The End Is Now

TWILIGHT OF THE MUSIC MACHINES Megan Arkenberg

Every party is a free party at the end of the world, Cloud likes to say. He winks at me when he says it, roaring over the music in the warehouse, or standing outside on the fire escape, puncturing the foil on a blister pack of prescription meds with the tip of his pocketknife. Privately, I doubt the apocalypse has anything to do with his access to ear-splitting music or pill-delivered euphoria of dubious legality. I always say the end of the world is like a rainstorm, or a monsoon, something torrential—some people head to higher ground, and the rest of us get washed miscellaneously into the gutter, swirled down with the leaves and cigarette butts. Just because the rain swept us in, though, doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have found our way here on our own.

Take Cloud, right now, rolling to the music like a boat on open water, eyes closed, flying high on something I can’t pronounce. He stuck the empty plastic bubble packaging onto the warehouse wall behind us, and the sound system’s sweeping lasers and reflected LEDs turn the empty cells into miniature mirror balls. When the same light touches Cloud’s face, clean-shaven, sharp-featured, all planes and edges under thin, anemic skin, it makes him look like a saint in stained glass. The patron saint of altered states, maybe, or of edges, of missing guardrails and falling off cliffs. The patron saint of living precariously. Now that he’s here, you could never imagine him anywhere else. This stripped, abandoned warehouse between the expressway and the canal is his Cathedral, the pills and lights and pulsing cyber-goth-industrial postrock beat the closest thing he has to sacraments, or to miracles.

Tonight, I’m running on nothing stronger than lukewarm instant coffee and the filter half of a broken cigarette, which Meme-the-DJ and I passed between us on the roof of the sound system’s van while the rest of the team was unloading, rigging up the speakers and the light displays and the portable gasoline generator in its square red frame. Their name is Paëday, pronounced “payday,” and isn’t that a funny coincidence, Meme said—meaning me, Frida, called Friday. Friday, payday. Sure, I said, hilarious. Didn’t mean that kind of funny, Meme said.

She’s smiling at me now, Meme is, her short brown fingers with their enamel rings and chipped electric-blue nail polish sliding over the controls in a turret-like platform at the top of the machine. Green and purple light sweeps over me, pulses, sweeps back again, and Cloud catches my hands in his, weaving his fingers through mine, purple light dancing on foil and plastic behind him. My eyes follow the horizontal joint in the concrete back to the corner of the warehouse where the sound machine works its magic. And too late, I see it, the gritty orange-brown support beam that has started to slide down the wall, the ceiling sagging above it, peeling like a hangnail, letting in the sky. Rainwater has already scoured a series of deep, chalky troughs down the concrete blocks and pitted the floor with half-dollar sized holes, illuminated in the sudden pulsing of a strobe. The music is wailing, pitch climbing, Cloud’s hands like ice, Meme smiling like a skull. The only warning I can give is a shout, too late, cut off by a roar like a freight train as the sagging sheet of ceiling peels away, collapses on the sound system, and brings a waterfall of battery-acid rain down with it.

Silence, then screaming.

Welcome to the end of the world.

I see the graffiti for the first time in front of Vanessa’s house, and if you’re looking for omens, I guess this is one. Venomous yellow spray-paint, the color of caution signs or police tape, curving like a sideways ‘C’ across a square of brown plastic that I recognize as the detached lid of a garbage bin. The plastic is corroded from the rain, looking like something chewed on its edges, and I guess that’s an omen, too. Something about the shape or the color or the brightness of it hurts my eyes, my stomach, like the hangover last night failed to give me.

Vanessa lives on one of the long blocks of close-set brick Victorians between Drexel and Woodlawn, a few blocks north of the University. The front lawns are all a dead, crumbling gray, the yews and rose bushes like tumbleweeds caught beneath the bay windows, and I’m convinced, for reasons I can’t put a finger on, that the whole neighborhood reeks distinctively of cat piss.

It’s also a long trek from Felicity’s house, where I’ve been sleeping in a first-floor bedroom that belonged to a paying tenant about four months ago, before the air went toxic and the rain turned corrosive, acidic, what-the-fuck ever. Four months—just in time for high school graduation, Cloud likes to joke, as though either of us had been likely to graduate, end of the world or not.

I floated down there about the same time that tenant packed up, floated out from under the perfectly manicured paw of a woman who wasn’t my mother and didn’t really want to be. Vanessa must have washed up in Cat-piss Park a little before that. Back near her alma mater, she says, after several years directing climate management research somewhere out west—Colorado, I think, or maybe Nevada. I met her because she was helping Felicity rig up a solar panel that looked like it had been a duct tape fetishist’s weekend project for the last decade.

