No one is rich anymore; no one is poor. There are only haves and have-nots. We, the Children of Abraham, God’s favored sons and daughters, have: Shelter. Food. Generators. Guns. Lives.
You, the rest, have not.
I don’t have to worry anymore about being left, about being wanted. For one thing, it doesn’t matter what any of us want—there’s nowhere to fucking go. We’ve got a radio here, we know what it’s like out there, or we know enough to imagine. Cities obliterated; West Coast underwater; governments fallen; everywhere riots and corpses. Tohu va vohu—Isaac says that’s how the Bible begins, in Hebrew. In the beginning, all was formless and void, all was wild and waste; so it began, he says, now so it ends. Isaac says we’ve all been alone long enough, that now we’ll be together. Not only all of us together in the Ark, but each of us together with another soul, matched pairs, two by two by two, as it should be. Isaac will pair us. He says God tipped him off about our proper soulmates, and since that’s the same God who gave him a heads-up about the end of the world and how to survive it, we have no choice but to believe him. So much easier than the old way. Isaac will pair us, then, in ten days, we’ll join hands and souls in the eyes of God. We’ll swear to our Lord. Forever, we’ll swear, and that’s how it will be. That’s another thing that’s changed from the old days. Once you know that God is willing to destroy the world when it pisses him off, you get a little more reluctant to break your word.
You said once that if I ever duped someone into marrying me, I should make sure to get a pre-nup, because that way when they left me I’d get mine. Actually, I’d get yours, I said, isn’t that how pre-nups work? And you laughed. Not, you said, at the lame joke, but at the idea that you’d be the one marrying me.
That’s when I should have known. Not because you laughed, but because of the when. If you get married; when he leaves you. You saw it before I did, that I was a girl to be left.
And now you’ve left again.
Don’t worry, this time I won’t make a scene.
I think you die with the rest of California when the waves come to sweep you away. You die thinking maybe you should’ve gotten around to learning how to swim, which wouldn’t have saved you but might have let you hang on a little longer or with a little more dignity; you could’ve gotten to see what it looked like for LA to float, see the Hollywood sign bobbing on the waves along with all the nippled silicone implants, the Jags and the Range Rovers and the Ferraris sucked under, fish shitting on all that Italian leather, anorexic starlets with their gym-toned bodies bloating in the sun, you die and I live, even though your house was made of brick and marble and mine is made of old shipping containers. The Three Little Pigs is not a disaster survival guide, and besides, our craftsmanship is solid, all the huffing and puffing in the world won’t blow our ark down. Where you live now, there is only seafood for dinner, night after night. I guess circumstances have exercised their will.
Love,
Heather
• • • •
Dear John,
Remember how we used to joke about that? How I used to leave you notes that would say, “Dear John, I am not leaving you. But please pick up some milk on your way home.” How we agreed that if I ever did leave you, all I had to write was, “Dear John, This time I am.” You thought it was unfair, that your name was synonymous with leaving, with being left. You said, I will never leave you. Not me. Not you.
Is it love that makes you stupid, or is stupid just a necessary criteria for falling in love?
Feel free to think of this as the letter you never got. Feel free to think whatever you want, except that I miss you.
Onion breath. Flop sweat. Fork scraping. The tick-tock click of a pen against teeth. Thought music, you called it.
The kind of person who would say the words “thought music.”
File it all under Things I do not miss.
Lying, that’s another one.
I will never leave you.
I will never leave you.
I will never leave you.
The way you looked at me, all wounded puppy eyes, that I could even imagine it. The insult of the fear. Just turn it off, you told me, like you’d never been afraid.
How could I have thought that would work, a forever with a man who didn’t understand fear? Here’s my forever, as of this morning: black, walrus mustache and graying scruff of beard, veiny biceps and lopsided ears. Small hands, big nose. His name is Gavin, and I think, in that other life, he was rich. The kind who has a midlife crisis and when he discovers the Porsche isn’t magically stripping off the years, acquires someone like me instead, sends flowers and makes promises and then signs the divorce papers and marries someone else. Except that Gavin’s already left his wife, left her out there to die with the rest of the world, and now, in here, there’s no one but me. Isaac says—or says that God says—we belong together. Maybe he threw darts, or picked names out of a hat. Maybe it really is God; maybe Gavin is my destiny.
I have one friend here, and she thinks this is fucked, though that’s a word she would never use. Theresa Babbage, who used to babysit Isaac when he was just some kid rather than Our Savior, who told me about the time he got so freaked out by some nightmare that he wet the bed, eleven years old and swimming in piss and she swore me to secrecy because if word got out he’d know she was the one who told, and we both know what would happen then—she thinks this is fucked. She thinks Isaac’s only making us marry because he outlawed fucking before marriage and too many of the single men miss it. I don’t tell her that I miss it, too. She wouldn’t like that. I don’t tell her that the arranged marriage thing doesn’t seem all that different to me than how it worked before. A man says he wants to be with you, and you stay. A man says he doesn’t want to be with you anymore, and he leaves. So what if in this case, it’s Isaac who says he wants me to be with someone? The only difference is that in this case, it doesn’t matter whether the man wants to be with me or not.
