Has The World Ended Yet?

by Peter Darbyshire

  I went back inside. Hakim was unpacking the kit of Déjà Yu samples for the actors. I took some of the cream from his kit and put it on my arms and face. Hakim watched me but didn’t say anything.

  The director came over and asked me what the plan was for the shoot. “Just make them look normal,” I said.

  “What do you mean, normal?” he asked.

  “Make them look like a real family.”

  I went into the bathroom and studied myself in the mirror while the actors put on the Déjà Yu stuff. The cream made me look a little alive again, but I didn’t feel any different.

  The director decided to do a breakfast scene. I sat on the couch and watched them shoot it in the kitchen. The director told the little girl to ask her parents for a new phone. He told the woman to say she was getting plastic surgery done again. He added she should look like she was on antidepressants. He told the man to think about the money he was going to take from Third World countries when he went to work.

  “So it’s just like before I died,” the man said.

  “Exactly,” the director said. “Act it like it’s the morning of your death.”

  I closed my eyes while they shot the scene.

  When they were done, I told the crew to come back the next day. I told the actors we wouldn’t need them anymore.

  “No offence,” I said, “but the last thing dead people want to see in an ad is more dead people.”

  “I was thinking the same thing myself,” the man said.

  “Maybe plastic surgery is the way to go,” the woman said.

  The girl didn’t say anything, just kept brushing the hair of her doll.

  I pulled Phoenix into the bathroom and told her to come back the next day with living actors. She sighed but nodded. I went back to my apartment and tried to call home again. The voice mail was still full. I watched cop shows all night long. They were all the same: a man took his family hostage; the police surrounded the place and sent in the dead cops, maybe even some dead dogs. The cops got shot but it didn’t matter. Sometimes they brought everyone out alive. Sometimes they killed the hostage-taker and brought him out screaming that he was going to sue them for the bullet holes in his chest or head or both.

  In one show, the cops killed everyone in the house. It was a drug lab, and they shot the wrong bottle of something and the place blew up. The cops and the newly dead family all staggered out different doors, but then the man and his wife and son all found each other in the front yard and hugged, their skin still smoking from the fire.

  And that’s when I came up with the idea to get my family back.

  The Pitch

  THE NEXT day, Phoenix showed up with a real-life family. Not only were they alive, but they were actually a family. A man, a woman and their son. I could tell they were together by the way they sat on the couch, leaning against each other without saying anything while they waited for the cameraman and director to set up for the shot again. It was just like how I used to watch movies with Tyler and the kids.

  “Where did you find them?” I asked Phoenix.

  “They’re mine,” she said.

  “You don’t know how lucky you are,” I said, but she just shook her head.

  The director gave the same set of instructions to Phoenix’s family as he had to the dead actors, even the comment about taking money from Third World countries.

  “I thought communism was dead,” I said.

  “So are you,” the director said, “and yet here you are.”

  Hakim didn’t bother putting any of the Déjà Yu cream on the actors, seeing as they were already alive. I put some on my face and hands again while they tested the lights for the scene. I thought maybe it would work eventually if I just kept applying it. Hakim watched me but didn’t say anything.

  When they started shooting the scene, my skin began to burn. By the time they reached the part where the son asked for a new phone, I felt like I was on fire. I ran for the bathroom to wash off the cream, but the taps in the house didn’t work anymore, so I rubbed the cream away with a towel instead.

  When I looked in the mirror, my skin was pitted and eaten away where the cream had been. I went back out into the kitchen. Everyone stared at me. Hakim couldn’t conceal a small smile. Phoenix and her family all put their hands to their mouths, even the boy.

  I couldn’t stand them seeing me like that, so I left.

  I went home. My home where my family lived, not my apartment. I rang the doorbell and then knocked when no one answered. Then I kicked in the door. I waved at my neighbours, who watched from their windows, and went inside.

  I was going to kill my family. I was going to do it as gently as I could, so they wouldn’t hurt after. Maybe pillows over their faces or carbon monoxide in the garage. Then they would understand. Then they would be like me. Then everything would go back to the way it was.

  But no one was home.

  And no one would ever be home again.

  The place was empty, all the furniture gone, everything gone. Just some outlines in the carpet upstairs where the beds and dressers had been. Not even a note left to say where they’d went.

  My phone rang. It was the executive assistant for the partners. She said they wanted to know where I was.

  “I don’t know,” I told her.

  She said they’d heard about what happened. She said they wanted to know the status of the Déjà Yu account.

  I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror while she talked. There were still spots of cream on my forehead and neck. My skin was still burning, and strips of it were peeling off now, hanging from my face. The skin underneath looked raw but was grey instead of red.

  I understood everything then.

  I was dead.

  “Are you there?” the executive assistant asked me.

  “Yes,” I said and disconnected.

  I went back to Maximum Mini Golf in Evergreen Mall. I bought a pass and took a club and a red ball from the clerk, a teen girl who had a phone in her hand the whole time.

  “You were here the other week,” she said. “You’re that guy that died.”

  “I guess I am,” I said.

  “So what’s that like?” she asked.

