Squidward took a long draw from his cigarette and flicked the still-lit butt onto the prostrate Sandy. The cherry-red flame burrowed carelessly through her plastic suit and into the soft fur of her back, a dying star in the starless dusk of Neo Bikini Bottom. A trail of greasy smoke curled up from the wound, filling the alleyway with the scent of burning hair.
"Everyone is in pain all the time, Sandra. Either you master that pain, or you learn to crave it."
Sandy's hands were leaden, her arms as sponge. Unable even to brush the cigarette from her back, she struggled to lift the dead weight of her broken body. With an impossible, defiant effort, she brought herself to her knees.
"No," she said through gritted teeth. Her mouth moved uselessly around the next words, opening to release not sound but foamy, pink blood. Squidward snickered.
"No? Is that all y—"
"No."
Sandy lifted her head to look Squidward in the eyes. For one moment, though he would never have believed it himself, the octopus felt true fear.
"That's just… what you tell yourself. That's just… how you justify hurting people." Sandy spoke more forcefully now, spraying a fine mist of blood onto the front of her helmet.
"Because… it feels good. Because… because… you're weak! Weaker than a… Y-you-"
Two of Squidward's heels crashed down with an explosion of glass, and night came to Neo Bikini Bottom.
Neo Bikini Bottom resembled its predecessor in name only. It was a dark stretch of greasy concrete that sprawled across the sand like a great scorch mark, punctuated with ugly steel buildings that jutted from the earth with neither rhyme nor reason. Never before had the capacity of modern industry to create entire towns without a moment of thought or a single happy coincidence been so clear. The entire city was a bare-minimum, disposable stage on which the survivors could act out bare-minimum, disposable lives, forever stumbling after the dream of a day when they might lose themselves completely in the performance and forget the cheapness and flatness of the set. No one who had witnessed the original town's fate would believe in any other sort of place, or in any other sort of life.
Tragedy, as always, had been sudden and ridiculous. One summer day the blue horizon had darkened, and moments later the sunwashed Bikini Bottom was gone, transfigured instantaneously to a giant handful of rubble strewn across the vast seafloor. Only later would survivors piece together a fragmented tale—some godlike, titanic being, dragging itself through the floor of the Pacific, had plowed straight through their small pocket of civilization. It had probably been an entirely arbitrary, thoughtless action—that Bikini Bottom was in its path was simply another coincidence of matter, as random and cruel as the reactions in the primordial brine from which life was first born.
Mr. Krabs had been killed instantly, dashed against the splintered remains of his favorite money-counting desk. SpongeBob, too, had been flattened, but fate was not so kind to the sponge; without any organs to crush, he would live on past the world into which he had been born, would live on to see the carcass of the town putrefy beneath its concrete shell. For the rest of his life he would be searching for bloodstains washed too quickly away in the name of reconstruction, desperate to convince himself of the reality of a past the others would sooner forget. Only SpongeBob had resisted Plankton's so-called rebuilding of Bikini Bottom, dragging out a series of grim protests that even he knew were doomed from the start. Embarrassed on his behalf, most of the town averted their eyes from what amounted to little more than public self-flagellation. When the sponge accepted Plankton's offer to work at the hollow shell of the Krusty Krab, rebuilt in name only, the townspeople of Bikini Bottom were merely relieved to see the painful memory end its death throes and at last grow silent. And so SpongeBob was granted the small mercy of being allowed to vanish quietly into history, and nurse his festering wounds alone in the darkness. Plankton never even bothered to ask him the secret formula for the once-legendary Krabby Patty; there was no point anymore, nothing to compete with.
Ironically, Mr. Krabs himself would be remembered as a hero. He was cast in bronze and placed at the site of his old restaurant, gazing proudly off into the horizon from which death had first appeared. This was a particularly cruel trick on Plankton's part: the money-grubbing owner of the restaurant would be remembered as a favorite son of Bikini Bottom, forever honored with a view of his rival's absolute success. No trace of the crab himself remained beneath the gilded veneer of heroism; Eugene Krabs had at last been destroyed completely, wiped from history.
Squidward, upon returning from a vacation to find his home destroyed and his workplace somehow even worse than before, had stood before the wreckage for hours, wordlessly holding the broken halves of his clarinet. There was nothing to say, and nothing to do. Reality stood before him, a smoking ruin, a bloodslick strip of sand. Bikini Bottom had always been nothing, he realized. Anything that had been anything wouldn't have vanished like this. Wouldn't have been so dwarfed by the monster that trampled over his entire life. A life lived amongst nothing, worth nothing. Death would have been preferable, but suicide suddenly seemed an absurd proposition—how does one throw away nothing? It was meaningless, a logical impossibility. For as long as he lived he would suffer, and that alone was something onto which he could grasp. The pain deep within him compacted into a hard, heavy core colder and denser than steel. An anchor to life. He dropped the shards of his clarinet and walked onward, onward into the endless and directionless open sea, not to be seen again for years.
