The Last New Year (2 page)

prologue
.

The most important day of humanity's brief existence on
Planet Earth began at exactly five o'clock in the morning Eastern Standard
Time, on December 31st, 1999.

Unlike the commencement of most of the important things that
happened in the life of humanity—things like the birth of inventors or
dictators or prophets, or strains of bacilli gently mutating to infect and
murder a significant percentage of people on a continent—this important
beginning was televised.

It wasn't viewed by a huge number of people in the city
where this story takes place, but it came as quite a surprise to the residents
of
Kiritimati
, also known as Christmas Island (named,
not surprisingly, because intrepid but unimaginative explorers discovered it on
a certain holiday). It is located at 1° 52' 0" N, 157° 24' 0" W, is
famous for its coral and nature sanctuaries, and is an excellent place to do
some bird watching, surfing and/or bone fishing.

It will now go down in history (what history is left anyway)
as the place where its roughly 5,600 inhabitants were the surprised first
witnesses to the thing that would end their lives, and eventually the lives of
every living thing on the planet. There were also cameras there, uplinked to
satellites, and so the news traveled quickly to those who were up and connected
enough to hear about it.

Australia was gearing up for the night's festivities, Asia
was finishing dinner, most of Europe was going about its daily routine, so the
news spread like a mutated bacilli in those places. Pretty much any sensible
person in the Americas was still asleep, perhaps dreaming sweet dreams that
could only serve to stave off the harsh reality that would greet them upon waking.

In essence, it took no one long to figure out it was like
this: As each country and people celebrated the
new year
,
it was wiped off the face of the planet. It was devastation on an unprecedented
scale. It was unrelenting, unstoppable, an end to all things.

Humanity, to its credit, was not completely unprepared for
this eventuality. There has always been a wide, fundamental streak of fatalism
in human beings as a species, an idea that an ending is inevitable, and that
one should be prepared. Most of this is a result of the finite length of
individual existence, and that in this world nothing can be said to be certain,
except for death and possibly some other thing.

This knowledge, that there will eventually come a full stop
to the physical world, manifested itself on an individual level in one of
several ways: either the person got severely depressed, or he learned not to
think about it, or he latched on to a way to prepare for the end that made it
seem not like the actual end, but just a moving on to another (usually better,
but not always) existence.

Religions popped up early and often in the stretch of human
history, with the idea that once the end came, if you were prepared enough, you
could continue on in some manner. Initially this idea presented itself as a
sort of bargain: If I don't steal or molest my neighbor's wife or oxen, then
the giant crocodile will not chew me up and spit me into the pit of knives and
I will get to eat honeyed fruit and sit on palm leaves forever.
Or something similar.

Most cultures celebrated this idea of death and rebirth in
the form of a new year's celebration, a time to let the past year go and
prepare for the next one. If there were a lot of unmolested oxen then the next
year would be bountiful. If there were a lot of inexplicably pregnant wives
then the crops would fail. But the idea that the end was also a beginning has
always been very firmly fixed in the mind of most human beings.

Usually this celebration took place on one of the equinoxes,
which meant that stars were in a certain place and the sun was up for a longer
or shorter time than what seemed usual. For the most part time was measured in
sunrises and sunsets, in cold seasons and warm seasons, and nobody much looked
beyond that.

Eventually, however, humans started putting numbers and
things into columns and checking boxes on forms and this higgledy-piggledy way
of operating was tossed out in favor of something called a calendar with real
numbers and actual dates that were measured in a scientific manner.

One group of humans, the Romans,
were
specifically good at that sort of thing. They were a people who adored putting
things in their proper place, celebrating holidays, and the mass murder of
other cultures. And so they created a calendar that put history in its proper
place, took inventory of when and where holidays should happen, and allowed
them to murder in an organized manner.

But despite their love of organization—or perhaps because of
their distraction by all the murder—the Julian calendar, as it was called, was
eventually discovered to be off by a full eleven minutes a year. So having none
of that, another organization called the Catholic Church (known for some of the
same things as the Romans, actually) came up with the Gregorian Calendar (named
for someone named Gregory, probably), and that's what was adopted and used by
most of the world ever since.

The thing is, calendars are all about numbers, and since
human beings tend to put significance on certain of these, such as multiples of
10, 100, and 1000, they celebrate the passing of these dates as somehow
important. Decades happen fairly often, centuries less so.

Since the invention of the Gregorian calendar, only one
millennium has passed, that being the year 1000, and the significance of this
completely man-made date was not lost on the populace of the time.

