One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses Read online

  He’s wearing light blue cotton pajama bottoms and a thin sweatshirt his father wore playing hockey in college. His clavicle is incredibly delicate, poking out of the ring of the sweatshirt. Soon a professor, in subtitles, suggests that the Smog Monster rode in on a comet, a space pollution scientific freak organism. No one in Patrick’s generation uses the word “ozone” to worry about the planet. Soon there’s the scene where the girl’s dancing on a stage in front of a multicolored projection of magnified pond scum. Patrick finds he’s thinking of ice. He’s picturing his father moving alone with his hockey stick across their neighbor’s vast lawn that fills and freezes over every year. That afternoon he’d gone into his father’s dresser for a sweatshirt and found the tape there, at the bottom of the drawer where porn ought to be. He then, in fact, set his watch for three a.m. and chose the third floor TV room instead of the living room for that very reason. Imagine, porn rising past the hallway balcony like steam, curling under the doorway and creeping under the covers to where his father lay, a man, a man with a wife and a son, with a fine, high bed, with snow-covered land, borderless and unobstructed all the way to the deep pine woods.

  Instead, Patrick is watching a boy in stupid-looking high-waisted shorts follow his grandfather along the beach. The movie is so badly made that when his attention wanders for even a moment he has no idea what’s going on. There are drunken Japanese hippies having visions of people turning into fish. In a long sequence, first Godzilla and then the Smog Monster stare into the screen at a series of angles. It will be years before it occurs to him that this was meant to be a dramatic showdown. He and his first real girlfriend will have broken into an abandoned grocery store. It’d been fun, racing their absurdly large carts down the emptied aisles—the absence of color, the inorganic skeleton—until he hadn’t seen her in a while. He’ll be running the cart through produce, wads of colored tissue and packing straw floating on the naked geometric planes of display islands, and suddenly feel done with it, the need to go at the level of panic. He’ll run the cart along the tops of the aisles—dairy, beverage, cereal, frozen food, natural, ethnic, snacks, baking goods—increasingly furious because he’s been texting her and texting her. Where r u? Finally she’s way down at the other end of canned goods. She’s deep in the lowest shelf, swallowed to her torso, her legs coming out of her ass in a stark V. For a second he’ll think she’s dead, something having shoved her in there. Then she emerges with a can held up like a torch. She says, “Look: a soup!” They lock eyes across the vast speckled linoleum. She’s so happy, and he’s so angry. He thinks, pow. He remembers sitting secretly among furniture in the tip of a house that is pointing its nose to the moon, and above him nothing but the stratosphere.

  When the movie’s over Patrick brings the cassette with him to his room and slips it under the extra pillow. For a long time he tries to sleep, facing it in the dark. He tries to think about the porn he’d expected, but his thoughts keep shifting back to the crumbling bodies, the masses of them in grainy gray and ashen white. It hurts. He longs for porn, but he can’t make it happen in a way that’s not horrible and sick.

  In the morning, kitchen sounds rise past the balcony. Patrick’s window is nearly covered in frost, a vast miniature white forest, and through the ice-branches he can see his father crossing the yard in his long brown coat and over boots, using a black branch for a walking stick, poking it into the snow. He can walk on the snow for a couple of steps but then crunches through. Cold comes off the window and the sun is soft and clean. His father, alternately light and heavy, comes off as funny. Patrick pulls his feather blanket around his shoulders and shuffles downstairs in his wool socks. His mother is holding their terrier on one arm and wiggling a frying pan over the stove with the other. In the pan are three eggs, whites oval, yolks off-center in each. She’s wearing a quilted bathrobe with a print-version of gingham patches. Patrick uses a foot to pull a chair out from the table and then sits in it, not really facing the table, not really facing his mother, either. He’s in a beam of sunlight. He blinks and yawns. He pulls at the blanket so he’s not sitting on so much of it.

  “I don’t think I want an egg, Mom,” he says.

