Deep Breath Hold Tight: Stories About the End of Everything

by Gurley, Jason

  “Our history will slip away,” she said, “and one day everything will be overgrown, and we’ll have forgotten things like Dr. King’s speech, or NASA, or basketball. We won’t remember any of it. We’ll stumble across an old museum and stalk through it looking for food, not giving the old paintings a second look. They’ll be no different to us from a pretty flower on a bush. Our brains will wipe themselves. We’ll grow up like animals, live like animals.”

  She asked what I thought, but I preferred to listen to her talk about it. After those first few days together, she talked a lot. I guess it had been a long time since anybody had wondered what went on in her mind, had asked her how she felt or what she wanted.

  She listened to stories of the books I’d lost along the way, the ones that I salvaged while Grant or his asshole men were throwing them off of the back of the trucks. Most weren’t books that could be considered classics, but pulp stories were just as entertaining in the dark, quiet nights in the nest.

  I never put myself on her, or asked her to sleep beside me on even the coldest nights. What kept us warm, what filled us with color again, were the stories, the conversations.

  She listened to the horror stories. She asked me about them, and I told her — about learning to cut a man’s throat, about watching the firelight the first time the hungry clan decided that the bodies could be cooked. She listened, and then she patted my hand, and as we both fell asleep in the dark, she’d whisper, “You’re not a killer. You’re redeemed.”

  “So are you,” I said back.

  She encouraged me to write a book about the after, about my life and what it became. About the nest, about her. She promised to find paper one one of her trips out, and she did, returning one day with a yellowed notebook. A few pages had been written on, and she wanted to tear them out, but I told her to leave them. We read them together, not understanding them at all.

  Project AKBON kickoff congregational. June 11.

  Attending: Michael Schwartzbaum, Digital Marketing VP; Sarah Lindeman, Marketing Manager.

  The ask — A cross-channel campaign to support a confidential product launch. Codename AKBON (maybe new interactive TV consumption platform?). Launch December 4. Development co-production.

  I started writing on the next page. Each night she would read my words, making corrections here and there.

  “You’re not a very good writer,” she said, laughing. “What were you doing in high school?”

  “I liked pot,” I said.

  But she asked for more every day, and before long the notebook was half-full. I wrote small and laboriously, my hand cramping, and every fresh sentence that I wrote conjured memories I hadn’t thought of in a million years. I wrote about high school graduation, remembering at first only the gowns and the ceremony — and then an image of my mother swam up in the dark, baking a cake to celebrate, standing over the oven, her hair in damp rings on her neck, the sun pounding the house. The air conditioning unit had been broken. I remembered sleeping naked in my room, a chair propped under the doorknob so nobody would walk in, the sheets cast off of my bed, the window open, an oscillating fan washing warm breaths over me throughout the heavy night.

  Every word was a spark for her. She read them slowly, sometimes returning to a line to savor the image of it — not the words, because I couldn’t write pretty, but she liked to tell me that I took photographs that lived, that was my achievement as a writer.

  We settled into a pleasant routine, one reminiscent of the old days, of couples that shared a room without talking. She would sit in her chair, reading, and I would stretch out on the cot, bent over the notebook, writing. We passed long evenings this way, forgetting that the world outside had jaws, that it was populated with men turned into wolves.

  Then the lightbulb popped.

  “I’ll get more on my next trip out,” she said. “I’ll go in the morning.”

  “We could just start a fire,” I said. “Use that little pit. I’ve never seen you use it.”

  “For good reason,” she said to me. “Fires are like blood in the sea.”

  “Nobody would see a thing, not in here.”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t build it right. The smoke doesn’t go out like it should. It fills up the nest. The hole up there is too small.”

  “I can widen it,” I said.

  To my surprise, she let me. We waited for the next rainfall, and then she helped me stand on the cot, and as the mud hardpack softened in the downpour, I smoothed it away from the edges of the hole, carefully picking out bits of twig and sticks that got in the way. I doubled the width of the hole, and she watched, pleased with the results.

  “When it dries,” she said, “we will have a fire.”

  We shook on it, and then slept.

  The end of the world — the end of ours — came before we had a chance to start the fire.

  We had never talked about what we would do if this happened, if either of us was discovered. We were unprepared. We had grown soft — as soft as two people living in a wasp’s nest in a dead forest can be. We were as battle-ready as a retired couple in a gated community. Our evening routines had been all wrong. Instead of reading to one another, or writing my memoirs, we should have been strengthening my leg, we should have been sharpening our knives.

  She was out when they came, and for that I am thankful. For months I have shared her quiet, secret home, without ever asking her name, this woman with the crooked smile and piercing eyes, and it seems appropriate that when they set the nest aflame, she was somewhere in a nearby town, scuffling through dust and bones, hunting for a good book to read.

  She would see the fire from far away, and she would think one of two things.

  She might think that I had started a fire to surprise her, and I hoped that she wouldn’t think that, because she would come running back, carelessly, to save me from myself.

