The End Is Now

The gentle sway reminded her of her journey to the US: forty-five days in the frigid hold of a merchant airship, packed with sixty other girls. They’d fed her hard-tack, laced with pure yapian to suppress her appetite and ward off dirigible sickness, but even then she knew the opium was being used to build invisible chains, binding servants to their masters. But she also knew that she was one of the lucky ones. The others—the picture brides—sat motionless, their feet confined to lotus boxes. The new contraptions would break and bind the girls’ feet en route, with a single turn of its iron gears each day. Dorothy remembered marveling at the acupuncturist, a man with a long gray beard who numbed the girls’ pain with tiny copper needles carefully placed along their legs, arms, face, and hands. The needles were then wired to an electric generator powered by the Lash of St. Francis, the seasonal trade winds of the North Pacific Ocean.

Dorothy had nearly dozed off again when she heard a crashing noise. That’s when she realized the tremors weren’t caused by the delicious, black tar vapors wearing off. Instead, the ground was indeed shaking, lurching violently. The building began roaring, as dust fell from the ceiling in the windowless room and the smoke-stained walls erupted into a jigsaw of splintering, cracking, falling plaster. A roar, a guttural wave of subterranean sound, muffled the screaming of men and women from the gambling room upstairs—choking, gagging sounds, ivory mahjong tiles and bodies falling to the floor.

In a waning moment of opiate-induced splendor, lingering like the warmth of a goodbye kiss, Dorothy closed her eyes and tried to imagine that the rocking, swaying, was her Nai Nai holding her. Her grandmother, like most descendants of China’s fallen Celestial Empire, had called the great comet the Broom Star.

The Seattle Times had renamed the astral visitor the Sidereal Tramp. Dorothy had also read that Edmond Halley, in a moment of colonial hubris, initially named the comet after himself, as though ship’s captains hadn’t been periodically led off course by that wandering light in the sky for the last four thousand years. As if planting a flag that bore a genteel name, one reflecting the teetotaling civility of Britannia could assuage the fact that the Broom Star’s long tail was made of mercury cyanide and could sweep the Earth clean of all life.

Dorothy blinked as the drugs wore off. She rubbed swollen, bloodshot eyes, and saw that no one else in the dimly lit smoking parlor seemed to notice the calamity, except the attendant who had crawled beneath one of the heavy wooden bunks. The rest of the men and women—the patrons—were fast asleep, smiling euphorically as fist-sized chunks of the ceiling rained down around them. A handful lay on their sides, still amiably puffing away, even as their pates rocked back and forth on their wooden headrests.

Dorothy wanted to stay, to spend the last of her money on one more sweet breath of sugary splendor. But she was knocked to her hands and knees, then flat on her stomach. Her dime skittered away, down a rift in the floor, as the room seemed to move, jolting two feet to the north and then buckling three feet to the southwest. Dorothy covered her head as she heard the crashing of copper spittoons all around her. Tins of Pilus Lunares, sounding like the plucked strings of a zither as the cans bounced, pinging off the wooden floor, spilling their contents, balls of fine British opium mixed with silver nitrate, camphor and musk which pharmacists had dubbed Hair of the Moon. Chemists had stopped trying to turn lead into gold. It was much more lucrative to turn poppies into vaporous whiffs of Heaven, even if the potent silver turned the user’s skin to an ashen shade of blue.

Dorothy struggled to sit up while the building swayed. Then her nostrils flared as the dark, fuzzy lumps of opium caught fire amid burning slicks of peanut oil. The heating lamps and bowls had shattered on the ground and the shards of manganese looked like islands of purple glass in a lake of fire. The patrons—those still nursing their long copper pipes—closed their eyes as if this were the happiest moment in all their lives; in many ways, this strange, serene dream of theirs probably was. While those who slumbered kept smiling, even as their sackcloth clothing caught fire, hair, skin, and fatty tissue burning as they succumbed to a sleep that would last from this moment until the next visitation of the comet, when no one would be left to notice the return.