I want the picture back; I want it all back. I want trashy reality shows and late night infomercials and Saturday morning cartoons. I want my MTV. I want Chinese take-out and a greasy-fingered remote; I want sick days that pass in a haze of talk show rumbles and game show hosts; I want Luke and Laura to reunite and As the World Turns to come back from the dead; I want fat men with their skinny wives and hospitals where everyone is beautiful and dripping with sex and only boring people die; I want tornado hunters and competitive eaters and Sunday morning televangelists and even that fucking ice queen on Fox News. I want back all those afternoons that I spent with you in your car and your office and that skeezy hotel, because I could have spent them at home with a bag of Doritos and Oprah and Boy Meets World and now, when I lie in my bunk and pretend to sleep, breathing stale air, tuning out snores, fingering my knife and wondering if one day I’ll wake up and decide to use it, I could play back all those episodes in my head, be my own laugh track, remember scripted lines and symmetrical faces, instead of you. I want oblivion, like the rest of you get to have, out there; I want not to be the one left behind when everyone else is gone.
I want. I want. I want. I’m sounding like a child again, aren’t I? Like a whiny brat who thinks bad things only happen to bad people and gods play fair.
Not that I would call Isaac a whiny brat, or an ignorant kid, or delusional or pathetic, simply because he believes that we were saved because we deserved to be, that death is punishment and life reward, that we can remember what we choose to remember and forget the rest, that because he saved us once, our lives are forever in his hands. There are no teachers anymore, and even if there were, you can’t teach the savior of mankind—God’s chosen vessel—anything he doesn’t want to know. So you see, this particular brave new world has no place for you. This is a world where children take whatever they want, and the rest of us live with what’s left.
Love,
Heather
• • • •
Dear John,
I said I don’t miss you, and that’s true enough. But I do miss fucking you. Or maybe I just miss fucking, full stop. Only one more week before Midlife Crisis and I join together in holy matrimony and connubial bliss, and you’d think I’d be more eager. He certainly is.
He tastes like fish.
Isaac keeps talking about what a joyful day it will be, but there’s too much sadness in his eyes to pull it off. I can see it, even if no one else can, because I know what it looks like, the face of getting left behind.
He’s got to be used to it by now. First his mother, dumping him at Father Abraham’s door like one of those shitty free newspapers that always went straight into the trash. Dumping him with a father he’d never met before, a father who happened to be in the middle of a doomsday countdown with his millennial flock of fuck-ups.
Kid makes the best of that, teams up with daddy, buddies up so close to daddy’s friend upstairs that he starts getting divine whispers in his own ear, turns savior, turns doomsday prepper-in-chief, teaches us to build our Ark and prepare for judgment day, and what’s his prize when the sky falls down and proves him right? Dad dumps him too. Locks the kid into the promised land with the rest of us and heads down the mountain to die with the unsaved masses. Chose the world over his own kid, and said God told him to do it, which, as trump cards go, beats out because I said so.
Now Theresa’s left him, too.
It doesn’t matter that she didn’t want to go; she’s gone. That’s how he sees it.
I couldn’t help it—I felt bad for him. I said, she wasn’t the right girl for you, Isaac, and to his credit, he didn’t pretend not to know what I mean. He didn’t even try to fake a smile. I saved her life, he said. Shouldn’t that be enough?
And you know what? Maybe it should. Everyone acts like love can save you, but love can’t save anything. So maybe we’ve got it the wrong way around, maybe it’s the saving that makes for love. Isaac saved us, and we should love him for it. He saved us, and so we belong to him. It’s kid logic, but you’ve got to admit that it makes sense, and that’s what I told him.
Still, I don’t like the way he looks at me now.
Without Theresa, there’s no one to ask about it, about whether I’m imagining things. The way his eyes follow me across the room. The way he saw me watching, and smiled.
I was just trying to be nice.
