The Apocalypse Reader (39 page)

"Welcome," Jule said. Why was she trusting them just because they looked interesting? It was the worst practice. I glared at them just to even things out.

The girl came up and made some hand signs, using them to say "We - trust - you - by - God - we - seek - we - feel - you." Then with her voice she said "Got lost."

"What your names?"

"Maria and Z."

"And where you come from?"

Z was standing with her now too. Watching like he got something useful out of everybody. He tossed his green dreads and laughed. "A sad childhood, like everyone." They were in.

JULE TOOK THEM in to the torture room. It was called the torture room because Calc practiced his drums in there. She gave them some scraps and the grand tour ... down the wide-open barriers, the brief mouse maze. Rooms unused, rooms we'd forgotten about. Some rooms devoted to nothing but trash, our own landfill we had to live with. She led them through a human-sized hole in the wall that they had to lift their legs up to get through and stopped just on the other side to point out a walled honeycomb of tiny glass cells making up a larger cabinet framed in light pink plastic like a toy box. Inside each cell was a different supply: a compass, a condom ... And then, through a cardboard tunnel and up the stair, turn right, you'd find the lab.

The lab ... blue science, makeshift medicine ... converted from a storage room into pink walls-whoever'd found it before us. Tools we didn't know the use for, parts saved from hospital Dumpsters and biohazard bins. A hammer like a bird's beak, stringy gauze like a spider web, malformed metals, shape and sharpness hinting at their use. Magnetic tubing coiling upward on a ternary coat rack. A kid's chemistry set, pretend solutions, surgical texts forming tables. A safety station had been set up next door, long abandoned. We'd already taken what we could use from it, but the place was uninhabitable, even by our standards.

I stood, idle notebook in my grasp, looking out on the station. Airplane trails showed through the window, heading up and down, and below me doors that were all French and shattered like breaking out of a mold. I imagined former tenants smashing through them in their escape. How much better it must feel to run outside to safety than in.

Calc sat on the floor below, arranging a few of his personal items. Matches, medical packaging, a surgeon's knife. It took awhile watching him to realize what he was preparing was a meal. Among historical newspapers turning into toilet paper, headlines illegible through slang. Food wrapping, half-used everything, garbage or what was becoming garbage. Light was reflected through dirt in the tile. Looked like it'd be so easy to clean it, but who was going to? He washed the knife in toothpaste, then set it back down on the floor.

"Calc, what's 286 divided by 13?" I asked.

He told me and I wrote it down. "Calories," I said. "What's the square root of pi minus 9?"

"Minus 7.2275461490945. Why?"

I smiled. "Just wanted to see if you could do it."

"Fuck you."

Jule was washing in the ocean. I could see her through the safe window. When she came in she sat down before us and said "My teeth hurt."

"Might be time to invest in a toothbrush," I told her.

"I do, it's not enough," she whined.

I motioned at her with the notebook. "It's all this sugar you've been picking up. We're not going to be going to any dentist. Stop with the sugar. We can't afford sugar."

"Sugar's all we have," she said.

I HAD AN idea it was evening when sun no longer hit the interior walls and the others had come in. Outside it was getting cold and inside it was getting colder. We gathered in the east stairwell. Z spoke biblically. Calc came in like sleepwalking and started a fire.

"You don't really think the world's going to end ..."

Outside people were living in houses, like normal. They were doing what they always did. In here shelves housed KFMs and KAPs, potassium iodide and medicine droppers. We were better prepared for the worst.

Jule was talking now. "It's paranoia."

Calc held fire on a stick. He said that it was happening already. That the kids would be the first to go, like miners' canaries. They'd see. Everything familiar lost to the big machine in tear gas crowds.

"Why are my eyes watering?" he asked, it seemed of Jule.

"Maybe you're crying."

Calc put the fire down. "Am I crying?" he asked no one, his voice only now beginning to tremble.

Before sleep I crept down to the cupboards, and only as I came up upon the empty shelves was I able to admit how hungry I was. I'd wanted the orange but Maria had gotten to it first. Garbage was empty and world was dark. There wouldn't be anything new till tomorrow. For some reason this felt much worse than it was, so that I sat down and just couldn't get up. Then I wished I could starve for weeks, grieved that this was not even the sort of tragedy that could be profound, that you got something out of suffering through. It was just a night.

