I’m thinking about how if you cut somebody’s head off fast enough, then turn it around, they can see their own detached body. This does not sound especially beautiful to me. “What about people in Omaha? Offutt? My family’s there,” I say.
He slaps his khakis with his wooden pointer, then winces in pain. It’s a weird thing to do, all things considered. “All three of them left without you?”
I nod. “Yeah. I know it’s supposed to be whole families, but I guess the president cut down on tickets. So I told them to go ahead without me.” I’m lying, obviously. If I had my way, my parents would have stayed behind like grown-ups, and it would be me and Cathy in that shelter.
“You didn’t get a ticket?” Nguyen asks.
I nod. Nguyen looks at me for an uncomfortably long time. Slaps his leg with the pointer again. It’s weird. I can’t be the only loser he knows who got left behind like a Mormon at the anti-rapture.
“Okay!” he claps. “Good question! Will! Offutt! Survive!? It all depends on how deep underground they are—what their ventilation apparatus looks like. They’ll survive the heat and seismic turmoil, but no one knows about the ejecta. Who can describe ejecta for me?”
Carole Fergussin raises her hand. “It’s the rocks and stuff the asteroid kicks up.”
“Right!” Nguyen says. “Ejecta! There’s evidence that the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs sprayed ejecta as high as the moon before it rained back down into our atmosphere. Our guess is that the rocks will be about the same temperature as volcanic lava, and about the size of aerosol particles. So, our friends in the shelters might survive underground, but we’ve got no idea for how long. It depends on the quality and pervasity of the ejecta and the apparatus they constructed in its anticipation.”
“Couldn’t we have done something before now, Mr. Nguyen?” Anais Bignault asks. She’s crazy skinny, like she stopped eating a week ago but her skeleton insists on taking the rest of her out for strolls.
“Call me Fred,” he says, and Jesus, I don’t want to call him that.
“What if we all get together, everybody in Pigment. In the whole Colony? We dig a shelter?” Carole Fergussin asks. She’s wiping the tears from her big, brown eyes. I feel like Carole and Anais ought to get an award for best sad puppy impressions on the eve of apocalypse.
Then I picture drowning them.
Nguyen shrugs. “I wish they’d selected me to engineer something like that. I really do. But with impact 36 hours away, can we build something that we can survive inside for ten years? Twenty? Ten thousand?”
“Can we?” I ask.
Nguyen points out the window at the refinery. It smokes above metal spires three miles away. “We’d need a lot of fuel. And a small population.”
“Like Offutt,” Carole says.
Nguyen nods.
I’m picturing Cathy in a dark, underground city. Picturing her safe and loved. Picturing the evolution of the survivors, people like my parents, over a thousand generations. I’m trying real hard to find the bright spot, here, but the future looks pretty monstrous.
“Did I ever tell you my parents’ story?” Nguyen asks, then answers himself in a lower voice: “Of course I didn’t. Why would I do that?”
“Tell us,” Carole says through her sniffles. I consider throwing my desk and announcing that this is not group therapy. During my last hours on Earth, I do not want to hear anyone’s crappy life story. I just want to hold my baby sister. Oh, yeah. And not die.
“It really was the last plane,” Nguyen says. “My father bribed a town official for the spot. And here I am today. I never wondered about those other people left behind. Survivors don’t do that kind of thing. But now I wonder. That’s because we’re not the survivors anymore. But we’re still the heroes of our own stories. You understand?”
I don’t. I want him dead. I imagine that I am Aporia, colliding. I am bigger than this whole planet, and my wrath is infinite.
“What I’m saying is, I always thought I’d be famous and my children would be rich. Why else would I be so lucky, born in America? But does dying make me less? I’m still Fred Nguyen, aren’t I?”
He looks at me, “Some of you, your parents abandoned you. Some people sold their own children’s tickets. That makes them villains, you understand? But you can still be heroes.”
The kid in the back row who used to be Harvard bait spits a wad of chewed-up quiz. “Liar!” he says. “Human consciousness was a bad mutation. Aporia is Earth’s self-correct. There’s nothing after this.”
