It is extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary that the world can end yet people will go on living. As if they never got the memo: World Over.

   Perception is an absurd gambit. You never know what you’ll see and what you won’t. It can take years, decades, a century for dramatic shifts or new realities to be perceived. You can walk through a graveyard for seventy-seven years and remain utterly oblivious to the reality of the graveyard, and then one day, click, recognition, and from that point forward how you walk in the world changes.

   Everything changed for me when I realized the world had ended and that I was walking among dead people and I was one of those dead people, benumbed and mortuary, sleepwalking through ruins hallucinated into community standards. Collective hallucinations are templates for continuity.  

   I remembered seeing a show when I was a child, in which a man refuses to believe he is dead, and continues to live in the house with his family, slowly rotting away and emitting god-awful stench, and it is only when he sneezes and his nose falls off that he accepts the reality of his condition and goes to settle into his grave. I started seeing noseless faces everywhere, including my own, when I challenged myself to a mirror. But allow me to digress…

   For an interminable length of time, I was a night watchman in an isolated warehouse on the edge of a pier. My duty was to babysit unmarked wooden crates. They were stacked eight or ten high, numbering dozens of rows. I had no idea what the crates contained, or if they contained anything at all. They may have been empty. Empty, full, it didn’t matter to me. My job was to crate-sit during the night, the graveyard shift as they used to call it, and I was paid handsomely to do so. I wasn’t paid for my curiosity (curiosity, in my experience has always been a low-paying gig), and I genuinely didn’t care about the crate’s content or lack thereof. A job is a job is a job. That’s what my uncle used to say. And the job suited my disposition well: immobility, masturbation, reading books, listening to jazz on a transistor radio, every night the same yet different. Also, I had plenty of idle time in which to write. So I wrote. I wrote to … I was about to say kill time, but I suddenly remembered that quote by Emerson or Thoreau, I always get those two confused—You can’t kill time without injuring eternity. I didn’t really understand what it meant, but it sounded important, one of those phrases like smart bombs that go off in your face.

   Was I injuring eternity being a night watchman guarding unmarked crates? Maybe. I’ll never know. What I did come to know, in the same way that a rotting nose falls into the palm of your hand—I was a dead man, the people around me were dead, and the world had ended. How do you miss the world ending? I don’t know, but so many of us did.  

   This fact changed things for me. I lost interest in being a night watchman. I left the warehouse and never returned. It felt like a dream I had dreamed a long time ago. That I was a man, or reasonable facsimile thereof, fulfilling a role as night watchman in an isolated warehouse on the edge of a rotting pier, guarding unmarked wooden crates.

   When I look back at that sentence I just wrote, I realize how ridiculous existence can be. Or sound. It can make you laugh out loud and cry silently or laugh silently and cry out loud or maybe just stop you dead in your tracks as you ask for an impossible refund.

   One night, dozing under a tree on the outskirts of a forest which I planned to enter in the daylight hours, a phrase came to me, or rather a question: Where were you when? It felt as if a voice was asking me this, and I was meant to not only ask this of myself but also of others. Where were you when?

   Where you when what, I wondered, and so I arbitrarily added—Where were you when it happened?

   After etching these words into the earth, I felt a chill run up my body. I put down the branch. Looked up at the tree—silent, slender, dark. I was hoping the tree would offer a murmur of recognition, or a word or two, even if thin and foreign. Nothing. It didn’t bother me that I couldn’t speak Mandarin or Dutch or Portuguese, but it did bother me that I couldn’t speak Tree. I was sure it was saying something, yet I was deaf and lost to what that might be. Deaf, lost, dumb, dead, that’s how I felt that evening under the tree.

   I picked up a stick and considered poking out my eye. Or jabbing my eardrum. I did neither. I’ve always been a physical coward. Or reality chicken. Bok-bok. Which is why my job as a night watchman lasted for as long as it did. In that sense, I became a legend of the pale and non-descript. Now that I no longer see the crates, my curiosity has flared and I wonder what they might have contained. And why was I hired to guard them? It doesn’t matter. You are to free to wander among the ruins and scribble without ambitions or illusions.