The Final Tweak

I woke up with a weightlessness in my eyelids and an ease in my mind on the first day. It really was remarkable. I was far from religious, but I did feel this peace wash over my body that left behind this inexplicable joy, and an unfamiliar lightness of disposition I hadn’t felt for about a decade. Since sometime in my late fifties. Inching my way out of bed, I began my day by opening the curtains to let the light in.

From somewhere deep in my head there came an excitement and an anticipation. That was first. Then came the awareness, and with the awareness came the most exalted news from a place I could not name. This world - this universe - would be undergoing subtle, but wondrous changes. The force of all matter would be working to improve itself over the coming week, tinkering with a few things in the system. The very fabric of existence would be untangled and rewoven.

I have to take a second to speak frankly. This wishy-washy abstract existential discourse can get tiresome, and it gets away from the fact that I’m absolutely terrified, and have been this whole week since that initial morning. It might be because I’m a severe pessimist. With these evident improvements to the world, I can’t help but think that humanity is one of those things that might have been a mistake. That the universe might see the end of humanity as an improvement.

Humanity is good for it’s own sake, don’t get me wrong. We can cure ourselves, we can move wherever we want in the world, and while we can’t turn water straight into wine I did find a kit online the other day that can make wine in under a week if you add water. I thought that was pretty neat. But ask any other living thing, and it will tell you that humanity is one big pain in the ass of everything. We’re constantly finicking with things to suit us. We don’t like that it gets dark at eight in the evening, so we invent our own light. We don’t like how cold it gets, so we make heaters. We don’t like how hot it gets, so we make air conditioners.

To get to the point, if the universe was going to work on improving itself, I can say with absolute certainty that we’re a bug in the system, and we’re going to be fixed.

When the message was put out into the universe that it was time for an update, my mind went swiftly from the joyous feeling I described to bone chilling terror. I grew up in a religious household, and knew everything I needed to know about the creation story to understand what was about to happen day by day.

Nothing happened on the first day aside from the anticipatory feeling that hung in the air. It was like every molecule in my body was bracing for the change. It began to feel as though only I knew what this meant. That this was the first day of the coming seven which would be the last days of humanity. That the hovering presence everyone felt wasn’t there to celebrate us, or make our world better, but to evaluate every piece of existence down to the finest detail.

It has taken about fifteen minutes for me to put down everything that occurred to me within seconds of opening my curtain. Once that stream of understanding raced through my mind, I noticed what was going on outside. Children were gleefully playing in the streets, with hockey nets and basketball hoops pulled out of every garage, lining the street. Neighbours watering front gardens, grinning ear to ear, waving at each other for the first time since moving in. One older woman had her head on straight, walking up the middle of the road, cursing at everything and everyone she laid eyes on. She brought a bottle of what I can only assume to be whiskey to her mouth and took a long swig from it. She knew. She’d lived her life honestly enough to know what it meant to be a human in a world that wasn’t actually made for you.

After taking in the scene, I turned away from the window, strained to utter a breathy “Shit,” and spent the day sitting in the front porch drinking tea my daughter would bring me. Whatever the universe was about to do it hadn’t started yet. I sat with my oxygen tank, and still felt like the two months my doctor gave me to live was too long. Now I felt almost grateful it would be cut short.

The first night of the week descended over the neighbourhood. I stayed up as long as I could, noticing the purity of the dark. The stars and moon hadn’t changed yet. That was on the fourth day. The depth of the darkness between the stars, and around the moon, was now inexplicably stunning. I left my curtains open in my bedroom, and was lulled into a soundless sleep by that new darkness. This marked the beginning of the end, as far as humanity is concerned.

* * *

The sunrise was absolutely wild. It was borealis-like in its colours and its pulse. I sat up in bed and watched for about an hour as the sun eventually broke the horizon with a brilliance that can’t be described. It was the perfect brightness. The light penetrated everything, and even the shadows had a luminescence to them.

This was the second full day we got, and it didn’t disappoint. It actually soothed a bit of the dread I felt yesterday and as I sat in the front porch again, watching the flurry of activity and excitement, I noticed even the old woman had a peace about her. Not that she had accepted our fate. I hadn’t really either. But she did seem to feel there was something about the light to be revered. My daughter brought me another tea, replaced my oxygen tank, and sat with me.

My daughter and I have an understanding that speaks through silences, and I appreciate that about her. As I sit here, journaling about what’s been happening, I’m grateful for our relationship. I know she prefers her mother, whose adventurous personality outgrew me as soon as the kids moved out, but I like to think there’s an unspoken love between us. Conveniently unspoken, given how little I’ve been able to speak these days.

She broke the silence and said, “It really is prettier now, isn’t it. Daylight, I mean.”

Taking a long drag from the oxygen tank, I mustered a drawn out “mm hmm”.

“What do you think tomorrow will bring?”

An exciting prospect occurred to me. After the darkness and the light was supposed to come the firmament; the space between the earth and the sky. The cancer in my lungs likely won’t disappear, but maybe if the atmosphere is changed in as remarkable a way as the dark and light had been, I might breathe with ease for the first time in ages.

“Air.”

I will say that the sunset that evening was breathtaking - lung cancer pun not intended. There are no words in any language to capture what it was like. We only ever knew our sunsets to be orangey-reddish-pinkish-yellowy. This one was like a disco in the sky with colours that faded in and out as the sun slowly descended over the horizon. When the sun finally set, leaving behind a dancing twilight, my daughter helped me up to bed where I stayed awake for hours wondering what miracle tomorrow might bring.

