Page 223 of The End of the World As We Know It
We have been forgotten.
He stops again, exasperated. Looks up at the sky. Those linear clouds, even more jagged in places than earlier. The sun is finally beginning to dip low, smearing everything with wild magenta.
And that noise. That damn noise. Definitely louder now.
“This is an isolated area,” he says back to her, jaw clenched. “That’s why I drove here in the first place!”
“Okay. But. Hear me out. Please.” She takes a few steps toward him. “After my friends died… I was all alone, and… The thing is, man, I hated my friends. They treated me like dog shit. Especially Bernie. I mean, I thought about killing them all the time—and I’m not saying this to skeeve you out, I’m just saying that’s how bad it was, okay? Ididn’tkill them. Captain Trips did. But then I figured I might as well just… kill myself, right? I mean, I still wanted to killsomething.So, I got really drunk, and I got really high, and I broke into our old high school to, y’know, do the deed, because that felt nice and dramatic. The place was totally empty, and I’m wandering down the halls, thinking about how shitty my friends were and how pissed I am thatthisis how my life turned out and why couldn’t I have been born in a different world, or at least gotten a fucking taste of how thingscouldhave been different, and I round this corner and… and there’s this door. Like, a freestanding door. In the middle of the hallway. Where there shouldn’t be a door.”
“Susie.”
“Justlisten.It had this weird, long number written on it, with dashes, kinda like a phone number, but not. No idea what it meant, but… Well, I was already ready for an ending, so I figured, ‘Whatthe hell,’ and I opened it up and next thing I knew, I was in—I don’t even know, where is this, Colorado?”
He doesn’t correct her. He’s too busy not thinking about the numbers he scrawled on the drawing inside his jacket pocket.
“Ever since I got here,” she continues, “I’ve been so… disoriented. Things feel off, don’t they? Nothing sounds right. Nothing tastes right. And every time I close my eyes, I still see that door. That fuckingdoor, man! What if it’s the same door they were talking about? Or… I dunno, what if I really did kill myself? What if that guy was right and this is the land of the dead?”
“He didn’t saythat!” Ezra yells, appalled. “He was rambling nonsense. Both of them! Comeon,Susie, did they sound compos mentis to you? Talking like they’re in a, a fantasy novel or something?”
“No.”
“No! Just a couple of mentally ill hobos! As for your ‘door,’ you said it yourself. You were high! And drunk!”
“But… how did I get here?”
He throws his hands up in frustration. “You’ve been through a trauma! You blacked out! Maybe you hitchhiked! Or you got kidnapped! Or you just walked! Like this!”
He turns away from her, starts walking once more. Huffing. Desperate to end this idiocy.
She calls after him. “What about all the earthquakes, Ezra? And seriously… where are all the bodies? Remember how many there were, all piling up?”
We have been forgotten. Abandoned.
Far up ahead, a building on the hilly horizon. The park station.
He swallows. “There’s an explanation!” he says. “There’s always an explanation!”
“What if the explanation is we’re dead?!” She has to shout after him now. “What if this is purgatory?! Or what if this is all some sort of fever dream in my head and I’m just waiting for the lights to go—”
“NO!” He turns back to actually scream at her, throat grinding.“Dreams don’t mean anything! And we’re not dead! We’re alive! We survived! We exist! GODDAMMIT,IEXIST!”
Feeling a little better having yelled all that, he walks in silence.
Eventually, she hurries to catch up with him.
They find Ezra’s father, singing, inside the visitor’s entrance of the Black Dragon Park Center.
He’s cross-legged on the welcome desk, his back to them. A bright yellow trench coat is tossed haphazardly next to him.
It’s his voice that first draws Ezra in. After that upsetting conversation with Susie, he’s not exactly raring for further interactions with a stranger. But that voice. It sounds just like Dad.
As they get closer, Ezra recognizes the song as one that had been getting a lot of radio airplay before—
(the world ended)
—everything started to fall apart. A song his father couldn’t have known.
The singer, sensing their approach, builds to a crescendo.
