One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses Read online

  IV.

  THESE FINAL APOCALYPSES

  expansion, disintegration, ellipses

  BATHING

  One thing about after the apocalypse is you can’t get dirt on you—I mean you can, but you better not—it stings and itches like crazy, and I don’t know about you but I can’t get anything accomplished if I don’t feel clean. Plus water’s a problem, even after everything. And sand—you know I read in a book when I was a kid about how to wash by scrubbing with sand—but now that’s even worse—what would you expect, it’s just another kind of dirt. Everything makes for one rash or another, some with welts, some with, well, stinking welts, or welts that take over your whole body, or welts that blend in with other people’s welts, or the welts on the animals and trees, or the welts on the dirt and on the water. The whole point of the apocalypse was to feel clean. What a load.

  BARBARIANS

  It was exciting about the economy because the economy deserved it. I was angry when they kept propping it back up, but I was scared when I lost my job altogether and found it nearly impossible to think. Soon enough I couldn’t find anything to eat. Then a guy I met went nuts, raped me and took my dog. He kept saying it was a matter of domestic policy, that was the vocabulary of his delusion. I kept thinking maybe it could all be for the better in the long run. I’m practical at heart. I got some guns and shot a few people I always knew were assholes, as long as the justice system was the last thing on our minds. That did something for society and me both. I shot a police. Then I found a bourgeoisie and shot him with another bullet I had and then pretended to be giving him some beans, and then I took the sharp edge of the can and cut his wrist with it for symbolic impact, like “you did this to yourself,” while his stomach was all bleeding from the bullet. Then Olivia spotted me. I’d been travelling with her and this smudgy kitten she kept in her coat pocket, and she was so pissed when she saw what I’d done that she took her kitten out and let it scratch at my eyes. She was like, You have lost all sense of perspective, that guy probably had a lot to contribute now that you fucked him up. I was just crying because of everything, physical and mental at the same time. At first I thought the kitten would really scratch my eyes out, but then it just patted me with its claws retracted. I felt the pats of little kitten feet and felt I was not in it alone. But I don’t know how long you can keep a kitten in this scenario.

  IDEA

  There should be a film starring people and a giant piece of paper that walks around with them, goes on picnics and everything. It definitely has text on it but you can never read it even though it’s larger than life. It’s the way the light hits that makes it so you can’t read it. That’s the best part. It’s a sunny and tragic film.

  SUPERPOWERS

  No one saw her jump from the city’s tallest luxury rental apartment building. Later that day a guest at a nearby hotel reported a body on the roof of a parking structure making a shape like frightened cartoon animals from her childhood. The guest and her partner in business and love, homeowners, car-leasers, personally know three additional people who killed themselves in or on parking structures (one a thing called a “carport”) this year. There’s yet another documentary going around about the guardrail-for-the-bridge debate. Clearly someone whose friend jumped is trying to be objective but freaking out behind the camera every single second. It’s amazing how transparent a camera can be in a situation like that. The partners wonder by what superpower they are operating when they can see through the movie like that. They are driving around, looking for a parking spot for the thing they’re doing after the movie, moving their perspective in and out so the world looks like the world, then like the world is just something playing in their windshield, and back again. They are always near a parking structure when they need one, but prefer to circle the city looking for a spot on the street. It’s not the money; they have money. From above, they are drawing a sacred circle of protection around the parking structure as they circle for parking, but they don’t tell each other, and they’re not going inside the circle anyway. Don’t they say that when people who jump off a bridge survive, they always say they wanted to live right after they jumped and were sure they were going to die?

