Everybody is there. Everybody who ever lived, loved and died in this strange universe of ours, they’re all there. All in the same place, all in the same time, all forever. No wonder Dr Skin can’t get to the fucking bar.
There are a trillion different bars in this place with a trillion different bartenders all trying to hear their orders, but the crush in front of the nearest one is still several hundred people
deep and Skin just wants a mango juice.
He’s in the human section of this infinite party, but there are still loads of gorgeous aliens in the way, with suggestive bumps and nodes. Dr Skin is strictly monogamous and always will be – when you’ve got the best partner in the universe, you don’t fuck it up – but he still can’t help but flirt with the extra-terrestrial.
He’s complimenting one fine specimen on the
shape of their tentacles when he recognises the face behind them.
"Cthulhu! You look great in those shoes!"
"Dr Skin!" says the Cthulhu, because dark gods from beyond the veil have feelings too and are always happy to see an old friend. "I haven't seen you since the Earth fell into the sun."
"Well, yeah, we've been busy, haven't we? What are you getting? I'm buying us a drink."
"It's all free, dude."
"Then I'm getting two drinks each. And all I really need is some vital information about the state of things."
Cthulhu made an awkward bow, his face tentacles brushing the weirdly clean floor. "That's what I've always been here for. I am, as always, full of vital information."
"Well, I'm not even going to ask why out of all the people in all the universe, I get to meet up again with the most useful of all. We'll just leave that lying there."
"Smart."
"I just want to know - what the fuck is going on? Where did all these people come from? Where the hell am I anyway?"
Cthulhu is puzzled. "You don't know?"
"Do I look like I know? As far as I remember, I've been in line at this bar since forever."
"Well, we are at the end of time."
"What?"
"Don’t you see? This is it, this is the end of time. "
"You keep saying that, like it explains everything."
"It’s really simple," says Cthulhu, putting a friendly - and slimy - arm around Skin. "Right here, right now, when everything has finally broken now, and there is no more energy to hold matter together anywhere in the universe, there’s just the endless cold dark of forever. All notions of time and space are gone now, dust in the mouths of ghosts that long since faded away. Time itself is breaking down.
"But somewhere in that truly endless void, there is still one tiny scrap of DNA in the dark. And because nothing makes sense now, everyone who ever lived is in here, inside the last spiral of life. We're all gathered for the last party in the universe."
He waves an arm upwards and Skin looks up to see the other side of the spiral, and he knows there's more party people there, even if they're far too small to see because they're an impossibly large distance away. He looks down the line and sees it all, the vast throng in this huge shape.
Doctor Skin breaks from the embrace. "They’re all here?"
"They’re all here. Everybody is here, and everybody is fucking!” Cthulhu is getting excited now.
“Wait, what?”
Dr Skin is just feeling really, really tired.
"Everybody is fucking!" yells Cthulhu the dark god. "Everybody’s fucking at the end of time!"
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THERAPEUTIC SKIN JOBS #24
EVERYBODY’S FUCKING AT THE END OF TIME
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They finally get to the bar and Skin gets two glasses of the best goddamn mango juice he's ever tasted in his life. Cthulhu orders the blood of a virgin toad and slurps it up happily.
Heading back to the party, they run into Azangel and Snow Sabre, who seem just as curious about the state of things as anybody else, and Cthulhu gets another chance to show how smart he is. Skin gives up on them, promising to catch up later, and heads out, looking for the obvious.
Within a few minutes, he gets into all sorts of fights with various nemesises,
all there for one last showdown. He dispatches them all with ease, because he doesn't have time.
Nobody has any time for anything any more.
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Somewhere on the outer spiral south from Skin, Max Zero is happy to nurse a can of a long-cherished brand of vodka and cola that only existed for a few years in the 1990s, while his pal Karma Kyle pounds down the most generic beer in the universe.
"This is what I don't get," says Max.
Kyle doesn't visibly roll his eyes, but he's doing it so hard on the inside he's turning his brain around. Here we go again, he thinks, but says out loud: "What is it this time? What don't you get?"
