Matthew stumbled, dropping his attaché and holding his arms out for balance. He looked to the walls surrounding him and watched in disbelief as jagged, lightning-shaped cracks coursed through them, spreading rapidly in webs of thick black veins. He jerked his head back in time to see the monitor on the glass desk topple and spark, the receptionist fall to the carpet, drowning in her fear. He wanted to run to her, help her, but the shaking was so violent, and the noise so ear-shattering, he could barely keep his own feet. He took a step toward her, saw her frantic eyes, her wide-open mouth an O of shock. Was she screaming? Calling for him? If she was, he could not hear her, not over the otherworldly noise of the building being ripped apart, the terrible growl of the rioting earth.
He watched helplessly as the ceiling burst open and a long rectangular tube of metal venting crashed on top of her, a plume of bright pink insulation dangling like a monstrous tongue from the shattered mouth of the broken panels. A cloud of drywall dust hovered low over the scene like a fallen cloud. He couldn’t see clearly, couldn’t hear anything over the tumult. Massive, desk-sized pieces of ceiling were smashing down everywhere, filling the air with more dust and debris. His eyes darted around the office space. People were under their desks, lying on the ground, running, falling. They were all screaming now.
Beyond the reception desk Matthew noticed a conference room, a long, polished wood table surrounded by empty swivel chairs, all of it behind a floor-to-ceiling glass wall. The outer wall of the room was also made of glass, large blue-tinted panes made to shield conference room attendees from L.A.’s hot summer days. As Matthew watched, the blue-tinted panes split, then shattered, then fell away. Sunlight invaded the office interior like a spotlight exposing a rat’s den.
The receptionist had found her feet. She climbed over the fallen vent awkwardly and stumbled toward Matthew. She steadied herself momentarily against the edge of her familiar desk. Matthew was able to get a good look at her. The side of her face had been torn open, gashed from ear to chin, and blood was slithering down her neck in pulsing ropes of red. Her terrified eyes, smaller without her glasses, locked on Matthew, yearning for assurance, naked and desperate. He started to say something, and then, to his disbelief, parts of Baskin and Associates began to simply... disappear. He caught her eye and frantically motioned for her to look behind her. She turned.
They watched in a frozen daze as the conference table dropped away from view, as if the floor, and the construct of the floor beneath it, had been erased from existence.
Next to the conference room, a well-dressed Asian man in a dark suit was gripping a large copier, hanging on as the floor tilted toward the crumbling exterior of the building. The man leapt atop the copier, as if the elevation of a few feet would save him. The machine slid, bumped and almost tipped, before spinning out into the expanse. Matthew had caught the man’s expression as he prepared to die, and would have sworn he had been smiling like a demon. Matthew thought of the moment in Dr. Strangelove when Slim Pickens had Yahooed while riding the bomb as it fell to the earth, flung like an insect to his own death, to the death of millions of other insects.
The remaining walls lining the far side of the office bent away, folding in half before flying into the open air, the people behind them long since gone.
Matthew backed toward the elevator, caught in a nightmare that did not have a panic button to jar him awake. There was a jolt and the building seemed to buckle and snap. His view outside the building tilted and he fell hard to the ground, his hand sinking into the sea-green carpet, so soft and solid. He looked up from his sitting position and heard the receptionist shriek, loudly enough that it pierced the rising, rumbling sounds of destruction. It was the kind of scream created from way deep down, leaping up from the abyss of absolute terror that came with knowing your life is about to end. There was a rising beneath Matthew as the building itself, or what remained of it, was lifted from the ground, as if it were elevating. A split-second later it crashed down so hard Matthew bit off the end of his tongue. He felt blood rush into his mouth and his eyes leak tears at the stab of sharp pain. A blast of stinging white dust filled the air, clogged his eyes, nose and mouth. He had no time to think of anything other than GOD HELP ME before the carpet beneath him disappeared—pulled away as if by a magician—and he dropped into empty space.
The building gave in to the earth’s desires, and it too fell. Graceless as a dying giant it collapsed in an implosion of glass and concrete and iron, heaping itself atop the bodies within, burying everything inside of it in a tangled black mass of clumsy, angry death.
