The End of the World

I watched her luridly jiggle her atomic cloud for ten seconds through the glass window of Don's TV and Appliance Shop on Main Street. She was courtesy 30 brand-new 16-inch RCA cathode-ray tube console television sets. I was 18 and newly enlisted in the United States Navy waiting for August to be shipped away where I'd do some job on a boat of some sort and prepare for an inevitable war. I was ready to do my patriotic duty and I even got a buzz-cut in preparation where I listened to Sam the barber talking about doing his patriotic duty in The Battle of the Bulge with a wry grin. The Big One, he longingly called it. 

We didn’t have a TV at home, but Don had thirty at any given time and he kept them running through the night until the station went off the air and that Indian head wheel thing came on and he would, I suppose, go shut them off. My father said it was because it gave him an excuse to leave his wife for a while at bedtime, so he would slip her a sleeping pill and stop in Mickey's Bar, which was next door to his shop, and have a drink or two. And my father would ask him the same question everyone asked him. "Sell any TVs today, Don?" 

Don would puff out his chest and boast that he sold one to the Parrish's over on Maple, or the Stewart's on King St., relaxing in his barstool like it was the frontier and he had a wagon full of beaver pelts. Don's father was a mortician who ran the town funeral home over on Sycamore Street. He wanted nothing more than for Don to take over the business and be a mortician too, but Don chose his own life and sold TVs because it takes a certain person to be a mortician, and he wasn't it. Or so my father said. I suppose it takes a certain person to sell TVs, too. Whatever my father said was gospel to me. 

It was good for business to keep them turned on like he did, glowing like magical treasure boxes. People walking by would stop and stare, attracted like moths to those unnatural flames, and in that hypnotic glow they'd ponder how they could afford a $300 TV, nefariously or otherwise. Or they'd stand there and grin at the novelty of it, not particularly interested in owning one, but transfixed by something about it, or on it, something far away that was suddenly so close. Lions on the African Sahara. Artic penguins. A ballgame. A war in Asia. It was all nice and neat and tidy in a wooden box and just on the other side of a pane of glass. Just as Ms. Atomica was to me, shaking her mushroom cloud on those wonderful dreamlike commercials that were gone in a flash.

I have never seen anything like her before in my life, granted it was shortlived. Certainly, not here in this small upstate New York town that epitomizes the term "sleepy." There were pretty women, sure, at church, at the library, and occasionally in the grocery, but she was more than just pretty and my affinity for her was more than just fleeting. I suppose in the Navy I might see those kinds of previously unimaginable things in ports of call that I haven't seen in my town. But life is a string of ports of call, my father said, whether you are in the Navy or not. I don’t suppose I know what he meant, but he often said such things that sounded profound and I figure I will understand them when I am old and smoking a pipe on a front porch somewhere. My father teaches history at the junior high, but he teaches me philosophy at home. 

I suppose many things because, as he says, I am a "supposer." He says we are all supposers until the reality of life hits us and then we become doubters and naysayers, right around the time we turn forty and have been married about twenty years and begin to lose our eyesight and hair. When our waistline expands, and we just don't care anymore about the simple things that fascinated us in our youth. Like frogs. Or fireworks. Or dreams. Or romance. The sad part is, he said, those are the people running the country. Old dried-up prunes in monkey suits without a scintilla of imagination or innocence left inside of them. They are motivated by profit and power. He said that is why he goes to the bar, because a bar is an emporium of dreams and the only place where he is still a supposer, and alcohol is youth in a bottle. 

I stood there in the glow of all of Don's Murdoch's TVs and figured I was seeing snippets of a life I was yet to know. A life that was promised and out there somewhere. It was as though anything in the world was possible. Even the westerns. Somewhere in Arizona that still happens. There are still Indians and cowboys fighting it out over broken treaties and land, and saloons full of pretty women and shady gamblers, and fat gold nuggets in crystal-clear streams. Towns full of lawmen and outlaws and giddy prospectors and fresh pine boxes for burying. And there is space and space aliens and creatures from black lagoons and blobs of weird space jelly that devour everyone and anything they touch. There are 50-foot women and werewolves. And somewhere, Ms. Atomica of the Atomic Soap Powder Company was waiting for me. She was my destiny. 