These days, we bring her water.

Not to be too delicate about it: Vanessa is fucking obsessed with water. Like everybody, I guess, but Vanessa is picky. Won’t touch anything that didn’t originate in a plastic bottle. Iodine, charcoal filters, those pale pink pH balancing tablets that FEMA distributed by the crate-load—none of it is adequate, separately or in conjunction. If the water’s been in a cloud in the last four months, Vanessa won’t have it, period.

She’s a sweet woman, Felicity says, always shaking her head when she says it. But nothing about Vanessa Novak is easy.

Any time Felicity gets her hands on bottled water, from FEMA or the Salvation Army or one of her ephemeral boyfriends, I hook up the red canvas child carrier to the back of my bike, load it with gallon jugs or cardboard cases of bottles, and head south. Vanessa’s apartment is on the top floor of a narrow, flat-roofed three-story, and you enter through the sketchiest addition ever slapped onto the back of a building, all unpainted two-by-fours, protruding nails, and square, single-paned windows that rattle loosely in their frames. Vanessa uses this back room as a greenhouse, a pile-up collision of tomato vines, bell peppers, chives, and basil in square plastic trays. A trapdoor and a painter’s ladder take you onto the roof, which has been plastered over with solar panels and more trays of plants, sheltered from the rain by a blue camping tarp.

Vanessa is up there now, fiddling with one of her panels, barefoot on the black stretch of tar-like shingle. A bandana with a pattern of koi fish and square coins keeps her tight brown curls out of her eyes. She looks up, hearing the trapdoor knock against one of the steel legs of the tarp as I flip it open.

“Hey,” I say, too winded to offer much more. “Got you some water.”

She grins, showing uneven but exceptionally white teeth. “Friday, you are magnificent.”

It takes about five minutes to get the eight gallons of water out of the child carrier and up the stairs to her apartment. She leaves six in the greenhouse room and has me lug the other two up the ladder, onto the roof, where she unceremoniously dumps the contents over a pallet of yellow-flowered something. Even after months of this, a small part of me winces to see perfectly good drinking water dripping off the leaves, soaking into the shingle. Vanessa, as always, doesn’t notice me squirming. Or maybe she just doesn’t give a shit. Hard to tell with her.

Sometimes, when I bring her water, that’s all there is—the magnificent smile, the wordless trek up and down the stairs, the unceremonious watering of the plants. Today, she wants to talk.

“Especially loud this morning, aren’t they?”

She’s standing with her brown, sleeveless arms folded across her chest, frowning at the unidentified yellow flowers. I have no idea what she’s talking about.

“Pardon?”

“The rain,” she says.

“Oh.” I shrug, scratch the back of my neck. “Slept through it, I guess. Last night was a total shit-show.” Which is putting it mildly, but she doesn’t need the details. “Felicity still wants you to come out with us sometime. If you’d like to.”

“Why? Got a solar panel that needs fixing?”

“Nothing like that.” She’s kidding, so I try to smile. All over again, I see the ceiling of the warehouse peeling away, the sheet of toxic water falling over Paëday’s generator. Sparks flying everywhere, then darkness so intense it hits me like a slap. Meme screaming. I push the whole thing away with an artificial, throat-clearing cough. “Just thought you might have a good time. Enjoy the music, meet people.” Pop a few pills, watch a few ceilings collapse. End of the world, lady, every party is a free party.

“Mutually exclusive,” she says.

“Pardon?” Again.

“I can’t have a good time and meet people. I don’t like music, anyway. Blows your hearing.” She licks her lips—is she still teasing? Hard to tell, again. “That’s probably why you aren’t hearing them. Look.”

She takes one of the now-empty gallon jugs, weaves her way between the solar panels and scoops something from the edge of the roof.

“Jesus. Is that rain water?”

“I’m not drinking it,” she says, screwing on the cap. “Just listen.”

She hands me the jug, half an inch of water sloshing around the bottom. I hold it against my ear. Hear plastic crinkling, nothing else.

“Sorry,” I say.

She gives me a look, mouth quirked and eyebrows crinkled, like I’m speaking with an accent she can just barely puzzle out. Or like she’s hearing two people shouting at once and can’t decide which to listen to. She lets me hand the jug back to her, holds it up to the light. Dark specks, like coffee grounds, float on the surface—flakes of shingle, I guess, from the roof.

