‘Let’s get out of here,’ he says, and you both leave, exchanging the ash-hazy room for the wide dark night.

You hop in the car, but before this you throw a pile of junk from the front seat into a greater, more massive pile of junk residing in the back seat, including but not limited to: empty Gatorade bottles, questionably used napkins, magazines (both science and porn), a dirty shirt stained with a musk of mildew, two Styrofoam plates with matching cups, several leaflets from various religious organizations, DVD cases, CD cases, a firearm catalog, a sewing catalog, several curious pieces of copper pipe, markers, pens, pencils, paper clips, safety pins, lighters, bottle caps, quarters, dimes, nickels, pennies, and yes, there are peanut shells.

‘Where to?’ he asks in his best obsequious limo-driver impersonation.

‘That way,’ you say, but you don’t point anywhere.

‘Excellent choice, sir, but might I suggest the Pinot,’ he laughs. You don’t. Jack: the Joker.



Jack drives and you ride. You roll across blacktop, the grumbling old sedan making right turns or left turns. Sometimes you just go straight, too.

After a while, you almost notice that you haven’t passed any other cars, but you turn to the mountainous region that used to be an automobile backseat and try to remember the name of the CD you wanted to find instead. Jack tells jokes, annoying ones, painfully un-funny ones. Jack loves unfunny jokes, they are his favorite to tell. He most often is the only one who laughs at them, but just so, he most often laughs the hardest—a hard healthy laugh, with tones of mayhem, pain, and contentedness. Jack is famous both for laughing and for telling unfunny jokes.

Elephant jokes are his favorite.

‘What did the elephant say when…’ he’ll say. ‘How did the elephant get down from…’ he’ll say. ‘What do ten elephants say when asked…’ he’ll go on—if you let him. Jack: the Inadvertent Torture Device.

‘You haven’t heard this one yet,’ he begins. To which, and out of instinct, of defensive impulse, I tell him, ‘Dude, I have!’ This doesn’t always work.

‘Bullfist, man!’ The steering wheel suffers his mock outrage as Jack beats it with his palms: a man of Action. ‘I just made it up a couple days ago. It smells fresh.’

‘Like that shirt back there, no doubt,’ you mutter. And thusly, you slice down the quiet road, making noises in the night.

Even though you are thinking it, Jack says it first: ‘Where the fuck is everybody?’ he asks, peering with rising orbicular worry down long shady side roads while you cruise the mainway, flanked by austere ranks of streetlamps. The anonymous faces of corporate chain restaurants and indignant small businesses haunt the stretch of land along the normally busy road, parking lots gaunt, still. You begin to feel what you decide is called eerie.

‘We haven’t passed one car, have we?’ you ask while knowing already both the answer and how he’ll respond.

‘That reminds me…’ he starts, a cheeky joke bubbling up from the depths; but you burst it, deftly asking him for the time.

‘Nine,’ is his reply. You are both quiet for a while, feeling progressively more what you had decided was called eerie.

‘Where the fuck is everybody?’ he asks no one again for what seems like the seventeenth time. You sit there somewhere between eerie, frustrated, and amused, and tell him again to stop saying that for what seems like the fifteenth time.



Jack drives and you ride. You pass: great yawning supermarkets, linoleum-floored malls, dentist offices, banks, a fattening buffet of fast food houses, Americana bowling alleys, gloomy shipping warehouses, an ostentatious train station of vaulted ceilings and stained glass, a bus station, two police stations, a couple of record stores, and a few repair shops. Neither of you see anyone. You stop at bars and diners and go inside, find no proprietors, no patrons. No one is sleeping in hotels. No one is going out to eat. No one is getting gas. No one is buying cigarettes. No one is coming and, coincidentally, no one is going. You drive around for over an hour, two, peering wide-eyed from the windows at dark distances beyond for signs of movement, of people, of anything at all. But you find no one. Not even any cars parked anywhere. The only thing that moves is the lifeless but faithful rotating sign at the donut shop just off the highway.

It is as if everyone just got up and drove away, called out by an urgent message that somehow only failed to make it to Jack and you.

It is around this time that you remember the friends’ house you had left earlier, and Jack turns the car around and feverishly races back. Neither of you say anything on the way, a creeping cold twisting down in the pits of your stomach, wrapping lithe fingers tight around the spine.

At the apartment, you stand outside and Jack cups hands around face as he tries to look into a dark window. Both your friends’ cars are gone.

‘Fucking twilight zone, buddy,’ he says quietly, a foreign sound in the quiet night air.

‘Mmm.’

You both sit down on the curb and occasionally look from side to side down the road. It is very quiet. Neither of you say anything for a long while, nor do any vehicles of any kind pass by, no planes in the old vast sky.

Then Jack stands.