I wrote her a letter in my naivety, addressed to Ms Atomica, in care of the Atomic Soap Powder Company, 400 Fifth Ave., New York, New York. I told her how wonderful her product was and how I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world and how I would love to meet her, or at least, to get a signed picture of her so I could frame it and hang it proudly in my laundry room (I thought saying my bedroom would be too forward). 

I asked her what she did besides model for the Atomic Soap Powder Company, if perhaps she did toothpaste advertisements as well, because her teeth were spectacular, or nylon advertisements because her legs were – well, I stopped before saying what I thought of her legs. I asked her what her real name was so that if she wanted to correspond I didn't have to call her Ms. Atomica. I often stood in the glow of those TVs on that sidewalk wondering if she was a Betty or a Kathy, or a Mary or a Linda, or something more exotic like Audrey, Alexandra, or Diana. But much to my chagrin, five months later, she had yet to reply. I checked the mailbox every day wanting to intercept the letter before my mother found it, just in case she was to reply something that a mother shouldn’t read.

But when the TVs darken for a moment and fade from her commercial to world news, I often catch myself in the reflection of the glass that is like a portentous black mirror, still staring at her though she is gone, smiling giddily like a dopey kid at a puppy or at an easy pop-fly, and I realize that I am becoming a doubter and a naysayer, and there is no way to avoid it. Maybe it was when I began drinking coffee instead of soda, or when I stopped collecting baseball cards, or chewing bubblegum, or when I preferred to look at pretty women over puppies. Maybe it was when I stopped jarring fireflies or dreaming of being a major league baseball player and signed up for the Navy and got a buzz-cut. Or when I stopped kissing my mom goodnight. Or when scary movies stopped scaring me and instead the news scared me more. Those old naysaying men talking about other naysaying men who were in a nuclear standoff waiting for the other guy to blink. To press his button first. Their cruddy-old retaliatory fingers on literal extinction buttons. 

All I knew of nuclear bombs was that time when my father drove us to the Grand Canyon when I was six or seven and somewhere in New Mexico there was a sign in the middle of nowhere for a road that seemed to go nowhere which he said led to the place where they developed and tested The Bomb. "The one they dropped on the Japs?" I asked. Yes, he responded morosely. The one they dropped on Japanese boys and girls. On women and babies and old people and paper houses. On dogs and cats and bunny rabbits and squirrels and just about everything good in life that you could ever imagine. Let's hope that one day someone doesn't do that to us. 

“Harry!” my mother shrieked. She scolded him for being so glum as though he could have instead found some joy in it, and for frightening us, so he stopped. He apologized somberly, but he looked down that road as we slowly passed it as though it were some horrific place where every bad thing in the world that happened, happened there. Every terrible and wrong thing knew it as an origin. As though it all began there. Under the guise of pursuing a new and better energy source to improve everyone's standard of living. And for miles and miles there was the Atomic Café, the Rocket Hotel, Nuclear Lube and Oil, the A-Bomb Gift Shop, selling hot dogs, beds, gas and keychains for a New Age of transcontinental travelers along the freeway. There was probably even a theme park somewhere, but not one fallout shelter or radiation burn center to be had. 

I don't suppose I recalled that trip when I first saw her. Nor did I consider the glorification of nuclear war in a simple advertisement because all I really saw was her jiggling around and then throwing her hands up in the air mimicking an explosion. It was cute and I was naive. All I saw was her mouth and her legs, and all I could do was to obsessively imagine what was behind that cloud. She had legs and a smile like Rita Hayworth, but she wasn't Rita Hayworth. She was simply in one commerical and thus she was attainable to me. Perhaps, I thought, she had a soft spot for younger men, though she herself couldn't have been any older than 22. Perhaps, when I was in the Navy she would be on one of those USO tours. Perhaps, we would meet somehow in passing. New York City was only a few hours away. Maybe I'd take the train in and see the city before I shipped out and there she's be in Grand Central Station, waiting for me. 

