This Way to the End Times

by Robert Silverberg

  (c)in our nightmares, slowly shaping us to our true forms.

  (d)hiding under your bed.

  (e)both c and d.

  6.WHAT COULD YOU HAVE done to prevent all this from happening?

  (a)Become a better cook, as Donald’s mother always hinted with her gifts of Julia Child and Betty Crocker collections, the elaborate kitchen gadgets whose names, much less their functions, remained shrouded in mystery. Though you never really learned to love food, you did learn to cook, to boil and bubble the bacteria out of a can of condensed soup. Incidentally, your mother-in-law would be proud.

  (b)Become a better liar. It is true that the pink-and-emerald tie he wanted to buy at the church flea-market was the ugliest thing you had ever seen, uglier even than the monsters from the sea, uglier even than Sultan. But it would not have hurt you to bit your lip and nod your head and say Yes, for seventy-five cents it certainly is a steal.

  (c)Prayed more, and harder, and to the right people. Saint Helena is the patron of dysfunctional marriage. Saint Neot is the patron of fish.

  (d)All of the above.

  (e)None of the above.

  7.THE WORST PART WAS . . .

  (a)when the first shambling thing ate the pink-suited reporter, and the camera man didn’t turn away, and you sat there petrified in the marriage counselor’s office, watching the flesh blossom and drip over the creature’s scaly lips. Jesus Christ, you said, reaching for Donald’s hand. He was gripping a magazine cover too tightly to notice.

  (b)when he flung the little velvet box at you over the dinner table, and you looked at him and you asked What is this for? and he said I knew you’d forget.

  (c)when you checked into the motel, and you couldn’t stop licking your bottom lip even though you knew your saliva was keeping the split open, and the man at the front desk was clearly worried for you but he just as clearly didn’t know what to say, so he handed you a pair of key-cards and told you, earnestly, to have a good night.

  (d)later that night, when you opened the bottle of pinot grigio that the liquor clerk had recommended and drank it all in one long throat-tearing gulp. Your cell phone started to sing from its compartment in your purse, the sweet black-andwhite movie love song Donald had tried to serenade you with, once, in the back seat of your car. Even drunk, your thumb found the phone’s power button and turned it off.

  (e)this moment, now, as you look back on all of it, and can’t think of anything that you would do the same.

  8.WHEN YOU CAME HOME from the motel the next morning, a hangover ringing in your ears, you found his packed suitcase sitting on the coffee table in the living room. You stumbled into the bathroom to vomit, and when you came out again, the suitcase was gone. That was, in a way, the last you ever saw of Donald. What happened to him?

  (a)Shortly after he left, he was eaten by one of the shambling creatures.

  (b)He met another woman on a bus to Chicago. She was taller than you are, and skinnier, and she smelled like cinnamon and vanilla.

  (c)He joined that cult down in Louisiana, the one with the blood sacrifices and the idol built of concrete blocks, and he was one of the men who walked into the ocean on June 21, and became a pillar of salt.

  (d)He committed suicide with a shaving razor in the bathtub of the same motel room where you hid from him, that last night. He never forgave himself for hitting you, not even when he remembered that you’d hit him first.

  (e)He slipped, somehow, into an alternate dimension, where the laws of physics and geometry are subtly different, and there is a house just like yours, but the woman inside is a better liar.

  9.HIS LAST THOUGHTS WERE . . .

  (a)incomprehensible with fear, the nauseating smell of his own blood.

  (b)of you.

  (c)revelations about the falseness of Euclidian geometry, the sheer wrongness of all human conceptions of time and history and causal relationships, that could never have been comprehended by another human being, even if Donald had lived, and admitted to himself what he had understood.

  (d)of Christine Kaminski, the slender brunette who took him to junior prom, and who forged a deeper connection with him on that one night in the rented Marriott ballroom than you did in seven years of marriage. She wore pale blue, his favorite color, and only kissed him once, during the last dance of the night. If he had married her, he would have been happy.

