Chapter 14
The disillusionment of ethereal sleepiness washed over Aaron almost immediately. Vanessa had worn him out; he could almost feel his energy reserves rattling with vacancy. With immense purposed, his mind lumbered toward a celestial landscape of dreamy serenity. The bounds of reality were frayed; the humming of indistinct change through his body was simmered into silence. For the first time in a long while, he felt at peace; reveling in a sublime world of make-believe that felt as stark in his mind as reality itself.
In this intangible, dreamy panorama, Aaron found himself on a catamaran. He was floating in a river with other people, some he knew, some he didn’t. Old acquaintances from high school were there and a stray handful of people he’d known in passing during the transit between all the people he’d been. He was socially lubricated by some wine he’d snuck onboard inside an opaque water bottle. The gulps he took were hot and stale. It was afternoon and the tidal wave of impending drunkenness felt, at that particular moment, like velvet across his mind.
Aaron was, for some reason, trying to get to know the people around him. That was the first tip that something wasn’t quite right. His crippling boredom with most other people had somehow lain dormant within him. After a few minutes of strained and forceful attempts at meaningful conversation, Aaron (rather characteristically) grew tired of the surrounding idiots and their babbling, so he sat in the sun with his wine and his knock-off, imitation solace. He wasn’t in a river, actually, but it wasn’t an ocean, either. It was a bay, Aaron guessed. He and everyone on board were far enough from land that they lost sight of the shore, yet they were close enough to understand, without question, that it was still in reach.
In a moment of silence amid the mingling chatter, when the world was doused in a gasoline of yellow, mid-afternoon buttery luxury, Aaron leaned his head back and took a long drag from the bottle, pulling the liquid heaven into himself, staring up at the sun.
“It’s so weird,” a voice chirped beside him. He was about the same age as Aaron, same build, also by himself.
“What?” Aaron replied, genuinely curious, his voice husky with the remnants of a truly remarkable sip.
“The sun… and the earth. The sun is hollow. The earth is full. The sun is so mighty, so life giving, and yet, there’s nothing inside. It’s a great big ball of fire on the outside, and that’s it. It’s hollow, and the earth, where we are, it’s full of everything. Hollow, full. Hollow, full. Hollow, full.”
Aaron took another pull from the bottle, neglecting to offer the man any. He needed every last drop of the wine to process what he’d said. Aaron was sliding into the cozy state of drunkenness where everything feels deep and thought-provoking, even if it’s idiotic. His drunk mind was astounded while his final grips of cynical sobriety were setting off alarms that whatever this man was saying was probably just maniacal ranting.
And then, it happened.
There was, eerily, no sound. It felt as if the explosion would have been too deafening for human ears to hear, so instead of a blast, an otherworldly silence fell over the landscape around them. It was almost like Aaron’s mind couldn’t conceptualize what the end of time truly sounded like, so it muted it instead. (An afterthought, of course, as it all unfolded, he had no reason to believe it was anything other than bleak reality.)
Blackness seeped from the sun like ink squirts from a broken pen, floating and billowing through the sky and toward him with a speed fast enough to be cause for alarm, yet slow enough to make everyone on board the boat fidget, make them insecure, make them marinate in their terrifying realization that within a few moments, they would face a certain and undeniably painful death. A blotch of murkiness bleeding across the atmosphere from the sun, heading toward the planet, and they all watched in nervous laughter as it rounded off and landed somewhere behind the curve of the earth—on some other continent, in some other land, terrorizing some other people.
Aaron and the people on the boat thought they were safe. They thought it was over. They were too concerned with celebrating their own survival trumping the mortality of other, less fortunate souls that they didn’t notice the splatter of black death rocketing toward them in a menacing encore of the first horrifying act. The sun was like a tiny ball of lemon candy in the sky—bitter and angry—and Aaron couldn’t quite conceptualize the size of the shadow coming at him until it got closer and closer still, encompassing all light, painting everything everyone saw with the color of death, swallowing them without chewing.
Water. Darkness. Confusion. Weight. That insidious, idle wondering while one is gripped by death of how, exactly, they’re dying. Was it drowning? Was Aaron being crushed by the pressure of the blackness? Was it a fire stronger than the standard red flames? A military-grade incendiary force, which chars a person to a crisp before it ever hits the skin? Was he choking on ash? Was he simply in the process of being scared to death?
