As blood dripped out of me into the sand, Nick set a one-liter bottle of water a few inches from my face. He said, “I was just supposed to shoot you. They didn’t say to kill you. If you’re lucky, I didn’t hit anything important.” Then, without another word, he stood up and walked away. I watched him grow smaller in the waves of desert heat until he was lost in the ripples. I must’ve passed out, because when I woke up I was shivering and stars wheeled above a purple horizon. I knew enough to put pressure on the wound but that was about the extent of my knowledge of self-administered first aid. I faded in and out and thought I was dying. I laughed, sending pain through my gut. I considered starting a fire with the books. I grabbed one of them, a dirty paperback titled How to Love People, which I found somewhat ironic. I drank some water. I tried finding constellations. I remembered fucking Star, the abrasive way her pubic hair felt around my cock as I went in and out of her. I scrounged through the backpack for a pen so I could write down what had happened to me. When I couldn’t find one, I cried and pounded my fist on the abandoned tire. Animals scurried around my periphery; I sensed them waiting for me to die. The pain was transcendent. I imagined planets being born inside my skull. Sometime in the night there was a meteor shower. I remembered an article I’d read once about a guy who got trapped in an elevator in Manhattan for forty-one hours. I thought about the crucifixion and The Old Man and the Sea. I imagined the faces of my long-dead family and told them how I loved them. Somehow a few grains of sand got into my mouth and terrorized my teeth for hours. Then the sun came up, casting long shadows. I drank the rest of the water and kept one hand pressed to the wadded shirt covering the hole in my gut. I figured the bullet really hadn’t hit anything important or else I’d be dead now. But I started fantasizing that maybe I was dead. Maybe this was my afterlife, a wind-raked mesa and a pile of trash. Maybe I was the last man on earth and all of history was my hallucination.
But you didn’t die.
I became absolutely certain I was going to. Then I heard a vehicle. Something coming from far away, gradually growing louder. There was the sound of an engine, rocks under tires. Finally I saw it, a Hummer, coming straight at me. I passed out again for what seemed like hours but when I came to, the Hummer had only come a little closer. Finally it reached me, the door opened, and Dirk Bickle stepped out. He walked up with another bottle of water. As I drank, he crouched beside me and asked how I was. I made a smartass response, or I’d like to think I did. I probably whispered something meekly. I don’t remember. With his elbows resting on his knees, Bickle squinted and looked into the distance. He asked if I was familiar with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s book On Death and Dying. The one about the stages of death. There’s denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance. He said, “You’re probably going through a little of that yourself right now. And you’ve probably noticed you don’t pass through those stages in a straight line. Thing is, Luke, the human race as a whole is going through those stages. For a long time it was denial, right? The jury’s still out on climate change. We can keep consuming at this rate forever. Then in the last few years we’ve been bargaining. If I just bring my own grocery bags to the store, the ice caps will remain. But what if I were to tell you, Luke, that those of us at the acceptance stage have done the math. We’ve done the computer modeling. What if I were to say that the only way to fulfill our holy purpose as stewards of life in the universe is to sacrifice ninety-five percent of the human race?”
“You’re fucked,” I think I told him.
“Oh, we’re in agreement there,” he said, then asked if I wanted to come to the academy.
I laughed, water dribbling out of my mouth. “The academy,” I said. “There is no academy. If there’s anything, it’s a support group for nut jobs that meets in a church basement rehashing bullshit theories about paradigm shifts and cyberspace.”
You didn’t actually put it that way.
Probably not. But anyway so Bickle said, “Miracles, Luke. Miracles were once the means to convince people to abandon reason for faith. But the miracles stopped during the rise of the neocortex and its industrial revolution. Tell me, if I could show you one miracle, would you come with me and join Mr. Kirkpatrick?”
I passed out again, and came to. He was still crouching beside me. He stood up, walked over to the battered refrigerator, and opened the door. Vapor poured out and I saw it was stocked with food. Bickle hunted around a bit, found something wrapped in paper, and took a bottle of beer from the door. Then he closed the fridge, sat down on the old tire, and unwrapped what looked like a turkey sandwich.
