“Come on,” Bobo said. “We should probably rehearse or something.”
“Why didn’t Eliza show up?” Andy said. “That was the whole point of this.”
“She showed. I saw her taking pictures from the other side of the quad.”
“Really?”
“Don’t get excited, Mary. It’s the closest you’re ever gonna get to nailing her.”
“Sticks and stones, asshole.”
They walked across the football field, passing close by the cop. Bobo spat right at his feet, but the guy either didn’t notice or didn’t care.
“You could have told me you booked a show,” Andy said.
“Fuck the show, man. The show’s just the bait.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means”—and Bobo took a deep breath, as if preparing for an argument—“that we’re inviting Golden.”
“Golden? Like, your boss Golden?” The first little disembodied finger of doubt took hold in Andy’s mind. What had he set in motion by making that scene in assembly today?
“He’s my distributor, yo. And he’s got a crew behind him.”
“A crew of drug dealers.”
“What’s your problem with dealers? You get along with me just fine.”
“Yeah, but you only sell weed.”
Bobo made an imaginary gun with his hands and trained it on Andy’s forehead. “You saying I’m not for real, bitch?”
“I’m saying that Golden freaks me out.”
“That’s exactly why we need him. Right now, this is just about Hamilton. With Golden, it could be citywide! We could actually make a stand, if we needed to.”
“Can’t we do that without him?”
Bobo shook his head. “When the real shit goes down, we’ll need more than a bunch of kids from marching band on our side.”
“I don’t know, man—”
“Fuck that,” Bobo suddenly snarled. “Fuck your weak-ass maybe-ing all the time! Can I count on you to help me with this, or are you gonna let me down?”
An unsaid word floated at the end of Bobo’s question: again. Or maybe that was just Andy’s guilty conscience talking.
“Fine. Golden can come to the show—”
“I know he can.”
“But only if you let me play one song solo.”
Bobo laughed. “Is this about Eliza?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, assuming she comes, I say go for it.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.” Bobo clapped him on the back. “Once she hears your shit voice, that grand is as good as mine.”
Eliza
SHE WAS STANDING IN THE shower when the thought first occurred to her. Just an idle question—how many more showers would she be likely to take?—followed by a quick calculation. Even if the water and electricity stayed on until the end, and even if she took one every morning and another every night, she’d only end up with about a hundred more showers. And that statistic led her to seek out others. Twenty more shampooings. A hundred more tooth brushings. And what about all the stuff that didn’t take place in the bathroom? Fifty sunrises. Twenty-five furtive masturbation sessions (or fewer, if extreme terror had a negative effect on her sex drive). One more skim through To the Lighthouse (“The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.”). People talked about their days being numbered, but really, everything was numbered. Every movie you watched was the last time you’d watch that movie, or the second-to-last time, or the third-to-last. Every kiss was one kiss closer to your last kiss.
It was a truly terrifying lens through which to see the increasingly terrifying world.
She and her dad spent most of that first long weekend on the couch, watching the bad news roll in. Riots everywhere from Amsterdam to Los Angeles. A record number of homicides reported in a single day. Half the shops and restaurants in major cities lacking the manpower to open (how many more times would she eat in a restaurant?). Eliza’s dad suggested they bet on what continent the next calamity would hail from; he won twice, both times with Asia. On Saturday night they chose to forgo the news in favor of a diversionary James Bond binge. Eliza thought it would help get her mind off things, but without the constant feed of real-world information, her imagination took over. All through Thunderball (and was this her last time watching Thunderball ?), she was envisioning America’s prisons breaking open like overripe fruit, releasing the seeds of chaos. Even now, some serial killer was probably skulking toward their apartment building, machete drawn, slaughter in his heart.
It didn’t help that her dad seemed to be taking the apocalypse in stride; she could’ve used him on Team Terrifying Existential Dread. That was the problem with a death-sentence cancer prognosis—the end of the world was already coming. But didn’t it bum him out a little bit that his daughter would never grow old enough to have kids, or see Europe, or drink legally? Wasn’t that worth a few tears?
