At some point between the First Swing and the End of the Universe—some few measures short of October—the freshman, Jake Stanton, supine on the hood of his late model Katarina in the Uptown parking lot, lay watching on as the stranger, the Circadian girl, thrashed away at the vehicles nearby, swinging a softball bat—his bat—in and out of time to a signature beyond him.
The bat had been in her hands since the diner, where he had, upon her request to see it, bowed his head in mock-squire reverence and presented the bat sword-wise over the booth table.
“So what’s the difference,” she asked as she took it from him, his gesture unacknowledged, her voice flat with disinterest, “between this and a baseball bat?”
To which he replied, with a shrug: “Different sports.”
And what if he had refused to hand it over then? Would he still be watching this same spectacle unfold in front of him now? Jake unwound further the record of time, followed the trail upstream. The bestowal of the bat, after all, had been only one of many choices that night. Instead of sitting at the diner, working on his essay, Jake could have just as easily ended up that evening at the—
“—End of the Universe party. Dude, let’s go.”
“End of the Universe?”
“Yeah,” replied the shortstop.
“Why ‘Universe’?”
“Because the Mayans nailed it and we’ve been stuck in hell ever since. Or something. Whatever. Who cares? It’s over at Brunswick House. Some of us are heading there after the game.”
“Paper’s due tomorrow morning.”
“Seriously? Come on—it’s worth, what? Five percent of your grade? Not even.”
“Ten.”
“Make it up on the final then.”
And he had been this close to going. Truly. But after the intramural game, after his team had won and shaken the other team’s hands, after he’d gone back to Crescent Hall and showered, the essay had won out.
“Disappointed in you,” they said. “Missing out, man. The Universe only Ends once.”
And Jake, knapsacked-up, diner-bound, had responded, “I don’t know what that means.”
But now, lying on top of his car, he thought he was beginning to understand. Because the universe did only end once. There was just the one, and no other but, and in the only Universe he would ever know Jake Stanton had chosen the essay in Rick’s Diner, that beloved campus hotspot, open 24/7, second home to (if for no other reason than a complete lack of alternatives) late-night crammers and sobering party-goers alike.
And had he gone to the party? How would things have been different? Well, for starters, he never would’ve met …
Uh …
“… so, uh, I didn’t get your name?”
“Yeah,” she said, “no shit,” glaring at him from across the table, “because I never told you,” her cheeks an indignant red, “you fucking idiot,” which colour she sustained for all but two seconds before deflating back into her seat with a resigned scoff.
Um, okay? But weren’t you the one who materialized out of the night, gawking at me from the other side of the glass, like I was a freakshow on display? And weren’t you the one who stumbled in through the doors looking like some disheveled mute bag lady and sat down fuming and scowling in my booth uninvited? I was just typing on my laptop, minding my own business. You’re the weirdo who—
—and so on, was what he wanted to say. But instead he let out a chuckle, of either amusement or discomfort, or maybe both, and offered, to the girl who had, after tossing the bat aside, crossed her arms on the table and buried her head in her sleeves: “Well, I’m Jake St—”
“—Stanton. I know who you are,” she said, voice muffled. She lifted her head up again, wearing, in addition to the grooves her sweater had impressed upon her forehead, a different face from the one she’d put down, a new expression, devoid of her initial edge of irritability, replaced instead by a worn severity, a weariness of something he couldn’t begin to guess at, and continued, “You’re not supposed to be here. You’re supposed to be at the End of the Universe.”
Whereupon he figured her to be an actual student of the school, rather than, as he had first suspected, and as her overall air would suggest, some sort of runaway drifter, on the lam perhaps, from parents or doctors … or otherwise …
“You know about that too? I was debating going—”
“Yeah, I bet you were.”
“—but I came here instead. I got ... I have an essay due.”
