The Everlasting Hour
by Chris Jalufka
Murmurs of the threat had spread quickly, and a final confirmation was released: yes, a meteor strike was imminent. There was a date. In approximately two years, the rock would burn through the Earth’s atmosphere and dissolve into the size of a suburban tract home. “This is not a global extinction–level event, far from it,” they said, “but the states of California and Nevada will be evacuated to ensure a mortality rate of zero.” Businesses took aid from the government to relocate, and their staff followed. Most fled to the broad plains of the Midwest and the humid pockets of the Southern states.
One year in and the pace of the evacuation had found its rhythm. The impending strike had become just another event on the calendar, and six months to impact, the final push of the evacuation found the military combing the area, removing the stubborn and those in need of assistance. Still, two remained. Starlet had made up her mind. She would not leave San Francisco. She would become invisible. Present for the big show. Robert expressed the commonsense perspective of the situation to her. The meteor will strike and destroy the area. It wasn’t overly complicated. Animals disperse at the first sign of danger, yet Starlet had made the decision to deny all instincts—not to mention Robert’s appeals—to flee. He, too, did not want to leave San Francisco. He did not want anything to change, but their home was to be destroyed by cosmic design, and they could either be upset or accept this chance to completely refresh their lives.
“You’ll burn alive as soon as that thing is a mile through the atmosphere,” Robert remarked.
“Only one way to be sure of that,” Starlet reminded him.
“Do you understand that if you stay, you will die? And you want me to do the same? And for nothing. Because you wanted to see what would happen when you stood your ground against a meteor.”
“I know, I get it. Just imagine this—we’re sitting there on the beach and a speck appears in the sky. Ten seconds later, all life is erased. But, in those ten seconds we will be inside a unique moment in the timeline of this planet. A rock from outer space is coming at us, Robert. Think of that. We’ll experience the same fate as the dinosaurs. Just you and me. This has never happened in any human lifetime.”
“Pompeii,” he said. “We know how that went.”
“That was a volcano,” Starlet said.
“We can go anywhere in the world right now and you want to stay here? There is no need to stay. If you want to know what’s going to happen here, just watch television. Read the book. Watch the documentary. I don’t understand why this is worth dying over.”
“I don’t care about dying. That’s going to happen no matter what we do, eventually. I’m staying because there is nothing for me in this world that even compares to the chance at witnessing something truly monumental. I don’t want to watch the movie or read the book. I want to live it. We will be the main characters in our own lives, Robert.”
The strike area had been successfully evacuated and the couple walked the empty streets of their neighborhood. Free of the buses, cars, and other forms of human transportation, now each street was dusted with a fine layer of sand that blew in from the beach. They walked the Great Highway, an almost four mile stretch of road that followed the curve of the coastline and ran the length of the western-most edge of the city. The Great Highway was the final street before you crossed over to the dry shrub, sand dunes, and damp shore of Ocean Beach.
Starlet led Robert to a home that sat next to the final bus stop before you hit the water. The home’s orange coat of paint was peeling, torn apart from the constant abrasive assault of beach weather. The gate was open and the courtyard overgrown with ice plant and Seacliff buckwheat. Sand filled the corners of the doorway and the entrance was unlocked. She knew the home and had dreamt, at one time, of being invited in by the family of surfers who lived there.
“Huh, not what I expected,” Starlet said.
The home was empty. The occupants had packed up well. Starlet hadn’t considered what she might find inside, but she was still surprised to find that nothing was left behind. On summer mornings, Robert had walked with her down to the beach to sit on the dunes and watch the surfers. If they got there early enough, when they passed that house the garage door would be open. Starlet counted a dozen or so surfboards strapped to the walls and a few bicycles hung from the rafters. On some mornings, Starlet might find a young surfer pulling on a wet suit, and she’d give him a polite nod. She hadn’t figured out how many people lived there, but over time she could link three men to the house. One of them looked as old as her grandfather, and she assumed the other two were his grandsons. She would hear them in the garage mumbling about which board to take out and the conditions of the ocean. Two decades of dance had formed her inner clock, and she was proud of her ability to wake early and be ready for the day, but then she saw these surfers who woke up earlier and chose the frigid ocean as their morning prayer.
In the prolonged stress of the oncoming meteor Starlet kept an easy calm, something Robert was unable to achieve. He was missing whatever she had, that secret element that erased all fear. He was with her, that is all he knew and that is all he cared about. Robert looked to Starlet to balance what was happening in his mind. Instinct and commonsense. The urge to run, anywhere. End up as a dentist in Nebraska. Another house with a large television and a calendar of deadlines, due dates, and empty commitments. He imagined telling tell this story, too, of how he almost stayed behind with his girlfriend. “Remember when that meteor struck the West Coast?” he would say. “I was there. I almost died.”
