by Kevin Shay
“All right. Good to see you, Randall.”
“You too. Merry Christmas. Thanks for the guitar.”
Good old Kinko’s, humming away on Christmas Day. And for once I have actual copying to do. I explain my postcard job to the nice Jewish boy behind the counter, who doesn’t appear at all upset to be working the slowest day of the year for time and a half.
I look over at the computers. There’s the one I was using that night.
“Also, can I get on a machine?” I say to the clerk.
OK, I can handle this. I log in to Yahoo, check my email. Just email, that’s allowed.
New Window! New Window! my demons demand. Type in just one of the doom-and-gloom URLs you know by heart. A few keystrokes, what’s the harm? Don’t you want to know what’s going on out there? New Window! The compulsion is almost physical. But it won’t get me this time. I’m not listening. There was a man and he was mad.
My pulse pounding, I finish reading my mail and quit the browser.
Gaining confidence, I move on to instant messaging. As I suspected, my mother’s spending her holiday chatting away.
rkracc00n: hi mom—merry Christmas!
shelly_knight1953: Oh, Randall, hello! Merry Christmas!
rkracc00n: how’s everything?
shelly_knight1953: Are you really in New York?
shelly_knight1953: That’s what Nicole said.
rkracc00n: yep
shelly_knight1953: But I thought you told me that New York was a “Death Trap.”
rkracc00n: heh, didn’t know you were paying attention
shelly_knight1953: What do you mean?
rkracc00n: never mind
shelly_knight1953: Well, you’ll be happy to know we’re starting to get prepared for y2k.
rkracc00n: really???
shelly_knight1953: Yes, we had a generator delivered yesterday. And Ted knows a fellow who’s teaching us how to do dry storage.
rkracc00n: what brought this on, mom?
shelly_knight1953: Oh, at church a couple of weeks ago they brought this man in as a guest speaker.
shelly_knight1953: He showed some very alarming slides.
shelly_knight1953: Really opened our eyes!
rkracc00n: you don’t say
shelly_knight1953: Speaking of storage, do you prefer nitrogen or dry ice?
rkracc00n: I think either is good
Huh. Go figure.
“Sir? Your copies are ready.”
On the way back downtown, I pass Paige’s street again. I look toward her window, wondering if she’s still there, if she’s unwrapped the package yet. When she does, she’ll find a note attached to a box of Lucky Charms:
Paige,
Merry Christmas.
I don’t see the leprechauns anymore.
Thanks,
Randall
chapter 23
366
Days
Paradoxically, everyone’s feet are freezing at the floorwarming party.
I have to hand it to Rafael. He was the only one who truly believed we’d have the loft ready for a New Year’s Eve bash. The rest of us were skeptics as late as yesterday, but Rafael kept the faith and kicked our doubting asses and here we are, thirty people in the house already, and the real action won’t get going until after the bell tolls and everyone makes their way here from their Manhattan premidnight venues. We’ve hauled Graham’s thirty-two-inch TV out of temporary storage for the occasion and given it a prominent place. The audio is on mute, and images of Times Square flicker silently in the dim loft.
Still a hell of a lot of work left, but look how much we’ve done. All the bedrooms have walls, if not ceilings or doors or paint. The light fixtures are installed and working, likewise the shiny new oven and refrigerator. And the parquet is laid, hence the “New Year’s Floorwarming Party” header on the invitation we emailed out. Except Rafael couldn’t bear the thought of winter boots and high heels trampling his brand-new surface just yet, so the guests are required to take off their shoes and walk around in stocking feet. And the radiators don’t get hooked up until next week. Newcomers make getting-cold-feet jokes until the novelty wears off, then start griping.
“Everyone’s complaining about the shoe thing,” Graham complains to Rafael. “You want to reconsider?”
“No. It’s a salient party feature. That’s what counts. ‘Oh, yeah, that party with the fondue.’ ‘Remember that party where everyone had their shoes off?’ That’s all people really want from a party these days, is a good conversation piece for the next party.”
“Talking points,” I suggest.
“Bingo.”
“We should’ve done fondue,” Graham grumbles.
“So where the hell is Ursula with that stuff?” Rafael says.
“She’ll be here,” Graham says. “But can’t we just lose the shoe rule for now?”
“Salient party feature, dude,” Rafael says. “I’m telling you. You have a salient party feature, you have a party. Without the shoe rule, this party is nothing. Nothing.” He slides over toward the drinks. About a kitchen’s worth of floor at the end of the loft is still bare concrete, awaiting kitchen tile, so that’s where we set up the coolers and keg.
I see Paige and Moira step out of the elevator and watch as someone fills them in on the footwear regime and they comply. Moira’s a notably short girl, pudgily cute, and she’s either drunk or very clumsy, because she holds on tightly to Paige while removing her shoes and still almost falls over.
“Randall!” Paige says, spotting me.
“Randall!” Moira shouts effusively. Definitely had a few at the previous party.
“Hi, kids!”
“Place is looking great,” Paige says.
“Want to see my room? I have a room now.”
I lead them through my doorless doorway. Twelve by ten, my bags and boxes stacked neatly on one side, and I’ve upgraded from the egg crates to a thrift-shop futon. Excellent right angles on the walls, if I do say so myself.
“Very nice,” Paige says.
“It’s coming along.”
I set them up with drinks, then excuse myself. “Have to move the bathroom walls back into place. People keep bumping into them.”
“They’re called shogun screens,” Moira announces confidently.
