Pralaya (An Anticipatory Story) 1:1
SEASON 1, EPISODE 1
“a kiss for the end of the world” by Nikos Mouras
Courtesy of Creative Commons license. No changes made.
From Christopher L. Fici, Ph.D
It started with a hangover
A planetary hangover.
The first off-key note was a chyron on CNN roundabout 9:34am:
REPORTS OF EXTRAORDINARY SICK-OUTS ACROSS MULTIPLE INDUSTRIES THIS MORNING
I couldn’t stomach the dread of teaching high school students any longer. Their hormones. Their drama. On of being so fucking tired all of the time. Cyborgs attached to their devices.
I’m lying in my bed, one eye open, everything foggy, instant regrets. Four scotches still percolating in the rot phase of the drunk from the previous evening at the Midlands bar off of Georgia in Petworth in D.C.
Hungover because I had to break up a fight in school and took a punch to the stomach. I spent the rest of the day fantasizing about hiring a lawyer and getting a sweet compensation package for my trauma. On top of just finding out the one higher ed job I wanted (I have a Ph.D in religious studies) was given to a colleague after numerous “promises” and impressions from a mentor that the job was mine.
Everything is foggy. The ladder keeps getting pulled up. You have to hustle or die. Publish or perish. Yet even those binaries were breaking down. Hustle and die. Publish and perish anyway.
There is a wild animal inside me, an Earthy boar, who is nevertheless also a deeply contemplative sage. My real ego. If I don’t tend to them, they will devour me.
So I woke up fed up. Fucking tired. Fucking done. The very thought of going to work that day, of doing anything resembling being a functional adult, made me weep like a baby in the shower (I was also primally missing my wife-she is in London and we have been in a long-distance marriage for the last year+ because, as she always says, “COVID is fucking up everything.”)
My Mom, who works at a hospital in my hometown of Detroit, texted me at 08:15am saying she was literally the only one at work. Of course she goes to work. 22 minutes later she tells me she’s been sent home. Because very few of the doctors and admin showed up for work as well (of course most of the nurses did). She is finding this especially weird.
Just fucking done. I lie in bed, nauseous, exhausted, doom-scrolling through Instagram, my only reprieve…
thisistheend: something weird is going on. I’m working from home today on a project for the State Department but literally no one showed up to our 30 person Zoom meeting…
Manistheone: Nobody here at all wot the fuck!
DrKeithbaby34: I’m seriously worried right now. They have a test today!? DID THE RAPTURE JUST HAPPEN?!
I fall back asleep for a bit and wake up around 10am. Texts from my sister and my wife telling me they have been sent home too (of course they went to work)
WIFEY: Baby they sent me home! No one came to work! And no one was on the tube on the way back. It’s very strange.
I turn on CBS News. The chyron is remarkable:
BREAKING NEWS: NATIONWIDE SPONTANEOUS SICK-OUT UNDERWAY: INITIAL REPORTS THAT 80-90% OF WORKFORCE DID NOT REPORT FOR WORK
I check SkyNews:
MASSIVE SICK-OUT ACROSS UK: NO REPORTS OF ORGANIZED GENERAL STRIKE, APPEARS TO BE SPONTANEOUS.
General strike? I didn’t even think of that. Maybe my leftist radical comrades finally got their shit together. I check Jacobin’s Twitter account:
This is not a general strike, as everyone keeps asking us. Our networks have not been planning a direct action like this. If anything, this appears to be a spontaneous “strike” but we debate the use of that term in this instance.
Three minutes later, my friend Salona (my Quaker witch friend I befriended at divinity school) texts me to say:
I knew this was going to happen.
I text her back: Really? Why? What is happening?
I don’t get an immediate response. Five minutes later, the entire Meta suite of apps, the great succubus on our attention and energy and love, goes down. It wouldn’t come back on ever again.
I step out on my front porch. The silence is rich and obvious, like I was in those days in NYC right after the pandemic started. All you could hear were sirens and the birds again! But this one is different. It felt like like a big inhaled breath. I live on a fairly busy street in D.C, yet no cars drive by for the five minutes I’m there. No helicopters. No buses. No people. Even Cheech didn’t show up to work next door at the corner market.
It’s starting to hit me. The world seems to have stopped. Everyone finally has decided to collapse into exhaustion together, consciously and unconsciously at the same time.
And why not? The other day I was having my usual hissy-fit, complaining to my wife that “everything is broken, and we keep going on like it’s not!” Walking to work the other day, always trying to say good morning to my fellow neighborhood residents, I made some fleeting eye-contact. What I saw is me reflected back to me, my neighbor reflected back onto themselves. This mutual recognition that we are on the verge of tears at all times. That making the bare effort to get up and walk the dog might be all we can do today. Love your neighbor as yourself.
