There were always death parties in the city; you just had to know where to look.
Sometimes this was as easy as hearing bad karaoke through an open window. Other times you had to stalk some gregarious friend on social media (one of mine would indiscriminately click ‘going’ to every event, even ones happening simultaneously). This time I was lucky because my upstairs neighbors were audibly having the sort of jamboree that could demolish the building. From the shaking ceiling I judged it to be somewhere between a rave and a ceilidh.
§
I slipped in through the mostly open door and camouflaged myself with half a bottle of black wine I happened to have lying around. They were listening to different playlists in each room and all four washed over me like a great noise symphony.
Not all death parties—or ‘wakes’, as some people insist on calling them—are wild. This one had either peaked or was still in its gestation phase. Though it was loud, the only people in the living room were two girls sitting on a couch, watching the news.
I stood and watched too. On the screen, a pissed-off Zeroan was shouting at the camera, having just shot the Erzherzog of Bacchus. The newsreader calmly announced that this was expected to unleash the wrath of billions.
“He’ll be dead soon,” said one of the girls.
“We all will,” said the other.
“You’ve got to hand it to him, really.”
“Some juries might call that treason.”
“Well, maybe not hand it to him exactly, but you can’t fault him on his significance.”
“He’s just a guy,” said the second girl, pulling off her socks and putting her feet under her bottom. “If he didn’t do it, someone else would’ve. Everything’s inevitable in an infinite universe.”
“Don’t get me started,” said the first. “I could talk about infinity all night.”
“Joe God,” she said, as she sprinkled whatever was in her socks into a roll-up cigarette. “It’s just GW1 all over again, isn’t it.”
“History repeats itself but with bigger guns.”
“You can say that again. Don’t though.”
Their brains were operating on a level way beyond mine, and they were talking so fast it almost sounded like white noise. I could sense the distance as one feels the presence of a high ceiling. To go undetected as a gate-crasher, I’d either have to find some drunken cliché-vendor to talk to or else tap into one of those wells of inspiration we all have secreted.
“Joe God,” I said, imitating their tones of voice so they mistook me for themselves. “It’s like the dregs of a party in here. Why don’t we open a new bottle? Fizz it up a bit? Dance as if everyone else was dancing and therefore not watching.”
The second girl looked at me. “We’ve just split a thimble of algebra. I don’t think I’ll ever stand up again. But if you want to get us a beer there’s some on the balcony.”
The night outside was black but not dark. I suppose you could call it light-black. Somewhere out there, though I couldn’t see them through the city’s halo, there were stars exploding and planets turning to ice.
This balcony was only one story above mine but it was enough to make me dizzy as I peered over the edge. My flat was on the floor below, and I could see my own balcony, with its astroturf and astro-litter. The drop from mine would break your legs, but this one would splat you dead.
I held onto the railing tightly and got three beers out of the bucket, one for me and one for each of the processors.
Click-psst went the beers. “To our armed forces,” I said.
“Let’s get frickin’ dead,” said the girl.
She took a gulp so big her eyes welled up; part tears, part beer.
I left when they started talking about cosmological applications of anarcho-nationalism, perhaps in an attempt to prove the fatal extremities of boredom.
§
There was still music coming from other rooms. I tried a door, walking into a strange funeral. A woman was lying on the bed with coins on her eyes, while another woman wept into her dress, and two guys drank beer and reminisced about the time they all drove to the beach or something.
“Oh I’m sorry,” I said, making to leave.
“It’s fine,” said one of the men. “It’s what we’re all here for. Come and pay your respects.”
“I didn’t know her.”
“She was the sort of person who was friends with everyone.” He raised his beer can. “To Olga. You’ve partied your way out of hell at last. You’re at peace now.”
The other woman suddenly cried harder while the rest of us toasted.
“Was she old?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” replied the man reassuringly. “90 or thereabouts. But she stayed young all that time, rich parents you see. Of course, that meant she got drafted, like, the eve of GW1.”
“Well,” I said. “At least she’s managed to escape now.”
“Across that border to the undiscovered country,” said the other man, who had a voice for the stage. “She was an inspiration to us all—paralytic before we’d even found a bottle opener.”
The awful death metal song that had been on since I came in finally ended and one of those old Earth dance tracks took its place. Pretty soon we were all dancing. Even the wailing widow stood up and started grinding seductively on each of the two men. She looked at me a few times and I panicked thinking she wanted me to join them, but eventually she said:
“Would you mind leaving? I’d like to have sex with my boyfriends.”
As I slipped out, far too sober for that sort of thing, I spied her kneeling down to untie their shoelaces.
