Album: Dreaming in Maine

Band: Luka and the Heteroflexibles

Cain: And this is a song about the first time Luka kissed me, because we were trying to tell if his mouth tasted like Cheetos before his first and only date with a girl.

Luka: That never happened!

Cain: You can't say that, I wrote a song about it!

In the most general sense of the word, things start ending when they begin. You're born dying. You plan trips that are already concluding when you start packing up to go. You get pulled up the hill of a rollercoaster that is in the process of pulling up to the station to let you off. So, in that vein, the apocalypse, also known as the end of the world, has been in progress for 13.8 billion years, or, if you define the 'world' as our world in particular (a little solipsistic, but we can afford it), around a tidy 4.543 billion.

If you want to be a little more specific, narrow it down to that last blissful free fall on the coaster, the world as we know it really started ending twenty years ago. Of course, this conveniently cuts me out of the picture, and as a teenager and thusly a certifiable narcissist, I'd prefer to be part of my own story. For everyone's convenience, we're going to start the end of the world at some arbitrary point at the very end of the ending, such as tonight. It's a good of a status quo as any to ruin with the inevitable progression of time. Toby's on my left. Luka's on my right. Together, we're slumped across the couch in the most platonic way three teenagers could watch a broken television in a dark basement while touching in at least four places with their clothes halfway off.

I lift the remote to pretend I'm surfing channels. An electric clock fully unconnected from the television set sits where the cable box should be, reminding us that Luka's curfew was an hour ago and Toby's was two. How Toby, who is an adult, has a curfew, is beyond me, but I'm also always the host, so it's hard for me to complain when I don't test the waters myself. I continue tapping the rubbed-raw buttons, most of which don't function anymore when we divert emergency power, bring all the kids in, and watch Pokemon movies as a community in the basement. The screen is small and boxed by a huge, bulky exterior. The television is a survivor, but each time it comes on, the electric hum is a little quieter, and it tends to keen like a dog that just wants to be put down. Tonight, it is dead silent, giving no promise it will ever come on again.

"So, when are we going to have sex?"

Toby presses her foot against my face. Luka, who is in the middle, does exactly no damage control to abate the full force of what's less of a kick and more of a thwack. Believe it or not, I'm not actually that fond of Toby's feet. They're callused hard on the soles and blistered and bitten on the tops, so that there's basically nowhere that it's not gnarled or unpleasant. Fortunately, this is true for most of Toby, and as for the smell, I've adjusted to that years and years ago.

"I'm into it," I call.

"Cain."

"Toby," I retort.

"Fellas," Luka says.

"Oh, that's not a good 'fellas'," I murmur.

"Intonation was a little strained," agrees Toby. "Come on, babe, tell us what's up."

"I've been holding off on it all night," Luka says, settling in an upright position with his hands folded across his lap. "I didn't want to ruin the moment, but as long as we're no longer having a moment, I figured it was time for us to just get it over with."

"This is a moment," I complain. "I'm having a great time."
"Please define 'a great time' for the rest of us, Cain, why won't you?" Toby asks.

"Okay, something minimally more exciting than sitting on a couch looking at a television we can't turn on in a hot, sweaty basement with our clothes kind of off but not really."

"Sometimes it's therapeutic to look directly into the dark eye of the uncaring void," Toby says. "I like to think."

"You can think out loud," I suggest.

"You wouldn't want to hear it."

"I might, occasionally. Does it involve me?"

"Fellas!" Luka is a little louder this time. He has mastered the whisper-yell, sharp enough to make us both bolt up into agreeable sitting positions. "Okay, so, um-- I was trying to get into center town to see if they had any of Ms. Digsby's old tools, since she's, uh, no longer with us and ordered her estate to be divided communally, and the blacksmith is fixing my pitchfork right now, which is a nightmare because his techniques don't gel well with mass-produced crap, as he elegantly told me--"

"Cut the warm up. Get to the chase," I suggest.

Luka closes his eyes. "Ms. and Mr. Hanshaw engaged me in friendly conversation that wasn't so friendly, and the point is, this is the last straw and they want you to come in tomorrow or they're going to start docking family credits."

I snap my fingers. "Living in the woods it is."

"We would die," Toby states.

I shake my head. "Onion grass is edible."

"The pipers will eat us," Luka adds.

With a 'tsk', I say, "They're not cannibals, they're just murderers. Don't slander them like that."

"I'm so reassured," Toby says. She kneads her forehead together. "I still think they're being facetious. They've threatened to dock family credits before and they've never followed through once. It's summer, credit-to-food ratio is low, trade's good, Carrie brought in some manufactured plastic goods the other month, heaven knows where she got them from, and we negotiated them out of her. Luka, you run the farm at home, and Cain and I are-- I suppose my point is, I don't understand what we've done wrong."

