Notes from the end of the world by Sam Herzog
Notes from the end of the world
Now that I’m immobile I have time to focus on the little things. A tiny scar at the base of my thumb. A flake of dandruff on my sleeve.
The hospice smells of ants and there’s residue on the floor. The walls are multicoloured. This place is malevolent as we all have numbers on our wrists.
Across the room, Mac is hunched up, a pillow under his back.
‘I suffered. I tried to get it all out me head by becoming a heroin addict. I mean heron addict; I was addicted to birdwatching. But I went blind from squinting – you’ve got to get a good pair of binoculars is what I’ve learned!’
His drivel throws me back to my days with Miranda. Her reptilian skin. Hair the colour of sweet potato. She spent too much time sitting – you could tell because her backside was pimply.
We met in a library in Japan. I – hunched over a laptop, slaving at my memoirs – glanced over and saw a beauty-young-thing beside.
Mac and I observe young goths in the baking sun saunter drably across the pavement. I scratch my scalp and some ragtag snowflakes drift to the floor.
‘She’s going away to Canada,’ I sigh. ‘I’ll never see her again.’
He tries to cheer me, spins another anecdote. The setting? ‘MacDonalds. The blue-lit bathroom. We’d come to shoot-up but left with a Big Mac, heh, heh!’
A nurse enters, tosses the paper onto my bed. The headline: BEIJING NUKES PYONGYANG.
‘I don’t mind,’ says Mac. ‘I’ve ticked off all the items on my bucket list. Found baby’s toy submarine. Gave a dollar to the local bum.’
He tries to flog me his used colostomy bag but I tell him it’s overpriced.
I have someone wheel me to the pharmacy. They’ve replaced the clerk with a petite-breasted brunette around M’s age.
‘Really dig into your war chests,’ the Prime Minister implores us on the telly as she swiffs about with my medicine.
‘My war chest is covered in cobwebs. No one’s touched my war chest in years,’ she quips.
Mac decides he’s going to become a masochist. He gives me a dollar to press my thumbs into his bruises all day long.
‘I shan’t go anywhere anymore,’ I sigh.
The world is about to end and these are my thoughts:
Farts that smell of dynamite. The oil crisis.
Hollywood. The golden era.
Animism. Power rangers.
Ash.
