Карен Хабер - This Way to the End Times

(d)He committed suicide with a shaving razor in the bathtub of the same motel room where you hid from him, that last night. He never forgave himself for hitting you, not even when he remembered that you’d hit him first.

(e)He slipped, somehow, into an alternate dimension, where the laws of physics and geometry are subtly different, and there is a house just like yours, but the woman inside is a better liar.

9.HIS LAST THOUGHTS WERE . . .

(a)incomprehensible with fear, the nauseating smell of his own blood.

(b)of you.

(c)revelations about the falseness of Euclidian geometry, the sheer wrongness of all human conceptions of time and history and causal relationships, that could never have been comprehended by another human being, even if Donald had lived, and admitted to himself what he had understood.

(d)of Christine Kaminski, the slender brunette who took him to junior prom, and who forged a deeper connection with him on that one night in the rented Marriott ballroom than you did in seven years of marriage. She wore pale blue, his favorite color, and only kissed him once, during the last dance of the night. If he had married her, he would have been happy.

(e)of his little brother, who died at birth, whom he never told you about. He intended to, but there was never a moment in that first year of marriage when you weren’t too busy with something else—arranging furniture, organizing closets and cupboards, filing for loans, writing thank-you cards. Afterward, it seemed too late to bring it up. The closest he ever came was during that Christmas dinner at your sister’s, when you teased him about being an only child.

10.LOOKING BACK ON ALL of it, you still don’t understand . . .

(a)why all the equipment at work broke down that day. You even stayed an extra fifteen minutes to play with the reset buttons and a bent paperclip; it made you late to the marriage counselor’s office, which in some ways didn’t matter, because her previous appointment was running over and you had to wait anyway, but in some ways it did matter, because Donald was expecting you to arrive on time. It didn’t help in any case. Everything was still broken the next day.

(b)why the water in the motel bathroom turned to blood. Afterward, you asked around town, and learned that no one else had discovered blood or any other bodily fluids running through their pipes. But there was a lot going on at the time; maybe they simply hadn’t noticed.

(c)why you told Donald about the Little Mermaid picture book as you collapsed drunken and giggling into your own back seat. Your throat was hoarse from swearing at your baseball team as they permitted run after humiliating run, and you had spilled beer on the sleeve of your sweatshirt. You tried to wiggle out of it and it got stuck around your hips, and you said, This reminds me of a story . . .

(d)what attracted you to Donald in the first place. Was it his eyes, his soft lips, the way he ran his fingers through his hair when he was nervous, the way all his undershirts smelled like chalkboards, the way he tightened his tie with both hands before saying something important?

(e)all of the above.

11.AFTER THAT INCIDENT IN Portland, when the shambling thing almost caught up to you by clinging to the bottom of your bus, your favorite shirt became stained with . . .

(a)seawater.

(b)blood (yours).

(c)ichor (its).

(d)semen.

(e)merlot.

12.YOUR SISTER, WHO KNOWS these things, told you that the best technique for fighting the shambling monsters is . . .

(a)frying them with a blow torch.

(b)dowsing them with holy water.

(c)dragging them behind a truck.

(d)flinging them into a nuclear reactor.

(e)running until they tire of chasing you.

13.YOU MOST REGRET . . .

(a)missing that shot at the fast food joint in Vancouver, when the little boy died. It was not your fault; no one had ever taught you to fire a revolver, much less where to aim on a bulbous heavy-lidded nightmare as it slivered over a drive-thru window. But it was your fault, because the creature had followed you, and if you hadn’t stopped to eat at that particular restaurant and that particular time, it would never have killed that child.

(b)not letting him buy that hideous watermelon tie at the church flea-market, when you knew it reminded him of his grandfather, and made him smile.

(c)wearing your favorite shirt on the bus in Portland.

(d)shaking Donald as you got into the car in the marriage counselor’s parking lot, then slapping him across the face. No matter how terrified you were, no matter how much you thought he’d earned it, you should have known better than to hit him. You did know better. You knew it reminded him of his father.

(e)turning into your pillow that last time he tried to kiss you goodnight, so that his lips caught you on the cheek.

14.IN YOUR DREAMS, THE shambling monsters appear at your bedside, and their voices sound like . . .

(a)radio static, interspersed with love songs from old black-and-white movies.

(b)the screaming of the pink-suited reporter as those yellow teeth crunched through her clavicle.

(c)the marriage counselor, with her gentle eastern accent, the sharp tick of her pen against her clipboard punctuating each clause.

(d)footsteps over broken glass.

(e)the whisper of a fish’s breath.

15.NOW, WHEN YOU LOOK out at the sea, you feel . . .

(a)the smallness of humanity in the face of a universe that is older and vaster and more full of life than any of us can imagine, much less understand.

(b)a sudden urge to jump.

(c)the awful terror of living.

(d)his absence; there is only the sea-spray on your face, salty, cold, and needle-fine.

(e)all of the above.

16.IS THIS REALLY THE end of the world? Defend your answer with evidence from the following texts: the Apocalypse of John, the Collected Works of H. P. Lovecraft, The Shepherd of Hermas, Ibn Al-Nafis’ Theologus Autodidactus, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, the fortieth through fifty-eighth stanzas of Völuspá, and last week’s edition of The New York Times.

17.JUST WHAT IS IT about filling in bubbles on a multiple choice test that makes you believe that every terrible decision you’ve made might, with luck, with sheer cussedness, have turned out right in the end?

What color were Donald’s eyes?

1.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (e) all of the above. You were nine years old, and had wanted to see the ocean ever since the day your third-grade teacher read you a picture book with the real story of the Little Mermaid—Anderson, not Disney. You wore a pink-and-yellow bathing suit that you had outgrown the previous summer and carried a purple plastic pail, not because you had any intention of building sandcastles but because the children in the picture book (who appeared in the seashore-margins on every page, though they had nothing to do with the mermaid or her prince or her beautiful raven-haired rival) had carried pails and shovels, made of tin, in which they collected seashells. At that moment, standing at the edge of the pier while your parents argued through a transaction at the overpriced snack-shack behind you, you registered nothing but the caress of the waves on your face. Only later, with reflection, did you feel the smallness, the terror, the urge to jump.

On your honeymoon, Donald tried to recreate this experience (which you had shared with him in the backseat of your car, after a drunken night at the worst baseball game your team had ever played). He took you to the same pier, bought you a paper cone of roasted peanuts at the same overpriced snack-shack, but the weather was different, clean and peaceful, and your red two-piece fit your body like a second skin.