Gavin will stay with me, and I will stay with him. That’s the difference. I won’t expect him to save me; I won’t expect him to love me or want me. I won’t expect anything, but that we will be together instead of alone.
You were the kind of guy who liked to save people, you said, and you said you’d save me. You were going to be different than the others, you said. You would be the one who stayed, who would convince me that staying was possible, that not everyone leaves. You said only the wrong people leave, that I was lucky they did, because if they hadn’t, there wouldn’t have been a you. Not all togethers are better than being alone, you said. Only this one.
You said I didn’t scare you. That no part of me would make you run away. That we would never be alone again, that instead, we would be alone together. Remember when we turned the apartment into a fort, said we would barricade ourselves away from the world forever? We would bury ourselves under blankets with an endless supply of caramels and Fresca, enough to last us through all six seasons of The Sopranos and every time one of Tony’s henchmen killed someone, we would kiss. We were stupid then, and didn’t understand forts or barricades or forever. And we never got around to finishing The Sopranos, which is a shame, because now there’s no more Netflix and it turns out there’s not as much overlap as you’d expect between premium cable viewers and doomsday cultists, so there’s no one here to tell me how it ends. Even if there was, they wouldn’t have acted it out in the stupid voices, the way you did when I missed an episode.
Here is what I think about sometimes: The day I figured it out, that the entitled ass who showed up every day to exchange his rental car because the seat didn’t recline all the way or the gas cap jiggled or the clutch was sticky or the radio cut out at the high end of the FM band wasn’t such an entitled ass after all, that you didn’t give a shit about the shitty cars, you just wanted an excuse to smile at the girl behind the counter. The day I smiled back. The four days it took after that, waiting for you to make your move; the way you dimpled when I made it for you. What you said,
when you dropped me off that night—the first time, before you made the U-turn in your tin can rental car because you realized taking things slow was crap—that it wasn’t because you thought I was pretty, that that’s not why you came back the next day. Not that you didn’t think I was pretty. Of course you thought I was pretty. It’s just it wasn’t because I was pretty.
I liked it when you stammered. I liked that I could make you nervous.
It was because you didn’t bother to say thank you when I handed you the keys, and I told you that wasn’t very polite.
Not just a pretty girl; a pretty girl having a crap day at a job that required her to smile and be nice. A pretty girl with butterflies on her dress and a glittering stud in her nose, with army camo nail polish and a chip on her shoulder, with one assy customer too many, and something about it woke you up, you said, and you came back that first time, the next day, just to see if I had quit. You had a feeling about me, you said. Like I was some tropical bug lighting on a flower, that all it would take was a breeze to spook me away.
I liked that you remembered what I was wearing; I liked that you didn’t call me a fucking butterfly.
You’re right that it was different with you, I’ll give you that. You’re right that it was better—but in the end, it was the same, because it still ended. It doesn’t matter how good something is if it doesn’t last; the being better only makes it hurt more when it’s over, so what’s the fucking point?
It’s over. That’s the only forever for us now. We both know you’re dead, and we both know how, and I don’t want to talk about it.
Love,
Heather
• • • •
Dear Cheating Bastard,
You die in the woods, where your smug face gets eaten off by escaped zoo bears, you chipmunk-headed fuckwit.
Love,
Heather
• • • •
Dear Teach,
That was my first ever A+, and I guess I proved myself a C student through and through by being dense enough to believe in it. That when you said I had promise, you meant in life, and not in a back office, bent over your desk, skirt hiked up, both of us listening for someone coming, only one of us actually knowing what that would sound like. You write like a writer. That’s what you scribbled on the last page. See me after class, and you underlined that one twice. A for effort.
I thought I was an old soul; I thought I was a portrait of the artist as a young woman. I thought you loved me for those things, and for the way I laughed like I had a secret and the way I perched on the fringe of life, expectant and ever watchful, seeing into things that most people can’t see at all—because that’s what you told me. Not that you loved me because I sucked you off like I’d done it a million times before or because you had some weird fetish for skinny wrists and slap bracelets, or because I was just stupid enough to believe you when you said I was smart.
I know, I know: When I whine, I sound like a child.
I’m thinking now you liked that best.
Age, you said, was just a number, which in retrospect explains why you liked fucking teenagers, because you assumed we would mistake cliché for wisdom.
A lot of things are clear in retrospect, not to mention cliché, like the things a girl will do when she grows up without a daddy and the sad vampirism of a guy in his thirties making one last lunge for his vanishing youth. I was sixteen, and you were sixteen years older—enough space for a whole other me to fit between us. Which I’m guessing you would have enjoyed.
