Kafka once wrote a book called The Metamorphosis, about a guy who woke up one day as a beetle for no reason and slowly started to deteriorate as his life spiraled out of control.

There was a word for his condition in German called "ungeheuren Ungeziefer," but it didn't really have a single definition. Everyone agreed that the word meant precisely what it described—a gigantic pest or a disgusting vermin. 

Anyway, spoiler alert, but the guy ended up wasting away in a cold, dark corner somewhere and dying while the rest of his family moved out of the apartment and went on to live happy lives. I think it was supposed to be some kind of metaphor for depression or mental illness, or maybe Kafka knew what it felt like to be an "ungeheuren Ungeziefer" himself, and he'd been trying to explain that to people without sounding like a nutcase. 

This didn't have anything to do with the meteor that was about to wipe us out, but I felt like humanity was kind of like the guy who had gone to bed as a traveling salesman and woke up as a cockroach one day. 

Everything had spiraled out of control, and now we were going to die in a cold, dark corner somewhere while the rest of the universe kept living, breathing, and existing without us.

I lay on the nearby queen-sized mattress, contemplating my roachy existence while Ender fiddles with the TV in the corner, trying to find a channel that's not all crackly or showing a grey screen with "please stand by" on it and a monotone beep. Most of the new stations, including the Whitehouse and everything else but the home shopping network, had shut down after all the news anchors went home to be with their families. 

"Bro, this is some bullshit," Ender sighs from where he crouches, and he slaps the side of the TV a couple of times as if to knock some sense into it. "You'd think they'd be able to afford a better TV in this dump. This thing's a literal dinosaur."

"How do I know you're not lying?" I ask him without moving an inch from where I lay. "What if the meteor turns around tomorrow and I wake up with your dead body lying on top of me?"

Ender stands up. "Dude. Why would I be lying on top of you? Second of all, it doesn't work like that. If I die tonight, tomorrow we're both going to wake up along with the rest of the world. I don't know the exact mechanics of it, but I've been through this scenario before. Time doesn't reverse; it just continues where it left off. We both have to go back to paying rent and eating ramen out of those orange packages that sell for, like, a dollar."

I still wasn't getting it, and trying to process what he was saying was like jamming a screwdriver into my ear repeatedly. 

"Okay, so if I theoretically believed you and we went through with this, then what?" I say, and finally sit up in bed, my legs crossed, "How much of this am I going to remember?" 

"All of it," he replies, "but only if I want you to."

The TV crackles to life from behind Ender, and we both turn and watch a hollow-eyed reporter pop up on the screen, a microphone in one hand. "This is Jake reporting to you from NYNS for one final broadcast," The man says shakily. "Kay is within our line of sight now. Significant portions of meteor chunks have already crashed into or destroyed several cities. The world is on fire; how about' yours? As Smashmouth so eloquently put it."

Ender sits down next to me on the bed, the glow of the TV reflecting off his face and the bright green walls around us as we sit in mostly darkness. Not that it fucking mattered, but we had unknowingly chosen the Wizard of Oz room in our rush to escape Skinhead. The owners had even painted a yellow brick road heading towards the bathroom.

"If anyone's still watching, I had an entanglement with Susan in one of the back rooms," Jake continues, his voice a little shrill now. "Oh, Christ! I've been living a lie for the last eight years!"

The TV cuts off and turns crackly before the national anthem begins playing. 

I stand up, and Ender watches me as I peel off my designer sweater in front of him, kick off my shoes, and then drop my pants in one smooth motion. I didn't consider myself the most handsome guy out there, but I figured it was better than nothing and that Ender would take me one way or another.

"But I thought you said you were—" Ender stammers when I gently push him back onto the bed and climb onto his lap.

"I am, but I'm not a robot," I tell him, one hand braced in the middle of his chest when I straddle his narrow waist. "I can feel things, too. Besides, you didn't just come here because you wanted me to kill you; let's be honest. When was the last time you touched someone or you and your boyfriend got together?"

Ender stares up at me, all that long blonde hair splayed out around his head, his hands up beside his head where he'd fallen backwards. "Hector, no," he tells me simply, and it's like all my motivation to fuck him just goes right out the window. 

"What do you mean, no?" I reply, a little offended now and maybe kind of angry now, "You barely even looked at me at the table earlier. Am I not attractive to you? Do you think I'm too ugly to fuck or something?"

"It's just the end of the world, man." Ender replies, and his hands go down to hold my wrists. "You're not in your right mind right now; neither of us are. Let's not do something that both of us are going to regret."

That's when I realized that this total moron was right. When I'd come here, I'd only done it so I wouldn't be lonely, not because I wanted to get my freak on with a stranger, which I didn't. And the weird thing was, maybe Ender had felt the same way as me. 

We both didn't want to die in some cold, dark corner, like the beetle guy in Kafka's story.

---

I'm not sure what happens after that, but Ender and I fall asleep in each other's arms to the sound of the national anthem playing in the background. I lie with my head on his shoulder and his arms encircling my waist in a bear hug. Skinhead had never come back to smash through the door, so we assumed that he had died out there wrestling a wolf or been struck by a small chunk of meteor, which was great for our mental health.

I wake up hours later to the sound of silence and realize that the TV's gone black and the lights in the room have cut out. There's a weird feeling in the air; it's ice cold, for one thing, but there's an electric charge that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. 

I crawl out of bed and go to the window to look outside, and I see flames in the distance and the outline of New York as it burns to the ground. The sky looks black with smoke, and fireballs rain down, leaving trails of black fire in their wake. Grey ash covers everything in a fine sheet of powder.

I wasn't an expert, but I knew we only had minutes left and that I needed to make a decision now.

Ender makes a soft, happy sound in his sleep, and I turn around, my shadow falling over his beautiful body. It was hard to believe that he was harboring something inside of him that could usher in the end of the world.

Could I risk not killing him and not waking up in the morning?

I grab a pillow from the mattress and slowly raise it over Ender's head. 

I'm sure you know how this plays out.