The room was dark except for a sliver of blue light from the window. Kelly stood with her back to me. She leaned forward, and the small dress she was wearing crept along the back of her thighs. I watched as she removed her earrings and placed them neatly on the desk, and then turned to open her computer. Soft, synthetic sounds filled the room, with the barest suggestion of singing in the background. She turned around and sat at the edge of the desk. She smiled, but it was an uncertain thing, as if she was embarrassed to find me watching her.
"I feel like a horrible person," she said.
"You're not."
"I feel like one."
"Well you're not."
"I didn't want him to come. I didn't ask him."
"I know. Even if you had asked him I wouldn't care."
That was a lie, but it was what she wanted to hear and I wasn't in the mood to argue. She came to the bed and sat next to me, resting a hand on my leg.
The previous week her boyfriend had arrived from the capital. She said he wanted to surprise her, which he did, staying for almost a week, during which time I kept my distance and focused on my work. It was a surprisingly easy thing to do. I assumed I wouldn't be able to write, full of the thought of her, and of him with her, but that wasn't the case; we'd had some time together and now it was over. She had her own life and I had mine, and I was fine with that. I told myself I was fine with it, and spent the week working on text for a video game that a friend of mine was developing. On Friday I called Richard and asked if he wanted to meet me for a drink.
"Why don't you come here?" he asked. "Things are happening."
"Honestly I have no interest in meeting this boyfriend of hers," I said.
"He left yesterday."
"Yeah?"
"Said she's happy he's gone."
I was at the share house within the hour.
As usual there were a few people smoking on the porch and several more crowded into the narrow hallway that led to the kitchen, but I was surprised by how subdued everyone was, as if they'd been drinking for hours and the party was already winding down.
I found Richard in the kitchen, talking to a couple girls I didn't recognize. The sink was piled high with unwashed dishes, and the three of them were drinking beer out of plastic soup bowls.
"You made it," he said. He stumbled over the words, slurring them badly, and one of the girls laughed. She had orange half-moons stained beneath her eyes, the only effect of which was to make her look tired.
"He didn't think you'd get here in time," she said.
"In time for what?"
"The show."
"He doesn't know?" asked the other girl. She was blond, or bleached-blond, and her over-sized t-shirt stretched all the way to her knees. Her legs were bare except for a pair of striped socks, and these coupled with her pouty expression made her look even younger than she was.
"Doesn't know what?"
"This is the official end of the world party."
"So you're wearing a t-shirt?"
"What? No." She seemed confused. Richard took me by the arm.
"Come with me," he said.
He guided me into the living room. Ten or more people were seated around the low table, and in the center, spread across a wrinkled sheet of tin-foil was the largest mound of powder I'd ever seen. My eyes drifted to Kelly, who was standing on her own in the corner. One smile from her was all it took to carry me across the room.
"Hey," I said.
"Hi."
"My name's Isaac."
"I'm Kelly."
We shook hands and I tried not to think about the fact that she'd been with someone else less than a day earlier. I touched the back of her bare arm. It was hot in the room, and I looked for a place to put my coat, but all the chairs were occupied, and along with the powder the table was littered with empty cans of beer and half-eaten bags of snacks, so in the end I left it on. I could feel a line of sweat trailing down my back.
"What's this all about?" I asked her.
"Richard didn't tell you?"
"He's drunk."
"Oh, well Taylor met an outsider."
"The one who'd been showing up here?"
"I'm not sure, but apparently they got talking and Taylor asked him about the end of the world."
"Obviously."
"Right? But the outsider wouldn't tell him anything. Said he'd need a bigger audience if he was going to talk about it."
"So you threw a party."
She shrugged.
"Well it's Friday anyway."
Richard was handing out plastic spoons. I shared one with Kelly and dug into the powder, nearly gagging on the taste as it went down.
I waited for something to happen, some rush or change in my perception, but there was nothing. I felt exactly the same. Kelly put her hand on my shoulder and I asked how her painting was coming along and it wasn't until one of the girls began talking to the empty space beside her that I realized something had changed.
"Is there someone sitting there?" I asked Kelly.
"Yes," she said. "That's him. It's your first time isn't it?"
"First time to take it raw like this, yeah."
"Then it'll take longer. The more you do the stuff the faster it is. Taylor says there's no gap for him at all now, between when he sees them and when he doesn't."
