The End Is Nigh

Jamie Ford — THIS UNKEMPT WORLD IS FALLING TO PIECES

May 1910

Young Darwin Chinn Qi didn’t smell smoke, but as instructed, he opened the heavy iron callbox and pulled the fire alarm just the same, alerting guests and the staff of Seattle’s opulent Sorrento Hotel that the Sidereal Tramp had finally arrived.

The great comet had many names: Astral Visitor, Celestial Vagrant, Sky Rover, even Flammarion’s Folly—but “The Tramp” had finally caught on in all the newspapers and on the wires. Darwin thought the name sounded much better than the less sensational and plainly named Smoking Comet of 1882, which had been visible in broad daylight but had hardly elicited such worldwide excitement (and widespread panic).

He wished he’d seen the last one, but Darwin was only fifteen years old. He wasn’t even alive when the previous comet passed by. That last apparition appeared long before he’d been born in Hong Kong—the bastard son of a sailor in the British Royal Navy and a Chinese woman. He’d been given to a mission home for half-breeds, shipped to Seattle, and sold into service.

Not a bad life, such as it is, Darwin thought. He hadn’t learned a trade, but he could speak and read proper English. And better to die a prince in Washington’s newest and finest hotel than live as king of the tarpaper shacks down on the mudflats.

Darwin had been to the stinking South Puget Sound once, during an especially low tide. He didn’t envy the poor grunts working enormous steam-powered Iron Chinks, digging geoduck clams out of oil-soaked mud for half-pennies a pound.

Darwin continued daydreaming as he stood at attention while gentlemen in tuxedos and ladies in formal gowns made of copper lamé pulled on their long, silken dinner gloves and hurried to the elevator queue, waiting impatiently to reach the Top O’ the Town restaurant on the seventh floor. Then he caught a knowing glance down the hall from Mr. Rosenberg, the hotel owner, and hurried to the smoking parlor. He hoisted a large humidor made from Spanish cedar and caught the servants lift to the top floor, which smelled like fresh calla lilies and prime rib.

Guests were lounging in the tearooms and newly appointed moon-rooms, listening to Betty Hall Clark sing Wild Cherries and spoony ragtime on the auto-piano, while oohing and aahing at the Aurora Borealis—luminous ribbons of purple and blue-green that bled into the night sky—the opening act before what might be the grandest of all finales. Meanwhile the more daring patrons ventured out onto the Florentine loggia and rooftop garden, leaning over the balcony to get a better view of the horizon and the lights from sailboats that deckled Lake Washington, bobbing up and down, moving slowly on the water, shimmering like fireflies in honey. A few of the more intrepid guests wore gas masks atop their heads like party hats, while many of the older ladies veiled themselves in birdcage lace and toted comet umbrellas to fend off any errant dust and soot drifting down from the sky.

As Darwin found a place for the humidor and offered Cuban cigars for ten-cents apiece, Lucy Stringfellow walked by in a shiny pink mini-dress with matching cap. She toted a silver cigarette tray, offering tobacco for the ladies as well as comet pills. The fashionable blue mints had been laced with colloidal silver to ward off bad humors and also had the pleasing effect of turning one’s skin the color of sterling ash.

“Hello, Dashing,” she teased and blew him a kiss. “I’ll love you until the end of time. Or sunrise, whichever comes first.”

Lucy was a year older, an inch taller, and always called him Daunting, Daring, Dancing—anything but his adoptive name—even the occasional Darling, which always made Darwin delightfully uncomfortable.

He caught her eye and then looked away. “Do you think we’re really going see it tonight? Because crying wolf is bad for business.”

Lucy nodded at the horizon. “Mr. Rosenberg said the Hydrographic Office just got a message from a ship at sea. Then the telegraph went down. He says that’s how we can know for sure when the Sidereal Tramp is close. The northern lights come out and then all the wires stop working.”

