Listen To The Thunder With Me

She reaches the top of the ridge and is smacked in the face by the view through the barren trees: a vast expanse of devastation stretching from just below her all the way to the horizon. Countless skyscrapers replaced with haphazard piles of concrete, glass, steel, asphalt, brick, and shattered memory. Ruins of an evaporated civilization, the detritus of all earthly existence.

But there is a meteor.

It practically glows with menace there in the distance, even though it has been dormant for as long as she can remember. The remains of the city appear to grow out of this misplaced celestial object, as if they are but pesky weeds affixed to it, tendrils in search of a new, more hospitable host.

No such host exists, not here.

Thirty years ago, this place was her home. And yet, the shock of the obliteration, the pure erasure, still stings even after all this time. The wind whips her slowly unraveling bun of hair about as she fishes something out of her pocket and weighs it for a moment before allowing her attention to shift away from the crater and toward what now rests within the curvature of her hands: a bright red bandana, wrapped tightly around a heavy metal lump. It stands out against the washed out drabness of her surroundings, a drop of blood in a sea of gray. Like the little girl from that movie she watched as a child, the title of which she couldn’t recall for the life of her.

She frees the object from the ties that bind and hoists it up toward her face by its rusted chain: a locket. Specifically, one in the shape of a heart. It is just as out of place here on this ridge as the bandana it called home just seconds ago. There is no love to be found up here on the edge or among the rubble below. Inside the locket is a single piece of paper, but she puts that out of her mind for now.

After a slick and treacherous descent into the shadowy, muddy chasm, she finds herself in a completely different environment than atop the ridge. Industrial debris towers over her, barely shedding any light onto block after block of decimation. Walking along them, she realizes that even if she wanted to stay overnight, she would not feel at home here. Not anymore.

Except for maybe one place.

And it is this place that she eventually happens upon, tucked neatly between two mammoth piles of brick and concrete like a child swaddled in its crib, an unassuming brick building still standing despite the odds. Lying on the ground just outside the smashed front door is a fractured wooden sign. It’s shape and design are familiar, but she does not immediately remember why: a gray ball betwixt two tall and slender objects, thick red stripes crowning their knobbed ends.

A bowling ball and two bowling pins.

A bowling alley.

She shifts her focus from the sign to the space directly above the front door. Though collapsed, she can tell that there used to be a whole second floor there. Perhaps, just enough room for a small apartment, a space one might rent at the beginning of one’s adulthood. The kind of place a young couple might call home, if only for a short while before building a life for themselves elsewhere. Fertile enough soil in which to plant a seed, sustain it with regular watering and sunlight, and wait until its roots finally take hold. Then, that intricate patchwork of leaves, branches, and flowers can be transplanted somewhere else, somewhere it can call home.

But this is no home, not anymore.

It is as if she is watching the memories of someone else flash before her, those of a much younger woman who hasn’t seen her entire world collapse into a crater, into the morass of heaven-come-down, of extraterrestrial invasion. This is where she once thrived, where nothing at all can ever thrive again… at least, that is what the scientists are saying. She remembers looking out the back window of the apartment onto streets bathed in neon pinks and greens, at skyscrapers and parks and bridges and rivers. The whole world was hers, was theirs. They kissed at that window more than she can recall. Especially on Independence Day, fireworks setting the nighttime sky ablaze.

In the blink of an eye, she has slid through the front door and up what is left of the rickety wooden stairs into the ex-apartment above the ex-bowling alley. Someone lived here when the meteor hit, or they at least stored fragments of their life here before all was lost. Another blink of an eye.

Why is she here? The ruins all around her, the collateral damage within her own mind, it all weighs her down like a ton of bricks. For all she knows, a ton of bricks may be nearby. She realizes now that she does not have a good sense of what one ton of something actually is, or what it would even look like. But such thoughts are distractions. Her reason for returning to this place is all too urgent, the intensity and clarity of it all searing into her forehead like a farmer branding the flesh of his cattle. Yes, this is where she needs to be, and yes, she will find what she has come to find.

She must, for him.

It has been thirty years since she last stepped foot in this apartment, but she reaches into a hole in the wall just to her right as if she has been doing it every day of her life, as if she knew it was there without even looking. When her hand emerges from the jagged opening, it is holding a book, a thick yet frail amalgamation of yellowing pages. One word adorns the cracked leather cover: his name.

His journal.

