Our movements became more and more jerky and I was glad when Diana let out a piercing scream as she climaxed, because I was paying attention to her and had reason to pretend not to hear the egg behind us opening with deafening thunder.
How to Have Sex When the World Is Ending
Copyright Notice: by Sergiu Somesan. All rights reserved.
The above information forms this copyright notice:
„This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.”
Adam was calling to me from behind a cliff somewhere. His voice was weak not so much from distance as from fear. But by this morning we'd all had time to get used to his fears, so for a while we took our time when he called out. A little earlier, when we had just started to climb, he had taken advantage of the greenery of some thick juniper bushes and hurried to hide among them, "to leave some of the beer down at the foot of the mountain, so I wouldn't climb it all the way up!" He had known Ionela only a few days, and he was still ashamed of her, so he was always using all sorts of complicated euphemisms to make his simplest wishes known. But his shame passed in a few minutes when, white in the face, he burst out of the bushes, stumbling and buttoning his pants:
"Bear, bear, bear," he cried in a whisper, pointing toward us, somewhere in the back, from where he had just arrived.
Diana and I, having roamed the mountains near our town for years without ever having encountered a bear, looked questioningly at each other, then at the juniper bushes. Without speaking, we both took a few steps in that direction.
"Don't go!" Adam hissed at us. "We'd better go, leave that damn bear!"
He grabbed the backpack off the ground and grabbed Ionela's hand, preparing to run.
Ionela yanked her hand away:
"Wait and see what happens!"
I carefully pushed the branches aside and, about a hundred meters away, in the dense shade of some fir trees, I saw a doe with her fawn. They were grazing peacefully, and only now and then did the doe glance anxiously toward us, startled, perhaps, by the rustle of the branches over which Adam had stepped in haste.
"Come and see the bear," I whispered to them, and, after a little murmur, they all came to look.
"Well, for goodness sake! It was a bear if I tell you!" Adam defended his point.
As I watched them, I found the explanation. At one point, the calf, which was quite large, came up behind the deer and all we could see was the back half of its body. Through Adam's always glassy glasses, not to mention the few beers he'd had, the two bodies might have looked like a slightly smaller bear walking on all fours.
No chance," Adam stubbornly said. It was a bear, if you ask me!"
Ionela took his hand and looked at him gallantly:
"But, Adam, if there had been a bear there three minutes ago, do you think those deer would be grazing so peacefully now, still in that spot?"
Instead of being impressed by his friend's iron logic, Adam looked gloomily, as if to say, "And you, Brutus?" and he set off alone up, up, up.
This had happened almost an hour before, and now he had seen something. I took off my backpack, took out my water bottle and started drinking quietly.
Ionela and Diana looked at me smiling:
"Aren't you leaving?" asked Diana.
I slowly took the cork out, wiped my mouth and put my head on my backpack. I groaned softly as my muscles relaxed and I returned my gaze to them:
"I'm not leaving! I'm fine here, besides, bears don't go that high.... In fact, bears don't even exist lower now."
When I was a kid, I'd seen two bears come in the evening from the mountains around town to the dumpster where we kids took our garbage. My parents always told me to beware of them. I always took a few loaves of bread with me and fed them. They were gentle, they ate the kids with their hands. After a while I didn't see them, I think they took them to a circus or a zoo. They were the last bears I ever saw in the wild.
From behind the cliff came Adam, mostly rolling.
"Come when I call you. He's huge... E... You must see him..."
Iona looked at him curiously and must have wondered if she should continue her friendship with such a strange individual. Nonetheless, she picked up her backpack from the bottom and started towards him.
"Let's see what, Adam? A giant bear?" I asked without getting off the ground.
Adam took off his glasses in surprise, then put them back on and looked at us furiously.
"What bear? Are you guys crazy? There's an egg up there..."
Adam has been my friend for a long time, and I wished I hadn't laughed, but I could feel the ligaments in my ribs tingling dangerously in an attempt to restrain myself, so I finally let out a huge, pitiful laugh. Along with me, the girls started laughing.
After a while, I stopped and wiped my tears away with my hand, then looked at Adam, who was staring at us, angry and red in the face.
I pointed to the cliff:"
"Behind that rock is an egg, Adam? A giant egg?
