【by Rebecca Arabian】
A man in a Spider-Man shirt told us the world was going to end in three days. We were at a gas station on the plains of Wyoming, stocking up on blue Gatorade and mini powdered donuts. The gas station was at the edge of the tiny little town where we had stayed the previous night. The hot dogs rolling on the counter were steaming, bubbles popping up from their skin like plastic when it just begins to melt. Outside on a bench, we had seen an Amish-looking woman and a baby in a bonnet on her lap, though we couldn’t figure out if the Amish also resided in western America. Three days in and three days left of our journey, this new prophecy prompted me to splurge on a Kit-Kat bar as well.
After hearing the man’s words, I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. I hadn’t used my phone much on the road in order to preserve the battery, and my cell service had been nearly nonexistent for the past eighteen hours. Everyone to the east of South Dakota could have died at that point and I’d probably have no clue. Mack just laughed as the man explained his ominous statement and told us how Doomsday was imminent by swinging his arms around like someone who was drowning.
Soon after, we drove from the gas station into a Wyomingian valley enclosed by mountains. The fields beside us had some patches of brown grass interspersed between the majority of green but, from far away, the two shades blended together to create almost an ombre effect. Other than the hue of the grass, the scene reminded me greatly of the generic desktop background of the old family computer my house used to have.
All day, I had been looking out the car window for any wildlife to mark off on our “List of Cool Creatures” booklet that my parents had bought me and Mack before we set off. That day, however, every time I thought I had seen an animal, it turned out to be just a tree or a bush. One time I even mistook a trash bag floating around for a very pale wolf.
In the car, Mack continued to laugh and taunt me about the end of the world. I didn’t completely trust the man from the gas station, but his words had yet to leave me either. In my mind, I could picture the crow’s feet around his eyes and the way his tongue would come too far out of his mouth when he spoke. His Spider-Man shirt looked like it was a child’s, and yet this man couldn’t have been under fifty-five years old. You never know if and when you’ll find a modern-day Cassandra, a crazy person, in a gas station, and so I thought of him while I listened to the satellite radio cut out over and over again.
Mack joked that one good thing about the world ending in three days was that we’d be together still, and I wouldn’t have to fly back to Michigan on my own. That was our plan—me driving out to Jackson, Wyoming with him after graduation, and then going back to work at the ice cream shop near my parents’ house until I found a job with my brand-new history degree. Mack was moving out here permanently, to do music or hiking or something, I never really got a straight answer. For most of our senior year, we had avoided explicitly discussing our post-grad plans, because that meant having to explicitly discuss the plans for our relationship. We both clearly knew that we were not heading toward the same place, so we organized this final trip without much hesitance or resistance. But Mack said that an apocalypse meant we wouldn’t have to say goodbye, and I continued to stare at the row of trees along the road. As we drove by quickly, they all blurred together, making one giant wall of tree.
The trip so far had been the ideal way to spend time together, as once we set off we had barely any interactions with any other parties, except of course the occasional local figure at a gas station or other rest stop. While planning the trip, I imagined that it would be some sort of big and memorable hoorah, a goodbye where Mack would confess how much I meant to him, maybe even making the both of us a little weepy but emotionally fulfilled and ready for what came next in life. Once on the trip, however, I found that Mack and I didn’t really act any differently than we had during the previous couple of months. There was some excitement in the air every time we came across a landmark or some weird novelty item like a purse in the shape of Mount Rushmore, but most of the time we sat in the car going from one remote place to another. Mack would ramble for a bit and I’d listen, and then we’d go back focusing on whatever we each had been thinking about previously.
The day after meeting the man in the gas station, we came across some guys on motorbikes. They had been the first sign of life we found after leaving the rest stop that morning, and while we were certainly in the middle of nowhere, it had been unsettling to not run into anyone else for a couple of hours. We had passed by some houses earlier, but they either had boarded-up windows or looked just recently emptied—garage doors open with no cars inside. Mack theorized that this was because of the economy, dwindling neighborhood population, and people wanting to move closer to town. I acknowledged what he said with a hmm sound, at the same time noticing a tiny pale pink shoe that had been left at the edge of the road. Only one of the two velcro straps had been fastened.