Max held up his can of soda. "Where is it all coming from? All this stuff? Not just all these people, but all this food and drink and musical equipment? Who's giving this to us? What's the supply chain?"
"I dunno man," says Kyle, chugging the last of his beer. "I’m more worried about the hangover."
"You should be! You're getting old, dude."
"But I still got it going on."
"Yeah man," says Max, and the two raise their drinks in cheers. "You still got it
going on."
He stops. "Wait, how old are you, anyway?"
"What? What do you mean?"
"How old are you? If this is the future, how did we get here?"
"What does it all mean?" shrugs Kyle.
"I mean, what are we? Are we all dead?
Is this the afterlife? Is this what we get?"
"We’re all reflections," says Johanna Grendul, who has suddenly appeared beside them, and is still trying to get that fucking gauntlet off.
"What?" say Max and Kyle together. Hang out with your friends long enough and this happens all the time.
"We’re a reflection of the universe," says Johanna. "It's all a giant hologram anyway, so it's just reflecting that hologram back upon itself, in the most concentrated space at the end of all things."
"No, that's not it," says the dadamerican, as he sails past, high on his own supply. "They’re a reflection of us."
Max watches him slide on by, then turns back to Johanna, but she's vanished again. Instead there is a strangely distinguished middle aged man in a dark blue suit, with a tiny button that looks suspiciously like a piece of wheat.
"You guys are a bunch of freaking idiots, it’s like a grain, don’t you see?" he tells them. "Everything in layers, but with infinite potential for more life."
"No, absolutely not, says the Phantom Scribbler, suddenly appearing in a burst of outrageous grammar and missing speech-marks. "This is J Street, stretched out and bent around by the crushing end of everything."
"I need another beer, says Kyle, getting up and heading to the bar.
"We need shots," says Max, joining him.
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Looking for the one thing he truly needs, Dr Skin instead runs into Nope Callahan, and it's like catching up with a lost and loved relative in a dream.Their time together is over, but the love is still there.
But in the middle of explaining what happens to his two kids - who have never, ever been mentioned before - Dr Skin falls through a hole in the fading universe and ends up somewhere else entirely.
Nope is just left there, standing alone and feeling like a dork.
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There is blood on his hands, but he does not know how it got there. That’s the first thing he notices.
Then he realises he is sitting in the back seat of a car being driven along a strange magenta desert road. He does not know how he got here, he does not know why the floor of the car is littered with full bottles of alcohol and he does not know why there is blood on his hands. But frankly, Dr Skin does not really give a shit as he hauls out a bottle of gin and tears the cap off with his teeth.
“Gin makes a man mean!” cries out King Goob from the driver's seat.
Sitting in the passenger seat beside him, Rocket Fish joins in the fun. “Everybody booze up and riot!”
“Oh God,” moans Skin. “Not you again. Who do I have to fuck to get a few new faces?”
“Shut it!” barks Rocket Fish, pointing an accusing finger in Skin’s face. “We’re on our 27th incarnation! It’s the new and improved 2025 model!”
“You’re not in control anymore, buddy,” says King Goob. “We’ve taken over things for a while, so sit back and take it easy. We’ll do the driving.”
“That scares the crap out of me,” says Skin, getting started on his gin.
“Drink driving is morally unacceptable” says King Goob as he steadies the wheel between his knees and gets into some beer. “Absolutely indefensible.”
“Not even funny,” says Rocket Fish, nodding solemnly.
“Why do we think we can get away with these things?” says King Goob. As he drains his bottle a rabbit with several more legs than are absolutely necessary darts out in front of the car, but Goob still manages to miss its head by millimeters.
“I thought I was at a party,” muses Dr Skin as he uses some gin to wash the blood off his hands. “We were playing games and everything. How did I get here?”
King Goob looks back over his shoulder, opens his mouth to say something, but changes his mind and turns back around. Suddenly he leapt backwards over the seat, landing perfectly beside Skin. He manages this without spilling a drop from his latest beer and Rocket Fish is equally adept at sliding across the front seat and taking the wheel, managing to miss another rabbit that tries its luck.
