There were plans for a party at Ava’s place to celebrate the moment when the continents would converge, when land would finally touch land again after billions of years of separation. Midnight was set to mark the Day of Connection, which is what the news channels were calling it, though it had lately been feeling more nefarious, like an impending crash, an earthy headbutt. There would be champagne and fireworks at the party—according to Ava’s invite—viewed from her apartment’s rooftop.
Arthur had been forwarded the email invite from Florence. She and Ava were roommates who lived on the other side of the water fault zone, which, by then, had thinned out to barely the width of a creek. On the invite, she included a note that there would be dancing at the party, dancing for the end of the world. Arthur immediately RSVPed “yes,” but her end-of-the-world comment did not sit right with him. He had been filled with anxiety and dread regarding the convergence, akin to waiting in his small beach town for a hurricane to hit. Sure, he understood that all the scientists and engineers of past generations gave this shifting process the utmost, enthusiastic support. They called it a solution to climate change, a rebirth of the world, allowing the oceans to reorganize and heal. But it still felt wrong, attempting to reposition the earth like that, set it back to an earlier stage of Pangaea. Continents pressed into place against other continents like puzzle pieces. For some reason, Arthur had been waking up two or three times a night for the last few months due to car accident nightmares. Head-on collisions. Hit-and-runs. Rear-endings.
Arthur had not seen Florence in a number of years. They grew up together, lived down the street, and graduated from the same high school. Then, after college, she took a job on the other side of the Atlantic—which had been reduced by then to the size of Lake Michigan—where she measured recurring earthquakes that were caused by the underwater mechanisms tasked with drawing the continents together. By then, she had fallen out of touch with all of her old friends, so Arthur never received updates about her life: where she lived, what she did for fun, who she was dating.
More recently, however, she showed up, out of the blue, at the funeral of a mutual friend of hers and Arthur’s. She looked nice in her lacy black dress and curly hair. It was there that she and Arthur briefly reconnected, and he learned that she regretted ever leaving town because she was so lonely where she now lived.
“I wish we were all close by again, like the old days,” she said. “Or, like we’ll be again soon after the Day of Connection finally happens.”
Arthur was distracted by how much he had, just there, fallen in love with her. He had always found her attractive, when they were in high school, but never came to loving her. Not in that way, at least. So this came as a surprise to him.
In truth, he doubted that the Day of Connection would really change anything. Here, there. Across the pond or nearby. In their little coastal hometown—everyone was still lonely. Stuck in loneliness. Just going through each day hoping for something different, which was likely the main appeal of the convergence. A new world. Still, the idea of Florence living nearby sparked something like hope in him.
“That will be nice,” he said.
Her expression brightened.
“By the way, your number hasn’t changed, has it?”
Arthur shook his head, feeling his heart throb slightly.
“Let’s keep in touch then,” Florence said. “I need more friends again, now that I’ll be close by.”
Then she left, back home to her own continent on the other side of the shrinking Atlantic. A few days later, however, Arthur got a phone call, and immediately upon answering, he heard Florence say, “Arthur. Are you awake?”
“I am,” he replied, having just finished cleaning up after dinner.
“I need you to play along with me for a second. I have an idea.”
And she proceeded to give Arthur a series of instructions, the first of which was to find something bright, like a flashlight or a lamp, and bring it to the beach, which was only a few blocks from Arthur’s duplex rental. She would be on the other side of the water, she said. So he grabbed a glowing lawn ornament of a giant mushroom and walked to what once, long ago, was the ocean. The water fault zone had been then reduced to merely a wide river. Incoming, like a slow car crash.
“Turn your light on,” she said when Arthur told her he arrived.
He did so, clicking on the glowing blue mushroom and waiving it overhead. He heard her quiet, airy laugh on the other end of the phone. Then, she turned on the flashlight on her phone and waved that, causing the microphone to pick up crisp, wrinkled gurgle of wind.
