The End Is Nigh

Megan Arkenberg — HOUSES WITHOUT AIR

The First Match

Six weeks before the end of the world, a new bar opens on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown. The proprietors are a middle-aged West Coast couple, evacuees from Seattle or Portland, Beth can’t remember which. The bar is on the first floor of the building where Beth’s favorite bookstore used to be, but the familiar smells are gone—dust, vegetable glue, and old, acidic paper, all drawn out by the pair of sleek Blueair filters that add their silvery humming to the murmur of the television and the small Wednesday night crowd.

The hanging colored-glass lamps have disappeared, too, replaced by fluorescents; the light from the tall street-facing windows is unreliable now, dirty, gritty and dry. At least the restroom graffiti is unchanged. The back door of the middle stall in the women’s room still says “No danger shall balk Columbia’s lovers,” an obscure scrap of Whitman in dark purple Sharpie.

Wednesday nights have been Immerse team nights for the last four years. They used to walk the five blocks from the University to a small Thai place near the river, but with the ash and acid of the ongoing eruptions in the air, a five block walk has become unendurable, even with carbon masks. Beth proposed a migration to the new Georgetown place, which is right on the bus route that she, Aidan, and Lena take to work every morning. Even so, after the first two weeks, she and Aiden are the only Wednesday regulars. Immerse is still running—one of the few projects anywhere that is—but the team is drifting apart. Spending more time with their families, as the official line goes, even though none of the contracts have been officially terminated. It looks like everyone’s losing enthusiasm for immersive alternate reality. Everyone except for Beth, who has no family to speak of—and Aiden, who is borderline delusional.

“Give it to me, Beth. The honest assessment.” Aiden’s brown eyes are lit up like gin under a black light. He’s two drinks in, which, considering the strength of this place’s rum-and-colas, is closer to four. The most recent DOI press release sets the remaining atmospheric oxygen levels at six weeks, maximum, and Aiden McCallum is the only man in the world to whom that could possibly be good news. “They’ll have to increase our funding now, right?”

“Jesus, Aiden, give it up.” Beth has been willing to play along for the last few weeks—Wednesday nights would get damn lonely, otherwise—but even she has a limit. “You can’t upload yourself into a damn computer. We’re talking decades of development, centuries even. You can’t just throw money at Immerse to turn it into a functional alternate whatever.”

The last word comes out more harshly than she intends, waffling over the word dimension, which sounds too science-fictional. Beth rubs the bridge of her nose as though she can massage away the soreness. Nose, throat, lungs, everything aches these days.

Her phone beeps from deep in her purse before Aidan can say something stupid. It’s a text from Farah: Where do you keep the baking sheets?

Cabinet to the right of the fridge. Beth hits send too quickly, curses under her breath. Wait, why?

“Is that crazy woman still living with you?” Aidan asks. It looks like he’s letting go of Immerse for the moment, which is probably for the best—but as far as Beth’s concerned, Farah Karimi is hardly a safer subject.

“She’s fine.” Beth forces herself to smile. “Going batshit with cabin fever, but then, who isn’t?”

Aiden shakes his head and stands up to get another drink, almost knocking over his bar stool. Another text from Farah shimmers on the small screen.

Do you have sand anywhere?

WTF are you doing?

Work. A second later: Is the sugar still in the cabinet over the microwave?

Yes.

Can’t reach. Where R U?

Now Aiden is deep in conversation with the bartender, gesturing at the television that hangs above the shelves of neon-colored bottles. It’s a basketball game, but the DOI announcement is scrolling along the bottom of the screen on a blue banner. The world has a use-by date now, just like a gallon of milk, just as arbitrary, just as inevitable.

Beth looks down at her phone. Farah again: I need sand or sugar. Also aquariums. Plural. Where’s the nearest fish supply shop?

On my way.

The Second Match

Immerse is long past the data-gathering stage, but Beth still catches herself in the habit of collecting sensations, of watching the fluorescent light play across the raised numbers on her credit card, of running her hand along the smooth-sanded barn boards of the bar’s countertop, picturing the precise regions of her brain that would light up in a scan as she alters the pressure of her fingertips. After years of this, she knows the patterns of wood from laminate from drywall, granite from sandstone, leather from writing paper. The sound of her heels on the bar’s tile doorstep compared to the sound of Farah’s rubber-soled crutches in their apartment’s tile stairwell. Some senses are impossible to program. Colors, for example—but she’s used to dreaming in black and white, and so is everyone else, if they’re honest. Smells are also difficult. Beth can hardly remember a smell—even inside Immerse—that isn’t smog and sulfur dioxide, the half-electric scent of a struck match.