All that Aaron knew was gone, all the emotions he felt were overridden. It didn’t matter who he was, how many books he had read, or how many pairs of lips he kissed in his youth. It didn’t matter whether he had traversed foreign soils or locked himself in the artificial light of a basement all his life, because this was his life now. This creeping, seductive dance with death was all that Aaron could understand.
Aaron was pulled under the surface of the water with a force he knew he couldn’t survive, and the sloshing of fellow human desperation was weakening his hope bit by bit. He resigned himself to death, which now threw itself at him, over him, into him. Aaron was rendered useless by this black sickness spewed from the sun, and it was either taking him too long to die or this suffering was all part of the plan. He stopped fighting. It was over. Aaron lost, Death won. His mind was slipping away, into its own darkness.
And yet, somehow, it wasn’t. He wanted to fall asleep forever. He wanted to dissolve into the water. He wanted to solidify into the sand. And yet, there was that goddamned unwavering positivity — whispering caramel-colored and velveteen lies of his untapped grandeur into his waterlogged ears — keeping the blood flowing through him.
Aaron woke up on a cot in the air, under an indignant sun. He didn’t realize that he’d received the luxury of repose until he snapped out of it. Human beings never do. The legs of the cot on which he was splayed were jutting up from the murky water. He was on a cargo barge now. On one side, where Aaron was strangled back into life, he saw rows and rows of cots just like his — some lowered into the water, some rising out of it. Past a partition, people were sitting around in shocked, strained silence. He was afraid to look at the sun, almost as if staring at it would cause it to bite again and release another cloud of venom… almost as if everyone else on the barge with him didn’t have the exact same thought process and subsequent course of action. Aaron glanced tentatively upward to see a smug, golden ball of simmering fire hiding behind a cloud, as if nothing had happened.
Aaron joined the side of the barge with all the people. Everyone was soaked and sodden from the ordeal, cradled in thick, woolen blankets despite the tyrannical August heat. The only audible sounds were that of the barge, carrying them at a maddeningly lackadaisical speed away from the horror that had just befallen them, the water from the bay lapping innocuously along the sides. Aaron tore through the tarnished air with a hoarse whisper and a motion to the cots, “Are they all…?”
“Yeah,” croaked the man whose untoward comment about the sun launched this whole catastrophe. He didn’t realize it, though. He was oblivious to his own sense of blame, and Aaron somehow couldn’t decide whether that was reprehensible, or for the best. “The ones above the water are breathing. Just not awake, though. We decided as a group to preserve the bodies where they died, in the water.”
It made sense. It made too much disturbing sense. It made Aaron sick to be alive. He didn’t see the foggy faces he knew from his past lives. He didn’t really feel much of anything… and the lack of feeling spurred an avalanche of guilt, but that’s all. And then, more guilt, because guilt is a selfish notion, not unlike self-pity and idle complaining. Guilt roars though a person, serving no purpose other than a snide, glum gloat about how practically it can julienne-slice someone’s soul. Aaron stopped thinking about it—his head lodged squarely in the sand of the issue—and he swayed to numb shock instead.
Regardless of the fact that the world around him had ended, that Armageddon had just taken place and he had, idiotically enough, survived it, Aaron was still bored while he waited for whatever his life was becoming to happen. Aaron noticed in his boredom that the population of the barge was a ratio of 80 cots to 20 people. There was a solitary huddle of gray-skinned, dazed zombies breathing and silently crying. And, looking over the partition, he could see that most of the cots were sunk below the surface. How many of the people in the semi-circle where he sat essentially raised themselves from the dead? What odds did he have while he was baking in the odious glow of the serial killer sun? How lucky was he?
An old colleague of Aaron’s from his early days of learning the ropes in his father’s company walked over to him and broke the clamor in his thrashing mind. Aaron got up, hugged her for a long time, and they both fell into a shiver of silent sobbing. She pulled away and opened her mouth to speak, but before there were words, Aaron jolted awake in a fluorescent hell of beeping and buzzing that smelled like Lysol and loomed with death. He was throttled back into the torturous grip of reality, his skin saturated and glistening with sweat. He was alone in a hospital bed, at 9:27 a.m., wishing he could throw up. And yet, a part of him felt paralyzed, totally incapacitated, not having the strength or the resolve to let go and fall into his own sickness.