Just before it arrived, they had announced it was over. It was said that all history had stopped in its place. The horse-drawn carriage had first brought the car. That was a problem solved, and now there was nothing, nothing to do but drive on in that direction. They could go for as long as they wanted to now. It was all over, so that nothing would ever end again. He was born into this feeling of limitlessness, but by the time he could start making memories of his own it was gone. Somebody had messed it up for everybody else. At least now there were new ways to communicate about it.
It had already grown hot by the time that he landed. People said the worst was yet to come in this regard. It seemed no one had thought that far ahead, to consider the long-term implications of setting so many things on fire. Life’s funny like that—you spend your time so focused on one problem that you fail to see real danger barreling your way. It made the people who thought they had stopped time itself get mad, because they had come so close and gotten no credit for it at all. His teacher liked to yell this lesson at the classroom, a few decibels higher than the rest of the unit. As though it were their fault. Lots of people carried guns. The parks department introduced a new thing called xeriscaping—it was like having a lawn except that nothing needed water. The river was getting low, which made the canyons more beautiful. People were endlessly entertained by a shared collection of cats and dogs. People invented new ways of talking to one another every week, and each wave seemed to disavow the ones that came before it. They hiked more often these days. People wore pants that could be unzipped into shorts, and jackets with many ingeniously hidden pockets. Everyone agreed that it was all more precious now. Far away, they heard the sounds of rivers running dry, the earth turning to dust, guns firing near the border. It was wonderful, how quickly the machine could turn each disparate thing into a joke.
She was jealous of the past. She read about it, late at night, in endless repositories. It seemed blatant, obvious, that no one had ever worried about their futures as much as she worried about hers. She was jealous of their misguided adventures, foolish waste, and the endless optimisms that spurred it—as though they really thought they’d be the first to outlaugh time. She laughed at their naiveté—foolish dead men! proven wrong in their time like everyone else, until now—and at the same time, here they were, in plain English before her, and translated into 59 other languages as well. They were forever and would forever be reachable there, at the end of a link. This was the only concession that time had made for them. She could die, the earth could die, but it lived on, glowing and growing, more intricate than Minos’s maze. It was built like thin twigs composing a fine nest of tinder, each one touching several others in its path, a link to a link to a link to a link, so that you could not touch one without touching them all, and always, like the universe, ever expanding, to the point that there was no way of wrapping one’s head around it, or placing it on the lattitude of something like time. It was truly the end, the only new thing, and it would never die so long as someone kept clicking.
- Nolan Kelly