Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Nigh

“It felt like sand. What the glove did just now… it felt like digging my fingers into warm sand.”

The visor comes down over her eyes. She lies back on the cot, breathes deeply. Beth steps back and lets the program begin.

The program runs more or less predictably. Moment by moment, Beth has always been able to guess what it will show. They built it out of her memories, after all. She was the one who lay in the MRI as they brushed and pressed and prodded, held her fingers against cloth and metal, paper and leaves. The one who opened her mouth and offered her tongue to sugar and vinegar and stale bread.

And so she knows that Farah is walking across a county fairground on a mid-summer evening, the system pulsing the pressure of sandy soil and sparse grass up through the soles of her feet, and every electrode registering heat and humidity. Carousel music—calliopes and brass bands—floats on a slow breeze. Balancing the volume was a challenge; it required adjusting the instruments’ pitch as the subject moved across the scene. In the distance, fair rides spin and tilt and shine in the orange sunlight. Scraps of paper and checkered hotdog wrappers plaster themselves against a chain-link fence. There are smells, of which Beth is especially proud, though they are still imperfect: cooking sausages, hot pretzels and mustard, fairground ponies, gasoline. Just when Beth estimates Farah is probably approaching the Ferris wheel, Farah makes a strange, strangling sound and moves her arms from the cot, reaching for her visor.

“Take it off!”

Her voice is muffled by the helmet. She doesn’t sound frightened, but angry.

Beth loosens the strap, slips the hood back over Farah’s head. Farah’s face is damp, frowning, unreadable. She seems ready to rip the gloves off, but Beth stops her; the system is delicate.

“What is it? Are you okay?”

Farah shrugs her off. “Yes. Sorry.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. It was just—”

“Uncanny?” Beth has heard that one before.

“Dull.”

A moment of thick silence.

“What’s wrong with it?” Beth says.

“No, no.” Farah shakes her head, raking her still-gloved hands through her hair. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“Just tell me what’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong . It’s just empty. Not a single living thing. No one else.” Farah’s hands are still buried in her curls. She glances up at Beth’s face, and the oddly angry expression still curls her lips. “No other people, right?”

“No. Not for a long time, anyway.” Beth remembers Aiden, his alternate reality fantasies. Hiding away in the imaginary world of Immerse, waiting for the storm to pass. Or not waiting—building a new world inside the program for just one person. “It was part of the plan for the future, of course, but we’re nowhere near that level. And there’s no time for it now.”

“So what’s it good for?”

Her eyes are narrowed, her voice raised, ringing a little in that small, bare room. She lowers her hands, rips the gloves off with a loud tearing sound. She doesn’t mean to be combative, Beth realizes; she’s genuinely curious. The anger comes from not understanding.

And Beth isn’t sure she understands, either.

She looks down at the glove dangling empty from the tight sleeves on Farah’s forearm, looks down at the crisp sheets of the cot, which smell faintly of bleach, at the ridges in the concrete floor, at the shadow of Farah’s crutch falling across them, that narrow black line against the pale gray. She hears the hum of the air filters in the room behind them.

“It gives people something they can touch,” she says.

Silence gathers again, thick. Farah smiles ruefully.

“If someone were to find this years from now,” she says, “if someone could survive and find this place on their own, would they even know what to do with it? Do you think they would understand this ?”

“I don’t know,” Beth admits. “But it will be here, just in case.”

The Sixth Match

Beth does not open up easily, if at all. She has never wanted to fall in love. She dreads travel, new jobs, new co-workers. She would rather reread a book she loves ten times over than risk picking up a new one. She had many acquaintances in college, and some even endeavored to stay in touch, but it never seemed worth the effort to her. It’s hard to get in touch with people now, what with the evacuations, the earthquakes, the fires. If she’s honest, she prefers it this way.

Farah smiles rarely, but when she does, it is extraordinarily pretty. She talks little. Beth has memorized her makeup, the brown lipstick on her full lips, the heavy eyeshadow with a hint of green, the precise curve of it beneath Farah’s straight, high eyebrows. Unlike Beth, she has no preferences for ink or paper; she writes on napkins, the backs of receipts, envelopes from the electric bill. She touches everything in the apartment. Her rent checks are always on time, never a day early or a day late. She moved to D.C. right after the Yellowstone eruption; the air was clear when she signed the agreement, but by the time she moved in, the DOI warnings had already been issued. I don’t mind , she’d said. I stay inside anyway .

Beth knows nothing about Farah’s family, her friends, her preferences. Doesn’t know if she’s ever been in love.

If Beth’s honest, she prefers it that way, too

The Seventh Match

One week before the end of the world, they take a taxi down to the west end of the Mall. The buses have stopped running. The downtown streets are eerie and unfamiliar: food carts abandoned at long-expired parking meters; newspaper vending machines empty or still filled with last week’s papers; plywood and plastic affixed over full-story windows, to protect against looters and smog. Both measures, Beth thinks, are overly optimistic.

It may be Beth’s imagination, but the air feels a little fresher down by the thick old trees, down by the wider stretches of the river and the tidal basin: a little less gritty against the skin her mask leaves exposed. The seven small aquariums fit in the trunk of the taxi, just barely. They’re obnoxiously heavy. Farah needs her crutches, so it’s Beth’s job to carry the boxes, one at a time, past the stone barricades and down the shallow steps to the place that Farah has selected on the lip of the reflecting pool.

“Is there a special way to do this?” she asks. “Should we say something first?”

Farah shakes her head.

They place the Houses Without Air in a tight semicircle with the open edge facing the pool. As Beth sets each aquarium in place, Farah crouches down across from it, inspecting the landscapes inside. She’s anchored them well; nothing has shifted except the sand. Farah’s custom-fitted lids have puckered, rubber-lined openings in the top corners large enough to take a matchstick, just barely airtight.

Beth hasn’t come down to the Mall in almost three years. The haze is so thick now that she can’t make out even a suggestion of the white obelisk far above and across the pool, and the Lincoln Memorial is only a pale, heavy smudge to their right.

Farah stays crouched over the seventh box, her crutches stretched out to either side like the barest framework for wings. Her eyes look red and damp, irritated by the air. Beth wonders what her lips are doing behind her mask.

“You can start,” she says.

The box of long matches is in Beth’s jacket pocket. When Farah nods, she strikes the first match, pushes it down flame-first through the opening in the first aquarium’s roof. They practiced back at the apartment; if they aren’t quick enough, the flame will go out before they can pass it through the lid. The flame makes it in, but there’s only a sliver of air between the lid and the surface of the water inside. It smothers quickly.