Owen writes another quick message to Rachel: You don’t need to write back, but I’m getting more information that this virus could be really bad. Please take care. He gets back in his car and drives out across the bay to Rockaway Beach, where he knows there is a marina. He and Rachel saw it once, not long after they got together, when they walked the boardwalk hand in hand and ate fish tacos and were happy together in a simple, summer way.
He parks the car in the first spot he finds, anxious to stretch his legs. When he finds the marina, it looks just the same as it did all those years ago when he was with Rachel, though this seems impossible given how hard the whole area was hit by Hurricane Sandy. There is a sign on the side of the main building that says Berths & Storage, Rentals, Repairs, Hands-on Training.
Owen opens the door and goes in. “I need private sailing lessons,” he says to the man behind the desk. “Intensive. With your best instructor.” He pauses while the man glances up at him, slow and wary. “Money is no object,” he adds, feeling foolish as he says it.
The man puts down the magazine he is holding. “We don’t really do that here anymore,” he says. “Maybe you’d be better off in the Hamptons.”
Owen suspects the man has taken a dislike to him, and wonders if he is refusing lessons out of some secret anti-elitist sentiment. Lingering by the door, he considers pressing the issue but worries that if he angers the man, something bad will happen. Paranoia pulses around his every decision now. Owen puts his hand on the doorknob, almost as unnerved by the irrationality of his own thought process as by the thoughts themselves.
“Thank you,” he says. “I’ll do that.” He will do that. Owen thinks about the firework exploding in New York City. How long might he have before one of its sparks rains down to touch him with its tongue of fire?
He walks away, longing to check his phone again but afraid of seeing the latest virus update. Afraid that if he looks, he knows what he’ll find. Afraid that if he thinks it, it will happen.
“No,” he says aloud. He’s just being spun around by too much information. Running his fingers through his hair, he forces himself to breathe slowly and sort through what he knows. He is not overreacting—he is reacting appropriately, given the facts. Also, he is not thinking magically. He is thinking rationally. Though he isn’t entirely put at ease by his own assertions.
He continues along the boardwalk, which has been repaired since the hurricane. The storm came and battered the shore, destroying buildings and livelihoods. But the storm was forecast, and people who were sensible and had the resources to leave the city planned accordingly and left. There was nothing magical about reading the signs in that case.
With the water at his back, Owen heads away from the beach, keeping an eye open for any familiar landmarks he might recognize from that day with Rachel. The bench where they kissed, scandalizing a group of tourists, or the neighbourhood bar where Rachel was thrilled by the tiny piña coladas in Styrofoam to-go cups.
He hopes Rachel is happy now. Of the two of them, she was always better at being happy, though he had perhaps benefitted from lower expectations. He knows that happiness is not a state of being. It is a knack. It is like hitting a baseball or skating backwards; there are certain tricks to it that some people can never master. A Buddhist he had sex with once told him that “desire is suffering,” but Owen has considered it and is sure she was wrong. Desire is electric. It is what keeps him alive.
What else is there? Only denial, which is death.
A few blocks inland, set between a surf boutique and a taco hut, he comes upon a squat concrete building painted turquoise that seems like some contractor’s idea of what he could get away with. A neon hand glows pink in the window, above a crystal ball next to a hand-lettered sign that says Sister Francesca’s Cosmic Consultations. A magic shop. It strikes him as a fitting rebuke for his own irrationality. As he pauses in front of the door, a woman opens it and emerges from inside.
“You look lost,” she says.
“Oh,” says Owen. “No.” He turns his hands over in a vague motion to acknowledge that he does appear lost, tarrying there and staring off into the distance. The people waiting in line at the taco hut are talking and laughing in a way that seems incongruous with an impending pandemic. “Just trying to decide what to do next.”
“Do you want to come in and get your bearings?” The woman is leaning up against the doorframe. She is wearing tight black jeans and a black leather motorcycle jacket crisscrossed with silver zippers.
“Are you Sister Francesca?”