She fits her carbon mask over her nose and mouth and strides quickly across the street to the enclosed bus stop. In the June twilight, the air is actually visible—shimmering, tangibly thick, settling between the restaurants, bakeries, furniture stores, and boutiques like a black-gray mist. The bus stop’s air filter sounds like it’s gasping for breath. Soon scrubbing out the pollution won’t do any good; there won’t be enough oxygen left in the air to make it breathable.

The bus rolls to a stop, and Beth darts from the enclosure to the top of the boarding stairs. Even the short climb leaves her winded. As usual now, the bus is almost empty, and she has no trouble taking a window seat. Not that it’s worth looking out. It’s a night in late June but it doesn’t feel like summer, not with the air so close. The anxiety is gone, Beth thinks, the clear gold glimmer that used to come with summer twilight, when everything is so fresh and open that it takes your breath away, when the sounds of traffic and sirens and thunderstorms made your stomach flutter with excitement.

It doesn’t feel like June without a sudden burst of agoraphobia.

The Third Match

She gets back to the apartment, finds Farah curled on the short couch in the corner of the front room, seemingly asleep. The sight makes her chew her lip, and she’s not sure why. Farah looks sickly, almost transparent these days, her thick hair pulled back with a bit of elastic, no make-up on her round, dark face. When she took the second bedroom three months ago, Farah warned Beth that she never eats when she’s working on a project, just sticks to liquids, and it’s starting to drive Beth mad. There’s a gallon of milk uncapped, souring on the kitchen counter, half a pot of coffee grounds clogging the old sink.

The door at the back of the narrow kitchen has been left ajar, and the back room is a complete disaster. Farah’s crutches lean against the asthmatic air conditioner, which has been hastily patched with blue electric tape to stay as airtight as possible. A stack of books has been accumulating around the ironing board for weeks, staggered and tilting like a bizarre art piece. Architecture books, landscape, interior design. Neuroscience textbooks and monographs on alternate reality.

What do you work on? they’d asked each other during that first phone call. Computer games, Beth had said. Memorials, said Farah Karimi.

All of Beth’s cookie sheets, plus all of her muffin tins and a loaf pan, cover every available surface. Each holds a tiny sugar landscape, dunes and valleys, a few toothpicks rooted in clay. Trees? Supports for something larger?

I need to work with my hands, Farah said. To touch things, mold them. I can’t start on a sheet of paper.

Beth takes a deep breath, goes back into the front room.

“What is all that about?”

“That is an entire afternoon’s work. Don’t touch.” Farah’s voice sounds distant, sleepy. Her hands are steepled and pressed against her lips. She doesn’t open her eyes. “You had extra sugar in the back of the pantry. I still need the aquariums, though. And matches.”

“I’m not sure you should have anything with sharp edges or anything that catches on fire until you explain what’s going on with my cookie trays.”

“Here.” Without lifting her head, Farah fumbles amidst the mess of legal pads, printouts, magazine pages and napkins on the coffee table, grabbing something that has drifted to the edge. She holds out a sheet of what looks like paper towel. Blue ink has bled through from the page behind, and Beth can’t read any of the labels on the diagram, but it’s clear enough what she’s looking at. Seven miniature landscapes, like elementary school terraria, set in glass boxes.

Beth studies the page without taking it from Farah’s hand. “Does something live inside these?”

“Of course not. It’s just a model. No animals were harmed, et cetera.” Farah rolls her eyes. “Moving on. I can get most of that from the florist: sand, gravel, clay, distilled water, lots of plants. I’ll find the miniatures online. I’ll need your help setting it up, though.”

“Back up,” Beth says. “What is this? Setting it up where?”

Farah makes a low, irritated noise in the back of her throat. With a sudden burst of energy, she tosses her sketch on the pile, raises herself up on the couch, hooks her hands under her knees and swings her legs over the side of the couch. Beth has missed something important, but she has no idea what.

“Look,” Farah says. “It isn’t commissioned or anything. Who would commission a memorial for the end of the world? But I want to do this, and I want to do it here. So it has to be small-scale.”

“Okay.” Beth is mentally calculating the odds of being stopped by security if they attempt to assemble Farah’s memorial on the National Mall. Another part of her is thinking that this must be the reason Farah came to D.C. in the first place. “That explains the aquariums.”

A very faint smile twitches at the corner of Farah’s mouth. She can smile prettily when she wants too—full lips, teeth hidden. “I’m calling it Houses Without Air.”

