Читаем The End Is Now полностью

Kid makes the best of that, teams up with daddy, buddies up so close to daddy’s friend upstairs that he starts getting divine whispers in his own ear, turns savior, turns doomsday prepper-in-chief, teaches us to build our Ark and prepare for judgment day, and what’s his prize when the sky falls down and proves him right? Dad dumps him too. Locks the kid into the promised land with the rest of us and heads down the mountain to die with the unsaved masses. Chose the world over his own kid, and said God told him to do it, which, as trump cards go, beats out because I said so.

Now Theresa’s left him, too.

It doesn’t matter that she didn’t want to go; she’s gone. That’s how he sees it.

I couldn’t help it—I felt bad for him. I said, she wasn’t the right girl for you, Isaac, and to his credit, he didn’t pretend not to know what I mean. He didn’t even try to fake a smile. I saved her life, he said. Shouldn’t that be enough?

And you know what? Maybe it should. Everyone acts like love can save you, but love can’t save anything. So maybe we’ve got it the wrong way around, maybe it’s the saving that makes for love. Isaac saved us, and we should love him for it. He saved us, and so we belong to him. It’s kid logic, but you’ve got to admit that it makes sense, and that’s what I told him.

Still, I don’t like the way he looks at me now.

Without Theresa, there’s no one to ask about it, about whether I’m imagining things. The way his eyes follow me across the room. The way he saw me watching, and smiled.

I was just trying to be nice.

Dear John, wish you were here, that’s what I’m supposed to say, I guess, since the other option is wish you were dead—wish you were starving or burning or being gnawed on by feral cats—but you wouldn’t know what to do with yourself here. You wouldn’t like being locked away, piecing things together with the static and screams and pleas on a CB radio, living in a tangle of bodies and bad breath, everywhere skin and sweat and people, all of us so pale.

I’m pale like you now, pale and thin and craving the sun. You always called me stupid for skimping on the sunscreen. Everyone’s got to die sometime, I said.

I know how you died. Of course I know how you died. Why do you think I’m so good at this game? What else have I been doing since the last time you saw me but imagining how you died? I dream it, and wake up smelling disinfectant and puke, wake up tasting you, not the good you but the way you tasted at the end, like iron and rubber, like something poisonous. Sometimes I imagined I could feel it, some fluctuation in the universe, someone cutting the invisible floss that held us together, some infinitesimal weight lifting or settling—and how the fuck do any of those things actually feel, so it was more like I felt headaches and muscle cramps and indigestion and each time thought, just maybe, it was you.

I didn’t have to be there to know how you died. Wasting away. Emaciated and skeleton skin but bloated with fluid. Pregnant with fluid, we might have said. High on drugs, so sky high you might have missed the headline, assumed you were easing into a nap instead of the big sleep, maybe high enough that you saw me, and smiled, because you thought you weren’t alone. But you were. I know that, too.

Love,

Heather
* * *

Dear Jackass,

I guess you’ll never finish that novel after all. God, the novel, the novel, always the fucking novel. And how could I be expected to understand such things, the bimbo who washed your filthy dishes once the fruit flies start swarming because your life of the mind precluded you from noticing such things. How could I, bovine dumb, so dumb I had to look up the word bovine, begin to process the profundities your mind was gestating, your miscarriage of literary greatness, your Solitaire games which I guess were tapping into some deep vein of emotional catharsis. If I thought there actually was a novel, I would wonder whether you’d turned me into a character, the stupid cunt who joined a cult, can you imagine I stuck my dick in that beehive of crazy, I can hear you saying to all your coffee shop losers, and that’s why I don’t feel guilty for taking your laptop when you left.

Not to be juvenile about it, or maybe to be juvenile about it, since according to you I’m incapable of anything else: Who’s the stupid cunt now? Who’s safe in the bunker with God’s chosen people, and who’s a rotting piece of meat waiting for someone else’s cat to come by and gnaw at your intestines because you’re far too busy to have one of your own?

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