She walks to the front of the house and dumps the water over the side, onto the dead lawn below. Something down there seems to spook her, because she steps back quickly, almost tripping over the corner of a panel. But by the time she gets back to the shade of the tarp, she’s smiling again, thanking me for the water, and I know that’s my cue to leave.

The plastic garbage lid with its yellow graffiti is still sitting on the sidewalk as I make my way down. I glimpse another flash of yellow at the end of the block, sideways on a fire hydrant. And again, on a manhole cover in the middle of the road. A ‘C’ turned on its back, with a row of circles clustered inside and the ends turned out, curling. Again and again, all the way out of Cat-piss Park. Bright as Day-Glo, yellow like the edge of nausea.

“A ship with two faces,” Cloud says when I show him a sketch of it. He’s standing on the bottom step of Felicity’s front porch, on his way out to find a new location for tonight’s music. He stopped over to check on Paëday, who spent the night on the two Ikea futons in Felicity’s living room. Meme has gone back to sleep, he says, in the upstairs bedroom that Felicity still refers to as Mia’s.

Mia is Felicity’s daughter. She’s twenty-two, four years older than me, and she hasn’t been in Chicago for years now. Whether Felicity thinks she’s ever coming back is a thing that shifts with the wind.

Paëday, Cloud says carefully, is fine, just shaken up—Meme especially, since she was standing closest to the part of the roof that caved in. The edge in Cloud’s voice makes me afraid to ask for details. Their generator is almost certainly lost, and most of the sound system with it. So now what are they going to do? What the fuck can they possibly do?

Isn’t that the question for all of us.

Cloud sees me thinking and he reaches up, puts a hand on my forearm, gentle as a kitten. He’s a different creature by daylight, without the drugs or the music. Years ago, in one of the month-to-month apartments where I lived with my mother, there was a janky light switch in the bathroom. The bulb only lit up while you were flipping it on or off—never when the switch was set all the way up or down, only for that split-second sweet spot in the middle, the undetectable moment of hesitation on the way from high to low or low to high. That’s what Cloud’s like, only bright in the middle. And the truth is, I like him best like this.

“Look,” he says now, tracing my sketch with the tip of his thumb. The other hand is still on my arm, warm and not too heavy. “It’s like a Viking ship. The circles are shields, and the curving ends are, what’s the word—beakheads? Although I’m not sure why there’s two of them.”

“Ship with two faces,” I repeat. Like the image itself, the phrase makes me faintly sick, although I couldn’t say why. Cloud hands me the scrap of paper with the sketch, and I push it down into the front pocket of my jeans. “Well,” I say finally, “I doubt it’s a gang sign. Unless we’ve got Viking gangs now.”

His brown eyes sparkle. “Strange days, Friday.”

“You got that fucking right.”

Cloud’s new venue, as it turns out, is a church.

“It’s abandoned, Friday,” he says, like that solves everything. Which it usually does. But I’m not worried about sacrilege as much as acoustics, and churches, in my experience, tend to appear in awfully residential areas.

Cloud tilts his head back, his smooth black ponytail swinging against his windbreaker. Exasperated, or pretending to be. “Trust me. We won’t have to worry about the neighbors.”

“Really. Why’s that?”

Surprisingly, it’s Felicity who answers, stepping into the kitchen with one hand at the nape of her neck, holding her poison green halter shirt together. “East side,” she says. “Flooding, probably. Now, one of you be a darling and tie this up for me.”

We pile into the open bed of her truck—Cloud and me, and a couple of Cloud’s stoner housemates that I only know by sight, strangely identical in chrome-studded vinyl jackets, black jeans, fingerless leather gloves. Thrift store stuff, once upon a time. The two of them have already started on the pills, leaning against the wheel wells and dry-swallowing. Cloud is holding off, since it’s his job to call direction to Felicity through the truck’s open window. He rests a huge flashlight on his knee, halogen blue, and he shines it up at street signs every now and then, checking them against some internal map.

Felicity tried to convince Meme to join us, but she said no, thanks, she and Paëday were salvaging what they could of their equipment, loading the van and heading out tonight. “Where?” Felicity asked, but Meme shrugged, didn’t try to answer. The last I saw of her, she was flinging a knapsack covered in bumper stickers and silver duct tape into the front of the sound system’s van. The back door was open, the plywood interior jammed with miscellaneous scraps of speaker, lighting equipment, a fragment of control panel with missing buttons, one slider hanging by a thin thread of copper.

