Nuclear Apocalypse

Pawel became acutely conscious of the blinding solar orb setting on the coastal city of Victoria when he noticed two intimidating guys approach him.

One of them was shouting, and Pawel felt as if the guy had pulled a rabbit out of the hat that was Pawel’s subconscious when the epithet “F****t” was hurled at him, singling him out mercilessly. A rough hand shoved him. Pawel froze, shaken by a sense of his own inferiority.

“The fratricide is a suicide is a birth,” the guy said. “This is evolution.” He held a knife.

They were awakened from their trance by a man’s voice. “Hey! What are you doing?”

“Slaughtering sheep,” the guy with a knife replied. “You want him? Sorry, man, but I don’t think the human race stands a chance then.”

“Leave him alone.”

The guy lunged at him with the knife, and the man managed to deflect this move and then kicked the knife to the ground, whereupon the man swiftly grabbed hold of the knife, altering the balance of power. Pawel, seeing his chance to redeem his masculinity, punched out the other guy. Although shocked at the sight of blood, an exhilarating elixir of vitality coursed through his veins.

The guys took off, venomous rage still spewing from their lips as they mumbled, “Fucking f*****s . . .”

“I’m Nabil Saïd,” the man said while shaking Pawel’s hand, “and my favorite novel is Ben Barka Lane by Mahmoud Saeed.”

“My name is Pawel Smerdikow, and my favorite novel is Blinding: The Left Wing by Mircea Cărtărescu.”

“Would you like to go to a club with me? . . . Gays ought to look out for one another. I’m gay and Muslim. Gay and Muslim men have at least one thing in common: the Islamophobes and homophobes think we’re both a bunch of woman-haters.”

The moment they stepped into the club, they were deluged by a loud, thumping beat — a chaos of sounds and pulsations. “I’m not sure we can talk here,” Nabil shouted. “I guess we’re going to have to stay really close to each other.”

“I think I’m agnostic, but I feel like I need to find a belief system that gives my life meaning.”

“You’re still looking. I questioned a lot, yet I don’t think I ever lost my faith. There are Qur’an verses that anticipated scientific truths. I’m proud that I can read it in Arabic.”

“I’ve read books like Sardar’s Reading the Qur'an that claim, among other things, that there are verses in the Qur’an that seem to sanctify man-to-man love.”

“Surahs 52:24 and 76:19 . . . Looking at me, would you have guessed that my father’s Iraqi and my mother’s Iranian?”

“I don’t know . . . My father’s surname was Pojoga. My Morantean grandmother’s maiden name was Petrescu.”

“But your name is Atlantidan, right?”

“My mother never married, and I was named after my maternal grandfather. He was from the USSR and moved to Morantea when he was eighteen . . . My father was thirty-two years older than my mother; she was his mistress. He asked her to abort me using quinine. I never knew him.”

I’m sorry to hear that . . .”

The almost deafening music ceased and Pawel said, “Karaoke. I’m singing ‘This Is the Last Time’ by The National.”

“‘I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know’ by Donny Hathaway . . . I’ve never sung it before . . .”

They got the chance to inhabit the intimate worlds captured by their favorite songs. There was a television in a corner of the bar, but it was set on mute and no one paid any attention to it.

“Turn the music down!” some guy shouted. He pointed to the TV and unmuted it.

The reporter said: “. . . Atlantida has inflicted a nuclear strike against Morantea. It has not yet been determined whether this attack was unintentional or malicious —”

“Of course it was intentional!” he yelled.

Nabil touched Pawel’s shoulder and said, “We should get out of here.” Pawel followed Nabil to his car. They were overwhelmed by the feeling that the world could end any minute. Pawel and Nabil wanted to see their families, so they decided they would travel to Surrey the next morning when the ferry would be operating again.

“Life is very lonely without friends,” Nabil said as he turned on the car radio.

“ . . . Some have conjectured that Chechen ISIS members managed to get their hands on an Atlantidan nuclear weapon, thereby delivering a strike against Dvarka. Atlantida may have assumed that this strike originated from NATO, leading inexorably to the Atlantidans’ fatally irrevocable and indelible decision to attack NATO-member Morantea . . .”

Pawel turned the radio off. “I don’t know if I can deal with another loss.”

“What do you mean?”

They decided to go to the Twilight Drive-In movie theatre. Mulholland Drive was playing, and when they arrived, the movie had just started. Pawel sat back and relaxed. Pawel and Nabil tried to make sense of the film — a web of irrational events and chain reactions brought to life by the timeless elements of dialogue, music, and aesthetics. Nabil found it difficult to focus, at times looking outside the car and wondering why everyone seemed so calm after the first nuclear strike since Nagasaki.

A sudden chill ran up his spine. He thought he saw something carrying a sword approach the car.

“We’ve got to go.” Nabil started the car.

The last thing Pawel thought he saw before they drove off was a skeleton or zombie walking toward them. They sped away into the pitch black night.

“Too bad we couldn’t finish watching the movie.”

“ . . . Can you teach me how to fight?”

They drove through the moonless night like disembodied spirits on a paradise-bound journey. They found a dark, quiet country road, and Nabil kept driving while Pawel slept. It was almost dawn when Nabil parked the car at an isolated area by a river. He closed his eyes, and like Pawel, he allowed himself to drift into an ineffably primordial, deep sleep.