IN THE MORNING I settle down into a nest of wires braided into dysfunction, on a floor sprinkled with shards of glass. Jule is walking around barefoot. I feel like I should tell her not to, but I know she won't listen to me. I tell her anyway. She doesn't listen. She curls up in the corner of the room and starts reading intently the nutrition information on one piece of trash after another. She's as good as asleep to us, so that Z and I are the only ones in the room.

"Puzzle's almost done," I say. "They just need to make a piece that will fit with something so twisted." Z's decoding a scrap of Styrofoam. I realize this is the first time I've spoken to him.

"Did you do that?" he says in distinct syllables, each one stressed as much as the other.

I look behind me to where he's looking, at a graffiti mural bursting open with metal flowers on a giant egg, cracks in the walls betraying its two dimensions. Why he should assume it was me, when there are others living here, and many more before us ...

"No," I say, turning back to him. "I'm not an artist."

"Ah," he sighs. "Me neither. But it's an important job. We need more beautiful pictures."

"Pictures? The world's about to end. We have more practical matters to worry about."

"What are your worries?" he asks, looking me up and down. I notice I haven't done anything all day.

"I'm not that worried," I say.

We both think of something for me to do.

"Maybe you should be an artist."

"No." He's looking for some explanation so I give him one. "Why strive for any great goal when we all might die soon anyway?"

"We all always might."

"Oh that's really some consolation," I tell him.

He's still decoding and smiling as though the speculations of this conversation couldn't interrupt any of his normal routines of action. "This stuff was invented by the dinosaurs. Their innovations getting dusty. When the old tech is finally set off ..." he says, then pauses so long I almost don't care what he's going to finish with. "... Kind of an anticlimax."

We'd been hearing the forecasts since before I'd been born. As a kid I'd hoped that when the world blew up it would be when I was doing homework, or about to give a speech in class. Now I wished for it more and more of the time.

"Goodnight," Calc said coming in, dragging a loose mattress in from the other room. He dropped it with a bounce on top of some clutter and went back into the other room for a moment.

As he left Jule got up without looking down, as if the two were hooked up remotely. She looked determined moving forward, paused to maneuver around me, and stepped barefoot on the glass. I cannot replicate the sound she made, but I can imitate it. It was something like "Aaaeeeerrgmmm- mmm," and she landed softly on the mattress Calc had moved there.

"Shit," Z and I said in unison, though his was more one of concern while mine was just shock.

But she didn't even pause, just made the sound as she kept walking, and then she was silent, trying to make us think nothing could get to her. And maybe nothing could.

I TRY To busy myself with cooking, but I can't get the fire started. The next day I take up interior decoration, but when I ask no one can tell anything's been changed. There must be a use for me here. Can't I do anything?

"Need help?" I'm asking Z while he works trying to build some machine I don't know the use for. I can tell this is going to turn out to be the kind of help that makes everything take much longer and the finished product not as good.

Instead I bring myself outside. I do the dishes in the sea and afterward go for a walk. At first just scaling the long government fence that surrounds our home. White picket in better times. Then once it ends I keep following where I think it would have gone. A straight line through other buildings-other objects that used to work, everything broken and impotent now. Nothing doing any good.

I come back in through the first room and Maria is in there. All she does is silently prepare, stacking crates of army paste and sewing protective costumes from material she goes out and gets during the days. I'm nonsensically comforted by the sound of the thread running through the crinkly fabric, to sleep almost.

I haven't seen Jule in a while. Actually a week, I think. The building isn't very big-I don't know where she could be.

Her voice was in my head, so it's what I expected to hear when Z came in and said, "Get the blood up from the reservoir."

I laughed at the contrast. "You alright there?" he asked.

"Yeah, but it doesn't sound like she is ..."

He had every right to be concerned. I'd been dreaming up, computergenerating ways I could finish myself before the end struck. But at that moment my preoccupation turned stale. I'd figured it out. It didn't make sense why I should have to feel good. It didn't matter to the world, didn't change reality.

And now I did hear Jule, crying out from the other room, panicked voices consoling her. She was telling us something about pain. She said she didn't trust them. That there was nothing they could do for her. Then for the first time since I'd been here, we were making a trip to the hospital.