Let's Call It a Doomsday

by Katie Henry

  Tal stares at me. “Who told you that?”

  “Your sister told my sister. About summer camp.”

  Tal sighs. “Caroline,” he says, “has an un-nuanced view of human sexuality.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m not gay,” Tal says. “I’m bisexual.” When I wait too long to respond, he continues. “It was a boy, at camp. But it could have been a girl.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Okay.” I drop my voice again. “Bisexual.”

  “You don’t have to whisper,” he says.

  “We’re in a library.”

  “That’s not why you’re whispering.”

  “Can I help you two find anything?” says a crisp voice behind me. I turn around to see one of the librarians, a youngish woman who always wears vintage dresses, looking at me from behind her cat-eye glasses.

  “Yeah,” Tal says, “we’re looking for a—”

  “Person,” I blurt out before he can say “book.” I feel him swivel to stare at me. “We’re looking for a man we heard might be here.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Tal mutters under his breath.

  “Nope, not him.” I wave Tal off without looking over. “A different itinerant preacher.”

  The librarian shifts the stack of books in her arms. “All right.”

  “He’s a homeless man, five ten, kind of tan,” I say, trying to remember every bit of Hannah’s description. “Brown beard, brown eyes, red-and-black jacket—”

  “I’m sorry,” she says, “there’s lots of guys like that. But if he’s a regular, you might ask Lydia.”

  “Lydia?”

  “Yeah, she’s been coming here for decades, she’s sort of like an ambassador,” the librarian says. “Very friendly. She usually reads on this floor. You’ll know her by the hat. Big and straw.”

  “Thank you,” I say as she goes, then look around. There are college students juggling textbooks, older Berkeley hippies in hemp perusing the Metaphysics section, and a group of middle school boys pelting each other with paperbacks, but no women in straw hats. I choose the most central reading table and sit down. Tal sits next to me. It’s not a great tactical move—if he sat across from me, we’d be able to see the whole room, between us.

  “Quick question,” he says, faux-casual. “Do you have any idea what the hell you’re doing?”

  I fold my hands. “I’m in the library, waiting for Lydia—”

  “You’re in way over your head.”

  “—waiting for Lydia,” I push through, “to see if she knows how to find—”

  “Yeah, I know who,” he interrupts. “I’ve been friends with Hannah a lot longer than you have.”

  She said I couldn’t tell the boys who we were looking for. Do they already know?

  “This isn’t helping her,” Tal says, shaking his head. “I know it seems like it would, but it doesn’t. We figured that out a long time ago.”

  “I believe her,” I tell him. “Maybe you don’t think it’s real, but I do.”

  His eyebrows knit together. “Of course it’s real. No one thinks it isn’t.”

  Huh. Maybe he only thinks he knows what Hannah’s doing, because there are many, many people who don’t think the apocalypse is real. And maybe I’ve already said too much.

  “Anyway,” I say, quickly steering back to our earlier conversation, “it’s probably easier, being bisexual, right? For you. Than if you were gay.”

  “What,” Tal says, long-suffering, “could you possibly mean by that?”

  I cringe. “I don’t know. Sorry. Never mind.”

  “Oh, no, no,” he says. “Come on, lay it all out.”

  “You kissed a boy, at camp, right?”

  He nods.

  “And your—some people were upset about that, right?”

  He nods.

  “And you just said it was a boy, but it could have been a girl. Right?”

  “All correct,” he says.

  “If it had been a girl, no one would have been upset. So isn’t that—easier?”

  He runs his hand over the table. “I think it’s all hard. Being not-straight. But the ways it’s hard can be different. When you’re bi—if you’re a dude, at least—people assume it’s just a stop on the road to gay. They think you’re pretending to like girls. Like their walnut brains can’t process it’s not an either/or situation, for you.”

  “Well—have you ever kissed a girl?” I ask. He shakes his head. “Then how do you know you like them?”

  “Have you kissed anyone?” he asks. I shake my head. “But you know who you’re attracted to, right?”