Dear John, wish you were here, that’s what I’m supposed to say, I guess, since the other option is wish you were dead—wish you were starving or burning or being gnawed on by feral cats—but you wouldn’t know what to do with yourself here. You wouldn’t like being locked away, piecing things together with the static and screams and pleas on a CB radio, living in a tangle of bodies and bad breath, everywhere skin and sweat and people, all of us so pale.
I’m pale like you now, pale and thin and craving the sun. You always called me stupid for skimping on the sunscreen. Everyone’s got to die sometime, I said.
I know how you died. Of course I know how you died. Why do you think I’m so good at this game? What else have I been doing since the last time you saw me but imagining how you died? I dream it, and wake up smelling disinfectant and puke, wake up tasting you, not the good you but the way you tasted at the end, like iron and rubber, like something poisonous. Sometimes I imagined I could feel it, some fluctuation in the universe, someone cutting the invisible floss that held us together, some infinitesimal weight lifting or settling—and how the fuck do any of those things actually feel, so it was more like I felt headaches and muscle cramps and indigestion and each time thought, just maybe, it was you.
I didn’t have to be there to know how you died. Wasting away. Emaciated and skeleton skin but bloated with fluid. Pregnant with fluid, we might have said. High on drugs, so sky high you might have missed the headline, assumed you were easing into a nap instead of the big sleep, maybe high enough that you saw me, and smiled, because you thought you weren’t alone. But you were. I know that, too.
Love,
Heather
• • • •
Dear Jackass,
I guess you’ll never finish that novel after all. God, the novel, the novel, always the fucking novel. And how could I be expected to understand such things, the bimbo who washed your filthy dishes once the fruit flies start swarming because your life of the mind precluded you from noticing such things. How could I, bovine dumb, so dumb I had to look up the word bovine, begin to process the profundities your mind was gestating, your miscarriage of literary greatness, your Solitaire games which I guess were tapping into some deep vein of emotional catharsis. If I thought there actually was a novel, I would wonder whether you’d turned me into a character, the stupid cunt who joined a cult, can you imagine I stuck my dick in that beehive of crazy, I can hear you saying to all your coffee shop losers, and that’s why I don’t feel guilty for taking your laptop when you left.
Not to be juvenile about it, or maybe to be juvenile about it, since according to you I’m incapable of anything else: Who’s the stupid cunt now? Who’s safe in the bunker with God’s chosen people, and who’s a rotting piece of meat waiting for someone else’s cat to come by and gnaw at your intestines because you’re far too busy to have one of your own?
Tell me you don’t actually believe this shit, you said after those first couple meetings. I pray to fucking non-existent god that I haven’t wasted my time with someone who would fall for this.
And I said, even at the beginning, because that’s what it said in the brochure, this is my calling and I need to repent before it’s too late, and I didn’t tell you what Father Abraham told me, that forgiveness is possible and God will never leave you because I knew you would laugh and I wanted to believe it was true.
And eventually you said I can’t handle this shit anymore and the sex isn’t worth the crazy, and that was fine with me because Father Abraham’s house had many rooms and plenty of empty beds, and how is that I’m never the one leaving, but I’m always the one who has
to pack up my suitcase and walk out the door?
I never got around to answering your original question.
Did I believe it?
Do I believe it?
What kind of stupid cunt would I be not to believe it? A father and his son told me the world would end, and it did. They told me when it would happen, and it did. They told me how to survive it, and here I am. Abraham gathered us to his chest, Isaac built us an ark, and here we are, floating to salvation on a sea of millet and automatic rifles and kidney beans.
If I didn’t believe, why did I come in the first place and why did I stay?
If I don’t believe now, what more could possibly convince me?
Atheism is the only honest intellectual position, you said, and I didn’t ask you what if an angel descended to Earth or a TV messiah parted the Red Seas or an eleven-year-old says God told me the world will die and the kid turns out to be right, because it was easier to let you think I wasn’t listening when you talked. Maybe if you had asked me a question, I would have answered. Maybe if you asked me who I was thinking about when you were inside me, and why I would hate myself enough to let you be there, I would have told you a story.