“And that explains the matches.” Beth chews her lip. She isn’t sure what else to say. “Well, at least it isn’t a Hans Christian Andersen reference,” she says finally. “I hate that story.”

“Pardon?”

“‘The Little Matchgirl.’ This girl’s selling matches on New Year’s Eve, and she’s freezing, so she tries to warm herself. She lights each match and imagines these little scenes while it burns. Christmas trees and family dinners, all that. But the visions only last as long as the matches do. And when she runs out of matches, she freezes to death.”

Farah responds with the world’s most dignified snort. “If she froze to death, how can we know what she was imagining?”

“Because it’s a story,” Beth snaps, exasperated. “The people who come after have to figure it out somehow.”

“Want to know a secret?” Farah leans back against the pillows, but she’s smiling fully now—almost mischievously. And this, Beth thinks, is the problem with Farah. She’s reckless, selfish, destructive of property, critical and dismissive of others. And she knows exactly what to say to make Beth forget all of it.

“Of course.”

“I never worry about the people who come after. If they can make sense of the memorial or not. It’s enough for them to know that something happened here, something important, that it mattered. Give them something they can feel. But telling the story? One story, with all its specifics? I don’t know if that’s possible.”

“I don’t know if I’d want to,” Beth says.

Farah nods, closing her eyes. “Exactly.”

The Fourth Match

Farah Karimi has lived in dozens of houses over the years: an apartment in an old palazzo in Venice where the stucco flaked from the moisture and where the elevator walls were black with mold; a cottage on the coast of the North sea where her chair’s wheels used to stick in the damp sand if she rolled too close to the water. She feels called to places on the edge of disaster.

She won’t build memorials for soldiers, battles, anything of that sort—not that she’d be invited to. She has a reputation for keeping things private. Nothing too obviously patriotic, although she’s made exceptions, as everyone has; she lets the land influence the design, and there are still places in the world where love for the land remains the highest expression of patriotism.

She has built memorials after terrorist attacks. Many refugee camps. Hurricanes and earthquakes are something of a specialty; she loves wind and fault lines, in glass and concrete, though she hates dealing with the rubble. She’s built memorials after Ebola outbreaks, and smallpox when it came back, although she was advised not to enter the areas both times.

The Venice Harbor Arch is Farah Karimi’s most famous work. The glass pillars catch the light of the rising and setting sun, spreading it in rainbows over the shallow water, still broken here and there by rooftops and church steeples. She’s never been fond of it; it’s too huge, too obvious.

When Beth first heard Farah’s name, she thought of Venice, though she couldn’t remember why.

The Fifth Match

Two weeks before the end of the world, Beth comes home early on a Wednesday night. Farah is on the floor of the back room, arranging cacti in the bottom of a thirty-gallon aquarium. She’s wearing her pale blue carbon mask. The tape around the air conditioner has started to fail.

“I want to show you something,” Beth says.

She offers to get Farah’s chair out of storage from the back of the building, but Farah demurs. Crutches are easier with the bus. They catch the bus to the metro, the metro to the University stop. In the dark and the smog, the campus feels deserted, though Beth knows it isn’t.

Six swipes of Beth’s ID takes them into a lab building, down an elevator and a long, winding corridor, into the Immerse laboratory, which really is deserted. The front room is all desks and computers and bookshelves, the stale smell of old coffee and spilled creamer. Farah glances around the room, eyebrows arched, doesn’t say anything.

“Through here.” Beth leads Farah to a door in the back. Her palms are damp despite the air-conditioned coolness. The small room beyond has a low cot along one wall, a set of white laminate cabinets along the other. From left to right, Beth opens the doors, lays out the cabinet’s contents on the cot. Wires and suction cups, long-sleeved gloves, a hood with a broad blue visor.

“So this is what you’ve been working on?” Farah remains standing in the doorway, leaning forward on her crutches. The public transportation and the walk across campus have been a greater exertion than she’s used to, these days. Her hair curls around her forehead in sweat-damp ringlets. “Yeah.” Beth clears her throat. “Yes. It’s called Immerse.”

“Not a very creative name.”

“It’s not a very creative project. The word inevitable comes to mind, actually.”

Laughing softly, Farah makes her way to the cot. She slips first one arm, then the other out of the loops of her crutches. “Entertainment purposes only, right?”

“Well, you can’t stay in there forever, if that’s what you mean.” Beth glances over the components spread across the crisp white sheet. Hooked together, they make a strange and skeletal assemblage. “Okay, you’ll need to undress for this. Most of these need to go right against your skin.”

