Armageddon House

by Michael Griffin

  Jenna stops at an undifferentiated section of plain wall. From the rough stone emerges a handle of brushed stainless steel.

  “Here.” Jenna gives the handle a tug. “See? Always locked.”

  Above the handle is a small inscribed panel, which Mark can’t stop himself from reading aloud. “Utgard.”

  “Right, right, that’s right,” Greyson says, as if grasping, then continues in a more definitive tone. “From mythology, I believe. Isn’t that right? Some kind of historic significance, if you will.”

  “It means outyard, or outer yard,” Jenna says.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Greyson insists. “How would you even know a foreign language?”

  “Stop it,” Mark says, shaking his head. He’s stunned to discover something like this here, after all this time. Vaguely he recalls Jenna having mentioned the word Utgard. At the time he believed it was a word he recognized, and didn’t give it much thought. Now, it makes no sense. The discovery of a door in this place, with this name attached to it, comes as a shock. He tries the handle, even though he’s seen Jenna pull without success.

  “This door will never, ever open,” she says. “We shouldn’t even hope for it. Because if it does, that’s the end. Somebody will have to start over.”

  Greyson takes his turn tugging, putting all his weight into it. He grunts and strains, even tries to gain leverage by putting a foot against the wall and heaving with his entire body.

  “What was Polly saying before she ran?” Mark asks Greyson, trying to remember clues. “What did you do to her?”

  “Do to her? Nothing. She got upset because I threw you around by the pool.” Greyson releases the handle and shoots Mark a dismissive smirk. “She hates conflict. You know, for one thing, you could stop fucking winding me up, man.”

  “Let’s please at least find Polly before we blow up again,” Jenna pleads.

  “No, she said you did something to her,” Mark insists, certain the truth might explain where Polly went. “Violence, or a threat. What was she talking about?”

  “Forget it, none of it’s your business anyway.” Greyson thumps Mark on the sternum. “Me and Polly, it’s family business. Mind your own, how about that?”

  Mark shoots Jenna a glance, wondering what Greyson’s comment will make her think. Are Greyson and Polly married? Does Jenna think of Mark as her family, or does she know Mark thinks of her in that way? This makes him want to lash out at Greyson. “Polly gets upset, and we have to spend our days searching for her, or digging for drugs in the trash upstairs. That makes it my business, Jenna’s too. And you’re the one upsetting her.”

  Greyson’s chin lowers, and his eyes shoot down, as if he may be questioning his own behavior for once. “That’s just Polly.”

  “No,” Mark persists, “that’s because of how you treat her.”

  Greyson appears as near to introspection as he’s ever allowed them to see, but then turns to Jenna while pointing at Mark. “I think he’s the plant. It’s him. It’s been Mark this whole time.”

  “What?” Jenna looks to Mark as if he might explain.

  “Him, this fucking company man right here,” Greyson continues. “Our buddy, Mark, he’s the one. The spy they planted in here to keep an eye on the rest of us.”

  Jenna looks back and forth, seeming even more confused. “That makes zero sense.”

  “An agent of the bureaucracy, a handler, or whatever. Not one of us, that’s the deal. He’s worse than a stranger. Polly says so. I thought she was paranoid, but she was right. She always knew.”

  “Stop it.” Mark glares at Greyson, hard and direct, trying to stand over him, to impose himself by height alone. He knows Greyson’s propensity to lashing out, knows he’s stronger and has the skills to fight, but Mark needs him to stop talking before he says something that will change how Jenna thinks of him.

  A rushing sound rises, along with a cool gust of air, as if a door’s been thrown open in a warm house, letting in the chill of a storm outside. The temperature changes, as does the whole sense of place. This new atmosphere comes from somewhere unknown.

  Greyson looks around, sensing it too.

  Jenna watches Mark. What’s she thinking? He wants to ask if she feels the cold, or hears the rushing air.

  Her head tilts back, her eyes roll up in her head so only the white shows. “The wolf won’t cry forever,” Jenna says, voice high and keening. “Someday he’ll climb out, he’ll ride, he’ll rear up and devour god. Then who’ll be crying?”

