The Cabin at the End of the World

by Paul Tremblay

  Sabrina says, “That’s not true.”

  “—so tell us what’s going to be on TV this morning? I know it’s almost time for something Leonard wants to see because he keeps checking his watch, just like he did yesterday. You know, I never realized the end of the world would be kept to such a tight, regimented TV Guide schedule. This is enough! This is insane! You’re all insane!”

  Adriane shouts, “You need to calm right the fuck down and think for a second!”

  Sabrina leans forward and speaks to Eric, as to his shame, he’s now been identified as the one who might believe them. “Even if we knew about the earthquake in the hours before we came here, why and how did we end up even coming here in the first place? I mean, how did the four of us strangers from different parts of the country know to randomly meet in the Middle of Nowhere, New Hampshire? It was because we had visions, were sent here, were told to—”

  Andrew shouts over her, “So you’re admitting you knew about the earthquake before you got to the cabin!”

  “Yes. I mean, no, no that’s not what I’m saying at all.”

  Adriane says, “It doesn’t matter. You have another chance to stop more people from dying by making the choice. You and us and everyone on the fucking planet will run out of chances if you don’t choose to save us.” Her eyes are wide, incredulous. She can’t believe she isn’t being believed. “If you choose to sacrifice one of you, then the world doesn’t end. That’s it. It’s that simple. I can’t tell you any other way. Fuck—”

  Leonard says, “Easy . . .”

  Adriane continues on ranting. “No charts and graphs or PowerPoints or, what, a fucking puppet show—” She cuts out and holds pleading hands out toward Eric.

  He feels all the eyes of the room on him, including Andrew’s and Wen’s. He says, “There is no choice. We will never choose to sacrifice one of ourselves, no matter what. Period. Look, I know this is hard to hear but you three are suffering from some kind of a shared delusion, and delusions are powerful things . . .”

  Adriane says, “Oh, Christ, we’re fucked. We’re all fucked,” and throws her hands up.

  Wen says from the couch, “Leonard told me it’s God making them do this.” Her speaking for the first time that morning freezes all the adults in place, like they were playing a game of Red Light Green Light.

  Andrew asks, “When did he tell you that?”

  “In the middle of the night. I woke up and he was awake, too.”

  Andrew says, “Well, he’s wrong. They’re doing this. No one and nothing else but them, and I know Leonard likes to act like your friend but if he really was, he’d let us all go.” Andrew glowers at Leonard, who doesn’t rebut.

  Wen doesn’t say anything else. She opens and closes her legs under the blanket, flapping them like butterfly wings.

  “God wouldn’t do this.” Less confident in the declarative than his words would indicate, Eric says it hurriedly, as one might when uttering a perceived truth about a future event while simultaneously worrying about being a jinx. In the same mental breath, he silently prays to God that they be freed from this ordeal unharmed. If pressed, Eric would identify himself as Catholic; he once said to a coworker that he was a “cautious Catholic.” He goes to church once or twice a month. Sometimes he attends Mass on Sundays, and sometimes, when he is feeling particularly stressed, he’ll go early on a weekday before work. Although he often struggles with the message and the messenger, the rote prayers and songs memorized so long ago as to have their own elaborately decorated memory palaces, the waxy cardboard taste of the host, and even the smell of dust, candles, and incense are a comfort, a balm. No Christmas Catholic—only attending church for the big holidays—is he, and he would stop going to church altogether before becoming one. In the weeks preceding Wen’s adoption, Eric reluctantly agreed (though the avowed agnostic Andrew doesn’t know how reluctantly) with Andrew that they would not have Wen baptized and not force her to adhere to any religion. Wen would be able to choose a religion when she was older and when the choice was hers alone. Eric knew that was the same as saying that Wen would be brought up without any religion at all. It nags at him on occasion, as he feels like he’s keeping an important part of himself from Wen, but he hasn’t once protested the family decision, nor has he secretly proselytized.

  A warm breeze flows into the cabin through the screen slider, which wobbles and vibrates in its track, bringing with it the stronger-by-the-minute garbage smell that isn’t really garbage. Andrew catches Eric’s eye and nods at him. Is he telling him he did a good job? Does he know something? Are Andrew’s ropes even looser than his and he’s telling him to be ready? The sunlight flashes and Eric turns away, fearful of being exposed to the light again when he might not be ready.

