Before We Go Extinct

by Karen Rivers

  I saw a great white shark.

  There is a shark here.

  J’ai vu un grand blanc.

  Un grand blanc est ici maintenant.

  Why don’t I know the word for shark in French?

  I pick a phrase and this time I hit Send and even though the screen is broken, somehow the pigeons manage to lift the message away and then swoooop, they are gone, on their way to New York, on their way to a different world, with my message that doesn’t mean anything to anyone but me. My finger makes a tiny bloody fingerprint on the Send icon on the screen, so small that you’d never notice it unless you were looking, one tiny drop of crimson on an expanse of broken glass.

  36

  “I don’t know,” she says, later, on the deck, a bottle of beer in front of her covered with flecks of rain. “The cards are wet. I can’t shuffle these.”

  “I don’t want to play cards,” I say. Inside the cabin, the circle of light from the candles illuminates Dad and Darcy and Charlie playing Monopoly. “I want to talk about how you can, you know, kiss me like that and then be completely hostile to me the next day.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “That’s why I said ‘I don’t know.’ Don’t you ever just not know?”

  “I know I like kissing you,” I say. “Nothing has to be a big deal unless you make it a big deal.”

  “You’re an idiot,” she says. “Kissing is always a big deal. Tell Mum I went home to read, ’kay?” She drops the cards on the table where they land in the pooling rain puddle. Water drips off my hair and into my eyes.

  I don’t say anything.

  I sit in the rain.

  I watch her go.

  Eventually, I get up and go down to the bay and climb up onto the rock. The night has submerged itself into the black water, sliding into it like the seals do when they are startled off the reef, spilling over into it, so the blackness of it is everywhere. I sit on the wet rock, which sticks to the back of my legs, and I try not to think about anything I don’t want to think about. I lie down on my back and stare up at the sky until the clouds thin and start to part and I can see stars freckling through. After a while, the tide starts to rise and the moon starts to glow through the veil of black wisps. I toss stones into the water and see the stars reflected there, except it isn’t the stars, it’s phosphorescence in the water itself and it’s so gorgeous and I yell, “Kelby!” And I know she can hear me because you can hear everything here, but she doesn’t come, so I strip down to my shorts and I swim, my hands picking up handfuls of stars, the light pouring off my skin in trailing drops.

  37

  In the courtyard of the unbuilt hotel, there is a patch of rock, twenty feet by twenty feet. It is almost entirely flat, except for a crack about three feet from one edge that runs the length of the square. We have our drinks stuck in the crack and a sleeping bag spread out that we are lying on. Charlie keeps getting up, finding things like caterpillars and termites, leaves and sticks. “Look at this!” he’ll say, excited. “Look at this!”

  I look every time. I mean, he’s a nice kid.

  “There,” Kelby says, pointing up.

  “That’s so ridiculous,” I tell her. “You’re pointing at the sky. That could be anywhere in the sky!”

  “Follow my finger,” she says.

  “Come on,” I say. “You’re pointing at every star. It’s impossible to tell which one you mean.”

  “I see it, I see it,” chants Charlie, without looking up. “I see the stars.”

  “Fine,” she says. “It’s sort of like a Y. Can you see the Y?”

  I look at the stars. I can’t see a Y. I see a million dots of light. A billion. An infinite number of stars shaken out like salt across the universe. I don’t tell Kelby that looking at stars makes me feel anxious because I know that looking at stars makes her feel safe.

  A satellite spins its way from east to west, the spin making it appear to flash on and off.

  “I used to think they were UFOs,” she says. “I used to hope they’d come and get me.”

  “Will they?” says Charlie, finally looking up. “Cool.”

  “No,” she says.

  “Why?” I said. “What’s so terrible about your life that being, like, I don’t know, probed, would be better? What if they performed experiments on you? What if they put ball bearings in your ears or something and you didn’t discover it until you went through airport security? What if they implanted you with an alien baby? Then what?”

