The End Is Now

DEAR JOHN Robin Wasserman

Dear Neckbeard,

The fact that I’m writing this on toilet paper shouldn’t make you think I don’t care. This toilet paper is not symbolic, it’s expedient. Writing you a letter on something I can use to wipe my ass is just a happy coincidence.

These letters are supposed to help us indulge in happier times—that’s what Isaac says. Bathe in all our wonderful memories, then pull the plug and watch them circle the drain. Write out our teary I loved yous and what might have beens to all the people we’ve lost out there in the world, then set them on fire and say goodbye to smoke and ash. Or, in my case: Write, wipe, flush. Farewell. This, Isaac also says, will be closure. Isaac, apparently, doesn’t know from mixed metaphors. And he doesn’t know his flock as well as he thinks, not if he imagines wonderful memories and happy might have beens. That’s not how you end up in a place like this.

You’d probably be surprised I ended up here, fucked up in this very specific way, but then, we haven’t seen each other in a while. Things happen. Maybe I’d be surprised about where you ended up, too. I doubt it, but see me politely trying to give you the benefit of the doubt—one of those things you thought I was incapable of? Things happen; people—at least those of us who venture out of our basement every once in a while—change. Here’s me, since the days of you: Austin, then LA, then back into the nation’s beer belly, even if it was a little too close to home, hop-skip-jumping through crap towns on I-70, six months waiting tables for truckers feeling like I was on one of those serial killer shows waiting for my big scene as a dumpster corpse, desert then mountains then plains, and everywhere I stopped, everyone I stopped for, promised me I’d be stopping forever. Remember when I popped your cherry and you told me you were going to chain me to the bed and keep me as your prisoner until I got old and wrinkled and ready to trade in for a new model? The pillow talk got better, but the men didn’t, and none of them kept me anymore than you did. Maybe people don’t change so much after all. (I’ve changed, you said, but it was only because I changed you, and if that skank you tutored wanted to fuck you, it was only because I made you throw out those orange clogs and stop whispering to yourself when you thought no one was looking.) To wrap this up: I came, they came, then they left. Until I threw in with the Children of Abraham, because Father Abraham said God would never leave me—but then Father Abraham left, and the fucking world ended, on exactly the day he predicted it would—so where does that leave me?

Here, in the Ark, locked up safe and sound in a mountain compound with Abraham’s kid and all of us who were fucked up enough to believe him when he and his dad said the end was nigh. The world left us, but we clued in and left it first. Followed that kid up a mountain, barricaded ourselves behind sheet metal and barbed-wire, waited for God’s wrath and wondered what form it would take. No shock he took us out just like he did the dinosaurs. There’s nothing much to read up here but the Bible, and I’ve read enough to know God likes repeating himself. He likes to smite, and very occasionally, he likes to save. I guess he must like us—the reformed hookers and crack addicts and embezzlers and sad sacks on the run from bad memories and worse husbands—because we’re the ones still here. You were always so pleased with yourself about your lack of fucked-up-edness. I would say look where it’s gotten you, but you wouldn’t exactly hear it, would you, because that’s the whole point of where it’s gotten you. Out in the world with the rest of the assholes, minding your non-fucked-up business when the shit came down. Isaac says we should imagine a happy and peaceful end for all the poor souls caught unaware. An aneurysm at the moment the sky exploded. Swift, unbloodied obliteration.

I would prefer not to.

You were in the basement when it happened—that’s how I prefer to imagine it. You’d been down there two days straight, fingers cramping on your joystick (and yes, I know it hasn’t been called a joystick since 1988 but fuck if you’re going to bully me into caring from beyond the grave), moldy pizza boxes at your feet, porn taped up to the wall because it’s been so many years and so many pounds since you’ve lured a girl down to your dungeon that there’s no point in keeping your inner perv on lockdown anymore. You were blowing shit up and giggling about it and when you heard the first explosions, you probably thought, dude, cool sound effects, whoa, while upstairs the sky fell down and then your roof fell down and it took another day before you thought to heave yourself off the couch and replenish the beer, and that’s when you discovered the door was blocked by ten tons of rubble and the phones were out and the wi-fi was dead and too bad for you, your emergency generator ran out before your food did, so you spent your last days on Earth in the dark, unplugged, fingers twitching at the joystick like you could turn the explosions back on, then eventually switching over to your own personal joystick, huffing and rubbing while you imagined me on my knees, blowing you while you shot the crap out of some imaginary kingdom, jerking off to some sad, faint echo of my voice because you never forget the first girl to get you off, thinking about how you pinned her down on the bathroom tile when she tried to dump your ass, crying and leaking snot and begging please baby don’t leave me while you jackhammered her into a concussion that made her foggy enough to say okay baby if you need me I’ll stay and then she did until you got bored and left her, instead, thinking now how if you’d kept her around you might not be shivering in the dark all alone, leaking sanity at a steady pace until the food runs out, and then the beer, and you die slow and whimpering, in a pool of your own puke and cum.

Thinking of you, keep in touch!

Dear Moneybags,

Remember how you used to laugh at me for always ordering the same thing? You started ordering it for me, before I could get the words out. Wherever we went, you knew. Veal parmigiana. Pad Thai. Chicken Tikka Masala. I thought it was cute, at first, that you were pretending that it bothered you, because what kind of pretentious turd would actually be bothered by someone who knows what she wants and sticks with it? It’s not like I was bringing peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches with me to sneak from under the table while you ate sushi, so how was I supposed to know that every time I ordered Pad Thai, or let you order it for me, I was proving to you that I was unadventurous and dull and provincial and inflexible and “unwilling to let circumstances exercise their will” on me. I was embarrassing you, somehow, in front of the waiters or your friends or maybe just some all-seeing deity who expected better from you than a girlfriend who didn’t want to try veal kidney.

