Paul
Our friend was a young man named Paul. He was usually very secretive, and we hardly ever saw him. He liked to cultivate an aura of mystery. When we finally met his parents, it turned out they were active members of a doomsday cult. The father wore a hipster's black framed glasses and a tricorn hat, and he almost constantly cited conspiracy theories: he believed that NASA tricked people into thinking there was moisture on Mars, and that blood from pet cats contained Demeter, goddess of corn. Paul seemed embarrassed by his parents' preoccupations, but not to the extent that we would have liked.Paul was a doctor, he had studied to become a generalist but during his residency decided to focus on oncology. We didn't see him very often, and when we did, he always made a big show of it, of the delight it brought him to see us. His secret obsession was the epigenetics of cancer. When we asked him about it, he would launch into dense discourses that went beyond his real expertise and almost sounded like bullshitting - yet there was always a seed of truth in what he said, and when he had finished we were left with the feeling that somehow this field needed to be explored by someone who really knew all the nuances.
Paul was also a cyclist, and he would always try to spend time biking with us in the neighborhood. He was semi-professional, riding for the enjoyment of it and to stay in shape. He equipped himself with the lightest, most advanced bike possible and trained for miles at a time. Once, he went with his team on a road trip through the American Southwest, and cycled 300km in one day. A few days after setting that record, 62 year old Paul died in a accident while riding only 15km from home. He was riding down a steep slope when his tire got stuck in some grass. The bike flipped over, Paul lost his balance and hit his head. He died on the way to the hospital. He was never quite the same after that accident, although his brain barely hurt any more. It seemed he had forgotten how to live.
Paul was an ambitious man. Once when we were young, he imagined traveling through space with astronauts. He worked so hard to arrive at this goal that we thought it would happen in his lifetime. Subterraneously, he cultivated his knowledge of the fields that would define his career, and when it became clear that there was no way he could still become a scientist by our estimation, Paul had an epiphany. This shift in perspective coincided more or less with the end of his affair with a woman named Anne, whose relationship to truth was very much like that of the Brontë sister whom she was named after. Much like Charlotte, Anne wrote a great deal of novels which she published under a pseudonym. She also thought of marrying, it had been arranged for her by her father. Paul's mother suggested that she was very compatible with Paul and it wasn't long before Anne became Paul's wife.
We didn't know Paul very well those few years. I was still a child. After that, we saw him a couple of times almost every year, during family reunions, long car rides with him and his wife and kids. Later, when I was older and he more so too, we began to communicate almost daily for several years. We were curious about what had become of us and we kept each other apprised - news from the endless war, sightings of the strange glow in the sky, ways to prepare and harvest whatever crops survived. As the years passed, he was preoccupied with one topic alone: escape. He would write endlessly about his dream to flee to Mars with a handful of survivors. To return to our ancestors and learn from their mistakes. To live in continuity with natural cycles, to be part of an ecosystem rather than society.
This all got to be quite a strain for Anne, who didn't share her husband's apocalyptic preoccupations. She would complain that he barely talked to her anymore, and Paul refused to listen to her singing in the apartment. One day, she disappeared. He said she had gone to France for a year long sojourn with some old friends. He was lying. We soon learned that after their first fight - he had thrown a plate at her, which missed hitting Anne but broke an expensive Chablis bottle behind his head - Paul had convinced one of our family's servants to take her away from us. Sophie went with her, and she was never seen again.
Paul's father died not long after Anne's disappearance. Paul's family life was coming undone. He wrote to us:
I doubt there will be too many of us left on this planet by the time your kid is my age...
The tone of this message was full of desperation, of things falling apart - we had not seen a sign of our world ending at such a scale as to justify Paul's doomsaying, and yet the sentiment spoke to something lurking in each one of us. The world was beginning to show the results of a long series of subpar decisions. The climate wasn't the only issue - in fact, some might argue that it was not even the main problem. The real issue was a general loss of faith in the direction of our endeavors, a loss that came in parallel with a growth in the number of significant disasters - we knew which directions not to go in. It was a difficult time.
In the years that followed, natural disasters became more frequent. Tornadoes ravaged the Midwest. Hail destroyed crops in Australia. Cyclones devastated the Cocos Islands. Taiwan was hit by a magnitude 7.3 earthquake. The climate on the Earth was warming up, and that's all you could say about it - it was happening more and more, each year, every season, daily. It was getting colder at night in the summer. Paul visited more and more infrequently. We had built a shelter by that point, some stockpiles. We had enough food for a couple of years. He would drop by unannounced and spend a couple of days, sitting in silent contemplation. Brooding, as they say in the books.
On the morning after his first visit since the earthquake, he came out of his hiding spot in the basement just as a small rock fell from the rubble above. A tiny part of him had always wanted to be a geologist, and this was the kind of problem he loved solving. He explained to us patiently, slowly (I only understood a third of the time) that rock is made up of minerals, and minerals are made up of atoms. Atoms are composed of protons, which repel each other because they have a positive charge and desire more negative charge, and neutrons, which just want to be alone.
We sat together, my wife and Paul and I, sat on the terrace, and the kids were out in the yard playing. Paul said:
"Look at the sky"
It was slightly cloudy and vaguely yellowish, actually
"Look at the sky"
We looked. There were a lot of clouds, some big and puffy, some tiny and finely structured. Some of the bigger clouds had what looked like little machines hanging beneath them. We said something sarcastic about this being the sort of cloud science that gets funded. The machines suspended beneath the clouds floated slowly, and some were even bigger than the clouds themselves. It was unclear to us exactly what these contraptions were for.
My wife said: "Really, they're there to measure the gases"
"No they're there to heat up" Paul replied.
"Paul, stop it. These machines are cloud cameras" I said, but he had already turned red and gone inside. We heard him shouting at the kids - our then 7 and 4 year olds - for a while, screaming in an almost hysterical tone that we'd never really heard before. It was a couple of minutes until the shouting stopped, and then came quiet cries. Our kids' cries. We ran down to the basement where they had sought refuge.
Sophie was huddled in a corner, we picked her up and carried her back to our room. Paul was a very good father, initially. He took care of us, he ensured that we were all properly fed throughout the crisis. When we asked about the things we were afraid of, about what might happen next, he lied or prevaricated. He kept us in the dark. We saw on his laptop some news from the world of science - at times this was difficult to come by, and it hurt us that he didn't want to share it with us. He went downstairs at odd hours of the night, I could hear him typing. He became paranoid, we complained about our symptoms. He would accuse us of spreading panic. The kids would stay up late talking about what might happen to us in the event of a catastrophe. Paul threatened them. Our children were not to speak of their worries or fears to him, they said.
In the end, Paul lost his patience completely. He flew into a rage, accused us of treason. We had failed in our duty to him and to humanity as a whole. Sophie, at that time 13 I think, took after her father and admitted no fault. She was right - we had done nothing wrong. Paul blamed us for the loss of his love. He claimed that Anne had left him because of our influence on her. He didn't understand that she had left him long before we arrived, and that it was his own attitude which had driven her away. I tried to convince him of it, to talk with Anne directly. Anne, he said, had gone to France 'forever', and there was nothing more I could do. One night, after drinking, he got into his car and drove right off the cliff.