Kingdom come

Nadyenka had been dreaming. For a moment she lay trying to reconstruct the dream, but the details had fled, the images suddenly gone as though her brain had turned away for a moment and then turned back to find them mislaid. She retained only the impression, like a nauseous aftershock. But Nadyenka was certain she had witnessed something gigantic and awful—something in which she was partly complicit and partly helpless to act otherwise.

What Nadyenka did hear was Hitch MacAbee in the flophouse bathroom across from where she lay. He was singing. The idea of MacAbee suddenly made Nadyenka’s stomach lurch. She strained up to look around the ill-appointed hotel room, its orange and brown rustic wallpaper and its artwork, the latter of which looked like another wallpaper pattern, simply framed.

“I miss, Daniel,” Nadyenka said en passant as she rose. She wasn’t listening to herself at this time.

She grabbed her purse, resurveying the room for anything that belonged to her—still half-somnolent, not usefully processing what she was doing nor toward what end. When she took hold of the doorknob it was cold. Suddenly Nadyenka smelled a smell that reminded her of Ft. Worth, her home, the brewery, her former life and livelihood. What she smelled, in fact, was old spilled beer in the hallway, unrelated to her situation but by random inference. Yet all of a sudden meaning-streams were racing up from of the void of sleep and becoming audible, becoming objects.

Wait, she thought.

Daniel Daniel?

...My Daniel?

This latter construction made Nadyenka smile.

My Daniel.

She nodded.

“Yes.”

She turned the knob and padded out like a burglar and hurried downstairs, leaving the hard bed unmade behind her, the room unpaid-for, a persecuted contralto in the bathroom bawling “You Make Me Love You” like a field-holler as he shaved—loungy and ragged.

As Nadyenka scanned the street her eyes kept returning to the same vehicle, hugging the curb about halfway down the block before what seemed to be an inactive bus terminal. She finally realized why it kept arresting her attention. She rubbed sleep away: It was a cab and it contained a driver. And it was pink.

As Nadyenka crossed the street she noticed a number of classic paintings reprinted in small over the nose of the cab, all different renderings of the “Rape of Europa,” in fact: Titian, Coypel, Lorrain, Sirani, Cesari, Veronese, the Berlin Painter and others. She did not recognize any of them, specifically. She did acknowledge them as classier intimations of forced bestiality.

“Huh,” Nadyenka critiqued.

When she arrived beside his open window, the cabby was reading a newspaper that lay on his lap, slowly turning a toothpick in his mouth as he did so. Finally he looked up. His complexion was ashy and gaunt, eyes smoldering white-blue.

“Hello, Miss,” said Nate DePaul, for that was the cabby’s name. “Can help you with something?”

There was a complex stiffness in the question, not quite a threat, not quite a growl, somewhere a fond wink hidden within. Nadyenka ignored whatever it was.

“Hi,” she said. “Are you taking fares today?”

Nate DePaul smiled, his manner easing. “Yes.”

Nadyenka was going to speak again, but she stopped.

“Why?” she said.

Nate DePaul tapped the livery ID that hung beside the driver side vent in his dashboard.

“My job,” he said.

Nadyenka looked around. “Is anybody out?”

“Not right now,” said the older man.

“Is anyone going to be out?”

Nate DePaul laughed. “Probably not today.”

He held up his newspaper. The above-the-fold color photograph pictured a smiling gentleman, in aspect something like the front end of a Clydesdale with the large face of a man and two enormous arms, matted in spiny fur: recognizable instantly as Satan. In startlingly delicate human hands the Fiend brandished a plaque that had an oversized ceremonial key affixed to it. The city of Las Vegas hunkered in daylight behind him as he held forth his honorarium, a bald official posing beside him like a power-suited munchkin.

“People are scared—” said Nate DePaul, setting the paper aside again.

“Yes,” Nadyenka said.

“Are you scared?” said Nate DePaul.

He seemed to be scrutinizing her over his glasses again, as though something rested upon her answer.

“I hadn’t thought about it,” Nadyenka said. “I guess not.”