‘Welcome to the new world, my friend!’ he is singing. Then he’s laughing and yelling the line with his face to the sky, his body jerking in erratic motions, limbs flailing ridiculously.

‘Shut up,’ you grumble in a normal sort of voice. ‘It’s not really funny if you think about it.’

He looks at you, lowers arms down to his sides, his face placid yet moving some-how still, like currents beneath the surface of a pond. ‘Oh it’s very, very funny, dude,’ comes his reply, calm and paced, inviting ruminations upon the content, giving space. ‘Think about it! We are the only ones around here! Think of what we could do!’

‘Around here!’ you snap, immediately having the sensation of falling off the curb. ‘How far does here go? There are no trains or jets or freight trucks anywhere, no reason to believe there’s anyone left. Listen! There’s nothing. It’s so quiet, man.’

You are both silent, listening. Long minutes pass, counted too loudly by heartbeats, the original measure and rhythm advanced by life’s advent; you feel what you decide is called unnerved. Jack finally sits back down beside you. ‘Revelation?’ he asks.

You just sit there.

‘I suppose you could be right,’ Jack says then. ‘But if we’re here, then there could be others, nah? Besides, we have everything we need. We could go anywhere: total freedom. How’s that for your revelation, dude?’

You sit on the curb, listening to nothing.



Jack drives and you ride. The lights are on and the doors unlocked at the liquor store. Jack begins telling an elephant joke about trash as he backs the car up to the dumpster. You both step out, open the rear doors, and look at the craggy pile of unnamables in the backseat, the strata of time’s detritus. After just the first sod-like layer, the foul reek of decay becomes too much to bear.

You are driving then, curiously enough, slowly past all the car dealerships down the road.

A large window is trashcanned, no alarm. You try not to wonder if it would’ve mattered had there been one; you might be glad to find authority racing responsibly to correct the Situation. Doorbells are for suckers, according to Jack.

And there is a lot of searching and rifling through drawers, opening and closing cabinets, rummaging, sorting, sifting, and other general poking around. There’s even a mock water-cooler conversation for quick laughs, albeit only on the behalf of Jack.

Back at the liquor store there is a lot more laughing and even some bottle smashing: alcohol abuse. There are many trips to and back from the shiny new Jag.



When you pull the new car up to the grocery store, you realize it has been spatially maxed out with rum, vodka, whiskey, wine, various cordials, and many cartons of cigarettes; your ‘supplies’ have left no room for nutrition. Jack laughs and you just sit there. So you take turns throwing bottles and dodging bottles and drinking from bottles, broken glass glimmering in the parking lot as a field of fallen stars.

Music plays in the grocery store, drugged and docile as always—the computer, a proper mother duck, still patiently leads her consumers along through another merry shopping day. The aisles are ordered; everything is packaged, labeled, categorized, and stacked into tidy lines and piles. You struggle to walk conscientiously along, wondering what you realistically need for the week, a bulleted survival list, but then you realize the futility of such order amid conditions of any order’s utter absence in the world around you, and start throwing anything that looks interesting into the cart. You lose Jack somewhere near the cookie aisle.

When you find him again, he’s sitting in the soup aisle surrounded by red and white Campbell’s labels stacked like bricks on the shelves. Burritos and several mini-pizzas lie in various stages of consumption around him. ‘Don’t do that! You can’t eat in here!’ you whisper, almost looking around to see if anyone was watching.

‘Why not?’ his mouth is full. ‘It was too cold over in the freezer section.’ Drunk, he folds a mini-pizza in half, tries to shove it all in his mouth.

‘Where did you find a microwave?’

It is around this time when you think about echoes and eventually about radio stations.



Jack drives and eats and you ride and eat.

Despite the general aching fear of the long vacant roads, and probably mostly due to the mild drunkenness, you are feeling pretty easy. Jack chuckles to himself intermittently, jaws masticating illegally upon pilfered pizza.

Everything seems what you decide is called surreal.



In the car you listen to an album from The Cure, but then Jack turns it off; you both sit in silent wonder at how quiet it all is without the boats and trains and planes, a silence that thickens the darkness and illuminates the ancient fear that night has always brought to living things—all the old dangers you’ve learned to feel safe from by drowning them out with the boats, the trains, and the planes.

For the first time in your suburban life, you really begin to think about survival.

When you get to the radio station you stand blankly in the lobby, staring at the floor and walls, devoid of any intuition as to what to do next. Above where Jack stands, scratching his head and surveying, there is a photo of a smiling Buddy Guy from some younger day, his face round with eager eyes. In recent months this station had been purchased by a bigger station, immediately sold to a medium size station, which happened to be owned by a vastly larger station that proceeded to tell all of its smaller stations to play all the same songs in all the same cycles. Consequently, the old black and white photo—Buddy’s antiquity, his sepia-toned eternal hope—seems lost in a sea of garish rap star posters; chains, cars, dogs, dice, bitches, and dollar signs run thematically through the bunch.

