Table of Contents
Part One
I Dawn
II The Radio Address
III The City
IV The Encounter
V The Church
VI Impending Gloom
VII Deus asconditus
Part Two
VIII The Flood
IX Sea of Uncertainty
X Great Plumes of Atmosphere
XI Sagrada Hostia
XII The Apocalypse
Well, what were your ten overcomings? And what
were your ten reconciliations and the ten truths
and the ten laughters with which your heart edified
itself? Weighing such matters and rocked by forty
thoughts, I am suddenly overcome by sleep, the
uncalled, the master of the virtues.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
The beings who live below,
say that God is on high,
while the angels in Heaven
say that God is on Earth.
- The Zohar
Part One
Chapter one
Dawn
Last night I went to Greg’s funeral.
It had been a long time since I last attended one. Greg was a childhood friend. He lived three houses from me. We attended the same schools until we graduated from high school. His sister, Margaret, was my girlfriend for a brief period during middle school. After that, I went on to graduate from a local college with a degree in computer technology. Greg opened a motorcycle repair shop. Motorcycles had been his fascination from the time he was a young boy. I remember how this hobby was always his parent’s torment. He was broadsided in a local intersection by a car that ran a red light. Greg was killed instantly.
He and I were altar boys from fifth to seventh grade. We volunteered to serve the noonday mass every chance we got. This was a good way of getting out of Ms. Cheevers’ chemistry class. When we weren’t serving mass, we would sit in the pews passing notes to the girls. Greg had perfected a technique whereby he would sleep until it was time to get up and take communion. He would later brag about how he didn’t wake up a minute too soon. He always told me, as he grew older, that for some strange reason he had the best dreams of his life sitting in that church.
I was lucky enough to grow up in a neighborhood where I kept four very good friends, including Greg. On summer nights we would sit outside my house and imagine ourselves twenty years later. After that we would up our antics to thirty and then forty. After that none of us could imagine what the passing years would resemble, so Greg would end this imaginary game by suggesting that it didn’t matter, because the world would have ended by then.
We were all different. I read a great deal, and thus, I was supposed to be the studious one. Greg, too, was fascinated with the stars and planets, a regular topic of discussion for all of us. One of us was a devout Catholic, which for a young man isn’t very difficult to be. Another was called the old man, because he was mature beyond his age. Another friend called himself an agnostic. To this day, I don’t think that any of us understood that word.
The night of the funeral I sat at home and stared at the walls. I found it hard to believe that Greg was gone and the world had not ended. I made myself a gin and tonic and walked out to the yard. It was a clear, warm night just like the ones we enjoyed so many years earlier. I looked up at the stars and tried to imagine any changes that had taken place since those days. Sure, time had passed, but the only changes that I could decipher, I had come to realize, had all taken place within me.
I went to bed.
Tossing and turning for what felt like the entire night, I began to dream what I suppose were many fragmented dreams, the kind that even though incoherent, keep us guessing about their meaning for days on end.
*********
Dawn.
The veil of night was slowly lifting.
The brown, artificial, early morning fog that like an overly protective mother had closely hugged the ground throughout the nighttime hours was now beginning to dissipate. The fog was a mixture of smoke, water vapor and dust, the color of confusion.
Fogilin Solotov was now able to see the devastation clearly. He saw the new world that he was to call his own for the first time since the overnight catastrophe. In the distance, the outline of the larger buildings and the dark shapes of the two, main, intersecting highways that were the heart and soul of this medium-size town, could be seen. However, not a great deal of detail regarding color, shape and texture could be made out, this, given that the city was blanketed by ominous dark clouds that remained very low in the morning sky.
Seeing the light of morning once again was a life-affirming relief for Fogilin. The previous night had been an excruciatingly long one, when sleep was supplanted by a nervous frenzy. He had spent the moonless night alone, walking about his once lively neighborhood searching for survivors.
Fogilin spent the night in a desperate and disheartening state of confusion that had completely rattled the very meaning of his existence. He walked around his neighborhood in an emotionally draining and hopeless circle. He was physically exhausted. Human company was now what he desired most.
The shock and disorientation of solitude was beginning to choke him. Around 5: 00 a. m. he returned to his home covered in sweat, fatigued. He walked slouching forward, like a humpback. Sharp stabs of pain began to make their way through his lower back. Sitting on his front steps, a flashlight in his right hand and tears streaming down his cheeks, he contemplated what had happened.
The fact that he was a grown man meant nothing to him now, for the death and destruction that he had just witnessed was more than any one man’s soul can bear. No adult could have ever prepared for what Fogilin now experienced.
Just a few hours earlier, Fogilin found himself in the quiet stillness of the darkest night he had hitherto seen. Fogilin began to think. Only now, to think meant to survive. He struggled to reflect on all those things, people and events in his life that he had once taken for granted. How he wished he could savor those ever-fleeting moments of his past once again.
But, in reality, these were only warm and pleasant memories now. Looking out into the surreal darkness, where the houses across the street should be, Fogilin realized that his life had changed. He witnessed the kind of quiet tranquility that is only afforded to country people. How long would this maddening loneliness last for? What he did know was that he sat alone in an abysmal darkness contemplating the source, man made or natural of the catastrophe that had changed his life.
Fogilin found himself totally alone for the first time in his life. The greatest torture that loneliness can inflict on humans is that it strips the vitality that is central to the passage of time, making it less real. The minutes were now catapulted into hours, and the hours into an incomprehensible and incongruous eternity.
Time had ceased to be a daily concern. Now his most pressing concern was this oppressive loneliness and existential confusion. He was like someone in a perpetual fugue state. Tired and mentally fatigue, he walked around his neighborhood like a dog searching for a suitable mat to sit on. His emotional condition resembled that of a small child in a doctor’s office, he knew not what to expect.
How much worse would things get? Fear was strangling him into inactivity. Not knowing what to do next, his mind began to drift back into the reality that was yesterday. His life was now confined to his vivid memories, as these grounded his life in a more pleasant objectivity. But the meaning and structure of his memories, too, was about to change. He could no longer tell if he was dead or alive, and what was real or mere illusion. Memories and self-identity began to take on a retroactive look that further removed him from the man that he had known himself to be.
The stifling loneliness remained his only certainty.
Fogilin kept a small battery operated transistor radio that he used to listen to the news and sports broadcasts, as he worked on his yard. His backyard was his refuge away from work, a mail clerk at the downtown law firm of Epstein and Wordsworth. After work he spent a great part of his free time outdoors, working on his lawn, sculpting his trees and shrubs and cultivating his flowers, which included roses, both red and white, tulips and some orchids that he had just recently acquired. This was in essence the very epicenter of his world. His mother’s house was now Fogilin’s cherished home. He went through great pains to keep her garden alive.
The peace and tranquility that he enjoyed as a recluse in his yard, in the middle of a modern city, was also to become an irrelevant and phantasmagoric thing of the past, a mere subjective and very private memory. The entire city had become a surreal and dreamlike setting, one best suited for science fiction, for its desolate peacefulness.
This quiet and seemingly tranquil appearance had now given way to a veil of death and solitude.
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