The Holocaust, you said. The Armenian genocide. Rwanda. What kind of a god, etc., etc.
Everyone dies, I said. Or do you blame Him for that, too.
I don’t know. That’s the answer. I don’t know if I believe in a Him, and so I don’t know whether to worry about breaking a promise to Him, but the question’s moot, because my soulmate-in-waiting is gone. Midlife Crisis Man slipped away in the night, mustache and all, apparently preferring certain death over an eternity bound to me.
That’s assuming he left of his own accord, and obviously it wouldn’t be the first time, but there’s also Isaac, and the way he looked when he announced the disappearance, and the way he took my hand when he told me that I shouldn’t worry about being alone for long, that God had plans for me.
Never trust anyone who says God has a plan, you told me, and that’s the one thing that made sense.
I keep a knife under my pillow, in case I need it. We all have something—our own personal emergency escape plan. Some people can’t handle it, losing the world. What kind of a god, you said, and now we have an answer, and it’s one that not everyone can live with.
We’ve pieced it together from the radio. What happened that day, after we locked ourselves in the Ark. What it looked like when the sky fell down. On the radio, they say it was beautiful, a hailstorm of light, but that’s because they’re the ones who lived. I think you lived too, at least past the initial impact, and maybe you tried to write a poem about it; maybe you thought: finally, good material.
I think your city wasn’t obliterated; your loft wasn’t vaporized. You were too far from the coast to get swept away. I think you felt good about yourself, while you still had time to feel. You couldn’t believe in a god that put Fifty Shades of Grey on the bestseller list, but a god that turned twenty million people to dust and left you still tapping ashes out of your hand-carved corncob pipe, I think that’s a god you could get behind. I think it wasn’t until the nukes started flying that you got in trouble, chaos breeds chaos you used to say, tapping on the pipe, and it only takes one madman with a nuclear code and nothing to lose, and I guess once you’ve lost the sky, what’s left. I think you got a full blast of poison and your skin started falling off in patches, you heaved up everything inside of you until you were hollow, you went full zombie, scaly and moaning, radiation cannibalizing your brain along with everything else, I think you tried to kill yourself by drinking a mug of fountain pen ink because you thought it would be a poetic way to go, but you threw that up, too, and died praying to your nonexistent fucking god that the pain would stop.
Love,
Heather
• • • •
Dear No Strings Attached,
It would have been a pretty big fucking string, our baby. Our un-baby, our cell grouping, our medical waste. Less a string than a cord. Or one of the ropes they use to tie up boats. Knotted, rough to the touch, stinking of fish.
The ropes they used to use, I guess I should say.
Hard to get used to that.
You didn’t have to tell me you didn’t want it. That once it was inside me, you didn’t want me, either, no matter how fast I got it scraped out. You didn’t have to tell me I would be a shitty mother.
These are things I already knew.
You didn’t have to pay for it, either, and so you didn’t. You could at least have offered.
Would I have been a shitty mother? I guess I’ll have my chance to find out, if I stay here.
You like how I said that, if I stay? The superfluous if, as in, I’ll meet you for coffee tomorrow, if the sun rises; I’ll hurt when it’s over, if it ends.
If gravity takes hold, I’ll break when I hit the ground.
Be fruitful and multiply, that’s the plan. Grow the compound until it’s safe to leave it behind. Repopulate the Earth. Not yet, Isaac says, but soon.
He says that about the two of us, too. Soon. That we won’t marry tonight with the others. We’ll wait until he turns thirteen, and then we will be joined. In all ways, we will be joined.
I told him I was old enough to be his mother, though I didn’t add that you don’t have to be Freud to see the relevance there. I told him there was no reason for him to hurry. That he had plenty of time to become a man.
He told me not to speak to him like a child.
He told me I understood him, and we would come to love each other. God would make it so.
He told me God wants him to have a son.
It’s possible that he’s making this shit up, but I’m pretty sure he believes it. Which is not better.
