Blueprints of the Afterlife

by Ryan Boudinot

I started going out, walking at night, along wide sidewalks littered with flyers for escort services. I passed among the drunk, the destitute, the horny, and the wealthy like I was the only one who knew a bomb was about to go off. Like someone out of the Bible in this titty bar wasteland. Inebriated bachelorettes howling through limo sun roofs turned into centaurs farting exhaust. Cigar smoke and sunscreen. A bride in a maternity wedding dress. The carnal desperation of neon. I considered my fellow human beings and thought that it wasn’t that we’d become animals, it’s that we’d always been animals. Watching a gang of fraternity boys muscling through a casino esplanade was like watching ancient tribesmen, all of them bent on mating after the kill. The women appeared to be fixated on two primary consumer goods—shoes and handbags—as if they lived in a long-forgotten civilization now survived only by its baskets and trinkets. I didn’t belong to these people. I didn’t feel better than them, I just felt alien. In fact, I saw how happy they appeared to be and I envied them for it. I imagined the moment it would all stop, the silent pause before the plants withered and the rivers ran with blood. My bones rattled with the coming apocalypse. What could I do but cower in my room, ordering french fries and lobster and surf and turf, sitting naked on the floor watching the obscene glitter persist with its monied seductions on the other side of a bulletproof window?