In the decade leading the end of the first 1000 years since
the birth of a prophet (or son of a deity, if you prefer), people began to get
more and more convinced that something wonderful or terrible was going to
happen.
Or something wonderfully terrible.
Or something terribly wonderful.
But
definitely something.

Dark Age peasants streamed into churches and begged
forgiveness for real and imaginary slights against God, people began either
giving away or hoarding
possessions,
and many slewed
up or down the scale of piousness and riotousness. As the millennium grew
nearer, some people drank themselves to death, ate themselves to death, or
simply killed themselves to death. It was a tumultuous period.

Or at least we think it was. Historians are, as historians
are wont to be, divided.

But then, 1000 came and went without a blip, and those who
were left went back to wallowing in uneducated filth and worriedly wiggling
their black teeth in infected gums. And so humanity survived to the second
millennium.

After a thousand years, what does the human race have to say
for itself?

Have they come this far technologically, philosophically,
and spiritually just to start wringing their hands in fear of an imaginary
judgment that could occur simply because a church official set the birthday of
a prophet (or son of a deity, if you prefer) as the year One? And by all
accounts did it incorrectly?

Ridiculous! Unthinkable! It is to laugh.

And so, with that peculiar human trait of seeing a boogeyman
in a dark closet that was obviously empty when the lights were on, a lot of
people began seriously wringing their hands in fear. There were three prevalent
reasons for this that became apparent in the late 1990s:

This is the idea that computers,
which have become so prevalent and basically run human society, were built with
an inherent flaw: their date counters were created and set to be used in the
20th century.

The companies that made them, being the forward thinking
entities that companies generally are, did not account for the fact that at
some point the century would change from 19XX to 20XX, and neglected to program
that into the computers. So, some alarmed people theorized, when the new year
occurs, all the date counters will roll over to 1900 again, and the computers
will realize that computers had not been invented yet in 1900 and cease working
on the basis that they have a good 40 years before they would be needed for
anything.

The upshot of this, the alarmed people speculated, is that
the entire world running on computers, from the defense industry, to the stock
exchange, to cars and video game systems, would seize up and refuse to work, or
at least start outputting turn-of-the-century slang:
ERROR 231: The program is about half a bubble off a plumb
.

Airplanes will fall out of the sky. The economy will
collapse as digital money becomes even more non-existent. Humanity will go back
to nomadic subsistence living and have only the toilet paper they thought to
pack beforehand.

This one is rather complex and has
been covered in detail in other volumes, but suffice it to say that a 19th
century theologian took it upon himself to translate the Christian Bible in
such a way as to put very specific meaning to very vague lines of scripture.

The basic idea is that when the prophet (or son of a deity
if you prefer, and in this instance it would only make sense) returns to judge
the righteous and the unrighteous, he will do so only after magically whisking
the True Believers into paradise and leaving the rest to muddle through famine,
wars, meteorites, dragons and the like until he found time to teleport down
again and send everyone to eternal torment.

There was no particular reason to think this would happen on
the millennium, but the True Believers were hoping.

People had been unhappy in a lot of
places for a long time on Earth, and a lot of those people looked around and
saw a great number of people to blame for their unhappiness.

In fairness, these unhappy people often had real and valid
justification for their unhappiness. A lot of bad things had been done to a lot
of groups of people in the name of a country, or a religion, or just because.
Oppression happens during the end of the 20th century much the same way it
happened in every subsequent century, and the people who were oppressed often
got sick of it and fought back.

One group in the late 18th century got so sick of being
oppressed by a bigger country that they waged a terror campaign to get the
oppressors off their backs. They didn't have much except for resentment and a
fair amount of pluck, but they put their terrorist plans into action and
eventually exasperated the controlling country so much that the King gave up and
went to have some tea and concentrate on India. No one knows whatever happened
to that group of terrorists. Their struggle has been lost to time.

Unfortunately, where muskets and tar and feathers were the
weapons of terror in the 18th century, the collapse of a country called the
Soviet Union and the disorganized dismantling of its nuclear programs meant
that there were all sorts of dangerous things unaccounted for and floating
around where oppressed freedom fighters might get their hands on them.

And so the anger might manifest in a nuclear device, or a
dozen or a hundred, going off in major cities across the globe.

Another country called the United States had seen its share
of terror, both foreign and domestic. Earlier in the decade someone had set off
a van full of explosions at a government building, and even the center of
economic power had been hit by a (fortunately minor) act of terrorism. So by
1999 the US had a real understanding of how bad things could get.

