The End is Nigh (The Apocalypse Triptych)

by Adams, John Joseph

  Because what child doesn’t love a story? And when you get down to it, that’s all I am: a storyteller. Nothing more, nothing less. Back in the Hilary days, I’d thought I needed more smoke and mirrors, some laying on of hands, but eventually I wised up. You don’t need to cure the lepers to be a faith healer. We’re all of us in my business doing the same work, because what is faith but another story that you tell yourself to feel better? That’s what these idiot skeptics, the do-gooders, the ones so desperate to snatch the wool from my Children’s eyes, would never understand: Lies don’t hurt anyone. Lies are the balm; truth is the wound.

  Even the Man himself, if you believed in him up there, napping on his cloudy throne, doesn’t have much more than pretty stories to offer these days. Sure, Joseph, Moses, Jesus’s precious lepers, they got miracles. But now? God’s out of the direct action industry, and all he’s offering in its place is a bedtime story. The fairy tale of heaven, the promise that whatever shit happens, your story gets a happy ending. The Bible, boiled down: Once upon a time I helped some poor suckers out and someday, maybe, if you’re good, I’ll help you too, but in the meantime, isn’t it a nice story to fall asleep to?

  You can’t say I’m not doing God’s work.

  All those social workers, estranged relatives, those Pittstown neighbors who turned their nose up at the Church buying up property in their suburban midst, they called us a cult. Maybe so. But the word carried a sinister whiff that didn’t match up with its reality, something that maybe you had to be in a cult—or in charge of one—to know. My Children were gentle, most of them treading through life with the care of the permanently damaged, whether by drugs, abuse, or simply the ordinary existential indignities, loss of job, loss of love, loss of dignity, loss of purpose. That was their universal: Loss. Who else would so desperately need to be found?

  That’s what I’d done when I first arrived in Pittstown, what I did when I arrived anywhere: I collected the lost, the ones who’d fallen through the cracks, like a dog-catcher scooping up strays for the pound. It was a service, not just to the feral, but to the tame and well-housed, all those cocky, secure, too good-for-it-all townsfolk satisfied with the comfort of their own homes who preferred not to acknowledge what I was doing for them, tending to their damaged so they wouldn’t have to.

  Alison Gentry’s sister left nasty voicemails every few months, and once she’d set the local cops on us, but where was she when Alison’s three kids and husband plowed through a guard-rail and into Lake Michigan? Where was she a year later when her sister washed down the anniversary with a vodka and Percodan cocktail?

  Where were Mandy’s parents—with their team of trust-fund-busting lawyers doing everything they could to keep her hands off her money—when she and her crack pipe had driven a Pontiac through a neighbor’s living room window, and then been promptly hauled off to jail, where she stayed, because mom and dad thought teaching her a lesson would be kinder than bailing her out?

  Where were Clark Jeffries’ kids when his board of directors dumped him on his ass, or Merrilee Babbage’s husband when—having been traded in for a secretary with a bad dye job and a dick—she was feeding her three kids with food stamps and blowing the landlord when she couldn’t make rent?

  I was the one who wiped their tears and salved their wounds and fed them some bullshit to live for, and if I took a little something with me when I went, it was only fair payment for services rendered.

  Despite my best efforts, plenty of the Children still had a hole to fill, and somehow, with his ugly, gap-toothed smile and post-nasal drip, the kid filled it.

  That was my smile. Those were my mother’s big ears and my father’s vampire canines—and the way he chewed his nails, but only the ones on his left hand, was like seeing my brother’s ghost. This was the kind of genetic detritus that was, I knew, supposed to kindle a fire in me, as if it mattered that we came from the same stock.

  I didn’t know whether my parents were alive or dead, and didn’t much care—had never understood it, this obsession people have with blood. This fixation on children, as if popping a baby out and watching him grow into your big nose and type 2 diabetes was your best shot at staving off oblivion.

  Ask people to worship you? They call you a megalomaniac. Ask them to worship your kid? They call that good parenting.

