by James Gunn
“Is it true what they've been saying about the end of the world?"
“What have they been saying, Earl?” Gentry had come to the conclusion that it was more difficult to shoot someone who called you by your first name.
“You, too—what you've been saying. That the world is going to end."
The barrel of the gun was wavering again, this time as if Earl had forgotten it was there. Gentry thought maybe Earl was trying to convince himself that it didn't matter if he killed them since everybody would die soon anyway. “There's no certainty, Earl."
The gun barrel steadied. “That isn't what you've been telling everybody else. I've read that stuff—pollution and overpopulation and the greenhouse effect and all."
“That's all happening, Earl,” Gentry said, “but we don't know when the conditions will really become critical."
“What I've heard, some of it already has."
Earl had lowered his head a bit, and the light now revealed all of his face but his eyes, which looked like black pits. Gentry started to say something else to cast a bit of doubt into Earl's mind, but he heard himself saying, as if he had said the same things so often that they had become automatic responses, “Some of us think that's true, Earl—the population may have passed the point where anything but plague, starvation, and war can reverse it, the carbon dioxide now in the air or to be released in processes that cannot be stopped for a decade or more may have reached critical mass, and pollution—."
“All that takes time,” Earl said impatiently. “Why this year?"
“What do you mean—why this year?"
“Everybody says this is the year the world ends."
“Not everybody,” Gentry said. “That's just superstition, religious fanatics, people with a vested interest in Armageddon....” He, of course, had a vested interest in Armageddon, but not this year. It had to be far enough down the line that people could do something about it, either to stop it or prepare for it. If people believed the world was going to end in a few months, he would get no more speaking engagements or contributions; they would turn for salvation to someone with a better offer.
“This year,” Earl repeated, “the year two thousand."
“The universe doesn't know anything about the way we measure time,” Gentry said. “Three-fourths of the world doesn't even use our calendar."
“Why are you talking about this stuff?” Frieda said. “What does this have to do with anything?"
“Why,” Earl said simply, “it has to do with everything."
Nobody spoke for a few moments. Gentry could hear Frieda breathing beside him and he thought, inconsequentially, of how she had panted during their lovemaking and then how that body, with all its capacities for emotions and work and thought and creativity, might soon be stilled forever. He felt, for a brief moment, a sense of sharing, a sense of concern for someone besides himself. And then it was gone.
“I'm going to get up now,” he said carefully, moving slowly.
The gun jerked in Earl's hand and fired. Gentry was surprised that he did not know which action came first, and then he checked himself for pain and then looked to see if Frieda had been hit before he noticed the black hole in the foam-rubber pillow between them.
“I'm not a very good shot,” Earl said apologetically. “I almost hit you. If I were you, I'd stay where you are."
“You needn't worry about that,” Gentry said. “Or about the world ending this year either."
“Tell me about the comets,” Earl said.
“There's always that possibility. Many are periodic; some appear for the first time. The Earth could get in the way of one of them, or a large meteorite. It's happened before. It's likely to happen again sometime. Chances are even a direct hit by a big one wouldn't kill everybody."
“That's some consolation. What about the galaxy exploding?"
“There's a theory,” Gentry said cautiously, “that huge black holes occupy the center of every mature galaxy and that these either gobble up all the stars or cause an ejection of smaller black holes or radiation that would be fatal to everything in their paths. But cosmic processes take millions, billions of years."
“But we wouldn't know, would we? It could happen this year?"
The incongruity of his position struck Gentry suddenly—here he was in bed with another man's wife and he was discussing with her husband the possible ways in which the world might end. He almost laughed, and then he caught himself and realized that he could still be shot, and that would be even more ridiculous. “Anything could happen, but it's unlikely."
“I've heard that volcanoes could cause a new ice age,” Earl said reasonably.
“Volcanoes are still unpredictable, and another big explosion like Krakatau could cause even greater damage today and the smoke and dust could cut off a lot of sunshine—a bunch of them could bring on an ice age. But that would take time. The more likely cause of an ice age would be fluctuations in the output of the sun."
“It could go up instead of down, I guess."
“Nobody really knows why stars put out more or less radiation. It could blow up, though that's not characteristic of stars as small as the sun."
“But it could happen."
“That's what I'm trying to tell you,” Gentry said with a hint of impatience. “Anything can happen. The only thing people can do is to stop behaving like damn fools; don't poison themselves, don't foul up the environment, don't produce more babies than the planet and the ecology can feed and house and provide a decent opportunity to exercise their humanity, don't blow themselves up."
“Earl,” Frieda said, “this isn't like you. We haven't had this kind of marriage. Nobody has this kind of marriage any more."
“That's what I came home to tell you, sweetheart,” Earl said steadily. “It came to me in New York, walking those streets, seeing those people—selling themselves, killing each other, living in the most degraded environment right next to indescribable wealth—and I turned around and came back to Gomorrah."
“That's all crazy, Earl."
