The blonde vision perched on his car was not a complete surprise. Even so, he was still wholly unprepared for the reality of her. She was the reason his body had come to an abrupt halt as if it knew it was supposed to.
There was an exotic feel to her, buried inside the girl next door. She was slight, and lovely, and smelled lightly of vanilla. He knew he’d never seen her before this moment, but was this really the first time he’d been in this moment?
There was something ‘off’ and yet so familiar about her. It went beyond the simple feeling of déjà vu, but he couldn’t bring himself to care just now.
"You either have good taste in older cars, or you really need a place to sit." He smiled, fully aware he’d said it exactly that way before.
"It’s a Mach 1, isn’t it?"
Impressed, he replied, "That’s right. 1971 fastback. 351 Windsor tall deck V8. Metal flake blue, and corrosion. She’s…a monster, but she’s mine."
The girl poured herself off the hood and down through the open passenger window. David opened the driver’s door and peered in at her questioningly, unable to say a word.
She slid down deep into the passenger seat until nestled to her satisfaction. Like a cat, the contentment spread over her slowly. Looking back at him with pursed lips, she seemed to own part of the car now.
"How fast can it go?"
"She." David corrected her. "She can go one ninety without flinching. I really don’t know past that."
He got in and shut his door. Curiosity had gotten the best of him. He turned the key, but couldn’t stop staring, trying to catch her eyes.
"My name is Dave," he said, extending his hand. "And you are?"
"You can call me whatever you want to," she said with a devious grin. "Names really aren’t as important as everyone seems to think they are."
Just being near her made him feel better, more alive. He couldn’t explain it. He couldn’t recall ever feeling this drawn to anyone but Des. Maybe everyone was right. Maybe you can get over love, eventually.
"So Dave, what’s got you so depressed?"
He cocked his head to one side, taken a bit off guard by the question. "End of the world isn’t enough?" he joked, even though he knew she was asking more than that.
"Sorry about that, Dave. But everything has to end. I just figured now was as good a time as any to end it." She looked out the window, her voice a casual monotone, like an afterthought.
"You figured? Wait. What?"
She opened the door and stepped out into the parking lot. Turning back, she bent down and peered into the car. Their eyes locked and he knew, as crazy as it sounded, that she was telling the truth. She was the cause.
"What’s your name?"
"Why do you dwell on things that don’t matter when there are so many things that do?" Her lips moved to smile, but it was obvious her heart wasn’t in it.
The sounds of a fist fight near the gas pumps drew David’s attention for a moment and when he looked back, she was gone. The door stood open. Try as he might, he couldn’t see anywhere she might have gone so quickly. He couldn’t shake the strange feeling he should have gotten more information about her, or at least a way to reach her. He knew she was the destroyer, the bringer of the end, and yet he was completely fascinated by her.
Completely sure he had slipped over the edge, he dropped his car into gear. It was the end though, so who could really fault him for the insanity?
***
The next week David spent shut up in his apartment. He ate sparingly, and found himself entirely unsurprised when first the power, then the water stopped working.
The rioting sounds outside and the pained, panicked screams seemed to rise and fall on cue, a symphony he’d heard before performed just for him, both meticulous and frightening. The basic social order of the world – of civilization – was beginning to break down and fall apart. All conventions of normality were lost, followed shortly by all sense of order.
His apartment was broken into twice and he narrowly avoided being shot by the second burglar. By week’s end, he welcomed the blessed peace promised by the end of it all.
There were those, mostly in positions or careers of service, who tried to hold order. Hospitals stayed open and some police and fire fighters continued to soldier on. He speculated that it was out of duty and habit more than desire.
Everyday he thought a few times about calling Des. Everyday he talked himself out of doing it. Why should the end of everything make a difference for him? It would simply mean less for him to worry about.
***
David was sitting on the roof of his apartment building when the end finally came. He greeted it happily. The sights and sounds almost inspired him for a moment. He could imagine capturing what he was seeing in oils on canvas, and what Des would say when she saw it. He marveled at the beauty of the impending planetary collision until the screaming started.
He never could stomach the suffering of others. He wished he couldn’t hear them, that he could make everything seem less real and more like a Michael Bay film.
Almost at wit’s end, a mere moment from total insanity, the collapse of his building granted him a reprieve. He was crushed under a few tons of brick and concrete. The cold black void was a welcome change, but only for a moment.
***
David’s depression deepened exponentially as realization settled over him. The pitch-black absence he found himself in was the same as before. A mind numbing sadness flowed out from him like a tide.
He thought about all the lives that had just ended, the accumulation of petty and mundane things people let themselves get caught up in, and how sad and trivial all of it was. Try as he might, he couldn’t bring himself to look outside his own suffering. The memories of a lifetime of failures, losses, and missed opportunities were all he could dwell on. There was no chance of repairing anything. Things could never get better now that it was all over. He only had her to blame.