The telegraphic services not working made Darwin feel, well—not quite scared—but certainly more nervous than he’d expected; after all, the headlines in the Seattle Star had been going on for weeks about Camille Flammarion, the French astronomer who had declared that the Earth would pass through the Tramp’s tail for five hours, which was—according to Flammarion’s scientific calculations—millions of miles long and made of something called cyanogen, which sounded ominous, indeed.

Flammarion had warned: The Terrible Tramp would impregnate our atmosphere with poison and most certainly cause a ruinous catastrophe for every living thing—mind blindness, all manners of sickness, and even death.

While in England, someone from the Royal Greenwich Observatory said that massive tides might cause the Pacific Ocean to empty itself into the Atlantic.

Darwin didn’t know what to believe and neither did anyone else. From atop the Sorrento he had a clear view of the Luddites at St. James Cathedral, which was holding an all-night prayer vigil. It seemed that all over Seattle—all over the world perhaps—people were either confessing their sins, or busy committing new ones.

“You look rather pale,” Lucy said. “You feeling alright, dearest darling?”

Darwin blushed.

“The cigar smoke doesn’t agree with me,” he lied, pretending to cough as the color came back to his cheeks. He knew that while Seattle’s gilded elite celebrated, many of those on the street had other plans. Some left, as the comet got closer, to hide in caves or the abandoned mines of Mount Rainier. Other poor souls, tormented by fear, religious fervor, or both, had committed suicide, quickly, with a bullet or by electrocution, or slowly, by drinking their fears away, one glass, one bottle, one cask of homemade apple-gin at a time. And the jails were overflowing with comet-crazed people. Darwin had even read about a sheriff in Oklahoma who rescued a girl who was about to be sacrificed by her stepfather to a band of end-of-the-world fanatics.

Darwin feigned a smile.

“I’ll make us some pearl tea,” Lucy said. “After the party. We’ll have our own celebration—why not live a little, while we still can?”

Darwin watched as she smiled and walked away. In my dreams.

They’d lived under the same grand roof for three years but had never been alone, not even for a minute, and had hardly spent any non-working, non-dining time together. Darwin resided in the east wing of the walkup basement with the colored men of the kitchen staff, custodians, and boiler mechanics, while Lucy lived one floor below with the rest of the resident female workers. Only Mr. Elliot, the majordomo, was allowed to live on the ground floor, and aside from group meals, which Mr. Elliot grudgingly tolerated, their boss frowned on social contact between the men and women. Though lately some of the doe-eyed servants had met up on their rare days off. But the couples were invariably discovered and, apocalypse or not, they found their employment contracts voided.

Darwin wondered (and worried) that Lucy had caught comet-fever and was willing to take that chance on his behalf. But as he heard hooting and a wild commotion from the balcony, he wondered if he was willing to meet that risk.

“Here’s to the end of the world!” a woman shouted, above the boisterous piano and the popping of a dozen champagne corks.

Darwin shut the humidor’s lid as everyone rushed outside or pressed their faces to the windows to get a better look. The end of the world has become a joke, Darwin thought, a debate to be hashed out in the editorial pages of newspapers.

“It’s here! Glory, it’s huge!” someone hollered.

“Good Lord,” a man stammered, his voice cracking. “Why is it so damn close?”

Darwin watched in awe as white lights exploded, silhouetting men with long-tailed jackets and women draped in fur cloaks and shawls. Then the laughs and jovial cheers dissolved into panicked shrieks and the sound of glass breaking. Darwin ducked as he heard thunderous booming, and the windows rattled in their panes. He smelled smoke, and burning, like fetid sulfur as fire and lightning filled the night sky. Scores of patrons swarmed back inside like ants caught in a rainstorm, climbing over each other and the serving staff. So many people piled into the elevator that the brass gate wouldn’t close and the lift remained a wobbling, jerking cage of mewling bodies and fine haberdashery.

Darwin chewed his lip and squeezed through the frenzied crowd, past drunk men at the bar who guzzled their drinks, and around the piano player who began Chopin’s Funeral March in earnest, her head down, eyes closed.

