Instructions for the End of the World

by Jamie Kain

  Soon enough, I get lucky and hear a rustling near a fallen tree. Easing closer, I see a lean brown hare, and I lift the rifle.

  I have the hare in my sight when I hear a voice yell, “Stop!”

  Startled, I nearly fire the gun, but my father’s training kicks in. I force my fingers to ease off the trigger, lower the gun halfway as the hare disappears into the brush, and turn toward the sound of the voice.

  A guy my age, wavy brown, too-long hair, is descending a tree. The way he’s dressed—all faded brown and green—I might never have spotted him if he hadn’t spoken up.

  “That hare has babies,” he calls as he reaches the ground.

  He looks at the rifle and hesitates, so I lower it all the way.

  “That was my dinner,” I say under my breath, but with no feeling.

  He comes closer and I tense, wondering who he is and why he’s here on our property.

  In a tree.

  Watching me, apparently.

  But as he nears, I see there is something about him that’s wide open, honest, not the least bit threatening. He has gold-brown eyes that glow like his skin, as if he’s somehow lit from within, a lantern shaped like a teenage boy. He is almost pretty, but with features that are a little too hard to be feminine. I watch him, my mouth dry and dumb, until he stops a few feet away and holds out his hand a little awkwardly, as if he’s never done it before.

  “I’m Wolf,” he says.

  I look down at the extended hand, the incongruity of it, as if we are conducting a business deal in the woods. He does not look like the kind of guy who worries about formalities.

  When I don’t extend my hand to his, he turns his palm up and smiles.

  “I bear no weapons,” he says. “Isn’t that what the handshake was originally meant to communicate?”

  I lower the gun until it points straight at the ground. “I’m hunting,” I reply.

  Stupidly.

  What kind of sixteen-year-old girl hunts for her dinner? is the question that forms in my head when I see myself through this Wolf’s eyes. I normally don’t worry much about such things, since I am strictly forbidden from dating or even contemplating the existence of boys (and what does it say about me, that I am willing to comply with such rules?), but this guy is like no one I’ve ever seen before.

  “Right,” he says, one eyebrow arching as if this is some kind of joke I don’t get. “What’s your name?”

  “Nicole. What were you doing in our tree?” I say.

  “Nice to meet you, Nicole.” He looks up at the tree then, as if the answer to my question might be found in its branches. “I didn’t realize it was your tree.”

  My face burns and I have no idea what to say. I have accidentally become a bizarre caricature of a hick, standing here with my gun, bickering over property lines.

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “I was just enjoying the quiet. It gets kind of crowded where I live sometimes.”

  “Which is where?”

  “Sadhana Village,” he says, his head tilting east. “You know it?”

  I guess my blank look answers for me, because when I say nothing, he goes on. “It’s adjacent to your property—a spiritual retreat center.”

  “You mean that yoga place? We passed a sign for it. I didn’t realize people live there.”

  “Yeah, it’s a self-sufficient village. There are about a hundred of us that live there full time.”

  I blink at this, recalling my father’s comments about the sign when we passed it on the road. He muttered about hippies and told me to stay the hell away from “those people.”

  From this guy.

  “Oh,” I say, as understanding dawns that I’m talking to a hippie. A real live one, not a character from a movie or a person in a Woodstock photo in my history textbook.

  My stomach does a stupid little flip-flop and I feel, suddenly, like the uncoolest girl on the planet.

  I become conscious, in an awkwardly sweaty way, that I’m alone with this disheveled guy in the middle of the woods. I’ve been around guys—normal guys who wear logo T-shirts and jeans and talk about football—but I’ve never been alone with one. Not really alone.

  This guy Wolf has a gaze that makes me feel like he sees into my soul or something. He stares straight into my eyes without blinking, and there is an unnerving stillness about him. I’ve never been looked at quite like this.

  I blink first, look down at the ground, then look back up to find him still staring. It’s like no one has ever told him staring is rude.

  “I have to go,” I say.

  He nods, and his gaze finally drops to the rifle. “Right, your dinner.”

  I don’t say bye. I just head in the direction the hare ran. I won’t find it, I know. I wouldn’t have the heart to shoot it now even if I did.

  Sometimes I think there is no uglier power than the kind that exists when I have a loaded gun in my hands—the power to destroy, with the pull of a trigger, all the complicated and miraculous work of creation.

  It’s the way of the world, my father would say, and our job is to come out on top in the game of survival.

  But what if he’s wrong?

  What if he’s wrong about everything?

  It’s the question that nags at me more and more these days.

  Two

  ISABEL

  I am not going to live in this haunted old roach motel. I am not, I am not, I am not.

  My dad is the king of Crazyland.

  He wears a Crazy hat and talks his Crazy talk, and for as long as I can remember, my dumb sister has believed him. I saw how crazy he was before I was even old enough to ride a bike, but Nic? She’s brainwashed.

  I remember him talking about how we’re going to run out of food and water, back when I was a little kid, and I was like, Duh. We can just go to the store and buy more. Have you even seen Safeway? It’s got enough food in it to last us forever. I was even sure that was the problem—that he’d never been inside a grocery store, because Mom does all the food shopping and cooking, or at least she used to.