Diana held me still:
"After all, how huge can an egg be, Adam?"
Adam looked from one to the other, then, suddenly calmer, said:
"Instead of sitting here and gloating at each other and all of you at me, you'd better at least come up a few steps and see."
Curious, his suddenly quiet voice convinced me more than anything, so I got up and put my backpack on my back.
"Well, let's go and see, then," I said and set off to go around the cliff.
In just a few moments, I climbed the few feet and lifted my head. Then raised it a little more.
"Well, now what do you say?" Adam asked triumphantly behind me.
I couldn't find the words, so I said nothing and just watched. Behind the rock, and well hidden by it, was an egg. I would have used another word, not the one Adam used, but he had found the best one: it was huge. It looked about two meters in diameter and four, maybe five meters in height. Almost as big as the rock it was hiding behind. It was yellowish-greenish in color, about the color of a goose's egg, and it was undoubtedly an egg. And if Adam, in his happiness at finally being right for the first time, had become completely indifferent to his new discovery, I couldn't help wondering what the bird looked like that had been capable of such monstrosity. It must have been as big as a cathedral. And I didn't want to think what he would think if he showed up just now and found us investigating his masterpiece. And with this thought in mind, instead of approaching, as curiosity urged me, I looked at the wheel in the sky, as prudence urged me. It was clear and birdless, neither large nor small, so I took heart in my teeth and approached. I picked up a rock from the ground and tapped gently on the shell.
"Are you crazy?" asked Adam quietly. "Do you really want to see what's inside? Or do you want to get ideas... to what's inside?"
I knocked once more, listening carefully to the full sound of the egg before answering.
"I don't want to give anyone any ideas, Adam. But I just want to make sure it's not all a big hoax. Or that we're not on Candid Camera..."
Adam and the girls began to look around suspiciously, but there was nothing in sight. It was just the four of us and the bleak view of Plešuvă Ridge. Somewhere below, the bushes began and then the forest. In the distance, between two rocky peaks, you could see the very town we had left this morning. But here, around us, not even the sound of people: we were alone! Just us and the huge, absurd egg.
"Do you remember the bird Roc from The Tale of Sindbad the Sailor?"
Diana looked at us questioningly and waited for an answer.
Being my friend, I felt it my duty to debunk her hypothesis:
"Diana, that was just a story. Besides, there are no diamonds around here".
Iona stared hypnotized at the egg and whispered as if in a trance:
"Maybe this is the primordial egg."
I watched her carefully to see if she was serious. She was talking so convincingly that I approached the egg again and pounded the stone hard on it.
"Ionela, the egg you speak of is a philosophical concept. You cannot hammer a rock into a philosophical concept."
To prove my point, I pounded the rock on the egg again. This time, the sound was louder, as if I was pounding into a giant bronze gong. The sound reverberated with deep echoes over the surrounding valleys. I tossed the stone from my hand as if I'd burned myself, but Ionela didn't seem to notice anything, continuing with her idea:
"Well, it's not a mere philosophical concept! According to Vedic cosmogony, primordial heat allowed the egg of the world to 'hatch' and 'crack'. And this egg really existed at the beginning of the world. And the same belief also says that, when this world has fulfilled its purpose, a new primordial egg will emerge around the generative cause, ready to give birth to a new world..."
Adam looked at her with his head cocked to one side, as if he was now seeing her for the first time.
"What you say is too hard for me. Besides, I read somewhere that you can't make a good decision if your blood sugar is low. So let's dig in the backpack, set the table, get our blood sugars up to normal, then see what else we decide."
"Let's eat," Ionela whispered, starting to rummage in her backpack. Especially since it might be our last meal!"
Despite the whispered tone, Adam heard her and jumped like burned:
"Did you hear that? I don't like pessimists!"
And, with jerky gestures, he began pulling out the deep-fried chicken drumsticks from his backpack.
As the girls tried to make our table look somewhat aesthetically pleasing, Adam eagerly placed a newspaper directly in front of the table, grabbed a chicken drumstick, a loaf of bread, and began to eat his fill.
