I turn down the volume and scan the headlines. It’s hard to find anything I can bear to read. The world is falling apart. Whole chunks are crumbling, like one of those medieval maps where the world ends and shit just drops off the side to get eaten by a sea monster.

Maps. Where are you?

I swap the newspaper for my laptop and return to the search. Think logically. If they’re coming tomorrow they’ll be close. So I start at the dock in Portsmouth where the boats come in from Appledore and Swan, and move inland from there. There are plenty of people out, taking advantage of the hot night and late sunset, shopping in cutesy New England boutiques, eating at tables on the sidewalks. Their bodies are stiff, caught in motion like the corpses preserved in the Pompeii ash, doing normal things just before a disaster, eating, paying the check in a restaurant, pushing a stroller, tugging the arm of a straggling toddler.

I think about the kids that people my age are having, or will start having soon. Life is going to be so boring for them. Not just because the world will have gone completely to shit by then and there won’t be much of anything left, but because their parents are going to talk constantly about how the world used to be. Remember when you could just get in your car if you needed to get somewhere? Or take a bus or a train even? Remember when everything used to be so much faster? Remember the internet? God, the internet! Remember real meat? Remember fish? I remember when I had my own house for a while. All this space, electricity all the time, taps that turned on and off. No lines for water. No lines for food. Wars all far away. Remember?

Yeah, that’ll get dull real quick.