By the time the meeting was over, Tess had somehow succeeded in convincing the group that she was the perfect person to write Etiquette for the End of the World (the title WOOSH had already decided on for their “handbook”). “I have to tell you, I would love to be a part of the adventure,” she had bluffed with a cheerful smile. It had not hurt her case at all when Peter—his expression appreciative, almost covetous—had interjected, “Listen, people, we’d be lucky to get her.”
Tess still felt a little guilty about Harriet, but mostly she was waiting for someone to tell her she had been punked, and that the whole project was a practical joke. The fee—if they really meant to pay her—was unbelievably good, especially as she had been halfway expecting them to ask her to do it for free. It was enough money that she’d be able to pay off her credit cards and still have most of a whole year’s expenses. It felt almost too good to be true. When she left, Tess was given some WOOSH pamphlets and a 3-page outline, an outline which she was to expand into a 275-page manuscript. The contract would be signed and the advance check paid as soon as she had written the first 50 pages and they had been accepted.
Tess had no idea exactly who was in charge of approving the 50 pages. She had no idea whether WOOSH really was an organization of twenty thousand, as Dakota Flores claimed, or twenty. She also had no idea how she was going to figure out how to write a humorous book about Armageddon. She only knew that if she could somehow pull off this crazy assignment, she would have a roof over her head for the next year.
Chapter Three
Coming home from a bike ride in Riverside Park, Tess saw that Victor was the doorman on duty and steeled herself for the inevitable weather talk. For the eight years she had known him, Victor, who was Polish, had never once let her pass without speaking to her about the weather, much as she tried to switch him to other topics. If was as if weather vocabulary was what he had first learned in English class, and he had decided it was the only thing he needed to succeed in all his interactions. He was unerringly affable about the weather, no matter what it happened to be.
“Very hot today, yes? Too warm … not good, not nice.” He shook his head and smiled sympathetically at her.
She took a deep breath and forced herself to smile back. “Yes. Not nice at all. I don’t like it when it is this hot.” She did not feel like having this conversation for the millionth time with Victor. And yet, ever since the WOOSH meeting ten days ago, the issue of hot weather had seemed more important, global warming more of an imminent threat. It really did seem way too warm for the end of September.
“Maybe rain tomorrow, yes? Cooler is comink!”
Tess nodded, her smile falling down on the job, pushing the elevator button repeatedly, hard.
When she opened her apartment door, Carmichael was waiting for her in the foyer as usual, tangling himself up in her feet as she tried to maneuver her bike inside. “Okay, Car,” she soothed, “hold your tail and whiskers.” This was what her mother had always said to their family cat, Dentine—and later (long after Dentine had gone off to the big sandbox in the sky), to her children. On her deathbed four years ago, she had even said it to the nurse who was giving her morphine. The nurse, misunderstanding, had responded, “What’s that you’re saying about my tail, Ms. Eliot? I shouldn’t wear trousers?”
After dumping a can of OrganiCat Chicken Feast into Carmichael’s bowl on the kitchen floor, Tess grabbed a liter of spring water and a bag of pretzel rods and headed immediately for her office. To get to her desk she had to weave her way carefully through stacks of mail, unread New Yorkers and newspapers, and a pile of books—all arranged on the floor like land mines, ready to topple at the slightest touch.
She turned up the AC and opened her laptop, then checked her phone and heard the beeping that indicated she had messages. She dialed in to her voicemail.
“Hi Tessie, it’s Harriet. Just checking to see how you are. Where are you? Call me back. I worry about you.” Tess had not talked to Harriet since the purloined letter incident. She had not quite decided whether she was going to tell her about the WOOSH job. “I also wanted to remind you of the Met opening next month on October 26. You know I am counting on you to take me there, darling.” Shit. Tess had forgotten about that party. She wasn’t at all looking forward to the whole ordeal with the wheelchair, but she knew there was no refusing Harriet.
