Let's Call It a Doomsday

by Katie Henry

  “Hannah.” She doesn’t look over. “Hey. Hannah.”

  She blinks, then rubs at her eye with one fist. “Yeah?”

  “Why are we here?”

  “On Earth? You’d have a better answer for that than me.”

  “Why are we on this hill?”

  “This is the place.”

  “What place?”

  “The place where it’s going to happen. The place where we’ll be when it does.”

  “The end of the world?” I ask, and Hannah nods. This isn’t good. It’s uncovered. There’s no shelter at all. This might be the worst place to ride out an apocalyptic blizzard. “How do you know?”

  “Breathe in,” she orders, and I do. “What’s it smell like?”

  Clean, sharp air. Dirt. Urban wilderness. “Lots of things.”

  “Eucalyptus.”

  You can’t really smell it up here, but she’s right, we passed through a eucalyptus grove as we climbed.

  “There’s eucalyptus all over,” I remind her. “In Tilden. At Lake Anza. Down by campus. How do you know it’s here?”

  “I just do.”

  “You’ve been here before,” I say, and it isn’t a question.

  “We used to come every Saturday,” she says, brushing her hair out of her eyes. “Early in the morning, all four of us.”

  Four? I think, but then remember. Hannah has a brother. She told me on our first walk together, but never mentioned him again. I guess they aren’t close.

  “It was Dad’s idea,” she continues. “I think he missed going to synagogue. Or, not that exactly, he was pretty done with religion, and my mom is, like, a third-generation atheist, but I think he missed that weekly thing, you know? One day of real rest.”

  There are so many religions, so many denominations to choose from. I’d never really considered you could have one no one else shared. A church without walls. A religion without authorities. A faith for you alone.

  “He made his own church?” I ask.

  “It wasn’t church,” she says, “and it wasn’t just his. It was all of ours.” She stares out onto the water. “My brother called it ‘the place where the light comes in.’” She smiles. Then hesitates. Then speaks. “Danny called it that because he loved watching the sun get higher and higher in the sky. My mom told him he’d fry his retinas.”

  “Danny,” I repeat, and that’s not a question, either. I know what I heard. “You said—Danny.”

  She looks down at her lap. “That’s my brother’s name. Daniel Jacob Marks.”

  Daniel like Dan, the street preacher we’ve never been able to find. Danny, like Lydia called him. D, J, M, like the bolded first letters of the note stuffed into Hannah’s backpack. A name, a name she’s been so careful never to mention.

  “Hannah,” I ask, “where’s your brother?”

  She’s quiet, until the sound of an engine breaks the silence. I look out to my right, where a car is climbing a paved road down below. Hannah looks too.

  “It would be cool to live up here, don’t you think?” she says lightly. Too lightly. “There’s even a house right up the path. They rent it out for weddings and things.” She points up the steep dirt path, but I don’t see any house.

  “Where is Danny?” I repeat.

  She swallows. “Around.”

  “That’s not much of an answer.”

  “It’s the only one I have!” she snaps, and I shrink back at the sudden fierceness.

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “I’m not avoiding the question,” she says. “I’m not in denial. He’s not dead, he’s not away, he’s not even missing, really. He’s somewhere close by. I just don’t know where.”

  Oh. Oh no.

  “It started in his freshman year at Cal,” she says, and then her voice hitches.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” I say.

  “I want to,” she says. “More than anyone else, I think you’ll understand.”

  I know she’s about to tell me something terrible, something painful, but still, my heart swells.

  “It happened in his freshman year at Cal,” she begins again. “Or maybe it started earlier than that, because he was always—” She hesitates. “I don’t know. Sensitive. Secretive. Maybe there were always things that hurt him. Things he couldn’t tell us.

