The Brand New Monday

In the morning, I wake up with the unexpected feeling that I actually want to see you and Sophie. Maybe it’s the aftereffects of the cocaine – the stash I tore into once the hospital painkillers wore off – and drowned generously with a bottle of cheap whiskey that tasted vaguely like brake fluid. I spend the entire day avoiding my own thoughts by lying in bed and staring at my laptop screen, watching every trending video the platform has to offer. The themes are appropriate: stand-up comics joking about the end of the world; influencers cashing in on a hot topic; DIY survivalists demonstrating how to build an internal combustion engine in post-apocalyptic conditions; compilations of the most picturesque world endings in video games. Occasionally a sober attempt to analyze what’s happening pops up, only to be met with a wave of constructive yet impressively silent criticism and a flood of downvotes. The most popular video is a five-minute speech from the President. I’ve never understood that: the President is always the most predatory bureaucrat who clawed his way to the top of the administrative food chain – by definition competent at nothing else. Why, after he wins the election, is anyone still want to listen to what he has to say? According to the forecasts, the wave will hit Earth when it is exactly midnight in New York. Amusing that even events of cosmic scale feel obliged to accommodate the world’s foremost democracy. Too cinematic, too Hollywood to be true. I’d bet anything it’ll happen ten minutes before or after whatever round number on the time scale humanity once invented as its system of temporal coordinates. Another rumor making the rounds is the supposed necessity of wearing hats made of aluminum foil. If the nature of the mysterious wave is electromagnetic, that should keep ordinary people’s brains from boiling on the spot. As for the brains of those willing to put a foil bonnet on their heads – nothing on Earth can save those anymore. I absentmindedly listen to the droning monologue of yet another egghead. It’s just him and the journalist in the studio. The whole thing is staged as a polite evening chat with a scientific luminary and is interspersed with the host’s dim pre-scripted lines and unfunny jokes – all to keep the audience from falling asleep halfway through the video. Even the impending apocalypse can’t make cosmology interesting for the average user. The scientist has a high forehead, early wrinkles, receding hairline, and the eyes of a deranged maniac – with which he gleams as he slowly and at great length explains something about the structure of the wave approaching the planet. Everything is hypothetical and full of endless caveats: there was no time to study the phenomenon, and there won’t be anymore; no practical data exists. Not a single theory predicts anything like this, but life is famous for pinning to the mat even the wildest ideas we come up with about it. Nevertheless, the main working hypothesis is that humanity can now, armed with nothing more than a trivial radio microscope the size of a small city, observe a quantum effect of unprecedented scale. It seems the idea is that we’re simply incapable of perceiving all the parameters of the oncoming catastrophe at once and, as observers, can either know what it is and how it’s structured on the inside, or know its speed, location, and all the other trivial parameters – but never both. He eventually talks himself into claiming that in order to understand the true nature of the threat facing us, all of humanity must first forget about it entirely and study only theoretical models, because any practical observation will influence the anomaly and distort it beyond recognition. I catch myself admiring the dazed, slack-jawed face of the journalist sitting across from him. He seems to have run out of all his prepackaged distractions for the audience, but his contorted mug has at least made the interview marginally interesting. I smirk and shut the laptop, ending the viewing. I’ve never been able to properly understand the way scientists explain things. And I’m certainly not going to manage it now, when they clearly don’t understand themselves either. We are all believers. Every one of us believes in electricity, in cellular networks, and in the ability of airplanes to carry us at nine hundred kilometers per hour to the other side of the planet while offering us the opportunity to buy overpriced brand-name watches mid-flight and christen the purchase with vinegar-flavored wine from a plastic cup. None of us, however, knows how the first, the second, or the third actually works. The moment we step outside our own narrow area of competence, we find ourselves adrift in an ocean of imprecise testimonies, secondhand truths, and hand-me-down opinions. None of us is going to bother, for the sake of a petty argument, to reinvent and re-prove the Pythagorean theorem just to claim, in good conscience, that we’re absolutely certain it’s correct. It’s a wonder Pythagoras himself had the patience for it. Which is exactly why there’s no hope that we’ll one day manage to use logic to settle our differences. Believers don’t need arguments – their absence suits them far too well.