The day had come, and they sat among the sea thrift and gum plants of the low dunes. There was a sense of loss marked by the muted city behind them, the streets empty of cars and human chatter, the distant call of the neighborhood cats and dogs silenced. The fog had scared off the local animals as well and gone was the missing squawk of gulls and threat of rats. Perhaps even the sharks that swam offshore, threatening those that entered the water, had moved on. In a city without people and animals the sand took over. The elements—wind, water, daylight—roared across San Francisco without resistance.
“We should set up a camera. Have the video sent immediately to the cloud,” Robert said.
“Don’t do that. Don’t spoil this,” Starlet said.
“I don’t understand giving up our lives for this experience and not even sharing a record of it. History will never know we were even here.”
“This is what freedom is—existing outside of modern society. Embracing the cosmos. We’re free, Robert.”
Freedom was not on Robert’s mind, just the anticipation of the meteor. Would he die from a sense of burning? Will the waves of the Pacific Ocean pummel him through the decimated streets? Will the meteor itself eat up all the oxygen, suffocating them before the debris can crush their bodies? He had questions, but these were not what he wanted to share with Starlet. He wanted to live inside of her excitement. Starlet wanted to see it all happen, and not on a television screen or beneath the bright glass of a cellphone, but really see it with her own eyes, in real time.
Robert had taken steps in preparation for this moment. He felt it proper to settle his bills and business. Do the work to save those he would leave behind these menial tasks. He had messaged his mother about his whereabouts and hoped she would understand. She accused his love of Starlet of merely being an obsession with a beautiful woman. He rarely left the city, for his own mother or for anyone. Now he was going to get himself killed because of that woman. Yes, Robert’s love was an obsession, or his obsession with her had grown into love—either way, he was not going to leave her. Starlet was an attraction he couldn’t break. He clasped her hands in his and watched a smile fold out across her face. When he imagined how much he loved her, he saw this smile. The plump of her upper lip had a tiny divot at its center, and when her lips met, that divot created a miniature cave at the center of her joyous, silly mouth.
The meteor breached the atmosphere, they could see it high above the clouds. It appeared like the moon in broad daylight. It was gaining toward them, growing larger in the sky. Robert had assumed they would hold each other at this moment. Their heads tucked together like resting cranes, a single body. Now in it, Starlet was right. He wanted to see it all play out with his own two eyes.
A warm breeze shook the calm of the Pacific. The dried tines of the coastal buckwheat bent over Starlet’s bare feet. There was nothing to hear—no roar of blazing rock as the meteor broke the atmosphere, no final cries into cloudless sky. They watched the streak of the meteor cut through the blue above. They looked down and saw the shadow of rock cascading over the earth, dimming the orange of the Golden Gate Bridge, the deep green of the bay, and everything in its path. The ocean sunk down under the force of it. The Earth convulsed. The sky shook with an atmospheric deluge of energy. A colossal break in all things that make up the living world.
The meteor had made contact far off in the desert of Nevada.
Somehow they were still alive.
The city was overtaken by a great fog that streamed over the land and lifted up to the sky, an unending curtain of gray. They walked back to Robert’s apartment in silence. The building still stood, and only a few new cracks were added to the walls first erected in 1909, two years after San Francisco’s last great disaster.
“Holy shit,” she uttered.
Robert could only expel a slow moan. A child’s moan. The meteor had shaken the framed art from the walls and collapsed the bookshelves of photographs and a career’s worth of plaques, gifts, and trinkets. Starlet checked on the home’s vitals. Everything worked: the lights, the running water, even the television. The world had learned about what they had just experienced. On impact the meteor caused nothing more than a mid-tier fear-inducing earthquake. The contained apocalypse that was promised did not happen, but the sudden, dense fog that followed was unexpected.
Robert acted quickly in cleaning up. He moved in panic. In stunted movements, unclear of what, exactly, he should be doing. There were those broken things like vases and ceramic figurines, and there were those unbreakable things like books and photographs.
“There’s too much here. I knew it. I’ve always known it, I suppose. Look, I can reach down and here it is—a program from the 2002 San Francisco Opera production of Turandot.”
“Is that something you need?” Starlet asked.
“No. That’s the point I am attempting to reach if I can stay in this thought long enough. Do I need this opera program? No. Need. Imperative. I can’t say. It was the first opera I attended when I moved to the city. The sets were designed by David Hockney, which you should know. I think you should know.”