  (e)of his little brother, who died at birth, whom he never told you about. He intended to, but there was never a moment in that first year of marriage when you weren’t too busy with something else—arranging furniture, organizing closets and cupboards, filing for loans, writing thank-you cards. Afterward, it seemed too late to bring it up. The closest he ever came was during that Christmas dinner at your sister’s, when you teased him about being an only child.

  10.LOOKING BACK ON ALL of it, you still don’t understand . . .

  (a)why all the equipment at work broke down that day. You even stayed an extra fifteen minutes to play with the reset buttons and a bent paperclip; it made you late to the marriage counselor’s office, which in some ways didn’t matter, because her previous appointment was running over and you had to wait anyway, but in some ways it did matter, because Donald was expecting you to arrive on time. It didn’t help in any case. Everything was still broken the next day.

  (b)why the water in the motel bathroom turned to blood. Afterward, you asked around town, and learned that no one else had discovered blood or any other bodily fluids running through their pipes. But there was a lot going on at the time; maybe they simply hadn’t noticed.

  (c)why you told Donald about the Little Mermaid picture book as you collapsed drunken and giggling into your own back seat. Your throat was hoarse from swearing at your baseball team as they permitted run after humiliating run, and you had spilled beer on the sleeve of your sweatshirt. You tried to wiggle out of it and it got stuck around your hips, and you said, This reminds me of a story . . .

  (d)what attracted you to Donald in the first place. Was it his eyes, his soft lips, the way he ran his fingers through his hair when he was nervous, the way all his undershirts smelled like chalkboards, the way he tightened his tie with both hands before saying something important?

  (e)all of the above.

  11.AFTER THAT INCIDENT IN Portland, when the shambling thing almost caught up to you by clinging to the bottom of your bus, your favorite shirt became stained with . . .

  (a)seawater.

  (b)blood (yours).

  (c)ichor (its).

  (d)semen.

  (e)merlot.

  12.YOUR SISTER, WHO KNOWS these things, told you that the best technique for fighting the shambling monsters is . . .

  (a)frying them with a blow torch.

  (b)dowsing them with holy water.

  (c)dragging them behind a truck.

  (d)flinging them into a nuclear reactor.

  (e)running until they tire of chasing you.

  13.YOU MOST REGRET . . .

  (a)missing that shot at the fast food joint in Vancouver, when the little boy died. It was not your fault; no one had ever taught you to fire a revolver, much less where to aim on a bulbous heavy-lidded nightmare as it slivered over a drive-thru window. But it was your fault, because the creature had followed you, and if you hadn’t stopped to eat at that particular restaurant and that particular time, it would never have killed that child.

  (b)not letting him buy that hideous watermelon tie at the church flea-market, when you knew it reminded him of his grandfather, and made him smile.

  (c)wearing your favorite shirt on the bus in Portland.

  (d)shaking Donald as you got into the car in the marriage counselor’s parking lot, then slapping him across the face. No matter how terrified you were, no matter how much you thought he’d earned it, you should have known better than to hit him. You did know better. You knew it reminded him of his father.

  (e)turning into your pillow that last time he tried to kiss you goodnight, so that his lips caught you on the ch
eek.

  14.IN YOUR DREAMS, THE shambling monsters appear at your bedside, and their voices sound like . . .

  (a)radio static, interspersed with love songs from old black-and-white movies.

  (b)the screaming of the pink-suited reporter as those yellow teeth crunched through her clavicle.

  (c)the marriage counselor, with her gentle eastern accent, the sharp tick of her pen against her clipboard punctuating each clause.

  (d)footsteps over broken glass.

  (e)the whisper of a fish’s breath.

  15.NOW, WHEN YOU LOOK out at the sea, you feel . . .

  (a)the smallness of humanity in the face of a universe that is older and vaster and more full of life than any of us can imagine, much less understand.

