The Remainder

I was there when the world stopped.

The planet had a stroke and every living thing dropped dead. Everywhere, blood stopped pumping. All at once. From pole to pole, from continent to continent, from the top of the sky to the depths of the ocean trenches. Fish floated to the surface. Birds plummeted to the ground. Airplanes dove, cars crashed, and every pedestrian became a rag doll.

The machines stopped, too. Lights went dark. Heaters went cold. The organic thrum of engines gave way to silence, and every carefully-cooled room returned to the uncomfortable sticky heat of the outside.

The wind halted and the waves went flat. The trees wilted and the sands stopped rolling. Rivers froze in their tracks and waterfalls tumbled their last. The clouds dispersed and the sky went hot and clear and yellow.

First it was cacophony, of course, as all the things that had to stop stopped. Here I was in the middle of the street as cars rolled and crashed to a halt, and the helicopters whirled off into concussions of sound and fury and death, and the bugs tumbled down to tap out their grim morse against the ground like aborted raindrops and birds splattered the pavement  and the lights went out.

The planet tripped and fell on its face and broke its neck. A whoosh and a crack and then the slow drip drip drip of a little blood as the last few human beings landed, staring vacantly at the ground or the horizon or the sky.

And then.

And then.

It’s impossible to express what “silence” really is. You’ve never heard it before. Even in a room with no sound, enclosed and away from the pulsing and groaning of the rest of the planet, you still have your heart pumping in your ears, the slow whoosh and sigh of your own breath, your hair bristling and your skin scraping roughly against other skin. You don’t know silence because you know the sound of the inside of your body. The ringing in your ears. The spasmodic twitching of your thoughts.

This was silence.

The world hit its head and went deaf.

There was silence.

And I was there to see it.

I knew in an instant what it meant. All living things simply ended. The living earth stopped living, and all things that moved and changed halted in their inexorable tracks.

I must not be alive.

I had never been alive. All living things are stopped, and here I am still going.

The earth exhaled and drowned and couldn’t breathe anymore and sank into the bog, smothered into purple-tongued silence and bulging bloodshot eyes rolled back to stare into its own dark eye sockets. Things don’t decompose. Even the bacteria are dead. The air doesn’t move as I shamble through the cluttered streets, and yet I can persist even though the stagnant vacuum won’t let me breathe. Every bump in the uneven pavement becomes a shard of diamond in my feet since it won’t erode under my weight. The millions of millions of dead don’t even have the courtesy to stink. Elephants and whales are dead and so are the amoebas and microbes. They don’t even stink.

They just sit there just as they were when the earth fell into the gorge and dashed out its brains on the rocks and its little thoughts scattered everywhere.

I had never been alive, and yet I am privy to the end of the world.

I can’t tell if the sun is still alive. Everything is the same temperature so the heat isn’t going away into space because the air is dead. But I can look right at the sun and I can’t burn my eyes out for some reason.

The damp loam is rock under my step. The snow is an ice sculpture that I can’t climb. The air won’t move.

Silence.

Silence.

You will never understand.

I am still here.

"Work is a Notepad and These are the Scribbles": Another Handful of Conversations.

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A man enters the lobby on a mid-January morning, looking first to the site of the gift shop. The site is clearly completely empty; the walls are bare, the floor hosts no furniture or products, and the lights inside are off (though the space is still well illuminated by lights without). 

Him: "Oh. Is the gift shop closed?"
Me: "Yep. They're renovating. Under new management. Nothing'll be there for the next week or two, is what I'm hearing. Maybe a month."
Him: "So it's not gonna be open?"

ME sighs at having to repeat himself, but presses on. 

Me: "Not for a couple weeks, no."
Him: “I mean today. Are they going to be open today?”
Me: “...no. They’ll be closed while renovating for a while.”
Him: “Why?”
Me: “Because they’re RENOVATING. Clearing everything out, top to bottom. No one’s there now, and won’t be until February.”
Him: “Oh.”

A pause as he casts his eyes back to the empty room. 

Him: “So, like, I’ll be back at three. Can I get flowers in there or something?”
Me: “February is more than five hours away, sir.”
Him: “Oh, okay. I’ll just check back in the morning.”

