The End Is Nigh

Ben H. Winters — BRING HER TO ME

Before she opens the door Annabel takes a moment to prepare herself. She smoothes the front of her frock, and tucks her hair behind her ears, and readies her face: smile, eyes. Ready.

“Hello?”

“Hello! Hi!”

The woman from the Center launches right in, full force: “Oh my goodness we are really getting down to it now, aren’t we? We are really getting down to it now!”

And Annabel says “Yes, we sure are,” and in unison they close their eyes, tilt their heads backwards, and stand glowing for one half of one second before snapping back into conversation.

“I keep pinching myself,” says the stranger at the door, and then she does it, she really pinches herself. “It’s actually—finally—seriously—really—here!”

Annabel laughs politely, as the woman pauses at last to take a breath and then to say, “My name is Marie St. Clair, by the way. I’m from the Center.”

“Ah!”

This had already been obvious, of course. Annabel knew the woman was from the Center, because of the clipboard—the flowers—the sash. But Annabel keeps her smile in place, and nods with enthusiasm. “Thank you so much for your service,” she says.

“Oh, pah,” says Ms. St. Clair, waving away the gratitude with a happy smile. “It’s my pleasure. My honor, I should say. It’s all just so marvelous, that we are here to see this day. You and I and all of us, everyone now living, we are the fortunate generation, we have heard, and we shall travel through. Marvelous!”

For a moment, after that, Ms. St. Clair just stands at Annabel’s door, beaming, and Annabel beams back. Because even though this speech of Ms. St. Clair’s is made of the same rote praise-words that Annabel has heard a million times; and despite her wariness of this woman; and despite the desperate secret that has troubled her restless heart for so many years; despite it all, Annabel Lennon feels just exactly what Ms. St. Clair is feeling. They feel it together. They stand there in communal pleasure for a moment, as if under mistletoe. Together they stand in the sunlight coming from the corridor window, and in the pleasure of what is, and in honey-toned anticipation of what is to come.

The truth is, Annabel does think it’s marvelous, and she does feel fortunate to be here, to be alive and in this world at this moment, on this day, she really does.

Behind them, out the corridor window, the city is a mass of black clustered towers, like a group of strangers in overcoats, waiting for a train.

“Anyway,” Ms. St. Clair says abruptly and with force. She takes out a stylus and holds it over her pad. “What I am charged with today, on this penultimate day, is performing a final, final, absolutely final sweep to ensure that everyone has heard.”

“Of course,” says Annabel, and then fears she said it too fast. She renews her smile, takes a breath. “Absolutely. We all have heard. Everyone in our home.”

“There are three of you?”

“Yes.”

“Mother, father, child?”

“Yes. Child. One child. A teenager.”

Quiet, Annabel. Hush. Smile.

“Great!” says Ms. St. Clair cheerily. She jots with her stylus. “And you all know the protocol?”

“Yes,” says Annabel, and bites back the words of course. Everybody knows the protocol. Obviously they know the protocol. Everyone is aware of every detail; for the last ten years all has been known; all has been arranged as it has been commanded. They have learned the protocol from the Center, learned it from one another other, and learned it directly from the source of all truth. Loud and clear.

But Annabel just says “Yes” one more time and widens her smile. She is smiling so tight now that her cheeks hurt. She wonders if this Ms. St. Clair knows somehow, knows the awful truth of their home, and is waiting to pounce. But the dreaded moment never comes. Instead the woman just runs down the protocol one last time—and then Annabel must sign that she has listened and understood. She does. She grips the stylus and she signs. It’s all mildly ridiculous, because of course it will all be gone tomorrow: the clipboard, the corridor, Building 170, all the buildings, these two smiling women as they are standing here now, as corporeal beings in a carpeted hallway.

“Okay, then, I will see you when we’ve all gone through,” says Ms. St. Clair at last, and for just one split second, for half of one half of an instant, Annabel wonders what would happen if she were to ask “But what if it’s all wrong, what if it’s all just wrong? What if we’re all just nuts? Doesn’t it ever occur to you?”

But of course Annabel doesn’t say that. Of course she just smiles some more as the woman from the Center slips her clipboard into her satchel and goes, and then Annabel turns and leans against the door with her eyes shut tight and her cheeks burning hot, until she hears her husband’s footsteps coming down the stairs.

