The End Is Now

BY THE HAIR OF THE MOON Jamie Ford

May 1910

Dorothy Moy stared at the silver dime in her palm for five solid minutes. She touched the tiny inscription, the word LIBERTY, with her soiled fingertips, debating whether or not to spend her last ten cents on a taste of yen shee, or on a jitney cab ride to take her as far away from here as possible. Her mouth watered while she debated, as she dreamed of chewing that ball of resin, savoring the dottle scraped out of the bottom of an opium pipe. She came here to kick the gong around but hadn’t been outside for more than a week. She’d barely been upright all that time and now the morning—at least she thought it was morning—seemed bleak, hopeless, even before she discovered, through a moment of sobriety, that the world was ending all around her.

“Diezen?” She asked the female attendant as she sensed the building gently rocking. Then she heard a muffled booming, like the sound of distant thunder. The Black Candle Inn was little more than a basement warren, thirty feet below the streets of Seattle’s Chinatown, hidden in the center of the newly built Milwaukee Hotel.

“Not an earthquake. It’s okay. Probably just the passenger Zephyr rolling by or a freight train,” the attendant said as she twirled a slender punk, causing the burning joss stick to flare so she could light the pipes of patrons, nursing their flames back to life.

Dorothy could have sworn the building was rocking.

The gentle sway reminded her of her journey to the US: forty-five days in the frigid hold of a merchant airship, packed with sixty other girls. They’d fed her hard-tack, laced with pure yapian to suppress her appetite and ward off dirigible sickness, but even then she knew the opium was being used to build invisible chains, binding servants to their masters. But she also knew that she was one of the lucky ones. The others—the picture brides—sat motionless, their feet confined to lotus boxes. The new contraptions would break and bind the girls’ feet en route, with a single turn of its iron gears each day. Dorothy remembered marveling at the acupuncturist, a man with a long gray beard who numbed the girls’ pain with tiny copper needles carefully placed along their legs, arms, face, and hands. The needles were then wired to an electric generator powered by the Lash of St. Francis, the seasonal trade winds of the North Pacific Ocean.

Dorothy had nearly dozed off again when she heard a crashing noise. That’s when she realized the tremors weren’t caused by the delicious, black tar vapors wearing off. Instead, the ground was indeed shaking, lurching violently. The building began roaring, as dust fell from the ceiling in the windowless room and the smoke-stained walls erupted into a jigsaw of splintering, cracking, falling plaster. A roar, a guttural wave of subterranean sound, muffled the screaming of men and women from the gambling room upstairs—choking, gagging sounds, ivory mahjong tiles and bodies falling to the floor.

In a waning moment of opiate-induced splendor, lingering like the warmth of a goodbye kiss, Dorothy closed her eyes and tried to imagine that the rocking, swaying, was her Nai Nai holding her. Her grandmother, like most descendants of China’s fallen Celestial Empire, had called the great comet the Broom Star.

The Seattle Times had renamed the astral visitor the Sidereal Tramp. Dorothy had also read that Edmond Halley, in a moment of colonial hubris, initially named the comet after himself, as though ship’s captains hadn’t been periodically led off course by that wandering light in the sky for the last four thousand years. As if planting a flag that bore a genteel name, one reflecting the teetotaling civility of Britannia could assuage the fact that the Broom Star’s long tail was made of mercury cyanide and could sweep the Earth clean of all life.

Dorothy blinked as the drugs wore off. She rubbed swollen, bloodshot eyes, and saw that no one else in the dimly lit smoking parlor seemed to notice the calamity, except the attendant who had crawled beneath one of the heavy wooden bunks. The rest of the men and women—the patrons—were fast asleep, smiling euphorically as fist-sized chunks of the ceiling rained down around them. A handful lay on their sides, still amiably puffing away, even as their pates rocked back and forth on their wooden headrests.

Dorothy wanted to stay, to spend the last of her money on one more sweet breath of sugary splendor. But she was knocked to her hands and knees, then flat on her stomach. Her dime skittered away, down a rift in the floor, as the room seemed to move, jolting two feet to the north and then buckling three feet to the southwest. Dorothy covered her head as she heard the crashing of copper spittoons all around her. Tins of Pilus Lunares, sounding like the plucked strings of a zither as the cans bounced, pinging off the wooden floor, spilling their contents, balls of fine British opium mixed with silver nitrate, camphor and musk which pharmacists had dubbed Hair of the Moon. Chemists had stopped trying to turn lead into gold. It was much more lucrative to turn poppies into vaporous whiffs of Heaven, even if the potent silver turned the user’s skin to an ashen shade of blue.

