The End of the End of Everything

by Dale Bailey

  The Girl Who Had Been Susan Hardesty afterward hunkered at the edge of the glade and tested the air with flaring nostrils. Nothing and nothing and nothing. Not yet. But men—though she no longer thought of them as such; they were merely other than the pack (the pack was everything), and therefore dangerous—men would come. The instinct in her loins had decreed the boy’s abduction. Instinct of another kind commanded her to abandon him, and so the pack slipped into the wood, leaving the not-life behind.

  The men came hours later, not long after daybreak, tramping through the trees. It would have been easy to avoid them but for their sheer number—there were so many of them. The pack splintered before the human onslaught, each of them isolate and terrified and stricken with longing for her sisters. As a quartet of policemen lugged Tom Anderson out of the woods, the search intensified. Parties of armed men blundered through the underbrush, and the clamor of dogs once again rang through the woods. Not long after nine, Jim Bildridge dropped The Girl Who Had Been Mildred Allen down by the lake. The bullet took her in the throat; Bildridge stood by and smoked as she writhed in agony, clawing at her wound. It took her thirty-two minutes to bleed out. Bildridge timed it.

  The Girl Who Had Been Kate Robinson was luckier. Perhaps the men in the woods fanned into flame that spark of regret that she had from the first day hidden deep in her heart; perhaps she thought once again of her baby brother, and though she was no longer fit to live among men and could not have been tamed even had she tried to do so—perhaps at some level she longed to return. Maybe that’s why she exposed herself on a trail and stood unmoving before her killer. State Trooper Asa Wilson, who had spotted her in the brush so many months before and turned away uncertain, this time took no chances. A sniper in the war, he licked his thumb and tested the wind. Then he socketed the butt of his rifle in the hollow of his shoulder and put a bullet through her left eye.

  One by one they went down: The Girl Who Had Been Elizabeth Smith, The Girl Who Had Been Joan Brown, The Girl Who Had Been Ann Miller, until at last only The Girl Who Had Been Susan Hardesty remained. She’d heard the shots echoing among the trees. As twilight closed in, she fled toward the lake, lunging across a field between enclosing arms of woodland, the panicky terror of all hunted, haunted things hammering in her breast.

  It was her father who spotted her.

  John Hardesty had lagged maybe fifty yards behind his party—the other three men had crested the nearest knoll—when he saw her crossing the meadow below, a hundred feet away. “Wait,” he said, and her sharp, wild ears caught the sound of the word, startling her. She wheeled about in terror to face him, crouching, her arms out flung, her matted shroud of hair swinging like a rope. And after all this time, John Hardesty still knew her. He knew the lineaments of her body, he knew the shape of her face, and though he could not see them from this distance and in this light, he knew even the color of her eyes—a midnight blue so dark they were almost black. He knew her, so long had he ached for her, standing on the porch and smoking as the pack howled into the dark, these children who had in another time been children of the light, and among them she who had been the child of his life in an age when the world had gone mad, and the best friend he’d ever known had peered just inches around the edge of a tank barrier only to be torn apart before his eyes by the thundering rounds of a German buzzsaw. He knew her, this the child of his heart, who had seen him through, who had once been, who was still and always would be, his daughter. He said her name, he said, “Susan.”

  They called out to something in her savage breast, those two syllables. She paused a moment, puzzling over them, and in that moment, John Hardesty had a chance to think it all through—the corpse of Tom Anderson beautiful in the grass, and his own son Frank, someday to be a man, and Mary at home awaiting his return, and all the women of the town in their houses in this blue twilight awaiting their men, lights coming on one by one against the night, and the smells of dinner cooking, these frail hedges against the horrors of the world men had made—and so he lifted the stolen Nazi rifle, sighted down the barrel just as his father had taught him, squeezed the trigger, and took his daughter down.