“You can see some stars tonight,” Florence said. “Big dipper, maybe. That’s nice.”
“It is,” Arthur said. He felt like she was fishing for conversation topics, felt ashamed of that. But for the life of him, he could not think of a second thing to ask that would be meaningful in the way he wanted it to be. So instead, they both sat across from each other on their own beaches, quietly commenting on the breeze and the shape of the sand, until weariness overcame them, and they returned to their respective homes, feeling like they somehow missed each other.
For the party, Arthur put on a crimson suit, but he quickly reassessed, remembering on the invitation that the apartment rooftop would have a pool. So he lost the tie. Tried to find the balance between party and casual attire. On the other end of the water fault zone, Arthur was surprised to find how European the town looked. The trees were different, housing styles and shapes as well. Cars drove on the other side of the street. Even the people spoke in accents entirely unlike his own. He wondered, briefly, if there would be anyone from his continent at the party that he could connect with, but realized he didn’t care much even if there were. He was there to see Florence and only Florence.
Unfortunately, when he arrived, Florence was busy helping Ava fix a large, inflatable movie screen they had set up next to the pool, upon which they hoped to project the TV countdown to midnight. So Arthur found a seat on an Adirondack chair next to skinny man in flipflops, who told him that it’s rare, but not impossible, for someone to live their entire life flipping coins that only land on heads. Statistically speaking, the man reassured him, that it would be rare, but not impossible.
The conversation was not particularly interesting, so Arthur nodded, said, “Yeah,” and “Mmhmm,” until another partygoer took the seat across from them, thereby sharing the burden of this man’s monologue. More people joined the party, and more conversations formed across the poolside. He looked around but no longer saw where Florence had gone, but he guessed she was around, meeting new people, enjoying herself. He wondered if she had anticipated this moment like he had, if she had invited him for any reason more than just as a friendly gesture, a sign of goodwill.
Eventually, Arthur abandoned his own group to stand near the rooftop ledge and look down at the city. Having never seen it before from this perspective, he tried to find the water fault zone, but it was too skinny to see, so he looked for signs of his own neighborhood on the other end, even his house.
It was all different, so vastly different, the landscape before him. Different how? He could not say. But the air felt strongly of change, of anticipation, of people on the street looking over their shoulders, feeling as if the ground was still shifting and their bodies could not find stillness no matter how hard they tried. Arthur tried to feel hope, that all this chiropractic effort humanity went through to change the spine of the earth would do some good, would save them from flooding, from extreme temperatures and earthquakes and hurricanes as it had been intended to do, but he simply did not understand how that would happen. It felt simply like a distraction.
Instead, he watched the faint combustion of fireworks in the distance until the sky turned dark and loudspeakers started playing music next to the pool that nobody was swimming in. Florence was right; there was dancing, though only by a small handful of individuals. The rest of the party simply stood to the side and watched, as if it were a show.
Eventually, Florence found Arthur and tugged on his sleeve.
“C’mon,” she said. “I want to show you something.”
So Arthur followed her to the other side of the rooftop, where a small metal staircase led down to the top of a fire escape. The view was not necessarily better or worse than the spot Arthur had just been standing, but they were suddenly alone, unseen by anyone else, sharing in the quietness of solitude.
“The coast,” Florence said, sitting down and letting her feet dangle over the edge, “is that way, next to that line of street lamps. Do you see it?”
Arthur looked.
“Oh, there it is. I couldn’t before.”
“I thought we would want to watch it happen.”
“Yes,” Arthur said. “I always wondered what it would look like or if we would actually be able to see anything change. Like if the land shakes or if something actually happens differently. Like the land shifting into . . .”
Just then, Florence kissed him. So he kissed her back. They drew closer to each other. And so on and so on. They continued as the ground gradually shifted onward, and in the faint, humid air, they could hear the partygoers count down along with the clock, down, down, eagerly waiting for the world to become something else entirely.
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