The End As I Know It

by Kevin Shay

  I’ve noticed some replies to parts one, two, and three, but I won’t read them yet. Can’t get derailed by some snide nitpicker before I finish. Now I’m pounding out part four at a furious rate. I’ve killed off two thirds of the earth’s population, and while the Third World barely has a heartbeat and your Chinas and Brazils and Eastern Europes are thoroughly catatonic, the survivors in North America, Western Europe, Australia, Japan are starting to brush themselves off, grieve for the dead, and contemplate building some sort of new society, or at least linking up the ad hoc local governments and markets that have begun to emerge. It’s 2003.

  Time for a short break. Inventory. Baggie of weed still about three-quarters full. If any’s left when I check out, I’ll have to ditch it. No point transporting it across any state lines, not to mention Nicole would kill me if I brought it into her home and she found out. Still, an excellent purchase. I congratulate myself once again on managing to locate and procure illicit drugs in Roanoke, Virginia. Which was easier than I expected. I sort of look like someone who wants to buy drugs, so it’s a simple matter of finding the right park and standing around for a while. Inventory, continued. Bucket of ice half melted, but enough fragments left to chill one more round of bourbon-and-ginger. Wish I had a bigger vessel than this little motel bathroom cup. Maybe on my next run to the store I’ll get a fountain drink in one of those jumbo plastic cups. With the smaller paper ones the bottom gets soggy. But with such a big cup, if I’m not careful I’ll end up too hammered to complete the Prognosis. Decisions, decisions. As I fix my drink, a tinny voice from the laptop speaker announces I’ve got mail.

  “Ooh, I wonder who that could be?” I say in my best Fred Rogers. Maybe it’s from Rob. He promised he’d read the sheaf of printouts I left with him, and I’ve emailed a couple of times asking if he’s gotten around to it. “Be right with you,” I assure the computer, and head for the bathroom. Hmm, let’s nip that habit in the bud. Talking to myself is bad enough, but talking back to America Online bespeaks true proximity to the deep end.

  The email turns out to be from the Bursey family, or, according to their address, the TheBrsys. Claude and Hilary and Megan—the other two kids are too young to go online—share the account, and I never know whether it’s Claude or Hilary writing until I open it. TheBrsys may be my ticket to survival. They fell into my lap the day before yesterday, saving me the legwork of hunting down a Y2K-savvy family to stay with. It was the first part of the Prognosis, my brief bio and description of my circumstances, that caught Hilary’s lurking eye and inspired her to contact me. We’ve exchanged about a dozen emails in the past couple of days, and I seem to be winning them over. Although they might not be so charmed if they knew I’ve been drunk and high the whole time. This one’s from Hilary, who doesn’t capitalize:

  hi again randall:

  good news! claude and i have talked it over and we’d love to have you here for thanksgiving. if you still want to come. but of course if you make it up with your dad then by all means, you should be with your family. i know it seems hopeless to persuade them—that’s how it seemed with claude’s parents too, but we finally broke through their denial, it just takes persistence, sometimes. well, sorry, i know you didn’t ask for a pep talk, lol, just got carried away. ;-) we’re looking forward to meeting you. we can figure out all the details later this week. best, hilary

  The Burseys are in east Texas, on several recently acquired acres at the edge of the woods. So I’ll head down there for Turkey Day and check out the scenario. Unless it goes well with Nicole. Of course my first choice would be for my own family to start preparing. But failing that, I’ll settle for a family that Gets It. Maybe they’ll be a swell bunch of folks, TheBrsys. I click the reply button.

  Bang! Bang! Bang! Jesus, now what? I nearly fall out of my chair. The door. A fist, pounding on the door of my room. A male fist, too aggressive for a maid or a misdirected visitor. Oh, this is not good. Did I miscount FlockWatcher’s money? Is he back with his arsenal for the balance?

  “Hey, are you in there?” The fist keeps banging. Doesn’t sound like FlockWatcher. Police? Oh, shit, drugs.

  “Just a minute!” I scramble, gather up the pot and related accessories, shove it all into the dresser drawer.