Dorothy struggled to sit up while the building swayed. Then her nostrils flared as the dark, fuzzy lumps of opium caught fire amid burning slicks of peanut oil. The heating lamps and bowls had shattered on the ground and the shards of manganese looked like islands of purple glass in a lake of fire. The patrons—those still nursing their long copper pipes—closed their eyes as if this were the happiest moment in all their lives; in many ways, this strange, serene dream of theirs probably was. While those who slumbered kept smiling, even as their sackcloth clothing caught fire, hair, skin, and fatty tissue burning as they succumbed to a sleep that would last from this moment until the next visitation of the comet, when no one would be left to notice the return.

I’m only sixteen. I’m too young to die! Dorothy’s panicked thoughts raced, sobering her intentions. Whenever she’d imagined dying she thought about her parents who were conscripted as dredgers and now were buried somewhere beneath Mount Rainier along with four hundred other mixed-breed workers who’d struggled for tailings in a played out silver mine. Now all she had left was her Nai Nai, and an assortment of calabash cousins that she knew of but never saw, like Darwin Chinn Qi, who worked as a servant at the Sorrento Hotel. She hadn’t seen him in years. Not since she’d spurned him when they were ten years old and a matchmaker’s I-Ching machine predicted that they would witness an important event and then eventually wed. Dorothy thought that meant they’d get pregnant and later married. So she ran away only to be caught by British colonials. The same company that later sold her entire village to a subsidiary in the Northwest where the children had been forbidden to marry, ever, and breeding would only be allowed for the purpose of replacing themselves in the servants’ lottery.

So much for predictions, Dorothy thought as she crawled over warm bodies while the earthquake subsided and spreading orange flames licked at the walls.

She struggled to her feet in the entryway where two guards were dead but their bodies still warm, the moneychanger as well, his quad-abacus shattered, beads scattered everywhere along with dirty wads of folding money. Dorothy lifted the hem of her dress and gathered her petticoats, stuffing handfuls of cash into her underwear along with a packet of opium. Then she climbed another tall set of smoke-filled stairs, sliding back the bolt and opening the heavy door. She savored a rush of semi-fresh air.

Inside the chamber she found another doorman, his face swollen, mouth twisted in a rictus of pain. There was another, a middle-aged man, finely dressed—a Caucasian, with bluish skin, probably from comet pills, the preferred drug of the rich and powerful, slumped in a chair. She recognized him as one of the club and casino owners, by the familiar cleft in his chin that was now filled with a rivulet of blood from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the forehead.

Most had ignored the prudent warnings of the Royal Hydrographic Office. They celebrated with comet parties, she thought. Science to the rich was like the I Ching to the poor—only believed when favorable. Meanwhile others surrendered to their fears.

When Dorothy finally reached the alleyway entrance, the door was open, jammed with fallen bodies. Half-naked men in silken robes and women in skin-tight cheongsam dresses made of brushed silver lamé, patinaed in jade, were clumped together and those who’d escaped to the alley didn’t travel far. Dorothy stepped over their swollen bodies scattered like leaves, arms and legs akimbo. She sniffed the cool breeze, which smelled like almonds, chloroform, and seaweed, then covered her nose and mouth with a scarf.

When she stumbled out onto South Jackson, the street was a frieze of cadaverous statuary. More men, women, and children dead on the stoops of collapsed apartment buildings, seafood restaurants, and the headquarters of the Chong Wa Benevolent Association. Others perished at the wheel of their motorcars and roadsters, steam turbines still turned, spitting jets of water vapor into the air. An electric trolley had jumped the track, crushed a jinricksha, and careened though a storefront and into the Manila Dance Hall. The passengers slumped out of their seats; others lay strewn among the broken glass and smoking rubble. Dorothy noticed a team of draft horses, still in harness, pitched on their sides. Pools of froth leaked from their nostrils. The half-dozen cloned beasts had fallen in the same direction, their markings and brands lined up perfectly, their legs jutting out as orderly as a book of matches. Scores of lifeless gulls and carrier pigeons were sprinkled among the ruin as well and feathers slowly rained like confetti. Dorothy stared at the red paper messages still tied to the legs of the many pigeons. She didn’t have to read them to know they were farewells and goodbyes, frenzied words hastily sent from the dying to their loved ones, who in all likelihood, where dead as well.