“It’s not going to happen,” he said. “I’m calm because I know it won’t. Now, shall we move on to the Roger Moore era?”
So it wasn’t any sense of social responsibility that got Eliza out of the house and onto the downtown 982 that Sunday night. She just needed to get away from her dad’s claustrophobic optimism.
There were way more people out on the streets than usual, and they weren’t the usual people either. Subcultures that had flourished underground, scared into hiding by the vitality of the world, had decided that the surface was safe for their kind again. Whole colonies of sightless nematodes were blinking to life in the moonlight: the punks and the bikers, the nutjobs and the druggies. They were everywhere, with their tats and their piercings, their jackets emblazoned with the bloodred A for anarchy, laughing too loudly and drinking fearlessly from paper bags. They walked from corner to corner and back again, aimless, as if they were waiting for a leader to show up and direct them.
Eliza’s first photo was of a girl with a crazy face tattoo and a baby asleep in the fabric sling between her breasts. The girl raised her middle finger just as the flash went off, which only made the shot more perfect. Next was a legless veteran with a sign that read YOU’LL BE DEAD SOON, SO GIVE ME SOME GODDAMN MONEY. After that, Eliza spent an hour transfixed by the balletic loopings of the hollow-cheeked skater kids at SeaSk8. A fight broke out and went on for twenty minutes before some cops came and broke it up. She got a lot of pictures of the police, who still looked fresh and capable. It would probably be a very different story a month from now.
She took photos of a couple of hip, expensive restaurants in Belltown that had already shut down, and then she happened to pass by Friendly Forks, the charity place where ex-cons and ex-addicts came to get work experience. Ardor didn’t seem to have affected anyone inside just yet; the place was a whirlwind of preparation for the dinnertime rush. Some guy was kneeling at the front wall of windows, spraying Windex and then wiping the spritz away with a rag. Behind him, waiters scurried to and fro, folding napkins and adjusting chairs. It was incredible, the way that people kept on going, whether they were dying of pancreatic cancer or drug addiction or the apocalypse itself. Just the thought of it made her want to cry. And as she lifted the viewfinder to her face, the guy who’d been scrubbing the windows stood up. She snapped the photo, but it wasn’t until she wiped the tears from her eyes that she recognized him. He waved, and she waved back, and something crackled warmly around the edges of her somewhere, like the inexplicable satisfaction you get stepping on an icy puddle after a freeze.
The following Monday Eliza came to school prepared, with her Exakta VX and a backpack full of Ilford Delta 120 film. She knew the first day back would be worth documenting, but she could never have guessed just how worthy it would turn out to be. The assembly alone was a gold mine: poor, flustered Mr. Jester, the gargantuan cops at the back of the room, all those empty seats. Then Andy, unsteady on his
feet, forehead dripping with blood, being roughly dragged toward the exit. Police brutality in a high school, gorgeously rendered in black and white? Next stop, Pulitzer Prize.
And that wasn’t the end of it either. After Andy had been removed from the auditorium, all eyes turned back to Mr. Jester. He cleared his throat. “To continue, we will be eliminating all off-campus privileges, including during free periods.” The crowd, primed for protest now, responded with loud boos and catcalls. Someone threw a pencil at the stage. It bounced off the lectern and clattered onto the floor. A moment later, the floodgates opened, and Mr. Jester suffered a veritable stoning of teenage paraphernalia: loose change and crumpled notes, tubes of lip gloss and squares of Starburst, tampons and Kleenex, and even one long fluttery confetti strand of unopened condoms that Eliza caught smack in the center of her viewfinder just as it connected with Mr. Jester’s forehead.
