The Idea

Samantha,
I feel so tired.
You’re so young and beautiful and vital you can’t possibly know what it’s like.  I feel my world shrinking.  I’ve seen so much of the globe, been to the bottom of the sea and stood on top of the world.  Earth is such a tiny place, you don’t even realize.  And it’s dying.  Just like I’m fading and falling apart from the inside out, the rind of our little rock is rotting.  One day someone’s gonna blow us all up or we’re gonna use up the Earth’s bounty and then what?  We’ll just be perched on some rotting fruit waiting to go the way of the buffalo.  Can you feel it?  There’s a futility hanging over everyone’s heads just like a big clock in the sky counting down to zero and everyone’s scrambling to finish their significant something before time runs out.  What no one understands is that when zero hits nothing will be significant anymore.  Our existence will end. 
I’m not a God fearing man; you’ve heard me talk about the futility of faith.  We don’t go to some bouncy cloud in the sky when we die; you know that don’t you?  I can feel death coming as if I’m falling through the sky with no parachute and at the bottom is an open grave. 
I’m doing something Sam.  I’m not changing the world, but when the Earth is dead and everyone’s gone we will all survive through me.  I’m going into space.  I’ll probably be long dead before it matters, but it’s the only thing I can do.

         As always, my Love,
         Chuck

It seems like the sun was shining that day.  That was the day the whole notion came to me. 
         I say it seems like the sun was shining, but it’s always hard to tell for sure.  With the clouds sitting over everything like dust on an abandoned sofa the sun can have a hard time getting through on the clearest days. 
         When I woke up the world was still dark, but a smear of lighter gray washed out the horizon.  I lay in bed for a while that morning, thinking.  I do that a lot.  When you have more money than God you can do anything you want.  You can spin your globe and just go wherever your finger lands.  You can buy the Lakers.  You can pay someone to take care of your parents so you don’t have to know exactly what’s coming for you.  I want to stay in bed most mornings.  I want to wake up and contemplate my life.  It had been fun, and I’d had plenty of luck, but I still pondered it some mornings and still do.  What will I be remembered for?  Once I die my money belonged to someone else.  All this shit I accumulated when I went places? Someone else’s.  What had I actually done?  Made some great investments?  I was always acting on advice.  Came up with a neat idea?  It’s not exactly a staple; one day people will realize that.  And even if they don’t, so what?  I had all this cash and all this stuff and it meant as much as a tear in the ocean.  So I got out of bed that morning and made myself an omelet or some oatmeal or a fucking protein shake and I had this nagging worry in the back of my mind.  This worry that once I’m dust in the ground that’s all I am.  Just so many little motes floating through the air.  No memory.  No place in history.
         Who even knows how much longer history will last anyway?  Storms all the time, masses of people dying from thirst everywhere else, political anarchy rampant throughout Spain, China, India, Greece, Hungary…the list goes on.  All the oil rigs in the Middle East abandoned years ago.  Every coal mining hamlet across the world transformed into a ghost town.  Little enough ice left in Greenland to keep your lemonade cool in July.  Soon there wouldn’t be any room left for us.  We were still buzzing around the beehive not realizing it was in the middle of the desert with nothing but sand everywhere.  I mean all of us; humanity.  Soon enough no one would have a place in history anymore.
So, here I was, moping about my life and what the hell to do about it, when I had this idea.  It was the type of thing that people normally have momentary and grandiose fantasies about and then forget the next moment when the news says some terrible new sickness has been invented.  But not this time.  I’m a billionaire.  I could wake up and lay in bed.  I could do this, too, if I wanted.  So I got in the shower.  I was going to save humanity.

When I hit it big there was a lot of people who liked to tell me how great I am.  I liked it, don’t get me wrong, but soon enough you get tired of fakers.  I had all these people all around sticking their lips on my ass trying to get a piece of my action. 
Thank God for Robbie. 
Robbie and I have been friends since high school.  Good friends.  The kind you can just watch a movie with and hang out.  The kind you can go to when your supermodel girlfriend dumps you.  He’s the kind of friend who says something with a little bravado to make you feel better: “At least you got to fuck a supermodel.”  It’s always good to have someone around you know can be trusted.  That person that accepts your vices as part of the package.  The one who picks you up from the hospital more than once when you give yourself alcohol poisoning.  The one who bails you out of jail.  Someone who really cares.  So, I made him an executive.  Not really in charge of anything, just to be there and have my back. 
I’ve never spent much time in the office.  I just make sure that my board isn’t turning me into one of the corporate devils of the world and pretty much stay out of the way otherwise.  They’re all better at making money than I am. 
I went into my personal suite of offices in the Chemicron tower in downtown L.A. and asked Nadine, my assistant, to get Robbie on the phone.
“Hey man, what’s going on?” was what he asked me when I got the line.
I paused for a second when I heard the genuine concern in his voice.  I looked at the time.  He probably hadn’t heard from Nadine at nine a.m. in years. “Everything’s fine, Robbie.  I have to bounce something off you, though.”  I told him about the major epiphany I’d had that morning.  I told him like I was some blabbering zealot freak from some second rate underground cult.  I told him like a lunatic raving in the hold of a truly epic fever.  He got the point.  He got it so good that by the time he spoke I’d already become used to the sound of my foot jittering on the marble tiles beneath my feet in the silence.
“Dude.”  That was all he said.  I had the phone in a grip that would make any porn star jealous and all he said was, “That’s crazy.”
Silence again.