The Biggest Orgy for the End of the World

So look, it’s a bit like when you decide to walk downriver to check up on your friend Ollie, because he’s been in dire straits since his girl left him to go to California and join the circus – at least you’re pretty sure that’s what you remember him saying – and your schedule’s got this wide berth in it now since your cucumber plant died, so you light up a spliff that’s about twenty percent American Spirit – if you had to put a number on it – and walk out into evening air muggy as a rainforest’s to jaunt along the levee to Ollie’s place, choking a little bit here and there on the combustion of smoke and humidity in your lungs.

When you arrive, the door’s open a crack, and this guy’s just totally oblivious to you letting yourself in, which is disconcerting because there have been a growing number of robberies in the neighborhood over the last year, and you and Ollie and circus girl – Rosa, that was her name – had some heavy conversations back before she left all about how things are going to shit everywhere. To which you’d shrugged, eyes down while rolling another, and said, “Well what’s even the point,” but Ollie and Rosa became nuts for security, getting locks and security cameras for every door and angle of visibility, the whole shebang.

So you make a little show as you lock the door once you’re in, as a signal of your respect for his values, and say loudly to announce your presence, “Hey.” It’s dark but he’s there at his work station, three desks around him, which is where he writes reports or blogposts or editorials or you don’t exactly remember what for some kind of news service, but even though you’ve made the announcement, he doesn’t move. “Hey!” you yell, “buddy! Come on up for air!” Still he doesn’t budge until you go over and punch him on the arm. “Ow!” he says and looks up, which is when you notice this bleak, glazed look in his eyes. “Oh hey,” he says, and in the space of a few slow milliseconds the glaze in his eyes rearranges itself into recognition. “Sorry…” he mumbles “…just finishing up some work.” His face vibrates the same color blue as the screen. 

“What kinda work?” you ask. You’re trying to sound nonchalant, because you’re genuinely worried about this guy. In the blue light he looks kind of jaundiced and gaunt, and you wonder how long it’s been since you last saw him like this, by which you mean all vacant and lost. So before he answers you kind of hulk him out of his chair and look to see what he’s working on.    

“After all the nukes kaplooey the whole world,” the words pulse in your eyes, “the only people left alive will be those with deep underground bombshelters. Since the explosion of the nukes is planned and agreed upon by the majority of the human race, all the ‘bunkers’ (the preferred term for those with bombshelters) have just enough time to stock up on beans and rice and distilled water and canned peaches, which they’ll need for the long nuclear winter. When asked, a few of the bunkers expressed dismay, even incredulity, at how easily humankind took to the suicide pact, but such attitudes are squarely in the minority. Most folks interviewed have stated how happy they feel with the plan for a collectively ‘mindful’ self-annihilation. ’We’re going to die anyway,’ goes most reasoning, ‘wouldn’t it be better if we all died together, blissfully aware? Like we’re one big family, which we pretty truly are?’ But the bunkers are not persuaded.” 

You turn from the computer screen with a face like “uhhhh…..?” but even though you’re a little concerned about what you’ve just read, you’re actually relieved it’s not a suicide note or worse, another sob letter to Rosa saying how he’s willing to leave behind his career and his friends to be a world-traveling puppeteer with her or whatever. And since you don’t want him to feel self-conscious or embarrassed about expressing his anger and hurt this way, you raise your eyebrows to look cool with it all, and you say something nice sounding like, “Imaginative story bud.”

But he gives you a kind of funny look, which feels nice at first because it seems like he’s gotten a little bit of life back in his face, but also alarming because it’s a look that, the more you look at it, seems to suggest a message of, “You’re the crazy person,” which makes you worry that maybe Ollie’s even further gone than you thought. But this turns out not to be the case at all. “You haven’t heard?” and his voice is transformed into all this pathos and gentleness, which stirs you up because you’re supposed to be the one talking to him like that. “Buddy,” he says, “they’ve done it, you know what they’ve been talking about for months? The nukes into the supervolcanoes. I think the CIA’s been setting it up all along.” He’s standing there looking down on you like you’re his child and his hand is on your shoulder. And now you’re nervous, maybe even shaking. Has he lost his marbles? Have you? Maybe, you reason quickly, he’s just joking, albeit weirdly, so you say, your voice piqued with a touch of anger, “Ha, ha, that’s a good one buddy.”