The principal backed away from the podium, shielding himself from the bombardment. Mr. McArthur, a well-liked history teacher, stood up and ran to the stage. Eliza had taken his Eastern Society, Western Influence course as a junior; she could still remember the story he’d told about living in China in the mid-nineties, and how he’d offended his host by confusing the word for “mother” with the word for “horse.” He was in his late forties, handsome in a teacherly sort of way. Word on the street was he’d just married some guy named Neil, though he still showed up to Hamilton events on his own. He whispered something to the shell-shocked principal, then stepped up to the lectern himself. After a few moments, the students—maybe a little scared by what they’d just been allowed to get away with—quieted down.
“I can only imagine how all of you must feel,” Mr. McArthur said. “This is an impossible amount for anyone to take in. For all of us, too. And now, on top of everything, it seems like your school is turning into some kind of police state.” He shook his head, gave a little whistle. “I certainly can’t blame you for taking a few potshots at Mr. Jester here. But before you load up your spitballs and your paintballs and your blue balls again, there are two things you have to know. First, these are not our decisions. We’re just passing on the rules handed down to us from the school board. Second, nothing we do is meant as a punishment. It’s only to ensure your safety. No one can say exactly what’s going to happen in the next two months, but this world is full of desperate people even at the best of times. Bob Dylan once said—you kids still know Bob Dylan?” Eliza laughed along with the rest of the room. “Thank God for that. I have a theory that if the day ever comes when the students and the teachers don’t listen to any of the same music, the entire educational system will collapse. Anyway, Dylan wrote that when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose. And Edmund Burke, who was kinda like a more boring version of Dylan back in the eighteenth century, said that those who have much to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous. Well, a lot of people in the world have just started thinking that they don’t have anything left to lose, and it’s our job to protect you from them. I don’t want to scare you, but history tells us that whenever there’s panic, there’s death. It’s the way of the world.”
He gave this morbid prediction a bit of time to sink in, then went on. “But to my mind, the physical threat is less of a danger than the psychological threat, which is why Suzie O and I have decided to start a discussion group entitled ‘The Consolations of Philosophy.’ It’ll meet every day, during eighth period. And I do realize how incredibly lame it sounds, but if you feel the need to talk about what’s happening, please come.” He leaned into the mic and added, “And in answer to Mr. Boorstein’s question, Ardor has probably not altered the relevance of calculus to most of your lives, which asymptotically approaches zero as you approach adulthood. Thanks, everyone.”
After assembly Eliza headed toward the arts building. She could feel her phone vibrating in her backpack, but she didn’t bother to fish it out. Her mom had called about a hundred times in the last few days, but Eliza had yet to answer.
In the empty photo lab, she put on her favorite Sigur Rós record (how many more times would she get to listen to Sigur Rós?) and let her mind slip into that strange space of both total focus and total unconsciousness that was necessary for making art. Images dissolved into being on the line.
The woman with the baby, baring her middle finger more as an act of desperation than an act of anger. The beggar with the sign, his upturned hat glittering dully with dirty change. The skateboarders fighting for absolutely nothing and absolutely everything at the same time. Cops standing sentry at street corners. Cops helping some homeless drunk into the back of a squad car. Cops everywhere, like a blue-sky promise of trouble to come.
At first Eliza worried she was kidding herself, because the photos felt important in a way that nothing she’d ever done before had felt important. But someone had to watch the watchmen, as the saying went, and why not her? Here was Bobo, screaming a wordless, animal challenge at the principal. Here was Mr. McArthur, standing silent as his heavy words hit home. The image of the students throwing all their junk at Mr. Jester managed to be both celebratory and menacing at once—a cross between Mardi Gras and a gladiatorial arena. The sweat reflecting off the principal’s forehead in one picture found its parallel in another, with the slick black blood that streaked across Andy’s face like war paint.
And though Eliza had promised herself that she would never, ever, ever start a blog unless someone held a gun to her head and said, I’ll seriously shoot you right now in the head if you don’t start a blog (and even then, she wouldn’t have been happy about it), she knew she’d have to break her rule. She wanted to share these photos with the world. She had to.
