The End As I Know It

by Kevin Shay

  “Dude, did you say high kick? High punch,” Damien says. Meanwhile, Ravi has taken advantage of the confusion to gain the upper hand. Ron dies, and drops the controller with a scowl.

  “Double missile. Why do I listen to you bitches? I was kicking his ass without the double missile.”

  “Who’s up?”

  Asher takes Ron’s controller for the next round.

  “Dude, stop being Nightwolf.”

  “What’s wrong with Nightwolf?”

  “Look at him. He’s all Village People.”

  Another socialist enters the loft.

  “Hey, Duncan.”

  “Duncan, this is my friend Randall,” Damien says.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “You come from Josh’s place?” Asher asks.

  “Yeah. Stacy needs these.” Duncan points to a cardboard Kinko’s box. “She wants someone to flyer with her on the North Side. I can’t do it.”

  Dave gets up. “I’ll go. Peanuts?” He hands me the bag.

  “Thanks.”

  “Where’s the staple hammer?”

  “Josh’s place.”

  Dave leaves with the flyers. Duncan sits down in Dave’s seat. “Dude! What was that spin move?” he says.

  So this is how the revolution is being built. One death-match at a time. From their respective posters on the wall, Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara gaze out on the proceedings, keeping their thoughts to themselves.

  I can’t help but want to correlate the housekeeping with the political philosophy. The abdication of individual responsibility or something. But when it comes down to it, they’re probably just slobs. I knew a pair of meticulous anarchists once, and you see plenty of Young Republicans who don’t know how to do their own laundry. Maybe the difference is that capitalists are cool with the exploitative act of paying someone to clean the damn house.

  They offer to let me play a round or two. Knowing that I wouldn’t stand a chance, I decline. Damien and I retreat with fresh Heinekens to the rooftop. We stand at the parapet, look out at Chicago by sunset, and try to work our way through the initial awkwardness you get whenever old friends reconvene after a long hiatus. It always takes a little while to strike the right mutual tone, lock in the appropriate set of references and locutions. We chat for a few minutes about Chicago, Damien’s courseload, our friend Andy, who just got engaged.

  “So has anyone met Mrs. Andy? Is she in high school?” Damien asks, reviving an old running joke. Andy always had a thing for dating much younger girls. Not in a sleazy way—these were long-term relationships, and the girlfriends, frankly, were not especially hot—but more because women his own age overmatched him in emotional maturity. We flog the gag awhile: Can she cross the street to the church by herself? Is the flower girl her older sister? What if she loses a baby tooth on the honeymoon?

  “You going to the wedding?” Damien asks.

  “When is it? Next September?”

  “Yeah. Long engagement.”

  What do I say? That by then the world may have shuddered to a lethal halt? That only a lunatic would make any long-range plans right now? No, better ease into all that.

  “I guess I’d go, yeah.”

  “So Andy’s the first one married in our little group. Wouldn’t have called that.”

  “We have a little group?”

  “Don’t we?”

  We must, but I can’t quite pin down its membership. I remember my own friends from college, but which of them were friends with each other? Did Andy hang out with Carmen, with Louis, with Cassie? Didn’t he date Cassie? Wait, did I date Cassie?

  When I finished junior high, my mother suggested I write my classmates’ names on the back of the class photo so I’d remember who they were. That’s crazy, I said, how could I ever forget these kids’ names? They’re indelible in my mind. And of course five years later I would look at that picture and draw blank after blank. Now the same wave of vagueness laps at my college years. Even the strong connections can wink in and out. I look over at Damien and for an instant can’t quite place him, or this rooftop, or anything. It’s like waking from a weird dream into an unfamiliar bed. I know I’m with one of my friends, but who? We’re in a big city, but which? The world is ending, but why again? The moment passes.

  “How’s Michelle? Speaking of marriage.”

  “She’s fine, she’s fine. Her workload is ridiculous, but she’s surviving.”

