Asimov's SF, Oct/Nov 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  A weapon, given the situation, could simplify matters to the ultimate degree possible. She understood that with the sharpest clarity. But she was squeamish, and it looked as though Creighton was lying on it. Also, possessing his gun might delude her with a false hope of survival, which she knew would be stupid. So she left the weapon and concentrated her thoughts on whether a return to her apartment was now feasible.

  From what she could see of it, the building appeared to be completely dark, inside and out—and, significantly, silent. Surely, she thought, that meant that those boys and girls weren't still rampaging within. They did not seem to take any interest in doing anything quietly—which lying in wait for anyone to return would require.

  Of course, they could be sleeping in there. It didn't seem as though they ever slept, but she supposed they must. And considering what she knew about the behavior of their wildness, if they did sleep, they probably slept in large groups, sprawled like beasts in dens, sated or exhausted from the excesses of their violence.

  It struck her at that moment, for the first time, that what was strangest about their behavior, apart from its crossing all lines of sex, class, race, and religious orientation, was that their violence seemed not to be directed against adolescents marked as other, as one expected with youth, but against the whole rest of the normal world.

  The risk terrified her, but she could not bear to continue her cold, wet huddle in the alley. She supposed there were a few safe places where crowds of people sheltered under armed guards, but she lacked the strength and courage to go in search of them. All she wanted was to crawl into her bed and die, by her own hand, in peace. It was all she could think of. (It was all she could bear to think of.) And so, bent over almost to the waist, she lurched stiffly, on feet gone numb, to the back of the building. She discovered that the locks had been shot off; but then she had known that (though she had forgotten). She hugged herself, to get her shivering under control. She didn't believe in God, but a voice in her mind whispered “Let them not be there, let them not be there, let them not be there...” over and over again.

  In the dark inside she could not see even her own hand when she held it before her face. Every step she took was on a guess, with her hands thrust out to touch the wall or banister. Her memory of the ascent is typically faulty. She remembers that there were terrible things in the halls and back stairwell. She doesn't recall exactly what they were. There were smells and messes and bodies to climb over. She remembers thinking: None of us are human anymore. No one is allowed to be human. It's impossible. Impossible. We are all beasts now. When enough of us become beasts, we all become beasts. We revert. We revert. We revert.

  She still thinks those words “we revert” every time she thinks about the End of the World. The Great Reversion. Though: reversion to what? She doesn't know. Doesn't understand enough about what homo sapiens is. The ultimate mystery of her life? Sometimes she thinks so. Though that other matter, which feels all important to her, seems far more mysterious, though perhaps that's simply wishful mystification...

  So she gets to the top floor and finds that none of the doors up there have been forced open. It's a miracle, she thinks at first. Then: perhaps it's a trap? A lure? A special torture?

  But who among those youth would have an attention span sufficient to realize such a conspiracy? They are cunning only in the short-term. Impulse rules them. Like two-year-olds...

  She fumbles her keys out of the side pocket of her rucksack. Her fingers are numb and stiff with cold. It's hard, in the dark, to fit the right key into each lock. By the time she succeeds in opening them all, she is sweating and panting with the effort.

  Home! Safe! Private! She secures the deadbolts and gropes for the light switch. She flicks it on, but nothing happens. She remembers that those boys and girls have been shooting up transformers all over town. It gives them a cheap, quick thrill—and is sure to make everyone miserable for a long time to come. No utility trucks will be going out any time soon to replace them.

  The apartment is almost as cold as the out-of-doors. The heat no longer works, of course, since though the furnace is gas, there is no electricity to power its fan. But hot water still runs from her taps. And a hot bath will get her warm and dry and cleanse the stink and filth encrusting her body. After bathing, wrapped in her down comforter, she can be warm and dry for as long as she can stay in bed.

  She lights a candle, sets it on the top of the toilet tank, and runs a bath. She fetches the large Sabatier from the kitchen, lays it on the side of the tub, and strips off the filthy clothing. An image pops into her mind, of the water meter in the basement, its numbers and arrows whirring madly with activity. It's scary to think about someone seeing it and knowing she is there. She tells herself: I'm going to die soon, anyway. If they come pounding up here and shoot my locks off, I'll have time to use the Sabatier on my throat. At the End of the World, a bath is the highest achievement possible. Small comfort is all that's left. Nothing I can do will stop the madness. Might as well die in comfort.

  In the tub she scrubs herself, drains the water, and scrubs the tub. Then she runs another bath and drizzles scented oil into it.

  She lay in that tub for at least an hour, probably longer. She remembers having let some of the water out from time to time and topping it up with another burst of hot. Gradually the shivering stopped. She was tired, so tired. She needed to sleep. Though she didn't think at all, the images never stopped bombarding her, images of things she later forgot entirely. This is human, too, you know, to forget some—or maybe most—of the unbearable. It's a problem of consciousness. What the capacity for pain in the consciousness is, what the capacity for understanding is. Clearly she had a low capacity for both pain and understanding. That is, I believe, why she forgot so much.

