by Owen Egerton
EVERYONE
SAYS THAT
AT THE END
OF THE
WORLD
EVERYONE
SAYS THAT
AT THE END
OF THE
WORLD
OWEN EGERTON
SOFT SKULL PRESS
AN IMPRINT OF COUNTERPOINT
To Jodi
I wrote a book for you.
Copyright © 2013 Owen Egerton
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication is available.
ISBN 978-1-59376-555-2
Cover design by Elke Barter
Interior design by Neuwirth & Associates
Soft Skull Press
An Imprint of Counterpoint
1919 Fifth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.softskull.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Once upon a time,
in one of the time periods,
an explosion of light came.
And ruined the oceans.
And turned the air to lava.
The end.
—Arden, age 7
Contents
2,732,841 DAYS BEFORE THE END OF THE WORLD
9,502 DAYS
Fuck balls
Mysteries
8,753 DAYS
Every moment, a universe
5,476 DAYS
Chlorine and cologne
Everything happens
4,365 DAYS
Like a dog can sense earthquakes
A little over half his height
763 DAYS
Too much want
Little Tick Clicky
4 DAYS
A hard, heavy dawn
KRST
Until what?
Sleepy, weepy, sleepy
Eber you ara
Pumpy pumpy . . . smiley smiley
Fist-size piece of strength
There I am
Hole of light
Cruel to the cat
Choose a faith
You’re flying, child. Your tits look great.
Can I help you?
Buttered
Same source as the wound
No time for certainty
Behind every good saint
Baby simply
Shit Walk
Finger closer
Wicks trimmed
Go shower
Holy fuck
3 DAYS
The nail won’t fail
Mingus would approve
Every feather, every bone
Something had changed
Name’s Jim Edwards
Hard to think with all the sirens
Oh my God! Nutria!
I can’t do this
It was going to
Fingers of God
Chewed
Roll in the dust
Moldy soccer balls
To his knees
A simple arrow
What a rat bastard
Do you want to miss this?
Austin
Four-hundred-gallon vat of puffed wheat
The sky declaring war
Skiing and ice wine
Night-black skin
Don’t be silly, Rica
Pretty fucking amazing
Where the hell?
The air was sweet, the world was crunchy
Something very else
Wheezing the whole time
Past Jesus Pick
2 DAYS
Kindness
Dick-mobile
The edges of the world exploded
My wife wouldn’t kill a roach
Cruel beliefs
Jesus-18
Poverty sucks as much as wealth
I’ve been gone for years
Christian Heaven Domes
The perfect reward for enlightenment
Desire
Hook in his chest
Stay awake!
A bed?
No words
White, red, black . . .
Larger Than Life
Squid
No longer labeled
Filled his heart with sawdust
Only on Christmas
This place will kill us
Yelling, pacing, preaching
Facts every time
In a day. In a decade.
Bacon
Jesuses
Hell in North Dakota
He’s dead. We’re not.
If you’re going to go bear, go grizzly
Wrinkle in the soul
Giggle giggle
All Christian, all the time
Are you live?
Brendan’s blood
I have touched fire
Fooled by time
Most wonderful man alive
Old-fashioned prayer
Exploded with white
Pissant town
Dot in the dirt
Her daughter’s hair
Diluted . . . eternal
Right
Death and change
THE LAST DAY
I won’t meet your baby
Better than coffee
Now would be the time
Home-desire
Moments from a family
On the last day
Fire taking her body
Sky to touch
Whole life pushing
Volcanoes
He wasn’t he
I actually get it
As each claw
To be born
Austin died
Shelter
We won’t miss the show
Baby mewed
To hide away
In this case it’s true
Space coffins
Physics, faith, and love
Nothing at all
Floated and blurred
Giant orange head
Ameyn
Acknowledgments
2,732,841
DAYS BEFORE
THE END OF THE
WORLD
POP
9,502
DAYS
Fuck balls
THE FIRST DROPS of rain were the heaviest, falling in broad, solitary beads. Awesomely destructive, if you were an ant. The boy, who had been meditatively lost in the ants’ comings and goings for that past hour, looked up to the black clouds, a drop hitting his face like God’s spit. It would be a downpour—a rush of water from the hot Texas skies. He looked back down at the pile, the rain puncturing the grainy surface. Already lines of black ants were erupting from out of the hill only to be thumped by fresh drops. He leaned over the pile, blocking the rain.
“Fuck balls!” he said.
It was his father’s expression and it felt powerful. Often his father, working through the night on some vague, nonsensical problem involving numbers and frustration and something called quarks, would hurl “fuck balls” up from the basement.
