The End Is Now

Track 1. The Patron Saint of Living Precariously

Every party is a free party at the end of the world, Cloud likes to say. He winks at me when he says it, roaring over the music in the warehouse, or standing outside on the fire escape, puncturing the foil on a blister pack of prescription meds with the tip of his pocketknife. Privately, I doubt the apocalypse has anything to do with his access to ear-splitting music or pill-delivered euphoria of dubious legality. I always say the end of the world is like a rainstorm, or a monsoon, something torrential—some people head to higher ground, and the rest of us get washed miscellaneously into the gutter, swirled down with the leaves and cigarette butts. Just because the rain swept us in, though, doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have found our way here on our own.

Take Cloud, right now, rolling to the music like a boat on open water, eyes closed, flying high on something I can’t pronounce. He stuck the empty plastic bubble packaging onto the warehouse wall behind us, and the sound system’s sweeping lasers and reflected LEDs turn the empty cells into miniature mirror balls. When the same light touches Cloud’s face, clean-shaven, sharp-featured, all planes and edges under thin, anemic skin, it makes him look like a saint in stained glass. The patron saint of altered states, maybe, or of edges, of missing guardrails and falling off cliffs. The patron saint of living precariously. Now that he’s here, you could never imagine him anywhere else. This stripped, abandoned warehouse between the expressway and the canal is his Cathedral, the pills and lights and pulsing cyber-goth-industrial postrock beat the closest thing he has to sacraments, or to miracles.

Tonight, I’m running on nothing stronger than lukewarm instant coffee and the filter half of a broken cigarette, which Meme-the-DJ and I passed between us on the roof of the sound system’s van while the rest of the team was unloading, rigging up the speakers and the light displays and the portable gasoline generator in its square red frame. Their name is Paëday, pronounced “payday,” and isn’t that a funny coincidence, Meme said—meaning me, Frida, called Friday. Friday, payday. Sure, I said, hilarious. Didn’t mean that kind of funny, Meme said.

She’s smiling at me now, Meme is, her short brown fingers with their enamel rings and chipped electric-blue nail polish sliding over the controls in a turret-like platform at the top of the machine. Green and purple light sweeps over me, pulses, sweeps back again, and Cloud catches my hands in his, weaving his fingers through mine, purple light dancing on foil and plastic behind him. My eyes follow the horizontal joint in the concrete back to the corner of the warehouse where the sound machine works its magic. And too late, I see it, the gritty orange-brown support beam that has started to slide down the wall, the ceiling sagging above it, peeling like a hangnail, letting in the sky. Rainwater has already scoured a series of deep, chalky troughs down the concrete blocks and pitted the floor with half-dollar sized holes, illuminated in the sudden pulsing of a strobe. The music is wailing, pitch climbing, Cloud’s hands like ice, Meme smiling like a skull. The only warning I can give is a shout, too late, cut off by a roar like a freight train as the sagging sheet of ceiling peels away, collapses on the sound system, and brings a waterfall of battery-acid rain down with it.

Silence, then screaming.

Welcome to the end of the world.

Track 2. A Ship with Two Faces

I see the graffiti for the first time in front of Vanessa’s house, and if you’re looking for omens, I guess this is one. Venomous yellow spray-paint, the color of caution signs or police tape, curving like a sideways ‘C’ across a square of brown plastic that I recognize as the detached lid of a garbage bin. The plastic is corroded from the rain, looking like something chewed on its edges, and I guess that’s an omen, too. Something about the shape or the color or the brightness of it hurts my eyes, my stomach, like the hangover last night failed to give me.

Vanessa lives on one of the long blocks of close-set brick Victorians between Drexel and Woodlawn, a few blocks north of the University. The front lawns are all a dead, crumbling gray, the yews and rose bushes like tumbleweeds caught beneath the bay windows, and I’m convinced, for reasons I can’t put a finger on, that the whole neighborhood reeks distinctively of cat piss.

It’s also a long trek from Felicity’s house, where I’ve been sleeping in a first-floor bedroom that belonged to a paying tenant about four months ago, before the air went toxic and the rain turned corrosive, acidic, what-the-fuck ever. Four months—just in time for high school graduation, Cloud likes to joke, as though either of us had been likely to graduate, end of the world or not.