  Damien’s girlfriend is in med school at Michigan. The interstate romance works out well for both of them at this point in their studies. They don’t have to waste precious hours mate-hunting, but they also aren’t obligated to spend time together, apart from a quick visit every few weeks. They’re even spared the traditional roving-eye pitfalls of long-distance dating, because who has time for infidelity? A good deal all around. Until one of them graduates. If they don’t happen to finish school at the same time, forget it.

  “Hey, I was sorry to hear about you and Hannah,” Damien says.

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  “You still talk to her at all?”

  “We email once in a while. I may see her soon, actually—I’ll be out in San Francisco next week.”

  “Really! You gonna try to, ah…”

  “No, no. Just thought I’d look her up.” And convince her the sky is falling. “So how did you end up living with those guys?”

  “They’re friends with a guy in my program. Actually, only two of the dudes you met live here. The other ones live over at Josh’s place. But all of them sort of drift back and forth.”

  “Are they all didactic and shit?”

  “Not really. I mean, sure, they’ll talk politics if you bring it up. Most of the time they’re like what you just saw.”

  “Do they actually, like, practice socialism in the apartment?”

  “That’s the funny thing. They have screaming fights if someone eats someone else’s food. And they go over the long-distance bill with four different color highlighters.”

  Damien tells me about his quest for a dissertation topic. But he doesn’t talk about potential topics as much as departmental politics. Your choice of thesis determines who they assign you as an adviser. But you want to get an adviser who has juice in the department, which is a tricky game because of all the rivalries and alliances and hierarchies. He describes the internecine intrigue with disdain, but I can tell he enjoys it. He seems to have found his thing, finally. Damien the freelance proofreader, Damien the production assistant, Damien the bookstore clerk—none of them seemed as happy and involved as Damien the grad student. Good for him.

  It’s nearly dark, getting chilly, and we go back inside without my having worked up the nerve to broach anything. Too bad, because the rooftop was the perfect place for it. When you want someone to contemplate a problem of incomprehensible magnitude, an expansive view of all man hath wrought (skyscrapers, smokestacks) makes a good point of reference. Now I’ll have to settle for a pizza parlor.

  We walk several blocks, the street getting more gentrified and campusy with every step. I ask Damien when he expects to get his doctorate.

  “Good question. I mean, the dissertation, there’s not a lot of time pressure. I’m thinking, considering I haven’t nailed down a topic, I’m thinking three years. So that’s what, 2001?”

  Two thousand and one. What will that look like? I can’t begin to guess. Too many upheavals between now and then, their effects unchartable. And what place will the post-civilized world have for academicians? I flash on a Twilight Zone episode. A nebbishy bank teller with Coke-bottle eyeglasses—Burgess Meredith?—wants nothing more in life than to sit and read, for which his boss and wife persecute him cartoonishly. But then, hiding in the bank vault with a newspaper at the moment H-bombs destroy the world, he ends up the last man on earth. The rest of the story is telegraphed with exquisite clumsiness. He gets suicidally lonely (“Find the library, moron!” thinks every viewer who’s paying attention), until he stumbles upon the library a
nd is in hog heaven, until in the final twist he breaks his glasses and can no longer read. In 2001, will Damien and his fellow classicists be a band of Burgess Merediths, wild eyes fervent behind taped-together specs, scouring the scorched earth for literature?

  The restaurant is packed, and we’re still waiting for our pizza when our second pitcher of beer arrives. In a lull while Damien pours, I inhale to speak. Not ready for this. I haven’t yet grown into the role, the out-of-left-field fanatic, barker for the Armageddon tent. Give it another minute, let the beer do its work. I take off my sweatshirt.

  “Warm in here,” Damien says.

  “Little bit.”

  “So you’re not working at that school this year? What’s it called?”

  “Ogden. Nah. Decided to do a little traveling.”

  “That’s cool. Did you sublet your place?”

  This is good, a way in. “No, actually, I got rid of it. I found someone to take the lease over.”

  He squints in confusion. “So you’re living…where, exactly?”

  “Pretty much my car.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yep.”

  We pause for a gulp of beer.

  “So what brought this on?” Damien asks.

  “Well, here’s the thing—”

  “Sorry about the wait, guys! Here you go.” Pizza, goddamn it! The waitress sets a metal stand on the table, puts the pie on the stand, serves us slices.

