I’m at a bar in Brooklyn, it’s 3am, two Estonian men are explaining to me the travails of translating Shakespeare into native tongues when I realize the world is ending.

It arrives like a swerve, like a meteor’s mutinous omen, like a prophecy whispered behind smoke—there is an oracle—where is she?—twisting in incense, and it is knowledge, heavy knowledge she mutters.  I don’t know the two Estonian men nor anyone sitting around me, and yet I know the end, know this now, I’m overfull with it, I’m all overflow, all awareness, all attunement to every suddenly obvious sign: I see me sitting with a cigarette in my hand, smoke curling up and around my frozen features; I see cigarette stubs pushed out like a thousand burial mounds. I see over the heads of whomever—shades and shades—out past the potted hedges at the seemly roof-edge, over the black choppy scab of river into horizon-Manhattan, smudging, melting, dying. I see into the knot of steel and light and size—I see nothing, nothing but components and materiality, the arrangement of dead things, dark-matter-nothing, webby negatives, an angelic, objective glow. Inchoate. How have I not seen before?

I return, descend to these hollow men, these hollow Estonians. —The trouble, er, is the music, the music of the word, is er, not the spectacular magic, er, in the Estonian—I nod along as if I’m listening, as if I’m thinking of the prosody and poetry of Estonian, as if I’m thinking of the virtues of Estonian, when in fact I’m reaching in my mind for a cliché, some inanity, everything is inane. —How do you deal with the meter? I ask—it’s like a time bomb goes off—they speak and speak of transcendental trochees, the natural rat-tat-tat of their mother tongue—time goes on, time explodes and crunches, the instant warp gathers, and the hot breath of a thought redoubles as a shiver, silver and earth-shaking: the world is ending.

My life returns to me, the hours return to me: Elise, my last true friend, is leaving me—I screamed it. You’re abandoning me, I screamed. That was then. There is an act of severance between us now.

I excuse myself and head to the ledge, pull out a cigarette and light. I look up at the seething metropolis, feel nothing but its emptiness ticking on. From now on there is only this great emptiness, ticking on like memories of the dead.

I want to ask why. I want to ask someone—why, throw my hands out wide and bellow, why why why. I need to know if there is anywhere in this world that is not ending, complete. I need to know if everything is lost as the total-melt begins. I am crushed, I am pulverized—is there anywhere I am not dust?

The smoke spreads out in my lungs, gives a sordid kick and punch. I can’t take another pull. I think my last pathetic thoughts.

I walk to the patio door, head down a long dark stairway. The contour of the noise changes—I realize how deafeningly loud it’s been, I remember nothing of how loud it’s been—my ears ring as I cross a booming dance floor, a laser-lit cabaret of strangers. Then I exit into the hot August air.

Escaped, I don’t feel anything. The end has begun. I must change everything. I must change my life.