  “You watch too much TV,” she says. “That’s crazy. Besides, I was a kid. It just seemed like it would be a good adventure. To go somewhere else, you know? To be someone else.”

  I nudge her with my arm. “You’re okay, just as you are,” I say. I’m sort of flirting, sort of not, mostly because I’m kind of scared of her and I don’t know if she wants me to flirt or not. I don’t know if I want to or not. Because Daff. In the moonlight, Kelby’s hair looks silver, her profile looks like something you would find etched on an ancient coin.

  “Yeah,” she says. “I’m not so great. You only think so because you don’t know me.”

  “Really?” I say. “What don’t I know? What terrible thing would make me not like you?”

  “She’s sort of mean sometimes,” says Charlie.

  “I like mean people,” I say.

  Kelby sighs and closes her eyes for a brief moment. It’s so quiet here that her sigh is the loudest sound and then there’s the rustle of the sleeping bag as she pulls her knees up.

  “Shooting star!” I say, watching one scream past the satellite and vanish.

  She opens her eyes.

  “Hey,” she says. “I was reading this thing about what would happen if a meteor hit the earth again. Like a big one, I mean. Like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. It said that if it was really big, we wouldn’t know it was coming until it was too late. Like an astronomer somewhere would see it and before he’d even be able to finish the thought, I see a meteor, it would have hit and it would basically just vaporize everything and everyone within a certain number of miles. Vaporize them. They wouldn’t even know it was happening or had happened. They’d be at Costco, buying a lifetime supply of dill pickles, and then they’d just see a bright light and then they’d be the bright light. You know?”

  “Wow,” I say. “Dill pickles?”

  “Seriously,” she says. “That’s what you got out of that? Dill pickles?”

  She sounds mad, so I say, “Kidding! That’s terrible. I mean, terrifying.” I stare up at the dusty-light stars and think about it. It is kind of terrifying, actually. To think that at any second that could happen. Now. Or now. Or … now.

  “I think it’s sort of beautiful,” she says. “Like poetry. Becoming the light. But not being able to prepare for it. I think people waste all this time preparing for things. Planning them. But we aren’t in charge. Are the pickles important? Maybe every minute of your life should be spent doing something that’s important enough that if the light comes for you, you know that you’re going out doing something that matters. Not that you’d have time to think that over, I guess.”

  “What do you mean?” I say.

  “Well, you’re dead,” she says. “And then your brain shuts down and whatever you think you see is just your brain sending this frantic kind of last dream to you on your way out. Plus a bunch of euphoria, I guess. Then you’re gone.”

  “Hang on,” I say. “What? I mean, that doesn’t sound like the words of someone who believes in ghosts. How does that work?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t really know anything. No one does. We just pretend to know stuff and say it like we mean it and people believe us. If you say things people want to hear, they believe you more.”

  “Uh-oh,” says Charlie. “I’ve gotta pee.” He takes off running down the path.

  “Charlie!” she yells. “Be careful!”

  “I’m always careful!” he shouts. Then, “Ouch.” Then, “I’m okay! Bye!”

  She laughs
, and so do I. I guess maybe this is the perfect moment to kiss her again, but I don’t.

  I can’t.

  And I don’t know why not.

  38

  The next day is a Sunday afternoon or it might be a Monday, it doesn’t matter here. I go up to the hotel early to work out, running slowly around the entire perimeter of the top wall of the structure, jumping the small gaps, like doing laps. I don’t look down because when I do I’m rocked by waves of vertigo, rolling me back and forth, sideways on my feet. I look only at the beam and my feet, which are bare and blackened from the trail up, thickened from a summer of rocks and barnacles and the earth.

  I do about ten laps, sweat pouring off me, before I see him.

  Charlie.

  He’s kneeling in the courtyard, slowly spinning to keep me in his line of vision. I pretend I don’t see him and do another lap, a sort of show-offy lap with a couple of things where I drop down and swing from my arms onto the lower beam. I know he thinks I’m basically the coolest person on earth and hey, not many people feel that way.