This is the neighborhood now, Cloud says, jostling me. Traffic isn’t heavy anywhere these days, but these streets are dead. Spookily quiet, not even the ubiquitous late-September buzz of insects, although the air is heavy with humidity. Cloud turns the flashlight beam on a block of houses, revealing glassless windows, graffiti tags like loops of colorful string, stained mattresses and broken chairs on the dead front lawns.

He is just lowering the light when the truck engine moans, chokes, grinds to a slow and utterly decisive halt.

“Fuck.” Felicity’s voice floats up from the cab, along with the dull sound of her hand slapping the dashboard. “Goddamn fucking son of a bitch.”

“Are we broken down, Felicity?” Cloud gets to his feet, ready to swing down from the truck bed, although I’m not sure what he thinks he can do to a busted engine.

“Out of gas,” Felicity says.

“Oh.” Relieved. “I’ll head back to the house and grab a gallon or two. Take an hour, tops.”

“No, sweetheart. I mean out of gas.”

We sit there, quiet for a minute, not looking at each other, tense with something like second-hand embarrassment. Embarrassed that we all knew this was coming, I guess, but didn’t think it would really happen. When was the last time the gas station by the I-94 ramp carried anything but candy bars and irredeemable lottery tickets? Felicity’s chewing her thumbnail, and I’m thinking that she must have known, must have seen that stupid needle dropping on the dashboard, the empty red cans underneath her back porch. Then I remember Mia. Figure Felicity has a talent for disbelief.

“Well,” Cloud says at last, puncturing the awkward silence. “Guess we’re close enough to walk.”

And thirty minutes later, we’re standing on the linoleum floor of the basement of Saint Mary, Help of Christians, the soles of our shoes squeaking on invisible dampness, dodging colorful slices of glass from the broken windows a full story above. The main floor is gone, caved in some time ago and all the fragments carted off, and there’s something ethereally Cathedral-like about the height of the ceiling above us, the candles on the window ledges completely out of reach. Some stray pews and a decapitated upright piano are piled against the rear wall, a backdrop for the wiry tangle of the sound system. It feels like the rest of Chicago has beaten us here, and I’m quietly impressed, as always, at Cloud’s ability to get the word out, at everyone’s willingness to return, in the face of everything, to dance.

Tonight’s sound system is something new. Paëday had been working their way from the east, from Toledo most recently and Cleveland before that. Gray City has come up from St. Louis, one of the identical vinyl-jacketed stoners tells me, from Kansas City, Wichita, Denver. That’s not what makes them different, though. Different is in the music, in chords so clear they sound acoustic, layered over intricate, precise percussion. And the lights they’ve got running, fitted almost too perfectly to the beat, are a whirlwind of red, green, blue, silver-white. I wonder if it’s possible for your eyes to get breathless, because that’s what it feels like—a rippling cascade of color that my vision can barely keep up with.

At some point, a rotating globe on the control deck pulses green light over the DJ, and she looks like something out of an album cover, a storybook, a bad dream. Her face, like Cloud’s, is white planes and sharp angles, her blue-black bottle-dye hair swishing down to her hips, gone thick and wild with the humidity. She wears red leather trousers, a pin-stripe vest, a set of handcuffs doubled up around her left wrist like a pair of bracelets. Her right arm is sleeved in tattoos, geometric, with small irregular blotches of brown, like someone tried to etch a rain-stained bus map into her skin.

Our lady of living precariously, I think. Wonder where that map might lead.

Felicity has me in her arms now, and she’s dancing like a woman half her age, silky green sliding under my cheek. And now Cloud, his hands resting lightly on my waist. When the pills come out of the pocket of his windbreaker, he passes me one, for the first time. I dry swallow, taste dryness and metal. Then it’s just music and light, light, light, washing over my face like rain. Welcoming me back to the end.

I wake up in my own bed, staring up at the ceiling, at a Chinese movie poster that belonged to whoever had this room before me. Beautiful woman in a lace tea dress the same creamy ivory as her skin, red vinyl heels that match her lipstick. Groaning, tasting something sour in the back of my mouth, I roll onto my side. Someone has neatly folded my clothes, stacked them on the window seat—not me, I never fold like that, so I must have had help getting into bed. Felicity? Or maybe Cloud?

Jesus Christ, I hope not. The thought of Cloud helping me out of my jeans makes my face feel as hot as Vanessa’s backroom, and redder than her frankly pathetic tomatoes.