You wouldn’t much like it here.

Here we eat beans and more beans. Canned tuna and canned peaches. We eat peanut butter when we’ve been especially good; we eat nothing when we’ve been bad. Every day is the same. Sometimes, early on, the men would suit up and go shoot something, and there would be fresh meat for a night, but then winter was too long and too cold and they say the animals are all dead. They say we don’t need the outside, that’s the point of our Ark. We are prepared. Months go by without a dent in our food stores. We planned well—we have enough beans to last us for years.

Years of beans and tuna and peaches and peanut butter. Can you even begin to imagine that? You, who thought it was a hardship to eat the same thing two nights in a row. Leave that kind of thing to the poors, you said, even though when I tried to leave our leftovers with an actual poor, you slapped it out of my hand and told me handouts only encouraged the weak, and left the guy to lick his veal parmigiana off the ground. That’s what I get for dating a Republican, you told me that night, when you had me spread-eagled on your Sleep Number mattress, because that was your idea of dirty talk.

You didn’t mind snorting the same drugs every night, I noticed. You loved the drugs; you loved that I had loser friends who could supply you with them. You loved that I looked pretty in the dresses you bought me and smiled pretty enough for your asshole buddies that they felt like shit and then went home and took it out on their ugly girlfriends; you loved that I fucked one of them when you asked me to as a special pretty-please for me baby favor; you loved that you could make me do that, but then you didn’t love that I’d done it. Done him. Put him in my mouth and in my ass, and let him cum on my tits, bad enough doing it, worse that you made me tell you about it, tell you while you were inside me, tell you how he felt and that he was smaller and softer than you, that he was flabby, with bad breath and thinning hair, that he made my nipple bleed, and after I told you what you wanted to hear, you threw me out of bed and said I’d never be with you if you weren’t rich, which was true, and that it made me a whore, which maybe was also. Now I think I liked your pool better than I liked you. Your pool and your stupid restaurants and your coke, even if you wouldn’t have had that last without me. I liked it best when you left for the weekend and I could float on the raft in the middle of the chlorine blue, drunk and sunburned, laughing at the clouds, at the gurgle of the pool filtration system and the way my fingers wrinkled up when I stayed in too long. I pretended it was my pool, my life; I imagined your plane flying into a mountain and some silver-haired lawyer showing up at the door to cup my hands in his and tell me, gently, that you’d left it all to me.

That’s a lie.

I imagined you coming back, but coming back different. Something new on your face when you looked at me, like you finally understood why you kept me around. I imagined us floating on the raft together, happy, that it would be like it was at the beginning, you bending me over the sink in gold-plated bathrooms while waiters tried not to wonder what was taking us so long, you tearing through some cheap K-Mart blouse like you were Tarzan and telling me I had a Michelangelo rack, that licking my nipples felt like desecrating priceless art, you wanting to ravish me, you wanting to My Fair Lady me, you wanting me. Instead you came back from that last trip and told me you wanted someone who better fit into your world, someone who knew enough to pick out her own sushi.

No one is rich anymore; no one is poor. There are only haves and have-nots. We, the Children of Abraham, God’s favored sons and daughters, have: Shelter. Food. Generators. Guns. Lives.

You, the rest, have not.

I don’t have to worry anymore about being left, about being wanted. For one thing, it doesn’t matter what any of us want—there’s nowhere to fucking go. We’ve got a radio here, we know what it’s like out there, or we know enough to imagine. Cities obliterated; West Coast underwater; governments fallen; everywhere riots and corpses. Tohu va vohu—Isaac says that’s how the Bible begins, in Hebrew. In the beginning, all was formless and void, all was wild and waste; so it began, he says, now so it ends. Isaac says we’ve all been alone long enough, that now we’ll be together. Not only all of us together in the Ark, but each of us together with another soul, matched pairs, two by two by two, as it should be. Isaac will pair us. He says God tipped him off about our proper soulmates, and since that’s the same God who gave him a heads-up about the end of the world and how to survive it, we have no choice but to believe him. So much easier than the old way. Isaac will pair us, then, in ten days, we’ll join hands and souls in the eyes of God. We’ll swear to our Lord. Forever, we’ll swear, and that’s how it will be. That’s another thing that’s changed from the old days. Once you know that God is willing to destroy the world when it pisses him off, you get a little more reluctant to break your word.

You said once that if I ever duped someone into marrying me, I should make sure to get a pre-nup, because that way when they left me I’d get mine. Actually, I’d get yours, I said, isn’t that how pre-nups work? And you laughed. Not, you said, at the lame joke, but at the idea that you’d be the one marrying me.

That’s when I should have known. Not because you laughed, but because of the when. If you get married; when he leaves you. You saw it before I did, that I was a girl to be left.

And now you’ve left again.

Don’t worry, this time I won’t make a scene.

I think you die with the rest of California when the waves come to sweep you away. You die thinking maybe you should’ve gotten around to learning how to swim, which wouldn’t have saved you but might have let you hang on a little longer or with a little more dignity; you could’ve gotten to see what it looked like for LA to float, see the Hollywood sign bobbing on the waves along with all the nippled silicone implants, the Jags and the Range Rovers and the Ferraris sucked under, fish shitting on all that Italian leather, anorexic starlets with their gym-toned bodies bloating in the sun, you die and I live, even though your house was made of brick and marble and mine is made of old shipping containers. The Three Little Pigs is not a disaster survival guide, and besides, our craftsmanship is solid, all the huffing and puffing in the world won’t blow our ark down. Where you live now, there is only seafood for dinner, night after night. I guess circumstances have exercised their will.

