Liz Jensen - The Rapture

‘Bethany, do you know my name?’ I ask.

Memory loss is the most significant side-effect of the procedure. Sure enough, Bethany doesn’t recall who I am. It doesn’t appear to bother her.

‘I saw this giant whirlpool made of wind,’ she croaks. ‘It was fucking incredible.’ The procedure seems to have carried her voice down an octave so that it sounds like it’s emerging from a toilet or a cave.

‘Where?’

She seems muddled. ‘The clouds. They start spiralling. And then on a map. The destruction’s, like, mega. Write this down. Write down, the fall of Jesus Christ.’

‘What does that mean to you?’

She shakes her head on the pillow. ‘ And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire . But you wait till you see it, man.’ She blinks. ‘Behold, the Lord maketh the Earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof.’

‘Where do you remember that from, Bethany?’

‘Hey, I know who you are. You’re Mrs Bibble Babble. Mrs How-does-it-make-you-feel. Listen. This is what you don’t get. This isn’t about what I’m feeling . It’s about what’s going to happen. Hey. Bring me that.’

She points to the wall, where a flimsy paper calendar hangs. I hesitate, then reach for a corner and pull it down.

‘Flip through to July,’ she commands. I do what she asks, then hand it to her. ‘There,’ she says, pointing to a square. ‘The twenty-ninth. It’s going to be a big day.’ She squints into the square as though it’s a tiny window through which she is seeing the far distance. ‘South America. Brazil. Hurricane. Whoosh. Up it goes and then it all comes down. A whole lot of people are going to get wiped out. Kapoom. Along with their… scooters and their chicken coops and their crap fencing and their screaming munch-kins and their pet dog Fuckface.’

‘How do you know this is going to happen?’

‘Because I saw it, duh . Just now.’

‘It sounds like it might be frightening.’

She shrugs. ‘Whatever.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘For the people who die it is. Not for me. I mean, I don’t give a shit about them. Hey. I want them to die The planet’s overpopulated, right?’ This sounds suspiciously like the dogma I have just spent a large part of my weekend mulling over. The fewer the merrier. More oxygen for the rest of us. Organic diseases.

‘Have you heard of the Planetarians?’ I ask.

‘The who?’

‘It’s an eco-movement.’

She looks either baffled or bored, it’s hard to tell: she clearly doesn’t know who they are, or can’t remember, or doesn’t care. Instead, on she talks, at high speed, about magma and trapped gas beneath the Earth’s crust, and a volcano gearing up for an eruption. I nod, and say little. I’m remembering there’s a word in Russian, izgoy , that describes someone with a flaw which makes them singularly unfit to perform their professional role. A blocked writer, a lascivious priest, a drunken chauffeur. As a screwed-up therapist, someone like me should not be working at all. Not yet. Not in my line of business. It is far too soon. Anyone can tell you that. Bethany, with her Competence Scale, already has. But here I am. An izgoy.

Trying to help a girl who has risen from the dead, bursting with ideas.

‘October the twelfth, that’s when the shit hits the fan,’ she is saying, flicking through the calendar. ‘Write that down, too. Mark it on the calendar. You got a pen?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Well, remember it then. That’s what I do. And write down about the hurricane. Rio, on July the twenty-ninth. It’s got to go in the notebook,’ she grins. The braces on her teeth flash.

I can see her moving on to the next stage, an adult facility like St Denis or Carver Place or worse, Kiddup Manor, and spooling out the rest of her existence there, with the occasional incident of violence, and the odd suicide attempt. Yet sometimes you want to help someone, despite yourself and what you have become, even if you know they are beyond it, and so are you; no remedy you can invent will change their trajectory: the fuse was lit long ago. But you try. Again and again you try, your life on a loop, a wheel. And when you get home you finish the bottle of Australian wine under the blank gaze of Frida Kahlo with her pet monkey and her dead hummingbird and her bad-luck cat and her necklace of thorns, and you leaf through the art books whose images still manage to flood your heart and brain, and drink your way into darkness and dream that you are flying in the stratosphere and having sex with a man you must not think about under any circumstances because the past, and the future it once held in embryo, has been wiped out.

And then you wake.

Self-analysis is a bad habit I indulge in regularly, under the guise of ‘working on myself’. It’s clear that in moving to the only place that will have me, but where I have no friends, I have been trying to prove something. But what? My independence? My ability to continue business as usual? The fact that I can leave my previous life behind? My own perversity? When I look at what is happening in the world I wonder: am I projecting my own internal dramas on the social landscape, or is there actually an atmosphere of recklessness in these long, overheated summer weeks? A generalised malaise that seems to go above and beyond the norm, not just in Europe but across the whole globe, a globe that is over-freighted, claustrophobic, product-mad, too dense for its own mass? I would like to stop reading the papers and watching the TV news but I’m increasingly addicted to knowing the extent of the horror. World preoccupations remain an uneasy, toxic mix: money (too little of it), disease (too much), territorial aggression, racist executions, spiralling oil prices, web stalkers, Islamist terror, the new fly-borne malaria, melting ice caps, aggressive cults in China, carbon credit fraud, the rise of the Planetarians, the rampant spread of ‘intelligent design’ teaching in schools, contraception, overpopulation, and the new, ‘proud-to-be-a-fundamentalist’ movement. In Britain alone there are now fifty thousand Faith Wave churches, of the kind Bethany was raised in; ten years ago, there were five hundred. Meanwhile in Iran and Israel the violence is an open wound on TV, so predictable in its bloodiness that the mutilated children and howling women become a spectacle you shudder at briefly before zapping over to some Japanese game show. The well-meaning optimism of those entertainment programmes, with their perky nerdiness and banana-skin tomfoolery, provides a counterpoint to the real-world grief. Their crude hilarities flit through my head while I swim my laps, like my Spanish Kahlo mantra, or fragments of some absurd erotic fantasy, poignantly irrelevant.

When I arrive for our next session in the art room Bethany is in full manic flood, ranting at the thickset female nurse about some snail-shells missing from her bedside drawer. Still unsettled by her ability to perceive and target my vulnerabilities, I am on my guard and keen to keep a distance. ‘There were twenty-five and now there are only fucking twenty!’ she shouts. ‘Can you explain that? How about this: Heidi’s a fucking klepto. She nicks things, everyone knows it, it’s her fucking diagnosis! Hey, there’s this earthquake that’s going to destroy Istanbul,’ she says, spotting me come in. The stolen shells forgotten, she pursues her theme: the quake measures ‘seven point blah-blah’, and it’ll kill ‘zillions’. Oh, and there’s a volcano about to blow on an island she can’t name somewhere in the Pacific — though if she had a map, she’d show me. A hurricane in the south Atlantic will zap in on the twenty-ninth of this month. ‘Kapoom! And that tornado that’s just attacked the American Midwest, I predicted that, Wheels. And I have documentation to prove it,’ she says elatedly, waving a large red-and-black notebook at me. ‘Yay! Proof positive! Evidence of things not seen!’