I thought of that Grand Canyon trip just now, watching her as she faded again from the screen and was replaced by some old-crotchety newsman speaking glibly of the latest in the stalled negotiations between Russian and American envoys. Cigarette smoke from an ashtray rose up around the anchorman's morbid gray head. His watery clear eyes looking at all of America in the eye, as though America had just one eye, the camera looking back at him attentively. He was reading from a paper about Russian missiles in Cuba, and his ash-gray lips were moving beneath the fuzz of a thin-peppery mustache, carefully enunciating each word so that he was clearly understood. He didn't stutter once. He didn't misspeak. And in some newsroom in Moscow, I suppose, there was a similar man haloed in smoke with a paper in front of him reading the other side of the story about American missiles in Turkey. 

It is absurd how so few men decide the fate of so many others. How we have to live with the consequences of their bad decisions. It was just then that Don Murdoch grabbed me from behind and pulled me into his TV shop. His hands clamped down on my arm so tightly that I had no hope to break free. I was stunned and any effort to get away would have been futile. He had a crazed looked in his eyes and smelled of beer and cigarettes. He looked like he was going to cry. Then he blurted out, “Get inside, Davey! They're launching the Big One!”

He let me go and my fear overtook me and we raced through that shop of TVs all of which were on but all of which were shrieking the same shrill emergency warning. It was a deafening intervallic shriek so that it could not be ignored, and all thirty TVs screamed in unison like ensnared animals. Any doubt I had as to the validity of his warning was erased by the dire urgency of their cry.

“Wait! My family! I gotta – I gotta go get my family!” I tried to break free, but he again clamped down on my arm. His hands suddenly like two desperate wolves biting down with such force in his panic that he was cutting off circulation.

“They’re coming! Your dad ran from the bar to get them. So did Mickey and the rest of them. Damn fools! I don’t know if they’re gonna make it, kid.” 

Mr. Murdock led me to the backroom and through a door I had only seen opened once, which looked like the door of a bank vault in a large city, not a small town. I assumed it was his safe, but I could see now there was a long flight of stairs that went too deep to be an ordinary basement. There were several ominous red lights on the walls leading the way. He told me to go down as he slammed the door shut behind him. When he saw me stop and turn around, he intercepted my thought and promised me that he would stay by the door and open it for them when they pressed the buzzer, assuaging me with the same grin he offered when he made an assurance about a TV he was trying to sell. I nodded my head and went down as instructed. The air was much cooler and there was the hum of some sort of ventilation machine which pumped fresh air in, I suppose.

When I finally got to the room it was large and there were a series of metal bunkbeds with perfectly made beds and crisp white pillows and between each set there were metal lockers like the ones at school. The room was nice and there were several rugs on the concrete floor and a series of lights that came on as I walked deeper into the room. A generator buzzed in the corner and there was a pool table, a ping-pong table and another larger table that held a scale model of the town with a train that circled it. There was a kitchen of sorts, two large freezers, a refrigerator, and cabinets full of canned food. There were bookcases of books and athletic equipment. A heavy bag hanging from a wood beam waiting to be punched. There were reading lamps and chairs and what appeared to be a family room with several cabinet TVs with short-wave radios on top lined up neatly next to each other. There were tables full of Life Magazine. Mr. Murdock had obviously planned and made a doomsday bunker. And I was the first person in it.

I waited impatiently for the sound of the buzzer. “Turn on the radio, Davey!” Mr. Murdock shouted. I did but there was only static on every channel. I didn’t care to hear anyone, I just wanted to hear the buzzer. But as I waited there was a distant thud and the room vibrated just enough that I knew the bombs must have been dropped.

“They shot them from a goddamn submarine,” Mr. Murdock muttered as he descended the stairs as though that were some particular indignity. “It’s too late, kid. If the blast hasn’t leveled everything, the radiation will kill everyone up there."

But then there was a buzz and another and another and he raced up the stairs to open the door. It seemed like the whole town was up there and they filed down into the fallout shelter like an army. Soldier by soldier. My parents were somewhere in the middle and we all hugged and said things like, "Thank, God, you're okay," as reflexively as someone saying excuse me when they burp. "Thank, God, you're okay." It turned out the explosions were not nuclear bombs, but rather a gas tank explosion when someone in a panic to get to the shelter ran off the road and into a pump at the service station nearby.