“Same way you always did,” says King Goob, answering the question Skin had almost forgotten asking. “You just ended up here, life is like that.”
“But where is here?” asks Skin, gesturing out the window.
King Goob stares out the window, his face set in concrete concentration. “I think we’re on Earth.”
“Nah!” yells Rocket Fish back over his shoulder. “It’s the Mars from one of them Bradbury books. You can tell by the smell.”
“But what am I doing here?” says Skin.
“If you don’t know, I can’t tell you,” says King Goob. “And since when did you start asking so many questions?”
Skin smiles. “Got to get things out in the open. This is why the Doctor needs a companion.”
“If you mention Dr Who again, I’m going to shoot you in the face with my ray gun.”
“Fair enough.”
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Back at the end of time, Nope is really annoyed that Skin disappeared in the middle of their conversation, and it doesn't look like he's coming back. Time might mean nothing anymore, but he still waits an awkwardly long moment before finally giving up and going to look for someone else to ignore him.
"Rude fucker."
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“I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time sitting in cars that go nowhere,” says Dr Skin, nodding his head slowly to a beat only he can hear. “I think I need to get out more.”
King Goob gives him a pointed look but doesn’t reply, shrieking with glee as he opens the sunroof above him. Standing up, he sticks his head up out of the car, howling happily into the wind. Skin isn’t surprised by the sudden move. If anything, he’s surprised by how long it took to happen in the first place.
“Honestly,” says Rocket Fish, rolling his eyes. “Can’t take some people anywhere.”
Dr Skin can’t be bothered replying, sitting back and having a bit of a think about things. He has to quickly shift as King Goob moves about and almost steps on his leg, but he lets this pass too.
He can’t remember how he got here and he doesn’t know what he’s doing. But that’s the way things usually work and the thing that bothers him most is the fact that he’s bothered by his current situation.
But that’s the trick, isn’t it? That’s the thing. That's how they get him.
That's how they got him.
He sits up in his seat. "Oh you fuckers," he says. "That's how you got me."
King Goob falls back down in his seat and is the picture of innocence and Rocket Fish is actually whistling up there.
"Don't know what you mean," says Goob.
Doctor Skin isn't having any of it. He grabs Goob by the lapels. "It's always so easy to just give in and go with it, but I have things to do."
King Goob gets out of his grip and slides back across the back seat. "There's no need to be a dick about it. We just thought you needed one more road trip. One more drive in a strange car, surrounded by violence."
"It's what you're all about," says King Goob from the front.
"It's what it's all about," says Rocket Fish from the back.
"It's like a secret of the universe," says Goob.
"Oh, shut it, you tool," says Rocket Fish. "Just give the whole fucking game away, Ringo."
First there is a car, then there is no car.
Now they're just hurtling through the void at speed, and King Goob is still fucking pouting. "We haven't even had the ninjas yet."
The party at the end of time is coming up, but the Kinky Space Pirates veer off in their own direction, like you do, and dump Skin back into everything with cheerful waves and obscene gestures.
"Goodbye, Doctor Skin," says one.
"Goodnight," says the other.
They do their own thing and disappear down an invisible line.
Doctor Skin lands at the feet of uncool grey aliens who still get off on non-consensual anal probing, but they're too busy chugging Waikato beer from a yard glass to notice, and he's quickly moving on while they're occupied.
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Move on. As if that could ever mean anything in this place. There's no end to it.
Still, Doctor Skin passes on through a huge group of cavemen who are all happily getting smashed on RTDs and gets through with his jacket pockets full of bottles and some suspicious bite marks on his shoulders. He sidles right around a group of Vikings who think they’re in Valhalla, and are hacking each other up, and maybe they’re right, because they're all fine again at the same time as they die. There’s even the Secret Society of Second Stringers.
"Shit," says Doctor Skin to nobody in particular when he spies them in an exclusive roped-off area. "There’s babs, man. I miss babs."
He would go and say hello, but they're busy. Typo Lad is on his feet, offering up another big theory.