He said, “You could explain the fridge a few ways. One, there’s some hidden outlet, probably buried in the sand, that leads to a power source far away. I figure there’d have to be at least twenty miles of cable involved before it connected to the grid. That’s a lot of extension cord. Or, this fridge has some kind of secret battery system. If the empirical details didn’t bear this out, if you thoroughly studied the refrigerator and found neither a connection to a distant power source nor a battery, you might still argue that the fridge had some super-insulation capabilities and that the food inside had been able to stay cold since it was dragged out here. But say this explanation didn’t pan out either, and you observed the fridge staying the same temperature week after week while you opened and closed it. Then you’d start to wonder if it was powered by some technology beyond your comprehension. But pretty soon you’d notice something else about this refrigerator. The fact that it never runs out of food. Then you’d start to wonder if somehow it didn’t get restocked while you slept. But you’d realize that it replenished itself all the time, not just while you were sleeping. All this time, you’d keep eating from it. It would keep you alive out here in the middle of nowhere. And because of its mystery you’d begin to hate and fear it, and yet still it would feed you. Even though you couldn’t explain it, you’d still need it. And you’d assume that you simply didn’t understand the technology, rather than ascribe to it some kind of metaphysical power. You wouldn’t place your faith in the hands of some unknowable god. You’d place it in the technology itself. Finally, in frustration, you’d come to realize you’d exhausted your rationality and the only sensible thing to do would be to praise the mystery. You’d worship its bottles of Corona and jars of pickled beets. You’d make up prayers to the meats drawer and sing about its light bulb. And you’d start to accept the mystery as the one undeniable thing about it. That, or you’d grow so frustrated you’d push it off this cliff.”
“Is Mr. Kirkpatrick real?” I asked.
After a long gulp of beer, Bickle said, “That’s the neocortex talking again.”
“Am I going to die?” I said.
Bickle replied, “What do you mean, like right now? I have no idea. I’m no doctor. I’m a docent. I show you around the museum and tell you what you’re looking at.”
At this point my consciousness was flickering like a bug light. I figured I would agree to whatever Bickle wanted then get out of it later if I needed to. So I said yes, I’d accept his offer to join the academy. He wiped his mouth and whistled toward the Hummer. Two guys got out, paramedics in turbans. They immediately went to work on my gunshot wound. One of them had a syringe of something. This time I disappeared for a long time.
I woke up in a hospital in Phoenix, conscious enough to know I was in a hospital and to catch a glimpse of the motorcycle accident victim I was sharing a room with, a black guy with a long beard, before I blacked out again. The world seemed to have been paused. I couldn’t hear. I was drugged and dragged into some sort of nothing zone and when I opened my eyes I stood across an operating room watching surgeons who were wrist-deep in my guts.
I left my body behind and walked down the empty hall. The motorcycle victim stood in the hallway talking on a cell phone, his bandages off. He was saying, “Yeah, baby. They want me here for when the dude wakes up. All’s I got to do is lay there and look injured.”
At the far end of the hall stood a woman who I somehow knew had been waiting for me. As I came closer I saw that she was naked and her skin was blue. Silvery-blue, really, like a fish. Hairless. I understood that I was supposed to follow her. She pointed to a door, which opened on a vast circular space with a floor that sloped inward, like one of those funnels you toss a coin into then watch roll around and around until it falls into the hole in the center, for charity. I stepped forward and approached the center and started to get scared that I would fall in. The woman stood beside me, then sat in a chair, a regular wood chair, that was pitched forward because of the slope of the floor. I saw there was a chair for me as well, so I took it. We now sat side by side, looking into the hole. I couldn’t see the walls of this place, or the ceiling. All was black except for the light beige floor, lit as if under an unseen spotlight. A dull machine roar came from the direction of the hole and I was overcome with panic and awe.
The woman’s voice surrounded me. She didn’t move her mouth. She said, “I come as an emissary from a steward race. Now is time for revealing. You have been encoded with the prophecy. This prophecy is not something that was to be revealed to you all at once, but over time. You were born encoded, and through your experiences have come to decode the message. Bloodshed and suffering are coming for all. The time for negotiating with this fate has long passed. Humans have been under observation throughout their rising by other stewards of life. At times we have intervened in your affairs. Your religions, your greatest achievements of art and science, were guided by our hands. Look within yourself. You know this to be true. Your religions have outlived their usefulness. They have become tools of death. A new path is opening to you, one that creates life and populates the universe with seeds. This is the purpose of your love. After the century of bloodshed and suffering will come a new era. Those few who survive will emerge from where they’ve hidden and set in motion new life. Still, pockets of the human animal will seek oppression and slavery. In this final struggle these forces must be overcome for new life to blossom.”
I asked, “What is my purpose in this?”
“Your purpose is to know these things to be true.”