Jack finds an old radio training manual while you stand around gawking stupidly at the walls. The book is thick and unwieldy, but this becomes less threatening as you both later find the machinery still to be operating, still broadcasting, ON AIR, the thin steel tower whispering a signal of soft prone static to every receiver in every empty car and every empty house for miles.

You assume the appropriate chairs.

You don the appropriate headphones.

You open the training manual to the appropriate page and find the appropriate information.

You turn the appropriate dials and push the appropriate buttons.

And you cannot think of one appropriate thing to say. You just sit there, mouth agape, frozen, appearing as if a mechanical arm was patiently offering you a bite of microphone to eat.

‘How about ‘Hello?’ Jack offers, shaking the dismay around in his head.

‘Hello?’ you manage to croak.

Failing to further realize anything of any foreseeable use to anyone, you give the mike to Jack.

‘Rum,’ is all you can communicate; you leave the sound room heading for the car. Returning with bottle plus carton of cigarettes, you find Jack engaged in what sounds at first and ecstatically to be a conversation, but ends up just being some rambling diatribe about an elephant and a Navaho code talker.

Failing to further realize anything of any foreseeable use to anyone, you remove the mike from Jack. You hand him the rum to replace it.

After several such trips to the car spread out over several hours and several drunken elephant jokes, you are feeling pretty shitty.

In between a few sudden and short-lived bouts of vomiting into a small trashcan, you manage to smoke a cigarette while repeatedly asking Jack, ‘What next?’ while receiving nothing you could call a response.

Jack screams into the microphone and laughs.

Spinning, anxious, in the chair, you think about things, including, but not limited to: drinking, the lack of any good plan besides drinking, smoking cigarettes, the passing of leaf to ash, vomiting, your parents, your bed, a few gorgeous names and faces that seem less like memories and more like sensationalized TV footage; your grave, cold indifferent earth, cremation—skin to ash, smoking again, vomiting once more, mahogany for some reason, government, total and sudden collapse of world order, hunters and gatherers, Mayans, food, food spoiling in a grocery store, vomiting, smoking, extinction, the loss of history, (of fecund persons to create history,) of records, music, math, psychology, microbiology, theoretical physics, aeronautical engineering, advanced archaeological excavation engineering, grave excavation, holes in the ground, who will bury you, what if he dies and there’s no one else, insanity, smoking, vomiting, those beautiful far off names and traces, smoking, vomiting, alone.

Jack is shoving arm through coat sleeve, stumbling. He’s mumbling, eyes closed, something about sail and mast ratios to either you or the floor.



You fall asleep in the car and wake lying on a long mahogany table. A mural of stars coats the ceiling above in a fantastic patina, with the somber colors of night. It is very quiet. Everything comes to you, then—the driving, the missing population, Jack, the fear of various things, the alcohol, the confusion of waking up in a library.

‘What am I doing here?’ you ask yourself, and are slightly unnerved to find yourself unable to reach a satisfying answer. You call for Jack, anxiety breaking in your voice, then nothing—still more silence.

You sit on the table feeling no particular impulse to wander around looking for answers. You smoke a cigarette and ash on the carpet, drunk. In the pale wash of near morning light cast through stained glass windows you taste your putrid mouth and decide that you have to choose either to survive, pained and yearning, or to die drinking, sick and blissful—but perhaps feeling unfulfilled in some last fleeting seconds.

To drink or not to drink; Jack does not answer the question.

But he does appear then on the second floor, shouting your name, echoes at first seeming like God was calling your attention.

You look for him from below, dazed on the table, as Abraham might once have peered, squint-eyed and stupefied, into mysterious bushy blazes. A stained glass window is behind him and probably on the sun side of the building, as it is brighter than the others. ‘Rise and shine, pilgrim,’ he says silhouetted, leaning on the railing.

‘Yeah?’ you sort of agree and ask.

‘We’re going to be sailors; get used to first light.’

You tell him he can be Captain Kangaroo and lay back on the table again.

‘I’ve been reading all morning,’ he continues, unfazed. ‘I suggest you do the same, Bartleby.’ You notice a pile of books beside him, on the ledge.

‘I’d prefer not to.’

And Jack casually kicks a small tower of books down onto the table, falling for your head. You have only enough strength to sit up and let the books hit your back. ‘What’s the point, dude?’ you turn and ask him from below.

‘The point?’ he cries from behind an easy smile. ‘The point is that we have a lot of work to do if we’re gonna get to the west coast in under a month. The point is that you’re my friend and I need your help. The point is that thanks to our public education, we have rather a lot to learn to be able to survive. And besides,’ he continues, reaching down, voice sinking conspiratorially, ‘I need someone to tell jokes to.’ This last comment that causes you to vomit on the carpet.

