5 days until the end of the world, somewhere near Interlaken, no other context
Lowri insisted – multiple times, adamantly – that everyone go to see the waterfalls without her. She sat in the tent in the early morning, wrapped in any blankets she could find, with Frieda holding the flap open just long enough for them to have this conversation and for Lowri to get about five emphasised “GO”s in. She tried to not make it sound overly self-pitying, although she absolutely did and does pity herself. She lied back down. She fell back asleep. She woke up an hour later, groggy, to birdsong and medium pain. The world was also still ending.
Lowri’s immobilized arm rests on her stomach. She knows for a fact how bright and lush it is outside, just from the way the sun filters through the orange nylon, rendering it almost garish to look at. It’s hot. Today, she’s not just feeling the broken arm. She’s feeling big and small cuts and scratches and bruises – on her arms on her legs, on her face – from the downward tumble. The CASCASSE IL MONDO tattoo throbs and itches horribly.
It occurs to her that she’s alone-ish for the first time since Frieda’s Hyundai pulled up in front of her dorm, which feels like a long time ago. With no one to distract her and her body in tatters, she should feel her worst yet, hit the crescendo of whatever week-long breakdown she’s been having, but she’s almost calm. The spiral has spun out, the breakdown has broken it all down, and left Lowri with no tangible problem to sink her teeth into. It’s not a good feeling. It’s like she hit her head right after discovering the ground-breaking research thesis, it’s like holding the holy grail and immediately dropping it, like a little sprout poking its head out of the earth with the first warm day in March, as an extended metaphor of the miracle of life, only to be immediately overrun by a cold front.
“Hey, have breakfast,” says Andrej outside.
Lowri blinks at the garish orange. Then, she slowly begins to shift and shuffle against the various fabrics around her body, and drag herself first to her knees, then to the flap of the tent. She’s wearing one of Frieda’s T-shirts – a horrible (hopefully ironic) tie-dye number – since none of her sweatshirts fit over her splint. Unzipping the flap, she squints against the real world, and warm air hits her face.
With her good hand held out in front of her eyes, she stalks wordlessly over to the camping stove, where Andrej is frying up the contents of an instant pancake mix bottle. In one hand he holds his phone, hooked up to one of Frieda’s power banks, scrolling through a “20 Movies to See Before You Die” listicle from two years ago.
Lowri sits down on the other side of the stove extraordinarily slow – cross-legged, right on the treaded down grass, balancing herself with one hand only. They don’t look at each other, but Andrej hands her a paper plate. It’s just him and her, and Lowri doesn’t know what to say or do, feels like a wound-up coil. She’s never talked to him directly and he’s probably aware of what she said in Barcelona.
She places the paper plate on the floor in front of her and, before anything else, digs through Frieda’s Tesco shopping bag for a water bottle. She unscrews the water bottle by holding it with her legs, washes down some Ibuprofen. Eventually, after a good amount of staring at her weirdly circular pancake, she says: “I can still take care of myself. You could’ve gone with the others.”
“Better to be not alone,” says Andrej. With the bottle all depleted of pancake goo, he switches gears to coffee brewing.
“You make it sound like I’m on suicide watch or something,” says Lowri. With barely a reaction from Andrej, she adds “Sorry” and pinches the bridge of her nose. With the sun somewhere in her back and her eyes perpetually squinted, Lowri folds up her pancake and eats quietly. Within a few bites her body goes crazy for it and she wolfs it down like a starved animal. It occurs to her that this may have been the first “real” food she’s eaten in a week.
Out of the first, second, and also the third pancake, mouth now very empty, Lowri says “feels oddly stranded with the car gone,” just to say something.
Andrej gives a noncommittal hum. The smell of coffee fills the air.
“I could’ve used this,” she maintains, gesturing vaguely to Frieda’s camping stove. “My other arm is fine. You’re missing out on some really cool waterfalls.”
You could’ve thanked him, it occurs to Lowri. For staying behind or for constituting 90% of first aid, or for literally carrying her back to camp twice. She’s well aware she won’t do it now. God, Lowri, you suck.
Andrej nods his head in the direction of the lake. He puts his phone down. “This is cool.”
Lowri slowly divorces her eyes from the dirty paper plate. Shielding them, she looks around herself, finally at the unbothered trees, the lake gentle and unruffled, the sky so clear it has a gradient. It’s so inappropriately idyllic, so kind to her that it softens her shoulders, her face, and her brain. Lowri takes a healthy, deep breath full of clean air and then she starts crying, wiping her eyes with her wrist.