  Yes. No. “That’s a weird question,” I say, too fast, too defensive.

  He holds up his hands. “All I meant was, you don’t have to kiss someone to know you like them. I’ve had crushes on boys and girls, both, since . . . forever, I guess.”

  A crush doesn’t mean anything. A crush doesn’t have to mean anything. “Crushes are different. It’s not the same thing as being . . .” I falter for a second. “It’s not the same as being something.”

  You’re saying all the wrong things. You wouldn’t know the right thing to say if it punched your vocal cords out. Which would be a net gain for the world.

  Tal frowns, but not like he’s offended or mad. Like I’m something written in code, something cryptic. Cryptic, from the Greek kryptos, meaning hidden.

  Maybe I want to stay hidden.

  Before he can ask me anything else, I steer the conversation back to him.

  “So is that why you left?” I ask again. “Because you’re bisexual?” He didn’t have to, necessarily. Gay Mormons exist; I know some. And sometimes I wonder, How do you stay? How do you stay when the whole system was designed without you in mind? When there are so many things you have to give up? When it’s cruel and unfair and wrong that you should even have to? But I know how; I know why. They stay because they believe this church is true. I wonder if sometimes they wish they didn’t.

  “That was part of why I left,” Tal says. “Not all of it.”

  “You could marry a girl,” I point out. “If you married a girl, you could get sealed in the temple like everybody else.”

  He shakes his head. “I could marry a girl. But never in the temple.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want to get married in a place that tells me some of my feelings are part of a beautiful Celestial plan and some of my feelings are—sinful, at worst. Something to chastely suffer through, at best. All of me matters. Not just the part that could marry a girl, someday.”

  After a moment of silence, I ask, “So then why else did you leave?”

  “Why do you want to know so badly?”

  “I’m just making conversation.”

  “That’s kind of a hard-core conversation for someone you barely know.”

  You’re making him uncomfortable. You make everyone uncomfortable.

  “Okay, whatever, sorry.”

  “You don’t have to be sorry. But if you’re only asking because you think I made a mistake, that you can convince me I made a mistake, please don’t. I’m good. I’m happy.”

  Wickedness never was happiness, that’s in the scriptures themselves. I believe Tal, though, when he says he’s happy. Maybe the passage is backward. Can real happiness, the kind that doesn’t hurt a soul, ever be wickedness? I don’t know. I don’t think so.

  “Was it because of something you read? On the internet?” I ask, because I still want to know. He rolls his eyes. “I’m not trying to be mean, but that stuff can be biased. That stuff can be really wrong.”

  “What should I have read?”

  “There’s the church website.”

  “Because that’s sure not biased.”

  “They wouldn’t lie.”

  “Just because something makes you uncomfortable doesn’t mean it’s a lie.”

  That’s a pretty good line. I don’t love how it’s being used against me, but it’s still good. I’ll have to remember that, for when Hannah
and I tell the world about its imminent destruction.

  “Look,” he says. “I didn’t leave because I wanted to sin. And it wasn’t because someone offended me. It wasn’t because of what I read online, though I did read a lot of weird stuff. I just didn’t believe. I wanted to, I tried to, I doubted my doubts and shut myself down. But you can’t force belief. And when I realized I liked other boys, when I realized I’d rather peel off my skin than go on a mission, I decided I had a choice. I could live my life for the church, or I could live my life for myself.” He shrugs. “I chose myself.”

  I wonder what’s that like. I wonder what it’s like to be that proud of who you are. To choose yourself, rather than change yourself.

  “Are you guys—” There’s suddenly an itch in my throat, and I cough. “Are you still together?”

  Tal looks confused. “Who?”

  “The boy you met at camp.”

  “No, it was just for the summer. He lives in Connecticut. And plays polo. The kind with horses.”

  “What does that matter?”

  “He and I were not meant for eternity.” He grins at me, lopsided. “I prefer my partners a little more salt-of-the-earth. And a little more local.”