2
DIANE KISSED HIS ear, but Matthew continued to feign sleep. He could feel her smile hovering inches from his neck. He waited, wanting her to kiss him again.
She did. Longer this time. Her soft lips were warm on his ear, then his temple, and then, as she gently rolled him, on his forehead. He kept his eyes closed, but his mouth betrayed him with a smile of his own.
She was face-to-face with him, so close he could feel the warmth of her breath on his cheek. When she spoke, he caught the sweet minty smell of whatever toothpaste she had found in his shared bathroom. She whispered.
“Matthew...”
He groaned, not wanting to wake. He wanted to stay in this in-between time, when the sensations of his body were peaked by his half-dream state. It was a bit like being on ecstasy, walking that padded corridor of consciousness that separated sleep and waking.
Dream, and reality.
He opened one eye, saw the soft curve of her cheek. You are so beautiful, he thought. Her black hair was mussed, her green eyes darted playfully from one side of his face to the other, as if she were memorizing him, a rushed portrait painted in her mind. The sunlight coming through the far window gave her a soft halo, her skin luminous.
“Morning,” he said, his throat dry, his mouth pasty. She slid a hand over his forehead, smoothed it over his clumpy hair in a way that made him want to close his eyes again and just feel a few moments more...
“You have class in twenty minutes, tiger,” she whispered.
The dream state evaporated, and Matthew woke fully with a rush of unwelcome thoughts about school, grades, career, money. He groaned again, meaning it this time.
“Right,” he said, twisting over in his tiny bed to gaze blurrily at the digital clock, the green illuminated digits mocking him with their vibrancy. “Right,” he repeated, and fell back to look at her again.
She was still naked and tangled in the sheets he’d brought with him from home, the same ones he’d slept in as a teenager. And how awesome was that? he thought happily. The same material that had covered his sexually frustrated fifteen-year-old body was now tangled sweetly between the thighs of a gorgeous coed who he’d spent the entire night having insanely great sex with. Fifteen-year-old Matthew would be proud.
“What?” she purred, sensing his amusement.
“Nothing. You’re just hot is all,” he said, kissing her. She responded, her hand running across his chest, then down it. He felt his body calling him to action, like a general screaming to rally the troops before battle... but then he remembered his Ethics class, and the thought of Professor Bruker’s monotone lecture voice was like a pail of ice water dumped pitilessly on his young lust. He clutched her hand in his, set it down on the bed.
“Don’t start,” he said. “I have Ethics. Like, literally.”
She laughed at his mock seriousness and, in that moment, he loved how they were doing that thing couples did. Like in the movies, or on TV, the hot actors saying their lines while lolling around, naked and perfect, the morning sun rich and hazy through their bedroom window.
The realization that he loved her came quietly, fitting into him like a puzzle piece.
“I have to go,” he said insistently. He sat up, kissed her mouth, and rolled off the mattress, planting his feet down onto the scratchy, thin brown carpet of his dorm room floor.
“If you must...” she teased, lounging gracefully in his narrow bed, letting the sheets fall to her waist as she extended a perfectly-posed nonchalant arm. “I’ll just be here, waiting for someone to have sex with.”
“Well,” he said, “Kelly will be back any minute, so I’m sure all your wishes will be fulfilled.”
Kelly, Matthew’s roommate and best friend, was a dashing, handsome guy who (besides being tall, intelligent and athletic) had known since middle school that he was, as he had put it to Matthew one day when they were kids, “without-a-doubt” gay. Kelly carried the confidence and inner peace that came with vast quantities of self-assurance and the unflagging love and support of family and friends. Matthew always envied him for having parents that were there for him, who cared and nurtured him. Something Matthew never had. Quite the opposite.
“Hmm,” Diane murmured thoughtfully, “that may be an uphill climb.”
“Don’t know until you try,” he tossed back at her as he disappeared into the small manila-lit bathroom he and Kelly shared with their dorm-neighbors, and closed the door.
WHEN MATTHEW CAME back into the bedroom – clean, naked and towel-wrapped – he found Kelly at his desk and Diane gone.
“What’d you do, scare off my girl?”
