I ran with all of my might deeper into the jungle toward the hole. I could hear Gottfried shouting with a new robustness my ears had never caught from his voice before. It sounded deeper than the normal shrill and hateful tone that I was used to hearing from him. It had morphed into something evil sounding that was actually very scary.

“I’m gonna hang you on my wall, Jim!”

As I ran through the jungle, I tried with all of my will to cry. I tried to express the deep sorrow I felt for my dear companion, but nothing came. “Need to go, need to get out, I want to go home.” I repeated this mantra through my head thousands of times as I ran along toward “the hole.” The mantra formed into “The hole, the hole, hole, hole, hole.”

I was nearing the hole rapidly. I could see my tepee and was fast approaching camp. I stood at the hole, thinking for a minute, thinking of what I might find on the other side. What the world might have become since I left it, when I heard the voice of God cry “There he is!” I decided the old world couldn’t possibly be worse than the real world and jumped in the hole head first.

It took a few minutes for my eye to adjust to the dim lighting of the dark bunker. I was confused enough as to where I was to temporarily forget about Billy and a destroyed utopia. I looked down and saw the hole I came out of, it appeared to bore into a stone floor and not clay like I had left it. I was in an oval-shaped stone fallout shelter that was about a half an acre in diameter. There was enough food for thirty people to eat well for ten years, water for thirty for five years, and many breathless and wheezing lifetimes worth of cigarettes. The bunker also housed a liver demolishing supply of wines and spirits. There was a desk in one corner and multiple army-style bunk beds near another. Directly in the center of the warehouse were the tortured, burnt, fingerless, decrepit bodies of Shooshi and Takumat. Both of my beloved brothers had faced the end with enlightened expressions that out shined the stars and with eyeless, toothless grins aimed toward the heavens. I ran and fell at their icy dead feet, in the same weak fashion I displayed when first I met those amazing beings. This time, no one lifted me from my misery to bring light to my misfortune. They just sat there dead, and what was worse was that my caretakers’ recently deceased, lifeless bodies would return to me none of the emotion that poured out from my rumpled reddened face unto their still and lifeless laps. Poor Billy came rushing to my mind to add to the grief and horror of witnessing my dead companions as the ground adjusted itself and rumbled. I rose to my feet when I heard an explosion in the distance. I ran to the door of the shelter and peered through a thick piece of Plexiglas that separated me from the destroyed (nuked it seems) ruins of the world I left behind. Looking out the window, I noticed about five feet from the door to the fallout shelter, there was a dead body in manacles, face down in the clay. I pressed my back against the cold shaking wall and slid down it sobbing until another blast shook me to the floor, unleashing another steady salty stream from my eye. I lay on the floor trapped in the agonizing thought of what had surely become of Sophia, my love from the grocery store.

Success! Tears finally found me again. I could cry. It was all I ever wanted, not only that, I had more to cry about than I could immediately form a list in my mind about (there would be plenty of time for designing that list later). I cried about my dead family, I cried for the dead animals I should have protected, I cried for Billy, I cried for forgiveness for failing Shooshi and Takumat who died trying to protect me, I cried for the two worlds that I let die, I cried for all of mankind including myself, but most of all I cried for myself. 

 All of the answers to everything dawned on me at that very moment in my misery. I struggled to my knees and shook my only fist at my enemy.

“I know you are up there, God! Laughing at me! You did all of this! You sadistic monster you! You dictatorial villain! I hope you enjoyed this! I hope this is what you wanted. Of the seven days it took for you to create this pathetic sideshow, what in your name is wrong with you? Why would you do such awful things? I pray to you God, deny me at the gates, if I for some unlikely reason appear in your kingdom, for I have no desire to meet you, you dick-less bastard!”

 I spit at the ceiling, but the projectile landed hard on my face, splattering on my forehead. 

I screamed.

I’ve spent who cares how much time learning how to write with my left arm. I’ve pushed the desk from the corner snug next to the hole, along with a bunk I hardly sleep in that sits by it and I can still hear murmurs of paradise on the other side with the occasional inflection of the screams and squeals of poor hopeless animals. The only relief from the smell of my friends decomposing body and the overflowing privy I am buried alive with is a cool breeze from the hole that tickle the hairs on my leg as I write.