* * *

But even with these three worries
lurking around the bend of the millennium, the majority of the world's
population just gave it some thought and let it go. The chances against
anything really terrible happening were terrifically small, and anyway, even if
something bad did happen, humanity would press on, would rebuild, would prosper
again, so there was no reason to get worked up about it.

Unfortunately, as was made plain at 5 am Eastern Standard
Time in the Christmas Islands, there was reason to get worked up about it. And
though no one understood at the time, that little coral atoll, stripped of
humanity and some of the most endangered species on earth, was the beginning of
the end of everything.

And at 11:37 am, EST in a city called Washington, DC, one
man was about to find that out.

I don't sleep well, I never have.

I have dreams.
These really intense dreams
that leave me breathless and disoriented when I wake up.
Not nightmares,
exactly, nothing like being chased by my grandmother's skeleton with a butcher
knife or being pushed off the Washington Monument. More just like a constant
feeling of momentum toward something, being in a fantastic rush to get
somewhere I don't know.

But tonight I'm not having any dreams. Everything is
blackness, a deep blackness that surrounds and suppresses my neurons from
firing, a void of unawareness that must be like death. Not to get all
existential right out of the gate or anything, but that's what it feels like.

I don't know how I can describe it when I'm not, strictly
speaking, experiencing any of it. You'll have to take me at my word.

But then I wake up and the feeling of uneasy isolation
almost immediately leaves me; I'm left with only a nagging sense of something
in the back of my mind.

I slap at the alarm clock for a few seconds until I realize
I don't have an alarm clock and the rhythmic buzz is actually coming from
inside my pounding head. So I slap at my head instead and accomplish nothing
except to irritate myself. My first impulse it to just say to hell with it and
go back to sleep, but I resist.

Usually I'm pretty in tune with my body, and try to follow
its internal suggestions as far as what it wants me to do: eat now, sleep now,
expel waste, fart and belch when necessary.

This morning, though, I have to admit that I don't
particularly like the conversation my body is initiating: it's a rambling,
tortuous narrative about a queasy stomach, pounding head, and a tongue that is
coated with what tastes like a semi-congealed layer of dog feces and oven
cleaner.

I lay in bed, trying and failing to talk my body out of
these sensations. It's not having any of it, however, and I resign myself to
just dealing for the time being.

Outside of my body, I can make out the loud but indistinct
tweets and woofs of a television coming from the living room. My roommate, it
seems, is already up. Or never went to bed. Either of these is equally
possible.

I take a few deep breaths, groan at the ceiling, and shove
my knuckles into my eye sockets. Stars explode behind my forehead.

After a few more seconds of self-pity, I untangle myself
from my sheets, swing my legs over the side of the bed and sit up. I look
around as I scratch my thighs. Yes, okay, this is my
room,
everything seems to be where it's supposed to be. Standard mid-level apartment:
beige walls, tan floor, off-white IKEA furniture. Not inspired but comfortably
utilitarian.

No one else is here asleep on the carpet or under the bed or
(I lean to my left and look through the door to my bathroom) in the tub. That
is a positive. I don't really feel like making awkward conversation or kicking
anyone out right now.

My stomach has settled down a bit, but my pounding head
calls for water and some kind of buffered analgesic.

I'm not a drunk, so you know. Not much of one, anyway. I'm
not going to sit here and say I never overdo it, or that I haven't had my share
of "oh god what did I do last night" mornings, but it's a pretty rare
thing, and getting rarer every year as time gets more and more precious and my
bounce-back period gets longer and more painful. So waking up this morning with
only a vague recollection of the night before is not an indicator of any major
problem. Honestly.

I know, I know. That's what someone with a major problem
would say. Bite me.

Needless to say, I'm not accomplishing much remembering of
the night before as I sit here, although the scratching seems to be going all
right. I shift it to the other leg.

Let's see. Most of the night is a blur of familiar and unfamiliar
faces, unfortunately placed furniture, and a rainbow of illogically colored
alcoholic beverages. I was at my buddy
Thwacker's
place (I'll talk more about him later, no doubt), and he was having a party to
celebrate... well nothing, really.

Except I guess he was celebrating the night before the night
before New
Years
. So it wasn't even the main event,
really, more a sort of pre-event to celebrate the fact that there is going to
be something to celebrate.

That's right! It's New Year's Eve today! It's the last day
of 1999! Tomorrow it will be a new millennium—unless you are
once
of those pedants who insist it's not until next year.
But come on, when all the numbers flip over to 00 again, that's the big deal.