But his face looms stone serious now. “Look,” he says grabbing for the remote and this is when he switches on the television and you see a press conference from a podium at the United Nations where a woman in a beige blazer is saying something about “the first true peace of humanity, and, of course, the last,” and it seems that sure enough, the bastard’s been telling the truth! You pass Ollie a newly minted spliff you’ve just rolled, and he does some rapid-fire switches between channels while he puffs. On every live feed there’s newscasters and crews partying hard, having a ball of a time, drinking and screwing and dancing on tables.

He lands on one and you see this guy with a priest’s collar nodding thoughtfully and staring into the camera like it’s his dying lover. He’s saying, “All we are is the Lord’s tool in his final punishment. But that’s it, no more after this one. Frankly Marianne, I believe we should let ourselves say a little hallelujah!”

For some reason the thought occurs to you that this priest has named his camera “Marianne,” but that doesn’t seem right so you ask, “Who’s Marianne?”

But Ollie shakes his head and says, “They’ve had this guy on four networks already.”

Now you’re starting to feel the heat. Even though the door is locked and the A/C is on, you’re starting to feel like you’ve been tied up inside a sock and thrown into a microwave, like you’re being vacuumed by a dust buster into a hot wet hug.

“So the world is ending?” you ask, and for a second some tears well up, but you can’t quite get them to come out, “Are we supposed to be sad?”

Ollie shrugs, “What’s the point?”

And you see this wise smile creeping into his mouth and eyes, which brings you a little bit of comfort. He says, blowing out some smoke, “Listen, it’s okay. We’re doing it the mindful collective way. I mean, it’s a bang right?” And then he says, the words faster, falling out of his mouth like a trainwreck, “Think about it like this. You’ve just woken up, and the world is ending. This is it, you think. But then you keep on thinking, because that’s the amazing capacity of a human mind. So then you think, so this it? And then you think: huh. Interesting.”

“What?” you say.

And Ollie looks like he’s not even sure what he said, but nods and then sighs and puts a hand back on your shoulder and says, “Maybe we oughtta get a sandwich.”

#

You don’t bother locking Ollie’s door when you leave because, like Ollie said, what’s the point. Your breath still feels tight but it’s better than in Ollie’s house because at least there’s airflow out here. You’ve decided to put out of your mind this whole world-ending business for a minute, so you’re focusing on the hope that the corner mart still has a few of their hot pressed turkey sandwiches with pepper jack and roasted red pepper with their in-house-cooked hot sauce. When you look down at the sidewalk you see that the cement swirls with embedded dirt and glass and garbage particles that glimmer like diamond shards.

“You can also think about it like this,” Ollie is saying, calmer now, “If you were drowning in a lake next to the president, who was there because he’d been thrown in the water after a coup at the hands of a radical supervillain, probably from the CIA, and this CIA supervillain is itching to launch nuclear attacks on Russia and Pakistan and North Korea, which would set off the Strangelovian-doomsday-annihilation-of-the-planet-machine that’s kept in nothern corner of the Pentagon” – “Right, okay,” you say, nodding – “and,” Ollie continues, “it so happened that the pretty girl who you’ve loved forever – we’re talking about the one here – comes along and has to decide whether to save you or the president, wouldn’t it make just as much sense for the pretty girl who you’ve loved forever to save you so that you two could be together as the nuclear sunset obliterated Earth? I mean,” Ollie says, “wouldn’t it make more sense for her to save you? You’d be dead either way, but in one of those scenarios you share the most passionate lovemaking ever experienced by any two human beings in history, which you know will never be topped, because history is ending tomorrow.”

He laughs and says, “I heard that on the radio.”

You nod, not because you have any idea what’s he’s talking about, but because you want to indicate that you’ve heard the words that have come out of your friend’s mouth despite your hunger. And maybe it’s the up-down motion of your head, or all this mention of “the girl you love” and history, but you notice that a coherent thought, the first one in a while, has shaken loose from the uneasy tumult in your mind, and since you can’t remember what exactly Ollie was talking about a second ago, you decide to speak it.

“You know, I’m sorry about Rosa,” you say, “all that circus stuff.”

