AN AUDIENCE FOR THE APOCALYPSE / SOPHIA KRIEGEL

AN AUDIENCE FOR THE APOCALYPSE

WORDS SOPHIA KRIEGEL

In a movie I’m watching, a blonde woman with a microphone and a tailored shirt is telling everyone to hug their children. To take cover. To call their mothers and thank them for a life of lessons and love and packed lunches they never ate. To spill all their secrets. Reveal all their sins for a shot at being saved. To repent. To repeal any wrongdoing. To run for their lives into the abyss, the inevitable inching towards the finale that the writer foreshadowed with the first line. To prepare for the end of the world.

When the screen goes black and the director yells cut and the blonde woman takes off her wig to go back to being the brunette woman she really is, there is nothing but my own reflection staring back at me. After the sky went blue, red, and finally black, that hollow shade, and after some beautiful actress cried in a lover’s arms and I, for just one second, felt so sorry for her and all the life she’d miss out on after the end of the world, the credits roll. When the screen goes black and the movie is over, I look up from my laptop for the first time in two hours only to realize that the sun has set. I close the computer. I contemplate washing my face but ultimately decide not to because that would require getting out of bed. I consider calling my mother but I don’t want to wake her up when I’ve got nothing important to say other than hello. So I just go to sleep. In my dream I’m dying. I don’t remember if it was peaceful or not and I don’t remember if there was a heaven. Just that I was afraid for a moment and then it was all over.

When I Google apocalypse movies and get 62,400,000 results in 1.14 seconds, I can’t pick just one to tell you about. They’ve all got a gorgeous actor on the cover and he has scratches on his cheek and he’s doing everything he can to save us. Each one is set in some gutted theme park or an abandoned high school that used to have pep rallies in the place where a rag-tag bunch of doomsday survivors are taking shelter. But behind the curtain, is a script outlining the same story we’ve seen in 62,400,000 movies and the one we will see in 62,400,000 more if we make it until then. The apocalyptic circus that is our future spiraling into itself, the world’s greatest show. A million dollars buried in a blonde woman’s terror. She’s got eyes like mine. She’s got eyes like ours.

I had my first kiss while watching World War Z, a typical zombie thriller in which Brad Pitt evades the end of the world by running to lots of places and playing savior. Nick had put his arm around me once we sat down for the film, 8th graders shaking like the scared children in the back of Brad’s car when he sees it all catch fire. When he knows what’s going to happen. I waited an hour and 45 minutes for him to do something. Nick, I mean. Brad too, maybe. Sweaty palms rubbing against the jeans I’d strategically worn for the occasion because I thought they made me look old and therefore kissable. And just as the movie was ending and Brad, who had lost so much, who watched people die, who did his best, who always knew it would end this way, let out one final, violent fight in an effort to undo what was always going to be done. Nick grabbed the side of my face with the arm that had to have been numb by then, pulled me towards him, and he kissed me. He kissed my chin, mostly. Opening and closing his mouth the way he thought he was supposed to. Proud of himself for fulfilling the prophecy he’d carefully planned out, knowing it would come true when we first sat on that couch. And there we were. Two children, our mouths colliding. Brad Pitt breathing heavily in the background. The world turning to ashes around him. Around us. A life underscored by a looming apocalypse.

I had nightmares for four months after hearing a story in sixth grade that stuck with me in a way that nothing had ever stuck with me before. It went something like this: Hunters, in an effort to kill wolves, stick a knife that’s been soaked in blood into a block of ice. When the wolf licks the knife, hungry for the blood that drew it to the object in the first place, mouth numbed from the cold that swallows the metal, it begins unknowingly

cutting its own tongue. The wolf’s blood mixes with the blood that the blade started with and everything is red and the wolf, still believing it’s possible to break through the ice and into something delicious enough to die for, bleeds out. Do you think the wolf always knew it would end this way? Or did he believe, in his animalistic pursuit, that he’d make it out alive? Belly full of some undiscovered warmth. How he survived off that hope until it killed him. Until he couldn’t consume anymore. We’ve found ourselves stuck in a web woven with all the ways the world will end. It’s an allegory in every song, a looming shadow in every television show, the last chapter in every textbook. A bloody blade we can’t help but reach for. It has inspired subcategories of humans, breaking into groups in preparation for some inevitable finale, deciding who will outlast the apocalypse. We’ve become so fascinated with the end of the world, watching ourselves/our doom, puppetered for us to enjoy. When it does happen, will we find ourselves sitting on the couch, holding the TV remote to the sky, believing that we could pause it again the way we always have. So submersed in this circus, this show we’ve seen millions of times in our dreams, in the back of our minds, on our screens. When it does happen, will we be the viewer? The blonde woman with the microphone? The child she’s begging us to save? Do you think it’ll feel like home? A haunted sense of deja vu, the replaying of one million scenes from one million shows, each one scarier than the last. Like an old friend. Familiar in the face, but she feels so different in your arms. When it happens, who will watch the credits roll? Who will close the laptop? There’s something eerie about the way we watch ourselves and the world we’ve been taught to love, the world that’s been taught to love us,

come to some violent end. A knife on the tongue, teaching ourselves to stomach that inevitable pain. We cling so tightly to this concept, calling an entire species of scared humans doomsday preppers, playing the final moments over and over in an animated simulation for science class, writing songs about who we’d choose to sit “When it does happen, will with and watch it all explode. we find ourselves sitting on We’ve fallen in love, in lust, with the couch, holding the TV an apocalypse we’re so afraid remote to the sky, believing of meeting. When I say we, that we could pause it what I want to say is you and I. again the way we always When I say we, what I’m trying have? So submersed in to say is, will you join me at the this circus, this show we’ve theater? Split a bucket of popseen millions of times in corn for a Sunday showing of our dreams, in the back of our final seconds. It’s a good our minds, on our screens.” one, I promise. There’s a blonde woman with a microphone and my mother says we have the same eyes. She’s so good at what she does. At making me believe she’s afraid. Do you think we’ll be afraid?