  I didn’t answer her. Instead, I went to the first hole and played through to the seventh. I waited my turn behind the other players and I recorded my score on my little scorecard like everyone else. When I reached the seventh hole, I lay down on the grass and looked up at the monitor overhead. It showed a hamburger patty sizzling over open flames and then the flag.

  Two men had just finished the seventh hole and were recording their scores. When they saw me on the ground, they took a few steps toward me and then stopped.

  “Are you ... ?” one asked, while the other took out his phone.

  The hamburger was replaced by an attack helicopter blowing up a car in a desert somewhere. Men in suits and ties stood in the desert and cheered.

  I didn’t hurt anymore. My skin didn’t hurt from the cream, my chest didn’t hurt from the heart attack.

  I didn’t feel a thing.

  I am dead.

  The Punchline

  THE MONITOR shows the Your Ad Could Be Here tropical island again. I close my eyes and imagine the videos of Tyler and me and the kids at Disney Time once more.

  I imagine a motto superimposed on the videos of my family. The videos of my life.

  Déjà Yu Makes the Pain Go Away.

  I imagine the ad playing on the phone of the man standing over me now. Playing on my computer at work. Playing before movies. Playing on monitors in restaurants and stores in malls everywhere.

  I imagine the ad is so successful it gets me an actual office at the agency, with my name on the door. My name added to the partner list. My name on every business card and company email.

  I imagine I’m lying on the floor of my empty house.

  I imagine the rest of my life.

  The Infinite

  SHADES OF GRIEF

&nb
sp; The Diver had gone deeper into the Drift than anyone else, but even he barely knew what secrets it contained until he met the nurse.

  It happened when he went into the hospital to hide from the ghosts. It was at the start of his dive, when he’d only been in the Drift for a few minutes. He’d been walking down the sidewalk, making his way around the abandoned cars and not really paying close attention to the green haze of the Drift that shrouded the remains of the city. The ghosts weren’t usually found in the shallow parts of the Drift, so he was relaxed and thinking about Lucas. That was when the white forms grew out of the Drift at the end of the block and the Diver stepped over to a school bus for cover.

  Nobody knew who the ghosts were, although almost every diver had a theory. Government patrols trying to keep looters and mourners and others out of the Drift. Alien scouts on security patrols while the invasion force assembled. Maybe even organized bands of thieves or squatters trying to keep the divers away from their areas. The only ones who could say for certain were those who got too close to the ghosts. The Diver stumbled across their bodies every now and then while exploring the city.

  The Diver went in through the open door of the bus and climbed up inside. He stepped over forgotten backpacks on the floor and crouched behind a seat halfway down. A phone sat on the seat he hid behind. The Diver didn’t bother checking to see if it had any life left. No electronics worked in the Drift.

  He looked through the cracked windshield and watched the ghosts come. They were spread across the street in a loose line. Men and women in full-body white hazmat suits, with assault rifles in their hands. The buildings around them hung tilted over their heads, as if they had stopped in mid-fall, and the street was frozen in mid-waves. The ghosts had to walk up and down the swells of pavement. The Drift was constantly moving, ebbing back and forth around the crash site, and the city moved with it, like it was caught in an unseen current that swayed buildings and shifted the streets around like ripples in the sand of a lake.

  Or maybe it was more like a dream than an invisible current. The Diver had a feeling like he’d been trapped in a nightmare since the crash had happened. A nightmare that grew worse by the second as he watched the ghosts make their way around the vehicles that had been left in the street by those who had fled the city. The ghosts didn’t look in any of the cars or vans. It was like they’d checked them already and hadn’t found what they were looking for.

  The Diver waited until they reached a transport truck jackknifed across the road and they had to go around it. They were out of sight for a few seconds. The Diver went out the back door of the school bus. He may have been safe in the bus if they weren’t checking the vehicles, but he was worried the ghosts would be able to hear him breathing if they got any closer. He wore a scuba tank on his back and kept the regulator in his mouth the entire time he was in the Drift. Most divers did. That was how they’d earned the name divers. You could breathe normally most places in the Drift, but not everywhere. There were invisible pockets of strange air and deadly gases scattered throughout the Drift. The Diver had once found a man suffocated on the steps of a church even though he had an air tank on his back. His regulator was in his hand, just inches from his lips. Ever since then, the Diver always used his regulator from the moment he stepped past the barricades outside and walked into the shimmering, shifting light of the Drift.

  The Diver dropped down onto the street behind the bus. He had to step around more backpacks and a couple of mismatched shoes lying on the ground. He ran for the hospital in the other direction from the ghosts. He kept the school bus in between him and the ghosts and crouched down to hide among more ripples in the pavement. It was only when he had almost reached the hospital that he realized it was the one where Lucas, his son, had been born. The doors to the ER were frozen half-open or maybe half-shut, from when the hospital had lost power along with the rest of the city after the crash. The Diver slipped through the doors as the ghosts came around the sides of the school bus.

