Let's Call It a Doomsday

by Katie Henry

They’re probably having a fight and you brought it up, why would you bring that up? Shut up, Ellis. JUST SHUT UP.

  We keep walking. When we hit the steep part of Durant Avenue where the ground begins to climb, Hannah turns and asks: “Why are you always looking around like that?”

  I startle. “What?”

  “You’re never looking straight ahead,” Hannah says. “You’re always, like . . .” She searches for the word. “Scanning.”

  Oh. “Sorry,” I say. “It’s weird. Sorry.”

  “You don’t have to be sorry about it,” Hannah says gently. “But why do you do it?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  She shrugs. “I bet it matters to you.”

  We’re at the corner of Shattuck and Durant. The traffic light is on our side, and she steps into the crosswalk, but I grab the loose sleeve of her hoodie and stop her. She wants to know? Okay. I’ll tell her.

  “I’m thinking about where we are,” I say. “I’m thinking about what we’d do if, ten seconds from now, a nuclear bomb was dropped on San Francisco.”

  She steps back in surprise, then recovers. “An earthquake’s more likely.”

  “An earthquake is easy. We’re outside, far enough from a building, not under a utility wire.” I point up. “We’d move away from the streetlight, then duck, cover, and wait. Like they taught us in kindergarten. This city was built for an earthquake. Half of this city was built because of the 1906 earthquake.”

  Hannah shifts her gaze from the streetlight above us, back to me. “But a nuclear bomb?”

  “Totally unprepared. Fallout shelters went out of style with poodle skirts and—”

  “Jell-O?” Hannah suggests.

  Maybe in her family. “So I’m thinking about what we’d do if we saw the white flash. I’m thinking about how we’d drop to the ground, right here, and wait for the shock wave to pass. I’m thinking about how Pegasus Bookstore might have a basement for storage, and whether it’s concrete, because that’s where we’d want to go next, to wait out the radiation. Or maybe we’d want to go back to school, because there are showers there and I don’t think any conditioner, which is good.”

  “What? Wouldn’t you want shampoo?”

  “But not conditioner. It binds radioactive material to your hair.” I sigh. “I’m thinking about the science test I have tomorrow. I’m thinking about how my hair looks right now and whether my mom’s going to leave me alone or make some comment she doesn’t think is mean but is. I’m thinking about whether this paper cut I got is going to turn into MRSA and whether the turkey sandwich I ate at lunch is going to give me listeria.”

  “And the possibility of a nuclear attack,” Hannah says.

  “And that.”

  “All at once?”

  “All at once.”

  She feels sorry for you, which she shouldn’t. She probably doesn’t. She probably thinks you’re deranged. Either way, she’s ten seconds from fleeing the scene of the disaster that is you.

  Hannah doesn’t run. Hannah doesn’t even look fazed. She grins. “But what about zombies?”

  I’ve never understood the fascination with zombies. With so many real things to be terrified of, things that could and do happen every day, why spend a moment’s thought on something fake?

  “Aren’t zombies scared of fire?” I reason. “I have fire steel in my Altoids box.”

  “I think it’s Frankenstein who’s scared of—” She stops, cocks her head. “Wait, your what?”

  I swing my backpack around. I unzip a side compartment and pull out an Altoids mints box, still remarkably shiny and new-looking despite being tossed around in my bag every day. I hesitate for a moment, my fingers on the lid. If I show Hannah, she’ll only have more questions. But if I show Hannah, maybe she’ll answer some of my questions. I open the box.

  “Fire steel,” I say, pointing to a two-pronged compact tool on a string. “One part’s a rod, one part’s the striker. When you scrape them together, the friction creates and ignites metal shavings, and that creates sparks. You can make a fire in any weather, no matter how cold, no matter if it’s raining.”

  She pokes her finger in the tin, moving the contents around. “Band-Aids. Alcohol pads. Superglue. Is that—dental floss?”

  “It’s stronger than you think. You can use it as thread. Replace a shoelace. Make a clothesline or a pulley system or a trip line.”

  “You carry this around with you all the time?”

  “We call it ‘everyday carry.’”