  I look around the restaurant as she leaves. Dozens of happy students munch away, laughing and hollering to be heard over the noise of everyone else laughing and hollering. Two tables down, a girl playfully feeds her boyfriend a sloppy pizza bite. Behind me, someone says, “That ham and pineapple looks so good. I wish I’d gotten that.” Across the room, a middle-aged couple visiting their undergraduate son watch with indulgent pride as he and two friends devour calzones. You fools, you absolute fools. Not one of you has the slightest idea what’s about to come down on you. I want to get up and shake each of you by the shoulders, slap you into awareness. What are you all talking about? Wake up, for Christ’s sake! Time is running out! And you wish you’d gotten ham and pineapple?

  “This is all going down!” I blurt.

  “Aw yeah! I’m starving!” Damien thinks I’m talking about the pizza. He lifts his slice, then looks at me. Whatever he sees stops him short. “Whoa. You OK?”

  “Yeah, no. Dig in.”

  I manage to swallow a few bites. Interesting how intimate this moment feels. I’ve known Damien since the first semester of sophomore year, when we both came back to school a week early for rehearsals of a student-produced play. I made and ran some marionettes that appeared in Act II, and he hung lights or something. Outside of our theatrical duties, there wasn’t much going on that week, and Damien and I ended up wandering around the eerily depopulated campus for several days, shooting pool, shooting tequila, shooting the shit. We’ve been friends ever since, but not, it now strikes me, the sort of bosom friends who consult each other on decisions or share deep confidences. So I feel I’m about to violate the terms of our relationship, as if I were going to make a pass at him, or confess a felony and accessorize him after the fact.

  “So I’ve been reading a lot about this Y2K computer problem,” I finally say, my heart racing.

  “Oh yeah? What about it?”

  “Basically, most of the software in the world is broken.”

  “Shit.” He has no idea where I’m going with this, whether it might be the start of a deadpan joke. I try to exude gravity. “I’m not talking about PC software. But the mainframes that run everything—every corporation, every bank, every government in the world. And most of the machinery that keeps the lights on and the water running and assembly lines moving and oil flowing. It’s all pretty much broken. And there’s no way it can get fixed in time.”

  “Wait, wait,” Damien says through a mouthful of mushrooms and pepperoni. “This is all because some software can’t count past 1999?”

  “Software and hardware. There are date-sensitive processor chips embedded in oil rigs, satellites, phone relays, railway switches, everywhere.”

  He’s realizing I’m serious. “I mean…but it’s just the really old ones, right?”

  “That’s how they spin it on a lot of the news stories. But no! Somewhere in the world—hell, somewhere in Chicago—programmers are writing non-2000-compliant code right now. See, you’ve got to go back to the beginning, to the earliest computers…”

  The first couple of times I gave this spiel, I waded in swinging with facts and figures like some kind of debate-team pen spinner. Gradually I figured out it’s more effective to tell it as a story. I don’t know how to make an argument, really, but I know how to tell a story. Which is a whole different animal. You’re not building up an impregnable edifice, you’re taking someone on a trip at the end of which you can say, See, here we are. You embellish some details, gloss over others, double back on yourself, tantalize, engage. Fortunately, I’ve always been able to do that. Unfortunately, this story is true.

  “So it’s the sixties, the seventies. Computer memory is hard to come by and it’s incredibly expensive. I mean, a pocket organizer you’d buy today probably has as much storage as a million-dollar mainframe did then. So you have to cut corners wherever you can in terms of what you store. Well, OK, so I’m writing a program and I need to store the dates of some financial transactions, let’s say. I don’t need the ‘19’ on the year, right? Because all the years are ‘19.’ And it won’t be a problem by the time 2000 comes around, that’s thirty years away, this code I’m writing now will be long gone by then.”