  FREEZE BOX (MAMA’S GOT A)

  Now, in the near future, we’d already perfected the cryogenic freeze-box for some time. We used it for everything, for animal and vegetable, but best was we could crawl in there for grieving. Let the psychotic teen shoot our mother, let the caped man rape us. We crawled into our machine to work through it all in distant dreams. Over time the teen used her own cryogenic box to wait through the delusions, and over time the caped man slept his rage away. Those of us awake on earth walked peacefully, and when we couldn’t walk we slept until we awoke to the clean air of past sadness. Freeze-boxes lined the hills and followed us like wagons but still came the end of the world. We saw it coming, and toward us it crept, over time, a horizon. We kept our cryogenic chambers near. We were getting so sad, watching it approach like soldiers. We gazed across our freeze-boxes, into the eyes of one another, waiting for the right moment. We didn’t want to leave, because finally it was all so beautiful.

  IDEA OF CHINA

  This apocalypse takes place in Her Idea of India, I mean China, whoever’s coming up faster. Last week a thousand more consciousnesses slipped south, just across the border. I am so ambitious. It’s one of the things she used to love about me. Used to be when someone said South of the Border I knew they meant something dirty. I’d think, could I go there? I’ve come a long way, I want to say to her. But she’s all the way across the room, looking out the window again. I line my sight up with the back of her head and it’s the back of her head.

  THE LONELY SHARD

  She took her laptop into bed to look at baby animals, so that the pattern was hard world, soft bed, hard computer, soft baby animals. What’s inside after that was hard to tell because the telescoping stopped. She looked at baby polar bears first because that’s what got it started was feeling herself floating away from the melting-iceberg mainland on her lonely shard. She moved on to puppies, a particular breed she’d had as a child that her parents had gotten rid of when they moved, the dog floating deeper into her past with every moment she remained alive. Her carpet was endless, but the animals were all so good and wronged that she started feeling better. But just as she started feeling better a sick feeling seeped in to cover the inside of her stomach like fur. Just keep looking at them, she told herself. It’s good for you no matter why. What would her male counterpart be doing? Looking at trucks? What would her destitute counterpart be doing? Counting stars? What would her animal counterpart be doing? Breathing, breathing, breathing.

  CROWD

  I have come to an aquarium. Here is a plexiglass column of water and silver fish. Each fish is like two fingers from my hand. The silver fish swim clockwise, they swim in a mass, the way little fish swim, in a cloud given form by the columnular tank. I can see this in the home of a bazillionaire among white sofas and a mishmash of Italian art. The bazillionaire likes how many fish there are in there, how they move like a machine, especially because of his appreciation for large amounts in small places. He can see that they are the axis of the planet, that they are turning the planet from their tank. The fish keep a constant speed that means the fish on the outside swim more slowly than the fish at the center. It’s that mathematical. Occasionally a fish will turn backward and push against the silver current for a stroke or two and then flip back. It will make a rush from inside to outside or back again. Occasionally a fish will unhinge its jaw for a beat, as if to let the quiet water they are all rushing through wash its insides out. Together the fish beat a rhythm of moving forward, a counter-rhythm of a series of singing movements across the tank, and a third rhythm of the pulsing of jaws. There are only three rhythms visible, and still they are incomprehensible. The fish seem delicate and hollow. Their silver skin is bright and young but their faces and bones make them ancient. This is why I feel so sad: all the
rest of the aquarium is dark. I wanted the world simpler because I wanted to take it in, and now that almost all of it is gone, it is still too much; it’s so much that soon I close my eyes, as if I can join everything else that has gone dark, but then it’s even worse because what happens when you close your eyes is that everything is possible again.

  GRAPH

  The difficulty of overcoming the hurdles left some straggling at the edges of the earth, and some leaping over them like spurts of oil from a deep pot of humanity. They’d reached a point and turned suicides. The earth was crowded with suicides, but those who were not offing themselves were mad with self-preservation. Crowds gathered into a crowd, forming a heap in the middle, the crowd climbing itself, rising into a mountain of people refusing to die. From the distance you could see one or another fall as from towers. But they were falling from each other. We have a graph of it.