  Mark studies this woman, someone he knows better than anyone. She looks the same, exactly the same Jenna as before, but part of her has disappeared. The voice belongs to someone else.

  “Of course we’re doomed.” Greyson laughs a sick, despairing laugh. “That’s the whole reason why we play, until our time runs out.” He shoves Mark backward, but with less force than his usual assaults.

  By the time Mark regains balance, Greyson has run off toward the stairs, jumping over and ducking obstacles with surprising ease. He disappears.

  Jenna gasps, as if she’s just surfaced after a long underwater swim. “What was that? What just happened?”

  Mark recognizes her again, not only her voice, but her eyes. This is the way she always looks at him, at once affectionate and distant. “Do you remember what you were saying?” he asks.

  She shakes her head slowly, seeming confused. She starts walking and gestures for him to follow. “We’ll find Jenna upstairs. I mean, Polly. We’ll find Polly.”

  An Interlude

  Comparison of Wishes

  They were going to look for Polly.

  They were going to look for Greyson.

  For some reason they’re not looking. Instead, Mark is in his tiny white room, unsure how long he’s been here alone.

  He focuses on the antique watch. The beautiful relic he repaired himself is off his wrist, resting in his palm. It terrifies him to wonder what he’d do if the watch stopped working. Times like this, he wishes he had his tools.

  This is where he retreats, more and more often. He excuses himself, ignoring Greyson’s mockery, when stress or fear overwhelm him. Is that what he’s feeling, fear, or is it obsession with Jenna? She’s with him almost constantly, yet somehow they’re drifting apart.

  He hears a sound, someone else shifting very close by. He’s not alone. She’s here, Jenna is, standing right behind him. Not speaking, only watching. It’s not that she’s just entered. She’s been here all along, and he’s forgotten. It’s as if Mark is lately paying less attention to the Jenna who’s actually present, and instead daydreams about some invented version. That other woman is the one he wants.

  “It has been stressful,” Mark says, agreeing with a statement she hasn’t actually voiced. “All this arguing. And searching.” He glances back, looks at her directly. It’s definitely her, same as before. Jenna is here with him, in his room.

  He’s been meaning to ask something, and almost starts to speak before he remembers he’s not really sure what it was. The urgent thing he needed to know seemed so near the tip of his tongue, and only fled in the instant before he resolved to ask.

  Then, the very moment he decides not to ask, he remembers what it was. He wanted to ask about the mural in her room. What piece of the world does she look at each morning when she wakes? He’s afraid he’s seen it before, or she’s described it to him, and that it’ll be embarrassing not to remember.

  “I feel the same,” Jenna says.

  Mark’s mind rushes ahead with this idea she’s just stated.

  She feels the same.

  She thinks of me all the time.

  She aches for what we’ve lost.

  She can’t understand how we’ve fallen apart.

  She wonders when we’ll come back together.

  This is all she ever thinks about.

  “Stressed from so much conflict,” she clarifies, and shows him her shaking hand. “Always trembling lately. So on edge.”

  “What’s that game
you like to play?” Mark asks. As soon as he’s spoken, he wonders, did she ever really have a game, or was he thinking of Polly? Which of them is the one that loves the guessing game?

  “Wishes.” Jenna smiles, vaguely pleased, yet still distant.

  “Do you have any wishes?” Mark wants to push onward, feeling pathetic, knowing the reason this game excites him is only the unlikely possibility she might surprise him by revealing her own wishes to coincide with his own.

  He wants his tools, his clocks, his watches. All the parts survive forever, even if they stop functioning properly together. The size of a second or a year never changes. Increments accumulate, and no matter how many are added, how long it takes, each measure remains exactly the same size.

  They are two people thinking different thoughts, describing different ideas, using words so vague and elliptical, so built upon wishes and dreams and half-memories, he’s able to shape what she says into any form he might desire. The only way it fails is if he lets himself think about it.

  “Where do you wish you lived?” Jenna asks. It’s as if she’s reached down into the darkness of his confusion and given him a hand to lift him back into clarity.