In response to which Ollie lets out something like a snort and tips his shoulders down like a running back and keeps staring ahead while he walks. “Who’s Rosa?” he says, “Are you talking about Lisa? Yeah that was a circus all right. That’s a good line man.”

Now you’re even more lost. “I thought her name was Rosa? And she went to join a circus?” and as the words leave your mouth you’re thinking: how did I even get that idea? Wasn’t Rosa a dental hygienist?

For some reason this realization of your own ignorance kicks you hard in the stomach and you feel a little bit like you’ve devolved into a tiny dumb hamster. You feel like curling into a knot and burrowing into your own stomach.

But your friend shakes his head, “Yeah, I guess that’s all true enough, when you stop and think about it. But it’s been months, right? Since Lisa got pregnant and left at least. Who even cares about that now?”

You stop right there, right in your tracks. “She got pregnant? Was it your baby?” you ask feeling terribly concerned about this, although you can’t exactly say why. You’ve never had a baby, although you had that cucumber plant that you would sometimes jokingly refer to as your “baby doll plant.”

“No J,” he says, “It wasn’t. But don’t worry about that kid. It’s just another life to get old, to get tired, doomed to grow up and grieve like the rest of us.” He turns to you and his smile is all of a sudden wide and open like a cave that’s just been exploded in an archeological dig, “Except not anymore, right? Isn’t this such a relief?”

#

It’s once you and Ollie are sitting in the corner mart that the pangs start to hit you. Faces are sneaking into your thoughts, faces of people you haven’t seen for years – your parents, your older sister, a few former friends – but you can’t see them clearly, they’re like lepers shrouded in bandages and shedding skin, ears, eyelids. You sense that there’s more than a little heartbreak growing down there in your chest, but you also notice that these sandwiches are doing the trick to fill your gaping stomach, and you start to think that Ollie’s been making some good points. You wonder: would it even feel good to see those faces in person again? Wouldn’t that make the pangs worse? Would it matter at all or change anything? Also, you do owe a good amount of money in a few unsavory places around town, and there’s some money owed you for that truck you sold last year, and it would be a major hassle to chase that down. Also your job cleaning the Mariposa Breakfast Nook two nights a week isn’t the best, and you don’t even have a girl who left you to mourn over, not one who left you for the circus or pregnancy or anything. Once, like Jonah in the desert, you had that single cucumber plant with lush and curved green leaves and the first few buttons of fruit sprouting, and that was something you cared about, but it never even grew a full cucumber and then it died, which was your fault because you didn’t know that cucumbers won’t grow indoors. Now you’re thinking of all the mistakes you’ve made over the years, not just gardening ones but social ones, all the ways you needlessly and stupidly injured people by saying and doing the wrong things, and you think of all that time spent in the fruitless search for meaning about it all, and you consider the crushing loneliness. And that’s just your life. Consider all the wars, the famines, the diseases, and yeah, the heartbreaks that everybody everywhere gets to avoid now.

You conclude: don’t even spend another second on it.

So you’re starting to see the sound logic of this situation, and some of that peace-and-acceptance-with-the-end is making its way into your gut alongside that satiating sandwich. Your mind is clearing from all that tumult of earlier, like a cloud dispersing. Ollie is a man of some wisdom you realize.

“So what next?” you ask your friend, and at that moment you both see scrolling across the bottom of the TV screen in the corner mart that only a few blocks away they’re trying for the “Biggest Orgy for the End of the World, Everyone Invited!” and Ollie gives you a little eyebrow raise and smirk, and you can tell that you both feel like a guiding providential pinky is at least a little bit involved in this whole situation. This is when you feel a surge of happiness at these unexpected developments of the evening because for the first time in months you feel like you have a genuinely strong sense of direction in life. Plus, you’re feeling pretty good about the camaraderie you and Ollie are experiencing right now, kicking off the world together, like brothers.

#

When you leave the corner mart, you pass people milling and partying on the streets, and a few religious folks who are holding signs with messages for Jesus and Mohammed and whoever like “I love you!” and  “Save me!” and “Was meat okay?” and this is when you see Mildred, the woman with one leg on crutches who you know from the neighborhood. “Hey Mildred,” you say, “Are you ready for the end of the world?”

