We All Fall Down (Part 2 of 2)

Benjamin

Ten minutes.

Carrying the wine glass stem between his fingers like a cigarette, Benjamin took a deep breath of the urban evening air as he climbed the staircase leading to the rooftop of his apartment complex. The smells radiating from the city and into the atmosphere were conflicting, he decided. Everything smelled like French fry oil and car exhaust – scents that screamed confidence. The perfume of ostentatious consumerism at it's textbook finest. Fragrances that saturated the monolithic obelisks of society like fresh blood on a white cotton sheet.

Strong, violent, empowering smells.

Corrupted.

Volatile.

Alive.

...But not anymore.

Tonight the city-smell wasn't sleeping alone.

The air also carried horror. Raw, bleeding-on-the-chopping-block fear that mixed with the French fry oil to create an acid-base synthesis that hung in the air like sludge. Sludge that erupted in elemental explosion whenever someone thought about it.

Action, reaction.

Everyone was thinking about it.

The sun was going to explode, after all.

A red hot sphere of gas releasing pure power at the matter-energy rate of ninety-one billion megatons of TNT per second. Continuous nuclear explosions. Explosions that could decimate China or North America in a fraction of a second, like the work of some displeased deity.

Core.

Corona.

Photosphere and Prominences.

All gone.

In ten minutes, planet earth would bake like a potato. And Benjamin wasn't going to miss it for his life.

He smiled at the thought. His life. Ten whole minutes of it. Worthless two days ago. Priceless now. The most sought after commodity. Obviously, the world was experiencing an international shortfall of this kind of currency. The currency of seconds. Of milliseconds. Of nanoseconds.

How was he going to spend his ten minutes?

Alone.

And with a front row seat.

At least he wasn't wasting it.

Benjamin stepped onto the rooftop, shadowed by the empty, metallic husks of ventilators and Air Conditioning ducts – dying monsters that sat on the rooftop, looking towards the horizon like abandoned gargoyles – and walked towards a lawn chair sitting by an end table. Humming, he set a bottle of Bordeaux and the wine glass on the table and lowered himself into the chair.

He popped open the bottle of wine.

And tossed the cork over the side of the building.

It hovered in the air like a tired sparrow for a moment, stumbling over the last shafts of sunlight – golden sunlight – before falling to it's death below.

Asphalt and feathers and cork.

The wine smelled like home.

He poured the Bordeaux carefully into his wine glass, talking now, talking to no one. Talking to everyone.

“Sunny with a chance of clouds. That's what they said. If you're vacationing at the beach today, better pack some sunscreen.”

He took a sip of the wine – cupping it in his hand like a blossom.

“Might get a sunburn.” He laughed.

Everyone's going to get a sunburn.

Another sip. He fell silent as the wind ran it's fingers through his hair. He wondered for a moment why he was being so calm about the whole affair. He wondered why he wasn't calling home. Saying goodbye to friends and family. He wondered why he wasn't praying. Reading scripture. Hurriedly making his deathbed conversion; rosary beads in one hand and a cross in the other, begging forgiveness before God's mighty wrath destroyed the wicked in a bath of fire and brimstone.

That was what this was, after all.

Judgment day.

Right?

Maybe not.

His parents couldn't make a Christian out of him. The world was too complicated as it was. Benjamin just didn't need the extra hassle of a culture that demanded so much energy, so much time, so much faith.

Faith was for the blind.

Rose colored glasses hidden in the pages of a bible, between the lines, twisted and bent into words like Hallelujah and Risen and Lord.

The world was the world. There was no sense in forcing the human race into an altruistic mold, Benjamin reasoned. They were all going to hell anyway.

The celestial and the terrestrial were on two completely different planes. Oil and water.

So why bother?

Another sip of wine: lukewarm blood. No, there was a completely scientific explanation for this solar Armageddon, one without extraneous religious interpretations or scripture or prophesies. The sun had served it's time. It was old. It was dying. And everything died eventually. The sun – the light, the warmth, the hope – was just following nature's law.

Live.

Die.

Benjamin checked his watch.

One minute.

A single minute until a tired, drained star exploded – casting trillions of white hot rosary beads into space, sighing cataclysmic prayers in the direction of Pluto.

Benjamin peeled off his watch and placed it on the nightstand beside him. He didn't want to know. He didn't want to know how many seconds were left until he took his last breath, until he died along with the source of energy that the human race had relied on for so long.

So he watched the skyline, with skyscrapers prickling like so many upright syringes.

He finished his glass of Bordeaux and sighed.

You are my sunshine.

Benjamin noticed for the first time how silent the city was, as if the sludge hanging in the air was actually ivory soap shavings of snow cascading down from the sky. No horns, no sirens, no voices. They were in their homes, in their bars, getting laid, getting smashed, getting what they could while the getting was good.

My only sunshine.

He was fairly sure only a few seconds remained. Maybe ten. But time was so fickle. And there was always a possibility that the scientists had predicted the apocalypse that night wrong, too. Hell, the weathermen had been doing it for years.

You make me happy, when skies are gray.

Benjamin smiled. Wouldn't that be ironic? Billions of people huddling in their matchstick homes waiting for a deadly midnight sunrise only to find it had been delayed an hour.

Funny.

Hilarious.

You'll never know dear, how much I love you.

There would be no delay.

Ten minutes, only seconds early.

It came quickly.

Benjamin felt his breath torn from his lungs by invisible hands as he watched the sun unfold itself in huge, masterful brush strokes across the night sky; an aura that domed up somewhere to his right blooming like a million fireworks lit off all at once. The velvet night caught fire. It was shredded into pieces of hazy darkness that spiked across Benjamin's eyes as he blinked and blinked again.

The most glorious sunrise.

Breathtaking.

Absolutely breathtaking.

Please don't take my sunshine away.