The men on the bikes, therefore, were a comforting discovery. Mack loved to ride, so he pulled over and insisted on talking with them for a bit. I stayed in the car and told him I would just read a book, but really I looked out the passenger side window and watched Mack charm his way into their lives, then charm his way onto their bikes, and soon he was doing donuts under the sky that was the same color as the Gatorade we had bought.
From the car, I could see Mack grab some canned drink from one of the men, though I couldn’t make out the label. Occasionally, I would try to get back to my book but I would always end up looking over at Mack again to see if he was coming back to the car. I think I ended up reading the same page around ten times over without actually taking in any of the words.
After twenty minutes, I was ready to go, ready to have Mack back with me and away from those random guys who we had come across day drinking outside in some obscure valley. I couldn’t fully understand why they had been so captivating to him, other than their motorbikes. Mack always seemed to need to insert himself in situations, to say hi to strangers. When I first met him, I liked this about him. I thought it showed that he was outgoing and friendly—both seemingly good traits. Until one day I realized that we couldn’t ever go out by ourselves without this happening. A walk with just the two of us would become a walk with us and three of his buddies from a photography class he once took. A couple’s dinner would suddenly become a double date with his bandmate and the bandmate’s girlfriend.
We weren’t on a date that day, we were just getting from one place to another, and I knew that we had spent four days together already, but I figured I would still go out to grab him anyway. The grass was covered with scattered beer cans, some of them crushed in the way Mack would crush cans whenever he finished a drink. I aimed to walk out there calmly but, once I got close enough, I found that the bikes and the men were too loud, so my attempt to politely ask if we could get going turned into a scream for him to get off the bike, only for my voice to blend in with the loud shrill of the wind.
He did hear me though, and as he turned back to me he yelled, “I’m doing it for Jesus!” just before using some big rock as a ramp and flying three feet into the air.
I went back to the car and cried. I was frustrated that Mack hadn’t come back with me. And, even though I was alone, I was nevertheless embarrassed by how I had so quickly lost control of myself, once again failing to act cool and collected while Mack was excelling at it. I kept crying until he found me around ten minutes later, offering a slurred apology and a limp hug. Then we got back on the road and I drove for the next few hours.
That night we slept in Mack’s car with the backseats down. We found a campground by a forest but we still didn’t have any reliable source of WiFi, so before bed we watched a few episodes of a new drama series that he had downloaded onto his phone. The show had something to do with religion. He had been gentler for the rest of the day, poked fun at me less, and didn’t bring up the end of the world once. He even kissed me and I heard church bells ring, though it was just from the television show.
In the morning, we awoke to the ringing of a different bell. It was the giant bell outside of the campground’s main building, where there was the reception desk and a small dining hall. Mack peered through the car window to try and see what the bell was signaling. He presumed it was letting all the campers know that breakfast was ready, and then he laid down and fell back asleep. I kept looking out the window, waiting to see if anyone followed the sound. The camp wasn’t that busy. I had seen only five or so other cars and vans when we arrived. But I still had expected to see at least one person make their way to the main building, and I didn’t.
When I walked to the communal bathroom a few minutes later, I peeked into the dining hall through an open window. Mack was right, it was breakfast time, and there was a buffet table with silver trays filled with steaming piles of food. There was no one in the room. But someone must have been in to bring the food, so I continued towards the bathroom while kicking pebbles out of the pathway.
On my way back to Mack’s car, I looked into the dining hall again and still saw no one. I went into the building this time and was greeted by only an assortment of breakfast food. On one of the dining tables, somebody had left their glasses. It was a cheap pair of readers like the ones my mom would get at the pharmacy. She lost them all the time. I brought the glasses to the reception desk but, once again, no one was there, so I scribbled a message on the receptionist’s notepad and took a piece of bacon from the dining hall on my way out. I was happy to find Mack where I had left him in the car, and I asked if we could get going soon and leave the eerie campground. He laughed at what he called my paranoia around not seeing anyone in places where we were bound to see barely anyone. It was true that he had been to Wyoming before and I hadn’t, so I asked him why he kept coming back to a state that was supposedly empty all the time. He just smiled at me and wordlessly left the car to take a shower.
