The Sea Came in at Midnight by Steve Erickson

Age of Apocalypse, had not begun at midnight New Year’s Eve 1999 after all. This was because, he went on, over the course of the last half century the very definition of apocalypse had changed, as empirically and quantifiably as a virus changes, or a galaxy: “You see, sometime in the last half century,” he said, “modern apocalypse outgrew God.” Modern apocalypse was no longer about cataclysmic upheaval as related to divine revelation; modern apocalypse, the Occupant told Kristin, speaking with more passion than she had ever heard him express before, was “an explosion of time in a void of meaning,” when apocalypse lost nothing less than its very faith—and in fact the true Age of Apocalypse had begun well before 31 December 1999, at exactly 3:02 in the morning on the seventh of May, in the year 1968.
    “How do you know?” she said.
    And exactly as she had answered his question about that New Year’s Eve on the cliffs of Northern California, he replied, “I was there.”
    For instance, the Occupant went on, by the modern definition of faithless apocalypse, the assassination of America’s greatest civil rights leader in April 1968 was not a modern apocalyptic event, because it had a rationale, however villainous the rationale was. The assassination of the civil rights leader’s mother, on the other hand, on the thirtieth of June 1974—Year Seven of the Secret Millennium, he pointed out to Kristin on the Calendar, down along the baseboard— that was a modern apocalyptic event, because it had no rationale at all: the woman had simply been playing the organ in church, when a maniac started randomly firing a gun.
    Such incidents littered the Calendar in sensurround, connected by red and black lines. These included irrational assassinations and killings: nuns in El Salvador (Year Thirteen or, by the old, now obsolete calendar, 27 December 1980), Hollywood Eurotrash in L.A. canyons (Year Two: 9 August 1969), benign Swedish prime ministers walking home from the movies (Year Eighteen: 28 February 1986). Such crimes fundamentally defied whatever conclusions commentators and sociologists and ideologues frantically tried to offer. Incidents of the New Apocalypse included mass exterminations so detached from cogent explanation that tragedy could never quite overcome absurdity: airplane explosions off the coast of Long Island (Year Twenty-Nine: 17 July 1996), schoolchildren beheading other schoolchildren in Kobe (Year Twenty-Nine: 27 March 1997), billowing toxic clouds from East Indian insecticide plants killing two thousand (Year Seventeen: 3 December 1984), nuclear-reactor meltdowns in the Ukraine radiating 400,000 (Year Eighteen: 26 April 1986), 1,400 panicked Moslems on the way to Mecca crushed in a 110-degree tunnel when the air-conditioning failed (Year Twenty-Three: 2 July 1990), thirty-nine members of a religious cybercult, in the hope of riding a passing comet to the next world, committing suicide in Southern California (Year Twenty-Nine: 26 March 1997), and a recently added item, Kristin noted, dated Year Thirty-Two: two thousand women and children walking off a cliff in Northern California. “I can tell you for a fact,” Kristin murmured, just trying to be helpful, “it was no more than 1,999.”
    The Calendar’s apocalyptic flotsam included the emergence of figures of such dazzling dementia as to momentarily mesmerize even thinking people: military buffoons in Uganda (Year Three: 25 January 1971), “holy” men in Iran (Year Eleven: 1 February 1979), megalomaniacal novelists in Japan (Year Three: 25 November 1970), genocidal schoolteachers in Cambodia (Year Seven: 13 April 1975), Nazi war criminals winning presidential elections in Austria (Year Nineteen: 8 June 1986), psychotic Texas billionaires polling one vote in five in presidential elections in America (Year Twenty-Five: 4 November 1992), and ludicrous duets in which it was difficult to know who was loonier—the memoir forgerer, or another