  Still, I played along, let them all believe what they needed to believe. That was, after all, my business. And it wasn’t the hassle I’d expected, raising a kid, especially with the Children so eager to do it for me. It was only once he started up with the questions and all that end-of-the-world shit, that the trouble really started.

  • • • •

  He’d been at the compound for a week, and though I dumped him on the Children whenever I could during the day, at night he was all mine. He got himself set for bed all on his own—mom calls me her little man, he said, when I caught him flossing for the third time in a day, and that was the second and last time he mentioned her—but my responsibilities had been made clear.

  “At eight, you tell me it’s time to go to bed,” he told me the first night. “I read for a while, and then at nine you come back and turn off the lights.”

  So that’s what I did, standing in the dark for a while after, watching this kid—my kid—lie on his back with his legs straight and his arms crossed across his chest like a fucking corpse. I made that, I thought, and waited to feel something.

  “You got everything you need?” I said. This was before the racecar bed and the hand-me-down pajamas. “Comfortable?”

  He didn’t look it.

  “Sometimes I like to practice being dead,” he said, staring up at the ceiling.

  “You’re a weird kid, you know that?”

  “She’s not coming back, is she?”

  That was the first time he mentioned her. And because he wasn’t crying or behaving anything like you’d expect from a kid in his situation, I gave it to him straight. “Doesn’t seem likely.”

  “Because I’m weird?”

  “Because she’s a loser.”

  “Oh.”

  “Always was. Always will be. You’re probably better off.”

  “Doesn’t seem likely,” he said. Then, apparently finished playing dead, he curled up on his side. I watched him until he fell asleep.

  That’s how it went until the night, one week after she’d dumped him, when he broke routine. I’d just turned out the lights when he said, “I get five questions.”

  “What?”

  “Before I go to sleep, I get to ask five questions.”

  “Says who?”

  There was no answer, and so I knew who.

  “Why now?” I said. “All of a sudden?”

  “I was waiting until I had the right questions.”

  That didn’t sound promising. “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “I’m willing to negotiate.”

  “Negotiate what?”

  “Questions,” he said. “How about four?”

  “How about zero.”

  “Three questions.”

  “No questions.”

  “You’re really bad at negotiating,” he said.

  “That’s a matter of opinion.”

  That was when, for the first time since he’d set foot on the compound, he burst into tears. Burst like a clogged pipe, ten years of misery spraying out of him in a gusher, and even in the dark I could read his fury, that his pathetic little body had betrayed him. I remembered that, trying to survive the battle zone, dodging artillery fire between the kid you were and the man you were supposed to be. The world screamed at you to grow up, your zits and your twitchy dick agreed it was about time, but you were still afraid of the dark, you still slept with that old teddy bear, you still wanted your mommy.

  Maybe you always wanted your mommy.

  “Okay. Three questions.”

  And that right there was my mistake.

  • • • •

  “Do you really get messages from God?”
r />   “I do.”

  “How?”

  “It varies. Sometimes I read His intent in the signs. Sometimes He’s got something more direct he wants to say, and He talks to me in my dreams.”

  “Why you?”

  I shrugged. “Why not me? I didn’t ask for the responsibility, I’ll tell you that much. It’s no picnic, devoting your life to the word of the Lord. You’d be surprised how many people don’t want to hear it.”

  “How do you know it’s really God? That you’re not just hearing voices or something?”

  “That’s four questions. Good night.”

  • • • •

  “Does God hate us?”

  “God loves us. We’re all his children.”

  “And you have to love your children.”

  “That’s the rule.”

  “That wasn’t a question.”

  “Got it. Thanks for clarifying.”

  “If he loves us, why would he kill us?”

  “Everyone dies, kid. It’s not punishment; it’s human nature.”

  “No, I mean, why would he kill all of us. Jessie Babbage says the world is going to end. In eight months and twenty days.”

  “That another question?”

  “The question is: Is it true, the world is ending?”

  I won’t pretend I felt good about it, but there was no other way. The kid had shown no sign he’d inherited his mother’s proclivity for bullshit, and I couldn’t show my hand without risking he’d spread the good news like a virus. “It really is.”

