Annihilation
The ashes rolled across the horizon like enemy soldiers on a battlefield — expanding and conquering until only slivers of faint light were left visible from the ground. The pine forests glowed in a sinister orange flame which illuminated the undersides of the rising smoke clouds above. The dry wind shouted in anger. Gunfire and human screams were audible in the distance, until both eventually stopped. Two people lay on the rooftop of an old brick building overlooking the rapidly decaying LA skyline at 4am on a Monday.
Jack’s heart was no longer anxious. The panic and dread he had felt were products of a certain pressure and uncertainty. But there was no more uncertainty and since nothing he did mattered any more there was no pressure either. Upon fully accepting the gravity of the situation, Jack strangely found himself consumed by a wave of rapturous ecstasy. The sensation behind his face grew stronger and compelled him to smile wide. He even broke into laughter. Giddy and manic and supremely enjoyable laughter. The cataclysm before him was like the punchline to one hundred million jokes, each of which had a setup that consisted of any silly little thing he had ever cared or worried about in his small, normal life. All of it struck him as absurd in the shadow of annihilation. Sobriety, addiction, love, grief, isolation, connection, achievement, disappointment. Landing the job at Accenture. Failing a college class. Winning a high school debate tournament. Getting rejected from NYU. Getting accepted at Tulane. Getting married. Getting divorced.
Devoting thought and energy and pain to these topics was as absurd as clipping one’s toenails while waiting for the firing squad to shoot. Or using a syringe to bail the water out of a sinking ship during a rainstorm. It was easy to say “hey none of this really matters” but for the first time in his life Jack actually felt it. He felt what it meant to be at peace with the universe and to truly relinquish control. The control that he had never really been in possession of to begin with, but had so desperately clung to the vain illusion of.
The rooftop where he lay supine was his final destination and he knew that. He looked over at Sully. She smiled and joined him in laughter. No words were exchanged but each understood perfectly what the other was feeling. She held his hand and squeezed it and they looked into each other’s eyes.
An object pierced the cloud veil far above them and plummeted, leaving behind it an ethereal trail of comet dust. From the distance they were at it was impossible to tell that the object was the Hubble telescope, but each of their eyes watched it with dreamy fixation nonetheless. Time slowed, almost to a standstill.
The object was falling at its terminal velocity but, when observed from far away, seemed to inch across the pink horizon like an insect. It struck the ground a few miles away and sent shockwaves through the air.
Their minds lost in the awesome beauty of the scene, Jack and Sully untethered from their mortal coils simultaneously as the geologic rift below them expanded and swallowed the old brick building and its foundation.
Twenty minutes after they died, so did the last of the city’s populace, and the sun began to rise on a stretch of land that would never again be recognizable as Los Angeles.