When the Americans first contacted him in a panic, somehow reaching his shellphone with their sob stories of the same beast incinerating their great cities and slaughtering their masses, it was only with a great effort that he refrained from laughing at their arrogance. He had always heard of the amazing industry and power of the human race—all come to nothing, in the end. But there was one thing that had chafed against him: as long as this godlike beast, this Godzilla, lived, the humans could spin their fairytales, could see themselves as a race of defiant underdogs. Only by destroying Godzilla, and leaving only the memory of their absolute powerlessness, would their humiliation, and by extent the complete affirmation of the emptiness of the world, be complete. Or was that just his own personal fairytale, one final attempt to deceive himself into believing that the choice between murder and certain death meant anything? Either way, when the Americans' pleas for compassion inevitably turned to threats of violence, Squidward was ready.
The Americans planned to use a device called the Oxygen Destroyer, which had apparently deployed in the past to obliterate a similar creature. A single unit would render a good portion of the Pacific Ocean an anaerobic graveyard and strip the flesh from the bones of every organic lifeform unfortunate enough to be trapped within its waters. It seemed the scientist who had developed it had given his life to ensure that it would never be used again—Squidward envied him. He must have died believing firmly that he could stand in the way of the proliferation of destruction, a pursuit to which humanity had always been slaves. In the end, he had only slowed the Japanese government's efforts to recreate the horrific device, which in turn would be stolen by the Americans and, at great expense, strengthened well beyond any reasonable point. Squidward couldn't help but admire their drive; if lives were worthless, and ending them profitable, America had—perhaps predictably—thrown itself wholeheartedly into an exceptionally lucrative industry.
Sandra was unlucky. She had cornered Squidward in an alley as he hauled the device home through the murky evening of the reconstructed city. It seemed the Americans had reached out to her first, and revealed too much in their haste. Once, long ago, he would have feared her. But she had been at her home when disaster struck, and had spent hours pinned beneath her great tree, blanketed in broken glass. Her muscles were scarred and atrophied, her once gratingly loud voice a painful rasp. With a fatal, stupid defiance, she had attempted to stop him. And so he stepped forward into the lightless future, expecting to plummet into a chasm too deep and dark to ever return from. Only, there was no chasm—or rather, he had already been at the bottom all along. Killing, dying, saving, living. It was all the same within the terrible shadow of the past.
Wasting no time, Squidward immediately began preparing to bring about the end of days. It seemed only appropriate, however, that he should deploy the Oxygen Destroyer somewhere with a nostalgic backdrop. Some trace of the old Squidward still remained in him, it seemed—he would kill that lingering piece here. It was hardly surprising to him that SpongeBob was still in the back of the restaurant even in the dead of night, and even less surprising that he was easily able to overcome the sponge, shoving him into the meat freezer with neither hesitation nor explanation. But SpongeBob knew enough. He could see it in the octopus's eyes, could see the shadow of death reflected in the dull metal of the device.
His pores beginning to fill with ice, the sponge could only stare helplessly from the freezer as Squidward set about turning Neo Bikini Bottom into a cemetery. For a moment Squidward stared blankly into the blue water, towards the ruins of his old house. SpongeBob wondered if he might be remembering better days. Things had been so carefree then. It was still beyond comprehension that, throughout those grease-scented years, something incomprehensible and unstoppable had been slumbering deep within those frigid, dark, ancient places beyond even Rock Bottom. That all of their petty struggles over the Krabby Patty formula, all of their trials and triumphs, had been inevitably bounded by that deferred horror, minuscule, invisibly small in proportion to it. Perhaps, SpongeBob thought, all happinesses were small happinesses—moments, trapped in fragile bubbles of ignorance, where one might find some effervescent bliss, or at least a pocket of numbness, just enough to seduce you into enduring another day within the freezing sea of time. And then, as Plankton placed his fins on either side of the Oxygen Destroyer, the coldness became absolute, and SpongeBob thought nothing at all.
Squidward's face was blank as he turned away from the activated Oxygen Destroyer. He himself could not decide what it was he had done. Had he made the only choice available to him, or had he at last exacted revenge for all those worthless days, those long, corrosive years of pointless work and restless evenings that had eaten away at his soul? What did he feel? Why did he feel nothing at all?
Sandy, SpongeBob, all the inhabitants of Neo Bikini Bottom… were they merely a casualty of his quest to destroy himself?
Lost in thought, Squidward turned just in time to see a restaurant table seemingly suspended in the water inches from his face. For a moment it was as if it were moving in slow motion, and then reality stuttered back to its horrible trajectory. His world spun, reorienting itself painfully against the floor with a burst of stars and fountain of blue blood. Over him stood Patrick Star, dumb, uncomprehending, unstoppable, half of a dripping Krabby Patty in hand. Death incarnate.
Still reeling, Squidward grabbed the spatula SpongeBob had left on the grill. It was red hot, and the melting plastic handle seared his tentacle as it closed around it, but he hardly noticed. Patrick, of course, was oblivious, shouting some nonsense about his friend. It seemed he was working himself into a rage intense enough to boil over his brainless lethargy.
