The End of the End of Everything

by Dale Bailey

  MacKenzie held the pack silently over her shoulder. Ben shook one out and struck it alight, inhaled deeply. Smoke drifted in twin blue streams through his nostrils. He’d smoked in college, but Lois had convinced him to give it up; it had become another vice of the road, indulged in frenetic after-reading parties. Playing the role of the dissolute poet, he used to think. That’s what they wanted to see. Yet he wondered who he really was—if the persona hadn’t become the person or if the persona hadn’t been the person all along.

  Lois looked up from the telescope. “It’s terrifying,” she said.

  Stan shrugged. “It just is, that’s all.”

  “It’s terrifying all the same.”

  She set her unfinished mimosa on the railing. “I’m going in to make a sandwich. Anyone else want one?”

  “Sure,” Stan said.

  And Ben, “Why not?”

  She didn’t bother asking MacKenzie, who, by the look of her, hadn’t had a sandwich—or maybe any food—in years, if ever. The door clapped shut behind her.

  Ben ground out his cigarette in MacKenzie’s ashtray. “I’ve always wondered,” he said. “What’s your real name?

  Stan laughed without humor and downed his drink.

  “MacKenzie,” MacKenzie said.

  “No. I mean the name you were born with. I thought you’d adopted MacKenzie as a stage name. You know, like Bono, or Madonna.”

  “My name is MacKenzie,” she said without looking at him.

  Stan laughed again.

  “Her name is Melissa Baranski,” he said.

  “My name is MacKenzie.” Her voice flat, without emotion.

  Wishing he’d never asked, Ben descended to the lawn. “Throw me the ball,” he called to Cecy, and for a while they played together by some rules Ben could never quite decipher. Stand here, Cecy would say, or Throw me the ball, and between sips from his drink, he would stand there or toss her the ball.

  “I win,” she announced suddenly.

  “Sure, you win,” he said, ruffling her hair.

  They climbed the steps to the verandah together. By then Lois had returned with a tray of sandwiches for everyone.

  Later, he and Lois made love in their suite. Before he came, Ben closed his eyes. A blur of faces passed through his mind: the features of an especially memorable undergraduate, and then MacKenzie’s affectless face, and the woman on the lawn last of all, Veronica Glass, the mutilation artist, kneeling before him to take him into her mouth. He felt something break and release inside him. He cried out and drew Lois to him, whispering I love you, I love you, uncertain whom he was speaking to, or why, and afterward, as she pillowed her head on his shoulder, that headachy sense of regret once again swept through him.

  Later, they walked by the sea, waves foaming far down the beach. At high tide, the water would hurl its force against the stony cliff itself, undercutting it in a million timeless surges. It leaned over them like doom, unveiling the faint blue tinge that gave the colony its name.

  He took Lois’s hand and drew her into an embrace. “It’s beautiful here, isn’t it?” he said, as if by the force of language itself he could redeem the fallen world. But Ben had long since lost his faith in poetry. Words were but paltry things, frail hedges against the night. Ruin would consume them.

  And it was to ruin that they came at last. They stopped at its edge, a ragged frontier where the beach turned as black and barren as burned-over soil, baked into a thousand jagged cracks, and the surf grew still, swallowed up by the same ashen surface. Digging their toes in the sand, they stood in the shadow of Bruno Vinnizi’s ruined beach stair and gazed out across the devastation. Vinnizi’s shattered corpse lay among the rocks, arms outflung, one charred hand lifted in mute supplication to the sky. As they stood there, the wind picked up and his outstretched fingers crumbled into dust and blew away, and the sea, where it still washed the shore, retreated down the naked shingles of the world.

  As ruin spread, Cerulean Cliffs retreated. On the second night, Ben stood on the verandah and counted lights like a strand of Christmas bulbs strung along the coastline; in the days that followed they began to wink out. One afternoon, he and Stan hiked inland to the edge of the destruction: half a mile down the gravel driveway, and two more miles after that, along the narrow two-lane state road until it intersected with the expressway. In the distance, a soaring overpass had given way, its support pylons jutting from the earth like broken teeth. The pavement Ben and Lois had driven in upon was cracked and heaved, as if it had endured the ice of a thousand years. Businesses that had been thriving mere days ago had decayed into rubble. The arms of corroding gas pumps snaked across blistered asphalt. The roof of the Bar-B-Cue Diner had buckled, and the shards of its plate glass windows threw back their sooty reflections.

