At the end of the world, the radio was blaring “Skyfall.” Joe, bent over the steering wheel in a stiff tuxedo, squinted through bird shit and grime and mouthed obscenities. One headlamp was blown and the other flickered like a guttering Davy lamp—it was a small act of mercy that the streetlamps still worked. In the twilight they cast, he saw plastic banners strung across the street like corpses, carrying stale consolations and platitudes. An unlikely one caught Joe's eye, made him snigger. BE JOLLY, it proclaimed, WE'RE FUCKED.

His wife, Ruth, hadn't said a word since they left. Now she reached for the volume knob.

“What is it? Can you see it—the Rock?”

The question startled him. “No, there was a . . .” He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “Never mind.”

Ruth pressed her nose against the window. Her face, distorted, was reflected in the uneven glass, her eyes turned vaguely skyward.

“It would be up there,” she said, “if you could see through this shit.”

Joe breathed in through his teeth. The Rock. That's what everyone called it, the asteroid hurtling their way. They said it would boil the ocean and sear the sky. Fifty thousand years of human civilization, poof, gone in the blink of an eye—nay, their very lives, their only lives, gone. And still they called it the Rock, as though it were something they could swat aside. A pebble.

When they arrived and Joe killed the engine, they found clusters of people idling in the grounds, mingling and tinkling wine glasses. Behind them was the house, flanking a black woods at the foot of a hill. More than a house, it was a sprawling mansion, festooned for the occasion with paper lanterns and torches, red carpet running down marble steps like a dog's tongue, the maw black and square, unlit save for two sconces that framed it like canines. A glint caught Joe's eye as they walked up the steps. He paused.

“You wore the ring?” he said. “Here?”

“Come, Joe,” said Ruth, fiddling with the strap of her Venetian mask. “There's no tomorrow. You know that. And you know that men go in for this sort of thing.”

Joe couldn't argue. What's the point of the good life when life had been stolen from them—of love, compassion, restraint? Hell, of wiping clean the bird shit from your car? The news had driven a stake through the heart of the old world. It was dead. All that remained, now, was the urgent call to fill to the brim the bone-dry glass of their bodily needs. He and his wife were equally complicit. There was no return. And so they were going to a bacchanal, a last-minute, one-way trip to orgiastic bliss.

Like a royal procession, they stepped into the grand foyer trailing a retinue of satin and coattails. A clock chimed the quarter hour. They were early. Good, time enough for a drink or three. They climbed a staircase to the ballroom, drawn by the susurrus of voices that emanated from within, up and into a wine-red haze that embraced them like a mother her prodigal son, a haze redolent of a sweetness that numbed the senses and anesthetized the mind. Apart, slowly drifting apart like two molecules in a Brownian experiment, they lost themselves in the dark tangle of strangers, swept along by laughter and teasing, by darting eyes lusting for contact and flashes of promising patches of skin. Time went by and the anticipation mounted. Rising chatter concealed base urges, hearts beat faster, feet shuffled, shoulders jutted at fragile, febrile, flirty angles.

Brrooiiiing. A quarter to one, and the gong is struck.

The crowd lets out a collective sigh. For a few short moments impossibly suspended like a crystal ball on a blade, a cold hush descends and unfurls among the feet of the partygoers. It does not last, for there comes from somewhere, disembodied, a rising titter that pierces the gloom. The effect is immediate: the precarious balance is upset, the plunge is resolutely taken, limbs entwine, voices drown out the last twinges of sorrow.

The orgy begins.

Much later—long after the chatter has given way to thrusting and slobbering, and aside from huffs and puffs and moans and whimpers, the aural environment is, by and large, otherwise unpolluted—a murmur arises in a corner of the hall from between two baroque monstrosities where a huddle of men and women are lying in various stages of post-coital stupor.

The murmur becomes a clamor, the clamor a yell.

“Everybody! It was a false alarm! Good God, it was a false alarm!”

What? God? A wave of disbelief sweeps rapidly through the ballroom. Mouths freeze agape. Ruth, in the middle of a remarkable feat of fellatio, snaps her head back and wipes her lips with the knuckles of a trembling hand. On the far side of the hall, Joe disengages from the woman pinned beneath him like a hunted doe. Phones whip out.

“It's true!” cries a woman. “Says here it was a near-miss.”

“They nudged it aside after all!” shouts a man.

The babble of voices rises to a pitch. Questions are hurled over the top of their heads to be left dangling like rude iron hooks in a hallowed chamber.

“Near-miss, you said?”

“That good or bad?”

“What now? We go back? Forget this ever happened?”

“Fuck!” declaims a voice as though in answer.

In the hullabaloo, a corpulent man in boxers bumbles across the hall and plants a fat hand on the wall. Suddenly, blue lights blaze on throwing the ballroom into electric relief. A window creaks open and slowly the haze dissipates. Joe can almost hear the furniture groan.

“Out, out!” shouts the fat man. “All of you, get out!”

Joe searches for Ruth, his head spinning, tripping once or twice over the limbs of those scrabbling for clothes. The light hurts, his temples are pounding, and there's a strange aftertaste. He can barely stand straight. Something must have been in the air—surely something worth suing over.

He finds Ruth fighting her dress on her knees behind a moldy, cheap divan.

“Christ,” he says. “It's all fake.”

“Keep your voice down—there's the Smiths!” she whispers hoarsely as he helps zip her up.

Five minutes later, they're driving to town. Joe slumps back in the seat and turns the wheel with an arm that feels like dead weight. They hit another pothole and the remaining headlamp stutters, blinks on, and finally goes out without a sound. Ruth, oblivious, faces away with her head bent and a cold palm pressed to her forehead.

“You okay?” he says.

Silence. Out of the corner of his eye, Joe can just about see her shaking her head at no one in particular. When they make it back to their house, she stifles a sob.

“The kids,” she says. “What are we supposed to tell them?”

But Joe clenches his teeth and holds his tongue. He slows down, stops dead in the street, and glowers at a truck parked carelessly by the curb.

“Jerk,” he mutters under his breath. “He's in our spot again.”

*