The End of the End of Everything Page 2

  Wyndham tore the mailing tape off and dropped it on the floor. He opened the box. Inside, wrapped safely in three layers of bubble wrap, he found a porcelain statue of Elvis Presley.

  Elvis Presley, the King of Rock ‘N’ Roll, died August 16, 1977, while sitting on the toilet. An autopsy revealed that he had ingested an impressive cocktail of prescription drugs—including codeine, ethinimate, methaqualone, and various barbiturates. Doctors also found trace elements of Valium, Demerol, and other pharmaceuticals in his veins.

  For a time, Wyndham comforted himself with the illusion that the end of the world had been a local phenomenon. He sat in his truck outside the Home Shopping Network Lady’s house and awaited rescue—the sound of sirens or approaching choppers, whatever. He fell asleep cradling the porcelain statue of Elvis. He woke up at dawn, stiff from sleeping in the truck, to find a stray dog nosing around outside.

  Clearly rescue would not be forthcoming.

  Wyndham chased off the dog and placed Elvis gently on the sidewalk. Then he drove off, heading out of the city. Periodically, he stopped, each time confirming what he had already known the minute he touched his dead wife’s face: the end of the world was upon him. He found nothing but non-functioning telephones, non-functioning televisions, and non-functioning people. Along the way he listened to a lot of non-functioning radio stations.

  You, like Wyndham, may be curious about the catastrophe that has befallen everyone in the world around him. You may even be wondering why Wyndham has survived.

  End-of-the-world tales typically make a big deal about such things, but Wyndham’s curiosity will never be satisfied. Unfortunately, neither will yours.

  Shit happens.

  It’s the end of the world after all.

  The dinosaurs never discovered what caused their extinction, either.

  At this writing, however, most scientists agree that the dinosaurs met their fate when an asteroid nine miles wide plowed into the Earth just south of the Yucatan Peninsula, triggering gigantic tsunamis, hurricane-force winds, worldwide forest fires, and a flurry of volcanic activity. The crater is still there—it’s 120 miles wide and more than a mile deep—but the dinosaurs, along with 75% of the other species then alive, are gone. Many of them died in the impact, vaporized in the explosion. Those that survived the initial cataclysm would have perished soon after as acid rain poisoned the world’s water and dust obscured the sun, plunging the planet into a years-long winter.

  For what it’s worth, this impact was merely the most dramatic in a long series of mass extinctions; they occur in the fossil record at roughly 30 million-year intervals. Some scientists have linked these intervals to the solar system’s periodic journey through the galactic plane, which dislodges millions of comets from the Oort cloud beyond Pluto, raining them down on Earth. This theory, still contested, is called the Shiva Hypothesis in honor of the Hindu god of destruction.

  The inhabitants of Lisbon would have appreciated the allusion on November 1, 1755, when the city was struck by an earthquake measuring 8.5 on the Richter Scale. The tremor leveled more than 12,000 homes and ignited a fire that burned for six days.

  More than 60,000 people perished.

  This event inspired Voltaire to write Candide, in which Dr. Pangloss advises us that this is the best of all possible worlds.

  Wyndham could have filled the gas tank in his truck. There were gas stations at just about every exit along the highway, and they seemed to be functioning well enough. He didn’t bother, though.

  When the truck ran out of gas, he just pulled to the side of the road, hopped down, and struck off across the fields. When it started getting dark—this was before he had launched himself on the study of just how it is night falls—he took shelter in the nearest house.

  It was a nice place, a two-story brick house set well back from the country road he was by then walking on. It had some big trees in the front yard. In the back, a shaded lawn sloped down to the kind of woods you see in movies, but not often in real life: enormous, old trees with generous, leaf-carpeted avenues. It was the kind of place his wife would have loved, and he regretted having to break a window to get inside. But there it was: it was the end of the world and he had to have a place to sleep. What else could he do?