  So as I am glaring at the disgusting old craphole that Dad claims is going to be my new bedroom, I know he’s gone from his old kind of crazy to a whole new level, complete with delusions that involve me. It started sometime soon after 9/11. When the whole world was freaking out, my dad was having a total mental break. This house, and this bedroom, are the final straw for me.

  First off?

  There is this dark brown wood paneling and the green shaggy carpet that smells like a dog’s been smoking a pack a day in here, and I’m like, seriously?

  No, really.

  Seriously?

  I can’t say a word, because if I talk back I’ll get an hour-long lecture and some horrible list of chores that will involve chopping wood and scrubbing the mangy toilet with a toothbrush. So I pop my gum, as my sole protest to this retarded situation.

  I mean, seriously.

  My hair is getting all puffy and weird from the heat in here, the land of no air-conditioning, and I want to find the nearest mirror to try to save it from oblivion, but I have already caught a glimpse of the bathroom, which I will not ever, ever, ever be using. It’s got a green tub, a green sink, and … are you ready for this?

  A green toilet.

  And not just any shade of green.

  I heard my mom muttering something about ugly avocado, but it’s like totally the color of a swamp, the color of things dying, the color green crayon you would choose if you wanted to draw an ogre or show someone the color of ugly.

  It’s Shrek green.

  Dad has moved on to showing Nic her room, so I slip back down the stairs to the main hallway and out onto the decrepit back porch, where I dig my compact out of my purse and set it on the railing so I can see my reflection as I start braiding my hair. At least if it’s in two tight braids the puffiness will have no chance of increasing. Then I notice that all my lip gloss is gone.

  I am ridiculously, strictly forbidden
by Dad from wearing makeup, but I have somewhat successfully argued that lip gloss doesn’t count as makeup because it’s clear (well, sort of) and it’s purely for keeping my lips from getting dry and cracked (okay, not at all). Dad didn’t really okay the lip gloss wearing, but he mostly doesn’t notice when I do wear it. He also forbids us from all the normal things girls are supposed to do to better themselves, like getting our ears or anything else pierced, getting highlights, wearing cute clothes, or wearing shoes with any kind of heel.

  If my dad had his way, I’d be wearing a neck-to-floor pioneer girl dress, with my hair all sad and plain and grown down to my knees (with a bunch of split ends, for sure, because Dad doesn’t believe in spending money on unnecessary things like girl haircuts), and some kind of granny boots that lace up to, like, my armpits or something—better for keeping the boys away.

  He seriously thinks that’s how girls our age are supposed to dress.

  Seriously.

  His head would explode if he found the stash of makeup I keep hidden in the bottom of my purse, or the outfits I’ve saved my own money to buy—that I hardly ever get to wear—with Mom’s help. Mom doesn’t agree with Dad about the clothes and makeup stuff, but she says she has to choose her battles, whatever that means. I think it mostly means she goes along with whatever he says, and then when he’s not looking she does what she wants.

  So I figure it’s all right with her if I do the same thing.

  I am just finishing up my second braid when I hear Mom’s voice rise from its normal tone into an angry shriek, and I bite my lip, wondering where I can go to escape the argument.

  That’s always my first instinct, but then I realize she’s yelling about this house and how she refuses to live in it, and this could be an important argument to be present for. I might be able to support the cause of us getting the hell out of here.

  Probably not, I decide on second thought, but I have to hear what Dad says, so I ease my way back inside just in time to witness something I’ve never seen before in all my parents’ years of fighting.

  Right after my dad says, “Shut up for a minute, Maly,” my mom slaps him across the face.

  It’s not the first time he’s ever told her to shut up, but it’s the first time she’s ever hit him, far as I know. My eyes have gone wide, but I hurry to rearrange my face in a way that says all this is no big deal, that I haven’t even noticed what’s happening, because if Dad sees me gawking, there’s no telling what punishment he might concoct later. Skinning a chicken, digging rocks out of the garden …

  For a long moment, it feels like everything stands still. My father is in shock that my mother has slapped him, and he stands there blinking, his face turning pink with anger, the reddish outline of my mom’s small handprint deepening on his cheek.

  I think the heat must be making her crazy like him.

  I catch a movement across the room and realize it’s Nic standing there, witnessing the scene too.

  Her dumb face is pale, her mouth slack.

  That my mom has not only dared to hit my dad, but that she’s done it in front of us kids—it’s a situation so freakish that it feels as if the air between us all is crackling with an electrical current.

  And then the current is broken when my father lifts his hand as if to grab my mother’s arm, but she screeches, “Don’t you touch me!” and dodges his grasp.

  A moment later, she has run from the house, and my dad follows after. Nicole follows them both, probably thinking she’s going to jump in and save the situation like a good daughter, but I only want to watch and see who the winner will be. I am of course cheering silently for Mom, but for my whole life she’s not exactly been a worthy opponent for our brick wall of a father.

  Outside, I am surprised to see not more fighting but my dad catching my mom in his grasp and hugging her to him as she struggles and cries. After a little bit of fighting she goes limp in his arms, and my hope of Mom getting us out of this house vanishes before my eyes.

