Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Now

There’s nothing left out there now. That’s what they say over the radio, although mostly, now, they don’t say much of anything. Occasionally, through the static, we pick up someone crying.

There’s nothing left out there and it’s insane to hope that there is, and we all agree on that—except when it’s time to put someone out. And then we pretend it’s not a death sentence, just an alternative life choice. Anything could be out there, we say. She didn’t like it in here, not enough to follow the rules and do as she was told, so maybe she’ll find something she likes better.

Maybe, if Theresa Babbage preferred not to fuck a teenager, if, unlike you, that didn’t turn her on, if she pretended Isaac’s proposal was a question rather than a command and politely declined, then that was her choice, and maybe, after a few nights out there in the waste and wild, she won’t regret it.

It’s not execution, Isaac said last night, after he locked the gates behind her. Not even punishment. Simply the smart policing of a peaceful community. Go along to get along, or get out.

She said he was fucking crazy. She said what about feminism and Hilary Clinton and MTV and how does a kid born in the twenty-first century buy any of this crap, the world hasn’t worked like that for two thousand years, and he said that the world was gone, and that a lot of things hadn’t happened for two thousand years, and he didn’t have to come right out and say I am the light of the world for us to know what he was getting at.

She probably thought her sisters would go with her, but she should have known better. She couldn’t have imagined I would go with her, but she might have expected me to say goodbye. She didn’t know how I feel about goodbyes.

She didn’t tell me she was going to refuse him, or I would have talked her out of it. I would have told her about doing the things you need to do, about how to endure, about what it takes to be the girl who stays. I could have told her what it feels like to be left alone, but she didn’t ask, and now they’ve pushed her out the door without warm clothes or food or any fucking idea how to take care of herself, because while the rest of us were preparing for the end by learning to shoot and make soap and forage for mushrooms, she was babysitting the future messiah, and now she’s probably dead. I still have my laptop. The battery’s long dead, of course, but sometimes I like to watch the blank screen, and imagine what used to be.

Even before, I liked to watch static, especially when I hurt. I liked the dead roar of it, the way you could squint into the wild and waste, almost believing that if you tried hard enough, you could resolve chaos into order, that somewhere, hiding between the squiggly lines, was a face, a voice, a world.

I want the picture back; I want it all back. I want trashy reality shows and late night infomercials and Saturday morning cartoons. I want my MTV. I want Chinese take-out and a greasy-fingered remote; I want sick days that pass in a haze of talk show rumbles and game show hosts; I want Luke and Laura to reunite and As the World Turns to come back from the dead; I want fat men with their skinny wives and hospitals where everyone is beautiful and dripping with sex and only boring people die; I want tornado hunters and competitive eaters and Sunday morning televangelists and even that fucking ice queen on Fox News. I want back all those afternoons that I spent with you in your car and your office and that skeezy hotel, because I could have spent them at home with a bag of Doritos and Oprah and Boy Meets World and now, when I lie in my bunk and pretend to sleep, breathing stale air, tuning out snores, fingering my knife and wondering if one day I’ll wake up and decide to use it, I could play back all those episodes in my head, be my own laugh track, remember scripted lines and symmetrical faces, instead of you. I want oblivion, like the rest of you get to have, out there; I want not to be the one left behind when everyone else is gone.

I want. I want. I want. I’m sounding like a child again, aren’t I? Like a whiny brat who thinks bad things only happen to bad people and gods play fair.

Not that I would call Isaac a whiny brat, or an ignorant kid, or delusional or pathetic, simply because he believes that we were saved because we deserved to be, that death is punishment and life reward, that we can remember what we choose to remember and forget the rest, that because he saved us once, our lives are forever in his hands. There are no teachers anymore, and even if there were, you can’t teach the savior of mankind—God’s chosen vessel—anything he doesn’t want to know. So you see, this particular brave new world has no place for you. This is a world where children take whatever they want, and the rest of us live with what’s left.

Love,

Dear John,

I said I don’t miss you, and that’s true enough. But I do miss fucking you. Or maybe I just miss fucking, full stop. Only one more week before Midlife Crisis and I join together in holy matrimony and connubial bliss, and you’d think I’d be more eager. He certainly is.

He tastes like fish.

Isaac keeps talking about what a joyful day it will be, but there’s too much sadness in his eyes to pull it off. I can see it, even if no one else can, because I know what it looks like, the face of getting left behind.

He’s got to be used to it by now. First his mother, dumping him at Father Abraham’s door like one of those shitty free newspapers that always went straight into the trash. Dumping him with a father he’d never met before, a father who happened to be in the middle of a doomsday countdown with his millennial flock of fuck-ups.

Kid makes the best of that, teams up with daddy, buddies up so close to daddy’s friend upstairs that he starts getting divine whispers in his own ear, turns savior, turns doomsday prepper-in-chief, teaches us to build our Ark and prepare for judgment day, and what’s his prize when the sky falls down and proves him right? Dad dumps him too. Locks the kid into the promised land with the rest of us and heads down the mountain to die with the unsaved masses. Chose the world over his own kid, and said God told him to do it, which, as trump cards go, beats out because I said so.

Now Theresa’s left him, too.

It doesn’t matter that she didn’t want to go; she’s gone. That’s how he sees it.

I couldn’t help it—I felt bad for him. I said, s he wasn’t the right girl for you, Isaac, and to his credit, he didn’t pretend not to know what I mean. He didn’t even try to fake a smile. I saved her life, he said. Shouldn’t that be enough?

And you know what? Maybe it should. Everyone acts like love can save you, but love can’t save anything. So maybe we’ve got it the wrong way around, maybe it’s the saving that makes for love. Isaac saved us, and we should love him for it. He saved us, and so we belong to him. It’s kid logic, but you’ve got to admit that it makes sense, and that’s what I told him.

Still, I don’t like the way he looks at me now.

Without Theresa, there’s no one to ask about it, about whether I’m imagining things. The way his eyes follow me across the room. The way he saw me watching, and smiled.

I was just trying to be nice.

Dear John, wish you were here, that’s what I’m supposed to say, I guess, since the other option is wish you were dead —wish you were starving or burning or being gnawed on by feral cats—but you wouldn’t know what to do with yourself here. You wouldn’t like being locked away, piecing things together with the static and screams and pleas on a CB radio, living in a tangle of bodies and bad breath, everywhere skin and sweat and people, all of us so pale.