I have been working on this book for what seems like more than a lifetime. I saw my face for the first time in an eternity today after I found a broken piece of glass in my stumbling search for more booze (the supply is now all but gone, when it’s gone, I am gone, it is decided). My beard is white and my moustache is stained brown from smoking. My once thick hair is stringy and balding. My formerly handsome face has become leather and cratered. My nose that at one time was thin and sharp has doubled in size and is a bright red hub for spidery purple veins to spread in every direction. My liver throbs painfully in my bulging gut. My fingers, that require the company of either a pen or a lit cigarette, are tar stained and shake almost too much for me to write any more of this nonsense. Whatever skin on my body is not red or purple is yellow or green, or both or all four. There has always been enough clothing here for me to never have to do wash and to always wear clean clothes, but I’ve never changed clothes yet. I cough and choke for air every day, and I hardly noticed recently that within the black and brown mucus that I no longer examine for impurities are shiny white pearls of lung and bloody black clots of blood that fly involuntarily from my sandy throat anytime I question if I may still have anything to say, the answer is always “no.” I tried to sing today, but my splintered voice split into three different smoky notes; each within its own respective octave. It is time to die. The mirror I found today has finally given me the courage to end it all and even makes it sound fun at the moment.

I hope this has been at least an entertaining useless apology, or at least an informative examination on human stupidity and vanity: the two main attributes that ended all of the joys and sorrows of the old world. I am sorry, though God is not. You are probably dead if you are reading this, but again, I am sorry. On the bright side, I can still hear bombs being dropped every day, that’s a good sign.

I can try to rationalize in my mind that I wrote this for them, for anyone who may find my crypt of dead and dying things, but mostly and more rightly, I wrote this entirely for me. I am self-admittedly vain and love myself too much; though I am far uglier now than any ugliness I have ever tried to escape, I will not accept the dead me. “I will find the courage to kill myself,” I thought, “after I finish my master piece.” (I was vain then too). Now that my work is at an end, I am less likely to kill myself than I had naively previously assumed. Even my hideous reflection did not end my love for myself, though it did damage it severely. There was a time when death seemed a fitting and epic ending to the climax that was me falling further than any man had ever fell before when I was certain that I would wake again. Death is for real this time. . . Death is finally for real. This will really, really, really, really mean the end.

Killing myself just seems out of the question at this moment, though suicide was a simple thought and pleasant to swallow when I was a God (and was only a cosmetic addition to life and fun to toy with the idea of). Trying to conquer the gravity of the idea now as a pathetic mortal seems impossible.

Why did I leave paradise? I was a glorious immortal! How great I was! I lament the beauty I unwisely fled from; perfection was my reality. My God! How happy I was. . . there was never a dull moment in those times, things were perfect in those most glorious of glory days! The food was better, the air was pure, the animals loved me, and how I loved them! I realize all of this now as I sit and swallow the final gulp from my last bottle of brandy. What did I leave behind? How could I? I was a better man in the real world, and my friends the Illuminati weren’t at all that bad, actually I am sure now they were a force of what is genuinely good, I can see that now, even though I might have tried to smear their pure motives in my bias mind. I was confused. Yes, I can see that as clearly as I can see that Gottfried had every right to kill Billy. War is a good thing, and things really do need to be conquered. But poor Billy! He deserved it, that fool! But oh, how foolish I’ve been! I know it sounds cliché, but things are actually much better on the other side.

In today’s prayer, I begged of God to give me another chance. I told him that I am not done yet and that I know he can hear me. I’m sure he just laughed; my misery probably even turns him on.

My work is done My reign of terror is at an end. I am mankind. I am humanity (I am certainly ugly enough to fit the profile). I have failed; man has failed. I think I am ready to die. It’s time for me to write the final lines and close this book forever. I must open the door that I’ve stared at in fear all of these years and walk into a fate that is far better than what I deserve or slice my throat. I haven’t decided yet. The point is, unlike God, I am sorry. –

 Those would have been my last lousy lines for this book, and I’m glad that they aren’t; from a writer’s perspective (which I like to think of myself as now, seeing that I am the only writer in existence), those lines are absolute garbage and un-poetic babbles, and I probably couldn’t die knowing I ended the only book in existence with such trash. After toying with the last line for another ten minutes or so, I give up and settle for less; and though the muscles in my legs, like the rest of the weedy muscles that hold together the dusty bones in my body suffer from atrophy, I have found the strength to come to a shaking and bent stance, and I might have actually walked out the door, but the plan has changed now. There is a hand tugging at my pant leg.