Gentry put a warning hand on her wrist, under the sheet, but she shook him off, and he realized that Earl and Frieda's relationship was beyond caution.
“Is it? Is it crazy to realize that we're all foul and corrupt and that we deserve to be wiped from the face of the Earth? I came home to tell you that we needed to get away somewhere, to start over, to cleanse ourselves for this life, or the next one. Only it's too late, isn't it? We're as sick as the rest."
“Speak for yourself,” she said, and folded her arms defiantly across her chest.
“Well, yes, I can do that all right."
“You've discovered God,” Gentry said.
“You could call it that. I was sitting there in my hotel room waiting for company—"
“Your usual whore,” Frieda said.
“Not the usual, no. A little kinkier this time. I felt in the mood for something as sick as what I was seeing around me, and I just happened to take the Bible out of the drawer beside the bed, and it fell open to Genesis eighteen and nineteen."
“Some previous occupants had similar concerns."
“Choose any explanation you want,” Earl said, “but suddenly I understood that the world really could end in a few months, all it took was somebody bigger than you or me to say ‘blow up, sun’ or ‘blow up, world,’ and that would be it."
“The really sad thing,” Gentry said, “is that it doesn't take God. Just somebody like you or me to push a button."
“Yeah. It could be God or anybody. The point is that we deserve to die. We've got nothing to live for."
“Not me—I've got a lot to live for,” Frieda said.
But Earl wasn't listening. “Just waiting around for a few more months. What's the point in that?"
“Maybe we'll get a reprieve,” Gentry said. “Maybe if there is a God he'll send a Savior again."
But Earl was beyond salvation. He raised the gun from where it had been resting against his leg. Gentry tense
d himself to spring but the gun kept rising, turning, and, Gentry, realizing finally what was going to happen, swung his legs out of bed and got up and was halfway to the chest, not knowing what he was going to do, when the muzzle of the gun went into Earl's open mouth and exploded.
Gentry felt splatters like warm raindrops. He knew it was blood and brains, and looking back, as if in slow motion, saw that Frieda, even where she sat with her mouth open in astonishment, was covered with little red flecks, and turned to where Earl was toppling from the chest, and he thought, in a final moment of irony, how appropriate it was that nature's experiment with intelligence should end like this.
CHAPTER NINE
August 8, 2000
Elois Hays
They had surrounded her before she knew she was not alone. They were not the young wild ones, driven even wilder by the panic of their elders that they could scarcely understand but whose contagion they could not avoid. The young accept life as it is, with all its perils; the real terror that tenses their necks and twitches their eyes has been called the Peter Pan syndrome, the fear of growing up and assuming the responsibilities that make zombies of their parents.
No, these were the middle-aged crazies. She had heard about them: how they drifted together in night-shrouded Central Park to commit their silent and inexplicable deeds. Never the same individuals, never the same acts. A recent article in The New York Times provided case histories for two of them. They had stood up one evening in their respective middle-class living rooms, one a man, the other a woman, and walked out without a word, without responding to the inquiries from their wondering and then alarmed spouses and met up with others, similarly moved to some unspoken rendezvous, and wordlessly had done their deeds and returned, without explanation, to their homes.
The phenomenon almost made people believe in possession by medieval demons—or in its contemporary equivalent, aliens in their unidentified flying objects and their curious ability to contact only the unsophisticated and the credulous, as well as their curious desire to control the thoughts and actions of a few believers. But the experts said the agency was fear—fear of a world out of control, fear of random violence, fear of the end of everything, exacerbated by the panic of this millennial year. Their fears took possession of them, and acted out their own exorcism. Sometimes they turned their terror upon inanimate objects: beds of flowers, park benches, street lights; sometimes they killed animals—rabbits, squirrels, cats, dogs—tearing them apart with their fingers. Lately, the remains of missing children had been discovered, small pieces of flesh laid out in circles around a pile of bones, as if some barbaric rite were being performed or some ancient god were being propitiated. But psychologists said the patterns were meaningless, and that the appearance of order was as illusory as the apparent timing of the gathering. The crazies had no organization, no leadership, no plan; the phenomenon was a form of mass hysteria to which the susceptible succumbed when the conditions were right and, as if sleepwalking, joined with others temporarily in the same condition.
But they had not attacked adults. Until now. Elois Hays thought of the Maenads, those drink-crazed followers of Dionysus who ripped apart wild beasts with their bare hands. She had once played in a revival of Euripedes's Bacchae. But these sober citizens were even more frightening, and she realized, sharply and unexpectedly, that she wanted to live.
* * * *
She had not thought so earlier as she had left the cast party. Suicide had not been on her mind, to be sure, but neither had survival. She was tired of struggling, tired of playing the old roles of featured actress, of gracious wife.... She was sick of seeing the same precious people, of saying the same things in response to the same weary stories. They were talented, creative people and for years she had considered herself privileged to be one of them, to experience their ready charm and their concern for art. But lately she had begun to realize that creativity was no substitute for kindness and that wit could not conceal an emptiness of soul.