Up and out of bed, pull on a clean pair of jeans, and in the kitchen I get another surprise. Gray City’s knockout DJ is resting her elbows on the chipped laminate counter, watching the hot plate boil water for coffee.

“Solar panel?” she says, pointing to the plate with her tattooed hand. Which may be the weirdest excuse for a “good morning” that I’ve ever heard.

“Yeah,” I say. “One, over the back porch.”

“Smart. A lot of people have gas generators.”

I grunt in response, thinking of Felicity’s truck, and grab a foil-packaged oatmeal bar from the cabinet.

While the coffee brews, I chew my oatmeal and study her more closely. She must have been wearing white make-up last night, because in the morning sunlight, her complexion is reddish-brown and bit blotchy. She’s got her hair piled up at the back of her head, secured with a lime-green plastic clip that I’ve seen Felicity wear before. Other than that, she’s dressed like she was last night—leather pants, pinstripe vest with, I now see, a flesh-colored tank underneath.

“Glad you’re doing okay this morning,” she says, catching me staring. “Your mom and I had a fuck of a time getting you home.”

“Felicity’s not my mom,” I say automatically. Catch myself before I can add something embarrassing, like my mother is dead. “Anyway, thanks. I appreciate it.”

She pours two cups of instant, one for me and one for herself. While I’m stirring in a packet of artificial sweetener, she spreads a small scrap of paper on the counter between us. I recognize my sketch of the ship.

“Did you draw this?”

It was in my pocket, I remember now. Must have fallen out when she was helping me into bed.

“Yeah. I mean, I copied it from somewhere. From some graffiti I saw in—” I stop myself just before I can say “Cat-piss Park.” This is really not my morning. “All around the University.”

“I know,” she says. “I put it there.”

She drums her fingers on the sketch. Long nails, enameled perfectly black.

“Good advertising,” I say after a pause that stretches a fraction of a second too long. Thinking back, looking for something Viking, Scandinavian about Gray City’s performance. Not finding it. Though I’m no expert, and I wish Cloud was here.

“Friday, I need to ask you a question.”

I stir another packet of sweetener into my coffee.

“I think you can help me find a friend of mine. She’d be living near the University now. Her name’s Vanessa, Vanessa Novak.”

“What makes you think I know her?” I suck a drop of too-sweet coffee off the end of my spoon

“Last night, in the van on the way home, you told me to listen to the water.”

I keep my voice carefully neutral. “Why would I say that?”

She slides her hands across the counter, back to her sides, drawing herself to her full height. Which isn’t unimpressive. But I’m not sure she’s trying to be intimidating. Her eyes, deep yellow-brown, narrow thoughtfully. “My friend, Vanessa, she thinks there’s something in the rain. Not acid. Machines.” Wets her lips with the tip of her pale pink tongue. “Like microscopic, mechanical viruses. Always looking for the minerals, the elements they need to make more of themselves. She says you can hear them working on the city. Digesting, not eroding.” She raises her coffee cup to her lips but doesn’t take a sip. “Did she ever tell you that?”

“Didn’t say your friend ever told me anything.”

“I’m worried about her, Friday. We were—friends—in Colorado. She disappeared pretty suddenly when the rain started. Ran away from her lab just when the government paid out a big chunk of money, if you believe the rumors. People think she knew something. Or the stress drove her crazy.”

Especially loud this morning, aren’t they? Vanessa had said. It had sounded crazy to me. And this woman, with her blue-black hair and her tats like a city eaten by acid, is sounding just as bad. Driving on the edge. Missing guardrails.

“So is she right, your friend?” I ask. “About these machines?”

“Maybe. I’m a musician, not a scientist. I don’t know.”

A musician who’s friends with Vanessa. Machines digesting the city. I don’t know which sounds more likely. “Well, that’s fucking terrifying,” I say. I grab my sketch and leave her and my over-sweetened coffee at the counter.

The room I’m staying in opens right off Felicity’s front door, like an architectural afterthought. There’s a little tile foyer there, a coatrack, a leather barstool with a shoebox on top where Felicity throws her gloves, her wallet, her keys. At the top of the pile sits an unfamiliar ring with a black leather tab, a tiny nickel sword charm, a single key with a plain black bow. I pocket it on my way out the door.

Gray City’s van, parked across the street, is empty. Which means we’re planning another night in the same venue: One of the team must have spent the night at St. Mary’s to keep an eye on the equipment. I sweep Styrofoam cups and cigarette boxes off the front seat, watch the needle on the gas meter swing up to the halfway mark as the engine sputters to life. Nice, I think, and maybe I even say it out loud.

