The Brand New Monday

Five days remain until the end of the world. Or so claim the commentators on the twenty-four-hour news channels, who stitched their forecasts together from the words of politicians – those, in turn, scrambling over one another to either soothe or terrify the public, shamelessly twisting the statements of scientists and turning them into fables, each more ludicrous than the last. Some members of the most “infallible” category of people – the one to which they have always confidently assigned themselves – insist that what’s happening is a harbinger of a new Messiah. Others swear it’s an extraordinarily rare astronomical event that occurs once every few billion years. Someone else is muttering about government conspiracies, aliens, and the intrigues of Atlantis; yet the meaning is the same: something is hurtling toward Earth from the galactic center of the Milky Way, something that looks suspiciously like a colossal tsunami, and it’s scheduled to wash over the planet in exactly five days. I begin my new day – one of my supposedly “last five” if the surrounding chorus of hysterical nonsense is to be believed – by waking up at six in the morning in my enormous, half-empty studio. I moved in a year and a half ago, and yet I still periodically mix up the closet with the bathroom. It takes me forty minutes just to convince myself to get up, perform the prescribed set of morning sanitary rituals, pour two glasses of yesterday’s pre-brewed sludge – sold in these parts as freshly ground coffee – into my stomach, and top it off with a hypoallergenic, gluten-free, lactose-free, trans-fat-free breakfast so “natural” that it looks about ready to get up and walk off the plate to someone who might genuinely appreciate all its hidden virtues. I simply wash it down with the last cold sip of coffee to kill the cardboard aftertaste and get on with getting myself ready for work. The end of all things is not an excuse to be late to office and incur my boss’s displeasure – he’d find a way to chew me out even in the afterlife. It is, however, a perfectly valid excuse to throw on the gift Prada tie that could probably cost even more if it were actually woven out of money. I put on my coat, grab my briefcase – its contents worth about as much as my entire life, which is to say, not all that much – and step outside. At the door I brush away another leaflet promising salvation in exchange for all my worldly possessions, and, unable to resist, glance at the motley line of hippies stretching down the sideway. It’s obvious they, in their desperate bid for a spot in heaven, don’t stand a chance: if getting through the gates requires handing your horse over to whichever prophet is currently in charge, they can’t afford even to stand near the barbed-wire-wrapped, sandbag-fortified checkpoint of Saint Peter with their handmade signs. Brushing the whole scene off, I catch myself regretting that the security detail I was promised a week ago never materialized – the one every state official above the rank of janitor is now supposed to have trailing behind him. But, as usual, there were neither the people nor, more importantly, the funds to actually enforce the order. The carefully stitched-together state budget contains no line item for “end of the world and/or universe”, and although the universe hasn’t been informed yet, it will have to bend and make concessions before the relentless gears of bureaucracy. I slip into the back seat of my government-issued car, tinted to near-total opacity, and give the driver a nod to head for the department. As the car’s wheels whisper along the filthy asphalt, crushing under them the garbage that hasn’t been collected in weeks thanks to the endless strikes, I study the city in its death throes with a kind of morbid curiosity. For the first time ever, the homeless out on its streets don’t seem lonely: the entire population has joined them, dividing itself into hobby-based factions. Depending on their imagination, people are now self-identifying as looters, vigilantes, desperate revelers, followers of freshly minted prophets, or just plain wandering idiots. Members of these distinguished groups are busy getting drunk, getting high, throwing up, bloodying their knuckles, and screaming themselves hoarse for whatever remains of the life they’re convinced is almost over. Among the brawling gangs, sects, and philosophically minded petty thieves grabbing anything that isn’t nailed down, the army – deployed into the city for lack of a better idea – stands around looking bored, forced to wage war against its own population. For the first time, the mighty American armed forces have no one to invade and nowhere to liberate for the immediate establishment of universal prosperity. It demoralizes them and amuses me, the sole orderly element left in this ocean of chaos, the lone cog in a system still trying to pretend it has any stability left. Reaching the towering glass facade of the New York Federal Courthouse, I hurry out of the car and push my way through the police cordon – lately nothing more than a dotted line separating civilization from the ocean of all-consuming anarchy – and make it to my workplace, nodding to colleagues, adversaries, and the vaguely familiar foot soldiers of our regional Lady Justice. The justice system is going all in. Everyone is guilty. At this point it would make more sense to gather the few people who somehow managed to keep a clean conscience, stick them all in one place – the state’s central prison, say – declare it an independent nation, and turn the rest of the country into one giant penitentiary. Let them issue entry visas and defend themselves from us however they can. And we’ll climb their walls screaming about freedom and democratic values. Of course, in a free country you’re not supposed to think like that. Especially out loud. Modern democracy is a delicate thing: it guarantees freedom of thought to each individual and grants everyone else the freedom to