  (b)a sudden urge to jump.

  (c)the awful terror of living.

  (d)his absence; there is only the sea-spray on your face, salty, cold, and needle-fine.

  (e)all of the above.

  PART II—SHORT ANSWER

  16.IS THIS REALLY THE end of the world? Defend your answer with evidence from the following texts: the Apocalypse of John, the Collected Works of H. P. Lovecraft, The Shepherd of Hermas, Ibn Al-Nafis’ Theologus Autodidactus, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, the fortieth through fifty-eighth stanzas of Völuspá, and last week’s edition of The New York Times.

  17.JUST WHAT IS IT about filling in bubbles on a multiple choice test that makes you believe that every terrible decision you’ve made might, with luck, with sheer cussedness, have turned out right in the end?

  PART III—EXTRA CREDIT

  What color were Donald’s eyes?

  PART IV—ANSWER KEY

  1.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (e) all of the above. You were nine years old, and had wanted to see the ocean ever since the day your third-grade teacher read you a picture book with the real story of the Little Mermaid—Anderson, not Disney. You wore a pink-and-yellow bathing suit that you had outgrown the previous summer and carried a purple plastic pail, not because you had any intention of building sandcastles but because the children in the picture book (who appeared in the seashore-margins on every page, though they had nothing to do with the mermaid or her prince or her beautiful raven-haired rival) had carried pails and shovels, made of tin, in which they collected seashells. At that moment, standing at the edge of the pier while your parents argued through a transaction at the overpriced snack-shack behind you, you registered nothing but the caress of the waves on your face. Only later, with reflection, did you feel the smallness, the terror, the urge to jump.

  On your honeymoon, Donald tried to recreate this experience (which you had shared with him in the backseat of your car, after a drunken night at the worst baseball game your team had ever played). He took you to the same pier, bought you a paper cone of roasted peanuts at the same overpriced snack-shack, but the weather was different, clean and peaceful, and your red two-piece fit your body like a second skin.

  2.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (e) when you asked him to pass you a butter knife, and he must have heard you, but he was marking something in the margin of his book and you had to ask a second time. It cost sixty-seven dollars to fix the drawer slides, sixty-seven dollars you didn’t have but managed to find somewhere, probably in the old plastic KFC cup you kept by the telephone to collect money for date nights, back when you went on dates. In days to come, that cup would hold many things: pinot grigio, as you drank yourself into a stupor; vomit; distilled water for an impromptu eye wash; strips of bloody gauze.

  3.THE CORRECT ANSWER, I’M sorry to say, is (d) Godzilla. You had never done your best or most original thinking under stress. Donald would not have hesitated to point this out, but then again, when Donald saw the shambling things on the television his first thought was of the illustration of the sea-witch, which he had seen only days before as he wandered through the mall, looking for your anniversary present. He found the old picture book in a store that specialized in plush animals and greeting cards, and he thought of buying it for you, but he remembered that day on the pier by the ocean, and bought you a pearl bracelet instead.

  There’s an old superstition that a bride shouldn’t wear pearls on her wedding day, because for each pearl she wears, her husband will give her a reason to cry.

  4.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (b) in an alternate dimension. At least, that was your theory; the true answer is somewhat closer to (d) on this planet, in the natural course of evolution. You, however, are not expected to know this, or to retain your sanity if you had glimpsed some hint of it by mistake.

  What happened between you and Donald was also by and large the result of a natural chain of events, an estrangement, a distancing of the sort that shambles into so many relationships. The truth—which you are also not expected to know—is that you never had very much in common to begin with. Your date nights stopped because you could no longer agree on a restaurant, or a movie, or a group of friends to visit. Breaking the cutlery drawer was the natural result of too many nights listening to you root for a baseball team he had never cared for in the first place.

  5.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (b) taking on the appearance of every-day people. The marriage counselor, who spoke to you briefly on the office phone when you called her during your lunch break, said that Donald thought you had trust issues. It’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you, you said. Who is out to get you? asked the marriage counselor.

