Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Nigh

“She said that,” Sara Grace screamed and hiccupped at me, crying hysterically, the tears and snot running down her face and mixing together in her mouth. “She said, ‘ When I hear her voice, I’ll know .’ Just like that.”

Sara Grace’s own mother had passed away two years before, dead of breast cancer at age 53, nine months before Sara Grace applied for nursing school.

This meant one of two things.

The first possibility was that Sara Grace’s mother would never make it to Planet Xyrxiconia, because only those who were alive and breathing at the moment of transition—the moment the laser cannons fired—would be reincarnated in this distant place.

The second possibility was that she was already on Planet X, that all our lost loved ones from eon after eon were already there, that they’d gone before us to prepare the way and would be there to greet us when we arrived.

The aliens had been somewhat unclear on this point, perhaps intentionally.

All we could do was wait and see.

For me, the breakdown was when I had a talk with my brother. He told me he was going to North Carolina. His ex-wife lived there now, with their kid, who was only three; she’d moved back there to be near her family when the marriage fell apart. My brother kept saying maybe he should have tried harder, maybe they should have tried harder, maybe they could have made it work. In the face of everything, whatever stupid arguments they’d had, those just didn’t really matter anymore, did they? She was the love of his life—she’d always been—and that was his son, and if these were the last days of his life on Earth he was going to spend it with the two of them.

He cried as he told me this and I cried too.

I should have enforced him.

But I couldn’t. How could I? My own brother?

I should have called for backup. I should have called Sara Grace.

But I didn’t.

On the off-fucking-chance that there was a paradise planet, I wanted to spend eternity there with my brother. And his wife. And their kid. So I let him go.

Other people’s brothers weren’t so lucky. And that’s how I knew that no one was actually headed to paradise.

Because if there is a heaven, that’s not how it works.

I stood on the Brooklyn Bridge for a long time after that, staring off into the distance. I stood there with the wind in my face and the roar and groan and exhaust of traffic to my back. It was chaotic, loud. The water yawned hungrily below. The reason I couldn’t enforce my brother was the same reason I couldn’t jump.

Some ragged, wild-eyed guy showed up after a while and stood beside me. We were quiet, companions in misery.

“You know what I think is funny?” he said after a while.

“What’s that?”

“All these bridges. All these tall buildings. All these train tracks. So inviting.”

“What do you mean?”

“They never even tried to make it difficult. It’s like all along, they’ve just been saying, ‘ Go ahead, we dare you .’”

“I guess I don’t understand.”

“They said ‘ Don’t do this, don’t do that .’ But somehow… I dunno. I get the feeling I’m doing them a favor. Anyway, sister, good luck to you. Wherever you end up.”

He jumped and disappeared into the waves below.

When I was a kid, my grandma used to say: “Cassie, if all your friends jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it too?”

I know, I know, everyone’s grandparents said that. Sometimes our parents said it as well, echoing the lectures they’d been hearing since childhood themselves.

You have to think for yourself; that’s what it meant. Someone has to stand up. Someone has to refuse to follow the crowd.

I didn’t jump. I didn’t do it too. Instead, I went home and sat in the bath and drank until I couldn’t see straight.

The next day at headquarters, they handed out thousands of bottles of Xanax. After that it all got a whole lot easier.

It was 9:17 p.m. on Wednesday… almost the end of the world.

We met at headquarters to go over the numbers. We’d had an okay day, but our stats were still down. Everyone’s stats were down.

What I thought—and maybe what a lot of people thought, although no one said it aloud—is that maybe the reason our numbers were down was that we’d already enforced so many people. And, of course, plenty of people had decided to off themselves.

The daring ones, the impulsive ones, the yearning ones, the emotionally unstable ones—they were all gone. The ones who were willing to hold out for paradise, they were the only ones left.

The streets felt awfully empty.

11:02 a.m. on Thursday. We enforced a lady euthanizing her six cats, just in case. We enforced a florist standing in the street in front of his shop, liquidating all his stock by handing out flowers to anyone who passed. We enforced an old couple, two women sitting side-by-side and hand-in-hand on the steps of a church, praying for mercy and grace for themselves and everyone they knew.

2:47 p.m. on Thursday. We enforced a young man scattering his father’s ashes. We enforced a young woman taking a dive into the East River. We enforced a young couple making love under a bench in the park and we enforced another young couple locked in a drinking contest.

5:22 p.m. on Thursday. “Less than twenty-four hours to go,” Sara Grace said, and we stood together looking out across the water, watching the sun as it sank toward the Manhattan skyline. “It was a beautiful world,” she said. “This world. It had a lot to offer.”

“Not really,” I said, but maybe that was just a tired old pose, that same old cynicism that made it easier not to get hurt. Now that it was ending, I did feel a pang of loss.

“I just wish we had more time.”

“I think we all do,” I said.

The sun glared red and glinted off the skyscrapers and Sara Grace snuck her tiny hand into mine.

That night at headquarters there was something in the air: darkness and restlessness and relief and jubilation all mixed together. It was our last nightly meeting. We were almost done. We were almost there.

There were long, rambling speeches and lots of hand-offs of the mic. There were congratulations and thanks all around. There were midlevel city employees and local politicians. All the managers came out on stage and did a dance routine to show their appreciation for our service.

There was a low rushing undercurrent of whispers and laughter and mumbling at all times, echoing against the concrete floors and walls like the ocean in a seashell. The room felt hot and sweaty, and it stank of beer and cigarettes and human sweat, except I could smell Sara Grace beside me too and she smelled like eucalyptus and jasmine and herself.

They showed us a slideshow with some facts about what we’d accomplished in the past two weeks. They’d coordinated at the highest levels of the project to put this together for us, gathering data from all North American offices. They’d set it to music.

The most active enforcers were in metropolitan areas (no surprise there): Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, New York. Here in New York, we hadn’t done quite as well as L.A., but we couldn’t let that get us down, could we?

Overall enforcement numbers for the United States stacked up surprisingly well against other western countries, demonstrating that despite all the doom and gloom, we Americans really could get organized and pull together when circumstances demanded. One out of every thousand people everywhere had been called to enforce and, of all these, nearly 83% had completed their service to the end, with each enforcer completing an average of about fifteen enforcements per day. Not bad, not bad at all.