  I hoped she would think the other — that I was gone, that the worst had come to pass. I hoped she would never return to the woods, that she would find a new quiet hiding place, and tuck herself into shadow and wait for the worst to pass.

  But it was never realistic to think such things. The world and its civil walls had crumbled years ago. Death comes daily to the scrappiest of survivors, and they are cast aside, glistening heaps of bones and urine and blood, as if they had never existed in the first place.

  I didn’t know if it was Grant and the clan, returned to hunt me down. It seemed unlikely. They would have moved on, would have forgotten me in a few days. There were deserters from the clan every few weeks, and though we usually never saw them again, it was likely they all ended up dead themselves, fallen prey to another clan’s knives, or dying from the most innocent of wounds — splinters or coughs or broken ankles.

  The flap of the nest was open, giving me enough light to write by, and it was, until the end, a peaceful afternoon, gray and calm and still. I didn’t notice their footsteps on the dead leaves, didn’t hear the murmurs of their voices. I came to myself only when the nest whooshed alive, a funeral pyre that locked me within its flickering walls. The mud around me started to drip, and the twigs caught fire, little wet flames slithering through the growing gaps in the nest walls. The walls sagged in the heat and then sloughed inward, falling upon me almost before I knew what was happening.

  The sleeping bag beneath me caught the falling, burning twigs and turned into a bed of flame. I rolled onto the dirt floor, the notebook tucked beneath me, and then the walls tumbled down, and I was swallowed whole, my final thoughts of her, my nameless friend, and of our lost opportunity to test the new chimney.

  And the pain. So much pain.

  I did not know his name. He never told me, and I don’t know if he knew it himself. He never asked mine, and I didn’t tell him. Somehow that was right for us. We were blank slates, just like the world had become.

  Blank slates.

  Not quite blank. If you squint, you can see the marks of what was there before. You can see what was erased and
what ghosts are left behind. A slate must be washed in order to be truly blank. Everything that went before has to be sacrificed so that the new beginning is pure, unmarked.

  But that’s a fantasy. Instead the slate is a dirty mess, with remnants of experiments, some failed, some beautiful, all of them gone. The slate is the blueprint of a ruined city, its greatest towers and darkest slums both crumbled and empty.

  This is not easy for me to write. I wonder what his last words were, what he wrote in his book while I was away. I wonder if he thought of me. I wonder if he knows who did that to him.

  During my worst nightmares I never thought of taking my life, of sparing myself those horrors.

  Now my friend is gone.

  Today I imagined so many different ways I might join him.

  I saw them today. The pack. Wolves, all of them. There are not so many — they are a small pack, dirty and vile. All such groups are like this. I have seen too many of them. I have watched from the woods as they chased down a straggler, some poor soul who traveled by day through the fields. I have seen them fall upon their prey like animals.

  They stayed in the meadow beside the woods for a day, long after the fire of the nest had burned itself out. I had hoped that in their sleep the fire would spread to consume the forest. It should have. But the rot in the trees, the whiteness of them, must have stayed the fire’s hand. It consumed the nest until it was gone, blackening the trees around it but leaving them untouched. Even the leaves didn’t spark the way they should have.

  The pack left at dawn, free to continue their perverse lives while my friend’s is ended.

  When they disappeared from sight, I stole into the woods, and stood in the trees staring at the black ash of our home. That is how I came to think of it — as ours, although I built it, though I lived in it longer alone than with him. I stood there and did not weep. He would not have wept for me. I mourned his lost childhood more than I mourned his soul.

  When I had stood there as long as I could, I went to the nest, slowly, picking my way through the leaves. They protested beneath my feet as I shuffled through them, making whatever noises they made. What did it matter, my silence? Why should I guard myself against discovery? In the end, the wolves will find us all.

  He was on the ground, a charred shape, vaguely human, surrounded by charcoal branches and black earth. I knelt beside his body, still smoking gray and hot, and I told him that I am glad I did not know his name, because he was more than his name. As a man he had betrayed the name his parents bestowed upon him, whatever it might be, and with me, he had earned a new name, one that I could never give him, that he would never know.

  He saved it, and while I do not know if he intended to, I know that had become his purpose. The notebook was under his scorched body, its edges brittle and burned, but its meat intact, his words preserved in gray lead. The men of his clan mocked him — they called him the Librarian, as though saving the words of the past were a foolish errand.

  His final days and months were not a fool’s errand.

  I said a few words, and what I said is between me and the forest. It would dishonor him to write them here, in this book.

  For this book is a record of his life, and of the man he was under his wolf-skin.

  This is his book.

  Not mine.

  In his memory, I will write my own.

  Contrary to her expectations, it wasn’t the command center window that had the best views. The windows there were small and narrow, like heavy-lidded eyes, and they were recessed into the shell of the command module. They were designed for the astronauts who sat in the tall white chairs, but they didn’t show much of anything, not even stars. Just slates of blackness.