He finally found Lucy crouched beneath a serving table and helped her up.

“Follow me,” he said, as he took her hand and guided her against the tide of terrified revelers, past the balcony doors, which were filled with smoke and flashing luminescence. They hurried toward the servants’ stairs. He put his hand around her waist and led her down the serpentine steps, down seven floors, pausing on the ground level as he heard screams from the foyer and the sound of pottery shattering.

“It’s not safe out there,” he said, unsure if she could hear him. Then he led her down two more flights, through a long hallway, past the cellar and into the boiler room.

“What are we doing down here?” Lucy asked, catching her breath.

“If the Tramp is that close we’re safer below ground,” Darwin looked around the dimly lit room, which was a cave of load-bearing columns, metal pipes, clanking pistons, and machinery that ran the length of the high, joisted ceiling. An enormous boiler, the size of a locomotive engine, dominated the center of the room, radiating heat. “This place is built like the Airship Kentucky.”

“But the poison vapors outside, the comet dust,” Lucy said. “Won’t that come through the doors, the cracks in the walls… ?”

“This way.” Darwin cut her off and led her inside the large coal bin. He climbed a pile of black rock and closed the coal chute, then he scrambled down and closed the heavy iron coal bin doors, sealing out light and smoke and the terrifying world above. He remembered that gas masks used filters lined with crushed charcoal. This room might filter out the toxic fumes, he hoped, as they sat down and huddled into the pile. He felt her hip, smelled her perfume mixed with sweat amid the smoky coal. He brushed her bare leg for a moment before he found her fingers laced between his.

The room was pitch black.

“This… this can’t be happening,” Lucy whispered. “I didn’t believe it…”

Darwin didn’t answer. He held her hand and listened, straining to hear something, anything above the pounding of his heart and his worried breathing. He heard what sounded like sirens in the distance and the muffled cries of people shouting. He couldn’t quite accept that the world was ending, but he recognized fear when he saw it, when he felt it.

“Darling, Daring… Dying.” Lucy sniffled. “I don’t want to die… want to die…”

“We’re not dead yet.” Darwin tried to talk about something—anything—to fill the silence, the dread of not knowing. “You know, my last name is Qi. It’s sometimes a lucky name because in Chinese it means life, or breath, or air—that’s a good omen, right? Though it’s kind of a funny thing too because in the mission home where I grew up, they told me the Chinese fable about the Qi Dynasty. They were the most backward of all people because they worried about anything and everything. The Qi literally thought the sky was falling—like Chicken Little. And now look at us. The sky is falling.”

As the sirens faded, the world grew quiet. He heard her breathing soften. He felt it proper to let go of her hand but he didn’t want to. He held on tighter.

“I’m not laughing,” she said. And then she did, just a little.

“See,” he said. “The end of the world’s not so bad. All we need is that cup of pearl tea, with lemon.” He squeezed her hand. “Quickly, tell me about your family.”

She sneezed twice from the coal dust and Darwin blessed her out of social habit, though he didn’t practice any such primitive religion.

“What family?” she said as the coal settled beneath them. Her voice echoed in the hollow steel chamber. “My parents came down from Vancouver to work in the copper mines. My father contracted green lung from the dust and couldn’t work. I was the youngest of seven mouths to feed so they sold me—put me in service, just like you—until I’m eighteen, just like you. I haven’t seen them in years. They’re probably dead now, or will be soon.”

Darwin understood the same sadness. The same bitter loneliness. He imagined suffering through the end of the world, only to be the last two survivors.

She patted his arm. “You can be my family.”

He mulled that over—the good and bad. Lucy had hinted, smiled, flirted, and nearly broken the rules to catch his eye. Part of him had known this all along and a part of him (the doubting, insecure part) had half-pretended to be oblivious—better to be wrong in his apprehension than right in her possible rejection. Where does that leave them now?

Family. Darwin thought. Like husband and wife, or kissing cousins?

Before he could ask, he startled at the clanging of the fire bell in the distance—the same alarm he’d pulled earlier—but this time he heard three sharp rings.