Then down four blocks, around the corner, stop in front of a particularly sketchy-looking brownstone with tattered green awnings over the first story windows. I toss a handful of gravel up at the bay window over the door until someone leans out. Identical stoner number three, this one a girl.

“I need Cloud,” I call up.

“Jesus, lady, look at the sky. It’s going to rain soon.”

“I got a van.”

Shaking her head, she slams the window closed behind her. Thirty seconds later, Cloud is jumping down the front steps, half in and half out of his windbreaker.

“You know Vanessa Novak?” I ask as his arm finds the other sleeve. He slides into the front seat next to me.

“Felicity’s smart friend? Fixes shit, hates parties?” He peers into the back seat. “Oh, God, Friday, tell me you didn’t steal Gray City’s van.”

“I’ll give it back later. And yes, that Vanessa. Gray City’s DJ—” I realize now that I didn’t get her name, and wonder if Cloud knows it— “She says they were friends out west. She’s looking for her.”

“And?”

“And? Can you imagine Vanessa being friends with her? The whole thing gives me the creeps. We’re going to see what Vanessa thinks about it.” And God bless him, he doesn’t ask why he’s along for the ride. Just grins and offers me a cigarette scrounged from the floor.

For the first time since I’ve known her, Vanessa has locked her door. Locked and barricaded, from what I can make out from pressing my face against a loose pane of window glass, fogged with humidity. Wooden pallets, terra-cotta plant pots stuffed with something indistinguishable, gallon jugs of filthy water piled up against it. I’m in the middle of congratulating myself for my accurate intuition about Gray City’s DJ, her poison yellow ship-with-two-faces on the sidewalk out front, when I feel the first drop of rain on my hand.

Cold, cold, cold, worse than snow melting down the back of your collar or scraping your knee on icy asphalt. Temperature has nothing to do with it, I know—it’s nerves dying, flesh corroding, Jesus Christ. I’m slapping the back of my hand on my jeans, hearing Cloud’s muted little gasp from the step below me, when the next drop hits my forehead. Hood up, just in time. Then fucking buckets.

Cloud leaps up next to me on the balcony, an arm stretched over my head. Trying to shelter me with his windbreaker, I realize: sweet, but pointless. Quickly, kneeling, I shake out the contents of my backpack—ancient CDs, iPod with a dead battery, leather wallet with an Illinois ID card and not much else—wrap the blue canvas around my fist, and punch the window. Glass already weak, scoured by the rain, it sprays inward beneath my hand, glass shards all over anemic tomato plants and sparse tufts of chive. We scramble inside. Behind us, the fringe of glass hanging at the top of the windowpane drops like a guillotine blade.

Jacket off, I dry my face with the lining. A spot on the back of my hand looks nasty, leprous gray, starting to flake at the edges, but I tell myself it’s my imagination.

“Good thinking,” Cloud says, “with the window.”

I laugh weakly. “Vanessa is going to eat me alive when she sees her tomatoes.”

“Better you than the tomatoes,” Vanessa says. She’s standing in the door between the greenhouse and the rest of the apartment, a stained white towel draped over each arm. Something winglike about that. She looks like the world’s most pissed-off Christmas angel. “You,” she adds without a trace of humor, “are not the ones I was expecting.”

Inside the apartment, we wrap the towels around our shoulders and sit on the lonely corduroy-upholstered couch that is the only piece of furniture in Vanessa’s living room. The floor is littered with empty plastic bottles. Vanessa disappears through a swinging door and re-emerges with a wicker chair under one arm. Slams it down across from us, and it skids on the age-worn floor, the decades of splinters held together with varnish.

“We’re sorry about your plants, Dr. Novak.” Cloud, hovering in the middle of the light switch, charming as can be: This is why I brought him along.

But Vanessa’s not having any of it. She glares at him, plops herself into the chair. “Don’t worry about it,” she says. “We’re all fucked anyway.”

This may be the first time I’ve heard her swear. Welcome to the end of the world, indeed. “Yeah,” I agree.

“Not in the abstract. I mean specifically, precisely fucked.” She points at the ceiling, the flaking plaster, yellow cracks spiderwebbing out from a bronze fixture that’s missing half its bulbs. “The solar panels, on the roof, in the rain. How long do you think they’ll hold up? Another four months?” Hard sigh, like she’s pushing all the air out of her lungs. “Hardly. I had to take one down this morning. Completely past repair. And everyone pretends not to notice.”

