All the Ways the World Can End

by Abby Sher

  Vacuum Decay

  Also known as “catastrophic vacuum decay” or “cosmic death bubble.” Space decays into a lower energy state, which makes a ginormous monster bubble, expanding at the speed of light. The bubble wipes out everyone and everything in its path—i.e., Earth, space, us.

  Stephen Hawking says, “This could happen at any time and we wouldn’t see it coming.”

  If we make it through the bubble collision, then we will most likely collide with other galaxies. Benjamin Shlaer (Tufts cosmology dude) calls it a “catastrophic sort of crunch.”

  Warning signs:

  None, really. Which is the beautiful horror of it all. There’s no way to prevent or prepare or even collect canned goods because it could happen in any space or time continuum.

  Preventive measures:

  Stay away from particle accelerators

  Write to Stephen Hawking for access to the doomsday preface he wrote for Starmus book

  Read more of Roxanne Palmer’s article “Will the Higgs Boson Destroy the Universe in a Cosmic Death Bubble?”

  Or better yet, don’t

  Chapter 2

  DON JUAN CRUSTACEO

  The Unicorn Diner was sort of like our secret clubhouse. Julian and I brought down the average age to midseventies because it was always crowded with blue-hairs from the retirement community behind the golf course. Our regular booth was on the side by the parking lot. It had optimal sightlines for people watching and checking in with the Unicorn ecosystem—i.e., the fish tank with three lobsters that never got eaten and a purple plastic seahorse sitting on a treasure chest with fake pearls dripping out the side.

  Julian and I had a favorite lobster we named DJC, for Don Juan Crustaceo. He only had one claw. Julian said it was from a gang fight with a bunch of mermen. We loved to make up dialogue for DJC as he wooed the other diner customers. He had a thick Italian accent and no room for subtlety. As in, “Hello, ladies, would you enjoy to come inside my treasure chest and lick-a my pearls-a?”

  DJC was quite the player. Plus, I was pretty sure he’d brokered a deal with the Unicorn cooks that he could never be slain. Not that there was a line out the door for surf and turf (that was the one dish on our laminated menus involving shellfish). Our sleepy suburb of Mountainside, New York, was landlocked and the nearest beach had been voted number two on a national list of the most-polluted waters for the past five years. Yum. Maybe that’s what gave DJC his gleam.

  “Is that a barnacle on your back or are you just horny to see-a me-a?” Julian said in an offensively slimy Sicilian accent as we stopped by the tank.

  “Don Juan, you naughty bottom-dweller!” I answered in my high-pitched seahorse voice.

  “Please-a. I want to give you pleasure-a with my pincers.”

  “Oooch, that sounds kinky,” said someone behind us. Julian turned around and pulled our buddy Dara into a tight hug, even lifting her off the ground a half inch. I saw she’d dyed her short hair again. It looked like she had on a helmet of fire.

  “False advertising,” Dara explained. “Also, I misread the instructions and didn’t dilute. But hey—” She pointed to a new pin she’d gotten for her apron that said, I’M STILL HOT, IT JUST COMES IN FLASHES NOW.

  “How are my two favorite misfits?” she said, knocking me sideways with her wide hip.

  “Eh,” I answered.

  “Amen, sister.” She showed us the mugs of coffee waiting for us at our regular table. The porcelain looked way too clean and each mug had a leaping unicorn printed on its side.

  “What the what?” said Julian.

  “Stephan’s orders. Don’t shoot the messenger, but coffee’s no longer bottomless either.” Dara rolled her big eyes. Stephan was the new manager of the Unicorn and was driving Dara insane. He had some vision about making this place into a fine-dining experience, which so far involved a lot more potted plants, a calorie count for each dish on the menu, and all of the staff having to memorize a list of “International Delight” dishes.

  “Actually, do shoot the messenger,” she whispered. “At least that way I get worker’s comp.” She put a few extra jams in my palm before rushing off to deal with a man complaining about runny eggs.

