The End Is Now

The room I’m staying in opens right off Felicity’s front door, like an architectural afterthought. There’s a little tile foyer there, a coatrack, a leather barstool with a shoebox on top where Felicity throws her gloves, her wallet, her keys. At the top of the pile sits an unfamiliar ring with a black leather tab, a tiny nickel sword charm, a single key with a plain black bow. I pocket it on my way out the door.

Gray City’s van, parked across the street, is empty. Which means we’re planning another night in the same venue: One of the team must have spent the night at St. Mary’s to keep an eye on the equipment. I sweep Styrofoam cups and cigarette boxes off the front seat, watch the needle on the gas meter swing up to the halfway mark as the engine sputters to life. Nice, I think, and maybe I even say it out loud.

Then down four blocks, around the corner, stop in front of a particularly sketchy-looking brownstone with tattered green awnings over the first story windows. I toss a handful of gravel up at the bay window over the door until someone leans out. Identical stoner number three, this one a girl.

“I need Cloud,” I call up.

“Jesus, lady, look at the sky. It’s going to rain soon.”

“I got a van.”

Shaking her head, she slams the window closed behind her. Thirty seconds later, Cloud is jumping down the front steps, half in and half out of his windbreaker.

“You know Vanessa Novak?” I ask as his arm finds the other sleeve. He slides into the front seat next to me.

“Felicity’s smart friend? Fixes shit, hates parties?” He peers into the back seat. “Oh, God, Friday, tell me you didn’t steal Gray City’s van.”

“I’ll give it back later. And yes, that Vanessa. Gray City’s DJ—” I realize now that I didn’t get her name, and wonder if Cloud knows it— “She says they were friends out west. She’s looking for her.”

“And?”

“And? Can you imagine Vanessa being friends with her? The whole thing gives me the creeps. We’re going to see what Vanessa thinks about it.” And God bless him, he doesn’t ask why he’s along for the ride. Just grins and offers me a cigarette scrounged from the floor.

* * *

For the first time since I’ve known her, Vanessa has locked her door. Locked and barricaded, from what I can make out from pressing my face against a loose pane of window glass, fogged with humidity. Wooden pallets, terra-cotta plant pots stuffed with something indistinguishable, gallon jugs of filthy water piled up against it. I’m in the middle of congratulating myself for my accurate intuition about Gray City’s DJ, her poison yellow ship-with-two-faces on the sidewalk out front, when I feel the first drop of rain on my hand.

Cold, cold, cold, worse than snow melting down the back of your collar or scraping your knee on icy asphalt. Temperature has nothing to do with it, I know—it’s nerves dying, flesh corroding, Jesus Christ. I’m slapping the back of my hand on my jeans, hearing Cloud’s muted little gasp from the step below me, when the next drop hits my forehead. Hood up, just in time. Then fucking buckets.

Cloud leaps up next to me on the balcony, an arm stretched over my head. Trying to shelter me with his windbreaker, I realize: sweet, but pointless. Quickly, kneeling, I shake out the contents of my backpack—ancient CDs, iPod with a dead battery, leather wallet with an Illinois ID card and not much else—wrap the blue canvas around my fist, and punch the window. Glass already weak, scoured by the rain, it sprays inward beneath my hand, glass shards all over anemic tomato plants and sparse tufts of chive. We scramble inside. Behind us, the fringe of glass hanging at the top of the windowpane drops like a guillotine blade.

Jacket off, I dry my face with the lining. A spot on the back of my hand looks nasty, leprous gray, starting to flake at the edges, but I tell myself it’s my imagination.

“Good thinking,” Cloud says, “with the window.”

I laugh weakly. “Vanessa is going to eat me alive when she sees her tomatoes.”

“Better you than the tomatoes,” Vanessa says. She’s standing in the door between the greenhouse and the rest of the apartment, a stained white towel draped over each arm. Something winglike about that. She looks like the world’s most pissed-off Christmas angel. “You,” she adds without a trace of humor, “are not the ones I was expecting.”

* * *

Inside the apartment, we wrap the towels around our shoulders and sit on the lonely corduroy-upholstered couch that is the only piece of furniture in Vanessa’s living room. The floor is littered with empty plastic bottles. Vanessa disappears through a swinging door and re-emerges with a wicker chair under one arm. Slams it down across from us, and it skids on the age-worn floor, the decades of splinters held together with varnish.

“We’re sorry about your plants, Dr. Novak.” Cloud, hovering in the middle of the light switch, charming as can be: This is why I brought him along.