Deep Breath Hold Tight: Stories About the End of Everything

by Gurley, Jason

  “There are other life forms alive on Earth,” Eve says.

  “You’re a buzzkill,” Alice says. “This is my one giant leap for mankind moment. Are you recording it?”

  “I record everything,” Eve says. “Although on this vessel my storage capacity will exhaust itself in a shorter amount of time.”

  “How much time?”

  “Sixty years, approximately.”

  Alice considers this.

  The excursion craft is small and neat. A photograph of the transport pilot’s family is displayed on a small, square screen on the control panel.

  Greetings and peace.

  “Are you certain you do not with me to calculate the probability of your survival?” Eve asks again.

  “You’ve already done it, haven’t you,” Alice says.

  “I have.”

  “Fine. What are my odds?”

  Eve says, “One in—“

  “Wait, wait, no, no, don’t — I don’t want to know,” Alice says loudly. “I don’t want to know. Okay?”

  Eve says, “Very well.”

  In the vastness of space, all life is family.

  “The extra oxygen stores will help,” Alice says to herself. “Extra food. Medical supplies. Eve, did you bring books?”

  “I did not know you had an interest any longer,” Eve says.

  “Shit. Eve, did you? It’s going to be a long trip.”

  “I have four thousand volumes,” Eve says.

  Alice smiles. “Okay. I’m nervous, can you tell?”

  “Your heart rate is higher than usual, but still within reasonable limits.”

  Good fortune to you.

  “The odds are pretty long, aren’t they?” Alice asks.

  She detaches the excursion craft from the Argus, and it descends gently. She watches the docking collar recede.

  “It depends on how you define ‘pretty,’” Eve answers.

  Alice accelerates, and the craft darts into the spreading black. The Argus falls quickly into the small craft’s wake.

  “We should name her,” Alice says. “This little ship.”

  Eve says, “Might I suggest a name?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Perhaps you might christen it the Santa Maria,” Eve says. “There is some historical significance.”

  Alice thinks about this. “No,” she says, finally. “Let’s call it Tess.”

  May we meet in peace someday.

  The Tess carries Alice and Eve deep into the darkness.

  Eve says, “You have considerably less than twenty-four years now.”

  Alice says, “Maybe they’ll meet us halfway. Do you think?”

  He has had the coat for many years. It is long and made of wool and is the color of rust, with a faint herringbone pattern and smooth wooden buttons. It doesn't quite match his winter cap, but he doesn't mind. The earflaps keep his sagging ears warm, and the sheepskin lining hides his thinning hair and pale, spotted scalp. He wears ancient gloves, the leather softened by time, and grips a gnarled wooden cane in one trembling hand.

  He moves slowly, drawing stares as he makes his way down the street. The crowds bustle around him in cargo shorts and flip-flops and T-shirts. He pays them no mind. He is not interested in their darkening suntans, their glistening skin, the beads of perspiration on their necks. He doesn't notice that people watch him.

  The warm spell of the last few weeks has not broken. The old man plods on, oblivious to the heat. Sweat trickles down his brow and collects in his unruly white eyebrows. It seeps into the deep creases of his tired face, as if sweat has carved those grooves over the decades. His breath comes in slow shudders. His body is curved like a comma, his shoulders high and round, his head tucked low. He can barely lift his eyes to see more than a few steps ahead.

  It takes him nearly two hours to hobble to the bookstore. A streetcar runs along the avenue between the shop and the old man's home, a small studio apartment in a retirement community, but he has never trusted public transportation more than his own two feet, no matter how much they ache. He barely notices the pain anymore.

  The bookstore is older than he is, a stack of bricks that will soon be empty. It has been marked for destruction in just a few weeks. A notice, posted by the city, identifies the building as structurally unsound — an unreinforced masonry building that may be unsafe during earthquakes. The old man hasn't felt an earthquake in these parts in — well, in his entire life. The building predates the war, was in fact heavily damaged by shelling, and clumsily repaired. Over the years its walls have begun to lean, just like the old man himself.

