Deep Breath Hold Tight: Stories About the End of Everything

by Gurley, Jason

  “What is happening?” I asked again.

  It got louder then, as more boards began to bend away from the houses, as bricks were pulled right out of the foundations of buildings. The ground shook, and I could see now that the railway men were terrified. They were trying to run away from the field, but almost comically seemed to be stuck in place, running nowhere desperately. They shouted, and then they fell down, and just like the trees they were hauled over the ground, the rough earth scratching their faces until they bled — and then the men, too, were sucked down into the black soil.

  I yelled, I think, and Josie moved from the rocking chair to the swing beside me.

  “It’s okay,” she said to me, patting my knee once more. “Let’s go inside.”

  She poured a fresh cup of tea, but I couldn’t drink it.

  “I don’t understand what’s happening,” I said.

  “Have you ever seen a person get sick and die?” she asked me. “Watched them get a cough first, and then get sicker, and then struggle for weeks, and then just give up?”

  “I don’t know anybody well enough to see that happen.” I looked around at her house, which was quiet and calm and still. Outside I could still hear the war that seemed to be happening. I could hear the houses being ripped and chewed, windows shattering like candy shells. “I want to get out of here.”

  “Well, you probably could,” she said. “If you really wanted to.”

  I stood up, and she just looked at me calmly.

  “What about you?” I said.

  “Oh, I couldn’t leave.”

  “But something bad is happening.”

  “I can see why someone might think it’s bad,” she answered patiently. “But it’s quite good. And anyway, I’m here for a reason. I couldn’t leave if I wanted to. I’ve got no place to go.”

  I looked around her house. “Why isn’t your house coming apart like the others?”

  “Well, that’s one of the perks of my reason for being here,” she said. “Are you sure you won’t drink your tea?”

  “Why do I hurt right now?” I asked. Because I did. I felt like someone had shoved an iron pipe through my torso until it stuck out at both ends, and now they were beginning to twist it clockwise.

  “Tension,” she said. “This is a stressful event for some. Here, sit.”

  She patted the sofa, and I sat down, reluctantly, confused by the noise outside. Josie put her hands gently on my shoulders and began to knead them. I felt a strange crawling sensation and realized that all of the hairs on my arms and neck were standing up. I felt warm. I had never been touched by anyone before. Not even by my mother.

  “You’ll feel better soon,” she said.

  I jumped up. “I don’t want to get eaten by — by whatever that is!”

  “Henry,” she said gently. “Please sit down.”

  Josie called it the quick death. She talked about a sick person again, and said that the sickness of the world was just like that. All the destruction and people losing their heads and sense of meaning — all of that was the world becoming ill. It sweated and shivered and we felt all of it. And now the world was dying, and that was what was happening out there.

  “I’m going to die,” I said.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “I haven’t done anything at all,” I said. “Why was I even here?”

  “Most people have a lifetime to consider those questions, to do something about them,” Josie answered. “You were perhaps unfortunate. You were born during the sick time. You never really had a chance.”

  “How do you even know all of this?”

  “Everything is a cycle,” Josie said. “This has happened before. I was there.”

  I stared at her. “The world has died before,” I repeated. “You’re scaring me.”

  “When the world dies, everything goes away,” she said. “The board is cleared off so that the next game can begin. Except the board has to go, too, because the game might be a different thing entirely the next time. Maybe the next time the world won’t be round, for example. Maybe it will be a ribbon, or maybe it will be a great beast that swims through the river of time. Can you imagine?”

  I opened my mouth, then closed it again.

  “When the world dies, a witness must be present,” Josie said. “That’s me. I show up just before it happens. This little town? I made it, just because I like things to be — homey, I guess you might say. It makes me feel better about what’s happening.”

  “A witness,” I croaked.

  “Right,” she said. “The last time that the world died, I was a fish. I had big feathery wings and a purple, bulbous light embedded in my forehead. The world was a very different place last time. You might have liked it, Henry.”

  “You’re crazy,” I said. “I just want to get on the train and —“

  She got up and walked to the window. “I’m afraid the train is just about gone,” she said.

  I peered out beside her. It was just about gone. Even as I watched, the last of the cars were pulled apart and drawn into the field. There was a sonorous metallic rippling sound, then, and I asked Josie what it was.

  She pointed. The tracks themselves had come free of the ties, and were being slurped into the dark field like long steel noodles. The field was full of things that I hadn’t seen fall into it. There was an entire house, upended and sinking quickly, with a woman and a man in the windows, just staring back at me. A shining silver automobile, wheels up, gone. A swingset. A mailbox. And at least a dozen people were there, too, fighting against the suction that pulled them below the earth.

  Already the town seemed half-gone.

  “It takes a little while,” Josie said, pulling the curtains shut. “First the immediate area goes. In a few hours, all the buildings that I put here will be gone. The trees, the wheat fields, the picket fences, the schools and playgrounds, the post office. All gone.”

  “Why did you make the town if it was only going to —“

  “Oh, fuel, of course,” she answered. “It needs an appetizer to get worked up for the really hard part.”

  “What do you mean, the hard part?” I asked slowly.

