Andy Schu
Andy Schu
Aug 23, 2017 · 6 min read

We are driving, towards the apocalypse.
the event we’ve all been
waiting for.

I grip the wheel between my left knee and right palm.

I use my left hand to roll down the window.
Slowly, I dip my hand into the world outside of the car. It feels like dipping into a warm bath. Not hot, but I feel my elbow and bicep surrounded in even, warm, suspended water. There is an invisible forcefield keeping the molecules from entering the car. Like we are in a space submarine, and the warm liquid is just suspended there, not breaking surface tension except for when my knuckles pierce the skin, grabbing at my air aquarium.

I pull my hand out of the bath, into the cooler, shaded atmosphere of the car. We are driving 6 hours to camp for the night and experience the total solar eclipse. Cars line the highway in long rows; the kind of traffic you see in zombie films when everyone tries to escape to their relatives’ in unaffected areas. We’ve all been convinced that the apocalypse doesn’t happen everywhere.

Aug. 20, 2017 | Southern Illinois

In college I studied post modern literature and theory, in addition to creative writing and italian. Postmodernism is most easily defined as the period of time following modernism. Deeper analysis proves the definition to contain layers, conditions, contradictions, and common characteristics. It’s difficult for me to tell you specifically what criteria entails something postmodern, it is much easier for me to point to something and say “that. that is what I’m talking about.”

No one can quite agree on the point in time where postmodernism ended, and whether or not it even has. In my own theories, it doesn’t really matter. Because postmodernism, is Skepticism. It is the questioning of everything, the theory of nothing, the challenging of space, and time, and reality.

Aug. 21, 2017 | Murphysboro, IL

I think I became so entranced by this topic because I feel it. I feel moments suspended in the air like beads of water and my very existence is postmodern. I am living in the literature I studied.


So, like I said, we were driving towards the solar eclipse, which some believed to be the end of times. It’s not the first time we’ve heard this. In fact, I’ve now lived through multiple apocalypses — Y2K, the 2012 Mayan calendar termination, 1/20/2017, and now the August 21 Total Solar Eclipse. We’ve even survived a few zombie outbreaks: west nile and H1N1.

Aug. 20, 2017 | Murphysboro, IL

We’ve got our playlist on, the songs we want to hear in our final hours. We’re enjoying our final night with the earth, pupils kissing the sky, lips slipping against the glass ring opening of beer bottles. Splifs leaking smoke into the summer air, the campfire keeping the bugs at an arm’s length. I am sitting next to my best friend; no longer seeking a friend for the end of the world. We’re preparing ourselves.


The approximate time it takes for the world to start ending, until the final moment is 2 minutes and 40.3 seconds. The leaves on the trees are the first to go. The green fades to a dusty eggplant color, with little slivers of dark reddish orange. The grass bugs begin to rustle, like the ground is shifting around our feet. And then I feel it on the very top of my head. It is light and cool, and slowly glazes over my skin. The sky is there and then suddenly it isn’t any more, the shadow of our mass extinction diffused over the forest surrounding us.

For 2 minutes and 40.3 seconds, we don’t exist.

We are displaced from the space time continuum and I cannot explain where we went. We were frozen, plucked from the here and now that our human minds designed. We were someplace else, someplace someone else designed. A place where time doesn’t function the same. We are the eclipse. We were the moon hovering over the sun. We are the craters cowering from the heatwaves and the highest peaks leaning in to kiss the oceans. We wanted both the fire and the water, and the earth. We are in the middle and we are stretching as far as we can in both directions and we are stasis. We are hanging directly in between, allowing no contact between the sun and the earth like a middle child designed to sit between fighting siblings. We dangled. Like the planets carefully constructed by the child hanging from fishing line to appear as if magic holds them in the air.

The bugs in the grass around our ankles sound like paper mache shreds blowing in the wind. But everything is so still, like if I open my mouth too wide I will be able to see a small cloud of my breath in the crisp frozen air. We are in a world where night is in the day; and the sunrise is in the afternoon; and the summer heat gives us goosebumps.

And then, it’s done. The moon’s craters can’t stand the tension a moment longer, and lets the tides and the mountains and the rays come together again.

We come back to life. The sun re-injects the trees and the leaves and my hands with saturation.

Aug. 21, 2o17 | Murphysboro, IL

And then, this is the part no one ever talks about.


Tents and coolers and dusty shoes stack together in the backs of cars and what food is left over is neatly arranged and stored. It seems silly to me now, like someone packing their dinner into Tupperware and placing the remnants on the second shelf of the refrigerator on the same night of an intended suicide. We don’t expect to come back for it, but we save it, just in case. Maybe zombies really prefer chicken salad over brains, we just never asked them.

The line at the gas station wraps passed both the soft drink and the coffee options. Everyone is calm and patient. It’s like we’re all collectively sighing, thinking,

“take your time, there’s plenty of where that came from.”

Traffic moves both fast and slow, the pull of the moon craters, the dance of the eclipse. We are experiencing the symptoms of post-apoctalyptic stress disorder. PASD. We are zombies behind leather wheels, we are autonomous, we are the disruption of humanity.


I roll down my window and slowly release the smoke from between my lips. It stretches towards the pressure change and slips quickly into the moving sky.

I take a deep breath, and look directly into the sun.

We are coming home now.

)

Andy Schu

Written by

Andy Schu

modern day transcendentalist | storyteller | littleshoestudios.com/andyschu

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