  Adriane walks to Sabrina and asks what are they going to do? Sabrina whispers something out of earshot. Adriane drops her head and covers her face with her hands.

  Leonard fills himself up with air. He says, “Sacrifices are required and will be made, one way or another, whether we like it or—”

  Andrew jolts and spasms like he is stung by a bee. He shouts, “Jesus Christ! Holy shit—” spewing a mess of profanities.

  Eric asks, “What? What happened? Are you okay?” Is Andrew acting? Is this part of a plan to get one of them over to his chair so he can do . . . Do what?

  Andrew is wild-eyed and breathing deeply, like he’s fighting off the urge to throw up. “Oh, fucking hell, Eric, it was him. Fucking Redmond! It was him! It was him! I knew these guys were nothing but a fringe group of homophobic nutbags here to . . . Oh, shit, Eric. Shit, shit . . .”

  Leonard, Sabrina, and Adriane back away from Andrew and share confused, what-now? looks.

  “Slow down, slow down. Talk to me.” Eric, momentarily forgetting about the chair and the ropes, tries to stand and walk to Andrew. He full-body flexes against his restraints and rebounds heavily back into the chair, which sends a dagger of pain through the center of his head. The rope binding his hands is looser than it was minutes ago with the bulk of the wound knot having slid lower down his wrists, almost to the tops of his palms. He’s confident he can squirm his hands free but he isn’t sure how long it would take and how obvious the effort would be to his captors.

  Andrew shouts at the others. “Redmond isn’t his name! You assholes using fake names, too? Did God tell you to do that?”

  Adriane still has her hands over her face. “What the hell is he talking about?”

  Sabrina says, “No, none of us are using fake names. Same for you guys, right?” Adriane and Leonard say, “Yeah,” and “Of course.” She looks distrustful of Andrew, afraid of him and what he’s saying.

  “That dead guy out there, the one you killed. His name is Jeff O’Bannon.”

  “Jeff O’Bannon?” Eric repeats the man’s name out loud and then says it many more times in his creaky head. It’s a name he knows, or a name he should know and should be able to put a face to or summon a dossier of significance for.

  “He’s the guy who attacked me in the bar, Eric! It’s him!”

  Andrew

  A hockey bar by name, the Penalty Box was a hard-drinking dive eschewing the ironic, hipster faux charm that might now be associated with the term dive bar. On the corner of Causeway Street, across from North Station and the Boston Garden, the bar was on the first floor of a brick-and-cement, two-story rectangular shoebox of no recognizable architectural style beyond industrial. It had one square front window next to a cavelike entrance chiseled out of the brick, above which perched a yellow sign with thick black letters. It was generally patronized by mean drunks, people spending their last dollars or loose change, or amateur-hour assholes fluttering in pre- and post-Bruins and Celtics games. In the late 1990s, the tiny room above the Penalty Box, called the Upstairs Lounge, was a local music hot spot and used to host what were called “pill dance parties” every Friday night. Eighty or so people would jam into the dark and grimy room with a DJ playing Britpop. Pre-Eric, Andrew and a small
group of friends attended the dances religiously for an almost five-year run, including after they moved the pill dances from the Upstairs Lounge to a new venue in Allston.

  In November of 2005, Andrew and his friend Ritchie decided to go to the Penalty Box (the Upstairs Lounge having been long shuttered up) after ditching a Celtics game early for a glass or two of nostalgia. The bar was half full with the green shirts of other Celtics game attendees who had given up on the home team as they were down by twenty-five points early in the fourth quarter. Andrew had on a twenty-year-old Robert Parish tank top that was too small for him over a white long-sleeve T-shirt. Ritchie had a new Paul Pierce jersey on even though he spent most of the game complaining about the player’s shot selection and perceived lack of foot speed.