  Mark tries to remember. “A cabin by a lake.” He restrains himself from saying more. He doesn’t want her to figure out what he’s really thinking, which is that he only wishes she would stay here with him in this room, and share it again.

  “The next time you see water,” Jenna says, voice quavering so the words convey an ominous, warning quality, “it won’t be a peaceful lake. It’ll be a giant wave, enough to cover all the world and all time, and wash away every single yesterday.”

  Mark isn’t sure how to respond. It always comes down to this same talk, with them. He wants to mention a new beginning. She returns to the end. Maybe they’re the same.

  Jenna’s expression changes. She regards Mark with old, comfortable familiarity. There’s intimacy in the way she leans in, lets him see her resignation. “No point in wishing, other than to make yourself feel better, if only for a second,” she says.

  Mark wants to disagree, but can’t speak against her.

  “The thing to do is forget,” Jenna says. “Keep going as if you never knew anything, never even wanted anything.”

  Mark wants many things. He wants to change her words so they say something else. He wants her to be the kind of person he’s always thinking of. Someone different.

  Seven

  Gymnasium, Television

  Mark changes into workout clothes while Jenna waits outside. When they reach the stairs, Mark tells her what he expects.

  “I’m going to think of how I would act if Polly had never screamed and run away, if Greyson had never gone crazy and attacked me and run away. Imagine if we went to the Gymnasium, and those things had never happened. That’s how I’m going to act.”

  What would that day be like? Today is that day. He forgets the other time, when different things started to happen. This is new.

  When they reach the Gymnasium, it’s the version Mark has tried to imagine. Both Greyson and Polly are spinning on exercise cycles, looking at a wall-mounted television, though the screen is black and there’s no sound. Their faces are neutral, neither Greyson’s rage nor Polly’s anxiety in evidence.

  Let’s pretend none of it ever happened, Mark wants to say. He doesn’t actually have to speak. They already know. He can see.

  Jenna drapes her towel over the rail of her preferred treadmill, the one she uses ten or twelve times a week. “You had us pretty worried,” she says, addressing nobody specific.

  “Everything’s fine,” Polly says between huffing breaths. She’s pedaling fast, rocking side to side with effort. Her face is pink. Sweat dampens her hair.

  “Everything’s good.” Greyson’s sweating too. He grips the handlebars so hard, veins stand out in his forearms. “

  You used the word attack,” Jenna says, addressing Polly but looking at Greyson.

  “Come on, nobody said that,” Greyson complains.

  Jenna dismounts her treadmill and stands between Polly and Greyson, breaking their line of sight. “Polly, it’s what you said.”

  “No.” Polly stops spinning and removes her glasses. She rubs the bridge of her nose, then both eyes. “What are you guys, detectives? We have to go on living here, until we don’t. If you and Mark would start working, we could get enough calorie burn to run the TV for at least one show.”

  Jenna climbs back aboard the treadmill and presses the start button. A whirring sound rises as the motor accelerates. Three miles per hour, four, five, six. She raises the incline to six degrees. Her preferred setting, six and six.

  Mark settles into the rowing machine, grips the handles and begins pulling. His back tightens, a stiffness he knows will loosen as his muscles warm. He tunes out distractions and focuses on rhythmic movement.

  The TV screen blinks white, then displays a blue and gold soundstage, a game show with three players standing behind podiums displaying dollar amounts.

  “Oh, fuck yes,” Greyson shouts. “Here we go.”

  Though it’s an episode they’ve seen many times, Greyson acts like it’s new. He always does. The loop of recorded TV includes episodes of many different programs, but over time, the same shows repeat.

  “What is Kepler’s Second Law?” Greyson shouts at the TV, then exclaims in unison with the host, “That’s correct!”

  This sequence of answers and questions continues. Greyson is the only one playing.

  “Who is Lauren Bacall? Correct!”

  Why try to escape, or hide? Eventually the experiment will be over. Investigators will come, and we’ll all try to describe what happened. Nobody’s getting away with anything. Nobody escapes a full accounting.