  “The board has to be cleared,” she repeated. “That means everything.”

  “Phoenix, Arizona,” she said. “The Statue of Liberty. Those lovely wharves in San Francisco. The Alps. Antarctica. All of it.”

  “I — you — it just eats it all?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t think of it as eating, really,” Josie said. “It’s more like the field is the box that the game pieces go into. And they’re just all being swept in. Well, pulled in.”

  “But what about your house? What about you?” I stopped. “What about me?”

  “You saw my nice fence when you came in,” she said. “Everything inside that fence stays until the very end. Remember, I’m the witness. I can’t witness anything if I’m not here, can I.”

  “Couldn’t everybody just have come to your house, then?”

  “Well, no, not really,” she said. “Only the ones I invite in. And really, they all know that. Nobody begrudges me this. After all, that they’re here at all is a sort of gift, isn’t it. They got to enjoy a few days of being alive and muddling about in a pretty little town.”

  “Where did they come from?”

  Josie smiled. “They’re just bits and pieces left over from the last time.”

  I pressed my palms against my eyes.

  “You poor dear,” she said. “It’s a terrible burden to know any of this. Please, have some of your tea. Do you want a cookie?”

  “Why did you bring me here?” I asked. “Why did you tell me any of this?”

  She smiled again. “Dear, I didn’t bring you here. The train did.”

  I slept on the couch for a time, and when I woke up, she said, “Come see.”

  She was at the window. Her house was still brightly lit and warm, as if the sun lingered right outside, just for her, but beyond the windows the world was barren. The earth
had been scraped clean of grass and weeds and rocks until there was only a raw brown surface in every direction. The field seemed larger, felt deeper.

  “See?” she asked me, pointing at the horizon.

  It took a moment, but then I saw movement, a rippling seam of darkness heading for the field.

  “And there,” she said, pointing to the east.

  I saw many of them then, and realized with a slow, dawning horror that these were caravans of things. Cars, buildings, airplanes, museums, people, swimming pools, and a dense, writhing mass of debris.

  “That’s all of it,” she said. “Watch awhile, and you can say you’ve seen the world.”

  “All of it,” I said. “You mean —“

  “I mean every single thing sitting above or below the surface of this earth. Every oil well, every bird, every buried treasure, every casket, every street sign, every brick from every bridge ever built. I always feel a bit sad for the people, though. They don’t usually survive the trip. They’re very fragile.”

  The streams arrived hours later, and I watched as they poured into the field. It swelled to accommodate the magnitude of the objects, until the field covered the earth as far as I could see. Enormous freight ships and airport signal towers sank into the soil, buckling and crumpling like aluminum foil.

  “It’s getting so big,” I said.

  “Eventually it doesn’t have to suck anything in,” Josie explained. “Eventually it gets big enough that everything just sinks on its own, and then it’s over pretty fast. After that — well, wait and see.”

  After that, the universe followed.

  It started with the clouds. Josie woke me from another nap to show me a fat white cloud thrashing in the center of the field. I watched as more and more of them fell from the sky, watched as the sky itself thinned and turned black. The moon grew larger and larger and larger and then just vanished. I looked at Josie.

  “Well, you could say that the field has become the biggest planet in the solar system now,” she said, “although that’s not strictly true. It’s a useful metaphor, though. Think of it like this — was the moon sucked in? Or did the field just get so big that it bumped into the moon?”

  I looked around. Her house seemed untouched. Every crocheted blanket and framed photograph was in place. The porch swing outside swayed idly on its chains. The teapot sang again in the kitchen.

  “What happens after that?” I asked.

  “Well,” she said, calling over her shoulder from the kitchen, “the field expands and expands and expands. All the planets that you knew, they go away. Jupiter, Neptune, all of those. Your sun.”

  “It eats the sun?”

  “It eats everything,” she said. “Planets and stars are enormously stimulating, so it gets even faster after that, and before long, it’s entire galaxies, and then it catches up to the expanding universe, and then it’s all over.”

  I stared at the cup in her hand.

  “More tea?” she asked.

  “It’s not really a field, is it,” I said.

  She shook her head. “Nothing is ever really anything. It just looks like something. When it all starts over, it will be something different, unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.”

  I took a deep breath. “And what about me?”

  “Well,” Josie answered, “when it’s big enough to start over, it needs something to start over with. That’s you.”

  I felt very heavy. “Me.”

  “You,” she said again. “Tea, Henry.”

  Days passed, I think, and then there was a faint popping sound, and Josie sat up straight.

  “Well,” she said, “that’s it, then.”

  We walked onto the porch. Beyond her green lawn and careful flower garden and nice picket fence posts there was only whiteness. Pure, blank white, as though the world had stumbled into the a thicket of clouds.

  “It’s white,” I said.

  “What did you expect it to be?”

  “Black,” I said. “I guess.”

  “Well, I suppose you can make it whatever you like,” she answered. “If black is what you prefer, then black is what it shall be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t tell you anything more,” Josie said. “It’s time for you to go.”

  “Go?” I felt my stomach lurch. “Where do I go? What’s going to happen to me?”

