The End Is Now

But not Robert and his new friend Pea, not lucky Robert and the sweet girl he’s always watched and loved from afar. Now it’s him and Pea stumbling, weary but glad, through the dead quiet streets of the city, washed in morning sunlight.

He’d imagined it happening just this way. He’d dreamed of this scene.

Except—except—

BRING HER TO ME. Like the pounding of a fist on a length of pipe.

BEAR HER AWAY. Like bullets being fired into a wall.

Stop it, hisses Robert into the chamber of his own mind, Stop it, please!—and then after the briefest of silences, after no silence at all this time, God does answer—tauntingly, smirkingly, like a peacock flaunting his omniscience, God answers—

I WILL NOT STOP.

I WILL NOT STOP UNTIL YOU BRING HER TO ME.

The voice is with him, dogging his steps like a wolf following the track, sometimes hidden but never gone. Pea turns down into the fourth circle; they’re almost there.

BRING HER TO ME.

I will not.

IT IS WHY I LET YOU LIVE.

I decided to live.

YOU DIDN’T DECIDE ANYTHING.

I am deciding right now to keep walking. To keep living. I will ignore you forever, if I have to. I will learn to live with you, like a handicap. I will bear you like blindness. I will live my life.

IT IS NOT YOUR LIFE I AM INTERESTED IN.

* * *

Pea doesn’t really feel sad at all.

Last night when she realized she was never going to see her parents again, she had felt sad, but just for a little while.

Running away with Robert, slipping out the cracked window, leaving them behind. It was like she knew she was supposed to feel sad, so she did, but then she forgot she was supposed to, and she stopped.

By now they had really done it, and she didn’t feel anything. Running away didn’t matter. If she had stayed, she’d be saying goodbye to them anyway. If she’d stayed, waited for morning and the feast, she’d be dead too. She’d never see them—or anything—ever again.

Unless she believed what God said—unless she believed what they said that God said, since she had never heard him herself—unless she believed that they would be reunited on the other side.

She had never really believed it, though. Never in her heart. And now she is free.

She doesn’t feel sad at all.

The world is beautiful this morning, as she and Robert make their way from the fourth circle in to the third, back toward Building 49. The scattered leaning trees that line the sidewalks and the windows of the buildings and the tattered awnings. It is more than beautiful. It is like everything is washed in beauty. Varnished in it.

There are specific small things that Pea knows she will miss, that she sort of misses already. Her friend Jenna doesn’t like pudding and always saves hers for Pea, has been doing so since they were tiny kids. She and her cousin Ruth invented a language one summer; they would whisper-sing made-up words to each other during star-night, when the whole city gathered out on the big lawn, looking up at the distant planets—she and Ruth would lie with foreheads just barely touching, giggling secret silliness.

Jenna is dead now too, and Ruth too, and her parents. But Pea doesn’t feel sad at all.

She climbs the narrow stairwell of Building 49, pausing now and then to let Robert catch up. He’s a bit heavy, a bit out of shape. He huffs and puffs along behind her. Just the two of them! The thought sets loose a clamor of birds in her stomach. Just the two of them of all the people in the world!

On floor sixteen, Pea’s floor, they walk down the hallway. Every apartment has a glass window that lets out onto the corridor; that’s how they were built—more communal, more friendly.

Now, as they pass down the corridors, they see in each window a frozen picture of death.

Families seated in semi-circles around kitchen tables, slumped or staring, mouths open or closed, hands clutching hands, chins tilted at unnatural angles, drinks mostly finished or just started. On every table the joint of poisoned meat, mostly eaten. A few stray slices still clinging to the remains.

Pea knows all the people in all the windows. Her neighbors; her schoolmates; her friends. Arranged like dolls, frozen in place, suicides in the service of the Lord.

Like dioramas, Pea thinks. Like projects from school.

She slows her pace long enough to let Robert catch up, and she places a reassuring hand on the sweaty small of his back. He grins at her nervously, and they keep walking, abreast now, down the center of the hallway. It’s funny, about Robert. At school she barely knew him. But now she feels this responsibility, this burden. To make sure he’s OK. He seems so shaken—so pale. He is silent and his face is drawn.