"What did I tell you a few days ago?" N demanded. It was only 11 a.m., but it was looking to be another long, hot summer day in the Hamptons. We'd been on the phone until 5 a.m. — my time zone — the night before and this was our first call of the next day, really just a few hours later, so it felt like one continuous bout of communication. She had just woken up on the opposite coast and read an e-mail I had sent her when I first got to work that morning, while I was groggy from yet another all-night phone call.

"Um…" It was so hard to remember. She told me lots of things. I sat on the warped wooden steps on the side of the old Victorian in Bridgehampton from which the newspaper where I worked operated, twirling my hair, slightly hungover, and wishing I was still in bed. "I don’t know."

"I told you I don’t want to hear anything else about the apocalypse." I had sent her a link to a website where you could order a pre-made bomb shelter. All you had to do was purchase a tract of land, dig a hole and plop it in. It seemed fail-proof. "I'm not calling or texting you again until you're ready to stop talking about this." She hung up.