  Her eyebrows go up. “‘We’?”

  “Prepared people,” I say. I try not to say “prepper” unless I have to. It instantly creates this image of some Unabomber type with dead eyes stockpiling peanut butter and AK-47s in his bunker. “All the emergency gear in the world won’t help if you aren’t close enough to it during a disaster. You never know where you’ll be when shit hits the fan.”

  “I didn’t think Mormons were supposed to swear.”

  “We’re not,” I say, returning the tiny survival kit to its pocket. “But ‘when stuff hits the fan’ just doesn’t have the same emotional resonance. You know?”

  She laughs, and we cross the street together. We’re nearly to Yogurt Park now, so if I’m going to ask the question I really want to know, I’d better ask it now.

  “How do you know the world is ending?”

  She takes a sharp breath in but doesn’t say anything.

  “Is that what happens when you meditate?” I press her. “Do you see it happen?”

  “It’s more complicated than that.”

  After all I told her about the things I worry about, the things I carry around, that’s all she’s going to give me? I fold my arms. “That’s it? It’s complicated?”

  “Up in the tree, I’m—I’m trying to see something. I’m supposed to be seeing something. But I can’t force it.”

  “Literally see it. In front of you.”

  She nods.

  “You mean a vision.”

  “Yes.”

  “Of the end of the world.”

  “Yes.”

  “Does it work?”

  “Only when I’m asleep.”

  Not visions, then. Not quite. “So they’re dreams.”

  She shakes her head. “I mean, I’m asleep, I’m always asleep, but these aren’t dreams.”

  “How do you know?” I can’t count the number of dreams I’ve been certain weren’t dreams. I’ve woken up panicked, ready to grab my go-bag under the bed, reaching for the flashlight on my nightstand because I’m certain the world has plunged into the Three Days of Darkness from the Book of Revelation.

  “Dreams are fuzzy,” Hannah says. “Dreams are unclear. But you can control your dreams, you know? You can switch locations. You can make things appear by imagining them. You can change your fate.” She closes her eyes. “When I go to sleep, I’m not dreaming. I’m remembering.”

  “But it hasn’t happened. You can’t remember what hasn’t happened.”

  “I know I can’t. But I am.” She twists her sweatshirt sleeve. “It feels exactly like a memory. Something that has already been and can’t be changed. Something . . . fixed. I don’t have each second of it, I’m not reliving it, I’m seeing the parts that mattered most. Will matter most.”

  “What do you see?”

  “The night where everything changes, forever,” she says. “The night the world ends.”

  My heart is pounding in my chest, my pulse is in my throat and my guts at the same time, my body is defying medical science just like Hannah is defying logic and reason and I want to know more. Why do I want to know more?

  “What does it look like?” I ask, again, certain I don’t want to know how life will fall to pieces but asking all the same. “When will it happen?”

  She looks away. “I can’t.”

  I stop walking. Why tell me this, if this couldn’t give me any real information? Why tell me the world is ending if she’s going to leave me powerless to stop it? My heartbe
at picks up, my lungs constrict. “You can’t?”

  Hannah grabs my arm and pulls me to the edge of the sidewalk, out of the way of other pedestrians.

  “I wish I could,” she says in a whisper. “I wish I could, but I can’t, because I don’t know, either.”

  “But you’ve seen it!”

  “It’s so vague. It’s so confusing. I need . . .” She trails off. Swallows. Focuses back on me. “I need someone to help me figure it out. Interpret it.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know how to do that.”

  Then it’s her turn to shake her head. “Not you, Ellis. There’s this—guy, who lives in Berkeley. Prophet Dan. He knows a ton about religion, and prophecies and things. He studied it. He helps people figure out this kind of stuff.”

  “Like a psychic?”

  “Like it’s a language, and he speaks it. But he’s really, really hard to track down.”

  “You don’t know where his house is?”

  “Well,” she admits, “he doesn’t exactly have one.”

  “He’s homeless.”