  To bid farewell to the bookshop's grand legacy, its current owner — the great-grandson of the shop's founder — has scheduled a week-long parade of author readings. Celebrated writers from all over the world have come to the old man's little borough to read from classic novels, or their own new releases. In the gaps between these high-profile appearances on the schedule, the owner has scheduled open-mic readings, inviting the public to come and enjoy the opportunity to read their unpublished works in the historic shop before it disappears forever.

  The old man clutches his cane in one hand and a sheaf of pages in the other. The papers are yellowed and old, grown thin with age. They crackle, tied into a bundle with twine. He has brought only a few pages — a dozen, no more — and has not given any thought to whether his voice will permit him to read even that much. He has nobody to talk to anymore, and has never made a habit of talking to himself, so his voice is sometimes quiet for weeks on end.

  At the shop, a slim young woman spies him struggling with the door and rushes to help him.

  "Oh, let me assist you," she says.

  "Thank you," he says, and his voice is not so haggard. It sounds like rocks in a tumbler, but it is clear enough, and even a little sonorous.

  She notices the papers in his hand. "Are you here for the readings?"

  He nods. He cannot see her face — it pains him to lift his neck so high, and he feels a bit like an old lech, for this puts his eyes level with her breasts. She does not seem to notice, however, and he follows her pointed finger toward the back of the shop.

  It has been hollowed out for the event, the shelves pushed to the wall to make room for fifty or sixty aluminum folding chairs. A velvet rope separates the gallery from the rest of the shop, and a felt signboard reports that the Heisel reading has just ended, and that the open readings will commence at four o'clock.

  He pauses beside the sign and pushes the cuff of his coat away from his wrist. The bulky watch beneath reads 3:44.

  The young woman appears at his side again. He does so wish he could see her face.

  "May I help you to a seat?" she asks him.

  He allows her the kindness, and she seats him in the front row — near the aisle, he suspects, so that he will be easy to attend to if he should suddenly die. Sudden expiration is a necessary consideration these days, and he takes care to always wear clean shorts, just in case.

  She holds his elbow as he lowers himself into the chair with a long sigh, then crouches delicately at his knees.

  "Can I bring you some water?" she asks him.

  He knows what he must look like to her. He can feel the thin line of sweat over his ribs, the dampness of the loose skin beneath his jaw and chin, behind his ears. His eyebrows are wet, and some of the sweat has sponged out of the wiry white hair onto the bridge of his glasses. A single drop slides down the glass, and he almost crosses his eyes focusing on it.

  "Water," he says, "would be very kind."

  She goes and returns a moment later with a paper cup, and pats his hand.

  "Can I take your coat?" she asks him. "It's very warm out."

  "But cool in here," he says. "No, thank you. I'll keep it."

  "If you need a thing —" she begins.

  He nods. "Thank you."

  He settles into the chair, shifting this way and that until he is reasonably comfortable, and waits. He puts the water cup, untouched, on the seat besid
e him, then tucks his chin to his chest and closes his eyes.

  His name is Jonathan Froestt.

  In the fall of 1958, after sending away hundreds of copies of a short story in a plain yellow envelope, and receiving hundreds of polite — and a few quite rude — rejection letters, he sold his first and only short story to a pulp magazine called Fantastic Wonderful Tales. The story was entitled "The Forgotten Winter Lands.” The magazine's editor, a patient old fellow by the name of Abraham Gendry, had accepted the story "despite its rudimentary properties,” as he wrote.

  "Your tale is both fantastic and wonderful," Gendry had written, "though your writing, sadly, is neither. It's nothing a little editing won't fix."

  Gendry had enclosed a check for ten dollars, which Froestt never cashed. The story was published in the magazine's September issue. It had been heavily edited by Gendry himself.