  CONVENTIONAL/WISDOM

  A quickly absorbed protective lotion pampers the body and keeps it feeling perfectly comfortable. When you are in the throes of madness, if you are a boy, you may try to kill people, and if you are a girl, you may try to kill yourself. According to renowned experts, apocalypses, utopias, and the persistence of capitalism are all due to a cultural failure of imagination.

  PREDATOR

  Boats are in trees. Photocopy machines are on the beach. The rack-line is made of bodies making a pattern like high-quality jacquard. A hyena sniffs along. There’s a bird that sees it coming. It’s standing on the sand flapping, from the look of it, madly. I don’t see what’s keeping it from taking off. From where I’ve landed on the tip of a pile of rubble, I’m trying to tell if the ways that birds express themselves has changed. Maybe nothing terrible is impending and the hyena is approaching for a new reason. I am scanning myself for the mechanisms of anticipation. There are no words for what I discover. I use my new eyes to scan the periphery. I take note of and apprehend a series of impossible and/or unrecognizable elements in this landscape. I note what predates what, as if we are following each other around.

  BINARY

  He went directly to the wilderness with his big knife and Gore-Tex. He was no longer against hunting because when you’re primal it’s just Monday morning. His hunting companion was the guy from the other side of the world who pushed the button, but now they got on fine. There were two girls they were raising into wives back in the clearing at the hut with the technology. Sometimes the men butted heads in the clearing, but out here they were of one mind. He was from Atlanta and the other guy was from someplace Arabic, and they did not have any language in common. It’s like living on a golf ball, thought the Atlanta guy. It’s like living on an orange, thought the Arab guy in fucked-up imaginary translation. Because the Earth had been wiped clean of landmarks and geographic features, they had no idea where they were or what it had been before. None of the animals looked like animals from places. They all looked and sounded like radioactive animals with multiple limbs and eyes, most of them giant and amphibious, and they attacked not with teeth and claws but with the poisons they spat from their fingers and that oozed when touched. They attacked with smells, with gases. None of them would make a decent pet, and neither of the guys was even thinking about domestication. They’d both been city kids, and they just wanted to feed the girls. In one episode their first fight was going to be who got which, like in buddy movies; in another episode they’d share, in another episode everyone would be gay and work out reproduction as a practical matter, and in another episode it was a combination. But for now the two men were hunting amphibians and the binary was like clean air, clean water, like invisibility, and they dreamed of the x axis and the y axis finding each other’s centers in space, magical, pure, and absolute.

  VENN DIAGRAM

  Her fear in the night was that her success made her like so many successful people she disdained, but she made a good case that she was exceptional. She thought people were only seeing the parts of her that were like other successful people, but the parts left over from that were actually the good parts. The parts left over for the successful people she knew were the bad parts. That lemon in the middle, the shady part of the Venn diagram—what was that? That was success. After the apocalypse she was dead anyway, but her work remained. Survivors crowded around it. Everything was black, but it glowed white. They discarded the part that had been the lemon because one thing’s for sure: everything had changed. They looked at what was left, and some of them wondered if this could be the new now. They remembered the stuff they’d always secretly loved or hated. One of them, a man, picked it up by the edge, lifted one crescent moon of it from the other, hooked it to his belt loop. This could be my ticket, he thought. Idiot.

  ONE THING

  Those two are as alike as eggs, but one small, one big. Sisters who could share clothes except for that one thing. “Are you sisters?” people are always saying. Both are physicists, except one’s applied and one’s theoretical. One is not mature—she throws fits, won’t button up, can’t fly right, and one will put an arm around her and say “sugar,” like clockwork, or a fool in the wind, because while one’s sweet one’s kind of a jerk.

  They’re going through their things because they want a baby and who should have it?

  One has brothers. Attributes: Buck’s handsome, Tom’s kind, Sam’s never sick. Like a logger, like a turnip, as an ox. One has friends: George works in Africa, Barton’s a playboy, Heinrich doesn’t come out of his shed. If they’re secretly eying a sperm bank they won’t admit it. They don’t like the odds. They call it a crapshoot. They’d rather play god if possible. Again: scientists.