  And then, though she would have liked to have remembered more about life before the End of the World, she was willing to give up those memories if it meant that she didn't have to remember all the things she could not bear to think about, all the images that made her highest aspiration, in those last days of the world, that of dying as quickly and easily as possible.

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  2.

  She did not kill herself that night. When she got out of the bath, she ate a couple of handfuls of nuts and an apple, swallowed five aspirin (since she didn't have sleeping pills and figured it wouldn't matter if she overdosed, as long as she got to sleep), crawled into her clean white sheets under her soft down comforter, and conked out. When she woke, the room was full of the cold thin light of January. Her watch gave the time as 10:30, the date as January twenty-first. The Sabatier waited on her bedside table. Looking at it in the chilly glare of morning, she wondered when she had last sharpened its blade.

  A sense of teleology is quintessentially human. Everything past and present, each of us believe, is inevitable. As for the future, it is inevitable, too. For early Europeans, the teleological thrust of life was at first repetition, climaxing (in the future) in destruction, to be followed by judgment and eternal disposition. Later, Kant and his contemporaries made it progress: never-ending, eternal, infinite. And then, finally, during her lifetime, it became a live-drink-and-be-merry sense of squandering the little that was left, concomitant with inevitable doom and destruction to be followed by nothingness. In this latter-day view of things, life must be as it is already and where it is destined to go: if humans are programmed to destroy the planet, then it is pointless to try to stop doing so. It was the converse of the destiny of progress—in which humans could make no mistake, do no wrong, could always adapt to or solve whatever catastrophe they might inadvertently create. From acceptance and struggle, to blind faith in triumphal superiority, to suicidal acquiescence and the drive for mere individual survival at any cost to the species: these were the responses of the organism to its consciousness of death and time—and to its inability to understand.

  Another quintessentially human drive is the need to feel in control in any and every situ
ation. This is most often accomplished by establishing a semblance of normality and order, especially when ordinary routine and morality is lost. That is what she did that morning. It was morning. She had survived the darkness of the night, the desolation of homelessness, the abomination of unceasing violence. She had accepted that she must die. And yet she saw no reason why it had to be at that very moment. True, she could hear gunfire nearby and suffered the burning throat and eyes caused by the inescapable stench of burning chemicals; true, she knew the stairwell of her building and the alley behind it to be littered with flesh and blood remains and that at any moment her building might be firebombed or re-invaded. But it was morning, and she was very hungry and had to pee, and, though cold, her apartment looked just as it always had.

  After a period of homelessness, she was home.

  For the moment, alone did not seem so bad (as long as she didn't start to think about how the apartment across the hall was empty and why).

  She bundled herself up in long underwear, wool pants, and sweaters. She thought her headache might go away if she had a cup of coffee. She could try pounding and crushing the beans using a mortar and pestle. She didn't know how much white gas she had in her camping equipment, but surely she would have enough to fire up her camp stove to heat water.

  While digging through her camping equipment she realized that if she had been a character in a movie or novel, she would be assembling a pack and going out into the world in a struggle for survival (if not to try, single-handedly, to save the world from its madness). At the very least, she would be trying to get to one of those safe places in which helpless people like her huddled under the protection of mature men with guns and authority. So she made her coffee (lousy, oh so lousy, the worst cup she'd ever made, acrid and thin, like a parody of itself) and crept about her curtainless kitchen crouched low lest anyone in the next building see her. And she planned meals with that all-American make-do spirit of the Original Pioneer Woman and tried to pretend she would be safe for as long as her store of food held out. The coffee didn't help her headache, though, or soothe the rawness in her throat, or jolt her with the adrenaline necessary to send her fleeing (though to where?).

  So. Her television was dead. Her VCR was dead. Her CD player was dead. Her radio was dead. Her computer was dead. Her telephone was dead. Worst, her brain was nearly dead and too exhausted (and unwilling) to read.

  She played solitaire on her dining room table. She played until it got too dark to see. Then she took six aspirins and crawled under the comforter and pretended the sounds outside were the neighbors’ televisions, a dozen or more of them playing too loudly all at the same time.

  The next day passed in the same way, and the day after that. No one threw a hand grenade or a firebomb into the building. No one burned it down. No one invaded it. It was as though, she thought, a shield had been thrown around it. A magic shield protecting it from the violence that could finish it off for good.

  For the first time in her life, she suffered constipation. The food was terrible, and she was low on fuel for cooking dried beans, the one staple she had in abundance. And she was always, always cold. On the third day she totally zoned out. She moved around her kitchen heedless of the danger outside. She stood at the sink, washing dishes, humming a childhood ditty, and naturally, naturally looked up from the dishwater and glanced out the window—to stare straight into the eyes of a man standing at the window opposite in the building next door.

  Her body went cold and colder and froze almost into a block of ice. She was seen. By A Man. By a man who looked odd, so very odd, she didn't know in exactly what way, and looked also a little like a young Sam Jaffe, only the bones in his face were sharp as razors, and his eyes chillingly cruel.

