It was a few hours before the end of the twentieth century, and I had cabin fever. If I still had a mirror in that unregistered trailer, I would have seen the bloodshot eyes and mess of greasy hair. But now every surface on the walls had been covered with notes related to The Schema.

There were newspaper clippings, hand-scrawled clues, and obscure symbols, all connected with string, tracing the intimate connections in a plot to drain the world of its libido. I knew for sure that the Neo-Maenad were in on it, using their Bull's Head brand sex toys to sap yonic energies and reincarnate Dionysus. In turn, the Ordo Templi Luxuria – the Order of the Templars of Lust – was putting saltpeter in the nation's water supply, with the help of those frumpy cat ladies, the Scotch-Brite Freematrons. Truly, chaos made strange bedfellows! And at the center of it all was the carnal knowledge in the Erotonomicon, the manuscript I had translated during my furlough in Salamanca. The book contained unassailable proof that life was one huge cosmic joke – but at least it was the one about the two horny nuns, some lube, and a rubber chicken.

The progress of my research made me feel oddly human again. But with a sense of humanity came that basest of desires – I needed to find some Nothingness to fill up with my Being. Yes, it was a foolish idea – as far as I knew, agents of The Schema were probably still after me. But hey, I figured we're all screwed anyway – might as well try and set the terms for how it will happen.

* * *

Against my better judgment, I took refuge – if you can call it that – at The 7 Brothers, a dive bar just off the campus. I might as well have been hiding in plain sight. You know the deal – tacky Americana on the walls, vomit traces on the floor, and dents in the sticky counter top from the last time someone was foolish enough to take Dave's stool. It was the kind of place where vacant-eyed townies blithely welcomed the year 2000 with Southern rock karaoke and a few games of pool, oblivious to the immanent eschaton.

I figured they would never think to look for me here. And yet that's where I found her. Now ain't probability a bitch?

I had barely set foot in the bar when Zara ran up to me – and worse, called me "Professor" out loud. Both of us had clearly gone through a lot of changes since the semester I had taught her.

Gone was the willowy Unitarian Universalist, clad in Birkenstocks and vintage flower-child gear, who once tried to argue for the moral equivalence of Scientology, Abrahamic scripture, and the Wiccan Rede. In her place was a more grounded, worldly adult, with sullen raccoon eyes, and a look that had been seemingly patterned after Helena Bonham-Carter in Fight Club. Yet Zara had not lost her trademark cheer, greeting me with a warm embrace that seemed less-than-appropriate for a former student.

So we found a corner stall, and caught up over beers that tasted like warmed-over cat piss. I regaled her with exaggerated tales of Ottoman bath-house flings, Thelemic sex magick rituals (strictly for ethnographic purposes, of course), and the sheer pointlessness of it all. She told me how she watched The Matrix and finally realized that my views were correct, all along. I'm fairly certain she told me a few other things about herself, but I admit I didn't really pay much attention until I felt her soles on my crotch, laboriously freed from their twelve-eyed Doc Martens.

One thing led to another, and before I knew it, I was going down on her in the bed of her pickup truck, in the parking lot outside the bar. I gazed long into her abyss, and it gazed also into me. I imagined myself as Jean-Paul Sartre, lapping away at Simone De Beauvoir's second sex. I was so consumed by her void that I had failed to notice the Eye of Fatima tattooed on her inner thigh. By then, she had fully opened her body to the pleasurable energies of the multiverse, so I wasn't sure if that was a shriek of pleasure I heard, before I felt the cold steel knocking against the back of my head.