He opened a notebook at random.
October 28, 1992. Ambrose Wives, tabloid journalist, aspiring novelist, had waited for October along with everyone else. Nothing happened.
January 1, 2000. A big one, good ol’ Why-too-kay. Ambrose had been temporarily unemployed, at the time, but had kept notes anyway. If the great technological spider’s web had come down that night, he probably wouldn’t have minded too much. He got three fourths of the way through a bottle of Beefeater gin — a disheartening, lip-curling task in itself — and woke up to a screaming, techno-colored, hangover sun in the new year.
Nothing had happened. Which was kind of a letdown.
He flipped open a nearly disintegrated pocket pad from near the beginning of his career.
March 10, 1982. The Jupiter Effect came ’round, and turned out to be a great excuse to take a really long lunch break.
March 31, 1998. God did not come to Earth in a flying saucer, and he did not steal the face of Hon-Ming Chen. Maybe he was at brunch when 10 a.m. rolled around; grapefruit and quiche at the Pearly Gates Country Club. Maybe he was in the crowd with Ambrose Wives, sharing the joke and passing the bottle.
September 10, 2008. Large Hadron Collider did not do anything unexpected. Neither did God, the Earth, or Ambrose Wives.
April 29, 1986. Nothing had happened.
October 21, 2011? Nothing.
May 27, 2012? Nothing.
“And here we are, Rhubarb.”
“My name’s Tabby.”
“I know your name’s Tabby.”
The waitress took an absent-minded slug from Ambrose’s spiked coffee, then took a more deliberate one. She was sitting at the booth now, flipping through his notebooks.
“Did you really write about all of these?”
“Each and every one. Every end-day going back forty years.” Ambrose sipped his own hot coffee. “Not that every bit got published, of course, but… One of these days, I’ll get lucky and be right.”
Tabby didn’t seem to get the joke. She turned leaves, read entries, flipped on. Some pages were tissue-thin, nearly worn to dust with age.
“It’s kind of frightening, isn’t it?” he asked. When she looked up, her eyes were as sober as ever.
“Not really. What’s frightening are the days you don’t see coming. Nine-eleven, Katrina, the Tangshan quake, the Bhola cyclone. Hiroshima. Pompeii. The great tree-rat fire in o’four.”
She drained his whiskey-coffee, then sat back shaking her head.
“This isn’t frightening —” she waved towards the notebooks. “It’s kind of sad, and… and really pessimistic… If you really want the truth, I’ll tell you.”
She looked up at him, and her eyes could have cut diamond.
“You want to know who comes back at dawn tomorrow? I mean, I don’t want to ruin the surprise… ?”
“Don’t make fun of me,” he said. “I’m a drunk, not a child.”
Tabby smiled. “The calendar salesmen.”
Ambrose slumped back in his booth, jet-lagged and all too unsurprised.
“Go ahead, laugh at old drunk fools…”
So what if the world didn’t end? And what kind of perverse psycho would actually want it to, anyway, he wondered. Had the world actually gotten that bad; that the only relief he could imagine was the end of it all? Or was it just the prospect of a change of pace that had everyone excited?
Who the hell knows anymore, Ambrose grumbled to himself. Who the hell cares?
It was growing light outside. He should pay his tab, gather his notes and go. It was growing light…
It was growing light outside. At midnight. The sky was growing light when it should have been full of stars.
“Tabby… Tabby what time is it!?”
The windows were filling with a clear, blue radiance. The air shimmered, beautiful and strange. Tabby smiled, her face white in the glow.
“It’s dawn,” she said.
About Amberle L. Husbands
