The End Is Now

by John Joseph Adams

  “Sorry,” I say.

  She gives me a look, mouth quirked and eyebrows crinkled, like I’m speaking with an accent she can just barely puzzle out. Or like she’s hearing two people shouting at once and can’t decide which to listen to. She lets me hand the jug back to her, holds it up to the light. Dark specks, like coffee grounds, float on the surface—flakes of shingle, I guess, from the roof.

  She walks to the front of the house and dumps the water over the side, onto the dead lawn below. Something down there seems to spook her, because she steps back quickly, almost tripping over the corner of a panel. But by the time she gets back to the shade of the tarp, she’s smiling again, thanking me for the water, and I know that’s my cue to leave.

  The plastic garbage lid with its yellow graffiti is still sitting on the sidewalk as I make my way down. I glimpse another flash of yellow at the end of the block, sideways on a fire hydrant. And again, on a manhole cover in the middle of the road. A ‘C’ turned on its back, with a row of circles clustered inside and the ends turned out, curling. Again and again, all the way out of Cat-piss Park. Bright as Day-Glo, yellow like the edge of nausea.

  • • • •

  “A ship with two faces,” Cloud says when I show him a sketch of it. He’s standing on the bottom step of Felicity’s front porch, on his way out to find a new location for tonight’s music. He stopped over to check on Paëday, who spent the night on the two Ikea futons in Felicity’s living room. Meme has gone back to sleep, he says, in the upstairs bedroom that Felicity still refers to as Mia’s.

  Mia is Felicity’s daughter. She’s twenty-two, four years older than me, and she hasn’t been in Chicago for years now. Whether Felicity thinks she’s ever coming back is a thing that shifts with the wind.

  Paëday, Cloud says carefully, is fine, just shaken up—Meme especially, since she was standing closest to the part of the roof that caved in. The edge in Cloud’s voice makes me afraid to ask for details. Their generator is almost certainly lost, and most of the sound system with it. So now what are they going to do? What the fuck can they possibly do?

  Isn’t that the question for all of us.

  Cloud sees me thinking and he reaches up, puts a hand on my forearm, gentle as a kitten. He’s a different creature by daylight, without the drugs or the music. Years ago, in one of the month-to-month apartments where I lived with my mother, there was a janky light switch in the bathroom. The bulb only lit up while you were flipping it on or off—never when the switch was set all the way up or down, only for that split-second sweet spot in the middle, the undetectable moment of hesitation on the way from high to low or low to high. That’s what Cloud’s like, only bright in the middle. And the truth is, I like him best like this.

  “Look,” he says now, tracing my sketch with the tip of his thumb. The other hand is still on my arm, warm and not too heavy. “It’s like a Viking ship. The circles are shields, and the curving ends are, what’s the word—beakheads? Although I’m not sure why there’s two of them.”

  “Ship with two faces,” I repeat. Like the image itself, the phrase makes me faintly sick, although I couldn’t say why. Cloud hands me the scrap of paper with the sketch, and I push it down into the front pocket of my jeans. “Well,” I say finally, “I doubt it’s a gang sign. Unless we’ve got Viking gangs now.”

  His brown eyes sparkle. “Strange days, Friday.”

  “You got that fucking right.”

  Track 3. Gray City

  Cloud’s new venue, as it turns out, is a church.

  “It’s abandoned, Friday,” he says, like that solves everything. Which it usually does. But I’m not worried about sacrilege as much as acoustics, and churches, in my experience, tend to appear in awfully residential areas.

  Cloud tilts his head back, his smooth black ponytail swinging against his windbreaker. Exasperated, or pretending to be. “Trust me. We won’t have to worry about the neighbors.”

  “Really. Why’s that?”

  Surprisingly, it’s Felicity who answers, stepping into the kitchen with one hand at the nape of her neck, holding her poison green halter shirt together. “East side,” she says. “Flooding, probably. Now, one of you be a darling and tie this up for me.”

  • • • •

  We pile into the open bed of her truck—Cloud and me, and a couple of Cloud’s stoner housemates that I only know by sight, strangely identical in chrome-studded vinyl jackets, black jeans, fingerless leather gloves. Thrift store stuff, once upon a time. The two of them have already started on the pills, leaning against the wheel wells and dry-swallowing. Cloud is holding off, since it’s his job to call direction to Felicity through the truck’s open window. He rests a huge flashlight on his knee, halogen blue, and he shines it up at street signs every now and then, checking them against some internal map.

