Ten Seconds Before Midnight

A story about hanging out with your friend and his crew.

We’re sitting on a tarp in the dirty basement watching TV in Russian, a language none of us can speak. We’re drinking. It’s some hour of the day outside. I’m with my friend Jeremy. His hobby is ordering weird shit from RiteAid on Instacart every day. Tylenol, peppermint gum, blueberry-flavor toothpaste for kids. He’s told me he intends to keep going until he gets a wellness check called on him. There were some other guys there, too. Uxo. Plasticheart. No one I knew that well, just the sort of guys Jeremy usually rolled with.

“I think someone just exploded,” says Jeremy. “Yeah, someone just blew up. Fuuuck.”

“Oh, yeah? Who?”

“Whoa. This air traffic controller out in Alcoa. Someone had been pumping his house full of gas and it just caught the fucking pilot light on his stove. Whole house went up. Kaboom. Blew out like, all the windows on the block. Car alarms going off. Dogs losing their fucking shit. Guy’s body is probably gonna end up in three different counties. What a fuckin’ shitshow.”

“Someone was pumping gas into his house? Like, on purpose?”

“Yeah. And half the guy’s head just landed in some massive fucking pig farm. Fuck! The pigs are totally devouring his shit. They’re pulling the skin off his cheek and scooping out his eyeball and shit. I don’t know where his other eye is. I think it got ripped out by the blast. It’s probably impaled on some branch outside a little kid’s treehouse somewhere. It’s gonna totally freak them out when they find it. Trauma for fucking life. Fuck. These pigs are eating his brains out of his fucking skull, though.”

“Yo yo yo, hold on,” says Uxo. None of us are paying attention to the TV at this point. Soldiers in uniform are marching down a snowy street in formation. It’s night time and the light is all yellow and orange. “Why was someone pumping gas into a flight controller’s house, dude? Are you sure it wasn’t just a leak or some shit?”

“Yeah man. Bro, these pigs are fucking stamping on his skull. I think they’re trying to get at the bone marrow. They’re trying to shatter this guy’s skull to suck the bone marrow out. That’s so —” he stopped suddenly. “Shit. Someone else just exploded. No, two people.”

“Two people?”

“Yeah. A pilot and a stewardess in Knoxville. Someone turned their car on in the garage last night and the whole place has been filling up with fumes. Just now a bad fuse sparked and that was all it took. They were sleeping in a bedroom right above. Fuck. This is so fucking twisted. They got totally obliterated. They’re gonna have to pull dental records to identify them. Only way now.”

“A pilot, a stewardess, and an air traffic controller?” says Plasticheart. “Shit, man. Someone in Tennessee really doesn’t want a plane getting off the ground. Someone well-connected. Must be.”

“Shit…” I say.

“Should we tell anyone?”

“Nah, man,” says Jeremy. “Not our business. Not our fucking problem.”

We all drink to that. The soldiers have turned into firemen putting on ski masks. The camera cuts to a shipping container smoldering in the field behind them. It cuts to a house made of frosted glass. The firemen are running through the glass house. A phone is ringing somewhere. They run up the stairs to the top floor. They run out onto the balcony at the top of the house. They see a meteor burning up in the atmosphere. We imagine the meteor is a plane locked in a death spiral. We imagine it crashing into an empty field and disappearing in a flash, like a magic trick. Everyone wakes up back at home. They go into the bathroom and touch their reflection in the mirror and wonder if they’re dead. The firemen force open the door of the shipping container. Inside, after the smoke clears, they find some sort of animal heart, wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper.

---

Jeremy gets kind of crazy later. He’s had a lot to drink by now and I noticed him take a capsule of something out of his pocket and slip it in his mouth when he thought no one was looking. He’s waving his arms around and yelling a lot. Some of the other guys are yelling, too. Plasticheart and I are just watching.

“I heard you’re back in school,” I say to Plasticheart.

“Nah, not really. It’s just this guy Lionel who bought an old porno shop near the reservation and started teaching classes there. It’s painted this nasty fleshy color on the outside so he calls it The Pink House. It’s really not a house, though. Just a shitty little storefront with the windows blacked out. Anyway, I saw one of the fliers he put up and thought it sounded cool. That’s the only way to find out about it, I think; he’s pretty old, not really online at all. He has all these tapes of him harassing random people on the street he likes to show us. Like, last week he showed us this one where he walks up to some guy standing outside a Junior Boy’s smoking and starts telling him he’s gonna get his blood sucked. ‘You’re gonna get your blood sucked!’” Plasticheart does a voice that sounds like a drowning rat and laughs. “Shit like that. ‘Junior Boy’s gonna suck all your blood out! He’s gonna suck you bone dry!’ And the guy’s like, not engaging at all, keeps trying to turn away from the camera but Lionel keeps shoving it in his face, and he’ll pause the tape at specific moments to point out the guy’s body language and shit, like, ‘he’s thinking about taking a very pious swing at me here,’ or ‘I had him on the psychical ropes here.’ And finally he gets to this moment where he has the camera practically up the guy’s nose and his eyes are real wide and he freezes it and says ‘right here, this is when the animal took over.’”

“And then what?”

“I dunno. He didn’t show us any more.”

“What kind of class is this? Like, what is he supposed to be teaching you?”

“‘True Valuable Life Lessons.’ That’s what the fliers say.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. I think he’s probably trying to start a cult. I know he’s got a couple girls living with him and giving him their paychecks already. But whatever, it’s something to do. If shit goes sideways I’ll probably end up getting interviewed for an article or a book or something. That would be cool. And I do think I’m learning things.”

The firemen have turned back into soldiers. They’re clearing a house in the desert. Jackals watch them from the surrounding dunes. They run from one room to another shouting Russian numbers. Their guns move up and down in long, slow arcs. One of them falls through a trapdoor into a room full of razor wire. A grinning boar’s head is mounted on the far wall, above a roaring fireplace. Another falls through a trapdoor into a pit full of water. A shark is swimming in the water. Its fin breaks the surface far away, near some glowing rocks. The soldier sees this and takes a deep breath and dives. He swims downwards. He swims down further and further. The shark disappears behind him. The surface disappears. He swims down and down through darkness. At the bottom he finds a grandfather clock. Its face is shattered. The hands are stopped at ten seconds past midnight. The soldier drowns violently, lost in the weeds. Outside, the commander shouts something into a walkie-talkie.

Jeremy throws his bottle on the floor and it shatters. “Shit! The whole airport just exploded! Sixty-eight people just died. Fuck!” He picks up a piece of broken glass and drags it down his right bicep. A bunch of blood comes out and gets on everything. We have to stop it up with some toilet paper we find in a shopping bag in the corner. We all feel gross and violated after that.

“Christ, man,” I say. He always does stuff like this, even though he knows it pisses me off. But at the end of the day, he’s still my friend.