The rest of the so-called penultimate day of humanity was spent on the road, in gas stations and rest stops, though none had prophesizing men for us to chat with.
Instead, outside a corner store by a stream that had been slowly running dry, we stumbled upon a group of five robins all lined up on a stone wall. I enjoyed the red shade of their feathers, remarking to Mack that, without their color, the scene in front of us would have nearly looked black and white. Unlike the past couple of days, that day was one of those particularly gray days where everything seemed desaturated. Even the grass looked somber with its natural green color just barely peeking out to create a hue reminiscent of the greeny-gray mold you find on stale bread.
The robins were so bright though, and so still. They were all looking in different directions and I was waiting for at least one of them to look at something new. I have always loved to watch birds move their tiny heads around. I found that the sharp and rapid movement of their necks almost made it look like I was watching a video clip with many cuts, completely opposite to the effortless smoothness of their wings gliding through the air. At this moment, though, these specific birds stayed vigilant in their staring. I took a few slow steps forward, wanting to look at them more closely but also trying to avoid frightening them, and they continued to stay still. It was a beautiful image, to me, and a part of me wanted to pull out my phone to take a photo of them, but I thought just staring at them for a few extra moments was good enough.
I do not remember how long I had been watching them before Mack started talking to me about the route we would take to get to our next stop. His voice and his sudden movement in my direction were eventually what snapped me out of my trance and the birds along with me. They finally flew off the wall and out of my sight.
Mack must’ve been actually looking at my face as he did this and noticed my eyes follow the birds, because he asked about what I was staring at now. I said it was nothing and assured him that I had been listening, which I hadn’t been. At this point, Mack and I had grown used to the other’s bouts of zoning out. He remarked that sometimes he would ask me a question and I’d just stare back at him as if that’s an answer. He chuckled as he said this and I did too, because he was right and also because it felt good to hear him be correct in his assessment of me.
We finally made it to Jackson in the late evening, and celebrated by getting a room in a real hotel at the edge of town. After checking in, we walked around a bit, stopping at the tourist shops and not buying anything. I could tell that we were not the only tourists there. There was a couple who, by the way they looked at each other, seemed like they would have rather been on different sides of the country than on a vacation with one another. And then there was a family with two small children. One of them was on the verge of a tantrum and the other was silently refusing every snack option her mother had put in front of her. Normally, I would have tried to get as far away as I could from such groups of people, but today I experienced an odd sense of interest in their lives, and wondered about what could have brought them all here to the place that I also found myself in.
Outside of an ice cream shop, there was a statue of a cow with sunglasses and Mack said the sunglasses looked like mine, so he made me pose beside the farm animal as he took a picture. His interest in photography had lasted beyond that class he took, I guess. I smiled and watched him look at me through his phone camera, and I couldn’t help but wonder when he’d look back at this photo. Or even if. He wasn’t one to look back, usually, but I still hoped he would miss me. I knew I would miss parts of him, like our comfortable silences or the sensation of his fingertips on my shoulder. I would miss his eyes and how it felt like no one else existed when they were locked onto me.
After taking the picture, he turned and continued walking again, so I jogged to catch up. I thought to myself that I wouldn’t miss the chases, big or little, and that it would be nice to not have to worry about keeping up with him, which I had been doing since the fall of our freshman year. I would be able to relearn my natural pace and discover the places I’d go to—or not go to—when I didn’t need to follow someone else. Mostly, I was excited to meet me before I had met Mack.
Eventually, we made our way to a tiny diner and sat in a booth by a window. The menus were sticky and stained, but the smell of frying oil from the kitchen drifted to our table and urged me to order anything as long as it came with a side of fries. As we waited for our meals, I asked Mack about what he would do after I left—if the world didn’t end, of course. He said he would drive a bit and go visit his friend Ally who lived about an hour away. Ally was his ex-girlfriend but he never called her that to me. I nodded and started studying the ketchup bottle on the table, and he made a joke about how old it must be or something like that. I smiled for him to see until my burger came and the conversation was allowed to end. The frying oil had not disappointed, my fries were crispy and addictive, and the burger was delectable as well. The bun had been toasted and the lettuce was surprisingly fresh considering the staleness of the diner as a whole. It was the best food I had had on this entire trip, so I ate the meal ferociously.
