Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Now

Here, in the Ark, locked up safe and sound in a mountain compound with Abraham’s kid and all of us who were fucked up enough to believe him when he and his dad said the end was nigh. The world left us, but we clued in and left it first. Followed that kid up a mountain, barricaded ourselves behind sheet metal and barbed-wire, waited for God’s wrath and wondered what form it would take. No shock he took us out just like he did the dinosaurs. There’s nothing much to read up here but the Bible, and I’ve read enough to know God likes repeating himself. He likes to smite, and very occasionally, he likes to save. I guess he must like us—the reformed hookers and crack addicts and embezzlers and sad sacks on the run from bad memories and worse husbands—because we’re the ones still here. You were always so pleased with yourself about your lack of fucked-up-edness. I would say look where it’s gotten you, but you wouldn’t exactly hear it, would you, because that’s the whole point of where it’s gotten you. Out in the world with the rest of the assholes, minding your non-fucked-up business when the shit came down. Isaac says we should imagine a happy and peaceful end for all the poor souls caught unaware. An aneurysm at the moment the sky exploded. Swift, unbloodied obliteration.

I would prefer not to.

You were in the basement when it happened—that’s how I prefer to imagine it. You’d been down there two days straight, fingers cramping on your joystick (and yes, I know it hasn’t been called a joystick since 1988 but fuck if you’re going to bully me into caring from beyond the grave), moldy pizza boxes at your feet, porn taped up to the wall because it’s been so many years and so many pounds since you’ve lured a girl down to your dungeon that there’s no point in keeping your inner perv on lockdown anymore. You were blowing shit up and giggling about it and when you heard the first explosions, you probably thought, dude, cool sound effects, whoa, while upstairs the sky fell down and then your roof fell down and it took another day before you thought to heave yourself off the couch and replenish the beer, and that’s when you discovered the door was blocked by ten tons of rubble and the phones were out and the wi-fi was dead and too bad for you, your emergency generator ran out before your food did, so you spent your last days on Earth in the dark, unplugged, fingers twitching at the joystick like you could turn the explosions back on, then eventually switching over to your own personal joystick, huffing and rubbing while you imagined me on my knees, blowing you while you shot the crap out of some imaginary kingdom, jerking off to some sad, faint echo of my voice because you never forget the first girl to get you off, thinking about how you pinned her down on the bathroom tile when she tried to dump your ass, crying and leaking snot and begging please baby don’t leave me while you jackhammered her into a concussion that made her foggy enough to say okay baby if you need me I’ll stay and then she did until you got bored and left her, instead, thinking now how if you’d kept her around you might not be shivering in the dark all alone, leaking sanity at a steady pace until the food runs out, and then the beer, and you die slow and whimpering, in a pool of your own puke and cum.

Thinking of you, keep in touch!

Love,

Dear Moneybags,

Remember how you used to laugh at me for always ordering the same thing? You started ordering it for me, before I could get the words out. Wherever we went, you knew. Veal parmigiana. Pad Thai. Chicken Tikka Masala. I thought it was cute, at first, that you were pretending that it bothered you, because what kind of pretentious turd would actually be bothered by someone who knows what she wants and sticks with it? It’s not like I was bringing peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches with me to sneak from under the table while you ate sushi, so how was I supposed to know that every time I ordered Pad Thai, or let you order it for me, I was proving to you that I was unadventurous and dull and provincial and inflexible and “unwilling to let circumstances exercise their will” on me. I was embarrassing you, somehow, in front of the waiters or your friends or maybe just some all-seeing deity who expected better from you than a girlfriend who didn’t want to try veal kidney.

You wouldn’t much like it here.

Here we eat beans and more beans. Canned tuna and canned peaches. We eat peanut butter when we’ve been especially good; we eat nothing when we’ve been bad. Every day is the same. Sometimes, early on, the men would suit up and go shoot something, and there would be fresh meat for a night, but then winter was too long and too cold and they say the animals are all dead. They say we don’t need the outside, that’s the point of our Ark. We are prepared. Months go by without a dent in our food stores. We planned well—we have enough beans to last us for years.

Years of beans and tuna and peaches and peanut butter. Can you even begin to imagine that? You, who thought it was a hardship to eat the same thing two nights in a row. Leave that kind of thing to the poors, you said, even though when I tried to leave our leftovers with an actual poor, you slapped it out of my hand and told me handouts only encouraged the weak, and left the guy to lick his veal parmigiana off the ground. That’s what I get for dating a Republican, you told me that night, when you had me spread-eagled on your Sleep Number mattress, because that was your idea of dirty talk.

You didn’t mind snorting the same drugs every night, I noticed. You loved the drugs; you loved that I had loser friends who could supply you with them. You loved that I looked pretty in the dresses you bought me and smiled pretty enough for your asshole buddies that they felt like shit and then went home and took it out on their ugly girlfriends; you loved that I fucked one of them when you asked me to as a special pretty-please for me baby favor; you loved that you could make me do that, but then you didn’t love that I’d done it. Done him. Put him in my mouth and in my ass, and let him cum on my tits, bad enough doing it, worse that you made me tell you about it, tell you while you were inside me, tell you how he felt and that he was smaller and softer than you, that he was flabby, with bad breath and thinning hair, that he made my nipple bleed, and after I told you what you wanted to hear, you threw me out of bed and said I’d never be with you if you weren’t rich, which was true, and that it made me a whore, which maybe was also. Now I think I liked your pool better than I liked you. Your pool and your stupid restaurants and your coke, even if you wouldn’t have had that last without me. I liked it best when you left for the weekend and I could float on the raft in the middle of the chlorine blue, drunk and sunburned, laughing at the clouds, at the gurgle of the pool filtration system and the way my fingers wrinkled up when I stayed in too long. I pretended it was my pool, my life; I imagined your plane flying into a mountain and some silver-haired lawyer showing up at the door to cup my hands in his and tell me, gently, that you’d left it all to me.

That’s a lie.

I imagined you coming back, but coming back different. Something new on your face when you looked at me, like you finally understood why you kept me around. I imagined us floating on the raft together, happy, that it would be like it was at the beginning, you bending me over the sink in gold-plated bathrooms while waiters tried not to wonder what was taking us so long, you tearing through some cheap K-Mart blouse like you were Tarzan and telling me I had a Michelangelo rack, that licking my nipples felt like desecrating priceless art, you wanting to ravish me, you wanting to My Fair Lady me, you wanting me. Instead you came back from that last trip and told me you wanted someone who better fit into your world, someone who knew enough to pick out her own sushi.