“Is it worth anything?” she asked.
“Nostalgia has its value. But this performance of this opera at this particular point in time has already been recorded into history. This physical reminder is redundant. It’s not that I don’t need it, it’s that it doesn’t need me. It will be remembered forever, even if I forget,” he explained.
“Throw it away.”
“Absolutely,” he said and paused. “Is the floor still shaking?”
“No. We’re motionless.”
“To be safe I won’t put anything high up on the shelves. No. Change that.”
Robert grabbed a few slats from the shelving and tossed them out of the window. The crash of dry oak and loose hardware echoed through the neighborhood, the frequency of splintered wood filled the night sky. Then Robert wrapped his arms around the bulk of the bookcase, heaving it out the window and onto the street below. He wanted the house to look as it never had before. Bare walls. Sofa, chairs, and bed. Simple living. He polished the hardwood floors and Starlet watched television.
Weeks had passed by and the sky held onto the muted steel of dusk light. There were claims that the sunlight would return once the chemical haze dispersed over the ocean, but the meteor continued to fume, and weeks after impact the haze remained. Robert sat in the chair and stared out of the window and into the everlasting hour, the media-designated moniker given to the steady blank gray fog that fell over the non-day. The city was lost to the movement of time: the cycle of the moon, the rise of the sun, the glow of the stars. They saw none of it. Only fog. Nothing to regulate the waking from the sleeping hours. From one day to the next. They lived in the constant colorless drone of a polluted slate cloud.
“Quite beautiful, isn’t it?” Starlet lounged on the sofa, content to simply stare outside. Robert drained the last of his drink and poured himself another from the bottle at his feet.
“I can’t tell if time has stopped.”
“Nope. Still going.”
“How can you be so sure?” he asked.
“News. Television. I’m connected.”
“Feels like we’re trapped in time. Trapped in something.”
“Does it matter?”
“I don’t know. I’m just trying to understand my future.”
“This is the future. We’re experiencing it, more than anyone else anywhere in the world,” Starlet said.
“There’s nothing here.”
“Everything is here. You and me. Isn’t that all that matters?”
Starlet lifted her legs and Robert joined her on the sofa. She laid her legs over his lap and he fiddled with the loose skin of her kneecap.
Above the kitchen table where they ate hung an aged photograph suspended between two sheets of glass. This was the only non-essential Robert had allowed himself to keep. In the photograph: a figure, a dancer poised, toes outward. She is phantom-white against the dappled blackness of the theatre curtains behind her. Anna Pavlova in the title role of Giselle, two men at her feet. Giselle, a figure killed by heartbreak and deception. Robert was a patron of the arts and this print, dated 1931, was a gift from the Los Angeles Ballet as a thank for his support in their inaugural season. The gallery lights suspended above the piece confirmed its provenance. Starlet knew this photograph—a copy of course—from her childhood. Two weeks after her twelfth birthday, her parents had packed up Starlet’s bedroom in their suburban home and drove her to a ballet academy in Chicago where she was introduced to the physical nature not just of dance, but of its history as well. The career of dancer Anna Pavlova was held up as one to aspire to.
Her first visit to Robert’s house was after the closing performance of a new modern work. The choreographer had created the piece with Starlet in mind, and in certain circles, it was quite the event. Robert was a major sponsor and hosted a post-performance reception. She had missed the photograph when she first walked through Robert’s house, but later that night on a trip to the kitchen for another glass of wine she saw Anna again.
As a dancer Starlet had spent the bulk of her life in study. Her free time used up attending events: fundraising dinners, annual galas, benefit luncheons, and the occasional appearance at backstage tours of the ballet house. Her dalliances were either with other dancers or people she met at these work events, and it was Robert’s donation to the ballet company that facilitated his attendance at each of her rehearsals for Massenet’s Manon. Eventually, he went from being just another guest to being the only one she wanted to see. Robert was a force of calm—it followed him wherever he went. Starlet could walk hand in hand with Robert at those career-making events and not get frustrated with the idiocy she saw in the business of the arts. She just wanted to dance, but she also had to compete with and outperform her peers. She was a small woman and had been a smaller girl. There was a constant eye kept on her weight and body form. Enough muscle to do the movements, but not so much that the bulge of muscle broke the line of her body. She made herself perfect. Her fellow dancers seethed at each of her successes. Starlet internalized their jealousy and became stronger. She made herself beyond perfect. Starlet, the rare dancer that was just as brilliant at thirty-nine as she was at eighteen, was at peace with her isolation.