Nate DePaul laughed again, the same loose, whistling and crackling sound, as though from antique depths.

“Okay,” he said. “Tell me this: how do you like the cab?”

Nadyenka surveyed the flamboyant automobile again. She turned back to Nate DePaul quickly. She noticed on the seat beside him a slim, brightly-bound paperback entitled: Remarks on Colour. She squinted at the old face.

“Why are you out here if nobody needs a ride?” she said.

Nate smiled, his eyes going further away, lines drawing deeper in the plastic topography of his face.

“It’s best to keep doing what you do, I feel.”

Nadyenka nodded.

“Huh.” Her critique went on.

“Do you need a ride?”

Nadyenka glanced at the dilapidated bus terminal.

“Are the buses running?”

“Not today.”

“Can you drive me to Ft. Worth?”

Nate DePaul laughed again, pulling the reading glasses from his nose.

“That I cannot. Not supposed to leave town.”

“Are flights running?”

Nate DePaul shook his head.

“No new take-offs....” he said. He looked at his watch. “As of six this morning.”

Nadyenka frowned.

“You got people going up into heaven,” Nate continued. “People turning into other objects. So what happens if the pilot gets called up into the other world while the plane’s in the air? Or all of a sudden a stewardess turns into a polar bear? Now you got a polar bear flying the plane.”

Nadyenka laughed.

“Is there an Amtrak here?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Is it close?”

“Pretty close.”

“Is it running?”

“Was this morning. But you’re gonna spend three days on a train getting all the way to Ft. Worth,” Nate said. “World might be over by then.”

Nadyenka blinked several times. Suddenly she was seeing Daniel Murrain’s birthday, his last one, his thirty-third: Depressed in his fuzzy red recliner before the television, cupcake crumbs over his undershirt, blue icing smudges about the snoring mouth—his penis having crept into the open through his boxer-shorts like a spy.

“Guess I should keep doing what I do,” Nadyenka said.

“Alright, then,” said Nate DePaul, taking his book off the passenger seat and tossing it in back with his paper. “Hop in.”

They drove a few blocks east, a few south. The sidewalks were bare, the bright forty-five degree day unenjoyed by nervous Midwesterners. As she and Nate DePaul sat before a traffic signal, Nadyenka noticed a brewpub beside them on the ground floor of an old storehouse. Every patron visible to Nadyenka through the windows was staring at the television above the bar. On the huge screen she saw a waist-up picture of Satan, enormous and affable, sitting with legs crossed in a director’s chair. He wore chinos and red leather driving mocs. A flimsy backdrop and faux palm waited behind him: the unmistakable trappings of a press junket.

“Nate,” Nadyenka said.

“Ma’am,” said Nate DePaul.

Nadyenka was looking up between the buildings now, at the high, faint overcast, its texture just discernable—a blistering white halo where the sun hid.

“Do you believe in magic?”

Nate thought.

“No,” he said.

“You don’t?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I believe in miracles,” he said.

“Miracles...”

“Yes.”

Nate grinned as they pulled up to the Amtrak taxi-stand and stopped gently, the daylight fanning over the mirrory surface of the cab’s new finish—visible from a thousand feet up, Nate imagined, as a bright pink blot.

“The unexpected unexpected,” said Nate DePaul.

Nadyenka nodded, quiet. Beneath them trains departed and arrived, concussing the earth.

The thought of home nearly made MacAbee giggle. The prospect of returning to his former life without his former confusion and nausea was unprecedented. He thought of Lucas d’Estime, who had died for him to become enlightened. This was unfortunate, but seen clearly there was no doubt what had happened was an extension of Lucas’ own morality. It was nothing Lucas hadn’t chosen through years of neglecting his wife and otherwise inter-complicating his moral commitments. As he rinsed the razor, tapping it in the sink, MacAbee thought of Jacqueline, the woman who had raped him. He splashed his face and dotted his mis-strokes with tissue, discovering a fondness in himself even for the sex offender in his new warm, dense sanity, whose yellow glow united them both in a maxim: That whatever had happened had happened, time and the universe had absorbed and accommodated the events, that Jacqueline was, as he had been, the victim of an ill-organized cosmos, implacable to reason or unreason. Like himself, a sufferer. MacAbee felt benign pity for all things.