Dear John,

Remember how we used to joke about that? How I used to leave you notes that would say, “Dear John, I am not leaving you. But please pick up some milk on your way home.” How we agreed that if I ever did leave you, all I had to write was, “Dear John, This time I am.” You thought it was unfair, that your name was synonymous with leaving, with being left. You said, I will never leave you. Not me. Not you.

Is it love that makes you stupid, or is stupid just a necessary criteria for falling in love?

Feel free to think of this as the letter you never got. Feel free to think whatever you want, except that I miss you.

Onion breath. Flop sweat. Fork scraping. The tick-tock click of a pen against teeth. Thought music, you called it.

The kind of person who would say the words “thought music.”

File it all under Things I do not miss.

Lying, that’s another one.

I will never leave you.

I will never leave you.

I will never leave you.

The way you looked at me, all wounded puppy eyes, that I could even imagine it. The insult of the fear. Just turn it off, you told me, like you’d never been afraid.

How could I have thought that would work, a forever with a man who didn’t understand fear? Here’s my forever, as of this morning: black, walrus mustache and graying scruff of beard, veiny biceps and lopsided ears. Small hands, big nose. His name is Gavin, and I think, in that other life, he was rich. The kind who has a midlife crisis and when he discovers the Porsche isn’t magically stripping off the years, acquires someone like me instead, sends flowers and makes promises and then signs the divorce papers and marries someone else. Except that Gavin’s already left his wife, left her out there to die with the rest of the world, and now, in here, there’s no one but me. Isaac says—or says that God says—we belong together. Maybe he threw darts, or picked names out of a hat. Maybe it really is God; maybe Gavin is my destiny.

I have one friend here, and she thinks this is fucked, though that’s a word she would never use. Theresa Babbage, who used to babysit Isaac when he was just some kid rather than Our Savior, who told me about the time he got so freaked out by some nightmare that he wet the bed, eleven years old and swimming in piss and she swore me to secrecy because if word got out he’d know she was the one who told, and we both know what would happen then—she thinks this is fucked. She thinks Isaac’s only making us marry because he outlawed fucking before marriage and too many of the single men miss it. I don’t tell her that I miss it, too. She wouldn’t like that. I don’t tell her that the arranged marriage thing doesn’t seem all that different to me than how it worked before. A man says he wants to be with you, and you stay. A man says he doesn’t want to be with you anymore, and he leaves. So what if in this case, it’s Isaac who says he wants me to be with someone? The only difference is that in this case, it doesn’t matter whether the man wants to be with me or not.

Gavin will stay with me, and I will stay with him. That’s the difference. I won’t expect him to save me; I won’t expect him to love me or want me. I won’t expect anything, but that we will be together instead of alone.

You were the kind of guy who liked to save people, you said, and you said you’d save me. You were going to be different than the others, you said. You would be the one who stayed, who would convince me that staying was possible, that not everyone leaves. You said only the wrong people leave, that I was lucky they did, because if they hadn’t, there wouldn’t have been a you. Not all togethers are better than being alone, you said. Only this one.

You said I didn’t scare you. That no part of me would make you run away. That we would never be alone again, that instead, we would be alone together. Remember when we turned the apartment into a fort, said we would barricade ourselves away from the world forever? We would bury ourselves under blankets with an endless supply of caramels and Fresca, enough to last us through all six seasons of The Sopranos and every time one of Tony’s henchmen killed someone, we would kiss. We were stupid then, and didn’t understand forts or barricades or forever. And we never got around to finishing The Sopranos, which is a shame, because now there’s no more Netflix and it turns out there’s not as much overlap as you’d expect between premium cable viewers and doomsday cultists, so there’s no one here to tell me how it ends. Even if there was, they wouldn’t have acted it out in the stupid voices, the way you did when I missed an episode.

Here is what I think about sometimes: The day I figured it out, that the entitled ass who showed up every day to exchange his rental car because the seat didn’t recline all the way or the gas cap jiggled or the clutch was sticky or the radio cut out at the high end of the FM band wasn’t such an entitled ass after all, that you didn’t give a shit about the shitty cars, you just wanted an excuse to smile at the girl behind the counter. The day I smiled back. The four days it took after that, waiting for you to make your move; the way you dimpled when I made it for you. What you said, when you dropped me off that night—the first time, before you made the U-turn in your tin can rental car because you realized taking things slow was crap—that it wasn’t because you thought I was pretty, that that’s not why you came back the next day. Not that you didn’t think I was pretty. Of course you thought I was pretty. It’s just it wasn’t because I was pretty.

I liked it when you stammered. I liked that I could make you nervous.

It was because you didn’t bother to say thank you when I handed you the keys, and I told you that wasn’t very polite.

Not just a pretty girl; a pretty girl having a crap day at a job that required her to smile and be nice. A pretty girl with butterflies on her dress and a glittering stud in her nose, with army camo nail polish and a chip on her shoulder, with one assy customer too many, and something about it woke you up, you said, and you came back that first time, the next day, just to see if I had quit. You had a feeling about me, you said. Like I was some tropical bug lighting on a flower, that all it would take was a breeze to spook me away.

I liked that you remembered what I was wearing; I liked that you didn’t call me a fucking butterfly.

You’re right that it was different with you, I’ll give you that. You’re right that it was better—but in the end, it was the same, because it still ended. It doesn’t matter how good something is if it doesn’t last; the being better only makes it hurt more when it’s over, so what’s the fucking point?

It’s over. That’s the only forever for us now. We both know you’re dead, and we both know how, and I don’t want to talk about it.

Dear Cheating Bastard,

You die in the woods, where your smug face gets eaten off by escaped zoo bears, you chipmunk-headed fuckwit.