  “You, you, you,” they say into each other’s faces when they’re happy and when they’re mad.

  People are always saying, “What if you end up with two? Or four? Or more!”

  You only go into physics if you think you can figure it out.

  One’s younger, one’s older, but not much.

  One has genes that make her small and wary of her body.

  One has Latina Birthing Hips and can swim a mile.

  One is afraid of what the baby will say about her mother.

  One is rough and tumbles like a dog.

  One has a way with teens and one is a whiz in the kitchen (especially baking).

  One has a therapist and one has an active ex. You know what? They can’t figure it out.

  They decide on an experiment: they’ll both go for it and let fate duke it out with the stars. Then they’ll know… something. They’ll know one thing.

  They take the drugs and baste away. They take their temperatures behind closed bathroom doors. They horde genius sperm culled from private deals in midnight hospital parking lots, sign contracts composed by lawyers they did coke with in school. They begin to see separate doctors and their calendars grow increasingly encoded. They spend their money down and pace their carpeted apartment.

  Now, when they lie on their sides they eye each other’s bellies as if. When they cuddle all they think of is being round.

  One is two steps ahead. One is throwing the match.

  People are always thinking, What are you thinking?

  But something is changing as they recede into themselves. They are turning their backs to us as to each other. They are walking into the future, into a great pink egg light.

  IDEODROME

  Mudslides in Pakistan were claiming masses. Celebrities flocked to toxic New Orleans. Zebras contracted anthrax in Africa. Tsunamis elicited tales of terror. Before him, the ideodrome rose from Earth, glowing like a lampshade, underdeveloped ideas swimming electrically beneath the opalescent surface. He remembered the time he arrived home drunk and noticed, just as the suspended tennis ball in the garage touched the roof of his car and stopped him from running the car through the back wall, that he’d been driving with a dead motorcyclist shot through his windshield. He thought of an idea piercing the surface of the ideodrome and making its way along the molecules of the air, sliding into his mouth and filling it with the
breath of knowledge. He looked up and a raindrop hit his forehead. Like a splash, his awareness expanded and he could see he was part of a crowd of people surrounding the ideodrome, that the people were like the particles that made up the ring of Saturn back when it seemed to have just the one ring, that the people looked computergenerated until another drop of rain hit him on the tiny bald spot on his crown where all his hair started, and suddenly he could smell how bad everyone smelled and see how everyone was wearing rags or Nike shirts from the ’90s, how they had incense stuck in their hair and scars on their faces and a lot of warped limbs. Then the ring was the ring of poverty around a great city, and the great city was of one mind that was not his own. Then he approached the ideodrome with his hand out. But an emaciated claw sprang from the crowd and yanked him back by his asshole elbow.

  RATE THIS APOCALYPSE

  He led her to a long white table, so clean, so cold, so bare, but for the apocalypses laid out in grid formation, uncountable, bouncing like icons waiting for updating, little puff of smoke in the grid, little lightning bolt, little funnel cloud, tiny tsunami, dancing flame, microscopic viruses magnified to match the rest, matchstick aliens, monsters like the figures on coins, anything you ever wanted. He said choose. The large print said to rate them but the small print said, in bed. She thought about choosing one of each, but he said it was one for each of us on Earth. He said each one was a little different, if only by nurture. He said she could rank based on her individual criteria. He said overall satisfaction, with a wink. She looked at him funny, and he laughed in cartoon under his dated mustache. She said skeptically that she would never consent to sleep with him, not in a million years. He said he’d fill out the form for her if she couldn’t handle it. He said the world was her oyster, blowing in the wind, if she’d only open her mind. She let several of the apocalypses run up her sleeve, down her pants, and enter her body while he wasn’t looking. She let them look out of her eyes. She crept up behind him while he was looking under the table for the missing animations, used an apocalypse on his pants so they collapsed around his ankles where they belonged, and made a run for it.