He combed his hair, put his pants and undershirt back on and filled the sink with water, working in a good deal of handsoap, then immersing his blue polyester socks. When he came out and found Nadyenka and Nadyenka’s possessions gone, MacAbee only sighed. Sanity held him like a ballast.

“No problem,” he said. “I’m fine.”

MacAbee donned his poncho, paid, and left the hotel, for the sooner he got outside, he felt, the sooner his new life, life without debilitating angst, would commence. Every few steps MacAbee reminded himself internally that he was “fine,” until finally he had paid and departed and was standing out on the cool January sidewalk. Barefoot.

**
The bus station was deserted—the interior dim, a couple office lights still on in a hallway behind the far counter, the switch on the coffee machine glowing orange in the near-darkness like an eye, baking an empty pot. A white plastic chain looped again and again around the handles of each pair of doubledoors. MacAbee turned away, still priming himself with internal encouragements.

I’m fine I’m fine I’m fine.

The street was empty, the morning sky turning an almost perfect white. He now noticed two windows were out in the façade of his hotel, dark as eye sockets. MacAbee hurried out from under their sight. He decided to search out transportation. The first stalled vehicle he approached sat just off center of the narrow downtown road. He came up slowly, crouching as though the thing might be unexpectedly inhabited. It was a recent model sedan, midsize, with a gold exterior and a taupe leather interior, well-preserved. MacAbee craned in the open window and found the keys hanging. Clearing his throat, he cracked the door and got in.

A key-turn elicited nothing but a sickening “n-qoit” from the engine, its battery gone. Neither did the gas gauge rise for, left running with headlights on, the car would have to run out of fuel before the battery began to drain. MacAbee got out. He went to the next abandoned vehicle, about sixty feet away. This was an older hatchback, paint peeling away from rust spots like delicate cinnamon bark, seats spitting yellow foam through cracks in the nylon. The second time MacAbee turned its key, the vehicle gurgled alive, trembling up to an idle. MacAbee was pleased by this for only an instant before the wrongness of grand theft auto banged awake in his conscience. The car was somebody’s property; he didn’t know whether they would be reentering the mortal expanse or not; he couldn’t properly know they’d ever left. And for a moment he sat in the trembling car, dithering.

About the time MacAbee decided the unprecedented extremity of his situation probably liberated him to extreme moral interpretations, MacAbee noticed a small banded cobra resting in the passenger’s seat. The snake was currently unspooling itself in a restless motion, the frenzied intent of which was difficult to ascertain. MacAbee’s throat caught hold of a scream, and he emitted instead a kind of asthmatic squeak. Receiving the distinct impression that this snake considered itself to be the owner of the vehicle, MacAbee rolled out onto the pavement, just as the juvenile cobra’s black cowl was flaring out demonically. MacAbee had hardly gotten the door closed again before the inside of the car window was blasted with a thumb-in-hose stream of venom.

MacAbee dusted himself off, cursing guiltily as he bustled away from the idling vehicle. Consider the issue of tribulatory property rights...tabled.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Fine.”

When MacAbee looked up again, he was back in front of his hotel. The scene remained quiet, eerie, unknowable The hulking, eyeless building presided like a skull, an all-seeing ghost. It saw him.

It occurred to MacAbee that this was not a sane idea. Wheeling, he scrambled across to a bank of payphones outside the defunct bus terminal, and without a pause removed his wallet and took out his credit card. He dialed his Las Vegas home. Seven rings yielded the answering machine.

MacAbee strained not to leave a desperate or schizophrenic-sounding plea.

“Rita...” he said. “I...You...”

There MacAbee’s intended message faltered, so he hung up. Immediately he dialed his mother-in-law. He waited. Twenty-two rings. He heard the receiver click up. He heard breathing and open-air noise on the other end.

“Rita?” he said.

“...Allo?”

