Eliot's Apocalypse

Eliot’s Apocalypse
A Short Story by Charles Hamilton
Eliot Aster’s world ended exactly two months, two days, twelve hours, and ten minutes before it was supposed to. Moments before his untimely death he was sitting at his computer scratching his head and watching the flakes of dandruff settle between the spaces in the keyboard. In his other hand, he held a lit cigarette. He had just finished masturbating. Twelve years, two months, and ten days earlier, when he was dating Dee, he had enjoyed smoking after sex. And since then it was as if his body had become accustomed to receiving nicotine after an orgasm. But there was something pathetic about smoking after a climax that was induced by watching Internet porn, and he knew it. He wished that he were smoking with a woman he was in love with. He wished he were smoking after having sex with Dee. That was the last thought that ever ran through Eliot Aster’s head.


The world was supposed to end on December 21st, 2012. Well, actually Eliot figured it would end at exactly 4:01am Baltimore time December 22nd, 2012 because that was when the last of the cities in the Hawaii-Aleutian time zone would hit 12:01am on December 21st. He’d been counting down the days.
Eliot was not a conspiracy theorist. By the year 2011, the apocalypse was common knowledge. Science had long declared that on the winter solstice of the year 2012 the poles would reverse and massive magnetic shifts, radical weather changes, and rapidly rising oceans would destroy the human race. Either that or the eruption of a super volcano would scorch the earth’s surface, melting every humanoid in its path. Or interstellar radiation would make sure all humans died a slow, agonizing, and cancerous death. Eliot had his own personal favorite apocalyptic theory and it went something like this: at that particular point or moment in the space time continuum the Earth’s alignment with other celestial bodies within the Milky Way would cause the planet to be consumed by a gigantic black hole. There would be no suffering. The end would simply be an all-consuming nothingness. Eliot liked that.
It wasn’t just science that predicted Eliot’s apocalypse. December 21st, 2012 was the end of the 5,125-year Mayan calendar. John the Divine had predicted that day as the beginning of the Second Coming in the Christian Book of Revelations. So had Nostradamus, and certain interpretations of the I Ching. The end was integral part of mass consciousness. Pakistan and India were perpetually on the verge of nuclear war. Parts of the Middle East had already become atomic wastelands. Countless television stations clogged the airways with reruns of their End of Days specials. The end, it seemed, was everywhere.
People had many different reactions to the end of the world. They usually went something like this: Some held vigil outside of Holy grounds in Jerusalem. Some danced naked in the streets of New York and Amsterdam. Some built bomb shelters, and hoarded batteries and clean drinking water. But for the most part the people of Earth did nothing revolutionary or even out of the ordinary in the face of the apocalypse. They went to work, drank their soy cappuccinos, and came home every night to watch television. For all intents and purposes life had continued on the same way it had for the last 130,000 years, ten months, and twenty days.
Eliot had waited the entirety of his thirty-two year, three month, and thirteen day existence for something to happen to him. For as long as he could remember he fantasized about zombies, nuclear holocausts, and impending ice ages. This wasn’t because of any deep-seated misanthropy or contempt for civilization. He wasn’t one of those extremist environmentalists who believed the world would be better off without human beings ruining it. No, Eliot didn’t care about any of that. He was just really bored. He desperately wanted something extraordinary to happen to him. He drew pictures of the Earth melting over and over again in his notebook. He drew black holes. The apocalypse, it seems, was extraordinary enough a thing to capture his imagination. And besides, he figured that if the world were to end he wouldn’t have to worry about that bump on his inner thigh. He wouldn’t have to quit smoking. And most of all he would have an excuse to talk to Dee again.

Fourteen years, two months and twelve days before the end of the world Eliot met Dee. He was traveling Europe the summer before college. They were both in Berlin at the time. They were both admiring Soviet the bullet holes on an old rusted copper statue of some long dead Keizer. As she bent over her thong was showing out the back of her tight blue jeans. Eliot couldn’t help himself. He just had to make conversation. Their first interaction went something like this:
“Pretty crazy how they just leave them like that,” he mumbled. “The bullet holes I mean.”
“I guess they do it so they will always remember,” she said without turning around. She was speaking English. That was a start.
“Do you ever wonder where the bullets go when people fire guns off into the air? You know like cops breaking up riots or whatever. They have to come down somewhere don’t they?” She was now fully erect. The both of them were standing side-by-side looking at the bullet-ridden statue. He had no idea what her face looked like. He couldn’t muster the courage to look directly at her.
“What an odd thing to say,” she said, glancing momentarily in his direction. He strained his eyes to look at her, not wanting to make his gawking too obvious, but trying desperately to see if she was beautiful as his mind’s eye had made her out to be. “But I guess you’re right. Where do those bullets go?” There was a short pause as if she were considering the question seriously. “I guess by the time they get all the way up there maybe they evaporate or something. Or maybe they don’t have as much speed on the way down as they do coming up.”
“I guess. But you know if you drop a penny off the Eiffel Tower it can gain enough speed to kill someone.”