  There was a long silence, long enough to make me nervous.

  “What do you think of that?” I said.

  “I think it explains a lot.”

  • • • •

  “How’s it going to end?”

  “You mean, specifically?”

  “Yeah. Nuclear war? Asteroid strike? Global warming? I read online about a giant volcano that might explode and kill us all. Also there could be a plague. Or some kind of alien invasion, but that’s not statistically likely. Did your dreams say which it is?”

  “God’s a little hazy on the details,” I said. “But the Bible’s got a lot to say on the subject, if you’re interested.” I wasn’t about to give him the whole Beast rising from a lake of fire sermon—let the Children take care of that.

  “What will we do? When it happens?”

  “We’ll go to heaven with the rest of the righteous people,” I said. “Nothing for you to worry about.”

  “You don’t even know me. How do you know I’m righteous?”

  “Fair point.”

  After that, the kid started having nightmares. And maybe I was partly responsible, but what kid doesn’t have nightmares? Anyway, these particular nightmares? Gold. Because he told the Children about them, and the Children took them to heart, figuring any kid of mine having visions of the apocalypse must be getting his info straight from the horse’s mouth. Purse strings started to loosen. No one wanted to be counted among the sinners when the big day came. Maybe I helped it along a bit, encouraging all that talk of divine visitation, but it’s not like I was forcing the dreams on him.

  I just put them to good use.

  • • • •

  “If we know when the world is going to end, shouldn’t we be doing something about it? Like, warning people? Or doing something to save ourselves?”

  “That sounds like three questions.”

  “It’s one,” he said. “Multi-part.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “So?”

  “So we don’t have to worry about it, because God’s going to save us, and whoever else he wants. That’s the whole point.”

  “But don’t they say God helps those who help themselves?”

  “Where’d you’d you hear that?” It wasn’t one of my favorites. Operations like mine didn’t tend to thrive on a philosophy of self-reliance and personal accountability.

  “The internet.”

  It killed me, the way people said that now, like they used to say “the Bible.” Or “TV.” As if it were Truth.

  “I don’t think the end of the world is one of those help-yourself situations,” I said.

  “But what if you’re wrong?”

  • • • •

  He wouldn’t let it drop. He wouldn’t keep it to himself, either, and before I knew it, the Children were buzzing with the prospect of preservation. The kid was a natural, only ten years old but already better than I was at talking people around to his way of looking at things. I’d taught them to be open to persuasion, and they were model students, repeating the kid’s questions and arguments and internet-supplied statistics about asteroid impacts like a bunch of ventriloquist dummies. I did my best, pointed out that righteousness was all about faith and faith was all about accepting your fate and waiting for God to intercede, and that’s when the kid—who had apparently taken my suggestion on the Bible-reading front—brought in Noah. Before I know it, we’re building a damn ark.

  Metaphorically, that is.

  It turned out you could order anything on the internet, including whatever supplies you might need to survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Canned food, wilderness gear, medical equipment, solar panels, ammunition—lots of ammunition. The kid spent hours at the computer, doing research, making lists, and then, like a Dickensian miracle, the wallets opened wide, even the tightest of wads. Sure, the Children had given lip service to buying the prophecy, but with the kid channeling their energy into survival scenarios, they felt it in their bones. Judgment Day. End times. No reason to save up for retirement when doom was on the horizon, and so they threw their credit cards at him, and anything left over after the bottled water and campfire stoves? That was mine. The kid, I realized pretty quickly, was like a money laundering shop for bullshit. I fed in my lies, he spit out a pretty good simulacrum of truth.