"I haven't done anything. You two didn't have to do anything. It's that you're not doing anything that makes you an aberration of our legal system. Get a job. Summer doesn't last forever. Eventually, we have to face facts."

"Summer just started," Toby begins.

I cut in, "And I am factually not going to go into the office and talk with Ms. or Mr. Hanshaw about our 'situation'." This is accompanied with air quotes obvious enough to be seen even in pitch darkness. "Let's flip a coin for it. Heads we go in. Tails we ignore it, do something nice for the town, and they at least let us sit around while the sitting is good."

Luka sighs. "Does this register as good to you?"

I can't really hear him because I'm too busy digging in the couch. I put my hand way down into its ancient folds, down to crumbs of crackers that have been foreign to my parents' paletes since before the apocalypse, down to bits of Cheetos they fed each other while seducing each other on this very couch, just two young gay guys playing Melee and pretending the mildly hostile world over their heads didn't exist. I draw out the Couch Penny. "Couch change is out. Damn, I guess this isn't that important. I thought the Couch Quarter might make an appearance, but I think Toby's sitting on it."

"Do you want me to get up so we can get the Couch Quarter?" asks Toby.

I ponder this. "Nah." I toss her the coin. "But you get to do the flipping."

She catches it in her palms. The faded edges of the Couch Penny glisten in light that isn't there. "Heads we go. Tails we stay."

"Go ahead," Luka says. The air is rank with the miasma of dust I've just unsettled.

All of us balance on the moment, leaning into it. The coin soars into the air with a faint ping, and it lands on the table a few feet away, standing straight on its edge.

"Is that a... should we try that again?" asks Luka.

Toby swipes it off the counter. "Heads we go. Tails we stay. Take two."

Ping.

The coin lands on its edge again, like a middle finger to chance.

"What are the odds?" whispers Luka.

"Do I look like a walking calculator to you?" I ask.

"Take three?" suggests Toby, humorously.

"Do you want one of us to flip it?" Luka asks.

I shake my head. "No no. We're gonna see where this one goes."

Toby casts us an incredulous stare. She flips it again. The coin repeats the result. We've just asked the universe for assistance, and the universe has responded, fuck you. It's kind of an electric feeling. It's at least more interesting than getting the yes, and you know, actually having to go in. No less than ten flips herald in the same result, as if causality is actively laughing at us, daring us to keep being obstinate little shits, as if--

"What's the trick?" asks Luka.

Toby laughs, not quite a "that's funny" laugh but more of a "that's for real, are you kidding me" kind of laugh. "No trick, no lie."

"There's no way there's no trick," Luka says.

"What's your trick with electronics?" Toby asks.

Luka smiles softly. "You'd think if I knew, I'd tell everyone else how to do it."

"Or how Cain just knows things--" Toby continues.

"You mean like how to press your buttons? That's not that hard to do," I say.

"Congratulations, I can tell, because you're pressing them right now," she responds.

"No trick, that's all I'm saying. It just... I mean, if you think about it, there has to be a world where the seemingly impossible happens, just because any highly improbable event has a near-zero chance of occurring instead of a zero chance. Remember that time I almost wrote the book about the guy who gets royal flushes every time he plays Poker and goes on to become a world-class Poker player? Everyone thinks he's cheating, but he just shrugs and says, 'At some point, at some place, if we all kept playing Poker forever, this had to happen.' It's like that."

Luka nods sincerely. "Of course. We've always been living in that timeline, if you think about it. We could all be dead or eaten or murdered, ravaged by environmental disaster, who knows, but instead we have a still-functioning nuclear power plant, basements to sit in, a healthy community..." He chokes up a little. "We really are too lucky, aren't we?"

"You guys are seriously philosophizing over this," I mutter.

"Yeah?" Luka's voice comes out high whenever he's sad like this.

"It's really late. You two might want to go home," I say. "Luka's right, there probably is a trick, Toby's just doing some shit with her hand she doesn't realize she's doing because she's so delusional she actively doesn't understand how she does half the cool shit she does."

"Thanks," Toby says. "I'm glad to know Mr. Can-We-Have-Sex-Now wants me to leave."
"It was a joke," I promise.

"Cain, do you want to flip the coin?" Luka asks. "Better yet, can we just go in and see what they want? They're not going to kill us. We kind of owe it to them to hear them out--"

I take the coin and flip it. Luka peers over and rubs it under his finger. "Heads."

The silence creeps back in.

"So. Think it'll be different this time?" asks Luka.

It's brave of him to think they'll ever tame me while I'm still alive.