Liz Jensen: The Rapture

As I try to fathom this, I don’t reply. But then it occurs to me she can probably simply smell the chlorine. ‘If I touched your hand I’d know even more,’ she says. The delight has gone, replaced by amused menace. ‘I didn’t even have to touch Joy McConey to know things. I saw what she had coming.’ If she’s asking permission, I am not giving it. I’ll shake hands on the first meeting but apart from that I don’t do physical contact. ‘I register stuff. But half the time it doesn’t mean jack shit to me. It’s, like, way over my head.’

‘Can you tell me more about this "stuff" you register?’

She smiles. ‘Seas burning. Sheets of fire. Whole coasts washed away. The glaciers melting like butter in a microwave. You know Greenland? Basically dissolved . Like a great big aspirin that says Hazard Warning on it. Empty towns full of human bones, with lizards and coyotes in charge. And trees everywhere, and sharks and crocodiles in the underground. The lost city of Atlantis.’ Are these drug-induced visions? Daydreams? Or is it metaphorical?

‘It sounds like a dangerous world you’re describing. Dangerous and chaotic and life-threatening. A lot of people worry about catastrophic climate change. It’s not an irrational fear.’

The latest projections predict the loss of the Arctic ice cap and a global temperature rise of up to six degrees within Bethany’s lifetime, if nothing is done now. I should be grateful to be childless. Just as the Cold War figures heavily in the fantasies of the elderly mental patients, climate-apocalypse paranoia is common among the young. Zeitgeist stuff: the banality of abnormality. Its roots in facts so appalling we turn the other way politely. I’d like to steer Bethany towards the subject of suicide, my main concern, on paper at least, because if she dies on my watch, there will be administrative issues that won’t look good on my first post-accident job. What is the likelihood of a repeat performance? Apart from the four attempts, according to the notes she is a regular self-harmer. They also label her well-informed, manipulative and prone to dramatic mood-swings, as well as psychotic fantasies, biblical outpourings and sudden, extreme violence. Again, unwillingly, I conjure the police photographs. Forty-eight stab-wounds. The screwdriver in Karen Krall’s eye. The film of skin forming on the blood like antique sealing-wax. The photographer’s flash stamped in it for ever, like a fossil star.

‘It is a dangerous world. And we’re in it. There’s no escape, Wheels.’ She gives a small mirthless laugh. ‘All of those people out there. Decent hard-working folks who ain’t never done no one no harm ,’ she says, putting on a cartoonish yokel voice. ‘Dying a horrible death. All of us dying a horrible death.’ This notion seems to cheer, rather than frighten her. Suddenly there’s an electric energy about her. I sense an immense reservoir of violence and anger, a latent force that I find as compelling as it is alarming. I must watch out of my own perversity. ‘Have you heard of the Rapture?’

‘Vaguely.’ I know of it as an element of the Faith Wave creed brought over by the British citizens who abandoned their sunshine homes in Florida and returned to the UK after the global crash. Its popularity was expanded by celebrity conversions and a swathe of addictive, redemption-themed TV shows. ‘Tell me about it.’

‘It’s salvation for the righteous. When the shit hits the fan, the true Christians go straight to Heaven in, like, a big airlift. The rest get left behind. Mercy for the pure in heart, justice for the rest. It’s all in the Bible. Look at Ezekiel, look at Daniel, look at The Daniel, look at Revelation. All the signs are there. Iran, Jerusalem. Things are going to blow any day. Seven years of tribulation. Coming soon to a planet near you. The heat of Hell. The survivors, they’ll be trapped in it. It’s starting now, you can feel it. Plagues and pestilences and God’s wrath and the reign of the Antichrist. Who shall plant the mark of the Beast upon them.’

There is a sick logic to the Faith Wave phenomenon, I reflect: in the face of more Islamic terror attacks, why not pit one insane dogma against another? Every week, there are mass baptisms, True Story gatherings, Commitment marches.

‘Do you have faith, Bethany?’

‘Faith?’ She snorts. ‘That’s a good one. Would I be here if there was a God? I don’t think so! But I have the mark of the Beast, look.’ She plants a forefinger on each temple. ‘Invisible in my case. That’s where the electrodes go.’

‘What did God mean to you, growing up?’

‘He never meant me any good. The thing I never get is, who created God? No one can ever answer that one. It’s like the universe. It’s ever-expanding, right? But what’s outside it?’

‘God never meant you any good in what way?’ She shrugs, and looks away. Either she doesn’t know, or she is withholding. I wait a moment but when I see I’ll get nothing I try another tack. ‘What was it like being a child in your family, Bethany?’ She shrugs. ‘You can quote the Bible. So I’m wondering what sort of influences you had.’

‘Are you? Well wonder on.’

She looks edgy. ‘ We believe in the universal sinfulness of all men since the Fall, rendering man subject to God’s wrath and condemnation.’

‘Who’s we?’

‘Them.’

‘Your parents?’

‘Hey, she’s hot! How many degrees has she got up her ass?’

‘So tell me what else you’re thinking about.’

She perks up, splaying her hands in front of her and flexing them as if to test their competence as grabbing tools. Her nails are as filthy as animal claws. One scratch, and she’d infect you. ‘Half the planet drowns, I can tell you that. Islands sinking, coasts getting eaten up by the sea. The land getting smaller. Water sloshing all over it in these giant tsunamis, the temperature zinging up. The stuff on the way, that’s just part of it. I’ve seen it in the Quiet Room. Earth looks like a gobstopper. You can zoom in. Satellite vision, Wheels. You hear what I’m saying?’ She is nodding so hard that her whole body begins to rock with the movement. She can’t seem to agree with herself enough. ‘Yeah. I have fucking satellite vision . Like the Hubble telescope.’

The Quiet Room is a nondescript chamber on the second floor of Virgil Block, where they administer a muscle relaxant, a general anaesthetic and then electroshock therapy to inmates who have not responded to other treatments. The thought of a sixteen-year-old enjoying it makes me feel queasy.

‘It’s not just weather that’s causing it. Weather’s just like a side-product,’ she’s telling me, still rocking, a fleck of spit gathering at the corner of her mouth. I try to quell my distaste for this girl, and for the unimaginativeness of her cataclysmic visions — visions already shared by half the population, along with a belief in miracles and tarot readings, if the polls are anything to go by. ‘It’s the kind of thing that could land you in a desert of chemical crystals. Or leave you stranded somewhere in a wheelchair.’ She raises her eyebrows at me meaningfully. ‘On a black rock with dead trees. It’s not just heat, it’s geological activity, worse than the worst earthquake.’ She is alert, flushed, vivid. The stock diagnostic phrase ‘a danger to herself and others’ slides through my mind. The cynicism has given way to manic excitement. ‘Cracking, not where the tectonic plates meet but in other places, new places.’ The words are tumbling out in a rush, making the fleck of spit pulse. ‘Belching out these unbreathable toxic gases. You know why it’s so hot at the Earth’s core? Because this planet’s just a chunk of some supernova that exploded, like, aeons ago.’