She makes a dismissive gesture, either implying that she is Francesca or that it is absurd that he should think so.
“I’m Owen,” he says. She rolls her eyes at him and disappears inside the shack.
He estimates the chances are at least even that something might happen between them, and this surge of confidence feels normal, much more normal than anything else he has been thinking all week. Keen to endorse that version of reality, he follows her inside.
When the door swings shut behind him, it is so dark that it takes his eyes a moment to adjust to the candlelight. The whole place is not much larger than a garage, and the walls are draped with red velvet curtains. Then the woman steps towards him and her hands, strong and cool, are on his wrists, pressing him into a seat. She sits down in a chair opposite him, across a small wooden table. She is wearing long earrings now and her hair is covered with a scarf. Her eyebrows are thick, pointed, and dark. She appears like another person entirely, and the effect has been brought about so quickly he almost feels as though he has been plunged into another virtual reality.
“Just so you know,” she says, “this is for entertainment purposes only.”
He must seem puzzled, because she adds, “Fortune-telling is illegal in the state of New York.” Her face is arch. “Except for entertainment.”
“I am definitely only looking for entertainment,” he says.
“Good. Tea, palm, or cards?” she asks. There is a sideboard nearby with a teapot, a kettle on a hot plate, and several china teacups.
Owen has no desire to drink any concoction brewed in this witch’s shack. “Cards, I guess.” He hopes she will hurry through the charade. The novelty is already gone and he feels only a growing shame to be in here with her at all.
She takes one of his hands and passes it above a pack of cards she has produced from somewhere. Then she withdraws a card from the deck and sets it on the table between them. It has a knight with a chalice on it.
“Tell me about your parents,” she says, still holding the rest of the cards.
“I thought you were supposed to tell me things?” She narrows her eyes at him. “Fine, my parents,” he says. He has not spoken to anyone about his childhood in so long, not to anyone except Rachel, that he has no idea how to do it. “They were good people. Decent, churchgoing.” Both of his parents are dead. They died of cancer before he got divorced, within a year of each other. He has a vision of Rachel at their funerals, wan and tear-streaked, her arm linked through his. It makes him ache for her plain, kind touch.
“And you’re not.”
Somehow he doesn’t think she’s asking if he goes to church. “No, I’m not.”
She puts down the cards and takes his right wrist, turning it to expose his palm and pressing his hand upon the table.
“Hey,” says Owen. Her grip is strong. He came into this hut hoping for a distraction, for some sort of contact to make him forget about his fear of contagion, but the touch he is receiving is entirely unwanted.
“There’s something wrong with you,” she says. Her finger is tracing a line he can’t see. “Something that you need to fix.” The woman pokes him in the centre of his palm and the jab zings straight into his brain.
He does understand now—in a profound way he did not before Rachel left—that there is something wrong with him and the things that he does.
But he cannot stop himself. Right now it is too difficult to stop. Right now it is enough that he is a person who understands that there is something wrong with the things he is doing. He has to believe that. If he didn’t believe in his own redemption, he thinks he would implode from the inside, like a potato in a microwave, with all his excuses just as bland, middling, and half-baked. Most days he does not enjoy being himself anymore, now that he can no longer pretend to be the man that Rachel believed him to be.
“So what should I do?”
The woman’s face twitches as though the question has startled her. Owen will think about this moment later, many times in fact, wondering why he listened and why she seemed to know what he was asking before he did. And how even if she was only trying to frighten him, it was as though she were offering him some kind of salvation.
The woman’s lips have fallen open. Her eyes are as dark and impenetrable as the future.
“You should stay away,” she says. “Stay away from them.”
September 9, 2020, 2:24 p.m.
Hi. This is Owen. Leave me a message and I’ll call you back.
[beep]
Owen. It’s Dory. Colleen and I have been trying to get a hold of you for over two weeks now. I know you’re busy, but we’ve missed out on Late Night and the Today show, and God knows what else. You’re turning Shillelagh into a joke and making it impossible for Colleen to do her job. And Julia is extremely pregnant, in case you’ve forgotten, so I’ve got bigger things on my mind right now. What is going on with you? Call me back. I mean it.