"You're mother had to check the mail," my father chuckled. 

"Well, you never know who is going to write or what prize you might win," she defended herself. "Oh, this came for you, Davey," she said handing me a large manila envelope. "What is the Atomic Soap Powder Company writing to my son about?" 

I didn't answer. I stared at the envelope for a long while before I opened it, oblivious to everything and to everyone around me. People were laughing and hugging and praying and talking loudly and making jokes, happy to be safe around 50 feet below the surface. I sat down on one of those bunks and opened the envelope careful not to tear the contents of whatever was inside. There was an 8x10 glossy of Ms. Atomica, signed by Jane Kelly. Jane Kelly, her name rolled off my tongue. It lingered there. Slept there. Made love with itself there. And then there was the letter. 

"Dear David,

I hope my words find you well. I was very happy to receive your letter. I have not received a fan letter before, so I find it encouraging. I might frame it and hang it on my apartment wall. I suppose people don't write to the girls on commercials as much as they do to the Marilyn Monroes or Elizabeth Taylors of the world. That is disheartening. What is brief can mean just as much as what is long. There is a beauty in brevity, isn't there? I like to think so.

"You might find it surprising that I don't intend to be an actress. I am a sophomore at Columbia and much to the dismay of my parents, I want to be a writer. I did the commercial for the money as my father has cut the proverbial purse strings. They have now accused me of being a stripper, among other things, which has only worsened the relationship and furthered me from their once obligatory charity. I suppose their desire for me to be a doctor is greater than their desire for me to be happy. I would be a doctor, but simply put, I haven't got it in me. Further, I believe that words can make people just as well as medicine.  

"The fact that you were so compelled to write me interests me greatly. More than I can say in a simple thank you letter. I noticed your upstate postmark, a town much like my own. I would like to invite you to the city to have a cup of coffee before you are deployed, as you say, in August. Would it be too forward of me to presume that you could meet me this Saturday night at the Delmonico Café on W. 54th? That way if we should desire to see each other again, we will have two entire months to do so. I never presume what will happen, but I am forever a starry-eyed optimist of the worst sort. I do presume you have no conflicting entanglement, since you wrote a letter to me expressing a desire that I think I can understand. 

"Do you find Atomic Soap Powder to be better than the competitors? Not that it matters in our affair, but the higher ups surely will be asking me to solicit information of the kind from such a studious and cleanly young man that I presume you to be. Is it fair for me to assume that you are as handsome as you are kind?

"I look forward to meeting you at the Delmonico Café promptly at 7pm. If you cannot make it, do not worry, I will take no offense and I will understand. I will simply write of you in your absence. An empty chair can often inspire as well as one that is occupied. Sometimes, even more so. Feel free to write me as well. Letters go straight to my heart. 

Love,

Jane"

I must have read that letter a million times. It was Thursday night. There was no pretending that I was not going if the bombs didn't drop before then. But bombs or no bombs, I was the happiest person in that shelter. I played checkers with my little sister and a few of the neighborhood kids until they all fell asleep. Then I lied in bed and prayed for the bomb to be delayed and planned my escape. I wrote my Dear John the next day and the next night, Friday, I left it along with the letter she had written me. I left the picture, too. Maybe they would understand. I like to think so.

I got up to sneak out and crept across the room. I was sure to avoid the light sensors which would have turned the lights on as I walked under them and woke everyone up. I made it to the steps and on the bottom rung in the dark was Mr. Murdoch. We were far enough away from everyone sleeping that we could talk without waking anyone. He didn't ask me where I was going. Or what I was doing. He sat there with a bottle in his hand and grinned at me. 

"You going to find her?"

"What?" 

"That laundry soap girl you're always staring at on TV. I heard your mother say you got a big envelope from the Atomic Soap Company yesterday and I've seen you staring at a picture of someone."

"I did. And yes, I am."

He scooted aside so that I could pass. "It will all be gone by the time you get there, Davey. The war is imminent. The Big One."

