighting turning everyone into irradiated ghouls. Maybe Sandro’s Green Crack still hasn’t worn off. Zack wants to give the pukers good news. This is all a dream. Something.

“Don’t forget to breathe,” he says. “In and out.”

He feels like an idiot. So he leaves.

Gertrude the Pig is alone and forgotten in the dining room. Ripped to shreds as if half-eaten by wolves who fled when a real monster slouched out of the forest. An electric carving knife rests stabbed into her neck. Zack leaves it. His paper plate of cold brussels and corn bread will suffice. There are some potato chip crumbles in the bottom of a ceramic bowl that Zack remembers are Sour Cream and Onion. He pours out the rest of the mini-chips with their flakes and flavor dust onto his plate. The sadness Zack feels over his pathetic dinner is perhaps the only access he’s had to a recognizable feeling in the last several hours. It feels alien. Outdated even.

When he gets there, Zack finds Berkeley alone in the garage. Head in hands, seated in a metal folding chair over in the corner facing the shadows. A fluorescent workbench light full of dead bugs is the only source of illumination. Zack approaches his friend, trying not to startle him. “Hey man.”

Berkeley speaks into the darkness. “There’s a black widow over here,” he mumbles. “I couldn’t see the red hour glass before it went off into that hinge there, but you can see the spiky egg sacs.” He points.

“We’ll have to let Mason and Sandro know,” Zack replies.

Berkeley scoffs. “I’m sure they’ll get right on it.”

Zack takes in the back of Berkeley’s head. “You want some cornbread?”

Berkeley finally turns and looks up at Zack from his chair. His eyes puffy and bloodshot. “You got any butter?”

“Yeah but it was cold and tore the whole thing to bits.”

“I’ll have some corn-bits,” Berkeley shrugs.

He pulls his chair along the concrete floor to where Zack unfolds his own in the buzzing light. They sit together and eat off Zack’s plate amidst the nostalgic scent of gasoline residue.

“I brought these Sour Cream and Onion chips,” Berkeley says. “Kettle Cooked.”

“Crunchy.”

“Yeah, they’re my favorite brand. Glad they were a hit.”

Zack finishes the rest of his leftovers in silence as Berkeley softly cries, sucking the last of the flavor dust off his fingertips.

The small music space off Sandro’s bedroom is the only place in the house where no one will find or bother Zack. He sits again now at Sandro’s drum kit. Needs to be alone. Never got to reset in the bathroom before the world started burning. Now Zack intends to attempt another reset. He tries to quiet his mind. Seek comfort. He had so many opportunities, though, to say something comforting to others. Friends. Strangers. Strangers/friends. He always came up short. “Ten figures.” Zack resents the fact that it’s something he must now process or to attempt to wrap his brain around.

He picks up the drumsticks and feels the raw wood in his palms. It comforts him. He taps on the taught snare lightly with one of the sticks. Slowly at first. Tentatively. Then he starts drumming, almost without quite noticing. A motorik beat. Circular. Hypnotic. Driving. He plays loud and hard. He leans into crashes and curt, martial fills. Plays harder. He wants the sticks to break. Wants to break the skins of the drumheads. Wants his hands to bleed. Wants to wail with his fists a scream that no throat could ever vocalize. The soundproof room thundering. He plays louder. Harder. A chain reaction. Exponential.

Something painfully slaps into the side of Zack’s head, breaking him out of everything. He spins on the drum stool, rubbing his cheek, looks down—it’s a baseball mitt. “BRO!!” Sandro stands in the doorway. Red in the face. Snot all over his upper lip. Fuming. He catches his breath. Shakes his head. Shrugs. Tears in his eyes. “Shut the fuck up.”

The cymbals sizzle their final resonance into the renewed quiet. “My bad,” Zack whispers. He sets the drumsticks back down onto the snare. He notices that the thumb on his right hand is bleeding. The drumstick has a dark red stain on it. It makes him snicker.

The Apocalypse broadcast, all told, is about five and a half hours long before it dies down to a whimper and then the TV coverage starts to speak in the past tense. And then, sometime around two in the morning, the news is gone. Phone reception goes, too. Internet down. Zack assumes landlines are down as well, but no one who’s still at Mason and Sandro’s has any way of checking. Zack’s been assuming he’ll wake up tomorrow and get the final figures. Process this all then. Find out what happens next. Now he isn’t so sure.