  Felicity tried to convince Meme to join us, but she said no, thanks, she and Paëday were salvaging what they could of their equipment, loading the van and heading out tonight. “Where?” Felicity asked, but Meme shrugged, didn’t try to answer. The last I saw of her, she was flinging a knapsack covered in bumper stickers and silver duct tape into the front of the sound system’s van. The back door was open, the plywood interior jammed with miscellaneous scraps of speaker, lighting equipment, a fragment of control panel with missing buttons, one slider hanging by a thin thread of copper.

  This is the neighborhood now, Cloud says, jostling me. Traffic isn’t heavy anywhere these days, but these streets are dead. Spookily quiet, not even the ubiquitous late-September buzz of insects, although the air is heavy with humidity. Cloud turns the flashlight beam on a block of houses, revealing glassless windows, graffiti tags like loops of colorful string, stained mattresses and broken chairs on the dead front lawns.

  He is just lowering the light when the truck engine moans, chokes, grinds to a slow and utterly decisive halt.

  “Fuck.” Felicity’s voice floats up from the cab, along with the dull sound of her hand slapping the dashboard. “Goddamn fucking son of a bitch.”

  “Are we broken down, Felicity?” Cloud gets to his feet, ready to swing down from the truck bed, although I’m not sure what he thinks he can do to a busted engine.

  “Out of gas,” Felicity says.

  “Oh.” Relieved. “I’ll head back to the house and grab a gallon or two. Take an hour, tops.”

  “No, sweetheart. I mean out of gas.”

  We sit there, quiet for a minute, not looking at each other, tense with something like second-hand embarrassment. Embarrassed that we all knew this was coming, I guess, but didn’t think it would really happen. When was the last time the gas station by the I-94 ramp carried anything but candy bars and irredeemable lottery tickets? Felicity’s chewing her thumbnail, and I’m thinking that she must have known, must have seen that stupid needle dropping on the dashboard, the empty red cans underneath her back porch. Then I remember Mia. Figure Felicity has a talent for disbelief.

  “Well,” Cloud says at last, puncturing the awkward silence. “Guess we’re close enough to walk.”

  • • • •

  And thirty minutes later, we’re standing on the linoleum floor of the basement of Saint Mary, Help of Christians, the soles of our shoes squeaking on invisible dampness, dodging colorful slices of glass from the broken windows a full story above. The main floor is gone, caved in some time ago and all the fragments carted off, and there’s something ethereally Cathedral-like about the height of the ceiling above us, the candles on the window ledges completely out of reach. Some stray pews and a decapitated upright piano are piled against the rear wall, a backdrop for the wiry tangle of the sound system. It feels like the rest of Chicago has beaten us here, and I’m quietly impressed, as always, at Cloud’s ability to get the word out, at everyone’s willingness to return, in the face of everything, to dance.

  Tonight’s sound system is something new. Paëday had been working their way from the east, from Toledo most recently and Cleveland before that. Gray City
has come up from St. Louis, one of the identical vinyl-jacketed stoners tells me, from Kansas City, Wichita, Denver. That’s not what makes them different, though. Different is in the music, in chords so clear they sound acoustic, layered over intricate, precise percussion. And the lights they’ve got running, fitted almost too perfectly to the beat, are a whirlwind of red, green, blue, silver-white. I wonder if it’s possible for your eyes to get breathless, because that’s what it feels like—a rippling cascade of color that my vision can barely keep up with.

  At some point, a rotating globe on the control deck pulses green light over the DJ, and she looks like something out of an album cover, a storybook, a bad dream. Her face, like Cloud’s, is white planes and sharp angles, her blue-black bottle-dye hair swishing down to her hips, gone thick and wild with the humidity. She wears red leather trousers, a pin-stripe vest, a set of handcuffs doubled up around her left wrist like a pair of bracelets. Her right arm is sleeved in tattoos, geometric, with small irregular blotches of brown, like someone tried to etch a rain-stained bus map into her skin.

  Our lady of living precariously, I think. Wonder where that map might lead.

