End of the Century

by Chris Roberson

  “My grandmother believes…believed…in everything,” Alice said. “My mother doesn't believe in anything. I believe in something, but I'm not sure what it is. Something bigger than me, bigger both in space and in time. I've caught glimpses of it during my seizures, my episodes, my visions, whatever they are, but I just can't put it into words.” She thought of the hundreds of spiral notebooks she'd filled over the years. “No matter how hard I try.”

  “It isn't just eldritch horrors that are indescribable, you know.”

  Alice caught the Lovecraft reference, but let it slide. “I wonder sometimes about religion, you know. They think that Joan of Arc and Ellen G. White were probably epileptics who thought their seizures were messages from God. And they think maybe even Moses and Saint Paul were, too. So what if all religions, everywhere, are started by people whose neurons keep misfiring, experiencing hallucinations while they drool on themselves or tap their feet…”

  “Or lick their lips while rubbing their tummies like hungry cartoons?”

  “Exactly.”

  Roxanne thought for a moment. “So if God exists, then no one has ever heard from him.”

  “Oh, I'm not saying that just because they're epileptic they're not hearing God.” Alice shook her head. “What if all of them were?”

  Alice was lighting a cigarette, striking a match on the ridged bottom of the vesta case.

  “That's nice,” Roxanne said, leaning in for a closer look. “Victorian, isn't it?”

  Alice exhaled twin streams of smoke from her nostrils and looked down at the silver case. She shrugged. “I guess.”

  Roxanne reached out. “May I?”

  Alice handed the thing over and took a long drag of her cigarette, then followed it with the last of her beer. “My grandmother gave it to me.”

  “‘J.D.’” Roxanne looked up from the case. “Are those her initials?”

  Alice shook her head. “Her name was Naomi Vance. She didn't know what the D stood for, but said the J was for ‘Jack.’”

  “A friend of hers?” Roxanne gave a sly grin as she handed it back.

  “Something like that.”

  Naomi Vance had been on her deathbed. It was the cigarettes that killed her, in the end, but not cancer. That would have been too quick. Instead it was all manner of unpleasantness. Emphysema, uterine prolapse, ulcerative colitis, you name it.

  Alice was a junior at Westwood High School when her grandmother went to bed for the last time. She missed so many classes, sitting by her grandmother's bedside, that she'd have to go to summer school to keep from being held back a year. And having already done that once, when she was seven, she wasn't in any hurry to do it again. The fact that she was older than all of her classmates, and the only ones she really got along with were the other kids who had been held back, too, reprobates like Nancy and company, was what had gotten her into trouble in the first place.

  So Naomi lay in bed, for all those weeks, waiting to die. They wouldn't let her smoke anymore, which Naomi considered incredibly rude, but she liked to make Alice lean in close when she got back from smoking cigarettes out in the parking lot, so she could smell the scent of tobacco smoke and outside breezes that clung to her granddaughter's clothes and hair. Alice had started smoking when she first met Nancy, back when she was almost fifteen and starting high school, and kept smoking even after the accident that no one at school liked to talk about.

  Naomi was tired all of the time, which was understandable. Dying took a lot out of you. So Alice spent a lot of time reading to her grandmother, when the crappy daytime talk shows and soap operas and game shows on the TV bolted high up on the wall got to be too much to take. Alice read newspapers and magazines and books, but most often she read to her grandmother from the copy of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass that she'd stolen from the Grisham Middle School library years before. Alice's father, James Fell, had read Carroll's stories to his daughter over and over again when she was a little girl, right up until the first accident. Later, when her mother, Samantha, had gotten rid of all of her husband's things in that crazy week when she decided that she just couldn't stand to look at them any longer, just couldn't bear the memories one day more, one of the things to go had been James Fell's copy of Lewis Carroll's collected works. The next month, Samantha had come to her senses and tried to buy everything back, but one of the few things that they were never able to relocate was James's copy of Lewis Carroll, which had been bought off the shelves of Half Price Books in the intervening days. It was years before Alice had another copy, when she'd stuffed the library bound edition into her back pocket at the Grisham school library, at Nancy's prompting, and walked right out the door with it.