Her brain stumbles over itself a little bit. “No,” she says. “I mean – no.” She laughs in a weird, sore pitch.
Lowri takes the steel cup from him. The smell does something to her, so does the warmth that spreads from the mug to her palm. It’s warmth again – warmth, warmth, warmth. It’s consoling. It’s tranquil. The trickle of time slows for a bit.
“Life hates me, I think,” says Lowri.
Andrej hums, in contemplation or – damn – agreement.
“Or, worse,” says Lowri, “it doesn’t.” She takes a gentle sip of coffee, and Andrej joins her. “I hate it, that’s for damn sure.”
“No, no I don’t. I’m talking bullshit. I don’t even hate life, I just want more time. I’m not done yet.”
Andrej nods, drinks. “I am,” he says, when he sets his mug down.
Both of them speak leasurely, with the same gravitas as talking about the – granted, magnificent – weather.
“I think I would’ve been fine with it if I’d done things before. Like, if I’d figured life out and contributed my, like, big academic impact already. That would’ve been fine. I would’ve died as somebody. I can’t die a nobody, that’s just so depressing. But every time I try to figure it out and try to do something, life knocks me down.” Lowri raises her splint. “Literally.”
Nodding toward her arm, Andrej says: “You did this.”
Lowri opens her mouth and exhales it shut. “I guess.”
With the warmth, a sort of full stomach, and gradually numbing pain, Lowri sets her half-full mug aside and lies down on her back. She squints up at the sun until it strains her eyes too much and she closes them. There’s stillness, for a while.
“You like the university a lot,” says Andrej, “it seems.”
“As a matter of fact, I don’t,” says Lowri. “I just want to be good at it.”
Andrej downs the last of his coffee, picks his phone back up, but just turns it idly in his hands. “I didn’t go to the university. I went from school to construction.”
Lowri keeps quiet. Her face twitches when the leaves shift with a breeze and a sunray hits her eyelid head on.
“I did this for 14 years,” says Andrej. “The same thing. Never anything else.”
The stillness cuts off. Lowri sits up in a cold sweat. “I didn’t – I wasn’t talking about you, I don’t mean that you’re a nobody – that’s not what I meant.”
Andrej tilts his head and looks at her with a sort of polite curiosity, waiting for her to explain what she did mean. She can’t come up with anything.
Shoving her arm between her eyes and the sun, Lowri drops back into the grass. “I’m sorry,” she groans, “I keep doing this to you. I keep saying stupid shit.”
Andrej doesn’t say anything, but the silence isn’t hostile. It’s neutral, almost calm. He gathers up the pan, the kettle, balls together the paper plates. “You drink this still?” he asks, Lowri’s mug in hand.
He sets it back down. The rest, he goes to haphazardly clean and stow away.
He says nothing, but there’s more than enough room to imagine him nodding in acknowledgement. Clinking and bag rustling fills the silence.
“It doesn’t matter,” Andrej says to her then, vocal equivalent of a shrug coming from now slightly farther away, “now.”
Though a throwaway comment, it hits Lowri like curve ball. Her brain is running circles around it still when Andrej goes to sit back down across from her.
23 or 32, try-hard-academic, blue collar for life, almost married, never dated, overcompensating orphan, time-waster, death-in-the-face-looker, perpetually terrified, with or without undiagnosed mental illness, self-hater, humble-bragger, hypercomplex organism, heart and brain – all sitting here, somewhere, in the sun, by the water, in the end.
“Have you seen The Godfather?” Andrej asks. He’s got his phone in hand again, thumb scrolling.
Lowri blinks against the sun a few times. “…I think so?”
“Have you seen The Matrix? 1999.”
“Do you want to see The Matrix?”
In the face of her speechlessness, Lowri braces herself on her healthy arm and lifts herself to look at Andrej.
“It’s good,” says Andrej. “One of my favourite movies.”
Lowri opens and closes her mouth a few times. Then Lowri, resident overcompensating orphan, death-in-the-face-looker, etc. says “Yes, I want to watch The Matrix.”
And so Andrej and Lowri spend this morning of the pre-apocalypse in the orange tent, watching The Matrix (1999) on Andrej’s phone.
