Baby,
Like everyone else, I am about to die. Every generation of humanity has believed that it was going to be the last one, and by some coincidence, my generation was right. In the past, a lot of people would've given God the credit for the coming disaster. Hell, I probably would've when I was a kid and I know my parents would've, too. But nobody I know believes in God anymore. As information has piled up, the whole idea has just become too absurd for even the most optimistic of us to still consider it viable. The fact of the matter is, two things that have probably been clear and obvious to people for the whole of human history have just been laid out in the open so nobody can really deny them anymore. They are that, first, human life is of almost no consequence at all to the universe at large (people used to struggle to believe that their own life was meaningless to the universe – now we've realized that the whole of human life is meaningless) and, second, everything comes from chance. If you rolled the dice a million times, the utter destruction of humanity and perhaps the planet (I say perhaps because whether it will be the planet also is another of the myriad things that are beyond our collective understanding at the moment and, as this is the final moment, for ever and ever) on the exact date it happens may come up once. So many specific causes have to create so many specific effects, which in turn create more effects, and this whole web of possibility just ends where it ends. There's no reason for it. It just does.
This letter, I realize, is a waste of time. There's been a near constant cacophony of drinking and fighting and fucking on my street since the first announcement was made. (Our vast collection of human knowledge doesn't include the exact date and time of our doom. We thought it did but the first estimate, the one presented to us as scientific fact by a panel of leading scientists and the heads of state for all the G-8 countries, was yesterday at three in the afternoon. Another group of scientists then presented some compelling evidence that it would, in fact, be tonight at midnight. A third group – financed by rich enough people that they've installed a countdown clock in Times Square – says it isn't until next week. I'm not really endorsing either the second or third group, but it's fair enough to say now that the first group got it wrong.) Regardless of when it is, it's self-evident that it's soon. And most people I know are choosing to drink and fight and fuck. I'm at the kitchen table with a can of tomato soup and a beer writing you this letter, which will be destroyed in the inferno (if it is an inferno – everyone's assuming it is, I think because it's what we've always assumed. Fair to say, given the information that keeps on coming to light about the usefulness of our assumptions, that it could well be anything. In fact, the certainty people have related to the inferno has got me leaning towards expecting anything but an inferno) along with everything else. Why write if you're not looking to leave a legacy? And what legacy will there be after all this? So, look, I have no good reason for why I'm writing instead of being outside and ringing in the apocalypse like everyone else. I just am.
It appears that that the last book I will have ever read – could be the last book anyone ever read – was Galapagos. That book is about the end of the world. This is not a coincidence, though. I picked it for that reason. Vonnegut was wildly optimistic about how this would all go down. There's no Mandarax, and no secret supply of captain semen to get us through, and no furry Japanese girl to give us all an evolutionary advantage that will sustain us through all this. At least, if there is, it hasn't made the news and I haven't heard a thing about it. So, even if that all does exist, it might as well not. It doesn't make any difference that it does.
Here's something funny. There isn't any money anymore. I got kind of careless when I thought the world might end yesterday afternoon and finished my tequila. I tried to go out to get some more this morning but there's no shops and, obviously, nobody will take cash for the bottles they've got. I have $5000 in a shoebox that I've been saving since I was 15, and it won't buy me a bottle of tequila. Shit, I've got all that college money in that mutual fund. There aren't any mutual funds anymore, either, it goes without saying. At first, I got mad at the idea that some asshole banker had drained it all out for himself when the going got tough, but then I went to try and get some tequila this morning and I realized he got what was coming. He was willing to completely betray his fellow man, but he can't. And now everyone knows he was willing to. Poor bastard.
Anyway, what prompted me to write is this. After the news hit, a lot of people left town because they thought going somewhere flatter was going to save them somehow. The area around my apartment was starting to get crowded with junkies and weirdos, so I found an abandoned house near the freeway. There wasn't much stuff left in it – the same optimism that made them leave town apparently made them think they'd need furniture. I started sleeping in the attic, for no reason really, and there was a box in the corner that had the word US written on it in black marker. I was hoping to find a blanket or can opener, but all I found was every letter I ever wrote you, pictures of us at our wedding, Ellie's baby book and the newspaper we saved from the day she was born. I know it's naïve, especially in the circumstances, but my picking your house out of all the houses I could've picked is the only thing I think in the universe I think might not be a coincidence.
Love,
Davy
