The Last Two People on Earth

Short Story. "Love is the worst possession born of fiction"

Nothing that hasn’t already been told, seen, or heard. For every beginning of the world, humans imagine its end. We write it, we film it, we prophesy it.

I met her on the internet, that heir to the medium Orson Welles once used in the last century to announce a fake end of the world. Back then it was just a hoax, told over the radio by a precocious genius. When it actually happened, no one said anything, but everything ended. You could only feel it in the air, the way you sense it when you turn the final pages of a novel you love. I used to write, but I no longer have anyone to write to. Now that I have so little time left, I tell this story to myself.

First there were only a few of us. Then fewer. And finally everyone vanished. Satellites fell from the sky like dead stars. I watched the last neighbor die from my window. He collapsed while sweeping his sidewalk. Only then did I let myself cry.

The machines kept running. It wasn’t just empty cars driving around. The war, which we thought would be the end but wasn’t, propelled the synthetic limb industry. In the streets, the robotic implants of the dead still dragged their bodies along. You could see them wandering, rotting upright on artificial legs. One morning, a skeleton in a threadbare suit and carrying a briefcase crossed the avenue.

I thought I was the last survivor. Until I saw her online. She had blocked me on that app long before. And right after, I blocked her on another.

Between the two of us, we managed to despise each other as thoroughly as possible. I even shoved her the day we argued while walking hand in hand and she dug her nails into me. Yet when she left with her things, we kissed, the only kiss I still remember from that long, intense relationship.

The last kiss, the final caress down the back in bed before parting, like scraping together every remnant of your past—even when you’re desperate to have that person far away—always feels, with time, like a beginning. What can one say about beginnings that are endings?

This being who had criticized me so relentlessly, filing down my virtues, stoking my flaws until I burned in the fire of my own madness, this being who had pushed me into the void, whom I had mistreated, yes, without realizing it until too late, who had abandoned me long before she actually left, silently and firmly, this being who had latched onto me like a tick, suffocating me like a fairy who knew nothing of life but everything about the end of her own tale, who could trip you while smiling, this dangerous, intelligent being was, for me, humanity’s last lifeline, the only way left to hear a human voice after so many months of solitude. And to see a woman. To smell her. To feel her.

Once that became clear, instinct began to play cruel tricks on me. I wanted to get closer. But the moment I started the car, my feet refused to press the accelerator. I’d come back and slam my head against the wall of my house.

Soon I was driving at full speed down roads leading nowhere, searching for a cliff to offer up my expensive car and my carefully trained muscles.

I weighed the branches of the trees I myself had planted, judging which would be strong enough to hang from. I pressed the knife to my throat the way someone does when they don’t intend to pull it away. I mixed everything I found in the medicine cabinet with vodka and drank it down, only to vomit it back up. I wandered near the zoo animals hoping they would devour me. But the poor lions had no strength left; they barely dragged themselves along. There was no one left to give the thumbs-down in this coliseum the world had become. No one to pull the trigger except my reluctant hand. No one to give me the final push except the wind. But far away—very far away—was her.

The day I tried to reach her house, I wanted to throw myself off the bridge. The river boiled with waves and bodies floated like overcooked hard-boiled eggs. I climbed down from the railing and went home.

I wondered what she would feel. Would she want to see me?

I threw away the phone. I smashed the computer. Nothing tied me to the world anymore, much less to her. But the next day, stripped of all my devices, I cried like a child. What ghost had I created? Had I once again let that insidious demon possess me?

Of all the possessions born of fiction, love is the worst. No priest can exorcise it, no medium can materialize it, no spirit guide can escort it out of this world, no angel can save it, no emissary has sacrificed himself for it. No crucifix drives it away, no silver bullet kills it. There is no way to cover your ears; we have eyes in the back of our heads to keep staring it in the face. There are no backs turned—love plays you and demands of you. At the limit lies the greatest fiction ever created by man: because death—perhaps the second one—rots, but love persists. It is as intangible as time. And it slips away forever. We search for it with patience and find it with madness.

That love—which in truth is a merciless war that fed armies with men and filled early graves in cemeteries—did not destroy humanity. But it very nearly destroyed me. And that was enough.

Knowing I was the last, I began to think again—this time with reason—that she was the only woman left in the world, that the fate of humanity depended on finding her, on reproducing. By breaking my phone I had destroyed the only smoke signal that still bound me to her. The future depended on our union, but I couldn’t have cared less. I never expected her to come looking for me.

Today I walked to the edge of the rooftop, thinking of her, more tempted than ever to dive headfirst. But I stopped. At that moment someone slammed on the brakes of a car that knocked over the trash bin and mounted the sidewalk. It missed crashing into my living room by a miracle. She burst out like lightning, slammed the door, and fixed her eyes on me. It was not the gaze of just one woman.

We’ve just had tea. Her makeup is smudged, there are several cuts on her wrists and a mark around her neck, as though some personality disorder had driven her to slash and hang herself—but I suspect it wasn’t a disorder at all. It was the same instinct that told me to drown, that almost succeeded in scattering my brains across the ground in front of my house, turning all my memories into grayish jam, and then the worms—luckily as indifferent as the lions to that contradictory impulse that had brought us back together—would have erased me from this planet forever.

I had no implants making me walk while dead, other than this need to be loved and wanted, which nothing can remove, and this need to love and want, which made my legs tremble whenever I passed near her, back when I still hadn’t won her over. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I can imagine a ghost in love.

In front of me, she butters the bread.

A little while ago we made the house shake with an entirely understandable passion.

Her smile is as bright as the blade of the knife she holds.

“We have so many plans,” she says.

I nod, unable to stop my knees from knocking together.

Outside, beyond the window, there are many people. With little or no flesh left, torsos slumped or still held upright on metal legs, tin arms scratching at the itch of skin that no longer exists.

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Written by Adrian Fares