There are over fifty deaths every year caused by stray bullets in Baltimore alone. In America as a whole, the number had to be in the thousands. Remembering that first conversation, Eliot often wondered if any of those deaths were caused by policemen scaring off angry mobs that believed the world was ending, or bullets from the twenty-one-gunshot salute at funerals for soldiers’ who had died in the fight to prevent nuclear war.
Like Berlin, Eliot’s home country America had lots of bullet holes. Of course, they weren’t the kind you left in the sides of statues to remind you of dead wars. They were in apartment building walls covered by drywall mud. They were in the redbrick houses and abandoned warehouses that populated Eliot’s neighborhood. There were bullets lodged everywhere in America.

Dee face had crinkled when she laughed at Eliot’s jokes about the apocalypse or his desire for zombies to roam the earth. Her freckles had that a way of maintaining innocence, even when joking about death. Their jokes usually went something like this:
“Seriously, zombies would be really cool. We would just fuck off to Canada, raid a shotgun store and fish and hunt and make babies for the rest of our lives.” This was, in fact, closer to Eliot’s fantasy than even Dee ever imagined. This was also closer to what would actually be Dee’s real life than Eliot ever imagined.
“How many babies do you think I could pop out before menopause?” The answer, Eliot would later find out, was three.
This was thirteen years, three months, and ten days before the end of the world. It was 1999 and Eliot hadn’t read or heard anything about 2012. He was more preoccupied with Y2K and the possibility of a worldwide computer meltdown. He had also been watching a lot of old zombie movies.
Dee and Eliot had run into each other almost a year after their initial encounter Berlin. Eliot was going an art college in Baltimore and Dee was going to Med School at John Hopkins. Neither of them knew very many people in town. They didn’t really even know each other, but after the usual adolescent courtship of drinking coffee, they moved on to alcohol. Two weeks into their friendship, Eliot lost his virginity. He was twenty years old. Two weeks after that he was in love.

In the ten years, five months, and twelve days since Dee left him, Eliot had spent a lot of time masturbating and watching pornography. He needed pornography to keep him focused. He hadn’t been with a woman since Dee left. He strained to conjure up her face in his fantasies. He couldn’t remember what she looked like naked, and without the porno videos to keep him focused he often he found his thoughts drifting towards minute, asexual objects. Highway lines or the isles of potato chips at the convenience store he worked at. The swirls he etched into the countertop with his key when he was bored. The guy behind the bar at the greasy spoon where he eat his breakfast every morning. The crazy women with matted hair who would come into the store to buy a pack of Marlboro Lights and a Snickers bar every evening at 11:45pm like clockwork. Other times, his thoughts would conduct themselves into lists of the things he had to accomplish the next day. He should phone his mother and wish her a happy birthday. He wondered what the soup is going to be tomorrow? His lungs hurt and he shouldn’t smoke so much. He wondered if he would meet the girl of his dreams before the world ended. All this and he would still be hard. Was he actually jerking off about stale coffee and Formica countertops? This is what life before the apocalypse amounted to. This is why Eliot was so bored. This is why he believed everything he read about 2012. This is why he was counting down the days.

The last thing she said to him was this: “I don’t ever want to see you again. Even if you are the last man on earth.”
Even though it was a tired cliché, Eliot was frightened the intensity in her voice. He remembered thinking that she really meant it. That was ten years, seven months, and thirteen days before the world was supposed to end. Ten months and twelve days before his world actually did end, Eliot had decided to go look for Dee. He wasn’t yet the last man on Earth, but there was a chance that he could be. Besides he had nothing to loose. And if the world was actually going to end, neither did she.

