Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Nigh

Smiling, the small man with artificial eyes bowed to allow me to walk ahead of him. The guests moved into the dining room, and aside from the chair at the head of the table, only one other seat was left empty. I sat and arranged myself, smoothing the napkin in my lap. The first course was served, and I nodded thank you as a waiter placed a plate before me.

I recoiled.

It appeared to be some kind of meat, but perhaps it was imitation? Michael appeared from the kitchen and sat beside me, hoisting his champagne flute into the air. “A toast!”

Everyone else raised their glasses. I fumbled for mine.

Michael looked around the table. “A toast to old friends.” He made eye contact with each person in turn, nodding and smiling, and finished by looking at me. “And to new.” He clinked my glass. “A toast to the truth, to sacrifice, and to the brotherhood of all things living!”

“To sacrifice!” erupted a chorus around the table.

I raised my glass and took a sip before inspecting my appetizer again. Everyone else began eating.

Michael was watching me. “Trust me, Effie.”

The way he looked at me made me think of my father when he’d taught me to swim, late in my childhood. I’d been terrified. Let go, Effie , my dad had whispered, holding me close, trust me . Swimming was now one of my greatest pleasures.

Picking up my knife and fork, I sectioned off a piece of the thing on my plate and placed it in my mouth. I chewed. The texture was soft and salty, recalling a distant memory of pork. I hadn’t eaten meat since I was a pre-teen and had declared my parents murderers. The memory made me ill.

Michael’s prosthetic hand, now oddly warm, was on my forearm.

“Trust me,” he repeated.

I made a promise , I reminded myself, and so I smiled and swallowed and began carving off another piece. I fought down each bite, resisting the urge to escape to the bathroom. Just when I’d finished it, the main course was served.

My heart sank.

In a large serving dish in the middle of the table, a bone protruded rudely from flesh that fell away into caramelized onions and roasted potatoes. The circling waiters began serving thick slabs of what must be meat.

Is Michael making fun, taking advantage? I panicked, with only Michael’s steady gaze keeping me from flying into space. Poking at my potatoes and carrots, I ventured to try a scrap of the meat.

Popping it into my mouth, I chewed, tears in my eyes, but I couldn’t stand it anymore. Pulling Michael to me I whispered, “What is that?”

He smiled. “The more relevant question is: Who is that?”

“What do you mean, who ?” I hissed.

“Effie, I think you have just tasted human flesh for the first time.”

The conversation around the table stopped.

I gagged. “Is this some kind of joke?”

Michael remained still. “In fact, tonight you are part of a very special evening. Tonight I am sharing my flesh, my body with all of you.”

I looked around the table. Nobody else was even surprised. They looked pleased.

The joke was on me.

I fought back the simultaneous urge to throw my plate against the wall and to empty the contents of my stomach all over the table. The cloying smell of decay rose up from my plate. Without realizing it, I was already standing.

“This is sick,” I cried, staring into Michael’s blue eyes, “I thought—”

“You thought you were eating an animal? Some poor creature who could not choose this fate? No, Effie, I choose this. I give freely—”

I convulsed. “No. Nobody would—it’s too disgusting.” Now I was sure I was going to throw up.

But Michael held me. “Since time began, we’ve been consuming the Earth, consuming our fellow living creatures. Now we have the ability to sate our hunger by consuming ourselves . It’s the only way.”

I tasted bile in the back of my throat. “Why would you do this?”

“Because I’m a Christian. Are you not?”

I nodded.

“Is Christianity not a cult of cannibalism? Do we not make a weekly pilgrimage to eat the body and blood of our savior? We…” He extended his arms, palms up, toward his guests. “… have made our religion even more personal. Every one of us is our own savior containing that same spark of the divine. Just as consuming Christ is sacred, so consuming ourselves is a symbolic act that brings us closer to the god living in all of us—sacrificing a part of ourselves to atone for our sins, eating a small part of ourselves to atone for our share in mankind’s sins.”

The blood drained from my face. “This is crazy.” But everyone was staring at me like I was the crazy one. “This is—”

But I didn’t finish my sentence. Tears streaming down my face, I ran for the door and out into the cold, ripping my coat from its hanger on the way out. Pounding down the stairs, I skidded onto the sidewalk and sprinted away. Catching the cold metal of a railing at the subway entrance, I leaned over and began retching and crying in heaving sobs. An automated transport growled past, and I imagined myself falling in front of it. The stars were bright diamonds overhead, out of reach in a dead black sky.

I stared at my reflection in the bedroom mirror. Flaccid skin hung in bunches from my knobby bones. That’s not me, that can’t be me . In disgust, I covered myself with my gown and shuffled to the closet to begin layering up. It was past noon already. I hadn’t been out of my apartment in days, had been forcing my dog Buster to do his business on my tiny fifth floor balcony. Everything was an effort. During the day, I could barely keep my eyes open. At night, I’d lay awake, my thoughts swirling and frustrations mounting.

My phone chimed. I groaned but accepted the call. My boss’s face appeared.

“Dr. Hedegaard, will we be seeing you in the lab today?” He wasn’t buying my excuses anymore. “I don’t need to remind you that you’re the leader of this project team. A physical presence is still required from time to time.”

“Yes, yes,” I scowled. Even working from home, exhausted, I was keeping up with my workload, probably putting in twice the number of hours as anyone else. While not everyone had God-given intelligence, everyone could at least work hard, and my boss failed in both categories. For the hundredth time I asked myself why I submitted to working for him, for them .

Weeks had passed since the dinner. I was ignoring calls from friends. When isolation overcame exhaustion, I’d take Buster out for short walks. The people passing me on the streets, the cars, the looming lampposts, the newspaper boxes with their horrific headlines—I saw everything as though from the bottom of a well. How can these people just chit-chat with each other? How does the world make any sense to them?

I finally decided to attend another church meeting. I needed to find strength and salvation, to find some way out. Before arriving, I’d built up scenarios of how I would ignore Michael if I saw him, how I would give him a perfunctory hello and behave as if nothing had happened. As it turned out, he wasn’t there, and after the meeting, a desperation seeped in. Did something happen to him? Now I needed to know he was okay, even if I thought what he was doing wasn’t.

Or was it?

Who was he hurting? Nobody . I’d played back his phone messages over and over, his apologies, his clarifications for where the meat came from, that it was lab-grown replacement organs, that they weren’t butchers. Perhaps it was my own failure, my own closed mind that was the real problem. He might have explained it all to me first, but then I’d never have gone to his home. I thought about his friends that I’d spoken to there, how intelligent they were. Eating lab meat didn’t harm any animals, and it was genetically pure. The idea did make a certain… sense, I had to admit.