Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Nigh

“Back up,” Beth says. “What is this? Setting it up where?”

Farah makes a low, irritated noise in the back of her throat. With a sudden burst of energy, she tosses her sketch on the pile, raises herself up on the couch, hooks her hands under her knees and swings her legs over the side of the couch. Beth has missed something important, but she has no idea what.

“Look,” Farah says. “It isn’t commissioned or anything. Who would commission a memorial for the end of the world? But I want to do this, and I want to do it here. So it has to be small-scale.”

“Okay.” Beth is mentally calculating the odds of being stopped by security if they attempt to assemble Farah’s memorial on the National Mall. Another part of her is thinking that this must be the reason Farah came to D.C. in the first place. “That explains the aquariums.”

A very faint smile twitches at the corner of Farah’s mouth. She can smile prettily when she wants too—full lips, teeth hidden. “I’m calling it Houses Without Air .”

“And that explains the matches.” Beth chews her lip. She isn’t sure what else to say. “Well, at least it isn’t a Hans Christian Andersen reference,” she says finally. “I hate that story.”

“Pardon?”

“‘The Little Matchgirl.’ This girl’s selling matches on New Year’s Eve, and she’s freezing, so she tries to warm herself. She lights each match and imagines these little scenes while it burns. Christmas trees and family dinners, all that. But the visions only last as long as the matches do. And when she runs out of matches, she freezes to death.”

Farah responds with the world’s most dignified snort. “If she froze to death, how can we know what she was imagining?”

“Because it’s a story,” Beth snaps, exasperated. “The people who come after have to figure it out somehow.”

“Want to know a secret?” Farah leans back against the pillows, but she’s smiling fully now—almost mischievously. And this, Beth thinks, is the problem with Farah. She’s reckless, selfish, destructive of property, critical and dismissive of others. And she knows exactly what to say to make Beth forget all of it.

“Of course.”

“I never worry about the people who come after. If they can make sense of the memorial or not. It’s enough for them to know that something happened here, something important, that it mattered. Give them something they can feel. But telling the story? One story, with all its specifics? I don’t know if that’s possible.”

“I don’t know if I’d want to,” Beth says.

Farah nods, closing her eyes. “Exactly.”

The Fourth Match

Farah Karimi has lived in dozens of houses over the years: an apartment in an old palazzo in Venice where the stucco flaked from the moisture and where the elevator walls were black with mold; a cottage on the coast of the North sea where her chair’s wheels used to stick in the damp sand if she rolled too close to the water. She feels called to places on the edge of disaster.

She won’t build memorials for soldiers, battles, anything of that sort—not that she’d be invited to. She has a reputation for keeping things private. Nothing too obviously patriotic, although she’s made exceptions, as everyone has; she lets the land influence the design, and there are still places in the world where love for the land remains the highest expression of patriotism.

She has built memorials after terrorist attacks. Many refugee camps. Hurricanes and earthquakes are something of a specialty; she loves wind and fault lines, in glass and concrete, though she hates dealing with the rubble. She’s built memorials after Ebola outbreaks, and smallpox when it came back, although she was advised not to enter the areas both times.

The Venice Harbor Arch is Farah Karimi’s most famous work. The glass pillars catch the light of the rising and setting sun, spreading it in rainbows over the shallow water, still broken here and there by rooftops and church steeples. She’s never been fond of it; it’s too huge, too obvious.

When Beth first heard Farah’s name, she thought of Venice, though she couldn’t remember why.

The Fifth Match

Two weeks before the end of the world, Beth comes home early on a Wednesday night. Farah is on the floor of the back room, arranging cacti in the bottom of a thirty-gallon aquarium. She’s wearing her pale blue carbon mask. The tape around the air conditioner has started to fail.

“I want to show you something,” Beth says.

She offers to get Farah’s chair out of storage from the back of the building, but Farah demurs. Crutches are easier with the bus. They catch the bus to the metro, the metro to the University stop. In the dark and the smog, the campus feels deserted, though Beth knows it isn’t.

Six swipes of Beth’s ID takes them into a lab building, down an elevator and a long, winding corridor, into the Immerse laboratory, which really is deserted. The front room is all desks and computers and bookshelves, the stale smell of old coffee and spilled creamer. Farah glances around the room, eyebrows arched, doesn’t say anything.

“Through here.” Beth leads Farah to a door in the back. Her palms are damp despite the air-conditioned coolness. The small room beyond has a low cot along one wall, a set of white laminate cabinets along the other. From left to right, Beth opens the doors, lays out the cabinet’s contents on the cot. Wires and suction cups, long-sleeved gloves, a hood with a broad blue visor.

“So this is what you’ve been working on?” Farah remains standing in the doorway, leaning forward on her crutches. The public transportation and the walk across campus have been a greater exertion than she’s used to, these days. Her hair curls around her forehead in sweat-damp ringlets. “Yeah.” Beth clears her throat. “Yes. It’s called Immerse.”

“Not a very creative name.”

“It’s not a very creative project. The word inevitable comes to mind, actually.”

Laughing softly, Farah makes her way to the cot. She slips first one arm, then the other out of the loops of her crutches. “Entertainment purposes only, right?”

“Well, you can’t stay in there forever, if that’s what you mean.” Beth glances over the components spread across the crisp white sheet. Hooked together, they make a strange and skeletal assemblage. “Okay, you’ll need to undress for this. Most of these need to go right against your skin.”

Farah slips her sweater over her head. In the air-conditioned lab, goosebumps dimple the dark skin of her forearms. Beth helps her up onto the edge of the cot so she can slip out of her blue jeans. “Every time I’ve been hooked in,” Beth warns, “the components have been cold as fuck. Just so you know.”

She begins fitting the system around Farah’s body. After years with Immerse, hooking in has become routine, but it’s rare that she’s put the system on someone else, especially someone who doesn’t know the components well enough to help. Farah stays slack like a doll, allowing Beth to wrap her arms in the tight compression sleeves and slide the thick, electrode-studded gloves down over each finger. Beth has never seen her so quiet, so attentive.

Arms, legs, torso. The hood comes last. As Beth reaches around behind Farah’s head, her inner arm brushes against the rough cloth of Farah’s suited shoulder. Farah doesn’t seem to notice.

“This piece is the brain of the whole system,” Beth explains, drawing it up around Farah’s thick hair. “Everything you see and feel starts in here. It’ll send signals to the other pieces, like so… ” Farah makes a soft sound of surprise as something trails across her fingertips. The glove on her right hand flexes perceptibly. “The system will be giving you real stimuli. Your brain will interpret it according to the program that the system is running.”