  “The fall started off okay. I don’t remember, it’s not like I was paying attention to that, but my parents say it started off okay. Even when he was weirdly quiet or getting irritated about the smallest stuff, they thought he was just nervous about college. And his first semester, he actually seemed to like it. He was taking this History of Mysticism course he was in love with, he thought he might major in comparative religion.” She smiles, just a little, at the memory. “He bought, like, twelve books that weren’t even required, which pissed my parents off because that academic stuff’s expensive and he didn’t even use his student discount.”

  Those must be the textbooks Paloma saw, after Hannah purged her room. They must have belonged to Danny—Prophet Dan, who knows so much about religion and mysticism and visions. Hannah lied, but not all the way. She only lied as much as she had to.

  “He’d come over for dinner every week,” she continues. “At first. And it was like—every dinner, something new was . . . off.”

  “Off?”

  “Like he’d be so nervous, even though it was only us. The next week, he’d refuse to eat what my dad made and wouldn’t say why. Then he left this cryptic, scary voicemail on the home phone, saying he ‘knew the truth about our family,’ and my parents got really worried. They told him something was wrong, he needed help. They asked him to see a doctor, a therapist, someone. Then they begged him. He wouldn’t go. He started talking to me. Only me. He told me our parents weren’t really our parents. Or, no, I guess they were, but they were evil and going to hurt us both.”

  “Oh my gosh, Hannah.”

  “It was awful. Because he really believed it. He wasn’t telling me to be mean, he was telling me because he was terrified.”

  “But how could he even think that?”

  She bites her lip. “Because the human brain is complicated.”

  I do know that.

  “So he’s . . . schizophrenic? Or something else?”

  She shakes her head. “He’s never been diagnosed with anything.”

  “I mean, that sounds like—”

  She shakes her head harder. “Bad idea.”

  “What is?”

  “Diagnosing someone you don’t know.”

  “Why didn’t he get diagnosed by a doctor?”

  “I told you, he wouldn’t go.”

  “They can force people. Commit them.”

  “Would you like that?” she says, on a razor’s edge. “If someone did that to you?”

  “No,” I admit. “But I’m not . . . sick. Not that sick.”

  “You could be,” she says. “Five years from now. Ten. Tomorrow.”

  The words stick in me like needles. Like knives. I turn away from her.

  “Sorry,” Hannah says, and touches my hand. “I only meant, anyone could be.”

  Is that true? Are we all just one illness, one crisis away from losing control over our own lives?

  “It was his whole life, this fear. It consumed him.” Hannah pauses with the weight of that word. Consumed. It means—or meant, in the original Latin—something destroyed. Something broken down into parts that can’t ever be rejoined.

  “My parents threatened to withhold tuition if he didn’t see someone. Not that it mattered. He stopped going to class. Around spring break, he left his dorm room in tatters and his roommate threatening to sue for pain and suffering. He smashed his cell phone and mailed me the pieces with a note saying I should destroy mine, too, so I couldn’t be tracked. At first, he slept on friend’s couches, we think. But eventually, he’d scare them, and they’d call us, and he’d leave. In April, we didn’t hear a single word.

  “I was coming back from Paloma’s house, and
it was dark,” Hannah says. “This car pulls up alongside me. I didn’t recognize it, so I kept walking. And it kept following me, and the driver rolled down the window. I’m thinking, great, can’t wait for this jerk to start catcalling me or asking if I want a ride, but then he said my name.”

  “It was Danny?”

  “I didn’t recognize him, at first. I’d never seen him with a beard. And I said, where the fuck have you been, essentially, and he said, get in the car, essentially.”

  “Did you?”

  “I thought—I don’t know what I thought. I hoped he’d just been soul-searching, or something, gone on some road trip to clear his head. So, yeah, I got in the car.”

  Hannah pulls her hair back, twisting it into a ponytail with so much force it must hurt. I’m almost afraid to ask, but if I don’t, she might not go on.

  “And when you got in the car?” I prompt her.

  “We drove around. We circled. Left turn after left turn.”

  That’s to make sure no one’s following you. If you still see them after four left turns, you’re being tailed. I wonder if Hannah knows that.

