brownian motion

Twenty-one days ago, Henry Spiegelmann locked himself in his apartment with a shelf of canned beans, a gun, and a bottle of wine.

Quite a massive shipment we’ve got for you.
Best to be prepared.
You think you’ll make it through all of this with just a bottle of red and some beans?

Henry Spiegelmann didn’t answer. He just bolted the lock and drew the curtains. Henry stood a moment in his living room for dramatic effect. Then he undid the cork and poured the wine, measuring carefully the millilitres. Henry drank. He nodded. He would allow himself a shotglass a day.

Why are you doing this?
I don’t want to live in a world without joy or meaning.
Why are you so melodramatic all of a sudden?
(he laughed) And I don’t want to live in a world without wine.

Henry drank. He drank to the past; he drank to the loss of his loved ones though they were not yet lost; he drank to the world that he knew was about to fold in on itself like cheap scaffolding in a magnitude-8 earthquake.

Surely it’s too early to judge their intentions.
I don’t want to wait to find out.
Why do you always assume the worst of people?
You know, in 1519, Moctezuma welcomed Hernán Cortés with politeness and open arms. He gave Cortés a finely crafted Aztec calendar. You want to know what Cortés did? He melted it down for the gold and silver and―
(she sighed) I know, I know, six days later he was a prisoner and a year later he was dead. You need to find a new example.

The moment he heard the broadcast, he knew it was over. A cloud of ten thousand interstellar objects detected by the ATLAS telescope in Chile, the first press releases said. Spectrographic analysis showed them to be high in iron and uranium isotopes. As the ships got closer and closer, the world’s observatories made higher and higher-resolution photographs. Angular silhouettes against a dark starry sky. Gnarly wraiths of what scientists conjectured were debris shields, hiding what were presumably hangar bays kilometers in size.

Maybe they’re just here to make friends.
You don’t show up with ten thousand invasion ships to ‘make friends.’
How do you know they’re invasion ships?
Look, even if they’re peaceful, I bet those things have enough guns on them to blow up all of Europe if they don’t get what they want.

Henry Spiegelmann kept a livestream of CNN running on the old television screen. He watched as the stock market heaved and crumbled; he watched as people wailed into microphones, prayed in public, and tried to sell their bunkers on Craigslist. He watched in a strange sort of smug satisfaction as raging storms of panicked people raided the shops of anything: toilet paper, cans, guns and ammunition. And of course, wine. Anything to raise the spirits. Anything to drink the future away. Of course, Henry knew he was guilty of that too. But he wasn’t prodigal, and he wasn’t panicked. He’d been prepared. He measured carefully the millilitres, and he knew he had enough.

If you’re really going to lock us in here, I’m leaving you.
Go ahead.
I’m going to take the dog and the car too.
I won’t stop you.
You’re really set on this, aren’t you?
Yep.
(she turned her head away)

Henry poured out the last thimbleful. The last drop plunked neatly into his shotglass, exactly as he’d measured. He let the smell of vanilla and cedar waft into his nostrils; slowly, he exhaled, imagining the fields of the Rhône valley, the bitter green of grape leaves, the lull of summer bees. He looked outside and he saw the city, gray monoliths set against the soft indifference of smoke and clouds, and for the last time his optic nerves etched the skyline into memory like a freeze-frame in the closing credits.

Then Henry Spiegelmann picked up the gun and pulled the trigger. The neighbors happened to be away. No one heard as he fell to the ground.

A few hours later, the great metal ships opened up their hulls just shy of the thermosphere and landing craft drifted down like dandelions in a gentle wind.
“Hi!”
“We come bearing gifts―”
“―cheap nuclear fusion―”
“―nanobot cures for cancer―”
“―unified theories of mathematics and physics―”
“―and the best wine you’ll ever taste.”