The End Has Come

Everybody was bracing themselves for the next thing. We still believed in money, kinda-sorta, even after a ton of people had lost their savings and investments in the big default spiral. We didn’t not believe in money, let’s put it that way. We still had electricity and cell phone service and Internet, even though many parts of the country were on-again, off-again. The red bandanas and the rump government needed a cellular network as bad as the rest of us, because they needed to be able to organize, so until they figured out how to have a dedicated network and their own power sources, they would make sure it kept running for everyone. We hoped so, anyway.

Sally and I spent hours arguing about what sort of movie we should make next. All of my ideas were too complicated or high-concept for her. I wanted to do a movie about someone who tries to be a gangster but he’s too nice — like he runs a protection racket but never collects any money from people. Or he sells drugs but only super-harmless ones. So the other gangsters get mad at him, and everyone has to help him pretend to be a real gangster. And he does such a good job he becomes the head gangster, and then he’s in real trouble. Or something.

Anyway, Sally said that was too complicated for people right now; we had to shoot for self-explanatory. Some of the film geeks wanted us to make a movie about the fact that everyone was deaf, but that seemed like the opposite of escapism to me — which I guess would be trapism, or maybe claustrophilia.

Sally was all about recapturing the Vikings-and-Samurai glory, like maybe this time we could have Amish ninjas who threw wooden throwing stars. I was like, Amish ninjas aren’t high concept? I was happy to keep debating this stuff forever, because I didn’t actually want to make another movie. Whatever part of me that had let me turn calamity into comedy had died when I fell out of a window on top of Reginald and watched him die on fire.

Snow fell. Then hail, then sleet, and then snow again. Things felt dark, even during the day, and I felt like my sight, smell, and touch were going the way of my hearing. Only my taste burned as strong as ever. Everything was salty, salty, salty. You could slip and break your leg in a ditch and nobody would know you were there for days and days.

This was going to be a long winter.

* * *

“ROCK MANNING. WE NEED YOU.”

I stared up at the giant scrolling light-up banner over Out Of Town News in Harvard Square. I blinked the snow away and looked a second time. It still looked like my name up there.

Okay, so this was it, the thing my school therapist had warned me about back in fifth grade: I was going narcissistophrenic and starting to imagine that toasters and people on the television were talking to me. It was probably way too late to start taking pills now.

But then a guy I had met at one of our movie shoots saw it too. He tugged my sleeve and pointed at the scrolling words. So unless he and I were both crazy the same way, it really did say my name up there.

A bus zipped past. (They’d gotten a few buses running again.) The big flashing screen on the front didn’t say, “WARNING. BUS WILL RUN YOU OVER. GET OUT OF THE WAY” as usual. Instead, it said, “ROCK MANNING, YOU CAN MAKE A CONTRIBUTION TO REBUILDING SOCIETY.” I grabbed the guy, whose name was Scottie or Thor or something, and pointed at the bus for more independent confirmation that I wasn’t losing it. He poked me back and pointed at a big screen in the display window of Cardullo’s delicatessen, which now read, “ROCK MANNING, COME JOIN US.” I grabbed my cell phone, and it had a new text message, much the same as the ones I was seeing everywhere. I almost threw my phone away.

Instead I ran toward the river, trying to outrun the words. Over the past few months since everyone went deaf, I’d seen the screens going up in more and more places, and now all of a sudden they were all talking to me personally. Computer screens on display at the big business store, the sign that normally announced the specials at the Mongolian buffet place — even the little screen that someone had attached to their golden retriever’s collar that would let you know when the dog was barking. They were calling me out.

I got to the river and ran across the big old stone bridge. In the murky river water, the letters floated, projected from somewhere in the depths: “WHY ARE YOU RUNNING? WE THOUGHT YOU’D BE FLATTERED.”

When I got to the other side of the bridge, Ricky Artesian was waiting for me. He was wearing a suit, and instead of the red bandana, he had a red handkerchief in his breast pocket, but otherwise he was the same old Ricky from high school. He held up a big piece of paper:

“Relax, pal. We just need your help, the same way we needed you once before. Except this time we’re going to make sure it goes right.”