"And," he shouted, standing over the mangled Squidward, "Here comes the giant fist!"
So, this is it, thought Squidward. This was not a punishment for the others, though Patrick probably meant it as such. It was just the order of things. The will of Patrick which set his fist into motion, the machinations of Squidward which would bring the ocean to ruin, all were merely expressions of the unchallengeable gravity which dragged all of them into place from moment to moment. Always downward, downward, toward the unknowing, lightless void at the end. Entropy, inanimate and inviolate; an emptiness more perfect and infinitely more cruel than any god.
If random violence was the order of the world, then reproducing that power was neither radical nor admirable—to forever pantomime the currents of nature, throwing one's own body again and again upon pyres erected to no purpose, that was the hell of beasts. But, then, what else was there, but the tyranny of that understanding? Was an octopus not a beast? Was it not right and proper, or at least blameless and inevitable, that he should injure, kill, be injured and be killed? It had nothing to do with pleasure. Yes, that was it! That was why he had felt nothing! There was no room for joy, and no cause for guilt, as they all inscribed their wounds and their memories upon each other's rotting minds. This world was endlessly blasted by lightning bolts of agony—Squidward was made of conductive flesh, and so he conducted. There was nothing else, no sins to absolve and no ablutions to perform.
When the beast first passed, some thought to sate its thirst for blood, and so win its cooperation. The rich smoke gave them away. For days the scent of alder and salmon fat hung over the remains of the convention hall. Arrogant fools, to think that our flesh was worth anything at all…
The fist came, and at the same time Squidward buried his burning spatula deep into the core of the starfish, propelled by instinct as much as any desire of vengeance. There was a hiss, a cloud of steam, and the impact of Patrick's blow—a torrent of confused sensations that overflowed the octopus' brain as it was pulverized into a viscous fluid. Carried over its liquifying circuits at the last moment, the taste of Squidward's own blood in his mouth was just like that of a Krabby Patty.
Patrick stumbled over to the refrigerator door, and put his immense brute strength to work peeling the steel from its hinges. He knew something was wrong with him, but he didn't know what—he had to ask SpongeBob, whose frozen form he could just barely make out through the glass. As he flung the door behind him, Patrick's momentum sent him careening across the bloodied floor with a crash. He felt… funny, he thought. As though something that had been hanging on by a thread for years had finally snapped, and the tension that had tugged at the edges of his conscious for all that time had instantaneously vanished. His arms fell to his side, limp and immovable, as he drifted weightlessly through daydreams, abstract impressions that spun outward from whatever had passed for thought, unravelling as they went. Patrick, always separated from reality by a lacy veil of ignorance, hardly noticed as the last embers of his primitive mind smoldered out and the soft dreams gave way to a velvety, opaque sleep.
Shivering, melted frost evaporating off of him in great puffs of steam, SpongeBob cooked. He slid the spatula ever so carefully beneath the patty, felt the slight give of the browned meat coming off of the grill, the gentle weight of the burger as it flipped through the liquid aether. Beyond the glass walls of the Krusty Krab, shimmering in the chemical haze, the dawn sun was rising incarnadine, bathing the restaurant in red light.
The patty landed with a soft pat and pronounced sizzle. It was perfect.
Yes, thought SpongeBob, as the first bubbles began to lap at the windows, This is good.
He stepped over the twin wrecks of Squidward and Patrick, leather shoes slippery against the gory floor, and gathered together two golden-brown buns, the crisp lettuce, the just-so pickles. There, in the sizzling silence, warmed by the grill, SpongeBob constructed the perfect Krabby Patty.
It's okay now, he thought. Things will be right again, soon enough. The first waves of mass hysteria, far away and dull, reached the kitchen, and then the fizz of the entrance being breached. Shutting the kitchen door, SpongeBob went into the cupboard and found the small jar of secret ingredient that he had stowed away all those years ago, scraping it from the ruined floorboards and picking out the splinters and rubble. There, in the confined near-darkness, he savored an authentic Krabby Patty. At last, it was exactly as he had remembered. A dusky illumination bled in through the cracks of the door, dyeing the shadows a blood red. He closed his eyes and let the old memories fill him, envelop him in a warm ignorance. He had spent so long away in a strange world, separated from his home by a growing and impassable sea of time. But now he knew.
The dead ocean would not become a cemetery. A cemetery was something the living bore inside of them, their hearts becoming heavier and heavier with the ghosts of the past until at last the weight of their losses dragged them down into the darkness. Something they projected onto stones and mounds and urns quite content to sit silent until the end of time. No, this time it would be a real, proper end. A complete death sweeping in and leaving only bleached bones and chitin and sponge, white and smooth as fresh-fallen snow. With no scars to read and no one to read them.
SpongeBob felt joy blossom in his breast for the first time in all those years. He did not fear disappearing back into the blinding, glimmering whiteness. No, far from it.
He was ready.