  She nods. It’s not shocking. This city has a huge homeless population. It’s warm year-round, we’ve got tons of public transport, and we’ve got history, too—people have been sleeping in Berkeley parks and panhandling on Berkeley streets since the hippies showed up in the sixties.

  “I need you to help me find him,” Hannah says. “I—I know that if we find him, he can tell us what we need to know.”

  “Why me?” I ask. “I don’t know anyone named Prophet Dan, I don’t know where he is, I don’t even know—”

  I cut myself off before I can tell the truth. I stop talking before I can say I don’t even know if I believe you.

  Hannah grabs my hand, and her fingers are cool and firm. “You can help me find him. I know you can, because when the end of the world comes, you’re going to be right next to me.”

  “How do you know that?” I whisper, but I don’t pull away.

  “Because I’ve seen it.”

  The way she says it, so casually but so definitively, turns blood to ice in my ventricles. I freeze. She notices.

  “Sorry,” she says. She drops my hand. “I didn’t mean to . . . Do you still want some frozen yogurt?”

  I nod. Sugar is always the answer.

  We walk the rest of the way to Yogurt Park in silence. I pile my cone with chocolate and mint yogurt, and enough toppings to decorate a large gingerbread house. It’s not until I’m accepting my precarious, lopsided order from the cashier that I notice. Not only is Hannah not behind me in line, she’s not in the store at all.

  I take a giant bite and race out of Yogurt Park, but she’s gone. I know she said she would only walk me this far, but I didn’t think she meant it quite like this.

  My brain feels frozen, and not from the yogurt. How could she dump something like that on me and then leave?

  I’m about to turn the corner onto Dwight Way when I see her. Across the street, in the shade of the trees and under an unlit street lamp, Hannah is standing in the middle of People’s Park.

  It’s not a typical park, because nothing in this city is typical. People’s Park was never intended to be a park at all. It was an empty lot until the Free Speech Movement, when students and hippies and runaways used it as a meeting ground and sort of communal property—a park for the people. When the National Guard tried to clear the park, the protesters fought back. Decades later, it’s still a park of the people—homeless people. Mostly men, mostly during the day. A sanctuary for people with nowhere else to go.

  And Hannah is standing in the middle of men and grocery carts and bundles and used needles. All by herself. Or—no, not all by herself. She’s with a tall, spindly man in a long coat, and they’re talking like they know each other. She asks a question. He nods. She pulls a small, white paper bag out of her backpack. She hands it to him, and they wave to each other as she walks through the uncut grass, back the way we came.

  Six

  I LIKE CHURCH, but I don’t like the minutes before church starts. I feel all this pressure to stand around and chat, like everyone else in the ward seems so comfortable doing. I’m sure it’s nice if you’re a new convert or a visitor or an ultra-mega extrovert like every single one of my family members. It’s a warm place. A welcoming place. But I want a quiet one.

  That’s why I’m standing in the corner just outside our ward meetinghouse trying to avoid the eye of the newest straight-out-of-Zion sister missionary. Sometimes I wonder if the missionaries from little towns in Utah and Idaho think we’re all a bunch of heathens, with our oddball congregation and our liberal-as-Mormons-get vibe. They’d never tell us that, of course. They’re sweet and sunny and positive no matter what, because that’s just how we do things. We fake it until we make it. We’re supposed to, anyway. So I spot the girls my age, shove my discomfort down somewhere near my pancreas, and walk over.

  Lia is the first to notice me. “Hi, Ellis,” she says, brushing some of her waist-length hair off her shoulder. It’s perfectly black and perfectly straight.

  Everything about Lia Lemalu is perfect, actually. She’s the president of our Young Women’s class. The top of her grade at her all-girls private school. And everyone knows not to perform after her at a talent show, because her expertly executed Samoan dance routine will put any boring piano solo to shame. She’s also easily the prettiest girl in our ward, and seems not to have to work for it at all, which is profoundly unfair. Or it would be, if she wasn’t so nice.

  “How was your week?” she asks me. “We missed you on Tuesday.”

  I was supposed to go to Mutual, a combined Young Women’s and Young Men’s church activity, but after my walk with Hannah, I couldn’t do it. Not only did I feel emotionally drained, but I hate ice-skating. So I faked a headache and watched myself into a reality-TV stupor.

