Starlight, so Bright

 

Night time

I’m on the fifth floor and the lights in the window horizon are spiked diamonds blue and white and red. Then some are green. My skin is bumpy as I put my pants over each leg and hobble to the bathroom atop frozen tiles just to take my pants back off for a moment as I sit on a freezing toilet bowl. The plastic seat shifts under me. 

My phone has kept me up for too long and now all I hear is a cricket dully somewhere nearby and a soft whir from electrical components in the room. It’s a suite with a kitchen, one very long, very unused desk and a television as large as a wall that acts as the divider between the bed(room) and the couch area which passes as a living room. The algorithm has been dark and mysterious. Too many times I was told to like, follow, comment, and direct message to ‘lock in’ some kind of blessing or future. Money, status, sex. All three were promised so long as I complete those three simple steps, and I scrolled before they told me the final, most important step, which I can only imagine is to give them something- an email address or a thin wad of digital cash. It is trite. Between offerings there are videos of near-miss ring-cam intruders, anti-Israel media, women with large soft breasts, and the occasional food porno. If I linger too long on any of these out of sheer curiosity or a desire to see a fat juicy burger, more of the same will pop up. Yet no matter how little I look, how quickly I scroll, the state of Israel is forever the algorithm’s suggested enemy and women with impressively proportionate bodies appear constantly. While I understand I fit into the demographic this visual bombardment works on, I am educated, morally upright at times, and have no particular reason to hate anyone. I hate violence. I hate genocide, as anyone would or should, but just because the machine is pumping video upon video of slanderous fictitious anti-group messages, I am not inclined to blame it on one particular group. And, for the record, the hatred isn’t even hatred for Israel, which it should be. Rather it’s for Jews as a whole, which is preposterous. Do we blame Eastern Orthodox Catholics for the war in Ukraine? No, it is Russia. 

I am stirred out of bed after a long sub-sonic rumble carries over the city without explanation. I am fearful for my life and I hold my screen with my thumb to pause as the woman shakes her chest for me and thirteen thousand other people who’ve liked it. Countless more views, shameful but willing to continue in the privacy of their own home, I with my fiancé on my shoulder asleep feel no such shame at this particular moment because death, the bomb, the great end, is upon me from outside. No flash follows as my heart pumps fast hard beats. Toes have no feeling for a stint. It is over, the world is ending. But the airport is nearby and as a matter of fact it was an airplane landing. If it were a bomb something would’ve followed. A real blast, a flash, some kind of alert. 

On Friday I had a conversation with my fiancé about the moral implications the scientists of the world would have if certain death was upon us. A meteor was my example, one that would cause total annihilation. I pitched a scenario in where one group of scientists detected a meteor incoming in a week, certainly, and no matter what, everyone would die. My question was if they were obligated to tell everyone, and if so, why? Given that in a week it was all over, would it be wise to do so? Society would crumble and people would revolt. There would be deniers, people who kill themselves first, etc. And, one step further, what if after telling everyone that THE END IS NEAR, they were wrong and it missed. Then what? Should they be put to death for causing the end of civilization as we know it? Would the threat of extinction, if pitched with certainty, cause extinction itself? Or would we all get along and spend time with grandma and have turkey dinner one last time? We’d be fucked. 

As I calm down from my sudden-death panic, there’s a sound at the door that sounds oddly like someone jiggling the handle. Trying to open it like in those reels I saw earlier. I picture him, long yellow teeth and humongous forehead, stabbing at the camera with a bowie knife and punching the door as if his lanky arms could do anything to it. My shoulder is heavy and aware of what is desirable behind this door. It’s not me, it’s her. She’s here and maybe someone has been tracking her. 

A hotel of mostly business people, some with two to a room, this young blonde woman is a treat. Her door right next to an exit or entrance and no rooms to run in; a studio, the ideal. He sits with his hands on his knees on the steps leading to the sixth floor, his neck craned to just barely make out her pale arm as she taps the thin white plastic card on the reader. The little green light, she has to shove- shove! the door open and then shut. Those doors aren’t heavy, he thinks, this’ll be easy. 

And now hours pass and I’m awake with the light on and her head, smelling of lavender and synthetic roses, resting damp on me and the metal jingle happens again harder. Sitting up, I place my phone in my pocket and click the off button so the reel disappears. Grab my fiancés head gentle and place a pillow underneath like Indiana Jones. The carpet is cold and snags my dry feet. Across the room, the peephole is yellow and I squint to make sure that it doesn’t change colors. It doesn’t. I inch closer. The noise continues but now that I’m all the way at the door, it becomes apparent that maybe, maybe, the sound was coming from the neighbour’s door and not ours, and when I put my eye up to the hole, all I see is room 549 in fisheye view. A door opens somewhere nearby, a door shuts, and some feet pitter patter out of earshot. 

And now I must write.