Hooray for Today!

The sun was just low enough in the sky for Jack to take a good long look without burning his eyes.

“It’s the perfect day for an apocalypse, “ Jack whispered to the stained, torn ceiling of  his old Nissan Sentra. He took a gaping bite out of the last Big Mac he would ever eat. The driver’s seat was cranked all the way back. From that position, it hardly felt to Jack as though he was in the junky pothole-ridden parking area behind his plastic-shingle duplex. From that position in his car, maybe he wasn’t still in the same stupid town he always grew up in. Maybe he was somewhere remarkable, like France, or Fiji, or the moon.

But he no longer wished to live in any of those places anymore. Jack knew that in just a few hours, those places wouldn’t exist anyway.

See, he’d done the math, and the numbers were telling him that at 7:28 tonight, a meteor was going to meet the earth precisely at the peak of Mount Will, a gradual hill outside the main town. It was a moment he’d been waiting for eagerly since he was a child; he had always dreamt of the day the globe would shatter into a gazillion little pebbles.

It had not always been a pleasant dream. The first night he ever saw the world end (November 16th, 1996, at the age of four), he woke to his own screams and cuddled up behind his mom before she could even open her eyes. Ever since then (and Jack could never figure out why the dreams started) he continued to have more and more detailed visions about the meteor which would kill him and everybody he knew. In some dreams, he got to walk about as world leaders discussed mitigating public outcry. In other dreams, he was side-by-side with astrophysicists and rocket scientists and nuclear guys who were all working like dogs to save the doomed Earth. But in most, he was just alone on the sidewalk looking straight at the meteor as it came down onto the Earth. Not with a friend, or a dog, or holding the hands of his parents.

Whenever he described the dreams to therapists, they went blue, which at first was an amusing reaction for young Jack. But after a while, this was no longer the response he desired.  He wanted to be congratulated for this extraordinary ability he possessed; he could see the future! Was it not incredible  what he had discovered? While other kids in school were learning how to tie their shoes still, Jack had already seen it all, he had seen every one of them die all at once. One teacher made the mistake of letting the kids draw on the back of their spelling tests when they were done. Boy, she never did that again. Not while she was Jack’s teacher.

Young Jack knew how it would happen, just not when. As he got older, his nights became less restful. In middle school, when everybody was asleep in the house, little Jack would wriggle around in bed, wondering if the end would come… now.

Now?

Maybe now?

Jack decided that if he lived to be a big kid, he would figure out when “it” was going to happen. He wouldn’t be able to stop it, but Jack couldn’t go on not knowing.

It helped that Jack always had a natural talent for numbers and computers. When he graduated from UPenn with his degree in astrophysics, his whole family was teetering on the edges of their seats to see what his next great move would be.

His post-grad plan was… unexpected. He took on a 25-hour-a-week customer service job at a credit card company. All he needed, he would always say, was enough time to conduct his research. All he needed was to be alone. So the job was enough for rent and food and electric. And of course, equipment. Nothing fancy. But without the proper equipment, and all of that free time, he would’ve never been able to crack this one.

But he had. Jack had checked and triple checked a hundred times over. Every time he ran the numbers, he came to the same time: today at 7:28 PM.

And now here it is!

The last day on Earth!

Jack felt happy. He felt good. But he didn’t feel done. Not quite yet.

Now, in 2024, he strokes his brown-gingery beard, rife with Big Mac crumbs. Jack checks his Timex watch.

“Morons.” Jack’s voice was like a goat’s, if the goat couldn’t swallow.

It was already 6:24, just over an hour left until show-time. If the couple in the apartment above him didn’t hurry up, they were going to miss it. This wasn’t the type of event Jack wanted to attend alone.

Stupid hipsters, don’t they have any understanding for a schedule? Jack was great at scheduling, which most people suck at. He had such an acute sense of schedule, after all, that he knew the exact moment when the human race would perish.

Tick, tick, tick. Time was running out. Jack would have to leave without them if he was going to make it to Mount Will for the big finale.

“Moron hipsters.” Neither of his upstairs neighbors had jobs. They never left the apartment, except for a walk on Mount Will every day to get some exercise. Other than that, they just smoked pot upstairs and sometimes Jack would hear them talking trash about Jeff Bezos through the plaster. He hated their dumb voices, and couldn’t believe they would leave this life having accomplished so little. But Jack didn’t really have any other friends to watch the end of the world with, and he figured bad company was better than no company at all.

Jack picked up his iPhone and killed some digital zombies for a minute and a half.