The next message was from Matt. Why didn’t he stop calling? Didn’t he realize it was like pressing on an open wound? “It’s me again. I don’t know exactly why you won’t call or email me back.” Tess took a deep breath. She could tell from his voice he was trying hard to control his annoyance. Matt never had been comfortable with any of the emotions in the anger family. To him, all confrontations were a sign of ill breeding. “Tess, listen. I’d really like to get my coffee table and bookcase. I know you are mad at me but I am kind of in a ... bad place now where I really need my stuff. I mean … ah … I didn’t mean I was in a bad place, like I’m staying in a bad place. What I meant was that I am in a bad space. I mean … as in, more the space in my head … .” She heard the familiar sound of Matt’s embarrassed cough and couldn’t help smiling; Matt was notoriously bad at voice messages. Once he had left a message with his therapist about changing an appointment that had lasted a full three and a half minutes. (Tess had timed it with Matt’s very own stainless steel All-Clad kitchen timer.) But this message was turning out to be one of his masterpieces. “Anyway, speaking of space, I miss you. I mean, besides the fact of getting my table and stuff. It would be nice to see you … . Okay, bye. Call me.”
Tess could only assume from this message that Sarah had “fenged” his “shui” enough to satisfy her and had dumped him. She certainly hoped so; for the last four months she had been terrified of running into the two of them in her elevator. Half the time she found herself taking the stairs, or skulking around the security camera in the lobby to get a video view of the elevator so she would know it was safe to get on.
She pressed the delete button, hard.
The last message was from her brother. “Hi, Tess, it’s Stuart.” The sound of his voice cut painfully into her chest. (When had her voicemail become the enemy?) Somewhere behind that voice was the big brother who used to carry her piggyback over the dunes when her toe was stubbed, the brother who took the blame when they both got caught melting crayons with matches under the porch. Tess had not spoken to Stuart in months; since the upsetting conversation about the will, they had communicated entirely by email. “I just wanted to let you know I’m sending you a package, so you should expect something, probably in about three or four days. It’s just something from the house that I thought you might like … . Nancy says hi.”
Something from the house? What about the house itself? She emailed him a curt, one-sentence note saying she could not talk because she was on deadline, and to go ahead and send whatever it was.
“If the world really were ending, then nobody would get the beach house,” Tess said aloud to Carmichael, who had jumped up on the desk. She gently pushed him off. She had to finally really get to work on the WOOSH project. Since the meeting, all she had done, besides making a few random notes, was procrastinate.
First she had reread How to Hold Your Head High with Your Foot in Your Mouth. Then she had Netflixed practically every end-of-the-world movie available—2012, Miracle Mile, The Road, A Boy and His Dog, whatever else she could find. She had surfed through more than a hundred 2012 web sites, from the historically informative ones on sites like Wikipedia to what Tess was starting to think of Wackipedia—the sites where people claimed that Prince William or Pee-wee Herman was the Antichrist, or that dogs and cats were going to inherit the Earth and eat all the humans. Also fascinating (in a car-wreck kind of way) were the Revelation sites: Christian fundamentalist treatises on the Rapture—including, of course, those put forth by Harold Camping, who seemed to change the date set for Judgment Day as easily as one would reschedule a lunch. Then there were the crazy pseudo-scientif
ic theories: that the Earth and Sun would enter a high-frequency band, or that human DNA would be “upgraded” from a signal coming from the focal point of the galaxy.
Tess had also watched dozens and dozens of 2012-related YouTube videos. There were many relatively respectable ones with reputable (or semi-reputable) scholars and scientists. Listening to Harvard professors seriously considering the Mayan prophecy was unsettling. Some spoke about the “wisdom of the ancients,” and the “lessons of Atlantis,” and how modern human society was so unbalanced and unhealthy that it was time for a planet-wide do-over. Others presented geological evidence to prove that every twenty-six thousand years, when the galactic alignment occurred, there was an ice age. Tess watched one clip about Israeli mathematicians who had uncovered a secret code in the Bible, pointing to 2012 as the end of time. She watched another one about stonemasons embedding secret code about 2012 into the facades of churches. She watched yet another that claimed there was a code hidden in Homer’s Odyssey which foretold of the 2012 end-times. Tess began to feel a constant humming of nervousness in her body. She was starting to see why people bought into this stuff. The sheer volume of it was alarming.