The rain was falling in full now, soaking through the boy’s shirt and turning the dusty yard into a rust-colored swamp. Even using his body as an umbrella, the rain was melting the anthill. A fist of panic squeeze
d the boy.
The boy had no particular affection for ants. His mother considered them enemies—using bleach and store-bought poisons to rid them from the kitchen and cursing their persistent colonization of the backyard. She would grimace to see her son working to actually preserve these pests. His father never noticed the ants. They were too large. His mother asserted that he was blind to anything larger than an atom. “Milton,” she had once told her son. “If it can be seen, your father can’t see it.”
On any other day, Milton might have just watched the ants drown, perhaps even cheered their demise. But something about that day—about the weight of the drops, about the singed scent of ozone in the air, about the tone in his mother’s voice as she sent him out to play an hour earlier, and how she had touched his face for a long moment before corralling him out the back door—made the boy feel that to abandon these ants would be a crime.
Without a clear plan, Milton dug both his hands into the pile and scooped up as many ants as he could carry. He glanced at the inner caverns of the mound filled with manic ants carrying plump white larva in their pinchers, then rushed for the shelter of the outer awning of the kitchen door.
The ants began biting before he took his second step.
“Fuck balls!” Nasty pin pokes of pain. The ants crawled from his hands up his thin arms, administering stings with a zealous rage. By the door sat an empty water bowl, once belonging to a family cat that had long since forsaken the family. The boy dropped his fists of ants and dirt into the bowl, but hundreds still clung to him. “FUCK BALLS!” the boy yelled, hopping up and down and wiggling his arms frantically.
“Fuck, fuck fuck balls!” he said, itching at his already welting arms.
The kitchen door opened. Milton nearly stumbled back into the rain.
His father stood, silent and staring. He wore the outfit he taught in—white short-sleeve button-down shirt with a navy-blue tie decorated with the emblem of his alma mater, Rice University. He was a thin man—tall with fingers that twitched at the end of his lanky arms. He looked at his son with confusion.
“The ants are biting me,” Milton said.
His father stepped back and let the boy slog in. Milton ran to the sink and plunged his arms under the faucet.
I was trying to save you, he thought as the last of the tiny black dots spiraled down the drain. He turned off the water. In the new silence, the house felt strange, a new strange. He turned to see his father standing on the other side of the kitchen staring at him.
“Where’s mom?” he asked.
His father walked to the fridge. “I’m going to make eggs for dinner.”
“Mom’s not here?”
“She left,” he said into the innards of the fridge. “Maybe waffles and eggs.”
“She left?”
“Hot damn, we don’t have any eggs.” He closed the fridge, leaning his back against the door. “Not even eggs.” He let his body slide down to the floor, sitting with his legs curled into themselves.
Milton watched his father with curiosity, wondering whether the man would cry. He’d never seen him cry.
“Look, she’s gone,” his father finally said. “Which is bad. But look, I’ve told you before, this world is one of countless worlds. Okay? Every quantum event creates a new world. Each world a page in a book with a billion pages. Got the image?”
The boy nodded.
“No, you don’t. You don’t, because if you did, you wouldn’t be looking like that, all stunned and beat up.” He rapped his knuckle on the lime-green linoleum. “Listen. Okay? Mathematically speaking, every possible outcome is happening right now. Each page a possibility that is not just possible but existing. Countless parallel worlds with slight and drastic differences.” He wasn’t looking at the boy. Instead his eyes seemed focused on the floor between his legs. “A world where oceans are acid, another world with no oxygen, another where you were never born, and a world—a world right next to us, closer than our skin—a world where she never left.” Outside the downpour petered down to occasional drops hitting the kitchen window in a rhythmless series. His father looked up at him, his eyes clear. “So in our world she leaves. But she doesn’t always leave. Doesn’t that help? It does, doesn’t it?”
The boy was watching four ants crawl in from under the back door, black ships on a massive sea of lime green. What drove them? What in the world could they hope to find? Milton hated them with all his heart.
Mysteries
“SEE THE LIGHTS, Rica?” Her father knelt beside her and pointed out across the dark desert scrub. “Just over the mountain.”
She watched them move. Small balls of light dashing in zigzags. One slowed, then shot upward. One faded in and out. One glowed an off-white blue, another slightly green.
“They’re just headlights,” her mother said, holding Rica’s younger brother’s hand. “I’m taking him to the potty. Meet you at the car.”