I looked down to find myself drenched in blood. From a crater in my torso came an explosion of tubes, clamps, gauze. Surgeons’ hands worked furiously to resolve something inside my body. I caught the eyes of one of them and heard him say, “Shit, he’s conscious. He’s conscious!” I wasn’t supposed to be seeing this. Someone did something to the intravenous. A biochemical semitruck plowed into my bloodstream and I was out again.
I remember the TV bolted to the wall. The view out the window, to distant hills stubbly with cacti. Blood coming out of my catheter. The black guy in the next bed staring straight ahead, saying nothing.
The cops showed up, wanting to know how I’d gotten shot. I told them I didn’t know. After they ran a background check and determined I had no criminal record or outstanding warrants, they lost interest in me. I watched game shows, sedated. The Price Is Right, that faithful companion to the elderly. The sun rose and fell. I sat in my wheelchair in the little park behind the hospital. I tried to speak as little as absolutely necessary. I didn’t want to talk to doctors or nurses or police officers or social service idiots about how this had happened or how I was feeling. I didn’t want to call anybody, not even Wyatt and Erika. I became an outline where a man had been, like one of those molds they made of people buried in the ruins of Pompeii. I can’t tell you what I even thought about. I went about the stupid business of healing.
How long were you in the hospital?
A month and a half? Two? Maybe three? I didn’t really keep track. My health insurance was apparently taking care of everything and I had money in the bank if I needed to dip into it. I walked with a lot of pain, taking little more than fifteen or twenty steps before I had to sit down again. I lost twenty pounds and grew a beard. I read People magazine cover to cover. No one came to visit me. I was always polite with everyone and tried to make myself as invisible as possible. Then one afternoon I was watching TV and something caught my eye. It was a shot of the Las Vegas Strip, abandoned, flooded with sand. The casinos were all decrepit, falling apart. A digital billboard flickered with an image of a woman in a bikini. It was an aerial shot, swooping down through the desolation. It took me a while to understand this wasn’t news footage. It was the trailer for some new action movie. And I thought, Las Vegas. Of course.
I was beginning to understand that the end of the world wasn’t something that came about all at once. There was no one climactic event that definitively destroyed life as we knew it. Rather, it happened incrementally, so slowly it was difficult to notice, the frog in the boiling water. A few of us saw it coming but were dismissed as insane, or we blew our cred by drawing lines in the sand and declaring that the world would end on a particular date. You know the cartoons with the sandal-wearing, bearded freak on a street corner holding a sign reading “The end is near.” The end was a slow but accumulating tabulation of lost things. We lost species of animals, polar ice, a building here and there, whole cities. There was a time when we lived on streets where we knew our neighbors’ names but now we were all strangers isolated in our condos late at night, speaking across distances to our lonely, electronic communities. Children used to play in forests. We used to gather around a piano and join our voices together. I tried to determine whether these sad thoughts were just the result of growing old. Probably, but that didn’t make them any less real. Maybe I had lost so much myself—my family, my friends—that I couldn’t help but project my grief onto the world at large. It was no longer enough for me to grieve for a lost mother, father, sister, or friend. Now my grief intended to encompass the planet.
Whatever had happened to me after the shooting—first Bickle, then the visitation by the blue woman—had so altered my priorities that I found it impossible to imagine returning to a so-called “normal” life in which I’d have a job, a place to live, friendships. I didn’t have any claim to these things anymore. The whole human enterprise—buildings, roads, laws, media, sports, religion, culture, you name it—struck me as a vast, collective dementia. The only pursuit that made any sense to me was the development and spread of new life through the universe. Ridiculously, of all people, I’d been selected to help bring that about.
Soon I was able to walk a loop around the halls. I managed to pee without a catheter. They took out the IV and I could eat more or less normal food. I thought again about calling Wyatt and Erika but the longer I put off calling them, the more I thought they’d be angry or something. It really makes no sense but I equated letting them know where I was with getting in trouble. All my belongings were at the house I owned but I couldn’t think of a single thing I wanted to retrieve. The gunshot wound had drawn a line through my life, separating the person I thought I was in San Francisco with this new person, alone in Arizona. Eventually I was released and on my way out the doctor asked me where I was going. I said I didn’t know. They pushed me to the parking lot in a wheelchair. I stood up, started walking down the street, and stopped at the first car dealership I found. Happened to be a Volkswagen dealer. I walked in and bought a new Passat, then drove to Las Vegas, where the apocalypse was well under way.
Luke, you are so completely full of it.
[…]
Apocalyptic visions in the desert? Near-death experiences where you commune with aliens? Really? You really expect me to take this seriously?