  Before I can say anything, or do anything, or even breathe, I spot a giant straw sun hat, and a tiny woman underneath. She’s carrying an improbably large stack of books, which she gently sets down on a table a few feet from us, then eases herself into a chair.

  Before Tal can see her, I push myself back from the table. And before he can say anything to stop me, I walk in her direction, trying to ignore the lump in my throat.

  You’re going to mess it up.

  From behind me, I think I hear Tal get up too.

  Hannah’s counting on you and you’re going to mess everything up.

  I approach her slowly, with light steps, like I’m stalking a skittish woodland creature.

  You’re going to ruin it, you’re going to say the wrong things to her just like you said the wrong things to Tal—

  The woman looks up. From somewhere outside my stupid body, I hear myself say, “Excuse me, I’m so sorry to bother you, but—are you Lydia?”

  She blinks at me, and takes off her hat. She’s not quite as old as I thought—maybe midseventies. Her face is round and wrinkled, and her mouth crescents into a warm smile. “Yes, dear. I’m Lydia.”

  “One of the librarians said you might be able to help me?” It’s not a question, but my voice goes up at the end anyway. I cringe. Mom’s always telling me not to do that. It makes you sound unsure.

  Lydia doesn’t appear to care. “Please, sit down.”

  I take the seat across the table from her. Without being invited, Tal sits to my left.

  “My name’s Ellis,” I say. “This is my— This is Tal.” He waves. Awkwardly.

  “What can I do for you, Ellis?”

  “We’re looking for a man, and the librarian said you might know him. Prophet Dan.” Tal takes a sharp breath in, so I keep going before he can interrupt. “He’s got a brown beard, a red-and-black coat, likes books about mystics—?”

  “Yes,” she says, and sighs. “Danny. He’s so young. It’s so sad, when they’re so young.”

  I always assumed he was older, one of those neighborhood fixtures. How else would Hannah have known about him?

  “You wouldn’t know it, though, from the way he talks,” she says. “So smart. Mind like a steel trap. Now, I’m not much for all that religion stuff, but he could talk to me about botany, about birds. He never forgot a thing.”

  “Has he been by today?” I ask. “When do you usually see him here?”

  “I haven’t seen him in weeks,” Lydia says, and my heart drops. “He didn’t think the library was safe anymore.”

  The library is the safest place I can think of. I think it even qualifies as a fallout shelter. “Why wouldn’t it be safe?” I ask.

  “It didn’t seem safe. To him.” She leans across the table and pats my hand. “You can’t make a person believe in what they don’t.”

  Tal shifts, and I bet he’s looking at me. You can’t force belief. That’s what he said, too. But I don’t know—this seems different.

  “Do you have any idea where else he might hang out?” I ask. “I’d just really love to talk to him.”

  “I’d suggest People’s Park, maybe Willard, maybe the encampment by City Hall, but I’m figuring you’ve looked there.”

  Is that why Hannah was in People’s Park? Was she looking for him then, too? Lydia misinterprets my silence as agreement.

  “Well,” she says. “When you find him, tell him I miss our talks. And those muffins he used to bring me—carrot zucchini, who knew you could make muffins out of that? But mostly our talks.” Lydia looks up at the ceiling for a moment, and blinks hard. “He’s a special kid. He deserves better.”

  I thank her for her help, and she gives me the number of the senior center where she’s living. Tal looks like he’d like to ask several more questions—of me, not Lydia—but I take a page from Hannah’s book and set a brisk pace for the front doors. By the time he’s caught up, I’m already outside, where Hannah is waiting, her hands twisted in her sweatshirt sleeves again.

  “Did you . . . find the book?” she asks.

  I shake my head, deciding to tell her about Lydia tomorrow, or whenever Tal isn’t just a couple of inches to my left.

  “I thought we all agreed to stop looking for that book,” Tal says to Hannah under his breath.

  Hannah folds arms. “We definitely didn’t.”

  “Anyone want to go to La Burrita?” Sam asks, hopping up from the bench. “I’m starving.”

