The Apocalypse Reader (13 page)

I could just see it, though, because he's a lot like my own father, tottering after me, shaking me by the shoulders, saying, "Goddamn you, girl, why aren't you following in my footsteps?" My cousin and I have talked about how I'm not going to have any kids for my reasons and she's not going to have kids for her reasons. We look at each other and know we're the end of the line.

APOCALYPSE

THEY COULD STAY afloat for only so long before the deranged creatures picked them off. They were so thirsty or so hungry. They swirled in the raging wind, fire, and water. Their skin shriveled. Time had ended and yet passed. Parched, they watched the last particles of moisture rise and fade in the golden air above the orange earth. There have never been colors like this. They trudged on and on but the land was barren. Fungus rotted their limbs and bacteria new to the dying world cruised their organs. Germs, maggots, and death from virile viral microscopic life loomed in the near future. Buildings tumbled upon them. Flying debris severed them. Chasms opened wide and swallowed. They were crushed and strewn, and they exploded. Their brains burst from the noise. A spinning cow or lamp broke them. Their insides fell out. Their fingers crumbled. They were all half-dead anyway, until they died.

DINOSAUR

A DINOSAUR LAY under a rainbow in a white sunset on shining hills. The girl reached for the imaginary hand of the ghost. The ghost had been trailing her for states, holding his basket, ever since the apocalypse. In the basket, tiny ghosts of prairie dogs and butterflies, mongeese and baby foxes wobbled, nested, nuzzling in their contained afterlife. The vast exposed land, its lid lifted, its whole history layered under the grass, now history: girl, dinosaur, ghost, basket, teetering on the deserted road in the light air. The dinosaur's anchor-shaped nose brushed the grass tips at its knees. Plateaus of clouds seemed still. The hand of the ghost was not a hand, it was the memory of hands, or now, since the apocalypse, the idea that a hand could come. She missed her dog. Purple flowers massed and then spread thinly over the field. Yellow flowers made a wave near the road. She remembered how many people must have used to have been awakening each moment. With so little left after the silent blast that razed so much and left so much as well-too much to take in, to count, witness, know, hunt, cover, recall-she didn't know what to do with her still empty hand full as it was to be, if she could reach it, with that much ghost. The dinosaur looked heavy, the rainbow looked light, and the hills could have been covered in snow, or nothing, or something that had never existed before.

CAKE

SHE BAKED AN angel food cake for the dinner party, which means it's as white as possible in cake except golden on the outside and you have to cut it with a serrated knife. It's funny to eat because you can kind of tear it, unlike most cakes. It stretches a little. It's a little supernatural, like an angel.

I was watching her with her boyfriend because I admire them and am trying to make them an example in my life of good love being possible. Toward the end of the cake everyone was talking and a couple of people were seeing if they could eat the live edible flowers that she'd put on the cake for decoration. A fairy cake. She told a story about making the cake. There wasn't a lot left. Everyone was eating the ends of their pieces in different ways, and because of the stretchy texture there were more methods than usual, and no crumbs at all.

Really funny cake.

I tried to imagine making the cake, same as I often tried to imagine love. I would never make a cake. So it's down to say less than a quarter of the cake and the boyfriend reaches across the table-it's a big table that no one else would be able to reach across, he just has really long arms, and he takes the serrated knife but when he cuts at the cake he doesn't do the sawing action, he just presses down which defeats the point(s!) of the serrated knife. The cake squishes as he cuts it in half; it was only a piece of itself already, clinging to its imaginary axis, and now it's not even a wedge-it's pushed down like you can push down the nose on your face-and then he takes his piece with his hands and I watch the last piece of cake to see if it'll spring back up but it doesn't, its just squished on one side like someone stepped on it.

But here's what I don't understand, is how all through it she's just chatting with the dinner guests and it's like he's done nothing at all. She's not looking at him like, "You squished the cake!" and she's not looking at him like, "He loves the cake so much he couldn't help himself," and he doesn't seem to be thinking, "Only I can squish the cake!" Or is he?

I never know how to read people.

But here's what else: watching the round cake disappear, watching the people trying to make the most of their pieces, people coveting the cake on one hand and reminding themselves on the other that this will not be the last cake. But will it be the last? I look at their love and I feel like this could be the very last piece of it on earth, and just
look
at it.

FEELINGS

I SMOOTHED THE described sheet over the described person I'd loved before the apocalypse. The rich feelings welled from the page emotionally. Under the blanket, the person I loved remained. We used to mean so much.

THREAT

FOR YEARS, A telephone pole leaned, a low fear at the back of the neighborhood. That evening he went home and poured several very even trays of ice cubes. I was dressed for the apocalypse. I was depressed for the apocalypse. I carried a bundle of dust like a nest. My heart beat in its fleshy pocket. Worms had tried to make it across our porch over night and now they lay like something shredded, like shredded bark, but deader. My brother, looking ashen, kept waiting for the telephone. I missed out on all the gossip. An iris wilted into a claw. A rowboat rocked in our vast yard. New birds gathered like, I don't know, a lack of entropy?

DOLL

Now SHE STEPS into the street of her town that has been cleaned by a supernatural oven. The chemical stench is left. The sky is a soft green. Behind the haze the sun hums, fuzzed like a moldy fruit. She is not quite sure where her limbs are in relation to her body. Something has happened to the air and given it a texture of fog. It is either hard to see through or her eyes are changed or there is a funny color or blur to everything and she has objects mixed up with the air. Across the street is the bank, with its mirrored exterior, and there's something on the sidewalk in front of it. What is the logic of this apocalypse? What is eradicated and what is left or half-left, zombie-like, behind? Is what's left behind a code?