If you don’t believe in Isaac, and say it out loud, they put you out.
If you don’t fulfill your responsibilities, they put you out.
If you sin against the Lord, or some big mouth accuses you of doing so because she wants those chocolate bars you’re hoarding, they put you out.
If I were a mother, I would make sure my daughter knew that you do what you have to do. Even if it means letting the kid shove himself into you, enduring one scraping thrust and a whiplash jerk, the blown wad, the wilting dick, the tears.
Yes, I’ve thought about it. Am thinking about it.
But maybe, if I were a mother, when I am a mother, I’ll hide the baby under my coat and steal her away from the Ark, and raise her in the world. Maybe, because she will be born into the after, she will have evolved to survive it. Or I could leave her when I go, if I went, leave her where she could be safe and tended to, if not loved, and let her accept how life is supposed to be without me there to whisper in her ear that she should want more, that once there was more.
Or maybe Isaac is right, and God will stick me with a son.
Love,
Heather
P.S. Did you think I forgot? I’d guess you died, gutshot, intestines on the ground, mouth gibbering with surprise, when you got desperate enough to take food from your neighbor and she didn’t want to share. She’s dead now too, I’m guessing, the one you used to spy on with binoculars when you pretended you were birdwatching, because you liked the way she bulged and jiggled when she was naked, even though you always told me I should lose weight. Not, like, in a shallow way, you said. For my health.
• • • •
Dear guy in the Arcade Fire t-shirt with the stain on the collar,
You were nice. That’s most of what I remember. You bought me drinks, but not too many, and didn’t say anything when I bought myself a few more.
I remember you’d just gotten fired, but you had your buddy’s entrance card so you could sneak into the building and smuggle out your files. You took me with you, and we didn’t go to your sad, abandoned cubicle to collect what was left of your old life. You didn’t want to have sex on your boss’s couch or take a dump on his desk. You wanted to show me the roof, because you said it was the best v
iew of the city and I seemed like someone who needed a good view.
I was a little afraid you were a person who needed a high place from which to jump.
I would like to remember the feel of your arms around me as we stood against the railing and watched the lights twinkle in the black, but I only remember that it felt like standing on the deck of a boat, watching fallen stars burn on a dark sea.
I thought, maybe him.
Maybe this.
Because that’s how you think when you’re the right amount of drunk, and hands and lips feel good, and someone is nice. Sometimes even when he’s not.
Someone is better than no one.
That’s what Isaac told me, because he doesn’t want me to leave like Theresa left, doesn’t want to have to make me leave. Would it be so bad to be with me? he asked, and he shouldn’t have, because it made him sound so young. He told me I could have a day to think about it, before I promise myself to him. He’s being generous, he says, because he likes me.
I always want to ask him whether he knows why his mother left him behind—whether he cares if she had a reason or not.
Not that having a reason is anything special. Everyone has a reason.
Would it be so bad? He won’t be thirteen forever, but he would be forever mine.
I thought I loved you all—even you, even for a night—and none of you saved me. Isaac saved me, so maybe he’s right that I should love him, that that’s how it should work.
He chose wisely this time, chose like he could see into me.
I am the girl who stays.
I am the girl who says yes, if you want.
Whatever you want.
As long as you don’t leave.
You didn’t have time to find that out about me, and you didn’t have time to test it. Or maybe you did. I can’t remember.
I might have told you the truth about me, all of me; you might have told me things you’d never told anyone, the secrets that made you who you were; we might have decided this night was the beginning of all things; you might have recited poetry and I might have recited the lyrics to all the C&C Music Factory songs I know, which is three, because we wanted to impress each other, and it might have worked; we might have done nothing more up there than kiss, like people in a boring movie, deciding, because Hollywood told us it was romantic, to take it slow, that why not, we had all the time in the world; we might have shaken the Earth. I don’t remember, like the next day I didn’t remember your name or where the office was, which was all fine, because I gave you my number; I thought I remembered that much, but then you never called, so one way or another, I was wrong.
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