The End Is Now

You didn’t mind snorting the same drugs every night, I noticed. You loved the drugs; you loved that I had loser friends who could supply you with them. You loved that I looked pretty in the dresses you bought me and smiled pretty enough for your asshole buddies that they felt like shit and then went home and took it out on their ugly girlfriends; you loved that I fucked one of them when you asked me to as a special pretty-please for me baby favor; you loved that you could make me do that, but then you didn’t love that I’d done it. Done him. Put him in my mouth and in my ass, and let him cum on my tits, bad enough doing it, worse that you made me tell you about it, tell you while you were inside me, tell you how he felt and that he was smaller and softer than you, that he was flabby, with bad breath and thinning hair, that he made my nipple bleed, and after I told you what you wanted to hear, you threw me out of bed and said I’d never be with you if you weren’t rich, which was true, and that it made me a whore, which maybe was also. Now I think I liked your pool better than I liked you. Your pool and your stupid restaurants and your coke, even if you wouldn’t have had that last without me. I liked it best when you left for the weekend and I could float on the raft in the middle of the chlorine blue, drunk and sunburned, laughing at the clouds, at the gurgle of the pool filtration system and the way my fingers wrinkled up when I stayed in too long. I pretended it was my pool, my life; I imagined your plane flying into a mountain and some silver-haired lawyer showing up at the door to cup my hands in his and tell me, gently, that you’d left it all to me.

That’s a lie.

I imagined you coming back, but coming back different. Something new on your face when you looked at me, like you finally understood why you kept me around. I imagined us floating on the raft together, happy, that it would be like it was at the beginning, you bending me over the sink in gold-plated bathrooms while waiters tried not to wonder what was taking us so long, you tearing through some cheap K-Mart blouse like you were Tarzan and telling me I had a Michelangelo rack, that licking my nipples felt like desecrating priceless art, you wanting to ravish me, you wanting to My Fair Lady me, you wanting me. Instead you came back from that last trip and told me you wanted someone who better fit into your world, someone who knew enough to pick out her own sushi.

No one is rich anymore; no one is poor. There are only haves and have-nots. We, the Children of Abraham, God’s favored sons and daughters, have: Shelter. Food. Generators. Guns. Lives.

You, the rest, have not.

I don’t have to worry anymore about being left, about being wanted. For one thing, it doesn’t matter what any of us want—there’s nowhere to fucking go. We’ve got a radio here, we know what it’s like out there, or we know enough to imagine. Cities obliterated; West Coast underwater; governments fallen; everywhere riots and corpses. Tohu va vohu—Isaac says that’s how the Bible begins, in Hebrew. In the beginning, all was formless and void, all was wild and waste; so it began, he says, now so it ends. Isaac says we’ve all been alone long enough, that now we’ll be together. Not only all of us together in the Ark, but each of us together with another soul, matched pairs, two by two by two, as it should be. Isaac will pair us. He says God tipped him off about our proper soulmates, and since that’s the same God who gave him a heads-up about the end of the world and how to survive it, we have no choice but to believe him. So much easier than the old way. Isaac will pair us, then, in ten days, we’ll join hands and souls in the eyes of God. We’ll swear to our Lord. Forever, we’ll swear, and that’s how it will be. That’s another thing that’s changed from the old days. Once you know that God is willing to destroy the world when it pisses him off, you get a little more reluctant to break your word.

You said once that if I ever duped someone into marrying me, I should make sure to get a pre-nup, because that way when they left me I’d get mine. Actually, I’d get yours, I said, isn’t that how pre-nups work? And you laughed. Not, you said, at the lame joke, but at the idea that you’d be the one marrying me.

That’s when I should have known. Not because you laughed, but because of the when. If you get married; when he leaves you. You saw it before I did, that I was a girl to be left.

And now you’ve left again.

Don’t worry, this time I won’t make a scene.