Of course, most of the videos were obviously uploaded by crazy people. One of them, narrated in Spanish, featured a huge eyeball with the Earth as the spinning iris. But the weirder they were, the more she could not turn her head away. They were like potato chips. Worse than potato chips, because there was an endless supply. She just kept watching them, one after another, the way she had devoured the entire first three seasons of True Blood in only four days, after her breakup with Matt.
But not today, she told herself. As absorbing as it might be to explore the paranoid fantasies of video-blogging strangers, none of this “background research” was helping her with the task at hand. She took out the WOOSH outline she had been given and read the first part again:
INTRODUCTION
If you are reading this, you have the right DNA and skills to have overcome various disasters and hardships. But are you ready to start being civilized again? You may feel that, what with looting, famine, disease, etc., you never want to meet strangers again. But our social lives are even more important now.
Chapter 1
The Psychology of Fear in the Post-Apocalyptic Reality, and the importance of remaining calm in the face of chaotic social structures. How positive energy will be the most important element of human interaction after the Big Change. This chapter should deal with how important it is to temper caution with hope.
Tess put the outline aside. Jesus, she thought. I can’t believe I am writing this book. Josh would just love this. He fires me for being too negative, and now here I am writing a feel-good book about Armageddon.
All right—concentrate, Tess. Think humorous how-to. Witty and light. She turned to her laptop, opened a new Word document, stuck a pretzel rod into her mouth like a cigar, and began to write:
CHAPTER 1
Is That a Gun in Your Pocket or Are You Just Extremely Worried to See Me?
We know you are quite alarmed at what has happened but listen: Will everyone just take it easy, please? And yes, many of us are living in makeshift shelters and other less than ideal circumstances, and food may be scarce, but is hysteria really going to help?
Tip Number 1: Don’t panic. Panic is not only unattractive but will not help you. You must project a confident energy. This has always been important for social success, but now if you look at somebody the wrong way, you could actually be killed. Literally.
Tip Number 2: There is safety in numbers. One-on-one socializing is out, unless of course, it occurs in the safety of your locked, barred, and bolted home. You will discover that the group dynamic—for conversation, meals, and even sexual activity—is more fun than you might have imagined.
Weapon-Wear—Displaying Your Firearms:
When out in public, it is considered gauche to make too great a display of one’s firearms. There is a fine line between the show of force necessary to stave off potential interlopers and the show of force that is simply tacky or ostentatious. For instance, a gun handle protruding partly from your pocket is a cavalier gesture—something that indicates you are prepared and confident—while carrying a gun in your hand as you are strolling in a park could be considered somewhat crass.
Tess stopped typing to read what she had written. Well, it was upbeat, wasn’t it? Though it was more ironic than funny. She had to concentrate on writing the guide as if this whole thing were real. And as long as her name wasn’t on it when it was printed, what did she care if she was producing something absolutely absurd? Still, she couldn’t help wishing she knew a little more about what they expected. But no matter what, she had to churn out some pages. She was a long way from fifty.
As if on cue her BlackBerry chimed. It was a text from Peter Barrett: Need to check in/can u meet me tmorrw at 5pm—will call 2 arrange. Yikes. Tomorrow? They couldn’t possibly expect her to be ready with the pages. Could they? And why was it Peter Barrett who want to “check in” with her? Wasn’t he supposed to be in charge of fund-raising? She glanced at the time display on her BlackBerry—shit, 12:20! She was going to be late—she was supposed to meet Ginny at 12:30. As she raced around her apartment in a frenzy, trying to find her shoes, her lipstick, and her keys, she realized there was more than one reason for her heightened adrenaline. She was going to be seeing Peter Barrett again.
