Anjeli

18

The sun rose and everything fell. Years later, scientists (the living ones, anyway) speculated that the earth’s gravitational attachment to the sun had probably been corroding for decades, dissolving quietly over time. But speculation is speculation, and the fact is that nobody knew exactly when or why the planet had been ripped from its orbit. And besides, for most people (the kinds of people who were prone to hysteria and hadn’t been very good at understanding science, even on a good day), the when and the why didn’t matter much.
What actually mattered was the fact that the world collectively woke up one morning and turned on the news and stared in shock at the television, a forkful of fried egg or French toast or frittata suspended halfway to their mouths. The entire planet, the newscaster informed them, was sinking downward into the vast expanse of the universe below. The newscaster seemed a little overly perky, given the circumstances.
“And is the paint on your pipes doing serious damage to your children? Tune in tonight to find out.” Apparently, Channel 4 thought that lead paint and the slow descent of the planet demanded similar threat levels. “And now onto Bob with the weather!”
Because the planet was drifting away from the sun, the tan and jovial weatherman predicted that it would be overcast for the rest of the foreseeable future. And then after the weather was a brief report on how the impending apocalypse might affect everyone’s commute (“In my experience, folks tend to flee in a, uh, northward direction and I don’t know about you, Cynthia, but I’d say that steering clear of the Holland Tunnel would be the best bet.”).
In a pre-war apartment on the Lower East Side that did not have a television, Alex Brandanowitz stood in his living room, his jaw slack and his eyes unfocused. He took off his glasses and polished them on his shirt and then, after a second or two, did it again. His face was a sickly gray color. If someone had walked into the room right at that particular moment, they would have assumed that he was having a stroke or, at the very least, reacting to a severe peanut allergy. But nobody did walk into that room. Alex didn’t have any children, and his wife had left a note saying that she would be at Pilates until noon. The reason that Alex was so ashen-faced was because he had only just realized that his wife was not, in fact, at Pilates. She had probably never even been to Pilates.
Alex’s wife was having an affair with a man named Kevin. Alex didn’t know anyone named Kevin, and for some reason this bothered him the most. Somehow, he thought, he would have felt better about this if she’d been seeing someone from her office or in the building, or one of his college friends. Alex didn’t know this Kevin person and he, for his part, didn’t know Alex, or how much Alex loved and desired and agonized over his wife.
Alex had discovered the affair because his wife had accidently left her phone on the bathroom sink, next to the toothpaste. He had been trying to shave and the phone wouldn’t stop buzzing, so he picked it up, trying to silence it, and saw a string of incriminating and very poorly-spelled texts in which Kevin (whoever he was) outlined to Alex’s wife exactly what he would do to her once she got to his apartment. Alex had read them all twice, stood there mutely for a minute, then wandered into the living room, shaving cream still on his face.
He wasn’t sure if this explained a lot about his marriage or if it explained nothing at all.
In hindsight, Alex thought, he should have known that she wasn’t going to Pilates. She always came back smiling just a little too much, and besides, when he had asked if he could come to a class sometime, she’d insisted (a little too quickly) that he wouldn’t like it, despite the fact that one of her chief complaints about him was that he was unwilling to try new things.
Alex sat on the ottoman, gripping his knees to his chest so tightly that his knuckles turned white. He remembered a writer (maybe Bukowski) once said, “Find what you love and let it kill you.” And he had, hadn’t he? Metaphorically, at least, he’d let her grab his internal wiring and yank it all out. But you know, in a loving way. And it wasn’t her fault. He’d asked her to, practically begged her. She’d tried to break up during their sophomore year of college in the back of her roommate’s station wagon, and he’d cried so hard that eventually she just gave up. And honestly, when she’d said no the first and then the second time that he’d proposed, he should have just stopped asking. If anything, he thought, all of this was his fault, not hers. He’d driven her to it, by being oblivious and awkward and by embarrassing her at parties in front of her intellectual friends because he brought the wrong wine and mispronounced “Iran.”
Alex pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with a long, thin finger and thought. This, he decided, was something fixable, something that could be solved by marriage counseling or better communication or maybe, maybe less communication. After another moment or two, Alex went into the kitchen and tried to make himself coffee. But there wasn’t any milk, so he pulled on socks and shoes and left, and nobody was there to tell him to wipe the shaving cream from his face.
Alex left the house without even glancing at the newspaper on the doormat (Earth Slipping into Oblivion, the headline read, and just below it, Albany Still in Gridlock). He now felt bizarrely numb as he drifted in and then out of the elevator, then down the stairs and out of the lobby, and then seven blocks east, to the only health food store that sold the type of almond milk his wife liked.
He wandered back home, his mind in a fog. He vaguely noticed that there were more people on the street than usual, but he chalked up the crowds screaming and looting to a Bastille Day parade that had gotten slightly out of hand.
If Alex and his wife had bought a television instead of a record player, he would probably have switched it on when he got home, looking for some kind of distraction, and learned that after leaving the sun’s orbit, the earth was now losing its own gravitational field, too. The gases that comprised the atmosphere would be the first thing to go, and oxygen had already started leaking out, like air from a punctured balloon. Eventually, gravity would be gone entirely, but many guessed that all of humanity would be long dead by the time the loss of gravity would really start to affect them. A scientist at NASA was interviewed, and seemed to be unable to say anything aside from repetitively stating that a rocket evacuation of at least some of the population quote “wasn’t in the budget.”
The situation had escalated quickly. Alex would have seen video clips of the pandemonium around the city and the world: hospitals being ransacked by hysterical mobs that were looking for oxygen masks; a sea of cars, all honking, trying in vain to get from here to somewhere, anywhere else; several sobbing LAPD officers and man with a faded sandwich board that read, “The End is Nigh” sitting on the curb, looking just as panicked as everyone else.
Birds were falling out of the sky. All planes were grounded until further notice, because there was no telling whether this strange new atmosphere would support them. People were retreating to bomb shelters with all the guns they could carry. Obviously, these were the kinds of people who wouldn’t listen to the indisputable scientific evidence that shooting the atmosphere would not make it more breathable. There was no telling how long the earth’s oxygen levels would accommodate human habitation.
But they had bought a record player, and so Alex knew none of this. Instead, he put on a Joni Mitchell album and sat on the floor with his legs crossed. He stayed like that, motionless, until he heard the click of her key in the lock.
He listened as his wife came in, kicking off her shoes and closing the door behind her. He heard her humming a song that he couldn’t identify, and he suddenly felt very far away from her.
He heard the bedroom door close and the muffled sounds of the radio, and at that moment he wanted her so horribly that he had to sit down and restrain himself from running into the room and pulling her close to him and just standing there with her pressed against him until everything was back to the way it used to be.
“Alex? Alex,” she called through the door, and the panic in her voice surprised him. He’d never heard her sound quite like that before, like she needed someone.
He had no idea that the world was falling into a black abyss, nor did he know that the reason his wife was panicked because she’d looked outside and seen that the deli across the street was being set on fire. All he knew, all he cared about, was that he was wanted.

He got up and walked towards the door and then he paused, his hand on the doorknob, and understood that he would never tell her what he’d found out. He felt a strange sense of both defeat and, somehow, triumph. Kevin, that asshole, wasn’t in control of him. They would make this work. They could always make this work.
He wasn’t a smart man. But then again, he had never pretended to be.
There was a funny feeling in his lungs that he couldn’t quite pinpoint. Alex stared at the door handle and slowly turned the knob.