MacAbee smacked the phone back down with a bellow of berserk, unconsidered force, as in the face of an impending foe. And, ruined with weather and direct sunlight for years immemorial, the black handset’s earpiece exploded on the hook, spraying him with hard plastic. Nausea shook MacAbee down like a sob. He felt his previous enlightenment dimming down in underserved chaos. The collective horror of the last 41 confused years began to rack and rollick over his consciousness anew—

MacAbee felt nausea.

He noticed a pink taxi cab approaching now, a long-faced middle age man behind the wheel. For some reason MacAbee experienced an almost irresistible need to flee the oncoming sight. But he resisted it. And before he could generate another potential reaction the cab had stopped a few feet away and the driver was exiting. MacAbee watched with sudden fascination as the cab driver continued toward him, a black rubber flashlight or truncheon bobbing on his right hip. The man was pulling a ball cap over his stiff, dusty-looking hair. Everything about the man was dusty and unassuming, in fact, except the hat, which showed in glittering gold stitch the blazon:
SECRET AGENT
MacAbee tried not to stare at the phantasmagorical words across the ball cap the way one tries not to stare at a birth defect on a stranger. He winced.

“Sir,” said Nate DePaul, when he stood very close to MacAbee.

“Hi,” said MacAbee.

“Is there something I can help you with?”

MacAbee had to think about the question.

“What do you mean?”

Nate DePaul removed his hat slightly to itch his scalp and replaced it.

“Where are your shoes?” he said.

“They wouldn’t let me back in my room,” MacAbee said.

Nate nodded. “They?”

“The...”

MacAbee squirmed. He felt slick anxiety sweat erupt all down his back.

“The desk people,” he said.

“The desk people.”

MacAbee was quiet a moment. Finally, with an old sigh, he gave up not seeming crazy.

“Yes.”

“What’s you’re name?” he said.

“Hitch,” said MacAbee.

Nate laughed, a loud, cracking sound, like breakers on icefront.

“Hitch?”

“Yes,” MacAbee said quietly.

“Well tell me this, Hitch,” said Nate DePaul. “What do you think of my cab?”
Nate DePaul’s body swiveled like a gate to re-showcase the pink apparition behind him. The vehicle was pristinely maintained, its finish buttery. MacAbee looked upon the scenes of goddess and amorous bull that made a grid over the hood. His eyes made little jerking movements. The colors mingled, unmingled and flared.

“—Why?” was what he came up with.

Nate DePaul winked.

“Exactly.”

MacAbee fought the desire to run away.

“How would you describe the paint-job?” said Nate DePaul. “I’m curious.”

MacAbee looked at the cab again. He blinked several times until he was sure he didn’t know the desired answer.

“All I need is gas and a jump,” he blurted.

“All you need?” said Nate DePaul.

MacAbee blinked. “Well...Not all all.”

“Maybe, I can help,” Nate said.

MacAbee nodded. “Maybe.”

The black rubber cylinder clicked free into Nate DePaul’s hand at this time and suddenly he was bringing it up to MacAbee’s chest, as though applying a balm. MacAbee saw annealed copper diodes on the business end of the device. It was not a flashlight. Instinctively MacAbee leaned away. He knew he could not run.

“Are you real cab driver?” he squeaked as though without oxygen.

Nate DePaul was smiling, avuncular, his face full of years, a temple of understanding.

“We can always deal with reality later on—”

MacAbee felt the icy current wiggle through his brain stem. He felt his toes convulse.

“Okay,” he meant to say.

“Pllkghhhhh—” he said.

MacAbee’s feet, he discovered, were welded in place, and when he finally went to step away from the insult, his whole body tipped backward as though on a hinge. He fell. The last thing MacAbee saw as his body became utterly flatly numbly in contact with the sidewalk was the decapitated pay phone handset clacking, dangling above him like a pocketwatch, as blackness oceaned over, blotting the universe—the tall lettering of the

ideogram hanging up in the dark, like a star of light in chaotic void before winking away. MacAbee could have sworn he heard the angry young cobra give a beep-beep as they passed its shabby Civic, but he would have been unconscious at this time.