  Finally, I come down. I come up behind him, where he is examining a trail of termites that are marching across the rock in a line, like ants, intent on getting to their next meal.

  “They grow wings, you know,” he says. “Like at the end of the summer, they all just get these wings at once and take off and they are really bad at flying, so they get in your hair. It’s pretty cool.”

  “Wow,” I say. “Really? I didn’t know.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Kelby gets totally freaked out. Because one flew in her mouth once.”

  “Gross,” I say.

  “Yeah,” he says. Then he starts laughing in his Charlie way, his laugh taking over his whole body, shaking him all the way down to his carefully tied shoes. “In her mouth.” He gasps, tears streaming down his face.

  I smile to let him know that it’s all right to laugh, but it’s not that funny.

  Finally, he goes, “Can you teach me?”

  And I’m like, “Teach you what?” My eyes sting from the sweat dripping in them and I’m dying to go back to the cabin for a cold drink, maybe lie in the shade for a while. Read a book.

  “That,” he says, pointing up.

  “No way,” I tell him. “That’s not for kids. You have to be big. Like me.”

  He stops laughing. He stops smiling. His broken tooth disappears under his lip. “Oh yeah,” he says. “Okay. Forget it.” Then, before I can tell he’s going to cry, he starts to run away.

  “Hey!” I say, running after him. “Wait up!”

  “Go away!” he yells, running faster, tripping over the massive root of a maple tree that sprawls lazily across the path, pushing up the earth and rocks in its way. “Leave me alone!”

  “I’m sorry,” I call. “Come back. I’ll teach you something. Please? Charlie?”

  But he’s gone, vanished into the thick salal path that leads down to their place. I follow him a good distance behind until I make sure that I see him on his own deck, panting hard from the exertion, shrugging off his mom’s hug. Then I go back up to the nameless hotel and lie down in the central square. It’s kind of sad that it was never named anything. I wonder what they thought it was going to be. I wonder what they imagined. Not this, that’s for sure. No one could possibly have pictured this skeleton of a building, unfinished, exposed, rotting in the elements. The rock under my back is doing nothing to cool me off. Up in the sky, white puffy clouds move by too quickly. The wind must be coming up. I close my eyes for a second, a minute, but the minute turns into an hour, and I dream of The King, of the day when I said, casually, “Hey, can you teach me that stuff?” and how he laughed at me and said, “You idiot, you just do it. There’s nothing to know.” And how I tried running up the wall, and fell, hard, back on my head, but in my dream, that’s not how it goes, instead the movie reel jerks to halt there, and then instead of falling, I keep running and running and I’m running up the side of a skyscraper made from mirrored glass, except that I’m so close to it I can see the silhouettes of office workers in cubicles, sipping coffee, staring at screens, and I run faster and faster up the wall, the sky at the wrong angle to me and my feet hitting the glass hard enough to crack it and then, at the top, I push off, and I tuck my head to my chest, ready to flip back down to the ground, and then I’m falling and falling and falling and yeah, of course, I wake up, you always do before you hit the ground, right?

  My face is sunburned and my body hurts and that sort of feels right. I go back to the cabin, where Dad is hunched over his typewriter, punching the keys hard, and he says, “Got a minute? Could you read this chapter for me?”

  I guess because I hate myself and everything already hurts, I nod, and he hands me this sheaf of paper and I take it to the hammock to read in the shade of the old-growth cedar, to the sound of the tide slowly moving in the pass in front of me.

  39

  Dear Daff,

  It’s been a while since I wrote to you. You’ve stopped texting me or it’s stopped working, which is good. You should stop texting me. You should stop. This should stop.

  I mean, I thought you’d answer because of the shark.

  But the more I think about it, the more I think it wasn’t real. My brain was telling me what it thought I wanted to hear. People do that. Brains do that.