  “I wasn’t feeling great,” I say. “Was it fun?”

  “Cameron Wright kept trying to help Lia on the ice, even though she’s a way better skater than him,” McKenna Cooper says conspiratorially, wrinkling her freckled nose. “He is so obvious.”

  “You should go out with him,” April Lee says to Lia. “You guys can come out with me and Tanner, it’ll be fun.”

  “Cameron’s okay, I guess,” McKenna says. “I’m not trying to be mean or anything, but Lia can do better.”

  “I like Cameron,” Lia says, and of course she does. She doesn’t understand meanness. It may as well be ancient Sumerian to her. “Not like that, though.” She touches my shoulder with a warm, delicate hand. “I’d rather have skated with you.”

  I take a feeling I won’t name and shove it down, all the way down, past my pancreas and into the quietest, safest corner of myself.

  The girls keep chattering about Tuesday and boys, and what we’ll do in class today. I stand there and smile, and feel like I’m drowning on land. I’ve known these girls since we were babies, eating Goldfish and fighting over stuffed animals. But sometimes, it feels like they’ve moved on without me, like everyone got a handbook in the mail explaining how to be a teenage girl, and I’m still a glue-stick-eating toddler. Not because they’re mean. They aren’t. But even though I’m standing right in the semicircle, sometimes it seems like they’ve stopped seeing me.

  You’re not allowed to feel sorry for yourself. As if you’d really want them to know you. As if you’d want them to know what kind of a person you really are. They’re better than you, you’re—

  I shudder. Lia frowns. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I say too quickly. “Hey—where’s Bethany? I saw her mom outside.”

  “She got her tonsils out on Thursday and I guess she still feels pretty bad,” Lia says.

  “She must be feeling really bad,” McKenna says. “When I got my wisdom teeth out I still made it the next Sunday.”

  Lia rolls her eyes. “McKenna.”

  “I’m not judging! I’m saying she must be feeling awful, or she’d come.”

  “Come on, sh
e was so out of it when we saw her on Friday,” April says, then looks at me, suddenly panicked. McKenna grimaces. Lia stares at the floor.

  They went without me. It’s okay they went without me. I get why they went without me, but there’s no way to explain that without embarrassing everyone involved.

  Lia glances up at me, mouth open, but I beat her to the punch. “That’s good, that’s good she got her tonsils out.”

  “Yeah,” April says, looking relieved. “They made her sick all the time.”

  “Also,” I say, “think of how much less bacteria she has in her mouth now.”

  “What?” McKenna asks.

  “The tonsils are a huge breeding ground for bacteria,” I say, and then the words start to tumble, because if I stop, they might be embarrassed again, they might feel sorry for me again. “The whole mouth is, not just the tonsils. There are actually more individual bacterium in your mouth than there are people on Earth.”

  “That’s . . .” Lia clears her throat. “That’s really interesting, Ellis.”

  Lia might be a perfect Disney princess in the flesh, but it doesn’t mean she can’t lie.

  “But you know,” I say, trying to save myself, “there are also more chickens on Earth than people. So.”

  “Cool,” April says. She nudges McKenna, who is struggling valiantly not to look weirded out. She is failing.

  “Wow,” McKenna says.

  “Yeah,” I say, letting the pit of awkwardness I’ve built envelop me.

  My mom, in an act of true and unintended motherly love, calls to me from the front doors.

  “See you in class,” I say to the girls, and head over to where Mom is standing with her back to me, next to Sister Jensen.

  “Hi, Sister Jensen,” I say. “How are you feeling?”

  “Tired,” she laughs, looking down at the tightly swaddled, impossibly tiny infant in Mom’s arms. “But he’s worth every three a.m. wake-up, aren’t you, buddy?”

  Mom cradles Sister Jensen’s new baby like her arms were designed for it. “What a sweet face. Look at those eyelashes.”

  I peer down at the baby, who looks shriveled and angry, to be honest. And you can’t even see his eyelashes. I don’t get it. I wish I did.