Goodness no, by the way—the answer is no. It never occurs to Marie St. Clair of the Answer Center that it’s all a mistake, all just a terrible mistake. Such a thought would never appear in her mind.

She is committed and enthusiastic beyond question to the plan, as she has been since the day she was born. Her head is filled with passionate belief that it is right, that it is right, that all of it is just exactly right. She is not unique in this. Most people feel this way. All people, officially.

Ms. St. Clair has been doing this for seven years, since the Answer Center was established—it’s really nine Answer Centers, one in each building cluster, all reporting to the main Center. Marie St. Clair has a chart affixed to the wall in her office, and another up in her rooms in Building 49. Sometimes at night, before falling asleep, she traces the organizational lines with her fingers.

Now, though, she has more to do. She will not sleep tonight. Never again. She adjusts her sash and feels the pleasing weight of the clipboard in her satchel as she glides down the corridor toward the next door.

YOU ARE MY WORK IN THE WORLD, she hears in her head as she walks with serene purpose down the corridor. It’s the voice of God, weaving golden through her mind, like a bright banner flowing between the pillars of a church.

YOU ARE SERVING MY PURPOSE AND PAVING MY WAY.

“I know!” she says, out loud. “I love you.”

YOU ARE MY VOICE YOU ARE MY WORK IN THE WORLD.

“I know!”

It’s 6:15. Ms. St. Clair knocks on the next door down—she is right on schedule. Tomorrow is May 1st. It’s happening! It’s almost here! It’s amazing.

“I… have been thinking,” says Kenneth.

The words emerge from him slowly. He is seated at the table with his chin in his hand, and Annabel is at the kitchen island, standing before the great joint of meat, cutting it carefully. She knows what her husband is going to say, what he has been thinking. She is tired of his indecision. She stops cutting and lowers her electric slicer and turns to him and stares.

“You have been thinking what?”

“Thinking—just—what if we are making a mistake?”

“We are not making a mistake.”

Kenneth sighs and stares at the smooth table. Annabel pushes the button on the slicer and the hot hum fills the kitchen. She is slicing small peels of animal off an enormous slab; the slices curl and fall away. The animal is raw. Under the kitchen table, a fourteen-year-old girl with big black eyes and a thick tussle of black hair is hidden, her knees clutched to her chest, listening and trembling. Annabel keeps cutting. The pieces curl off the flesh and fall in their thin slices into a pile of blood. Kenneth sits in troubled silence at the table, cracking his knuckles. Annabel knows it’s too late now to change course. They’ve made their decision. It’s done.

BRING HER TO ME, says God in Annabel’s head, whispering and vivid and undulant. BRING HER TO ME.

But Kenneth keeps going. “I fear we are making a terrible mistake,” he says, quietly but urgently. “By our deception. A terrible mistake. And it’s not too late, Anna. It’s not too late to take care of this properly.”

“To take care of it properly!”

The euphemism is too much for Annabel to bear. She pivots toward her husband, wielding the still-humming slicer. “You mean bring her to the Center and tell them that she can’t hear! Leave her behind. Abandon our daughter. Our only child! We travel through tomorrow—we go on to Glory—and she stays and rots.” She bares her teeth, jabs the slicer angrily. “That’s what you mean.”

Kenneth pushes back his chair and stands.

“What the theologians say—”

“I know what they say.”

“Let me—can I finish?”

Annabel gestures with the slicer. The blood from the meat flies from it and splatters on the old thick carpet of the living room. The towers of the city loom in the the windows. Lights glow in the distance; the black sky punctuated by gold and gleam. Annabel jerks her thumb onto the lever of the slicer and the hum of it is loud and keen. The blade hums into the meat. Annabel cuts while Kenneth watches. It’s what, 8:15 now? He raises his voice.

“They say that only those who have heard may come through.”

“She has heard her whole life. She has heard from us.”

“Only those—”

“From her teachers. From her friends.”

“Only those who have heard directly may travel through. Or else—”

“She has heard her whole life,” Annabel says again.

Kenneth’s face is trembling. He paces with his hands behind his back.

“We are defying His will.”

“You don’t know what He wants.”

“Of course I do!” says Kenneth. “He talks to me.”

“He talks to me, too! He talks to everyone.”