  “Someone’ll eat it. You still sleepy?” She crouches to let the terrier hop off her arm. He shakes himself as if he’s wet and then leaps into Patrick’s lap. Patrick holds the little dog at arm’s length and it licks at the sunny air. Patrick likes the dog, but he doesn’t like it to lick him, and lately the licking has been seeping into his overall opinion of the dog.

  His father comes in, stamping, and then unclasps the dozen clasps on each overboot and pulls them off. He’s wearing his slippers underneath, and he’s got the newspaper. His mother turns the radio on and it sends out classical music. Strings. Copland?

  “Brrrr. Chilly, chilly,” his father says. After he hangs his coat on one of the pegs by the door he crosses to the fridge, mussing Patrick’s hair as he passes by, sending the threads of dust in the sunbeam into tantrums. In a moment that no one notices, the dust plumes into the shape of the Smog Monster.

  Patrick’s father takes bread out and puts slices in the toaster. Soon they’re all at the table. Toast, butter, jam, eggs, coffee, juice. Sometimes when Patrick comes home from school after practice or late from a game his parents will be off somewhere in the house, but at the kitchen table will be his father’s briefcase on one chair and his mother’s briefcase on the chair opposite it, these abbreviated versions of them, like sentries.

  Three days later it’s a Wednesday and at lunch Patrick and his friend Arbuckle, first name shunned and practically forgotten, get lost in conversation at the far end of the snow-covered soccer field where they like to sit on this extremely wide, ragged stump of a tree that’s near the edge of the woods but not really part of the woods. They don’t know it, because it’s their first year at the high school, but for ages it’d been a climbing tree, and only that summer it’d been proclaimed dead enough to be dangerous. Kids used to congregate at the tree, but now it’s just a stump and no one cares about it.

  So Patrick and Arbuckle get to class late, starting back across the field when they hear the bell, trying to run through the snow at first but then giving up, taking it easy, trudging with their heads low, arms folded, still talking, thinking something through. Then Arbuckle heads off for French and Patrick steps into his biology class but no one even looks at him as he enters, snow pressed into shapes quietly dropping from the treads of his boots. He stops a few steps in. The room feels funny. They’re all watching the television on its wheeled cart. It sits at the front of the rows of one-armed desks, and Mr. Bernard is sitting in Patrick’s—in the second row, watching. News is on. There’s footage of raging, raging fire. It’s raging in a box in the upper-right of the screen. Patrick’s seen commercials for a videotape of fire you can play to make your television more festive—he and Arbuckle joked about buying it for his uptight parents, ages ago, when they saw it in a dollar bin. But they didn’t buy it because after they thought of it, the joke was over.

  This fire, however, is a real fire, raging in the city of Los Angeles. Something swooped overhead and dropped, or dropped something. Something fell burning from the sky and what is it, chemicals, flaming viruses, maybe nuclear—whatever it is, California is burning on the television and burning across the country. There’s also no way to tell how far away the video is being shot from because looking at fire up close is pretty much the same as looking at fire far away, as long as it fills the screen. “My country,” people say on the TV, anchors and men on the street. “Our country.”

  Patrick stays in his spot on the periphery. All around the room are posters of biology things. Definitive drawings of cross-sections of plants and animals. Everyone listens to the reporters, watching the fire. Landmarks are gone forever, museums and mansions enumerated by one after another correspondent. A series of explosions level the hills. One of Mr. Bernard’s hands is clinging to the slender arm of Patrick’s desk. He has a round head, gl
asses, and strings of black hair that his scalp shows through. He’s got a quirk of smoothing his hand across them. He’s about the same height and build as Patrick, and while Patrick has tried to picture the lives of some other teachers, he has never even thought about Mr. Bernard except in terms of biology. Now that Mr. Bernard is in his spot, Patrick follows the teacher’s eyes to the intercom, back to the television, then back to the intercom. The speaker is dangling from its wires in a corner near the ceiling over the blackboard, but everyone knows it’s done nothing but occasionally spit for months. Mr. Bernard’s homeroom just does the pledge on their own. Notes come from the office, if anything. If Patrick moved to the front of the room, that could complete a kind of reversal, and the thought comes close but doesn’t actually cross his mind. He stays by the door. He is looking at Mr. Bernard for some ideas of what to think, but meanwhile Mr. Bernard’s mind is filled with the fire and includes Patrick only as a sort of pixel among many student-pixels massed over time. He’s an okay teacher who occasionally, maybe every few years, gets swept up in a kid. He’ll find himself thinking about the kid’s life, and trying to do something to help the kid, and have to pull himself back.