The North Wind was a success. She knew that. The others congratulated each other and smiled confidently, but she knew. She had opened too many plays not to scent the difference between success and failure, and she had not needed the buzz of the audience at intermission or the look of the critics rushing to meet their deadlines to tell her which this was.
Fred Hampdon had rewritten the play according to her brief critique, and he had done it even better than she had imagined possible. He had talent—perhaps in time he might become a first-class playwright—and that moment of insight had released the inhibitions that had made him unwilling to drop his protection from the world, to reveal to uncaring strangers what he really was like.
As she had expected, he had forgotten that the suggestions were hers, but she had forgiven him that. She had been willing to forgive him almost anything if he could stop her thinking about George. George had been surprised by the changes and more than a little annoyed; Josh had been irritated by the delay. But both had recognized the improvement and had been persuaded to start over. The subject was timely, as Hampdon had said. In the last few days of rehearsal, the cast had come together and had begun to embody in their small ways the impatient dread the world was experiencing. The play was due for a long run—unless apocalypse cut it short.
Her attraction to Fred had deepened and sharpened over the months, but she had suppressed it. The time had never seemed right to get him alone, to brush against him, to put her hand over his, or even, in the modern style, to declare her interest. Fred had been busy with rewriting, and then she had been busy with rehearsals, and then he was busy with other friends or closeted with Josh or, more often, George. She had told herself that it was all for the best; just because George was involved in a series of desperate encounters, she had no need to be as foolish—or, more appropriately, because George was involved in a series of ridiculous entanglements, she would avoid anything that even slightly resembled his stupidities.
But she could not help what her heart felt, and it yearned for Fred. Foolishly, crazily, it had built a shrine for Fred with a sentimentalized image of him above the altar of her desire. She had known it was folly, she had known the difference in their ages was not only biological but cultural, she had known he was not worthy even as she suspected that she was not, but she had not been able to help it. Each day she had forced herself to behave normally in his presence, and each day she had felt her resolution weakening. Wait, she had counseled herself. Wait until the run is over. Wait until the play has opened. Wait another day, another hour....
And now the play had opened. The cast was happy. Josh was happy. George was happy, and he would, she had known, soon be rutting with Susan. She could easily get Fred alone. In his state of incredulous excitement at his own artistic success, he would be easy to arouse, to lead to an unoccupied bedroom, to deliver to the bliss of final fulfillment. For herself as well as for him.
But how would she feel afterwards? How could she then distance herself from the disgust she felt for her husband?
As the producer, George had wanted to host the opening night party in their own Central Park West apartment. By the time Elois arrived, the living room had been filled with overdressed people trying to impress each other while crowded into unaccustomed intimacy. Waitresses, hired for the purpose, threaded their black uniforms through the narrow spaces with trays of hors d'oeuvres and champagne in fluted glasses.
Elois, delayed by well wishers and the chores of changing herself from actress to hostess, had had to brace herself to enter and accept the recognition and congratulations she knew would be her burden of the evening, but she had squared her shoulders, taken a deep breath, put on a smile, and made her way into the smoke-filled, crowded room.
Nobody had recognized her.
She had experienced an eerie sensation of disorientation, the anxiety nightmare of walking into the wrong party, which is the adult equivalent of the class she had never attended or the opening night of the play for which she had never memorized her lines
. That was what we all were, she had thought, unprepared actors thrust onto a strange stage to improvise and fake our way through our scenes as best we could. Now the stage was even stranger: the sets, the apparatus, were changing around us, and the audience was disappearing in a fog that was creeping closer moment by moment.
And then she had recognized a familiar face—the wife of one of the backers—and then another and another, and then she herself had been recognized and the terror of alienation was replaced by the irritation of social intercourse. She did not want to be here, pretending to be something she was not, a satisfied wife, a successful actress, a contented member of the artistic class.... But the alternative had seemed worse: offend expectations, insult friends, break free, undergo the upheavals of change.
She was used to being what she wasn't, and she had put on another performance—making her way through the crowd, speaking to friends and well-wishers, accepting congratulations and, without recoiling, the fat arm around her shoulder and the blubbery kiss of her already slightly tipsy spouse. And smiling modestly as George called for attention and raised his glass in a toast to the play, the playwright, the director, the cast and the crew, and most of all to his talented and beautiful wife, the great, the immortal Elois Hays, who had another hit to add to her long list.
And she had had to make her little speech in turn, deflecting the praise onto the playwright and the other members of the cast, upon Josh, and upon George and his backers who had made it all possible by their confidence and willingness to put their money into art.... It was all partly true. Partial truths are the biggest lies, she had thought.
She overheard fragments of conversation as she made her way among the guests, playing the gracious hostess. Some of it concerned the play, of course, but not much. Most of it was idle conversation, the sort of things that people say to each other at parties: superficial comments about appearance, about mutual friends, about tastes, about diet, about illness, about occupations, about economic conditions, about the weather. Mostly, though, she overheard concerned voices discussing the end of the world.
