Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Now

The ropes they used to use, I guess I should say.

Hard to get used to that.

You didn’t have to tell me you didn’t want it. That once it was inside me, you didn’t want me, either, no matter how fast I got it scraped out. You didn’t have to tell me I would be a shitty mother.

These are things I already knew.

You didn’t have to pay for it, either, and so you didn’t. You could at least have offered.

Would I have been a shitty mother? I guess I’ll have my chance to find out, if I stay here.

You like how I said that, if I stay? The superfluous if, as in, I’ll meet you for coffee tomorrow, if the sun rises; I’ll hurt when it’s over, if it ends.

If gravity takes hold, I’ll break when I hit the ground.

Be fruitful and multiply, that’s the plan. Grow the compound until it’s safe to leave it behind. Repopulate the Earth. Not yet, Isaac says, but soon.

He says that about the two of us, too. Soon. That we won’t marry tonight with the others. We’ll wait until he turns thirteen, and then we will be joined. In all ways, we will be joined.

I told him I was old enough to be his mother, though I didn’t add that you don’t have to be Freud to see the relevance there. I told him there was no reason for him to hurry. That he had plenty of time to become a man.

He told me not to speak to him like a child.

He told me I understood him, and we would come to love each other. God would make it so.

He told me God wants him to have a son.

It’s possible that he’s making this shit up, but I’m pretty sure he believes it. Which is not better.

If you don’t believe in Isaac, and say it out loud, they put you out.

If you don’t fulfill your responsibilities, they put you out.

If you sin against the Lord, or some big mouth accuses you of doing so because she wants those chocolate bars you’re hoarding, they put you out.

If I were a mother, I would make sure my daughter knew that you do what you have to do. Even if it means letting the kid shove himself into you, enduring one scraping thrust and a whiplash jerk, the blown wad, the wilting dick, the tears.

Yes, I’ve thought about it. Am thinking about it.

But maybe, if I were a mother, when I am a mother, I’ll hide the baby under my coat and steal her away from the Ark, and raise her in the world. Maybe, because she will be born into the after, she will have evolved to survive it. Or I could leave her when I go, if I went, leave her where she could be safe and tended to, if not loved, and let her accept how life is supposed to be without me there to whisper in her ear that she should want more, that once there was more.

Or maybe Isaac is right, and God will stick me with a son.

Love,

P.S. Did you think I forgot? I’d guess you died, gutshot, intestines on the ground, mouth gibbering with surprise, when you got desperate enough to take food from your neighbor and she didn’t want to share. She’s dead now too, I’m guessing, the one you used to spy on with binoculars when you pretended you were birdwatching, because you liked the way she bulged and jiggled when she was naked, even though you always told me I should lose weight. Not, like, in a shallow way, you said. For my health.

Dear guy in the Arcade Fire t-shirt with the stain on the collar,

You were nice. That’s most of what I remember. You bought me drinks, but not too many, and didn’t say anything when I bought myself a few more.

I remember you’d just gotten fired, but you had your buddy’s entrance card so you could sneak into the building and smuggle out your files. You took me with you, and we didn’t go to your sad, abandoned cubicle to collect what was left of your old life. You didn’t want to have sex on your boss’s couch or take a dump on his desk. You wanted to show me the roof, because you said it was the best view of the city and I seemed like someone who needed a good view.

I was a little afraid you were a person who needed a high place from which to jump.

I would like to remember the feel of your arms around me as we stood against the railing and watched the lights twinkle in the black, but I only remember that it felt like standing on the deck of a boat, watching fallen stars burn on a dark sea.

I thought, maybe him.

Maybe this.

Because that’s how you think when you’re the right amount of drunk, and hands and lips feel good, and someone is nice. Sometimes even when he’s not.

Someone is better than no one.

That’s what Isaac told me, because he doesn’t want me to leave like Theresa left, doesn’t want to have to make me leave. Would it be so bad to be with me? he asked, and he shouldn’t have, because it made him sound so young. He told me I could have a day to think about it, before I promise myself to him. He’s being generous, he says, because he likes me.

I always want to ask him whether he knows why his mother left him behind—whether he cares if she had a reason or not.

Not that having a reason is anything special. Everyone has a reason.

Would it be so bad? He won’t be thirteen forever, but he would be forever mine.

I thought I loved you all—even you, even for a night—and none of you saved me. Isaac saved me, so maybe he’s right that I should love him, that that’s how it should work.

He chose wisely this time, chose like he could see into me.

I am the girl who stays.

I am the girl who says yes, if you want.

Whatever you want.

As long as you don’t leave.

You didn’t have time to find that out about me, and you didn’t have time to test it. Or maybe you did. I can’t remember.

I might have told you the truth about me, all of me; you might have told me things you’d never told anyone, the secrets that made you who you were; we might have decided this night was the beginning of all things; you might have recited poetry and I might have recited the lyrics to all the C&C Music Factory songs I know, which is three, because we wanted to impress each other, and it might have worked; we might have done nothing more up there than kiss, like people in a boring movie, deciding, because Hollywood told us it was romantic, to take it slow, that why not, we had all the time in the world; we might have shaken the Earth. I don’t remember, like the next day I didn’t remember your name or where the office was, which was all fine, because I gave you my number; I thought I remembered that much, but then you never called, so one way or another, I was wrong.

I think you died when it first happened, went up in a blaze of light, fused with the thing that fell from the stars. I hope they’re right that it was beautiful.

Love,

Dear John,

This is what I would have written, if I had written anything. Dear John, it’s better this way. Dear John, it’s now or later, and we’re both better off if it’s now. Dear John, you won’t believe me, but I’m doing you a favor. Dear John, it’s okay if you fucking hate me forever because I hate you too. You told me you would never leave me, and now you’re leaving, so don’t try to blame me for leaving first. Dear John, don’t die, and maybe someday I’ll come back.

You can see why I didn’t leave a note.

Your mother took me aside. Not that first day in the hospital—there was too much crying for that, all that weeping and rending of clothes by your bedside. It’s not natural for a mother to lose a son, she kept saying, like it isn’t the most natural thing in the world, like that isn’t what mothers do every day, like that isn’t why she hated me, no matter what you claimed. After the first day, before the week had ended, before I went home to pack a bigger suitcase for you, because we’d moved past duffel bags, into some new category of traveler, long-term visa to the kingdom of the sick, somewhere in there, she took me aside. You can’t handle this, she told me. You think you can, but you can’t. She thought because her husband was dead, she knew what it took to handle things, and she thought, because you called her sometimes to bitch about me never doing the dishes, and because once, the time you thought I was sleeping with the coffee guy, you made the mistake of telling her why I didn’t speak to my family anymore and why I never went to college and what I did that year in LA to pay the rent, because of everything you let her imagine, she thought she knew me.