  The End

  of the End

  of Everything

  The last time Ben and Lois Devine saw Veronica Glass, the noted mutilation artist, was at a suicide party in Cerulean Cliffs, an artist’s colony far beyond their means. That they happened to be there at all was a simple matter of chance. Stan Miles, for whom Ben had twice served as best man, had invited them to his beach house to see things through with his new wife, MacKenzie, and her nine-year-old daughter, Cecilia. Though the Devines had no great enthusiasm for the new wife—Stan had traded up, was how Lois put it—they still loved Stan and had resolved to put the best face on the thing. Besides, the prospect of watching ruin engulf the world among such glittering company was, for Ben at least, irresistible. He made his living on the college circuit as a poet, albeit a minor one, so when Stan said they would fit right in, his statement was not entirely without truth.

  They drove down on a Sunday, to the muted strains of a Mozart piano concerto on the surround sound. Ruin had lately devoured most of the city and it encroached on either side of the abandoned interstate: derelict cars rusting back to the elements, skeletal trees stark against a gray horizon, an ashen, baked-looking landscape, though no fire had burned there. In some places the road was all but impassable. They made poor time. It was late when they finally pulled into the beach house’s weedy gravel driveway and climbed out, stretching.

  This was a still-living place. They could hear the distant sigh of breakers beyond the house, an enormous edifice of stacked stone with single-story wings sweeping back to either side of the driveway. The sharp tang of the ocean leavened the air. Gulls screamed in the distance and it was summer and it was evening, and in the cool dusk the declining sun made red splashes on the narrow windows of the house.

  “I thought you’d never get here,” Stan bellowed from the porch as they retrieved their luggage. “Come up here and let me give you a kiss, you two!” Stan—bearded, stout, hirsute as a bear—was as good as his promise. He delivered to each of them a scratchy wet smooch square on the lips, pounded Ben’s back, and relieved Lois of her suitcase with one blunt-fingered hand. Ghostlike in the gloom, and surprisingly graceful for such a large man, he swept them inside on a tide of loose-flowing white silk, his blouse unbuttoned at the neck to reveal corkscrews of gray hair.

  He dumped their baggage in an untidy pile just inside the door, and ushered them into a blazing three-story glass atrium. It leaned rakishly over the dark, heaving water, more sensed than seen, and Ben, as always, felt a brief wave of vertigo, a premonition that the whole house might any moment slide over the cliff and plummet to the rocky white beach below. Ceiling fans whispered far above them. Two Oscars for Production Design stood on the mantle, over a fireplace big enough to roast a boar.

  Stan collapsed into a low white sofa, and waved them into adjoining seats. “So the last days are upon us,” he announced jovially. “I’m glad you’ve come.”

  “We’re glad to be here,” Ben said.

  “Any word from Abby?” Stan asked.

  Abby was Stan’s ex-wife—Ben’s first stint as best man—and just hearing her name sent a spasm through Ben’s heart. When the dust from the divorce settled, Stan had gotten the beach house. Abby had ended up with the house in the city. But the last of the city was succumbing to ruin even as they spoke. A gust of sorrow shook Ben. He didn’t like to think of Abby.

  “Ruined,” Lois said. “She’s ruined.”

  “Ah, I knew it. I’m sorry.” Stan sighed. “It’s just a matter of time, isn’t it?” Stan shook his head. “I am glad you decided to come. Really. I’ve missed you both.”

  “And how’s MacKenzie?” Lois asked.

  “She’ll be down any minute. She and Cecy are upstairs getting ready for the party.”

  “Party?”

  “Every night there’s a party. You’ll enjo
y it, you’ll see.”

  A moment later, Mackenzie—that was the only name she had, or admitted to—descended the backless risers that curved down from an upstairs gallery. She was a lithe blonde, high breasted, her face as pale and cool and unexpressive as a marble bust. She wore the same shimmering silks as her husband, and nine-year-old Cecy, trailing behind her, lovely beyond her years, wore them as well.

  Ben got to his feet.

  Lois pulled her shawl tight around her shoulders as she stood. “MacKenzie,” she said, “it’s been too long.”

  “It’s so good to see you both again,” MacKenzie said.

  She brushed glossy lips against Ben’s cheek.

  Lois submitted to a brief embrace. Afterward, she knelt to draw Cecy into her arms. “How are you, dear?” she asked, and Ben, though he despised cliché, uttered the first thing that came into his head.

  “My how you’ve grown,” he said.