Dear Teach,

That was my first ever A+, and I guess I proved myself a C student through and through by being dense enough to believe in it. That when you said I had promise, you meant in life, and not in a back office, bent over your desk, skirt hiked up, both of us listening for someone coming, only one of us actually knowing what that would sound like. You write like a writer. That’s what you scribbled on the last page. See me after class, and you underlined that one twice. A for effort.

I thought I was an old soul; I thought I was a portrait of the artist as a young woman. I thought you loved me for those things, and for the way I laughed like I had a secret and the way I perched on the fringe of life, expectant and ever watchful, seeing into things that most people can’t see at all—because that’s what you told me. Not that you loved me because I sucked you off like I’d done it a million times before or because you had some weird fetish for skinny wrists and slap bracelets, or because I was just stupid enough to believe you when you said I was smart.

I know, I know: When I whine, I sound like a child.

I’m thinking now you liked that best.

Age, you said, was just a number, which in retrospect explains why you liked fucking teenagers, because you assumed we would mistake cliché for wisdom.

A lot of things are clear in retrospect, not to mention cliché, like the things a girl will do when she grows up without a daddy and the sad vampirism of a guy in his thirties making one last lunge for his vanishing youth. I was sixteen, and you were sixteen years older—enough space for a whole other me to fit between us. Which I’m guessing you would have enjoyed.

Theresa Babbage is only nine years older than Isaac, which seems distasteful enough now, when he’s only thirteen, but won’t matter too much down the line, and either way, you’ve no room to judge. Isaac says that when he turns thirteen, he will be a man, that that’s how it worked in biblical times and—look out the window—here we are again. (We have no windows here, but we all know what he means.) He says God wants him to be with a woman, and he wants that woman to be Theresa, and since age is just a number and what Isaac says goes, so be it. That’s what we all tried to tell ourselves, and shrugged.

It makes sense he would pick her, not just because she’s closer to his age than anyone other than the little kids, not just because she’s hot, but because she was his babysitter, and that’s the closest thing we’ve got to a teacher. (Hot for a teacher, there’s another cliché you know pretty well.) She broke the rules for him, let him stay up after his bedtime, let him watch horror movies even after the nightmares started, the ones from God about the end of the world, and there’s something intoxicating about that, breaking the rules together, sneaking around together in the dark, sharing a secret. Secrets breed.

Write dangerous, you said, when you gave us the journals, told us to write what we felt and what we feared, no sanitized shit about proms and puppies. You called them journals, not diaries, because diaries are for little girls, and you promised they would be for our eyes only. Make the page a repository for your soul, you told us, but when I showed you the page about how you tasted and what my heart did when you spelled words on my neck with your tongue, you told me don’t be a fucking idiot and never write any of this down, and never even bothered to say if it was good.

I did what I was told. I didn’t tell anyone. Even after you traded me in for that sophomore who wrote a love poem in her own menstrual blood, I didn’t write any of it down. I learned my lesson about that. Never write down what actually matters. Never tell.

Even so, I still thought I might be a writer someday. If I had the time. If anything worth writing about ever happened to me. And here I am, witness to the end of the world, nothing to do but can fruit and record the fall of civilization and the mourning song of my heart or whatever, and the only thing I’ve bothered to write are my little collection of shitpaper letters to all you pieces of shit. There’s nothing in here I want to record, and nothing out there that I can bring back by writing about it. What I want is to lie on a couch and watch TV.

You told us TV would turn us into passive consumers of other people’s words and we should take a sledgehammer to the screen, impose our creative will on the world, creation via destruction, raze our brain-washed, consumerist, capitalist, shallow, pimple-popping lives to the ground and build from scorched earth; you told us no one ever died wishing they had watched more TV, but I will. I wish I’d watched more Friends reruns and had made a dent in the list of Boring-Sounding Shows I’m Tired of Admitting I Don’t Watch. I can picture how you probably died (pierced in the jugular by exploding glass while you begged the mirror for help with your comb-over), but I’m already forgetting what the Real Housewives look like. I told you once that I thought soap operas were the most realistic form of storytelling, because they never stopped at happily ever after, they never stopped at all, and you laughed like I was making a joke, and I guess now the joke is on me because they stopped along with everything else.

There’s nothing left out there now. That’s what they say over the radio, although mostly, now, they don’t say much of anything. Occasionally, through the static, we pick up someone crying.

There’s nothing left out there and it’s insane to hope that there is, and we all agree on that—except when it’s time to put someone out. And then we pretend it’s not a death sentence, just an alternative life choice. Anything could be out there, we say. She didn’t like it in here, not enough to follow the rules and do as she was told, so maybe she’ll find something she likes better.

Maybe, if Theresa Babbage preferred not to fuck a teenager, if, unlike you, that didn’t turn her on, if she pretended Isaac’s proposal was a question rather than a command and politely declined, then that was her choice, and maybe, after a few nights out there in the waste and wild, she won’t regret it.

It’s not execution, Isaac said last night, after he locked the gates behind her. Not even punishment. Simply the smart policing of a peaceful community. Go along to get along, or get out.

She said he was fucking crazy. She said what about feminism and Hilary Clinton and MTV and how does a kid born in the twenty-first century buy any of this crap, the world hasn’t worked like that for two thousand years, and he said that the world was gone, and that a lot of things hadn’t happened for two thousand years, and he didn’t have to come right out and say I am the light of the world for us to know what he was getting at.

She probably thought her sisters would go with her, but she should have known better. She couldn’t have imagined I would go with her, but she might have expected me to say goodbye. She didn’t know how I feel about goodbyes.