Kenneth shakes his head bitterly. “Not everyone,” he says.

There is then a long silence in the room. Annabel stops moving. She gives up all pretense of continuing work on the tartare. She cannot do it properly unless she is paying attention. The instructions from the theologians are quite clear: thin slices of beef, as thin as paper, as thin as skin. The meat must be sliced very thin so that the poison can soak its way through: so the poison can saturate the flesh, striate each thin piece, marble each slice with the will of God.

BRING HER TO ME, Annabel hears. BRING HER TO ME. It gives her courage. Steels her voice and steadies her hand.

“Okay, so fine. She doesn’t hear. So she’s never received the instructions. But we have, and we have told her, and she has shown no hesitation, no reluctance, because she trusts us. She trusts us and she trusts in God even though she has never heard Him. This is her test, and it is our test.”

Kenneth crosses his arms and stares out the window at the looming buildings. Annabel comes over and stands beside him, holds his shoulder with one bloodied hand.

“She has to come,” says Annabel, and her voice has changed now. She is not telling Kenneth, she is pleading. Asking him. With love: for him, for their child, for God. “She has to eat of it and come through with us. We will not give her up. We will not leave her behind.”

The meal will be served in the morning. The morning of May 1st, the long and longingly awaited. Annabel takes his other shoulder, looks him in the eyes.

“She is our daughter and she is coming through with us tomorrow. Coming along like everyone. Do you agree?”

Kenneth turns away. The voice is in his head, too, God’s voice, Annabel knows that. She wonders what it is saying at that moment but she is afraid to ask. She steps closer.

“Do you agree?”

The first to hear was a girl named Jennifer Miller, just a regular girl, just like anyone, from Building 14—this is when there was a Building 14. This is twenty-four years ago.

And God just came along to Jennifer Miller, when Jennifer Miller was still a child, almost, when she was thirteen years old. And God began to speak to her and told her that all of this would end in her lifetime, and Jennifer Miller thought that she had gone crazy, and when she told others, in her building and at her academy, they thought that she had gone crazy, too. Of course they did.

This was when things were still good but beginning to get bad.

Jennifer Miller, in time, began to believe that she really was hearing a voice; and then that the voice was really God’s voice; and then that what He was telling her was true.

TIME IS SHORT, is all He said in those first years. To her, and then at last to others. In various of the buildings; in various of the floors; His voice, mighty like a ram’s horn or hushed like the purposeful whisper of a child playing telephone, was now being heard. TIME IS SHORT.

And then, as the years went on—and the buildings slipped along on their various rates of decay—the messages began to vary, some people hearing certain things and others hearing other things. Soon everyone heard, and soon the instructions became clear and specific and nobody thought Jennifer Miller was crazy any longer, because everybody could hear. A man named Ronald Clarke was the first to be told the day, and a woman named Barb Ruiz, of Building 2, was given to know the method.

Eventually He let there be no ambiguity. He showed himself to be a democratic God, and a clarion God. He let the word ring out and ring true to all: Here is my will and here is how it shall be, it shall be by feast, by joyous gathering around tables of poison. These crumbling buildings we will leave behind, these frail bodies, and all of us will travel through together, on the first of May of the appointed year.

And now at last, the day of the feast has come and it will be in the morning.

Pea waits until her parents are gone. She sneaks silently up the stairs.

She sits in her tiny room like she sat under the table in the kitchen, with her knees clasped to her chest and her body trembling. A frail flower.

It’s past midnight, now. Just past. It’s very dark outside, no stars.

She has spent her whole life pretending, and at least that’s almost over.

She has learned to do the thing they do, tilt her head back and half-close her eyes, listening. Stop in the middle of a conversation and mouth silent words, as if in conversation with a ghost.

Now it’s all almost over.

They live in Building 170. It is called that because it was the 170th one built, of the original two-hundred, but there are only sixty-three left now.

Pea sits on her bed and looks out the window at the bleak black horizon, and her life is almost over.

Her parents are good parents—they love her despite her deafness—but she knows it is a source of pain and shame to them. She knows one literally deaf child; that girl’s name is Sharon. She is in the lower group, still, two years behind Pea. She literally cannot hear. Pea can hear but she can’t hear God.