Yes, he had. But that ten percent had been forfeit from the moment she arrived. He might not’ve known so in the diner, but he knew it now: now, here, reclined on the car, eyes drifting between star and lot, mind wavering to and back from lesser night, retrospection scored by rampage, the now anchored to the here with each shattered window and popped tail light and added alarm, the discordant chorus growing, rising, ever louder, harsher—and now really, why hadn’t anybody shown up to investigate this ruckus? Where were the security guards? Campus police? Jake Stanton turned away from the stars and looked her way as she wound up again for yet another Swing, the outline of her stance bringing his mental traversal back to the first Swing (not the First, but some kind of first nonetheless), which began, he supposed—if he had to choose a when—when she picked the bat up again to flag the waiter over to their booth.
“Hey, you need to put that down. You can’t wave that around in here.”
“Whatever. Gimme a Heineken.”
“You got ID?”
“Gimme a coffee.”
And when the coffee came it came in a plain white ceramic mug, which she loudly sipped from, while Jake tried his best to initiate some kind of conversation: What was she studying? Did she live on campus? Why was she so obsessed with the time on her unlock screen? Or, hey, how ‘bout an easy one—What’s your name?
But she wouldn’t bite. And the more Jake tried, the more he found himself casting lures into not so much a lake as, say, a toilet, until finally he struck some unseen threshold of annoyance within her, at which point she rose from her seat, pulled her hood up, stepped out of the booth and, without so much as another word to the boy whose night she’d interrupted, headed for the exit.
Which would’ve been fine with Jake, were it not for the fact that she was making off with his bat. “Oh, um, you still have my—” But she was already halfway out the door. Jake stuffed away his notes and laptop and scrambled off into the night after her.
On the main campus road she walked, in and out of the dark, under the imitation gas streetlamps, holding in one hand his bat, and in the other the empty coffee mug, taken as if in lieu of a glove, the missing half of a loadout she seemed (to him, at least) to want to assume.
He jogged up the road to catch up to her. “Hey, uh, listen, you think I could get that back from you now?” he asked, pointing to the bat, then to the cup, adding, “Also, you’re probably not supposed to take that outside,” an admonition which she chose to either ignore or denounce—even now he couldn’t tell what her actual intent had been—by stopping in place, pitching the mug skyward and winding up the bat; and then swinging, when the mug fell, back to earth, as hard as she could—only to miss by an embarrassingly wide margin, leaving the cup to fall through the whiff and clatter to the ground, where it remained, somehow, still intact.
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“You’re swinging too early,” he said. “And your posture is off. Here, let me show you.” He reached for his bat, but she jerked it away from him and snarled, in a tone so genuinely venomous, so seethingly spiteful that the hair on his arms couldn’t help but bristle, his blood but quicken, “I’ll swing that f-fuck nose off your bitch face, you don’t stop following me.”
At which words Jake Stanton, watching her storm away yet again, knew, instantly, and without the slightest uncertainty, that he would follow her anywhere that night. To world’s end, if so asked.
Well. As it turned out, no such piety was required of him. They walked as far as the campus parking lot—the closest they would get to the end of the world—though by how far or short they fell of such a destination neither could reasonably hazard, really—before Jake Stanton put forth the suggestion that would, looking back, signal the start of the end of the night. “Wanna see my car?”
And she had looked at the time on her phone once more before giving him a shrug, which was, apparently, approval enough for Jake, who then proceeded to lead her through the lot to his car, inside which he, after unlocking the driver’s side door, leaned across past the steering wheel and reached for the glovebox, but stopped just short of opening it, hesitating for a moment before pulling himself out of the car again, and calling over the roof: “Want to go for a drive?”
Not deigning to look at him, her eyes fixed to the cosmos, arms extended, taking aim at the vertex of some constellation in equal parts provocation and measurement, bat wielded as weapon or instrumentation or perhaps both: “Maybe next time.”