Farah slips her sweater over her head. In the air-conditioned lab, goosebumps dimple the dark skin of her forearms. Beth helps her up onto the edge of the cot so she can slip out of her blue jeans. “Every time I’ve been hooked in,” Beth warns, “the components have been cold as fuck. Just so you know.”

She begins fitting the system around Farah’s body. After years with Immerse, hooking in has become routine, but it’s rare that she’s put the system on someone else, especially someone who doesn’t know the components well enough to help. Farah stays slack like a doll, allowing Beth to wrap her arms in the tight compression sleeves and slide the thick, electrode-studded gloves down over each finger. Beth has never seen her so quiet, so attentive.

Arms, legs, torso. The hood comes last. As Beth reaches around behind Farah’s head, her inner arm brushes against the rough cloth of Farah’s suited shoulder. Farah doesn’t seem to notice.

“This piece is the brain of the whole system,” Beth explains, drawing it up around Farah’s thick hair. “Everything you see and feel starts in here. It’ll send signals to the other pieces, like so… ” Farah makes a soft sound of surprise as something trails across her fingertips. The glove on her right hand flexes perceptibly. “The system will be giving you real stimuli. Your brain will interpret it according to the program that the system is running.”

“It felt like sand. What the glove did just now… it felt like digging my fingers into warm sand.”

The visor comes down over her eyes. She lies back on the cot, breathes deeply. Beth steps back and lets the program begin.

The program runs more or less predictably. Moment by moment, Beth has always been able to guess what it will show. They built it out of her memories, after all. She was the one who lay in the MRI as they brushed and pressed and prodded, held her fingers against cloth and metal, paper and leaves. The one who opened her mouth and offered her tongue to sugar and vinegar and stale bread.

And so she knows that Farah is walking across a county fairground on a mid-summer evening, the system pulsing the pressure of sandy soil and sparse grass up through the soles of her feet, and every electrode registering heat and humidity. Carousel music—calliopes and brass bands—floats on a slow breeze. Balancing the volume was a challenge; it required adjusting the instruments’ pitch as the subject moved across the scene. In the distance, fair rides spin and tilt and shine in the orange sunlight. Scraps of paper and checkered hotdog wrappers plaster themselves against a chain-link fence. There are smells, of which Beth is especially proud, though they are still imperfect: cooking sausages, hot pretzels and mustard, fairground ponies, gasoline. Just when Beth estimates Farah is probably approaching the Ferris wheel, Farah makes a strange, strangling sound and moves her arms from the cot, reaching for her visor.

“Take it off!”

Her voice is muffled by the helmet. She doesn’t sound frightened, but angry.

Beth loosens the strap, slips the hood back over Farah’s head. Farah’s face is damp, frowning, unreadable. She seems ready to rip the gloves off, but Beth stops her; the system is delicate.

“What is it? Are you okay?”

Farah shrugs her off. “Yes. Sorry.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. It was just—”

“Uncanny?” Beth has heard that one before.

“Dull.”

A moment of thick silence.

“What’s wrong with it?” Beth says.

“No, no.” Farah shakes her head, raking her still-gloved hands through her hair. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“Just tell me what’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong. It’s just empty. Not a single living thing. No one else.” Farah’s hands are still buried in her curls. She glances up at Beth’s face, and the oddly angry expression still curls her lips. “No other people, right?”

“No. Not for a long time, anyway.” Beth remembers Aiden, his alternate reality fantasies. Hiding away in the imaginary world of Immerse, waiting for the storm to pass. Or not waiting—building a new world inside the program for just one person. “It was part of the plan for the future, of course, but we’re nowhere near that level. And there’s no time for it now.”

“So what’s it good for?”

Her eyes are narrowed, her voice raised, ringing a little in that small, bare room. She lowers her hands, rips the gloves off with a loud tearing sound. She doesn’t mean to be combative, Beth realizes; she’s genuinely curious. The anger comes from not understanding.

And Beth isn’t sure she understands, either.

She looks down at the glove dangling empty from the tight sleeves on Farah’s forearm, looks down at the crisp sheets of the cot, which smell faintly of bleach, at the ridges in the concrete floor, at the shadow of Farah’s crutch falling across them, that narrow black line against the pale gray. She hears the hum of the air filters in the room behind them.

“It gives people something they can touch,” she says.

Silence gathers again, thick. Farah smiles ruefully.

“If someone were to find this years from now,” she says, “if someone could survive and find this place on their own, would they even know what to do with it? Do you think they would understand this?”

“I don’t know,” Beth admits. “But it will be here, just in case.”