[…]
What do you think is beyond that door? This isn’t a rhetorical question. What’s beyond that door?
I—I don’t know.
Well, there’s a hallway, some offices, a break room with vending machines for soft drinks and snacks, a parking garage where I park my Volvo every morning. Beyond that there’s a city, with streets lined with stores like Applebee’s, Whole Foods, and Best Buy. There are dry cleaners and gas stations and churches and schools. There are freeways leading to suburbs where there are homes where people live. And in those homes are kitchens where food is prepared, bedrooms where people sleep and dream, garages where they put their cars. People typically get up and go to work five days a week then spend a couple days doing whatever they want. People take vacations, make money, meet partners, have children, get old, get admitted to hospitals, then die. Every year there are a couple new and exciting electronic gadgets that people get excited about. People pay attention to sports scores and who celebrities are sleeping with. They try to get promotions to get more money to spend on stuff for themselves. Some of them go to community gatherings, some get obese, a very few commit criminal acts and get incarcerated. There are addicts, social workers, software developers, bus drivers, attorneys, and teachers. Everyone getting up in the morning, taking showers, listening to the radio on the way to work, catching a movie on the weekend or doing some gardening. That’s the world out there, Luke. Not some fucked-up postapocalyptic nightmare. So things got a little hotter there for a while thanks to fossil fuels. We’ve had wars, some instances of genocide. A terrorist attack on occasion. But overall we see problems, we fix them, and we move on.
You’re a nihilist. You’ve given up on the human race. You assume all will end in a rain of fire and boiling oceans but have the temerity to suggest that somehow a few “good” people will be able to stick it out long enough to propagate life through the universe. You want it both ways.
All I know is—
You said it yourself, Luke. I have the transcript right here. Hold on… Where is it. Okay, here, “… it’s flattering to imagine that you’re so important that secret brotherhoods struggle over your fate…” But you fell for it, too. You let your imagination get the best of you with all this talk of aliens in hospital corridors. Imagining a postapocalyptic future is just a way to cope with your sense of being an outsider. Since you can’t fix the disappointments of your real life, you imagine a future life in which you’ve miraculously survived and are looked to as some sort of prophet. But this is all there is. All we have are roads, buildings, institutions, commerce, entertainment, governments, and jobs. This is the real world. There is no other world.
[…]
Okay, I didn’t mean to fly off the handle like that.
[…]
Can I get you something? A juice?
[…]
Look—
Why is the prophecy so threatening to you?
Threatening?
If what I’m saying is crazy, why have such an emotional reaction to it? Why not just dismiss me? Who’s crazy? I know what’s happening on the other side of that door. I can get online in this place. I read blogs. We’re at the dawn of a horrifying and hellish new era.
New era? What’s so new about it? When has the world not been fucked-up? Wasn’t it pretty fucked-up for the Jews in Auschwitz? Wasn’t it pretty fucked-up for the Africans on slave ships?
You have no—
Point to any era and I’ll show you pestilence, war, slavery, genocide. Even the supposed good times were tinged in darkness. There’s no such thing as a new era of fucked-up shit because the shit has always been fucked-up. Fucked-up is the nature of the shit. And yet somehow we endure it. And little by little life improves. Fewer women die in childbirth. Slavery is abolished. Children don’t have to work in factories anymore. Life expectancies increase—
Momentary illusions of—
Here’s a question for you: Why is it that when things were going relatively well for you, when you were making the big bucks in the dot-com bubble or just sort of retired and hanging out, getting stoned with your friends, that you seemed to lose interest in finding Nick, the academy, and Mr. Kirkpatrick? You only started believing in the Age of Fucked Up Shit after Nick shot you in Arizona—if, in fact, that’s what actually happened. Anytime things were going right for you, the future of the world seemed bright. Anytime they were going wrong, the imminent collapse of civilization was at hand. Can’t you see how thoroughly you projected your own subjective vision of reality on the world?
I’m done here.
I’m not trying to get into a fight. But I think we’ve reached a point in this conversation when we have to change the fundamental question. Instead of asking what kind of world you live in, it’s time to ask what kind of world you want.
[crying] [unintelligible]… too late for that.
It’s not, though, Luke. It’s entirely up to you. What kind of world can you imagine? A sick world of suffering? Or one of beauty and light? What’s it going to be?
[crying] I can’t.
Yes you can.
I can’t choose. I just have to [unintelligible] in Vegas.
What happened in Las Vegas?