She didn’t tell me she was going to refuse him, or I would have talked her out of it. I would have told her about doing the things you need to do, about how to endure, about what it takes to be the girl who stays. I could have told her what it feels like to be left alone, but she didn’t ask, and now they’ve pushed her out the door without warm clothes or food or any fucking idea how to take care of herself, because while the rest of us were preparing for the end by learning to shoot and make soap and forage for mushrooms, she was babysitting the future messiah, and now she’s probably dead. I still have my laptop. The battery’s long dead, of course, but sometimes I like to watch the blank screen, and imagine what used to be.

Even before, I liked to watch static, especially when I hurt. I liked the dead roar of it, the way you could squint into the wild and waste, almost believing that if you tried hard enough, you could resolve chaos into order, that somewhere, hiding between the squiggly lines, was a face, a voice, a world.

I want the picture back; I want it all back. I want trashy reality shows and late night infomercials and Saturday morning cartoons. I want my MTV. I want Chinese take-out and a greasy-fingered remote; I want sick days that pass in a haze of talk show rumbles and game show hosts; I want Luke and Laura to reunite and As the World Turns to come back from the dead; I want fat men with their skinny wives and hospitals where everyone is beautiful and dripping with sex and only boring people die; I want tornado hunters and competitive eaters and Sunday morning televangelists and even that fucking ice queen on Fox News. I want back all those afternoons that I spent with you in your car and your office and that skeezy hotel, because I could have spent them at home with a bag of Doritos and Oprah and Boy Meets World and now, when I lie in my bunk and pretend to sleep, breathing stale air, tuning out snores, fingering my knife and wondering if one day I’ll wake up and decide to use it, I could play back all those episodes in my head, be my own laugh track, remember scripted lines and symmetrical faces, instead of you. I want oblivion, like the rest of you get to have, out there; I want not to be the one left behind when everyone else is gone.

I want. I want. I want. I’m sounding like a child again, aren’t I? Like a whiny brat who thinks bad things only happen to bad people and gods play fair.

Not that I would call Isaac a whiny brat, or an ignorant kid, or delusional or pathetic, simply because he believes that we were saved because we deserved to be, that death is punishment and life reward, that we can remember what we choose to remember and forget the rest, that because he saved us once, our lives are forever in his hands. There are no teachers anymore, and even if there were, you can’t teach the savior of mankind—God’s chosen vessel—anything he doesn’t want to know. So you see, this particular brave new world has no place for you. This is a world where children take whatever they want, and the rest of us live with what’s left.

Dear John,

I said I don’t miss you, and that’s true enough. But I do miss fucking you. Or maybe I just miss fucking, full stop. Only one more week before Midlife Crisis and I join together in holy matrimony and connubial bliss, and you’d think I’d be more eager. He certainly is.

He tastes like fish.

Isaac keeps talking about what a joyful day it will be, but there’s too much sadness in his eyes to pull it off. I can see it, even if no one else can, because I know what it looks like, the face of getting left behind.

He’s got to be used to it by now. First his mother, dumping him at Father Abraham’s door like one of those shitty free newspapers that always went straight into the trash. Dumping him with a father he’d never met before, a father who happened to be in the middle of a doomsday countdown with his millennial flock of fuck-ups.

Kid makes the best of that, teams up with daddy, buddies up so close to daddy’s friend upstairs that he starts getting divine whispers in his own ear, turns savior, turns doomsday prepper-in-chief, teaches us to build our Ark and prepare for judgment day, and what’s his prize when the sky falls down and proves him right? Dad dumps him too. Locks the kid into the promised land with the rest of us and heads down the mountain to die with the unsaved masses. Chose the world over his own kid, and said God told him to do it, which, as trump cards go, beats out because I said so.

Now Theresa’s left him, too.

It doesn’t matter that she didn’t want to go; she’s gone. That’s how he sees it.

I couldn’t help it—I felt bad for him. I said, she wasn’t the right girl for you, Isaac, and to his credit, he didn’t pretend not to know what I mean. He didn’t even try to fake a smile. I saved her life, he said. Shouldn’t that be enough?

And you know what? Maybe it should. Everyone acts like love can save you, but love can’t save anything. So maybe we’ve got it the wrong way around, maybe it’s the saving that makes for love. Isaac saved us, and we should love him for it. He saved us, and so we belong to him. It’s kid logic, but you’ve got to admit that it makes sense, and that’s what I told him.

Still, I don’t like the way he looks at me now.

Without Theresa, there’s no one to ask about it, about whether I’m imagining things. The way his eyes follow me across the room. The way he saw me watching, and smiled.

I was just trying to be nice.

Dear John, wish you were here, that’s what I’m supposed to say, I guess, since the other option is wish you were dead—wish you were starving or burning or being gnawed on by feral cats—but you wouldn’t know what to do with yourself here. You wouldn’t like being locked away, piecing things together with the static and screams and pleas on a CB radio, living in a tangle of bodies and bad breath, everywhere skin and sweat and people, all of us so pale.

I’m pale like you now, pale and thin and craving the sun. You always called me stupid for skimping on the sunscreen. Everyone’s got to die sometime, I said.

I know how you died. Of course I know how you died. Why do you think I’m so good at this game? What else have I been doing since the last time you saw me but imagining how you died? I dream it, and wake up smelling disinfectant and puke, wake up tasting you, not the good you but the way you tasted at the end, like iron and rubber, like something poisonous. Sometimes I imagined I could feel it, some fluctuation in the universe, someone cutting the invisible floss that held us together, some infinitesimal weight lifting or settling—and how the fuck do any of those things actually feel, so it was more like I felt headaches and muscle cramps and indigestion and each time thought, just maybe, it was you.

