Alexandra Kleeman: Intimations: Stories

I had a dream I was lying in a very soft bed on a very soft pillow and around me was a blanket that I was chewing on, absently, like a baby chews on its own thumb, but when I woke up I found it was a rabbit I was chewing on, or rather a couple of rabbits, and I felt embarrassed, but mostly tired.

On the open tundra you can see someone approaching from five to ten miles away, dependent on weather conditions, the elevation of the viewer, and the curvature of the earth. Once you see them beginning to approach, you discover it takes forever for them to arrive. Early on, the slowness of their progress put me in a fever state. Who might it be? When they make themselves known, what will they say? Are they the threat I have been watching for? There was nothing to do from this position but ask oneself over and over again: What could that be, making its way so slowly from the horizon to my burrow? Will they arrive? Will they change course? A diet of questions is a steady way to shed weight, and health, and contentment. Now I know that it will not make a difference who it is, which is an attitude that takes the edge off but does not at all alter the fact that this edge is connected to a knife. The sky is blue as always, and today it is scored by a small figure heading toward me — with supplies? With word from the experts at the central base? With a flag to plant at my feet?

Knowing is a weak food, and watching is a weak food, and a figure on the horizon is a weak food destined to weaken with knowledge, as at all times we walk on a thin layer, tread our way toward the far reach, and so on.

When I went downstairs this morning and found Cookie missing, I knew that official emergency procedure called for me to phone all the information in to the Bureau of Disappearances. At the prompting of the prerecorded voice, I would enter my social security number and zip code. I would press 2 to report the sudden absence of an animal, 3 for “domestic animal,” and then at the sound of the tone I would speak the word “cat” clearly and audibly into the telephone receiver. The woman’s voice would then give a short parametric definition of a cat, and if this definition matched my missing item, I could press the pound sign to record a fifteen-second description. A three-note melody would let me know that my claim had been filed, and then that lovely prerecorded voice would read out my assigned case number, along with some instructions on how to update or cancel my claim.

Instead, I picked up the phone and pushed your number into it. I was always telling you about problems you couldn’t fix, as though multiplying badness could dilute it.

Cookie’s gone, I said, and waited for your response.

There was a pause on the other end of the line.

Have you phoned it in? you asked. Your voice was casual, like it was someone else’s pet entirely, a pet from a faraway land owned by people we’d never meet.

I didn’t, I said. I’m kind of depressed, I added. I was often depressed, but now we all had better reasons to be.

I’m sorry, you said back.

Cookie loved to chew on wires, I said.

I know, you said. You didn’t say you wished you could be here. I didn’t say it either.

There was nothing more to say. I hung up the phone. Sometimes I dialed you back right away just to hear you pick up and know that your hands were, at that very moment, resting on a chunk of plastic that threaded its way delicately to me over hundreds of miles of wire and cord. To know that even though your voice had disappeared, you had not yet. But recently I hadn’t been allowing myself any callbacks. I was getting more afraid of the day when you wouldn’t pick up.

The apocalypse was quiet. It had a way about it, a certain charm. It could be called graceful. It was taking a long time.

People prepared for an apocalypse that they could take up arms against, bunker down with. People hoarded filtered water, canned corn, dry milk, batteries. They published books on how to get things done in the new postworld, a world that they always imagined as being much like our own, only missing one or two key things. They might imagine, for example, that survivors would reemerge onto a planet stripped of all vegetable and plant life. First, the animals would grow vicious and then starve. It would be important to hoard as many of these animals as possible, pack them in salt and hide them away to keep. You’d want to have a supply of emergency seed to grow in a secure location, maybe using sterilized soil that you had already hoarded. Then you’d want to gather a crew. One muscleman with a heart of gold, a scientist type, an engineer, a child, and somebody that you thought maybe you could love, if you survived long enough to love them.

Nobody thought the apocalypse would be so polite and quirky. Things just popped out of existence, like they had forgotten all about themselves. Now when you misplaced your keys, you didn’t go looking for them. Maybe you went to your landlord and asked for the spare set, took them to the hardware store and made two copies this time, an extra in case the disappearing wasn’t a one-off but part of a trend. Or maybe you took this as a sign and decided to leave instead, walked out directionless into the world to find your own vanishing point, which meant moving to Chicago to stay with your brother, who still had the keys to his house and a spare set to give to you.

It was cute the way this apocalypse zapped things out of existence, one by one. It was so clean and easy, like clicking on a little box to close an Internet browser window. It had a sense of humor: a fat man walking down the street lined with small abandoned shops would look down and find that his trousers had vanished, baring his out-of-season Halloween boxers to the public. That kind of humor.

Videos of things like this used to show up all the time on the Internet, until the Internet went.

I thought I would visit the Ferris wheel at the pier before it vanished. I didn’t know when it would go. I had the idea that I could try to be the last person ever to visit it, but that would require a lot of work, a lot of waiting around and watching, and there were things to do even in the time of last things. I put two apples in a plastic bag and headed out the door, which I didn’t lock even though it would have been easy to do. I took the elevator down to the first floor and walked on East Jackson Drive to the edge of the water, then up along the highway, holding onto the handrail with one gloved hand. A sedan full of teenagers drove by, and one of them shouted a blurry word at me that sounded like it had once been a taunt. It was winter, but it wasn’t so cold. There was less weather, the same way there was less of everything. This day resembled the day before: sleepy air and wan blue sky, no clouds but a vague foggy white that might just have been a thinning of the atmosphere.

At the pier I saw the seagulls huddling together on the boardwalk, pressing their dirty white bodies up against each other. They seemed able to eat anything — crusts, rinds, paper napkins. They were made to survive, even in a fading world that was unthinking itself faster than we could fill it back up with our trash. One seagull worked to swallow a little plastic toy lion, snapping its beak down on it with blunt patience. The Ferris wheel loomed up big behind them at the end of the pier, though it wasn’t as big as it had seemed the first time I saw it. The wheel was missing spokes at random, and some of the red seating cars had gone. It looked like the mouth of someone who had been punched over and over again in the face.