  Alice had just gotten to the part about the Red King's dream, with the television bolted high up on the wall muted and silent, when Naomi had another one of her coughing fits, and by the time it had died down, she was ready to tell her granddaughter her last secret, the one she'd held for so long.

  Naomi waved her hand, fluttering like a dying bird's wing, and motioned for the television remote, which was over on the rolling table, just past the plastic tray holding the day's lunch, untouched. Alice, taking a moment to realize that her grandmother wasn't asking for the lime JELL-O, grabbed the remote and handed it over. Naomi stabbed the buttons until the sound came up and waved Alice silent.

  The television was tuned to a twenty-four-hour news station that was running a story about a volcano erupting in Iceland. Mount Hekla, it was called. The volcano had started erupting the week before, on February twenty-sixth, and had just subsided that morning, seven days later.

  The news anchor started talking about something to do with computers, and Naomi shut off the television. Alice had come to distrust computers deeply, after Y2K ended up being such a disappointment. If you couldn't count on computers to bring on the apocalypse, what good were they, anyway?

  Alice looked to her grandmother and was surprised to see tears streaming down her cheeks. She asked Naomi what was wrong, not sure she wanted to know the answer.

  Naomi's husband had died when Alice was just a few years old, and she had only the dimmest memories of the man. In Alice's vague recollections, her grandfather was a mountain covered in a wool suit that smelled of Aqua Velva aftershave, who always had pieces of hard candy in his pockets for her.

  Tearfully, Naomi explained that her husband hadn't been Alice's grandfather at all, not really. Another man had been the father of Alice's mother, Samantha. And all because of that damned volcano.

  Back when she was only a few years older than Alice was now, Naomi, then Naomi Ward, had been a flight attendant. They called them “stewardesses” in those days, but it amounted to the same thing. Young Naomi had worked for American Overseas airlines, flying back and forth from Paris to New York.

  Alice had known this since she was little. She'd always known the story about how her grandmother had worked in an airplane, until something bad happened, she lost her job, got married, and gave birth to her only child, Alice's mother.

  Only, that wasn't what happened. Not really.

  Naomi explained. The plane she worked on, all those years before, had been a Douglas DC-4 airliner. In those days, planes couldn't make it all the way across the Atlantic in one hop but had to stop for refueling along the way. They'd take off from Paris, then land in Shannon, Ireland, then Keflavik, Iceland, then Narsarsuaq, Greenland, then Frobisher Bay, Canada, and then finally New York, America, where they'd empty out, rest up, and do the whole thing all over again.

  In 1947, when Naomi's plane was refueling in Keflavik, a goddamned volcano had erupted, blanketing the skies with smoke and ash, blotting out the sun. They'd been grounded for days, waiting for the air to clear enough for them to navigate at takeoff. The passengers and crew waited in the town, crammed into the few available rooms to let, drinking with the civilian employees of Keflavik Airport, all of whom were Americans, either employed by American Overseas or by Lockhead Ai
rcraft Overseas Service. They hardly saw any Icelanders at all the whole time they were in town. But there were a few other foreigners in the mix, including a trio of Brits. One of them was named Jack.

  Naomi never did learn his last name, but she fell in love with him all the same. They spent three days together in a cramped little hotel room, hardly even leaving to eat or drink, wrapped around each other. Jack was older than Naomi, maybe even fifty, but Naomi didn't mind. He was in terrific shape, and had stamina to beat the band, and they even smoked the same brand of cigarettes. When the smoke cleared, and the plane was ready to take off, Jack was already gone, along with his two friends, off on some business or other elsewhere on the island. All he'd left Naomi were a few days’ worth of pleasant memories, a soreness that meant she walked funny for days, his engraved silver match case, and the child growing in her belly.

