Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Now

No one is rich anymore; no one is poor. There are only haves and have-nots. We, the Children of Abraham, God’s favored sons and daughters, have: Shelter. Food. Generators. Guns. Lives.

You, the rest, have not.

I don’t have to worry anymore about being left, about being wanted. For one thing, it doesn’t matter what any of us want—there’s nowhere to fucking go. We’ve got a radio here, we know what it’s like out there, or we know enough to imagine. Cities obliterated; West Coast underwater; governments fallen; everywhere riots and corpses. Tohu va vohu —Isaac says that’s how the Bible begins, in Hebrew. In the beginning, all was formless and void, all was wild and waste; so it began, he says, now so it ends. Isaac says we’ve all been alone long enough, that now we’ll be together. Not only all of us together in the Ark, but each of us together with another soul, matched pairs, two by two by two, as it should be. Isaac will pair us. He says God tipped him off about our proper soulmates, and since that’s the same God who gave him a heads-up about the end of the world and how to survive it, we have no choice but to believe him. So much easier than the old way. Isaac will pair us, then, in ten days, we’ll join hands and souls in the eyes of God. We’ll swear to our Lord. Forever, we’ll swear, and that’s how it will be. That’s another thing that’s changed from the old days. Once you know that God is willing to destroy the world when it pisses him off, you get a little more reluctant to break your word.

You said once that if I ever duped someone into marrying me, I should make sure to get a pre-nup, because that way when they left me I’d get mine. Actually, I’d get yours, I said , isn’t that how pre-nups work ? And you laughed. Not, you said, at the lame joke, but at the idea that you’d be the one marrying me.

That’s when I should have known. Not because you laughed, but because of the when. If you get married; when he leaves you. You saw it before I did, that I was a girl to be left.

And now you’ve left again.

Don’t worry, this time I won’t make a scene.

I think you die with the rest of California when the waves come to sweep you away. You die thinking maybe you should’ve gotten around to learning how to swim, which wouldn’t have saved you but might have let you hang on a little longer or with a little more dignity; you could’ve gotten to see what it looked like for LA to float, see the Hollywood sign bobbing on the waves along with all the nippled silicone implants, the Jags and the Range Rovers and the Ferraris sucked under, fish shitting on all that Italian leather, anorexic starlets with their gym-toned bodies bloating in the sun, you die and I live, even though your house was made of brick and marble and mine is made of old shipping containers. The Three Little Pigs is not a disaster survival guide, and besides, our craftsmanship is solid, all the huffing and puffing in the world won’t blow our ark down. Where you live now, there is only seafood for dinner, night after night. I guess circumstances have exercised their will.

Love,

Dear John,

Remember how we used to joke about that? How I used to leave you notes that would say, “Dear John, I am not leaving you. But please pick up some milk on your way home.” How we agreed that if I ever did leave you, all I had to write was, “Dear John, This time I am.” You thought it was unfair, that your name was synonymous with leaving, with being left. You said, I will never leave you. Not me. Not you.

Is it love that makes you stupid, or is stupid just a necessary criteria for falling in love?

Feel free to think of this as the letter you never got. Feel free to think whatever you want, except that I miss you.

Onion breath. Flop sweat. Fork scraping. The tick-tock click of a pen against teeth. Thought music, you called it.

The kind of person who would say the words “thought music.”

File it all under Things I do not miss.

Lying, that’s another one.

I will never leave you.

I will never leave you.

I will never leave you.

The way you looked at me, all wounded puppy eyes, that I could even imagine it. The insult of the fear. Just turn it off, you told me, like you’d never been afraid.

How could I have thought that would work, a forever with a man who didn’t understand fear? Here’s my forever, as of this morning: black, walrus mustache and graying scruff of beard, veiny biceps and lopsided ears. Small hands, big nose. His name is Gavin, and I think, in that other life, he was rich. The kind who has a midlife crisis and when he discovers the Porsche isn’t magically stripping off the years, acquires someone like me instead, sends flowers and makes promises and then signs the divorce papers and marries someone else. Except that Gavin’s already left his wife, left her out there to die with the rest of the world, and now, in here, there’s no one but me. Isaac says—or says that God says—we belong together. Maybe he threw darts, or picked names out of a hat. Maybe it really is God; maybe Gavin is my destiny.

I have one friend here, and she thinks this is fucked, though that’s a word she would never use. Theresa Babbage, who used to babysit Isaac when he was just some kid rather than Our Savior, who told me about the time he got so freaked out by some nightmare that he wet the bed, eleven years old and swimming in piss and she swore me to secrecy because if word got out he’d know she was the one who told, and we both know what would happen then—she thinks this is fucked. She thinks Isaac’s only making us marry because he outlawed fucking before marriage and too many of the single men miss it. I don’t tell her that I miss it, too. She wouldn’t like that. I don’t tell her that the arranged marriage thing doesn’t seem all that different to me than how it worked before. A man says he wants to be with you, and you stay. A man says he doesn’t want to be with you anymore, and he leaves. So what if in this case, it’s Isaac who says he wants me to be with someone? The only difference is that in this case, it doesn’t matter whether the man wants to be with me or not.

Gavin will stay with me, and I will stay with him. That’s the difference. I won’t expect him to save me; I won’t expect him to love me or want me. I won’t expect anything, but that we will be together instead of alone.

You were the kind of guy who liked to save people, you said, and you said you’d save me. You were going to be different than the others, you said. You would be the one who stayed, who would convince me that staying was possible, that not everyone leaves. You said only the wrong people leave, that I was lucky they did, because if they hadn’t, there wouldn’t have been a you. Not all together s are better than being alone, you said. Only this one.

You said I didn’t scare you. That no part of me would make you run away. That we would never be alone again, that instead, we would be alone together. Remember when we turned the apartment into a fort, said we would barricade ourselves away from the world forever? We would bury ourselves under blankets with an endless supply of caramels and Fresca, enough to last us through all six seasons of The Sopranos and every time one of Tony’s henchmen killed someone, we would kiss. We were stupid then, and didn’t understand forts or barricades or forever. And we never got around to finishing The Sopranos, which is a shame, because now there’s no more Netflix and it turns out there’s not as much overlap as you’d expect between premium cable viewers and doomsday cultists, so there’s no one here to tell me how it ends. Even if there was, they wouldn’t have acted it out in the stupid voices, the way you did when I missed an episode.