As she walked, Dorothy heard the sounds of buildings settling, fires raging, and the hissing of gaslights that had been shattered, their flames extinguished, and the babbling of an old Japanese man. She found the gent with light bluish skin as he leaned against a leaking fire hydrant. His head was bleeding and he was only wearing one shoe.

“We’re alive, child. Yokatta mada Ikiteru! We’re alive! The silver saved us.”

Dorothy looked away as the old man coughed and hacked. She noticed her reflection in a puddle, the Hair of the Moon had turned her skin a rich shade of porcelain blue. Her week at the Black Candle had saved her from the poisonous fumes.

Then she heard the man sobbing, moaning in agony as they both realized that he’d coughed his teeth into his hands, blood dripping from the empty sockets.

Dorothy felt the Earth move again; the buildings shook; the street signs bobbed and spun, as a storm gust sucked the air from her lungs, toppled her to the ground and pin-wheeled her halfway down the block amid garbage cans, newspapers, take-out boxes, pine cones, dead rodents—all manners of detritus. The wind subsided as it flipped her up in a sitting position in the direction of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains. Her dress had been shredded, her hands and elbows skinned; her knees oozed blood and puss into her cottony slip, making the fabric wet and sticky.

As she waited for the stinging pain and dizziness to subside, she reckoned that this should be early morning, but the horizon looked as though a massive sun were rising in the west—a rich, orange, sulfurous glow thrumming beneath a horizon of dark smoke that stretched the length, width, and breadth of the sky as though they were looking up at an upside down field of black cotton.

And when the Earth stopped shaking again, Dorothy took stock of other survivors, slowly emerging from the ruins—cooks and gamblers, bankers and showgirls. They acknowledged each other with glances of shock and fear and reluctance, as they shambled down the middle of a vaguely familiar street Dorothy no longer recognized. She followed along, blending into the dozen or so strangers as they passed the still-smoking mountain of trains that had derailed and piled below the King Street Station, creating a logjam of metal and brick that smoldered like a volcano. And as they passed through Pioneer Square, the many creep joints and frolic pads had become a neon carnival of the dead. There were so many broken, splintered bodies that Dorothy hardly noticed them anymore. She merely adopted the mute language of her fellow refugees, walking in silence, some in their party clothes, others nearly naked, burned and bleeding. All of them had skin in variations of blue. They were alone, together, as they migrated down Cherry Street toward Coleman Dock.

It was there, at the edge of a collapsed pier that Dorothy felt her numbered days winding down, slowing like the second hand of a broken watch. Frozen, she stared out at a deep, sprawling canyon of mudflats that had once been filled with the waters of Puget Sound. The islands of Vashon and Bainbridge now looked like green mountaintops as the vast tendrils of the Pacific Ocean had been drained away, leaving a queer, puddled moonscape of rotting seaweed, dead fish, and the wreckage of freighters, still under American, British, and Canadian flags. The ships foundered on the seabed as the water had rushed away. One large frigate had wrenched itself in two, caught fire and burned as the crew had spilled out onto the mudflats where they died of the noxious fumes, half-frozen in quicksand. Other smaller vessels slowly sank into the silt as tremors shook the landscape again and buried their hulls in fetid mudslides. To the south, on what once had been the prosperous tidal flats, a platoon of mechanized canners stood lifeless. Dorothy could see the bodies of their operators pitched forward within the metal skeletons, their long diggers extended into the sand, searching. She wondered if the clams and oysters would still be alive. Or the trees, the plants, edible crops—how long could they survive in the wake of the Broom Star?

As she turned around she noticed a wealthy couple. She could tell by the finery of their clothing, their noble, confident gait, the air of importance even as they walked around the wreckage, arm-in-arm, beneath a pair of matching silver gas masks. The woman spun her tinsel-fringed parasol and the man tipped his felt bowler hat to the blue-skinned crowd as if this were just another lovely Sunday afternoon.