“Never seen headlights bounce,” her father said to Rica once her mother had gone. One light chased another, the two zipping up and down and across the horizon like squirrels in a tree.
“They look happy,” she said.
“I told you Texas wasn’t so bad,” he said with a chuckle.
“What are they?”
“Mysteries,” he said. “Mystery lights. People have been seeing them here for more than a century. No one knows what they are.”
Two of the lights darted together, circling each other in a bright-blue glow.
“They’re dancing,” Rica whispered.
8,753
DAYS
Every moment, a universe
HIS FATHER, BREATH bitter with coffee, shook him awake. “Wake up, Milton. I want to show you something. Look out the window.”
The boy, still half asleep, tried to sit up, but his father placed a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back down. “I have to tell you something first. Nothing I’ll repeat. You ask me about it tomorrow, I’ll call you a liar, hear me?”
The boy nodded. His father’s sweaty face twitched toward the window.
“I don’t know what they are, but they’re better than us and they’re alive.” He nodded to the boy, his eyes wide. “The whole department knows, but no one will talk about it. We make side comments to each other, knowing looks, but we never just say it. It’s like a dirty family secret that everyone knows and no one will talk about. Understand?”
“What’s outside, Dad?”
“Remember all those worlds? All those countless worlds? They’re not just parallel. Not just a near-endless book. That’s too small an image. It’s more like a sphere, each point an endless book. A ball of endless books! But you understand. No, don’t try. But get this. Every moment—each microsecond—is really another world. A new world exactly like the last moment’s world but with the changes of the moment. Every moment, a universe.”
His father stared down at him for a moment. Milton knew he was waiting for a nod of comprehension. But he didn’t comprehend. His father grunted and grabbed a half-filled water glass from the boy’s bedside table.
“In one world this glass is falling.” He let the glass go. It fell to the floor, shattering. “In the next world the glass is broken on the floor. See? So experiencing time is just moving from one world to the next and to the next and to the next.” He grinned at his son, then raised his head, glancing out the window and quickly ducking down. “Jesus!”
“What?”
He stared back at his son. “So we, just by being alive, travel through the many worlds. But we have no control. We move through in one direction, along one path. Just one book, page by page. We’re not so much traveling as falling. Falling through the pages. Or maybe we’re motionless and the pages fall through us. Is that it?”
He paused, and the boy wondered if he was supposed to answer.
“The thing is, Milton,” he said after a beat. “They, those things out there, can move wherever they want. Any direction, any book, any page. They don’t fall. They float.”
He took a deep breath. “Do you get it?”
Milton nodded.
“Of course you don’t get it,” his father said. “But you will. You’ll see.” He glanced toward the window. “Go ahead.”
Milton sat up, keeping his eyes on his father.
“Look!”
The boy turned to the window. There was a man in the yard. Near the back, underneath the dead pecan tree. Naked. No hair or genitals. Just skin—tight, smooth, and nearly blue in the moonlight. Not a man. Something different, the boy thought. A non-man. Under the tree, his body swayed like a corpse moved by the wind.
“What does he want, Milton? What the hell could he want?”
Milton looked back to his father and he could see now that his father did want an answer, but he had nothing.
“They follow me, Milton. They watch me. Like goddamn ghosts.”
Milton looked back to the yard and startled back. The Non-Man’s face was an inch from the window, staring in at them with unblinking black eyes, his mouth opened in a silent, screaming gasp.
5,476
DAYS
Chlorine and cologne
RICA WAS THIRTEEN years old when she first considered that what is could have been otherwise. When she was five, she hadn’t questioned her parents’ move from L.A. to Plano, a suburban community on the outskirts of Dallas. But as she entered her teens and her body became a pubescent battlefield of bumps and blood, she examined her life and imagined what might have been had her parents raised her by the Pacific Ocean, in the capital of the entertainment world, instead of an outpost on the plains of Texas, whose cultural highlights included Chili’s restaurants and a dozen suburban shopping malls.
As that summer had approached and Plano sank into a roasting, sticky suck, Rica found her changing body releasing sweat in ever-creative ways, her pores opening and closing like a chorus of suffocating guppies. She begged her parents to fly her to California to visit her cousin Cece.
The two weeks in Santa Monica were a heady introduction to her teen years—eyeliner experiments, late-night beach concerts, strawberry-banana wine coolers snuck from her aunt’s fridge. Cece dismissed Rica’s own modest, one-piece swimsuits and replaced them with low-cut bikinis. She instructed Rica on how to revel in the stares, how to meet a boy’s eyes with coy confidence, how to enjoy her expanding attributes.