  Wyndham hadn’t planned to stay there, but when he woke up the next morning he couldn’t think of anywhere to go. He found two non-functional old people in one upstairs bedroom and he tried to do for them what he had not been able to do for his wife and daughter: using a spade from the garage, he started digging a grave in the front yard. After an hour or so, his hands began to blister and crack. His muscles—soft from sitting behind the wheel of a UPS truck for all those years—rebelled.

  He rested for a while, and then he loaded the old people into the car he found parked in the garage—a slate-blue Volvo station wagon with 37,312 miles on the odometer. He drove them a mile or two down the road, pulled over, and laid them out, side-by-side in a grove of beech trees. He tried to say some words over them before he left—his wife would have wanted him to—but he couldn’t think of anything appropriate so he finally gave it up and went back to the house.

  It wouldn’t have made much difference: though Wyndham didn’t know it, the old people were lapsed Jews. According to the faith Wyndham shared with his wife, they were doomed to burn in hell for all eternity anyway. Both of them were first-generation immigrants; most of their families had already been burned up in ovens at Dachau and Buchenwald.

  Burning wouldn’t have been anything new for them.

  Speaking of fires, the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory in New York City burned on March 25, 1911. One hundred and forty-six people died. Many of them might have survived, but the factory’s owners had locked the exits to prevent theft.

  Rome burned, too. It is said that Nero fiddled.

  Back at the house, Wyndham washed up and made himself a drink from the liquor cabinet he found in the kitchen. He’d never been much of a drinker before the world ended, but he didn’t see any reason not to give it a try now. His experiment proved such a success that he began sitting out on the porch nights, drinking gin and watching the sky. One night he thought he saw a plane, lights blinking as it arced high overhead. Later, sober, he concluded that it must have been a satellite, still whipping around the planet, beaming down telemetry to empty listening stations and abandoned command posts.

  A day or two later the power went out. And a few days after that, Wyndham ran out of liquor. Using the Volvo, he set off in search of a town. Characters in end-of-the-world stories commonly drive vehicles of two types: the jaded sophisticates tend to drive souped-up sports cars, often racing them along the Australian coastline because what else do they have to live for; everyone else drives rugged SUVs. Since the 1991 Persian Gulf War—in which some 23,000 people died, most of them Iraqi conscripts killed by American smart bombs—military-style Humvees have been especially coveted. Wyndham, however, found the Volvo entirely adequate to his needs.

  No one shot at him.

  He was not assaulted by a roving pack of feral dogs.

  He found a town after only fifteen minutes on the road. He didn’t see any evidence of looting. Everybody was too dead to loot; that’s the way it is at the end of the world.

  On the way, Wyndham passed a sporting goods store where he did not stop to stock up on weapons or survival equipment. He passed numerous abandoned vehicles, but he did not stop to siphon off some gas. He did stop at the liquor store, where he smashed a window with a rock and helped himself to several cases of gin, whiskey, and vodka. He also stopped at the grocery store, where he found the reeking bodies of the night crew sprawled out beside carts of supplies that would never make it onto the shelves. Holding a handkerchief over his nose, Wyndham loaded up on tonic water and a variety of other mixers. He also got some canned goods, though he didn’t feel any imperative to stock up beyond his immediate needs. He ignored the bottled water.

  In the book section, he did pick up a bartender’s
guide.

  Some end-of-the-world stories present us with two post-apocalypse survivors, one male and one female. These two survivors take it upon themselves to Re-Populate the Earth, part of their larger effort to Re-Establish Western Civilization without the Bad Old Ways. Their names are always artfully withheld until the end of the story, at which point they are invariably revealed to be Adam and Eve.

  The truth is, almost all end-of-the-world stories are at some level Adam-and-Eve stories. That may be why they enjoy such popularity. In the interests of total disclosure, I will admit that in fallow periods of my own sexual life—and, alas, these periods have been more frequent than I’d care to admit—I’ve often found Adam-and-Eve post-holocaust fantasies strangely comforting. Being the only man alive significantly reduces the potential for rejection in my view. And it cuts performance anxiety practically to nothing.

  There’s a woman in this story, too.