We didn’t talk much for the rest of dinner. Finally, once I had finished eating, Mack surveyed my empty plate and joked that I must not have liked my meal. Before I could fully think about what I was saying, I told Mack that I hoped he had a good time with Ally, a good time going out in the world and doing what was right for him. It must have been hard for him to be stuck at school with me for nearly four years. I gave my apologies for never being enough for him, even in our last five days together. I said that maybe we’d both find our true selves once we were out of each other’s lives. My voice grew more cutting towards the end as I grew more tired of trying to be polite. After all, wasn’t a boyfriend the person I was supposed to be myself with?
I think I caught Mack off guard because, for the first time in a while, he heard what I said and didn’t have an immediate response. Not even a smirk or a joke. His face was blank. Eventually, he said with a sigh and a little apprehension that he’s loved these past few years but he’s excited to wander for a bit. Moving around is a part of life. Then the waiter came with the check and I offered to split the bill. I would have no debts once I walked onto that plane back to Michigan.
When we got up from the booth, he gave me a hug, his arms resting on my shoulders and his hands placed delicately at the top of my back. He promised to finally get around to visiting my hometown sometime in the next year, maybe after Christmas, but he would see what he could do.
After dinner, we went back to the hotel and I got ready for bed while Mack watched a show about catching alligators in Florida. I asked to turn all the lights off at around ten since I wanted to get a good night’s sleep before flying home, and I thought that Mack and I didn’t have much else to discuss. Once we were in the dark, we both laid down on our separate sides of the bed, the fluffy white comforter covering us up to our necks and placing an inch-and-a-half of space between our bodies and the freezing hotel air. At some point, Mack had rolled closer to the middle of the bed, so I then rolled closer to my edge, assuming that he wanted more space. This happened a few more times until eventually he reached his arm over the side of my body and pulled me into him. We laid like this for what I think was a few more minutes, and then he used his arm to turn me onto my back so he could lie on top of me and rest his head on my chest. I wrapped my arms around him while his hands made their way up and down my body. Soon his hands were underneath my t-shirt, and I could figure out what was going to happen next.
I went along with him. After all, it was our last night together and it was always nice to feel wanted in some way.
Sometimes, when someone lies against you, when both of your bodies are so warm yet not sticky with sweat, you feel like you are almost blending together, maybe even melting into one another. But on this night, Mack’s skin was cold, and I could tell with full certainty where my body ended and his began.
I continued to lie underneath him until it was over, and then he rolled back to his side of the bed. Under the covers, he searched for my hand and held it for a little bit once he found it, but ultimately, he pulled his hand back towards him. Our bodies were now entirely on their own sides of the bed, and we slept like that for the rest of the night.
On our last day, I woke up early to pack all my things, separate my liquids into a TSA-approved bag, and print my boarding pass in the hotel lobby. The sun had yet to rise and I didn’t want to wake Mack up by turning on a light, so I made coffee in the dark. A few times, I banged my knee into multiple pieces of furniture that were scattered within the small room. Something scratched my skin, not causing me to bleed but still bad enough for the scratch to sting when exposed to air. It must have been the desk. The wood on all of the furniture was cheap and plastic-y, and it gave the desk sharp edges. The coffee I made was watery and lukewarm, but I brought it with me as I went to sit outside, just to have something to hold in my hands.
Since Mack had parked his car at the edge of the lot, I opened the trunk and sat with my feet dangling out. In front of me was a forest of Douglas firs shooting up like arrowheads, or rockets about to take flight. The surrounding mountains had soft peaks. They weren’t jagged or pointy. Rather, they went up and down gradually, looking almost like the outline of someone on their side sleeping. The consequences of modernity had yet to fully hit the sky of Wyoming, and so I was able to inspect the uncountable amount of stars above me. In the coming minutes, they would begin to fade, making way for the return of the sun.
