What is the eschaton?
The eschaton is the king who dreams.
Where is the eschaton?
The eschaton is here right now.
I’m driving but my mind is pulsing with math. Road whipping past, speeding into darkness. Wind whipping through the car. I feel the exhilaration, the wild fresh hope welling up.
Kill it?
Ride it.
Write it down. Go, go, right now.
I pull up to my hotel. How did I find my way back? Don’t care. Barge into my dingy little room, get to work. Fill the hotel notepad with equations, diagrams. Chasing down the eschaton. Figure it out. Plug the time I died into the equations; reverse everything; work backward to the original derivations. Go down to the night manager at the front desk. Get another notepad. Get twenty! Back in the room, drinking coffee, on the trail of it now, back to work, I’m not even working, the work is just happening through me, something huge is trying to enter the world, a vast invisible thing so I just try to get out of its way, I make myself the door the vast invisible thing can pass through. Something is trying to get itself born through me, to make itself real, even as something else tries to stop it. It’s the world itself struggling against me. I’m caught between two energies, pivoting off both sides, zigzagging back and forth, the opposition between the energies pushing me further and higher, eschaton, anti-eschaton, take a break, take a walk down the hall, standing in front of the hotel ice machine, chunk-chunk-chunk, chunk-chunk-chunk, finding the rhythm, disassembling the eschaton equations in my head. Getting farther from shore. The hallway of locked doors. This hotel is full of death. Walking back to my room, all at once I know when every guest here will die. They will all die at the same time. I pass the night manager and I know his death clearly, too, no calculation required, because now I feel thanatons surging all around me like a fizzing sea, thanatons streaming after thanatons, the geometry of them wobbling and gushing.
But never touching me.
Everyone in this hotel will die tomorrow.
Except me.
Because the eschaton isn’t a particle.
It’s a person.
An eschaton and anti-eschaton are born at the same time; they diverge. A universe flourishes between them. The king and the princess enter the enchanted hill; they lose each other in the dark. Dreams flourish. The king and princess find each other again and they leave the hill. The particles plunge back into each other and annihilate each other. The universe is annihilated, too.
I am the eschaton.
The eschaton is not a particle. It is me.
I go into bathroom. Shaking. Every particle has its antiparticle. So who is the anti-eschaton?
But I already know who.
Her.
In the mirror I see myself but it’s not myself. Behind me the shower curtain moves. There’s a ragged man behind it. I leave the bathroom, go back to my desk. Shut up and calculate. But someone has moved my stuff around. There is nonsense on my paper that I hadn’t written. Wait, it’s not nonsense, no actually it is nonsense, but it puts my mind in a new place. My ability all comes rushing back. I’m scrawling across the papers, I barely understand my own math but to do the math makes the math come true. There’s a ragged man sitting on the bed behind me. How did he get in my room? Don’t look at him. You invited him in. Eyes on your work. The ragged man creeps closer, he’s standing right behind me now. Something that had been forming inside me for years, now brimming over. The ragged man is leaning over me, I smell his musty breath, so close.
The thing that had been forming within me is showing itself. Is this how it felt for Stettinger? Did Stettinger go through this?
Burning up. Fever.
Get up.
Hang “Do Not Disturb” on the outside door handle.
Everyone in this hotel is going to die tomorrow.
Lock the door.
I feel all the thanatons around me, buzzing and prickling.
They are unstable.
I look at the equations. In clear math, I’ve laid out how it works. Over hundreds of years, thanatons naturally break down. Stumbling and collapsing into more and more degraded versions of themselves. All things being equal, in fact, there should be no thanatons at all anymore—by this time, every thanaton in existence should have already collapsed, disintegrated, vanished. Gods, heroes, men, chaos.
Except the universe can’t exist without thanatons.
So something must be refreshing the thanatons.
I feel it in myself.
I can calculate it.
I already feel the shape of it. Like a story, like a metaphor. For the thanatons to reboot their cycle would require a massive amount of energy.
The kind of energy that’s generated when the eschaton and anti-eschaton meet each other at the world’s end.
When I meet the anti-eschaton.
A possible solution: bring the eschaton and anti-eschaton close together, thus stirring up that necessary energy, but then separate the eschaton and anti-eschaton before they end the world—yes, that’s it. I push forward, keep searching, keep writing, go faster. And all at once the answer drops out.
I’ve hit the target.
I’ve got it.
I read it again.
How can the thanatons be refreshed?
By bringing the eschaton and the anti-eschaton close together and using the energy between them to perform a Great Calculation.
What is the Great Calculation?
Subjective mathematics that involves mass actuation of thanatons.
What is a “mass actuation of thanatons”?
A giant amount of human death.
Step away from my desk.