Pea picks up her journal and then puts it down again. No point now—no sense. She has never written the truth in it. Too risky. She has hidden her secret her whole life, without her parents ever telling her to. Without needing to be told. Her whole life has been one ache, one absence.

She lies down on the bed. Tomorrow it will all be over. One way or another. Sleep flickers in and out of her eyes. Dream scraps, stitched together strangely: Her father riding on the Building 170 elevator, pointing the lever up; her mother carving something that is not meat.

She is awoken by a nervous plink-plink on the window. She sits upright and stares at the window. Her nightgown is gold-colored and old and ratty. There it is again: Plink—plink. Like fingertips gently rapping on the glass.

“At last,” she whispers. She slides off the bed—plink, plink—and walks on trembling legs toward the window. “At last!”

What will He look like? How will He sound? Maybe there are special instructions that have been held back until now, because it was necessary that they be given to someone special. To her. Just to her. It was all a long test of her faith, and now it is done. She presses the buttons to work the window screen.

She sees the puffy face distorted through the glass and her excitement whooshes out of her. It’s not God. It’s Robert, a fat boy from her class. He is standing there sweating on the ledge that runs around the building, clinging to her sill. Poorly dressed, glasses skewed, his face confused and almost apologetic, as if he’s not sure he’s in the right place. He is wearing his clothes from the academy, though it is long after hours. Though they will never need to be worn again.

Robert must see it through the glass, the disappointment in Pea’s face, and she immediately feels bad. She presses the buttons and opens the window and Robert tumbles himself in over the sill and lands splat on her floor. Pea crosses her arms. She is in her thin gold nightgown. She has never talked much to boys in private. It’s the middle of the night, the last night. She tucks her hair behind her ears and waits while he pulls his thick clumsy body up to standing.

“Hey,” says Robert, obviously nervous, breathing loudly through his nose.

“This is really strange,” Pea says, “you being here.”

“I know,” he says, nodding vigorously. “I know.”

And then he takes a deep breath and they peer at each other. His imperfections are striking. His eyes bulge behind thick-lensed glasses. He’s got odd hair, black tufts that go off in all directions like a scattered herd. Pea is afraid that he’s never going to break the silence. Is he waiting for her to say something? But then—

“Pea, you are different than other girls. D’you know? I mean—different.”

“Oh,” she says. “Oh, God.”

She feels a cold rush of fear. How does he know? How did he find out? Does he know?

But then Robert suddenly starts talking again, a hundred miles an hour, wringing his hands together and looking everywhere in the room except at her. “I know this may seem crazy to bring this up to you now, but my heart has been with you since forever. I mean, not since forever but for a long, long time. Since pubescence, and probably sooner. Since Academy.”

The words at first are a confusing blur, but then at once Pea understands, and her fear dissolves into embarrassment—for herself. For him. What Robert means when he says that she is different is that she is special. He means that he likes her. She cups her face with her hands. She almost laughs but doesn’t. He doesn’t know her secret! He is confessing a crush. She looks up at him, holding her palm over her mouth. Of all the scenes to be playing out in her bedroom late at night, late on this night!

“I honestly Pea… I don’t even know what I would want you to do with this information…”

Robert has his hands in his hair, he looks wildly about her room, his confusion accelerating. He is sweating so much: his neck, his chin. His forehead. Pea resolves to put him out of his misery.

“I don’t really like you in that way,” she says suddenly, kind but firm, interrupting the heartsick monologue. “I’m sorry.”

Immediately, Robert nods. “That’s—I mean—sure. I knew that was coming, obviously. I guess I was expecting that. I mean, of course. Of course I knew you would say that.”

He laughs nervously. Pea smiles at him. She feels bad for him, but she doesn’t do anything like get up and take his hand or kiss him. She’s not the kind of person to do something like that just because of the weird circumstances. But there is something nice about this, right now. She has never had a boyfriend—never kissed a boy. These are pleasant things to be thinking about, even in the negative, instead of what is coming: the morning, the meal, the end.

And Robert, having unburdened himself, now seems almost relaxed. He takes the liberty of sitting down on Pea’s bed, and exhales, and even laughs.“I expected that, like I said. I mean, it’s funny, you know? It’s kind of a little hilarious. If I can’t get a girl to like me now, I guess it’s just not in the cards, right?” He laughs again. He has a snorting kind of laugh. “Now or never, right?”