  “When are you not starving?” Theo asks.

  “Whenever I’ve just finished eating at La Burrita.”

  “I’m in,” Tal says, with one final long look at Hannah.

  “I have to get to therapy,” Hannah says, pointing her thumb in the direction of the Martha’s office.

  I check my watch. “Yeah, I should go too.”

  Everyone’s going the same direction but me, so I say goodbye to them there. But at the last second, I turn around and catch Tal by the arm. He looks surprised, but stops. The rest of them keep walking.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell him, “if I was weird, back there. If I said the wrong things. You didn’t have to tell me those things, and you did, and I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable.”

  “No worries. We’re cool.”

  “Are you sure?” I ask.

  “Yeah. Look, I’m not thrilled about what you’re helping Hannah do, but your heart’s clearly in the right place. So I’m figuring your heart’s in the right place just . . . in general.”

  Something warm and unnameable surges in my chest and floods the veins in my arms and legs. I take a sharp breath.

  “I know,” he says. “I’m as shocked as you are.”

  He salutes me with two fingers as he walks away.

  Eight

  LATER THAT WEEK, Hannah corners me in the hall after English class.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she says, “we should hang out this weekend.”

  I can’t remember the last time someone asked me to hang out during the weekend. Or more accurately, I can’t remember the last time someone asked and it wasn’t out of obligation or pity.

  “Yes let’s do that yes please,” I say, too fast, too eager.

  Hannah pretends not to notice. “Awesome. Saturday?”

  Then I remember. “Oh. I have to go to a wedding on Saturday.”

  “So, Sunday.”

  “Well, I have church. . . .”

  “After, then,” she says with a shrug. “It’s only, like, an hour, right?”

  “It’s two hours. It used to be three.”

  Her eyes widen. “Jesus. Do you read the whole Bible from start to finish?”

  I laugh. “Do you want to come with me and see? You don’t have to,” I add quickly. “But if you wanted to . . .”

  “Okay.”
r />   “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah.” She grins. “It’ll totally freak my parents out. With any luck.”

  “I don’t get your family dynamic,” I admit.

  “Me neither,” she says, turning to go. “I hope the wedding’s fun.”

  The wedding’s a disaster, and we aren’t even there yet.

  “I told you we were going to be late,” I say to Mom from the backseat of the Volvo. “I told you.”

  “Ellis, it’s going to be fine,” Dad says, hands on the wheel.

  “It’s starting in fifteen minutes and we’re still on the bridge,” I point out. “We’re going to be late, just like I told Mom we would be.”

  “Weddings don’t start right on time,” Mom says without turning around. “And I don’t appreciate you blaming me.”

  I slump in my seat. Who else is there to blame? Was it me who only started to get ready a half hour before we were supposed to leave? Did I do that? No, what I did was check the traffic report. What I did was give Mom a fifteen-minute warning. But it was like she hadn’t heard me.

  “Which shoes, do you think?” she had asked, showing me two identical pairs of black pumps.

  “They look the same.”

  She held one pair up higher. “These are suede.”

  “Mom, whatever, who cares, we have to go.”

  She shrugged so quickly it almost looked like a wince. “I’ll ask Emmy.”

  “Seriously, if we’re not in the car by—”

  “I only have to do my makeup,” she said, padding to her attached bath. “And my hair.”

  “That’s going to take forever, you don’t have time!”

  Mom looked away from the mirror, three different lipsticks in hand. “This is one of Dad’s partners getting married.”

  “It’s not his partner, it’s a junior dentist we barely know.”

  “It doesn’t matter who,” she said. “They invited us to celebrate their marriage. It’s one of the most important days of their life. The least I can do is look presentable.”

  “The least you can do is be on time.”

  She glared at me, then sighed. “Why don’t you put on a little makeup while you wait for me? This color would look so pretty on you.” She selected one of the lipsticks and held it out. “Here.”

  “I don’t wear lipstick.”