  Yet his life had in some respects been a cliché. His poetry, while not without merit, had broken no new ground—though perhaps there was no new ground to break, as he sometimes told audiences at the small colleges that sought his services. Poetry was an exhausted art, readers a dying breed in a dying age, and he’d never broken through anyway. His verse was the stifled prosody of the little magazine, his life the incestuous circuit of the MFA program, and he had occasionally succumbed to the vices such an existence proffered: the passing infidelity, the weakness for drink and drug.

  His marriage had weathered storms of its own. If Ben did not entirely approve of Stan’s decision—he had loved Abby, and missed her—he could understand the allure of novelty, and he was not immune to the appeal of MacKenzie’s beauty. Perhaps this accounted for the tension in their suite as he and Lois dressed for the party, and when they departed, descending the cliff-side steps to the beach, sensing her discontent, Ben reached out to take her hand.

  Down here, that salty tang was stronger and a cool wind poured in off the water. The sea gleamed like the rippling hide of some living behemoth in the moonlight. The sand seemed to glow beneath their feet. Everything was precious, lovely in its impermanence, for what was not now imperiled? And an image came to Ben of the gray towers in the once-bustling city, of men and women in their millions but blackened effigies, shedding ashen debris in the unforgiving wind.

  Yet it was nothing to brood upon, this slow doom that the earth or fate or the God Ben did not believe in had inflicted upon them. Not now anyway, not with another set of precipitous steps to ascend or another house of glass set back a hundred yards from the brink of cliff-side annihilation, great windows printing flickering panels of light upon the still-succulent grass, and pouring forth the dissonant, tremulous notes then in fashion. Inside, in the darkness, the intersecting beams of digital projectors cast violent images upon every available surface—upon walls and windows and the faces of the people who danced and drank there. “This is Bruno Vinnizi’s place—you know, the director,” Stan shouted over the music, passing Ben a drink, but he needn’t have said anything at all. The movies spoke for themselves, half a dozen stylized art-house sensations that Ben had seen in the last decade and a half.

  Somehow, in the chaos, Ben lost Lois—he caught glimpses of her now and then through the crowd—and found himself talking drunkenly to Vinnizi himself. A blisteringly bloody gunfight unfolded across Vinnizi’s fashionably stubbled cheeks. “I have been making movies about ruin for years,” Vinnizi pronounced. “Even before there was a ruin, no?” and Ben saw how true it was. “So you are a poet,” Vinnizi said, and Ben answered something, he didn’t know what, and then, without transition, he found himself in the bathroom with Gabrielle Abbruzzese, the sonic sculptor, chewing jagged crystals of prime. After that the party took on a hectic, impressionistic quality. A kind of wild exhilaration seized him. He saw Lois across the room, sipping wine and talking to the tattoo-skulled frontman of some slam band or other—Ben had seen him on television—and stumbled once again into Stan’s ursine embrace. “Having fun yet?” the big man yelled—and then, abruptly, Ben was squiring Cecy giggling across the dance floor.

  Finally, exhausted, he reeled outside to piss. He unzipped, sighed, and let flow a long arc. A husky, female voice, deeply amused, said, “Something wrong with the bathrooms?”

  Ben stepped back in dismay, tucking himself away.

  A tall angular woman with razor-edged cheekbones and a cap of close-shorn blonde hair stood in the shadows. She was smoking a joint. He could smell its faint sweetish scent. When she passed it to him he felt the effects of the prime recede a little.

  “I know you,” he said.

  “Do you?”

  “You’re the artist—”

  She took a hit off the joint. Exhaling, she said. “This place is lousy with artists.”

  “No”—slurring his words—“the humiliation artist. Victoria—

  Victoria—”

  In a stray reflection from the house, a car screeched across one of those exquisite cheekbones.

  “Victoria Glass,” he announced, but she was already gone.

  The party climaxed at dawn, when the rising sun revealed how closely ruin had encroached upon the house, and Vinnizi hurled himself over the cliff onto the rocks below.

  It was accounted a triumph by all.

  They slept late and joined Stan and MacKenzie on the verandah for drinks at eleven. Piano and saxophone burbled over the sound system. Stan paced, sucking down mimosas like water. MacKenzie reclined in an Adirondack chair, her long legs flung out before her. She sipped her drink, watching Cecy at some solitary game she’d improvised with a half-deflated soccer ball.