I didn’t have to be there to know how you died. Wasting away. Emaciated and skeleton skin but bloated with fluid. Pregnant with fluid, we might have said. High on drugs, so sky high you might have missed the headline, assumed you were easing into a nap instead of the big sleep, maybe high enough that you saw me, and smiled, because you thought you weren’t alone. But you were. I know that, too.

Dear Jackass,

I guess you’ll never finish that novel after all. God, the novel, the novel, always the fucking novel. And how could I be expected to understand such things, the bimbo who washed your filthy dishes once the fruit flies start swarming because your life of the mind precluded you from noticing such things. How could I, bovine dumb, so dumb I had to look up the word bovine, begin to process the profundities your mind was gestating, your miscarriage of literary greatness, your Solitaire games which I guess were tapping into some deep vein of emotional catharsis. If I thought there actually was a novel, I would wonder whether you’d turned me into a character, the stupid cunt who joined a cult, can you imagine I stuck my dick in that beehive of crazy, I can hear you saying to all your coffee shop losers, and that’s why I don’t feel guilty for taking your laptop when you left.

Not to be juvenile about it, or maybe to be juvenile about it, since according to you I’m incapable of anything else: Who’s the stupid cunt now? Who’s safe in the bunker with God’s chosen people, and who’s a rotting piece of meat waiting for someone else’s cat to come by and gnaw at your intestines because you’re far too busy to have one of your own?

Tell me you don’t actually believe this shit, you said after those first couple meetings. I pray to fucking non-existent god that I haven’t wasted my time with someone who would fall for this.

And I said, even at the beginning, because that’s what it said in the brochure, this is my calling and I need to repent before it’s too late, and I didn’t tell you what Father Abraham told me, that forgiveness is possible and God will never leave you because I knew you would laugh and I wanted to believe it was true.

And eventually you said I can’t handle this shit anymore and the sex isn’t worth the crazy, and that was fine with me because Father Abraham’s house had many rooms and plenty of empty beds, and how is that I’m never the one leaving, but I’m always the one who has to pack up my suitcase and walk out the door?

I never got around to answering your original question.

Did I believe it?

Do I believe it?

What kind of stupid cunt would I be not to believe it? A father and his son told me the world would end, and it did. They told me when it would happen, and it did. They told me how to survive it, and here I am. Abraham gathered us to his chest, Isaac built us an ark, and here we are, floating to salvation on a sea of millet and automatic rifles and kidney beans.

If I didn’t believe, why did I come in the first place and why did I stay?

If I don’t believe now, what more could possibly convince me?

Atheism is the only honest intellectual position, you said, and I didn’t ask you what if an angel descended to Earth or a TV messiah parted the Red Seas or an eleven-year-old says God told me the world will die and the kid turns out to be right, because it was easier to let you think I wasn’t listening when you talked. Maybe if you had asked me a question, I would have answered. Maybe if you asked me who I was thinking about when you were inside me, and why I would hate myself enough to let you be there, I would have told you a story.

The Holocaust, you said. The Armenian genocide. Rwanda. What kind of a god, etc., etc.

Everyone dies, I said. Or do you blame Him for that, too.

I don’t know. That’s the answer. I don’t know if I believe in a Him, and so I don’t know whether to worry about breaking a promise to Him, but the question’s moot, because my soulmate-in-waiting is gone. Midlife Crisis Man slipped away in the night, mustache and all, apparently preferring certain death over an eternity bound to me.

That’s assuming he left of his own accord, and obviously it wouldn’t be the first time, but there’s also Isaac, and the way he looked when he announced the disappearance, and the way he took my hand when he told me that I shouldn’t worry about being alone for long, that God had plans for me.

Never trust anyone who says God has a plan, you told me, and that’s the one thing that made sense.

I keep a knife under my pillow, in case I need it. We all have something—our own personal emergency escape plan. Some people can’t handle it, losing the world. What kind of a god, you said, and now we have an answer, and it’s one that not everyone can live with.

We’ve pieced it together from the radio. What happened that day, after we locked ourselves in the Ark. What it looked like when the sky fell down. On the radio, they say it was beautiful, a hailstorm of light, but that’s because they’re the ones who lived. I think you lived too, at least past the initial impact, and maybe you tried to write a poem about it; maybe you thought: finally, good material.

I think your city wasn’t obliterated; your loft wasn’t vaporized. You were too far from the coast to get swept away. I think you felt good about yourself, while you still had time to feel. You couldn’t believe in a god that put Fifty Shades of Grey on the bestseller list, but a god that turned twenty million people to dust and left you still tapping ashes out of your hand-carved corncob pipe, I think that’s a god you could get behind. I think it wasn’t until the nukes started flying that you got in trouble, chaos breeds chaos you used to say, tapping on the pipe, and it only takes one madman with a nuclear code and nothing to lose, and I guess once you’ve lost the sky, what’s left. I think you got a full blast of poison and your skin started falling off in patches, you heaved up everything inside of you until you were hollow, you went full zombie, scaly and moaning, radiation cannibalizing your brain along with everything else, I think you tried to kill yourself by drinking a mug of fountain pen ink because you thought it would be a poetic way to go, but you threw that up, too, and died praying to your nonexistent fucking god that the pain would stop.

Dear No Strings Attached,

It would have been a pretty big fucking string, our baby. Our un-baby, our cell grouping, our medical waste. Less a string than a cord. Or one of the ropes they use to tie up boats. Knotted, rough to the touch, stinking of fish.

The ropes they used to use, I guess I should say.

Hard to get used to that.

You didn’t have to tell me you didn’t want it. That once it was inside me, you didn’t want me, either, no matter how fast I got it scraped out. You didn’t have to tell me I would be a shitty mother.

These are things I already knew.

You didn’t have to pay for it, either, and so you didn’t. You could at least have offered.