  The story was about a military sniper named John Frost. ("Clever disguise," Gendry wrote.) In the tale, Frost is sent into the dusky hills high above a German village with his spotter, a soldier named Jankel. Frost and Jankel find a cliff dense with foliage. There's a clear line of sight to the village church, a narrow building with a tall bell tower that overlooks a plaza. Frost burrows into the bushes, and Jankel climbs a tree to serve as lookout.

  They've been assigned to take down a German general. For days they watch the church. Intelligence suggests that the general and his men are holed up deep inside the structure, perhaps in a subbasement. Frost doesn't know what the general has done, and he doesn't ask.

  Days pass, and nobody emerges from the church. Frost and Jankel take shifts on the cliff's edge, sip water from their canteens, and munch ration bars, and otherwise speak very little. On the fourth day, Jankel's shift at the scope ends.

  "I don't think they're here," he grumbles to Frost, who scoots into place with the rifle.

  "You know our orders," Frost says. "We wait."

  And so they wait. But they are tired, and Jankel falls asleep in the tree. Frost concentrates on the church, employing his sniper's training to slow his heart rate, his breathing, to dim the world around him. He does not hear Jankel's light snores. He doesn't feel the rain that has begun to fall. He doesn't feel the tiny hunger pangs in his belly. For him, there is only the church, and nothing else in the entire world.

  When Jankel awakes, Frost lies still in the bushes. Hours pass before Jankel realizes that Frost hasn't stirred, even a little, for some time. He hisses at Frost, who doesn't answer. He climbs out of the tree and crawls to Frost's position, and grabs his partner by the ankle.

  Frost's boot is freezing cold, to Jankel's surprise. He grips both of Frost's feet and yanks him, inch by inch, out of the bushes. Jankel discovers, to his horror, that Frost is frozen solid. The rifle is locked in his blue fingers.

  In the story, this is an unusual development because it is not winter. The story takes place in the peak of summer, when it is hot enough in the German countryside that both soldiers sweat while sitting still in the shade.

  In Froestt's original draft of "The Forgotten Winter Lands," Jankel abandons Frost on the hillside and returns to base. Gendry, whose brother had served in the war, found this unrealistic, and modified the story. In the published story, Jankel drags Frost back to base, dodging German patrols and moving by night. It takes two days — two days of hauling a heavy, icy corpse across sweltering hills — but Jankel succeeds. Frost is declared dead by a field doctor — who in both drafts seems rather unsurprised to find that Frost has become an icicle — and his body is parked on a gurney in the morgue tent while it waits for extraction with other casualties.

  But Frost thaws out, and when he does, he reanimates, startling a nurse and raving about a beautiful white snowbound world where men can be gods. "You have to let me go back!" he yells at the medical staff. "They need me there!"

  He is quarantined and interviewed by several army doctors, and tells each the same story in almost identical words: he quieted his body, as any good sniper does, and eventually fell into a sort of fugue. The world blurred out around him, and then so did the world he saw through the scope. He felt calm and relaxed, and then, in his mind's eye, he saw a red door. It opened, and he went through it, and when he emerged on the other side, he was in a white world of ice and snow and sun. He called it the land of winter, the doctors reported, and described sparkling ice castles that were no taller than his belly. These structures were inhabited by very small, very human-like beings that Frost called the Snowlings.

  "Patient reports that these Snowling creatures received him as a god, and petitioned him for help," one doctor reported. "Patient is clearly delusional, and I recommend a medical discharge for psychiatric reasons."

  In the story, Frost is indeed discharged. He returns to America, where his family is disillusioned by his strange rants about the winter lands. Frost's wife takes the children and leaves him. He is unable to hold a job, and eventually, as he grows old, his eldest child returns and puts him in a retirement home with medical supervision. To his death, Frost talks of almost nothing except for winter and the Snowlings. He hammers at a typewriter, producing page after page of complete drivel — rambling passages about quests and kingships and storms and gods and ice. He is found dead in his room one morning, his lips blue, skin pale and drained of color. His body radiates cold.