He dreamt himself a blue frog.
At this time Nadyenka Czillicz’s former live-in, Daniel Murrain, was on I-10 in southwest New Mexico, en route to Phoenix, and his sister, Caesarea. It was Dan’s routine to petition Caesarea for psychological support whenever his life fell apart. Last time, she had lived in Detroit, when at twenty-eight Daniel impregnated a college sophomore by the name of Nisha Ramprakesh. Caesarea let Daniel stay in her basement for a month, while over the phone Daniel cajoled Nisha’s parents and the secretaries of an impassive ethics panel for clemency. In the end, the panel directed gouts of university funds to the nativity, pre- and post-. Then they fired Daniel quietly and congenially. Daniel hadn’t sought full-time work since. He had a daughter somewhere in San Diego by the name of Durga.

Currently Daniel was fleeing Ft. Worth. Thus far he’d made good time. But in a valley called Pava Apacible Daniel came upon a long column of unmoving traffic. It stretched from the opening bend of Pava Apacible to its far vanishing point. Nothing had budged for a long time, it seemed, and people were standing between vehicles with their cars off, leaning on hoods, fanning, chatting. The air above the cars wobbled in the sun as Daniel slowed to a stop. He was about to witness, from quite a ways off, the first domestic nuclear explosion in several decades.

Dan bit his lip.

“Alright God,” he said, “You nonexistent fuck....”

Then something shuddered. Something rumbled. And the plastic and aluminum components of Daniel’s hatchback started to squeak and click as the ground began swaying in earnest. Dan watched as the assembly of displaced drivers before him turned to a mass of shrieking, stumbling, diving and cursing. He noticed after a moment that his own car had filled with an irritatingly shrill sound. He realized it was his own voice. In the rocking and squealing and unleashed bedlam Daniel was screaming like he’d jumped out a window. Everything was so loud for a moment you had to shut your eyes.

Then it was quiet again. A soft wind passed over and died. Daniel tried to catch his breath. He spat.

“Bullshit,” he said.

But shortly everyone had returned to their vehicles. And almost imperceptibly the cars began to trudge forward.

What happened in New Mexico was that four members of the Baleful Horde—Gerry, Jason, Ulf and Tarquod—decided that they wanted to know what it was like to stand beside a nuclear explosion. And so they had looted and whored their way down to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. There was a brief fracas at the gates, whereupon Gerry and Tarquod sustained main-mass bullet wounds from the M4 of a blue-suited marine—who in the hand-to-hand exchange that preceded his death bent Jason’s arm back on itself, and it now hung loose, swinging at the elbow with ratcheting fluid sounds. Ulf became excited and erratic during the fray and consumed several feet of steel fencing. In a moment the demonic quartet had activated the command equipment via a short, virginal hostage named Matt.

Gerry got on top to straddle the nose of the warhead, howling with stupid laughter. Jason hung from a catwalk. When Ulf and Tarquod had turned their respective keys, they ran out onto the launch floor.

“Thanks Matt,” Tarquod called back.

But Matt was crying. The test siren sounded. The Horde members giggled, Tarquod and Ulf holding hands. Matt was dialing his mother. There was no launch—just the blast.

“Again!” he wailed—

As for Ulf and Tarquod, who’d held hands, they landed about two hundred and fifty miles apart in Texas. Coming down in a Houston suburb, Ulf crashed through a high-rise, bursting fifty floors before he arrived in the lowest basement, at which point he smacked his head on a vault, and would be unconscious a week. Tarquod fared better, lighting in the parking lot of the macrobiotic kitchen that had become the seat of regional government in downtown Ft. Worth. Tarquod’s coming was considered a fortuitous omen, a favorable gesture on behalf of the Evil One, and Tarquod was feted with a vegetarian fete, which he found somewhat distasteful, but obliged.

In his own arc, the scourge called Jason—much-beloved inventor of the Unreachable Back Pimple, among other natural shocks—reached the very cusp of the Thermosphere, and for one silent moment achieved a view of the spangled blackness more poignant than is ever possible within Earth’s canopy. It had never occurred to Jason to look outward from the planet, as such, to appreciate the work of gargantuan depth and absurdity that presides over it. Now the sight made Jason heartsick in a way he hadn’t been in a long time, and when he plashed down in the Atlantic off southeastern Brazil it was with a despairing kind of sigh.

