End Days

I stayed up late in those days, when our kids were young. Sophie in grade school, Eli still in preschool. We put our kids to bed by seven or eight. Susan followed around nine. I stayed up until midnight or later, reading or watching a movie. Dystopia was my jam. A steady stream of low-budget apocalypse films littered Netflix. I watched them all. I can’t remember any of the movie titles, and most of the plots blur together. The most memorable, not because of its quality, but of sheer creepiness, went like this (and sorry, this recap is a bit longer than I wanted it to be):

A classroom of sixth graders opens a time capsule to reveal a cache of letters written to them by a sixth-grade class decades earlier. Most of the letters detail the excitement of daily life—sports, friends, crushes, that sort of thing, but one girl receives a sheath of papers crammed top to bottom with an unbroken string of numbers—thousands and thousands of numbers. The girl feels cheated and angrily shows her father what she received. Her father, clearly suffering from OCD, studies the numbers nightly for weeks looking for a pattern.

Eventually, in the middle of one line he sees 091101 and recognized it as the date 9/11/2001. Following the date are the numbers 2996, the number of fatalities in the collapse of the twin towers. With this epiphany, he quickly identifies the numbers preceding 0911 as the longitude and latitude of New York City. The document, he realizes, predicted every United States mass casualty event over the past thirty years. The numbers abruptly end on the date the time capsule was opened.

As the movie progresses, the world, the people, plus that physical orb that we call earth, degrades. Earthquakes, volcanos, mass shootings, plane crashes become increasingly frequent. Late one night the father finds his daughter writing feverishly, seemingly possessed. She finishes the list—a half a page of densely packed numbers and then the words “EVERYONE ELSE.”

End times. The apocalypse. Judgement day. The hairs on my neck stood up. I quicky looked behind me to make sure no one was standing there.

I think about this movie all the time. I’m not the type to believe in an interconnected universe. Historically, I haven’t believed a laundry list of unrelated events somehow portends a greater trend; although since 2020 this rock-solid assuredness has been on shaky ground. It truly seems like we’re hurdling towards end times.

In early September 2016, a series of events caught my attention. Hurricane Hermine bore down on Florida; a Space X rocket exploded on liftoff; Zika ran rampant in the United States; and a car racing through downtown Gettysburg slammed into a popular Chinese buffet. To me, all these events seemed to fit together into a pattern. When I heard about the car crash, I nodded my head as though the final puzzle piece was laid. My vision seemed to sharpen. I noticed details in the world around me that I never saw before. Song lyrics suddenly made more sense. I thought I was going nuts.

I called my doctor’s office to find out if I needed psychiatric intervention. His receptionist told me the only way I could get a message to my doctor was to write it down in a letter and fax it into the office (yes, I’ve since found a different doctor). In my letter, I explained the random events that seemed to fit together and concluded with my fear that I was entering a schizophrenia fueled psychotic break. I faxed it off and waited. A half hour later, I got a phone call. “Hey Jeff, you faxed your letter to the wrong number. I got it instead of your doctor.” He didn’t say who it was, but by the way he talked to me, I’m sure he knew me.

I made an emergency appointment with my therapist. She said not schizophrenia, OCD. My mind was working overtime trying to scare me.

Over the past several months, the American news seems interconnected, all symptoms of the same disease. The unprovoked shootings of people under the guise of self-protection, the sudden erosion of rights coming through state legislatures and our courts, the record setting mass murders, book bannings, the escalating culture war. Now all we need are a couple of natural disasters, and I’ll be certain that “they” are coming for EVERYONE ELSE.

Possibly, my mind is playing tricks on me again. Or maybe we’ve entered the dystopia I used to enjoy watching in movies. Almost every time I talk to my father, he reminds me that the world won’t be inhabitable in seventy-five years. The Op Eds speak of civil war. The nation is brimming with hate. Is it my imagination or is the train barreling towards station with severed brakes? I recognize my propensity to look for the worst in all situations, but right now, much like how I felt in 2016, my vision couldn’t be clearer.

If anyone knows the name of that movie, please leave it in the comments.

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Previously Published on jefftcann.com and is republished on Medium.

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Photo credit: iStock