I’m sorry if everything is a bit of a mess right now. I am of late an atomic gas, fragmented in polyhedrons, so is space, so is time, all shattered glass. I’m not sure where I end and everything else begins, as it were.

I’m not in a very good state of mind right now.

Listen: do you recall that day a week after all the dogs started reciting religious poetry? July sixth or June seventh–one of those dates, I can’t figure out linear time anymore. I fell in love with you, or you fell in love with me, or both–well, that would be nice, right? It wasn’t neither, anyhow. There was love somewhere in that equation, though you (or was it I?) were Catholic, and I am not quite sure they would have been very happy about that. Well, the joke’s on them, isn’t it?

Yes, it was on that jutting spike-tip of the island where the air stank like sweat and fish and there were always frogs and crickets so even in the brightest daylight, even when the sky was so blue, so stupid wide like a swallowing mouth, it felt like night. There was the salt breeze wet and cool–it’s good for your skin, I hear. And all the dried reeds were rustling and the viney gnarled overgrown shadows of the trees above us shook and sunlight fell in beams, fell on motes, clouds of bugs. We were coming to terms with death, I think.

‘I can’t come to terms with dying like this,’ you said.

‘That’s not a good way to think about it.’ I was always the optimist between us, (or you were?) which I found strange. I was used to being the dour one, but then along came you, dour as a lemon. Maybe it’s an English thing.

‘Isn’t it? I think I’d rather not die. I’d like that. Or, at least, I’d like to die differently.’

‘How?’

You shrugged, rubbed your hands together. Do you recall doing that? You did it a lot, you know. Do you still try and do that, even now, hands all polyhedral, fragmental? Old habits die hard, I suppose.

‘Car crash. Sniper. Rockslide. Something quick.’ And you thought a bit longer. ‘It isn’t really that. It’s just, ah.’

‘Ah?’

‘Why like this?’

Why? Why! Glorious mother of questions, the fruit on the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Seed of science, progenitor of enlightenment, illumining the wide and far unknown! The appeal has worn off, hasn’t it?

‘Why?’ I recall saying in a fizzling drifting state when the entire world awoke together, certain that the world was ending. That was sign one. It was a very convenient sign, and made it very easy to believe there really was an intelligent god.

Why, why, why. Involuntary perceptual drift was the answer, actually. The onwards march of perceived sequential events and so came entropy, inevitability. So a rock dropped off a cliff went downwards, not upwards, not widdershins. So things died, rotted to bones, stank like hell. So you put it to me while I was parched and drifting semi-conscious on the lumpy chair next to the medical tent’s bed that week after the second sign, when all linguistic references to the colour purple vanished, starting with Arabic and ending with Dutch.

You hadn’t wanted to tell me, at first. Even when I got you talking, you seemed embarrassed. You were an evangelical leader and the thing you always seemed to hate discussing the most was your own religion.

‘Please?’

So you sighed and told me about the pupils of cuttlefish, that they are shaped like W’s, not O’s like ours. The perfect geometric pattern, the ideal image of simultaneity–two v’s, four lines, one line, all at once. Divine semiotics, majestic numerological implications that refracted the colours on the skin of Saint Chromatophore. Cuttlefish did not perceive distinct moments in time, so you said. Cuttlefish didn’t see events at all. To them, everything just looked like coloured, sparkling gas.

And you told me about metachrosis. A sort of camouflage, the same kind used by chameleons. The rippling of skin, pigments in chromatophores dancing and flitting and blending into other colours. All starlight, crashing nebulae, dust.

That’s what it all was, you said. All things, everything.

‘All things? Everything? What about–atoms? Quarks? Electromagnetism?’ I dug around in the distant science lessons I had been pretty good at in school.

‘Nah,’ you said. ‘Metachrosis–all things, everything.’

This was a lot for me to handle, you understand. My relationship with divinity had been monogamous, vaguely patriarchal, I admit somewhat contradictory, for most of my life.

‘Is that what God is? A huge cuttlefish?’

‘Who said anything about God?’

Saint Chromatophore–the universe–was dying, or, at least, it looked a whole lot like death to the people with circle shaped pupils. I am a minor prester, not a marine biologist, I could not tell you what was killing Saint Chromatophore, what ailments would kill any cuttlefish, let alone a cuttlefish of that size. Perhaps their bones collapse when they get that large. Perhaps it was some sort of parasite, though I don’t want to encounter the religious implications of that.

‘Sounds like a lot of shit to me.’ I recall Earl Stockhard’s voice, all brassy hard resounding in the chapel. Actually, this was just a day before I taught you about metachrosis.