  The reporter they’re watching gets a message in her ear to move farther from the billowing fire, and when she sends it back to the anchor Mr. Bernard says, “We’ll wait and there’ll be an announcement.” None of the kids are saying anything, but two girls link fingers across the aisle. Outside, it’s snowing again. Patrick lets his backpack slip to the floor and into the puddle from his boots. After a while Mr. Bernard says, “I have an announcement,” but then the news anchor says something about the fires raging into San Diego, Santa Barbara, about speculations, who is responsible, and he doesn’t say anything.

  In the doorway, Patrick remembers another emergency with Mr. Bernard, back in September. One of the kids in their class had tried to kill himself by taking all the prescriptions he scrounged up in his house. It was supposed to be assembly where everyone processed together, and that had already happened, but the kid had been in their biology class before the coma, and the girl who had been his partner in collecting specimens had been assigned to join another group, making a threesome. In class, the girl kept saying, “It’s just not going to be the same.” It came off a little like she was complaining about the group, and after about the third time she said it, Mr. Bernard lost his temper. Patrick had never seen a teacher lose his temper like that. He said, “Hold it, listen up, class,” and then just went off. He was grasping a wooden yardstick for some reason. He wore such ridiculous plaid pants no one could tell if they were an intentional joke, but Patrick saw him shake, and in the doorway he remembers being afraid the man was going to cry, praying and praying his teacher wouldn’t cry. He remembers this vibrating hope against hope, he remembers not what Mr. Bernard said but how angry it made him to see his teacher out of control like that, and then the memory dives back under the surface and his mind doesn’t hook onto it again.

  Mr. Bernard will always remember what he said. He said, “I know you’re all freaking out and excited. I know it feels like this changes everything, and I know half of you are thinking that might be cool, even necessary. But let me tell you, I know several of you in this very room have experienced some real hardship. And some of you are going to learn very soon what tragedy is if you don’t know it already. That, my friends, is life,” he said. He dropped the yardstick accidentally and it made a huge smack hitting the floor. He’d been teaching for twenty years. He’d talked to kids whose parents beat each other, who were sick, dying, kids whose parents fucked them when they were babies. He’d had a refugee kid who never spoke, whose eyes rested only on the things between people, and who the fuck knows what happened in the world to do that to her. “I am here to tell you that nothing is changed,” he’d said that day. “Ice ages come and go. Stars supernova and nothing is changed. Species go extinct every day. So you can take heart in that.” After school, Patrick had said something to Arbuckle about Mr. Bernard losing it in class and never thought of it again until now. In fact, three months later and the school is pretty used to one of them being off in a coma. It’s what Mr. Bernard might call resilience.

  “I have to go home,” Mr. Bernard says, sick of it, rising from Patrick’s desk and returning to his own. “If you want to stay, I’ll stay here if you want me to stay, but otherwise I’m going.”

