There are a lot of new readers this month so I want to take one minute to tell you about Age of Aquarius. The fiction here is dark, you could even call it horror. It can, and often does, include bloody bits, death and dying, a general atmosphere of dread, characters doing unpleasant things to their own and other bodies, paranormal forces, and, of course, unhappy endings.
I occasionally include content warnings, when the material is especially sensitive and if I don’t think the warning will spoil everything. But I don’t always include them and they are not comprehensive. In this story, there is a depiction of suicide. If that’s not for you, please skip this one.
I appreciate you being here and I never want to ruin your day. Unless you’re into that. In which case, on with the show.
2028
“Please don’t do this.”
Gunner’s fingers wrapped around the Coke can and he squeezed so hard the aluminum began to crumple. It was only half-full, but sweat ran over his hand and he wondered how long his grip would last.
Crystal’s eyes were wild and her long fingernails touched his hand on the can as she tried to tug it back. She didn’t pull hard— the last thing she wanted was to fight him— but she kept her grip. Her little bicep strained.
The Christmas lights in the window blinked red and green, giving the room a surreal glow. Gunner wondered what her real name was. Surely Crystal, like the others, was a fake name. Why hadn’t he paid more attention?
“Crystal, I do not want you to do this. I do not want this.” He tried to sound commanding but his voice caught in his chest. He didn’t look anywhere but at her, because he knew he would lose his grip. In his mind’s eye he saw the bodies on the floor around them.
Hope, Kitty, Goldie. Buck, River, Hunter, Rain. And Dean. Dean was there too. Curled up on the fluffy carpet, his mouth frozen in a silent scream.
He had lost so much.
Crystal let out a loud, percussive sob.
“Seawater,” she said between tears. “Seawater doesn’t freeze.”
“Crystal stop, please. It doesn’t mean anything. This isn’t what I want.”
Gunner had to save her. He had to save one person.
2027
A tall woman with long red braids came through a door into the carpeted hallway. She didn’t make eye contact with Gunner, but she lifted her chin toward him.
“Seawater doesn’t freeze,” she said.
Gunner smiled out of reflex. Whatever the hell that means, he thought. His bright smile usually worked, even on crazy chicks.
Behind him, a man’s voice answered.
“But it will boil.” It was Dean.
The woman looked from Gunner to Dean, with a shy smile. She seemed relieved.
Gunner waited for her to go then looked at Dean. “What the hell was that?”
Dean clapped him on the shoulder and laughed. “It’s your ark, man. It’s full of hot women, and they think you’re a god.”
Dean laughed and Gunner joined him. He would not admit to missing an inside joke. He rubbed his hand on the wooden door frame, feeling the solidity of his big mountain house. It was stupid to call it an ark, he knew that, but he was proud of what he had accomplished.
Downstate, Brooklyn was roiling between droughts and floods. The subways were washed out. The parks were on fire. Here? Mountain air, good friends, and hot women.
In the kitchen, another woman was making sandwiches. She wore only underwear, a t-shirt, and a pair of tan Ugg boots. She was gorgeous, with pale skin and platinum hair. The underwear was forest green, and it glowed against her skin.
On her naked thigh was a big, ugly tattoo that made Gunner feel weird. He had his share of tattoos— some he still liked and others he was kind of sick of. But this one was like nothing he had ever seen. He couldn’t tear his eyes away.
It was a picture of animals, their bodies intertwined in a muddy, twisted blob. He made out the shape of a lion. In its jaws it held an antelope by the neck, the animal’s eyes rolling, blood oozing around the lion’s teeth. The lion itself was half-eaten; a monstrous hyena licked its lips over an open, bloody shank. White bone showed through the mess. The tattoo was violent and sad in a way that instantly haunted him.
She looked at Gunner, saw him staring at her upper thigh, and blushed. She cast her eyes down and cleared her throat. The corners of her mouth pushed up into an almost-smile.
“Seawater doesn’t freeze.”
“Uh, right. Yeah. It boils,” he said back to her with a wink. He didn’t really feel like flirting, but it was so natural. “What’s your name?”
“Crystal.”
“Nice to meet you. I’m Gunner.”
She laughed without sound, a canine tooth peeking out from between her lips, then she looked directly at him, stopping him in place with her sudden eye contact. The whites of her eyes were visible in narrow crescents beneath sandy brown irises. It gave her a look of wired exhaustion.
“I know who you are. You’re the Weatherman.” she said. “These are for you,” she added, and held out the plate.
“Oh. Wow. Thanks,” he said, taking it from her. He looked around the room for help. He never asked for sandwiches, did he? Where was Dean?
Crystal left the kitchen but Gunner didn’t watch her go. He didn’t want to see the tattoo again, those desperate animals ripping each other apart. He looked at the plate but he couldn’t bring himself to eat.
