The End of the World

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At the end of the world, nothing had changed. The phylogenetic tree carved into the tall, serpentinite wall of the museum still told the same tale. And what other tale was there to tell? Every story was fundamentally reducible to the same story about the lurching endeavors of humanity, man’s grasp gradually falling shorter and shorter of his reach.

The domed roof had caved in. Blue-green rocks fuzzy with moss and discolored by chemical decay had crumbled into slanted heaps. Magenta clouds swirled in the exposed sky above. Cracked Greek columns guarded the side walls of the main gallery, dark brown foliage creeping between the interstices.

“Not much of an inheritance, is it?” The old man’s voice croaked as he plodded through the rubble, his staff thundering as it hit the ground.

I sat on the stairs beneath the giant mural, chin on hand, studying his weary body as he approached. “I had never expected blooming meadows, but it is quite pitiful, father.”

“Ahhh-kh-khhh.” His voice scraped his throat. “So it misquemes you, does it? You’ll find a way. You have to.”

“And if I can’t?” I asked, but he didn’t reply.

The steady clack of his staff pounded in my head. His robe was muddied and rasped as it dragged across jagged stones like the injured wing of some flightless bird. He was on the steps now. Ragged breaths and long pauses. Beside me now, he perched a wrinkled hand on my shoulder.

“No alchemist, no ecologist, nor geneticist can save us now,” he said, gazing up at the wall.

“No historian will again steal through the night to save our story,” I said, rising and turning to face the tree.

“No inventor, no scientist, nor engineer will blueprint a machine to light us with glory,” he said, climbing with me, our hands around each other’s shoulders.

“And no poet,” I said as we reached the platform, “will ever travel to starless caverns before we have.”

“We were the first.” He retracted his hand from my back.

“And the last,” I finished, letting my hands fall limp.

Rain began to fall. Drops trailed and diverged on the grooves on the wall like a thousand splintering meteorites. At the root of the tree was a single node from which all others branched. Within it was etched a lonely word: Human.

Days after he passed, the sky burned black for the first time in months. Falling ash stained my teary cheeks and I collapsed on the gravel of the road. My cheek rubbed against coarse particles and I tried to find meaning in the pebbles, warring and internecine like TV tuned to a dead channel. I thought I saw his face traced there like lines in a zen garden, his smile shining brightly, but it was just pareidolia.

Months passed before I found another, her eyes wild and red and feral. She crawled like an animal and bared her teeth when I approached. When she saw what I was, she choked and convulsed. Her growls fluctuated as she struggled to fight the animal she had become. Not wanting to see her suffer, I turned to leave.

“Ple-laease, stayyy.” She managed to whisper, but I didn’t look back.

Years passed. Long years stretched by spasms of involuntary memory, lost somewhere in the overgrown streets of dilapidated cities. Short years ripped away from me like the health of the earth, flickering past like the pages of a cheap flipbook. I had more time for reflection about my father, about the dying world he and his generation had left us. More time to detox the bitterness from my heart, more time to let time let heal it. Our suffering wasn’t in vain; it only felt that way because the silver lining of it belonged to the people of the past. They had squeezed blood out of the heart of the world for their pleasure at the expense of the children of the future. It was that simple, nothing personal. We had been left for dead by a people who had never known us.

I trudged up the snow blanketed hill, wondering if he could see my growth. It hadn’t been his fault, I had realized. His generation was handed a world hardly better than we were. All was forgiven, even that which I could not bring myself to forgive. I focused on the distant horizon, listening to the crashing waves of sludge. The vortex of darkness parted like a dead eye opening, iris still white, at the end of the universe where crimson shafts of light spilt past the edge and mirrored off the toxic ocean and scattered into a handful of eyes that were still alive in a dead world or dying in a world that might still yet live.