Fear Nothing

the universe. So bright.
        Afterward, in a mood that made even the most apocalyptic news seem tolerable, I told her about my night from sundown until dawn, about the millennium monkeys and Stevenson, about how Moonlight Bay was now a Pandora's box swarming with myriad evils.
        If she thought I was insane, she hid her judgment well. When I told her of the taunting by the troop, which Orson and I had endured after leaving Bobby's house, she broke out in gooseflesh and had to pull on a robe. As she gradually realized fully how dire our situation was, that we had no one to whom we could turn and nowhere to run even if we were allowed to leave town, that we might already be tainted by this Wyvern plague, with effects to come that we could not even imagine, she pulled the collar of the robe tighter around her neck.
        If she was repulsed by what I'd done to Stevenson, she managed to suppress her emotions with remarkable success, because when I was finished, when I had told her about even the fragment of the doll's face that I'd found on her bed, she slipped out of her robe and, although still stippled with gooseflesh, brought me into her light again.
        This time, when we made love, we were quieter than before, moved more slowly, more gently than we had the first time. Although tender before, the motion and the act were more tender now. We clung to each other with love and need but also with desperation, because a new and poignant appreciation of our isolation was upon us. Strangely, though we shared a sense of being two condemned people with an executioner's clock ticking relentlessly, our fusion was sweeter than it had been previously.
        Or maybe that isn't strange at all. Perhaps extreme danger strips us of all pretenses, all ambitions, all confusions, focusing us more intensely than we are otherwise ever focused, so that we remember what we otherwise spend most of our lives forgetting: that our nature and purpose is, more than anything else, to love and to make love, to take joy from the beauty of the world, to live with an awareness that the future is not as real a place for any one of us as are the present and the past.
        If the world as we knew it was this minute being flushed away, then my writing and Sasha's songwriting didn't matter. To paraphrase Bogart to Bergman: In this crazy future tumbling like an avalanche straight at us, the ambitions of two people didn't amount to a hill of beans. All that mattered was friendship, love, and surf. The wizards of Wyvern had given me and Sasha an existence as reduced to the essentials as was Bobby Halloway's.
        Friendship, love, and surf. Get them while they're hot. Get them before they're gone. Get them while you're still human enough to know how precious they are.
        For a while we lay in silence, holding each other, waiting for time to start flowing again. Or maybe hoping that it never would.
        Then Sasha said, “Let's cook.”
        “I think we just did.”
        “I mean omelets.”
        “Mmmmmmn. All those delicious egg whites,” I said, ridiculing her tendency to carry the concept of a healthy diet to extremes.
        “I'll use the whole eggs today.”
        “Now I know it's the end of the world.”
        “Cooked in butter.”
        “With cheese?”
        “Somebody's got to keep the cows in business.”
        “Butter, cheese, egg yolks. So you've decided on suicide.”
        We were doing cool, but we weren't being cool.
        We both knew it, too.
        We kept at it anyway, because to do otherwise would be to admit how scared we were.
        

    * * *
        
        The omelets were exceptionally good. So were the fried potatoes and the heavily buttered English muffins.
        As Sasha and I ate by candlelight, Orson circled the kitchen table, mewling plaintively and making starving-child-of-the-ghetto eyes at us when we looked down at him.
        “You already ate everything I put in your bowl,” I told him.
        He chuffed as if astonished that I would make such a claim, and he resumed mewling pitiably at Sasha as though trying to assure her that I was lying, that no food whatsoever had yet been provided him. He rolled onto his back, wriggled, and pawed at the air in an all-out assault of merciless cuteness, trying to earn a nibble. He stood on his hind feet and turned in a circle. He was shameless.
        With one foot, I pushed a third chair away from