Part 5 (1/2)

DOLL.

Now SHE STEPS into the street of her town that has been cleaned by a supernatural oven. The chemical stench is left. The sky is a soft green. Behind the haze the sun hums, fuzzed like a moldy fruit. She is not quite sure where her limbs are in relation to her body. Something has happened to the air and given it a texture of fog. It is either hard to see through or her eyes are changed or there is a funny color or blur to everything and she has objects mixed up with the air. Across the street is the bank, with its mirrored exterior, and there's something on the sidewalk in front of it. What is the logic of this apocalypse? What is eradicated and what is left or half-left, zombie-like, behind? Is what's left behind a code?

Zombies are codes. They are codes of warning. They are the form of our preapocalyptic foolishness; our sort-of-dumb-sort-of-evil existence that led to this, which is our fault even if it turns out the final threat was the one from outer s.p.a.ce.

What she finds on the sidewalk will help us know. As she approaches the object she discovers that it could be one of two things: it could be a doll, or it could be a baby. If this is a doll, she thinks, then this is a sentimental apocalypse.

She can see herself kneeling at the doll, touching its cold fingers, raising her eyes as if she is being witnessed, meeting her own eyes in the mirrored bank wall. This could make the television right after all.

Luckily, when she arrives, it's not, and when she touches its fingers the fingers are like rubber. Then when she raises her eyes she is startled to find she sees eyes that are not her own; they are the eyes of a ghost who is standing in the street behind her. When she turns she cannot see the ghost, but back in the mirror, there the ghost is. The ghost doesn't really look at her. The ghost only sort of has eyes. The ghost is a little bit clothed, a little cloaked. The ghost is hard to see. It's heavier than vapor; more held together than dust, more specifically formed than constellation, and it seems, she decides, to be a male ghost. She gazes across the baby at the ghost. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, she thinks. It's the three of us left to redeem civilization.

JULY FOURTH.

GOT THERE AND the ground was covered in bodies. Lay down with everybody and looked at the sky, grinning and bracing for the explosions.

THE OTHER WAY AROUND.

WE CAME AT last to the wackily fantastic land of opposites. We'd read this one in childhood. Candy tasted terrible and we all wanted liver with onions. Water got us drunk and we could only breathe when we were under it. Right was wrong and so we were very popular. Our mouths swapped spots with our a.s.sholes. Our belly b.u.t.tons turned outward, (except for George's) and our v.a.g.i.n.as, well, you had to be there. The birds under our feet annoyed us with their philosophies. It was the end of all we'd known, and our hopes sank.

MINIONS.

THE MINIONS LINED their sneakers along the wall and then made two lines, like teams at the end of a game, and each by each held hands and touched foreheads. They were past words. They'd been hollering and leafleting for months. They'd been psyching themselves up and out for years. They lay in their cots like orphans. Hands to hearts, eyes to the black air, the rafters of the bunker invisible in the dark, a sky without stars, everything celestial sprinkling the insides of their domed minds. They waited for the world to disintegrate. It would disintegrate before next light and they waited for a red and gold explosion to light the universe in one final burst. They listened to night tick through the wooden walls. It could be now, or now, or now. Someone held back a sneeze and then sneezed. They'd abandoned their timepieces in the river that evening at dusk, but at two A.M. a boy named Jonathan got up from his cot, cracked open the door, put his p.e.n.i.s out and peed. Then he went back to his cot. One woman, a secret doubter, had taken a bottle of pills before she lay down to wait and died with the click the boy made closing the door.

By morning, there have been three more suicides and two of the leaders have disappeared into the woods. One leader is weeping under a tree, fallen leaves in his fists. One leader is running, running, running, hoping he will die midstep, trying to feel the moment within each step when he is sure both feet are off the ground because he feels that if he can prolong that beat he will be flying, he will be without his body finally, he will be light, light air, light light. In the hut one minion has punched another in the chest. One is cross-legged on her cot, watching. She's vacant or else she's fuming. Three have closed themselves in the kitchen and begun to screw. Two are quietly packing their knapsacks, stuffing them as full as they can with any useful items the group had forgotten or not bothered to purge: a woolen lap blanket, a can-opener, a tin of olives, a box of matches, a comb, a tube of lip balm. By two o'clock in the afternoon the bunker is empty except for a few dead bodies and one man, badly beaten, who is clinging to his cot like it's a raft, who is gasping for breath and calling ”Help! Help!”

MIRROR.

Two DAYS SINCE the apocalypse and freckles rise in the skin around my mouth. I am very close to my face, looking. Green funnels of what were pastures whirl and spit in the background. The last bits of cities are like comets and pa.s.s behind my head as if I am shooting myself repeatedly, as if I shoot myself and the fireb.a.l.l.s go in one ear and out the other. It's riveting. It's hypnotic. My face contains more colors than are left in the universe. I watched Miranda's teeth panic and run away. I watched Amber buckle. Now, in the mirror, there is no comparison. It's me, and everything, and that's all.

WITCHES.

THREE GIRLS, MAYBE eight each, stand with sticks at a pothole of water. They're leaning, or stirring. It's hard to tell, because they're frozen, although it's summer. They're looking into the water together, with their sticks. Dim oils sketch the surface like lines from skating. One girl, the one in the middle, from this angle, anyway, has a piece of gra.s.s between her teeth, and she's grimacing. The end of the gra.s.s has fluffy seeds, and normally, it'd be bobbing. There's breeze, yet all is still. In this apocalypse, the air, it seems, can move, though nothing in it can. Where do you draw the line? Even seeds that could drift like smoke stick. There's no logic in it. Especially with pages acc.u.mulating, time continuing to pa.s.s. The girl on the supposed left is turning to dust as we speak, but invisibly, like a figure made of icing going stale. Touch her and pool.