Cloud looks like he’s been bitten by a strange dog.

“What don’t we notice?” I ask.

“We’re running out of everything. I don’t mean going to run out, I mean out, now, today. So I’m not sure what good my vegetables would do, all things considered. I’m not pretending anymore.” She kicks a plastic jug under her chair. It’s a weak kick, toppling the jug, not moving it along the floor. It should strike me as pathetic, more sullen than angry, but it doesn’t: Her face is too hard. And suddenly, she’s shouting.

“Fuck this city,” she says, “with its goddamn fucking doomsday parties, and all the rest of it. You’ve convinced yourselves that you’re ready for the end, but you aren’t. You’re pretending. Still convinced that this can go on indefinitely. All the fun of the end of the world without the ending, isn’t that right?”

“Stop it.”

I think I’m as surprised as Vanessa when the words come out of my mouth. It’s her turn to say, “Pardon?”

“I said stop it. You don’t have to lecture me about endings.” I feel my voice climbing to match hers, and part of me wants to shut up. She’s scared and angry, she doesn’t deserve me yelling at her. But maybe it isn’t just her I’m yelling at; maybe I’m reaching for something else. Cloud has started to stare. “My mother died,” I say, “because she was hooked on prescriptions. Benzodiazepine. Not from an overdose. She went into withdrawal, and died from a seizure, because she couldn’t buy any more. Her body couldn’t get the fix it needed. So yes, I’ve seen what happens when things run out. I’m not pretending, either.”

Cloud is definitely staring at me, frowning, and I feel my eyes watering. Blink the tears away. I pull the graffiti sketch from my pocket and hold it out to Vanessa. “Now. What is this?”

The rain streams down the windows, etching white lines in the glass. Somewhere, distantly, thunder rumbles. Or maybe something is collapsing.

Vanessa takes the scrap of paper between two fingers.

“It’s Naglfar,” she says. “The ship made out of dead men’s nails in Norse mythology. My lab used it as a logo on some of our projects. Morgan helped me come up with it.”

“You used the ship of Ragnarok as a logo?” Cloud interjects. I remember he was the one who recognized it as a Viking ship in the first place. “Brilliant.”

“Well, we didn’t plan on sparking the apocalypse.” Turning to Cloud, she lapses back into classic Vanessa, and I can’t tell if she’s serious. “We just liked the look of it, the ambiguity. Forward or backward, who can tell? The project was intended to clean up the air pollution, replenish lost oxygen. I said we should try to make the bots self-repairing. Didn’t think we’d actually get it to work.”

“So Morgan, she’s the woman who’s looking for you? What does she want?”

“Her name is Morgan Larsen. At least it was. She probably goes by something different now. In Colorado, she was a manager at a music store, a friend of mine.” Speaking precisely, lining up the sentences like aluminum cans she’s going to knock over with stones. “At least, she started out that way.”

“And what is she now?” I ask.

“After what we did at the lab? What I told her?” An almost imperceptible shake of her head. “I don’t think I have friends anymore.”

The edge sweeps back into her voice, like a gust slamming rain against the window glass. Sitting in her wicker chair, staring down at her hands, her voice cold enough to burn. The rain comes in sheets down the living room window, and the gray spot on the back of my hand itches, whitening at the edges. Toxic, all of it. So toxic I could be sick.

“Well, fuck me,” I say.

Vanessa looks up.

“Fuck me and fuck Felicity.” I meet her eyes, warm cinnamon brown and hard as glass. Well, fuck it. I can be hard, too. “How long have we been bringing your water? You want to talk about running out, let’s start there. Start with the lines at the distribution centers, twelve, twenty-four, thirty-six hours waiting. For you, Vanessa. Start with the men Felicity’s been hanging around with because they know where to get it. Start with the goddamn trek I make on my bike to get down here. You know how lucky I am this is the first time I’ve been caught in the rain?” I grab her towel from around my shoulders, fling it into the corner beside the door. It wraps itself around the neck of a gallon jug.

“And every time,” I continue, “I’ve been inviting you. I guess you don’t like music, or you don’t like it anymore, but goddamn it, we wanted you to have fun. Have a good time. But no, you say you don’t have friends anymore. Wonder why that is.”

She actually flinches.

A warm hand touches my wrist, Cloud’s hand, but I brush him off with my fingertips. My eyes are stinging, liner running. I’m not done. “Your friend Morgan,” I say. “I didn’t believe her when she said she knew you. Didn’t trust her, and do you know why? Because she was a lot like me. A lot like us. I didn’t think you’d have anything to do with a person like that. And I guess that’s right.”