‘Oh, Earl–oh, you. Ohh, darn you,’ his mother chortled, laughed and honked and placed a hand on his shoulder. Her hand was wrinkled, skin like paper wrapped around chicken bone, drenched in rings and bracelets. If you cut it off and sold it, you could have bought the entire island. She was wearing a purple dress twice as expensive as it was just two weeks ago because nobody could describe its colour anymore. ‘Please, ignore my son.’

Prester Gullie was quaking like a man on the deathbed. He could have only looked more corpse-like buried, pale, licking thin lips, dabbing at his forehead with a handkerchief. The chapel was packed to the throat and the air had a stinking, crowded taste to it, and you could tell all you were breathing was just somebody else’s exhale.

The crowd was organised like an army. The reporters made up the flanks, glaring cameras all pointed at poor corpse-like Gullie like guns to shoot him dead. The researchers and the chaplains and other visiting religious types squished together at the front, eyes steel. And the rest–the taffy, tinkling core–were the rich folk. They’d come for answers, and for immortality.

The chapel was a customarily silent place, wood beams and dusty shadows, creaking on windy evenings. But this, now, was a hefty, brutish silence, silence of a stalking predator, silence of a sickly coma. A gummy, unwholesome silence that was moments away from breaking out into:

‘That does sound like a lot of shit,’ said one crouching journalist, glancing up from his notepad.

‘Ahum. Might I ask what species of cuttlefish would you describe Saint Chromatophore as?’ asked a fascinated marine biologist, tilting glasses.

‘What’s metachrosis?’ asked an Anabaptist squished in the front.

‘What’s a chromatophore?’ echoed a Wiccan squished nearby.

‘Do you have any air-conditioning in here?’

‘That sounds like a lot of shit!’

Prester Gullie was going red. You could hear all his thin knobby joints knocking around like tree branches. His heart was thumping at his ribcage, his guts wanted to tunnel out and escape.

‘Oh,’ answered Prester Gullie, and his heart stopped. He collapsed, made a horrid thunk when his skull hit the floor. I recall you, after a few moments of shocked paralysis, scrabbling forwards, divine compassion pulsing in your veins, driving your limbs. Scrambling ahead to help us at the stretcher before fainting from stress and terror. And we needed a second stretcher.

It was a sort of havoc, when it turned out that we were the ones who had been right, all along. It was a calm havoc, a heavy breathing, pondering havoc. Evolutionary theory, intelligent creation, panspermia, ancient aliens, Xenu–inertia and atoms–over the course of only a few months it slipped quietly into the rubbish bin. Science textbooks were hastily repackaged as speculative fiction in libraries across the globe. Political relations flared, sputtered, twisted. People marched disorganisedly in the streets. Somebody threw a molotov cocktail at a fish and chips store, but that was about it. Nobody knew who to be angry at, because it turned out everyone was a fraud. There was always a tight-lipped resentment hanging in the air. I don’t hold it against anyone. The barely comprehensible existential terror of impending total extinction of the entire universe was stressful. For our part, though, we were never, ever smug about it.

I have always had a vague awareness of the dinkiness of my home, even as a child. The dingy, stodgy, potty, miniscule pointlessness of the place. We were located somewhere in the general area of Ireland, France, and Portugal, are too far from any of them to be within their territories. We sometimes grew barley. Mostly, we fished. We had never been involved in international politics because we were too small, too boring and indistinct to be of any colonial worth.

A month from the first sign and we were totally crowded. Onwards marched the minor signs. A donkey ate an entire town in Spain, swallowed the whole thing in one gulp, died when the pointed peak of a chapel ruptured its lower intestine. The dead rose in Brazil and began demanding civil rights. A statue of Saint Mary in a graveyard in Russia folded inside-out. Strange lights flitted in dark places, paced over night skies in the pacific. The dogs had not started reciting religious poetry quite yet, though their barks were sounding more intelligible by the day. A new page somehow grew in every dictionary in the world and all it said was: Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. So on.

It was blinding coincidence–uncanny movements of metachrosis–that we kept running into each other. You always seemed very stressed, you know. You always seemed like you needed a good massage. And we stopped dreaming in those days, the both of us. Maddening synchronicity.

‘I’ve stopped dreaming, too,’ I said, or you said. Twiddling pointless chatter as we tramped across wet grass, supplies to set up more tents in clinking sacks. If you ever want to know something about the true power of the human will, it is this: that no matter the circumstances, somebody will find a way to complain. The world was ending in somewhere within two weeks and everybody was sick of philosophising. It was all just smelly discomfort.