As he raises his arm to throw, what must be the first rays of the morning sun break across the horizon, flare through the magnificent stained glass and through the top half of the room, brilliantly highlighting his throwing form as Jack heaves the big black book at you from above. You suddenly realize this is actually happening, but you feel distant, somehow objectified; it feels like something you’ve always remembered somehow.

You dodge the ridiculous unwieldy thing as it falls through the sunlight into the shade. It falls past you, smacks an old globe sitting on the end of the table right along the equator and the whole mess, world and text, shoot off and onto the floor where you vomited. You stand on the table and walk to the end to check the damage.

Jack stands there staring down at you standing there staring down at the floor where a Bible splays across a puddle of puke, an old globe split open at the middle, dark and hollow inside.

Your first instinct is to laugh and you do. Jack laughs then, too. Jack stands above in the sun laughing and you stand below in the shade laughing and then for a while, there’s a lot of running and jumping, dodging, climbing, grabbing books and throwing them, peeking, aiming, chasing, rolling, charging, blocking, lobbing, chucking, and catching. There are overhand tosses and underhand whips and other various maneuvers.

Books fly through the air, derelict pages snapping back and forth, flapping like wings, and slide across the floor or smack into bookshelves.

You run up the stairs and he climbs off the rail onto a table below, inverting the original positions.

‘You’re free!’ Jack would scream. Or, ‘We can do anything we want!’ Or, ‘Here’s your Intervention; here’s your damned blessing!’ he’d yell. ‘We’ve been given a chance to live life differently,’ Jack says then, no longer running. ‘Can’t you see that? Instead of rotting away in relative safety, we will have to grow and live life in the world.’

‘And die unknown,’ you reply sharply, breathing heavily, leaning against a cart marked for returns.

‘Tell yourself you’re famous if you want. Most people do anyway. It’s all the same in the end, isn’t it?’

‘Wow, you have been reading, haven’t you?’

‘Actually, that’s from an old joke I know; there’s a lot of wisdom in humor, you know.’

‘How long can we go on, Jack?’

‘You decide. You know this.’

‘I don’t want to be the last man on Earth, dude,’ you say, sitting down on the carpet, acquiescent, ‘I just don’t.’

‘What else are you going to do? That’s my question to you.’ He repeats himself and stands there looking down at you feeling sheepish on the floor.

A great feeling of unease sweeps over you in the cool library air, with morning outside waking, as Jack just turns around, starts walking away, surely not to look back again to see if you will follow. You almost fall through the floor, or at least it feels like it. You begin to sense something powerful about this moment. You sense the future’s nearness, its vast surface stretching even back, too—the long arc with no origin or terminus, the cavernous continuity, the epic insignificance of your individual life along its patient plain.

What difference does it make then, you think, what delusions one has about the world, what methods one could find to follow? They will all be lost. And Jack doesn’t care; he just does what he wants with his time. It’s a challenge to him, fuck what comes in the end. You wonder, there, on the carpet, if this is what he was talking about. And for a small time, you are almost just okay with everything. You can breathe.

But then Jack just starts telling an elephant joke while you throw books and maps into the car.



Large amounts of gasoline are easy to acquire when no one is near to ask questions. It’s lugging all the weight around the mall that is taxing.

Jack walks around and splashes, and you walk around and splash.

‘What did the man say when 19 elephants came over the hill?’ he yells. Splash splash.

‘I don’t know,’ you call back, voice booming across Formica and glass pane win-dows. Splash splash.

‘Hey, look at those 19 elephants coming over the hill. What did the man say when 19 elephants came over the hill wearing sunglasses?’ Splash splash.

‘What?’ Splash splash.

‘Hey look at those 19 elephants coming over the hill wearing sunglasses.’ Splash splash. ‘What did the man say when 19 elephants came over the hill wearing sunglasses and top hats?’

‘Christ, man,’ you yell, ‘what?’ Splash splash.

Jack waits for effect. Splash splash.

‘Nothing! He didn’t see them. He decided to do something better than fucking watching elephants come over a fucking hill!’

Laughter echoes through the empty mall, bold, rasping, past shoe stores and dress shops, past imported men’s clothing displays and diamond merchants. It rebounds off tall glass windows of toy stores and hardware departments, glances off the ceilings of food courts. It bathes everything with the noxious fumes of our celebration, stains all the ridiculous artifacts that populate the slow afternoon daydreams of submissive suburban mailboxes. Splash splash. Laughter and gasoline.

And you both watch it all burn, from the parking lot, a furious pillar and dance of light, and heat, boiling black smoke rising, climbing ever higher, becoming thinner, dissipat-ing traceless into the wide dark night.