  Busses aren’t around, the parking lot is crazy, and Patrick gets a ride with a senior who lives on his street. Sara has a lot of light brown, almost golden fluffy hair, and even though she’s not a big deal at the school, she doesn’t usually say anything to him. Their parents know each other, but even as children, Sara and Patrick never got along. It’s no loss either way. Practically all he knows about her is that she’s adopted and she’s part black. Biracial, which sounds like a part of an insect. Multiethnic, which sounds like a ride at a carnival. Sara’s got a black Trans Am with a red interior—not the kind of car most kids go for in this district in this moment in history—and her hair really stands out against it. Her eyes are sunken and blurry, and while some kids look a little dazed, and some kids are running around like they’re high on sugar, Sara has clearly been crying. Maybe she knows someone in California. Patrick has an older cousin who lived in Santa Cruz for a while but now he’s back.

  Her hair rises in the wind in one fluffy mass.

  “You okay?” he says. Her hair looks like the Smog Monster, and while it’s true that he doesn’t like her, it’s such a juvenile thought he pushes it aside.

  “This is all so very fucked up,” Sara says, shaking her head. She’s being nice, that’s one thing being stripped and raw can make you, is nice, but he’s skeptical. He thinks she’s so immersed in what she’s feeling that she’s assuming everyone feels exactly like her and that’s what makes her be so nice. She’s feeling her commonality with all humankind, and it doesn’t matter what he feels.

  They’re rising and falling along the slick, curving road. Long rows of evergreens line some of the properties, and acres of snow separate the road from the houses it leads to. There’s an old donkey who lives with a pony in a post-and-rail paddock with a little wooden shelter. When they pass the paddock, the donkey is lying in the snow, curled like a dog on a hearth, and the pony is standing over it. Gray donkey, white pony, dark rail fence, pale, pale sky.

  Sara wants to drive him right up to his house, she insists on it, but it’s a very long driveway and though it’s plowed, it’s icy. They have an extremely grown-up-sounding conversation, a kind of I’ll-get-the-check, no-no-I’ll-get-the-check exchange, over whether or not she should drive all the way down the driveway. Patrick wins by saying he wants to get the mail and when he gets out he just says, “Thanks. Really Sara, the walk will do me good,” which completely freaks him out for a second, like the remark comes directly from the future. He gets the mail but instead of walking down the driveway, he uses his father’s footprints across the loping yard. They’re left from days ago, iced over and just that one set.

  Inside, Patrick’s parents are upstairs in their bed on the green comforter in their work clothes, watching California burn on TV. Their shoes are in the hall, empty and at odd angles, as if the people in them had disintegrated mid-step. When Patrick arrives in the doorway, his parents hold out their arms and he gets up into the high walnut bed with them. Patrick’s mother shifts so that he can share the green pillow she’s leaning on. He can smell that she’s had a cigarette. The cat’s in his father’s lap, her tail dripping over onto Patrick’s leg, shifting like a hunting snake. The terrier hops up and his mother distracts it from the cat by nudging it playfully with her feet. The terrier bites at her toes and then lies down, leaning into the curves of her arches. The TV continues its coverage. The fire is spreading. It’s past Fresno. It’s consuming the state but has yet to cross over its lines. Suspects accumulate, worldwide. The anchor chokes up, waxes and relates. Sometimes Patrick’s father offers an analysis and sometimes his mother o
ffers an analysis. They talk about who could have done it, who in the world. Patrick points to the map on the television and says things like, “I didn’t know that country was pronounced like that. I think that lady said it wrong. Is it bigger or smaller than, say, Kansas?” Or he asks, “Is stocking up dumb? Are we stocked up?”

  But mostly he finds he’s feeling wonderful and warm, there between his parents, with the cat and the dog. It’s such a big and carefully furnished house for there to be so many lives in those few square feet of space. He thinks, I am in the moment. Nothing is dirty. Everything is either very near or very far. The fan turns overhead, pushing heated air down.

  At ten p.m., Patrick is already in his bed, reading by the light of a little clip-on book light that came with a magazine subscription. It’s cheap and the bulb doesn’t fit right in its socket. The light keeps flickering. His father is upstairs in the TV room, still watching the coverage.