He thought he should know more of the people who were living in his house.
2026
Gunner watched the snow fall through his thick front window. The old glass was warped and made everything outside look like a snow globe.
The snow hadn’t begun to accumulate yet, but at least it was falling. If his knee held up, he’d be snowboarding right outside his front door on Christmas.
“Hey Weatherman, what’s the temp?” Hunter called out behind him.
“Twenty-nine and dropping,” Gunner said, without checking. He had a sense for these things. It was a sense that anyone could have, if they were obsessed enough.
There was a ripple of laughter. He smelled weed and overheard Dean telling their “origin story” yet again.
“It was right before Hurricane Veronica, remember that one? Big fucking storm, man, trashed the east coast. Gunner was retired from soccer and thinking about his next move.”
“After the injury,” someone added, and he heard a sympathetic sigh.
“Right. Gunner was laid up, watching the world get worse and worse. And he saw the future, man. He said, ‘Dean, we have to get the fuck out of New York’ —”
Gunner didn’t want to hear the story ever again. He was afraid it made him sound like a crackpot. He tuned Dean out, watching the snow and daydreaming about winter.
The cold air always let him breathe easier. In Brooklyn, the scorching summers had been torture, and when those 80-degree days crept into October, then November, he started to feel anxious all the time. This mountain house had been his lifeboat.
At first, he feared he’d be alone, moving to the mountains to die like a hermit, but it seemed like everyone wanted out of Brooklyn. Artists, musicians, a yoga teacher. A couple people who worked remotely. Somebody’s sister, someone’s dog walker, a guy Gunner met playing pool in Ridgewood. They called it Gunner’s Compound. Then Gunner’s Commune. And finally, The Ark.
There were girls too, a lot of them. Girls made life in The Ark beautiful. They lit candles and wore perfume and recycled empty cans. They painted their nails and fluffed couch cushions and flossed their teeth, which reminded him to floss his teeth, which made everything feel very real.
In the evenings, which came early, someone always got something hot and delicious going on the stove. Beautiful people gathered around the long dining table— a chosen family, and Gunner loved them all, even if he didn’t always know them personally. Next year they would plant a garden, raise chickens. In the meantime, Gunner’s pockets were deep— one quick endorsement deal with Gatorade was enough to pay their bills— and the group was self-organizing, making sure someone went to the store, someone kept the solar panels clean, someone took out the trash.
Gunner had never felt so relaxed about his future. He watched the snow dusting the evergreens in the front yard. His front yard. He breathed onto the glass and drew a peace sign in the vapor.
Here, he felt like he had time.
2025
Gunner and Dean were splayed on an enormous black couch. Around their heads a dense cloud of smoke hung heavy, clinging to the exposed brick. On a television screen the width of a full size bed, a soccer game played out with the sound off.
“Oh man,” Dean said.
“What?”
“Uh— I don’t know,” he laughed. “I totally forgot what I was about to say.”
The two exploded into giggles, Dean wiping tears from his eyes. When his laughing fit finally died away, Gunner reached down and adjusted the pillows under his knee. His leg was hardly recognizable these days— pale, weak, finished. Without the brace on, he was cautious about moving it even an inch.
Under the glassy surface of his high lurked a grinding dread. He took another drag, held his breath, tried to smother the feeling.
The game wrapped up— nil, nil— and the eleven o’clock news came on. Another storm was headed for New York. Gunner felt the unease building in his gut, a slow motion panic that settled on him every time he watched the news. He rubbed his eyes.
“Bro, what are we going to do when that hurricane hits?”
He could never forget Hurricane Sandy, the East River flooding into lower Manhattan, parts of the city dark for days, other parts in flames.
“What?” Dean asked. “Why do we need to do anything? We’ll be fine.”
There was a story about a parking garage attendant who drowned in his booth, and Gunner had started to see him when he closed his eyes, started to see himself trapped under a million gallons of brown East River water, his tongue bulging out of his mouth.
“Yeah, maybe.”
There was a long pause. Then Gunner sat up, and looked Dean straight in the face.
“You know what? No, bro. I’m done. You want to be sitting here smoking weed in the dark while the park washes away? You want to have to go through that again with the trains underwater and all the street trees dead?”
He remembered the trees that bleak Spring after Sandy. When the snow finally melted and it was time for new leaves and they never came, only hundreds of ghost trees haunting the sidewalks.
“I mean, I guess not?” Dean coughed up a cloud of smoke and tried to look serious.
“What about the next one, bro? And the next one after that? What about five years from now when Wall Street is under water and the fuckin’ ocean is boiling?”
Gunner could feel his pulse in his knee. It tended to flare up when he was agitated. He took a long drag off the pipe.