She thought of her relationships before the meteor and how they were all grounded in her beauty. It was the sexual attraction that kept her busy. She could be as occupied with men as she liked but she could not turn it off. Men would complement her beauty. Men would follow and linger, timid and afraid in her presence. She had her pick of them. Robert had begun in that pool, but for him, for him only, their relationship had developed to something beyond what she had previously allowed.
As tests were still being done remotely to determine exactly what the fog was and why the downed meteor continued to spew the vapor from deep within its crater, the impact area remained empty. The world watched as the fog engulfed the entirety of California, deep into Nevada and southern regions of Oregon. Robert thought of the fog, he thought of its chemical make-up, the long-lasting medical conditions brewing in his respiratory system. He had begun to ache for his old life. Without a job he had no purpose, and without the constant pestering of his mother he felt no urgency to do better. He could feel the fog fold around him, in his hands and face. He imaged the fog taking him around the neck and easing down his shirt collar and covering him like a spider’s web.
Starlet opened a can of spinach and a tin of sardines afloat in tomato broth and poured both into a small steaming pot. No living food had survived the fog. The farmlands roiled into gaseous swamplands; the livestock, left behind, scattered across the coast for their own private deaths. Processed foods became vital for survival, and after months of trial and error Starlet had mastered her own personal combination of iron-rich foods. They drank the powdered milk and fortified vitamin mixes they’d taken from the corner shops, and she had never felt so healthy since early in her dance career.
“We can drive out of this fog and go wherever we want to. Drive to Santa Fe and grab a flight to anywhere. The rest of the world is out there, waiting,” Robert offered.
“The world is here too,” Starlet told him.
“Is it? Because I don’t feel like anything is here. Not me. Not you. Nothing.”
“There is no one else in the world right now experiencing this. Just us. You and me.”
“I know. I get it. We’re doing it, but can we be done with it? You won. Let’s celebrate to the future,” Robert said.
“Just wait, the future will come.” Starlet divided the pot of steamed spinach and sardines between them, took a packet of crackers from the cabinet, spread the algae-like mixture over the salted wheat.
Remote rovers entered the desert from a makeshift camp set up by a collection of global scientists. Cameras fixed on each, the rovers surrounded the rim of the crater and fed the world a non-stop stream of video. This stream was broadcast as Camera One. Robert had hoped that someone out there was in the midst of preparing for the reoccupation, yet there had been no outside contact with the impacted area. A fear of contamination, of upsetting the isolated bubble of the fog, kept a rush of scientists at bay until more was known. Starlet kept her television on Camera One. From the pit a steady flow of basalt particles winnowed into the air. The meteor was barely visible behind its spew of fog.
“I’d like to see it. In person,” she said.
“What?”
“The meteor. Visit the crater. See this for myself.”
“And then what?”
“Then I would know what’s kept me here. What’s kept us alive.”
“Really? You want to go?” Robert perked up at Starlet’s first sign of movement.
“Yes. It’s time.”
Robert loaded an abandoned car with gas, water, and enough food for a day or two, and they drove in silence through the dense ash of the empty coast and across the dead expanse of California. Signs for abandoned gas stations and hotels, truck stops and weigh stations, speed limits that held no purpose. The fog thickened and misted against the window glass. The asphalt of the highway broke and they drove on the pure ionized soil of the new barren Earth.
“Do you think it’s safe, getting this close?” he asked.
“About as safe as staying home for a meteor strike.”
He nodded, wondering why he even asked. Safety had become a foreign concept.
“Drop me off wherever. If you’re afraid, I can go alone.” she said. “I’ll walk from here.”
“Fine. This is not something I need to see.”
Robert stopped the car and watched as Starlet headed toward the crater’s edge, deep into the fog. He had yet to see the crater himself. He had let his fear get the best of him. Starlet would watch Camera One and he would leave the room. Unwilling to see his situation from an outsider’s perspective. He had feared knowing the truth. The world was still there, same as it ever was. Their isolation was unnecessary. He sat in the car and realized he hadn’t bothered to buckle his seatbelt. It was odd, but he found himself surprised by this.
He finally got the nerve to switch on the radio and soon he heard a voice describe the weather in Boise. Another spoke of stocks and the economy. Growth in the marketplace. The statistics of modern sports flowed between two voices, arguing over the virtues of unknown athletes.
Hours passed. No sign of Starlet. He thought of the time when all of this would be over, and life would be normal again. He saw a backyard with a grill and a swimming pool with a painted blue bottom. Another office: this time he would work somewhere that gave him as much free time as he wanted. He could see himself playing tennis and learning piano. In his mind, he saw Starlet.