Zombies are codes. They are codes of warning. They are the form of our preapocalyptic foolishness; our sort-of-dumb-sort-of-evil existence that led to this, which is our fault even if it turns out the final threat was the one from outer space.

What she finds on the sidewalk will help us know. As she approaches the object she discovers that it could be one of two things: it could be a doll, or it could be a baby. If this is a doll, she thinks, then this is a sentimental apocalypse.

She can see herself kneeling at the doll, touching its cold fingers, raising her eyes as if she is being witnessed, meeting her own eyes in the mirrored bank wall. This could make the television right after all.

Luckily, when she arrives, it's not, and when she touches its fingers the fingers are like rubber. Then when she raises her eyes she is startled to find she sees eyes that are not her own; they are the eyes of a ghost who is standing in the street behind her. When she turns she cannot see the ghost, but back in the mirror, there the ghost is. The ghost doesn't really look at her. The ghost only sort of has eyes. The ghost is a little bit clothed, a little cloaked. The ghost is hard to see. It's heavier than vapor; more held together than dust, more specifically formed than constellation, and it seems, she decides, to be a male ghost. She gazes across the baby at the ghost. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, she thinks. It's the three of us left to redeem civilization.

JULY FOURTH

GOT THERE AND the ground was covered in bodies. Lay down with everybody and looked at the sky, grinning and bracing for the explosions.

THE OTHER WAY AROUND

WE CAME AT last to the wackily fantastic land of opposites. We'd read this one in childhood. Candy tasted terrible and we all wanted liver with onions. Water got us drunk and we could only breathe when we were under it. Right was wrong and so we were very popular. Our mouths swapped spots with our assholes. Our belly buttons turned outward, (except for George's) and our vaginas, well, you had to be there. The birds under our feet annoyed us with their philosophies. It was the end of all we'd known, and our hopes sank.

MINIONS

THE MINIONS LINED their sneakers along the wall and then made two lines, like teams at the end of a game, and each by each held hands and touched foreheads. They were past words. They'd been hollering and leafleting for months. They'd been psyching themselves up and out for years. They lay in their cots like orphans. Hands to hearts, eyes to the black air, the rafters of the bunker invisible in the dark, a sky without stars, everything celestial sprinkling the insides of their domed minds. They waited for the world to disintegrate. It would disintegrate before next light and they waited for a red and gold explosion to light the universe in one final burst. They listened to night tick through the wooden walls. It could be now, or now, or now. Someone held back a sneeze and then sneezed. They'd abandoned their timepieces in the river that evening at dusk, but at two A.M. a boy named Jonathan got up from his cot, cracked open the door, put his penis out and peed. Then he went back to his cot. One woman, a secret doubter, had taken a bottle of pills before she lay down to wait and died with the click the boy made closing the door.

By morning, there have been three more suicides and two of the leaders have disappeared into the woods. One leader is weeping under a tree, fallen leaves in his fists. One leader is running, running, running, hoping he will die midstep, trying to feel the moment within each step when he is sure both feet are off the ground because he feels that if he can prolong that beat he will be flying, he will be without his body finally, he will be light, light air, light light. In the hut one minion has punched another in the chest. One is cross-legged on her cot, watching. She's vacant or else she's fuming. Three have closed themselves in the kitchen and begun to screw. Two are quietly packing their knapsacks, stuffing them as full as they can with any useful items the group had forgotten or not bothered to purge: a woolen lap blanket, a can-opener, a tin of olives, a box of matches, a comb, a tube of lip balm. By two o'clock in the afternoon the bunker is empty except for a few dead bodies and one man, badly beaten, who is clinging to his cot like it's a raft, who is gasping for breath and calling "Help! Help!"

MIRROR

Two DAYS SINCE the apocalypse and freckles rise in the skin around my mouth. I am very close to my face, looking. Green funnels of what were pastures whirl and spit in the background. The last bits of cities are like comets and pass behind my head as if I am shooting myself repeatedly, as if I shoot myself and the fireballs go in one ear and out the other. It's riveting. It's hypnotic. My face contains more colors than are left in the universe. I watched Miranda's teeth panic and run away. I watched Amber buckle. Now, in the mirror, there is no comparison. It's me, and everything, and that's all.

WITCHES

THREE GIRLS, MAYBE eight each, stand with sticks at a pothole of water. They're leaning, or stirring. It's hard to tell, because they're frozen, although it's summer. They're looking into the water together, with their sticks. Dim oils sketch the surface like lines from skating. One girl, the one in the middle, from this angle, anyway, has a piece of grass between her teeth, and she's grimacing. The end of the grass has fluffy seeds, and normally, it'd be bobbing. There's breeze, yet all is still. In this apocalypse, the air, it seems, can move, though nothing in it can. Where do you draw the line? Even seeds that could drift like smoke stick. There's no logic in it. Especially with pages accumulating, time continuing to pass. The girl on the supposed left is turning to dust as we speak, but invisibly, like a figure made of icing going stale. Touch her and pool.

I know what they were doing. The girls were playing "three witches." They were making magic. They were poking their stew. They kept meaning to get on with their game. They'd planned to capture someone, and they'd planned to turn a bunch of things into other things. But after a while the entire plot had been taken over by recipes for potions. Then, of all things, this is what happened.

THE LAST MAN

Adam Nemett

EVEN HITLER WAS on meth. I saw it on the History Channel. Under the green light of the German morning, Hitler's personal physician-Dr. Theo Morell-would enter his bedroom to administer charisma intravenously: a cocktail injection of methamphetamines and morphine, plus cocaine eyedrops. Hitler never asked what was in the needle and Theo never offered the secret. He simply upped the dosage until Adolf succumbed to something like Parkinson's, something like addiction, and drowned in his own sea.