“Cheers.” He raised his coffee cup and couldn’t quite meet her eyes. Paul’s mother had paid for his university tuition.
“We have to go out dancing tonight,” Melissa said finally. “I’ve got a couple places in mind.”
“I know people who are holed up in remote cabins with supplies in case civilization collapses,” Vincent said.
“That seems like a lot of trouble to go to,” Paul said.
“Do you find yourself sort of secretly hoping that civilization collapses,” Melissa said, “just so that something will happen?”
Later that night they got into Melissa’s beat-up car and drove to a club. Vincent wasn’t legal but the doorman chose not to notice, because when you’re eighteen and beautiful all the doors are open to you, or so it seemed to Paul as he watched her flit through ahead of him. The doorman scrutinized Paul’s ID very carefully and gave him a searching look, which made Paul want to say something snappy, but he decided against it. The new century was a new opportunity, he’d decided. If they survived Y2K, if the world didn’t end, he was going to be a better man. Also if they survived Y2K he hoped never to hear the word Y2K again. At the coat check, Paul saw that Vincent was wearing a sparkly thing that was really only half a shirt, like the front was a normal shirt but the back was missing, just two pieces of string tied in a bow under her naked shoulder blades, making her back seem horribly vulnerable.
“I need a drink,” Melissa said, so Paul accompanied her to the bar, where they ordered beer instead of hard liquor, pacing themselves—responsible adults here—and when he looked back at the dance floor Vincent was already dancing by herself, eyes closed, or maybe she was just looking at the floor, alone in a very fundamental sense: lost in her own little world was the phrase Paul remembered Vincent’s mother using, whenever someone was trying to get her attention while she read a book or stared unreachably into space.
“She’s so spacey,” Melissa said, actually shouted, because the music was quieter by the bar but still not quiet enough to talk.
“She’s always been spacey,” Paul shouted back.
“Well, what happened with her mom, that would mess anyone up,” Melissa shouted, possibly mishearing him. “It was just such a tragic—” Paul didn’t hear the last word, but he didn’t have to. They were quiet for a moment, contemplating Vincent and also the Tragedy of Vincent, which was a separate entity. But Vincent didn’t strike him as a tragic figure, she struck him as someone who had her life more or less together, a composed person with a full-time job busing tables at the Hotel Vancouver, and as such he felt somewhat ill at ease around her.
After two beers he went to join her on the dance floor and she smiled at him. I’m trying, he wanted to tell her, I’m really trying, everything’s gone wrong but the new century’s going to be different. He ingested nothing except beer and danced hard for a while under the influence of nothing—almost nothing, beers don’t count—until he looked up and saw Charlie Wu in the crowd and the night skipped a beat. Paul froze. Of course it wasn’t Charlie, of course it was just some random kid who looked a little like him, a kid with a similar haircut and glasses that reflected the lights, but the vision was so appalling that he couldn’t stay here for even long enough to tell Vincent and Melissa he was going, so he stumbled out onto the street and that was where they found him a half hour later, shivering under a streetlight. Nothing, he told them, he just didn’t really like the music and suddenly needed a little air, did he mention he got claustrophobic in crowds sometimes, also he was really hungry. Twenty minutes later they were staring at menus in a diner where all the other customers were drunk. The lights were so bright that it was possible to be certain that he hadn’t actually seen a ghost. Everyone looks alike in strobe lighting. There are doppelgängers everywhere.
“So why did you come here for New Year’s?” Melissa asked. He’d been a little vague about how long he was staying. “Aren’t the clubs better in Toronto?”
“I’m actually moving here,” Paul said.
Vincent looked up from the menu. “Why?” she asked.
“I just really need a change of scene.”
“Are you in trouble or something?” Melissa asked.
“Yeah,” he said, “maybe a little.”
“Well come on,” Melissa said, “you have to tell us.”
“There was some bad E going around. It seemed like I was maybe going to get blamed for it.”
“Well, because there was just no reason not to be sort of honest,” he told the counselor in Utah, in 2019. “Of course I didn’t tell them anything else, but I already knew I was going to get away with it. I was on academic probation, so it wasn’t weird that I’d withdrawn from school. Paul must be one of the most common names in the world, and that was the only name the Baltica people knew—”
“Oh wow,” Melissa said. “That’s awful,” and he thought, You have no idea. He couldn’t help but notice how disinterested Vincent seemed. She’d returned to the menu without comment. None of the possibilities here were great: either she didn’t care about Paul at all, or getting in trouble was something that she’d come to expect from him, or she was acquainted with trouble herself. I don’t hate Vincent, he told himself silently, I’ve only ever hated Vincent’s incredible good fortune at being Vincent instead of being me, I only hate that Vincent can drop out of high school and move to a terrible neighborhood and still somehow miraculously be perfectly fine, like the laws of gravity and misfortune don’t apply to her. When they’d finished their burgers, Melissa glanced at her watch, a big plastic digital thing that looked like it should belong to a child.
“Eleven-fourteen,” Melissa said. “We’ve still got forty-four minutes to kill before the end of the world.”
“Forty-six minutes,” Paul said.
“I don’t think it’s gonna end,” said Vincent.
“It’d be exciting if it did,” Melissa said. “All the lights going out, like poof—” She spread her fingers like a magician casting a spell.
“Ugh,” Vincent said. “A city with no lights? Thank you, no.”
“It’d be kind of creepy,” Paul said.
“Dude, you’re kind of creepy,” Melissa said, so he threw a French fry at her and then they all got kicked out. They stood shivering and dehydrated on the street for a few minutes, debating where to go, and then Melissa remembered another club where she thought Vincent probably wouldn’t get carded, another club in another basement, not that far from here—so they set out, got lost twice, eventually found themselves in front of an unmarked door through which the bass pulsed faintly from below. It was somehow still 1999. They descended another set of stairs into another permanent night, and Paul heard the lyrics as the door opened,
—and for a second he couldn’t breathe. The song had been remixed into dance music, Annika’s voice layered over a deep house beat, but he recognized it immediately, he’d have known it anywhere.
“You okay?” Melissa shouted in Paul’s ear.
“Fine!” he shouted back. “I’m good!”
They dispensed with their coats and were absorbed into the dance floor, where the Baltica track was shifting into another song, a song about being blue that was playing on all of the dance floors of 1999, of which only a few minutes remained. Last song of the twentieth century, Paul thought, and he was trying to dance but there was something bothering him, a sense of movement in his peripheral vision, a feeling of being watched. He looked around wildly, but there was only a sea of anonymous faces and none of them were looking at him.