“Shogun?” Paige says. “Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. Shogun screens.” She doesn’t fare too well with all the sibilants.
I fix the bathroom, grab a beer, and make a circuit around the party, stamping my feet to warm them up. Someone taps me on the shoulder.
“Damien! What are you doing here?”
“You invited me.”
“Yeah, but—” He’s supposed to be at some hotel in the city, having a romantic evening with his girlfriend. When I found out he was in town, I forwarded the invitation, but I never expected him to show up. Now I notice his loosened tie, his half-tucked shirt, his shell-shocked eyes. “Where’s Michelle?”
“The hell with Michelle.”
“Oh, no.”
“I just want to, like, dance, you know?”
Instead I coax him into a chair and make him explain. They’d been fighting all day, airing long-suppressed differences about their mutual future. They reconciled in time for their dinner reservations, then broke up during the soup. That was two hours and a whole bunch of beverages ago. “So I decided to come here,” Damien says. “Cool place, by the way.”
“Thanks.”
He stands up. “I’m gonna go enjoy myself. Aw yeah.”
That was quite possibly the weakest “aw yeah” I’ve ever heard. “Go for it!”
“Whoa. When did I take my shoes off?”
He heads for a corner where a dance floor is starting to develop.
I think back to Chicago, a couple of months ago, pizza with Damien, my fevered explanation of the looming disaster. Could I muster the same anguished conviction now, even if I wanted to? See, it takes a whole supply chain to make a keg
of beer…No.
I survey the loft. An hour until midnight, and everyone’s having fun, despite a little frostbite below the ankles. And it makes me happy to see everyone having fun. That’s new. All through those dark days, I couldn’t watch people enjoying themselves without playing the ant to their foolhardy grasshoppers, mentally consigning them to awful post-rollover fates.
Paige approaches me, looking embarrassed. “Sorry about this. Moira’s making me ask you about that guy you were sitting with. She has some interest.”
“Damien?” I look over toward the dance floor, where my old friend is energetically working through some issues. Grad Students Gone Wild.
“Yeah, what’s his deal, she wants to know?”
“Damien is recently single.”
“How recently?”
I look at my watch.
“Oh, Jesus,” Paige says. “All right, I’ll pass that along.”
Ursula appears at the elevator doors with one of her fellow actresses, each of them carrying two shopping bags. They kick off their shoes, march over to Rafael, and instruct him to cut the stereo. Ursula hops drunkenly onto a milk crate full of electrical cords, balancing herself on the corners.
“Everyone, can I have your attention for just a second!” She does a nice job projecting from the diaphragm. “It’s come to our attention that certain people are getting cold feet about this party.” The room groans. “Thank you, thank you.” She holds up the shopping bags. “Well, salvation has arrived!” She and her friend overturn the bags, and several dozen pairs of thick gray wool socks, still in their cardboard sleeves, tumble to the floor.
Everyone cheers and runs to pick out socks. Rafael restarts the music. Within a few minutes the loft is filled with people in semiformal attire and matching wool socks. Salient party feature. I catch Rafael’s eye and tip my bottle to him.
“Randall?” Paige says.
“Yes?”
“You have any big plans for midnight?”
“I’ll be here. You?”
“Me too.”
“OK.”
“OK.” She points at my feet. “Cold?”
“Oh yeah. Yours?”
“Fucking icicles.”
We hurry over to get ourselves some socks before they’re all spoken for.
“Ten. Nine.”
Someone has cranked up the sound on the TV, and the voices of Dick Clark’s revelers blend with ours.
“Eight. Seven.”
Paige smiles at me.
“Six. Five.”
Moira and Damien stand next to each other, their drunken lips ready for some ill-advised action.
“Four. Three.”
I reach for the hand of the lovely person I stumbled across in Freakshow, Texas.
“Two. One.”
Who did the thing I was trying to do all along: save someone.
“Happy New Year!”
We kiss as the ball descends. We kiss several minutes into 1999, with nothing in my mind except the kiss.
So was I crazy then, or am I crazy now?
Am I wrong, dead wrong, to have no fear?
The date will roll over, after all. Two digits will be too few. The bugs are real. Even Lincoln Vance said so. No doubt. Computers, mainframes, embedded chips will malfunction, go haywire, shut down.
And what happens then? What happens one year from today?
Whatever.
It’s not the end of the world.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Mom, Dad, and Laura, who never doubted the writing thing would work out someday; to Kevin Guilfoile, Jennifer Sullivan, and Gabriel Roth for reading earlier drafts and offering bug reports and feature requests; to Anne Ursu, E. J. Graff, and Madeline Drexler for leading me sherpawise to the foot of the publishing mountain; to Michelle Tessler and Gerry Howard for taking a chance on a period piece set in 1998; to Steve and Jeremiah (fellas, we need jobs); to the Fischers for care and feeding; and, of course, to Gabria, for everything.
About the Author
KEVIN SHAY’s humor writing has appeared in print and online in McSweeney’s, eCompany Now, Salon, Modern Humorist, and the anthology 101 Damnations. He was the online editor of McSweeney’s in 2000 and 2001 and recently coedited Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans, a collection of humor pieces from the site. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY 2008
Copyright © 2006 by Kevin Shay
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.
www.anchorbooks.com
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shay, Kevin, 1973–
The end as I know it : a novel of millennial anxiety / Kevin Shay.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Puppeteers—Fiction. 2. Year 2000 date conversion (Computer systems)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.H397E6 2006
813'.6—dc22
2006040155
eISBN: 978-0-307-38955-8
v3.0