The End Is Now

A lot of things are clear in retrospect, not to mention cliché, like the things a girl will do when she grows up without a daddy and the sad vampirism of a guy in his thirties making one last lunge for his vanishing youth. I was sixteen, and you were sixteen years older—enough space for a whole other me to fit between us. Which I’m guessing you would have enjoyed.

Theresa Babbage is only nine years older than Isaac, which seems distasteful enough now, when he’s only thirteen, but won’t matter too much down the line, and either way, you’ve no room to judge. Isaac says that when he turns thirteen, he will be a man, that that’s how it worked in biblical times and—look out the window—here we are again. (We have no windows here, but we all know what he means.) He says God wants him to be with a woman, and he wants that woman to be Theresa, and since age is just a number and what Isaac says goes, so be it. That’s what we all tried to tell ourselves, and shrugged.

It makes sense he would pick her, not just because she’s closer to his age than anyone other than the little kids, not just because she’s hot, but because she was his babysitter, and that’s the closest thing we’ve got to a teacher. (Hot for a teacher, there’s another cliché you know pretty well.) She broke the rules for him, let him stay up after his bedtime, let him watch horror movies even after the nightmares started, the ones from God about the end of the world, and there’s something intoxicating about that, breaking the rules together, sneaking around together in the dark, sharing a secret. Secrets breed.

Write dangerous, you said, when you gave us the journals, told us to write what we felt and what we feared, no sanitized shit about proms and puppies. You called them journals, not diaries, because diaries are for little girls, and you promised they would be for our eyes only. Make the page a repository for your soul, you told us, but when I showed you the page about how you tasted and what my heart did when you spelled words on my neck with your tongue, you told me don’t be a fucking idiot and never write any of this down, and never even bothered to say if it was good.

I did what I was told. I didn’t tell anyone. Even after you traded me in for that sophomore who wrote a love poem in her own menstrual blood, I didn’t write any of it down. I learned my lesson about that. Never write down what actually matters. Never tell.

Even so, I still thought I might be a writer someday. If I had the time. If anything worth writing about ever happened to me. And here I am, witness to the end of the world, nothing to do but can fruit and record the fall of civilization and the mourning song of my heart or whatever, and the only thing I’ve bothered to write are my little collection of shitpaper letters to all you pieces of shit. There’s nothing in here I want to record, and nothing out there that I can bring back by writing about it. What I want is to lie on a couch and watch TV.

You told us TV would turn us into passive consumers of other people’s words and we should take a sledgehammer to the screen, impose our creative will on the world, creation via destruction, raze our brain-washed, consumerist, capitalist, shallow, pimple-popping lives to the ground and build from scorched earth; you told us no one ever died wishing they had watched more TV, but I will. I wish I’d watched more Friends reruns and had made a dent in the list of Boring-Sounding Shows I’m Tired of Admitting I Don’t Watch. I can picture how you probably died (pierced in the jugular by exploding glass while you begged the mirror for help with your comb-over), but I’m already forgetting what the Real Housewives look like. I told you once that I thought soap operas were the most realistic form of storytelling, because they never stopped at happily ever after, they never stopped at all, and you laughed like I was making a joke, and I guess now the joke is on me because they stopped along with everything else.

There’s nothing left out there now. That’s what they say over the radio, although mostly, now, they don’t say much of anything. Occasionally, through the static, we pick up someone crying.

There’s nothing left out there and it’s insane to hope that there is, and we all agree on that—except when it’s time to put someone out. And then we pretend it’s not a death sentence, just an alternative life choice. Anything could be out there, we say. She didn’t like it in here, not enough to follow the rules and do as she was told, so maybe she’ll find something she likes better.

Maybe, if Theresa Babbage preferred not to fuck a teenager, if, unlike you, that didn’t turn her on, if she pretended Isaac’s proposal was a question rather than a command and politely declined, then that was her choice, and maybe, after a few nights out there in the waste and wild, she won’t regret it.