==================== 

Him: “Excuse me, sir. Where is the designated smoking area?”
Me: “There is no smoking permitted anywhere on campus. You’ll have to make your way down to the street.”

The man gestures to the patio. 

Him: “Out here?”
Me: “No, that’s still on campus. If you walk out and turn left, you can take the driveway down the hill to the street.”
Him: “All right. Nowhere closer, huh?”
Me: “Sorry, no.”

The man proceeds to exit the front doors, walks about ten feet, sits down at the fountain, and lights up a cigarette right under a “No Smoking” sign. I stare at him for a moment, then walk around my desk and out the doors. 

Me: “Sir, you’re still on campus. I have to ask you to go down to the street if you’re going to smoke.”
Him: “What do you mean?”
Me: “I mean you’re still on hospital grounds, where smoking is prohibited.”

I gesture to the sign, which he looks at, after which he looks angrily back at me. 

Him: “What?! Why am I always the last to hear about these things?!”
Me: “I ask myself the same thing every day, sir.”

The man saunters down the hill, returning some twenty minutes later, smelling something like an industrial smokestack and wheezing profusely. 

Him: “That hill is murder! You should have a smoking area on this level!”
Me: “It had occurred to me. I blame tectonic activity for the objectionable topography of the region, myself.”
Him: “What?”
Me: “That hill is murder.”

 ================= 

Her: “Where’s the cafeteria?”
Me: “On the ground floor.”
Her: “How do I get there?”
Me: “By taking this elevator down to the ground floor.”
Her: “And then?”
Me: “And then you’ll be at the cafeteria’s entrance.”
Her: “Now hold on. Say that again?”
Me: “Elevator down to G.”

I don’t continue talking, but she replies quickly as if to cut me off from continuing to speak. 

Her: “Wait a minute. I know I’m going to forget. Can you write it down?”
Me: “Oooooh-kay.”

I write, as neatly as I’m able in large letters, “Elevator Down to (G)round Floor” with a circle around the G, indicating the elevator button one must press to complete the trip. She inspects the note closely once I hand it to her. 

Her: “Now wait a minute. ‘Elevator.’ That’s THIS elevator?”
Me: “Yep.”
Her: “And ‘down to (g)round.’ So what do I press?”
Me: “First you hit the ‘down’ button. When you’re inside, hit the button marked ‘G’.”
Her: “And then?”
Me: “And then you wait until the elevator’s on G, for ‘ground’, and then when you step off, the cafeteria will be right in front of you.”
Her: “Oh god. I’m gonna get lost.”

She dashes off to the elevator, hits the “up” button, and is gone. Half an hour later, she returns, note in hand and looking distressed. 

Her: “I never found it!”
Me: “The cafeteria you mean?”
Her: “Yeah! This place is a maze! I wound up in the emergency room!”
Me: “How’d you get there?”
Her: “I did what you said! I went up to B...”
Me: “Down to G, ma’am.”
Her: “...wh... what?”

I point to the relevant lines in the note I wrote. 

Me: “Elevator down to G. You went one level too far.”

She stares dolefully at the note for many long seconds before finally renewing eye contact. 

Her: “Now wait a minute. Can you tell me that again?”

============ 

A woman enters when I am feeling mischievous. 

Her: “Hi. Does this elevator go down?”
Me: “No, actually. The car on the right only goes up, and the car on the left only goes down.”
Her: “Oh. Makes sense.”

Taking my jest entirely seriously, she hits the down button, staring at it contemplatively for a few long seconds. 

Her: “I guess the buttons should be side-by-side, then, rather than up and down.”
Me: “...I honestly hadn’t thought of that.”

============== 

Them: “I’m looking for room 803.”
Me: “There’s no room 803 here.”
Them: “They told me it was room 803.”
Me: “Well, give us the patient’s last name and I can look them up.”

The visitor tells me the patient’s name, which I can’t find. 

Me: “Not finding the name here. Are you sure it’s here and not at [the very similarly named hospital on the other side of town]?
Them: “No, they never go there. She said she was at [completely different hospital with an entirely dissimilar-sounding name in a totally different direction].”
Me: “Yeah, that’s... not here.”
Them: “...well why would they lie to me?!”

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