SARAH
SEPTEMBER 2020
When she finally got to the office, Sarah slunk past the receptionist and straight into her cubicle, where she deposited her face mask and transit gloves into a desk drawer. Swabbing her sweaty face with a tissue, she once again regretted sleeping in. Noah was not a child who was easily hurried, which meant another hour of daycare money down the drain, only to be followed by the resentful glares of those dried-up crones who thought interrupting snack-time was like starting World War Three.
Snack-time reminded her of the turkey sandwich in her purse, so she got up and put it in the staff fridge before filling a tall glass of water from the cooler.
The phone in her cubicle was ringing when she got back.
It was her boss, Dory. “Where were you? I’ve been calling all morning.” In the ten years Sarah had worked at Shillelagh Press, Dory had risen from senior editor to publishing director and finally to vice-president—a figure of fearsome competence who responded to all urgent messages in five minutes or less. “Never mind. Can you meet me in the upstairs break room in five minutes?”
Dory’s summons were often abrupt. Sarah slipped first one foot then the other out of her sneakers and into her cherry-red work pumps, feeling something swell and throb in her head as she leaned forward. Last night’s celebration of the end of Elliot’s quarantine had gone later than expected. “Maybe I should respond to a few emails first?” She clicked open her inbox and saw the usual smattering of messages she felt little interest in answering.
Her boss snorted. “Just get up here.”
Dory always preferred their tête-à-têtes to take place in private, as though on guard against any accusation of playing favourites. She had hired Sarah at a time when the only entry on her resumé was “part-time nanny on a Bolivian commune,” but Sarah thought the precaution was silly: she’d never even been given so much as a promotion. The only reason her former sister-in-law had offered her a job in the first place was to get Sarah out of her and Elliot’s apartment, where she’d been crashing since she’d returned to the States.
“Thank goodness,” said Dory, handing her a latte from the automatic espresso machine. “I needed to see a friendly face.” She was wearing a houndstooth skirt and buttoned blazer, with black-framed glasses that had slid partway down her nose. Even in three-inch stacked heels, she was shorter than Sarah.
“What’s the matter?” asked Sarah. It wasn’t often that Dory appeared vulnerable or expressed an emotion beyond mild annoyance or impatience with the world at large. “Is everything okay with Julia?”
“Jules is eerily calm for someone who is eight months pregnant, but I feel like one of us ought to be worried. So I guess it has to be me?” Dory sat down at the table and motioned for Sarah to join her. “Honestly, I feel like I can’t win. How to Avoid the Plague is back on bestseller lists thanks to this horrible virus and ARAMIS Girl, and Owen Grant has chosen this moment to go AWOL. Doesn’t want the attention.”
Sarah took a sip of her latte and scalded her mouth. “That doesn’t sound like the Owen Grant I used to know.”
Dory’s eyes popped a little, then narrowed. “You’ve met? How did I not know this?”
“I only knew him a bit, back when I was a freshman in college and he was a visiting writer.” Sarah shook her head, nursing her sore tongue. “It was almost nothing. A flirtation, I guess.” Owen’s then-wife had been her professor. Sarah remembered being surprised, at the time, to discover they were married, then less surprised, years later, to find out they’d divorced. Of all the things from her youth that she regretted, she felt perhaps the most shame for how thoughtlessly she’d accepted Owen’s attention as no more than her due, the just reward of somebody young and beautiful. “Anyway, what happened to Colleen?” Colleen was the senior publicist, who up until now had handled everything to do with Owen Grant.
“There seems to be some problem with Colleen.” Dory frowned. “Or with Owen. It’s not working.” She spun sideways in her chair and stretched out her legs, rotating each foot in turn as though her ankles might be sore. “I warned her not to fall for his act…at least not until he agreed to a good dozen or so events. And now he won’t even return my calls.”
A woman carrying an empty mug poked her head into the break room and Dory turned to glare at her. “Occupied,” she snapped. “Five minutes.” When the woman retreated, Dory got up and locked the door behind her. Twice she opened her mouth as though to say something before closing it again. It wasn’t like her to leave silences in a conversation.
“Do you want me to try with Owen?” Sarah asked.
Dory looked almost as surprised by the offer as Sarah was to have made it. She straightened her glasses. “Oh, I didn’t mean to suggest you needed to—honestly, I’m not sure what you could do.”
“Yeah, of course.” Sarah let out a breath she’d been holding and watched as Dory paced the room. Then her boss stopped in front of her and crossed her arms.
“But it could be an amazing opportunity for you,” Dory said slowly, seeming to scrutinize her. “And it would really help me out.”
Sarah swallowed, wondering if Owen would even remember her. “Then I’m happy to do it.” Encouraged by Dory’s growing enthusiasm, she added, “And remember when you asked me about reading manuscripts? I think I’m finally ready.”
“Sarah! That was years ago.” Dory drew back, then returned to her seat and leaned forward across the table. “Look, part of the reason I called you up here was to brainstorm how to keep you on. They’re canning your current position.”
“Oh.” Somehow, in spite of her best intentions, Sarah always seemed to coast under the office radar, while everyone else was moving on, getting ahead. Glorified intern, she thought with a sudden clarity. And then, So what? Publishing wasn’t exactly a growth industry, although she’d thought that with the latest spike of infections in New Jersey, a few positions might have opened up.
“But you taking on Owen Grant’s publicity could solve everything,” said Dory. “As long as you watch yourself with him. Seriously, though. No more broken hearts allowed at Shillelagh.”
Sarah was already regretting her offer to help. “So what exactly am I supposed to do? Owen’s already been profiled everywhere.” She was sure she’d seen a think piece about How to Avoid the Plague and the tortuous relatio
nship between fiction and reality in a recent issue of The New Yorker. “And I’ve been doing my part on the subway this month, wearing my kit.” Her transit gloves and face mask were among the thousands that Shillelagh Press had purchased and branded as promotional tie-ins for Owen Grant’s novel after the official federal advisory of the virus was announced in mid-August. A Shillelagh Precaution Kit, as they were marketed, came free with the purchase of every copy of Owen’s book, and sold separately for $4.99 on the company’s website, undercutting the drugstores. There had been the predictable social media backlash against the cynicism of the marketing plan, but Dory had insisted they weather it out and her gamble seemed to have paid off. These days, Sarah estimated three-quarters of the people on her morning train wore personal protective gear, and at least half of those were Shillelagh-branded. She’d even given Elliot a few sets last night as a get-out-of-quarantine present.
Dory sighed. “It’s only going this well while ARAMIS is making people nervous. And it would be better not to have the company’s fortunes tied irrevocably to a global pandemic, don’t you think? We don’t want every sale tied to the outbreak. We have to assume there will be some people left to buy books.”
“Dory,” said Sarah.
“Look, the problem is that Owen Grant has started bailing on his responsibilities. Everyone wants him, especially with that tie-in video game coming out, and now he’s stopped picking up the phone. At least when Colleen or I call. But this is his moment! You’ve got to get him back on board and make him take care of his book.”
“If he doesn’t listen to you, why—”
“He’d better listen to you, Sarah. Or, like I said, you’re out.”
* * *
—
All afternoon, Sarah tried and failed to call Owen from her cubicle. The truth was that she could think of no good reason why he ought to speak to her when he wouldn’t even talk to Dory. It was only once she was at home and Noah’s giggles had finally subsided into sleep that she felt the day’s failures recede. She registered a fleeting triumph in Noah’s long lashes curled against his soft cheek as she lowered a kiss onto his forehead. It was something, to be raising a son so joyous he could laugh himself to sleep. Then she sank into a corner of the couch, dialled Owen Grant’s number on her cell, and hit Call before she could change her mind.
Songs for the End of the World Page 14