“Y’all are a bunch of criminals!” she yells and then spits, and the anger in her voice immediately busts your peace-and-acceptance high. “Destroying the world like that!” You have to admit, you’re a little shocked by her reaction. You’d have thought that a woman in her situation wouldn’t mind an end to the suffering she’s surely going through on a daily basis because of the difficulty of having a leg missing, so now all of a sudden you’re having second thoughts about the whole business — is it such a big deal to chase down that money? Is it really so hard to get a new plant?

“You telling me that after I’ve been through all I’ve been through and y’all are just gonna end it like this? Bunch of no good sons of bitches,” and this is pushing you back down into depression because Mildred’s not usually so angry, and maybe she’s even right.

“What have you been through?” Ollie jumps in and asks, which is a relief because you were frozen as a tree.

“Oh baby,” she says, shaking her head and lifting one crutch into the air to point at the two of you, “What’ve I been through? Oh I’ve been kidnapped, that’s for one. CIA took me, yes they did, and they did experiments, I won’t even tell you about those. But that’s how come I ain’t got a leg. Though on the other hand it’s also how come I can see so good.”

Ollie gives you this look like, “Her? She’s gonna make you feel bad now?” but he sees that you’re still underwater, so he turns back to Mildred and says, all light and knowing, “We’re heading to a massive orgy, the biggest ever, for the end of the world….come with us!” and you see that, thankfully, this induces a pretty good shift in her attitude.

“An end of the world orgy?” she asks, and a grin slowly spreads across her face. “Well I ain’t been to one of those in fifty odd years! Not since Myra and them!”

And, you have to admit, it makes you feel a little better now that she’s on board, but you’re still only back up to confused. Usually when you and Mildred talk, you just let her go, but since it’s the last day you ask, “Who’s Myra? And what do you mean you’ve been to an end of the world orgy before?”

Ollie meanwhile gives you this “really dude?” look, but Mildred doesn’t seem to mind the questions while you walk. “Oh baby,” she says, “Myra, she was the most beautiful woman I ever met. Always carrying round a big wooden staff with her. I tell you baby, down in New Mexico we had some times. Had our own baby together. And yeah baby, we been to some end of the world orgies, some beginning of the world orgies too.”

“What happened?” you ask.

“Oh you know baby, them CIA goons come after me, send their men with their mustaches and their leather shoes.”

You remember that this is why you love talking to Mildred, because she’s got these stories. You can feel the burden lifting. Ollie’s into Mildred’s talk now too, especially after the second mention of the CIA, and he asks, “Can you tell us anything about the experiments?”

Mildred sighs long, through at least four or five hops on her crutches, “Oh I seen them do everything. Make horses fly, turn people into vegetables, and yeah, end the world a time or two.” She nods to you. “You never know what’s gonna happen on the other side though,” she says, “ain’t everybody coming back, that’s for sure. I tell you what baby, I do miss me my Myra.”

Mildred’s head drops a little bit as she says this and you place a hand on one of her bouncing crutches. You can’t explain it, but you feel comforted by Mildred right now, and happy to provide her a little comfort with that hand on her crutch. You’re grateful she’s with you and Ollie on this adventure.

#

So the three of you on five legs get to the address where the orgy’s happening and without even a thought Ollie and Mildred strip down and jump in. Mildred tosses her crutches into the crowd like a healed woman in a revival tent. After a minute you lose sight of them, and you feel that it’s majorly hot in here, like way hotter than outside, like you’ve moved from the microwave into a volcano. Moans and sloshing and slapping noises abound. Sweaty body parts in all kinds of twisted positions are everywhere. Every fleshy hole is getting filled. You catch sight of one-legged Mildred in with five or six people, this look of utmost concentration on her face.  You can’t always see how they’re all fornicating, but you can’t deny that they are. You also see your buddy who’s in with a big group as well, pelvic-thrusting every which way like it’s the last day on Earth, which, after all, it is. But you’re starting to wonder if maybe he looks a little absent over there, back to that glazed zombie look he had in his eyes in that darkened room where you first found him.

