The End Is Now

“I don’t blame you,” she says to him suddenly, and takes one of his hands. His eyes widen in surprise, and she squeezes his hand. They have stopped now, where the hallway bends. Around the corner will be Pea’s apartment—and Pea’s own dead parents.

“You were right,” she tells him. “We did the right thing.”

“Yeah . . .” he says, and looks not at her but at the floor. “I know.”

But he doesn’t know. He doesn’t believe her, she can tell. He must be blaming himself. He’s wondering what they will do, how they will live. How the world will go on. We will handle it together, thinks Pea, and is pleased with herself, pleased at the maturity and the correctness of such a thought.

They will. They will handle everything together, for they will have no other choice.

“Come on,” she says, and takes Robert by the hand and they go around the corner.

This scene is like all the others: Pea’s mother and father are seated across from each other at the kitchen table, still and silent, eyes like the eyes of dolls. The third chair—Pea’s chair—is empty. The plate of meat is at the center of the table, very little left on it. The poisonous meat. The electric slicer with its curved end lies by her father’s still fingers. Does it still work, Pea wonders idly? Anything left in the battery? Or is that dead, now, too?

Only now, only looking into her mother’s empty eyes, does Pea feel a pang of grief. A momentary wash of sadness. Were they waiting for her to come back? Or did they assume that she had been found out? That someone from the Center had at the last minute discovered her family’s secret, their daughter’s deafness to the will of the Lord, and that she was therefore not permitted to go through?

Her mother would have been devastated, surely, to think the whole world was going on to gladness and permanent harmony, the whole world except for Pea. Surely her mother would protest—surely her mother, if she really believed they were going on to paradise, wouldn’t go without her daughter.

And yet here she is. Her thin arms lolling at her sides as if weighted. Here she is. She ate. She died.

Pea shakes her head tightly, back and forth. Never mind. Never mind.

“It’s going to be okay,” she says again to Robert. “One way or another, it’s going to be okay.”

Grief is gone again. There is no time for it. No time. What comes to Pea now is a sudden sense of mission. It’s as if a voice speaks in her head and tells her what to do: Bring them down. Bring them down.

But it is only as if a voice is speaking to her. No voice is really speaking. She hears no whisper of God, no echo of his voice, even now—even now her head is still and silent, and the voice that speaks clearly up from that stillness is her own, announcing calmly and with purpose what is to be done. She has spent her whole life waiting for God to give her instructions, and now she is not. She doesn’t need to be commanded. She knows what to do.

“Let’s get to work, Robert,” she says, and he looks up, startled, from his trancelike contemplation of her dead father and mother.

“Get to work?” He steps back from the table, trips on a chair leg and almost falls. “Doing—doing what?”

“We have to bring them down,” says Pea calmly. “We have to clear the bodies.”

“The . . .” He scratches the side of his head, squints at her through his glasses. It’s like he can’t hear. “The bodies?”

She nods. “We’re going to bring them down to the outskirts. We’ll start with these, but we need to do all of them. Get rid of them. It’ll take time. We have to.”

Robert gapes back at her, and she turns away, back to her parents. Pea is suddenly impatient. This is it. This is right. This is absolutely what must be done. The world has to begin again. The bodies must be gotten rid of. They will draw animals. Maggots. They will stink and spread disease. There will be many problems, but this is the first. It has to be dealt with, right away.

“Okay,” says Robert at last, slowly, uncertain. “Sure.” He pushes his glasses up on his nose and rolls up his sleeves.

Together they go down to the basement of Building 49 and find a hand cart. They wrestle the stiff bodies away from the table and bump them laboriously down the stairs, one by one, and tie them into a cart they find unsecured, parked on a sidewalk in the fourth circle. Pea says, “More,” and back they go, back into the building, and take a pair of neighbors, and then another. So that by the time they set off for the outskirts, four hours later, with the cart secured haphazardly to two bicycles, they have six people on the cart—six bodies—a flat, rolling cart full of corpses.

They grunt and moan and labor to pull the cart with the bicycles. Halfway there they hit a curb and four of the corpses topple out, into the road.