"Even if it's just a small part of time," he says between healthy slurps of something that smells strongly of cinnamon, "just a small part of the world, just a small part of something, it makes you feel like you belong. It might not mean anything to anybody else, but it damn well meant something to me."
Doctor Skin moves on, avoiding the gail zone entirely, but doing some bongs with some post humans of the 64th century, still high on the whiff of all things Flash.
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As he goes further, it's all getting more blurred. He knows he's getting closer because he's straying into fictional areas, where ideas too great to stay still spill out into reality. Fantastical criminals and noble muscle-men. The dance floor is heaving with them. Mick Travis is in the middle of it all, and he's dancing with Octobriana. Fight Man just kicked Zenith in the balls and Batman cannot be seen. Cheating his way out of the end yet again, Doctor Who takes Maggie Chascarillo, the vampire Genevieve and Number Six to go see what sort of party is happening at the other end of the universe.
("I warned
you! I fucking warned you!" yells King Goob, brandishing his ray gun and
looking for a face to shoot, but Rocket Fish calms him down with a
lovely glass of red.)
It's not all bad, Johnny Alpha takes off his helmet and has a beer with Carlos Ezquerra. Dredd's there too and has somehow found a corner to back into in this infinite spiral, keeping an eye on everyone. His helmet stays on, but his jurisdiction is dicey.
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Max Zero sits up suddenly. "Wait a second, we never sorted it out. How old are you?"
Kyle shrugs "I don't know, you lose count after the first thousand."
"But what year is it?"
"Time doesn't exist anymore."
"Exactly. But I'm 47 right now, I know that in my soul."
"Well, then we're not in the afterlife then, are we? I know you live a lot longer than 47."
"That's... That's really good to know."
"I mean, you'll never live as long as me, but who does?"
Max is getting distracted again. "I saw Freddie Mercury doing Who Wants To Live Forever over at the karaoke bar. He looked great.
"That's what I'm saying."
"The other thing, if there is no time, there is no tomorrow."
"True."
"And if there is no tomorrow, there is no hangover."
"True." Kyle took a drink. "Mission solved."
Max also took a drink.
"Wait a second...."
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Fuckin' nazis take over a tiny area, but everyone just ignores them and they get freaked out and sing racist beer songs that nobody else wants to hear. Some of them try to fuck with the vibe of the last party ever, some of them are getting the shit kicked out of them forever. This is what they want, so that's what they get.
Even Lipstick Shit, the epitome of all that is rotten in the human soul, doesn't want anything to do with those dickheads.
"I don't want anything to do with those dickheads," the Shit tells its latest target, "but it really is all pointless. Life is a sham, and it all ends with nothing worth holding onto. It all slides through your fingers."
But Lipstick Shit had drastically underestimated its prey, and Agent LOVE shrugs off the cod nihilism and orders another mocktail with a flick of the wrist. "Then we live in the moment, my dear shit. We always live in the moment, because that's all we've got. It doesn't matter if we're at the end of time, or sitting in front of a screen in 2022, we're here right now, and that's all that matters."
The Shit isn't having that. "But the moment is always gone, disappearing before we can get at it. It's gone forever before we know it."
"Oh my goodness, no," says Agent LOVE, suddenly reaching over and taking the Shit in a truly affectionate hug. "It's always here in our hearts."
Lipstick Shit tries to break free, but suspiciously doesn't try too hard.
"This is the worst thing that has happened to anybody ever," it moans.
"See?" says Agent LOVE, not letting go. "There's still time for something new!"
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I've got to give it one last try, thinks Max. He points at his best mate.
"If there is no time, than how are we having conversations? Doesn't that require some kind of linear progression? Otherwise it'd just be one long scream."
"You are one long scream, man," says a weary Kyle.
"This all implies some kind of ending, something that can not be put off any longer. Nothing lasts forever."
"Better get in one more movie, then."
"Yes. Wait. No. Wait. What?"
"All this talk of linear progression, let's just go to the googleplex ,huh? Smoke a cone and watch some shit."