Nguyen throws a piece of chalk at him and we’re all totally shocked. “I’m not talking about God! Who cares about that idiot! I’m talking about the devil. You don’t have to let him out. Scramble for some false promise of salvation; climb over your own neighbors for crumbs. I won’t leave my family to live in some hole! I’m going to die with dignity!”
The bell rings.
We all kind of sit there. What the hell? Is he having a nervous breakdown? At least he picked a good day for it. Then I figure it out—clear as the open gates of heaven: Mr. Nguyen has a ticket.
• • • •
Jules and I eat jerky in my shelter after school. I’m fantasizing about stealing Mr. Nguyen’s ticket and saving Cathy from our idiot parents. I’ll show up at their barracks, baby bunny in hand, and for the first time since the five days they’ve been gone, Cathy will stop crying and smile. Then I’ll glare at my mom and dad until the guilt drops them dead. They’ll resurrect again after Aporia, turning them into decent people instead of assholes. We’ll live a few years down there, until I figure out the environmental cure for ejecta that will make Earth’s surface habitable. Then everybody will elect me king and they’ll all say how awesome it is to be gay.
We’ll wear as much goddamned pink as we want.
It’s the first happy fantasy I’ve had in a long time, and I wish I could keep it going. But the shelter’s cold, and Jules is smacking her lips. We’ve got the crank-CB tuned to the scabs. They were worked up about a missing rig a little while ago. Somebody broke through a checkpoint with it during the night.
Then the call we’ve been waiting for comes in: The steel cage at the top of a catalytic reformer went smash.
“Wanna check it out?” Jules asks.
She’s been kissing me and I’ve been letting her. Once, we tried to go all the way. The experience was miserable, which she tells me is normal.
“Okay. Let’s go chase an ambulance.” I start climbing the wooden ladder out. I built this shelter with my dad. We dug for more than a week, then realized that under any seismic stress, the whole thing would collapse. Son, my dad had said, looking down the twenty-foot hole. Buried alive’s an unaccountable way to go.
When I was twelve, my dad found my Freenet porn. Nothing crazy—just guys on guys. He called me a perversion. It made me feel like I was covered in herpes or something, and I’m starting to think it’s why they left me behind. And you know, with all these dead-puppy-skinned-meat-people fantasies I’ve been having, maybe he was onto something. Then again, maybe calling somebody a perversion makes them act like one. Or maybe everybody’s having these thoughts, because the apocalypse sucks.
The truth is, my parents are the real perverts. They’re love perverts. You’re supposed to care more about your children than about yourself, and they messed it up. The whole fucking world of adults messed it up.
Jules and I get on our bikes and ride through Sacket Street. The grocery is dark. So’s the pharmacy. It’s blue-dick cold. We’re over the tracks, racing just ahead of the supply train headed for Omaha. It’s a thrill. The kind that makes you feel like Superman.
“Arm or leg?” Jules asks as we race, out of breath and too cold to cry.
“Arm?”
“Okay. Arm, your turn. Leg, I get to be the doctor,” Jules says.
“Game on.”
We drop our bikes and head for the crowd. The grass is long in spots, dead from spills in others. I want to take off my shoes and feel t
he cold, frozen earth. Squeeze it between my toes and tell it to remember me.
We push through. Catalytic reformers look like space needles wrapped in steel scaffolding. They’re the size of Manhattan buildings. You’ve seen them, probably. They turn low octane raw material into high octane fuel. But unless you live in a refinery town, you probably had no idea what you were looking at. You just blinked, then checked your distance to Chicago.
About twenty eight-by-two foot beams have collapsed. As Jules and I approach, some rent-a-cops retract a jaws of life. They pull a guy out from the wreckage and amputate his leg, thigh down. Then they give it to him. He’s holding his amputated leg, high on morphine. Jules and I clench hands. I wonder if this turns me on, touching her. Or if it’s the suffering that has my erection going.
Thirty minutes later, the generators start cranking. Dirty smoke spouts all over again. Jules and I book after the ambulance.
• • • •
There’s nobody in admission or reception at Pigment Hospital, just this janitor mopping floors. He picks at this stuck-on bit of grime with his fingernail.