Robert stepped out into the drizzle of ash and shouted her name into the fog. His voice rang out across the empty horizon. He missed her and could not believe he let her walk off alone. He wasn’t thinking. He hadn’t thought straight since first meeting Starlet. His love. The woman who turned all beauty around her invisible. On stage with the members of the corps de ballet, and Starlet was all he saw. His stomach ached. Nerves and panic. They had driven halfway through the fog. Once she had seen the meteor for herself, they could keep driving east. Give up whatever it was they were living and return to the world. He just needed for it to make sense to her. He needed her to be done. To return from her pilgrimage and get back in the damn car.
Robert drove through the fog, honking the horn and flashing the headlights. Starlet was out there, and he would find her. The fog thickened. He was close to the crater. It was a strange feeling, the fog at each window, nothing to give away which way he was heading. The sand swarmed around the car, clinking against the glass. He pounded on the horn in rhythmic spurts, a propulsive noise to puncture the din of sand on glass. The car slid and it reminded him of driving in the city during a heavy rain. Except he could see in the rain. He was driving blind. He knew if he drove too close the car could fall into the crater, or maybe crush one of the cameras. Maybe someone would see him on television, a sign of life, and come to their rescue.
Robert couldn’t risk hitting Starlet. He stepped out of car and began to shout. It didn’t help to search the area because there was nothing to see. He needed to reach a city. Any city. In a city he could find the police. He would tell them it was safe and the fog was no threat. In a city there would be an authority who could locate Starlet in the desert. He returned to the car and drove toward the Utah border out of the thick fog and into the sunlight. Another surprise. His hands where bone white on the wheel. The fog had bleached all color from his body and clothes. The fog grew thin and there were colors he didn’t remember. The desert was an iridescent gold. Within that gold were deep greens and blues. Shades of coral and the insides of seashells. The world was new to him again.
He felt light. Weightless.
The loose sand turned to road and at the first exit he found a diner. Robert checked himself in the dashboard mirror and saw his ashen face. Colorless, a strange ghost. He took a seat at the counter like they do in movies. The waitress asked if he needed an ambulance, but no, just a glass of water. His white fist around the glass made the water appear like the purest of blue. The waitress returned with a menu and Robert nodded to the television mounted above the window into the kitchen.
“Does that work?” he asked.
“Yeah. You sure about that ambulance though?”
“I need the cops. Call the cops, okay?”
The waitress placed a dish with a packet of crackers in front of him and refilled his water glass. She grabbed the remote and turned on the television and tossed him the remote.
“Stay here, all right? I’ll get the cops on the phone.”
Robert took the remote and found Camera One. The fog had no specific shape. It was an endless cloud. He wondered if the police would arrest him or if they would even believe him. Is there anything to explain? They stayed home when everyone else left. It was simple and he couldn’t see anything they had done wrong. They couldn’t be arrested, of course not. He was feeling better and finished off the packet of crackers. He devoted his attention to Camera One.
With a squint he made out the dull outline of the meteor in the gray haze. There was a shadow cast from within the fog. Petite. An upright skeleton. It was Starlet.
The waitress refilled his water glass, “Cops are on the way. Can you hang tight?”
“For sure. I’m fine.”
“Doesn’t seem like it.”
His hand around the glass, missing. From the wrist on, his fingers gone. Wet ash against the glass, a pile of white dust on the countertop.
“I told the cops you’d need a doctor too.”
Robert watched behind her, on the screen, Starlet stood in front of the meteor as an apparition. He stood up, shouting at the screen, “That’s her. Are the cops here yet?”
“Not yet.”
Another customer came in. With them came the dull wail of a siren. The waitress moved her hand to Robert’s shoulder but was too afraid to touch him. It didn’t matter. He saw Starlet and she was alive and that was all the comfort he needed. Now that he saw her, he knew he could find her. He just needed to try harder.
“I have to go, okay? Tell the cops I had to go.”
“They’re going to be here any minute. You can hear the sirens.”
Robert rushed for the door. He ran to the car and pictured an afternoon spent lying about in bed, of twisted sheets, and most of all he thought of Starlet’s smile, and by the time he reached the car there was nothing left of him beyond a brief huff of smoke, lost to the desert sky.
BIO
Chris Jalufka writes fiction and non-fiction, focusing on the arts. His work has been published in Print Magazine, HOW Magazine, Content Magazine, Juxtapoz, Nerdlocker, and Evil Tender. Most recently he has written the forward for Object Compendium, a collection of works by the Swiss artist Kilian Eng, published by Floating World Comics.