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
"The googleplex. I don't know how it happened or who runs it, but it's a cinema complex up the party a bit, with literally a billion screens, all playing movies from across the universe."
"You're shitting me."
"I shit you not. Turns out the movie format is the most replicated in history. You have got to see the films they produced in Betelgeuse just before it went supernova. They make Mad Max look like Mary Poppins, man."
"Oh, I gotta see that," says Max, happy enough to let the logistics rest if he can just watch movies with his mates forever.
Who could ask for anything more?
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The crowd thins out suddenly and there is a hole in the spiral, with a small ledge looking out onto the nothingness that is now the entire universe. There's someone already out there, sitting on the edge, dangling his feet over the void.
He introduces himself to Skin, but the name doesn't stick for some reason. All Skin can take in is that he says he's from Temuka, like that means anything.
"Is this it?" asks Doctor Skin.
"Looks like it," says the stranger. "But it lasts forever. The food and drink will never run out. All the stuff we're all consuming here is nothing but imagination, and that never runs out, even in the heat death of the universe. It's infinite."
He thinks about this for a second. "I should tell Max. Might put his mind at rest."
He thinks a moment longer. "I should also tell him that he's 47, because we're here at our happiest, and that's his. There's still plenty of joy to come, but the grief of a long life piles up, and nobody wants to be that kind of dropkick bringing down the party. I should tell him that. I should tell him a lot fot things."
Doctor Skin is not bored, no way, man. "I think you already did."
The stranger gets up and wipes non existent ash off his pants. "You're not wrong! Anyway, I got to get back inside. I gotta get back to the family. I got two kids, and they're waiting for me."
"It's the best feeling when they see you, right?" says Doctor Skin softly. "The way their face lights up when they're back with you. That never changes."
"It took us a while," says the stranger. "But I'm so glad we got there in the end."
Doctor Skin knows of his own warmth when he speaks of his own children. "We kept them out of the adventures for a while. Now they're started their own new stories, in new places, we just had to point them in the right direction and fucking let them run riot. There was beauty in their toddler stumblings and the disturbing way they would laugh during nap-time, and I can only imagine transcendence in the own later revolutions."
"Fuck yeah," says the stranger, as he warmly shakes Skin's hand. "I'm also glad we had this last chat. Hey. Do you want to know the real secret of your universe?"
Doctor Skin isn't sure he does, but he's getting it anyway. The stranger pulls him in tighter to whisper in his ear.
"You're somebody that we get into, and have fun with, and do things we couldn't imagine. We're in your skin. This is a skin job. When things were shitty in the real world, I could be you. How bloody therapeutic is that?"
"Just couldn't fucking help yourself, could you?" says Max Zero, wandering past on the way to the toilet.
Skin breaks free of the handshake and goes to say something, but Max is already gone. He turns back to the stranger, but they're gone too now. He's just surrounded by everyone else who ever lived, and never more alone.
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No.
Never alone.
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And there...
And there she is, in the middle of the biggest dancefloor the universe has ever known, (of course she is), and she drags him in, and tells him real secrets of the universe, and he feels like a silly teenager when he's with her, and he's blessed.
Kay.
Holy shit, thinks Doctor Skin, too mind-blown to come up with anything more poetic, stumbling into her arms.
He hasn't seen her in forever and knows she's had her own story to tell, and own adventures to have, and she doesn't need him for any of that, but they still come together at the end.
Skin can't stand it. She just gets more beautiful every day,
"U have to tell her more," says Prince, dancing past with his guitar as purple rain falls from the sky.
He goes to tell her, but they're so far beyond words that it doesn't matter. They both know it. They both say it anyway.
"I love you."
And they all dance in an eternal moment and it just goes on forever.
It's all getting more heaving, with way more obvious fornication, and the sheer amount of fucking means the basic laws of physics are breaking down. There is no centre, it's all the same place, and we've finally all figured it out.
We never get bored, we’re never alone, we never wonder about the small stuff in the end.
Everyone's fucking, everyone's together, everyone is as one. They're all there, and I'm there fucking along with you. We're all there.
The End
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This has been a MADWISH2022production
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