Eliot’s last September on Earth was a cold one. The weather had become unpredictable. He put on a pair of long underwear for the first time since grade school. He thought about Dee’s thong sticking out the back of her pants. He didn’t bother giving notice to the convenience store. He didn’t think it really mattered. Nothing really did now except finding Dee.
So eleven months and twelve days before the world was supposed to end he bundled up in his gas-stained work coat, stuffed all of his possessions, including his book collection and laptop computer, into two large format garbage bags, and he left the bullet holes in his Baltimore apartment for the last time before boarding a bus for Canada.
It took exactly one day, twelve hours, and two minutes to arrive cross the Canadian border, and another two days, ten hours, and twelve minutes for Eliot to hitchhike to Brooksby, where Dee was living. She was, it seemed, living his dream: fishing, hunting, and making babies. She was way up north where zombies couldn’t get her.
His last ride into Brooksby was by far the most interesting. The driver had lived and farmed in on the Canadian prairie his whole life. The end did not scare him. His name was John and he was the last person Eliot would ever have a conversation with. That conversation went something like this:
“There doesn’t seem to be much hysteria around here does there? I mean people do realize that in few months this will all be over.”
“My wife doesn’t believe it will actually happen. She won’t even let me tell our three young ones. With good reason I suppose. But I reckon some people around here do. We do have cable you know,” he paused for a moment, as if testing Eliot’s American sensibilities. “Most of them just don’t care, I guess.” In Eliot’s hometown the end of the world had brought with it mountains of souvenir t-shirt vendors, holy gurus, and fiber-optic Jesus statues. There didn’t seem to be any of that here.
“What do you mean they don’t care? That seems completely insane.” It was completely insane and Eliot knew it. He also knew that he too was completely insane for believing that the human race would act otherwise in the face of impending doom.
“We all knew it was coming. We all knew that one day we had to die. Now we are just hunkering down for the worst of it.”
Eliot had to admit to himself that somewhere in the back of his mind he wanted the end to fulfill some Hobbes-like fantasy. He wanted people to be at each other’s throats, rioting, smashing windows. He wanted them to be murdering and raping each other around every corner. He wanted there to be more bullet holes. Instead they were just going on with their lives. They were making up in their beds morning even though they knew they would just be going back to sleep and messing them up that night. They were paying their taxes even though they knew the government would soon be extinct. It all seemed so futile.
Barely making eye contact with the clerk, Eliot got himself checked in to a motel a mile or so outside of Brooksby. It was one of those places that still advertized colour TVs and air-conditioning on the dilapidated sign out front. The room was yellow and tobacco stained. The sheets were made of cardboard, and the sink was cracked. It looked like the black holes from his notebook. He thought about what John had said about people not caring that the world was ending. He thought about Dee and what kind of house she lived in. He wondered if she was happy. He wondered if she believed that the world would end. He wondered why she moved to Canada. He remembered a conversation they had about it once. It went something like this:
“I think it’s a good thing that I have gun. I mean I can protect myself, and you if anyone tries to break in. Baltimore is scary place you know.”
“Eliot listen to yourself for a second. Do you ever think about why Baltimore is scary place? Could it be because people have guns?”
“Yeah, but they do and we’re here now.”
“Think about it for a second, though. In Canada they don’t have guns the same way we do, so they don’t need guns. I see it like this. Bear with me for a second. I was at this party once. It was the middle of winter so everyone was taking their shoes off at the door. Everything was fine until the party got a little bigger and some guy walked in with his muddy shoes on. Then everyone had to put their shoes on or else their socks would get all muddy. Do you see what I’m saying? The only reason we need guns is because some asshole walked into our party with his muddy shoes.”
All it took was some asshole with muddy shoes to get Dee to move to Canada where there weren’t as many bullet holes, and where it was customary for people to take off their shoes before entering a house.

There wasn’t any one reason why she left him. It was a combination of things. It was her not him. It was because they grew apart. It was because he wanted to world end and she wanted to save it. It was because he was a struggling artist and she was on her way to become a successful doctor. It was because three years, and twenty-three days seemed like the maximum amount of time a couple could stay together if they weren’t going to be with each other until the end of time.

In the next room, Eliot could hear the pounding of the bed’s backboard against the wall. The tacky nature painting above the colour television vibrated a bit. Above the air-conditioner, he could hear the exaggerated moans of a woman, and beneath it the subdued grunts of a man who seemed too proud of his every thrust. Despite himself, Eliot found he was aroused. He tried a first to imagine himself in there, but soon gave up and pulled out his laptop computer.

He still had his headphones on so he didn’t hear when the next motel door over was kicked open. A woman was faking an on-screen climax so he didn’t hear the cocking of John’s shotgun. He didn’t hear him scream Dee’s name in anger. He didn’t hear John call her a slut, or a whore, or a bitch. He didn’t hear any of that. In Eliot’s mind, Dee was that same freckle-faced woman with a thong sticking out the back of her pants. In his mind she was the same as she had been for the past twelve years, two months, and ten days. He did hear the gunshot, but by that time it was too late. The bullet made a whole in the wall the size of a small coin. It made a similar sized hole in Eliot’s face, before lodging itself in the drywall next to the color television. And there it remained and the world went on without him. It went on, at least, for another two months, two days, twelve hours, and ten minutes.