  “OK…”

  “Only my program never gets replaced. It works, right? So why replace it? Instead I just change it here and there, I build new programs on top of it. And to work with the old code, all the new code has to use the same two-digit dates. You know, and this same thing happens to every program in every department as the company gets bigger and starts doing more stuff by computer, until you’ve got a million lines of code, all with this date logic that won’t work in the next century. Meanwhile, at some point along the line I’ve left the company, along with all the other guys who wrote the original code. So nobody really knows how it works. Now, say you’re my successor at this company. You see what it all adds up to—a ton of boring work, wading through ancient code with an impossible deadline, and if you fail, the company’s out of business because without its systems it can’t do business. So what do you do? Quit, right? So then half the IT staff quits and the company’s even more screwed.”

  “Shit,” Damien says, but it may or may not be sinking in. He’s been chowing down throughout, not stunned off his feed—a bad sign. Never mind, keep talking. I proceed to interconnectedness while my half of the pie congeals.

  “But let’s say this company manages to keep its programmers, and they pull off some heroics, and it gets its own house in order. What about their suppliers? Here, think about how this pizza got onto the table.” I wave a slice. “Let’s say it has a dozen ingredients. They came from five different wholesalers, and they were shipped there on five different truck fleets by ten different producers. That’s, what, twenty points of failure. And each of those twenty companies has its own suppliers. Remember making a domino run? You pull a couple out in the middle and the whole thing doesn’t work. Pizza, who cares, but make it the latest line of cars from General Motors. And multiply that by a million companies. You start to see what we’re up against, right? But that’s not even the most important thing.”

  “What is?” Damien asks obligingly.

  “Utilities! Power and gas and phones! And you’d shit yourself if you really understood how fragile the power grid is. This is according to insiders, the engineers. It’s a patchwork, it can barely even keep up with demand in the summer. New York City, ’77, a bird flies into a transformer, boom! Dark city. And if the power goes, everything goes.”

  I’m a little loud by now. A girl at the next table has
keyed in on my harangue, eyes me warily. I smile at her—nothing to see here—and drain my glass.

  “Another pitcher may be in order,” Damien says.

  “Another pitcher makes a lot of sense.”

  After we’ve flagged down the waitress, Damien asks, “So where did you find all this out?”

  As I’ve learned the hard way, baldly announcing that I read it all on the Internet can lead to a credibility problem. So, softpedal. “Well, there’s a lot of stuff online that comes right from the source. The SEC filings, testimony to Congress, regulatory surveys. When you actually start to read some of these reports that come out, every piece of information just bodes iller and iller. But, I mean, they’re dense to wade through. So instead of taking in the grim facts on pages one through ninety-eight, your average so-called journalist just flips to page ninety-nine and reads the happy-face conclusion that has nothing to do with the data. The information is out there, though.”

  Oops. Sounded a little too much like Special Agent Mulder there. Note for future renditions of this: avoid statements of the form “such-and-such is out there.”

  Time to wrap up. I lay it on a little thicker about the utter unfixability of it all, the billions of lines of code, tens of millions of chips. “Oh, and even if the U.S. were miraculously fine and dandy, what about every other industrialized country in the world? They’re using ancient shit, secondhand mainframes. Some of these countries on a good day have riots, they have breadlines, they have deflation. If we can’t fix it, if Japan can’t fix it, how the hell will the Ukraine or Argentina or Thailand fix it? You think Brazil’s on top of this? Brazil’s never on top of anything! But they’re almost as computerized as we are. No, the global economy’s pretty much dead in the water. I don’t know. It just all seems very bad.” Weak conclusion. I cringe inwardly.

  “Man,” Damien says. I wait for him to say something more, scrutinize him for a hint of whether it was all too much to swallow. This juncture’s a good litmus test. Among the friends who have heard and rejected my Y2K lecture, almost all of them have broken the postspeech silence by inquiring about my own plans and preparations. In other words, they think this is about me. They’re worried about my mental state, not about civilization’s imminent clusterfuck. My grandmother, though, asked me what I thought she should do. Which is the appropriate reaction if you believe the story, assuming you aren’t suicidal. I was proud of Grandma. People on the message boards have reported this phenomenon: how elderly people tend to Get It more readily than others. Maybe because they remember a depression and a world war and know from hard times. Or are they just more vulnerable and easily spooked? Either way, my grandmother bore out the theory.