  She took my hand and walked with me down the steps to the cobblestone path, and led me to the gate. She patted my hand and said, “The rest is for you. I can’t help you any longer. Just call me when you need me.”

  “Need you?” I said. “I need you now. I want another cup of tea. A cookie. I’m sleepy. I need a nap. My body aches.”

  “Henry,” she said sweetly, and then she opened the gate.

  I felt a faint suction, and fear flooded my veins. I was lifted off of my feet and drawn through the gate and into the whiteness. Josie and her house fell away from me slowly, and she waved, then turned and went back into her house. The fence folded over, and folded over again, and the lawn and the steps and the house followed suit, until Josie and her home and everything around me were gone.

  The sucking sensation dissipated, and I hung alone in the white. I don’t know how much time passed, or if any passed at all, or if time was something that existed any longer. I closed my eyes, blind to all sensations. There were no smells, no breezes to be felt.

  I thought of strawberries.

  Strawberries on the night air, and a plump white moon in a dark blue blanket. The smell of cinders and coal. Boxcars that were dry and stuffed with hay, drawn along behind mighty engines that sailed through quiet, sleepy towns and patchwork farmland and dark, burbling rivers. A burlap sack to keep me warm, the sway of the train to lull me to sleep, and maybe a journal to write in.

  I was the last of the rail-riders.

  I am the first of all things.

  I opened my eyes, and it was so.

  THEN

  I caught her.

  The doctor gave me a textured blue wrap. Frannie looked alarmed and said, “No, no, skin — skin-to-skin, I want skin-to-skin,” and the doctor assured her that this was only for me, so that I wouldn’t drop her. I lost track of what I was supposed to feel, and I bent over the bed, only dimly aware of Frannie’s feet near my head, her toes splayed wide as she fought. I heard her scream like I’d never heard her do anything before. It was primal, and I felt like a hunter on the savannah, standing over my kill, like a warrior, head thrown back and the taste of blood in my mouth.

  And then she came to me, like a child on a water slide into my arms, slippery and dark and blue, and I caught her, and her tiny face looked like the wrinkles of my knee, almost featureless in her surprise, and she bawled rapidly. She pierced my heart and my ears with her cries, and a nurse clamped and clipped the cord, and I carried her to Frannie and laid our daughter on her breast.

  She wailed and clung to her mother, her tiny fingers opening and closing against Frannie’s skin, and Frannie breathed heavily and said, “Elle.”

  I didn’t want to look away from either of them — Frannie dripping with sweat, her hair in damp rings on her face, and Elle, pushing against her mother’s skin like a fresh piglet — but the movement at the door caught my eye, and I did, I looked up, and for the rest of my life I wished that I hadn’t.

  Frannie saw, and looked, too.

  The man in the doorway smiled regretfully, and waggled his fingers at me, and nodded.

  I met Frannie’s dark eyes, and watched the tears well up, and I felt my heart pull out of my chest and stay behind in that beautiful room, the most wonderful place that had ever been made. I kissed Frannie, but she kissed me back, harder, and then I nuzzled Elle’s tiny soft ear with my nose, and kissed her head everywhere, and her small hands. I would have stayed in the room forever if I could have.

  But I followed the man out of the room, my ears ringing with sadness, an enormous hole in my head and my heart, and that was that. We both knew th
at it had to happen, but we pretended it wasn’t going to. And then it did.

  I followed his dark suit through the hospital corridor. I couldn’t feel my hands. My feet moved on their own.

  He said something, but I don’t know what it was.

  We stepped out of the building and into the light, and the cold wind turned my tears to ice.

  NOW

  Elle taps the camera, and I watch her fingertip, large enough to crush worlds, grow dark and obscure my view. I laugh, and she giggles, and this makes her laugh harder, and then she begins to hiccup wildly. She rocks back on her bottom and puts her hands on the floor behind her, and reclines and stares at me, hiccuping and laughing, and I laugh with her.

  “You’re silly,” I say to her. “Silly, silly Elle.”

  She babbles at me, and in the stream of muddled sounds I hear something that sounds like a-da, and I say, “Frannie!”

  Frannie turns the camera on herself, and her smile is big and bright and threatens to push her eyes off of her face. “We’ve been working on it all week,” she says. “She can’t quite make the d sound work, so all we’ve got is ada-ada, except, you know, it’s more like atha, atha.”

  I turn away from the camera and wipe at my eyes.

  “Daddy’s crying,” Frannie says. I look back to see her turn the camera to Elle, who thinks this is hilarious. She pats her round tummy and laughs harder, and then the hiccups take over in a big way, and a moment later Elle burps up breakfast.

  “Oh, uh-oh! Uh-oh!” Frannie sing-songs, and she says to me, “We’ll be right back, Daddy!” and puts the camera down.

  I watch Frannie’s feet, then she scoops up Elle and whisks her out of frame.

  I sigh and push off of the wall and turn in a slow flip, waiting.

  Sarah comes in through the research wing hatch and sees the camera and says, “Oh, shit — I mean — oh, goddammit, I — fuck! Shit.”