Would I have been a shitty mother? I guess I’ll have my chance to find out, if I stay here.

You like how I said that, if I stay? The superfluous if, as in, I’ll meet you for coffee tomorrow, if the sun rises; I’ll hurt when it’s over, if it ends.

If gravity takes hold, I’ll break when I hit the ground.

Be fruitful and multiply, that’s the plan. Grow the compound until it’s safe to leave it behind. Repopulate the Earth. Not yet, Isaac says, but soon.

He says that about the two of us, too. Soon. That we won’t marry tonight with the others. We’ll wait until he turns thirteen, and then we will be joined. In all ways, we will be joined.

I told him I was old enough to be his mother, though I didn’t add that you don’t have to be Freud to see the relevance there. I told him there was no reason for him to hurry. That he had plenty of time to become a man.

He told me not to speak to him like a child.

He told me I understood him, and we would come to love each other. God would make it so.

He told me God wants him to have a son.

It’s possible that he’s making this shit up, but I’m pretty sure he believes it. Which is not better.

If you don’t believe in Isaac, and say it out loud, they put you out.

If you don’t fulfill your responsibilities, they put you out.

If you sin against the Lord, or some big mouth accuses you of doing so because she wants those chocolate bars you’re hoarding, they put you out.

If I were a mother, I would make sure my daughter knew that you do what you have to do. Even if it means letting the kid shove himself into you, enduring one scraping thrust and a whiplash jerk, the blown wad, the wilting dick, the tears.

Yes, I’ve thought about it. Am thinking about it.

But maybe, if I were a mother, when I am a mother, I’ll hide the baby under my coat and steal her away from the Ark, and raise her in the world. Maybe, because she will be born into the after, she will have evolved to survive it. Or I could leave her when I go, if I went, leave her where she could be safe and tended to, if not loved, and let her accept how life is supposed to be without me there to whisper in her ear that she should want more, that once there was more.

Or maybe Isaac is right, and God will stick me with a son.

P.S. Did you think I forgot? I’d guess you died, gutshot, intestines on the ground, mouth gibbering with surprise, when you got desperate enough to take food from your neighbor and she didn’t want to share. She’s dead now too, I’m guessing, the one you used to spy on with binoculars when you pretended you were birdwatching, because you liked the way she bulged and jiggled when she was naked, even though you always told me I should lose weight. Not, like, in a shallow way, you said. For my health.

Dear guy in the Arcade Fire t-shirt with the stain on the collar,

You were nice. That’s most of what I remember. You bought me drinks, but not too many, and didn’t say anything when I bought myself a few more.

I remember you’d just gotten fired, but you had your buddy’s entrance card so you could sneak into the building and smuggle out your files. You took me with you, and we didn’t go to your sad, abandoned cubicle to collect what was left of your old life. You didn’t want to have sex on your boss’s couch or take a dump on his desk. You wanted to show me the roof, because you said it was the best view of the city and I seemed like someone who needed a good view.

I was a little afraid you were a person who needed a high place from which to jump.

I would like to remember the feel of your arms around me as we stood against the railing and watched the lights twinkle in the black, but I only remember that it felt like standing on the deck of a boat, watching fallen stars burn on a dark sea.

I thought, maybe him.

Maybe this.

Because that’s how you think when you’re the right amount of drunk, and hands and lips feel good, and someone is nice. Sometimes even when he’s not.

Someone is better than no one.

That’s what Isaac told me, because he doesn’t want me to leave like Theresa left, doesn’t want to have to make me leave. Would it be so bad to be with me? he asked, and he shouldn’t have, because it made him sound so young. He told me I could have a day to think about it, before I promise myself to him. He’s being generous, he says, because he likes me.

I always want to ask him whether he knows why his mother left him behind—whether he cares if she had a reason or not.

Not that having a reason is anything special. Everyone has a reason.

Would it be so bad? He won’t be thirteen forever, but he would be forever mine.

I thought I loved you all—even you, even for a night—and none of you saved me. Isaac saved me, so maybe he’s right that I should love him, that that’s how it should work.

He chose wisely this time, chose like he could see into me.

I am the girl who stays.

I am the girl who says yes, if you want.

Whatever you want.

As long as you don’t leave.

You didn’t have time to find that out about me, and you didn’t have time to test it. Or maybe you did. I can’t remember.

I might have told you the truth about me, all of me; you might have told me things you’d never told anyone, the secrets that made you who you were; we might have decided this night was the beginning of all things; you might have recited poetry and I might have recited the lyrics to all the C&C Music Factory songs I know, which is three, because we wanted to impress each other, and it might have worked; we might have done nothing more up there than kiss, like people in a boring movie, deciding, because Hollywood told us it was romantic, to take it slow, that why not, we had all the time in the world; we might have shaken the Earth. I don’t remember, like the next day I didn’t remember your name or where the office was, which was all fine, because I gave you my number; I thought I remembered that much, but then you never called, so one way or another, I was wrong.

I think you died when it first happened, went up in a blaze of light, fused with the thing that fell from the stars. I hope they’re right that it was beautiful.

Dear John,

This is what I would have written, if I had written anything. Dear John, it’s better this way. Dear John, it’s now or later, and we’re both better off if it’s now. Dear John, you won’t believe me, but I’m doing you a favor. Dear John, it’s okay if you fucking hate me forever because I hate you too. You told me you would never leave me, and now you’re leaving, so don’t try to blame me for leaving first. Dear John, don’t die, and maybe someday I’ll come back.

You can see why I didn’t leave a note.

