The Universe in Miniature in Miniature

by Patrick Somerville

  “What if we start to spin again?” I said. “What if we go back to normal?”

  “Yes,” he said immediately, nodding. “We have no reason to assume the planet won’t correct itself, just as—well—just as we had no reason to assume that it would never stop.” He was quiet then. I wasn’t proud of my thought, I didn’t think that I had outsmarted him, and knew something other people didn’t know. I didn’t understand what he’d just said. But I knew that my idea was a simple and clear idea, and it seemed to be the best one to hold on to. Why not go all-in for hope? Every time? What other arguments made sense? It had taken apocalypse for me to see it.

  Uncle Drake finally came up with an answer, one that I am still thinking about during these long, long days.

  “It may start again,” he said. “But it won’t make a difference. Not now.”

  “There’s too much damage?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “The earth can always heal itself, given time. It’s us. We’re the ones who’ve been destroyed. I mean that now, and forever, we won’t know what to believe. Our knowledge has fallen apart.”

  He smiled again. “Causality. Simple and horrible.”

  All around I was reacting well to apocalypse, frankly. And more than just the deeper thoughts. Something inside of me—maybe this came from my time living on the West Coast—just understood doom, and had understood since the beginning of the long night, when we woke to the bed sliding across the floor, and then our backs were pinned against the wall like we were two insects, hands and feet squirming a little but the majority of our bodies stuck in place. Uncle Drake told us later that it was the Earth slowing down that had pushed us all in one direction. When he said it I found an eerie beauty there. It made me think of surfing—we were all surfing through outer-space, but on a cresting wave. He told us that Tycho Brahe would have been proud to be alive to see it. I didn’t know what that meant.

  I was not a doomsday prophet and had never thought much about these kinds of things. I remember a man named Clive who used to scream at the streetlights on my corner when I lived in Portland. I’d see him when I went to get cigarettes. He thought that unnatural light was tied up in with the many sins mankind had committed against nature, and that the punishment, when it came, would involve the melting off of our skin by aliens with horns and metal mouths. It was never very convincing back then, but then again, nothing had been. Portland. Portland was a dark time. I’d almost killed myself with drugs, and not at all on purpose.

  These days, though, these days of my new life, I was a practical person. I usually looked for ways to solve problems, not understand them. It hadn’t taken me long to start acting. And besides whatever intuition I’d had, you could feel the significance very quickly, even as we were just beginning to be able to move around again, and were realizing that it had been first twenty, then thirty, then forty hours since daylight. I’d hit the grocery store and the hardware store early, before people were panicked, before the lines snaked out the doors, before the best supplies were snatched up. I was ready.

  “He said he thought it was a good idea,” I told Sara about an hour after I left Drake’s, after I’d again checked over what I’d packed into the Cherokee. There was enough for maybe a year. I didn’t think that water would be a problem, and so I’d concentrated on food, guns, ammunition, and clothing. Also condoms.

  “What kind of good idea?” she asked. She was standing in the kitchen with a cup of tea, wearing her bathrobe. It was tied loosely, and I could see her bra and panties hidden underneath. There were candles all around. This was not sexual, however; this was depression minus electricity.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Like oh, good idea, the same as any other idea you can have? Or oh, good idea, like it makes sense and could be good for many reasons?”

  “I think the second,” I said. “I wasn’t sure. He was distracted.”

  “By what?”

  “Thinking.”

  Of the many bad things happening and the indescribable feelings of this strange time, the worst was maybe the most selfish. Here we were in the endtimes and I couldn’t stop thinking about my own inner world. And the day before it started. It was the best day Sara and I had ever had together, and because of that, very possibly the best day of my life. It wasn’t anything incredible. We’d had lunch together at Denny’s, and had then driven out to Kettle Moraine. We first went and looked at the kettles from a wooden observation deck, then went down to the grass in the park and sat on a blanket, watching some kids play on the park’s jungle gym. Later, we drove back to town and ate Chinese food at her apartment, then made love for the first time. I have the image of her still—she’s lying beneath me on the cheap white couch, small breasts bare, shoulders back, odd smile on her face. Eyes closed. There couldn’t be eye contact.

  We’d met in N.A. I was still going as much as I could, although the details of my former addictions were confusing to me, and so sometimes I avoided meetings because I didn’t want to have to articulate what had happened. I wasn’t a normal addict. In fact I don’t think I was ever an addict. I just did everything, all the time, and when I felt like not doing it anymore I stopped. But I had fucked up my emotions. I could tell. Whenever I smiled I heard a voice in my head saying, “You are smiling.”

  She hadn’t been clean for quite as long as I had, but she was doing well. Now she was a librarian. I knew that she had had problems with depression, and was on meds now, but she had a wry way to her that fascinated me. She could let cynical barbs go, softly, from a place of psychological resignation that she had arrived at years before. There was power to that. I loved her darkness.

  “Are they saying anything on the radio?” I asked her. This to avoid saying, “Are you coming or not? Because I’m leaving now, baby, into the forest, bravely.”

