My neighbor gave me the full tour last weekend. Steel door, a foot of concrete, air scrubbers he can run for a year. Shelves of water in blue jugs, canned beans stacked to the ceiling, batteries in labeled bins. He's ready, he says, for when it all goes.
I kept quiet. But I've seen what he's afraid of, and it doesn't look like his door.
The thing that keeps everything alive up here is the air, and the air is almost nothing. From orbit you can see it: a blue line hugging the curve of the planet, and it's thin. Thinner than the shell of an egg, to scale. Everything anyone has ever loved is pressed into that one bright rim, and past it is just black that goes on without end and does not care.
That's the bunker. The real one. We're all already inside it.
He walked me through his supplies like a man who'd figured out how to step outside the danger. But there's no outside. There's the thin blue line, and then nothing, forever, in every direction. He built a smaller box inside the only box there is.
I didn't tell him that. He seemed happy, checking his jugs, counting his beans. And I liked him for it, honestly. Down here you can't feel how close the edge is. You just get up, you stock your shelves against the dark, you do what you can.
He offered me a can of peaches on the way out. I took it.
Two men in a fragile place, agreeing to last a little longer.