Back to the bathroom. A giant amount of human death. Legs weak. The sacrifices in Cahokia. Splash water on face. This time my shower curtain is open. There is a living baby lamb suspended over the bathtub. Each of its legs is held by a steel clamp that is part of a larger apparatus screwed into the tiles. The lamb is attended by another ragged man. The lamb is struggling, its eyes are wild, it stares at me like it knows me, it’s emaciated, missing an ear, its body is completely laid open, skin sliced aside and pinned back, but it’s still alive, blood streaming down the drain of the bathtub, its heart still pumping, organs writhing against each other, its little tongue moving. I look into the lamb’s eyes, watch the struggling animal held over the bathtub by a network of steel wires and clamps.
Lamby-Lamb opens its mouth, and the vast invisible thing begins to speak.
* * *
—
When did the current generation of thanatons begin?
In Cahokia. The day of the supernova. July 4, 1054. At what stage in their life cycle are the thanatons now? Thanatons are now in their final stage.
When will the thanatons collapse?
All of the thanatons will collapse tomorrow.
What will happen if the thanatons collapse?
The universe collapses with them.
How do we keep the thanatons from collapsing?
A Great Calculation.
What is the Great Calculation?
You already know this.
What is a “mass actuation of thanatons”?
You already know.
Who is going to do a Great Calculation?
…
What is going to happen tomorrow?
…
Is the world ending?
…
* * *
—
I wake up on the floor.
My hotel room is full of light. Birds are singing somewhere outside. It’s eleven in the morning. I’m still wearing yesterday’s clothes. My body is covered in a sour film from last night’s wine and coffee and sweat.
It’s a normal day.
I get up, bones aching. I move around
the room.
Everything is clean. I don’t remember cleaning it.
I go into the bathroom. The bathroom is all in order. No bloody lamb skewered on poles in the bathtub. No ragged men.
I come back out into the bedroom. All the pages of my calculations from last night are neatly stacked on the desk. Equations, lines of symbols, spinning out crazier and wilder as they go on.
No need to look at them again.
I know.
Strange how calm I feel.
I take a shower. The warm water hits me and the steam rises around me. I scrub myself down. I wash my hair.
Then I do it all again.
Savor it. How many times in my life have I showered like this and really appreciated it? How many times have I taken the time to enjoy hot water, privacy, soap?
This is my last shower.
I get out. I dry myself off. It feels good.
Good-bye, showers.
I look at the stack of calculations on the desk.
It’s all there. How everything will end. How it all must end, today. I had mathematically derived it in the equations, but now I can feel it around me. The thanatons are almost dissolved and the universe is showing its age all at once. It’s too old. Forced to live longer than it should. It’s an ancient tapestry that’s been rotting on the wall for centuries, ready to fall to pieces, the world is an aged sickly animal that just wants to lie down, wants so badly to sleep. Everything in my hotel room is hollow and insubstantial, straining to persist. This bed. The desk. These curtains. Nothing holds them up from inside anymore. Matter itself is starting to falter. Existence had been living on a precarious line of credit that has finally run out.
Today is the last day.
* * *
—
I call Erin in my hotel room.
“Hi, Erin.”
“What’s wrong with your phone?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve called you like five times,” she says. “It doesn’t even go to voicemail. I just get disconnected. My texts come back ‘failed to deliver’ or something.”
“Oh—uh—”
“Where are you?”
“San Francisco.”
Exasperated: “San Francisco?”
Too hard to explain. “Hey…are the boys there?”
“It’s Saturday, remember? They’re at soccer practice. Why are you in San—”
“I’ll tell you later. Or actually—uh—”
“What’s going on?”
I will never see Erin again. Never see the boys again.
“Do you think we can all talk on the phone later on?” I say. “All four of us? Like, together?”
She senses it. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just wanted to talk to you and the boys.”
“I’m at the grocery store. I’ve got to go.”
“Wait. No. Erin. Not yet.”
A sigh, hundreds of miles away. But maybe something in my voice makes her not hang up.
“Will you be back in Chicago before Christmas, at least?” she says. “Because you have the boys this year. You do remember that, right?”
I can’t answer that.
“Are you still there?”
“Erin?”
“What?”
I say, “Do you remember that Christmas Eve when we went to 7-Eleven?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your family didn’t have a party that year, nobody else was doing anything, but you wanted to do something special, so you made a reservation at um, um—”
Impatient. “Of course I remember.”
“But then something went wrong with the reservation and we had no place to eat that night and we were all starving.”
“Because someone else with our last name made a reservation there, too. The restaurant got mixed up.” Baffled, then defensive. “That wasn’t my fault.”
“I’m not saying it was. And so we ended up at 7-Eleven—”
“Uh-huh—”
“—we ended up at 7-Eleven and the boys had corn dogs for their Christmas Eve dinner and we had that terrible frozen pizza.”
“Ha. That’s the only Christmas Eve the boys ever talk about.”
Pause.
“They talk about it?” I say.
“And then we went back home and watched the end of It’s a Wonderful Life and the boys fell asleep between us.”