  “What the fuck are you going on about?” Greyson shouts, glaring at Mark. Mark looks around. The others are all are looking at him.

  “What? Who?”

  “Do you hear yourself with that bullshit, interrupting my show?” Greyson continues. “I’m talking to you, dummy. What’s all that bullshit about nobody escapes?”

  “Did I say something out loud?” Mark asks.

  Polly rolls her eyes. “You’re a fucking mess, Mark. I thought I was bad.”

  Greyson makes his usual scoffing laugh.

  Mark wants to give in to flaring anger, but experience has taught him escalation is dangerous with Greyson. Better let it pass, be the bigger man, and his aggression will subside.

  Following these thoughts, he briefly worries he might have made the same mistake again, and spoken aloud his latest stream of consciousness, but nobody looks at him now. Greyson’s focus remains on the television.

  Everyone’s back to normal. Greyson and Polly on stationary bikes, Jenna padding lightly on the treadmill, Mark low to the ground, sliding on a rail, pulling cables attached to a spinning flywheel.

  Mark’s ears pop, so sharp and loud he’s sure others must’ve heard it. Pain stabs the center of his skull. He tries to tune it out, but at the point of greatest effort in each stroke on the rower, something inside his head gives, like a valve popping open. He often wonders if there’s a problem with pressurization in this place.

  “My ears,” Mark says, blinking, trying to look around, though he can barely open his eyes. “Anyone else?”

  No answer.

  “The physics don’t make sense,” Mark says, and stops pulling. “The cavern is lower, it’s deeper than this, but my ears never pop down there.”

  The television flickers and goes dark, though the sound continues. When the collective calorie burn on the exercise machines drops below a certain level, first the image cuts out, then eventually the sound too. There’s plenty of electricity to power the television, but this arrangement gives them incentive to exercise at high intensity, all together.

  “Come on, you fucker!” Greyson shouts, banging on the handlebar. “Get going, start pumping it, you bitch! This is important.”

  “Sorry, Greyson,” Polly say
s.

  “It’s not your fault,” Greyson says. “It’s mister sensitive over there. Quit jacking off and pull that rower. For fuck’s sake, it’s almost the final question.”

  “Lighten up, Greyson,” Polly says. “Jesus, you’re relentless with your shittiness lately.”

  “So hostile,” Jenna says between breaths, synchronized with her strides.

  “None of this matters,” Mark mutters, barely mindful of the need to row. All he’s thinking about is a way past the pain.

  “It does matter,” Greyson insists. “Final Jeopardy is a culmination of all the promise of regular Jeopardy, multiplied by Double Jeopardy.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Mark says, pulling again, trying to breathe, “because we’ve seen this episode. We’ve seen them all. That’s why you know the answers. We all know them. You’re the only one so desperately insecure, you pretend you know the answers because you’re a genius, and not because we’ve seen every episode a thousand times.”

  The television screen lights up with a return of garish colors, a drug for the eyes.

  “Not answers, dumbfuck,” Greyson says. “Questions.”

  “Let him have it, Mark,” Jenna says. “It hurts no one.”

  “Maybe you’ve seen it before,” Greyson says. “I haven’t. When I get them right, it’s because I know the answers.”

  “Not answers, dumbfuck,” Mark says. “Questions.”

  Polly giggles, then covers her mouth to stifle herself.

  “Whoever won the prize,” Jenna says, “they long ago spent their prize money and probably died. Only we’re still here, watching them try to win, over and over forever. One wins, the rest lose, and we just spin and spin and spin.”

  “You’re spinning, not me,” Greyson says, spinning.

  Mark pulls harder, recruiting muscles all down his back, from forearms to shoulders, hips, thighs, knees and calves. He concentrates, pulls the handle attached to the cable which turns the flywheel faster, faster. The movement blurs. It could be motionless; the stainless-steel disc is without markings to show its rotation. Heat builds in his core and radiates from his flesh into the room, becoming part of the air they all breathe. This heat has nowhere else to go.