“The ocean can’t boil,” said Dean.
“Bro. Of course it can. You’re thinking about freezing. Saltwater doesn’t freeze. But it sure as hell boils. Haven’t you ever made pasta?”
“Come on. I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon.”
“Maybe not. But you know this shit is coming. We can get ready for it, right? We can at least do better than this.”
Dean looked around at the apartment. It was the nicest apartment either of them had ever lived in— a floor-through unit in a restored brownstone— but it was ground level, with a wide backyard that flooded every time it rained.
“What if I bought a building?” Gunner was on a roll. “No, wait— a house!”
“Yeah, sure man. I support you, whatever you want to do.” Dean was used to Gunner’s big ideas going nowhere, but maybe this made sense. Buying real estate was never a bad plan.
“It’s an investment right?” Gunner asked, talking himself into it. Dean nodded. “We can find a huge house in the mountains and have a place for all our friends. High up, no flood zones.”
“Oh, we’re talking about a commune?” Dean laughed, blowing smoke out his nose, but he didn’t hate it. He was desperate to get out of the rat race. “I’m in.”
“Yes, bro! A commune. It’ll be chill, and we won’t have to stress every time there’s a storm. We won’t have to go through another winter without seeing a single snowflake. We’ll go somewhere safe.”
“The end-of-the-world commune, sponsored by soccer legend Gunner Steele.”
“Sponsored by a torn ACL and Gatorade, who will be paying my bills for the rest of my life.” He was already on his phone, searching real estate listings. He had been sitting on an insurance payout for six months, using it to buy weed while he grieved his soccer career. Now he could turn a corner. He felt light.
“I know what this is really about,” Dean joked. “You need someone to watch weird European sports with you in the middle of the night.”
“Exactly. Ten people. A hundred.” Gunner laughed.
Maybe a commune could be a break in this cloud. A lifeboat, to deliver them through the worst of it. Maybe he could lead people out of the sinking city.
“We’ll all stay alive, at least until it’s ninety degrees on Christmas. After that, who the hell cares?”
2028
Crystal sobbed.
“Gunner please, it’s the last one.”
Gunner looked at the Coke can they were both holding. He didn’t know what was in it but they were scattered across the floor, one next to each of the corpses in the house.
“It’s ninety degrees on Christmas,” she pleaded with him. “You said—“
“What did I say? What are you talking about?”
Crystal looked at him like he was a venomous snake dropped in her lap.
“You said we would all stay alive until it was ninety degrees on Christmas,” she said. Then she whispered to herself, reciting: “Seawater doesn’t freeze, but it will boil. We won’t be here when the oceans boil. You said.”
The air conditioner wheezed like a laugh. It was the hottest Christmas on record, and the thought had consumed him with grief. He had locked himself in his room to hide from the nightmare of a burning planet, while his world had actually ended right downstairs.
When he finally came down, the blue-grey faces of his friends stared up at him from the floor, their vomit drying on the carpet. He found Crystal shaking in the corner, willing herself to drink.
“Crystal, please listen to me. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t want everyone to die. I don’t even remember saying that.”
Crystal’s face dissolved in her pain, her skin paled to the color of steam. She opened and closed her mouth, looking for words. She seemed very fragile, almost temporary.
He pictured Dean brewing some toxic punch and filling empty Coke cans from the recycling bin, his beautiful commune lined up to drink it. All because they thought they had a suicide pact.
Their friends were dead. The end of the world, as Gunner himself had foretold it, had arrived. He couldn’t save her by explaining it was all a misunderstanding.
He only had one option left.
“Crystal, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m saying. Give me the can. I have to— this was all my idea, right? I’m the Weatherman, right?” He tried his smile to reassure her, but he was sure he looked insane. “Let me drink it.”
Outside, the sun burned hot and sickening on bare brown earth. After everything, the world had found him here and burned him to ash.
“What’s your name?” He asked her, his nose running.
“Crystal.” Mascara streamed down her face. The whites of her eyes were bright pink against her faded skin.
“No, your real name. What is it?”
“Angela.”
“Angela,” his throat tightened and he choked on her real name. A real name meant she had a family, a past. Maybe a future. “Angela, you need to stay alive.”
“But Gunner—”
“You need to live. You need to tell people our story,” Gunner said.
He felt her fingers give, just a fraction of an inch.
This is a Custom Subscriber Story. Elite subscribers to Age of Aquarius get to star in their own tailored tale of woe. Are you brave enough?
Bleak. Loved the reversed timeline, that's something I've been trying to work out for ages. And you nailed it. Well-oiled prose with a satisfying snap at the end. EJ at her best!
Oh man. Such a compelling gut punch☠️❤️