  Alice had been aboard the Argus for three weeks before she happened upon the water filtration system closet. Eve had let her know about a clog in one of the output lines, and told her where to find the system. The closet was startlingly large, almost the size of a luxurious walk-in closet in a nice house below on Earth, but filled with an orderly tangle of slim, clear tubes and winking lights and knobs and dials. But she had hardly noticed any of it, because the opposite wall — the station’s hull — was missing entirely, replaced by a wide, tall triple-paned panel of smooth, clean glass.

  Inside the water filtration closet, she could see Earth below her like the top of a giant balloon.

  It became her favorite place on the Argus. She is alone, so it isn’t as if someone might come looking for her and never find her, or wonder what she was doing spending all of her free time in the water filtration closet.

  Alice Quayle is in her second tour as the Argus’s caretaker. She lives aboard the space station between projects — watering the plants and changing the light bulbs, so to speak. Her first tour had been short, just three days, and she had spent the duration terrified. She barely slept, afraid that a wiring panel might spark and set the oxygen supply on fire, afraid that a meteor might take out the communications array. Afraid that she might break something.

  Her second tour is scheduled to last until August, when the biophysicist team from Apex will join the WSA crew on the Argus. That is two whole months away. When the live-aboard team docks on August fourth, Alice will hand over the keys, board the excursion craft with the transport pilot, then return to her usual day job at the WLA facility in Portland.

  But Alice will never see Portland again.

  Alice is resting in the water filtration closet when Eve wakes up. Alice hears the familiar soft tone echo throughout the ship, and says, “Good morning, Eve. You’re up early today.”

  But Eve has no patience for pleasantries. “There’s traffic on the military band that you should listen to,” she says.

  Alice has never quite gotten used to Eve’s voice. It’s lovely and kind and unassuming, which she finds that she quite likes in a shipboard A.I. But Eve’s voice emanates from the walls of the station in an otherworldly, haunting way, as if she speaks from everywhere and nowhere at once.

  “The military band isn’t part of my monitoring routines,” Alice says. “Am I actually allowed to listen to it? Isn’t it classified? Do I have clear—“

  “I have authorized clearance override,” Eve says.

  “Can you do that?”

  “In exceptional circumstances,” Eve answers.

  Eve does not display anger or urgency when she speaks. The WSA team and contractors who developed her spent years studying A.I.-human interactions, and discovered that an A.I. who embodied too much human emotion simply paralyzed astronauts. Their stress levels would climb to disastrous levels if, during an emergency, the A.I. raised its voice. Eve’s pleasant detachment made it possible for the astronauts themselves to separate their emotions from difficult or dangerous tasks, and actually improved their problem-solving skills.

  But when Alice hears those two words — exceptional circumstances — she feels her shoulders knot and her pulse begin to thrum.

  “What do you mean by that?” she asks.

  Eve notices her changed attitude. “Slow your breath, Alice,” she says. “Count to twelve, and then join me in the communications module.”

  Alice obeys, and after the twelve-count she says, “Can’t you just pipe the radio in here?”

  “Certainly,” Eve says.

  A darker tone sounds, and then the static wash of radio traffic from 1.2 million feet below swells to fill the water filtration closet.

  — serious concerns. Who doesn’t have serious concerns, sir?

  All I’m authorized to say is that we have the situation under control.

  “That’s Mission Control,” Alice says. “What are they talking about?”

  Eve says, “The topic of conversation is unclear.”

  Alice turns to the window and stares down at the planet below, moving so fast yet so slowly that she can barely detect its spin.

  “Extrapolate,” Alice says.

  But Mission Control speaks again.

  That’s not what we’re hearing over here, s
ir. Over here it looks pretty goddamn bad.

  I assure you, gentlemen, that we have our hands firmly on the ball.

  “Nuclear detonation,” Eve suggests. “If I were to hazard a guess.”

  “Nuclear —“ Alice stops. “The disarmament talks? How certain are you?”

  “Very,” Eve answers.

  When is he going to raise the threat level? We’ve got—

  The transmission from Mission Control was swallowed in a crush of static and feedback, and Eve disabled it. The water filtration closet fell into relative silence, the only sound that of the rumbling, churning equipment behind the wall panels. Alice barely notices.

  She stares down at North America, where a bright flare, like a single pulse of a strobe, flickers and then vanishes.

  A fat cushion of smoke billows out, then seems to rise, and Alice realizes she’s staring at the expanding head of a mushroom cloud.

  SIX HOURS EARLIER

  Alice squeezes the silver package. The contents — French Toast with Syrup, the label read — have the strangest texture, but taste quite good. It’s like drinking dinner through a straw, she had thought the very first time. She has a difficult time selecting her meals, entranced by the broad selection and the novelty of their state. Salisbury Steak with Mushroom Gravy. Spinach and Feta Cheese Wrap. Chicken and Dumplings. All of them liquefied, most prepared warm. She enjoyed the sensation of eating this way — of tasting all of the different components of the meal at the same time, as a unified flavor. There were even special holiday-themed meals. Roast Turkey with Cranberry Sauce.

  She cheated and ate that one a few days ago, though it was June. It was better than her mother’s Thanksgiving dinner.