  Don’t get your hopes up.

  By this time, Wyndham has been living in the brick house for almost two weeks. He sleeps in the old couple’s bedroom, and he sleeps pretty well, but maybe that’s the gin. Some mornings he wakes up disoriented, wondering where his wife is and how he came to be in a strange place. Other mornings he wakes up feeling like he dreamed everything else and this has always been his bedroom.

  One day, though, he wakes up early, to gray pre-dawn light. Someone is moving around downstairs. Wyndham’s curious, but he’s not afraid. He doesn’t wish he’d stopped at the sporting goods store and gotten a gun. Wyndham has never shot a gun in his life. If he did shoot someone—even a post-apocalyptic punk with cannibalism on his mind—he’d probably have a breakdown.

  Wyndham doesn’t try to disguise his presence as he goes downstairs. There’s a woman in the living room. She’s not bad looking, this woman—blonde in a washed-out kind of way, trim, and young, twenty-five, thirty at the most. She doesn’t look extremely clean, and she doesn’t smell much better, but hygiene hasn’t been uppermost on Wyndham’s mind lately, either. Who is he to judge?

  “I was looking for a place to sleep,” the woman says.

  “There’s a spare bedroom upstairs,” Wyndham tells her.

  The next morning—it’s really almost noon, but Wyndham has gotten into the habit of sleeping late—they eat breakfast together: a Pop Tart for the woman, a bowl of dry Cheerios for Wyndham.

  They compare notes, but we don’t need to get into that. It’s the end of the world and the woman doesn’t know how it happened any more than Wyndham does or you do or anybody ever does. She does most of the talking, though. Wyndham’s never been much of a talker, even at the best of times.

  He doesn’t ask her to stay. He doesn’t ask her to leave.

  He doesn’t ask her much of anything.

  That’s how it goes all day.

  Sometimes the whole sex thing causes the end of the world.

  In fact, if you’ll permit me to reference Adam and Eve just one more time, sex and death have been connected to the end of the world ever since—well, the beginning of the world. Eve, despite warnings to the contrary, eats of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and realizes she’s naked—that is, a sexual being. Then she introduces Adam to the idea by giving him a bite of the fruit.

  God punishes Adam and Eve for their transgression by kicking them out of Paradise and introducing death into the world. And there you have it: the first apocalypse, eros and thanatos all tied up in one neat little bundle, and it’s all Eve’s fault.

  No wonder feminists don’t like that story. It’s a pretty corrosive view of female sexuality when you think about it.

  Coincidentally, perhaps, one of my favorite end-of-the-world stories involves some astronauts who fall into a time warp; when they get out they learn that all the men are dead. The women have done pretty well for themselves in the meantime. They no longer need men to reproduce and they’ve set up a society that seems to work okay without men—better in fact than our messy two-sex societies ever have.

  But do the men stay out of it?

  They do not. They’re men, after all, and they’re driven by their need for sexual dominance. It’s genetically encoded so to speak, and it’s not long before they’re trying to turn this Eden into another fallen world. It’s sex that does it, violent male sex—rape, actually. In other words, sex that’s more about the violence than the sex.

  And certainly nothing to do with love.

  Which, when you think about it, is a pretty corrosive view of male sexuality.

  The more things change the more they stay the same, I guess.

  Wyndham, though.

  Wyndham heads out on the porch around three. He’s got some tonic. He’s got some gin. It’s what he does now. He doesn’t know where the woman is, doesn’t have strong feelings on the issue either way.

  He’s been sitting there for hours when she joins him. Wyndham doesn’t know what time it is, but the air has that hazy underwater quality that comes around twilight. Darkness is starting to pool under the trees, the crickets are tuning up, and it’s so peaceful that for a moment Wyndham can almost forget that it’s the end of the world.

  Then the screen door claps shut behind the woman. Wyndham can tell right away that she’s done something to herself, though he couldn’t tell you for sure what it is: that magic women do, he guesses. His wife used to do it, too. She always looked good to him, but sometimes she looked just flat-out amazing. Some powder, a little blush. Lipstick. You know.