"Well, maybe so, but I..."

"I know. And you know what, I spent 6 years building this bunker and stockpiling it like so. But in 6 hours I am wondering why I did. What will be left when they blow it all up? What kind of life will we have then? Decades of radiation and cancer and struggle. What wars will follow? What loneliness and lawlessness? Men that are able to nuke each other don't stop there. It doesn't bring peace. It just goes on and on. It will repeat itself until we build it all back up and nuke each other again. And we will scurry like roaches trying to survive the exterminator. Not living at all. Just busy trying not to die. Forgive me, Davey, but I'm drunk. Maybe I should have been a mortician, after all. And all this would have been so much easier to take."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Murdoch."

"Don't be sorry, Davey. I admire your guts. So where is she?"

"New York City."

He grinned. "They'll not be running trains, I'm sure. Take my Indian, Davey. You know how to ride a motorcycle?"

"Yeah, but I can't take your motorcycle, Mr..."

"You think it's doing me any good down here? The keys are in the drawer by the register. The one with the red rabbit's foot, for luck."

"Thanks, Mr. Murdoch."

He nodded. I was halfway up the stairs when he took a swig of the bottle and said, "Hey, good luck, kid."

I unlocked the door and stepped outside like I was on a foreign planet. In the distance, tornado sirens periodically squalled. The only difference was there were no people. Everything else besides the fire at the service station was the same. Apparently, though, a few people remained. And a few looted what they wanted from wherever they wanted. I saw a hobo walking from the Mickey's Bar carrying a crate of whiskey. He stopped when he saw me pull out on Mr. Murdoch's '37 Indian and nearly dropped the crate. Then he carried on reminding himself, what did it matter? It was the end of the world, after all. 

I stopped at the house and showered and packed a bag and got dressed. I put on the tuxedo I had in my closet that I wore to senior prom. I took some of my dad's cologne and got something to eat for the road. Everything was eerily quiet except for the occasional siren and the sound of someone doing something they shouldn't. Those who didn't find a bunker, or who weren't invited. Those who were just living it up in some sort of way. Getting drunk. Shooting glass bottles. Others just watched TV. Or they looked up at the sky with binoculars hoping to be the first to see it. They were a different element than those down below. It was an inverse HG Wells' "The Time Machine." The Morlocks were above ground this time and the Eloi were down below. 

I sped out of town unsteady on the motorcycle with the suicide shift which was more powerful than those I had handled before. But in a few miles I got used to it and I drove for three and a half hours until I got to the city. There were still many people on the surface of New York and unlike at home, business carried on very much as usual. The reality was there was nowhere for them all to go so there were no warning sirens or anything to cause panic. The news was deliberately suppressed in order to maintain order and to prevent complete anarchy. The giant TV in Times Square said everything was okay and there was nothing to fear. Still, people seemed to know better from what they had heard before the news went out. Many fled the city in over-packed cars in desperation. There was not a ticket to be had on an outbound train from Grand Central Station and the place was clogged with people like a sewer with rats. "Women and children first," I heard men yell through bullhorns and over emphatic police whistles that kept blowing. 

Of course, I wasn't sure that my date with Jane would stand due to the recent developments. I wasn't sure that she would honor it in such an uncertain time, nor even that Delmonico's would be open for business. But they were. Behind a hot red flashing neon open sign. I went to the bathroom and washed my face and got ready as best I could, fixing my bowtie, not knowing anything other than that I wasn't to be an empty chair. And the rest of my life wouldn't pass me by, however long or short that was to be, with me wondering what if I had come because I was here. While my whole town was 50 feet below the Earth's surface waiting for the inevitable bomb to drop, I was in New York City about to meet the woman of my dreams on the first date of my life, if time allowed.   

I didn't know where to sit. There were only a few people in the café. A few couples and some single men reading newspapers and smoking cigarettes as though nothing in the world was going on. A pretty but older waitress said hello and to sit wherever I like and I said hello and thank you. It was a quarter til seven. There was plenty of time. So I picked a spot and sat there and nervously waited reading over a menu without reading it at all. Pretending to consider things I wasn't considering. The turkey salad on rye. The tuna melt. I told the waitress I was waiting for someone and she said, "Aren't we all," as she chomped on a wad of gum and disappeared into the kitchen. 