***
Tess found Ginny at her favorite table of vintage linens just inside the chain-link fence entrance to the playground of P.S. 87. She was rifling through a stack of brightly colored 1950s tablecloths as if shuffling a giant deck of floppy cards.
“It’s okay, Tess. I told you not to rush,” Ginny said, noticing how out of breath Tess was. “You know the more time I have with old linens, the happier I am.” They kissed each other on both cheeks the way they always did. Ginny put the tablecloths back in their proper place and mouthed a thank-you to the owner of the booth, who was busy helping a customer. She pushed her short black hair back behind her ears. Ginny had a thin, tiny face and a tiny body to match. People always thought she was anorexic, she was such skin and bones, but in actuality she had the appetite of eighteen-year-old twin boys.
Almost every Sunday Ginny and Tess would meet at the 77 Street flea market. Today they had a specific goal: to find the perfect birthday present for Ginny’s assistant. They strolled down the center aisle of vendors, scanning tables to the left and right. They passed scarves, dishware, costume jewelry, children’s games and toys, postcards and magazines, jade and clay Buddhas, hats, sterling flatware, boxes and boxes of antique buttons, funky lamps and vases… . “Look at this, this is fabulous!” Ginny picked up a piece of milk glass in the shape of a bathtub. “Do you think Susan would like it?”
“Does she collect milk glass?” Tess smiled and looked at her friend over her sunglasses, giving her a “just think about it” look.
“No … . But it’s only twenty-five dollars. Maybe I should get it anyway… .”
“Stay focused, Gin.” Ginny put the bathtub back and moved on to the next table, running her fingers over items, checking price tags. Tess automatically wandered over to a table in the next aisle where she knew the dealer sold Bakelite poker chips. There was, in fact, a luscious set in plain view: a rich, marbled orangish red holder, filled with gold, dark blue, and red chips. Ordinarily the sight of the smooth plastic case with its creamy translucent chips would quicken her heartbeat. Now she glanced down at it and realized with surprise that she did not even care to see how much it was. She walked away and then stood still for a minute, looking around at the whole scene—the rows and rows of tables, the crowd of people looking, touching, bargaining, buying. All this stuff that had no real meaning, except for getting to look at it in your house, and having a souvenir of somebody else’s past.
“Hey, what about this?” Ginny called, motioning Tess over. She pointed at a salt and paper shaker set made from cut-glass perfume bottles.
The dealer moved quickly toward them. “I kin make you a real good deal on these,” he said with false casualness. He was wearing a Yankee baseball cap and a white sleeveless T-shirt. There was a tattoo of a cobra on his shoulder.
“Ginny,” said Tess with an apologetic but firm smile. (Shopping was the only time she was the leader when they were together.) “Your assistant is twenty-two years old and has two roommates. Isn’t that what you told me? Who knows what kind of kitchen she has? I somehow doubt that crystal salt and pepper shakers is the thing.” Tess took Ginny by the elbow. “Sorry, thanks,” Tess threw over her shoulder to the dealer. Then she turned back to her friend, “I think you should get her a nice piece of jewelry. Let’s go inside; it’s air-conditioned.” They headed toward the school building, where the better jewelry was displayed. Twice on the way Tess had to grab Ginny’s arm, gently drawing her away from tables.
When they finally pulled open the door to what during the week was the school’s cafeteria, the cool air was so heavenly it made them shiver. Tess and Ginny slid their sunglasses up to the top of their heads. Tess scanned the jam-packed tables with a discerning eye. This was her one true super power: she had antique jewelry shopping radar. Within ten minutes she had guided Ginny to a pair of marcasite and carnelian dangle earrings from the 1920s.
“I bet Susan will love these … . You told me she likes to wear clip-ons, right?” With minimal effort, Tess talked the dealer down from sixty dollars to forty-five.
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