That woman. That succubus. That enticing agent of death and destruction. He still didn’t even have a name for her. She was simply the destroyer from the hood of his car, nothing more. It was all too crazy to be believed, but then nothing seemed sane anymore, least of all himself.
"How long are you going to wait?" Her lilt was just as he’d remembered it, just as he’d expected it.
"I’m nowhere again, right?" He asked it more angrily than inquisitively.
"Nowhere. That’s right."
"Everything just ended, didn’t it? It was the end of everything all over again?" The resigned bitterness he felt was obvious in his words.
"Yes."
There was a quiet calm in the gulf of nothing for what could have just as easily been an hour or an eon. When her words came they were no surprise, but he’d just as soon not have had to hear them.
"Is it safe to assume you’ve made a decision then? Where are you going?"
With a pain he could never have put into words, he intoned the only thing he felt that he could. "I want to go home."
He could have sworn he heard the smile in her reply. "Why didn’t you just say so?"
***
Tool blaring startled him awake again. He sat bolt upright on the threadbare green couch, as though it were a trained response as much as a choice.
"So you’re finally awake, huh?"
A dream? Had it only been a dream? The dirty room came into focus slowly again. This reality seemed even less true than it had been when he’d woken up last time. Had he even passed out on this couch?
"You gonna get your ass off my couch? You’re sweaty and you smell."
He could hear the words forming in his mind before they escaped his lips. The layered thickness of the repetition ate at him as he focused on the room around him.
"Sorry Des, I guess I just had a few too many."
It was as though he was a passenger in his own body. His head shook, though for the life of him he had no idea why he was shaking it.
"Every night you have too many. Sh
e’s gone, Dave. Dead. You have to accept it sooner or later. I still miss her. I always will, but I don’t drink myself to oblivion. You’ve got to keep living."
He hung on the word "oblivion," though even that felt a little forced. Was the world unraveling, or was he just going insane?
Part of his mind noticed her work uniform, and how nice her curves looked in her form-fitting black pants, but he felt detached.
She cleaned around him and he thought about his "dream," all the while in awe at the levels of thought colliding at the same time in his head. It was as though there were hundreds of him having similar thoughts all at once, trapped in a single mind. The subtle dissonance was almost enough to make him scream.
The more he tried to focus on anything original, the more his head swam. His voice wavered a little as he mumbled what he had been preprogrammed to say. "What happened to us, Des? We loved each other, didn’t we?"
He knew her answer well enough to mouth it along with her.
"You did have too much to drink last night, didn’t you? We usually don’t have to have this talk until the holidays."
She noticed his lips moving and stared into him angrily, as if waiting for a punch line. After a few moments of silence, she blinked and took his hands. "What we had was kid’s stuff, Dave. Life’s about more than that. It’s about paying the bills and keeping a roof over your head. It’s hard work, and it’s everyday."
He pushed her hands away from him as he rose and stepped away from her. He made an effort not to look at Mireille’s photo as he gathered his things from the table.
Destiny fluffed up the frayed throw pillows on the couch and doused them with Febreze. Standing next to him, she never even looked in his direction. He returned the favor keeping his eyes on anything but her. He was standing at the door when she started to speak.
"You need to get moving, Dave. I’ve got…"
The door closed behind him, cutting off her words. He knew what they were, and his wounds felt the salt without having to hear them. She was dating, and that was something he couldn’t deal with. He walked away from the door as a tear raced down his face.
He was in hell. Worse than that, he was in hell, and someone had set it on repeat.
***
He knew he wasn’t going to find his car on the streets surrounding the apartment building, but he let himself look anyway. The entropic decay of life around him made what he was going through a little more bearable. He wasn’t falling apart alone, the whole world was falling apart with him.
When he again stood on the corner of East 23rd and MLK, he decided to just go on to Murphy’s. He didn’t feel like wandering around as much as last time, and a Guinness never seemed like a bad idea.
***
David walked in and made a beeline for the bar. He ordered two drafts, standing next to "Steve" the mechanic. It was hard not to chuckle. Taking the mugs, David headed for the table he knew Roger would be sitting at. As he walked away he winked suggestively at the familiar grease monkey.
He could swear that "Steve" had considered slugging him, which only served to make him laugh and spill a little beer as he walked away. He began to ponder just how much effort would it take to do something wildly or completely different.
Roger had yet to notice him and he jumped a bit as David fell into the booth. "Love the shirt, man. I could really use a time machine about now."
"Why this time, Dave? Do something else to make Des stop talking to you?" Roger smiled broadly as always.
David enjoyed seeing a smile. He hadn’t considered it before, but smiles were really a commodity in life; rarer and more precious than gold.
"Not that this will come as a surprise to you, but I think I’m losing my mind," David said flashing a beleaguered smile back at his friend.
"Okay." Roger said from behind his laptop, "Anything new?"
"If only there were," he said flatly.
Roger engrossed himself in something on his screen as the waitress stopped to drop off his Guinness. She seemed baffled that there were already drinks on the table.