* * *

When I awoke, it was like coming to after receiving CPR. Each breath came and went with such ease that I forgot it was my first real breath since even before I was diagnosed. I don’t know if it healed me, but my whole body surged with new energy that must have come from the changes to the atmosphere. The only way to describe the quality of the air, the smell, and the taste, is like a sip of water when you were close to dying of thirst.

I sat in my daughter’s front porch without the oxygen tank for the first time, and watched as everyone drank in the air. She brought me a cup of tea and sat next to me, placing her hand on my knee.

“I haven’t seen you like this in years,” raising her brow as she spoke, gently patting my leg.

Still with substantial effort, I wheezed, “I... haven’t... felt... like this... in years.”

“Maybe after all this is over, you’ll have more than a couple months to enjoy it.”

I wasn’t sure whether to weep because she didn’t know, or be relieved. She didn’t have to know. I didn’t have to tell her. She might enjoy this more in her blissful ignorance. The tables had strangely turned, and I found myself counting down my daughter’s final days instead of her counting mine. The greater good was good for everything but us, and as much as I try every time I stop admiring all the work going on around us, I can’t reconcile it.

But I did enjoy the breath, looking forward to another new sunset, and I wasn’t let down.

“Tomorrow... should be... interesting.”

Then we sat in silence.

* * *

There was a crash through my window, and my room smelled like peaches. I couldn’t see the sunrise through the rich green overgrowth that was outside. With more in me than yesterday I swung out of bed, though I still walked gingerly, and went straight downstairs.

I watched my feet as I made my way, and it wasn’t until the last step that I noticed my foot settle on the softest bed of grass I had ever felt. As my eyes raised, I saw the whole house had been all but ripped apart by greenery. It was beautiful, but I felt the truth of it. There was no consideration for our house when the plant life had been seen to. I doubted there would be any consideration going forward.

Weaving through strange flowery vines, and the odd bush in the living room, I managed to get to the front door, but couldn’t see the street through the erupted garden. There were tomatoes, and peppers, and squash along the ground. I picked a couple berries and walked through the strange new woodland that was our front lawn. Without meaning to, I had carried on forward until I reached the front door of the house across the street. Meeting the eyes of my neighbour, the confusion on his face was clear. I could see him thinking behind his eyes, ‘Sure all this greenery is beautiful, but it’s a bit intrusive, don’t you think?’

I nodded and turned to go back home, stuffing my pockets with whatever bit of fruit and vegetable I saw, tossing the odd blackberry in my mouth.

My daughter was in the kitchen, making a salad and whistling “What a Wonderful World”. She didn’t see this as an intrusion. She was overjoyed at the grocery basket that sat everywhere within arms reach. We didn’t sit in the front porch today. Its roof was sagging, and looked like it might cave in under the weight of the peach tree. We sat on sofa chairs slanted by the shifting earth, and ate from giant pots we filled with what we could find.

We hardly slept that night. When it dawned on me what the evening would bring, we dragged a wealth of pillows into the backyard and set them under the largest gap in the canopy above us. We listened to the new river behind our house as the sun took the shimmering twilight with it, and the sky began to sparkle in the most spectacular fashion.

The moon swelled, and stars seemed to form and explode in the same moment. After a couple hours of this light show, the sky settled again. It was now dense with stars that moved around each other, sometimes colliding in an explosion of technicolor. Some stars emitted a radiant violet, blue, or yellow, and some took on a gentle hue of some new wave of light.

* * *

When the sun rose the next day, stirring my daughter and I, its transformation quite literally dawned on us. The light around us remained as brilliant as the first day, but now we could stare squarely at the sun, and the autumnal colour it had developed. It didn’t hurt the eyes. You could feel the warmth of it, as though it were a campfire you were sitting by.

The gentleness with which the sun carried the day allowed for a deep restful sleep even if you sat directly under it in mid-afternoon.

My daughter wasn’t concerned about me on that day. She told me she wanted to walk around and see as much as she could of what had been changing, and set out from the house. I enjoyed the property enough, and occasionally bumped into a neighbouring house, always turning back home. The dread I felt eased today, and I began to feel peaceful about it all. If this was the world we would be leaving behind, despite ourselves, there’s no sense grieving. You could feel how much more life there was, and I could see how much my daughter enjoyed soaking in every bit of it.

* * *

Last night the birds and the fish happened, and the chirping in the morning was sonorous. When I opened my eyes, the flurry of activity above my head was incredible, and I could hear the river splash excitedly with the flood of life that swam through it.

But I’m growing uncomfortable, feeling crowded and claustrophobic.

The world is overwhelming, and I feel now more than before that we won’t be welcome in it come tomorrow. There’s no way to tell how it might happen, or how it might feel, but I prayed for the first time since childhood. I prayed that it would be painless. That’s all I’m worried about.

I’m writing this now because there might be some thing on the other side of this that is conscious. Some thing to replace us. I don’t know what it will be, or what it will look like. What form it will take. But maybe, and this is probably a futile hope, the universe will spare the books and the things we leave behind under the new growth, and maybe what replaces us - if anything replaces us - will read this and think, ‘We have to make sure we’re a part of this, or else we won’t be next time this comes around.’

It’s been about seven full days since I woke up differently. Since something returned to this universe and found it needing change.

Maybe it was answering prayers. Maybe it was simply due.

I am excited for what this world will bring. I am sad I won’t be a part of it. But life looks good. It looks healthy.

The sun is setting again.