  Dara was actually one of the few people who knew how crappy things had been for my family, because Julian and I came into the Unicorn so often to debrief. Dara hadn’t had it exactly easy in the past year either. She was a single mom with a fourteen-year-old son who’d been caught lighting things on fire in his desk at school. So at age forty-nine she moved herself and her son into a one-bedroom apartment with her mom and took a third part-time job so she could afford some mandated behavioral therapy for her kid. Dara’s mom sounded angry and agoraphobic. She drank whiskey all day and ordered a lot of kitchen utensils from cable channels. Dara was constantly trying to mail rubberized whisks to random P.O. boxes.

  Whatever mayhem was going on at home, Dara showed up to every shift at the Unicorn with a new pin and a gritty smile. She swore she owed each sliver of her sanity to AA. Julian connected with her a lot on the power of twelve-step programs. They exchanged mantras and silent nods of recognition that I wished I understood on a deeper level. Julian was my best friend in the whole world, and yet there were so many pieces of his past missing to me.

  Julian and I were four years old when we first met at the nursery school sand table. He wore a blue superhero cape and called himself Captain Booger. His magical powers included picking his nose and predicting the future by gazing into a big bouncy ball colored like the globe. Julian said that I could be his sidekick, Louise. My superpower was that I could swim through concrete. I was never allowed to touch his Ball of the Future, though.

  One day while we were in Ms. Birdstall’s first-grade class, Julian’s mom decided she was in love with the cleaning lady and they moved out to an apartment a few towns away from us by Yonkers Raceway. Julian had not predicted that. No one had. Rumors rushed from carpool to carpool because who knew there was a lesbian amongst us?

  My mom told me there were crazy custody battles and Julian was forced to testify against his mom in court. (Julian’s dad accused his mom of reckless abandonment because she’d once left him in the car while she ran into the grocery store to get milk. Which everyone had done at some point, but Julian’s dad was on a vendetta.) Meanwhile, Julian started losing patches of hair from all the stress and I clearly remembered him peeing his pants in the hallway when we were seven and trying to deny it even though there was a dark stain seeping down his leg.

  It was like a modern-day witch hunt, Mom told me years later. Julian’s mom was only allowed to visit once a week, and even then it had to be supervised. After a few months, she just stopped coming. I was pretty sure she was living on the West Coast these days, but I tried not to pry.

  Julian and I lost each other for almost a decade because his dad put him in some private day school where they learned math by contorting their bodies into numbers. Julian got really depressed and self-medicated by smoking and snorting anything that could make him feel lighter. He once told me about some acid trip he’d been on and I felt like a naïve idiot because I asked, “Does that come in pill form or as a spleef?”

  Julian laughed a low, sad laugh and said, “Yeah, never mind. Why are we talking about this anyway?” essentially locking the access gate to that part of his life. I did know he went to Valhalla Treatment Center for rehab twice and to another private school that specialized in performing arts and was also sort of a correctional institution before I met him again as “freshpeople” at Mountainside High.

  That was almost three years ago now. Julian had walked into World History, sat down behind me while I was writing my daily “All the Ways the World Can End” list, and said, “Really? Tsunami?”

  I’d sucked in my breath quickly because a notebook was supposed to be private property and I didn’t know any of my classmates well enough for one of them to be shoulder snooping. Certainly not anyone of the male persuasion. (On a scale of one to co
ol I was holding steady at a solid two.) But when I turned around with a clenched fist, Julian just smiled. He looked exactly as I’d remembered him, with maybe a longer chin and some new blond whiskers. The same turquoise eyes smirking behind his sandy, shaggy hair.

  “Megatsunami,” I answered. “It’s not that far-fetched. Could wipe out Honolulu in minutes and keep traveling inland for sixteen miles.”

  Julian frowned. “But I just bought a bikini,” he said.

  That was the biggest reason why I loved and admired Julian so fiercely. He took the fog of all my obsessions and shrank them into the size of a two-piece. I never told Julian why I was studying all the ways the world could end because:

  a) he never asked, and

  b) I didn’t have an answer. I just had to.

