The End Is Now

Felicity tried to convince Meme to join us, but she said no, thanks, she and Paëday were salvaging what they could of their equipment, loading the van and heading out tonight. “Where?” Felicity asked, but Meme shrugged, didn’t try to answer. The last I saw of her, she was flinging a knapsack covered in bumper stickers and silver duct tape into the front of the sound system’s van. The back door was open, the plywood interior jammed with miscellaneous scraps of speaker, lighting equipment, a fragment of control panel with missing buttons, one slider hanging by a thin thread of copper.

This is the neighborhood now, Cloud says, jostling me. Traffic isn’t heavy anywhere these days, but these streets are dead. Spookily quiet, not even the ubiquitous late-September buzz of insects, although the air is heavy with humidity. Cloud turns the flashlight beam on a block of houses, revealing glassless windows, graffiti tags like loops of colorful string, stained mattresses and broken chairs on the dead front lawns.

He is just lowering the light when the truck engine moans, chokes, grinds to a slow and utterly decisive halt.

“Fuck.” Felicity’s voice floats up from the cab, along with the dull sound of her hand slapping the dashboard. “Goddamn fucking son of a bitch.”

“Are we broken down, Felicity?” Cloud gets to his feet, ready to swing down from the truck bed, although I’m not sure what he thinks he can do to a busted engine.

“Out of gas,” Felicity says.

“Oh.” Relieved. “I’ll head back to the house and grab a gallon or two. Take an hour, tops.”

“No, sweetheart. I mean out of gas.”

We sit there, quiet for a minute, not looking at each other, tense with something like second-hand embarrassment. Embarrassed that we all knew this was coming, I guess, but didn’t think it would really happen. When was the last time the gas station by the I-94 ramp carried anything but candy bars and irredeemable lottery tickets? Felicity’s chewing her thumbnail, and I’m thinking that she must have known, must have seen that stupid needle dropping on the dashboard, the empty red cans underneath her back porch. Then I remember Mia. Figure Felicity has a talent for disbelief.

“Well,” Cloud says at last, puncturing the awkward silence. “Guess we’re close enough to walk.”

* * *

And thirty minutes later, we’re standing on the linoleum floor of the basement of Saint Mary, Help of Christians, the soles of our shoes squeaking on invisible dampness, dodging colorful slices of glass from the broken windows a full story above. The main floor is gone, caved in some time ago and all the fragments carted off, and there’s something ethereally Cathedral-like about the height of the ceiling above us, the candles on the window ledges completely out of reach. Some stray pews and a decapitated upright piano are piled against the rear wall, a backdrop for the wiry tangle of the sound system. It feels like the rest of Chicago has beaten us here, and I’m quietly impressed, as always, at Cloud’s ability to get the word out, at everyone’s willingness to return, in the face of everything, to dance.

Tonight’s sound system is something new. Paëday had been working their way from the east, from Toledo most recently and Cleveland before that. Gray City has come up from St. Louis, one of the identical vinyl-jacketed stoners tells me, from Kansas City, Wichita, Denver. That’s not what makes them different, though. Different is in the music, in chords so clear they sound acoustic, layered over intricate, precise percussion. And the lights they’ve got running, fitted almost too perfectly to the beat, are a whirlwind of red, green, blue, silver-white. I wonder if it’s possible for your eyes to get breathless, because that’s what it feels like—a rippling cascade of color that my vision can barely keep up with.

At some point, a rotating globe on the control deck pulses green light over the DJ, and she looks like something out of an album cover, a storybook, a bad dream. Her face, like Cloud’s, is white planes and sharp angles, her blue-black bottle-dye hair swishing down to her hips, gone thick and wild with the humidity. She wears red leather trousers, a pin-stripe vest, a set of handcuffs doubled up around her left wrist like a pair of bracelets. Her right arm is sleeved in tattoos, geometric, with small irregular blotches of brown, like someone tried to etch a rain-stained bus map into her skin.

Our lady of living precariously, I think. Wonder where that map might lead.

Felicity has me in her arms now, and she’s dancing like a woman half her age, silky green sliding under my cheek. And now Cloud, his hands resting lightly on my waist. When the pills come out of the pocket of his windbreaker, he passes me one, for the first time. I dry swallow, taste dryness and metal. Then it’s just music and light, light, light, washing over my face like rain. Welcoming me back to the end.

Track 4. Listen to the Water