"You pick up another screen and sit quietly in a separate office, watching world events unfold and worsen before your eyes as your co-workers seem still bent on depicting "the nice part" of the Marquis de Sade's novels.
You try to ignore the ecstatic exclamations and cries of pain and turn up the volume on the television. You begin to wonder if you shouldn't have stayed home, or better yet, bought that damn bomb shelter....
Just then someone else enters to disturb your solitude. It's Marina.
"Oh. I didn't know anyone was here. I thought everyone was immersed in the bacchanals." She says.
"Yeah... Wait, how come you're not with them either?" you ask nervously.
"Nah, it's not my thing, what about you?"
"Same here."
"I see... so what do you do to pass the time?"
"Keeping up with events to see if things change for the better."
"Ah, an optimist, eh?"
"Not really, I guess I like to live in a world of fantasy and delusions to make myself feel better.... That and I admit I suffer from a morbid fascination with the utter chaos the whole world is in right now."
"Hmm, interesting way of tackling life... Say, can I ask you something? I've always noticed that you were very reserved. You like solitude, don't you?"
"It's easier to live that way."
"But here's something interesting, you've stayed here, with all these people, waiting for the end."
"Yes, and now I'm wishing I hadn't, I don't really fit in. I never did. Not even at the beastly level everyone seems to have adopted now. I don't know why I thought things would change in the end?
Fuck, it really looks like society is going to be shred to pieces, and it's probably for the best if our co-workers are a reliable sample of what people are like. Still... I think I wish I had bought that bomb shelter..."
"So you don't want to die?"
"Well, I don't think the world will be any utopia when the war is over, but I guess I want to stay alive."
"But, if you had to die, how would you prefer it?"
Marina has changed her tone and is looking at you with a inquiring countenance, as if she were testing you.
"How, what do you mean?" you ask in surprise.
"I'm going to put it another way. If you had a way to decide how and when, knowing there was no hope, would you take it?"
"Let's see, I guess. It's better than just waiting for the roof to fall in on us."
Marina seems satisfied with your answer and leans back on the cubicle table, arms folded.
"I suppose you realize that this city, being a major capital, is going to be bombed soon. And I don't mean the minor attacks we've already suffered, but a nuclear bomb.
I don't know about you, but I have not prepared myself to survive. I was already struggling to deal with everything before this shit. I've struggled with an eating disorder my whole life, and just when I thought I had managed to stabilize, all this happens.
Frankly, I don't see much point in trying to survive, even if you manage to avoid the explosions you'll be exposed to some kind of horrible radiation death or the cruelty of the rest of the humans once the mask of civilization falls off."
"... Actually, I feel exactly like you. When I thought about continuing to come to work I did it like one flips a coin. I realized that nothing mattered anymore, that if the old world was foreign to me, whatever was to come would probably be much worse. In a way, I think I came here so that it would all be over sooner."
Marina smiles with infinite sadness and adjusts her hair behind one ear. For a few seconds your gazes melt together, as if you two don't needed to talk anymore.
"Why don't we go to my apartment? I think we've already found what we were looking for here."
Marina lives very close to the workplace, but you two still walk hurriedly, in tension. The streets are littered with garbage, broken glass from stores that have been plundered... There are even people lying on the sidewalk, well, lifeless corpses.
The worst thing that could happen to you two is to encounter a police car. Rumors have reached the office that they are currently dedicated to take anyone capable of handling a weapon with them and to requisition what they need from the rest... And that they shoot anyone who resists.
Fortunately you arrive at Marina's place without mishap. It is a small but tastefully decorated apartment. Marina takes you by the hand and leads you to her room, where you are surprised to find a large library. You sit on the bed and Marina starts talking.
"Ivan, have you read 'Disqualified from being Human' by Osamu Dazai?"
"Well yes, it's one of my favorite books."
"What do you think about what he and his lovers did?"
"Let's see, it's a complicated subject. On the one hand there's something sinister about someone who seems to go about facilitating the death of the people he bonds with, but on the other if these women already had those intentions and simply found someone to share them with it's undeniable that there's a romantic halo to the whole, otherwise baleful, thing."
Marina nods earnestly.
"It always seemed like a beautiful thing to me. It's true that before, when I was trying to rebuild my life, I put it down to a morbid tendency that I had to discard, but we're not in that condition anymore, are we?"
You and Marina spend some bittersweet days, loving each other and pouring your life story tirelessly into each other's ear, hardly eating or sleeping. It's bittersweet to find someone who understands you but having to face how even that doesn't seem enough to keep you going for either of you.
Finally Marina shows you what prompted the talk about Dazai: you don't know how, but she has a bottle of one of the drugs used to euthanize pets. A transparent liquid in a glass bottle, sealed on the top. Nembutal, reads on the front. The rest of the bottle is in a foreign language. You're told that one glass is enough for each one.
One evening when the sky is dyed a dismal gray with brown tints from the smoke of the fires, you sit on the balcony and drink it. It tastes repulsive and salty. As you lose consciousness, discomfited only by a slight dizziness, you squeeze Marina's hand. "