Dorothy backed away when she saw the anger in the faces of the other survivors. She ran back toward Chinatown and heard screams as the crowd descended upon the couple like dogs on a sick, lame deer. Years of rage from generations of servitude had been unleashed. The affluent strollers must have emerged proudly from a generously built comet shelter, armed with the dull axe of wealth, a blunt instrument now. Their money and social standing was inert, useless at the end of the world.

When the Earth shook again, stronger than before, this time for a long minute, which stretched out like an hour, Dorothy crouched next to an overturned brewers wagon, sheltered by a copper cask the size of a bank vault. She cried into her fists, determined to see her Nai Nai one last time before the world ended. But even that familial notion seemed like a hopeless wish as she watched the Hayes & Hayes Bank building explode.

A gas main must have erupted.

When the tremors subsided, she ran away from the heat. She was four blocks away when she heard the terrifying reverberation of the Earth opening its maw as a chasm of flame swallowed what remained of the six-story building.

Ten minutes and many haggard breaths later, she arrived on the far side of the International District and the Asian Housing Zone, Dorothy found her Nai Nai where she’d last seen her—in the mixed-roots cemetery next to a potter’s field.

Dorothy stared at the toppled forest of slender Buddhist headstones. The carved granite obelisks that once stood virtually shoulder-to-shoulder had all fallen, or cracked, or both. Dorothy felt bad for irreverently stepping on so many graves, but was relieved—comforted even, to find her Nai Nai’s headstone in once piece. She embraced the cold grave marker and felt the vibrations of the Earth through the stone, slow and rhythmic, like a metronome.

Then the cemetery lit up as lighting flashed deep within the dark clouds rotating on the western horizon. The billowing haze spun into tornadoes that reached down with long twisted fingers, probing, searching, and wending their way across the horizon, creeping as though ready to pick the bones of the ruination of Seattle.

Dorothy watched numbly, helplessly, as a fleet of zeppelins was pulled toward the maelstrom. Their concrete anchors tore through the wrecked remains of the waterfront and the massive blimps were swallowed whole, disappearing into the spinning clouds.

“I don’t have much time, Nai Nai,” Dorothy cried above wind and the sporadic spotting of hailstones that were the size of the opium balls she’d been smoking, the ones that had briefly extended, if not saved, her life.

“I think I’ll be seeing you soon, wherever you are.” Dorothy imagined herself sucked into the sky along with her grandmother’s ashes.

That’s when she noticed the inscription on her grandmother’s headstone—her Nai Nai’s favorite quote from the I Ching. She touched the ornate Chinese characters.

It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are, without any self-deception or illusion, that a light will develop out of events, by which the path to success may be recognized.

She heard a thick, European accent shout, “I see one!” and looked around. A block away there was a gathering of men, five or six in soiled fox hunting garb. “She’s skulking in the graveyard. And she’s ripe. Blue for the taking!”

“Thank Heavens,” a man said, “It’s only right that God favors the just.”

Dorothy stood up, confounded by their words, shocked to see their mouths, their suit collars mottled with what could only be the rusty, clotted crimson of human stain. That’s when she surmised that they weren’t looking for stragglers to rescue. They wanted the silver in her blood. They must have been seen the blue-hued survivors and decided that drinking their cruor was the only way to stave off the effects of the comet’s poison.

“Careful, you’ll spook her.” Another man said as the group spread out and crept toward her, “We don’t have much time to find shelter from the storm.”

Dorothy remembered her Nai Nai—the message on her grandmother’s grave, the I Ching and the fateful prediction that she and her cousin would witness an event and later marry. If the I Ching were true, then this was the event, the end of the world. And she’d see Darwin again, whether she wanted to or not; her life was destined, preordained, fated. But only if she had the courage to face things exactly as they are, these men—these savages who wanted to take her blood, and make it through the storm, which was disassembling the city, block by block, sucking brick and mortar into the sky.

But she had a chance, didn’t she? She had a glimmer of hope, along with a hidden packet of blue silver opium—the last Pilus Lunares. She’d find Darwin, alive, and she’d keep him alive. She’d save him if she could, by the hair of the moon.