Ten minutes into the walk, a brilliant white light suddenly turned on in front of them, nearly blinding them.
“What—?” Myrra exclaimed, and tried to shade Charlotte’s eyes. Tobias waited for his vision to adjust. It was a giant projection lamp, pointing upward toward a hole in the ceiling. Looking around, he could see countless more lamps dispersed in the distance.
“They’re stars,” he said. “The sky must have switched to nightfall.” The sky, as it turned out, was nothing more than a great sheet of metal with holes poked into it.
“They’ll probably stay lit for the next half hour or so,” he surmised. Tobias thought back to the desert, how quickly the sun had set and risen. Presumably that aspect of the world was still broken.
The holes were rough and forcibly punched through. They reminded Tobias of holes punched in the lid of a jar with a screwdriver. Barnes had taken him hiking once or twice, when Tobias first came to live with him. He remembered finding a praying mantis in a grass field. It was a small green thing, and yet somehow it had a menace to it. Much like Myrra. Barnes scooped it up in a jar he’d kept in his bag, with air holes already punched into the top. They put in some grass, and a few ants they found along the way, for food. Tobias took it home and kept it on his windowsill. He thought he would make a pet of it, but the mantis died within days. He remembered feeling more guilty than sad. Guilt and grief washed over him again at the thought of Barnes, settling deep inside him like a lingering stomachache.
Myrra had no such memories of catching bugs in jars. When she looked up at the sky, she was mostly surprised that the engineers had done such a rough job of it. She’d expected clean-cut holes in the metal. Everything else in this world was so elegant. Then again, stars were only meant to be seen at a distance. Maybe this was where they’d skimped.
They walked for a long time, too long to measure, especially since Tobias’s watch was broken. Myrra noted with amusement when he occasionally raised his wrist to check it, then stopped halfway through the motion and dropped his hand again. For someone like him it must be maddening not to know the time. To Myrra it felt as if there were no time, as if time had abandoned ship days ago, a coward who didn’t want to see the end of everything and so had jumped overboard.
Occasionally the floor shuddered beneath their feet. When this happened, Charlotte let out a loud screech, trying to match the volume of the creaking metal around them. She seemed completely unafraid. Myrra wished she could say the same. She was jumpy as hell. At least the stars had turned on—it felt better walking around when there was more light.
“What’s that?” Tobias asked, peering into the dark. Myrra followed his gaze. Off in the distance a long piece of metal hung down from the ceiling. They walked closer—it was another ladder, leading up to a circular hatch above them. Tobias walked forward, climbed up one rung, shook it, testing its weight. He held out a hand.
“Want to go sit among the stars?” he asked, his tone forcefully light and jaunty, as though they were on some adventure in a storybook and not preparing to die. He was trying to distract her, and she was grateful.
Tobias turned the handle on the hatch and popped it open. Light flooded down on top of them. Once Tobias climbed through, Myrra handed Charlotte up to him, then followed behind.
It was dusk outside; the starlight streamed out of the holes in the floor like spotlights, and the walls of the horizon projected a gradient of dusky purple. They wandered away from the nearest artificial star; the light was too bright to stand too close. Birds’ nests littered the ground: pigeons roosted around them everywhere, ruffling their feathers as if they were unused to the company. No other signs of life besides the birds. Tobias had trouble comprehending how pigeons had come to roost up here at all, and he felt suddenly obsessed with the mechanics of the thing.
“Do you suppose they’re able to fly through the midpoint of the atmosphere, when everything goes weightless, and come out on the other side?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Myrra replied. She was concentrating on the floor, her feet dodging droppings.
“Do bird wings work in weightlessness?” he muttered to himself. It suddenly seemed so important.
Myrra stopped walking completely, and Tobias turned to her. She was staring upward, pointing. “Look,” she said.
He looked up above their heads and saw the entire expanse of the world above them, skyscrapers, trees and mountains clinging to the ceiling like stalactites. The whole world was reaching toward them with fingers of human progress, with each building and tower usurping its predecessor, reaching ever closer.
They found the patch of sky where the floor seemed cleanest and sat, Tobias and Myrra leaning against each other, forming their own architecture. At first they let Charlotte roam free in front of them, but she kept crawling away, trying to chase the pigeons, so finally Myrra just pulled her onto her lap instead. At first Charlotte fussed and wriggled, but when another tremor shook the sky for a few seconds, she changed her tune and clung to Myrra’s knee. Maybe even Charlotte is sensing it now, Myrra thought.
She could picture her mother sitting here years ago on the same sky, on a break from labor, looking up at the world. And maybe she was thinking of me, she thought, maybe she tried to pinpoint which city I was in, which building. Maybe she squinted in the same illogical way that I’m squinting now, trying to spot me on the ground.
Another quake shook. From where they were sitting, they could properly see that it was the whole world that was shaking; the sky, the walls of the horizon, and the mountains and cities and towns and seas and rivers above them. It was a marvelous picture—they were lucky to have a clear view, not a cloud in the sky. Leagues above them, mountains loomed with their snowy cragged peaks, flanked by the mirror surface of the Palmer Sea, which was fixed improbably upside down over their heads, not a drop of water spilled.
Tobias thought, similar to what he had thought before: What if we died here, sitting on the sky? And Tobias knew, even as he asked the question, that this was where it would end. He stole a glance at Myrra, who was busy staring overhead. There was no one around them. No one else had found this place. They had the most exclusive spot to sit and watch the end of the world. He looked around, looked above him. It was a beautiful place to die.
His father’s voice entered his head: young Tobias, looking at the image of Cape Cod, saying to his father, “It’s a beach,” and his father snapping back, “Yes, but it’s the right beach.”
There was no right place to die.
Myrra reached out to grab Tobias’s hand and pulled Charlotte closer. She was full of feelings: sadness, fear, happiness, anticipation, anxiety, anger, exultation. She brushed her calloused fingertips over Tobias’s knuckles and felt the warm softness of Charlotte leaning into her. This had to be enough.
Without any one reason why (it was all reasons), Myrra’s eyes welled up again and tears coursed quietly down her cheeks. As a way to calm down, Myrra focused on Tobias’s face and told him a story.
“I remember the first time I ever tasted sugar,” she started. “When I’d worked with my mother in the factory, they’d just served us eggs and porridge and bread: necessity food. But then I got transferred to the bakery. It was the only good part of my mother going away, that I ended up transferring out of the factory. The baker who ran it was much kinder. And one day, after I’d done an especially thorough job sweeping, he gave me an éclair. The filling got all over my hands. I got so sticky. I tasted sugar on my fingers for weeks afterward. At least, that’s what it felt like.”
The story had no purpose. Myrra just needed to talk. Maybe she just wanted to share one last part of her life, before it went away. Her memories felt like marbles dropped on the floor, and she needed to catch as many as she could before they all rolled away.
Tobias smiled, soaking in the sound of her talking, as though Myrra’s voice were permeating the pores of his skin. The words alone, the hum of a voice talking to him, regarding him, reminding him he was sti
ll here, was important.
Charlotte pushed off Myrra’s lap and tried to stand. Tobias and Myrra both held out their hands, giving Charlotte something to grab on to. He heard a crack above them. Overhead, he watched a mountain crumbling. It was uncanny to see boulders rolling upward.
Myrra and Tobias looked out onto the projected walls. The horizon was shifting into night, turning a deeper and deeper blue. Tobias felt a thrill to his senses; this blue struck him hard, the same as it had in Kittimer, it was filling him up inside, it was sensuous and new and vibrant. It was a blue of loneliness. It was a blue of endings.
He wanted to say to Myrra: My life is remarkable now, for having seen all this with you. Instead he held on to Myrra’s hand tighter. He felt that he must be hallucinating. Her face was glowing. Tobias dipped his head down and kissed Myrra lightly on the mouth. There was no other way to fully express his gratitude that she had agreed to share even a tiny sliver of time with him.
Myrra touched his cheek, felt the bristle of it; Tobias hadn’t shaved in a few days. The world shook again. Charlotte’s knees buckled, and Myrra swooped her back into her lap before she had a chance to fall down. She wrapped an arm around Tobias and held on until she felt as if the three of them might meld together. Tears carved pathways down her cheeks.
She wanted to say so many things. She wanted to have epiphanies. She wanted to ask all life’s questions and feel the answers instinctively in her bones. At this point, after facing so much, she knew she was supposed to be wise and accepting of what came next, but she couldn’t be. She turned to Tobias.
“I want…” she said, and couldn’t finish the sentence.
He looked at her. He was crying too.
“Me too.”
She could hear the pigeons cooing and ruffling their feathers. The birds were agitated.
From her lap Charlotte reached up and tugged on her ear, murmuring unintelligible sounds. Myrra kissed her on top of her head and stared off into the field of spotlights.
“Does it even matter, how we die?” She spoke softly to herself. Tobias heard it anyway, even though the world was shaking again.
“It matters, I think, when it’s all that’s left.”
They held each other, and they waited. It was hard to discern lengths of time. They stayed there for minutes. They stayed there for days. They stayed there for a lifetime. And the world kept going, round and round and round, until it couldn’t go round anymore.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Sarah Bedingfield for looking at a plot map on a blackboard and saying yes to it, and for all your guidance thereafter. Thanks also to the rest of the LGR team.
Thank you to my editor, Angeline Rodriguez, for seeing what I wanted this book to be and helping to make it a reality. To the rest of the team at Orbit and Hachette: I also owe you a huge debt of gratitude, specifically Tim Holman, Rachel Goldstein, Lisa Marie Pompilio, Lauren Panepinto, and S. B. Kleinman.
Thank you to everyone at Stony Brook MFA, especially Susan Scarf Merrell with her genius story brain and Paul Harding with his genius prose brain.
There are many people who helped me early in this process, who provided a crucial leg up: thank you to Emma Straub for always readily saying yes in the midst of a busy life, to Julia Fierro for those Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop discounts, to Amelia Kahaney for all the advice over coffee. Thank you to every teacher I’ve ever had. Thank you to Marian Mitchell Donahue for the kitchen table craft chats with glasses of whiskey. Thank you to Kristie Stevens for reading all my terrible fan fiction when we were young.
To my parents, Larry Levien and Denise Kramer-Levien: thank you for framing that kindergarten story I wrote (the one with all the aliens and entrails) rather than sending me to therapy.
And thank you to Michael del Castillo, my handsome genius of a husband, for the boundless support. I will love you past the end of the world.
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The World Gives Way: A Novel Page 36