Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Now

“Most of those guys, you just tell them where to stand and what to do, and they’re happy. Don’t make them think too hard,” Sally told me afterward. Our movies had built her into a queen bee. She wanted to walk me home, but the sun sagged and I didn’t want her to get caught out after dark. I ran into a couple of red-bandana groups on my way home, but I told them I was a friend of Ricky Artesian, the red bandana leader, and they practically saluted. The second group insisted on escorting me home. Film students and red bandanas, both whooping at me, all in one day!

Soon, I was healed enough to go back to work at the convenience store, where I kept seeing bone-crushed Reginald on fire whenever I looked at the lighters. Nowadays, I saw both Raine and Reginald in my dreams, unless I watched some Buster Keaton right before bedtime.

Some of my housemates were planning a giant protest against the red bandanas and the economic policies and the move to expand the war, and the crazy weapon projects like that sonic gun that people claimed would make an army shake itself to pieces from a distance. I was leery because, duh, the last time I’d gone to a protest I’d wound up covered in slippery bodies, choking on a piece of my friend’s brain.

I started hoping my body wouldn’t heal too quickly, because once it did they would expect me to create more serious mayhem, and just the thought of it made me start to shamblequake. Sally texted me saying it was time to do some more mad slapstick, and I texted back that we really needed to talk.

I have a perfect recall of my meeting with Sally, maybe cause it was our last-ever conversation.

We met in the middle of the Mass Avenue bridge, with faded paintwork measuring the bridge’s span in “Smoots,” the height of some long-ago MIT student whose classmates had rolled him across the bridge. On either side of us, the river swelled with gray bracken and flecks of brown foam, and in front of us, the jagged Boston skyline. The John Hancock Tower’s windows had all started falling out and hitting people on the head, so they’d condemned the whole building and only gotten halfway through demolishing it, and now it looked like a shiny blue-green zigzag climbing to a single razor point. We watched the water churn a while. The wind battered us.

Sally was gushing about my chemistry with Zapp Stillman, and how much people liked seeing the two of us interact, and maybe we could do a few more clips featuring the two of us. Gang boss and lieutenant, an ineptly gay couple, boxer and trainer, rock star and manager, superheroes. The possibilities were endless, almost like having Raine back. For a moment I wondered if Sally had a thing for Zapp’s gangly ass.

“That’s why I wanted to talk to you,” I said once I could break in. “I need to take a break from making movies. I was thinking of going back to North Carolina.” I tried to explain how I kept seeing Raine and Reginald whenever I closed my eyes lately, but Sally grabbed my scruff and pushed me halfway over the edge of the bridge. My pants fell down, and the wind whipped through my boxer shorts. My ass was in space.

“You asshole,” Sally said. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Every time I think I can rely on you. What the fuck? I was going to be a real director. I was doing great in film school, making serious films about real stuff. And then you turned up and sucked me back into spending all my time making these dumb movies instead. And now you’re just going to leave? What? The? Fuck?” She shook me with each word. My shirt tore around the armpits. I could feel my feet, somewhere far away, trampling my pants.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” I looked up into her bugged out eyes. “I just can’t. I can’t deal. Jesus, you’re my best friend no matter how long I live, but I’m a poison time bomb, you don’t want to be around me, I’ll just hurt you, I’m so sorry. I break everything.”

She hauled me off the edge and dumped me on my feet. “What the fuck are you talking about, Rock? I love you, but you’re an idiot. Just listen to me, okay. You’re not some kind of destructive engine. You are good for exactly one thing, and one thing only, and that’s turning people’s brains off for a few minutes. You should stick to that. And another thing, did you ever stop to think about what I’m getting out of doing these movies with you? Did you? I mean, jeez. The world we live in now, the only time things make sense is when I’m coming up with bigger and crazier disasters to put on film. I finally decided, slapstick is the new realism. And I can’t do it without you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, but . . .” I took a breath and pulled up my pants. The snap had broken, so I had to hold them together with one hand, and that limited my gesture menu a lot. “I keep feeling like I’m going to hurt somebody. I feel like people keep getting hurt around me, and maybe it’s my fault somehow. Like what happened with Reginald. And Raine, before that.”

“Jesus, this pisses me off. My boyfriend dies, but it’s still all about you. What is up with that?”

The bridge rumbled, and I worried the supports had eroded or someone had sabotaged them. I tried to get Sally’s attention, but she was still talking about how dumb I was. I grabbed her arm with my free hand and pulled her toward land. She jerked free and said she didn’t want to go with me, she was sick of my crap, let go.

“Listen, listen! Something’s wrong,” I said. I pulled her the other way, toward Boston. By now the bridge was definitely vibrating in a weird way. I could feel it in my teeth. I ran as fast as I could without letting go of my pants-clasp. The bridge felt like it was going to collapse any second. We made it to land, but the sidewalks had the same problem as the bridge. The rumbling got louder and felt like it was coming from inside me.

“What the fuck is going on?” Sally shouted.

I raised my hands. By now I was seeing funny, like there were one and a half of her. My teeth clattered. My stomach cramped up. And most of all my ears were full—they hurt like murder. I had earaches like someone had jammed sticks into my ear canals, it hurt all the way down my throat.

The last words Sally ever said to me were, “What the hell, we need to get inside—”

The pressure inside my ears built up and then it spiked, like the sticks in my ears had jammed all the way in and twisted like a corkscrew. I can’t really describe the pain. People have written tons of poems about it, but mostly they use it as something to compare any other kind of pain with. Two giant hands smacked me in the head, at the same time as a massive force trying to push its way out from the inside of my skull. I staggered and fell over, nearly blacked out.

Blood burst out of Sally’s ears at the same time as I felt something splash on my shirt. I tried to say something like, What the fuck just happened, or Shit I dropped my pants again, but nothing came out. No, I was doing all the right things to make a sound, but nothing. I couldn’t hear birds or street sounds. I couldn’t hear anything. Sally was moving her mouth too, but she had the same panic in her eyes as I felt. I sat down on the ground, impact but no noise, like we were in outer space.

Sally was still trying to talk, tears coming down her cheeks. I gestured that I couldn’t hear her. She grabbed her phone and fumbled with the buttons. A second later, my phone vibrated. A text message: wtf im deaf. I texted back: me 2. She wrote: we need help.

She hauled me to my feet and found a safety pin in her bag for my stupid pants. Then we rushed down Mass Ave., looking for someone who could call an ambulance. I still felt jumpy crossing the streets without being able to hear cars or other vehicles coming up behind me. Plus I kept turning to look over my shoulder in case someone ran up behind me. We found a guy up near Commonwealth Ave., but we could see from a distance he was clutching his ears and crying. Same with the half a dozen young people we saw near the boarded-up Urban Outfitters at Mass Ave. and Newbury. They all had blood on their shoulders and were texting each other or using pidgin sign language. They tried to plead for our help with their hands, until they realized we had the same problem.