  “I haven’t been listening,” she said. “I’m scared to use up the batteries.”

  “I’ve got some in the car.” By “some” I meant 256 Cs and 256 Ds.

  “Have you seen your brother?”

  “You’ve only been gone for like two hours,” she said, turning away from me and going back toward the kitchen. “No.”

  I knew she was thinking about her brother and his family, but she hadn’t said it out loud yet. I honestly didn’t know what to think. That was another four people, including two children. The food that would last us a year might last us three months.

  “I think we should discuss it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we have to go. Today. Now.”

  “I haven’t decided that I want to go.”

  “I can tell you don’t want to go without him. We should discuss that.”

  “Why do we have to go again?”

  “Because there are too many people here.”

  “So this whole thing about going up to the mountains is just about getting away from the population? The world is ending and you want to get away from other conscious life? You realize that many people would have the opposite reaction.”

  “Don’t act like you don’t know what people are like.”

  “What are they like?”

  “No one will hesitate to take everything we have and kill us if they think it means it will help them.”

  “Did you see that in a movie?”

  “Don’t.”

  “What?”

  “You’re acting like I’m being crazier than you actually think I’m being.”

  “What are you? A holocaust survivor? You don’t know about this kind of thing.”

  We had done this more than once. But I knew that she believed me, and that she would in fact leave with me. It was a feeling, again. All of this was just her building it up in her own mind, so when she looked back and wondered about her brother and her nieces and nephews, and wondered whether or not they survived, and wondered whether or not she should have left, whether she was an immoral person, she could recall all of the soul-searching she did, recall that I had pushed her, and n
ot think of herself as greedy or a bad person. She hated her sister-in-law and always tried to get out of babysitting, anyway. She didn’t want to stay. I was just making it easier for her by being tough about it.

  You just want to live, I told her. We both do, and I want to live with you. And we could start spinning again, and we could come back, and we could have a new life. Don’t discount the possibility of having a new life.

  It’s funny that we think of the sun as something that comes up, still. Even after they realized that it was us turning around, not the sun. That it never came up, just that we came around.

  I imagined it as we drove. I never had, not the real one. Who thinks hard about the sun? I had seen the dramatic shots of it, flaming and alive, regal in its sun-way, with dark spots all over it, as though piles of black fire floated around on a sea of liquid fire on its surface, and so that’s what my mind gave me, and it was as though something inside of me was asking for it, and I tried to remember that it was there, still, either way, and that we just couldn’t see it anymore. I tried to take away the feeling that what I was seeing was a photograph, or an artist’s rendering, and just imagine what it must be like out there, in space, floating in front of it. On its own. It’s not there for a reason—that’s the heart of it. It’s not there for a reason, but there it is.

  I’d gotten the sun tattoo while unconscious. I suppose that means I can’t say that I was the one to get it. Someone got it for me. First I was sitting in a bar and then I was in an alley. Then nothing. I never found out exactly how it had gotten there, who had taken me down to the parlor. I can only remember waking up, sitting perfectly upright, and seeing that I was sitting at a coffee shop. There was a bagel in front of me. There was a bandage on my arm. I was sitting with a girl named Ruth, and she watched as I peeled the bandage away and we both looked down at the new black tattoo. Ruth was into heroin. I think I was in a gasoline phase.

  “Would you look at that,” I said.

  “That,” Ruth said, “is the motherfucking sun.”

  We passed the occasional car, lone headlights first only a blip on the road. Once, Sara said, “I wonder who’s in there.”

  “People with the opposite idea we have.”

  “You mean people going to bigger towns. People gathering down in Chicago. People not going to hide in the mountains because they can’t think of anything better to do.”

  “I guess,” I said. “I don’t know. I can’t see.”

  “Wouldn’t you ever think,” she said, “that rather than all of us, like, turning into animals and ripping out each others’ flesh and becoming the absolute worst we could be, that maybe the best in people will come out? Maybe we’ll help each other? Maybe it’ll be easy?”

  “I guess,” I said. “But maybe not. How can you know?”

  We had a game that we sometimes played when we drove, a game about movie stars and movies. You would say a star’s name and then the other person would say a movie they were in, then you’d say a different star in that movie, and the other person would say a new movie.

  “Don Cheadle,” I said.

  “Boogie Nights,” she said.

  “Marky Mark,” I said.

  “The Departed,” she said.

  “Jack Nicholson,” I said.

  “Five Easy Pieces,” she said.

  I thought for a minute. “I don’t know anyone else from that.”

  I looked over and saw that she was staring out the window, her head resting against the glass.

  “Look,” I said. “I’m sorry. I honestly think—”

  “What else did your uncle tell you?”

  “What?” I said. “About the sun?”

  “Yes.”

  “He mentioned something about weather.”

  “What?”

  “That bad weather was probably going to start coming. Because the atmosphere. And everything.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “What am I going to do when my Wellbutrin runs out?” she asked.

  “You’ll be okay,” I said. “Things are different. You’ll adapt.”

