One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses Read online

  ZOMBIES

  Last town, he’d lived near the tracks, heard the train, and no one did anything to prepare for Halloween. Some raided the fridge for eggs, evidently. Halloween was like most days, fear in the air. It marked time in the nation, in a parade with the other holidays. One year in that town he made a rule for the neighborhood kids: no costumes, no candy. He got together a bag of rags, masking tape, and markers from around the house. When kids arrived in jeans and t-shirts he wrapped one kid in shredded sheets: “Look, you’re a mummy, here’s your candy”; and he wrapped another one in shredded sheets: “Look you’re a Vietnam Vet, back from the dead.”

  “I’m a mummy!” kids cried. “I’m back from the dead!”

  But here, the kids across the cul-de-sac had lined their porch with intricate pumpkins. He went over to look at them. “That one’s bored, that one’s perplexed, that one’s ambivalent,” the boy said, pointing with a knife much too big and sharp for his body, but suited to his pirate outfit. The older sister, a girl in the tenth grade who practiced piano every evening, had used a pattern from a magazine to carve a wolf howling at the moon, with more and less pumpkin carved out to create depth, character, and shadow. She was inside the house, practicing. She was just about as close to him as the boy, but veiled through the window screen.

  “You’ve got some complex pumpkins over here,” he said to the boy.

  “That’s not complex,” said the boy. “That doesn’t even begin to be complex.”

  In this town he lived near the tracks, too, but on the other side, the construction of a new development paused indefinitely, a dozen houses wrapped in Tyvek.

  He fixed a drink and took a chair to his porch and sat with his basket of assorted miniatures. He liked Halloween. He liked the dying and then undying. When he was a kid he said he wanted to be a boat and his aunt made him a boat to wear. He was the captain and he was also the boat, the aunt explained. His parents and their friends gathered around him in their witches’ hats, with bright cocktails, and complimented him. But he still felt like he was just the captain, walking around in a boat.

  This town was a lot like the town he’d grown up in, something he’d been working toward for a long time. It had been a hard bunch of years. I’m back from the dead, he’d thought, dropping the last box into his new living room. Here, though, the kids eyed him just as suspiciously. They eyed him with better vocabularies. And here, he felt himself looking at the town with as much bewilderment as he’d looked at the adults in the town where he’d been a child. Only now he was an adult. He walked with his drink to the center of the cul-de-sac. He turned around and around, just enough to get a little dizzy. Then he tried to aim himself home.

  But the apocalypse is not the wobbling away. The wobbling away is life persisting. The apocalypse is him spinning, with the drink clink-clinking, delicate potential to go faster and faster, to drill a hole into the earth with his body—or—and—alternately, to dissipate centrifugally like rings through water, into droplets, into air.

  STAR CHART

  We took a day trip to San Francisco and I wanted dim sum which I’ve never gotten to eat but my uncle basically ordered only shrimp and one pork thing and the pork thing was so divine, I just haven’t had anything like it—it was so cinnamony and had puffy white bun stuff around it. Like a cake you might make. But all the rest was one delicious yet almost identical shrimp thing after another. My uncle sensed from us girls a bit of boredom with the shrimp. He said, “I just wanted to show you what I like.”

  He’s a glassblower and he makes a lot of fish to sell. He also scuba dives and goes on fly-fishing trips and deep-sea fishing trips. He also collects fish figures, especially realistic ones. One time when I was visiting he was swimming and got stung by a whole mass of jellyfish and came back to the house covered in whip marks, but he was so quiet and just sat there while my aunt put meat tenderizer on him.

  In Chinatown I liked the tea shops and candy shops, not to eat (my uncle enjoys the dried octopus snacks) so much as to wonder at. My cousin bought a silk halter top, “for clubbing if he’ll let me out of the house,” and I bought a cotton robe with symbols on it. She’s the blonde and I’m the brunette. Then we went to the aquarium.

  “Sturgeon! Yum!” I have never been to an aquarium with someone who wanted to eat everything. Then on the way back to the cabin we picked up Dungeness crab and clams and mussels and my uncle made that San Francisco-style stew with sourdough for dinner. We ate outside. I hardly ever look at the sky, but my uncle looked up, crossing his legs and sipping his wine. My uncle was getting pretty drunk, which at first comes off like he’s a little pleased with himself, lightening up, but then he starts to get psychological. He went into the cabin, we heard the zip, zip of his bags, and he came back out with a star chart. I don’t know anything about stars. He waved the chart and said, “Speaking of child abuse…” and my cousin got up from the table and went inside and came back with an extra shirt to put on. My uncle said, “Remember how we used to look at the stars?” and my cousin said, “Dad, put the chart away” and put the shirt on. He would not let up on the subject. I couldn’t tell what he wanted me to do, if it was a test involving whether or not I’d think the star chart was cool. I cleared some dishes and he followed me into the kitchen with the star chart. It was yellow, with two parts that revolved in relation to each other.