At 6:27, the door to the upstairs apartment swung open and two early-twenty-somethings hopped jauntily down the creaky balcony stairs. They got into their blue Prius, which sat across from Jack in the lot. Jack watched them in his periphery, making sure to mindlessly tap his phone screen. Jack was sure that they wouldn’t notice him anyways. In several respects, Jack was very unnoticeable. He knew it.

The Prius vrrred off quietly. Jack gave them a good two minutes’ head-start.

…

It was 7:15. Just over ten minutes until the grand salami.

On one side of Mount Will, a glistening ocean. The other side was dark forest. Gnarled scrub pines, jagged catbriar, lots of swamp oak.  Jack liked to come up here as a kid and gaze into the spaces between the trees.

In days prior, he had studied the couples’ route up the hill, and had already picked out the perfect rhododendron bush to hide in. Just a few yards behind the bench atop the summit. The bench was a memorial to some guy and his dog. The couple always sat there to look out over the sunset.

When Jack arrived at the parking lot for Mount Will, he first made sure the Prius was there (it was) and then he drove about a mile further down the winding road, to a trailhead which brought Jack up the back of the hill. It was a shorter way. Marching through the bristly vegetation, he looked at every little bug, squirrel, chipmunk with forlorn eyes. He beat the couple to the summit, as expected. Now, all there was to do was wait. He leaned against the spindly trunk of the rhododendron bush, in a puddle of mud. He figured that he didn’t care about being dirty anymore.

“Nggghhhh” moaned Jack, as he splished and splashed his hand about in the roots behind him.

Then there was a murmer, about thirty feet off. Growing closer, he heard the man’s stupid  hipster voice, lecturing on and on about Tame Impala’s genius.

“God, they’re so insufferable.” Jack softly hissed. He wished to himself that he had cooler friends. He adjusted his butt in the mud so that he would be able to see their faces as the meteor came in from the west.

It was 7:25.

“Three minutes left until we’re all ash!” Jack thought. His heart pounded, his

mouth frothed for the gratification of knowing that yes, he had known everybody else would die, and they were all just walking around down in the town like today was some normal ordinary day.

Obviously, it wasn’t!

  He wondered if other scientists had caught on. What were the feds doing? He was surprised they had managed to keep the media in the dark.

His plan was this: he’d wait until 7:27 when the two of them gave him some sort of cue, like “holy shit” or, “Oh my god” and then he would come out of the rhododendron bush. He would say something dramatic and cool like, “Beautiful, isn’t it?” and then the meteor would come in and wipe the three of them out. They’d share one final moment of eye contact, and Jack and his friends would die. To him, this was a very good plan. The puddle of mud rippled around Jack as he got more and more excited for the big moment.

Jack was awoken from his teeth-chattering excitement by the hipster woman’s strange voice. She sounded like her heart had been stolen out from under her.

“For the final time, Chuck, I have some really bad memories mixed up with Tame Impala and my ex. I don’t want to listen to it, Chuck.”

“That’s not fair, Olivia! Kevin Parker is one of like, two guys I actually give a shit about. Kevin Parker and Jack White.”

“Guess what Chuck, I don’t give a shit about the White Stripes either!”

“Babe… babe…. That really… th-th-that hurts my f-f-f-eelings.”

Chuck let out a gross little whimper complemented by a splattering of saliva and snot. From his mud-seat, Jack could only see Olivia’s face. She was looking at Chuck like he was completely worthless.

“Chuck… Chuck, I don’t think this is going well.”

“What isn’t?”

“Like… oh god… I don’t want to say it.”

“Just say it. Please please please just say it.”

“I don’t want to.”

“So do you just hate me now?”

From the bushes, Jack saw Olivia shake her head.

“Well, what should we do?” Chuck sort of barked this like a dog.

Olivia put her face down in her hands and said, “Please, yell at me!”

Silence. Jack watched Chuck get up out of his seat. Chuck looked exhausted, suddenly.

“I don’t want to.”

Jack wondered if this was how couples often talked to each other. He’d never had a girlfriend, or a boyfriend, or many friends in general.

Chuck and Olivia hung in the silence. Finally, Olivia whispered in a voice Jack could barely hear, “Can you take me to my mom’s? We’ll… we’ll f-figure this out tomorrow.”

The two of them rose and glumly started back down Mount Will, back to the parking lot. It was now dark. Jack leaned back onto the roots of the rhododendron. He checked his watch.

It was 7:31. He’d been wrong.

“Thank god”, Jack muttered. He slowly picked himself up and plopped his muddy rump on the bench.

Jack watched the final glimpses of sun bid him farewell from the west.