The Sixth Match

Beth does not open up easily, if at all. She has never wanted to fall in love. She dreads travel, new jobs, new co-workers. She would rather reread a book she loves ten times over than risk picking up a new one. She had many acquaintances in college, and some even endeavored to stay in touch, but it never seemed worth the effort to her. It’s hard to get in touch with people now, what with the evacuations, the earthquakes, the fires. If she’s honest, she prefers it this way.

Farah smiles rarely, but when she does, it is extraordinarily pretty. She talks little. Beth has memorized her makeup, the brown lipstick on her full lips, the heavy eyeshadow with a hint of green, the precise curve of it beneath Farah’s straight, high eyebrows. Unlike Beth, she has no preferences for ink or paper; she writes on napkins, the backs of receipts, envelopes from the electric bill. She touches everything in the apartment. Her rent checks are always on time, never a day early or a day late. She moved to D.C. right after the Yellowstone eruption; the air was clear when she signed the agreement, but by the time she moved in, the DOI warnings had already been issued. I don’t mind, she’d said. I stay inside anyway.

Beth knows nothing about Farah’s family, her friends, her preferences. Doesn’t know if she’s ever been in love.

If Beth’s honest, she prefers it that way, too

The Seventh Match

One week before the end of the world, they take a taxi down to the west end of the Mall. The buses have stopped running. The downtown streets are eerie and unfamiliar: food carts abandoned at long-expired parking meters; newspaper vending machines empty or still filled with last week’s papers; plywood and plastic affixed over full-story windows, to protect against looters and smog. Both measures, Beth thinks, are overly optimistic.

It may be Beth’s imagination, but the air feels a little fresher down by the thick old trees, down by the wider stretches of the river and the tidal basin: a little less gritty against the skin her mask leaves exposed. The seven small aquariums fit in the trunk of the taxi, just barely. They’re obnoxiously heavy. Farah needs her crutches, so it’s Beth’s job to carry the boxes, one at a time, past the stone barricades and down the shallow steps to the place that Farah has selected on the lip of the reflecting pool.

“Is there a special way to do this?” she asks. “Should we say something first?”

Farah shakes her head.

They place the Houses Without Air in a tight semicircle with the open edge facing the pool. As Beth sets each aquarium in place, Farah crouches down across from it, inspecting the landscapes inside. She’s anchored them well; nothing has shifted except the sand. Farah’s custom-fitted lids have puckered, rubber-lined openings in the top corners large enough to take a matchstick, just barely airtight.

Beth hasn’t come down to the Mall in almost three years. The haze is so thick now that she can’t make out even a suggestion of the white obelisk far above and across the pool, and the Lincoln Memorial is only a pale, heavy smudge to their right.

Farah stays crouched over the seventh box, her crutches stretched out to either side like the barest framework for wings. Her eyes look red and damp, irritated by the air. Beth wonders what her lips are doing behind her mask.

“You can start,” she says.

The box of long matches is in Beth’s jacket pocket. When Farah nods, she strikes the first match, pushes it down flame-first through the opening in the first aquarium’s roof. They practiced back at the apartment; if they aren’t quick enough, the flame will go out before they can pass it through the lid. The flame makes it in, but there’s only a sliver of air between the lid and the surface of the water inside. It smothers quickly.

Farah lets Beth light the second, too. It lasts a little longer, but then the oxygen is gone, and the matchstick smokes over dunes of sand and pink gravel. Farah holds out her hand for the matchbox.

The third House is the desert, layered with miniature cacti in shades of green and pale, waxy blue. The fourth is a rainforest, as much as Farah could fit in the little box, broad leaves, flower petals, two inches of water along the bottom. The fourth flame burns halfway up the matchstick before it suffocates.

The fifth match is Beth’s again, and it takes three tries to strike. Beth curses under her breath, worrying that it’s the air, but of course it’s just her stiff fingers. The red tip catches, and she pushes it into the fifth box; Farah has added a chain-link fence to the low gravel mounds, bright flecks of paper caught along its foot. The sixth House holds a tiny city block, the colonial rowhouses tall, identical, red and white, with red brick sidewalks and slender trees marching along the front. The sixth flame rises as high as the fourth.

Beth passes the matchbox to Farah. “Thank you,” she says.

The seventh House is a flight of shallow white steps leading down to a sheet of dark, reflective glass. Farah closes her eyes. It is a race to see which is consumed first: the oxygen, or the match.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Megan Arkenberg lives and writes in California. Her short stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and dozens of other places. She procrastinates by editing the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance.