A Million More Tomorrows

Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4

When Paul Everett woke he was 21 years old and a thick heat clung to his forehead. The opening breaths of morning were humid – more humid than he had ever experienced and brighter than he thought his eyes could manage. A fat slug of a hangover lay prone across his eyebrows.

"What happens now?" he heard, the words falling through the muggy ether and down his reluctant ears. Charlie Short was laying on the ground to his side, stretching out forever in both directions like a felled tree. "What happens now?" he repeated. Paul's melted brain eventually glued the voice into his friend's possession, and he craned his neck to answer. Sleepily and without thinking, he released:

"About what?"

Paul liked to answer questions with questions. Doing so prolonged conversation in the easiest possible way, and was a handy tactic for those not inclined to talk much themselves. Conversing is conversing however you manage it, he thought, and it was usually arduous.

"About Saturday," Charlie said.

"I think that's very much out of our control, Charles," Paul offered, disinterestedly. And with that he raised to his feet to investigate the lay of things.

"Well I know that. I just meant–," but it was in vain. Paul had wandered off, slightly away from the mattress of grass, stepping over the sleeping bodies littered across the hill and towards the rocky verge. He was still within earshot, but was no longer actively listening. He picked up a stick and started thwacking at the bushes as if scything them down, deciding to continue until such a time came where he would feel fully awake. Below, just over the precipice of the hillock, was Laos in earnest. The view ambled down over the exotic bracken and bottomed out where the river took control of the streets and buildings hugging its banks. The two boys had been sleeping atop a limestone crest that resided over one of Vang Vieng's muddier corners, gifting a line of sight many miles across. It was a beautiful place, Paul thought, but it couldn't really be enjoyed any more; all its stunning sights had, in one half-understood newsflash, been tainted with the essence of something bordering on despair. It was not something he could find the right words for, but it was palpable. Some people were awake down below, and those who were stood mostly in place, scattered about in small groups, not knowing what it was they should or should not be doing in response to the previous day's announcement.

"Hard to find purpose now, isn't it?" Paul sighed, dropping his stick and turning back. "Hard to get all that excited about very much."

Charlie Short said: "Don't." The word was curt and sad.

"Don't what?"

"Don't talk about it so flippantly," replied Charlie, who had walked over to the edge of the hill to join Paul. He slumped down solemnly, hugging his knees. "I'm terrified mate," he said, and his voice was like stones scratching against themselves. "I'm fucking terrified."

Paul thought for a moment about how best to ease his friend's worries, but found it too difficult a task to accomplish. His late teens and the debut years of his twenties had only been an extended exercise in self-indulgence – in only doing whatever it was Paul Everett wanted to do – to such a point that whatever empathy he had learned as a child and was once able to employ now felt sanded down to nothing but a raw knuckle. The issue was that he simply did not see the Earth's impending demise as much of a problem. Not like everyone else did, anyway. The death of his Mum and Dad? Admittedly sad. His friends from home? There were not many who warranted a second thought. And what else? Nothing much. Besides: he had already been dead. He had known death for aeons before birth and life, and had found its nothingness more calming than the stress of both combined, so he knew he could face it again with ease. Other than perhaps the restoration of downed telephone wires, Paul wanted for nought. And it wasn't, he reasoned, as if he were about to die alone; the Earth's six billion tenants were about to be stricken from the record together.