  And he appreciates the effort. He does. He’s flattered even. She’s an attractive woman. Intelligent, too.

  The truth is, though, he’s just not interested.

  She sits beside him, and all the time she’s talking. And though she doesn’t say it in so many words, what she’s talking about is Re-Populating the World and Re-Establishing Western Civilization. She’s talking about Duty. She’s talking about it because that’s what you’re supposed to talk about at times like this. But underneath that is sex. And underneath that, way down, is loneliness—and he has some sympathy for that, Wyndham does. After a while, she touches Wyndham, but he’s got nothing. He might as well be dead down there.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she says.

  Wyndham doesn’t know how to answer her. He doesn’t know how to tell her that the end of the world isn’t about any of that stuff. The end of the world is about something else, he doesn’t have a word for it.

  So, anyway, Wyndham’s wife.

  She has another book on her nightstand, too. She doesn’t read it every night, only on Sundays. But the week before the end of the world the story she was reading was the story of Job.

  You know the story, right?

  It goes like this: God and Satan—the Adversary, anyway; that’s probably the better translation—make a wager. They want to see just how much shit God’s most faithful servant will eat before he renounces his faith. The servant’s name is Job. So they make the wager, and God starts feeding Job shit. Takes his riches, takes his cattle, takes his health. Deprives him of his friends. On and on. Finally—and this is the part that always got to Wyndham—God takes Job’s children.

  Let me clarify: in this context “takes” should be read as “kills.”

  You with me on this? Like Krakatoa, a volcanic island that used to exist between Java and Sumatra. On August 27, 1883, Krakatoa exploded, spewing ash 50 miles into the sky and vomiting up five cubic miles of rock. The concussion was heard 3000 miles away. It created tsunamis towering 120 feet in the air. Imagine all that water crashing down on the flimsy villages that lined the shores of Java and Sumatra.

  Thirty thousand people died.

  Every single one of them had a name.

  Job’s kids. Dead. Just like 30,000 nameless Javanese.

  As for Job? He keeps shoveling down the shit. He will not renounce God. He keeps the faith. And he’s rewarded: God gives him back his riches, his cattle. God restores his health, and sends him friends. God replaces his kids. Pay attention:
word choice is important in an end-of-the-world story.

  I said “replaces,” not “restores.”

  The other kids? They stay dead, gone, non-functioning, erased forever from the Earth, just like the dinosaurs and the 12 million undesirables incinerated by the Nazis and the 500,000 slaughtered in Rwanda and the 1.7 million murdered in Cambodia and the 60 million immolated in the Middle Passage.

  That merry prankster God.

  That jokester.

  That’s what the end of the world is about, Wyndham wants to say. The rest is just details.

  By this point the woman (You want her to have a name? She deserves one, don’t you think?) has started to weep softly. Wyndham gets to his feet and goes into the dark kitchen for another glass. Then he comes back out to the porch and makes a gin and tonic. He sits beside her and presses the cool glass upon her. It’s all he knows to do.

  “Here,” he says. “Drink this. It’ll help.”

  The Bluehole

  That was the summer of ’82, a bastard hot summer if there ever was one. Sauls Run sweltered in the crucible of the Reagan recession. “Hungry Like the Wolf” blasted down the airwaves from WROK, in Princeton, a county of unemployed coal miners away. E.T. flickered in the dark at the Lavon Theater on Main Street. Lines stretched around the block well into June. I must have seen that movie half a dozen times.

  Mom had been dead just a little over six months by then. Thirty-eight years old, and a stroke dropped her in her tracks while she was wrapping Christmas presents in the spare bedroom. A bleeder, the doctors called it, the worst kind, like you even needed to know that when you’d found your mother laid out on the rug, a square of Christmas paper crumpled across her chest and a rope of saliva leaking out of the corner of her mouth. A bleeder. Like you didn’t know that was the worst kind of all. Like you couldn’t fucking see.