Endling, Part III: Luke Gets to the Fucking Point

By Draven Copeland, Editor in Chief

**TRIGGER WARNING: This text contains references to sexual abuse, suicide, and self-harm. Please be aware of this potentially upsetting content as you engage with the text.**

“I… turned around,” John said in the present day. The memory had ended abruptly and he hoped that if he said the words out loud, it would hold together in his mind as its details began to wash away entirely. When he tried to run it back in his mind, all he could remember was red neon, blood, and vomit.

Other memories came and went as he strained every muscle in his skull trying to recall anything at all. He saw moments from all stages of his life, but he couldn’t place any of them. He couldn’t tell if the people he saw were relatives or not, if the places he saw were still around, or if these ‘memories’ were only his imagination. He began to feel sick again.

“Stay with me John,” Luke said, his voice bringing the sick man back to reality. “I really have a lot to tell you.” He leaned forward again, and his eyes gleamed unnaturally in the sunlight that passed first through overcast clouds and now through the window of the hospital room. “You turned around that night, and I was gone. That’s what you can’t figure out. You couldn’t ever figure it out when your brain worked normally, no wonder it’s screwing with you now. I left that alleyway as soon as you started to rush toward that rapist fuck that disguised itself as a man, and I took all my things with me.”

“I didn’t want you to–” John said, his voice failing before he could say more.

“You did. Trust me, you were a lot better off without me. And she was better off because of you. You saved both of your lives that night, you know. You were both going to die… you might even say that you were supposed to. Had you not punched that man, the next swipe of his knife would’ve landed in her neck, and believe me, that still wouldn’t have been the worst thing he did to her that night. And, had you taken one more dose with me, the police would’ve found your body in that alleyway while they were investigating the crime scene splattered around her corpse. 

“You know, even though you never saw one another again, I’ve always liked to consider the two of you soulmates, in a way. Deathmates, maybe. Funnily enough, you’d have never known each other even if you both had died. She was going up, as the saying goes, and you, Johnny, you were going down. It doesn’t really work exactly like that, but it’s something along those lines”

Luke smiled to himself before becoming gravely serious.

“Now, there’s no easy way to say what I have to tell you next,” he continued. “Believe me, I thought for a long time that I never would. But I’ve decided you deserve to know. Hell, maybe I’ve grown a conscience.

“I wanted you to kill yourself. I was trying really hard to get you to. And I’m sorry for that Johnny, I really am.”

He shifted in his seat uncomfortably. John stared at him, trying to keep his mind focused as he began to fade into delirium again. He wasn’t sure what he would say even if he could’ve spoken. 

“Now, please let me explain,” Luke continued, a sincerity in his eyes that combined with their unnatural glimmer in the light. “I was never human either, although I’ve always been jealous of the whole thing. Over time, the finality of death and the fleeting state of your lifespans become appealing… and it really doesn’t take all that long. I’ve been here a long, long time, Johnny. Longer than a young man like yourself can comprehend.”

Luke laughed to himself in wispy breaths. “Ninety-two years really isn’t much, I promise you. I watched the earth grow, man. I watched eons of nothing. The only company I had for millenia were the waves of the ocean and the angry storms of a new world finding its balance in an infinite void. I had no idea humanity would grow from it. That you… the collective “you” – I’m talking about the unfathomable number of you that keep breeding and killing one another like there’s never been enough cum or blood – would be my company. 

“At first, I thought you were beautiful, if not a little ironically hilarious. The way you chase immortality while consistently ensuring that no one else has the opportunity… how you turn to hate when you’re not shown love, as if love is not the most essential piece of life… and I’ve watched so many of you pretend for one another that life is something more– devoting your lives to the make-believe so that the unimaginitive can leave the horrors of reality with you… I will say, though, that I have quite enjoyed many of the stories you all have written. 

“The Divine Comedy, Macbeth, ‘Heart-Shaped Box’. Really, I’ve loved all of the tales your people have told. The way they explore the real world by fantasizing of a fake one. You have always been that way, even back to the stories your race made when it was still very young. It was… funny to me when they wrote me as their adversary. Your “Devil,” as you call it now. I like to think your ancestors were jealous of my immortality and made it something to fear.”

Luke sat back in his seat, ruminating on the subject for a moment and slowly nodding to himself. “Honestly, that’s what I hope,” he continued. “It’s much better for you all that way. You see, death is a beautiful thing when you have closure like that. When you accept that you won’t be around forever. Hell is real, Johnny, but the stories all got it wrong. The reality is that when one of you dies while chasing death, you stay here for a long time. I don’t know why, but you do. It’s like your soul is punishing you for wasting your life. When you view death as a ‘way out’, it’s the only time it isn’t.

“Myself, I try to avoid these people– the ones that stay behind. The living don’t often see them unless they look for them. Your brain blocks them out, I guess. The things they do to themselves, man… it’s hard to handle them, especially at first, when they realize that they have to stay and watch with complete inability to interfere. They get… angry. And very, very sad. You wouldn’t believe the depths of sadness a human soul can reach. Many of them thought they were the saddest they could ever be while they were alive and when they see how deep it really goes, well… they’re nearly irreparable. They spend hundreds or even thousands of years trying to find a way to end it, and the things they’ve come up with…”

Luke paused. “Are you sticking with me, John?”

John could neither nod nor shake his head, even if he wanted to. Although he had so many questions he couldn’t even begin to form, one permeated his mind above all of the rest, written across his vision in bold letters. “I’m… dying… today, aren’t I?”

Luke breathed out another wisp of a chuckle, the same one that gave no semblance of humor. “Yes, Johnny. You are. Very soon, actually. I’m sorry to put it so bluntly, but there really isn’t time for anything else.”