Your mother took me aside. Not that first day in the hospital—there was too much crying for that, all that weeping and rending of clothes by your bedside. It’s not natural for a mother to lose a son, she kept saying, like it isn’t the most natural thing in the world, like that isn’t what mothers do every day, like that isn’t why she hated me, no matter what you claimed. After the first day, before the week had ended, before I went home to pack a bigger suitcase for you, because we’d moved past duffel bags, into some new category of traveler, long-term visa to the kingdom of the sick, somewhere in there, she took me aside. You can’t handle this, she told me. You think you can, but you can’t. She thought because her husband was dead, she knew what it took to handle things, and she thought, because you called her sometimes to bitch about me never doing the dishes, and because once, the time you thought I was sleeping with the coffee guy, you made the mistake of telling her why I didn’t speak to my family anymore and why I never went to college and what I did that year in LA to pay the rent, because of everything you let her imagine, she thought she knew me.

She said you can’t handle this, and if you can’t handle this it’s better if you go now than later. I can handle this, she said, and what she was actually saying was he’s mine. You’re nothing and he’s mine. She probably never told you that, and so you never knew it was partly her fault. She made me weak. A witch, like I always said. She put a curse on me and it came to pass.

I am the girl who stays—except somehow, I left.

I left before you could leave me, and I did the same thing with the world, left it out there alone to die, locked myself up tight, huddled around a radio and listened to it burn.

I don’t think about all the millions of people who died. I think about you, and whether your hair fell out like they said it would, and how you looked without it. What we would have done to kill time while they pumped poison into your veins, whether it would have been Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit, or if you finally would have guilted me into reading to you, even the crap poetry that you know I hate. How many more times would you have yelled at me for biting my cuticles? How many more times could I have crawled into your bed, snaked my hand around the wires and up your gown, massaged cold, veiny skin until you gasped thank you, yes, please, always polite, even in heat?

I will never leave you, Isaac said, and of course I’ve heard it before, but no one has ever meant it as much as he did. In this life and the next. You will never have to be alone. I promise.

He believes in his word. He believes in eternity. He won’t get bored or distracted. He won’t see the tohu va vohu at my center and realize I am a girl to be left, not loved. He will not leave. I believe he believes that, and I almost believe it’s true.

I promise forever, he said. Isn’t that what you want? Isn’t that what we all want?

Love me forever if you love me at all—fairy tale love, fairy tale happily ever afters, that’s what he believes in, as he should, because he’s still a child.

That’s what I’ve believed in all these years, too. That’s what I’ve wanted, and now that a child wants me to have it, I’m thinking it may be time to grow up.

Because it turns out everybody leaves. And not all leavings are the same.

Not all endings are the same.

Not all endings come at the wrong time, and when they do, maybe it doesn’t have to be anyone’s fault. Maybe you leaving didn’t mean I wasn’t enough.

Maybe I should have waited for you to leave me, instead of leaving you first.

Sometimes I wonder, what if. What if there was a miracle. A remission. A cure. What if you sat up five minutes after I walked out of there, you tore the oxygen off your face, strength flooding through your veins, tumors shriveling. What if you called out my name but I was already gone.

I let myself imagine you out there somewhere, and if you got one miracle, then why not two? Why not miracles enough to survive the skyfall and whatever came next? You could be leading a hardy band of survivors through the countryside, eating mushrooms and roasting goats, a Hollywood vision of man’s triumph over god and nature, ready for your close-up. You could be the tan one now, stronger than ever, muscles bulging through tattered clothes, hair lit blond the way it always got by the end of the summer, and if you are alive, if you are a miracle, then I know that’s how it would be. You wouldn’t be alone; you wouldn’t look for somewhere to hide, to lock yourself away and wait for the hard part to be over. You wouldn’t need a knife under your pillow, you wouldn’t be tempted to escape from the world. You would anchor yourself to it, raise a fist to the broken sky, shout this is mine and you can’t have it, and then you would go looking for survivors and make the world new. Maybe you would go looking for me. Maybe you are looking for me.

Maybe I should go looking for you. Maybe I meant it when I said, don’t die.

Don’t die, and maybe someday I’ll come back.

I could leave here. Slip away in the night. I could find you out there, huddled in the woods or in a cave or in the shelter of a decaying mall, mannequins watching over you while you forage for supplies in the camping store and gnaw at stale candy bars from a long dead CVS. That would be another miracle, but everything’s a miracle in this new world. A man saw the apocalypse on the horizon; a boy listened to the word of God and built an Ark; I came to them because I thought I deserved to die, and because of that, I lived. This new world is taped together with miracles. What’s one more?

I know you’re dead. It’s possible that if I leave this place, I’ll be dead soon, too. I’ll be the one chewed up by zoo animals in an overgrown forest or falling in a sinkhole and journeying to the center of the Earth, gang-raped by a merry band of anarchic survivors or shot in the back for my shoes and my canteen. But before it happens, I’ll get to see the clouds again, and stomp around in the rain. I’ll get to taste grass and sky, and I won’t have to imagine ruined cities and rotting corpses because I’ll see them for myself. I won’t have to imagine and dream and wonder and wake up tasting blood and ruin, and maybe, if I return to the world, I can stop dreaming about it. Maybe I’ll even find it’s not as bad out there as we think. Maybe the world hasn’t left us at all, not entirely, not yet, and there’s still time to say goodbye, or build another miracle.

Maybe I don’t have to be the girl who stays, because she’s afraid of facing what’s out there on her own. Maybe I don’t have to say yes, okay, whatever you want, just don’t leave me alone, just don’t leave. Maybe I can be the one to leave, or the one to return, the one to decide. Maybe forever together is worse than being alone. Maybe forever is beside the point.

Dear Isaac,

I’m sorry.

If I’m still alive when the world really ends, maybe I’ll come back. Sometimes people do.