  Felicity has me in her arms now, and she’s dancing like a woman half her age, silky green sliding under my cheek. And now Cloud, his hands resting lightly on my waist. When the pills come out of the pocket of his windbreaker, he passes me one, for the first time. I dry swallow, taste dryness and metal. Then it’s just music and light, light, light, washing over my face like rain. Welcoming me back to the end.

  Track 4. Listen to the Water

  I wake up in my own bed, staring up at the ceiling, at a Chinese movie poster that belonged to whoever had this room before me. Beautiful woman in a lace tea dress the same creamy ivory as her skin, red vinyl heels that match her lipstick. Groaning, tasting something sour in the back of my mouth, I roll onto my side. Someone has neatly folded my clothes, stacked them on the window seat—not me, I never fold like that, so I must have had help getting into bed. Felicity? Or maybe Cloud?

  Jesus Christ, I hope not. The thought of Cloud helping me out of my jeans makes my face feel as hot as Vanessa’s backroom, and redder than her frankly pathetic tomatoes.

  Up and out of bed, pull on a clean pair of jeans, and in the kitchen I get another surprise. Gray City’s knockout DJ is resting her elbows on the chipped laminate counter, watching the hot plate boil water for coffee.

  “Solar panel?” she says, pointing to the plate with her tattooed hand. Which may be the weirdest excuse for a “good morning” that I’ve ever heard.

  “Yeah,” I say. “One, over the back porch.”

  “Smart. A lot of people have gas generators.”

  I grunt in response, thinking of Felicity’s truck, and grab a foil-packaged oatmeal bar from the cabinet.

  While the coffee brews, I chew my oatmeal and study her more closely. She must have been wearing white make-up last night, because in the morning sunlight, her complexion is reddish-brown and bit blotchy. She’s got her hair piled up at the back of her head, secured with a lime-green plastic clip that I’ve seen Felicity wear before. Other than that, she’s dressed like she was last night—leather pants, pinstripe vest with, I now see, a flesh-colored tank underneath.

  “Glad you’re doing okay this morning,” she says, catching me staring. “Your mom and I had a fuck of a time getting you home.”

  “Felicity’s not my mom,” I say automatically. Catch myself before I can add something embarrassing, like my mother is dead. “Anyway, thanks. I appreciate it.”

  She pours two cups of instant, one for me and one for herself. While I’m stirring in a packet of artificial sweetener, she spreads a small scrap of paper on the counter between us. I recognize my sketch of the ship.

  “Did you draw this?”

  It was in my pocket, I remember now. Must have fallen out when she was helping me into bed.

  “Yeah. I mean, I copied it from somewhere. From some graffiti I saw in—” I stop myself just before I can say “Cat-piss Park.” This is really not my morning. “All around the University.”

  “I know,” she says. “I put it there.”

  She drums her fingers on the sketch. Long nails, enameled perfectly black.

  “Good advertising,” I say after a pause that stretches a fraction of a second too long. Thinking back, looking for something Viking, Scandinavian about Gray City’s performance. Not finding it. Though I’m no expert, and I wish Cloud was here.

  “Friday, I need to ask you a question.”

  I stir another packet of sweetener into my coffee.

  “I think you can help me find a friend of mine. She’d be living near the University now. Her name’s Vanessa, Vanessa Novak.”

  “What makes you think I know her?” I suck a drop of too-sweet coffee off the end of my spoon

  “Last night, in the van on the way home, you told me to listen to the water.”

  I keep my voice carefully neutral. “Why would I say that?”

  She slides her hands across the counter, back to her sides, drawing herself to her full height. Which isn’t unimpressive. But I’m not sure she’s trying to be intimidating. Her eyes, deep yellow-brown, narrow thoughtfully. “My friend, Vanessa, she thinks there’s something in the rain. Not acid. Machines.” Wets her lips with the tip of her pale pink tongue. “Like microscopic, mechanical viruses. Always looking for the minerals, the elements they need to make more of themselves. She says you can hear them working on the city. Digesting, not eroding.” She raises her coffee cup to her lips but doesn’t take a sip. “Did she ever tell you that?”

  “Didn’t say your friend ever told me anything.”