Across the table, the girl in the long t-shirt cocked her head as if she was listening to someone. Suddenly, the empty space opposite her ballooned, the air rippling, and I watched as a vaguely human shape struggled to break through the transparent skin of the world. All at once he was there, a thin man with narrow, bony shoulders. He was wearing an oversized t-shirt and skinny jeans and there was a multi-coloured band of string tied around his right wrist. His head was shaved, and the right side of his face from his forehead to his cheek was cut with a narrow, purple line. He picked up a can of beer from the table and drank heavily.
"What's his name?" I asked Kelly.
"Auld," she said loud enough for him to hear it. He looked up.
"This is Isaac," she told him.
"First time?" he asked.
"Yeah."
"Fucked up isn't it?"
The girl in the t-shirt laughed, covering her broad mouth with her hand.
"A little."
"Well don't worry. I'm just here for the free alcohol. You're not drinking?"
"Not yet."
He handed me a beer. It was luke-warm, but I drank it anyway. Auld looked at me, and then at Kelly, frowning.
"What?"
"Do you have a sister?" he asked her.
"No. Why?"
"No reason," he said, and then he turned away.
I sometimes think about that question of his, aware that looking back on things lends them a certain coherency. Events have a tendency to fall into line that way, marching in neat rows toward a certain conclusion, but the truth is very different; patterns are formed in hindsight, and "life" is just a word we apply to a string of disparate events, hoping to tie them together.
I once dated a girl who liked to say that everything happens for a reason. It's a tired cliché, and essentially meaningless, but she really believed it. In the early days of our relationship she took the time to walk me through the key plot points of her life, pointing out how each of them had helped her to get to where she was "supposed to be." I didn't buy it. I told her that was just her way of trying to make sense of a chaotic world, and that in my view there was no place she, or anyone else, was supposed to be. There was only where she was, and where she went from there. We didn't last too long, but I stand by what I said, and the point is I'm not about to read too much into Auld's question; he may have asked Kelly if she had a sister because he saw Hazel (or Kelly masquerading as Hazel) in the future, but he might only have meant it as a kind of back-handed compliment. For all I know he was just trying to get laid. Either way, he seemed to lose interest in us after that, paying more attention to his beer than the people around him.
r /> Honestly, he wasn't very impressive; Auld might have been an outsider, but aside from the line on his face he was no different from anyone else at the party. He carried himself with a kind of dogged weariness, and while he was the center of attention for much of the night, he seemed to find the constant barrage of questions boring.
"The future isn't something it's good to see too clearly," he said at one point. As far as I was concerned, the future wasn't something I wanted to see at all. I was content in the present, or at least that's how it appears to me now, although I likely wouldn't have said so at the time. Again, these are all labels we apply in retrospect, like documentarians or hack novelists, framing times in our lives as happy or miserable, good or bad, when the truth is we're all too busy processing things to know how we feel about them.
It was Richard who eventually asked Auld if he had a big enough audience to get things started. By that point Richard was sprawled across one of the armchairs, his legs dangling over the side, and he was alone; the two girls from the kitchen had moved to the opposite end of the table, and were ignoring him.
"This is it?" asked Auld, with a rough edge to his voice. The line on his face was almost livid. The girls next to him shifted away and looked down at their hands. Taylor, who had been sitting on the floor next to the television, got to his feet.
"Auld," he said. "Relax. It's only the end of the world."
"Oh is that all?"
Taylor laughed. No one else said anything.
"Well it's easy enough to see. The world ends on the 18th of January."
There was a tepid, expectant pause.
"That's six months from now," Kelly said, breaking the silence.
"That's right," Auld replied.
The girl in the oversized t-shirt laughed nervously. Someone else asked if Auld was serious.
"It's a good thing," he said tiredly. "This entire universe was a mistake anyway."
Taylor tried to press him for details, but Auld refused to answer. A kind of quiet resentment was building in the room, a feeling as if we'd been conned into forking over money for a show that didn't live up to the hype, except that none of us had paid anything, and Auld was not a performer.
One by one people began filtering out of the room. Richard was asleep; I'm not sure if he even heard the announcement or not. Kelly led me to her bedroom, where she apologized about her boyfriend and I told her that it didn't matter.
All of this was nearly six months ago.