Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Now

I’m pale like you now, pale and thin and craving the sun. You always called me stupid for skimping on the sunscreen. Everyone’s got to die sometime, I said.

I know how you died. Of course I know how you died. Why do you think I’m so good at this game? What else have I been doing since the last time you saw me but imagining how you died? I dream it, and wake up smelling disinfectant and puke, wake up tasting you, not the good you but the way you tasted at the end, like iron and rubber, like something poisonous. Sometimes I imagined I could feel it, some fluctuation in the universe, someone cutting the invisible floss that held us together, some infinitesimal weight lifting or settling—and how the fuck do any of those things actually feel, so it was more like I felt headaches and muscle cramps and indigestion and each time thought, just maybe, it was you.

I didn’t have to be there to know how you died. Wasting away. Emaciated and skeleton skin but bloated with fluid. Pregnant with fluid, we might have said. High on drugs, so sky high you might have missed the headline, assumed you were easing into a nap instead of the big sleep, maybe high enough that you saw me, and smiled, because you thought you weren’t alone. But you were. I know that, too.

Love,

Dear Jackass,

I guess you’ll never finish that novel after all. God, the novel, the novel, always the fucking novel. And how could I be expected to understand such things, the bimbo who washed your filthy dishes once the fruit flies start swarming because your life of the mind precluded you from noticing such things. How could I, bovine dumb, so dumb I had to look up the word bovine, begin to process the profundities your mind was gestating, your miscarriage of literary greatness, your Solitaire games which I guess were tapping into some deep vein of emotional catharsis. If I thought there actually was a novel, I would wonder whether you’d turned me into a character, the stupid cunt who joined a cult, can you imagine I stuck my dick in that beehive of crazy, I can hear you saying to all your coffee shop losers, and that’s why I don’t feel guilty for taking your laptop when you left.

Not to be juvenile about it, or maybe to be juvenile about it, since according to you I’m incapable of anything else: Who’s the stupid cunt now? Who’s safe in the bunker with God’s chosen people, and who’s a rotting piece of meat waiting for someone else’s cat to come by and gnaw at your intestines because you’re far too busy to have one of your own?

Tell me you don’t actually believe this shit, you said after those first couple meetings. I pray to fucking non-existent god that I haven’t wasted my time with someone who would fall for this.

And I said, even at the beginning, because that’s what it said in the brochure, this is my calling and I need to repent before it’s too late, and I didn’t tell you what Father Abraham told me, that forgiveness is possible and God will never leave you because I knew you would laugh and I wanted to believe it was true.

And eventually you said I can’t handle this shit anymore and the sex isn’t worth the crazy, and that was fine with me because Father Abraham’s house had many rooms and plenty of empty beds, and how is that I’m never the one leaving, but I’m always the one who has to pack up my suitcase and walk out the door?

I never got around to answering your original question.

Did I believe it?

Do I believe it?

What kind of stupid cunt would I be not to believe it? A father and his son told me the world would end, and it did. They told me when it would happen, and it did. They told me how to survive it, and here I am. Abraham gathered us to his chest, Isaac built us an ark, and here we are, floating to salvation on a sea of millet and automatic rifles and kidney beans.

If I didn’t believe, why did I come in the first place and why did I stay?

If I don’t believe now, what more could possibly convince me?

Atheism is the only honest intellectual position, you said, and I didn’t ask you what if an angel descended to Earth or a TV messiah parted the Red Seas or an eleven-year-old says God told me the world will die and the kid turns out to be right, because it was easier to let you think I wasn’t listening when you talked. Maybe if you had asked me a question, I would have answered. Maybe if you asked me who I was thinking about when you were inside me, and why I would hate myself enough to let you be there, I would have told you a story.

The Holocaust, you said. The Armenian genocide. Rwanda. What kind of a god, etc., etc.

Everyone dies, I said. Or do you blame Him for that, too.

I don’t know. That’s the answer. I don’t know if I believe in a Him, and so I don’t know whether to worry about breaking a promise to Him, but the question’s moot, because my soulmate-in-waiting is gone. Midlife Crisis Man slipped away in the night, mustache and all, apparently preferring certain death over an eternity bound to me.

That’s assuming he left of his own accord, and obviously it wouldn’t be the first time, but there’s also Isaac, and the way he looked when he announced the disappearance, and the way he took my hand when he told me that I shouldn’t worry about being alone for long, that God had plans for me.

Never trust anyone who says God has a plan, you told me, and that’s the one thing that made sense.

I keep a knife under my pillow, in case I need it. We all have something—our own personal emergency escape plan. Some people can’t handle it, losing the world. What kind of a god, you said, and now we have an answer, and it’s one that not everyone can live with.

We’ve pieced it together from the radio. What happened that day, after we locked ourselves in the Ark. What it looked like when the sky fell down. On the radio, they say it was beautiful, a hailstorm of light, but that’s because they’re the ones who lived. I think you lived too, at least past the initial impact, and maybe you tried to write a poem about it; maybe you thought: finally, good material.

I think your city wasn’t obliterated; your loft wasn’t vaporized. You were too far from the coast to get swept away. I think you felt good about yourself, while you still had time to feel. You couldn’t believe in a god that put Fifty Shades of Grey on the bestseller list, but a god that turned twenty million people to dust and left you still tapping ashes out of your hand-carved corncob pipe, I think that’s a god you could get behind. I think it wasn’t until the nukes started flying that you got in trouble, chaos breeds chaos you used to say, tapping on the pipe, and it only takes one madman with a nuclear code and nothing to lose, and I guess once you’ve lost the sky, what’s left. I think you got a full blast of poison and your skin started falling off in patches, you heaved up everything inside of you until you were hollow, you went full zombie, scaly and moaning, radiation cannibalizing your brain along with everything else, I think you tried to kill yourself by drinking a mug of fountain pen ink because you thought it would be a poetic way to go, but you threw that up, too, and died praying to your nonexistent fucking god that the pain would stop.

Love,

Dear No Strings Attached,

It would have been a pretty big fucking string, our baby. Our un-baby, our cell grouping, our medical waste. Less a string than a cord. Or one of the ropes they use to tie up boats. Knotted, rough to the touch, stinking of fish.