Ancient History

“They’re starting the demolition next month,” said Jack, eyes black in the dancing firelight. He took a pull from a half-empty bottle of whiskey and passed it along.

I loved these nights, perched on the hood of his car, bonfire crackling in front of us.

The rig hung over our town like a mountain, impressive and intimidating in equal measure. Its mass of pipes and drills had once been the lifeblood of Saint Helens, of the country, hungry to extract every drop of what was buried deep in the earth. Now it sat empty and abandoned, a husk of the past. Soon it would be gone altogether.

The bottle was heavy in my hand, warm where Jack had held it.

“Can you imagine being up there when they take it down? The last oil rig in America?” I drank from the bottle, coughed as it went down. It happened every time, no matter how many pulls I took.

“You know they’re letting people go up. Spend the night and stuff,” I said as I handed the bottle back.

“Yeah, but it costs like a million dollars. It’s meant for tourists, not people like us.”

“$20,000. It’s $20,000 for three nights.”

“You actually looked into it?”

I looked at the ground. The corner of his mouth crinkled into a smile.

“If I didn’t know you better I’d say you were blushing.”

“I just think it would be cool, that’s all. It’s important. It feels like we’re finally progressing. We spent so much time stuck, wondering why things sucked so bad. No one was thinking about the future or looking forward or anything. And then we woke up. And besides, it’s been there my whole life. But it’s fine. Not like I have $20,000 lying around. So, yeah. I just think it would’ve been cool.”

They had it decked out with all the amenities of a five-star hotel. An Americana-themed restaurant that served $30 meatless burgers, a sterile and unbearably trendy bar called Dive Bar, a swimming pool with a glass bottom that looked down onto the old coils and pistons of the drill. Industrial chic.

There weren’t a lot of people there, just a handful of ironic trust-fund kids looking for something to shake off their inertia, a few families with bleary-eyed moms, some rich techies with $600 quarter-zip fleeces and branded company dad hats. And me.

We didn’t talk to each other, all lost in our private worlds. Some people took advantage of the spa, others went shopping or bowling or ice skating. I wandered.

“Open it,” Jack had said as I clutched the envelope, hands shaking.

“I don’t know if I can,” I said. He put his hands on mine.

“Open it,” he repeated.

I couldn’t ask where the $20,000 had come from. All I could do was cry.

The world should have ended yesterday.

I found the notebook tucked away in a pile of faded schematics and rusted out tool-kits. Small and black, edges worn, pages yellowed. The handwriting was cramped and frantic, letters stitched together like some kind of Frankenstein cursive. Some pages were completely indecipherable, the curves and lines so close together and homogenous they could have only held meaning to the writer. Bad handwriting as a substitute for code. Some were easier to follow. Good days and bad days, maybe?

3/13/2032.

Yesterday.

It was somewhere near the back of the book, scrawled out on the bottom of the page. A prophesied doomsday that never came to pass. Was it just a guess? A wild, pessimistic stab? Or educated. Calculated. Were the equations and symbols scattered throughout the journal all leading up to this? The final number, the end of days.

The author hadn’t bothered to date the entries, but judging by the fading, the tears, the comfortable musty smell, they weren’t around to be proven wrong. I wished I could reach back through the paper, let them know they needn’t have worried. The world wasn’t ending. We were okay.