But wow! New Years! I can't tell if I'm excited about it,
despite the exclamation points. I mean, it's not like I've ever really cared
about New Years. It's just a date on a man-made calendar. It's not like it
means anything important in the Grand Scheme of things. So I'm not excited.
But...

Something is worming in my gut, and it's not from my
hangover. It's like a little anxious flutter, but a good one, like I've
captured that feeling of going over the crest of the first hill of a roller
coaster and lodged it in my stomach. I'm excited about something, but I can't
remember what.

I suddenly remember something: I spent most of the night
holding my drink and drinking and doing everything with my left hand (when I'm
really right handed!) for no real reason except that I was in a good mood and
felt like having a little secret. But that's not what I'm excited about, and
actually I'd dropped my drink several times.

There was something though. Something had me giddy and
excited even before I started drinking. Something important and wonderful
happened, and the memory flits against the walls of my consciousness
annoyingly.
Something wonderful.
Did I meet someone?
No, not at the party.
There
were the usual
gang
of derelicts there. Fun people, but all the sexual tension that
existed had been dealt with one way or another long ago.

So not at the party, then...

It comes to me in a flash: Her.

Her! Oh my Christ how could I have forgotten?

I stand up like I've been electrified, my hangover
forgotten, my tongue peeling itself from the roof of my mouth. I grin like an
idiot at my dresser and bark harsh but delighted laughter that sends me into a
spastic coughing fit, which makes me laugh more until it all comes to a
shuddering halt and I'm still smiling.

Dust motes cartwheel brilliantly in a shaft of sunlight
slanting in through the blinds. My skin tingles, my heart thuds, I glide
effortlessly from the bed and to the window, feeling the slight chill from
outside that radiates from the glass. I scratch my butt, grinning, and yank on
the cord. The blinds go up with a clattery
fwoosh
.

A lovely, brisk winter's day, fairly typical for this time
of year in Washington, DC. A few wisps of white cloud inch their way across a
steel blue sky. Doesn't look like snow, but you never know. Come February we
might get a few big dumps, but this isn't Minnesota and the snowfall will be
rare enough that it's generally quite nice for kids off school and anyone else
not trying to brave the Beltway in the snow.

But as nice as it looks, at street level it's no doubt fairly
miserable for pedestrians, with cutting wind howling down the alleyways and up
ladies' skirts and down the back of your jacket. Up here it just looks evenly
lit, gray and peaceful. Just like a perfectly normal late December day.
Which it is, obviously.
A perfectly normal
day.

In the next building I can see Ape-Head through his big
apartment window watching television. In the past two years I've managed to
create a sort of superficial relationship with the slope-shouldered, heavy
browed and wonderfully ugly man across the way. We exchange mild, gesticulated
pleasantries most every morning.

I don't know his real name. My roommate gave him the
appellation "Ape-Head" after seeing him through the window one day
and barring any new information I don't see a reason to refer to him as
anything else. All I really know about him is what he looks like, that he walks
around in a blue terrycloth bathrobe almost all the time, and he watches the
news constantly.

He must be taking the day off today, though, as I can just
make out on his big 48" Sony some kind of big budget Hollywood action
movie, something with big orange explosions. This strikes me as slightly
unsettling, though I can't say exactly why.

But then my mood shifts back to barely contained exultation
and I no longer concern myself with the television viewing habits of the
ugliest man in the city. So he wants explosions to ring in the
new year
. What's it to me? Nothing, that's
what
. I giggle and slap my hand against the window, leaving
a foggy hand print.

Ape-head glances up from the TV and out the window at me. I
toss him a quick, friendly wave, like usual, but he just stares at me with wide
eyes for a long moment, then goes back to his program. This reaction is a
little off, but my mind immediately goes to the bemused thought it reaches most
mornings: he really does look like some kind of semi-evolved gorilla.

I laugh and stretch and then pick my way past a few piles of
clothing to the bathroom.

Piss.
Splash.
Brush.
I emerge a man reborn.

A man with the whole world stretched out in front of him, a
world of possibilities, of potential for long walks through parks, furtive hand
touching, and maybe even soft kisses under moonlight.

I might be getting ahead of
myself,
I think as I pull on pants and a new t-shirt, I only met her yesterday. This
line of caution is not convincing in the slightest, however, and so instead I
think about lying on a picnic blanket counting and naming all the stars in the
sky.

I grin wide at the thought and push my way through my bedroom
door.