How can we live when the world is ending at every second? The Buddhists and the plant scientists will always tell you there is no real solid ground. Everything is always shifting. Everything is always impermanent. Yet everything is always interconnected, which prevents everything from dissolving into a stew of chaos, inertia, and ennui.
The schools of Buddhism teach us about sunyata, the emptiness of reality. Buddhists also describe reality through the concept of pratitya-samutpada, or the doctrine of dependent origination. In essence, the existence of everything depends on the existence of everything else. No one exists independently. Our existence is always connected, quite literally, to the existence of everything else (this is hardly emptiness right?) Everything that is important to us is always connected to us. Our very sense of identity depends on the identity of those separate-but-always connected fellow beings who experience our reality with us and within us at all times.
All that is to say that all things must always pass at all times and in all ways. At every moment, creation and destruction unite. The cellular structure of our body, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, your crypto investment, the acid level of the oceans, the shape of your thoughts, all of this changes without fail at every single moment. Death, loss, and grief accompany us at every moment of existence. All the while, rebirth and regeneration also accompany us at every moment of existence.
That’s been the hardest part of all of this, all of this unending COVID spacetime. Every relationship, every project, every hope, every idea, and every dream we have is now compromised or dissolved or mutated in some way. It is because we keep trying to go on like it’s normal, clinging desperately to the mirage of the permanent, that we have become sick: physically, mentally, and spiritually.
In trying to avoid a virus we have become the virus. I have watched my friends and communities vanish and change and morph into paranoid, tribal, and insane people...I try not to feel it. We try not to feel it. Because if we felt it all we would just collapse. Maybe that is what is happening now.
I take a deep breath. Lately three deep breaths have brought me oh so temporarily to a space of rest. I breathe in. I breathe out. The perfect drug. I feel a sense of relief wash over me. Finally the world might be actually ending. It feels great. Inhale. Exhale. It feels fucking terrifying.
Like a tear in the fabric of reality, suddenly five police cars race by at a speed which is only “safe” if there is literally no one out driving or walking. A minute later two big black helicopters-those ones which are always expected to appear in country-fried visions of the apocalypse, the locusts of Revelations, fly by literally only forty feet over my head.
For some reason I start laughing out loud. What the fuck is going on?
I walk into my favorite back alley behind my house to muse and ease my hangover. Rather out loudly I say again: what the fuck is going on? This time I get an answer: the auntie who always sits out on her balcony talking on her phone. She’s there now. She’s made radio contact with somebody.
Auntie: I never did care for Eloise. She was always so nasty to her daughter…hmm hmm…well…
What the fuck is going on?
She hears me, stops her conversation, and shouts back to me: Child! People are just done tired of it all.
There is a sudden rush in the air above me. I’m expecting one of DC’s ever low-flying federal aircraft to fall on top of my head, but I can’t see anything. I look up at Auntie and she is back on about Eloise, seemingly oblivious to the sheet-metal death-metal rumble getting louder and louder.
The geese who sit eternally on the grounds of the Veterans’ Retirement Home campus across the street are flying chaotically in the air above me. I have to start dodging geese shit. The funny thing is that I can’t hear the geese, only the whoosh, which starts to fill up my body with a deep, deep bass note. Like at the very bottom of Mingus’ ax. I start to feel like I’m going to float away from the inside. It’s actually rather ecstatic.
There is a sharp tearing sound and then back to that silence which still feels like an inhale. Whatever that was is over. I still feel like I’m floating for a few seconds. Whatever that was actually felt really good, like those last moments before you sneeze.
Auntie stands up on her balcony again. She is looking down at me.
“Alright, this weather is getting nasty. Take care young man. I always see you out here.”
She goes back inside. I do too.
Signals are very scrambled. I text my wife but it takes fifteen minutes for the message to go through. Radio silence from her end. From my family too. What was once fun has now tipped over to the terrifying end. The signal from CNN flashes back on my tele. The third-string anchor who got roped in this morning is talking. There is no chyron.
“…federal and local officials are asking everyone to remain in place as much as possible right now. They are requesting that all individuals…all households…please listen to local authorities.”
Signal out again. Three deep breaths, especially so I don’t begin hyperventilating.
…
My wife is trying to write back
…
…
Then silence. I try calling about eight times in a row. Texting again. Starting to really hyperventilate.
…
“Baby I’m here. I’m safe with my family.”
I text her back, but every signal cuts out again.
It’s my turn to collapse. My bed is the only place I want to be. My whole soul is swirling.