It wasn't long before the tell-tale bell on the door rang and I looked up and there she was. Walking in wearing a black trench coat and sunglasses and red heels that clip-clopped across the tile floor. Even the way she walked was beautiful. One foot in front of the other and her head down looking through those large black lenses. She came straight for the table and I stood up and greeted her, extending my hand to shake which she pushed aside, giving me a hug and a kiss on the cheek instead. She took off her jacket and tossed it beside her and she was wearing a red silk dress and a string of long pearls. 

"I didn't think you would come," she said putting her journal and pen down on the table. "You're handsome and you smell good. It is such a relief when a man is considerate enough to bathe and smell nicely. Some believe in the power of sweat, you know? Pheromones, what have you. Filthy creatures. And you are in a tuxedo! Ain't I the lucky girl?!"

I smiled nervously. We sat down to order. She looked over her menu and I looked over mine. Then her eyes peeked over at me and I fell in love. I never thought I would know the exact time in life when that would happen, but I did. The waitress approached, interrupting my unspoken sentiment, reawakening me from my splendid dream. 

"Hey, Janey," she grinned. 

"Hello, Bea. Bea this handsome young fellow is Davey Jones."

"Davey Jones?" Bea repeated. "Thee Davey Jones. Like Davey Jones' Locker?" Bea sounded as though she had a hive in her throat. The result of decades of smoking, surely. She was smoking as she stood there, taking quick drags and exhaling puffs occasionally out the side of her mouth. But what did it matter now if she had throat cancer or not? Now was a good time to have cancer. 

"Yeah. Like Davey Jones' Locker," I repeated. 

"Where we will all be by the end of the night," Jane jibed. "Isn't he handsome?" She pinched my cheek. 

"Like carrot cake," Bea added. 

"We should just dispense of all formality and live totally in the moment, being that the moment is all that we apparently have. Us brave ones who aren't hiding in a basement somewhere with the rats. Bea, honey, bring us whatever. Bring us the works. Delmonico's best dish. Whatever Raul feels like he wants to cook in his finest hour. But not the lobster or any seafood. I know better. And alcohol, whatever you have. Please. And some of that carrot cake, too. We don't need to worry about waist lines and all that nonsense. Not tonight. And a couple of those cigarettes, if you don't mind."

I didn't smoke before, but what the hell, I supposed. She was right. She laughed as I coughed when I inhaled and that cloud of smoke that hovered over our table made me think of the mushroom cloud and the ominous halo above that pasty anchorman's head giving us the latest in bad news because that is what everyone wants to hear and what they get paid to give. The ruling class rules by fear and pushes insecurity and divides people into factions until the factions become so angry that they cannibalize each other. I heard my father say that when he was drinking and I think he is right. The more I see, the more I know he is right. And although my mother was probably very upset that I left the bunker, I am sure my father was somewhat proud of me. For not living in fear. For being here with Jane.

Jane smiled at me and scribbled some things down in her notepad before apologetically burying her pen in the spine and closing the cover. 

"I suppose it doesn't matter that I write, anymore," she sighed, "being that no one will ever read it." 

"It does matter because you're a writer."

She smiled at me and nodded. Perhaps that is when she fell in love with me. If she had time to write her account of it all, maybe that is what she would say. It seemed like it, in her eyes. In her smile.

We had a nice dinner. They gave us a few cold beers and I got into the impromptu spirit of things and asked the cook for some candles. We borrowed a tablecloth and ate and had a few smokes and many more laughs. Many moments that were perfect and surreal. There was a bottle of wine in back that Bea smuggled to us and which we shared. We didn't have wine glasses though, so we just used regular café glasses. It is amazing how quickly a bottle of wine goes. 

She asked me to go back to her apartment to get another bottle of wine. She rode on back of the motorcycle and remarked that she had never been on a motorcycle before with such enthusiasm that I hoped we had time. We did. Riding without helmets because what did it matter. Racing through the busy streets that weren't so busy and slowly through Central Park because I had never seen it before and we didn't know if we would have a tomorrow to see it then. 