Before she could ask, David gave her his order. "I’ll have a cheeseburger with everything but onions and a side of pub fries, TJ. Roger, what do you want?"
TJ and Roger both looked at him for a moment before finishing the order. David even had the presence of mind to look away as she picked up the menus, skillfully avoiding what he already knew he enjoyed seeing.
The echo of the day still reverberated within him, but he was beginning to realize he could change it; it just wasn’t easy.
"Roger," David said, intentionally sounding as serious as he could. "I need to ask you a question, and I need you to really think about it before you answer."
Roger leaned back in his seat and stared at him blankly for a moment before his face brightened with his trademarked, disarming yet impish grin. "What if I don’t really feel like thinking?"
"Seriously, man. Have you ever had déjà vu? Epic déjà vu? Like hours of it?" He let himself ask the question, knowing full well where the conversation would go.
"As in, ‘Your life is crap today. It was crap yesterday. It was crap the day before that?’"
"No, I mean more like being trapped in the plot of a Bill Murray movie where you were continually killed, along with the rest of the world, by a sadistic but beautiful girl whose name you still don’t know."
"Are you back on drugs, Dave?" Roger asked with a sincerity David wasn’t prepared for. "Okay, really, you have to stop the self-destructive, self-loathing shit… It’s not cute. It’s not the Nineties anymore. Have you done anything that we could call productive, so far this year? Keep in mind now, that this is already August."
"I had a civil conversation with Des, after waking up on her couch from a bender that included the end of all reality. Does that count?"
"You’ve really lost it this time haven’t you, Dave?" Roger sighed as Dave did his best to contain a slightly psychotic laugh. "Look, Dave, you are a mooch. A talented mooch, I’ll give you, but a mooch nonetheless. When was the last time you paid all your bills in one month without someone else’s money?"
"I can guarantee you that’s about to stop abruptly." Dave said chuckling, amused with himself.
"Your life," Roger continued, "your choices. You just have to live with it."
Dave, smiling madly, interjected. "I’m living in the toilet. I’ve noticed. And it’s not going to get better. Trust me, you’ll see shortly. There’s really no time."
Again, as TJ put plates on the table in front of them, a sudden, eerie hush fell over the other patrons.
David snapped his fingers to get Roger’s attention and then pointed him to the large plasma screen above the bar where a nervous looking, and obviously unprepared, reporter addressed the room.
"…NASA scientists are baffled and unable to explain why the existence of the Stellar Black Hole wasn’t detected earlier through use of X-Ray monitoring. However the discovery at this late hour has been confirmed by independent agencies around the globe. The one thing that has been unanimously agreed upon is that the threat was as impossible to predict as its imminent contact with our solar system will be to survive. There is some debate as to the time frame of the threat…"
Before the report ended, David was out the door. His depression had only grown from the progression of events. Even if the disaster was different, the outcome was the same. The end was coming again, and he was powerless to stop it. This time, though, he wasn’t going to follow his previous steps. It was just too infuriating.
***
David walked quickly up the sidewalk toward the gas station. He knew she’d be there and he wasn’t going to waste more time than he already had arriving at the most important moment of his day.
Around him the same insanity he remembered roiled like an ocean. The panic was already beginning. He was moving with purpose, not involved in the chaos.
Standing on the corner opposite the gas station, he took out his last cigarette. Lighting it,
he almost dropped the empty pack on the ground. He paused and looked at it for a moment before returning it to his pocket. The world was ending, but he was done letting that influence his actions. He wasn’t going to litter, even if he could do it with impunity.
He crossed the street and stopped outside the store. Through the window, he watched the clerks arguing inside. He marveled at how the woman held a pink plastic sandal in her hand, using it to gesture at the television behind the counter. It was still the little things, the little differences that got to him. Crushing out his cigarette, he decided now was as good a time as any to quit smoking, even if emphysema and lung cancer were no longer realistic deterrents.
Walking to the side of the building where he knew his car was parked, he prepared himself to see her. He knew she’d be there the same way a child knows that there will be presents to open on Christmas morning.
This time, he forced himself to keep moving forward when he saw her, despite the pressure to stand and gape. He stopped almost close enough to touch her. She tossed her hair to the side as she smiled at him invitingly. Her scent still impressed him, but not enough to keep him from asking the questions he felt he had to.
"Why are you doing this? Why are you destroying everything?"
"I like your car." She said it with the same lilting tone he expected, ignoring his questions.
"I know that already. I shouldn’t, but I do." He took another step closer as she stood. "What I don’t know is who you are, or why you’re ending everything. Or why you’re making me go through it over and over."
"You can call me whatever you want to," she said with a different sort of sincerity and a devious grin. "The name isn’t as important as you want it to be. A label doesn’t change what’s inside."
There was a glimmer of something different in her eyes. Something he didn’t recall seeing before. It was only there for a moment, and then she fell back into the pattern.
"So Dave, are you ready to finally tell me what’s got you so depressed?"
"This isn’t a game, and it isn’t amusing."
Destroyer of Worlds Page 2