Ionela cut the tomatoes into even slices and placed them symmetrically next to the equally meticulously sliced cheese. She corrected the symmetry of the whole a little more, then said in a breathy voice, as if reading from a book:
"Heidegger says somewhere that the state of silence arises when man is watching nature.... Through his endeavor, through his investigation and study of it, he is asking for a way out of its concealment. Thus he insists that nature surrenders itself as the object of investigation to such an extent that the object itself disappears in the absence of the object as a feature of available situatedness.
For a while, Adam stopped chewing, staring in amazement. Then he swallowed angrily and burst out at her:
"I didn't harass nature, if that's what you mean. The damned thing won't go away either. The object haunts us with its innocent egg face."
He seemed to have exhausted his arguments, for he began to eat again. He chewed silently for a while, then threw the ultimate argument at Iona:
"And in general, I'm inclined to agree with those who say that girls who dabble in philosophy don't dabble enough in real life!"
Ionela put her glasses better on her nose and said, smiling coquettishly:
"Well, I'm your girlfriend, so it's your own fault if you don't slam me enough."
Adam stopped with his mouth agape, and you could tell by the expression on his face that he was preparing a harsh retort, when Diana said in a changed voice
"Listen here! With hurried movements she pushed aside the tomatoes and cheese from a portion of the newspaper on which they lay and began to read: 'There is an old legend that in a temple in Hanoi, beneath the vault which indicates the center of the earth, there is a bronze plate in which are fixed three diamond spikes, a cubit high and as thin as the middle of a bee. On one of these spikes the creator strung, at the making of the world, 64 disks of pure gold, the largest being on the bronze plate, and the others being smaller and smaller, up to the top end of the spike. This is Brahma's tower. Day and night, unceasingly, a priest moves the disks from pillar to pillar, following Brahma's unwavering laws. These require the priest to move only one disk at a time and never to place a larger disk over a disk of smaller diameter. When the sixty-four golden disks are thus moved from the stake on which the Creator has placed them on one of the other two stakes, then the tower, the temple and the Brahmans will vanish into nothingness, and with a deafening thunder the whole world will disappear..."
"Well, what's that got to do with the egg?" Adam asked, still pouting.
"Listen further," said Diana. Only now it gets interesting: "The legend above has given rise to a beautiful programming problem, known to all high school students as the 'Towers of Hanoi Problem.' The total number of moves to move the disks according to the rule specified in the caption is 18,446,744,744,744,744,744,073,709,709,709,551,615. This number is so large that, if a Brahman were to make, without tiring, one move per second, we would still have a comfortable number of billions of years until the end of the world predicted by the legend. Roughly 58 billion years, by a rough calculation. As students at the Faculty of Computer Science in our city recently received a high-performance mainframe computer, they decided to simulate for the first time the huge number of motions required.
With the help of specialized software, they were able to simulate 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 disk movements per second, so the program would have been completed in 18,446 seconds In just under 13 days! Thanks to this extraordinary novelty - apparently a world first - an impressive crowd of foreign guests will be present in the Computer Science Faculty lab today at 2 p.m., when the computation will be finalized, even though it is Sunday. Of course, because of the extraordinary speed of data processing, only every billionth movement of the disks is represented graphically, and even then the disks look on the monitor screen more like a kind of golden haze than actual disks. Those who wish can witness this remarkable achievement of our young computer scientists today. Admission is free. We mention as a curiosity that, more than a month ago, a similar experiment failed due to the action of a sect, apparently convinced that such a simulation, even if only a simulation, would lead to the end of the world!".
Diana stopped reading, Adam stopped eating, and I looked at my watch: five to two.
"Five minutes to go," I said in a voice I didn't recognize. 'Of course, if everything it says there is true,' I added, seeing the girls' reproachful looks.
As if in warning, there was a popping sound from the huge egg, and I thought I could see a crack in the wall of the egg, somewhere at the top.
Diana pulled herself closer to me:
"Kiss me! I'm cold!"
We stood up and kissed her.
"Not like that! Harder! Like last time!"
We kissed her again and I felt her so aroused that, disregarding the other two, I undressed her in a few strokes and penetrated her there in the ominous shadow of the egg.
Our movements became more and more jerky and I was glad when Diana let out a piercing scream as she climaxed, because I was paying attention to her and had reason to pretend not to hear the egg behind us opening with deafening thunder.