Том Светерлич - The Gone World

Moss visited her mother that night. An enduring image of her mother, alone in the kitchen, only the single kitchen light on, going through her envelopes of Reader’s Digest cutouts, the rest of the house dark. Moss used to wonder if this was how she would remember her mother long after her mother had died, but now she knew that the Terminus would rob her of even this. Moss had called after Brock’s memorial and told her mother she was coming over, trying to prepare her for her injuries. She’d told her mother over the phone that she’d been in a car crash, that she would be fine, but the moment her mother saw her, she stood from the kitchen table.

“Let me look at you,” she said, angling her daughter’s chin toward the light. “Whoever he is, leave him.”

Moss sighed. “I told you how this happened. I was in an agency car, and a truck ran a red light—”

“They don’t stop,” said her mother. “You listen to me,” she said, staring hard into her daughter’s eyes. “If it’s in them, it’s always been in them and always will. He’ll destroy everything about you, he’ll take everything that was good. You’re worth more than that.”

“It’s nothing like that, I’m telling you—”

“Protect what you have, even if it means losing everything you think you want.”

Moss had aged as she traveled IFTs, even as the rest of time stood still, catching up with her mother incrementally over the years. Since her mother had been pregnant with Moss when she was young, only seventeen, Moss sometimes thought she might actually catch her mother in age, or pass her by. As her mother examined Moss’s face, however, the hot light of the kitchen lamp warming her skin, Moss had never felt more like a child. They ordered pizza and settled in for a night of television. Her mother kept the living-room lights low, and in just the harsh blue flicker of the television Moss found herself staring at the photograph of her father in his Navy whites, grinning until the end of time. They watched ABC News, her mother smoking cigarettes. The news of Brock’s funeral had been buried beneath the news of a cult in California, thirty-nine members discovered dead, a mass suicide.

“Of all the… you hear about this?” asked her mother.

“No,” said Moss.

“Thought the damn comet was a spaceship, so they killed themselves. They thought if they killed themselves, the spaceship would beam them up, like in Star Trek ,” she said. “All wearing the same sneakers. Look at that, they’re showing one of the bodies. Look at the sneakers.”

A body draped in a purple tarp, only the slacks and black-and-white sneakers visible, brand-new sneakers, bought for the occasion of death. They watched Beverly Hills, 90210 and Party of Five , shows her mother followed, but Moss let her mind wander to the Vardogger trees, the infinite paths—to Remarque ordering her crew to self-destruct Libra and commit mass suicide like the Heaven’s Gate cult, believing that if her crew died, then the world they had wrought would die with them. Her mother had fallen asleep in her chair by the time the local news came on, her glass of whiskey still in one hand, her cigarette in the other, burning down. A house fire, Moss imagined—she wondered in how many IFTs the cigarette dropped ash to the floor, caught the carpet on fire. Moss brought an ashtray over, a clay monstrosity she’d made for her mother in first or second grade, stubbed out the cigarette.

She expected more of the Heaven’s Gate suicides on the news, wanted to hear more about the spaceship these people thought was flying the Hale-Bopp, but the news was filled instead with a different cosmic event. Images of people gathered in fields, crowding hilltops and the roofs of buildings, staring at the night sky. The Star of Bethlehem had returned, some said—the Star of Bethlehem hanging in the sky, eastward. Some said the star was pointing the way to Bethlehem, some thought it represented the second coming of Christ, though the talking-head astronomers offered differing explanations. Another comet, some said, coming into our viewing region in a cyclical manner, an unprecedented doubling of comets, the Star of Bethlehem and Hale-Bopp like twin silver lights. Others claimed that the shining celestial event was more likely a distant supernova, the light just now reaching the Earth from a star that had died magnificently several billion years ago. Moss’s eyes, however, filled with tears that spilled down her cheeks. She unlocked the side door and walked into the street and faced the east. There were already others out on the street, looking up, shielding their eyes. The event was like a shining star, a star extraordinarily bright—bright enough to seem like a nighttime sun casting the Earth in a cold glare that washed out color and heightened shadow. The moon was dim, as were other stars—as was Hale-Bopp, that silvery smudge that had hung grandly in the sky for the past several weeks. The new light felt like the brightest light Moss had ever seen, and it grew ever brighter as she stared. It meant the death of everything she’d ever known. The White Hole had appeared. The Terminus had come.

Her cell phone rang, and she checked the number: O’CONNOR.

“We’re still alive,” she said.

“We have work to do.”

She drove to Virginia by the pale luster of the White Hole, a blinding disk bounded by a halo of night. Four a.m., but people gathered on their lawns and lined the roads, staring eastward, the unnatural light reflecting against their faces reminding Moss of faces in a movie theater. At dawn the sun rose pallid, but the sky remained preternaturally gray, the temperature dropped, and soon Moss turned on her windshield wipers against fat snowflakes that spun in the air. The radio was full of prophecy at the Star of Bethlehem, announcing the second coming of Christ—a child had been born in Puerto Rico in the instant the White Hole appeared, he’d been named Jesus, and already the infant was hailed as the sublime sign announcing the end of time. Winter was general over the Earth; even the sandblasted deserts of Africa experienced snowfall. NPR news reported that suicides lined the streets of Manhattan, Los Angeles, London, copycat deaths of Heaven’s Gate, bodies draped in sheets. There had been minor looting of shoe stores, people stealing the black-and-white Nikes favored by the cult. This is how the world ends , Moss thought. No panicking, no riots. No reports of the hanged men appearing, or of people running in herds, not yet anyway, though when she arrived in Virginia Beach, its few snowplows deployed laying salt and scraping the roads clear of slush, she learned that scores of people had congregated on the beach, that they had bent and flailed in concert, a sort of calisthenics, before wading into the ocean to drown.

Naval Air Station Oceana was in the midst of Operation Saigon when Moss arrived at the gates. The president’s and vice president’s families would be flown here on Marine One, would be boarded onto Eagle , a Cormorant shuttle kept ready for this moment. Their families and the members of their essential staff would rendezvous with TERNs Group 6, the USS James Garfield , at the Black Vale Station. NSC soldiers were notifying civilians who’d been chosen for evacuation, a life-or-death lottery plagued by nepotism, a supposed mix of genetics, genders, and aptitudes that a think tank of politicians and scientists had devised in consultation with the military to represent the last best hope to revive mankind. Moss drove the streets of the base and saw one of the Cormorants taking off, its flight path over the churning Atlantic. She met O’Connor at the NCIS offices.

“We have a new crime scene,” he said.