  NICOLE

  My parents don’t fight like this, at least not in front of us girls.

  Fighting takes two participants, and my dad, as a rule, does not participate. There are times like now, when my mom gets mad. She will start trying to tell him something, and when he doesn’t respond she starts complaining in a heavier and heavier Khmer accent until she is speaking no English at all, and then when he still doesn’t respond she will go storming around the house slamming doors and objects as she cleans.

  This is a scene I’ve witnessed countless times growing up, and when I was little I thought it was my mom who was acting badly. As I’ve grown older, though, I have had to rethink that idea.

  Which is harder to do than it sounds.

  What if one person is mad and the other person ignores it, over and over again? What if the person you are supposed to care most about in the world has a problem and you refuse to do anything about it? What if you pretend they’re not talking to you at all?

  It is past midnight. I am lying in a sleeping bag in the dark, curled up on my side, a pillow hugged against my chest.

  Mom’s ranting, Dad’s silence.

  He has a way of being silent that is louder than any voice.

  “You never asked me,” she is saying. “You just take us here and you don’t ask me what I want.”

  I can sort of understand why he tunes out. My mother’s message is always the same, or nearly the same. She has a standard list of complaints that goes something like: you didn’t ask me what I want, you don’t listen, you don’t care.

  Extra things get thrown in, depending on the situation that’s upset her. Like now: this house is a dump, it’s in the middle of nowhere, there are wild animals outside, bugs everywhere, no people around, you are acting crazy.

  This last accusation hits me in the gut, causes me to hug my pillow closer, as if the insult was leveled at me and not Dad.

  I don’t know why.

  I do know why.

  Because it’s true, and I don’t want it to be.

  I don’t know how we are supposed to recover from crazy. I don’t know where we go from there.

  My dad, mostly competent, mostly okay, seems to have come a little unhinged since retiring from the military. It’s as if the structure of life in the army showed him how to act, what to believe, how to be, and then things started to unravel when we were all shown by a group of terrorists just how illusory our ideas of safety really are.

  And now, free to make his own choices, he is leading us astray.

  My mother, never much of a willing follower in the first place, is a problem he probably should have considered long ago.

  She has been looking forward to his retirement as the time when she could finally go back to school and focus on moving up in her own career. Dad had the idea that when we moved here to the middle of nowhere she would homeschool us, but Mom never seemed to be into that idea.

  She has always been a regular teacher with her own second-grade classroom, and I know she loved having a whole room full of students. She most loved the difficult ones, and I remember from looking over her shoulder as she used the computer that she’d been checking out graduate programs in special education, learning disabilities, autism. She’d looked up the distance between our new home and the MIND Institute at UC Davis, which is apparently the new place to go for becoming an expert on autism. And later she’d filled out online grad school applications.

  It wasn’t hard to see that she would have considered teaching just me and Izzy, at home all day, about as interesting as watching grass grow, especially when there were kids out there who could have really used her help.

  I’m not sure Dad ever truly heard her about any of her own goals or wishes. He definitely didn’t understand, judging by the state of this house, that she has no intention of returning to the poverty she knew as a small child in Cambodia, if she can help it. She knows there are suburban stucco houses with pristine lawns, clean running water, master suites, luxury bathrooms, all
within her reach if Dad would stop acting like the world is about to end next Thursday.

  And why shouldn’t she want that like everyone else?

  My dad has been making me keep a notebook full of his survivalist wisdom for as long as I’ve been old enough to write complete sentences. I remember the very first entry I ever made, with him watching over me and telling me how to spell the words as we sat at the kitchen table after dinner one night. It went like this: “Survival means being able to rely on yourself, no matter what happens.”

  Back then, I was eight years old, and I didn’t know what it meant even after Dad explained it. I had some ideas, like if I got lost in the woods, I’d have to find my own food and shelter, or if my parents were killed in a car wreck, I would have to live on my own or with a foster family. I sort of understood, but not really.

  The part I didn’t get, the part no amount of prepping can make clear, is that there is no one else who’s going to save the day in the end. No one else is going to give you a hug and tell you everything will be okay.

  ISABEL

  Today is the day my life stopped being my life.

  Today is the day that will go down in history as the day when everything started to suck.

  No, actually, suck is a completely inadequate word for what this day has done to my sense of the universe being a fair and nonretarded place.

  The government should make it illegal for people like my dad to have kids.

  This house only gets worse the longer we’re in it. It’s like if you were watching a horror movie, and in the movie the family pulled up to their new house with the moving van, you would scream in your head for them to back the fuck up and drive away, go live somewhere on the other side of the planet, because you know there’s going to be some ghosts up in there, and people are going to die, and it’s just not going to end well for anyone.

  Consider my room.

  I still am (considering it), and it’s 1:14 a.m., according to the clock on my phone that no longer has a signal. I am lying wide awake, trying my best not to touch anything that I didn’t pack and bring here from my old room. There is a brown stain on the ceiling above me, shaped like the edge of a continent, all uneven and weird. I stare at it, because I don’t know what else to do.