“I guess so,” says Pea. “But, you know… pain will be a memory when we all go through. Pain will be a word in books.”

“Right,” he says. “Of course.”

This is something people have heard. Pea of course has never heard it. She feels cold inside. She looks past Robert, out the window. He gets up, paces back and forth a couple more times, with his hands locked behind his back like a politician.

“Robert?”

“I know, I know, I’m leaving,” he says. “It’s just — there’s one more thing.”

BRING HER TO ME.

Annabel sits in the dark in the basement of the building with her hands wrapped around herself, her fingers laced together, clutching her knees against her chest.

For many years now this has been her private place, down here in the storeroom of Building 170, among the scattered trophies from when things were good. This is where she comes to think. Where she comes to wrestle with her burden. Not Pea—never Pea; Pea herself is not a burden. She is a joy. It is Pea’s difference that is the burden. Pea’s deafness. The question of what God wants for Pea, what Annabel wants for her. Those are the burdens, and now the hour has come, now it is almost here.

BRING HER TO ME.

Annabel winces and clutches her ears as if the voice can be silenced. For many years she has taken the service elevator down here when it is working—or taken the stairs otherwise. She comes down here and sits in the dim night glow to think, away from Kenneth, away from the others, away from the Center.

Sometimes it even feels like God’s voice can’t reach her here, as if this subterranean place is hidden from Him, too buried for His voice to find her. Sometimes it feels like she is a little girl in the quiet world again, like when she was Pea’s age, before Jennifer Miller. A time of pure untroubled silence.

Sometimes it feels that way, but not all the time. Not tonight.

BRING HER TO ME.

“So—” Robert clears his throat and then lowers his voice. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

“What am I…” Pea is confused. She steps back, toward the bed. “You’re joking.”

“No.”

Robert shakes his head. His hands are still clasped behind his back and he is staring at the ground.

“No, I’m not joking, Pea. Is your family going through with it? Are you?”

Pea, still in her child’s gold nightgown, gapes at him. He had been anxious before, nervous, like a child. Now it’s as if Robert is growing up before her eyes, his agitation becoming more purposeful, somehow, more adult. His hand worries at his hair.

“Everybody’s going through with it,” she tells him.

He shrugs. Makes a sour face.

“Is your family going through with it?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“Are you?”

He doesn’t answer. She stares at him. She feels the valves of her heart open, as if to allow an extra rush of blood. She pictures the kitchen counter, two floors down, where the meat lays in curled piles, waiting, the bloody pink slices of tartare.

“When you were little,” Robert asks her earnestly, “did you ever peek out from between your fingers when the Grace was being said?”

“I don’t know,” says Pea. “I don’t remember.”

She does, though. She does remember. She would peek from between her fingers, just as Robert is saying, peek out and watch as her parents mouthed in silent communion with the God they could hear and she could not. She would sit, fearful and strange, staring at her food and waiting.

“Tomorrow night,” says Robert. “It’s all I can think about.” He rushes to her, then, suddenly, lifts her hands and holds them in his own. “All I can think about is being here tomorrow night. Being alive. What it will be like, to still be alive tomorrow night. We could walk the streets between the buildings, Pea. We could do that. When everyone else is dead.”

It hits Pea like a wash of cool water: the absence of euphemism. Dead.

They won’t be dead, they will have gone through. They will be on the other side.

Or maybe not. Maybe they’ll just be dead. Oh God, thinks Pea, where is your voice? Oh God, guide me.

“Why would you want to stay in this world?” she asks Robert quietly. “This world has collapsed. This world is broken.”

“Pah,” says Robert. “It’s collapsed because everybody stopped taking care of it. It collapsed because everybody’s been sitting around waiting to eat poison for twenty-four years.”

Pea stands there in the tense silence while time ticks by, and she feels thrilled and overwhelmed, disoriented and excited. She has thought these things before, in the dark spaces that in other people’s minds are filled by God’s word. The buildings, those remaining, tilting toward each other in the marshes like old dominoes. The broken elevators. The aluminum fixtures that used to be steel. Everybody just waiting. The world slowly running down.

Pea feels a butterfly fluttering around in the cold chamber of her chest. Its wings brush against the bars. She whispers to Robert.

“You don’t hear Him either.”