Thanks for helping me carry that stuff, by the way.

It was in the middle of this that–you recall–the man from The Cult of Nukemother approached me.

‘Um,’ he said.

‘Um,’ I said (or you said.)

‘Hi there.’ He looked dishevelled and crushed. He looked like he had been abandoned and dug up, hair in jagged oily masses, mouth hanging.

‘I’m a representative of The Cult of Nukemother. Um. In Australia? Queensland?’ he tilted his head hopefully. His eyes were deep and far and wet.

‘Who?’ one of us asked.

‘Oh. Uh. Haha! Hah. Haha!’ when he laughed it looked like his bones were coming apart. ‘No, you wouldn’t have heard of us. We’re a religion too, you see–we follow our Holy Greatest Nukemother. She’s–um. Eh-heh. Anyway. We’ve been trying to end the world for a while, now.’ A wracked, falting smile crossed his face. ‘Uh. So, it’s clear we’ve been beat.’

‘Oh. Sorry,’ I said.

‘No! Nonono, don’t be like that!’ his hand, cold and moist, reached out and grasped mine in a flapping, quivering handshake. ‘We just wanted to congratulate you. You know? Cult to cult. You got us, fair and square. You got us.’

Thin tears were rolling freely down his face, now but he kept smiling, nodding, kept shaking my hand. He was quaking. I wanted to help him.

‘Um. Thanks.’

He was the first of a flood of them. The Holy Brotherhood of Jagged Edges, The Belemnite-in-Veilsists, The Folk of God-In-Candles, The Church of Returning Holt, The Angle-Smoothers Guild, The Church Implied (and their squabbling rival, The Cathedral Suggested). They queued in a long line outside of the island chapel, sadly nodding at anybody who walked by, one by one congratulating Prester Gullie and walking away, alternately crying, furiously muttering, or dully gazing.

Listen: do you ever figure you are going to wake up?

Why’s everything feel so spread out, all the time? Like reaching through liquid. Grabbing a hold of something in water that darts away when you try and clamp around it. Something in the physics of it, inertial movements–waveform of water particles slipping out and around your fat fingers. All feeling like a series of ropes, of pulleys. Stink of oil, sunlight, sunlight everywhere–it feels like a big machine I can’t figure out. A big machine that isn’t made for humans.

It’s made for cuttlefish, I suppose.

One of us always fell asleep in the car. It was always on one of those grocery runs down to one of the docks with my dad, or it was always you driving out to the doctor a whole highway away for an allergy shot with your mum, something in there. I recall all the long shadows, all the dots of light boiling in the distance–street lights or flashing windows or the shepherds with their torches–and the trees and hills melding in a black mass, the blurry implications of a dusty road, the edge of a house, stained scratched pole of a stop sign, glistening shaking leaves. A shoreline lapping, rubbly gravel beach, tarmac and graffiti. Degrees of unfamiliarity vary. Disintegration, a mulching, grinding, the universe reduced to symbols outside those foggy windows.

There wasn’t ever anything more soothing than those roads. Rattling, rattling, rattling beneath. Kinetic lullaby. Hillsong’s rumbling in the speakers–well, that one’s you, isn’t it?–vague and low. Breathing in the aircon, head leaning back. Breathing through your mouth–your throat hurting like hell, all phlegmy–it’s not good, inhaling all that aircon.

And you’d be home, again. The driveway, the gravel, the house–the dusty brick flat with the rolling litter and the nonsense graffiti and the line of cars, the shack in the dry humming grass and the gnarled bench with dead spiders and the rusty rubbish bin. Car rumbling to a stop and you’d shake all the sleep off and drag your way through the door.

You had to wonder, where did it all go? It was uncanny! The instantaneous transmission of matter–a flashing removal of everything, and tired eyes creak open to the driveway, once again. So many faraway places, vague, familiar only somewhat–a hill with its edges drawn in moonlight, crickets in the shrubbery and the knobbly branches; a McDonalds all blinding neon red and yellow and jutting from the shadows; a place where the mushrooms glowed ever slightly, a grimy green humming light–and gone, just like that.

We were talking about that, on that jutting spike-tip. We were sick of talking about death. The only thing worthwhile to say about death is that it is very tiresome.

‘Suppose you could wake up. Right? Right back at the driveway,’ one of us said.

Somebody pondered it. Onwards came the salt breeze, the reeds sung. The dogs were singing religious poetry. The sky was so stupid blue and wide. There was nothing in it, nothing anywhere but love, love.

‘Nah,’ somebody said.