Then silence.

“Thank goodness,” Darwin whispered. “We’re in luck.” He helped Lucy to her feet and opened the creaking, groaning, coal room doors. “That beautiful sound was the all-clear signal. We just might live to see the morning after all.”

“You’re sure?” She hesitated. “Is it really safe?”

“There’s only one way to find out.”

They took turns dusting each other off in the shadowy darkness—turning, smiling, laughing, and gently touching. He took her hand and boldly kissed it once, then wiped off the coal dust where his lips had been.

Why not? he thought as he paused, grateful for catastrophe. Then he let go.

As they stepped into the corridor, they squinted at Mr. Elliot and a custodian who Darwin didn’t recognize. Each of them carried a matchless flashlight. The majordomo bit down on his pipe and grunted, “Jeezus and Mary! I had better never catch you two down here again in this state of… aloneness.” He pointed to the stairwell. “Clean yourself up and get back to your stations—hurry along now. The show is over but the party will continue as planned and you still have guests to serve.”

“But… the Tramp… ,” Lucy protested.

“What Tramp? Get upstairs,” Mr. Elliot barked. “Now!”

They hurried along the servants’ stairwell, then waved goodbye as they split up to go change into new liveries on their respective floors. Darwin, though, couldn’t wait to abate his curiosity. He peeked into the octagonal-shaped lobby where a host of guests were collecting themselves and waiters were offering everyone free cocktails and comet pills. He wandered from the stairwell out the front door and down the steps to the circular porte-cochére where three police motorcars were parked and a patrol of mounted officers clip-clopped by in the cold, brisk Seattle night. Darwin’s mouth fell open as he looked above the smoke that had settled in the Italian garden; he saw a fire engine, ladder extended, pumping water into the trees that were still ablaze. Above that queer spectacle floated a massive airship; a hot air balloon half the size of the hotel, hovered above the seventh floor balcony. Below the basket was an enormous wooden platform, still smoking, sparking, glowing with fireworks and a neon contraption that read DRINK REAL OLYMPIA BEER from the CLAUSSEN SWEENEY BREWING COMPANY. Darwin heard police officers with bullhorns shouting at the aeronauts to come down and face charges for public nuisance and disturbing the peace.

And for inciting a riotous stampede. Darwin thought. And for making a young girl cry in my arms. And for terrifying me, yet also making me happier and more relieved than I’ve been in a long, long time.

An hour later, the end-of-the-world publicity stunt was the talk of the party as comet-watchers resumed their previously scheduled frivolities, though some of the elderly celebrants had taken their heart medicine and gone to bed. If the end of the world was nigh, they had chirped, they would greet it lying down, dreaming of greener pastures and tinctures of laudanum. Several of the guests had been taken to the hospital to treat their bumps, scrapes, bruises, and one man’s broken leg.

Despite the somewhat subdued atmosphere, Darwin quickly ran out of machine-crafted cigars from Havana and had moved on to the hand-rolled labels from Trinidad and Brazil. No one seemed to mind the rough cohibas. And Lucy resumed her duties, though her pink cap had been crushed in the scrum.

Darwin stood his post and gazed out the window as the Madison Street cable car descended the steep hill to downtown, past sodium-arc streetlights that flickered in the darkness, beneath the aurora, which continued its heavenly performance, unfettered. He thought of Lucy and her touch, and the end of the world seemed farther away than it had been sixty minutes ago. But, perhaps he’d earn a measure of insurance just the same.

In Chinatown, Darwin heard that the locals had taken to the Underground—which had been publicly closed during the bubonic plague scare of 1907, but had quietly been repopulated ever since. First for opium dens, gambling parlors, and pleasure houses, and now for handsomely built comet shelters complete with brass bottles of air and Dr. Melvin’s Comet Tonic, which was advertised as wormwood but was probably nothing more than castor oil. The brick bunkers were so popular that only a few were left and could only be had through a lottery run by the Chong Wa Benevolent Association.

