The Apocalypse Reader (24 page)

He drove toward Hyde Park. He stepped out of the car on the edge of Eden Park and watched the thick brown layer of smoke choking the city around the Ohio River, and the river itself foamed, as though it were a cauldron of water boiling over. He couldn't see clearly across the river, into Covington, Kentucky, for the thick brown smog. High up, the clouds were pink and orange. He'd never seen colorful clouds in the middle of the day before. When he walked back to the car, his soles sank into the glossy black asphalt. One of his shoes stayed in the asphalt. He pulled it up with his hands, and as he bent over, the heat from the road scorched him.

Daniel thought that what he saw was not natural. God hadn't created the world to be so dirty-and then it occurred to him: God was choking the world. It was the end of the world. It was happening already. Maybe it would be over in several days. He panicked, suddenly certain that the temperature would continue to rise, and rise. God said he wouldn't flood the earth again. God even said,
I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake
(Genesis 8:21).Yes, it says, "the ground," and doesn't say anything about the air. So He could do it with air. He probably wouldn't burn the earth either. But He could just suffocate the earth in its own stench, sending the heat through the ozone holes. This is it, Christ is coming, and I am choking in the lust of my own eyes.

He rushed home-drove as fast as he could-to tell his wife to get ready for the end of the world.

But at home, his wife was gone. Green beans were simmering on the stove, so she must be somewhere near. Yet he couldn't find her anywhere. He couldn't even find his Saint Dalmatian.

He recalled the verses (Matthew 25:40-41):

Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.

Two women shall be grinding at the mill- the one shall be taken, and the other left.

This was it; his pious wife was ascended to heaven, as were no doubt the other few pious people, and the rest of them, including Daniel, were left to suffer the seals of God's wrath.

He called his son, but got through only to the son's message machine.

He went to see a Baptist minister, and the minister was home. That did not surprise him.
The first shall be last, the last shall be first
. Many ministers had fallen, like Swaggart and Bakker. "Have you looked outside?" Daniel said. "The end of the world is here. Have you seen how the air simmers? We are all choking."

"That's a Cincinnati summer for you, my brother."

"You don't believe in it?"

"In what? The summer? Well, you just hide away from it."

DANIEL FIGURED OUT that the minister didn't believe much.
There shall be many false prophets
. He thought about it-there were false prophets everywhere. Faithless priests. Davidians. Deepak Chopras. Self-help gurus. Diet gurus (religious practices, fasts without a God). Everybody offering happiness, with false gods, selves. Worship of the ego; wasn't that the root of all evil in the garden? Man and woman imagined that they could be like God, self-sufficient and all-knowing. Now again, men want to be all-knowing, and have the illusion that they are; you just finger computers a bit, and they give you the information you need; computers are nearly omniscient, and of course, many computer operators have the conceit that they themselves are omniscient. Daniel had had a conversation, with a doctor whose house he painted, about what Moses would have done if he'd had a computer with CD-ROM programming; the Ten Commandments would have been written on CD-ROM. Maybe they would have been different; instead of, Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's ass, a commandment might have turned out to be, Thou shalt not spill coffee or any other liquids on the screen while surfing the Net. He shuddered, afraid that his thought was sacrilegious, and then wondered whether Moses climbed Mt. Sinai with a hammer and a chisel to lend to God so the commandments could be engraved into the stone tables, or did God keep such tools, or did God simply blast grooves in the stone with his fiery breath?

He went home alone. Intentionally he left the windows open, to feel the heat. He didn't want to use air-conditioning; he had concluded that air-conditioning was a part of man's arrogance against God-to create a mini-climate, avoid God's winds. No, he'd bear those winds. He wouldn't contribute to the destruction of the world; for it was not God himself who was directly destroying humankind. Humankind was destroying itself through its greed and pleasure seeking.

Usually, they kept the windows not only closed but locked because there was crime in the neighborhood. But what harm could a crime do to him now?

Maybe it was not too late for him to be ascended. He had noticed the end, while most hadn't. He prayed. And after his last "Amen," and he said many of them, he looked up. The moon was scarlet red, and there were three rings around it. He'd seen one, never more, on cold nights, when the moon was full, but now, the moon wasn't even full; it gave off little light, and around it, there was a blue ring, and a red ring, and a hazy white ring. Daniel remembered,
And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars ...
(Luke 21:25); and ...
the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light
... (Mark 13:24).

He didn't sleep. In the morning he turned on CNN, expecting to see reports about the coming of Christ. Would they try to interview Christ before he got to his business of resurrecting the dead and ascending those whod been truly forgiven into heavens? Who would do that? Christiane Amanpour?

Instead, there was a report about how Srebrenica was overrun, and how thousands of Muslim men and boys were rounded up and bussed away into the fields where, according to "unconfirmed reports," mass executions were taking place.

So there it was.
Now the brother shall betray the brother to death, and the father the son; and children shall rise up against their parents, and shall cause them to be put to death
(Mark 13:12). These were basically the same ethnic group, in Eastern Bosnia, Serbs and Croats of Muslim religious tradition who lost track of being Serbs and Croats, and Serbs of Orthodox tradition, who perhaps lost track of religious tradition, but not of being Serbs. Brother against brother-in the name of God, just to add sacrilege to the massacre, which already was sacrilege.

Daniel decided to go watch the end of the world from Eden Park. There he sat and waited.

On the horizon showed up dark clouds and lightning. He wondered whether God's host was coming. Then a terrible hailstorm came, hail the size of a cliche, a golf ball, although of course, once he could catch it, it was the size of a peanut.

The storm was soon over. Other than a few indents on the roof of his pickup, there was no other damage. The air was cool now, cool and clear, as though the world was washed clean. Daniel felt a moment of sadness. He wondered whether God had changed his mind. What had happened? Like Jonah, who would have liked to see the destruction ...

He drove home. At least his wife then would be back. Who knows where she'd gone that long.

The machine blinked. He played the message. "Hi, here's Nikolai. Just calling so you wouldn't
sorgen
. Mira and I ... we decided to live together. She says you haven't treated her
harasho
, and I try my best to help her. Here
Schatz
, you tell him too, so he knows." There was weeping, and Mira said: "We couldn't go on like that any more. You never paid any attention to me. We'll be in touch about splitting up our property."

Daniel shrieked with laughter. And he thought she'd been ascended to heaven! Cold air streamed through the window. The end of the world. Shit, how could he have been that stupid. And then he was incensed. She had seduced Nikolai right in front of him. She even chided Daniel for noticing it.

He called his daughter, Marina. Marina believed that her mom was kidnapped, and advised him to call the police. He didn't believe his daughter.

He drove off to a pawn shop to buy a gun. Yes, he'll find those scoundrels. Whom should he shoot? Just him? Well, he didn't even know him that well. Her? Obviously, he didn't know her that well either. You could live with someone all your life and never learn. It wasn't worth the bother, shooting somebody, going to court, being pictured in the newspapers as a demented maniac. Ridiculous.

He walked into a phone booth and dialed the tennis player's number in Hyde Park to play Windows '95 with her. No answer. Surely, she was not ascended, he thought, and the thought entertained him. As he laughed, he felt a terrible relief.

He no longer believed in the end of the world and in the prophets, not even the prophets of the global warming effect. He knew his reasoning was not quite right now, as it hadn't been right before, but he was sure that the granite faith of his transatlantic youth was gone. The faith had through years attenuated into a delicate crystalline structure that broke down the light-broke it down into the aura of transcendent, otherworldly, seeking and relishing extreme spectacles of collapse; and this fragile aesthetic faith crumbled in the heat, into a heap of glass dust that could no longer be resurrected into crystal, and that would be lost in the sand of the entropied world as spittle in the ocean.

SOME APPROACHES
TO THE PROBLEM OF THE
SHORTAGE OF TIME

Ursula K. Le Guin

THE LITTLE TINY HOLE THEORY

THE HYPOTHESIS PUT forward by James Osbold of the Lick Observatory, though magnificently comprehensive, presents certain difficulties to agencies seeking practical solutions to the problem. Divested of its mathematical formulation, Dr. Osbold's theory may be described in very approximate terms as positing the existence of an anomaly in the spacetime continuum. The cause of the anomaly is a failure of reality to meet the specifications of the General Theory of Relativity, although only in one minor detail. Its effect on the actual constitution of the universe is a local imperfection or flaw, that is, a hole in the continuum.

The hole, according to Osbold's calculations, is a distinctly spacelike hole. In this spatiality lies its danger, since the imbalance thus constituted in the continuum causes a compensatory influx from the timelike aspects of the cosmos. In other words, time is running out of the hole. This has probably been going on ever since the origin of the universe 12 to 15 billion years ago, but only lately has the leak grown to noticeable proportions.

The propounder of the theory is not pessimistic, remarking that it might be even worse if the anomaly were in the timelike aspect of the continuum, in which case space would be escaping, possibly one dimension at a time, which would cause untold discomfort and confusion; although, Osbold adds, "In that event we might have time enough to do something about it."

Since the theory posits the hole's location somewhere or other, Lick and two Australian observatories have arranged a coordinated search for local variations in the red shift which might aid in pinpointing the point/instant. "It may still be a very small hole," Osbold says. "Quite tiny. It would not need to be very large to do a good deal of damage. But since the effect is so noticeable here on Earth, I feel we have a good chance of finding the thing perhaps no farther away than the Andromeda Galaxy, and then all we'll need is what you might call a Dutch boy."

THE NON BIODEGRADABLE MOMENT

A TOTALLY DIFFERENT explanation of the time shortage is offered by a research team of the Interco Development Corporation. Their approach to the problem, as presented by N.T. Chaudhuri, an internationally recognised authority on the ecology and ethology of the internal combustion engine, is chemical rather than cosmological. Chaudhuri has proved that the fumes of incompletely burned petroleum fuel, under certain conditions-diffused anxiety is the major predisposing factor-will form a chemical bond with time, "tying down" instants in the same manner as a nucleating agent "ties down" free atoms into molecules. The process is called chronocrystallisation or (in the case of acute anxiety) chronopre- cipitation. The resulting compact arrangement of instants is far more orderly than the pre-existent random "nowness," but unfortunately this decrease in entropy is paid for by a very marked increase in bioinsupport- ability. In fact the petroleum/time compound appears to be absolutely incompatible with life in any form, even anaerobic bacteria, of which so much was hoped.