"No," Stu said.
"I was prejudiced against the world," Bateman said. "I admit that freely. The world in the last quarter of the twentieth century had, for me at least, all the charm of an eighty-year-old man dying of cancer of the colon. They say it's a malaise which has struck all Western peoples as the century - any century - draws to a close. We have always wrapped ourselves in mourning shrouds and gone around crying woe to thee, O Jerusalem... or Cleveland, as the case may be. The dancing sickness took place during the latter part of the fifteenth century. Bubonic plague - the black death - decimated Europe near the end of the fourteenth. Whooping cough near the end of the seventeenth, and the first known outbreaks of influenza near the end of the nineteenth. We've become so used to the idea of the flu - it seems almost like the common cold to us, doesn't it? - that no one but the historians seems to know that a hundred years ago it didn't exist.
"It's during the last three decades of any given century that your religious maniacs arise with facts and figures showing that Armageddon is finally at hand. Such people are always there, of course, but near the end of a century their ranks seem to swell... and they are taken seriously by great numbers of people. Monsters appear. Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden. Charles Manson and Richard Speck and Ted Bundy in our own time, if you like. It's been suggested by colleagues even more fanciful than I that Western Man needs an occasional high colonic, a purging, and this occurs at the end of centuries so that he can face the new century clean and full of optimism. And in this case, we've been given a super-enema, and when you think about it, that makes perfect sense. We are not, after all, simply approaching the centenary this time. We are approaching a whole new millennium."
Bateman paused, considering.
"Now that I think about it, I am dancing on the grave of the world. Another beer?"
Stu took one, and thought over what Bateman had said.
"It's not really the end," he said at last. "At least, I don't think so. Just... intermission."
"Rather apt. Well said. I'm going back to my picture, if you don't mind."
"Go ahead."
"Have you seen any other dogs?" Bateman asked as Kojak came bounding joyously back across the road.
"No."
"Nor have I. You're the only other person I've seen, but Kojak seems to be one of a kind."
"If he's alive, there will be others."
"Not very scientific," Bateman said kindly. "What kind of an American are you? Show me a second dog - preferably a bitch - and I'll accept your thesis that somewhere there is a third. But don't show me one and from that posit a second. It won't do."
"I've seen cows," Stu said thoughtfully.
"Cows, yes, and deer. But the horses are all dead."
"You know, that's right," Stu agreed. He had seen several dead horses on his walk. In some cases cows had been grazing upwind of the bloating bodies. "Now why should that be?"
"No idea. We all respire in much the same way, and this seems to be primarily a respiratory disease. But I wonder if there isn't some other factor? Men, dogs, and horses catch it. Cows and deer don't. And rats were down for a while but now seem to be coming back." Bateman was recklessly mixing paint on his palette. "Cats everywhere, a plague of cats, and from what I can see, the insects are going on pretty much as they always have. Of course, the little faux pas mankind commits rarely seem to affect them, anyway - and the thought of a mosquito with the flu is just too ridiculous to consider. None of it makes any surface sense. It's crazy."
"It sure is," Stu said, and uncorked another beer. His head was buzzing pleasantly.
"We're apt to see some interesting shifts in the ecology," Bateman said. He was making the horrible mistake of trying to paint Kojak into his picture. "Remains to be seen if Homo sapiens is going to be able to reproduce himself in the wake of this - it very much remains to be seen - but at least we can get together and try. But is Kojak going to find a mate? Is he ever going to become a proud papa?"
"Jesus, I guess he might not."
Bateman stood, put his palette on his piano stool, and got a fresh beer. "I think you're right," he said. "There probably are other people, other dogs, other horses. But many of the animals may die without ever reproducing. There may be some animals of those susceptible species who were pregnant when the flu came along, of course. There may be dozens of healthy women in the United States right now who - pardon the crudity - have cakes baking in the oven. But some of the animals are apt to just sink below the point of no return. If you take the dogs out of the equation, the deer - who seem immune - are going to run wild. Certainly there aren't enough men left around to keep the deer population down. Hunting season is going to be canceled for a few years."