  “Abby and I celebrated our fourteenth anniversary there,” Stan said.

  “We used to go there every time we came down,” Ben said. “Best barbecue I ever had.”

  “It was shitty barbeque, and you know it. The company made it great.”

  Laughing, Stan unclipped a flask of bourbon from his belt. He took a long pull and handed it to Ben. The liquor suffused Ben with warmth, and he recalled his first liquor drunk—he’d been with a girl, he couldn’t remember her name, only that she’d held his head as he puked into the toilet at some high school revel. After that, he’d vowed never to drink whiskey again. You had to learn to love your vices.

  As they turned and started back, he snorted, thinking of Cecy and her soccer ball and her mysterious games upon the grass.

  “What?” Stan said.

  “Cecilia.”

  “She’s a good kid.”

  “The best,” Ben said, taking another swig of whiskey. He handed the flask back to Stan. They passed it back and forth as they walked. The blasted land fell behind them. The day brightened. The sky arced over them, fathomless and blue. Ben took out a cigarette and lit it and blew a stream of smoke into the clear air.

  “You ever wish you’d had children?” he asked.

  “I have Cecilia.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I had a career.”

  “What about Abby?”

  “What about her?” Stan said.

  “Did she want children?”

  Stan was silent for a time.

  “Ah, it was my fault,” he said at last.

  “What?”

  “You know. The whole goddamn mess.” He took a slug of whiskey. “We had a miscarriage once. I never told you. After that—” He shrugged. “She never forgave me you know.”

  “For a miscarriage? Stan, she couldn’t have blamed you—”

  “Not that. Cecilia, I mean. She could forgive the infidelity. God knows she had in the past. She never forgave me Cecilia.” He looked up. “She always thought that was driving the whole thing: MacKenzie had the child she could never have.”

  “And was it?”

  “No.” Stan laughed. “It was lust, that’s all. Simple lust.” He shook his head in dismal self-regard. “I envy you, you know. Holding things together the way you have.”

  They turned into the driveway. Ben kicked a stone. A wind came down to comb the weeds. Somewhere in the trees a bird burst into song. The faint sound of the ocean came to him. Envy was a blade that cut two ways.

  “What about you?” Stan said.

  “What about me?”

  “Kids?”

  Ben finished his cigarette.

  “It never crossed my mind,” he lied. “I wish it had.”

  They’d reached the house by then. Ben went to his suite and lay down to sleep off the whiskey before the party. When he woke, the sun was red in his window, and Lois was reading in the chair by the side of the bed. They walked out onto the balcony and gazed at the ocean. The dead water had crept closer. He’d lost track of time. It all blurred together, the liquor and the prime and the multi-hued tabs of ecstasy spilled helter-skelter across the butcher block of a financier who’d filled her house with pricel
ess paintings. Her taste had run toward the baroque—Bosch and Goya—and over the course of the party she’d slashed them to ribbons one by one. At dawn she’d walked out onto the lawn, doused herself with gasoline, and set herself on fire.

  “Did you know Abby had a miscarriage?” Ben asked.

  “Of course, I did,” Lois said, and they stood there in silence until the first faint stars broke out in the dark void where ruin had not yet eaten up the sky.

  The parties were Ben’s solace and his consolation: the photographer whose prints adorned the walls of her house, the painter whose canvases did not, the novelist who’d won a Pulitzer. Ben had met her once before, a lean scarecrow of a woman with a thatch of pink hair and a heart-shaped pinkie ring on her left hand: a brief introduction by a friend of a friend at a Book Expo party. “What are you working on?” he’d asked as she paused. “I subscribe to the teakettle theory of art,” she’d responded. “Open the valve and the energy escapes.”