“And I held your hand.”
Pause.
She says, “Yeah, I remember.”
Pause.
“Hey, Erin?”
Pause.
“Erin?”
* * *
—
My phone died. It was at three percent power when I made the call. I had plugged it into the wall in my hotel room, thinking it would charge. Apparently it hadn’t been charging. I jiggle the charger in the phone.
Nothing.
I pick up my room phone.
Except I don’t know Erin’s number, ridiculously. It’s trapped inside my phone. And my phone is dead.
Maybe the problem is my charger. I can get another charger.
With what money?
I had wanted to talk to Erin again. To talk to my boys one last time. Not happening now.
They deserved better.
I leave my room.
I walk past the hotel’s front desk, where I will never pay, and I go outside.
San Francisco is chillier than yesterday. But peaceful, everything’s normal. I feel a slight buzz, a little hum. The first crack in everything. The beginning of the crumbling. Can’t everyone feel this buzz, this hum?
The sound of thanatons running down, dwindling, fading.
I get in my rental car.
The engine doesn’t even turn over.
Try again.
I turn the key. A grinding, defeated sound.
But I’m supposed to meet Ron Wolper at Dare to Know in an hour. At two o’clock. Wait, why would I waste time meeting with Ron Wolper on this, the last day of the world?
Well, why not?
It doesn’t matter what you do.
Eat your shitty panini.
I twist the key in the ignition one last time. The car sputters. Then nothing.
Actually it’s fine. I have time.
Until 2:33 p.m. We all have until then.
I get out of my car and I start walking to Dare to Know.
I never return to that hotel.
Every trip is one-way.
* * *
—
Down the beautiful winding streets of San Francisco, past the elaborately restored houses, up and down flower-lined hills. Dare to Know isn’t too far from my hotel; it’s downtown, it’s walkable. I can almost kind of see it already, between buildings, far away: a mod fortress atop a hill, at a skew angle to the grid.
As I dip into a different neighborhood, the temperature drops. I wish I’d worn a jacket. The air is gray and tired, as though everything around me already knows it’s on its way out. The world is exhausted but it’s still trying. It’s keeping up appearances. Lisa Beagleman. So many puh-puh-puh-puh-proms not happening now. The predicted death dates of so many people changing from whatever we had said to today. I didn’t handle Lisa very well so let me make up for that. Maybe I can reassure the whole universe now a little.
2:33 p.m. and then it’s over. But it’s okay. You had a good run, world. We’ll go out together calmly, with some dignity, some sense of occasion. We’ll help each other through it.
I’m passing people in the street, all going about their ordinary lives. Should I tell them? No. What’s the point? You want to spend your last few hours insisting to strangers “the end is near”? You don’t need to convince anyone. You know it in yourself. Inside yo
u is the hole in everything. The eschaton. It’s splintering, it’s widening. And anyway. Look in everyone’s eyes.
We all know it’s coming, deep down.
We’ve all been waiting for it.
Wanting it.
2:33 p.m.
I’m hungry but I have almost no money. I end up walking into a McDonald’s. My last meal is really going to be a McDonald’s hamburger? Fine, whatever. And yet even this cheap shitty hamburger is somehow pretty good. My last hamburger. I sit there, chewing, looking out the window. Almost nobody else in here. Like some folks got the memo early and raptured themselves out of the world before it ended.
What will happen after the world ends? Will the eschaton continue to exist, will I be conscious in any way? Will I remember this world after I meet the anti-eschaton, the anti-me, after we come back together?
How will I meet her?
Will she just appear, and then it’s all over?
The thought is too big.
Do I really believe any of it?
Look at the McDonald’s cashier. She’s talking to her friend who just walked up to the register. A whole life that has nothing to do with me. I am soon going to end her, end her friend, everything. What will happen to that cashier and her friend? How much of her will stay real? Or is she just a dream I had, or a dream of one of my dreams, a shadow stuck inside an enchanted hill?
What time is it?
I stick my charger in the wall and try to recharge my phone. Nothing. I jiggle and kink the cord. There is a momentary flash. But the phone won’t charge. Or it’ll charge for a few seconds and then stop. Nothing works. The car, the phone, the credit cards—every machine is working against me. Matter itself is fighting me.
But not fighting that hard.
Deep down, it wants to go.
It’s not just Erin and the boys I want to call. I want to call Julia, to apologize for last night. Did I disgrace myself at dinner? Did I actually drive to my hotel blackout drunk? I want to call Kulkarni, if Kulkarni was still in touch. But he isn’t. Who, then? I want to call…
The cashier and her friend laugh.
I’m alone.
Buying that hamburger put me under ten dollars. No credit. So I have literally less than ten dollars in the world. Six dollars and change now: two quarters, a dime, a nickel, a penny. I look at the coins until they stop meaning anything.
Dare to Know Page 23