  It wasn’t enough to gather supplies, the kid said. We needed a place to store them—a place we’d be safe from the ravaging hordes, not to mention the Horsemen and the Beast, though the specter of these had been overshadowed by the kid’s visions of power grid failure and food hoarders. We needed to move off the grid, and Clark Jeffries—who, in the duration of our acquaintanceship had never once gifted anything that could be lent—violated his cardinal rule and dipped into the principal. The kid had befriended a bunch of doomsday kooks online, one of whom must have believed in cash even more than he believed in magnetic pole reversal, because he was only too happy to trade his kook compound for a couple million of Jeffries’ hard-earned bucks. And this time, the deeds went to the church, along with the rest of his savings. There it was, my retirement account: Fully funded.

  A third of the Children—fortunately, none of the big fish—decided to tough it out at home, whether due to a lack or overabundance of faith, and we kissed them a weepy farewell, promising to meet again beyond the Gates of Heaven, pretending to believe it. The rest of us loaded the supplies into a fleet of retrofitted armored schoolbuses—bug-out vehicles, the kid called them—and headed for the hills.

  Our Garden of Eden was a rectangular compound built out of old shipping containers, bullet-proof, impenetrable, and a poor substitute for my marble flooring and twelve-jet Jacuzzi. The kid was happier than I’d ever seen him, and he was doing a hero’s job of keeping the Children busy. They taught themselves to can food, forage for mushrooms, fire automatic weapons, build solar generators, suture wounds, identify poisonous snakes, milk goats and slaughter pigs—the internet truly was a wonder. As was the sight of all these accountants and housewives transforming themselves into mountain warriors, the kid at their fore, a pipsqueak Napoleon commanding his troops. They were disciplined in their mission, wild with abandon in everything else. Christian temperance gave sway to desire, to what the hell, to affairs and drunken revels, to one rumored orgy and two suicides. They honestly believed it was all coming to an end: Because I’d told them I dreamed it—and because the kid really had.

  He’d stopped having nightmares, sto
pped asking questions. Now he was the one with the answers.

  “It doesn’t scare you?” I asked him one night before turning out the lights. We’d abandoned privacy at the new compound, the Children sleeping dorm-style in their hollowed out shipping containers, but I still had the special privileges that follow from a direct line to the Lord. The kid slept on a cot beside me. I’d almost gotten used to the sound of his breathing, and his occasional muffled snore. It had been a long time since I’d slept beside someone long enough to recognize the rhythm of them falling asleep. “It really doesn’t scare you, the thought of it all ending?”

  It scared the fuck out of me. The kid liked to walk me through potential apocalyptic scenarios—his version of a bedtime story. I fell asleep imagining the oceans rising, volcanic ash blotting out the sun, supergerms knocking out fifty million in a week. The kid taught me about nuclear winter, and in my dreams my skin sloughed off and my Children died a rainbow of deaths, atomized in a cotton candy puff of light, poisoned slow and steady by food and drink and acid rain, huddled in caves before flickering fire as the ice rose around them and the sun set on human life. There were nutcases with nuclear buttons and physicists messing with black holes; there were alarming seismic indicators and a supervolcanic eruption 40,000 years overdue. This was not to mention the potential damage of a solar storm, a not-so-great leap forward in nanotechnology, an asteroid impact, or what might happen when computers the world over gained sentience and turned on their masters. (That last was the kid’s favorite, and one of the reasons all computing devices on the compound were nearing their date with a sledgehammer.)

  All that talk about reading the signs, and I hadn’t realized the signs were everywhere. The world was like one of those supersaturated solutions we’d played around with in chemistry class a thousand years ago—a class I only remembered, and only attended, because of my lab partner’s tendency to lean over the beakers and grant me a heavenly glimpse of her sacred mounds. They were solutions with more crap in them than they could bear, suspended in perfect balance, the dissolved particles invisible until you dropped one last, miniscule, harmless particle—and wham, liquid turned to crystal, just like that. I never got how it worked—was too busy plotting my way down Jenny Crowley’s v-neck—but I never forgot the sight of it, the possibility of instant transformation. Until the kid started sniffing around dark corners, it hadn’t occurred to me that we were living inside the beaker, waiting for someone to drop in one final speck of dust, make one tiny, irrevocable mistake. You didn’t need God for a scenario like that. You just needed bad luck or human idiocy, and those I believed in with all my heart.