“Oh, I hear Him,” he says. He doesn’t look like a fat nervous kid anymore, not at all, not to Pea. “I hear Him. I just think He’s full of shit.”

Dawn is approaching and Marie St. Clair has finished her appointed rounds. Everybody in these three buildings knows. Everybody is ready. Everybody has been ready for years.

GO HOME NOW AND WAIT.

She tightens her sash around her chest, her heart beating faster and faster as the sunrise approaches.

GO AND BE GLAD.

There is no question in her mind. That is perhaps the greatest thing, that is what makes her happy. No doubt and no question, no trouble and no worry, she simply knows what will happen next. The truth. The uncomplicated truth.

BRING HER TO ME.

“More.”

BRING HER TO ME.

“I need to know more. Please. Please. I need to know more.”

Kenneth stands at the foot of the stairs in a furor of indecision. God will only say what He has said, what He keeps on saying, and His brevity is a kind of absence, the cruelest imaginable absence.

Does it mean what his wife insists, that they must allow the child to die, like everyone, and that she will be brought through? Or does it mean, as Kenneth fears, that if he trusts God he must trust Him like Abraham. He must trust Him all the way: Report his own daughter’s deafness, her defect, and abandon her. Allow her to be left behind so the process is not ruined for all the rest.

BRING HER TO ME.

He knows what is right. Time is running out.

Kenneth takes one deep breath and flings himself up the creaking stairs, three big steps at a time, as if over hurdles, as if slowing would make him stop—no, not as if, for he knows that indeed slowing down will make him stop. Kenneth hurls himself up the stairs and grabs the door handle of Pea’s room and throws it open, and he meets his wife coming out of their daughter’s room.

Annabel stares wildly at him. She is panting and shivering, and in her hand is the electric slicer, and it is on, humming, with red blood all along its vibrating edges.

I am too late, Kenneth thinks. Too late too late.

Annabel stares, the electric knife dancing in her palm, and at last her lips open and she says “Where is she? What have you done with her? Where is she?”

BRING HER TO ME, says the voice in Kenneth’s mind, and he can see it in the frozen mad look on her face, that she is hearing the same thing—the same, the same, the same—BRING HER TO ME.

He rushes past her. They search the room. They lift the mattress and throw it aside. They toss open the dresser drawers and paw wildly through. They crowbar open the closet and find it empty. They feel the heat of time, of the morning sun growing closer, of the dawn of the new and final day.

Kenneth and Annabel rush to the window and they look out and see nothing and then they keep looking and Annabel sees it first and then Kenneth does, too, or he thinks he does: two distant shadows, moving swiftly and getting smaller. Two shadows running so close beside each other they were almost one, slipping together into the narrow space between two towers, swallowed up by the buildings and disappearing into darkness.

Robert laughs as they run. He finds, indeed, that he cannot stop laughing. Pea is running beside him, and they are not holding hands, but every once in a while his right hand jostles against her left, and that mere touch, skin against skin, sends electric shivers coursing through his body. It isn’t just that she’s a girl, not just that it’s Pea—it’s… it’s all of it, all of this wild chaotic joy. The jolt of triumph and liberation, the thrill of rebellion, the sheer power of life continuing on! In the morning will be the feast, the feast for everyone but them!

Light is beginning. The time is at hand. Robert looks at Pea, and he laughs, astonished. And she laughs back, astonished too. He watches her hair bounce on her back while they duck giggling through the alleyways, in search of what and where they do not yet know.

The voice speaks then, freezing the smile on Robert’s face, clouding his heart. It speaks in his mind, clear and cold like a steel cage lowering.

BRING HER TO ME.

BRING HER TO ME.

BRING HER TO ME.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ben Winters is the winner of the Edgar Award for his novel The Last Policeman, which was also an Amazon.com Best Book of 2012. Other works of fiction include the middle-grade novel The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman, an Edgar Award nominee; its sequel, The Mystery of the Missing Everything; the psychological thriller Bedbugs; and two parody novels, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (a New York Times best-seller), and Android Karenina. Ben has also written extensively for the stage and is a past fellow of the Dramatists Guild. His journalism has appeared in Slate, The Nation, The Chicago Reader, and many other publications. He lives in Indianapolis, Indiana, and at BenHWinters.com.