  “He was talking the whole time, about our parents, how I was in danger. And some stuff about UC Berkeley and an underground cult, I think, I’m not sure. He talked fast.” She pulls her ponytail even tighter. “He always talked fast. Like if he didn’t get it out, he’d explode. That was the weirdest part. Other than what he was saying—and the beard—it was still Danny. He was all there. There was just something . . . else there, too.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “His delusion, I guess. That horrible, unshakeable, real thing. This was—” She swallows. “This is real to him. As real as this bench or that tree or . . .”

  Or your dreams, Hannah? I think.

  Hannah clears her throat. “So he was saying all this stuff, and I was telling him he was wrong, that he’d lost it. I’m not even being nice at this point. It’s been so many months of my mom calling his RA, calling his friends, calling the police. My dad hasn’t smiled since February, I haven’t slept through the night in at least that long, and I’m so angry at him even though I know it isn’t his fault.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, either.”

  “I yelled at him. I called him crazy. Delusional. And other things. That part was my fault.”

  I wince, because that does hurt a person. “You were under so much stress.”

  “It broke his heart. I could tell. He said he was going out of town, somewhere Mom and Dad couldn’t track him or send their ‘people’ after him. He said I had to come, that I’d never be safe here. He couldn’t leave me alone here.”

  “You said no.”

  “Over and over until I was hoarse. Danny knew he was scaring me, and I could tell that broke his heart even more. We were still driving around, circle after circle, until finally he said”—she gulps—“that it was time to go. That we had to go. That I’d understand someday.”

  She’s breathing fast now, and when I put my hand on her arm, I can feel her heartbeat pounding under the skin. Like mine, when I’m panicking. But she’s not panicking. She’s reliving.

  “I did understand. I understood that I was not going back home tonight, not if he could help it. I understood that he was desperate. I understood that I had to make a choice, right now, or I might not be able to make one for a while. So I reach over—” She uncurls her arm into the empty air next to her. “And then I open the car door—” Her hand swings wide. “And then—”

  “Then?”

  “I jumped.”

  There’s no air in my lungs. “You jumped?”

  She nods.

  “Out of a moving car?”

  She nods again.

  “Were you okay?” I ask, like an absolute child. Of course she was, or she’d still be in the hospital. Of course she wasn’t, because she jumped out of a moving car.

  “The falling was okay,” she starts. “It didn’t feel like anything. The falling felt safe. And I thought maybe I’d fall forever but then I hit the ground and at first you don’t feel it, you know?”

  I don’t know. I don’t know anything.

  “You’re just staring at the road. When you stand up, your legs are weak, because you landed on them, and your hands are wet, because you landed on them, too. Your palms are all blood and dirt and asphalt and so are your knees but you don’t know that yet, you can’t see them. And for a second, you can’t even remember how you got there, in the road. But then you hear the car door shut and footsteps and you don’t really remember even then but you run anyway.”

  “You ran after that?” I interrupt. “All scraped up?”

  She shrugs. “Adrenaline is a hell of a drug.”

  “Hannah, I’m so sorry, I’m so—I don’t know what to say.”

  “My dad didn’t know what to say, either, when I called and he picked me up from the gas station. It was like he wasn’t sure if he should be raging or sobbing.” She laughs, and it sounds forced. “I was sobbing, that’s the one I chose. After the adrenaline wore off and my whole body just . . . burned.”

  I wonder if it’s anything like what I feel when I panic. I try to imagine it, but I can’t. I’m so lucky I can’t.

  “You’re so lucky you’re safe,” I tell Hannah.

  “Safe?”

  “Who knows what he could have done.”

  Her eyes flash. “He’d never hurt me.”

  “He made you jump out of a car!”

  “No one made me do anything,” she says, clipping her words off. “I jumped because I had to.”

  “You could have called the cops,” I say. “If you’d had a phone.”

  “I had a phone then,” she says. “But I kind of wanted my brother alive.”

  “What?”