  The waiting room was dark but enough light came in from outside that he could see all the chairs were unoccupied except for a few jackets. The Drift had a bluish tinge in here. An empty baby stroller was jammed in the doorway to the treatment wards, stopping the door from closing. The Diver stepped around it, into the hallway beyond, and pulled the stroller after him. The door slowly swung shut, locking with a metallic click that was louder than he liked.

  The Diver looked into the nurses’ station to his right, but he didn’t see anywhere to hide. There was only a window of glass between the station and the waiting room. He went deeper into the wards. It was almost pitch-black in the triage area, so he had to go slow. Even so, he bumped into a stretcher pushed up against the side of the hall. A blanket covered the form of a person on it. He lifted the blanket in case it was Lucas. He checked all the bodies he found to see if they were Lucas. His son had never come out of the Drift after the crash, so he still had to be in it. The body was an old woman, though, who stared sightlessly up at the dead lights overhead. She was as perfectly preserved as all the other bodies in the Drift. Another mystery that maybe someone would figure out someday. The Diver pulled the blanket back up over her face and went deeper into the ER.

  He stopped in front of another nurses’ station and looked around. He was surrounded by empty hospital beds and machines whose purposes he didn’t understand. He was in a trauma ward. There were other hallways leading away, deeper into the hospital, but he didn’t know where to go and he didn’t want to become lost. A shadow moved under the door he had closed, catching his eye, and he looked back the way he had come. The door moved a little in its frame, as if someone was trying to pull it open. The shadow under the door shifted from side to side, then faded away. The Diver didn’t hear a thing other than his breathing, but he stayed there for a moment longer, not moving.

  “Are you here for the children?”

  The woman’s voice came from behind him, and the Diver spun around, reaching for the knife strapped to his leg. It wouldn’t do any good if one of the ghosts were behind him, but he had to do something.

  The woman wore nursing scrubs instead of a hazmat suit. She stood in the nurses’ station and held a temperature monitor instead of an assault rifle. She looked at the knife, then back at him. She didn’t say anything else, so the Diver took the regulator out of his mouth so he could speak.

  “What children?” he asked.

  “The babies,” the nurse said. “I’ve been looking after them since whatever it was happened. I thought they would send an emergency response team.” She looked past him, at the door. “Is it just you?”

  “Maybe I can help,” the Diver said.

  The nurse took him down one of the other halls and up a flight of stairs to the next level of the hospital. The stairwell was so dark he couldn’t see anything and had to hang on to the handrail and feel each step with his feet.

  “What’s your name?” the nurse asked him out of the darkness as they climbed, and he had to think how to answer that. No one had asked him that question for some time. He’d gone by many names in the past – Michael, Mr. Andre, CEO Andre, Dad. But none of those names fit him anymore. Now everyone just called him the same thing.

  “The Diver,” he said.

  “The Diver,” she said. “That’s a curious name.”

  “This is a curious place,” he said.

  “You don’t have any other names?” she asked. He knew she was doing her job, trying to gauge his state of mind and see if he was someone who was really here to help or if he needed to be checked into the hospital himself.

  “Names don’t really matter anymore,” he said.

  He walked into a wall before he realized they’d reached a landing. He turned in the darkness and followed the nurse’s voice up more steps that climbed in the opposite direction. She could have led him to walk right off the steps and into the void and he wouldn’t have known until it was too late.

  “It must be bad, whatever it is that’s happening,
” the nurse said. “I haven’t seen anyone since the hospital was evacuated.”

  “Nobody knows what it is,” the Diver said. “I mean, it was an alien crash. But we don’t know what kind of alien.”

  “An alien?” the nurse asked. “Like refugees?”

  “An alien spaceship,” the Diver said. “It fell into downtown.” Even as he said it, he realized how his words failed to capture what had really happened. There were no words that could capture it. “We’re still not sure if anyone was on board or not, but it did all this. It made the Drift.”

  They reached the next floor and left the stairwell. There was enough light coming in the windows of the rooms that the Diver could see again. The nurse turned to look at him, and he couldn’t help but notice the wisps of green drifting around her head.

  “What’s the Drift?” she asked.

  The Diver looked around. He didn’t see any signs of life, although there were some crayon drawings by children on one wall. He couldn’t hear anything other than the sound of his own breathing.

  “Where are the babies?” he asked.

  The nurse took him down the hall and into a room with a half-dozen incubators. There were a half-dozen babies in the room, too, but they weren’t in the incubators. Instead, they drifted in the air like stray balloons. They wore diapers and onesies, and one of them trailed a blanket off one foot. They were shrouded in colours the Diver had never seen before, each one a different shade. There was no end to the colours in the Drift. The babies didn’t make a sound and the Diver knew they were all dead. He’d seen stranger things in the Drift but not many.

  “My son was born in this hospital,” the Diver said, watching the dead babies drift around. “He spent some time in this room, in one of these incubators.” He remembered the sleepless nights spent sitting in a chair, holding him. Now he was sleepless for other reasons.

  “Maybe I was the nurse that looked after him,” the nurse said.

  “It was a long time ago,” the Diver said, shaking his head.

  “I can’t even remember how long I’ve been here.”