Darwin had bought a ticket last week, just in case, as a way of preventing disaster, like taking your bumbershoot out because you know it only rains when you leave it behind. The ticket had cost ten dollars, an extravagance that now seemed affordable as he palmed a pocketful of old folding money he’d earned in tips from guests who had currency to burn and perhaps a limited lifetime in which to spend such wealth.

“Quite the evening, eh?” Darwin said, as he cut and then lit the cigar of a cotton-haired gentleman stooped over a silver-tipped cane.

The old man looked back with a twinkle in his eye that might have been a tear. “Perfect night for the end of the world. And not my first, young lad.” The old man’s lips trembled and his hands shook as he spoke. “I saw the Sidereal Tramp back in 1835, the last time it came ’round—course they called it Halley’s Comet back then. Few of us are around to remember the same panic, the same stupidity. The same… indulgences.”

Darwin nodded, not realizing that people were still alive from the last apparition. “They say the Tramp’s gravity is closer this time. And the poisonous tail…”

“And this you believe?” the old man asked, but his question felt like a statement.

“Begging your pardon, sir. I honestly don’t know what to believe.”

“And that’ll be your downfall, your lack of faith in science. But soon… all will be revealed. Because at my age, I feel every storm, every snowfall—I feel it in my bones. This storm—this thing—I feel it coming. This unkempt world is falling to pieces.” The old man’s voice quavered. “I’ve lived my life, I should be so lucky as to expire with an entire continent to keep me company.”

Darwin sensed the same dread he’d felt in the boiler room. He heard the crowd’s chatter settle into a bouquet of delicate whispers. Everyone stopped dancing, or mingling, and slowly, timidly, drifted to the balcony, yet again.

“That’s more like it,” a woman cooed as she sipped a glass of sparkling wine.

The hunched old man stood a bit taller to see outside, and Darwin noticed the detachable collar of a retired science minister.

“When beggars die there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes,” the old man said. “That’s Shakespeare.” He squeezed Darwin’s shoulder. “G’night, lad.”

Darwin bid him well and peered, with the rest of the wait staff, over the shoulders of the regal men and women they’d been serving. He could see the Tramp appear just above the horizon, drifting slowly across the Western sky—an unmistakable white light, the size of his thumb as he extended his arm away from his body. The light flashed a ruddy crimson, arcs of fire hovering above the Olympic Mountains. The deep curve of the comet’s tail stretched out behind the glowing orb as partygoers made silent wishes, offered solemn toasts, or kissed as though celebrating the New Year all over again. There was a wave of apprehension that conceded quietly to relief.

He felt someone take his arm and knew by her perfume that it was Lucy. He continued watching the Tramp make its way through the darkness and through the glowing curtains of the northern lights. “It’s breathtaking.” He smiled and nodded. “The end of the world should happen more often, don’t you think?”

“Darwin—” She paused. “Darwin, I…”

And then the comet flashed and the lights went out—the comforting thrum of electricity gone—everything dark but the candles and the jellied fuel which glowed pink and yellow beneath the chafing dishes and coffee pots, then that too was snuffed out in a rush of air that stole Darwin’s breath and shattered every pane of glass, exploded every bottle of wine, and gave voice to a primeval sound that was felt, not heard—something great and terrible, a city, surrendering its death-rattle.

Somewhere amid the maelstrom, between the flutter of heartbeats, bounded by the turbulent light that enveloped the sky and the Stygian dark that would follow, Darwin thought of Lucy Stringfellow. He wished he’d touched her lips, at least once.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jamie Ford is the great grandson of Nevada mining pioneer Min Chung, who emigrated from Kaiping, China, to San Francisco in 1865, where he adopted the western name “Ford,” thus confusing countless generations. His debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list and went on to win the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. His work has been translated into 32 languages. Jamie is still holding out for Klingon (because that’s when you know you’ve made it). He can be found at www.jamieford.com blogging about his new book, Songs of Willow Frost, and also on Twitter @jamieford.