The school day had just ended when she finally emerged from the photo lab; she’d spent more than five hours inside, skipping out on all her classes (how many more classes would she actually bother to go to?). A surprisingly large crowd had gathered on the bleachers—all the freaks and geeks of Hamilton, perched like a murder of silent crows, cheerless in a place meant for cheering. She took a few photos of them from the other side of the football field.
Her phone was vibrating again. By tomorrow morning, she’d have seven new messages on her voice mail: six wordless hang-ups bearing an area code from Honolulu, Hawaii, and one long, drunken screed from a certain Andy Rowen, throwing around words like “karass” and “duprass” and “wampeter” that Eliza would only vaguely recognize. But that was tomorrow.
Tonight she would post her twenty-five favorite photos to her newly designed Tumblr, Apocalypse Already. She’d tell the whole story of that morning’s assembly in the captions, then juxtapose the photos from school with those from downtown to demonstrate how the police officers walking around the outskirts of Hamilton gave off the same vague air of threat as the thugs walking the city streets. She couldn’t have explained why she felt compelled to add yet another blog to a 66.6-percent-doomed world, other than that she didn’t know what else to do, other than that there was nothing else to do. Nor could she have explained why that blog would go viral over the course of the next forty-eight hours, or how that would instantly transform her into a kind of minor celebrity—a little star—sliding as easily and frictionlessly into the public consciousness as Ardor was just then sliding through the cosmos, bearing down a little closer every moment, like the end of a story.
Anita
EIGHT DAYS AFTER THE ANNOUNCEMENT, on a misty Valentine’s Day morning, Anita clandestinely packed a small suitcase. She included a week’s worth of clothes (good for even longer if she mixed and matched), her toiletry kit (this was to be a grand gesture in the name of independence, not a stand against personal hygiene), and a sleeping bag and pillow (in case she ended up spending the night in the back of the Escalade). In her view, the jailbreak was equal parts running away and running toward. The first half of this equation was pretty obvious; in the last few days, her parents had totally lost the plot. At dinner on Wednesday, her father had thrown a
full plate of food at the wall, then dabbed at his mouth with a napkin and politely excused himself from the table. Her mother was acting out in a different way, hiding all her anxiety behind a creaky facade of sunniness, like that thick cake of foundation some girls tried to use to cover up their acne. Anita saw her parents now as if from some stupendous, galactic distance. For the first time in her life, she felt sorry for them. They were both so stuck in their ways, so unhappy without knowing it. But it wasn’t her job to fix them. The only person she could save was herself.
As for the running toward, that was harder to explain. She only knew that something was out there, calling to her, and if she didn’t go now, she wouldn’t get another chance. This was (according to her mother, at any rate) the end of days. The Rapture. The Second Coming. Anita had heard it all described in the most lurid detail on any number of groggy Sunday mornings. The book of Revelation—“revelation” being the English translation of the Greek word apokalypsis, as some minister or another had taught her—said that the end times heralded the return of Jesus. But that seemed unlikely in this case, unless he was planning to ride in on an asteroid like a white-robed space cowboy. Anita never thought the last book of the New Testament fit in very well with the rest of it. You started off with this incredibly nice guy who spent his time with prostitutes and preached forgiveness, and you ended up with eternal damnation and the Whore of Babylon. That was the first thing that had shaken her faith, followed soon after by ninth-grade biology. And according to a fair number of sermons she’d heard, those doubts meant she had an eternity of hellfire to look forward to. Good times.
Anita knew she was supposed to be terrified at the thought of death. So then why did she feel this unbelievable lightness of being as she zipped up her suitcase? Why couldn’t she stop smiling and humming to herself as she slipped out the front door? Why did she find herself laughing as she drove past the Broadmoor gatehouse, as the stiffness of eighteen years of pretense and submission suddenly fell away from her, golden chains snapping as easily as uncooked spaghetti? It scared her a little; she didn’t know whether madness was the kind of thing you could actually watch overtaking you, or if being aware of your developing insanity was enough to prevent it.
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