I know what they were doing. The girls were playing ”three witches.” They were making magic. They were poking their stew. They kept meaning to get on with their game. They'd planned to capture someone, and they'd planned to turn a bunch of things into other things. But after a while the entire plot had been taken over by recipes for potions. Then, of all things, this is what happened.

THE LAST MAN.

Adam Nemett.

EVEN HITLER WAS on meth. I saw it on the History Channel. Under the green light of the German morning, Hitler's personal physician-Dr. Theo Morell-would enter his bedroom to administer charisma intravenously: a c.o.c.ktail injection of methamphetamines and morphine, plus cocaine eyedrops. Hitler never asked what was in the needle and Theo never offered the secret. He simply upped the dosage until Adolf succ.u.mbed to something like Parkinson's, something like addiction, and drowned in his own sea.

For my part, I never a.s.sumed Vitali Zinchenko was real-real as in unenhanced, unadulterated-only that his was an evolved consciousness and, even though I'd fail to comprehend the extent of his genius, I would be among the tawdry heroes who faked greatness, who sat at the feet of his being and came to cla.s.s. I only and infinitely believed believed in him. But I never a.s.sumed he was real. Now the lights are going off and the electricity is leaving us, maybe forever. The tide is coming in. in him. But I never a.s.sumed he was real. Now the lights are going off and the electricity is leaving us, maybe forever. The tide is coming in.

The news claims it's the biggest flood since Noah. A real live end. If it's going to happen, I'm hoping for a giant blue wave, an emblematic tsunami ripped from a j.a.panese woodcut, its many crests cras.h.i.+ng and bouncing back like a cavalry charge, galloping hooves beneath gaunt hors.e.m.e.n. But it's more like a bathtub slowly filling. From the roof of Wallace Hall, we see the gray swell on the horizon. The sky is not falling; the ground is just rising up to meet it.

IT WAS IN my senior year of college that I stopped going to cla.s.s and became a superhero. I came from humble beginnings and I met the requirements: a restlessness; a germ of majesty; a l.u.s.t for significance; a love of decadent costuming, of masks. We all did. But Vitali gathered our spark and set the place aflame. Like our fathers before us, we occupied campus buildings, but swore never to jump s.h.i.+p like those d.a.m.ned dirty longhairs did. We were making progress against the powers that be. The news told stories about us. And then this. A major disaster to divert the public's attention. The adults are gone now. We're cut off. The campus belongs to Vitali, and when the electricity is gone the students will look for him to glow in the dark. They're downstairs, the student body, just babies really. There are a handful of superheroes here on the roof. Vitali can see it, he already knows. Man is weak and known to fall apart. He tells us to keep our masks on, no matter what, keep them on. Like all leaders, our mystery is our power.

We see entire grids going, browning out one by one. Our buildings and trees, they are disappearing in the evening, bequeathing us a gray and choppy sea. Before everything goes dark and the voltage buzz is hushed, we look to each others' masks, to the eyes behind the masks, and we know all that will remain is our lingering dependence-on the gadgets and microchips that hummed us to sleep at night; on the chemicals, the bees in our blood, enhancing muscle and mind; on Him, The Ubermensch: our Vitali Zinchenko.

I am his second-in-command. I am twenty-two.

I look towards Vitali. He looks toward the gray and choppy sea.

”You need to speak to them,” I say.

”Where is Ryan?” he says, not looking back.

Ryan is online, downstairs in a computer cl.u.s.ter, taking one last stroke to Cytherea's wet and powerful o.r.g.a.s.ms, hoping he'll be able to return to paper-based p.o.r.n once his streaming video G.o.ddess is gone.

”Where is Mike?” Vitali says.

Mike is in the belfry of the gradschool clocktower, screaming and shooting his father's rifle down at the rising waters below. The bullets are splas.h.i.+ng. It looks like the flood is firing back.

”Where are you?” he says.

I'm still here. I am his second-in-command.

”We need them to be strong,” Vitali says. ”I'm going to caution them about Nietzsche's concept of The Last Man-cut off, apathetic, weak. Lacking a certain imagination imagination.”

I've read some of what he told me to read and so I say: ”Right: nihilism.”

His cheeks smile around his mask.

”Either that, or I'll just suggest that they f.u.c.k each other senseless and start repopulating the earth.”

I'm too nervous but I manage a smile. The mask hides it from him completely.

”Listen to me,” he says, ”here is your job.” He pulls from his pocket three orange bottles of pills. Vitali's pills for focus, pills for energy, pills for strength: his charisma. He shakes them once, a fistful of maracas.

”Does anyone else know?”

”Of course not,” I say. ”No.”

”Your job is to hold these. Hold them quietly. Give me one per day.”

”Of course,” I say. ”That's the dosage.”

”Listen to me,” he says. ”They're not going to last.”

He's right. There are only two or three left in each bottle. Maybe enough for a week. The news claims we'll be cut off much longer than that.

”Some days, you're going to administer a placebo,” he says. ”Don't tell me when. I'll close my eyes. Otherwise they're not going to last.”

I hate to state the obvious, but: ”Vitali, we're cut off and I don't actually know how to make placebo pills.”