The Brand New Monday

Thursday dissolves into one uninterrupted stream of hopeless courtroom drudgery. We churn out guilty verdicts with factory precision, sending defendants straight from the courtroom to prisons that have all, without exception, been on strike for two weeks now. The inmates are demanding… well, I’m not entirely sure what. Probably just the opportunity to remind the world they exist too. Everyone is occupied with exactly that these days. Each person wants to go mad in the brightest, loudest way possible, hoping the universe will notice and spare them personally. Those who don’t believe in the coming end – myself included – are doing the same thing, but with extra performance value. Never before have loyalty to routine and the utter shapelessness of personal convictions looked so baroque and socially motivated. Each of us can’t help showing off how little our life has changed after the government’s official announcement of the apocalypse. We go to the same bars, buy whatever’s left in the same stores after systematic raids by bunker-dwellers, and guard our everyday habits from the general madness – thereby going insane faster than the wildest of lunatics. In the evening you ask me to come to Miami. Unheard-of. We haven’t seen each other for half a year, and all this time we were doing just fine. Apparently, you’re losing your mind too. I don’t remember exactly why we stopped living together – at some point it simply became more convenient. Our ambition, stoked by circumstance, demanded solitude and the absence of emotional attachments. Now several thousand miles lie between us, but our pragmatism protects us from potential affairs better than the worst kind of erectile dysfunction: temporary lovers require moral investment, attention, and money, and inevitably threaten to become a permanent headache the moment you let them closer than absolutely necessary. No, we’re not cheating on each other and we’re not breaking up – but we’re also not trying to move back in together, knowing full well it would require sacrifices neither of us is prepared to lay on the altar of our marriage. You’re mildly concerned about Sophya – whom you insist on calling Sophie, because you think it’s right. Many people claim children grow best in complete families; I believe children, like weeds, grow perfectly well under any circumstances, no matter what you do with them. The worst thing parents can do is convince themselves they actually get to decide anything in their children’s lives and call that delusion “parenting.” “Are you coming?” I chuckle into the phone. As if you didn’t know: the end of the world may be capable of halting life at the molecular level and wiping out everything up to the hardiest microorganisms, but it still can’t put a dent in court proceedings. There are more of them every day now – my schedule is booked solid for a month, and I’m not even that important. I can’t begin to imagine what Judge Wolff’s schedule looks like. In his place, I’d be sending every second person to the electric chair without even looking, if legally killing someone weren’t such a bureaucratic chore these days. At this point it’s easier to just let even the most vicious bastards live out their full lifespan. Honestly, I don’t understand how anyone is supposed to be deterred from murdering their fellow humans when the worst consequence is lifelong room and board on the taxpayer’s dime and the occasional chance to order a lobster for three hundred bucks as yet another “last meal.” Apparently, humanity overall is better than it thinks of itself. I drift off in my thoughts and realize you’re still breathing into my ear, waiting for an answer. “Maybe Monday.” I hear your laugh in response. “Perfect. This time, if something happens, you’ll have an excellent excuse not to show up. But Jimmy, try anyway, okay?” “Okay,” I mutter, wincing as you mangle my name in that annoyingly American way yet again, and hang up in irritation. Hanging up, I find myself wondering what I actually want. After all, the twilight of the ages – even an imaginary one – is as good a reason as any to reflect on the eternal, just ask any psychologist. Yet, predictably, nothing meaningful comes to mind. Maybe I’d like to go back home for a short while and visit my parents’ graves – the funerals I stoically ignored from the moment I left. I’m almost certain now that I wouldn’t break into a jig at the sight of their joint headstone with two stern faces engraved upon it. A professor of law and a German teacher. Teachers make the worst parents; they can choose only between indifference and tyranny when it comes to raising a child. From my father I got the former; from my mother, the latter. I believe I’m no longer angry. In truth, I don’t think I ever was – I simply allowed them to live their lives without my presence in it. I hope they were happy, since they even managed to die almost on the same day. What they thought of me, I still don’t know, and now I’ll never get the chance to ask. Outside, the shouting and gunshots start up again. Last night it was the nationalists and the radical environmentalists beating the shit out of each other. A wonderfully pointless conflict, considering that both ecology and the national question will cease to matter any moment now. And the recycling enthusiasts should be celebrating outright – soon there won’t be anyone left to litter. The only explanation I can find for all this is that none of these people – just like me – believes for even a second that our existence will end on Sunday night. Each of us is certain that on Monday morning we’ll wake up and go to the office as usual, ready to fire off angry posts on social media and gleefully torment the doomsayers who will have to urgently revise their predictions and move the date of the apocalypse to the next tax period. There’s nothing surprising about the fact that no one wants to believe in a threat you can’t eliminate by threatening someone with nuclear weapons – or at the very least by sending a dozen B-list actors into space under the leadership of Bruce Willis. The everyday routine that is dragging us all along never lets up for a second and never allows anyone to stop. I know for a fact that oil futures for the summer – still six months away – are being actively traded on the financial markets. Every broker is trying to either make a fortune or lose everything in spectacular fashion by trading in a future none of us may actually have. The picture of universal irresponsibility is both frightening and fascinating. Not a single politician has paused their preparations for the fall elections, not a single bank has abandoned its desire to collect interest on its loans. And the organizers of next year’s football championship have refused to refund the money for the tickets they’ve sold in advance.