Jason dragged himself onto shore near Rio de Janeiro and huddled into a cathedral there, beneath that watchful colossus, Cristo Redentor. He sat among the empty pews. And waited.

Of course this medium nuclear incident had a catastrophic effect on nearby towns, blowing through them with a four hundred mile an hour blast wind, then turning them to cinder in a storm of heat, x-rays and both visible and invisible light. Several minor earthquakes were sprung loose by the event, and there was substantial damage to the municipally-regulated adobe architecture in Santa Fe. Anyone outdoors or near a window there suffered an instant sunburn on all exposed surfaces.

Still, the blast was a kind of Godsend.
Though the Manhattan Project is what made Los Alamos famous, somewhat less well-known is the large particle accelerator housed there. What a particle accelerator does is so simple that it only takes a bit of imagination and artificial credulity to understand.

A subatomic particle, in short, is run around an electrified magnetic track until it gets up near the speed of light and then is slammed into another particle going the opposite way. When this happens the particle explodes into a jellied mass of subatomic crud, remaining in that state for about a quadrillionth of a second. What’s curious is that during this fraction of an instant a fireball develops—microscopic but several million times the heat of our sun—and in the center of this fireball, it has been theorized, a microscopic black hole. On the day of the Horde members’ visit, the physicists at Los Alamos were having their girlfriends in, playing drunkenly with the multi-billion dollar device, and nearly proved this theory in a catastrophic manner.

There was no question but that physicists and others of their type were offended, not to say existentially horrified, by the random lapses in physical laws that were now customary. They’d become malcontents, drinking on the job, prank-dialing grant committees, setting their own robots into unspeakable acts with each other and worse. Now, well-drunk on lite beer, these men were racing protons, tracking the outcomes by quintillionths of a second. At one point, unknown to those assembled, a certain particle happened to achieve and very nearly exceeded the Speed of Light. If this had occurred, of course, Einsteinian physics would have been debunked, the Four Universal Forces likely collapsed, and the Cosmos taken on a suddenly bizarre and inhospitable character. The reason it did not occur was that, a sextillionth of a second before it could, this whistling proton encountered another proton whistling the opposite direction.

In the conflagration that resulted, a black hole of unprecedented stability was birthed and immediately began readying itself to open up and consume several hundred light-years of Milky Way. This did not happen because—a septillionth of a second before it could—a group of thrill-seeking supernatural beings set off a nuclear device that wiped out the physicists and their accelerator and the army base that employed them and quite a lot of municipally-regulated adobe architecture.

There was the hermaphrodite celebrity-wedding. There was the pterodactyl volery that had taken up residence in and around the Crossroads of the World at Sunset Blvd and Las Palmas. There were the Critic’s Circle laureates who’d committed suicide ensemble after an advanced screening of something called “Satanic Overthrow.”

Nadyenka remembered the world was ending.

“I have no reason to go home,” she said to herself, to the nearby cosmos, the words falling out absently. And as though from a different part of her brain, an alter-existence—in an older version of her own voice—someone answered.

“Same boat.”

Nadyenka looked up coming back to the immediate sights and sounds around her. Sitting across the waiting room aisle was an old lady with luminous white hair, otherwise rather troll-like.

“My Evangeline’s run-off with a demon,” said Liza, for that was the old woman’s name.

“Really?” Nadyenka said with half-interest.

“Yes, really.” Liza held forth a photograph of a hunkering, unlit building with an aluminum exterior, like a hostile-looking furniture mill. “They live in an abattoir.”

Nadyenka shifted in her seat, setting the magazine aside.

“Huh.”

“‘He needs me, mamma. He needs me,’ she says, like it’s some kind of penance. I don’t understand it.”

“Right.”

Nadyenka blinked.

“Of course—” she was about to say.

Then a few people around them gasped. Someone stood up, transfixed.