  Naomi was reasonably sure he hadn't meant to leave his match case behind and was positive that he hadn't meant to leave a child, but there it was.

  Naomi didn't know about the baby until weeks later, of course, and by then there was nothing that could be done about it. Even if she'd been married, her employers would have fired her on the spot, but at least then they might have been a bit more forgiving. But unwed? They booted her out the door in New York with her last paycheck, and that was that.

  Naomi ended up marrying the first man she found, a Texan, and when he moved back home to Austin to be nearer his family, she went with him. It wasn't the greatest marriage—how could it have been, since Naomi had just married the first guy she found—but if George Vance knew that his daughter Samantha hadn't been born premature at all, he didn't let on.

  There in the hospital room, the television once more silent, the lime JELL-O slowly melting away, Naomi asked Alice to bring over her purse from the side table. From its fusty interior, she pulled out the silver match case. Alice had no idea how many times she'd seen her grandmother light cigarettes with matches from that case. Hundreds of thousands? Millions? Enough to kill her, at any rate, which was plenty.

  Naomi started crying again, but with a different expression on her face. She wasn't feeling sorry for herself. She was feeling guilty.

  She told Alice that she felt horrible about the exorcisms and everything else she'd put her through, all those years before. She said that maybe, just maybe, it wasn't the devil that Alice was hearing at all. Maybe it was really the voice of God, instead. Maybe by silencing those voices, they'd really prevented Alice from doing something really amazing.

  Then Naomi had given the silver match case to Alice. As a gift? As a token of apology? Alice was never sure. But when she went out into the parking lot next to smoke, she tossed her disposable lighter in the trash, took out one of the wooden matches from the case, and sheltering from the unseasonably cold March wind, lit another cigarette. She knew the things would kill her, too, if she let them. But then, Alice doubted she'd live long enough for them to have a chance.

  And then, a few months later, Alice's grandmother died. Naomi Vance had been a part of Alice's life every day since she was seven and a half. After James Fell had his heart attack and Alice fell, Naomi had moved in with her daughter and granddaughter to help run the family business on Anderson Mill and to help raise Alice.

  Alice had watched her grandmother move through stages of belief like a farmer rotating crops, Buddhism one week, nature worship the next, crystals the week after that. The only constant in Naomi Vance's system of beliefs was the unwavering conviction that there was meaning in the universe and that everyone and everything had a destiny to fulfill. Samantha Fell had given up on the idea of meaning and destiny when her husband had a heart attack and died, all while she was out working in the garden. Alice knew that her mother didn't blame her for falling, but in some strange way Samantha blamed herself for not being there to catch her.

  Now, Naomi Vance was dead, and Alice felt that she'd fallen farther away from her mother than ever.

  “So what happens if you don't go back on your meds?”

  Alice looked up at Roxanne and thought about how truthfully to answer. Again, what the hell? It wasn't as if they'd ever see each other again.

  “If I stay off long enough, and have enough seizures, I've got a fifteen percent chance of psychosis. Not quite schizophrenia, but close enough to count, if you ask me. If I stay on the meds, I don't have visions, but I'll still have all the symptoms of Geschwind's.” She paused, and then cocked her head to one side. “Do you have any kids, Roxanne? Or want any?”

  Roxanne thought for a moment. “No, and I'm not sure, in that order. I have trouble enough keeping relationships with adults working, you know? I'm not sure how successful I'd be establishing any kind of connection to a child.”

  A good answer. “Well, if I take the meds, I can't get pregnant, unless I want to have a kid with all kinds of birth defects. My TLE means I'd have a hard time getting pregnant, even if I wanted to, since a messed-up temporal lobe means reduced fertility. But since I exhibit what the doctors call ‘hyposexual tendencies,’ it's not as if I'm much interested in sex, anyway.”

  Roxanne nodded, wearing a sympathetic look.

  An awkward silence stretched between them.

  “Another round?” Roxanne finally asked. “My shout.”