With her other hand, she rends open the locket, grabs hold of the paper within, and lets the piece of jewelry tumble to the floor below like a meteor falling to earth. Moving to a nearby half of a table, she sets the journal down and flips to its final intact pages. Beyond that, hedgerows of evidence indicate that still more pages have been ripped out. One such artifact happens to match the cartography of the page she holds in her other hand, like a prodigal son returned home.

This is why she is here.

She is fulfilling some long-forgotten promise, the details of which evade her now. A quick glance out the window in front of her reveals a thick fog descending upon the city — almost nighttime — not unlike the fog blooming inside her own skull. She must concentrate and read his words. She must read every last one and remember what he wanted to tell her. When she found the coordinates he had scrawled upon the paper once stored inside the locket, they haunted her. And once she realized that they would lead her here, that he had told her about the meteor seven years before it eventually happened and no one believed him, not even her… well, she knew she had to return.

The plant of their lives didn’t just grow beautiful flowers and leaves; it also produced thorns, and those thorns soon grew thorns of their own. Before long, the flowers and leaves were gone, leaving nothing but knotted wood behind. It wrapped itself around her wrists, around his every thought. He had dreams, bad ones, and they were bleeding into the edges of his reality. He stood over her at night, knife in hand, not realizing what he was doing until she screamed and woke them both up. The cancerous growth inside him spilled out onto the pages of his journal, and she never understood any of it. Visions of apocalypse, of creatures from an alien world, of their final days together — all of it was here.

She pores over the pages with tears in her eyes, completely forgetting about the locket at her feet. As she reads the second to last page, she inhales sharply.

I AM GONE. EVERYTHING IS GONE, OR IT WILL BE SOON. I AM LISTENING TO THE THUNDER. I AM GOING DOWN UNDER.

She knew what this meant once, but not anymore. She continues reading, now glancing at the final page, the page she brought with her.

TWO BECOME ONE. IF YOU’RE READING THIS, YOU ARE GONE, TOO. FOLLOW COORDINATES, YOU KNOW THE PLACE. LISTEN TO THE THUNDER WITH ME. COME DOWN UNDER WITH ME.

Below his inscrutable scribblings are the clearly printed coordinates, the very same coordinates she typed into her battery-powered GPS just five days ago. She turned it on only when she feared she may have strayed from the path, when she feared she may have forgotten why she was braving this nuclear wilderness in the first place.

But she made it.

And now, reading her husband’s final written words, the memories come rushing back to her.

They were on vacation, somewhere tropical and far away. It was more than they could afford, but they were starting a family of their own soon. Their final indulgence. She was asleep on the beach. He was exploring the mouth of a nearby cave carved into the cliffs. There one moment, then gone the next. All he left behind was the locket, the journal, and their years of happiness. Pain, too, but all she could remember as the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months, was the happiness unfulfilled. Only when the police informed her that the months had now turned into years did she allow the pain to seep back in, the pain that washed up onto the shores of her memory and took everything with it. He may have hidden the journal in the walls of the apartment when they moved, but it was never far from his mind. Even as she sat two months pregnant upon that beach, his mind was back in the cramped, musty space above the bowling alley. His mind penetrated its walls, flipped through the pages of his own debris, and descended into the cave.

Down under.

Thundering waves. The ocean’s tide leaked into the cave’s gaping maw, causing a cacophonous crash, a sound that woke her from her slumber at the same moment that she awoke to her new reality.

Listen to the thunder.

She thinks of kissing him at the apartment window again, this time during a particularly nasty thunderstorm. At the same time, a bowling tournament was happening below their feet, the competing sounds without and within melting together like the neon city lights.

Thunder.

She can almost hear it, here and now, and she wonders what it might sound like from below. And then she is there, standing at one end of their favorite lane. #3. About halfway between her and where pins once sat in groups of ten, moldy wooden beams disappear into a sink hole, and the sink hole into yet another sink hole.

A cave. Here, in the bowling alley, a cave.

What might the thunder sound like if she were to drop down into that cave? Might it sound to her like it did to him that day on the beach, as he stepped hesitantly into the cave, never to be seen again? Maybe he sauntered in with purpose, without even considering the life that grew inside her?

She must hear it for herself. She must allow the thorny branches inside her own head to grow. She must hear them creak as they wrap around her gray matter, never to let go. She must descend, must go down under, until she re-emerges on the other side into a world where they can be together again.

She will find him there. He wants her to find him there.

And in the blink of an eye, she is gone, just as he had written.