Last day on earth

“My dad’s a physicist. Was. He told me all about it.” He pointed his cigarette at my chest. “Probability-wise, there’s a parallel universe out there where you and I are talking right now, exact same conversation, everything, but you’re wearing a green shirt instead of a blue one.” I looked down at my shirt. I was starting to feel a little funny. I’d never heard a twelve-year-old use expressions like “probability-wise” before. This was 1987, before the World Wide Web, before loony ideas were as prevalent as the cicadas buzzing outside.

Alistair looked out the windshield. He did not believe that bad choices always had consequences. It was a fantasy that adults had cooked up, to make them feel better about their boring lives. In fact, you could do everything right and still die miserable, just as you could do idiotic things—like smash your head through a pane of glass—and get off scot-free. It might even be the highlight of your life. Thus says the Lord of Punk.

It was a slow day—most days were slow ones, to be honest—so I decided to surprise him with a round of Highly Specific Yet Obscure. This was a game we used to play. One of us would pretend to be a customer and come up with an outrageous request, the harder the better. It was good practice for the Christmas season. Rogelio, the reigning champ, had never once been stumped.

Nothing in life—or in literature, for that matter, or art or cinema or philosophy—had prepared her for it. It was not nausea, or fear and trembling, or a scream on a bridge. It was not a black dog. It was not a fucking bell jar. It was not chatting with a skull, or throwing your arms around a flogged horse, or walking back to the hotel in the rain.

Alistair slipped on his glasses and checked his phone, to see who’d called him in the restaurant. He’d been hoping it was Naya, a wish like an egg, one that would hatch into being if he let it incubate long enough.