  I’d been writing some form of this list every day since I was nine years old. I even knew the precise day I started: December 27, 2010. I was on winter break and my dad and I had taken the train into New York City to visit the big planetarium. There was a special exhibit about the future of intergalactic exploration. We got to climb inside some simulator where we floated upside down and my nose dripped backward because I had a cold.

  When Dad and I got out of the cockpit, I sat down on a bench to wipe my snot and there was a movie playing on loop next to us called Vacuum Decay: An Instantaneous End. The subtitle said it all. There were clips of scientists in lab coats shaking their heads and pictures of meteors and quotes from people like Stephen Hawking coming out of the nebula. They couldn’t be sure when it would happen or even if it already had happened once and was going to happen again. They just all kept saying vacuum decay was “a very real and cataclysmic possibility.” Also, vacuum decay would bring “universal obliteration.” And my favorite, “wiping out Earth and any memory of what it was.”

  I asked Dad for a pen and wrote those lines down on my forearm. Then I committed them to memory. Or really, my memory committed those lines to me.

  Once I watched that stupid ten-minute horror-fest, I couldn’t unwatch it. On the train ride home, I kept asking my dad how the Earth could be in that much peril and how come nobody was prepared. Dad answered, “How could we prepare?” which was the most terrifying answer possible. I didn’t say another word the whole way home. I was so distracted that I ate the waxy paper that came with my hot pretzel and got a nasty scrape in the back of my throat.

  I started my list of all the ways the world could end that night because I had to get it all out of my head. I added to it each day and made sure nobody else saw it. At least until Julian sauntered back into my life and shoved his nose into my apocalypse.

  Of course, he was completely unfazed. He told me that the real threat was bioterrorism from homosexual robots and he was going to lead that charge. Also that before we all died, he was going to skip last period of school and go get Carvel flying saucers and I could come with him, but only if I committed to eating three.

  I did.

  Then we lay on the brown grass at Squirrel Park and talked about who was more influential—Thomas Edison, Buddha, or Whitney Houston. I showed Julian all my data on nuclear proliferation and he showed me the scars on his wrists, and that night I forced Julian to swear he’d never leave again and would be my best friend forever.

  “Whatever that means.” He shrugged. Which I took as a yes.

  I was so thankful to have Julian back in my life. I knew I wouldn’t have survived the recent past without him. Whenever my dad was getting carved up or chemo’d, Julian took me to the movies or through the aisles of Costco for cracker samples. Once I’d escorted Julian to an AA meeting in the basement of St. Mary’s Presbyterian, but I didn’t go inside. My favorite was when we dressed up and went to the fancy car dealerships on Central Avenue. We talked to a lot of well-groomed salespeople and even test-drove a Lexus. Then we took a long time to count all our pocket change as if that could make or break the deal. We found it hilarious, even if nobody else did. I always felt taller when I was near Julian. If the world were ending, at least we’d go down together.

  Only we were pulling into the last two months of our junior year now, and Julian had applied to some exclusive dance conservatory in San Francisco. He was acting nervous and moody about it, but we both knew he’d be getting the thick acceptance letter soon. He was really passionate about modern dance and obscenely talented on stage. Plus, he’d already finished the high school credits he needed to graduate a year early by taking summer classes.

  Logistically, Julian was being forced to move out. His dad had just gotten married for a third time—this one was a hedge-fund analyst named Katya who only had enough affection for her shihzoodle, Daphne, and told Julian he was “not her problem.” She’d even written a prenup that stated her decision to be child-free. Katya had scheduled demolition of Julian’s bedroom for the first week of summer break. (So she could build a bigger office with a treadmill desk and a heated dog bed for Daphne.)

  Even if somehow Julian didn’t make it into the conservatory, he was determined to escape this town.

  I gulped lukewarm coffee to get rid of that thought. Julian was digging into the plastic squares of jelly with a spoon and offered me a taste of mixed berry but I shook my head no. Life would be so much easier if he could be not gay and I could be not so needy and we could run away and live off the fat of the land. Whatever the fat of the land meant. Probably fields of bacon swaying in the breeze.

  “What’s up?” Julian asked, waving his sticky spoon in my face.