Jake grinned and stuck his body back into the car. He opened the glovebox and retrieved the object of interest. The car door shut behind him and he walked back over to batter and stargazer and extended the hip flask towards her, wiggling it side to side in sarcastic temptation, eliciting from her, when she returned to earth, a scoff and, possibly, for the first time that night, unless he was misremembering, the slightest curve of something resembling a smile.
“Why is it in your glove compartment?”
“Ah,” unscrewing the cap, “you know.” He took a sip. “I drink and drive sometimes.” He offered it to her.
“Right. Sure.” She took it. Sniffed, scrunched. “Who doesn’t?” She looked at the flask for a long time, and as she did so Jake could hear her head whirring away with simulations, contemplating not the flask’s brushed steel chrome or its gaudy engraved decals so much as, warily, the liquid contained within, which she eventually, to his surprise, not to mention delight, drank.
“It’s good, right? Got it from a bazaar in the Undivided.”
Face twisted: “Uh, yeah. Awesome. I love paint thinner.”
“No, I meant the ... flask, not the ... Um, never mind.”
A few sips later they were lying on the hood of his car, the shadow of Jake prior superimposed on his present self, no delta save the world’s spin, his and her backs against the windshield, both faces staring up at the cloudless night above, the flask passing back and forth between them, his mouth moving for no other purpose than to dispel silence as he jabbered on about such worthless topics as his essay, his softball game, his childhood growing up here, his—
“Wait, hold up,” she said, turning to face him. “You grew up here?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh. That’s new.” She drank. “Never knew that about you.”
“Uh, well. Yeah, that’s—I mean … Why would you?”
“I didn’t even think people lived here.”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“Guess I never thought about Uptown as anything other than a school. Why do you—Why don’t you just live at home?”
He shrugged and drank. “Where are you from?”
“New Circadia.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s pretty far.”
“Yeah.”
“First Divisioner, huh? Isn’t it mostly farmland over there?”
“Huh?” exasperated. “Maybe back, like—that’s way before I was born, dude.”
“Why’d you come all the way over here for school? There’s nothing here. You’re in the wrong part of the Third if you came looking for fun. Or excitement. Or interesting people. Or much of anything, really.”
She paused, allowed for a swig. “I don’t know. I guess because my— …”
Inquisitively: “… your …?”
She sat up. “Wait—shut up. Shut up.”
“I’m not … talking …”
“It’s here,” she said. “You hear—you hear that?”
He did not. He followed her eyes, which seemed to be locked to some unseen point in the far-off distance, as well as her ears, one of which was twitching felinely at some unheard noise, but he was unable to observe whatever had roused her so. And as he tried to finer-tune his dials to match her frequency, the (New) Circadian hopped off the hood, bat in hand, muttering indistinguishable incantations to herself, and stumbled over to a yellow SUV nearby, the lucky target of the First Swing.
And this time she didn’t miss. The passenger window shattered into rugged jewels. The car alarm blared and echoed through the parking lot. She brought the bat up behind her head and brought it down on the hood. She swung and she swung again. Metal on metal, metal on glass.
Jake could do nothing but watch. In static incredulity he unmoored himself from the present and relived the night through the recollection of the memory of the event as he moved through time, and she through cars, marking her trail with the ever-growing tally of Swings: the Fifth, the Tenth, the Twentieth on ... and with the Thirty-Sixth the then became the now, and when Jake Stanton emerged from out his head he heard it at last—a humming, a drone without origin or direction or ties to any world he knew, a noise that at once underlay all perception as though it had been so for the entirety of all existence (and who was to say it hadn’t?) yet was only now allowing its presence to be known: a sound whose vibrations forewent resonance and timbre, whose amplitudes and periods resolved to no definition, whose inherence seemed within rather than without.