  I could just see it, though, because he’s a lot like my own father, tottering after me, shaking me by the shoulders, saying, “Goddamn you girl, why aren’t you following in my footsteps?” My cousin and I have talked about how I’m not going to have kids for my reasons and she’s not going to have kids for her reasons. We look at each other and know we’re the end of the line.

  HER SUICIDE

  After her father killed himself, one thing she wanted to know was which gun. Possibly the hunting and guarding gun they kept in the house and all learned with. Probably that was the gun, but she thought maybe, in the most considerate way, he might have gone and got a different gun, to clarify the event.

  METH

  On the road to ruin a man in the maroon car was on meth and driving like it. The girls lagged behind for safety. A couple days later they saw him at the store with a boy and a puppy. A.J. got nervous. She didn’t know where to put her eyes. The puppy was so cute. The boy was eating out of a plastic bag and the man was carrying the puppy. They crossed paths on the porch of the store. Behind them was the beautiful landscape. The man wasn’t carrying any groceries, but then they were all on their way back toward the maroon car. The man carried, carried, and carried the puppy. He was a little handsome. Maybe the man didn’t have teeth. The boy was cuter with every bite. Give me a break, this is not the end of the world.

  Kim had said, as they were parking next to the maroon car, “That’s that car from before that almost killed us.” It had gone up and down the curves in the mountain road as if there weren’t curves, just straight ahead on methamphetamines. They saw his teeth for a second and they still seemed pretty okay. One thing A.J. always knew was if she lost her job, without dental she’d finally start flossing like clockwork. They went up the stairs onto the porch of the store. Kim said to the boy, “Is that good?” and the boy nodded with a lot of energy. Kim patted the puppy’s head in the man’s arms. Then, in the store, she started looking at the shelves. That was about it. Puppies and little children.

  Live and let live? Down at the breakfast shack a man is eating a breakfast burrito and he’s the father of a kid he beat, who another lady in the town adopted, and they all live here. A.J. felt angry. I am not adopting that boy and that puppy! she thought as she passed by them with her purchases, bags swiping the door of his car.

  TAKEN

  My father got really into UFOs. He’d talk about it at dinner, about how he wanted to be taken. I’d be freaked out that Martians were going to take my dad, and he’d sit there with the chicken and pout because when would he get taken already. He’d had a vasectomy and they have to do those experi
ments. There was always a sense that something was going to happen in the house. There was real fear of poverty. Always bomb-shelter mode, the stocking of the shelves with cans of food, because my father had grown up super poor, so he’d be really afraid if there weren’t enough peas on the shelf in the garage. Like we had two refrigerators and he had to see a certain height of food. I have a lot more fear as I get older. My parents were half-assed about both their religions, so that trickled down to about a quarter, but it did its job. I was freaked out about the scapula and the Lord’s prayer. The string for around your neck is piece-of-shit pleather and one night it broke and I remember just lying in bed putting the string on top of me. Evidence I was trying. A ticket stub. Airplanes when they crash, they just go down and down. Like because you bought that ticket. It’s the way they keep going down that gets me. Maybe they made that phone call to their loved one.

  I never want the apocalypse to happen.

  Polar bears clinging to ice, all that shit, my worst nightmare. Being separated. I am so afraid of not being together.

  HALF

  For half of the year, when her father was working, it was as if she weren’t half made of him. But during the summer he worked on the car in the garage, and she’d play near his feet with bolts, stubby screwdrivers, the ratchet and its sockets, and the wrench that looked like a dinosaur. He cursed a lot, headless and heartless, but not at her. She knew all the tools, and when he called, she handed each into the dark, grit from the garage floor pressing into her legs. The holes in her father’s jeans, her father’s sandals, the hair on his toes, the all-around blankness of his feet, his voice, bouncing and metallic, distant and safe, the general quiet mess, all there beyond her eyes.

  When she comes home from school on the day of the apocalypse she’s fifteen. The garage door has closed on her father. Waist down he is in the driveway. The rest of him is in the garage. The garage is suddenly a mouth that has shut already. She thinks of the mysterious fall of the dinosaurs. She thinks of the movie Captains Courageous, which they watched together, she and her father, on late night TV, and she remembers the pleasure of being included in his insomnia, this new other half of sleep, looking at the side of his face in the television light, like watching someone sleep, like being a ghost. Spencer Tracy bobbed among sharks, truncated in the water. They’d been reading “Ozymandias” in school, and she was still thinking about the word trunk. They’d been talking about Persephone, the pomegranate, and the two ways people tended to pronounce her name. In grammar, they were going back to tenses because nobody seemed to get it after all. “You’re slipping!” said the teacher. Her father lay far away in a new way: something about viewpoint, something about organizing principles, something about presence, absence, something.

  THREE SISTERS: BLOND, BRUNETTE, REDHEAD

  We were coming out of the movies into some real-life darkness when we heard his coat open. Rows and rows of apocalypses shone along the satin lining. He blocked our way with his wide stance. “Pssst, wanna buy a—” he hissed, but I held my hands over my younger sister’s ears.