  “Did you have a good time at the party?” Mackenzie asked.

  “Of course they had a good time,” Stan said, clapping Ben on the shoulder, and Ben supposed he had, but the night itself came back to him only in flashes: blue smoke adrift in the intersecting beams of the projectors; the taste of prime sour on his tongue; the tall angular woman who’d caught him cock in hand outside the house. Her name came to him, he’d seen a piece on her in The New Yorker—Veronica Glass, the mutilation artist—and he felt mortified for reasons that he could only vaguely recall. All this and more: the headachy regret that comes after any bacchanal; the image of Vinnizi leaping off the cliff onto the jagged rocks below. No sight for a little girl, he thought, and he recalled swinging Cecy drunkenly across the dance floor.

  Lois must have been thinking the same thing. “Do you really want Cecy to see things like that?” she asked MacKenzie, and Ben could sense her struggling to reserve judgment, or anyway the appearance of judgment.

  MacKenzie waved a languid hand.

  “What does it matter anymore?” Stan said, and Ben thought of Abby, built like a fireplug, with none of MacKenzie’s lissome beauty. Abby wouldn’t have approved, but then she wouldn’t have approved of MacKenzie either, even if the other woman hadn’t stolen away her husband on the set of a failed summer blockbuster where her blank mien actually played to her advantage. Skill was a handicap in such a role; MacKenzie’d been little more than eye candy on the arm of the star, an aging action hero long since ruined himself.

  A wind off the ocean lifted Ben’s hair. He leaned over to peer through the telescope mounted on the railing. Near at hand, white-capped breakers rolled toward shore. Farther out—he adjusted the focus—the waves gave way to the cracked, black mirror of dead water. Moldering fish turned their ashen bellies to the sky.

  “How long, you think?” he asked Stan.

  “Not long now.”

  “It doesn’t matter. No child should have to see a man throw himself over a cliff,” Lois said.

  “She’s not your child,” MacKenzie responded drily, and Ben straightened up in time to see Lois shoot him a look of disgust—with MacKenzie and with Stan for marrying her, and with Ben most of all, for standing beside the groom and collaborating in the disposal of Abby like a used tissue, and this after more than twenty years of marriage.

  But what was
he to do? He and Stan had been friends since their freshman year at Columbia, when they’d been thrown together by the vagaries of admissions counselors on the basis of a vapid form with questions like: Do you sleep late or get up early? He slept late and so did Stan. And they’d had the same taste for girls (as many as possible, as often as possible, and no need to be choosy) and for drugs (ditto). It had been a match made in heaven. Sometimes Ben wondered why Lois had ever been attracted to him in the first place. He supposed she’d wanted to save him. The same was probably true of Abby and Stan. But old habits die hard and in his peripatetic days, reading indifferent poems to indifferent audiences, Ben had fallen into his former ways: banging nubile English majors and chewing prime. At home one man, on the road another. Jekyll and Hyde. Last night Hyde had been in the ascension. And why not? Nero fiddled as Rome burned, but what else could he do, break out impotent buckets against the conflagration?

  All this in the space of an instant.

  “Here,” he said to Lois, “why don’t you have a look?”

  “I’ve seen all I want to see,” she said, but she strode over and gazed through the telescope all the same. She’d thickened in middle age, and Ben found himself studying MacKenzie, suddenly envious of Stan, who’d had the courage to throw it all aside. A sudden hunger for MacKenzie’s raw sexuality—she seemed to glow with lascivious potential—possessed him. What had Stan said, when he’d called to tell Ben that he and Abby were done? She’s a fucking tiger in the sack, Ben.

  Stan shoved another drink into his hand—they’d moved to chilled vodka, it seemed—and Ben felt his headache retreat before the onslaught of the alcohol.

  MacKenzie lit a cigarette. He could smell its acrid bite.

  “Mom!”

  “It’s not like I’m going to die of lung cancer, sweetie,” MacKenzie called, and Ben thought, no, none of us is going to die of lung cancer.

  “You mind if I have one of those?” he said.