  Alice wasn't sure what she was shouting about, but it seemed a good idea to her.

  Roxanne knew what time it was without checking a clock. It was time for her to go.

  “I've got to meet my dad for dinner,” she explained, shouldering back into her leather jacket, which had lain across the back of the bench. “You sure you're going to be all right?”

  Alice nodded again, and for the twelfth time lied and said she'd be fine.

  “And you've got somewhere to stay, with these friends of yours?”

  Alice tried to remember the names she'd given her imaginary friends with the apartment not far from here and managed a fairly convincing smile.

  Roxanne gave her a close look, suspiciously, but didn't call her on it. “You have something to write on? And with?”

  Alice thought a moment, and then fished her partially full notebook from her backpack, along with one of her pens.

  Roxanne flipped open to the first blank page and wrote her name and number. Then she cursed herself under her breath, crossed out the number, and wrote another below it. “They just changed all the dialing codes in April, and I can never remember whether I'm before the change or after. This is June, so this is the 0207 number. Call me if you need any help. Okay? You promise?”

  Alice made a show of looking at the number. She nodded. “I promise.”

  Roxanne stood by the side of the table, chewing her lower lip. “I don't know. Maybe you should just come to dinner with me. I'm sure my dad would love to meet you.”

  Alice shook her head, still smiling. “No. Go on. I'll be fine.” She waved a hand at the notebook, merrily. “Look, I've got your number right here. I'll call you if I run into any trouble. I promise.”

  Roxanne continued chewing her lower lip, still looking unconvinced, but finally shrugged with defeat. “Okay, then.” She reached out and put a hand on Alice's shoulder “You take care of yourself, you understand?”

  Alice smiled, blinked, and nodded.

  When Roxanne was gone, Alice scowled at the number on the page, the purple ink looking black in the poorly lit booth, and shoved notebook and pen back into her backpack.

  As if she could face someone who knew her secrets. Not all of them, of course, but enough.

  The next little while passed in a blur.

  Here's what Alice later remembered:

  Alice was hungry, and so had an order of the fish and fries, though steered well clear of the frozen peas.

  She drank some more.

  She smoked all the cigarettes in the pack and started on the next.

  She fended off all manner of losers and creeps who tried to hit on her.

  There was only one other incident that stuck out in memory.
One of the creeps who tried to hit on her had adopted, at least, a novel approach. When he saw that Alice was reading Lewis Carroll—but she wasn't reading it, not really, just finding comfort in flipping through the pages, looking at the familiar images and well-worn clusters of words—he started talking about mathematics, and physics, and fractals. He said he was an amateur mathematician himself, and had read a book all about a mathematician named Kurt Gödel, and that the book had used characters and stories from Carroll's Alice stories to illustrate its points. He talked about Carroll's mathematical paradoxes, the word games she remembered from her father's book. And he talked about how Gödel had espoused all kinds of strange notions, including the idea that if the universe were revolving, then it would be possible to travel backwards and forward in time just by moving far enough through space.

  Hadn't Roxanne mentioned something about time travel, too? Alice couldn't remember.

  The amateur mathematician had moved on, getting bored of his unsuccessful attempts to dazzle Alice with his erudition and trying the tactics on a pair of clerical workers further along the bar.

  Then it was last call, and the bartender or publican or whatever was telling everyone that they didn't have to go home, but they couldn't stay there.

  Alice couldn't go home if she wanted to. She'd only bought a one-way ticket and couldn't afford to get back. She doubted there was room on her credit card to cover the cost and knew there wasn't enough in the bank. She was stuck.

  Alice slid off the stool. She'd moved from the booth after Roxanne left and hadn't stood up in hours. Now, it seemed like the universe was revolving after all, the way the walls spun around her.

  She lit a cigarette, to cover her disorientation, and then followed the burning coal at the cigarette's end like a lighthouse beacon, managing to get outside and onto the sidewalk without falling down. Barely.