  Ben had nodded, taking a long drink of his gin and tonic. He leaned against the wall, trying to pretend he wasn’t alone. He’d come for the free drinks—he always did—but he knew that nothing was ever free; you paid the price in the coin of humiliation. And that reminded him of his fleeting encounter with Veronica Glass, the “humiliation artist,” as he’d called her. He’d seen her flitting through the crowds occasionally, tall and gamine with her cap of blonde hair, but mostly she lingered in corners. If it bothered her to be alone, Ben could not discern it. She observed everything with an air of bemused fascination, the expression of an anthropologist faced with a curious custom she had not seen before.

  Once or twice, they’d even talked briefly.

  “Hello, again,” he’d said, as he squeezed past her in the scrum around the bar, and briefly he felt her taut body glide against his sagging middle-aged one.

  Another time, she appeared ghostlike at his side, and handed him a joint. “I’ve had my eye on you,” she said.

  “You have?” he said.

  “Are you surprised?”

  “A little.”

  She smiled, remote and amused, the way you’d smile at a child. “Outsiders interest me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In Cerulean Cliffs, you’re either a rich artist, or you’re just plain rich.”

  Ben thought of the financier who’d torched herself on her lawn, staggering about in screaming agony until she collapsed and the flames consumed her.

  “You don’t seem to be either,” Veronica Glass said.

  “I’m a poet,” he said.

  “But not a successful one.”

  “I make a living. That’s more than most poets can say.”

  “But is it a good living? Does anyone know your name?”

  “It offers me a certain freedom.”

  The freedom to write mediocre verse, he thought.

  “Is that enough?” she said, “I mean for you,” and of course it wasn’t. He coveted the trappings of fame: the New Yorker profile, the Oscars on Stan’s mantel, the trophy wives. In the night, as Lois slept at his side, he thought of Stan, stout and hairy, running his thick fingers down MacKenzie’s long body.

  He couldn’t say these things to Veronica Glass, couldn’t say them to anyone at all if you got to the heart of the matter, so he settled for, “It’s what I have.”

  And then the lights blinked twice. Veronica Glass—that was how Ben thought of her—laughed and pinched off the joint. She handed it to him as the novelist announced that there would be an hour of readings—twenty minutes of her novel in progress (so much for the steam-kettle theory, Ben thought), followed by a young woman much admired for her jewel-like short stories, and a poet last of all. The poet, when he took the mike looked the part. He had a head of dark hair that swept back to his collarbones in perfectly sculpted waves, a voice that rang out across the crowd, a National Book Award. He was twenty-seven.

  The lights came up.

  “Do you envy him?” Veronica Glass asked.

  “A little.”

  “Poetry makes nothing happen,” she said.

  “Does mutilation?”

  “L’art pour l’art.”

  “Art moves me,” he said.

  And again she asked, “Is that enough?”

  “Tell me,” he said, “Where do you get the subjects for your art?”

  “They volunteer. I have more volunteers than I can possibly use.” She gave him an appraising look. “Are you interested?”

  Before he could answer, he saw Lois across the room.

  “Is that your wife?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does she do?”

  She was an accountant in the unruined age he did not say. He did not say that she read good books—books that moved her and said something true about the world—and that she loved him and forgave him his trespasses, which were many, and that that was enough. He merely smiled at her through the thump of music, the crush on the dance floor, the smell of sweat in the air. Veronica Glass lifted a hand to her in some kind of ambiguous greeting, but she was gone before Lois could wend her way to them through the crowd.

  “That was Veronica Glass, the mutilation artist,” he said. “You’ve read about her.”

  “I know who it was,” she said.

  Ben wanted to ask her to dance but they were too old for the bass pounding from the speakers; they’d lost their way. Sometime in the deepest trench of the night, a cry arose from the master bathroom. The music died. They all trooped up to look at the novelist. She was dead in the blood-splashed tub, naked, her arms flung out, slit from wrist to elbow as neatly as a pair of whitened gills. Her sagging breasts seemed deflated somehow, empty of life. Her pale face was at peace.