  In the intervening years, Andrew has curated a carefully pieced together timeline of nonevents prior to his attack: He and Ritchie were in the Penalty Box for less than ten minutes. Andrew made a beeline for the bar upon entering and ordered two Sam Adams drafts. He doesn’t remember seeing Jeff O’Bannon or his two friends sitting at the bar, which was where they were according to the police report and testimony. Andrew carried the two beers over to Ritchie, who was near the entrance and talking to a middle-aged woman wearing a Bruins hoodie and jeans. Tall and rail thin, she was loudly drunk, and when she wasn’t wiping greasy hair out of her face, her hummingbird hands were all over Ritchie’s arms, shoulders, and back, and Ritchie couldn’t have been more amused or pleased. Andrew doesn’t remember her name. He gave Ritchie a beer and they clinked their plastic cups. The woman told Ritchie he looked like Ricardo Montalbán when he didn’t look anything like him. She told Ritchie that Andrew was cute but not as cute as he was. She laughed at her own joke but there was a lag between, so he couldn’t be sure why she was laughing. Andrew pretended to be offended at his second-class cuteness status. She asked Ritchie to dance even though there wasn’t any music playing, only the TV audio of Mike Gorman and Tommy Heinsohn calling the blowout game in muted, eulogistic tones. Andrew egged Ritchie on, telling him to go ahead and dance. Ritchie said things like, “I don’t know. My quads are sore from my run this morning. Maybe. I have an inner-ear problem and I get dizzy if I spin around. I’m thinking about it. I’m missing the baby toe on my left foot so I always list to the right. Sounds like fun, but . . .” She interjected with “oh yeahs” and more pleas for a dance and now a beer, as her demands increased with the extended negotiating. Andrew thought she was pleased to simply have this conversation continue. Ritchie wasn’t flustered in the least (like Andrew would’ve been) and started to ask her questions (“So, where are you from? Come here often? Will the Celtics ever be good again?”). Ritchie clearly enjoyed building the suspense of will-he-or-won’t-he. Then Andrew remembers Ritchie asking, “What was the name of the last guy you danced with in here?” She smiled and waved a hand in the general direction of the opposite side of the room like her previous dance partner was still there and she said, “That fucking guy, his name was Milton” (Andrew interjected, “Like the city?”). “Yeah. He was no fun. Wouldn’t let me feel him up.” The three of them shared a big laugh, and then O’Bannon was behind Andrew, over his left shoulder, and he said, “Faggot,” and it wasn’t a wild, out-of-control shout, and it wasn’t slurred or sloppy. It was clear, concise, and dismissive, a one-word statement of argument and justification. Andrew turned to his left, toward the speaker whose face he would not see in person until the two of them were in the same courtroom. As he turned, O’Bannon smashed a beer bottle on his head, the impact and follow-through cutting a gash that needed almost thirty stitches to close. Andrew remembers hearing the smash of glass, but there was no pain, and instead a flash of cold on his head and neck, and then he was looking at the floor, which began getting closer very quickly. He remembers lying facedown with his eyes closed and people shouting. He doesn’t remember getting into the ambulance, but he remembers insisting upon sitting up during the ride. He remembers the inexplicable feeling of shame upon seeing Eric for the first time at the hospital. When Eric said, “Oh my God, what happened to you?” Andrew whispered, “I don’t know . . .” and stopped so he wouldn’t say I don’t know what I did. O’Bannon later pled guilty and told the court he was drunk and not thinking clearly and that Andrew had accidentally spilled a beer on one of his friends (which was patently false), and they then were looking for a fight and his friends egged him on, and he said repeatedly that that wasn’t him, wasn’t who he was.

  Andrew thought about the attack before every boxing lesson and workout, before each trip to the shooting range. For the first couple of years postattack, when he couldn’t sleep, he internet-searched his attacker’s name and he’d spend hours digging into the digital lives of other people named Jeff O’Bannon. After exhausting the information on his O’Bannon (and that’s how he thought of the man, as belonging to him like a disease might), Andrew read about an O’Bannon who lived in Los Angeles and worked in the art department for major Hollywood movies, and there was the one who was a middle-school social science teacher in New Mexico and hosted a Looney Tunes viewing party for his students the first Friday of every month. Andrew spent one night poring through the 1940 government census and finding a twenty-five-year-old Jeff O’Bannon who had a wife, three kids, and his mother living in their Mississippi home. Later that night, Eric woke to find Andrew asleep in the desk chair, and he gently led him back to bed.