Cloud grabs me again, and this time I yank my wrist away. Stand, pull my hood up, head toward the door. Rain and Vanessa both be damned.

“Wait.” Cloud’s voice, not Vanessa’s. “Wait, Friday.”

I turn on my heel, stand there with my arms folded. Face in shadow, and I hope they can’t see the mess I’m making of my eyeliner.

Cloud turns to Vanessa, who’s staring down at her hands again. He scootches to the edge of the couch cushion, touches the tips of his fingers to hers, and she lets him. “Will you come, please? Tonight? You’ll be in a crowd. You can see her from a distance first. You won’t have to come any closer if you change your mind.”

Oh, Cloud, I think. This is why I brought you with me, this gentleness. This is why I love you.

And I’ve never thought those words before, never said them even to myself. I love an addict at the end of the world, a bridge about to buckle, a building on the verge of collapse. A disaster waiting to happen, Felicity says, and who wants to admit a thing like that? The stupid tears spill over, hot and sticky. I bend down, grab the stained towel, dab at my cheeks. Stupid, but neither of them is looking at me. Vanessa, pressing her hand to Cloud’s, is nodding her head.

“Okay. Okay, great.” Cloud beams—a big, stupid, relieved smile. “They’ll be setting up by the time we get back. It’s in a church, abandoned from the flooding. No one’ll bother us. We can find a ride down there, meet some people on the way—”

“Cloud,” I interrupt. My voice sounds normal again, thank God. Thank the patron saint of living precariously, who for whatever reason seems to be smiling on us. “Gray City is still at Felicity’s. We have their van.”

Vanessa steps out of the van like she’s wading into deep water. One foot, then the other, flat white sneakers on rain-spotted concrete already drying in the afternoon sun. Felicity stands on her front porch in a satin robe the color of chocolate ice cream, smoking a cigarette. “Hey, sweetheart,” she says to Vanessa, not batting an eyelash.

By the time Cloud and I are climbing the steps, Vanessa is in the foyer and Morgan, or whatever she’s calling herself now, stands in the doorway from the family room. In a different vest and the same leather pants, her hair down and face made-up. Smiling and crying at the same time. Her eyeliner runs, too.

“Let’s get out of the way,” Cloud whispers in my ear. I give him a nudge toward my room, surreptitiously slipping the key to Gray City’s van back into the shoebox.

There’s a note on the top of my pillow, green pen on lined paper:

I read it twice. “She can’t be serious.”

I hand the note to Cloud, who seems to take it in with one glance. “Norse goddess of the underworld?” He shrugs. “Hel’s half-black, half-white, so I guess it’s kind of clever, with the arm tats. Or maybe she’s trying to justify drawing Naglfar over half the city.”

“Not that,” I say. “Well, not just that. I mean she seems to be surprised that someone was looking out for Vanessa.”

“You don’t think that’s surprising?” He raises his eyebrows as he sets the note down on the window seat. It’s only afternoon, but the sky has started to turn red. Autumn is coming, or maybe the end of everything. “Vanessa seemed a little—”

“Batshit?”

“Difficult, I was going to say.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” I sit on the edge of my bed. Cloud sits next to me, long legs folded under him. “It’s just, I guess I expect that things will work out okay. Or no, not that things will be okay, but that people will be. Call me crazy.”

“Join the club,” Cloud says. He leans back on the mattress, resting his weight on his forearms. Looking up at me, grinning. “The way I see it, we’re all going different kinds of crazy. Vanessa is, I don’t know, maybe paranoid, or maybe she really knows something the rest of us don’t. Felicity’s delusional about Mia, and I guess I have the pills, and whatever’s up with Morgan and Hel and fucking Ragnarok, that’s pretty damn nuts.”

“So what kind of crazy am I?”

He wets his lips. Reaches up, cups my cheek and gently rubs a streak of eyeliner away with his thumb.

“I’m not sure,” he says. “But I like it.”

Tell him, I say to myself. Tell him now. The rain will be back tomorrow, who knows when you’ll get another chance.

“Stay off the pills tonight,” I say. “Can you do that? Just tonight. No drugs, just you.”

“I can try,” he says. “Just me.”

I kiss him. One arm around his back, catching some of his weight, the other wiping my cheek. He tastes like tears, clean and sweet.

“Good,” I say. “That’s all I’m looking for.”