I’m Jules’ bitch today, so I take the nurse coat, and she doctors up. We head to the ER, where they always take the scabs.
Some doctor is just closing the curtain on our lucky refinery scab. She’s one of the last in this skeleton crew. I wonder why she comes at all. But then again, why not?
Jules walks with purpose. I’ve got my clipboard and Nguyen’s Bic pen. I’m thinking about Cathy, who was born here. She smelled like milk and I loved her.
I love her still.
“How are you this morning?” Jules asks once the doctor is long gone.
The scab kind of blinks. He’s pale from blood loss and won’t let go of his leg. Does he think we’re going to steal it?
“Not so good?” she asks.
I’m completely serious when I tell you that Jules would have made a great doctor. She’s not squeamish.
She peeks inside his bandage. He bites his lower lip to keep from crying, but that doesn’t help; he cries anyway. He’s one of the rave guys. I can tell because he’s got glitter on his cheeks.
“I’ve seen worse. Don’t worry,” Jules says with this big smile.
The guy calms down. “Do I know you?”
“We’re gonna take great care of you, mister. That’s what we do in here in Pigment,” she says with this made-up hick accent and I grin because it’s funny, this whole thing. It really is.
“Can it be saved?” he asks. He’s talking about his stump, which he’s holding like a baby.
“We’ll try real hard,” she says. Then she turns to me. She’s smiling that angry smile from this morning. I’m a little scared of her, and a little turned on. What’s wrong with me?
“You’ll need to change his bandages every few hours,” she says.
I scribble Bandages x2hrs because I’m a terrible liar, so it’s important to make this as real as possible. When I play the doctor I just stare while Jules does the talking.
“And you’ll need morphine every six hours. Three em-gees per.”
I jot that down, too.
“Dwight here’s from Kansas,” she says, nodding at me. “Where you from, sweetness?”
The guy’s sweating from the pain—morphine comedown. “Jersey,” he says. “But really no place. Bopped around the rigs in Saudi a while . . . You sure I don’t know you?”
“I’m sure,” she says. “Any family? Because there’s some experimental treatment for your predicament, but it’s a hella lotta dinero.”
The guy looks at her funny, shakes his head. “No family. I got six gold bricks, another coming tomorrow.”
I’m waiting for the punch line, because Jules usually makes this game fun. We even help a little, make the guys feel better. Listen to them talk about their ex-wives and good times. You’ll be saved, we reassure them. We’ll all be saved by the giant nukes in the sky!
“Aw,” she says. “Then I guess you’ll just have to pray the fuckin’ thing gets all spontaneous regeneration, you fucking cripple.”
She’s running out through the curtain and I’m just standing there, so it’s me he grabs. He’s sweating even more, and I’m wondering if he’s shotgun-up-the-cooter-guy. I wish I was the type to ask, but I’m not.
“Let go of me!” I’m crying, even though this guy can’t stand up. His detached leg rests in his lap. I swivel, leaving him with just the jacket.
Jules is waiting for me in admission, white coat gone, like it never happened.
“You ever think about killing a guy?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “All the time.”
• • • •
We’re at Jules’ house for dinner. It’s some carrots her big sister dug up from their yard. Everybody munches. I used to pretend that I could trade these guys for my real family, but it doesn’t work like that. My parents yanked me across every pipeline on six continents. I know French and Hindi. When I’m introduced to someone, I shake firm, look people in the eye, and repeat their name back at them. I’ve got three million dollars in a trust fund I’m not allowed to open until I’m twenty-one. Jules’ family is dirt poor. They’re mean and they laugh out loud when you make a mistake. They give their boyfriends free rein, which is one of the reasons Jules is so mad all the time. Every time she puts a lock on her door they take it right down. If she had an ounce of self-awareness, she’d probably understand that it’s also why she only falls for men like me, men she can’t have.
I can’t wait to get out of this town, she told me the first time we met.
Jules’ mom and sister want to play Gin Rummy after dinner. They’re starting to realize that Aporia’s real, which is making them pretend all the more desperately that it’s not. “Did you see that the sale of crank-operated devices has gone up 2000%?” her mom asks. “It’s a conspiracy, this whole asteroid business. Mark my words!”