  If your memory had a better sense of irony, it would have recalled that conversation two months later as you darted from shadow to shadow down your near-deserted block, clutching a gun you didn’t know how to use, listening for the gelatinous thump of the creature’s footsteps behind you. You’d learned by then that they could distinguish humans through scent, and that they gave off distinctive odors of their own; this particular creature, a female who smelled as chalky as a jar of antacid, had been trailing you for weeks. In the end, you only lost her when you packed the truck and moved up to Oregon for a few months, to stay with your sister, who’d compulsively saved canned goods and ammunition in her basement. Even later, after you worked up the courage to return home, when you cracked open the front door and slipped into the foyer, your nostrils were assaulted by the stench of mold and chalk.

  6.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (e) none of the above. Of course, you could have tried cooking, or lying, or praying; it would not have hurt to try. But you never did.

  7.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (a) when the first shambling thing ate the pink-suited reporter, and the camera man didn’t turn away. You will see that scene in your nightmares for the rest of your life. You will never again look at that particular shade of pink without your stomach churning, your tongue fumbling compulsively past your lips, your ribs curling inward, your vision spotting like blood on bathroom tissue. In all of this, the reporter’s death is the only thing about which you have never spoken to anyone. Sometimes, you think it is the real reason you drink.

  8.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (b) he met another woman on a bus to Chicago. Her name was Nora and she used to work in a bakery; she was not a very good baker, but her hand was perfectly steady as she drew looping cursive letters in pink gel across the smooth buttercream canvases. The last cake she decorated was for a little girl named Rebecca, who ate the frosting in huge gobs with her fingers, but had wanted the lettering to be blue. Nora didn’t care that Donald was married, and he didn’t care that her last relationship had been with a woman who died of suspiciously severe food poisoning. They settled for a while in an apartment over an abandoned antique store. Then, after a year and a half, Nora joined the Louisiana blood-cult, and Donald never heard from her again.

  Though he did eventually commit suicide with a shaving razor, it is too much of a coincidence to think that he did it in that same motel room where you’d sobbed over the sink all those months before.

  9.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (b) of you. For better or for worse, you were the love of his life. In the early whirlwind years, he imagined that some corner of his heart had always known and loved you, even a
t junior prom, when he was kissing Christine Kaminski and smelling the soapy-bubblegum scent of her shampoo. Later, when Nora disappeared, he began to write letters to you. He never sent them, which is just as well. You would never have opened them, and they would not have told you anything you didn’t already know.

  (Here is what the last one said:

  Baby girl, I’ve forgotten the color of your eyes.

  Sorry for everything. Don.)

  10.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (e) all of the above. It’s ironic, when you consider that an Apocalypse is meant to be a revelation, an unveiling, that at the end of everything so much remains veiled. No one knows why, in offices and stores around the country, computers and cash registers went down in droves that Tuesday afternoon. You were the only one to see the blood come out of the faucet, and you wouldn’t even swear that it was blood. It might have been zinfandel. You will never learn why you always need to be drunk before you can share really important information with the people you love. Even this answer key won’t give you all the answers.

  (What first attracted you to Donald was the way he mispronounced your last name.)

  11.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS (b) blood (yours). You were sitting at the window above the left rear wheel, your head jolting with each pothole against the padded headrest, when you caught the stench of chalk coming through the air conditioning. You panicked and fought your way to the front door, and the driver misinterpreted your flailing and laid you low with a punch between the eyes. Everyone was jumpy, those first few months. You woke a half-hour later to learn that the bus had crossed six bridges while you were out, and the smell of chalk was gone, replaced by the sour-metallic taste in the back of your nostrils and gummed in your lace neckline.

  12.THE CORRECT ANSWER IS, of course, (d) flinging them into a nuclear reactor, but you had to make do with (e) running until they tired of chasing you.