Apocalypse isn’t something that is handed to you on a platter. You have to achieve it.
Also, de-worming is good for you.

There are so many things that I didn’t know before I wrote my book and came to the big city.
Like the fact that Lennon isn’t dead. He just went undercover. He lives in the big city in an underground room. Or a turret, I don’t know, he wouldn’t tell me. He is ashamed of where he lives.
Or the fact that Hitler wasn’t just killing Jews. He was trying to exterminate everyone except the worm people.
Or that the Incas only sacrificed worm people to appease their hungry gods.

Or the fact that worm people are everywhere. To recognize them, Lennon says, you must look at their eyes. They are blank. Vacant.

Now I see them all. They are at all these book parties that I am invited to, all these talks I must give, all the plays I am invited to see. Vacant people, with nothing to say, though they talk all the time. They never listen to what you say; I think they have an inner monologue going all the time.
In a conversation, instead of the appropriate response, if you say something quite different, they still make their appropriate response. It doesn’t matter to them, a conversation is a dance and they are fixated on their own moves, only their own moves.
They are beautiful to watch. I feel like a rock slab in a forest of rich, golden willowy reeds, I stay in one place and scuff my feet, and I watch them furtively, jealously, I watch their rich smiles and the darkness they hide inside their halos of sunshine.

It is terrifying. Sometimes I feel like we are the only persons left alive, Lennon and I, and I am drowning in a sea of billowing clouds and sophistry.
I become claustrophobic, I gasp for breath while the worm people do their polite dances, and sip their wine.
And it is such wonderful wine. Tart, and subtle, like ancient poetry.

And they don’t know that I know about them.

Like the girl whose name I have forgotten. Olive skin, with eyes shaped like olives. Only there is a hungry nothingness in those eyes. There were shadows on the walls, and she had no heartbeat, and a voice like low chimes that said nothing at all, and her perfume that was soft and cloying, like exotic spices touched with the faint tang of madness.
They are such graceful dancers, even when the dance means nothing at all.

That was the night I first met Lennon.
There were a lot of firsts that night.

Lennon told me that thing about the apocalypse. He always comes up with things like that. Blood is sterile, he said, when I hurt my thumb and I put it in my mouth. I asked him what he meant, why he said it. ‘Just like that,’ he said. ‘No reason. Because it is true.’

That is why we are on my motorbike now. I’m in front and Lennon is behind me. We’re speeding, but there is no one on the streets, its one of their holidays, they are all at their worm-people parties. Every so often, Lennon stoops and places something heavy on the road, and we speed up, and from behind us streams a conflagration, a wall of sound and fire that hits us and yet flows through us. And we scream with delight, and raise our arms and speed through the empty streets, the wind making our eyes water.

De worming, Lennon shouts.