  “Sometimes, when the cops try to deal with someone living in a different reality, they get scared. Sometimes, when a person isn’t together enough to realize they should be scared of the cops, bad things happen. Sometimes, people get shot.”

  My parents always told me to find a police officer if I was lost, or hurt, or scared. That they’d help me. I can’t imagine how scary it must be to live in fear of the people who are supposed to help you. I’m lucky, unfairly lucky, to be unable to imagine.

  “When he drove off—that’s the last time I saw him. Mostly.”

  Mostly? I’m about to ask what she means by that, when she runs a hand along the red bracelet on her wrist. The one she found in my mailbox. And then it all clicks. The trips to People’s Park. The packages tightly wrapped and handed over to Chris and Frank Zappa, the quiet conversations with the Street Spirit sellers and the stuffed fish in her tree. The uneasy sensation I have, sometimes, when I’m with Hannah. The feeling that we’re being watched.

  And then, Hannah takes a breath and tells me what I already know.

  “Prophet Dan doesn’t really exist,” she says. “We’ve been looking for my brother.”

  “Oh,” I breathe out. “Hannah . . .”

  “You can understand,” she says, almost as an afterthought, “why I’d want to find him. Now. Before the world ended.”

  I try to imagine Em sick, lost, in danger. It nearly rips my ventricles apart, just the imagining. Yes. I can understand.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask. “You could have told me who were we really looking for.”

  She shakes her head. “You didn’t know me, you didn’t believe in my dreams, yet. If I’d told about Danny right then, you would have thought . . .” She swallows, hard. “You would have thought I was like him.”

  It’s probably true. I hate that it’s probably true. “No, I wouldn’t—”

  “Of course you would have.” She twists the sleeve of her hoodie. “Sometimes even I think it.”

  “You never needed someone else to interpret the dreams,” I say. “Did you?”

  “I might have figured out the place on my own, with the eucalyptus, but I wouldn’t have figured out the date. Even though it was so o
bvious.”

  “Because it’s the solstice?”

  “Because it’s his birthday.”

  I don’t have to ask whose birthday she means.

  “You . . .” I pause, because I know she’s just told me something huge, but why did she wait so long? “You lied to me, though. About everything.”

  If Hannah could lie about this, she could lie about other things.

  She looks down at her lap. “I know. I’m sorry. I understand if . . . you don’t feel like you can trust me.”

  Can I? Do I? I must, a little bit, because something in the back of my brain is already explaining this away, twisting it into something easier to swallow. Hannah lied, but because she had to. Hannah lied, but it’s not like I haven’t done that. Tal said I’m completely—what was it? Snowed. Like Hannah’s words are relentless flurries, and they’ve buried me. Like she’s a flesh-and-blood blizzard.

  If Hannah could lie about this, she could lie about everything.

  That’s true. It’s logical. It makes sense from the outside looking in, from a distance.

  “But I swear, I didn’t lie about seeing you in the dreams. I do need you.” Hannah looks up and meets my eyes. She smiles. “I didn’t know why, but I knew I needed you.”

  I’m not looking in, I’m not at a distance, I’m an inch away from Hannah, wrapped inside the center of her story. And if I shouldn’t still trust her, after what she’s said . . . well, fine. But I do. If I shouldn’t still believe her, fine, but I do.

  “I need you to help me find him,” Hannah says. “Before . . .”

  This isn’t just a doomsday. It’s a deadline. Hannah and I can survive an apocalypse, and I’m making sure my family can, too, but a person living in parks doesn’t stand a chance.

  “We’ll find him,” I promise. “We’ll make sure he’s safe before anything happens. He’s still in Berkeley, isn’t he?”

  “He hasn’t tried anything. Like with the car. But I think he stuck around to make sure I’m—” She looks at me. “I know how this sounds. But Danny was trying to save me. The wrong way, for the wrong reasons, but he was trying to save me.”

  “Maybe that’s why he hasn’t tried to, again. After you jumped out of the car.”