We got to her apartment and she asked me to come inside and listen to a Frank Sinatra record so we walked up the five flights of stairs and she unlocked the green door that looked like it had been painted over a hundred times and never sanded once. And she kicked her shoes across the room and peeled off her coat and threw open the curtains that exposed a building, much like this one, across the street. She was in that beautiful red dress and she asked me to unzip her, a little tipsy, and she said it was the end of the world so what did it matter, as though she had to talk me into it. 

Her dress fell willingly the ground and she was in her bra and panties and nylon stalkings and I stood there, still wearing that tuxedo. She put on the record and took off the rest of her clothes and as Frank Sinatra crooned some smooth words about some love lost, I swallowed my youth in one gulp and she was naked standing before me with a bottle of wine in her hand and two glasses in the other. No mushroom cloud jiggling. Not in black-and-white anymore. No trench coat or red dress. No string of lazy pearls. She must have recognized the moment on my face and she paused and didn't do anything or say anything, she just let me look. Then she uncorked the wine and poured us each a glass and we had our drink on the balcony. It was a hot night, but a cool and forgiving breeze mercifully blew through. 

"Some peeping Tom lives across the way," she chuckled. "I wonder if he is peeping anymore. Or if he has buried himself somewhere in hopes to live and peep some day down the road. He is really missing out tonight." She laughed and took a long drink. "Usually the building across the way is all lit up this time of night. But there are more lights off than on, I suppose they have run away. Or they're praying. It sort of looks like a jack-o'-lantern, doesn't it?"

"I suppose it does."

"Do you pray?"

"Not anymore."

"Me neither. I always feel guilty for asking for something. If you have any objections to making love to me, I do understand. We have, after all, only just met," she said. 

I drank the rest of my glass and took a deep breath. "I've known you for a long time, Jane. I used to watch TV through the appliance store window just to see that commercial. And for those ten perfect seconds or so that you were on the screen, the world stood still. Nothing moved. Nothing was born and nothing died and no one breathed. It was just me and you."

She dropped her glass over the ledge and put the bottle down on the floor and stumbled over to kiss me with such passion that I was nearly consumed by her. And we kissed before the bomb dropped and everything was still. It was as though that bomb waited on us. As though it were watching like that peeping Tom. I tasted the sweetness of the wine on her warm lips and the smokiness of the cigarette in her breath and sucked them, learning everything as I went, mimicking how she kissed me. But it was all so innate, so passionate and visceral and we stumbled back inside and made our way to her bed where a cat I before hadn't noticed darted away, fearing for its life, as we violently fell on the bed and made love. 

I thought for a second that the bomb would blow at any moment. Before the crescendo of our lovemaking, but thankfully it did not and I thought of it no more. We continued and reprised our performance for several more hours, perhaps so that we could die together this way. Like they probably did in Pompeii. For there was no better way to die. 

Hours later we found that bottle of wine and a couple of smokes and we sat on the balcony naked as car horns periodically blared below. Our feet dangling over the side. Laughing like kids. She told me she wasn't on birth control, but what did it matter? And for a while I wondered if while two men were destroying life had we created it. If inside of her, there was life. Hope. It was such a tranquil moment that I thought that maybe those old men made some sort of deal and their cruddy-old fingers wouldn't press the button. It was supposed to have happened yesterday, after all. Maybe Jane and I could get married and live a happy life somewhere in Arizona where there are saloons and cowboys and Indians and streams of fat gold nuggets. Or maybe we would live here in the city where she could write and I could go to school and become a doctor in her stead rather than going in the Navy. Or maybe back home, or anywhere in the world.  

But as she told me about her dreams and her life and what she was like when she was a little girl, and as Frank Sinatra crooned about love lost and love yet to be and love never had, a brilliant white flash overtook the sky and consumed everything in its wake. She looked at me and smiled, so beautiful in that brilliant blinding light, holding my hand as we went. She was right. There is beauty in brevity, after all. I wish we had more time, but I am happy that I didn't live long enough to ever become a naysayer.