§
During GW1, I hadn’t been afraid of sex. It’d been easy to fit in at parties, and to enjoy the last days of indulgence. For a time I thought this was simply because the concept was new, and that none of us truly appreciated the fact that our sun could be obliterated by interstellar missiles, nor that our planet could become a water-mine for The Anti-Human Union. We were all young and stupid, even the 90-year-olds.
But I suspect now it was thanks to my friends and loved ones—those people whose lives I could reflect, and who now cast only shadows across me. Everyone I went to school with was dead, my home planet was gone, and I was the last of my siblings.
No party is fun if all you do is stand in the corner by yourself.
§
The boom of starships overhead was louder than usual, enough to strain the foundations and rattle the sheets of glass in their panes. One particularly loud screech made the whole corridor shake like the carriage of a braking train.
In the next room, three girls watched a man strip while extreme kickdrum music drowned out cheers and snorts. I could still hear the ships though. This city was a military target, after all.
“You too,” the girls shouted at me, over the din, so I downed a beer and did as I was told.
By the time I was fully undressed the girls had poured almost an entire bottle of wine over me, but most of it found its way into my throat, despite the fact that they’d stuffed my mouth with money. They stripped too on the condition that I sprayed them with sparkling wine. Two of them, who had been staring at each other hungrily since I came in, started kissing on the bed, but I was more interested in the plethora of drugs being laid out.
I was about to dissolve a handful of y-drugs into my wine, when the third woman said, “No you don’t. Do it properly.”
“What do you mean?”
“Lick it off Channah and Mali while they do it.”
People were coming and going and each time the door opened I realized how loud the sky was. A light brighter than the sun turned the whole room white, and left me with baby-vision for some time afterwards. There was a very real possibility that this was it.
It didn’t matter. Being alive was not something I really understood anymore. In fact I started to seriously consider that I’d already died. I was looking down on the universe from somewhere high up, way above the flat tableau of galaxies. The corner of the room provided firm support for my back and shoulders as I tumbled forwards through time, while our little planet hurtled through the dark warehouse of space.
Was it the drugs, or some new weapon of the Hogmen?
My old roommate swam past, smiling. It was agony to see her. Agony. I missed her more than life itself. I missed having someone to talk to, someone to get dressed for, someone to ignore all my little comments about the weather. But most of all I missed the sex.
It seemed like no matter how many parties I went to, nothing fun would ever happen again.
Instead, I focused on the shadowy monolith in front of me. It was a woman with a strand of bile-colored drool dangling from her lip.
“I love you,” she said.
§
I felt like I was in the middle of a deep sleep when the explosion happened. All of a sudden I was on my feet, though others remained horizontal and unresponsive. One of the girls from the living room came in shouting.
“The city’s being evacuated!”
Her words meant no more to me than the ongoing drums did, her expression no more than the patterns on the wallpaper.
Those capable made our way to the balcony, hopping as we pulled our pants up, past the television as it flickered between static and breaking news, and into the similarly flickering night.
Each bang was a knife in my ears. A Hogman watched us from the porthole of a ship, hairy nostrils flaring. Someone turned the music up and kept going until the war was drowned out.
“I’m too sober to die!” someone shouted over the noise.
No one stopped dancing as the building collapsed, except Channah who took a ceiling fan to the head. As rubble and furniture smothered me I sucked at my half-finished drink. Then my arms and legs wouldn’t move anymore and my hot skin seeped blood.
We lay in the wreckage until the fires went out and the sun was up and the pain subsided (a little). I couldn’t move at all so Anton, who was the only other one alive (though grimacing nonstop), poured wine into my mouth at two minute intervals. We waited for help long enough that we got to know each other quite well. We kissed a few times too because ultimately it was still a party.
“I reckon this will be it,” he said.
“You mean you’re finally dying?”
“No, this’ll be the last war. Can’t get any bigger than this. Didn’t think it could get any bigger than the last. People on moons shooting down their own planets. Whole solar systems gassed. This has got to be the end. The last great war. Ragnarök on ice.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “There’s already a school of historians who consider GW2 to be an extension of GW1. Two skirmishes in one larger war. But if you take that to its logical conclusion then all wars are one big war starting right back when the first tribe attacked another to steal their cave.”
“Will it ever end?”
“Not until the last two protons of humanity collide and explode, no.”
“Joe God,” he said, and for a while he didn’t say anything, and I thought about the rest of the universe and wondered what bits were still there. More lights came. Then we ran out of wine.
Probert Dean is from Liverpool. He won the PFD Prize for his as-yet-unpublished novel. He passed MA Creative Writing at Manchester University with distinction. His work has appeared in Mechanic’s Institute Review, Stupefying Stories, Manchester Review, Loft Books, and a few other spots here and there (and has also been shortlisted for several things). He plays with jazz punk band Unstoppable Sweeties Show.
On his days off, he likes to work part-time in an office.
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