A wave of exhaustion overcomes him when there’s no more television. Relief-like. Time to go home. He’ll walk like most of the others did, he decides. So he rises from his seat and slips away from the stragglers trying to fix the TV connection. A laptop out to stream something as a backup plan. Someone desperately looking for an HDMI cable like their life depends on it.

Zack works his way up the stairs to say goodbye to Mason and Sandro. Marta crosses his mind. Ducking out like she did. Sandro’s door is closed. He peeks into Mason’s dark room, lit by a sole midcentury brass desk-lamp and the light spilling in from the deck. Los Angeles sparkling like starlight on a pond in the distance. Marta and Anni on the balcony taking it all in.

Zack’s stomach drops. Since he arrived, he’s known deep in his heart that he never truly wanted to speak to Marta. Never actually knew what he would say to her. Just wanted to confront her and then planned to go from there.

Anni steps inside when Zack steps out onto the balcony and approaches. She just nods and ducks inside the other side of the sliding doors, back through Mason’s dark, empty bedroom. Marta leans on the railing. Not surprised at all to see him.

“Hi,” she says and doesn’t move from the railing to embrace or hug or anything. Zack abruptly realizes that he was leaning forward expecting her to. He almost stumbles.

“Hi,” he replies. “Um.” He considers for a moment what he thought he knew how to say a moment ago, but it’s gone. “I kinda came to this party to confront you.”

Marta blinks. “Huh?”

“About the interview. From FYF. On YouTube. It’s obviously not relevant now.”

“No. It’s not.”

“I’m glad I’m not dead, though, and I’m glad that you’re not dead either and that I got to see you before I left.” He hesitates. “I wish you hadn’t avoided me, though.”

Marta turns away and takes in Mason’s view she’s always been so envious of. Plucks up a bottle of Pacifico. Holding it to herself for a beat. “Y’know, I thought about you tonight. About the last time I saw you.” She turns back from the cityscape and looks into Zack.

Zack shifts his weight. “I don’t wanna talk about that. Not at a time like this.”

“You punched a hole through my big canvas painting,” Marta bluntly states. Zack looks around like someone might hear. “You can’t fix that, y’know? That painting’s dead now.”

“This is kinda the last thing I wanna be talking about, Marta.”

“When I took the painting down,” Marta continues, “I realized you broke through it into the wall. There was a your-fist sized indentation in the drywall of my apartment.”

Zack blinks.

“Did you wreck your hand? Did you break something?”

“My hand was cut a little bit,” Zack replies sheepishly. “I figured it was the picture frame.”

Marta nods. “Right. Well. That’s your legacy in my life, so you know. Not the music. Not the camping. Not the fucking. Just a favorite painting of mine with a hole blasted through it, and the imprint of your fist punched into my wall. I thought about that during,” she swirls her finger in the air, meaning everything, meaning nuclear holocaust. “I thought about plastering over your fist print.”

“. . . Why?” is all Zack can muster.

Marta shakes her head and looks back out at shining LA. “I dunno, Zack.” She takes a sip of her beer and thinks on it. “Because I think maybe from top to bottom, macro to micro, individual to whatever, on every possible level,” she turns back to look into Zack again, “we’re just fucked and there’s no getting out of it.”

Zack doesn’t know what to say.

Marta takes him in for one last beat, sighs and slips inside through the sliding doors.

Zack is left alone with the skyline and Marta’s hanging words. He takes a beat to swallow and process. He’s more numb than ever. He looks out at the far-off city lights. Remembers his app and takes a series of deep breaths.

In for four heartbeats.

Hold.

Out for four.

Hold.

In for four.

Hold.

Out for four.

Hold.

He imagines an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile descending on Los Angeles faster than the speed of sound. The city alighting in a blinding flash before Zack can even hear the sound of the missile coming. He figures his best hope is to be close enough within the missile’s blast radius that he’d get vaporized instantaneously. He hopes it would be painless.

He knows it won’t be.