  “I’m worried about her, Friday. We were—friends—in Colorado. She disappeared pretty suddenly when the rain started. Ran away from her lab just when the government paid out a big chunk of money, if you believe the rumors. People think she knew something. Or the stress drove her crazy.”

  Especially loud this morning, aren’t they? Vanessa had said. It had sounded crazy to me. And this woman, with her blue-black hair and her tats like a city eaten by acid, is sounding just as bad. Driving on the edge. Missing guardrails.

  “So is she right, your friend?” I ask. “About these machines?”

  “Maybe. I’m a musician, not a scientist. I don’t know.”

  A musician who’s friends with Vanessa. Machines digesting the city. I don’t know which sounds more likely. “Well, that’s fucking terrifying,” I say. I grab my sketch and leave her and my over-sweetened coffee at the counter.

  Track 5. Naglfar

  The room I’m staying in opens right off Felicity’s front door, like an architectural afterthought. There’s a little tile foyer there, a coatrack, a leather barstool with a shoebox on top where Felicity throws her gloves, her wallet, her keys. At the top of the pile sits an unfamiliar ring with a black leather tab, a tiny nickel sword charm, a single key with a plain black bow. I pocket it on my way out the door.

  Gray City’s van, parked across the street, is empty. Which means we’re planning another night in the same venue: One of the team must have spent the night at St. Mary’s to keep an eye on the equipment. I sweep Styrofoam cups and cigarette boxes off the front seat, watch the needle on the gas meter swing up to the halfway mark as the engine sputters to life. Nice, I think, and maybe I even say it out loud.

  Then down four blocks, around the corner, stop in front of a particularly sketchy-looking brownstone with tattered green awnings over the first story windows. I toss a handful of gravel up at the bay window over the door until someone leans out. Identical stoner number three, this one a girl.

  “I need Cloud,” I call up.

  “Jesus, lady, look at the sky. It’s going to rain soon.”

  “I got a van.”

  Shaking her head, she slams the window closed behind her. Thirty seconds later, Cloud is jumping down the front steps, half in and half out of his windbreaker.

  “You know Vanessa Novak?” I a
sk as his arm finds the other sleeve. He slides into the front seat next to me.

  “Felicity’s smart friend? Fixes shit, hates parties?” He peers into the back seat. “Oh, God, Friday, tell me you didn’t steal Gray City’s van.”

  “I’ll give it back later. And yes, that Vanessa. Gray City’s DJ—” I realize now that I didn’t get her name, and wonder if Cloud knows it— “She says they were friends out west. She’s looking for her.”

  “And?”

  “And? Can you imagine Vanessa being friends with her? The whole thing gives me the creeps. We’re going to see what Vanessa thinks about it.” And God bless him, he doesn’t ask why he’s along for the ride. Just grins and offers me a cigarette scrounged from the floor.

  • • • •

  For the first time since I’ve known her, Vanessa has locked her door. Locked and barricaded, from what I can make out from pressing my face against a loose pane of window glass, fogged with humidity. Wooden pallets, terra-cotta plant pots stuffed with something indistinguishable, gallon jugs of filthy water piled up against it. I’m in the middle of congratulating myself for my accurate intuition about Gray City’s DJ, her poison yellow ship-with-two-faces on the sidewalk out front, when I feel the first drop of rain on my hand.

  Cold, cold, cold, worse than snow melting down the back of your collar or scraping your knee on icy asphalt. Temperature has nothing to do with it, I know—it’s nerves dying, flesh corroding, Jesus Christ. I’m slapping the back of my hand on my jeans, hearing Cloud’s muted little gasp from the step below me, when the next drop hits my forehead. Hood up, just in time. Then fucking buckets.

  Cloud leaps up next to me on the balcony, an arm stretched over my head. Trying to shelter me with his windbreaker, I realize: sweet, but pointless. Quickly, kneeling, I shake out the contents of my backpack—ancient CDs, iPod with a dead battery, leather wallet with an Illinois ID card and not much else—wrap the blue canvas around my fist, and punch the window. Glass already weak, scoured by the rain, it sprays inward beneath my hand, glass shards all over anemic tomato plants and sparse tufts of chive. We scramble inside. Behind us, the fringe of glass hanging at the top of the windowpane drops like a guillotine blade.