  Shock kept her standing at the sink. She didn't notice that he was no longer at the window staring at her until she heard the pounding on her door. “You might as well let me in now,” a voice like a sonic boom bade her—a voice, she thought, as harsh and sharp and deafening as thunder, and surely damaging to her ears.

  The thunderous voice cracked and splintered the ice of her shock, crushing her into a gelid, formless slush. She shivered violently with the loss of her integrity. This was the end, the end. As in a nightmare, she was trapped without a thought for how to escape her Fate. She could not flee through the window. She could not go looking to find the Sabatier. She suffered the paralysis of nightmare, where the only escape lay in waking, an escape beyond her.

  She could either stand there shivering, or obey.

  She felt his eyes boring into her, as though he were still staring at her from the window of the other building. Even as she walked in a near-trance to the door, she felt his gaze surrounding her. His voice continued to thunder, but if it spoke words, she did not remember them afterwards. In her mind lived only his gaze and the conviction that he had a gang of adolescents behind him, a gang that would savage her the way all the youth were savaging everyone they could get their hands on—unless she placated him. Yes, that was the thought that drove her to obey. He might be cruel, he might very well hurt her, but if she played her cards right, he would protect her from the boys and girls she imagined were under his command.

  She drew back the dead-bolts and threw open the door. I must note that from this moment on her perceptions, reactions, and behavior were those of a madwoman. She was so terrified at the sight of him, towering so many feet above her, that she nearly wet her pants. She took a step backward, then froze, as she had done at the kitchen sink when she had seen him looking at her. She would have run away, to hide under the bed or behind the clothes hanging in her closet—if she had been able to move. Her perceptions took on that insane clarity that certain drugs produce when they chemically impact the brain, such that every sense became acutely, painfully sensitive to even the smallest imaginable stimuli to her nerves.

  When he spoke again—though of course the giant towering over her was not a “he,” had never been, except that she assumed the creature to be male, and human, and even now finds it necessary to refer to as “he"—when the creature spoke, the voice, though deep, did not boom at her so much as growl. She noted, of course, with the crazy detachment of one paralyzed by terror, that his lips neither moved nor parted when he spoke, but she did not process the fact sufficiently to wonder why they did not. The creature took her arm. A terrible shudder went through her. Her legs trembled violently, making them almost too weak to hold her up. And yet she left her apartment—without closing the door, without looking back, knowing she would never see it again, knowing that to care about losing it was as hopeless as to care about losing the world, which she knew must be as unrecoverable now as a building onto which had been dropped a kiloton of TNT.

  How to write what happened next, I do not know. I do not know if I can. Before the world ended, I know that it would have been impossible to write it out of modesty, self-respect, or what in past centuries or many non-Western cultures might be called shame. (The word pudeur comes to mind, I know not why. It is a word I no longer remember the meaning of—if I ever knew it. It is a French word, I think, which suggests that I might have spoken or read French before I lost my memory.) None of that matters now, since there is no one, really, to perceive any particular debasement in a situation that is beyond such niceties. Rather, I question whether I can write it because I doubt I can get it exactly right and because it matters that I do, in a way that it didn't matter at all for the previous part of the story.

  I have lived with this in my mind, imagistically rehearsing it so many times for so long, that I fear what putting it into words will do to it—and to me. It may, on the one hand, destroy the heart of my wish to live, destroy all that is left of who I am (for this is really the one memory I have, that constructs the little bit of consciousness of self that I own). Or it may, on the other hand, through small errors of omission or commission replace the true memory with something false, changing through an error of transmission my very memory itself. A luxury even to worry ab
out? Perhaps. But I do know—my memory does not give me the basis for the knowledge—I do know that once a memory has been written down, the written version becomes more real than the memory, and the memory conforms itself to match the written version, editing out all the tiniest details and nuances the written version neglected to include, thus altering the feel of it—which is what matters to me, rather than any point.

  Walking at his side through the ruins was a little like being a child again, for not only did she have the strongest sense that her safety depended on his protection, but also his size to her, in proportion, was that of an adult to a child. But her overwhelming sense was of numbness. She moved like an automaton and barely noticed her surroundings. Her eyes streamed with the irritation of burnt chemicals; her throat, already raw, spasmed almost constantly with a racking cough and a choking tickle that the cough could not relieve. Her shoes often crunched on glass. Several blocks of still-smoking, burnt-out shells of buildings were unrecognizable. She had no sense of walking through a neighborhood well known to her. The few street signs remaining looked strange to her, their names no longer familiar. She knew only that the giant had a hold of her arm and that she must be prepared to grab his hand or his shirt the second he let go, to keep him from abandoning her. Twice, bands of boys and girls roared down the middle of the street, shrieking and giggling and bellowing incomprehensibly. Each time she looked down at the sidewalk, quivering with fear lest she catch a hostile, malicious eye. But both times the teenagers did not seem to see them. She thought, Somehow he makes us invisible to them. As long as I'm with him, they can't see me, and I'm safe. Safe. Safe.