  “It’s the manager. I’m coming in!” A key ring jingles. At least he’s had to stop that relentless knocking to look for the key. I see I haven’t put the chain on the door. Stupid, stupid.

  “No, wait, I’m letting you in! Just let me put some pants on!” I wave my hand as if doing so will clear the air of smoke. What else here could incriminate me? Liquor’s legal, unless there’s a house rule I wasn’t told about. I manage to open the door before he does.

  Huh. I expected someone bigger from the volume of the door-pounding. Must’ve thrown all his weight behind each knock, because he’s a skinny little guy, with tragically obvious hair plugs, no undershirt under his gaudy faux-silk shirt, wrath in his beady eyes. From behind him, unwelcome sunlight streams into my darkened nest.

  “What the hell is wrong with you, son? You been on that phone line for two days!” He leans from side to side, trying to look past me into the room, expecting to see God knows what.

  The phone line? The phone line! Not the weed! I should be relieved. Instead I become combative. “So what? A guest can’t use the phone?”

  “For two days?”

  “Has it been that long?”

  “Don’t bullshit me. I been watching it on the switchboard! Who you talking to, I might ask?” I take a step back, and he seizes the opening, darts triumphantly into the room. He’s drunker than I am, it occurs to me.

  “Hey!” Noticing the computer. “What the hell is this, huh?”

  “It’s a com-pu-ter,” I say as patronizingly as I can.

  “Oh, I see how it is. You hacking into my phone system?”

  “I’m not hacking anything. I’m online. It’s a local call.”

  “Ho, online! Now I get it. You running one of those porno sites?” He stands over the computer and squints down at the screen, trying to see what’s on it, but from that angle the LCD is a dim blur. I slam the laptop shut.

  “Am I running—of course not!” But I start to blush, feeling unaccountably guilty over the porn I wasn’t looking at.

  “Online for two days, that doesn’t sound suspicious to you?”

  “I told you, it’s a local call. I’ll pay you the seventy-five cents.” Six bits, I wanted to say, but I couldn’t verify the arithmetic in time.

  “You can keep your money. I’m shutting off this line.”

  “What? You can’t do that.”

  “Consider it done.”

  “I’m a paying guest in this—”

  “I don’t want to hear it. Look, you want to stay here another night, knock yourself out, but you won’t have a dial tone. Find somewhere else to transact your business, son.”

  “Why won’t you listen to me? I’m not transacting any—”

  “You’re lucky I don’t get the cops in here. I bet they’d be interested to take a look at what’s on your little machine. Because I hear this Internet porno can bring in a lot of money. Lot…of…money.”

  Oh, I see. Fishing for a bribe. Fifty bucks, maybe, and I could stay here and wrap up my prognosticating. But no, I can’t bring myself to grease the palm of a man with hair plugs that egregious. And maybe he’d call the cops anyway, just for kicks.

  “All right, sir. You win. So I’ll be out by checkout time. Is there anything else?”

  He opens his mouth, wondering if he should request money more explicitly, then shrugs and heads for the door, spinning his key ring around his finger. Muttering as he walks out, “What kinda pervert stays on a phone line two days?”

  I throw my things together, then check my connection and find he’s already made good on his threat to cut off the phone. Well, fine, then. Let him think he’s thwarted a traveling pornographer. I shut down the laptop and stick it in the bag. Jesus, that’s heavy. Hope I
can make it to the station. Should I leave the vodka behind? No, I should not. “Ah, mobile living,” I say in the voice of R. K. Raccoon, shifting the duffel’s shoulder strap, which is already starting to pinch a nerve. This will all make a nice Paul Revere story to tell my grandkids, who will be curious about what the industrialized world was like.

  “Julie, as we look at these returns this morning—where did the Republicans go wrong?” says CNN. I shut off the TV before Julie can reply, then flush the weed, swap out the Bible, and stagger into the morning light.

  chapter 10

  421

  Days

  “Whoa, rough trip?” my sister says through her Audi’s rolled-down window. “Wow, you don’t look so good!”

  I was hoping I didn’t look as bad as I feel, after a fitful night of sweaty Dadaist dreams in a greasy-sheet hotel a few blocks from here. But no such luck, I guess, if I earned a “whoa” and a “wow” in the same breath.