  “I’ve got something for you,” he snarled and was about to reveal his you-know-what but my older sister clamped her hands over our younger sister’s eyes. He stomped, thwarted. We could hardly see the shape of him in the darkness, we had no idea how to locate his vulnerable features in all that swirling fabric, the edges of the apocalypses winking in and out of view confusingly, and our hands were all used up on the little one, besides.

  “You fuckers! You apocalyptical—” (or did he say “apocalyptic little”? or did he say “of all the people will you”? It’s hard to know what comes to me glazed with my preoccupations…) His hands reached down at us from his great height and we all clumped together, trying to shut him out with our bodies, knowing we were bound for the interior of his coat unless we could somehow pin down his head or his hands or his—

  SAILS, HULL, JIBS

  She was eating an enormous salad at an outdoor café at the marina. Every few bites she bent under the table to rearrange a folded napkin under one of its three feet. She added a bottle cap under a second foot. The third foot hovered. Then she scooched the table around on the cement. She took another few bites of the salad, which loomed like a mountain in front of her. She could see her knees through the mottled glass tabletop. The top wobbled in its white metal frame. She looked around, feeling the edges of panic. A boat made a shape against the sky, a triangle with potential dimension. Everyone seemed happy as bunnies. Bunches ate, clinking glasses. She turned sharply in her chair, this way and then the other way. A few people looked up. Her breath felt like a train. More people looked up. A boat went by. It was a marina on the harbor and still she could see only one boat. It went by, sails gushing, and by the time she couldn’t see it anymore everyone in the café had turned to watch her as, item by item, signposts, trashcans, pedestrians, and then, plank by plank, the pier, disappeared, until she was sitting with her salad in a desert at the ocean surrounded by nothing but suspended eyes.

  ARTISTS

  When artists transport the furnishings of a family room into a gallery space and paint everything white, they are trying to transform contents into ash without using fire. Results include: knitted afghan, previously fuzzy and multicolored; oversized patriarch chair with pop-out footrest and sweat-catchers on the head and armrests like sugared pancakes; the fireplace of brick; television, huge-assed or flat-screen, depending on the era, oozing spray-snow; shag carpet turned frothy white sea, as frozen in paint as the sea within us; the bookcase of books arranged with knick-knacks from around the world, little children with outfits that used to be the colors of national flags—but back to the books, because what else in the room might have something still comprehensible there on the inside? (That sea?) Perhaps if you crack open the popcorn on the coffee table it will reveal a GM seed within a seed beyond its coating.

  I remember when we finished remodeling the house, we’d covered every surface with another polymer, and then we found out about the plumbing in the cement. We’re supposed to raise a family in this sack of shit. Artists do this all the time—cover the surface, cover like news, like the opposite of oil. These artists with their white paint are signifying ash to make a post-apocalyptic space. It’s because of where they came from: earth. Coating the things with paint erases and exposes them like you can’t make your mind up. When we are with the artists I’m thinking of, our throats have filled with cotton to help us be ourselves even when bisected. As painted things float further from their meanings, we can too. When everything is coated with the debris of everything else it has the appeal of a finished product.

  HOT TICKET

  In my town, where we live on a hill in the desert which was a desert even before this last apocalypse, I can stand on the wall surrounding the house and look down with binoculars. Tonight there is a famous rock band in the ball park. Everyone left is watching them hook up their amplifiers to some car batteries they found. The band is in leather outfits, just like the old days, like nothing happened, except now they don’t have roadies. They’re being really particular about tuning their instruments, given the circumstances, always close to starting and then not starting. Rumor has it they sold tickets to every single person left on earth. That’s like 100. Except us. We’re up on the hill. Behind the wall. With my binoculars. Looking down on the rock stars. No way am I paying for this show.

  AUDIENCE

  I would sit in the back seat and everything we were passing—street signs, buildings, trees, animals—I was as still as a telephone pole, and they rushed past me. I personified them all so they’d been packing up and preparing. I was a stone in a river, and all of these things were fleeing whatever was happening. I would imagine what each of them would sound like as they were telling me that they were leaving.

  The pitch of their voice, or how they would say “Goodbye!” or if they were similar things, two buildings that looked alike, would they sound the same or different, or a grouping of several
things together, of trees, would they speak in unison? They were rushing past me this way, calling out, but I didn’t feel afraid.

  They weren’t warning me, they were just getting out of there as fast as possible, but I was headed into there, and I was going to be the only one there when I got there, whatever it was. But no, I wasn’t afraid.

  I’ll be back in a sec. Do you want one of those sandwiches?

  The thing with the rocking chair is, my mother told me that when she was a toddler, she had a rocking chair that she would sit in for hours, and I found a picture of it in with these funny-smelling relics from the ’60s, like Clark Gable picturebooks. My mom looks Asian but she’s not Asian, and when she was little she looked even more Asian, even with her eyes, blue like mine, which of course you can’t tell in the picture, and it’s always strange to see your mother shrunken into this distant person—and when she got on this kick, she sat me down, sometimes me and my brother, but usually just me, my brother wouldn’t sit for such things, but she would sit cross-legged, really tall, on the couch or anything, and she would rock back and forth like this and tell me terrible things. About all her child abuse, about the Holocaust, about all the people who died in her family—