The End Is Now

Tell me you don’t actually believe this shit, you said after those first couple meetings. I pray to fucking non-existent god that I haven’t wasted my time with someone who would fall for this.

And I said, even at the beginning, because that’s what it said in the brochure, this is my calling and I need to repent before it’s too late, and I didn’t tell you what Father Abraham told me, that forgiveness is possible and God will never leave you because I knew you would laugh and I wanted to believe it was true.

And eventually you said I can’t handle this shit anymore and the sex isn’t worth the crazy, and that was fine with me because Father Abraham’s house had many rooms and plenty of empty beds, and how is that I’m never the one leaving, but I’m always the one who has to pack up my suitcase and walk out the door?

I never got around to answering your original question.

Did I believe it?

Do I believe it?

What kind of stupid cunt would I be not to believe it? A father and his son told me the world would end, and it did. They told me when it would happen, and it did. They told me how to survive it, and here I am. Abraham gathered us to his chest, Isaac built us an ark, and here we are, floating to salvation on a sea of millet and automatic rifles and kidney beans.

If I didn’t believe, why did I come in the first place and why did I stay?

If I don’t believe now, what more could possibly convince me?

Atheism is the only honest intellectual position, you said, and I didn’t ask you what if an angel descended to Earth or a TV messiah parted the Red Seas or an eleven-year-old says God told me the world will die and the kid turns out to be right, because it was easier to let you think I wasn’t listening when you talked. Maybe if you had asked me a question, I would have answered. Maybe if you asked me who I was thinking about when you were inside me, and why I would hate myself enough to let you be there, I would have told you a story.

The Holocaust, you said. The Armenian genocide. Rwanda. What kind of a god, etc., etc.

Everyone dies, I said. Or do you blame Him for that, too.

I don’t know. That’s the answer. I don’t know if I believe in a Him, and so I don’t know whether to worry about breaking a promise to Him, but the question’s moot, because my soulmate-in-waiting is gone. Midlife Crisis Man slipped away in the night, mustache and all, apparently preferring certain death over an eternity bound to me.

That’s assuming he left of his own accord, and obviously it wouldn’t be the first time, but there’s also Isaac, and the way he looked when he announced the disappearance, and the way he took my hand when he told me that I shouldn’t worry about being alone for long, that God had plans for me.

Never trust anyone who says God has a plan, you told me, and that’s the one thing that made sense.

I keep a knife under my pillow, in case I need it. We all have something—our own personal emergency escape plan. Some people can’t handle it, losing the world. What kind of a god, you said, and now we have an answer, and it’s one that not everyone can live with.

We’ve pieced it together from the radio. What happened that day, after we locked ourselves in the Ark. What it looked like when the sky fell down. On the radio, they say it was beautiful, a hailstorm of light, but that’s because they’re the ones who lived. I think you lived too, at least past the initial impact, and maybe you tried to write a poem about it; maybe you thought: finally, good material.