  “There’s no sun, though,” she said. “I mean what’s it going to be? An ice age? Like a whole ice planet? Isn’t the sun supposed to be the thing that makes you happy?”

  “It’ll come back,” I said. “You’ll see. We’ll just stay warm and safe for a while, then it’ll come back.”

  “You keep saying that,” she said. “It’s not like we can sit there and play the movie game the whole time.”

  “We’ll adapt,” I said. “We’re people.”

  I could not resist stopping at the fully-lit gas station that was about a mile after we’d passed 64. I knew we were not going to see people again. And here it was, lit up and apparently open for business. I thought that we might be able to find a few more things to eat, maybe fill the tank one last time. There were five or six cars parked in the small lot beside the building. I thought it might be a gathering place. This made me nervous, it’s true, but still I couldn’t resist. What if they had gas?

  “See if you can get the pump to work,” I said to Sara. She had come out of her haze a little, and was looking curiously at the lit station. We could see at least one man through the window, leaning on a countertop.

  It looked like his mouth was moving, that he had an audience, but I couldn’t quite see. Just then he turned and looked right at us.

  “This is weird,” she said. “Let’s just go.”

  “I thought you liked communities.” I had the Smith and Wesson .45 under my seat and pulled it free while she was watching them. I ticked the safety and tucked it into the back of my pants.

  “Just weird that they’re open. How are we going to pay? Do you think they actually want money?”

  “I’ll go see.”

  The temperature had dropped. I felt it when I opened the door. I didn’t bother to get my coat, but I could see my breath now. Someone else came out of the station’s door before I got to it. His body was round and portly, and he wasn’t especially tall. He had a toothpick in his mouth and wore glasses. He had a friendly face—he looked like he might have been a preacher. I can’t tell you what preachers look like, that’s not really what I mean. It was just a feeling. His hands were in his pockets.

  “Welcome,” he said. “I see you’re partaking in our gasoline bartering collective.” He nodded with a little smile. “Go ahead and fill her up. What would you like to trade?”

  The way he said it had a certainty to it that I didn’t like. As though already a new economy was in place, one that had been agreed upon without my vote.

  “We’ve got some things,” I said. “How about batteries?”

  “We’ve got those.”

  “Food?”

  “What kind of food you got?”

  “Not too much,” I said. I wondered about value now. What was a can of beans worth, at this point? Gasoline was like gold. I looked over my shoulder. Sara was still filling up. To fill the whole tank she’d probably use fifteen gallons. I thought of calling out to her to stop filling as we negotiated, but he knew and I knew both that we needed the gas, and were going to pay whatever we had to pay to get it.

  When I looked back there was another man standing beside the preacher. Also a boy, ten or twelve.

  “I said what kind of food?”

  “Mostly canned,” I said. “Beans, soup. Some of those Campbell’s Chunky Soups.”

  “How many of them you got?”

  “How about I give you fifty cans?”

  Finally the other man spoke; he was taller, and had long gray sideburns. He was wearing a baseball cap. Something like GO AMERICA! And SUCK A COCK IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT!

  “Sounds like you got lots,” he said. “We were thinking more like 300.”

  “I can’t do that,” I said. “We don’t even have that much.”

  “Why don’t we just go and take a look at what you’ve got back there,” said the preacher.

  “I’ll give you fifty cans of the Campbe
ll’s Chunky and fifty cans of chili beans,” I said. “I’ve also got a couple extra flashlights I can give you.” I was worried most about the axes. If they took the axes we were done.

  “Why don’t we just go and take a look at what you’ve got back there,” said the preacher again, in the exact way he’d said it the first time, very amiable, and now the three of them were already moving.

  Sara looked to be finishing up with the gas, and as they approached the car, I heard the Lambchop man say, “Hello, dear,” to her in a too-nice voice, and she nodded back at him. When she looked at me I nodded at the car and she understood and she got back inside. I could see her locking her door.

  The preacher leaned toward the back door of the truck and pulled on the handle. It popped, and he leaned back as it slowly opened. “I have to be honest with you,” he said to me, after taking a long look at everything I had back there. “This isn’t really a negotiation. It’s more like a requisition.” He turned back to look at what was there. “It ain’t like it matters much one way or the other.”

  “No?” I said.

  “You see what people—”

  I shot Lambchop first, in the back of the head, only because he looked to me like a biker, and I was sure that he was the one, out of the three, carrying a weapon. It did, then, feel like time was slowing down a little, but only for them, not for me. I moved fast for me. I’m usually slow as it is. I thought that maybe somewhere Uncle Drake was smiling, noting how well I was paying attention—I wondered too about whether he’d been on to something about the time. We wouldn’t know, would we?

  Lambchop’s big body crumpled to the ground in front of me after the bullet went through his head and the preacher turned, stupid words caught in his mouth, one hand still on some of my batteries, and I shot him in the face, and his brains sprayed out over my supplies.

  I pulled him off and dropped him down next to Lambchop. The kid was just standing there.