kick your ass for exercising it. The only way to survive is to cling to a crowd. If you don’t think this way, then you must think the opposite. You’re either a Democrat or a Republican; either right-wing or left-wing. Those who refuse to stand in either camp get trampled with special enthusiasm by both – one of the few things the opposing sides still share. But that was then. Now things are different. The end of the world is a magnificent diplomat, having managed to unite humanity under the single banner of supermarket theft. One might expect store owners to form the opposition, but they’re in on it too, making up their losses by robbing their competitors. The only entity left holding the bag is the state. All its wonderful, time-tested sleight-of-hand tricks – luring any one of us in with the promise of a massive jackpot and fabulous benefits, right up until the moment some gullible idiot reaches for his wallet – no longer work. Loans, mortgages, insurance policies, compensations, subsidies, late fees – suddenly no one needs any of it. When people stop stealing from the state, the state immediately loses touch with its own citizens and sends its police forces to find out what’s wrong. And it’s only fair. The day the human mind stops craving more than it has is the day the world grinds to a halt and we all die of intellectual starvation. The first ape didn’t begin its evolution when it picked up a stick; it began when it thought to beat its neighbor with it and pocket the bananas she had gathered. Which is precisely why we’re all here now: with the pedantic precision of a coroner, we’re dissecting society alive, trying to figure out what’s happening to us and issuing a diagnosis to each and every one. And if you’re curious about my medical opinion – death by intellectual starvation is definitely not a threat. The day at court unfolds under the banner of recreational physics. Practically everyone – from the guard at the security checkpoint to the district attorney’s secretary – suddenly considers themselves an expert and feels morally obligated to pontificate on neutrinos, Bose-Einstein condensates, quantum foam, and the theory of relativity, making one shaggy-haired Jew spin in his grave from the sheer frequency of hearing his name invoked and the breathtaking nonsense surrounding it. The only mildly comforting thing is that by the end of the workday, this esteemed community of newly self-appointed astrophysicists, mathematicians, and xenobiologists reaches the conclusion that astrological forecasts and Nostradamus’s predictions don’t quite hold up. Their victory is far from complete: the disciples of Weinland and Meade refuse to concede defeat, forming a discussion circle of “alternative-to-the-alternative” opinion and further entangling their already hopelessly tangled position – the essence of which, it seems, they no longer grasp themselves. I get home around half past ten and finally work up the nerve to make a call. A ritual I’ve been neglecting for a week now. You pick up almost immediately, as if you’ve guessed my intentions before they even managed to form in my increasingly graying head. “I can hardly believe it. Couldn’t you have called any later?” There’s reproach in your voice. “I couldn’t – another half hour and I would’ve passed out. It’s absolute hell here,” I say, plain truth, and I can feel you softening. “I miss you. Sophie does too.” “I miss her as well,” I lie, but with such conviction you’d never suspect it. The appearance of a child in our lives was the result of your whim and my financial contributions, multiplied by a few connections in one of the local orphanages. A bit of effort, a couple of recommendation letters to wrap another stack of cash in – and suddenly we’re the happy owners of a rosy-cheeked little marvel: eighteen and three-quarter inches tall, weighing six pounds and three ounces, full-term, no developmental issues. The drug-addicted mother who handed the baby over to the orphanage right after giving birth doesn’t count; she quickly dissolves somewhere on the edges of consciousness. Now our girl is the proud recipient of a professionally certified happy childhood, approved by top pediatricians and child psychologists, and sustained by her parents’ hyper-compensated guilt over their mismatched genetics. Sometimes I worry that one day she’ll drag a dead pigeon into the house, and we won’t have a single appropriate medical guideline on hand to justify throwing the feathered atrocity into the trash. “I miss you too. What’s new over there?” “Ma called me. There’s a curfew in their town. She said there was a shooting by the central market two blocks from their building. Someone tried to hijack a truck full of groceries. Three dead, several wounded. She and my father aren’t leaving the apartment now. Looks like we got lucky.” Of course we got lucky. You’re in Miami, raising our daughter and battering down the doors of one modeling agency after another, each of them regularly offering you yogurt commercials in which you’re expected to smile as if, to enjoy that sugary sludge, you had to wipe out an entire family of multigenerational farmers. And I’m here – a criminal and criminal-procedure court clerk for the city of New York – an unbelievable level of trust and a miraculous career leap for a former immigrant worker from some improbable, half-mythical enemy nation. We once settled into a tiny place in Brighton Beach, and then drifted apart again: you to another state, chasing your dream; me to an elite penthouse in the city center. First-wave immigrants seems can’t stay in one place even after changing the entire country they live in. “There’s shooting here too. They looted a couple of stores and burned down our café. Remember those disgustingly pink strawberry-filled donuts you loved? If they bring the arsonist to our court, I won’t even know whether to beg Wolff for clemency or go straight for capital punishment.” “Idiot,” you laugh. “Will you call tomorrow?” “Of course.”