The End Has Come

“I won’t say I’m glad that you had to live through that. From one mother to another, no one should have to watch their child die. Certainly not like that. A slow, cruel, inhumane death that I wouldn’t wish on a dog.” Colonel Handleman took another step. She reached out her hand and, before I could fully register what she was about to do, ran her fingers down my cheek, leaving cool wetness behind. She stepped back again.

“We’re all dirty here, Dr. Riley.” She smiled as I whimpered, and her eyes were cold, and there was no forgiveness there. Maybe there never could have been. “You made this mess. You made it. Every speck, every smear, every fruiting fungal body, it’s all yours. It belongs to you. Now what are you going to do about it?”

She turned before I had a chance to remember what words were, walking calmly back to the door. She let herself out. The bolt clicked a moment later, and I was alone with the mess she had made, here in the ruins of the world I had destroyed.

The mud was drying on my cheek. I couldn’t move. All I could do was sink lower into the bed, and close my eyes, and wait for the end to finally arrive.

* * *

This is the thing about OCD: everyone remembers the “compulsive” part. They remember the cleaning, the counting, the tapping, the little rituals that construct a scaffolding for a life that never seems stable enough to be real. When I first started dating Rachel, she seized on the way I always sorted my cafeteria fruit salad onto separate quadrants of a paper plate — grapes here, watermelon chunks there, strawberries somewhere else altogether, and pineapple in the remaining quarter. The sad bits of cantaloupe and honeydew had remained at the bottom of the bowl, slouching together like naughty children.

Rachel had stabbed her fork at them and asked, “Why?”

“Why what?” Even then, I had been helpless before her, a mere mortal stunned by the presence of a goddess. We’d met at a mixer for the school’s LGBTQ association. She had spoken passionately about the need for more asexual and genderqueer representation, before asking me if I wanted to have pancakes. I had basically fallen in love before the syrup hit our plates.

“Why aren’t you eating the melon?”

“Oh.” That was the moment where all of my previous attempts at relationships had fallen apart: over something as small as a few chunks of melon in the bottom of a bowl. “They’re too superficially similar to separate, but too different to eat together.”

Rachel had blinked slowly, taking this in, before she’d asked, “So you don’t eat them?”

“I don’t eat them,” I had said, and paused, waiting for her to tell me that I was too strange, that I was being unreasonable, that I was wasting food. I had tried countering all those arguments in the past. I had pointed out that everyone had food preferences, and that it wasn’t my fault that the only fruit salad came with chunks of interchangeable melon. I had explained that I was afraid of developing an allergic reaction to one and identifying it as the other, which would make it impossible to keep my medical history straight. I had done all those things at one time or another, and all of them had failed.

Rachel had thought about this for a moment longer before she said, “I guess I’ll be eating double melon.” Then she had dipped her fork into my bowl, and I had seen the future unspooling in front of me like a beautiful dream. It had taken another three years before I could convince her to marry me. It had been worth every single day of trying.

Rachel had understood that for me, the compulsions were always second to the obsessions. I knew, in the place where most people know that gravity works and the atmosphere is unlikely to be sucked off into space, that if I made a mistake — just one — it would be the end of everything. I had known it since I was a child, when I had accidentally skinned my knees on the playground and ruined my new jeans, and my parents had told me they were getting a divorce that same night. I wasn’t the most important person in the world. I wasn’t special. I was just the one whose mistakes mattered more than anyone else’s.

And here was the proof: the all-consuming softness, which had spread from the lab I managed, consuming my wife before it went on to satiate its hungers on everything else. The mistake had been mine: I had believed that my people would trust me, that they would tell me if something was going wrong in Project Eden. But like so many others before them, they had seen only the compulsions, only the cleanliness and order. They had seen me as the end of their grand experiments, and they had stayed silent.

If I had reviewed their work more closely, I might have been able to spot the holes where they hadn’t fully documented their research. If I hadn’t trusted them to trust me, my wife and daughter might still have been alive. All my life, the whispers in my head had said “you will destroy everything you love.” And they had been right. They had been right all along.