  I just shrugged, because him leaving and my dad dying and the smell of home fries creeping up my nose was just too much. Julian reached across the table and took my hands in his. I could feel his caffeinated pulse bouncing between us.

  “I don’t know,” I said, scanning the blue-haired horizon for something else to talk about besides the truth. “Did you read that new study about how all tap water is contaminated with Teflon now? But who can afford to drink bottled water every day, right? And speaking of water, do you think Don Juan’s tank looks extra murky? I do. I think we should say something to Dara or maybe take it straight to management. What do you think? I can do the talking or you can really, because I use a lot of run-on sentences, which I’m pretty sure is hereditary. But whatever. Oh, and I was just thinking, not that you would, but could you please not go to San Francisco and never call and never write and forget that I ever existed?”

  Julian’s knuckles were turning white as he held on to my hands firmly. He blew the hair out of my eyes and made me meet his gaze.

  “I’m not sure which question you want me to answer first, but I will say this: Yes, you use run-on sentences. And no, I will not abandon you.”

  Which gave me just enough courage to blurt out, “And can you tell me I didn’t kill my father this morning?”

  This time it was Julian’s turn to take a gulp of coffee and cleanse his palate. While he did that, I described in detail what Dad’s chest looked like and tried to imitate his wince. Julian watched carefully before answering.

  “Listen up,” he said sharply. “Your father might be dying. But you are not killing him.”

  I loved and hated Julian so much all at once. I couldn’t trust my voice to be non-squeaky and warbly, so I just nodded.

  “You know that, right?” he pressed.

  More vigorous nodding.

  “And you know it’s not your job to save him?”

  I pressed my napkin into my eyes until I saw floating blobs. I just wanted to hitch myself to one of them and drift away too. There was no other place to escape this feeling of everything falling apart.

  “Too burnt?” I heard Dara ask. She often brought us plates of rejected bread that had gotten jammed in the diner’s finicky toaster.

  “Perfecto,” said Julian. “And hey—if anyone can pull off that highly flammable-looking hairstyle, it’s you.” I knew he was giving me some time to compose myself. I opened my eyes and shoved some blackened toast into my mouth, mumbling agreement.

  “
Aw shucks,” said Dara, fluttering her eyelashes quickly. “You say that to all the basket cases.” Dara gave my cheek a pinch before taking off for another table.

  “I feel like we should get going,” I told Julian. “I want to try calling my mom again before second period starts.”

  “Wait,” said Julian. “If you’re going to call anyone for medical advice, it should be sweet Dr. G. Am I right? Answer is yes and you’re welcome.”

  “You think?” I felt a smile peeking out from my haze of doom and pulled a business card from where I’d stashed it inside my jean jacket pocket. Actually, I had three copies of this card squirreled away in different pockets and a fourth locked in my top desk drawer at home. It read:

  RADHAKRISHNAN GANESH, M.D., Ph.D.

  Medical Oncology Resident

  917-555-0198

  “Now that’s what I’m talking about,” said Julian.

  Dr. Ganesh was the newest addition to my dad’s oncology team. He was also ridiculously handsome. Somewhere between thirty and timeless, with warm brown eyes and eyelashes that were long enough to be illegal. He was always so excited—to be doing rounds, to be studying immunotherapy, to be alive and part of the new alliance between Eastern and Western medicines. He loved to talk about how far we’d come in medical innovations just by looking back at our origins. (A quick search on the interwebs told me he was born in southern India and came here for college.) I especially loved how he used random American slang like “Can I get a what what?” and “That is what I am talking about!”

  I could always hear him coming down the hall because his voice was so energetic and he gave a lot of fist bumps, especially when he liked my dad’s vital signs.

  Julian didn’t believe me about Dr. Ganesh when I first told him. Or rather, Julian said that Dr. Ganesh was symbolic of my need for unrequited infatuation and addictive self-flagellation and that I was transferring loss into lust. (Julian read Piaget and Bettelheim in his spare time.) He was also pretty sure I suffered from “CTSD” (continuous traumatic stress disorder).