  I kissed Kelby and now she’s

  I kissed Kelby

  I think I like Kelby

  I don’t think I like Kelby

  I don’t know what I mean anymore about anything. Maybe it’s only a trick of the light: the shark, my feelings for Kelby, the kiss, the way I miss you.

  Remember The King’s birthday party last year with the magician and that black light? We were all glowing white shirts and teeth and shadows and he cut you in half, the magician, and there were your feet and there was your head and that was so weird. I still don’t get it. I know it’s mirrors. But I don’t know how they work. So you can know you’re being tricked and still not understand why, I guess is the thing. I remember The King was seeing that girl from St. X. I can’t remember her name but she was super hot and then in the black light, there was that dusting of white on her shoulder and afterward he said he couldn’t date a girl who didn’t notice that she had dandruff and we never saw her again. I think he was a pretty unforgiving guy. You know, sometimes I try really hard to think about the stuff I liked about him, and it’s like it’s slipping away. Like there must have been something, but I can’t grab hold of it, and then I’m worried that he was right all along, that I liked him because he was rich and sort of famous or maybe, I don’t know, I grabbed at the first lifeboat from the sinking ship and never really thought about it. You don’t, right? You don’t spend a lot of time thinking, “Gee, why is this person my friend?” You just are friends. Half the time they drive you crazy, and the other half they feel like an extension of you, your arm or your foot, and you kind of take that for granted and then they die and you have this terrible phantom pain where they were before they went.

  Maybe it’s like that.

  I have to really think about what you looked like, Daff. These two months have been forever.

  You know how sometimes enough stuff happens that you start to feel like your entire life up until a certain point was a dream and the only thing that is real is what happens after that? So if everything was a dream until The King died, then everything that is real is about me getting away from you and stopping loving you, so I was just lying in the hammock, reading my dad’s incredibly terrible book, which, by the way, is called The Hotel Neverwas—which is so weird because I’d just been thinking about how it’s kind of sad that half-built hotel never got a name. My dad and I think alike, I guess. I think it’s about what he imagines I’m doing here and instead is just a really confusing story about a teenage boy who probably thinks and acts a lot more like a normal teenage boy than I do. I feel like when I’m reading it, I’m reading how a normal person would act. Like, look! An otter! Cool! I can stea
l a beer from my dad! Party! A pretty girl! Whooo-hoo!

  Which maybe is how I think, after all.

  Anyway, the book made me so mad that I “accidentally” let a couple of pages blow away.

  I don’t know why I did that.

  It’s just this thing between Dad and me, where just when I feel like we can really see each other, he shows me that I’m wrong.

  I know it’s his only copy, because he types on an actual typewriter, like he thinks he’s Hemingway with his beard and his island retreat. I wonder if Hemingway would wear ironic T-shirts if he was still alive. I bet he would. I bet the hilarity of the ironic T-shirt would keep him from killing himself and he’d be alive and writing scripts for Marvel comics remakes for Paramount or something. Everyone is such a phony if you think about it. He’d probably sell out, too.

  Not that Dad has sold out. The thing is that no one is buying what Dad is selling.

  Darcy went over to the mainland for supplies and she bought us a bunch of stuff, like ice cream and cereal and milk and cheese and steaks and fresh vegetables and fruit and somehow in one of our bags, there was a magazine, a stupid magazine, and on the front cover there was a tiny picture of you.

  You, Daffodil Blue.

  Can you even?

  I mean, what the——? How did this happen?

  Now I am so angry at you. I am so mad, Daff. I am punch-the-wall mad. I want my fist to hurt. I want my skin to crack open so I can hate you even more for hurting my hand because I’m so mad, but I’m not doing that. I’m not going to.

  I guess The King falling off that building was the best thing that happened to you and now you’re going to be in a movie—a movie—and what? I mean, seriously, what? Who ARE you? And I guess you can see why all of this seems like the nightmare that comes after the dream that I had up until The King died.