The Brand New Monday

In the morning, I head to work once again. The wound barely bothers me now, and we’re working Sundays these days – something I’m secretly grateful for. I can’t imagine what it would cost me to sit at home and watch what’s happening out on the streets, the panic gradually giving way to nationwide festivities. There are now almost more people rejoicing at the end of the world – welcoming it with open arms – than those who fear it, and certainly far more than the ones who decided that the apocalypse wasn’t a sufficient reason to make any adjustments to their established daily routines. Another rape trial goes by without surprises. Twenty-five-year-old James Fowley was caught practically with his dick out, trying to bring an end to his prolonged virginity at the expense of one of his classmates. Despite all the evidence, the kid refuses to plead guilty, insisting he never did anything of the sort. Judge Wolff, like an angel of death, reads out the sentence: seven years in a high-security facility, with the possibility of early release for good behavior. The defendant yells something at his public defender, who just nods once, agreeing with the verdict. The daughter of that public defender, Andrew Loftz, got into Harvard last year with Judge Wolff’s active support. For the next five years or so, Loftz will gladly agree with any decision Wolff hands down – assuming there’s even a decision left to agree with. I stare, with a kind of dull stupor, at the heavy, marble-hewn figure of Samuel Wolff – the immovable center we’ve revolved around this whole time. I can’t imagine him in any role other than the one he occupies now. I’m fairly sure that on Judgment Day he’ll be standing at the podium just like this, reading out sentences to the damned. In the courthouse corridors Wolff looks exhausted and even refuses to join the discussion of yet another scientific theory – this one claiming that our universe has collided with some other dimension now hurtling toward Earth, distorting our familiar reality beyond recognition. A wonderful hypothesis, made even better by the sheer lack of any possible way to prove or disprove it. My bet is that it’ll take an informal lead in the public’s hit parade of theories. Wolff, however, stoically keeps silent and retreats to his office to draft the reasoning sections of the rulings he’s issued today. I partly understand him and find myself wondering what it costs the old man to maintain any sense of working order among his subordinates at this point. Wolff does have a head start: he’s sixty-seven, a member of the conservative party for the past forty years, with one gay son and another who married a Black nightclub singer moonlighting in a jazz bar on Long Island. By local standards, his world collapsed years ago. I stumble home, walk into the hall without taking off my shoes, swipe the cover off the bed and collapse onto it as I am. It’s 9:42 p.m. I don’t care – I intend to sleep through the whole madness of this night and trouble the universe only with my snoring. And if that professor from the interview is to be believed, I’ll be the only person on Earth capable of comprehending the secrets of the cosmos, since there isn’t a single thought in my head about the approaching apocalypse. I couldn’t give less of a damn about it – which makes me, apparently, the perfect detached observer. A belated thought finally comes to me – what I would actually want to do if I truly believed the world would cease to exist in three hours. Would I want to be like Wolff, pretending until the very last minute that nothing is happening? I suppose I’d still rather see my daughter. And seeing you wouldn’t be bad either. Maybe even find out that things between you and me aren’t entirely over, and that my own little universe is still worth caring about. With a groan, I bang my head against the pillow a couple of times and reach for the nightstand, grabbing my phone. It seems I’m not destined to become the perfect observer after all. It takes only a few minutes to find and book a ticket on the nearest daytime flight to Miami. Even on the eve of the apocalypse, modern technology is capable of developing suspiciously superluminal speeds – at least when it comes to extracting money from the wallets of ordinary citizens. Heart pounding, I send a screenshot of my ticket to your number, and after an impressively short while I receive a full-blown punctuation bacchanalia of parentheses, dashes, and colons – your way of expressing joy at my decision. I catch myself sitting here like an idiot, smiling at a message whose meaning, should we all turn out to be doomed tomorrow, not even the sharpest philologist or cryptographer could decipher. I’ll have to leave for the airport at five in the morning, and I can only hope that among the surviving remnants of civilization there will be at least one taxi driver willing to take me to Kennedy. I set the alarm and don’t even notice myself falling asleep, my head throbbing with the thought that in the morning I’ll still need to call the court and request a short leave of absence for family reasons – after listening to whatever Judge Wolff deems necessary to tell me about it.