  The story ends rather abruptly. Frost dies, and when he opens his eyes again, he stands in the winter land, surrounded by the Snowlings, revered and welcomed into their tiny arms. The story is a curiosity at best, readers seemed to think, and only a few letters to Gendry mentioned it. None celebrated it; one reader described it as “neither fantastic nor wonderful, but interesting.”

  It was the only story of Froestt's that Gendry would publish, though he received a plain yellow envelope in the mail, once per week, for the rest of his life. When Gendry died in 1974, the envelopes were marked “Addressee Deceased” and returned to Froestt, who never submitted another story to any publication ever again.

  The old man wakes up with a start. He looks to his right. His water cup is gone, replaced with a human being. All of the chairs around him are occupied now, and he struggles to sit up, aware that he has slumped a little toward his neighbor during his unexpected nap.

  "I'm sorry," he whispers loudly into the person's shoulder.

  The room feels almost full, and the old man suddenly feels very out of place. He doesn't belong here, really. He is not an accomplished writer, only a persistent one. The small apartment he occupies in the retirement community is mostly unfurnished, except for a twin bed and a lonely chair and end table. The rest of the room is stacked with cartons. They are ancient and so stuffed with paper that their squared-off sides bulge, their flat bottoms sag. At some point over the years he ran out of cartons, and could no longer find the model that he preferred, so he simply began stacking loose paper on top of the boxes. Towers of typing paper clutter the apartment. He has filled the cabinets in his kitchenette with pages. The icebox contains reams of them. His dish rack has never seen a dish, but holds several hundred loose sheets of paper that fold and curl over each other.

  He has written of the winter lands for more than sixty years. His writing has not improved with practice. It employs a passive voice, and is richly populated with fragments of sentences, and he has never learned the difference between an adjective and an adverb. He frequently shifts from a first-person perspective to a third, and sometimes misspells his hero's name, using Frost and Froestt interchangeably.

  A woman writer stands at the dais now, reading from a short story that is, so far as Froestt can tell, about a bastard who gets his in the end. She reads nervously, but with a certain shaky confidence, and at her last line — "He sits up, looks around, and never sees the car that lops his head off like a cantaloupe" — there is a polite smattering of applause.

  Froestt can only see the woman's legs as she walks away, and the legs of the man who steps up to the dais next. His pants are well pressed, his sho
es shiny brown leather. His voice is reedy and he says, "We've got a few minutes before Heidi Johannsson arrives, time for one last reader. Any volunteers?"

  Several hands go up — the old man can hear the rustle of sleeves and pages — and he lifts his cane into the air and waves it around.

  The man at the dais hesitates, and then the old man sees a familiar pair of legs approach the dais — the girl who brought him water and helped him to his seat. He lowers his cane, certain that she will intervene for him, and she does.

  "The gentleman with the cane," the fellow at the dais says, and then the woman appears at Froestt's side to help him up. She walks with him to the dais. His feet squelch in his shoes, his socks damp with sweat. She notices, and with kindness asks if he will be all right. He nods and whispers a rattly thanks.

  Froestt is small and hunched at the dais, and cannot crane his neck enough to see the man who has welcomed him there.

  "What's your name, sir?" the man asks.

  "Jonathan," Froestt says.

  "Jonathan," the man repeats. "And your story? What will you be reading to us today?"

  He tips the microphone down. Froestt clears his throat and says, "I'll be reading from my novel."

  "What's your novel called?"

  "The Forgotten Winter Lands," he says.

  "Catchy title," the man says. "I assume you've been sending it to publishers?"

  Froestt can feel the crowd's alternating curiosity and disinterest in his story. Sweat dribbles down his nose. He shakes his head and says, "No publishers. It's not finished yet."

  "Well, I wish I could say that I hope we'll see it on our shelves one day," the man says. "But I wish you luck in your writing, and let's all give Jonathan a round of applause for joining us today."