  “It’s swell to see you too, sis,” I say, a doting little brother from a 1950s filmstrip.

  “Just throw your things in the backseat.”

  The bus terminal hasn’t changed much since I arrived at it the night before last. Should have called Nicole when I got here, let her know I’d reached D.C. a couple of days early. My booze-and-Internet spree had no business extending beyond Roanoke. But no, I perversely booked that fleabag room instead and kept writing, kept drinking. The bill for that decision has now come due, and the usual suspects are shaking me down for it: throbbing head, pounding pulse, roiling colon, and a few of their pals. And to top it off I had to slink back here to be picked up, because Nicole thinks I just got off the bus.

  I unburden myself of guitar and bag and climb into the passenger seat. The second I shut the door, Nicole locks the power locks and pulls out. “Hey there,” I say to the side of her head.

  “Hi. Sorry, I just want to get out of this neighborhood. It makes me nervous.” Is it a bad neighborhood? By now I’m so inured to bus stations and their environs that the sketchiness of this part of D.C. barely registered. At this point I probably resemble predator more than prey anyway.

  “Do you have leg room? You can reach down on your right and adjust everything.”

  “No, it’s comfortable.” Sure is. Outside of a taxi or two, I haven’t ridden in a car since I left my wreck in San Francisco. Now I remember what it’s like. You can see the road straight ahead instead of catching oblique glimpses out the side window or craning into the aisle. I lean back, luxuriating in German-engineered ergonomics, and wait for Nicole to reach a less frightening part of town where she’s capable of speech. I try to pay attention to our nation’s capital flying by outside the window, but my eyes prefer to close. I’m drifting toward sleep when Nicole breaks the silence with a loud sigh of relief. We’ve reached the freeway.

  “OK. We’re on the way. So what’s up with you, Randall?”

  “It’s been an interesting few months.”

  “Sounds like it. From what I can piece together. Like, you and Dad, what happened there?”

  “Not much of a story. We had a little difference of opinion.”

  “Well, I hope you’ll explain at some point.”

  “All will become clear.”

  “Anyway, Morgan’s looking forward to seeing you. He wants to show you his little plastic guitar.”

  “I can’t wait!”

  “Randall, are you getting enough sleep?” Whoops, dozing again.

  “Well, you know, motels and buses, it’s not ideal.”

  “But I mean in general. Are you tired all the time?”

  “Oh, I get by.”

  “Well, because I wonder if you might have apnea.”

  “That sounds good. I’ll have the pan-seared apnea.”

  “I’m serious. It’s a sleep disorder.”

  “I know what it is.” Classic Nicole. I’m with her ten minutes and she’s diagnosed me with a worrisome syndrome.

  “Cause, you know, you used to snore. Do you still?”

  “Not too much, I don’t think.” Should I come out and tell her I’m tired because over the past three weeks I’ve been drunk eight hours a day? No, that might not set her mind at ease.

  “Well, you wouldn’t even know unless someone told you.”

  “Nicole, this may come as a shock, but I have shared beds with people once or twice during my adult life.”

  “You should take this seriously, Rand. It can really affect your health.”

  “I’ll check into it.”

  “I can look up some information for you. Did you know you can search Medline on the web now for free? Also, Boyd has Nexis through work.”

  “That’s handy.” Nicole must spend hour after anxious hour availing herself of these resources, eyes glued to the screen, marching along on her self-perpetuating quest to shield herself and her loved ones from microorganisms, toxins, unsafe intersections, vitamin deficiencies, drug interactions, suspicious moles, undertow, bad neighborhoods, sunlight, the whole deadly world. Behind each link, another peril; behind each peril, ten more links.