When Nabil woke up, he saw Pawel devouring a bag of walnuts. “That’s brain food,” Nabil remarked. “They’re shaped like little brains.”

“Please teach me how to fight.”

“Give me some brain food first.”

Afterwards, Nabil taught Pawel the standard stance and the hook punch, followed by wrestling moves like the blast double and the double-wrist tie-up. They ended up wrestling on the river bank, immersing themselves in a masculine contest of strength and intimacy.

They stopped and looked into each other’s eyes. Nabil laughed, his face brightening in youthful mirth. They kissed. Everything that separated them fell away. Their bodies joined together and floated in an ocean of bliss.

_ _

“You know, human males are not the only ones who engage in frottage or belly rubbing. Bonobo chimpanzees do. Gray whales do.”

“I read that in Biological Exuberance.”

Nabil turned on the radio, hoping to hear some music; instead he was barraged with harsh, dissonant voices conveying more bad news: the horrors caused by the Atlantidan nuclear strike against Morantea and the carnage being inflicted in a colossal war between ISIS, Atlantida and NATO.

“Time to go to the ferries,” Nabil said.

“I’m hungry.”

“Me too.”

When they got to the ferry, they each ate a Nanaimo bar with a slice of chocolate cake. While he was finishing the cake, Pawel’s pocketbook (doubling as a journal) fell from the edge of the table. He picked it up and immediately noticed a golden heart-shaped locket right next to where the pocketbook was.

“What is that?” Nabil asked curiously.

Pawel opened the locket and they both saw an old black-and-white photograph of two smiling men standing close to each other, one with his arm around the other. “I wonder if they were lovers or friends or both.”

“I’m sure they experienced a lot, perhaps even more (both bad and good) than we do now after the anti-gay Peasants won the latest civil war against us.”

“Have you ever experienced any other kind of discrimination?” Pawel asked.

“ . . . A guy once told me, ‘You’re a good Muslim: you don’t poison the water supply.’ There were guys who yelled ‘DP’ at me as they drove by . . . After the 2015 Paris attacks, a guy spat at my sister. People told her awful things like, ‘Get the fuck out of this country, you invisible terrorist,’ and ‘shut your Muslim mouth.’”

“That’s terrible . . . A woman once told my mother, ‘I hate you! Go back to your fucking country!’ After the Boston bombing, another of my mother’s co-workers joked that my mother’s from Chechnya. Even a junior high girl once spat at my mother . . . People sometimes asked me why I still have an accent if I’ve been in Canada since I was seven-months-old; they found the truth hard to believe. They asked me if I’m Atlantidan, if I know Atlantidan, if I have dual citizenship with Atlantida, if I’m a Canadian citizen, et cetera . . .”

Nabil clasped Pawel’s hand in his own, and the sun suffused their entwined hands with a magical glow.

A blinding flash of light suddenly disoriented everyone as it completely blinded them for several seconds or more. The ferry stopped, and when they regained their sight, Nabil was possessed by the desire to find out more about what happened and turned the radio on. When Pawel’s consciousness completely returned, he could hear the radio and Nabil trying to hold back his tears. Pawel couldn’t look Nabil in the eye.

Nabil narrated his understanding of what happened: “Not long after Atlantida erroneously retaliated by nuking Morantea, neo-Nazis decided to ramp up their attack against Atlantida. They perceived Atlantida as an easier target than America, especially since Atlantida was distracted by its paranoia regarding NATO. They made their own nuclear weapons. You know about neo-Nazis or white supremacists, a Western and elitist brand of white identity politics. Over time, many disaffected and lost souls from all over the world joined their ranks. They also managed to steal nuclear weapons from Atlantida’s vast arsenal. They nuked a couple of other Atlantidan cities in addition to Dvarka, and I guess their warning is that we’re next . . .”

“ . . . Atlantida has immolated itself in an inferno of its own making. It bothered me to be seen as Atlantidan. Now I’m just sorry that all of this had to happen . . . My mother’s ex was a mystic. In a dream, he once told me that the apocalypse is coming; it’s only a matter of time. Our world is just an infinitesimal grain of sand in a vast ocean of other worlds. Are we so narcissistic to believe that the creators of our universe or simulation will care if we destroy ourselves?”

“I’m not sure how to say this. I think our families are dead.”

“I don’t want to think about it,” Pawel said. He took the old heart-shaped locket from his pocket and tried to give it to Nabil as a necklace.

“Don’t. You yourself said that you don’t know if you can deal with another loss. Now we’re facing the greatest loss. And you don’t want to face it. I don’t know if I can deal with this either.”

_ _ _

When they returned to Victoria, they took a nap for a couple of hours.

When they woke up, Nabil drove until they reached an apartment building.

The building’s manager and Nabil exchanged heartfelt words, their sense of finality resounding like wailing church bells. Nabil took Pawel by the hand as they took the elevator to the one-hundred-thirty-ninth floor. Nabil guided Pawel to Room #1393. They both felt the intoxicating elixir of divine Eros and elation flow through their bodies.

_ _

Pawel gazed into the mirrors of Nabil’s eyes.

“It’s a shame our lives have to end so soon,” Nabil said. “You should’ve gotten the chance to be happy.”

“ . . . Nabil . . . ”

The noon summer sky exploded with the blinding brilliance of a primeval blaze.