“Now that,” Liza said, sitting back pointing over Nadyenka’s shoulder, “would be worth leaving business school.”

What Nadyenka saw when she turned was the waiting room television suspended above the counter on a black aluminum arm. There was a face on the screen Nadyenka didn’t recognize, a slim, muscular man in a fine blue suit traversing a sidewalk, hounded noisily by reporters and camerapeople. Scads of microphones in different shapes and combinations jutted at the bottom of the image—paparazzi gear. The man shaded his face.

“Jim—” called an unseen provocateur, as flashbulbs bombed over the gentleman, flicking off the mirrory limo. “Who was that fat chick you were with?”

Naïve, the Antichrist stopped.

“...I’m sorry?”

Flashbulbs continued to blitz the confused person. The unseen paparazzo gave a honking, monosyllabic laugh.

“Just keeping you in frame, sir.”

The digital ticker tape across the base of the screen identified the unknown celebrity: “Jim Johns, Antichrist.” Las Vegas Blvd was the location given. Realization dawned over Jim John’s face, just as it was beginning to dawn on Nadyenka 1400 miles away in Kansas City.

“Oh—” said Jim Johns and ducked quickly into his limo.

Photographs continued, frantic as before, bleating off the limo’s clean finish, and just as the Headline News anchoress was picking the story back up in the studio, the Antichrist’s window slid down, and the remote image craned in again greedily. The meek face in the vehicle’s interior was barely visible and only for an instant before the window reclosed, but something had obviously plinked to the ground before the limousine squealed off. The item was variously identified among rabbling bystanders, and then only the very first instant—half a dozen frames—of a white-hot explosion was transmitted before the newscast finally did return to the studio. A brassy haired forty-something began thanking her entertainment reporter for the remote—one of the journalists who had almost certainly just been immolated by a mass incendiary device—

“What a dreamboat,” cooed Liza in the train station background.

Nadyenka swallowed. She heard trains. She heard hoots and murmurs in doomed waiting areas below the Earth.

“Totally—”
Here was Nadyenka’s dream.

She was moving through a nothing, gliding along in empty space, and eventually she realized it was outer space, as though she’d received a firm push in the absence of gravity. Nadyenka noticed how fast she was going, however, as she moved out of the Solar System, her home star system, and then on out of her home galaxy, the Milky Way. In a short time, in fact, Nadyenka noticed she had achieved an overview of the Local Galaxy Cluster, in which her home galaxy figured prominently; then her native Virgo Supercluster, a cluster of clusters, in which her native Local Cluster did not figure prominently. And so the Universe continued organizing itself before her, aggregates of aggregates of aggregate aggregates, till she had achieved a height at which the whole lot could be viewed at once.

Strangely, considering how far apart all of these bodies were, at the moment they seemed uncomfortably close together. Soon Nadyenka realized that the great mega-lights were actually coming closer to each other, and before she knew it larger aggregates had begun to envelope smaller ones, and then much much larger ones were consuming the previously large ones. This predatory operation continued till only three gargantuan entities were left sweeping toward a common point, as though suspended on absurdly long, impossibly heavy lines—as though marbling over a smooth surface on which a single point was depressed.

And now she was watching intently, for where all the light had gathered and the Omega Aggregate mooshed itself into being there was a terrible flickering, like a lamp in which the bulb is not sufficiently screwed-in being shook, except on the scale of a billion quadrillion (10²⁴) or so suns. The light blob flickered more and faster, each flicker representing a vigintillion or so nuclear blasts. It had also begun to shrink.

The shrinking was palpable around Nadyenka too, as though the envelope of the Cosmos—a tough polymer made of unused inches, polygons, polyhedrons, and all the tiniest planks of time normally used for quantifying male sexual enjoyment—was constricting. That a great time-space cellophane was being blow-dried, and collapsing on and adhering to every surface in the universe, smothering the mouth and sealing off the chambers of everything. This was the nightmarish ending, at any rate, that would leave Nadyenka breathless and vaguely panicked. It culminated in the great lights-out at the Center of Everything—just as Nadyenka’s waking had coincided with the sound of a flushing toilet.