I sat in this car and watched the town slowly begin to wake. Our hotel and its parking lot were on the top of a hill, therefore I could see beyond the trees some buildings and streets with just a couple of tiny cars wandering around like toys on a track. The sky was introducing its golden hue on the horizon, though today’s sunrise was particularly orange and saturated, like lava, or a flame that was just incited by lighter fluid.
Soon I could see the glowing orb that was emitting all the light and noticed that it looked off. It was rising like the sun normally did, but the glow was different, softer. I could stare directly at it and not hurt my eyes. Eventually, the whole sky became this reddy-orange color, except for the light. The light itself wasn’t pure white, like a hospital room, but it was more off-white, almost cream-colored. It looked warm, and it continued to rise higher in the sky.
As I examined this being in my view, I moved my hand and found the empty plastic wrapper of powdered donuts left in the trunk. I let it crumble beneath my palm and thought back to the man from the gas station, as well as his prophecy. When the world ends, does it happen in the morning or once the day is nearly over? I should’ve asked him that when I saw him. I should’ve held his hand and thanked him for his message. He wasn’t trying to frighten us, he was trying to advise us. I felt grateful for that.
I knew Mack hadn’t taken the man’s words seriously, and even I hadn’t been fully able to believe him, though he had lingered in my mind nonetheless. But at this moment, the white light in the sky prompted me to settle into acceptance. I was disappointed that it had taken me this long but also soothed in knowing that I wouldn’t have done anything differently. I felt that if I had truly thought that the world was to end that day, then I would’ve been more extreme, more dramatic. In short, more performed and less like me.
When I was a child I had learned how the world would end. I learned about a few different ways, actually. Creatures coming from the ground or from machines, taking over the earth and wiping out humanity in the process. Temperatures rising until every surface is scorched, our homes and our bodies burnt to crispy scraps that fall apart with just a gust of wind. Comets, lizards, plagues, Martians. I don’t know much about the Bible, but I believe it says that the end of the world comes with a final judgment and a resurrection. And maybe even a loud bang as well, calling to tell each body that ever was and never will be, that it’s over, it’s done.
Once, I went to a planetarium on a middle school field trip. The twenty or so of us seventh graders sat in a small auditorium and stared at the wide endless expanse of the universe above us—was it everything, or was it nothing? We watched the history of the earth play out in a manner of five minutes, ending with the probable and scientifically backed end of the world. While this event wouldn’t occur for another seven billion years after my trip to the planetarium, I still sat frozen and watched the only planet I knew disappear into nothing.
It was terrifying, and yet I couldn’t stop looking. My wide-opened eyes filled with tears as I gaped at the presentation until finally the fluorescent lights of the theater turned back on and my teacher tapped my shoulder to get me moving.
And years later, here I was sitting in the trunk of this car parked in Wyoming. There was no narrator explaining to me what was occurring, nor was there a loud bang. Everything was watching, waiting for the light to take its time and move at its own pace. The tips of the trees in front of me welcomed this light, allowing it to absorb them in its glow. I soon felt its warmth radiate onto my body as I watched it blanket the hotel. Mack must have still been sleeping, but my parents in Michigan were certainly awake. It made me feel comforted to think that they were watching the same sight as me, just a thousand miles away.
I grew excited to experience what would happen when the light fully reached me. I imagined that it would first make its way to my toes and then slowly creep up my legs. I would feel weightless like how one does when they are floating in water. There would be nothing to keep me down, and yet nothing to pull me away. I would be stable, still, and almost hungry for the light and its gentility. It might even continue its crawl until I saw nothing else besides it. When it would be close to reaching my chest and wrapping me wholly in its shroud, I imagined breathing in sharply, and then who knows what I would find on the other side.
In actuality, I continued staring at the inexplicably bright light in front of me growing wider and taller, or maybe just coming closer. I wasn’t sure what was happening around it but that didn’t matter, there was nothing else I wanted to look at. My eyes were glued to the sight but this time I only felt wonder and relief, as well as the soft beating of the heart in my chest. It synced with the expansion of the silent light.
As the orb of light swelled in size, I could tell for certain that it was not the sun or any other object in the air. There was an emptiness that lived inside of it, but also a sense of limitlessness. It was as if the sky itself had a hole in it. The glowing entity was not a thing, but it was the lack of one.