The Universal Flood

The great gods Anu, Enlil, Ninurta, Ennugi, and Ea were sworn 
to secrecy about their plan to cause the flood in the Epic 
of Gilgamesh, tablet XI, now housed in room 55 of the British 
Museum in London. It was baked into clay in the 7th century 
BCE, which turned out to be a very good idea, durability-wise, 
much better than how we’re writing about it now, these files 
that barely exist anywhere. So what will they be reading of ours 
in 27 or so centuries? I’m falling asleep already, thinking about it, 
our digital ephemerality, how no one will be able to dig up 
our old wedding photos for the memory walls of the future. 
There’s a guy building a non-functional replica of Noah’s Ark 
in Williamstown, Kentucky, as a world-class themed attraction 
now open to the public. Hope floats, they say, and it looks 
pretty big, but it also won’t make it to the year 4,700. They’ve 
been saying for a while now that the next generation will live 
forever, that we’ll be, those of us over twenty or whatever, 
the last to die. It’s always us, isn’t it? As if we needed another 
reason to hate the young, because they’ll replace us, like Noah 
replaces Utnapishtim, and science will replace them bit by bit 
with application updates. But in the story, it’s Utnapishtim 
and his unnamed wife who get the immortality. They were human 
beings, but now they’re gods, and go to live by a river far away, 
where, apparently, they still reside. What are they up to now, 
day 84, 210? Just now, a pink and yellow flamingo pool float 
blew by the front and then side windows and across the lawn 
of our house into our neighbor’s yard where it got caught up 
in their shrubs. It’s my daughter, Natalie’s, who’s 14 now, 
and who just ran around the corner of the house chasing it 
as all these stories stand for something real that we can’t stop.