The End Is Now

I floated down there about the same time that tenant packed up, floated out from under the perfectly manicured paw of a woman who wasn’t my mother and didn’t really want to be. Vanessa must have washed up in Cat-piss Park a little before that. Back near her alma mater, she says, after several years directing climate management research somewhere out west—Colorado, I think, or maybe Nevada. I met her because she was helping Felicity rig up a solar panel that looked like it had been a duct tape fetishist’s weekend project for the last decade.

These days, we bring her water.

Not to be too delicate about it: Vanessa is fucking obsessed with water. Like everybody, I guess, but Vanessa is picky. Won’t touch anything that didn’t originate in a plastic bottle. Iodine, charcoal filters, those pale pink pH balancing tablets that FEMA distributed by the crate-load—none of it is adequate, separately or in conjunction. If the water’s been in a cloud in the last four months, Vanessa won’t have it, period.

She’s a sweet woman, Felicity says, always shaking her head when she says it. But nothing about Vanessa Novak is easy.

* * *

Any time Felicity gets her hands on bottled water, from FEMA or the Salvation Army or one of her ephemeral boyfriends, I hook up the red canvas child carrier to the back of my bike, load it with gallon jugs or cardboard cases of bottles, and head south. Vanessa’s apartment is on the top floor of a narrow, flat-roofed three-story, and you enter through the sketchiest addition ever slapped onto the back of a building, all unpainted two-by-fours, protruding nails, and square, single-paned windows that rattle loosely in their frames. Vanessa uses this back room as a greenhouse, a pile-up collision of tomato vines, bell peppers, chives, and basil in square plastic trays. A trapdoor and a painter’s ladder take you onto the roof, which has been plastered over with solar panels and more trays of plants, sheltered from the rain by a blue camping tarp.

Vanessa is up there now, fiddling with one of her panels, barefoot on the black stretch of tar-like shingle. A bandana with a pattern of koi fish and square coins keeps her tight brown curls out of her eyes. She looks up, hearing the trapdoor knock against one of the steel legs of the tarp as I flip it open.

“Hey,” I say, too winded to offer much more. “Got you some water.”

She grins, showing uneven but exceptionally white teeth. “Friday, you are magnificent.”

It takes about five minutes to get the eight gallons of water out of the child carrier and up the stairs to her apartment. She leaves six in the greenhouse room and has me lug the other two up the ladder, onto the roof, where she unceremoniously dumps the contents over a pallet of yellow-flowered something. Even after months of this, a small part of me winces to see perfectly good drinking water dripping off the leaves, soaking into the shingle. Vanessa, as always, doesn’t notice me squirming. Or maybe she just doesn’t give a shit. Hard to tell with her.

Sometimes, when I bring her water, that’s all there is—the magnificent smile, the wordless trek up and down the stairs, the unceremonious watering of the plants. Today, she wants to talk.

“Especially loud this morning, aren’t they?”

She’s standing with her brown, sleeveless arms folded across her chest, frowning at the unidentified yellow flowers. I have no idea what she’s talking about.

“Pardon?”

“The rain,” she says.

“Oh.” I shrug, scratch the back of my neck. “Slept through it, I guess. Last night was a total shit-show.” Which is putting it mildly, but she doesn’t need the details. “Felicity still wants you to come out with us sometime. If you’d like to.”

“Why? Got a solar panel that needs fixing?”

“Nothing like that.” She’s kidding, so I try to smile. All over again, I see the ceiling of the warehouse peeling away, the sheet of toxic water falling over Paëday’s generator. Sparks flying everywhere, then darkness so intense it hits me like a slap. Meme screaming. I push the whole thing away with an artificial, throat-clearing cough. “Just thought you might have a good time. Enjoy the music, meet people.” Pop a few pills, watch a few ceilings collapse. End of the world, lady, every party is a free party.

“Mutually exclusive,” she says.

“Pardon?” Again.

“I can’t have a good time and meet people. I don’t like music, anyway. Blows your hearing.” She licks her lips—is she still teasing? Hard to tell, again. “That’s probably why you aren’t hearing them. Look.”

She takes one of the now-empty gallon jugs, weaves her way between the solar panels and scoops something from the edge of the roof.

“Jesus. Is that rain water?”

“I’m not drinking it,” she says, screwing on the cap. “Just listen.”

She hands me the jug, half an inch of water sloshing around the bottom. I hold it against my ear. Hear plastic crinkling, nothing else.

“Sorry,” I say.