Theresa Babbage is only nine years older than Isaac, which seems distasteful enough now, when he’s only thirteen, but won’t matter too much down the line, and either way, you’ve no room to judge. Isaac says that when he turns thirteen, he will be a man, that that’s how it worked in biblical times and—look out the window—here we are again. (We have no windows here, but we all know what he means.) He says God wants him to be with a woman, and he wants that woman to be Theresa, and since age is just a number and what Isaac says goes, so be it. That’s what we all tried to tell ourselves, and shrugged.
It makes sense he would pick her, not just because she’s closer to his age than anyone other than the little kids, not just because she’s hot, but because she was his babysitter, and that’s the closest thing we’ve got to a teacher. (Hot for a teacher, there’s another cliché you know pretty well.) She broke the rules for him, let him stay up after his bedtime, let him watch horror movies even after the nightmares started, the ones from God about the end of the world, and there’s something intoxicating about that, breaking the rules together, sneaking around together in the dark, sharing a secret. Secrets breed.
Write dangerous, you said, when you gave us the journals, told us to write what we felt and what we feared, no sanitized shit about proms and puppies. You called them journals, not diaries, because diaries are for little girls, and you promised they would be for our eyes only. Make the page a repository for your soul, you told us, but when I showed you the page about how you tasted and what my heart did when you spelled words on my neck with your tongue, you told me don’t be a fucking idiot and never write any of this down, and never even bothered to say if it was good.
I did what I was told. I didn’t tell anyone. Even after you traded me in for that sophomore who wrote a love poem in her own menstrual blood, I didn’t write any of it down. I learned my lesson about that. Never write down what actually matters. Never tell.
Even so, I still thought I might be a writer someday. If I had the time. If anything worth writing about ever happened to me. And here I am, witness to the end of the world, nothing to do but can fruit and record the fall of civilization and the mourning song of my heart or whatever, and the only thing I’ve bothered to write are my little collection of shitpaper letters to all you pieces of shit. There’s nothing in here I want to record, and nothing out there that I can bring back by writing about it. What I want is to lie on a couch and watch TV.
You told us TV would turn us into passive consumers of other people’s words and we should take a sledgehammer to the screen, impose our creative will on the world, creation via destruction, raze our brain-washed, consumerist, capitalist, shallow, pimple-popping lives to the ground and build from scorched earth; you told us no one ever died wishing they had watched more TV, but I will. I wish I’d watched more Friends reruns and had made a dent in the list of Boring-Sounding Shows I’m Tired of Admitting I Don’t Watch. I can picture how you probably died (pierced in the jugular by exploding glass while you begged the mirror for help with your comb-over), but I’m already forgetting what the Real Housewives look like. I told you once that I thought soap operas were the most realistic form of storytelling, because they never stopped at happily ever after, they never stopped at all, and you laughed like I was making a joke, and I guess now the joke is on me because they stopped along with everything else.
There’s nothing left out there now. That’s what they say over the radio, although mostly, now, they don’t say much of anything. Occasionally, through the static, we pick up someone crying.
There’s nothing left out there and it’s insane to hope that there is, and we all agree on that—except when it’s time to put someone out. And then we pretend it’s not a death sentence, just an alternative life choice. Anything could be out there, we say. She didn’t like it in here, not enough to follow the rules and do as she was told, so maybe she’ll find something she likes better.
Maybe, if Theresa Babbage preferred not to fuck a teenager, if, unlike you, that didn’t turn her on, if she pretended Isaac’s proposal was a question rather than a command and politely declined, then that was her choice, and maybe, after a few nights out there in the waste and wild, she won’t regret it.
It’s not execution, Isaac said last night, after he locked the gates behind her. Not even punishment. Simply the smart policing of a peaceful community. Go along to get along, or get out.
She said he was fucking crazy. She said what about feminism and Hil
ary Clinton and MTV and how does a kid born in the twenty-first century buy any of this crap, the world hasn’t worked like that for two thousand years, and he said that the world was gone, and that a lot of things hadn’t happened for two thousand years, and he didn’t have to come right out and say I am the light of the world for us to know what he was getting at.
She probably thought her sisters would go with her, but she should have known better. She couldn’t have imagined I would go with her, but she might have expected me to say goodbye. She didn’t know how I feel about goodbyes.
She didn’t tell me she was going to refuse him, or I would have talked her out of it. I would have told her about doing the things you need to do, about how to endure, about what it takes to be the girl who stays. I could have told her what it feels like to be left alone, but she didn’t ask, and now they’ve pushed her out the door without warm clothes or food or any fucking idea how to take care of herself, because while the rest of us were preparing for the end by learning to shoot and make soap and forage for mushrooms, she was babysitting the future messiah, and now she’s probably dead. I still have my laptop. The battery’s long dead, of course, but sometimes I like to watch the blank screen, and imagine what used to be.
Even before, I liked to watch static, especially when I hurt. I liked the dead roar of it, the way you could squint into the wild and waste, almost believing that if you tried hard enough, you could resolve chaos into order, that somewhere, hiding between the squiggly lines, was a face, a voice, a world.
The End Is Now Page 38