Which World

When the world ends, white dust will fill the air like
the curtain at the end of a play. A rain of desperate
bodies will fall from the windows of burning buildings,
drumming the concrete below. Men with splinters in
their eyes will stumble through streets choked with debris;
women clutching babies will pick through the rubble and
tear out their hair. Our generation will go to its grave
shouting its last words into a cell phone.
Or perhaps it will arrive as a thief in the night, step
by invisible step. Factories will disappear overseas and
corporations vanish into thin air, taking jobs and retirement
funds with them. Cities dying from the inside out will
spread like ringworm, the shrapnel spray of suburbs slicing
through forest and field. Wars will reach from continent
to continent and neighborhood to neighborhood—the
terrorists who won’t make peace against the horrorists who
enforce it at any price, who keep trying to impose harmony
between oppressed and oppressor with fear and firepower.
Tides will rise with global warming, acid rains fall with the
last of the redwoods, computer systems crash with stocks
and stock markets . . . until one day everyone has cancer.
Or else nothing will happen at all, business will
continue as usual: prison guards pace concrete tombs,
psychiatrists contemplate madness, demons glare from
the eyes of ministers, consumers are bought and sold in
the marketplace. It’s after the end of the world, whispers the
homeless man on the corner—don’t you know that yet?
Others, mysterious and knowing, who have held
themselves aloof from the discussion until now, finally iterject :Which World