For a while you stand there, not sure what to do, trying to act like you’re just casually seeking out your opportunity, but you’re starting to feel more and more withdrawn, even a little ashamed that you’re not into this whole business. Thoughts start cascading down to you from the suddenly reconstituted cloud of a more solid self. Like maybe the bunkers from Ollie’s computer screen are right to go underground, or maybe for some reason you don’t want to go out in a massive orgy, even if it is the Biggest Orgy for the etc. You put your hands over your eyes for a second and when you remove them again you notice this wildly cute lady standing kind of awkwardly on the other side of a moaning pile, her eyes shining like two green moons, and just the sight of her seriously gurgles the juices in your deuces. She’s looking around the room with close to the same expression of discomfort on her face that you’ve got, and you immediately feel that holy magnetic pull and then she sees you too and, thank God!, starts to walk in your direction just as you walk in hers.

“See any opportunities?” she asks, and, not believing someone so beautiful is even talking to you, you say “totally” and then remembering that it’s the last day and you don’t have anything to lose, you try to say something romantic which comes out, “we spend our whole lives misinterpreting our hearts, don’t we?” And she kind of shakes her head in small movements, like its malfunctioning in between the rungs of a narrow ladder, and says, “That’s really stupid.” And then she takes your hand.

 Sometime later, the two of you walk out of the Biggest Orgy for the End of the World onto the street where it’s finally quiet, what with most of the people inside fucking or praying or whatever else. The air has cooled off in these final moments of existence, and there’s an orange twirl in the purple sky cutting through the clouds above you. You feel refreshed now, like you’ve just woken up, like you’re almost an entirely new person. Peering into her green eyes, you catch this glimpse of the mystery inside her churning like a roly-poly in deep soil, and while you can only see its outer layers at the moment, you’re suddenly overwhelmed by the elating sense that if only you had access to all the energy and time in the universe, you would surely use it to watch this unfathomable mystery unfold. And when she looks back at you with those relaxed bright eyes, it feels like she’s seeing something you’d forgotten was there, something unmistakably yours but long dormant, like the drive you felt way back when you first got that cucumber plant and desired more than anything to keep it alive. “You’ve got a great forehead,” she says, and the two of you sigh in unison, sigh into each other and keep holding hands tight while your shoulders touch. Everything is pretty truly perfect now, and all you can do is keep holding hands for as long as humanly possible and hope to stave off the detonation of your hearts until the world ends, which is probably about another five minutes.

Sure enough, right on time like the trains in Italy, five minutes pass and the two of you watch in awe as the giant missiles fly just above the heights of the neighborhood houses and then start to dip down like sparks from a flame coming back to the fire, and you turn to stare deep into each other’s eyes, all the way down to the soul until you’re both completely lost in that deepest well of the universe which is the true mystery of one another, and your grips tighten so tight that you can’t even tell apart each other’s heartbeats through your palms, and then…KAPLOOEY!

#

You look up at the sky and it’s the fuzzing snowy gray of a dead signal. There was definitely an explosion, you’re sure of that, but aside from that fuzzing gray sky, nothing seems to be different. The houses are still there. The trees. Cars and mailboxes. You even hear some birds chirping. Now the sky looks like it’s fading back into focus as well. Suddenly, you remember back to what Mildred was saying about worlds ending and beginning, about the CIA. A mosquito buzzes at your ear and you try to slap it, but you can’t seem to raise your hands, or, it seems, even find them. Naturally, you think to ask your dream girl if she can help you. She’s your true love after all, the one who’s seen your soul, and you turn to look at her only to have your heart drop from your chest and break into a hundred pieces on the gray-lit street. Interlocked in the soft and delicate hand of your love is no longer your hand, but all of you, round and purple, a grape you figure, and a pretty sun-shriveled one at that. If you had to put a number on it, you’d say you’re about forty percent raisin. And you see too that her face has creased into that of an elderly woman with a few dark circles under her eyes and tired cheeks. She tosses you up into the air where you spin over yourself once and then begin to hurtle toward her open, wrinkled mouth, down into her red, elegant throat, in which you conjure a hope that this is maybe the tunnel to a new life. And even though you’re pretty positive nothing like this has ever happened to you before, even though all of this seems so perfectly new and unknown, something like a gong-chime warps in your mind and the thought arrives deep and true, “Oh boy, this again.”