  Andrew has long since quit those internet searches and he doesn’t look over his shoulder in public places as frequently and as urgently as he once did, though the hypervigilance will never go away completely. In unguarded moments, he’ll still pick and worry at why he was attacked. Well, he knows why, the hate-filled why was made painfully clear, but why did O’Bannon choose Andrew? How did O’Bannon know Andrew was gay and by proxy that Ritchie was not? If Ritchie had been standing with his back to the bar, would he have been the one who was attacked? Had O’Bannon simply made a terrible, lucky guess? (O’Bannon maintained in court his faggot wasn’t why he attacked Andrew and it didn’t mean he thought Andrew was gay; it was a word he and his buddies used all the time and it didn’t mean anything to them and the slur didn’t and wasn’t supposed to mean what it actually meant.) Had O’Bannon seen Andrew outside or even inside the Boston Garden and then followed him to the bar, his dumb, ravenous hate fueled by Andrew’s visage, the way he talked, the way he walked or smiled or laughed or shook his head or blinked his eyes? Did O’Bannon first see Andrew when he walked to the bar and ordered the beers? Did he look at Andrew and instantly see whatever it was he saw? Was Andrew like a bright orange flame to O’Bannon, burning only to invite his violence? Did O’Bannon patiently observe and deliberate and plan and have doubts that he overcame with a grunt and a swing of a glass bottle? As galling as Andrew’s being somehow read and then classified by that fucking loser as an other, a thing, was that Andrew, at least for one night, was then marked as a victim.

  Andrew says, “It’s him. He buzzed his head. He’s older and more than fifty pounds heavier, and that bloated up his face and everything, so I didn’t see it right away, but Christ it’s him. Redmond is Jeff O’Bannon. You know who I’m talking about, right?”

  “Yes, of course. Yes.” Eric furrows his brow and Andrew can’t tell if Eric remembers O’Bannon and/or recognizes Redmond is the same guy. “Um, okay, you might be right.”

  “Might be?”

  “I mean, I don’t see it but—”

  “How can you not see it?”

  “—but if you say it’s him, then it’s him. I believe you.” Eric won’t meet Andrew’s eyes.

  Andrew sighs. “Dammit, I’m telling you it’s him. I would know, Eric.”

  “Yes, yes, of course you would.”

  Adriane says, “Hey, guys? We don’t have time for this? We need you to make the choice?” Her statements are questions.

  “Wait, hold on,” Sabrina says, and her weapon wilts in her hands. “What are you saying Redmond did?”


  Andrew says, “Going on thirteen years ago I was in a Boston bar with a friend and your guy—totally unprovoked—snuck up behind me, called me a faggot, and smashed a bottle over my head, knocking me out and cutting me open.” Andrew spies Wen watching him. Her empty expression breaks open as she flinches and blinks hard twice.

  Adriane says, “Oh shit . . .”

  Sabrina exhales sharply, distending her cheeks.

  Adriane says, “Hey, you’re not, you know, making that up, to get us to—?” She stops talking as though the question mark is worth a thousand more words.

  He considers telling them to take a good look at his scar that runs from the base of his skull down the back of his neck, but he doesn’t want to risk their closer inspection now that his hands are finally loose enough within the ropes to wriggle free. He spent his waking hours in the dark last night flexing and unflexing his fingers, twisting and bending his wrists. It’s no longer a question of if he can free his hands, but when should he?

  Andrew says, “I’m not lying or making any of this up. And Redmond is the guy who attacked me. I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life. How about one of you go out to the deck and find his wallet, his license, and read his name? It’ll be Jeff O’Bannon.”

  Sabrina says, “I’m not calling you a liar, Andrew. I believe you’re not making up the getting assaulted—”

  “He does have that nasty-ass scar on the back of his neck,” Adriane says, pointing at Andrew, and backs away from him to stand between the others.

  Leonard’s shoulders are slumped. Some unseen great weight is pushing him down. “Andrew, you told Wen your scar was from getting hit with a baseball bat when you were a kid.”

  “Huh? Wait. How—?” Andrew sputters and looks at Wen. She doesn’t look back, as immobile and blank faced as a mannequin. He doesn’t know what to say to her other than he’s sorry, he’s sorry for everything in the world.