Which was ridiculous. After all, she’d first heard the noise long before he did, and, unless some other new disturbance had taken its place, she was still hearing it now, still swinging the bat to its non-rhythm, still maintaining a profane litany (“—do it! Do it! COME ON! YOU FUCKER! DO IT!”) that was no more curse than prayer to some unseen and uncaring deity, who, in delayed response to her manic supplications, effected a break in the scene, a shift in the noise, a charge in the air, and as the hair on his arms stood prickling and electric, Jake Stanton first glimpsed, rolling in from a distance, from somewhere far beyond the Continuate, past the periphery of the known, the White, closing in on them from every direction, consuming all in its path, devouring earth and firmament alike as if its tracks were a negation, and its convergence some gross nullification, the primal erasure of all that which lay antithetical to its horrid wake, this tempest nothing.
And all his life, hadn’t Jake associated ‘nothing’ with a kind of darkness? Something barren and cold? Some distant ancestor to the black between stars, surely. But this notion had never seemed more misguided than it did now. Because space was space. It wasn’t nothing. It was an absence, an emptiness, but it bore no relation to whatever was heading for them now.
Which was nothing.
And nothing was …?
Nothing was the White. Nothing was the campus promenade. It was the convocation hall, the athletic centre. Crescent Hall and Brunswick House. Nothing was Rick’s Diner and the softball diamond and the library building at whose entrance he had pointed out to her the bronze bust of some octogenarian (“I think he’s our first mayor or something. Dude’s been there since before I was born.”) and it was his home on the other side of town, the years he’d spent under its roof, and it was the years yet to come; for here now was the world in composite, its disparities brought to level, its souls a vast accretion; and what had once been or could’ve been was beside the point now for from this moment on they existed only in false disposition according to the horrific White closing in now on him (them), the great Nothing which had long predated any darkness, this prime antecedent from which the universe had come into being, returning once again from night not only to reclaim its stake upon all that had dared to profane its supremacy but to bring about his and all end because what else could this be? Say it out loud, Jake. This was—
—the end of the universe.
Had he spoken?
No. No, but I want to.
Articulation was the first debt of his unraveling. The White had come for his words, as it had the night and stars and the world beyond the lot, and Jake knew (knew!) the rest of him would soon follow. What could he do besides wait? He surveyed the un-world around him, standing dumbfounded in that dimming radial slice, that decaying lot whose center comprised the final remaining testaments to existence—him, her, his car, his bat—the last of which she now windmilled about as she floated over to his car to wind up for the Last Swing.
No, wait—
He caught her arm a split second before she connected with the windshield. He shook his head, pleaded with his eyes. Don’t. Please don’t. It’s all I have left.
But whatever she’d been about to do no longer mattered. The car was gone. As was the bat. Only they remained, standing on neither ground nor air, joined by grip and forearm, forged in this union to become reciprocals of that first pair present at the beginning of creation, as if the two freshmen, staring now into each other’s eyes, were in fulfillment to some obligation kept secret from them their entire lives, to roles predetermined by something they would never know, never understand, under whose will the two were bound to usher in the coming of the endmost, the irreversible annihilation from whose final order they (you) can never return, from whose hold they (you) can never escape, from whose ruination they (you!) can—
“—you can let go of my arm now.”
But his grip on her arm only tightened. He didn’t want to leave.
“Jake. It doesn’t hurt. Let go.”
He did, eventually—though not through any agency of his own—and when Jake Stanton no longer existed, the freshman, for the seventh time that she could count, stood alone in the Void, kneading the part of her arm where the boy had grabbed her, her skin still bearing the red imprint of his phantom grip, a trace of someone who’d once been, the only proof that there had ever existed a soul, any soul, besides her own.
She could stay here for as long as she wished. This purgatory ended only when she was ready. This she’d known for many iterations now.
So for a while she stayed. And when she was finally ready she felt the familiar sensations, once strange but now routine: the feeling of falling upwards, of being pulled apart seam by seam, of becoming one with the Void. Then she faded into the white null and she too was nothing.
And she hadn’t lied to him, truly. There was no pain.