John’s thoughts were clear just for a moment. His life played in his mind, from the moment he left the womb to here in this gray, vacant hospital room. He saw his parents again, watching them pretend to raise him until they left him with nothing but his clothes on the side of the street on his eighteenth birthday. He watched himself hate them. He saw himself hurt himself in some form of misplaced idea of vengeance; there was a lot more of that than he liked.

He saw the day he met Luke in the very alleyway he was supposed to die in, watched as night after night ended in that alley. He glimpsed Luke turning back to look at him one last time as he ran out of the alley and left forever. He saw his wife, and then his kids. He began to cry when he saw his grandkids and felt how much he had loved them. He watched as, after his wife passed away, he stayed in contact with their children, when they let him. How the kids had visited him when he got sick, but couldn’t bear to look at him anymore when he really started to lose himself.

He was not angry with them, he realized. Any of them. His parents or his children. Although he was surrounded on both sides by neglect in the moments he needed his family the most, he harbored no resentment on his deathbed. In his last moments, he saw no reason to continue to be unhappy. 

“It’s okay,” he said, finally. His voice worked almost perfectly as he said it.

Luke smiled and wiped a tear away from his eye. “I thought you might say something like that. Can I finish my story before you go?”

John smiled softly. “Please,” he said.

Luke smiled back, both in response to John’s and, more bittersweetly, to himself. “Almost every time, the people that stay are insufferable. Honestly, when you’ve been around as long as I have, most of you are insufferable even before you die the first time. You’re like children that pretend you understand the entirety of existence because, suddenly, you’re supposed to. 

“Can you imagine that? In the time that you have? I’ve seen trillions of lives pass and not a single one has figured it out, yet all of you pretend so that you can go on with your lives. So that you can spend your lives working to survive instead of enjoying yourselves and one another for your brief stay.

“I’d selfishly hoped that, over time, your discoveries would be shared and that you’d find the answer. I thought that maybe because you had others to work with, you’d figure it out, but, in another characteristic irony of you people, those that don’t want to share the space hold things up for those that do. You all want the answer, but you keep yourselves from it. I realized that I’ll never know why I’m here or if I will ever… ever leave. And now, Johnny, we’re at the most important part of the story.”

Luke stood and crossed the room to John’s bedside, reaching out with his thin hands to lightly clutch his friend’s. He was tall and looming, but rail-thin, only blocking some of the pale light from the window. 

“I wanted you to stay,” he said. “Don’t flatter yourself, you’re not the first. But you are the last. Your world is ending, Johnny. It happens. And, over the millennia that I have seen, I’ve learned to spot clues just before it comes. 

“The way the world exists as you know it is not at all what it was for most of its existence; there have been many ends and beginnings, and the only attribute that they all share is that they are accompanied by a great storm, every single time. A greater storm than you’ve ever seen. And, at the beginning of every one of these storms, there is an era of peace; sometimes minutes, sometimes centuries. Then, ominous dark clouds appear, and there’s an intense dread that builds in the air. Maybe it’s the wind, maybe it’s the subtle change in temperature that is somehow starkly apparent, to this day I don’t know what it is, but it is strong. And then, the storm rages and ravages as the earth assaults itself. The greater the storm, the greater the destruction and, more interestingly, the greater the period of peace that prefaces it. 

“I’ve seen these storms embodied in your race. Humanity… nature, brought fully to life. You will destroy yourselves for a time until you cannot take it any longer, when your societal world is collectively and irreversibly changed. And then there is peace, for only as long as it is allowed to stay. It wasn’t until recently that you had the power to destroy yourselves completely and, now that you can, it’s only a matter of time until another storm hits. The last one. And when all of you die for the first time, I’ll only have company for a little while; hundreds, maybe thousands of years, before every one of you that stays will leave and I’ll still be right here.

“I wanted you with me for that time after, Johnny. Someone to cherish my time with before I have no one at all. So I tried to kill you that night. Or persuade you to kill yourself, rather. I never wanted you to take that responsibility, it would always have been on me.

“But, in the moment that you saved that woman, I saw something in you that stopped me. I saw who you are. You’re one of the good ones. Maybe that’s what attracted me to you all along, why I wanted you to stay for as long as you could. That night, not only did you save yourself and, in so doing, change the lives of everyone you met and everyone your children and children’s children have met, you did the same for her. You changed the trajectory of your race’s existence that night, holding off the coming storm just the smallest bit in your own way. You’d never see what change you made. None do. 

“I knew right then that I couldn’t make you watch what would happen next. I couldn’t selfishly keep you here when you deserve to leave, to have your finality and go… wherever you go. If there is a place. I can’t say whether I hope there really is one for you or not. If it’s anything like this, I hope not. But, if there is a heaven to this hell, I hope there is for you.

“After that night, I walked around the entire world. It sounds crazy, but I really did. I can’t physically feel like you can… I don’t get tired, I don’t get hurt… I can’t even feel the touch of another being. My curse, I guess. If I had stayed there with you I knew that you would’ve relapsed because of me. That, and I selfishly wanted to find another person to make stay before things ended for all of you.

“What I found confirmed my suspicion; you really are the last one, Johnny. The last of the good people. In all of the places I’ve been and in all of the years since that night, I couldn’t find any other person in the world holding off the storm like you did. So I came back here – and just in time, it seems – to thank you.”

There was a long moment of silence. Luke couldn’t feel John’s pulse to tell if he was still alive or not, and there were no other signs of the former.

“It… was…” John began, his consciousness fading quickly now. He wasn’t even sure that anything was happening at all, only responding to a voice that he couldn’t even remember the origin of. He wasn’t even sure that it had spoken at all, or that he or the voice even existed anymore. “Nothing,” he finished.

Bright tears streamed from Luke’s eyes as he nodded. “You’re about to go, okay Johnny?”

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