  MacKenzie laughed hysterically, her knuckles to her mouth, her eyes bright with an almost sexual excitement. Cecy began to cry and Lois took her into her arms and hurried her home. Ben lingered as the party wound down. He watched the sun rise with Stan and MacKenzie. Afterward, they looked out over the wretched ruin that had already begun to engulf the writer’s grounds. It crept toward them, turning the soil to ash. Flowers withered to dust. The guesthouse sagged. They descended to the beach and walked home.

  Cecy was sleeping. Lois had waited up.

  Stan and MacKenzie went off to their bedroom. Ben and Lois heard MacKenzie cry out after a time. They wandered outside and sat on the edge of the verandah, legs dangling. Ben dug out the crumpled joint and lit it, and they looked out over the sea and smoked it together. Ben spoke of Veronica Glass, and Lois held a finger to his lips.

  “I don’t want to hear about her, okay?” she said.

  They went into their dim bedroom. The sun cast narrow bars of light through the blinds as they made love. When Ben finished he thought of Veronica Glass; when he slept, he dreamed of her.

  He dreamed of her awake and sleeping both. One more party, two, another passing encounter. She didn’t always show up. He asked Stan about her. “She lives six houses down,” Stan said, gesturing. “Crazy bitch.”

  “Crazy?”

  “The things she does. You call that art?”

  The last picture Stan had worked on had been a slasher flick. The usual: a bunch of kids at some summer camp, screwing and smoking dope; a crazed killer; various implements of destruction, the more imaginative the better. The virtuous survived. There would be no Oscars for this formulaic trash, Ben reminded him. And didn’t it trade upon our worst impulses?

  “It trades upon imagination,” Stan said. “There’s a difference between special effects and the genuine item.”

  He was right, of course, demonstrably so, yet—

  Maybe not, Ben thought. Maybe special effects were worse. People thrilled to the mayhem on screen; they identified with the killers, turned them into folk heroes. No one thrilled to the work of Veronica Glass. Horror and fascination, sure—how could you do such things to a human being, and why? What had she said? I have more volunteers than I could possibly use. And worse yet: Are you interes
ted?

  And he was. The whole phenomenon interested him.

  Beauty is truth, truth beauty, Keats had said.

  Was there some terrible beauty here? Or worse yet, some terrible truth?

  Or maybe Veronica had been right. How had she put it? L’art pour l’art.

  Art for art’s sake.

  Perhaps it was these questions that led Ben to stray down the beach one day toward her house. Perhaps it was the woman herself—that blonde hair, those high cheekbones. Perhaps it was chance. (It was not chance.) Yet that’s what he told himself as he mounted the stair to her house—a house like every other house along the cliff side: gray-stained shingles and acres of windows that threw back the afternoon light, blinding him, and suddenly he didn’t know what he was doing there, what was his intent?

  Ben started to turn away—might have done so had a voice not hailed him from the verandah. “The poet takes courage,” she called, and now he saw her, leaning toward him, elbows on the railing. “Come up.”

  He crossed the lawn, climbed a set of winding stairs. She had turned to greet him, her back to the railing, clad in a sheer white dress. She held a clear glass with a lime wedge floating among the ice, and she laughed when she saw him. She brushed her lips first against one cheek and then another; they were moist and cool from the drink.

  “So we meet by daylight, Ben Devine.”

  “How did you know my name?”

  “It’s no great mystery, is it? You’re a guest of Stan Miles—and MacKenzie, of course. Dear, poor MacKenzie, and that lost child of hers. Who doesn’t know you, those of us who remain, a weed sprung up among the roses?”

  “Is that how you think of me, a weed?”

  “Is that how you think of yourself?”

  How was he to answer that question? How indeed did he perceive himself among the glittering multitude of Cerulean Cliffs? Stan had said they would fit right in—he and Lois—but did they? Ben had his doubts.

  He opted for silence.

  If Veronica—and when had that shift occurred exactly, when had she come to be Veronica in his mind?—expected an answer she did not say. Nor did she ask him if he wanted a drink. She simply put one together for him at a bar tucked discreetly into the shadows. He brought it to his lips: the tickle of tonic, the woodsy bite of juniper and lime. At first he thought that she didn’t care about his response to her question, but then—