  It’s only in the past few years that this obsessive caution has taken hold of her. Through our childhood, through college, into her midtwenties, Nicole was as heedless of health and safety and oral hygiene as the next carefree kid. She and Boyd went skydiving on their honeymoon, for God’s sake (the lame tandem kind where the instructor clutches you the whole way down, but still). Then pregnancy, and boom! Instant hypervigilance. Nice little case study there, the hormonal and psychological factors or whatever. She’s been leaning on the panic button for Morgan’s entire life, with no sign of stopping. Boyd’s too busy to notice the extent of her issues, or maybe he just likes a tidy house—along with the worrying came compulsive neatness and whirlwind homemaking. Nicole and Salmon Ella would get along well. Which reminds me, I should inquire about her new career. If only to distract her from my alleged apnea.

  “So how’s life as a personal organizer?”

  Condescending snort. “A personal organizer is, like, a datebook, Randall. A Palm Pilot or something. I’m a professional organizer.”

  “Sorry. How insensitive of me.”

  “It happens to be going pretty well. I’m getting a lot of referrals. You’d think springtime would be the big season, spring cleaning, but actually more people get stressed toward the holidays—cards, gift buying, the meals, the guests.”

  “Yeah, Santa’s workshop must be a total wreck.”

  She shoots me an aggrieved look. “This isn’t some weird job I invented, you know. There are thousands of us. They’re gonna have a certification program soon.”

  “Who is? The, ah, National Organization of Organizers?”

  “Keep your day job, Jerry Seinfeld. Anyway, it’s an association, since you asked.”

  “Hey, as long as you enjoy it.”

  “I do. And it’s flexible enough so I didn’t have to put Morgan in day care this summer, which was great.”

  “Yeah.” Although day care might have done the kid some good. The more time he spends outside the electric fence of my sister’s maternal love, the better.

  “We’re here.” Nicole taps me on the shoulder.

  “How long was I asleep?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Did I snore?”

  She pulls up in front of one side of the garage and kills the engine. I heave myself out of the front seat and into purest suburbia. A lush lawn scattered with fallen leaves fronts a gracious three-story brick home. A modest dwelling, compared to some of the others on this tree-lined block. The residents here are NIH doctors, political rainmakers, mass-media opinion shapers like my sister’s husband. I’ve been here before, but now I see Bethesda with fresh eyes: rich plunder for the ravening hordes who will spill out of inner-city D.C. in search of Y2K-enfeebled victims. Wow, FlockWatcher must have rubbed off on me.

  “Do you need any help with your things?” Nicole wrinkles her nose in distaste at my overstuffed worse-for-wear bag.
r />   “I’m good.”

  “You sure? That thing looks heavy.”

  “I carried it across the country, I think I can make it ten more yards.”

  I follow her to the door, skirting the edge of the lawn—one keeps off the grass around here—and into the house. Which is immaculate, a living calling card for Nicole Knight, Organizer-at-Large. She leads me through the living room, where no dust dances in the sunlight streaming in through the bay windows. We go into the kitchen, where pots, pans, utensils, and stemware hang attractively from space-saving hooks and holsters. On a small table, Post-it pads of three different sizes sit at the foot of the telephone, flanked by pens and pencils lined up in parallel. I’d bet money that the drawer of that table holds a laminated sheet of paper with an alphabetized listing of contacts. Nicole’s a big alphabetizer-laminator.

  “You can sleep in the basement, if that’s OK.”

  “Does it lock from the outside?”

  “Ha-ha. It’s nice, actually. It’s the playroom, but the couch folds out. We’d put you in the guest bedroom, but Boyd’s having this cocktail thing tomorrow night and we have to use it for coats and stuff. Anyway, you’ll have more privacy down there.”

  “No problem. Wherever.” This time last year I might have taken offense at getting lower priority than the party guests’ outerwear, but by now just spending a night in a private home feels swanky.

  In the wainscoted room downstairs I plunk my bag and guitar down on plush wall-to-wall carpeting. A playroom, she said, but to see all the toys lined up on the shelves and sorted into containers, you’d never guess any playing took place here. More like a collector’s gallery. A lot of the alleged playthings are filed away in stacking plastic drawers with transparent printed labels—Legos, Action Figures, Crayons/Markers—that with a touch of regret I recognize as the output of the Brother P-Touch I gave Nicole a few Christmases ago. I’d like to think the playroom’s only this tidy in anticipation of my visit, but sadly this is probably its normal condition.