“I gotta shove off,” I tell them as I stand. Then I look at all three of them and realize they’ve all got Jules’ dull marble eyes. “Take care of yourselves,” I say. Then I’m out the door.
“The asteroid’s a hoax!” Jules’ sister shouts behind me. But it’s right outside, big as the moon and in the opposite direction. It glows, making the night doubly bright.
I’m on my bike, headed I don’t know where. Well, actually, yes. I do know. I’ve been thinking about it all day.
“Hey!” Jules calls after me, and she’s riding, too.
It’s biting cold. We’re wrapped in Hefty garbage bags to keep warm. “You go ahead. I don’t wanna rave,” I tell her.
“Where else is there to go?”
“Omaha,” I say.
She doesn’t chew me out for a half-brained plan, like riding our bikes six hundred miles in below-freezing weather. She just pedals right along with me, fast as she can, like the whole world behind her is on fire.
We go past the center of Pigment, near the high school. I stop at this arts and crafts house with a hoop out front. It looks like gingerbread. Jules doesn’t even ask whose house we’re at.
I ring the bell. I’m so nervous I’m panting.
“Don’t leave me,” Jules whispers. She’s sniffling. “You’re my family.”
But she’s not.
A Hobbit opens the door. Mrs. Nguyen, I presume.
“I’m looking for Fred,” I say.
Twin baby girls and a toddler boy crowd the mom’s legs. Warm air gushes out. It’s been so long since I felt radiator heat that I almost mistake it for magic.
Mrs. Nguyen brings us to a plastic-covered couch. The kids surround us, drooling. Out of habit, I pick one up and squeeze her thigh until she laughs. I’m going to murder Mr. Nguyen if I have to. This doesn’t change that.
Mrs. Nguyen brings us blankets and steaming hot cocoa with little marshmallows. The sugar is so sweet that my mouth dries on contact, then waters all over again.
“Jesus God this is good,” Jules says.
Mrs. Nguyen grins. “D
on’t tell the Militia about our heat!”
We fake smile back.
“Mr. Tom Crawford, Ms. Juliet Olsen,” Mr. Nguyen says as he walks in. He’s still in khakis and a dirty shirt. He seems pleased we’ve come.
“I want your ticket,” I say. “I know you have one.”
Jules squeezes my knee.
Mr. Nguyen sits on the arm of a La-Z-Boy. The kids squirm and roll like seals. Mrs. Nguyen brings out hot brie and crackers.
“I love food,” Jules says as she scarfs. “I’m so happy about food!”
“Are you staying for dinner?” Mrs. Nguyen asks.
“I want a ticket,” I say. “My sister needs me. She can’t be raised by those people.”
“You know your parents got four tickets, don’t you?” Mr. Nguyen asks.
I’m holding a dull cheese knife, which should be funny but isn’t. I’m also crying. Everybody looks horrified. Mr. Nguyen is standing between me and his kids. Mrs. Nguyen is holding the twins. Even crazier, Jules has the little boy.
“Give me your ticket!” I’m shouting, waving the damn cheese knife.
Mr. Nguyen opens his wallet. He pulls out this credit card-looking-thing and hands it to me slowly, and I want to yell, Seriously? You think I’m going to cheese knife your stupid family?
The ticket is clear with engraved writing:
Offutt Refugee Center, First Class
Thomas J. Crawford
109-83-9921
I’m holding both the card and the cheese knife, and for just a second, I’m happy. Fred Nguyen is a magician.
Jules leans over, babe in arms. “Why do you have his ticket? Did you steal it?”
Mrs. Nguyen kind of connipts. She’s waving her hands, which happen to be full of kids. “His parents traded it for fuel to Nebraska! Dears, dears! It wasn’t easy for them. You have to know. They had no other way of getting to the shelter. Without fuel they’d have frozen to death. They had to sell! But true, true. We could have given it away. That would have been Christian. Indeed, indeed. I wish we had, to be honest. I truly do wish we had. It was a bad idea.”
Mrs. Nguyen runs out of steam. She’s got big tears in her eyes. “Now, Tom, dear, may I have that knife?”
The End is Nigh (The Apocalypse Triptych) Page 42