THE END OF THE PARTY

The party was so good that, by the end, no one was able to leave. Beginning in a blaze of virgin enthusiasm around eight o'clock, gathering speed and excitement at nine, becoming focused and wilful as the clock struck ten; then the crunching router of substances whizzing minds into elegant shapes through eleven, twelve and one; the gilding of each look, each gesture, each implicit sexual invitation at two and three; the sublime regret of four; the anticipation as five ticked over; the day and, it was unanimously felt, all of us, reborn as six gave way to seven and eight. At 9am, as a trembling gratitude for the privilege of the life that we had been given to live and to enjoy passed over us the first nervous partygoer struggled to his feet - it was Alex H - and tried to make his apologies. No more than a sentence in was he when he burst into tears, rested a sweating hand on the coffee table and sank once more to the couch. Hours passed. Initially immobile, we tried to remember the form and rhythm that a normal day followed, to destroy by willpower the new template set by the party, and were unable to. We raged around the patio and the garage. Helplessly, we tried on clean t-shirts and attempted to find the ingredients for toast. We stood in tremulous awe of the bathroom's toothbrush cup. We ordered McDonalds on Uber Eats and sat in an anxious circle eating burgers and trying to remember if it was normal. Surely - surely - burgers must be normal. Then, as the shadows lengthened in the yard we drifted once more to the stereo, and turned the music up, and then we opened some wine, and it was as though a goddess of inspiration had reached an elegant hand into the clearing and created a door for us to step through. We partied again. We heated up cheese and spinach triangles, we went into the cupboard and found a carton of beers, we opened up Samuel P's bottom drawer - Samuel P was with his parents - and pulled out a zip lock bag of marijuana and took it to the backyard, where we arranged milk crates and attained the mindset. Then we taped up paper on the shed wall. THE PARTY, we painted in thick green letters. For want of an alternative blueprint to enjoyment we stayed up all night, and when the morning came and it was a work day, resolved to not repeat the past's mistakes and instead emptied our bank accounts into a central fund and procured Turkish pizzas and Coca Cola and four dozen hard seltzers. Clear-eyed and resolute, we set our jaws and continued the party. Kirsten lived next door and she poked her head over the fence and said "I'm just working from home today. Could you turn down the music a little bit?" And we said Kirsten - we've always liked you - come join the party. And she narrowed her eyes at us and stomped back inside, but then 20 minutes later was at the front door, changed out of her work clothes into a sports bra and bike pants and holding a shopping bag with tequila, triple sec, limes and salt in it. "Kirsten's here, Kirsten's here, Kirsten's here!" We chanted, conga lining through the bedrooms and laundry. Kirsten made drinks for us and we said Kirsten, Kirsten, slip your wrists free of the shackles of productivity and just party with us. And she made herself a double and slid onto a barstool next to Cassie M and they fell in love and snuck off to bang in Samuel P's bed. Later the cops came. "Join our number," we invited them, but they shook their heads sternly. "Then show us where we have exceeded the bounds of the law," we challenged, and they looked at each other uncertainly, and we continued, "Is it not the primary function of the law to fortify those manifestations of leisure and liberty that lend our society its character?" They exchanged looks of conflicted agreement, as if years of conditioning were slowly but irresistibly being peeled away from their brains like old wallpaper from a wall. "You are invited to the party," we again urged. This time they complied, even radioing the station to tell them to take up the cause and unlock the drunk tank and make the drunks a frozen pizza. As he replaced the radio on his belt the largest cop, Brandon S, as we came to know him, turned to us with tears in his eyes and said "Whatever you need - whenever you need it."

The party continued through the next week and then the one after. Eventually the mayor landed on our doorstep, promising an end to the party. He rested a hand on our iron fence and told the reporter from the local news that the party would end or he'd hang up his sash. We filmed him through the curtains and leaked the footage to his opponent. "Negative canthal tilt; spongy physique; another milquetoast ganglion of the deep state turning his wheels," we said in the email. Over weeks our narrative gained momentum. The mayor resigned. The new regime, too arrogant to feel indebted to us, nonetheless respected our savvy. An incognito operative tapped on the back fence and told us the new mayor would permit the party to continue.

With the party's chief antagonist now humiliated and deposed we found ourselves on the precipice of legitimacy. We decided on a show of force, to emphasise the transcendent correctness of the party with an extra big party, and bought $3000 worth of pills from James L's guy and sent Cassie M over to her parents' place to borrow their Weber barbecue. We called Woolworths and told the guy at the service counter that if he left now and brought all the chicken wings he could fit in a trolley then we'd let him join the party. Forty minutes later he was there. Two hours later there were choppers over the house. By morning the party had spread across the whole street, the ends barricaded with perpendicular-parked cars, couches and tables and campfires dotting the asphalt at irregular intervals. News of the party spread. People from across the city drove past slowly, craning their necks at the party, then returned to their dormitory suburbs and held meetings with their neighbours about whether the party had a place on their street. Not all of them agreed, of course. But enough did. As the party reached the limits of the metropolitan area the international community began to pay attention to who we were and what we expected to achieve. We spoke to Reuters, to MSNBC, to Xinhua, draped luxuriously on the old brown couch in the front room. "We're projecting anime fancams onto a sheet in the lounge room," we told them, holding the labels of our Strong Zeros towards the camera, as per the terms of our agreement with Suntory. "It's a vibe." The hosts of Morning Joe loved what we were doing. The main guy shrugged off his jacket, and the blonde woman returned from the next commercial break with a winged eye.

Of course even before that had happened the party was unstoppable. Anywhere a vector brought it, it was accompanied by the raised eyebrows and knowing looks that signified a popular groundswell, a true phenomenon, the rumble of a thousand hooves in the canyon. KNOW ABOUT THIS OR PERISH, the looks said. In Ulaanbaatar they put The Strokes on the stereo; in Tegucigalpa they got their best friend's boyfriend to make fresh sushi right there in the kitchen; in Antananarivo they caught the neighbour's cat and opened a whole can of tuna just for it to eat. In Yamoussoukro they stayed up all night and ate eggs for breakfast. And you might think that we'd have hated that - copied the world over! But we didn't. Or you might think that we'd have been troubled by the size of the party - it's human nature to fear a mass movement! But we weren't. A seashell resents neither the waves nor its brother shells. And after that the party spread into the desert and the tundra, the great uninhabitable places, where the simple impediments of drought and heat and cold were overwhelmed by sheer enthusiasm and drink coolers and big bowls of corn chips and the basic human instinct to hang out and take it easy. As the party grew the Sahara Desert shrank to the size of a couple of football fields and was fenced off and put on a conservation list. Populations moved and new patterns formed. Mighty rivers traversed the centre of Australia. Those corporations and institutions built to extract value from human beings saw the writing on the wall and turned their focus to philanthropic works while they still could. Were there people wound too tightly to party? Were there those so wedded to the past that even the joys of partying could not modernise them? Were there those so determinedly contrary that they could bear to stand on the shore and watch the rest of the world sail away? Well, of course. Eventually they all died and were not replaced. But everyone else was. The replacements only knew about the party, and they moulded it in their own way, developed new ways to party, slowly but entirely changed what the party would be, but still called it the party and imagined they remained true to the simple yet remarkable principles we had laid forth. Not that we knew about any of it. The waves had beat on our shell until we were sand, and then we'd washed away.

A version of this story first appeared in Sick Leave's Party Report III.